Burning Angels (6 page)

During the years he’d served with elite units, clearing buildings was one of the most heavily rehearsed of all of their drills. It was fast, natural and instinctive.

Two doors led off the staircase, one to either side. Jaeger went right, Narov left. He let fly the retainer clip on a third canister of Kolokol-1. His boot hit the door, crashing through the wood and shunting it wide open, and he tossed the canister inside.

As the gas began to pump, a figure stumbled towards him, choking and cursing in some language that Jaeger didn’t understand. The figure opened fire, spraying wildly with his weapon, but he was blinded by the gas. An instant later he keeled over, his hands grasping at his throat as he gasped for air.

Jaeger advanced into the room, expended brass bullet casings crunching under the soles of his overboots. He did a rapid scan for Leticia Santos. Not seeing her anywhere, he was about to leave when he was struck by a blinding realisation:
he recognised this place
.

Somehow, somewhere, he had seen it before.

And then it hit him. In an effort to torture him remotely, Santos’s captors had emailed Jaeger images of her captivity. One had shown her bruised, bound and kneeling before a torn and dirtied bed sheet, on which had been scrawled the words:

Return to us what is ours.

Wir sind die Zukunft.

Wir sind die Zukunft
: we are the future.

The words had been crudely daubed in what appeared to be blood.

Jaeger could see that very sheet before him now, pinned to one of the walls. Below it on the floor was the detritus of captivity: a dirty mattress, a toilet bucket, lengths of frayed rope, and a few dog-eared magazines; plus a baseball bat, no doubt used to beat Santos into submission.

It wasn’t the room that Jaeger had recognised; it was the instruments of Leticia Santos’s incarceration and torture.

He whipped around. Narov had cleared the room opposite, and still there was no sign of Santos.
Where had they taken her?

The two of them paused for a second at the bottom of the stairs. They were soaked in sweat and their breath was coming in heaving gasps. Each grabbed a canister and prepared to press on. They had to keep the momentum going.

They hammered up the flights of stairs leading towards the roof, hurling more canisters, then spreading out to search, but the entire floor appeared empty. After a few seconds Jaeger heard a burst of static in his earpiece, and Raff’s voice came over the radio.

‘Stairway at rear leads to the roof.’

Jaeger turned and sprinted in that direction, fighting his way through the thick swirling gas. Raff was standing at the bottom of a flight of worn metal rungs; above him a trapdoor was open to the sky.

Jaeger barely hesitated before he started to climb. Leticia had to be up there. He could feel it in his bones.

As his head neared the opening, he flicked off the torch beam on his pistol. There would be enough moonlight to see by, and the flashlight would simply make him an obvious target. With one hand he eased his way up the ladder, the other keeping his gun at the ready. No point unleashing the gas up here. It was little use in the open.

He stole his way up the last few inches, sensing Narov on the rungs below him, then eased his head and shoulders above the opening, scanning all around for the enemy. For several seconds he stayed utterly still, watching and listening.

Finally, in one swift move, he vaulted on to the roof. As he did so, he heard a crash. It sounded deafening in the comparative silence. A battered television set had been dumped in the centre of the roof, a pile of old furniture heaped up behind it.

A broken chair had tumbled over as a figure raised a weapon from behind the patch of cover.

A moment later there was a savage burst of fire.

Jaeger came to his feet, keeping low, his pistol in the aim. All around him, bullets were ricocheting off the slick concrete of the roof. Either he dealt with this pronto, or he was a dead man.

He took aim on the muzzle flash, and squeezed off three rounds in quick succession:
pzzzt
,
pzzzt
,
pzzzt
! In this game it was all about being able to unleash rapid but deadly accurate fire.

This was life and death in the kill zone. Here, the dividing line was measured in fractions of an inch and milliseconds. And Jaeger’s aim had been that much faster and better.

He moved position and went into a crouch, scanning all around him. As Narov and Raff leapt out of the stairwell to either side of him, Jaeger crept forward, perfectly balanced on the balls of his feet, a cat stalking its prey. He swept the heap of broken furniture with his weapon. More of the enemy were hiding there, he just knew it.

All of a sudden a figure broke cover and began to run. Jaeger pinned the runner in his sights, but as he tensed to fire, his finger bone-white on the trigger, he realised it was a woman; a dark-haired woman.
Leticia Santos, it had to be!

He saw a second figure sprint after her, the silhouette of a pistol gripped in his hand. It was her captor and would-be killer, but they were too close for Jaeger to open fire.

‘Drop the gun!’ he snarled. ‘Drop the gun!’

The FM54 mask had an inbuilt voice-projection system, which acted like a megaphone, making his words sound weirdly metallic and robotic.

‘Drop your weapon!’

In response the gunman snaked a powerful arm around the woman’s neck, forcing her towards the edge of the roof. Jaeger advanced, keeping them covered.

In his respirator and suit he looked twice as large as normal. He figured Leticia would have little idea who was behind the mask, and his steely, voice-projected tones would be equally unrecognisable.

Was he friend or foe?

She would have no way of telling.

She took a fearful step backwards, the bad guy fighting to keep her under control. The edge of the roof was right at their backs. There was nowhere to retreat or to run.

‘Drop your weapon!’ Jaeger repeated. ‘Drop the bloody gun!’

He held the SIG before him double-handed and tight to his body: the silencer tended to force the gases from the barrel back into the shooter’s face, so it was crucial to keep as firm a stance as possible in order to dampen the kickback. He had the bad guy pinned in his sights, the pistol’s hammer was back and his index finger was on the trigger – yet still he couldn’t take the shot. In the faint light he couldn’t be certain of his aim, the bulky gloves making the shot doubly difficult.

The bad guy had his own pistol jammed in Leticia’s throat.

Stalemate.

Jaeger felt Narov move up on his shoulder. She too had her long-barrelled P228 in the aim. Her hands remained rock solid: steady and ice cool as always. She moved a step ahead of him, and he flicked his gaze across to her. No response. Not the hint of a reaction. She didn’t break eye contact with the iron sights of the SIG.

But there was something very different about her profile now.

Narov had ripped off her respirator, leaving it hanging on its straps, and slipped on a pair of AN/PVS-21 night vision goggles. They lit up her features with a fluorescent green alien glow, and she had also pulled off her gloves.

For a horrible moment Jaeger knew exactly what she was about to do.

He reached out a hand to try to stop her. He was too late.

Pzzzt, pzzzt, pzzzt!

Narov had pulled the trigger.

She’d taken the shot.

9

The standard military round for the 9mm P228 weighs in at 7.5 grams. The three subsonic bullets that Narov had unleashed were each two grams heavier. Travelling one hundred metres per second slower, it still took them only a fraction of an instant to bite.

They tore into the gunman’s face, driving him backwards and over the edge of the roof in a death plunge. It was incredible shooting. But as he fell, his arm remained locked around the woman’s neck.

With a piercing scream, both figures disappeared from view.

The drop from the roof was a good fifteen metres. Jaeger let out a savage curse.
Bloody
Narov!

He turned and raced for the trapdoor. As he thundered down the ladder, the Kolokol-1 swirled around his knees like a ghostly fog. He dropped down the last of the metal rungs, tore along the corridor, then hammered down the stairway, vaulting bodies as he went. He raced out through the shattered doorway, turned right and sprinted around the corner of the building, coming to a breathless halt where two figures lay in a crumpled heap.

The gunman had perished instantly as a result of three shots to the head, and it looked as if Leticia’s neck had been broken by the fall.

Jaeger cursed again. How could it all have gone so wrong so quickly? He knew the answer pretty much instantly:
it was Narov’s trigger-happy, dumb-ass attitude.

He bent over Leticia’s crumpled form. She lay face down, unmoving. He placed a hand on her neck, checking for a pulse. Nothing. He shuddered. He could barely believe it: the body was still warm, but she was dead, just as he had feared.

Narov appeared beside him. Jaeger glanced up, eyes blazing. ‘Nice bastard work. You just—’

‘Take a closer look,’ Narov’s voice cut in. It had the characteristic cold, flat, emotionless ring to it – the one that Jaeger found so disconcerting. ‘A proper look.’

She reached forward, grabbed the fallen figure by the hair and jerked the head roughly backwards.
No respect, not even for the dead
.

Jaeger stared at the ashen features. It was a Latino woman all right, but it wasn’t Leticia Santos.

‘How the—’ he began.

‘I am a woman,’ Narov cut in. ‘I recognise another woman’s posture. Her gait. This one – it wasn’t Leticia’s.’

For a moment Jaeger wondered whether Narov felt even the slightest remorse for having killed this mystery captive, or at least for taking the shot that had sent her plunging to her doom.

‘One more thing,’ Narov added. She reached inside the woman’s jacket and fished out a pistol, holding it up to Jaeger. ‘She was a member of their gang.’

Jaeger gawped. ‘Jesus. The drama on the roof. It was all an act.’

‘It was. To draw us in.’

‘How did you know?’

Narov turned her blank gaze upon Jaeger. ‘I saw a bulge. A gun-shaped bulge. But mostly – instinct and intuition. A soldier’s sixth sense.’

Jaeger shook his head to clear it. ‘But then – where the hell’s Leticia?’

With a sudden flash of inspiration he yelled into his radio: ‘Raff!’ The big Maori had remained in the target house, checking the survivors and looking for clues. ‘Raff! You got Vladimir?’

‘Yeah. Got him.’

‘Can he talk?’

‘Yeah. Just.’

‘Right. Bring him here.’

Thirty seconds later Raff emerged from the building with a figure thrown across his massive shoulders. He dumped the man at Jaeger’s feet.

‘Vladimir – or so he claims.’

The leader of the kidnap gang showed the unmistakable symptoms of a Kolokol-1 attack. His heart rate had slowed to a perilously low level, as had his breathing, his muscles going strangely slack. His skin was clammy and his mouth dry.

He’d just been hit by the first waves of dizziness, which meant that vomiting and seizures would quickly follow. Jaeger needed to get some answers, before the guy was rendered beyond any use. He whipped a syringe out of his breast pouch and held it before the man’s eyes.

‘Listen good,’ he announced, his voice reverberating through the mask’s voice-projection system. ‘You’ve been hit by sarin,’ he lied. ‘Know much about nerve agents? Horrible way to die. You’ve only got a few minutes left.’

The man’s eyes rolled in terror. Clearly he understood enough English to get the gist of what Jaeger was saying.

Jaeger waved the syringe. ‘You see this? Compoden. The antidote. You get this, you live.’

The man thrashed about, trying to reach for the syringe.

Jaeger shoved him with his foot. ‘Right, answer the following question. Where is the hostage, Leticia Santos? You get the injection in exchange for an answer. If not, you’re dead.’

The man was twitching violently now, saliva dribbling from his nose and mouth. Yet somehow he raised a shaking hand and pointed back into the villa.

‘Basement. Under rug. In there.’

Jaeger raised the needle and plunged it into the man’s arm. Kolokol-1 requires no antidote and the syringe contained a harmless shot of saline solution. A few minutes in the open air would be enough to ensure his survival, though it would take him many more weeks to fully recover.

Narov and Jaeger headed inside, leaving Raff to keep tabs on Vladimir. Back in the basement, Jaeger’s torch revealed a bright Latino-style rug laid across the bare concrete floor. He scuffed it aside, uncovering a heavy steel trapdoor. He tugged at the handle, but it didn’t budge. It had to be locked from the inside.

He dug out a shaped explosive charge from his rucksack and unrolled it, exposing the sticky strip, then chose a spot at the back of the trapdoor and taped the charge along the crack.

‘Soon as the charge blows, get the gas in,’ he announced.

Narov nodded and readied a Kolokol-1 grenade.

They took cover. Jaeger triggered the fuse, and instantaneously there was a sharp explosion, a thick cloud of smoke and debris billowing through the air. The trapdoor was now a blasted ruin.

Narov lobbed the gas canister into the smoke-filled interior. Jaeger counted down the seconds, allowing the gas to take hold before lowering his frame through and letting himself drop. He hit the deck, taking the impact on his knees, and immediately had his gun in the aim, sweeping the room with the flashlight attached to the weapon. Through the thick fog of gas in the air he could see two figures lying on the floor, comatose.

Narov dropped in next to him and Jaeger swept his torch over the two unconscious men. ‘Check them.’

As Narov went to do so, he slid around the wall towards the back of the room, where there was a small alcove containing a heavy wooden chest. He reached out with his gloved hand and pulled at the handle, but the chest was locked.