Endgame (Agent 21) (22 page)

Malcolm didn’t move, but Ricky and Zak hurried up to the far end of the hangar. The doors here, just beyond the Cessna, were several metres high, each one half the width of the hangar. The heavy bolts were locked by a chain and padlock. Moriarty unlocked them. He took the right door while Zak and Ricky took the left. Together they started pushing them open. A fierce blast of wind rushed through the crack between the doors. Hard pellets stung Ricky’s face. While they’d been inside, the snow had turned to hail. It blasted in through the open doorway, clattering against the metal of the Cessna with a hard, percussive sound. It took all their strength to force the doors open against the power of the wind. They secured them against some stout wooden poles fixed in the ground for that purpose. Only then did Ricky properly look out beyond the hangar.

He could barely keep his eyes open on account of the wind and the hail. He could, however, make out a runway of sorts. It was probably no more than ten metres in width, but it was dead straight and stretched into the distance further than Ricky could see. The hail was settling lightly on the runway, but the snow was nowhere near as deep as it was on either side.

Moriarty ran up to them, his head bowed against the wind. ‘I shovel salt onto it every other day!’ he shouted in explanation. ‘It keeps the snow from building up. But it’s still pretty icy. We need to keep our weight as low as possible. Only bring what you absolutely need.’ He looked towards the other end of the hangar where Malcolm was still sitting. ‘That one over there seems like a dead weight. You should leave him here. There’s enough food for him to—’

‘He comes with us!’ Zak shouted.

Moriarty looked like he was going to argue, but Zak immediately strode off towards Malcolm. Ricky followed. Together, they gathered their packs. Even at this end of the hangar, the wind was blowing chunks of ice towards them. As they hauled their rucksacks onto their backs, Ricky heard the sound of the aircraft’s engines being started. He felt a lurch of anxiety in his gut.

–
This is madness. How can any aircraft take off in these conditions?

‘Surely the wind’s too strong?’ he shouted at Zak. ‘We should wait till it’s died down a bit.’

Zak shook his head. ‘The strength of the wind is less important than its direction. Moriarty’s right. At the moment it’s blowing directly parallel to the runway. If we wait, we run the risk of it changing direction. It’d be much more dangerous to take off with a crosswind. It would blow us sideways across the icy runway. We’d crash before we even left the ground.’ He grabbed Malcolm by the arm and encouraged him towards the aircraft. Malcolm looked terrified, but he seemed to trust Zak implicitly. ‘Let’s board,’ Zak shouted.

Ricky’s limbs were heavy with a kind of icy dread. He battled against the wind that was blowing into the hangar as they moved towards the aircraft. Half of him wanted to bail out – to tell Zak that this was crazy, that they were going to get themselves killed. His mind spun with the fear. But just as he was about to throw down his pack and refuse, he remembered something that Felix had once told him:
The time’s going to come, Coco, when you’ll have to be brave. Being brave isn’t the same as being fearless. It’s not an absence of fear – that would be stupid. It’s the ability to master your fear. To keep it in a box and not let it get the better of you.

Suddenly, it was almost as if Felix was right beside him. That feeling was like a knife in his stomach, carving out the fear. He remembered why he was here in the first place – to catch up with the guy who’d killed his friend and mentor. He set his jaw and upped his pace towards the Cessna.

It was cramped in the cockpit. Moriarty was already sitting in a leather seat by the control column. A bewildering array of dials and controls were lit up in front of him. There was a small rechargeable GPS unit, with a flashing blue light that indicated their location. The windscreen was being beaten and battered by the hail. It was deafening. Zak took his place next to the pilot. Ricky sat behind Moriarty, with Malcolm next to him behind Zak. They had their packs at their feet. Zak slammed his side door shut. The howling wind grew momentarily quieter, and Moriarty edged the aircraft forward, out of the hangar.

Ricky could tell the difference in the feeling of the wheels on the ground as soon as they moved from the hangar onto the icy runway. With less friction, everything felt much smoother. Once they were clear of the hangar doors, the pilot braked gently. Ricky wasn’t sure, but he thought he felt the wheels gliding slightly before they came to a halt. Ricky’s stomach glided with them.

Moriarty opened his side door. The screaming of the wind became louder again. He jumped out of the aircraft, closed the hangar doors and then re-embarked. Once the aircraft door was shut again, he turned to his passengers. His eyes were strangely bright, almost as if, in a wild kind of way, he was looking forward to this. It crossed Ricky’s mind that Moriarty was just as crazy as the job they’d given him.

‘Not too late to back out,’ he said. ‘We can while away the winter in the hangar. I could do with the company.’ He grinned for the first time, and Ricky saw that he had several missing teeth. He struggled to put a lid on his panic.

‘We don’t have all winter,’ Zak said. ‘We’ve got less than twelve hours. If we’re too late, your sister dies.’

Moriarty inclined his head. ‘Then strap yourselves in, my friends,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be a bumpy ride.’

They did as they were told. Ricky could sense that Malcolm was trembling, and he reminded himself that just because Malcolm hadn’t spoken much, he still knew what was going on. ‘It’s going to be all right, mate,’ he said. Malcolm just stared straight ahead.

The pilot accelerated. Immediately, Ricky felt the headwind buffeting the aircraft. He looked out of the window to his right. The wing tips were shaking alarmingly. He decided he didn’t want to look at them. Instead, he stared directly out of the front windscreen. Bad idea. From this vantage point, he could see how badly the light aircraft was sliding on the runway as they sped forward. The hail formed a kind of vortex as it slammed against the cockpit – Ricky honestly expected the glass to break at any second. There was a terrible whining noise from the engine as they precariously gathered speed. The drifting snow on either side of the runway zoomed past in a blur. Ricky found himself praying that Moriarty knew where the end of the runway was – with such poor visibility, it would come at them out of nowhere . . .

‘We’re not getting enough speed!’ Zak shouted suddenly. Ricky understood what he meant – the engines were shrieking badly, but Moriarty refused to pull back his steering column. The pilot said nothing, and Ricky stared at the back of his hunched shoulders, consumed with panic.

‘
Stop!
’ Ricky heard himself shouting suddenly. ‘
We’re not going to make it! Stop!
’

‘Uh-uh,’ the pilot shouted, his voice very tense. ‘We’re too far gone. Either we take off, or we crash.’

‘
Then take o—
’

Ricky inhaled suddenly. The aircraft had slipped and they were veering sharply to the left. The view through the windscreen was suddenly not one of the runway. It was of the drifting snow to its side. They were about to crash into it . . .

‘
NO!
’

But as Ricky shouted, he suddenly felt a sensation of weightlessness.
They were off the ground.
He sucked in another lungful of air. The plane was badly wobbling. It banked sharply to the right. With a flash of insight, he realized Moriarty was trying to get them in line with the headwind again. But it was a struggle. Everything inside the plane seemed to be vibrating – including the pilot’s hands on the control column. Through the windows, they could see nothing but pelting hail.

‘
We need to get above the weather as quickly as possible
,’ Moriarty shouted. ‘
Sit tight!
’

Ricky didn’t think he
could
sit tighter. He was clutching his seat so hard, his knuckles had gone white. The engines suddenly shifted pitch again. The feeling of weightlessness returned as the aircraft quickly gained height. The plane was shuddering even worse now. Ricky heard himself shouting, though he doubted anyone else could hear over the immense noise of the engines and the weather.

Hail became cloud. Visibility: zero. Just a whiteout, all around. There was no way of telling if they were a hundred feet or a thousand feet above the ground. Horrific thoughts cruised through Ricky’s head. What if they hit something? What if they collided with another aircraft that Moriarty simply couldn’t see?

– Don’t be stupid. Who else would be flying through this?

Ricky’s lungs started to hurt, and he realized he’d been holding his breath ever since they’d entered the clouds. How long had that been? A minute? More? But suddenly, they burst through the cloud line. Ricky realized it hadn’t just been him holding his breath. Everyone in the plane explosively exhaled as the whiteout suddenly became a sharp, piercing blue. Ricky screwed his eyes shut. The sun, which they hadn’t seen for so long, was throwing hot hammers into their eyes. He was vaguely aware of Moriarty pulling a pair of dark glasses from his top pocket so that he could fly safely. Ricky, Zak and Malcolm, however, had to settle for holding their hands over their eyes to shade themselves from the glare.

For a moment, nobody spoke.

Then Ricky cleared his throat. ‘I, er . . . I’d say that went pretty well?’ His voice sounded high-pitched and stressed.

Moriarty looked back at him over his shoulder. ‘That was the easy bit, son,’ he said. ‘Landing in this weather? Now
that’s
going to be a challenge, even for me.’

Zak’s eyes ached. As afternoon became evening, the sun grew lower and redder. But they were heading in a north-westerly direction. With the sun setting in the west, the glare was almost straight ahead of them. He allowed himself to close his eyes and rest as the Cessna flew smoothly across the clouds.

His mind turned to Raf and Gabs. He couldn’t get the image of them, battered and bleeding in Cruz’s last video, out of his head. Anger burned through him. He knew Cruz was pulling him into a trap, and had no idea what was waiting for him when they landed. Even so, he was impatient to get back down on the ground. It was time to finish this, once and for all.

He glanced across at Moriarty. He had barely spoken since they’d broken through the cloud cover. His attention seemed fully focused on controlling the plane, and keeping track of their position on the portable GPS screen.

Zak opened one eye. ‘Tell me what happened,’ he said quietly to Moriarty.

The pilot glanced at him. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘To make you run away and live in Alaska.’

At first, Zak thought Moriarty wasn’t going to answer. ‘You heard of Afghanistan?’ he said finally.

‘Of course,’ Zak said.

‘I was out there, in the early days of the war. I used to fly an Apache. It’s an attack helicopter. Scary piece of kit. The order came through that I should launch a Hellfire missile at a deserted school where dangerous militants were hiding. So I did.’ He breathed deeply. ‘Turns out the intelligence was wrong. It wasn’t a deserted school. It was an
actual
school. Thirty-five kids died, and two teachers.’ Moriarty’s jaw clenched. ‘It was my fault.’

‘No it wasn’t,’ Zak said. ‘You said so yourself. The intelligence was wrong.’

Moriarty didn’t seem to hear him. ‘Before I fired the missile, I saw them. Three kids, playing with a ball outside the school building. I should have questioned the order, but . . .’ His voice trailed off. ‘I went a bit crazy after that. Couldn’t handle what I’d done, I guess. Couldn’t handle the fact that those kids were dead because of me. I started disobeying orders for the hell of it. They turfed me out of the army soon afterwards. Dishonourable discharge.’

There was silence in the cockpit. Shielding his eyes, Zak looked at Moriarty. There was a tear on his weatherbeaten face. He wiped it roughly away, then turned to Zak. ‘People don’t know what it’s like, taking a life,’ he said. ‘They think they can handle it. But every night, when you put your head on the pillow, you hear them. The screams of the ones you killed. And you can never escape them, even when you run to the ends of the earth.’ He gave Zak a piercing look. ‘Remember that, son, if you’re ever tempted to put a bullet in someone.’

Zak turned away. It was time to change the subject. ‘How long till we land?’

‘
If
we land,’ the pilot said. ‘It’ll be in about half an hour. It’s going to be very rough getting back down through the clouds.’

‘Have you landed on Little Diomede before?’ Zak asked. ‘Do you know the runway?’

Moriarty raised an eyebrow. ‘Runway?’ he said. ‘There’s no runway, son.’

Zak blinked. ‘What do you mean, there’s no runway?’

‘The Little Diomede islanders carve a kind of makeshift runway into the ice in the winter. That’s what we’re heading for.’ He flashed Zak a smile. ‘Here’s hoping we hit it, eh?’

‘Yeah,’ Zak breathed. ‘Here’s hoping.’

There was a pause. ‘Tell me something about Annabel,’ Moriarty said.

Zak looked out of the window. ‘She’s like a sister to me,’ he said. ‘She’s been kidnapped, along with another good friend of mine, Raf. They’re the best agents I know.’ He turned to Moriarty. ‘You’ll see her soon,’ he said.

The sky darkened as the blood-red sun dropped below the horizon. A few stars appeared in the inky sky. Zak shivered as he glanced towards the glowing screen of the GPS unit. He could see the crinkly coastline of western Alaska tracking across the screen.

Time check: 6:30 p.m. Five and a half hours to go.

Moriarty looked over his shoulder at Ricky and Malcolm. ‘Strapped in?’ he asked.

They nodded wordlessly.

‘Then here goes nothing.’

Moriarty adjusted the steering column. Zak immediately felt the aircraft losing height. The cloud cover glowed slightly beneath them. It seemed somehow stormier now that night had come. More threatening . . .