Red Ice Page 29
“Russia and its people deserve freedom, they deserve a democratic system—they swap the current guys for you, it’s the same old bullshit,” Fox said. “You can try and sell this all over the world, but I ain’t buying.”
“I could have had you killed months ago,” Babich said. “I know what drives you: the truth! You have to do what’s right here, you can’t help it. You have to let the truth come out!”
Fox’s eyes were burning like he’d never felt them before. Something within him, a weight in his conscience, shifted. He had to do Babich in; this was the end of the road.
“Some truths can’t ever be heard,” Fox said. He saw the change in Babich’s demeanour—the realisation that Fox wouldn’t back down. Fox leaned forward a little in his seat, his thighs tense, ready to spring himself up. “Guess you had me pegged wrong. Tell you one thing, though: this ends here, right now.”
“Help me up there,” Hutchinson said. He used a Marine as a crutch, and together they raced out onto the flight deck of the New York.
There, waiting for take-off, was a black tilt-rotor aircraft, a Bell-Boeing V-22 Osprey kitted out for covert night operations.
A squad of Force Recon Marines, specialists in black ops that require direct action, was locked and loaded. Tonight they’d fulfil another part of their mission: in-extremis hostage rescue. As Hutchinson was helped to a jump-seat, he noticed a carbon-fibre ramp structure bolted to the inside deck of the aircraft. The marine captain was the last aboard, and he gave the thumbs-up to the loadmaster that they were ready to go.
Once airborne, the nacelles rotated forwards ninety degrees and within fifteen seconds they were racing low across the sea towards Shanghai.
The action had happened so fast Fox felt as though he had watched it in a movie, an out-of-body experience; from his seat to Babich’s in a second.
Fox held the broken bottle against the Russian’s throat, firmly, so it just cut into the skin.
Zoe was right behind him, the protocol cylinder in her hand.
Lavrov was out of his seat—pistol loose in his hand—but didn’t dare make a threatening move.
The Russian guard was pressed back against the wall, frightened.
“Put your gun down!” Fox ordered, cutting harder into Babich’s neck. The guard complied and Zoe picked up the MP5 as they were backing out.
“The radio,” Fox said to Malevich. The Russian looked at him oddly, then it registered that he’d been given an order that might just save his skin. He ran to the coffee table, picked up the radio and Fox’s clothes, then joined them in exiting the room.
The Chinese soldiers on the mezzanine level were spooked, watching intently with guns trained. Colonel Zang looked to Babich for directions but he wasn’t talking—Fox increased the pressure on the broken bottle, and used Babich as a shield as they pushed towards the door. Fox heard Zoe opening it.
“Don’t try and follow us.”
105
SHANGHAI
“Come on!” he yelled, tossing the broken bottle and pushing Babich ahead of him as they ran through the empty restaurant. Malevich followed behind, shell-shocked, and Zoe held the rear as they took the fire stairs up to the ninety-third floor, where they’d been earlier, in the bar. Fox pulled on his pants and shirt, tying his shoes while his heart raced. Nodding to Zoe as she kept the MP5 pointed at Babich, they set off.
The sprinklers were still going and there was a good few centimetres of water on the ground. Dark but for the emergency lighting. They ran to the other fire stairs in the far corner—
PING!
The lift opened as they passed through the lobby—a dozen firemen about to spill out.
The fire doors they’d just exited burst open—Zang’s troops were taking cover positions, firing as—
Fox and Zoe rounded a wall for cover, too. Zoe put the MP5 around the corner and fired blind to hold the troops off. Fox watched in the reflection of a mirror as the firemen made a hasty retreat to the lift. Key operated, the doors closed and they were gone.
Stairs were the only option. They ran through the long expanse of hastily evacuated tables and headed for the kitchen.
Out of the windows was the neighbouring building where the bulk of the G20 delegates and security personnel were crammed, so close to be almost within reach. Fox remembered Hutchinson warning him about the possibility of Russian sniper fire from there directed at Babich.
Bullets tore into the dining room, punching holes through some of the floor-to-ceiling windows to their left as they cleared through the double doors into the kitchen. Fox shoved Babich over to Zoe, took the radio from Malevich, flicked it on and attached it.
“Al, you hear me, buddy?” he asked, urgently, as he dragged a large cutlery trolley across the doors and signalled the others to run through the kitchen. The sprinklers were beginning to stop, but the kitchen tiles were slippery underfoot.
“Lach!”
“Al?” Fox replied, adjusting the volume and scanning the room for anything useful as the others ran to the far end.
“Where you at?”
“Kitchen, ninety-third floor. You?”
“Still in the room.”
Fox looked at the long line of industrial stoves.
“You still playing that Xbox?”
“Fuck you! We’re worried sick, I’m coming—”
“Listen: stay there, don’t come up—you get the chance to leave, get outta here!” Fox said. He turned around: “Zoe—little help—cover fire!”
She tossed Babich to the floor and kept her foot on his back, scanning down her sights to the double doors, ready to fire as soon as she saw their pursuers enter.
“They’re here!” Zoe yelled, as full-auto gunfire shredded the kitchen doors from the other side. Zoe let off some controlled single shots from the MP5 to cover Fox. He was down on the tiles, under the cover of a kitchen bench as the gunfire blasted into the tiled wall above. A big chef’s knife clattered to the floor and he looked at the oven in front of him … Looked down the ovens—fifty of them, all big-arse new stainless steel behemoths.
“Buy me time!” Fox crawled down the line of ovens, the razor-sharp knife in hand, cutting the orange gas lines under the stoves. Soon, he could smell the gas filling the room.
“Run!” he yelled, watching Zoe drag Babich up and running for the fire doors where Malevich was hunkered down. “Come on!”
As Fox ran out he noticed some large compressed gas canisters—back-ups maybe—lined along the wall of the pantry. Oh shit!
“Hurry!”
They were through the fire door, headed upstairs.
“Hutchinson, this is Fox!” he said into the radio. He used the open line. “Ninety-third floor, southeast corner, Babich’s guys en masse! They’re all there—we have the protocol and Babich! Too many of them!”
In Washington, Bowden heard the intercept and nodded to his Air Force operator in contact with the TLA001 flight, who relayed the target coordinates to the aircrew.
“DC, we have that last radio transmission,” the pilot of the Advanced Tactical Laser aircraft said. “Target acquisition, ninetythird floor, Shanghai World Financial Center, southeast corner.”
“TLA001, confirm you have the target.”
“That’s affirmative; we have biometric measurement lock on two separate groups. Make it Group One as our primary targets, currently ascending, in a fire escape; Group Two made up of several unknown targets in their pursuit,” the aircrew replied. “On station, awaiting next.”
Fox and Zoe ran up the stairs and exited on the hundredth floor, which had the highest observation deck. The transparent glass hall was suspended almost five hundred metres above Shanghai. They ran to the middle of the glass walkway and stopped.
“Which way will they come?” Zoe asked.
Fox shook his head. Scanned out to the east sky for Hutchinson’s evac. Willed some kind of intervention. Zoe’s French security as well as some US Delt
a troops would be somewhere in the stairwell, ascending fast. Not fast enough. Shanghai was at their feet, the distant glittering lights reminding Fox just how far from safety they were.
Bowden asked, “Clear shot on both?”
“Group Two is a turkey shoot,” the pilot replied. “Group One we’ll make a turn, wait for another pass once they’re in the clear. They’ve got nowhere to turn.”
“Okay. Take the shots,” Bowden ordered. “Both targets at will.”
“Copy that.”
Fox and the others saw a brilliant flash, followed a moment later by an ear-shattering—
KLAPBOOM!
Muffled concussion. The four of them hit the floor. The building shook beneath them as they huddled together. A loud cracking noise as the laminated glass floor beneath them began to spider-web.
Babich started crawling away.
“Zoe—stop him!”
She stood then dropped for cover as …
Windows along both sides of the walkway shattered in succession like dominoes falling, the twisting pressures of the gas explosion winding its way through the structure. Glass rained down on the building and street below.
Babich steadied himself against the howling wind through the blown-out windows and made for the far lift lobby.
The lift doors buckled and blew out—Babich was knocked back as the building’s lights flashed on and off, staying off once the sprinklers came back to life. Malevich was balled up on the floor, covered in broken safety glass, not daring to move.
Water began pooling on the glass floor. Fox inched towards Babich. The glass spiderweb was just holding together, but the water kept coming. Fox looked back at Zoe; the cylinder with the protocol was between them. In that moment they both knew it was about to get worse.
There was a sound of glass breaking, giving way—and then they were all falling …
106
EAST CHINA SEA
“Tell them we’re close,” the pilot of the Osprey said over the internal radio-sets.
Hutchinson pulled out his short-range radio linked up to Fox and Gammaldi.
“Holy shit!” he heard the pilots call out.1
“What?”
“Our target building—it’s a fireball—”
Hutchinson stood, grunted through the pain of his leg, held onto the strap above his head for stability and looked out of the cockpit as the fireball flashed into the night sky. Looked like a whole floor had blown out. Smoke plumed up and the lights of the whole neighbourhood flickered off and on, off and on.
“So that’s what a laser can do,” the pilot said.
“Must have hit a gas line,” the co-pilot said.
“Who?” asked Hutchinson. “What laser?”
They told him about the CIA’s aircraft, a good twenty clicks behind them.
“Patch me through to them,” Hutchinson ordered. “Now!”
As he waited for the connection he watched the Shanghai World Financial Center, a giant totem of China’s modernity and capitalist ideals, blink its lights in the night sky and then go dark. Like it had just vanished.
107
SHANGHAI
Fox was on his back, looking up at the sky. Slowly, he felt his senses returning. He could hear sparks and he could see that there was a structure above him—the top beams of the Shanghai World Financial Center. In profile, the building resembled a kind of bottle opener—a tall glass-clad tower with a hollowedout top section between which the glass observation decks were suspended. Or had been. Now, those very structures had given way, and he was flat on his back looking up at the large beam, maybe ten storeys above him, that served as the very top of the tower. He coughed and then the pain hit—his ribs felt like they were on fire, his face and swollen eye numb. He slowly rolled to his side, still coughing.
Malevich was next to him, on his side. Bright arterial blood fountained up from his leg, a piece of twisted metal spiked through it. Zoe was a little further away, getting to her feet.
They’re okay, Fox thought. Then bullets sprayed around him.
He turned—
Babich had snatched up the MP5. There was a large pane of sheet glass standing behind him, like his section of the observation deck had fallen largely intact. He didn’t even look injured. He took a step closer to Fox.
“Where is it?” he asked.
Fox had already spied the cylinder containing the protocol between him and Malevich. He dragged himself over and picked it up. He noticed Malevich’s breaths were short and sharp, in shock from the pain and massive blood loss, his eyes wet and vacant.
“Here,” Fox said, still on the ground, holding the cylinder up for Babich to see. “And now?”
“Now I’m going to change this,” Babich said.
“Like what you did in Georgia and South Ossetia?” Fox said. “Nigeria! The attacks in America—”
“And what about America? It doesn’t do the same things to protect its interests?”
“Not like this.”
“How many Iraqis, Afghanis, Vietnamese have the Americans killed?”
“Always as collateral—”
“Always?”
Fox was silent.
“For too long there has been this ‘us and them’ mentality,” Babich said. “It drove international relations in Western bodies—”
“You’re talking moral equivalence?” Fox yelled. He was hoping that Zoe, out of view behind him, would have time to do something. “It’s a goddamned political debating term, not something based in the real world.”
“I’m making a change in the real world. Hand me the protocol.”
“The guys who plug that kind of thinking believe their side is—by definition—morally superior, because of who they are, not what they do,” Fox said. “They—what—use selective history to cast the situation as a big-picture struggle against an evil force? Well, you know what, you’re right. Russia does that. America does that.”
“My Russia is not that evil force, Lachlan, you need to see that. Move on. Well, too late I guess.”
He lifted the MP5, levelled it towards Fox’s torso. This range, he would not miss.
“You’re saying your state isn’t totalitarian?” Fox dared.
“I’m saying, I’m changing things. Saddam had to go, sure—look at what he did to his people—your atrocities in this way become acts of good, not evil; we gave people freedom, it is the price of freedom…”
“Now you sound like Dick Cheney.”
“Lachlan, if you think you and your side are morally superior to me and mine, then you are unwilling to negotiate on the basis of moral equivalence. Now, hand it over.”
Hutchinson’s words still rang in Bowden’s ears.
“DC: I say again, we are approaching for final shot of Group One, confirm strike is a go.”
The image on the main screen was like something from a sci-fi movie. Four human heat shapes signatured on a roof high above a city. Another shot showed a low-light live video feed, from a long-lens camera.
“ATL001: target standing with the gun,” Bowden said. There was a clear picture of Babich from one of the ATL’s onboard cameras, a multi-million dollar piece of lensing equipment that would put the Hubble Space Telescope to shame. “I say again: your target is with the firearm. Only him. Take the shot.”
Zap. Inside of a millisecond. Blinding light against the window behind Babich, quicker than a camera flash. Fox blinked against it; there and gone again. Babich staggered forward. There was a glowing halo of red in the glass behind him—a hole the size of a fist, molten. Fox could feel the heat from fifteen metres away—the ceramic tiles of the roof were a smouldering mess by his side. Something had shot clear through Babich …
Babich looked down at Fox, wide-eyed. His mouth was agape. He made a noise and then his head tilted—a dark hole burned right through his chest. He fell to the ground.
108
SHANGHAI
They got the evac call from Hutchinson. Agent McKee went to the suite’s main window, shot it twice with her service automatic, blasting two neat holes into the thick glass. Gammaldi threw a chair at it—the chair smashed to pieces. He went over to the bench, took the silenced SIG carbine and set loose half a mag full-auto across the glass. Still it was held by the plastic sheeting laminated between the thick safety-glass panes. He and Jacob picked up the sofa to use as a battering ram.
It blasted right through, the window and furniture falling to the ground way down below. Wind howled into the room.
“We’re good to go!” Gammaldi called into the mic.
“Five seconds!” Hutchinson’s voice replied.
Within moments the room filled with the sound of a heavy tilt-rotor aircraft and then the V-22 materialised. It was level with them, an ominous blacked-out insect hovering steady outside their hotel room. It rotated one-eighty degrees, and the rear cargo ramp lowered to reveal US Marines either side of a black skybridge that was being extended out towards them.
“No way!” Kate said to Gammaldi and then Jacob. “I can’t!”
She screamed as Jacob picked her up in his arms. A Marine ran over the telescoped bridge, attached a belt to the FBI agent, who fled across first. Jacob and Kate followed and finally Gammaldi, as the metre-wide carbon-fibre structure bucked and moved, hundreds of metres above the streets of Shanghai.Hutchinson was inside the aircraft. Gammaldi ran to him, yelled into his ear as the Osprey moved away from the building.
“Where’s Fox?”
Hutchinson replied, “On the roof!”
109
SHANGHAI
Fox dragged himself to his feet and moved to Malevich. He was alive but not by much.
“Please…” Malevich said. “I—I didn’t know.”