Outcast, p.26
Outcast, page 26
Carter looked around despairingly.
The whine of the jet engines rose to a high-pitched crescendo. He had only a few more seconds before the jet would start tearing down the runway.
I’ve come this far. I can’t fucking lose. Not here.
Not today.
His gaze instantly settled on the bright orange snow plough. An idea took split-second shape in his mind. Maybe a chance in ten it would work. But he had to try.
One last desperate roll of the dice.
Carter bolted upright. He left the Dragunov on the asphalt and raced over to the carport sixty metres away, lungs burning with the effort.
Hurry up.
He tugged open the door on the side of the snow plough and clambered up into the main cab. The key was already wedged in the ignition. Carter twisted it to the right.
The engine didn’t start.
Carter cursed in bitter frustration. More broken equipment. He was beginning to take this shit personally.
By now the whirr of the jet engines was deafening.
He had seconds until the Learjet started rolling forward.
Carter turned the key to the start position again. There was an agonising pause as the diesel engine coughed noisily, spewing out black smoke from the exhaust. Then it sputtered into life.
I’m in business.
Carter strapped on his seat belt, because in another twenty seconds it might save his life. He shoved the vehicle into gear, hit the accelerator and started rolling forward across the ground towards the Learjet, six hundred metres from his position.
As the plough gathered momentum Carter worked the hydraulic lever on the right-hand side of the seat, lifting the blade off the ground by about a metre or so. He would have to wait to raise the bucket the rest of the way up until the last possible second before he collided with the aircraft. Otherwise he would be driving blind.
The vehicle picked up pace as Carter cranked up through the gears, climbing to a speed of fifty kilometres per hour. Fast enough to generate the necessary force for what he had in mind. The plough engine screamed, drowning out the incessant whine of the jet. In another few metres he broke clear of the asphalt and Carter struggled to control the plough as it jounced and rocked over the irrigation ditches parallel with the taxiway.
Four hundred metres from the Learjet.
Carter hit the taxiway with a jolt. He drove right across it, crashed through a sign, then looked up again and saw that the jet had started rolling forward along the runway.
Making its escape.
No, you fucking don’t, pal, Carter thought.
He made an instantaneous calculation, based on speed and distance, and adjusted the vehicle so that the half-raised blade was pointing at a spot on the runway approximately three hundred metres south of the Learjet’s current position. A rough guess, but the best he could do under the circumstances. He had one chance to hit the aircraft and stop Ramsey from getting airborne.
To the north-east, the jet carried on down the airstrip. Moving faster now. Two hundred metres from Carter. He had to constantly alter the vehicle’s path, compensating for the increase in speed as the aircraft surged down the runway. Like targeting a fast-flying bird. You had to follow through the bird, aiming a couple of metres ahead before pulling the trigger, so that the bird flew into the shot. This was the same principle. But much higher stakes.
The ground became bumpier as Carter cleared the taxiway and steered over the rough ground. A hundred and fifty metres to the target. The pilots must have spotted him by now. No way they could have missed him, not at this distance. But they hadn’t slowed down. Which meant they were gambling on racing ahead of the plough before it could collide with the aircraft. They were playing the world’s most dangerous game of chicken.
Carter had resigned himself to the fact that this was a suicide mission. The chances of him walking away from a direct collision with a moving jet were virtually nil. But he was out of options, and time, and luck. He had a choice between letting Ramsey escape, and hoping that someone else sorted the problem later down the line, or stopping him right now.
No kind of a choice at all.
Carter didn’t believe in letting other people fix shit. A question of personal responsibility. The way he looked at it, you could do something right, or do nothing at all. Which was just as bad as doing wrong.
Lives depended on the outcome of this face-off on the runway. If that meant having to sacrifice himself, so be it.
In another fifty metres Carter steered onto the runway, bulldozing through the row of marker lights. He was less than forty metres from the jet now. The aircraft was shooting along at well over a hundred kilometres per hour, the pilots flooring it in their sheer desperation to avoid the snow plough. Carter made a final correction to his trajectory and steeled himself.
He didn’t think the nukes would detonate on impact. It would take more than a violent jolt to trigger them.
He hoped.
In the final few seconds before contact, Carter pulled hard again on the hydraulic lever, lifting the blade up so that it reached the same height as the front of the Learjet. The bucket now fully blocked his view but that didn’t matter. He knew he was going to hit the aircraft. Impact was inevitable.
He wondered if kamikaze pilots had felt like this, in the moments before they slammed into a battleship.
His body tensed. Carter braced himself.
The plough rammed into the cockpit at a forty-five-degree angle, shearing off the front end in a shriek of twisted metal and engine-screech.
Carter had just enough time to see the Learjet spinning off its axis, tipping over onto its left wing. Then the force of the collision threw him forward. His head slammed against the dashboard. Carter saw white for the briefest moment. A jarring pain ripped through his skull, and then his world went sideways as the plough tipped heavily onto its right side. There was an incessant din of shattering glass, metal scraping against metal, the squeal of burning rubber and the high-pitched scream of a damaged engine. The cab shook violently, throwing Carter from side to side, and he felt sure that he was going to die.
The plough engine cut out.
Carter opened his eyes.
Alive, he realised.
Christ, I’m still alive.
He was conscious of something in the air. The unmistakable smell of avgas, pissing out of the ruptured Learjet tanks. A second later, he felt a searing wave of heat through the cabin’s spider-cracked windscreen as the aircraft caught fire.
Some primitive survival instinct seized hold of Carter. A voice in the lizard part of his brain spoke up, shouting at him above the scream of the engines.
Get out of the cab. Right fucking now.
Carter shook glass fragments from his head and reached for the driver’s side door. Which was now facing skyward. He desperately flung the door open, pushing it up, like a trapped crewman forcing open a submarine hatch.
The flames quickly spread as Carter crawled out of the overturned vehicle. He tumbled down to the ground, scraped himself off the glass-sprinkled asphalt and hurried away from the aircraft.
He was twenty metres away when the jet burst into flames with a furious roar. The heat scorched the back of his neck; he staggered on for several paces, then paused to glance back at the blazing wreckage.
Apricot flames engulfed the canted Learjet. Smoke spewed up from the fuselage, billowing into the afternoon sky. There was debris all over the ground. Twisted bits of metal, lengths of electrical wiring, shattered flight instruments. Amid the carnage, Carter spotted the severed torso of one of the pilots, cooking in the glow of the flames. The plough blade had cleaved his body in half.
He spied a flicker of movement beyond the flames. Carter shielded his eyes against the intense heat and smoke and saw Ramsey limping away from the aircraft. Carrying a black duffel bag in his right hand. The guy struggled on for another three or four metres before he collapsed.
Carter slowly approached the stricken American. Blood-splashed fingers fumbled for the Grach in his holster. He stopped beside Ramsey. The latter peeled his face away from the asphalt and rolled onto his back as he gazed up at Carter. He was in a seriously bad way. His clothes had been singed. His flesh had been badly burned. The left side of his face looked like someone had taken a blowtorch to it.
Ramsey read the intention in Carter’s eyes. His face, or what was left of it, went pale with fear.
‘No,’ he gasped. ‘No.’
‘Yes,’ Carter said.
He shoved the tip of the Grach barrel against Ramsey’s blistered forehead. His eyes were wide with terror. He let out a final pleading moan before Carter blew his brains out.
Carter turned away from the dead American. He shuffled back down the runway towards the control tower.
A million different nerve endings flared in his body. His skull felt as if it had been split down the middle with a battleaxe. He’d lost a couple of front teeth. A bruise the size of a grapefruit throbbed painfully on his temple.
It hurt like fuck to breathe, and he could feel the blood oozing out of a deep wound on his scalp. But otherwise he seemed OK. No serious internal damage. Nothing that wouldn’t heal eventually.
Bad, but could have been a fuck of a lot worse.
He stopped at the edge of the airstrip and paused briefly as he looked back at Vann. At the man he’d once admired, now sprawled on an airfield in Tajikistan with a hole in his head. Carter half expected some profound meaning to occur to him, but none did.
The control tower was six hundred metres away, but it felt more like six miles. His legs were heavy with fatigue, every muscle in his body ached abominably. Like the end of Test Week. It took a great will of effort to stumble through the door and climb the stairs to the control room.
One last thing to do.
He briefly wondered what would happen once he reported this to Six. There would be a frantic effort to cover their tracks. That would be Vauxhall Bridge’s first priority. A clean-up crew would be dispatched to the airfield urgently. Local assets. The nukes would be seized. Witnesses paid off. The skeleton crew at the airfield was in for an unexpected bonus.
There would be a debrief once he’d returned home. Six would want to go over his story in forensic detail. The Company probably wouldn’t get involved. They’d be busy cleaning up in-house. Mullins, and Ortega, and whoever else was involved in Ramsey’s deranged plot. But the hawks would use it to their advantage. There would be some difficult conversations in the Oval Office. Uncomfortable truths would be presented to the president. A week or two from now the White House would send a fleet to the South China Sea. Training exercise. Back channels would be opened with Beijing. Warnings issued. Nothing specific, nothing overtly hostile, but with just enough meat on the bones to persuade the CCP that they were serious.
You really don’t want to call our bluff on this one. Trust us, you don’t want to go there.
No one would thank Carter for his efforts. There would be no gong, no handshake from the head shed. That was for fucking sure.
He reached the top of the stairs, pulled the Grach on the crew working the tower and told them he needed to use a phone. None of them apparently understood him. They simply stood looking at the bloodied Englishman with expressions of shock and terror. Eventually one of them got the message and directed him to a console with a keyboard and a bunch of monitors and a Cisco phone.
Carter picked up the receiver and punched in a UK number from memory. An emergency contact number at Vauxhall Bridge. For assets in the field.
The phone rang twice. A female operator answered in a polite businesslike voice and gave the name of a generic data solutions business, one of several fronts used by Six.
‘How may I direct your call, sir?’
‘Department Nineteen,’ Carter said.
‘Please hold.’
There was a beat of dead air, followed by a burst of cheery hold music. Some upbeat 1980s pop song. Carter listened to it for several moments while he watched the aircraft burn through the slanted tower windows.
Then someone picked up.
‘Yes?’ the voice asked.
‘This is Carter,’ came the reply. ‘They’re all dead.’
EPILOGUE
Hereford, UK
Four days later, Carter sat at the end of a long table in a windowless briefing room at the Regiment camp in Credenhill. There were several such rooms at SAS headquarters: bland, sparsely furnished, with no electronic devices permitted inside, ideal for secure meetings.
He had been summoned by the Regiment ops officer to the camp earlier that morning. Three days after his return to Hereford. Carter had been kicking his heels at home since he’d left Tajikistan, reading and recovering from the injuries he’d sustained at the airfield attack. His own form of decompression. There had been an initial debrief at the British Embassy in Dushanbe in the immediate aftermath of his phone call. But Carter knew there would be a follow-up at some point once he was back home. Inevitable, given the sensitivity of the mission. When the ops officer had called him with orders to report to base, he knew exactly what was going on.
Four people sat around the table in front of Carter, their features starkly lit by the ceiling panel lights.
Peter Hardcastle, the CO of 22 SAS, was a stern man, a career Rupert who despised Carter for his freelance attitude. It was an open secret that he’d wanted Carter out of the Regiment ever since the Mali siege.
Next to Hardcastle sat a smooth-faced man in his late fifties with piercing blue eyes. Eliot Lebrun was a senior Six officer, an old China hand, with an accent redolent of old money and French aristocratic roots. Part of the Old Etonian dynasty that still liked to think it ruled Six, but increasingly found itself on the back foot.
To Lebrun’s right was another Six officer, Philippa Beck. She was dark-haired, with mouse-like features, small but fierce, a fortysomething Northern lass with a fondness for strong ale and rugby league. Carter had liked her from the moment they had first met.
The fourth person was a chubby guy in an ill-fitting suit and a Tory-blue tie, mid-forties, with a prominent bald patch. James Gregory was a former Colonel in the Grenadier Guards, and one of the up-and-coming figures in the Foreign Office. He had a permanent frown etched across his brow, and the restless energy, limitless ego and naked ruthlessness of a man who had his eyes on one day becoming Defence Secretary.
Carter had worked with Gregory, Beck and Lebrun on various jobs in the past. They had been waiting for him in the briefing room when he’d arrived at the camp. Lebrun did most of the talking. He greeted Carter with a pleasant smile and feigned concern for his injuries, then asked him to talk through his story one more time.
Hardcastle made no attempt to hide his displeasure with Carter. He spent most of the meeting glaring at him in silent contempt.
‘. . . and that’s when I decided to crash the plough into the jet,’ Carter said, finishing his account.
‘A rather risky move, don’t you think?’ Lebrun asked. ‘Could have easily turned out rather badly for you.’
Carter shrugged. ‘I had no option. It was the only way I could see to stop them taking off.’
‘Why not let them get away?’ Gregory wondered out loud. ‘You could have made a note of the tail number and called it in to us. Our chaps would have been able to track them down sooner or later. Hell of a lot less messy, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I had to make a decision,’ Carter said. ‘I couldn’t take the risk.’
‘Seems sensible enough to me,’ Beck said in her strong Lancastrian accent. ‘There’s no guarantee we would have caught them in time. Ramsey might have cached the weapons before we could locate them.’
Gregory muttered something under his breath.
‘Go on,’ Lebrun said.
Carter said, ‘After the crash, I neutralised Ramsey. That was it. I walked away, called it in to your lot. End of.’
‘What about Vann?’ asked Gregory. ‘Did you go over to check his body?’
Carter realised the others were staring at him intently.
‘No need,’ he replied. ‘I saw him go down. He was dead. I figured Ramsey had shot him in the head.’
‘But you couldn’t be sure?’
‘A plane full of nukes was on fire,’ Carter replied tetchily. ‘I didn’t plan on sticking around the scene for long.’ He frowned. ‘What the fuck’s going on? Why are you asking me all of this stuff?’
Lebrun and Beck exchanged a look. Gregory coughed and shifted uncomfortably. Hardcastle sat with intertwined hands, glowering at Carter like he was something he’d scraped off the sole of his boot.
Lebrun said, ‘After your call our friends at the Company sent in some of their local assets to secure the airfield. It had to be the Americans because we didn’t have any assets of our own in the area. They found the plane and the snow plough, in exactly the condition you described. They found Ramsey, and the two pilots. But there was no sign of your chum.’
Carter flinched in shock. He felt something cold running down his spine. ‘No.’
‘Also missing, a duffel bag filled with heroin, if we are to believe your version of events,’ Lebrun continued.
Gregory gave him a long, searching look. ‘I don’t suppose you’d know anything about that, would you?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Still.’ The Foreign Office man spread his hands. ‘It looks rather convenient, wouldn’t you say? Your friend vanishing without explan-ation, plus the drugs.’
Carter shook his head. ‘I don’t understand. Vann was right fucking there. He went down. I saw him.’
Lebrun slipped on a pair of rimless glasses and consulted his scribbled notes in front of him. ‘Let’s be specific, shall we? You told us that Vann was killed by a shot to the head.’
‘Aye. That’s right.’
‘But you can’t possibly be sure, can you? Not from a distance of six hundred metres.’ He looked up from his notes. ‘Unless you wish to volunteer some other explanation to us?’
