Rage, desperation, compulsion — all expressed in the swing of his arm at the surprised, half-turned face of the driver, all weighted in the strength of the blow he delivered to the man’s face with the barrel of the Makarov.
He was still looking at the body when hands grabbed him and thrust him into the car’s leather-scented interior. Someone, grunting with pain, got heavily in beside him, there was a third, wearing the chauffeur’s uniform cap, in the driving seat. Dmitri, the first he recognized, was in the front passenger seat. Marfa flung open the door and clambered in, squashing Vorontsyev, who yelled with pain. His face was ashen with effort. The car was heavy with tension, exhilaration.
‘Slowly!’ Vorontsyev cried, still in pain, clutching his ribs.
Lubin steered the Mercedes forward. Lock glanced through the rear window. The driver’s unconscious form was clearly visible, lying in the snow between the two hangars. They passed the GRU soldiers, clustered around a truck painted olive-drab.
They were drinking coffee or vodka, oblivious to the passage of the car. Lubin turned onto the taxiway behind the self-propelled passenger steps that had followed the Learjet. Turgenev was going to get off the airplane before it took off, and his Mercedes would be waiting for him.
The aircraft reached the end of the taxiway and turned onto the runway. The main passenger door, behind the flight deck, opened as a dark gap. Lock could only snatch at his next breath.
‘Slowly,’ Vorontsyev insisted, his breathing less ragged.
The passenger steps were twenty yards ahead of the Mercedes.
The Learjet was poised at the end of the runway. Lock heard his own sharp intake of breath as a tall, fur-hatted figure in a well-cut, dark overcoat appeared in the gap of the open passenger door. Turgenev. The name filled his mouth with saliva, like the anticipation of food. The terminal building was a wall of dull glass against which the tank and the self-propelled gun were posed. The passenger steps drew up beside the plane and their hydraulics jiggled the top step into alignment with the open door. Everything seemed slowed down and made distant; the effect of the car’s tinted windows or perhaps his own anticipation.
Vorontsyev was watching him anxiously. The Mercedes drew to a halt near the bottom of the steps.
‘Just me,’ Lock said. ‘When he’s halfway down the steps. Not till then, not ‘
‘Don’t kill him, Lock.’
Lock made no reply, his hand poised on the door handle. They watched him like an audience, each one of them still, tense.
Turgenev waved a hand’back into the passenger cabin of the plane, then stepped onto the short flight of steps.
‘Look!’ Marfa breathed, pointing back towards the hangars.
‘They’ve found the driver!’
The GRU uniforms were clustered in a tight knot between the two hangars, small as a gathering of ants around a dead fly. A UAZ jeep was pulling up beside them. Lock turned back to the steps and saw, to his horror, that Turgenev had paused near the top, one gloved hand on the metal handrail. He was unalarmed, merely curious, squinting towards the hangars. The familiar car, parked beside the steps, reassured.
The Iranian would be armed, Turgenev probably not…
… now.
He thrust open the door, climbed out, skidded on wet slush, then pushed himself towards the bottom of the steps. As he looked up, he knew at once that Turgenev had recognized him. The Russian turned quickly to regain the aircraft. Lock’s boots pounded on the metal steps as the man retreated. His breath was laboured, his feet slippery beneath him. Turgenev was quicker than he, having passed through shock into action in an instant.
Other boots on the passenger steps. Turgenev, turning in the doorway, his hand reaching into the breast of his coat. The distance too great, the time too short, his sensation of being slow, old, hardly moving —
— released as he blundered into Turgenev, catching the scent of his cashmere overcoat, and his aftershave. Then he collided with a locker’s metal, dizzying himself, his head shrieking with pain. His hands fumbled for Turgenev, who slipped them with a matador’s grace and was gone, through a drawn curtain into the forward passenger cabin. Lock held his head, something wet on his gloved fingers. Lubin and then Dmitri loomed in the doorway, Marfa’s head bobbing behind them.
Lock pointed forward, then staggered through the curtain.
Turgenev was at the other end of the small cabin, at the door to the flight deck. And turned to watch him. Hunted, alarmed
— and strangely aloof. The Iranian was on his feet, on the starboard side, rising from his seat, staring wildly at them. Armed.
Gun in his hands, held out stiff-armed, no shock-delay, pure professionalism.
Lock fired twice and the Iranian’s blood splashed the cabin ceiling and the wall behind his head. Lock’s left arm almost torn from its socket by the impact of the single shot the Iranian had had time to fire. He staggered, sat heavily on the arm of a chair.
A terrified, middle-aged face stared up at him from behind thick glassed spectacles.
‘Stop him!’ Lock groaned.
The flight deck door had closed behind Turgenev. Foreboding.
There was no way the man would allow himself to be taken hostage, allow the airplane to ‘Christ, stop him—!’ he bellowed.
Dmitri had reached the door, his hand was on the handle, his face careless of his own safety, when Lock heard the first shot.
Dmitri threw back the door. The second shot echoed in the cabin. Someone whimpered in terror. Through the open door, Lock could see Turgenev standing between the two pilots’ seats, each of which held a slumped, still form. He’d shot the pilot and copilot. They couldn’t, now, fly anywhere.
Then Turgenev turned away to shut down the engines. Dmitri seemed startled into rage at the movement and struck at Turgenev’s arm with his gun. Turgenev’s pistol clattered to the floor of the flight deck, his features expressing a snarling anger for an instant. Then he shrugged, rubbed his arm, and raised his hands in a mockery of surrender. Dmitri wore ashen shock on his round features. Turgenev entered the passenger cabin and Dmitri closed the door on the bodies.
Someone screamed, as high-pitched and alien as a siren.
Vorontsyev turned, “to see Marfa slap the stewardess across the face, then hold her tightly against her. The woman’s shoulders heaved, her face buried in dark hair and the stuff of Marfa’s coat.
Lock looked down at his wounded arm. There was blood on the sleeve of his coat. There was hardly any pain, surprisingly.
His arm was still in traumatic shock. He let his hand rest on his lap, oblivious of the stunned imprinted fear on the face of the bespectacled man in the seat beside him. He coughed at the tickle of burned powder from the gunshots. A gout of blood splashed down onto his hand. Blood ran from his lips, down his chin. He gingerly opened his topcoat. The breast of his check shirt was darkened with blood. He felt a numb terror — the salty blood on his tongue, filling his mouth again.
The Iranian’s one shot had passed through his arm — and his lungs.
Vorontsyev was looking at him in horror, even as Turgenev announced:
‘It seems, gentlemen, our flight has been delayed indefinitely.’
Vorontsyev raised his pistol in his left hand, but did not strike Turgenev. Instead, his imagination sensed the isolated aircraft, the runway, the fleeing passenger steps, the tower, the terminal, all spreading out around them. The game was lost. The aircraft had been sabotaged.