Nina had brought the golden Magnum above the water and fired. The dead man slumped over the tiller. The speedboat veered away from Eddie, spinning in decreasing circles until centrifugal force threw the corpse over the side. With nothing holding the throttle open, the outboard dropped to an idle putter, the craft slowing.
Fortune caught up and guided his boat towards the bobbing couple. ‘Eddie! Nina!’ he called. ‘Wait there, I will get you!’
‘Thanks!’ Eddie replied — then he regarded the abandoned vessel. ‘No, wait!’
‘What do you mean, “wait”?’ demanded Nina, tossing away the empty gun. ‘Haven’t you seen The African Queen? I want to get out of the water before we’re eaten alive by leeches!’
‘We still need to catch Brice before he gets away with the Shamir,’ he said, swimming for the drifting craft. ‘And that boat’s the fastest thing on this river!’
28
Eddie’s hunch proved correct. Once he and Nina had boarded Luaba’s boat and set off in pursuit of the British agent, Fortune’s craft was soon left behind.
He stared ahead for his quarry. The flood wave had diminished in power the farther it rolled from Zhakana, the riverbanks this far downstream not having burst. That meant Brice couldn’t take any shortcuts across flooded land, so the speedboat would eventually catch up. ‘What’s the plan, then?’ said Nina.
‘Catch the bugger and shoot him is about as far as I’d got,’ he replied. ‘After that… I dunno. I don’t think letting anyone get hold of the Shamir would be a good idea, though.’
‘Not even the IHA? It would fall under their remit, after all — it’s the Horn of Joshua, a biblical artefact.’
‘You think they could keep it safe? Hell, where could they keep it? The UN building’s not lead-lined, so if they put it in that vault in the basement, the whole building’d probably come down by Tuesday morning. And besides,’ he went on grimly, ‘I’m not sure I’d trust ’em to keep hold of it. Think how many different countries’d love to get their hands on a weapon like that.’
The IHA’s former director felt distinctly defensive about ‘her’ agency. ‘The IHA’s an independent organisation under UN jurisdiction,’ she insisted. ‘They don’t have to release anything under their protection if it would endanger global security. When I was running it, I had requests — demands, even — from governments to grant them unilateral access to various discoveries. I always turned them down. My argument was that if something we found was safe for one nation to have, then all nations should have the same access. Funnily enough, none of them liked that, but the IHA’s charter gave me full right to control how the things we were protecting were used — or even if they were allowed to be used.’
‘Yeah, but you’re not running the IHA now, are you? You think Lester Blumberg was picked because of how he stands up against the same bloody governments that fund him?’
‘So what are you suggesting? Destroy the Shamir, smash it into bits? All you’d get would be a whole load of little Shamirs, like the one King Solomon used to cut the stones for the First Temple.’
He shook his head. ‘I dunno. I mean, giving it to the IHA’d be better than letting one country get hold of it for themselves, but—’ He broke off. ‘There he is!’
Nina glimpsed a distant flicker of colour through the trees. ‘He must be over half a mile ahead of us.’
‘Maybe — but that waterfall’s a few miles from here,’ he remembered. ‘It’s too high for him to go over. He’s trapped!’
They swept through more bends, the speedboat’s sides brushing against undergrowth along the banks as Eddie carved around them. The other boat reappeared ahead. ‘There!’ said the Yorkshireman excitedly. ‘He’ll be in range in another minute. You take over so I can shoot him…’ He trailed off.
A new sound reached them over the outboard. At first Nina thought it was the waterfall’s rumble, before realising it was too regular, mechanical. She looked up. ‘Eddie, there!’ she cried, pointing.
A helicopter was sweeping towards the jungle.
Brice spoke to the approaching aircraft’s pilot via the satphone as he guided his boat downriver. ‘Yes, I’ve just seen you,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how far I am from the waterfall, but I assume you can see it from up there. There was a clearing two hundred metres upstream. You should be able to land and pick me up.’
‘Yeah, we saw the waterfall,’ replied the pilot. His accent was South African, and he sounded decidedly irate at being rushed into the jungle to perform an extraction, covert operations not being part of his job description. ‘It’s about three kilometres ahead of you. But you said you’re the only person being picked up, right?’
‘That’s right,’ Brice said impatiently.
‘Then it looks like you’ve got some hitch-hikers.’
The MI6 agent looked back upriver. His eyes widened as he saw another boat following him — and even at this distance he could tell its occupants were not Congolese. ‘Unbelievable,’ he muttered.
He saw the Yorkshireman switch places with his wife. There was only one possible reason for the change of seats… ‘I’m about to come under fire,’ he told the pilot.
‘You’re what? Hey, no one said anything about guns!’
‘I won’t have time to stop,’ Brice went on firmly, ‘so you’ll have to lower a line to pick me up. The weight will be—’
‘What am I, a stunt pilot? I’m not—’
‘Oh, do be quiet,’ he snapped. ‘Your orders are to do exactly what I say, yes?’ The sullen silence from the other end of the line confirmed it. ‘Then lower a line and fly overhead to pull me up. The weight will be roughly that of two adult men, so be ready for it.’
He brought the boat around a bend — and the river beyond straightened, stretching out towards the distant edge of the waterfall.
An edge that was getting closer every second.
He looked back up at the descending helicopter. ‘How far away am I now?’
‘Uh — two klicks, I’d say?’
‘Then you’d better bloody get on with it!’
Eddie readied the replacement AK Paris had given to him as he watched the helicopter drop towards the river. ‘He’s not going to do what I think he’s going to do, is he?’
‘I think he is,’ said Nina as one of the cabin doors opened — and someone inside pitched out a rope ladder. It unfurled like a banner, falling towards the boat below.
‘Bloody spies! They really do all think they’re James sodding Bond!’ He took aim at the chopper — but held his fire.
‘What are you waiting for?’
‘The ride’s too bumpy to hit anything at this range.’ The river was picking up speed as it approached the falls, whitecaps forming. ‘Keep after ’em!’
‘Where else would I go?’ she said sarcastically. The speedboat was at full throttle; all she could do was follow the other craft.
The chopper matched pace with Brice’s boat, the ladder flapping beneath it. Eddie fixed his sights on the fleeing agent and took an experimental shot. A tiny white speck puffed from the river behind the vessel. He adjusted his aim for a second attempt — which missed by a wider margin, thrown off by the churning waters.
His target would have to be the helicopter. He wasn’t happy about that — it was a civilian aircraft — but he couldn’t let Brice escape with the Shamir. A couple of rounds hitting the chopper might be enough to scare off its pilot, though. He raised the rifle—
The snaking ladder hit Brice’s hull. The spy grabbed a rung with one hand — and hauled up the lead box with the other.