Ratcatcher - By Tim Stevens Page 0,101

lights of the city, awake for several hours by now, ten kilometres away. From the east, sunlight was leaking through the cloud cover and spilling glittering tendrils across the surface of the water. The sea below the helicopter was roiling, bewildered and furious at the sudden conjunction of three interlopers.

Venedikt had been distracted by the Englishman’s approach and hadn’t noticed the advance of the second speed boat until Lyuba had called out. He’d taken his eyes away from the binoculars, then immediately reapplied them. The woman was steering while the man, Purkiss’s crony, had lifted his assault rifle over the top of the windscreen. In the larger boat the men were already hefting their own weapons into position across the back rail of the craft.

It took Venedikt a moment to realise that Purkiss’s man was levelling his rifle not at Raskov and his men in the boat, but upwards at the Black Hawk.

The helicopter was perhaps sixty metres above the surface of the sea, the approaching speed boat almost half a kilometre distant. It meant that the Black Hawk was at the limit of the AK-74’s effective range, but Venedikt flinched as the characteristic clatter of the rifle cut through the whap of the rotors even at this distance and tiny streaks of noise whispered past the fuselage. Leok banked the chopper to the left and upwards. Venedikt struggled to keep his feet, gripping the back of the pilot’s seat while with his other hand he swung the binoculars. He saw that Raskov and his men had opened fire themselves, no longer caring about the range now that the Black Hawk had come under fire. Crazily, Purkiss’s man wasn’t returning their fire, but was still aiming at the Black Hawk, now impossibly beyond reach, a modern Don Quixote tilting at his own particular windmill.

In his ear Dobrynin yelled, ‘Now.’ Venedikt looked at his watch. Seven fifty-eight.

He stepped forward into the cockpit, shouldered Ilkun aside, and crouched at the controls.

*

Close as he was to the engines, Purkiss couldn’t at first be certain that he was hearing the remote noise of automatic fire. Above him, Fallon thumped hard several times on the lid of the bench and he knew it was happening.

He felt the Black Hawk veer and yaw, felt rather than heard the ping of something off the undercarriage. Kendrick had hit it, he thought, even though he was probably too far away to do any damage. With the swinging of the chopper came a sudden creak in the bench lid and the thump of a body hitting the floor. Purkiss knew it was Fallon.

He released the breath he’d drawn and exploded upwards, flinging the lid up and out. He registered shock on the face turned towards him. A familiar one, Dobrynin, the man with the claw hand with whom he’d had such an urbane discussion in his office just the previous afternoon. Purkiss had the SIG Sauer up and levelled. He fired twice, catching Dobrynin in the chest with both shots, slamming him back against the partition that separated the cabin from the back of the pilot’s seat. At Purkiss’s feet Fallon rolled and gasped, hands fastened behind him. Purkiss stepped over him.

In the cockpit Kuznetsov squatted at some sort of apparatus that looked like it had been added to the basic design of the craft. A launcher. The launcher. Kuznetsov glanced round. Purkiss raised the pistol.

The chopper rolled then, to the right, almost through ninety degrees. Purkiss was flung off his feet and crashed against the cabin door. The world tipped as the helicopter was righted again, and somebody came charging through into the cabin. Not Kuznetsov but Lyuba Ilkun.

Her foot pistoned into Purkiss’s abdomen. He doubled and twisted to protect against another blow, but she was reaching past him for the release on the door. The blast of air was torrential and terrible in its cold suddenness. She shouted and the craft gave a jerk again, expert handling by the pilot, he had to admit in a detached, crazy way.

Then he was tumbling through the gap out into the grey whipping void, away from Ilkun’s triumphant, yelling face.

*

The Jacobin pulled on the wheel, taking the boat acutely to the right, away from the melee ahead. Kuznetsov’s men were answering Kendrick with artillery of their own. It appeared he had given up on his ambition of bringing down the Black Hawk, was ducking low beneath the screen of the speed boat while Elle held it steady, no longer accelerating,