The Moscow Cipher Read online

  Ben felt that cold chill in his bones that comes with the growing certainty that one’s chance of survival is slim to zero. He’d experienced that chill plenty of times before and lived to prove it wrong. But one day it would be right. One day, he wouldn’t make it out alive.

  That day might just have come.

  Chapter 32

  Ben could either let go of the half-unconscious, injured Yuri and abandon the guy in order to save himself, or he could stand his ground and let himself get shot to pieces. Neither option appealed to him. He kept hold of Yuri’s collar, hauling him one-handed away from danger. With the other hand he trained his near-empty weapon on the stream of men emerging from the house.

  Four rounds left. Four rounds to make the difference between living and dying. Here we go , he thought, and squeezed the trigger.

  No submachine gun ever made was going to be much of a target weapon. Firing one-handed backwards over his shoulder while at a run and simultaneously struggling with a hefty dead weight made it even less conducive to accuracy. His first shot took off a man’s earlobe and smashed a window of the house. His second hit another man in the arm. His third went nowhere at all.

  But in the next fraction of a second Ben had one of those crazy ideas that were known to make Jeff Dekker, and others who’d seen him in action, go pale.

  The flicker of the still-burning electrical transformer and the showers of sparks from the severed high-voltage line were gleaming off the cylindrical surface of the propane bottle that had been knocked over and rolled across the yard. It was lying at just the right angle, so a bullet fired from where he was standing wouldn’t simply ricochet off its rounded side.

  Would the underpowered 9mm Makarov round penetrate the thick steel? Only one way to find out.

  Ben thought fuck it and fired . Last shot. He heard the clack of the silenced weapon’s bolt and the simultaneous solid clank of the bullet punching cleanly through the metal of the bottle’s curved flank and out the other side.

  In the movies, firing at vehicle petrol tanks, propane canisters or anything remotely volatile was always guaranteed to make them go up like a ton of TNT, killing all the bad guys in the vicinity without harming the hero. Ben usually fell asleep watching those kinds of films, and he’d seen enough bullet impacts in his life to know that such things just didn’t occur in real life.

  And this was real life, not cinema. When he shot the steel bottle, as expected, nothing happened except a rapid and hissing escape of pressured gas from the two holes his bullet had made on its way through the bottle. In itself, quite harmless.

  But that was without accounting for the flames of the burning transformer just a few feet away. Flammable gas is at its most dangerous when mixed with air. The hissing gas jetted into the flames and ignited.

  The explosion happened so fast that the men running from the house had no warning. The fireball expanded across the yard, lighting up the night and swallowing up Yuri’s Volkswagen and Grisha’s pickup truck, which immediately caught light and blew up in a staggered sequence as their tanks ruptured and detonated. The pressure of the burning gas inside the propane bottle blew it apart like a bombshell. Jagged fragments of steel flew outwards in a deadly rain. A man who hadn’t been close enough to the fireball to be engulfed was hit in the belly by a piece of shrapnel that tore him almost in half and spilled his intestines onto the dirt.

  The heat of the explosion seared Ben’s face and drove him back. He dropped his empty gun and grabbed the prone Yuri with both hands, manhauling him to his feet and yelling ‘ Move!’ in his ear. Yuri’s shot leg buckled under him. Ben went down on a knee, let Yuri topple across his shoulders, raised him up in a fireman’s lift and ran. He’d no idea how many of the enemy had survived the blast, and he had no intention of hanging around to do a head-count of survivors. The time to get out of here was now or never, while the wall of flames raged and could have held back a regiment.

  Bent under Yuri’s weight and thankful he hadn’t had to carry Grisha instead, Ben hurried towards the darkness of the woods. He was half blinded by the sunspots that the propane blast had imprinted on his retinas and had to keep blinking to get his vision back. Behind them, the farmyard looked like a battlefield. A couple of bodies lay burning. The whole front of the house was ablaze and the inferno would soon take over the entire building.

  Reaching the perimeter fence Ben turned to look in all directions and called, ‘Valentina!’ He’d last seen her taking off after her father was hit. Where had she gone? He called her name again, as loudly as he dared. Then saw the figures of armed men skirting like ants around the edges of the fiery farmyard and ran faster before they spotted him and gave chase.

  Ben struggled over the perimeter fence and kept moving through the darkness towards the trees, stumbling over the rough ground, bushes tearing at his legs. He spun around at the sound of a voice.

  ‘Psst! Over here!’

  It was Grisha. He was hiding at the edge of the woods, still panting hard from his flight. The flicker of the distant fire reflected in his eyes as he glanced around and then looked ashen-faced at Ben. ‘Where’s the kid? Where’s Valentina?’

  Ben had to admit, ‘I don’t know. I lost sight of her back there.’

  ‘Oh, no. No, no.’

  ‘She must know every nook and cranny of the farm,’ Ben said, trying to sound more assured about it than he really was. ‘She’ll be hiding somewhere. I’ll go back for her. First I need to get him to safety.’

  Grisha touched Yuri’s arm, tentatively, as though he might be dead. ‘Holy shit. Is he okay?’

  ‘He will be,’ Ben replied. ‘Once we get the bullet out of his leg. He took a nasty zap from a Taser.’

  ‘I know the feeling. What about the chick, what’s-her-name?’

  ‘Tatyana?’ Ben shook his head. He was perplexed about her. Why had she vanished so suddenly?

  Another explosion sounded from the direction of the farm, making Grisha jump. Another propane bottle had just gone off.

  ‘Oh man, what happened to my house?’

  ‘It was a tip anyway,’ Ben said. ‘Now why don’t you shut up and lead us to the trailer, or do I have to find it myself?’

  The lumbering Grisha led the way into the dense forest. They kept moving for several hundred yards, until the burning house was just a dim orange flicker through the trees. While Grisha trampled through the bushes like a water buffalo, Ben moved stealthily and quietly even with the weight of an unconscious man over his shoulders.

  Suddenly Ben tensed at the sound of crackling twigs. Fast footsteps, coming up behind him.

  He whirled around to meet the threat.

  Chapter 33

  But it was on four legs, not two, that they’d been followed. Alyosha trotted up to Ben and dropped to his haunches, tongue lolling. Ben breathed a sigh of relief and patted the hound on the head. He seemed to have come away from the battle uninjured, and none of the blood that matted his tawny fur was his own.

  ‘You helped me out a lot back there, Alyosha. How’d you like to come and live with me in France?’

  The dog made no reply. Maybe he needed time to think about it.

  With Grisha in the lead, Ben’s new best friend bringing up the rear and nobody else in pursuit, they kept moving through the dark forest. Just when Ben was becoming convinced that the big guy had lost his way, Grisha stopped up ahead and pointed. His breathing was so laboured that he could barely wheeze out, ‘Here it is.’

  At first Ben could see nothing but shadows. As his eyes got used to the darkness he was able to make out the solid black shape among the foliage. He stepped towards it, reached out and his fingers felt the mesh of the camouflage netting with which Grisha had draped his trailer, carefully blending it into its surroundings. If the assault team had come this way from their drop zone, they could have stalked within a few yards of it in the darkness, and not known it was there. For the second time that night, Ben had to confess that the company of a paranoid conspiracy nut brought
certain advantages.

  Grisha pulled aside some netting, fumbled with keys and managed to find the trailer door lock in the darkness. Between them they manhandled Yuri’s limp form up the steps and laid him down on the floor. Grisha bolted the door shut behind them and groped about for a light switch until he remembered there was no power, and reached instead for another of his gas-powered survival lanterns.

  ‘No lights,’ Ben said.

  ‘All the windows are blacked out, man. Nobody will see it.’

  ‘Keep it low.’

  The dim light shone about the trailer. Grisha’s hideout was some forty feet in length. Two thirds of the space was devoted to his internet radio setup, enough equipment piled everywhere to sink a boat. Every bare horizontal surface was crowded with mouldy coffee mugs and the remnants of meals and snacks. The walls were plastered with peeling conspiracy posters in Russian and English. A recent US president with airbrushed demon eyes and goat ears. A UFO overflying a Cyrillic slogan that probably said ‘I WANT TO BELIEVE’. Electric cables covered the floor like a nest of snakes. ‘Watch you don’t trip,’ Grisha warned.

  ‘How do you run all this stuff?’ Ben asked, looking at the mountain of computers and assorted gear.

  ‘Power supply runs all the way from the house. The wire is buried four feet deep. I keep a couple of backup generators, too.’

  ‘Know something, Grisha? You’re even nuttier than I realised.’

  ‘That’s what it takes to elude the New World Order, man.’

  ‘Says the guy who just had his home destroyed by a tactical raid team. You’re going to need to have a real think about how the hell they found you out here in the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘Oh, I’m thinking about it, man. And it beats me.’

  ‘Me too. For now.’

  Alyosha curled up in a heap of old clothes covered in dog hair. Ben and Grisha heaved Yuri into the narrow aisle between the trailer’s bench seats. Yuri stirred. His eyes flickered open, then rolled back shut. Blood from his gunshot wound was leaking all over the carpet. Crouching beside him Ben ripped the blood-soaked trouser leg to the knee and inspected the wound. The bullet had torn right through the muscle without touching bone, but had left a nasty exit wound that was going to need sutures. ‘Got a first-aid kit in here?’ Ben asked Grisha.

  ‘Sure.’ Grisha tossed aside a pile of old magazines and dragged out a plastic box, which turned out to be a comprehensive piece of kit that any survivalist prepper would be proud of. First Ben reached into his jacket pocket for his flask and splashed whisky on the wound, which had the effect of bringing Yuri much more to life. The kit contained local anaesthetic spray and antiseptic cream, both of which Ben applied liberally to the holes in Yuri’s leg before wrapping him up from knee to ankle in a makeshift field dressing that would do for now. Yuri’s pain eased, but nothing could allay his distress about Valentina.

  ‘I’ll find her, Yuri,’ Ben promised him. ‘I’m going back.’

  ‘I want to come too,’ Yuri groaned.

  ‘Not a chance.’ Ben turned to Grisha. ‘If I’m not back after thirty minutes, it means you’re not safe here and you need to get away. Is there a place you can go?’

  ‘Screw that, man, I’m not going anywhere.’

  ‘We’ll have that conversation when I get back. Thirty minutes.’

  Ben left the trailer and scouted back alone, silent and fast, just a shadow flitting among the trees. As he reached the edge of the woods, he paused and heard the distant rhythmic pulse of helicopter blades. At least two choppers but more likely three, judging by the sound. They were incoming from the north, still some distance off but approaching fast.

  Ben kept moving and soon reached the perimeter fence. The goats were bleating in agitation and milling around their pen. He slipped over the fence and let himself inside their enclosure, crouching low behind the wire to observe the scene. There was no sign anywhere of either Valentina or Tatyana. Grisha’s farmhouse was still burning out of control, nothing to save it from total destruction. The air was thick with the stench of smoke. He could see the remnants of the assault team silhouetted against the fiery background, at least half a dozen men that he could count. They were busy collecting their equipment and gathering up all the dead bodies of their comrades they could find, the ones that hadn’t been burned up in the blaze. One man was speaking on a radio. A couple more were hobbling about or sitting nursing their injuries.

  But the walking wounded could still maim or kill an unarmed enemy, as long as they still had a trigger finger to shoot with. Ben could get no closer.

  Above, the blinking lights of the approaching choppers were becoming visible through the smoke. As he’d guessed, there were three, flying close together in a V-formation. They hovered over the farm and began to descend at a safe distance from the flames. The deafening hurricane from the combined blast of their rotors was whipping the fire into an even greater frenzy and beating back the smoke, which swirled and roiled in the bright white shafts of the searchlights sweeping the ground. For an instant the goat pen where Ben was crouching was lit up like daylight, before the dazzling beam quickly passed over and he could breathe again.

  As the helicopters came down, Ben recognised them as Kamovs, a type in service to the Russian military. All three were painted black, with no identifying markings. Special Forces, or something else? Whoever this enemy was, the resources being deployed against Yuri Petrov and his partner in crime were all the proof anyone needed that something much bigger was happening here. The wild conspiracy tales that Ben had hardly been able to swallow earlier that night now all seemed deadly plausible.

  The worrying question now on his mind was whether the enemy was about to drop a fresh contingent of men on the ground, to search the whole area and finish the job they’d come here to do. But as he watched, he saw with relief that they were pulling out. The wounded clambered aboard, while their able-bodied teammates slung their dead in after them like sacks of rice.

  This wasn’t over, by any means. Ben knew they’d be back, and probably in larger numbers. For the moment, though, they were beating a retreat. Someone would be wondering how the hell a crack squad of over twenty men, bristling with all the firepower they could muster, had managed to be repelled by such a tiny force. There would be a lot of questions, explanations, recriminations. He’d have loved to be there to see it.

  If some part of Ben was able to derive grim satisfaction at the sight of his decimated enemy retreating from the field of battle, what he saw next made his heartbeat shudder to a halt and his blood turn to ice in his veins.

  Grasped tightly in the arms of two men, a smaller figure was being loaded aboard the chopper. Smaller, and all too familiar, and kicking and struggling and screaming in a terrified little voice that Ben could hear over the noise of the rotors and turbine.

  Valentina.

  In that moment, all hope of finding her hiding somewhere in the vicinity of the farm was lost. They’d found the poor kid. She was now their prisoner. Their hostage.

  Ben shot up to his feet, every muscle tight as steel cables. Even if he’d had a weapon, he couldn’t have dared open fire for fear of accidentally hitting the child. He wanted to run to save her, but knowing he would achieve nothing except to die trying. How he was going to tell Yuri this news, he couldn’t begin to think. Or Kaprisky and the girl’s mother.

  The last of the men clambered aboard the chopper after their captive. The pilot increased his revs. The turbine screeched and the rotors became a blur. The helicopter went light at the nose, then the tail. Firelight glinted along its fuselage as it lifted off and climbed.

  Ben watched helplessly as the helicopter, and Valentina with it, disappeared into the smoky night sky.

  Chapter 34

  As he was leaving the ruin of Grisha’s farm with a leaden heart and a sick feeling in his stomach, Ben paused by the goat pen. The animals were stampeding around their enclosure in a blind panic in the darkness, bleating wildly and butting the wire in
their desperation to escape. The farmstead was lost now. The trapped livestock wouldn’t survive long penned up without food or water, so Ben flipped the latch of their gate and let it swing open to free them. At least he’d have helped to save someone that night, he thought miserably.

  That was when he heard the low groan from nearby, a sound definitely not made by a goat.

  It was the raider he’d battered unconscious earlier with the butt of his weapon. On coming to, the guy must have managed to drag himself as far as the fence of the enclosure before he’d passed out again and slumped in the shadows where his comrades had failed to notice him. He was splayed out on his belly, all six foot three of him, slowly returning back to the painful reality of consciousness.

  Ben rolled him over with his boot. The man’s lips and nose were a mess of blood. His Taser gun was lying in the dirt nearby. Ben thought of using it on him and watching him twitch a while, just out of sheer savage nastiness and to get back at the men who’d taken Valentina.

  The raider’s eyes fluttered open a glimmer, then widened all the way as he registered Ben standing there over him. Suddenly fully awake, he made a grab for a pistol on his utility belt. Ben stamped on his wrist and kicked the hand away from the weapon, got to it first and drew it out of its holster. From the feel of the pistol in his hand he knew without looking that it was a Glock 17. From its weight, that it was fully loaded up. He pointed it in the guy’s face. The guy put up his hands to shield himself, in that irrational moment when even trained soldiers have to believe their palms could stop a 9mm bullet. But Ben had no particular intention of killing him, not yet anyway. He had a better purpose to which to put this fellow.

  ‘Looks like your friends gave you up for dead,’ Ben said. ‘Which makes tonight your lucky night, because now you’re mine.’

  Still holding the gun on him, Ben grabbed one thick wrist and with some effort hauled his prisoner upright. He twisted the arm behind the man’s back and shoved his bulk roughly towards the perimeter fence, keeping the pistol poked into his side.