Tundra (24 page)

He stepped inside and pulled the door closed and for a heartstopping moment imagined movement down the corridor to his right; but it was just that, imagination. Montrose and Budian were gone. Medievsky lay sprawled against the wall, the pool of gore around his head no longer spreading. Haglund’s rifle was gone.

Purkiss pulled off his goggles and balaclava. Quickly he knelt and searched the pockets of the body’s snowsuit. He found the Walther, the one he’d taken from Wyatt and that Medievsky had subsequently taken off him. He hadn’t been certain Medievsky had kept it. Purkiss ejected the magazine. Four bullets remained.

Gun in hand, he loped down the passage, acutely aware of his footfalls and stepping as lightly as he could. He reached the third door on the left. On the evening of his arrival at the station, Medievsky had tapped it as he led Purkiss past.
Fuse boxes
, he’d said.

Inside the room he examined the panels, which covered most of one wall. There were separate boxes for the east and west wings, as well as for each outbuilding and the perimeter lights. The master switch drew his attention.

He could shut off the lights within the complex while keeping the hangar illuminated. That way he’d avoid plunging Haglund and Clement and Avner into darkness, and possible panic. On the other hand, Montrose might already be on his way out of the main building, in which case the hangar would be a beacon of light on which he’d focus.

Purkiss reached up and tripped the master switch.

The station shut down around him with an audible hum that spread through the walls like a sigh, the lights and the remaining computer equipment and electrical appliances ceasing their activity in quick succession. Purkiss was surprised by how suddenly the wind outside reared into prominence, now that the static obscuring it was gone.

The blackness around Purkiss was total.

He believed Montrose would now do one of three things.

One:
lie low, wherever he was, waiting with his hostage to see what developed.

Two:
return to the entrance corridor and confront whomever it was that had cut the power.

Three:
assume the
Spetsnaz
forces had arrived and were shutting the station down. In which case, Montrose’s priority would be to get out at all costs. One of the costs would involve killing his hostage.

It was a risk Purkiss thought unavoidable. Because he suspected Montrose would be listening out for the approach of a helicopter, would accept he hadn’t heard it and that the noise produced by the wind wouldn’t be enough to mask it, and would therefore regard the cutting of the power supply as an act of counteraggression by Purkiss.

And Montrose would, in Purkiss’s estimation, most likely sit tight. Recognise it was worth waiting to see what kind of counteroffensive Purkiss was mounting, and prepare himself for it, confident in the knowledge that he, Montrose, had the upper hand, because he had Budian as a shield.

Which meant Purkiss had to find Montrose, somewhere in the depths of the station, in pitch darkness.

He stood in the dark, his eyes widened to allow the rods in their retinas the best opportunity to absorb the faintest photons of light filtering in through his pupils. The process of maximal adaptation to complete darkness would take twenty to thirty minutes. Purkiss didn’t want to wait that long – Montrose might well decide to escape towards the hangar in that time – but he was prepared to give it ten minutes.

In Medievsky’s office, he’d checked the spreadsheet for the entry on the twenty-ninth of December. The log stated clearly that Medievsky, Wyatt, Montrose and Haglund had gone out to look for Feliks Nisselovich after he’d disappeared from the station. Yet Clement had been adamant that the search party had comprised only Medievsky, Wyatt and Haglund. It meant, if Clement was both telling the truth and remembering accurately, that the log was wrong.

Which suggested it had been falsified afterwards.

Purkiss had taken the biggest gamble of the mission so far, and had told Clement of his belief that Montrose was the person they were looking for. He’d told her quickly what to do: hit him from behind with the trophy on Medievsky’s shelf, causing a plausible injury, so that Purkiss could create the fiction that she was the killer. It was a gamble because if he was wrong, if Clement had been lying all the time, she’d take the opportunity to kill him, and would succeed, smashing the weight of the stainless steel cup against the exposed vertebrae of his neck or simply sliding a concealed blade in between them, severing his spinal cord.

But he’d been right, and the ruse had worked. His ploy to keep them all at the station until the
Spetsnaz
arrived had provoked Montrose into showing his hand.

Before Purkiss’s dark-blinded eyes, details were starting to take form: the expanse of the wall opposite, the shapes of the rows of shelves. As his vision struggled to reestablish itself, his other senses sent out their probing tendrils to compensate, his ears attuning to the creaks and ticking of the walls of the station in the sudden silence, his hands finding substance in the stippled grip of the Walther and the smooth curve of the trigger against his index finger.

He decided it was time.

*

P
urkiss opened the door of the room and tossed a box of replacement fuses into the corridor beyond and waited.

He expected the box to clatter into the corridor and produce a brief echo and then for the black silence to settle once more.

One second later, the corridor erupted.

The cacophony sent him recoiling backwards. The light flashed from the left, sparks blazing though the darkness like microsecond flashlight beams. Five successive crashes followed, the insect scream of ricochets overlapping.

He came back...

Purkiss thought quickly. Montrose would be as blind as he himself was. But Montrose had two advantages. Purkiss hadn’t been able to see the exact model of the handgun Montrose had drawn and with which he’d shot Medievsky, but he had to assume the magazine was nearly full; in addition, Montrose had the two Rugers. Purkiss, on the other hand, had four shots available to him.

Montrose’s second advantage was that he had his hostage, Budian. Which meant Purkiss couldn’t risk even one shot into the dark.

Purkiss lunged for the opposite wall and found the metal shelves with his hands and tested the strength of the middle one. It held. He hauled himself upwards, using his legs to propel himself so that he sprang froglike, his boots gripping the bottom shelf. He clambered onto the top one and turned and sat, his legs dangling, his torso bent almost double under the ceiling.

The metal beneath him began to tilt, its moorings straining away from the wall housing them.

The shelf would tear away from the wall in a matter of seconds.

He’d left the door ajar, and he watched its vague shape in the darkness.

With a
chunk
, one of the heavy-duty screws broke free from the wall.

The shelf tipped, and Purkiss grabbed its edge with his left hand to steady it.

Five seconds, at most, and either the shelf would separate from the wall or the degree of slant would be such that Purkiss would slide off.

The door slammed open and the twin blasts, separated by a second, smashed into the room, illuminating it in strobe splashes.

An instant after the second one exploded, Purkiss dropped off the shelf and aimed for the snapshot he’d seen in the muzzle flash of the dark head just inside the doorway and slammed the butt of the Walther down and felt it connect a fraction before his feet hit the ground. The head jerked away and Purkiss grabbed in the dark and felt the shape of a body and clawed his left hand upwards, feeling for the face. An instant later Montrose’s arm swung hard against his abdomen and he doubled against the blow but kept his fingers probing for the eyes. He felt teeth dig at his palm, seeking purchase, but they served to orientate him and he seized a lock of hair – he didn’t feel the glasses,
Montrose never needed to wear glasses, it was all for show
, his mind told him distantly – and wrenched downwards while bringing the Walther up and over with his other hand and finding purchase with its muzzle against the bony protuberance of the flexed neck.

Purkiss hissed, close to where he judged the ear must be, ‘Stand down or I’ll fire.’

He saw, now, in close proximity and with his night vision becoming more acute, the side of Montrose’s face, his eye swivelled towards Purkiss.

Purkiss let go of the hair and dropped his hand and felt for the handgun and prised it out of Montrose’s grip and flung it aside.

He shoved the almost invisible shape away and backed into the room, the Walther in his extended right hand. He reached up blindly with his left hand and flipped the master switch.

The light above sputtered and caught, flooding the room with a brilliance that made Purkiss blink. Montrose himself was squinting against the light, his knees slightly flexed, his hands open in readiness at his sides. Beyond him, through the open door, Budian hovered, her expression dazed.

Purkiss jerked his head at her. ‘Get suited up and wait at the front.’ When she didn’t move, he said,
‘Go.’

To Montrose he said, ‘Walk backwards through the door and turn to your right. Keep moving.’

Montrose stepped back carefully, his hands groping for the door to orientate himself. As Purkiss followed him into the corridor he risked a swift glance back up to the entrance. Budian was there, pulling on a snowsuit.

When Montrose had backed past the next door, Purkiss said: ‘Stop there.’ He advanced to the door, opened it with his left hand, stepped back and motioned Montrose inside. It was a store room for supplies. Purkiss cast a swift eye over the stacks and the shelves. His attention was caught by box from which a length of electrical flex spilled.

‘Get that box down,’ he said.

Keeping Montrose covered and at a distance of six feet, Purkiss pulled out the flex. Plastic ties would have been better, but he didn’t have time to go hunting for them. To Montrose he said, ‘Turn round and put your hands behind your back.’

For the first time, Montrose spoke. ‘You’re too late, you know.’

‘Maybe.’ Awkwardly, one-handed, Purkiss looped the flex around Montrose’s wrists. ‘But at least you’ll be able to provide some information.’

‘You’re assuming we’ll make it to safety before the troops get us.’

‘We?’
said Purkiss. With the gun still in his right hand, and for the first time not aiming directly at Montrose, he began to tie the flex. ‘Sorry, I think you’ve misunderstood. I’m not taking you along. A prisoner would just slow us down.’ He tightened the first knot. ‘They’re going to find you here, tied up like a Christmas present, and you’ll be back in Moscow before you know it, in a nice warm cell in the Lubyanka. They’ll do a far better job extracting information from you than I ever could.’

Purkiss had known Montrose would make his move sooner or later, and had decided to trigger it with the provocation most likely to do the job. He jerked his head aside as Montrose snapped his skull back, felt the man’s heel attempt to rake his shin. Purkiss brought the stock of the Walther down hard on the mastoid process below Montrose’s ear. Montrose sagged and Purkiss let the dead weight slide to the floor.

He moved more quickly, with both his hands now unencumbered, and trussed the man’s arms and legs so thoroughly his limbs were barely visible beneath the layers of flex. Purkiss found a chamois cloth and stuffed it in Montrose’s mouth, securing it with duct tape.

One of the boxes contained stationery. Purkiss chose a notebook and a ballpoint pen and wrote in Cyrillic lettering:
This man is Ryan Montrose. He is involved in the extraction of nuclear-armed missiles from the lost Tupolev aircraft. The location of the aircraft is near the so-called Nekropolis, the abandoned research site ninety kilometres north-west. Montrose will have associates working to remove the missiles. The location must be identified immediately and quarantined
.

It was the best he could do. It was all he knew that would be of use to the Russians. The FSB man he’d spoken to on the satellite phone, Wyatt’s handler, had said the location of the aircraft wasn’t known. Purkiss didn’t know why he’d said that, because the
Nekropolis
had clearly been shut down as a result of the Tupolev’s crashing nearby, which meant the authorities knew where it was. Could it be that the FSB man was being kept out of the loop?

It didn’t matter. Purkiss had to assume the man genuinely was unaware of the plane’s location. In which case, it was possible the troops were being sent to Yarovsky Station but not to the
Nekropolis
. Which meant Montrose’s colleagues, whoever and however many of them there were, would probably even now be working on the wreck, removing the missiles.

Purkiss took hold of Montrose’s ankles and hauled him into the corridor. He left him in the middle of the floor, and tucked the folded note between the coils of flex.

Budian stood by the main door, fully suited up. Purkiss strode across, pulling his own balaclava back on and fitting the goggles. She gazed at him, her eyes dull with shock. He glanced her over. She seemed unhurt, at least physically.

‘Let’s go,’ he said.

C
aptain Anatoly Aleksandrov listened to the final report in his earpiece –
outbuildings clear
– and allowed the adrenaline surge to ebb a degree, not enough that fatigue could get even close but sufficient to allow himself a moment’s reflection.

Around him, in the entrance corridor, his men moved like spectres through the haze of gas still hissing from the CS canisters. Two of the men, their faces made insectoid by the snouts of their gas masks, hoisted the trussed body like pallbearers. The gag had been ripped from the choking mouth as soon as it was evident the bound man was still alive. He was being carried face down, to spare his lungs in case he vomited, and Aleksandrov glimpsed the red, swollen face, the spew of drool and nasal mucus.