The John Milton Series Boxset 2 Read online

  Callan straightened his arm and aimed at Milton’s head.

  He knew with certainty that there would be no successful appeal to his better nature.

  He closed his eyes again and waited.

  He heard the crunch of snow.

  The shot didn’t come.

  Milton paused, holding his breath, wondering why he could still feel the cold working its way up between his shoulder blades, feel the rough texture on the inside of his gloves, the cold breath of winter on the patches of bare skin around his eyes and mouth.

  He opened his eyes.

  Callan wasn’t there any more.

  He rubbed the snow from his eyes and looked. It looked as if a patch of the deep white drift at the side of the drive had detached and risen up. Snow and ice fell away, revealing the figure of a woman dressed in a makeshift ghillie suit. She was twenty feet away. He saw a parka with a mesh across the opening and shaggy threads sewn across it in horizontal lines to break up its outline, similarly adorned waterproof trousers and chunky boots. Her face was visible within the loop of the fur trimmed hood.

  Beatrix Rose.

  She had two throwing knives, one in each hand.

  Callan had fallen backwards and now he was facing straight up. Her first knife was buried in his throat. The knife was made of a single piece of steel. His carotid artery was severed and his still beating heart spent its terminal beats spraying aortal red blood across the dirty snow.

  Milton’s head snapped around just as Beatrix flicked out her right arm and sent her second knife on its way.

  Blake’s padded jacket seemed to absorb the knife, the blade disappearing into his gut, the impact and the surprise sending him staggering backwards, his hands clutching at the grip.

  Spenser got a shot off but the bullet went wide, ricocheting off the wall of the dacha.

  Milton crawled across the gritty snow, pressed right down into it, until he reached Callan’s body. He still had his Sig in his hand. Milton took it.

  Hammond raised her rifle and fired an unaimed spray towards Beatrix. The bullets peppered the trees and the ground behind her, a dozen little explosions of snow jagging backwards. Beatrix ducked behind a tree, out of sight.

  Hammond wasn’t looking at Milton. He shot her in the right temple, her head jerking hard to the left as she fell to the ground.

  Underwood saw him shoot and brought up his rifle but Milton was quicker with the Sig and put two shots into his gut.

  Spenser was last man standing. He turned and started to run but Beatrix's left arm flicked out again and her third knife caught him in the thigh. His leg went out from beneath him and he collapsed sideways into a drift of snow. He scrabbled around so that he was facing back towards them.

  Milton aimed at him with the pistol. “Drop it!”

  He flung his weapon aside and raised his hands. “Don’t shoot,” he called out.

  Beatrix came out from behind the tree and stalked through the drift towards him.

  “On your knees,” Milton yelled back. “Hands on your head.”

  “My leg,” he said. “I can’t… my leg…”

  It was moot: Milton might have been clement but Beatrix was not so inclined. She reached down to the bandolier that was hidden beneath the ragged strands of the ghillie suit, a leather strap that stretched diagonally across her chest, with half a dozen sheathes spaced across it, and took out another knife. She knelt down in the snow and spoke to him quietly; Milton couldn’t make the words out. He protested. She ignored him, stepped around, slid the fingers of her left hand into his hair and yanked back, exposing his neck. She drew the knife across his larynx, opening his throat, the razor-sharp blade severing his trachea. His fingers clutched at the gruesome rent, helplessly trying to close it even as it gaped open and closed with the frantic up and down of his head. His hands slicked red, his body toppled backwards, hinging at the waist, his torso thudding back into the drift, the abundant blood drenching the snow a bright crimson.

  Jesus, Milton thought.

  “Is that it?” she called out.

  He hurried back to Pope and helped him up. “Are you alright?”

  “Who’s that?”

  Beatrix was over Spenser’s body. She wiped the bloodied blade on his jacket and slid it back into its sheath.

  “You don’t know her,” Milton said.

  “Who?”

  “Her name is Beatrix Rose. She used to be Number One.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  MILTON HAULED Pope into the back of the Tiger. It was an All Terrain Armoured Transport, much like an American Hummer. The benches behind the driver’s and passenger’s seats had been cleared from the interior and Milton pulled Pope all the way inside, reaching back to close the rear door. Beatrix had climbed into the front and turned over the big turbocharged diesel. The locals were up at the gate and the blue and red lights of a police car flashed against the sides of the buildings down the hill.

  They had to get away.

  “Go, go, go,” he shouted.

  The Tiger lurched forwards, the tyres slipping until they found purchase and then slinging them ahead. Beatrix aimed down the hill that led away from the dacha, hitting the brakes at the bottom and swinging them around to the left and the road that would lead to Privolzhsk.

  The police car came around the corner and followed after them. It was faster and, provided the road stayed clear up ahead, it would very quickly overhaul them. Milton held onto the side as he glanced back through the windows: it was a hundred feet behind them and closing fast.

  “Milton!” Beatrix yelled. “You need to do something about that car.”

  Milton unlocked the rear doors and kicked them open. The blue and white painted car was fifty yards behind them now, close enough for Milton to see the driver and his passenger. He waited until they had passed onto a smooth section of road and, fixing his left hand around a stanchion, aimed his Sig with his right. The first shot struck the ground three feet in front of the car, throwing up a small cloud of grit and ice. Milton had not intended to hit the car, just warn the driver, but it did not have the desired effect: the passenger leant out and fired three shots with his own semi-automatic. The third caught the nearside mirror, shattering it.

  Thirty feet.

  Fair enough.

  Milton extended his arm and aimed again, absorbing the recoil in his shoulder for a smoother shot. The bullet found its mark, slicing into the front-right tyre and shredding it so that it flapped off the wheel. The car swerved out of control, the driver braking hard and bleeding off most of the speed before the car spun across a sheet of ice and thumped into a deep drift that had been ploughed to the side of the road.

  “Put your foot down.”

  Milton grabbed hold of Pope’s jacket to hold him in place as the Tiger bumped and bounced over the uneven road, ploughing through the fresh drifts that had not yet been cleared.

  “How far is it?” Beatrix called back.

  “Sixteen clicks,” Milton reported.

  “So say thirty minutes.”

  “Come on, Beatrix, we’ve got no time. Pope needs medivac now. We need to be faster.”

  Beatrix clunked the Tiger into fifth gear. She stamped on the accelerator and they lurched forwards.

  “Alright,” she said. “Let’s say twenty.”

  Milton switched radio frequencies and brought the mic up so that it was pressed against his throat again. “Any station, any station. This is Blackjack Actual in the clear. Radio check in the blind, over.”

  There was a moment of silence, adorned by static, and then an accented Russian voice replied: “This is Overlord. We have you five-by-five. Phase line Echo secure. State your position, over.”

  Milton looked out of the window and did his best to guess. “Two clicks south of Plyos. Heading for exfil point. ETA twenty minutes, over.”

  Milton could hear the sound of a big engine in the background. The speaker had to raise his voice to be heard. “Acknowledged, Blackjack. What is the sit-rep
in Plyos?”

  “Success.”

  “The target?”

  “Affirmative, Overlord.”

  “Acknowledged, Blackjack. Make your way to exfil. We’ll be there. Over and out.”

  Pope coughed, a tearing sound that came from deep inside his lungs. He reached up for Milton’s elbow. “John,” he said, his voice a ragged whisper.

  Milton leant down nearer to his face. “Don’t talk. We’re getting you out.”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  THE KAMOV KA-60 had been airborne for some time already and it had been forced to circle the exfil point for twenty minutes. Beatrix slalomed the Tiger through the deep snow at the side of the road, the Tiger decelerating sharply, and cut across the wide field to the clear space that Milton had indicated. He opened the door and dropped down, taking four chemlights from his Bergen, cracking them alight and tossing them out to form the corners of a wide rectangle. The chopper’s engines roared as it descended, the pilot flaring the nose and the vicious wash kicking up thick eddies of snow, blowing away the fresh fall to reveal the icy permafrost beneath.

  Milton and Beatrix went around to the back of the Tiger and helped Pope down. They draped his arms across their shoulders and stumbled towards the Kamov, the toes of their boots catching against the ridges of snow and his carving long troughs behind him. There were two crew onboard, and the second man went back into the cabin and opened the door for them. Beatrix reached the chopper and vaulted up. Milton helped Pope inside, boosted him forwards and Beatrix hauled him the rest of the way. Milton vaulted up himself.

  “Where are rest of your team?” the crewman called out.

  “Didn’t make it,” Milton said.

  Milton was no pilot, but even he could tell from the anxiety in the open cockpit that the crew were concerned that they would have enough juice to make it back to Kubinka.

  Nothing he could do about that. He spun his finger in the air, the signal to take off. “Let’s get out of here.”

  He sat with his back against the fuselage. He took off his helmet and scrubbed his fingers through his sweaty, bedraggled hair, then swiped the sweat from his eyes. Pope was shivering and Beatrix found a blanket and draped it over him. The crewman shouted back that there was hot coffee in the vacuum flask in the pack fastened to one of the chairs. She took it, poured out a cup and held it to Pope’s lips. He sipped at it. Beatrix looked over at Milton with concern. He was very sick and very weak.

  He turned to the pilot. “How long to Kubinka?”

  “Forty-five minutes,” the man shouted back.

  “Is that at top speed?”

  “Top speed, maybe thirty-five, but fuel…”

  “Do it,” Milton said. “He needs a doctor.”

  #

  THE LIGHTS of Kubinka airfield blinked brightly in the snowy night. The runway was delineated by converging horizontal lines and then, beyond, red and green vertical stripes that marked the runway edges and the centreline. They could see the Moscow suburbs away to starboard, the urban glow shining through the darkness like a golden mantle. The pilot radioed that they were on final approach, swung the Kamov into a sharp turn and then bled the height away. They were coming down on the runway itself, aiming for the darkened outline of the Hercules, its white landing lights refracting brightly against the wetness of the cleared asphalt beneath it. The rotors eddied the stubborn flakes as their ride touched down and Milton was the first to disembark, bent low to manage the wash as he crossed to the RAF Flight Lieutenant who had flown the Hercules that had brought them in. He was standing with three Russian airmen. The Hercules was twenty feet away, the four big engines already rumbling and the propellors turning slowly.

  “Welcome back, sir. Everything alright?”

  “Everything is fine, Lieutenant.”

  “Where are the others?”

  “They’re not coming back.”

  “What happened?”

  “They were ready for us,” he lied. “Heavy resistance. They others didn’t make it.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “We need a stretcher. Captain Pope is very weak.”

  “Already sorted that out, sir. We’ll bring it across.”

  “And the doctor?”

  “Over there, sir.” The Flight Lieutenant pointed to the medic who was running towards the Kamov.

  “Are you ready to go?”

  “We’ll be on our way in five minutes. Don’t see much point in hanging around, do you?

  “No, Lieutenant, I do not.”

  “Get aboard then, sir. I’ll make sure our man gets on in one piece.”

  Milton paused. “Got a smoke?”

  He didn’t but one of the Russians nodded that he understood and offered Milton a packet of Java Zolotaya. Milton thanked him, took one and tried to hand the packet back; the Russian held up his hand and shook his head. Milton thanked him again. He put the cigarette to his lips and lit it.

  The Flight Lieutenant led the Russians to the Kamov. Beatrix stepped down and walked over to him.

  “Thanks,” Milton said.

  “I thought I was going to be late. The car Mamotchka gave me broke down in the middle of nowhere. I hitched the rest of the way.”

  “You hitched?”

  “Truck driver took pity on me. Probably thought his luck was in.”

  She cocked an eyebrow in amusement. It wasn’t difficult to imagine how quickly he would have been disabused of that idea.

  They walked across the airstrip to the Hercules. The ramp was already lowered and they climbed aboard, knocking their boots against the hydraulic struts to clear the compacted snow away.

  Milton watched her. “You know Spenser was surrendering, don’t you?”

  “I know,” she said.

  “I’m not being critical.”

  “I wouldn’t care if you were,” she said. “He had it coming to him.”

  “You had history?”

  “We did.”

  “He was one of the ones Control sent after you?”

  “He took my daughter,” she said absently. “I’d kill him twice if I could.”

  “The score is settled, then.”

  “With him, yes. Just five more now.”

  Milton looked at her: there was steel in her face and fire in her eyes. He didn’t press.

  He finished his cigarette and threw it onto the runway outside. The Russians had Pope on a stretcher and they were bringing him across to them.

  He took out the packet. “These taste like shit. You want one?”

  “Go on, then.”

  He handed one to her and then gave her his lighter. She lit it, holding it between her lips as she took the pistol from its holster, secured the manual safety and then ejected the magazine. The action was completed easily and smoothly, with minimum effort. He knew she would have been able to strip and reassemble the gun when she was blindfolded, too. He was just the same. He remembered what she had been like when she had selected him from the other applicants who had been competing to join the Group: fierce and intimidating, and none of that edge had been dulled in her lost years. Her anger had become a crucible and she had submerged himself in that slow-burning, pitiless flame, until the emotion had been smelted out of her.

  Just five more now.

  He knew the identity of one of those five.

  There was nothing that could have persuaded Milton to swap places with him.

  PART SEVEN

  LONDON

  Chapter Forty-Six

  CONTROL SAT at the wide table and glared with undisguised disdain at the three men opposite him. It was a senior deposition: the foreign secretary, a particularly oleaginous politician called Jonathan Coad of whom Control had always had a rather bleak opinion, together with the heads of MI5 and MI6. It was midnight and the meeting had been called as a matter of the greatest urgency. The evidence had been delivered earlier that day. It had arrived by email, from an anonymous account that had been accessed at an internet cafe in Hounslow. Agents had been
sent to the cafe to question the owner but he could not remember anything of the customer who had booked fifteen minutes at the machine from which the email had been sent. When they checked his security cameras, they found that they had been disabled. Whomever it was who had sent the email, they had an interest in hiding their identity.

  Control had not been given advance warning of the subject of the meeting although, after the failure of any of the five agents to respond, it was not difficult to guess. They had taken thirty minutes to run through the extensive evidence with which they had been presented. There were the pictures of Control with Alexandra Kyznetsov and the correspondence and financial details that had been culled from the flash drives. That, in itself, would have been enough to damn him, but they hadn’t stopped there. They had obtained ex camera search orders and collected his bank details for the last ten years. He was not foolish enough to have passed the money he had received from Kyznetsov, or the other people like her who had come afterwards, through accounts that could easily be traced. There were other accounts for that, ones in jurisdictions that did not so easily divulge their secrets, but even with those precautions in place they had put questions to him that he had struggled to answer: how had he found the money to purchase his property outright, for example? He had paid for his Jaguar in cash. Where had that come from? The holidays, the extravagant purchases. They suggested that they exceeded his income. They accused him of living beyond his means. Where was the money coming from? Control knew that they had already reached their conclusion and that anything he said could only incriminate him further, and so he deflected them all with bluster. How did they find the temerity to question a man who had given so much to his country? It didn’t matter. He had already started to plan his next steps. He had already started, in truth, as soon as it became obvious that the mission to Plyos had failed. Forewarned was forearmed and he had always feared that this day would come, no matter how careful he had been. He had steps in place and, knowing that, he was able to brazen it out.