The Blind Spy

vessel now. There would be pandemonium and, in the confusion, it would make her task easier. Immediately, sirens tore through the low hum of the city and klaxons began to scream their message here, inside the Russian fleet’s highly protected zone.

She looked up along the quay towards the high steel gates that shut her in on the inside of the protected zone and unwanted visitors out. There she saw the train on its tracks that led along the quay and, at the end of the quay where the tracks ended, she saw the aircraft carrier Moskva, broadside on, its towering superstructure dead in line with the train tracks.

There were uniformed men running along the quay pointing at the stricken ship, shouting orders. She heard a man shout at her but she ran past and shouted an order in return. She kept running and was concealed in her speed by the desperate reactions of the few people left inside the protected zone. She reached the engine of the goods train and saw the twenty goods vans trailing behind it and carrying three hundred submarine batteries, most of which weighed half a ton each. With the weight of the train itself, there would be well over two hundred tons of force.

She climbed into the cab. She heard shouting, but it wasn’t directed at her. Not yet. She started the engine of the train and released the brake. Slowly it ground into action and began to rumble along the quay the quarter of a mile before the quay ended at the Moskva. Once it had reached nearly thirty miles an hour, she jammed the accelerator into place, crossed to the other side of the cab, and flung herself out on that side where there was no one. All the people on the quay were on the other side of the train, watching the aftermath of the explosion.

Anna rolled hard on the unyielding concrete and got to her feet. Beside her the twenty goods vans were gathering speed and she heard the engine roaring with the strain of reacting to the jammed accelerator. She ducked down and ran to the far side of the quay, away from the train and the burning ship. She wanted to be far from the train when the last of the vans passed her so that she and the train’s catastrophic run towards the Moskva were dissociated as far as possible. When the final van passed she saw that all the military personnel were now turned from the burning ship and watching in horror as the train reached forty, then fifty miles an hour and still kept adding speed.

She didn’t watch but now kept moving at a fast walk towards the steel gates that protected the quay from intruders. She heard the smash as the train broke through the concrete buffers at the end of the track and then the squeal of tortured metal as it swung itself clear of the tracks and onto the bare concrete of the quay. It must be going at seventy or eighty miles an hour now, she thought, and increasing all the time. When she did stop so that, like all the others now on the quay, she was looking at the impending disaster, what she saw was two hundred tons or more of roaring steel crash into the superstructure of the aircraft carrier Moskva and keep on going. The train was like a massive bullet, the thickened steel of the ship’s superstructure no match for its onslaught. It sheared the side of the superstructure away completely on the quayside and kept on boring into the ship until by the time it stopped half of the train was hanging into the harbour on the far side of the carrier and the engine finally exploded with the unrewarded effort of forward propulsion. The entire superstructure toppled and swayed and crashed over itself and on top of the train. Then a sheet of flame erupted from the bowels of the ship.

Anna turned away. She ran towards the steel gates, her right hand arming one of the Semtex tubes, her left waving the Contender. She hurled the explosive at the centre of the gates and rolled away to feel the flash of the explosion on her back and the searing pain of the heat that tore off the back of her uniform. She kept rolling behind a watch hut and gathered her breath. Then she leapt to her feet and ran through smoke and falling debris out of the protected zone. Behind her a ton of steel from one of the gates crashed to the ground and she was through.

The approaches to the gates were now a mass of troops and security personnel, military vehicles and fire trucks that raced towards the gates from the land side. She dodged in and out of them, losing herself in smoke and terrified humanity until she reached the embankment. There was the Ukrainian military ambulance, exactly where Taras had told her it would be. She ran towards it and stepped into the cab, discarding the jacket of her Russian GRU uniform and slipping on the jacket of a Ukrainian military medic. As she turned the ambulance she saw the aircraft carrier Moskva heave a huge sigh that released another wall of flame, then it keeled over to one side and rolled into ten metres of water.

36

FROM A WINDOW OF A HOUSE in the foothills behind the city, Laszlo watched the pyrotechnic disaster unfold in the harbour below. First a rust bucket of a ship exploding in the main lane of the harbour, then the train hurtling towards the Moskva and the carrier’s total destruction. In the moments before the train’s impact with the carrier he focused on the train itself as it began its apocalyptic race to mutual destruction and from the window of the engine’s cab he saw a figure hurl itself and land hard on the concrete quay. He saw the GRU cap roll away as the figure itself expertly went into a crouch and a roll to lessen the brutal impact. Then he saw the figure rise up, temporarily dazed and scraping her hair back under the cap, and he knew it was her. His face twisted in fury and he shouted at Eric to get another set of binoculars from the table behind them and train it on the figure, running now, swerving along the quay towards the steel gates of the exit from the protected zone. Then Laszlo saw the explosion at the gates and furiously trained the binoculars onto the swirls of smoke billowing outside them to see in a patch of clearer vision, and still running through falling debris, the figure still there, and escaping.

When Eric had her in his sights, Laszlo told him to keep her there and to radio her movements. He unlocked a door into a back room, summoned Logan from the bed he was lying on and trying to read a newspaper, and half dragged him from the bed. Then he took a spare gun from his coat pocket and jammed it into Logan’s hands.

“What’s happened?” Logan said laconically. “A nuclear attack?”

“This is your moment of glory, Logan,” Laszlo snarled. “We have her. Follow me.”

The two men ran down the stairs to a Jeep Cherokee outside. Claude started the engine, looked in surprise at the gun in Logan’s hand, checked with Laszlo for instructions, and revved the Jeep through the gears as they hurtled down the hill.

“To the harbour,” Laszlo screamed at him.

His radio crackled and Eric’s voice came clearly over the head-piece. “Follow it as far as you can,” Laszlo shouted in return. “Then follow us.”

The Jeep raced around two curves in the steeply falling street to see the embankment ahead.

“It’s a Ukrainian military ambulance,” Laszlo said, quieter now. “And it’s heading west.”

Once they were on the embankment, Claude drove the Jeep up onto pavements and on the wrong side of the road, past oncoming military and fire vehicles until, at a distance of some four hundred yards, they saw the rear of the ambulance traveling at a steady speed towards the end of the harbour where the sea finally ended and abutted the city. It followed the curving road around towards the north side.

“Bring the other car,” Laszlo shouted into the radio to Eric again. “She’s going to the north side. Cut off the route from the top of the city if you have time. Keep your radio on.”

But by the time Eric had gotten the second car onto the road that descended at an angle above the embankment, the ambulance was round the corner of the harbour and heading at greater speed along the north side. Behind it, the Jeep travelled fast enough to gain a little without alerting Anna to the fact that she was being followed.

Halfway around the north of the harbour, the ambulance took a sudden right turn, up a street that climbed away from the sea. The Jeep followed and Laszlo radioed again to Eric, giving him the track of the ambulance.

The Jeep was now two hundred yards from the ambulance and Anna caught it in her mirror.

“She must be heading for the military hospital,” Logan said, bemused. “Why do you think it’s her? Why would she be driving an ambulance to the military hospital, for Chrissakes!”

“Never mind why. It’s her. Eric saw her getting into it.”

“Unless there are two ambulances,” Logan replied.

But then, as the Jeep began to gain again on the ambulance, he saw her hair free from the cap and knew it