was her.
“Load up,” Laszlo said quietly. “But shoot to wound, to disable, not to kill. The Russians want her alive.”
Ahead of the Jeep, the ambulance swung to the left up the incline of a hairpin bend and suddenly it was broadside to the following Jeep. Logan saw Anna level the barrel of the Contender on the ledge of the door and fire. There was an ear-splitting crack in the Jeep. The bullet made a neat hole in the windscreen, the Jeep veered violently to the right across the road and bounced against an earthen bank, ricocheting back and twisting on itself so that by the time it reached the bend it was facing in the opposite direction from that in which it needed to go, the rear tyres squealing against tarmac and the smell of rubber rising into the car. Claude screamed at the wheel. His left arm hung uselessly by his side and he was fighting the spinning steering wheel using only his right hand.
Laszlo grabbed the wheel and steadied it, the tail spinning slowed, and Claude gunned the accelerator up the hill.
“The bitch! The bitch shot me!”
Ahead of them the ambulance swung up and around another bend and in the rearview mirror Laszlo saw the black Toyota truck right behind them, Eric at the wheel, his face gripped with stone-cold rage.
“Wrap this around his arm,” Laszlo shouted at Logan in the back and handed him a white silk scarf.
“Jesus!” Claude bit his lip and the blood ceased pumping where the scarf tightened around his bicep. The Jeep had fallen back after the encounter but now they were gaining again when they saw the grim facade of the military hospital on a rise in the hill above them.
In the ambulance Anna reloaded the Contender. Ahead of her she, too, saw the hospital and prayed that Larry and Taras and the others had made it. But still, when she was five hundred yards below the hospital, she knew the ambulance wasn’t going to make it. In the mirror, she saw the Jeep and another car behind it gaining all the time. And from the windows of both cars she saw gun barrels levelled at the ambulance and knew now that her only chance was to fight.
As she swung the ambulance sharply to the right she spun the wheel back until the vehicle screamed on its rear wheels and was suddenly facing the way she had come up; the two cars slowed to a halt, one beside the other, blocking any route to her from above or to anyone coming up from below. She saw the doors swing open on both sides of the cars for some slim protection and a man from the second car dipped below the sill and ran into the cover of an earthen bank. And then she saw Logan.
At the sight of him, Anna was gripped by the cold anger of revenge, but she was enraged not just by him but by Burt, too, for allowing Logan to jeopardise everything and all of their lives. At some point, they’d all warned, cajoled, and almost threatened Burt on the subject of Logan. She couldn’t believe that Burt—out of some uncharacteristic generosity of spirit—really wished to give him every chance at redemption, or that in some way he even saw much in Logan worth redeeming. She was distracted now by the sight of him, and the first bullet from a pistol in the Jeep thwacked its way through the dashboard of the ambulance and missed her by an inch.
Anna rolled onto the floor of the ambulance cab and reached up to open the connecting door to the back. She crawled through and cautiously opened the rear doors. The first thing she saw was Larry and Adam, who had heard shots from higher up the road. Their short machine pistols were drawn. She silently motioned them with her hand to take cover and held up four fingers to indicate the number of assailants. The two of them fanned to either side of the road and, once away from the cover of the ambulance, rolled behind earthen banks and began to crawl down the hill.
Logan slid painfully out of the Jeep through the window, knowing that the car’s panels would offer little defence against Anna’s Contender. He began to retreat to the rear of the car, crouching and facing forwards all the time. He saw Laszlo indicate to Eric to move up behind the earthen bank towards the rear of the ambulance. Then he saw Laszlo himself drop over the other side of the road, taking advantage of the lull in any sight of Anna. And as he stopped now, seated on the road and with his back pressed against the bumper of the Jeep, his gun cradled and loaded in both his hands, and a bead of sweat making its way between his eyes, his mind took one of its revolutions that had always—as long as he could remember, back to childhood—spun his senses from confusion to clarity or clarity to confusion. But this time it was the former. Through the turmoil and resentments of the past, through the unnameable grief at the waste of his existence, and from the depths of his self-tortured soul emerged a clear vision of what he had to do.
His eyes blurred for a brief moment, but he knew he could rely on the cold and deadly killer inside him that had gotten him into Russia two years before when he had killed the KGB-trained Moscow mafioso who had butchered Anna’s husband, Finn. His hand was steady, his heart was still and hard, and the clarity that now burned in his mind was like a drug that swept conflicting thoughts from his head and left one clear and conscious sliver of knowledge remaining. All that he had done—from his years in the CIA and then his abandonment by them, from his days as a mercenary collector and seller of secrets and his original betrayal of Anna, from his restless and inconclusive sojourn at Cougar under Burt’s eye—all his confused and hopeless past, in fact—could be wiped away by this sliver of knowledge. The confusion that had led him to even think—let alone suggest and act upon the suggestion—of betraying Anna a second time, to Laszlo and the Russians, was swept away. The only thing that remained in Logan’s mind was that he had to save her.
He looked carefully round the side of the Jeep to where Eric was crawling up the hill behind the bank, then to the other side where Claude was similarly ascending the hill at a painfully slow speed, and decided that he would kill Laszlo first. Then he would take cover and shoot whoever put his head above the earthen banks. Laszlo was ahead, crouching, then rolling, crouching again, and all the time his eyes were on the spot where they’d last seen Anna. He was now ten feet from the ambulance.
Logan gripped the pistol in both hands, got up into a crouch, and then, with a swiftness that would have momentarily dazzled any normal observer, he whipped his body around from the rear of the Jeep, arms locked in a V shape with the gun in his hands at the end of them, and levelled directly at Laszlo’s back.
But Anna was no ordinary observer. She had emerged from the rear of the ambulance and then crawled back underneath it towards the front. She’d seen Laszlo’s progress towards her, but couldn’t get a fatal shot from beneath the ambulance, only a wounding blow to a shin at most. But as she saw Logan’s sharp movement, only his feet and lower legs visible, she decided to act instantaneously. She rolled over twice and emerged on the right side of the ambulance, totally exposed, and, without a pause, shot Logan through the heart.
At once, two short bursts of automatic fire that burst from behind the earthen banks crashed into her consciousness. She saw Laszlo, confused by the sound of weapons he knew his people didn’t possess, turn for a second to the right, just as he’d seen her prone form on the road. Her second shot entered the side of his head, just in front of the ear and, travelling upwards from her position on the ground, blew his brains out.
“Anna?” It was Larry’s voice. “All dead?”
“If you got two, yes.”
“All dead,” he said and was suddenly beside her.
“Where’s Taras?” she asked him.
“He’s waiting.”
They left the two cars blocking the road from below. Their exit route was in the other direction. They left the bodies splayed on the road or contorted in death behind the earthen banks as Anna turned the ambulance and headed the remaining five hundred yards up the hill, with Larry, Lucy, Adam, and Grant in the back.
Taras had heard the gunfire. He was already inside the hospital where there was sufficient mayhem from the sight of the ships ablaze and sinking down below in the harbour. His message had already been relayed to the guards inside. “A terrorist attack. Get down to the harbour.”
Some went, others refused to leave their posts without orders from a direct superior. As Taras emerged onto the front steps, he saw the ambulance approach, then swing around to the side of the hospital to the bay where the dead or wounded were admitted.
He tore back inside, shouting that he needed all the men they could get who remained to guard the front of the hospital. He himself went to the rear, down three corridors and across an instant surgery room, and swung the lever that raised the metal curtain between the emergency bay and the hospital’s rear entrance. The ambulance doors were open, and he saw all five of them, Anna putting a new clip into the Contender. The others had reloaded, he half-thought, with the dim, professionally automated subconsciousness born in extreme moments of action. The ambulance was backed up right to the ledge where a trolley could be wheeled straight into it.
The six of them took the service lift. Anna led, the only one of them with a silenced weapon. As the doors
