two miles down, was the city of Ruin, the four straight lines of the boulevards converging like crosshairs on the darkness at its centre.
He’d done airdrops from this plane before, but never at night and never at this altitude. It was a useful way of getting round red tape when governments dragged their heels over visas while the people on the ground desperately needed help.
He unhooked his leg from the net and shuffled round until he lay centred on the ramp, his feet pointing back towards the howling night. He did a final pre-flight check on the packs strapped to his front and back then edged backwards towards the lip of the ramp, his hands clinging tightly to the cargo net and straining against the pull of the slipstream.
His feet hit the edge and he slid them over into the freezing air, continuing to work his way backwards until his hands were the only thing still holding on. He was in the air now, his body stretched out horizontally from the back of the plane, held up by the fluid roaring rush of the night. He held on tight, staring straight down at the city, watching the patch of darkness creep closer. He fixed his left eye on it and closed his right, as though sighting down the barrel of a rifle.
Then he let go.
The plane was doing a little over eighty miles an hour when he dropped into the churning, frozen air of its prop wash. The moment he cleared the turbulence he opened his legs and arms, flaring the Parapak membranes stretched between them and inflating the wing. The combination of airspeed and the shape of the suit generated instant lift and he felt himself being pulled upwards. He adjusted his arms, leaning one way then another, his open eye never leaving the dark target below as he flew down towards it.
Wing-suit training had been the last course he’d completed before mustering out of the army. They were the latest development in HALO jumps — the High Altitude Low Opening drops that were the cornerstone of covert ops deployment. The theory went that by jumping at high altitude the delivery aircraft could stay well out of range of surface-to-air missiles and by deploying a chute at very low altitude it minimized the risk of being spotted by forces on the ground. A man in freefall is also too small to be picked up on RADAR. It was the perfect method of inserting highly trained troops quickly and covertly into enemy territory. It was also the perfect way of getting into a mountain fortress no one had ever breached.
Gabriel checked the altimeter on his wrist. He was already below four thousand feet and dropping at eighty feet per second. He leaned over and began to turn in a tight circle, watching the darkness grow as he spiralled down towards it, searching its dark centre for the garden he knew was there.
Chapter 135
Kathryn spotted light ahead of her in the tunnel and her fingers tightened around the steering wheel. She reached over to the black canvas bag on the passenger seat, slipped her hand inside and pulled out her gun.
She thought about the pause, out in the alley, after she’d swiped the card, before the steel shutter had started to rise. Maybe they were expecting her. Perhaps she was now heading straight into an ambush. If so, there was no point in stopping. The tunnel was too narrow to turn round and reversing would be too difficult. Besides, running wasn’t going to help Gabriel. So she kept her foot on the accelerator and her eyes on the patch of light, growing brighter beyond the wash of her own headlights. She brought the gun up over the dashboard just as the van cleared the top of the rise. The headlights cut down through the dark revealing a cavern and a car. Lights on. No one inside. Driver’s and passenger doors open.
She jerked down hard on the wheel, bringing the front of the van round just in time to clear the rear bumper of the parked police car. She slammed on the brakes, bringing the van to a crunching halt, brought her gun round, and scanned the cavern for movement. She noticed the closed steel door in the wall in front of her, but apart from that there was nothing.
She reached over and killed the van’s engine but left the head-lamps burning. The sudden silence was oppressive. She grabbed the black bag from the passenger seat, opened the door and slipped out, taking the long way round the car, gun first, checking there was no one hidden behind it. Still nothing. She moved to the back of the van and wrenched open the rear doors.
The contents had shifted around a little on the journey but the pile of fertilizer, sugar and smoky combustibles was still pretty much intact.
She carefully placed the black canvas bag down on the metal floor next to a large cardboard box wedged against the rear wheel arch. Inside the box was a hurricane lamp and two of the sheet sleeping bags they used in hotter countries. She lifted out the lamp, set it on the floor and knotted the sheets together to make a long white cotton rope. She dropped one end in the box and fed the other under the door towards the petrol cap.
She noticed the camera as she rounded the end of the van, set high in the back wall, red light burning steady by the lens. She fumbled the key into the petrol cap, twisted it off, and turned her back to the camera while she carefully fed the other end of the rope down into the fuel tank, leaving the middle part looped under the door and trailing on the floor. She ducked round to the back of the van, grabbed the hurricane lamp and unscrewed the reservoir cap at the base. She doused the length of the cotton rope with kerosene splashing a generous puddle where the middle section draped on to the cavern floor.
She emptied the last of the kerosene into the box in the back of the van then reached into the bag and took out two grenades, their dark green surfaces now buried beneath multicoloured layers of rubber. It was the sum total of every single elastic band she had managed to find in the warehouse office. She placed them carefully in the centre of the kerosene soaked box.
She took the first grenade, slipped her finger through the ring, then stopped. She was getting ahead of herself. She put it down again and reached over for the last thing Gabriel had hauled into the van before sending her on her way.
The lightweight trail bike slid out of the back of the van and bounced on to the stone floor. The helmet was threaded through the handlebars, but she left it there, mindful of the security camera and the ticking of the clock.
She leaned it against the tailgate and picked up the grenade again. There was a small
Gabriel had told her.
Her eyes bored into the metal arming spoon as she slowly forced her fingers to let go of it.
The lever didn’t move. The rubber bands had held it in place.
She blew out a long stream of air, picked up the second grenade and pulled its pin before her nerve failed her. She placed it in the box next to the first then pushed the whole lot further into the van until it rested against the fuel cans and the sacks of fertilizer. She pulled a large box of matches from the black canvas bag — the last piece of the bomb.
Kathryn slung her leg over the bike, reached into her pocket for the swipe card and jammed it between her teeth. She struck a match, fed it into the open box and dropped the whole lot on to the puddle of kerosene just as the matches flared inside the box. The kerosene
Kathryn turned the front wheel of the bike towards the dark mouth of the tunnel, twisted the throttle and kicked down hard on the starter.
