‘Richter,’ he announced briefly
‘Are you in a secure location?’ his superior demanded, without preamble.
‘More or less. I’m sitting by myself in a Russian bar. Why?’
‘Taken to drink at last, have you?’
‘Not yet, but I’m working on it. I’m also in a hurry here, so what do you want?’
‘A possibly related matter.’ Simpson then outlined what FOE had learned about the robbery in Dobric. ‘We don’t know for sure that these Acrids were taken by whatever group has been acquiring the Foxbats, but being the missile of choice for the MiG-25, that’s at least likely. Where are you? What progress are you making?’
‘Not a lot so far, but I might have something concrete later this evening. I’m currently about seven hundred miles east of Moscow, in Perm, waiting for a couple of bad guys to meet with a MiG pilot from the local air base. If anything comes of it, I’ll brief the duty officer tonight. Anything else you need to know?’
‘No, that’s it. Just keep in touch.’
Five minutes after Richter had ended the call, Pavel Bardin walked through the door. He ordered a vodka, and knocked it back in one as soon as the bartender had placed it in front of him. Then he ordered another, carried it across to a table beside the door, pulled out a newspaper and began reading. Or, at least, appearing to read, for every time the door opened, he looked up to scan the faces of the new arrivals.
The Russian was, Richter realized, both amateurish and terrified, which wasn’t the best combination when about to encounter people who had killed at least once during the past week. But it was too late to do anything about that now, and what could he do anyway, because Bardin was the only one who might recognize the three men who had almost certainly killed Georgi Lenkov.
Seven came and went, and the door opened regularly to admit new arrivals, or to allow customers to leave. On each occasion, Bardin glanced at Richter across the bar and shook his head. The man was being about as subtle as a flying brick, and Richter knew the expected agents would twig what was up the instant they stepped through the door. The idiot would have to be warned.
He stood up to do so, and had taken no more than a couple of steps towards Bardin’s table when the street door suddenly opened again, and two men entered. The pilot looked up at them, then turned towards Richter and nodded. He might just as well have waved a banner over his head carrying the words ‘This is a trap.’
The men stopped dead, then turned round, yanked open the door and hurried outside. Richter muttered a curse and followed them.
He’d expected them to turn either left or right, making for wherever they’d left their car. But instead they sprinted straight across the road, towards the river. Off to his left, Richter saw the brief flash of headlamps, the signal agreed with Bykov to indicate that he’d radioed for the police cordon to be set up. But that now seemed rather academic, because Richter had realized there was a huge hole in their plan. If the bad guys had a boat waiting for them on the river, the police cordon became irrelevant. They’d covered all the surrounding streets, but not the water.
So Richter ran. But he’d barely left the bar when one of the running men looked back, then stopped and turned, tugging open his jacket. The moment Richter recognized the weapon, he dropped flat on the tarmac surface of the road. Because, in the uncertain light of the street lamps, he’d seen the unmistakable outline of a Skorpion machine-pistol and, with only the Yarygin, he was hopelessly outgunned.
The man in front of him squeezed the trigger, sending a stream of nine-millimetre bullets screaming over Richter’s head to smash into the wall and windows of the bar behind him. As glass shattered, he heard shouts of alarm intermingled with cries of pain. Sighting down the barrel of the Yarygin, he loosed off two snap shots, barely aiming, just wanting to discourage the barrage of fire.
Both his shots missed, but the two men began running again, then abruptly disappeared from view as they reached the far edge of Kama Boulevard, and ran on down a flight of stone steps leading towards the river.
Richter jumped to his feet and chased after them, but slowed to a walk as he approached the top of the steps. That was just as well, because the moment he raised his head over the low parapet bordering the pavement, the guy with the Skorpion opened up again, a hail of copper-jacketed slugs knocking lethal chips of stone out of the wall as Richter dropped back down. A couple of the flying shards hit him in the face, opening up a long but shallow cut across his forehead.
He raised his right hand over the top of the parapet and fired two shots in the general direction of his quarry, then slid sideways until he was lying right beside the gap in the wall at the top of the steps. Behind him he could hear the sound of running footsteps. Glancing to his left, he saw Bykov approaching, pistol in hand, and gestured for him to keep back.
Cautiously he peered around the solid stone, ready to draw back at once. But there seemed no immediate danger as the two men had by now moved to the water’s edge, where a third figure was waiting in a boat with a hefty outboard motor attached to the stern. Even as Richter watched, the boat swung away from the jetty and began accelerating fast towards the opposite bank of the river.
‘Shit,’ Richter muttered, realizing there almost certainly wasn’t enough time to get the Perm police to arrange a reception committee on the other side. He stood up and hurtled down the steps, the Yarygin ready in his hand.
At the water’s edge he stopped, feet apart, and raised the pistol to take careful aim, supporting his right hand with his left to steady the weapon. The boat was probably thirty yards away as he fired his first shot. It was bobbing and bouncing on the water as it gathered speed, its three occupants crouching low.
The moment his shot rang out, one of the figures turned, and seconds later the Skorpion began to return fire. But a bouncing boat is too unstable a platform from which to shoot accurately, and although Richter flinched when a couple of rounds struck the jetty a few feet away, he knew it would be a miracle if any of the bullets hit him.
His advantage was to be standing on solid ground, so he concentrated on making each shot count. His second shot also missed, but the third scored a hit. One of the men gave a yell of pain and slumped forward, while the boat suddenly veered to the left. But it was Richter’s fourth bullet that did the real damage.
It hit the outboard motor’s fuel tank, sending a spray of petrol right across the open cockpit. The man armed with the Skorpion was still firing, and whether it was due to muzzle flash from the machine-pistol or a spark from one of Richter’s bullets ricocheting off something metallic he’d never know, but with a sudden roar the vessel erupted in a ball of flame.
Richter lowered his pistol, the weapon instantly irrelevant, and just watched the conflagration. The petrol- soaked clothing of the fugitives caught fire immediately. Illuminated by the burning fuel, their three indistinct figures gyrated in violent, panicky movements as they frantically tried to beat out the spreading flames with their bare hands.
It was never going to work, and almost simultaneously they reached the same conclusion and leapt overboard. The water doused the flames straight away, but the boat was still fully ablaze and only a madman would attempt to climb back on board. Richter guessed that the three men would try to swim for the opposite bank of the river.
‘I had hoped to question them.’ Bykov was panting slightly as he stopped beside Richter and looked out at the ball of flames where the powerboat was now drifting slowly on the current.
‘We might still be able to, if any of them manage to reach the shore.’
‘I’ve asked Wanov to send some of his men over to the other side, and to organize a couple of boats to recover the wreck, but they’ll take a while to arrive and it’ll be dark soon. This is
‘We should have thought about it ourselves, Viktor. With hindsight it’s an obvious escape route. You can’t blame Wanov – he did exactly what we asked him to.’
Bykov shrugged. ‘You’re right, but it’s too late now. Maybe we’ll find some clue on whatever’s left of that boat. It has to be registered to somebody.’
Kim Yong-Su sat in his office in the centre of Pyongyang and checked everything one last time. When Pak Je-San had first explained his plan back in the autumn of 2003, Kim had realized two things.
First, the timing was absolutely crucial: they had to make their move when the nearest American aircraft carrier was at least forty-eight hours sailing time distant, and no Aegis cruisers were in the vicinity of the Korean
