“What a shit-show. You know, she’s starting to seriously piss me off,” the former Russian Spetnaz commando said, glancing over to where Lotte was still handcuffed to the guardrail. “But at least we got her this time my friend. From now on, I promise you we will throw a ring of steel around her wherever she goes.”
Dyatlov was clearly pumped, even though he had lost lots of good men. Pieter wished he could feel the same way.
“We might have caught her, but the other guy, the sniper, he got away,” he pointed out.
Dyatlov pulled a face and sucked in air between his teeth, but then he shrugged as though he was determined not to let this mar what was ultimately a good result: Nina was safe and well, at least physically if not emotionally, and their No 1 suspect and the most wanted person in Europe was under arrest and destined to spend the rest of her life behind bars.
“It all came at a big cost,” Pieter continued. “There’ll be hell to pay.”
“Huijbers was an asshole. A vain, fat prick who wanted all the acclaim for himself. Well, he got his big moment all right, in front of the world’s press. Good riddance, if you ask me.”
On the road behind him, somebody had thought to use one of the bulldozers from the construction site to push the still-burning wreckage of the helicopter out of the way, making room for the ambulance holding Nina to move past. More sirens could be heard in the distance, probably fire-crews coming to douse the flames, and overhead three or four choppers buzzed around in the sky like irritating gnats, some belonging to TV news crews.
Dyatlov moved away to re-join his men, so Pieter went back along the roadway to where Lotte was sitting and leaning with her back against the rails.
She looked up as he approached.
She smiled at him, and her brown eyes seemed to reach out to him, as though trying to convey they shared some common bond, some secret unbreakable alliance only they knew about. Once again an invisible spark flitted briefly, a connection, and Pieter quickly averted his gaze to break it.
He’d had enough of her games.
Unfastening her from the guardrail and then cuffing her wrists back together once more, he marched her towards the nearest police vehicle.
◆◆◆
Harderhaven was a tiny fishing community east of Amsterdam built on land reclaimed from the sea. It was early evening by the time Johan Roost arrived in the beat-up pickup truck. After slipping through the net closing in around him, he had driven hell-for-leather through the large town of Lelystad. Then he had cut further east, trying to put as much distance between himself and the chaos on the dam, hoping to lie low for a few days while he worked out his next move.
Lotte had told him about this place. She owned a small bungalow out here, in this backwoods part of Holland so-to-speak. It was a bolt-hole, a safe place to come should things go bad for them. Considering what had gone down today, the bloody mayhem followed by his last-ditch escape (aided somehow by Lotte, and he tried not to think too much about that) then he thought this certainly qualified. So he found himself driving out here to wait things out.
Following the quiet coastal road through the small cluster of homes and holiday lets he cut the headlights and slowed down to a crawl, looking into the darkness for the turning.
He saw it just beyond an empty industrial estate and found himself moving along a narrow lane with a small yachting marina on one side. Further on it swerved left past a line of whitewashed stones on the grass verge, and then he was driving slowly along a narrow strip of land close to the water’s edge.
There was hardly any lighting here, just a couple of small security lamps casting out a feeble glow, and the track was slippery and covered in snow, making his path even more treacherous.
A row of overturned rowing boats ran parallel with the track. Johan counted them, and when he reached the seventh one he drew the pickup truck up alongside, cut the engine, took a flashlight from the glovebox and stepped out.
Crunching quietly through the snow he grabbed a hold of the wooden boat and tried to flip it over. It was much heavier than it looked, so he lay the flashlight on the ground and bent and gripped the wooden side with both hands and, grunting and cursing, he rolled it over.
On the ground beneath was a flat piece of corrugated plastic weighed down with stones. He kicked these away and slid the plastic to one side, revealing a shallow pit dug out beneath. Taking the flashlight again, he shone the strong white beam of light into the hole.
At the bottom lay three green metal boxes with black numbers and letters stencilled on the side. One box was longer than the others, and this one he knew contained a variety of different firearms, all military-grade weapons such as C10 and C15 assault rifles, RPK light machine-guns and Uzis, CZ Scorpion machine pistols and K-100 handguns. The other two boxes contained hundreds of rounds of ammunition as well as blasting caps and plastic explosives.
This was one of three similar arms caches in the local area and he would be visiting the others over the coming days to retrieve even more firepower, but for now this would do. The weapons had all been smuggled into the country from Slovakia over a year ago, and much of the same stock had been used during the gunfights at The Weeping Tower and The Waag during Lotte’s ambitious but ultimately doomed plot several months ago. These arms dumps out here contained the leftover guns, and they should be more than adequate for his task.
Heaving the heavy boxes out of the hole one by one, he dragged them across to the pickup truck and lifted them into the
