‘Yeah, well, sod that.’ Kate pulled her radio headset up from around her neck, but before she could slip it over her ears and position the mike at her lips, Finn was right behind her.

  ‘I said no,’ he spat, and with a savage jerk he tore the headset away and tossed it into the back of the flight deck. The cable whipped by Kate’s face, the metal audio jack stinging her cheek as it went.

  ‘You idiot!’ She shouted back at him. ‘You’re going to get us killed!’

  Hamid folded his arms. ‘How long until we reach Algerian territorial waters?’

  ‘Not soon enough,’ Kate growled, biting out each syllable.

  Knox leaned in, close enough to smell the odour of the acrid sweat gathering around the rim of Marty Chester’s collar. ‘What’s the word?’

  Marty blinked, pressing one cup of a set of headphones to his ear. Knox could faintly hear the crackle and burble of military communications leaking from the other earpiece, the live signal feeding back to the MOU via satellite from the USAF’s active network. ‘No joy,’ said the technician, after a long moment. ‘No response on radio, no reaction from the jet.’

  ‘Shit.’ Knox stared at the ground, feeling the metaphorical walls closing in around him. Every one of his limited options was slamming shut, narrowing the possibilities for his response with each passing second.

  The asset could not be allowed to make it into unfriendly territory. And with the currently foul political status between the United States of America and the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria, the latter certainly counted as enemy turf as far as he was concerned. If the jet crossed the border, it would mean the immediate involvement of men far above the CIA operative’s pay grade. Drawing their attention was the last thing he wanted.

  Knox had no confirmation either way of Lillian Breeze’s status, alive or dead, and no idea if the pilot and co-pilot were still in the equation. He tried to put himself in the position of the limey who’d turned traitor.

  If I was jacking the jet, how would I do it?

  Breeze would have to be neutralised first, of course. Then maybe waste one of the aircrew, to thin the numbers. Plus, there was the unavoidable fact that Finn had already co-opted the pilot. The turncoat held all the cards.

  ‘He’s gambling that we won’t burn them out of the sky,’ Knox muttered, voicing his thought with a shake of the head. ‘Wrong play.’

  ‘What’s going on up there?’ The other Brit, the pale chump in the hoodie, called out from a few metres away, where one of the PMCs kept him under guard. ‘Come on, mate, you have to tell me.’

  ‘I don’t gotta do shit for you.’ Knox deliberately turned his back on the MI6 operative and fixed his attention on Marty. ‘What about visuals on the plane?’

  Marty blinked again and let out a breath. ‘The UCAV pilot reported they saw lights and movement inside the cabin. Whoever’s running the show up there, they know the drone’s on them. They’re ignoring it.’

  ‘Calling our bluff.’ Knox gave a slow nod and made the inevitable choice. There would be hard questions to answer, he knew, after the dust settled. And as much as Breeze could be a colossal pain in the ass, the woman was gutsy, and he respected that. She deserved better.

  But Knox was firm in his conviction. Breeze would do the same thing if she was here and I was there. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Tell the drone jockey to splash the jet.’

  ‘Uh . . .’ Marty’s watery eyes widened and he hesitated.

  ‘Did I stutter?’

  ‘No.’ The technician licked his dry lips. ‘It’s just . . . well, the weapons payload it’s carrying, it’s not configured for air-to-air. I mean, we had to take what was already up there and inside intercept range, right? It’s mounting a Hellfire. It’s not optimal.’

  ‘It’ll have to do,’ insisted Knox. ‘Give the word.’

  ‘OK.’ The other man spoke into the radio mike again. ‘Yard Dog, Yard Dog, this is Authority, over. How copy?

  Yard Dog was the call sign for the Reaper, a unit attached to the USAF’s 52nd Operations Group, and Authority represented exactly that – the liberty granted by the CIA’s operations command to exert lethal force in the national interest. Killing a member of al-Sakakin certainly fell right in the middle of that, even if it would come with a steep collateral price tag.

  Knox heard a mutter of acknowledgement over the radio and then Chester gave the fatal order in a dull, blank-eyed monotone. ‘Weapons free. Yard Dog will commit, over. Release one, repeat, one on designated target.’

  ‘Copy weapons free.’ In the moment of silence that fell after the command, the faint voice of the drone pilot rang over the open channel. Then in the next second, he repeated the brevity code for the launch of a Hellfire missile: ‘Rifle.’

  ‘Where is it going?’ Finn called out, and the tone of his voice made Kate’s gut flood with ice. ‘The drone, it’s leaving.’

  She shook her head and shot a look at Hamid, who remained at the rear of the flight deck, his hands kneading the headrest of the co-pilot’s chair. ‘It’s not leaving.’

  ‘It’s dropping back to firing position, yes?’

  ‘You two, go strap yourselves in,’ she replied. ‘If we want to survive the next few minutes, I’m going to have chuck us around a bit. You get me?’

  ‘This is an executive jet, not a fighter aircraft,’ said Hamid. ‘We have no countermeasures on board. What exactly do you intend to do, Ms Hood?’

  ‘Not die,’ she shot back. ‘Get back there and belt up, man! And make sure everyone else is secured.’

  Hamid hesitated at the door as Finn pushed past, back into the main cabin. ‘Do not fail.’

  ‘I’m not doing any of this for you,’ Kate retorted, then shouted so her voice would carry back to the cabin. ‘Finn! Go to the window! Can you still see the Reaper?’

  ‘Off the starboard wing now,’ he called. ‘Extending away.’

  ‘Watch for a missile launch,’ she told him. ‘You’ll know it when you see it.’

  Kate gripped the Hawker’s flight yoke and disengaged the autopilot. Her free hand dropped to the throttles and she eased them forward, increasing speed. For a moment, she blotted out everything else and concentrated on her tactical options, as they had taught her in air combat training.

  She visualised the space around the Hawker in her mind’s eye – the sky above, the sea below, the spindly drone riding the wind as its chin turret turned to aim a targeting laser at the jet. The invisible spot from the beam would act as a homing beacon for the sensor head in the missile, following it right in to impact on the fuselage.

  The moment she saw the Reaper, the pilot had been terrified that the drone would be armed with AIM-9 air-to-air weapons, the notorious Sidewinder missiles that Kate had carried herself on the Strike Tornado she flew for the RAF.

  A Sidewinder was built to kill a combat jet with brutal efficiency, and an unarmed plane with no electronic defence systems – one like the civilian Hawker 800 – would be no match for it.

  But the Hellfire was a different story. While no less lethal than the AIM-9 in the hands of an experienced warfighter, the AGM-114 wasn’t designed to shoot down other aircraft. It was an anti-armour weapon, used against slower-moving targets like tanks, ships and ground vehicles, or static objectives like buildings and bunkers. It needed a laser beam constantly ‘painting’ its intended target in order to hit home, but holding a glowing dot on the side of a speeding jet was a difficult proposition, even with computer assistance.

  Kate’s gut tightened. That fact – that the drone was using the wrong weapon for an aerial intercept – granted her the slimmest of chances to avoid the Hellfire’s strike. But it wasn’t a prospect she welcomed.

  There was a story Kate had heard, a half-remembered pilot-lounge tale about an Israeli combat helicopter taking out a rogue prop plane with a Hellfire, successfully using the air-to-ground weapon in an air-to-air engagement. She had no desire for tonight’s flight to become another example that validated that possibility.

  Her eyes dropped to the map screen. Algerian airspace was near, but not near enough to matter, and she imagined it unlikely that Hamid’s terrorist cohorts had the influence to get any local MiG interceptors sent out to escort them in.

  ‘We’re on our own,’ she said aloud, just as Finn cried out from the cabin.

  ‘I see a flash of light! A burst of smoke!’

  Here we go, Kate told herself, and she rammed the yoke down hard, putting the Hawker in a sudden, brutal dive toward the glittering ocean.

  The thick rod of the Hellfire spiralled out through the night air, the rocket motor in the casing propelling the missile after the Hawker as fast as a hunting dog gaining on a running fox.

  The sensors in the clear dome on the tip of the missile scanned the world around it for the particular light frequency of the Reaper’s laser designator. It found it in a dazzling flash of reflected glow – invisible to human eyes – that flickered over the white flanks of the executive jet. Above and behind, the cruising drone’s targeting system spotlighted the Hawker, its remote pilot framing the plane in a set of digital crosshairs.

  But then the jet fell like a stone, plunging toward the surface of the Med, picking up speed as it dropped. For an instant, the laser lost purchase on the Hawker and the missile reacted, hesitating, the hunting dog briefly losing the scent.

  But only for a moment. The drone pilot compensated, retargeting and reacquiring the target, the laser finding the jet once more. The Hellfire continued its supersonic approach, the tiny fins jutting from its sides shifting to adjust its flight path.

  The unfolding sea beneath was a shimmering expanse ranging away in all directions, low waves rolling as the falling howl of the Hawker’s engines echoed across them. At the last possible second, Kate pulled back on the flight yoke and flattened out the jet’s trajectory. The Hawker skimmed the waves barely metres from the cold embrace of the ocean.

  Another pilot, someone less skilled, someone less willing to risk it, might have flown the jet straight into the drink, but Kate’s luck held as she pitched the aircraft over, raising the starboard wing to begin a shallow climbing turn.

  The Hawker shuddered and complained under the unexpected G-forces; it was built for gentle, easy flights and careful landings, not to be dragged around the sky under enemy fire. But still, it was nimble enough to make the drone pilot’s work harder.

  Glaring into his monitor screen, the faraway attacker was being forced to constantly recompute his firing solution and find the jet again and again, as Kate zigged and zagged it through the air. Framed against the surface of the sea, the targeting laser’s return became choppy and intermittent.

  Confused by conflicting inputs from its targeting sensor, the leading Hellfire dipped low, barely adjusting its heading to avoid smacking into a whitecap. The missile made the turn after the Hawker and continued on toward the glowing patch of laser light shimming unseen over its wing root.

  Aboard a combat aircraft there would have been threat systems and sensors to warn those on board that a weapon had locked on to it. There would be a banshee howl alert preceding an incoming missile, the split-second caution to the pilot telling them to dump sunburst flares or radar-fogging chaff, telling them to jink their aircraft and break the lock.

  The civilian Hawker had nothing like that. The first and only warning Kate and the others on board would get would be the millisecond of brilliant light as the Hellfire’s high-explosive payload detonated, before it tore open the fuselage and killed them.

  The missile entered its terminal phase, burning in at near Mach 1 as it closed the distance, and in the Hawker’s cockpit, Kate saw a flicker of rocket exhaust from the corner of her eye as the jet turned, still running less than a hundred metres above the water.

  She instantly threw the yoke in the opposite direction, slamming the jet hard to port and applying as much thrust as the Hawker’s engines could provide. Against every screaming instinct in her body, Kate turned the aircraft into the missile’s flight path, dragging it nose-high so the speeding Hellfire would roar past beneath them.

  Weapon and target crossed over one another with less than a few metres between them, and the missile clipped the surface of the sea as it tried vainly to adjust its attitude.

  The warhead exploded, sending a spray of white-hot shrapnel into the belly of the fleeing jet.

  EIGHTEEN

  The hipster wasn’t as smart as he thought.

  After Breeze had ground him down, complaining long enough to convince him to let her have the first-aid kit, she’d dry-swallowed a handful of the painkillers she found inside and palmed the little pair of medical scissors when he walked up to the cockpit. Of course, the scissors were inadequate as an improvised weapon – some blunt-tipped bullshit she couldn’t use to stab the fucker – but the cutting edge of the blade was still sharp, so maybe she could still slice him if the opportunity arose.

  But her plan – and how it was to laugh at giving it so grandiose a name – went to hell when Finn started yelling about a goddamned drone on their tail.

  Lillian Breeze wasn’t into the idea of karma and that kind of crap, but she had to wonder if this was some sort of cosmic balancing of the scales. How many times had it been her at the end of a command chain, giving the go order to some guy sat in a comfy chair with his hands on a glorified X-Box controller who was flying a Predator or a Reaper to drop warheads on foreheads?

  She’d seen enough of that grainy, black-and-white drone camera footage to last a lifetime. The silent plumes of grey light blossoming out of some jihadi asshole’s hideaway as the missile struck it. The laconic pilot voice over the tactical net saying two familiar words in a mundane litany of death: ‘Good kill.’

  Was that going to be the last thing anyone said about her when this jet blew apart over the Med? Lillian Breeze’s legacy – just a bad reputation, a good kill and bunch of oily wreckage washing up on a beach somewhere.

  The fire in her belly was so fierce that she half-welcomed the idea of oblivion, if only to make the pain go away. Hood’s work with the field dressing kept Breeze from leaking out all over the cabin, but the wound from the glazer bullet burned and burned. The meds were doing nothing to help.

  She used that to keep herself awake and tried to concentrate. She panted like an animal, blinking sweat out of her eyes as Finn came striding back into the cabin. He ignored her and moved to the window, pressing his face to the plastic oval.

  Breeze thought about stabbing him in the back with the scissors, but then she remembered she couldn’t do that. She blinked again. It was hard to stay in the moment when the agony of the wound did all it could to eat every last bit of her focus.

  When she looked up again, the asset was there as well, belting himself into the chair on the far side of the cramped compartment. He ignored her, his expression unreadable.

  Then the jet dropped unexpectedly, and Breeze’s head bounced off the wall of the cabin. She clung on to the arms of the seat as the aircraft shuddered through a power dive.

  Breeze thought that they might have already taken a hit, that they were crashing. The idea of that was worse than getting instantly cooked in an explosive fireball. Who wanted to know to count off the seconds before auguring into the sea, knowing it was inevitable?

  Then the jet changed attitude and G-forces pressed her back, a heavy, woolly pressure crushing her body into the leather cushioning of her seat. The invisible giant’s hand tightened around Breeze’s torso and, impossibly, the pain from the bullet wound became worse. She teetered on the brink of passing out and Breeze dug her nails into the padded armrests, forcing herself to stay present. Each sluggish gulp of air she took felt like blades against the inside of her ribcage.

  It was less than seconds but it felt like forever before the aircraft’s descent levelled out and, mercifully, the pressure on her eased. Her level of distress dropped from infernal to just terrible, and she sucked in as deep a breath as she dared.

  Finn was close, standing in the aisle between the rows of seats, bracing himself against the low curved ceiling as he peered past her and out of the window on Breeze’s side of the cabin. ‘Is that it?’ He asked the question but she wasn’t sure if it was for her. ‘I don’t see it any more!’

  See what? The thought processed through Breeze’s mind with glacial slowness. Is he talking about a missile?

  The jet shuddered violently, the metal tube around them complaining as the stresses resonated down the length of it, and once again the aircraft lurched to one side. The floor tilted sharply, unexpectedly, and Finn lost his footing.

  He fell against Breeze’s chair and, all of a sudden, he was within her reach. She had no sense of conscious choice about what came next, it just happened from out of nowhere. Her body reacted on her animal instinct to do some harm to the man who had shot her. Breeze grabbed a clump of the hipster’s thick, lustrous beard and yanked his chin down, bringing his face to meet her balled fist coming up.

  Finn’s nose broke beneath her knuckles with a damp, satisfying crackle. She kept on pounding him in the face with one blow after another, but what energy Breeze could muster had been spent in the first hit. She could feel herself quickly ebbing, the follow-up punches becoming weak and ineffectual.

  Still, he couldn’t extract himself immediately, pinned against her by the force of the jet’s turn. Breeze maintained her death-grip on his facial hair and fumbled for the scissors she had stolen. I’ll slit his throat, she vowed.

  A sphere of smoky yellow light flashed outside the aircraft and the jet’s rear end kicked up at a ten-degree angle. Explosion noise vibrated through the curved hull near Breeze’s head and she lost her momentum, fearing that the next thing she’d see would be the wall unzipping and the black sky beyond reaching out for her.

  She lost her grip and Finn fell away, collapsing to the deck, clutching at his face and newly crooked, blood-streaming nose. But the asset took his place, the neutral expression on his face replaced with a mask of taut fury.