Burning Angels

He fished inside his smock and pulled out a second canister. But as he ripped out the pin, ready to hurl the grenade down the stairwell, a spike of blinding claustrophobia hit him like a punch to the stomach. He felt himself freeze, his mind locked in that dark moment on the mountainside, which seemed to play through his head on a continuous loop.

It was crucial to keep the momentum going on an assault such as this. But waves of nausea swept up from the pit of Jaeger’s stomach, doubling him over in their vice-like grip. He felt as if he was back in that tent, drowning in the sea of his own failure, unable even to defend his own wife and child.

His limbs seemed utterly frozen.

He couldn’t hurl the canister.

8

‘Throw it!’ Narov screamed. ‘THROW IT! Santos is in there somewhere! Throw the goddam canister!’

Her words ripped through Jaeger’s paralysis. It took a stupendous effort of will, but somehow he managed to regain his grip on his senses and let fly, launching the grenade far into the darkness below. Seconds later, he was pounding down the steps, sweeping the area before him with his weapon, Narov right behind him.

During the years he’d served with elite units, clearing buildings was one of the most heavily rehearsed of all of their drills. It was fast, natural and instinctive.

Two doors led off the staircase, one to either side. Jaeger went right, Narov left. He let fly the retainer clip on a third canister of Kolokol-1. His boot hit the door, crashing through the wood and shunting it wide open, and he tossed the canister inside.

As the gas began to pump, a figure stumbled towards him, choking and cursing in some language that Jaeger didn’t understand. The figure opened fire, spraying wildly with his weapon, but he was blinded by the gas. An instant later he keeled over, his hands grasping at his throat as he gasped for air.

Jaeger advanced into the room, expended brass bullet casings crunching under the soles of his overboots. He did a rapid scan for Leticia Santos. Not seeing her anywhere, he was about to leave when he was struck by a blinding realisation: he recognised this place.

Somehow, somewhere, he had seen it before.

And then it hit him. In an effort to torture him remotely, Santos’s captors had emailed Jaeger images of her captivity. One had shown her bruised, bound and kneeling before a torn and dirtied bed sheet, on which had been scrawled the words:

Return to us what is ours.

Wir sind die Zukunft.

Wir sind die Zukunft: we are the future.

The words had been crudely daubed in what appeared to be blood.

Jaeger could see that very sheet before him now, pinned to one of the walls. Below it on the floor was the detritus of captivity: a dirty mattress, a toilet bucket, lengths of frayed rope, and a few dog-eared magazines; plus a baseball bat, no doubt used to beat Santos into submission.

It wasn’t the room that Jaeger had recognised; it was the instruments of Leticia Santos’s incarceration and torture.

He whipped around. Narov had cleared the room opposite, and still there was no sign of Santos. Where had they taken her?

The two of them paused for a second at the bottom of the stairs. They were soaked in sweat and their breath was coming in heaving gasps. Each grabbed a canister and prepared to press on. They had to keep the momentum going.

They hammered up the flights of stairs leading towards the roof, hurling more canisters, then spreading out to search, but the entire floor appeared empty. After a few seconds Jaeger heard a burst of static in his earpiece, and Raff’s voice came over the radio.

‘Stairway at rear leads to the roof.’

Jaeger turned and sprinted in that direction, fighting his way through the thick swirling gas. Raff was standing at the bottom of a flight of worn metal rungs; above him a trapdoor was open to the sky.

Jaeger barely hesitated before he started to climb. Leticia had to be up there. He could feel it in his bones.

As his head neared the opening, he flicked off the torch beam on his pistol. There would be enough moonlight to see by, and the flashlight would simply make him an obvious target. With one hand he eased his way up the ladder, the other keeping his gun at the ready. No point unleashing the gas up here. It was little use in the open.

He stole his way up the last few inches, sensing Narov on the rungs below him, then eased his head and shoulders above the opening, scanning all around for the enemy. For several seconds he stayed utterly still, watching and listening.

Finally, in one swift move, he vaulted on to the roof. As he did so, he heard a crash. It sounded deafening in the comparative silence. A battered television set had been dumped in the centre of the roof, a pile of old furniture heaped up behind it.

A broken chair had tumbled over as a figure raised a weapon from behind the patch of cover.

A moment later there was a savage burst of fire.