Bourne 7 – The Bourne Deception - Страница 77

— You-you‘re taking over Yevsen‘s business? Despite what he‘d just heard, Perlis couldn‘t stop himself from laughing in Arkadin‘s brutal face. -You have delusions of grandeur, my friend. You‘re nothing but an uneducated, lowIQ Russian hood who‘s inexplicably come into some good luck. But in this business good luck will get you only so far, then it‘s time for the professionals to take you out.

Arkadin resisted the urge to turn the American‘s face into bloody pulp. That time would come, but first he required an audience for what he was about to do. Still holding on to Perlis‘s hand, he thumbed open his cell phone and sent a three-digit text message. A moment later the belly of the Air Afrika jet seemed to split open with the remaining eighty men in Arkadin‘s private army.

— What‘s this? Perlis said, as he watched his own personnel being overpowered, disarmed, thrown to the ground, where they were systematically bound and gagged.

— It isn‘t only Yevsen‘s business I‘m taking over, Mr. Perlis, it‘s these oil fields. What‘s yours is now mine.

The Russian Mi-28 Havoc combat helicopter carrying Bourne and Colonel Boris Karpov, two of his men, as well as a two-man crew and a full complement of weapons, banked low over the Iranian oil fields in Shahrake NasiriAstara, and immediately they saw the two planes-one the Air Afrika jet Karpov‘s IT

man in Khartoum had tracked here, the other a Sikorsky S-70 Black Hawk painted matte black but with no markings: Black River transport.

— According to my intel in Moscow, the American-led allied forces have not yet crossed over into Iranian territory, Karpov said. -We may still have time to avert this catastrophe.

— If I know anything about Noah Perlis, he‘s sure to have made contingency plans. Bourne, peering down at the swiftly changing terrain, was mulling over everything Soraya had told him. At last he had all the pieces of the puzzle, save one: Arkadin‘s angle. He had to have one, Bourne was as certain of that as he was of anything in this delicately constructed spider‘s web.

And there was the spider, he thought, as the Havoc swept down like a bat out of hell, passing directly over the figures of Arkadin and Perlis. As Karpov directed the pilot to land, Bourne felt the deep throbbing pain in his chest wound, returning like an old enemy to dog him. Ignoring it, he tried to work out what was going on. Five men and one woman were lying facedown on the ground, trussed like suckling pigs ready for the rotisserie. Bourne counted a hundred heavily armed men in camo uniforms that were clearly not American military issue.

— What the fuck is happening down there? Boris had just now switched his attention to the same scene that absorbed Bourne. -And there‘s that fucker, Arkadin. He clenched his fist. -How I want his nuts in a sling, and now by God I‘ll have them.

By this time the Havoc had come under small-arms fire and the pilot, sitting in his raised cabin in the rear, was taking evasive maneuvers, the two TV3-117VMA turboshaft engines whining in response. Neither Bourne nor Karpov was particularly concerned by the semi-automatic fire, since the Havoc was outfitted with an armored cabin able to withstand the impact of 7.62 and 12.7mm bullets as well as 20mm shell fragments.

— Are you all set? Karpov asked Bourne. -You look ready for anything, just like an American should. And he laughed tonelessly.

The weapons man yelled a warning. Looking to where he was pointing, they saw one of the men slide a Redeye missile into its launcher, and his compatriot swing it up onto his shoulder, aim it at them, and pull the trigger.

The moment Arkadin saw the Redeye rammed home into its launcher, he delivered a vicious uppercut to Perlis‘s jaw and, releasing his hand as the American went down, ran toward the man who was about to fire at the Havoc. He shouted for the man to stop, but it was useless, the noise of the helicopter rotors was too loud. He knew what had happened. His men had seen the Russian combat Havoc and had reacted instinctively against an enemy.

The Redeye shot into the air, detonating against the Havoc‘s fuel tanks. That was a mistake because the Havoc‘s tanks were insulated with polyurethane foam to protect them from being set on fire. Plus, any rents in the tanks themselves were instantly closed with latex in the self-healing covers. Even if the blast had ruptured one of the fuel lines, which seemed likely because the Havoc was at a low altitude when it was hit, the fuel feed system operated in a vacuum, which prevented the fuel from leaking into areas where it could be ignited.

In the aftermath of the hit, the Havoc swung back and forth like a disoriented insect; then what Arkadin feared most happened: two Shturm antitank missiles streaked out from the underbelly of the wounded Havoc toward the surface. The resulting detonations took out three-quarters of Arkadin‘s cadre.

Bourne, thrown face-first against a bulkhead, felt the explosion of pain in his chest radiating out into his arms. For an instant he thought the trauma to his wound had caused a heart attack. Then he got himself under control, mentally tamped down on the pain, and, extending a hand, pulled Karpov off the deck of the Havoc. Smoke drifted into the cabin, which made it more difficult for him to catch his breath, but it wasn‘t immediately clear whether it was from damage the helicopter had sustained or from the shallow craters on the ground where the Shturms had struck.

— Set this bucket down, and I mean now! Karpov ordered over the racket of the engines.

The pilot, who had been battling the controls ever since they were hit, nodded and they descended vertically. The moment they made contact with a bone-rattling jar, Karpov wrenched the door open and dropped to the ground. Bourne followed him with a grimace of pain. His breath was hot in his throat. Both of them ran, crouched over, under the aircraft‘s wind-sweep, until they were outside the circumference of the rotors.

What they came upon was hell on earth. Or, rather, war. In the air, the virile whoosh of the missiles had been exhilarating, especially as retaliation for the first strike, but here on the ground, without the cool detachment of a God‘s-eye view, all was devastation. Great mounds of black earth, scorched and smoking as if from the pits of the underworld, halfcovered random bits and pieces of bodies, as if some insane creature had decided to improve on the human form by first dismantling it. The stench of roasted flesh mingled with the foul odors of excrement and exploded ordnance.

To Bourne, the scene had the nightmarish quality of Goya‘s half-mad Black Paintings come to life. When so much death presented itself, when all was horror in every direction, the mind interpreted it as surreal in order not to go mad.

The two men spotted Arkadin at the same time and took off after him. The problem was that the pain in Bourne‘s chest was growing in size and heat. Whereas only moments before it had seemed to be the size of a pinball it now seemed larger than a fist. It seemed, moreover, to have encompassed his heart. As he went down on one knee, he saw Karpov vanish into a plume of black, oily smoke. He couldn‘t see Arkadin, but what was left of his cadre was engaged with the Iranian oil field guards in a pitched hand-to-hand battle for every inch of territory that hadn‘t been turned into an infernal pit. As for the Black River operatives, none that he could see remained alive, having been either killed in the missile attack or executed by Arkadin‘s forces. All was chaos.

Bourne forced himself to his feet, staggering past the bodies into the curling smoke that reached up into the sky. What he encountered on the other side was not encouraging. Boris lay on the slope of one of the craters, one leg at an unnatural angle underneath the other. White bone shone through. Standing astride him was Leonid Danilovich Arkadin. In Arkadin‘s hand was a

38 SIG Sauer.

— You thought you could fuck me up, Colonel, but I‘ve waited a long time for this moment. Arkadin‘s voice could just be heard over the screams and the harsh, rat-a-tat sounds of weapons of war. -And now my time is here.

He turned abruptly, facing Bourne, and a slow smile spread across his face as he squeezed off three shots in a tight triangle into Bourne‘s chest.

34

BOURNE WAS BLOWN BACK off his feet by the concussion of the bullets striking him. Searing pain racked him; he must have passed out for a moment, because the next thing he knew Arkadin had climbed up to the lip of the crater, looking down at him with an odd expression that might have been pity or even disappointment.

— Here we are, he said as he walked toward Bourne. -Karpov isn‘t going anywhere and Perlis‘s men are dead, if not buried. They‘re both dead men. So now it‘s just you and me, the first and last Treadstone graduates. But you‘re on the verge of death as well, aren‘t you? He crouched down. -You are complicit in Devra‘s death and I made you pay, but there‘s something I want to know before you die. How many more graduates are there? Ten? Twenty?

More?

Bourne could barely speak, he felt paralyzed. There was blood all over the front of the jacket Boris had given him.

— I don‘t know, he managed to get out. Breathing was more difficult than he‘d expected, and the pain was incredible. Now that he was in the center of the web, now that he had found the clever spider who crouched there spinning his intricate strands, he felt helpless.