The Secret of Excalibur

  ‘Either that or a Portaloo. Come on!’

  Nina gingerly descended. The water was coming faster now, rushing down the steeply sloping floor to churn against the bulkhead below. More spray found its way into the electrics - something further down the passage exploded, sending a cloud of smoke swirling up past Chase. Flames crackled briefly before the rising water extinguished them.

  Chase brought up a hand to help Nina, directing her towards the open hatch. ‘Come on, quick—’

  The entire submarine shook, titanium and steel groaning as if in pain. A wave burst over the top of the corridor, hundreds of gallons of freezing water cascading down on them. Hanging halfway across the passage, Nina was hit by the deluge and slipped, sliding down the sloping deck.

  Chase’s hand flashed out, snagging the baggy sleeve of her overalls. A seam tore, but he clenched his fist tighter round the bunched material as Nina swung below him. Water drenching her, she managed to clamp her hand round the edge of the hatch and shakily pull herself back up. ‘Thanks,’ she gasped.

  He gave her a relieved smile. ‘Didn’t want you to miss the wedding.’

  ‘Uh-huh. And when’s that going to be, exactly?’

  ‘Oh, don’t fucking start,’ Chase moaned, pushing her through the hatch. He followed as more water gushed down the corridor, the dying submarine moaning around them.

  Nina had already found a control panel by the hatch, helpfully annotated with diagrams beside illuminated push buttons. She hit each in turn.

  The inner hatch rumbled shut, closing with a clang. Nothing seemed to happen for a nerve-racking moment - then the escape pod trembled as its compartment flooded. The hatches on the Typhoon’s outer hull retracted, and with a thunderous bang of compressed air the pod was blown free of the stricken sub.

  Nina was thrown against Chase as the pod abruptly righted itself. A digital depth gauge rapidly counted down to zero, and before they had a chance to recover a whoosh of spray over the hull and a bobbing motion announced that they had reached the surface.

  Deeper booms and thumps came from below as the Typhoon finally hit the seabed. Nina looked worriedly at Chase, pushing her sodden hair off her face. ‘What about the sub? What if the reactors explode?’

  ‘They won’t,’ Chase assured her. ‘That’s not how they work. And sub reactor casings are tough, they should be able to recover them without too much crap leaking out.’ He stroked her cheek, then took in the pod’s interior. As well as the hatch through which they had entered, there was another in the ceiling with small portholes set beneath it. ‘I think this is the bit where M and Q are supposed to catch us having a shag.’

  Nina huffed. ‘Y’know, freezing seawater doesn’t really put me in the mood.’

  ‘Does wonders for your nipples, though.’

  ‘Hey!’

  Chase chuckled tiredly, then levered Nina off him and stood, pointing at a protective plastic cover over another panel at one end of the pod. ‘See if there’s a radio under that.’

  Nina lifted the cover as he looked through the portholes. There was indeed a radio beneath it - and more besides. ‘I think this thing’s got an engine,’ she told him. ‘There’s a wheel and a compass.’

  ‘See if you can start it.’ Chase peered out towards the shore. The glaring lights of the sub pen stood out clearly against the dark cliffs - as did the burning hilltop where Vaskovich’s facility had stood, a thick pillar of smoke and dust lit from below by the flames. ‘Jesus. Jack really fucking wrecked the place.’ He wondered what had happened to the DARPA agent; Mitchell hadn’t run for the Typhoon’s bow out of panic. He’d had a plan. Chase turned, looking out to sea.

  Something in the distance stood out against the horizon, a barely discernible line of white in the dark water. Waves washing against a floating object.

  The clatter of an electric starter was followed by the low chug of an engine. ‘Pretty neat, huh?’ Nina said.

  ‘Yeah. Are there any binoculars down there?’

  She searched the compartment beneath the controls, finding a medical kit as well as what Chase had asked for. ‘Let me fix those cuts,’ she said, handing him the binoculars.

  ‘In a minute.’ Chase scanned the horizon. ‘Well, fuck me.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Jack’s got a ride home.’ Through the binoculars, he could now see the cause of the line of waves - another submarine. A faint red light lit up an open hatch from below, figures moving around it to pull an inflatable life raft out of the water. Though Chase couldn’t make out the face of the figure climbing from it, the sword he was holding was a dead giveaway.

  Once Mitchell was aboard, the other men dropped the raft back into the water and climbed through the hatch. A wash of reflected light briefly passed over the sail as it closed, letting Chase pick out the number 23 painted on the black metal before it vanished in the darkness. The sub began to move; he tracked it until it disappeared under the surface, which it did with surprising speed.

  ‘The bastard had a sub waiting for him,’ he told Nina. ‘Soon as it’s clear of Russian waters, he’ll probably get picked up by a chopper and taken to . . . well, wherever the fuck he’s going with Excalibur.’

  ‘God.’ Nina sat, rubbing her hands over her arms to warm them. ‘The whole thing was a set-up, right from the start. And Jack was, what, a quadruple agent? The hell? Shit,’ she added as a thought struck her, ‘I bet he was the one who got Vaskovich to kill Bernd - that way he could be sure I’d help him find the sword.’

  ‘It’s not over,’ said Chase, eyes narrowing. ‘He was going to take you with him as well. He’ll want to get you back; he needs you to make his own system work. And his is a weapon.’

  ‘Jesus. So what do we do?’

  Chase looked through the portholes again. ‘First thing we do is get back to shore.’

  ‘It’ll take a while,’ said Nina, examining the controls. ‘This thing’s not exactly a powerboat. The speedo only goes up to five!’

  ‘Well, it’ll give you time to patch me up.’ Chase sat heavily on one of the bench seats.

  Nina turned the pod towards the sub pen, then took the medical kit and sat beside him. ‘You know, you were right about Jack. He was after my body. Just in a really weird way.’

  ‘Yeah. I can’t believe I got jealous of that arsehole. Sorry about that, by the way. Ow.’

  Nina finished dabbing one of his cuts with antiseptic. ‘Apology accepted. Just don’t do it again, huh?’

  ‘Oh, I won’t. Next time some bloke tries to chat you up, I’m just going to lamp the bastard.’

  Nina laughed, a little uncertainly. ‘Wait, no, really?’

  ‘Nah, I’m just—’

  ‘Taking the piss, gotcha. Anyway, you don’t need to worry about other men.’ She gently kissed his cheek. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For everything. I just realised what you were trying to tell me in London, at the embassy. About not wanting to lose me.’ She kissed him again. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘What made you realise?’

  Nina smiled. ‘Oh, y’know, just that you’d sink a nuclear submarine to save me. Most women don’t have a fiancé who’d do that. So I’m pretty sure I’ve found the right one.’ She applied a plaster to his face.

  Chase lifted an eyebrow. ‘Only pretty sure?’

  ‘Well, there is still that whole won’t-talk-about-his-past deal . . .’

  ‘You know I can’t. Official Secrets Act and all that.’

  ‘I don’t mean the SAS stuff,’ she said with a pointed look.

  ‘Right.’ Chase sat in contemplative silence as Nina continued to patch up his injuries, waiting for him to find the right words. ‘The thing . . .’ he began, and hesitated.

  ‘It can wait,’ she assured him. ‘We’re not exactly in the ideal surroundings here.’

  ‘No, I need to get this out. The reason I never talked to you about my family is . . . because it hurts. There, I said it.’ He let out a breath. ‘It’s
nearly twenty years ago, and it still fucking hurts. My mum was dying of cancer right in front of me, and my dad . . .’ Chase’s fists clenched. ‘My dad had a fucking affair! He was with some other woman while my mum was dying. So after she did, I just left. I didn’t want anything to do with him.’

  ‘So that’s why you never talk about him.’

  ‘Your dad was a role model,’ Chase said, voice bitter. ‘Mine was everything I didn’t want to be. I never talked about him ’cause I didn’t want to be reminded of him . . . and I didn’t want to think that I might be anything like him.’

  Nina had paused in her treatment to listen; now, she gave a final dab to his last cut. ‘I don’t think you are,’ she whispered, kissing him.

  He returned it. ‘Thanks.’ It was only a single word, but it told Nina the depth of his gratitude.

  They sat against each other as the lifepod continued its sluggish voyage home.

  To their surprise, they weren’t met by armed and angry Russians as the pod finally bumped against the jetty. Instead, Chase opened the top hatch to find Maximov waiting for them. ‘It’s okay, he’s on our side,’ he assured Nina as he helped her out. ‘I think.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Nina said uncertainly.

  ‘What happened to submarine?’ Maximov asked. ‘Whole front end came out of water like - like whale!’

  ‘Well, it’s sleeping with the fishes now,’ Chase told him. He saw a handful of people waiting at the dock’s cavernous entrance. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘They were going to fly away in the boss’s jet.’ The big Russian grinned menacingly. ‘I persuade them to stay, wait for army or navy or whoever to arrive.’

  ‘But we’ve got to get out of here,’ said Nina. ‘Jack’s got the sword. We need to go after him.’

  ‘Can you get us back to Moscow?’ asked Chase.

  Maximov looked puzzled. ‘Da, in jet. But I said, we wait for army to arrive.’

  ‘No, seriously, that would be a really bad idea. You know who they’re going to blame for all this? Whoever they find. You’re Russian, you know the drill - bag everyone in sight and worry about who actually did anything later. And if we’re all under arrest, we can’t stop Mitchell getting away.’

  ‘You have point,’ said Maximov. ‘Okay, I take you to plane, get you back to Moscow.’

  Nina shivered. ‘Anywhere, as long as it’s warm.’

  The lights were on in Pavel Prikovsky’s warehouse, but it was far from warm. The gate was open, the door ajar.

  ‘Stay in the car,’ Chase warned Nina. Vaskovich’s jet had been equipped with a gun cabinet; the fact that it had a combination code presumably known only to Vaskovich and Kruglov made no difference to Maximov, who simply ripped off the door. Both men drew their weapons and cautiously advanced across the yard.

  Chase peered through the door, seeing one of Prikovsky’s men lying in a pool of blood. It had coagulated; whatever had happened had taken place some time ago. It couldn’t have been Mitchell, then . . . but it could have been men acting under his orders.

  The warehouse was silent. Chase held up three fingers as a signal to Maximov, mouthed a countdown, then burst through the door, the Russian covering him. He swept his gun from side to side. No movement. No life.

  They made their way through the stacks of boxes to Prikovsky’s office, passing another corpse slumped against a forklift, his chest a ragged mess of bullet holes. Prikovsky was slumped over his desk, dead eyes staring at the door as they entered. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ said Chase softly. Prikovsky had hardly been a friend, but he had still come through for him, and this was his reward. The Russian had been shot in both legs, but the actual cause of death was easy to see: a metal pole protruding from his back, plunging down through his chest and the table below. Someone had held Prikovsky in that position in order to impale him, leaving a very clear message.

  Chase knew he was the intended recipient. A piece of paper had been taped to the pole, three words printed on it in large bold capitals.

  CALL YOUR SISTER.

  ‘Shit,’ Chase whispered, filled with utter dread. He hunted for a phone, and found one that had been knocked from the desk by Prikovsky’s struggle.

  ‘What does it say?’ Maximov asked.

  ‘The fucker’s going after my family!’ Snatching up the phone, Chase dialled 44, the international dialling code for Britain, then Elizabeth’s number. He waited anxiously for the connection to be made, the phone to start ringing . . .

  The answer came on the second ring. ‘Lizzie!’ Chase snapped. ‘Are you okay? Is Holly all—’

  ‘Eddie, oh, my God!’ Elizabeth cried. ‘They took her, they took Holly!’

  ‘Who? Who took her?’

  ‘I don’t know, they wore masks! They said they were watching, that if I called the police or spoke to anyone else they’d kill her - that I had to wait to hear from you!’

  Chase smashed his gun down on the desk, splintering the wood in his barely contained fury. ‘Mitchell, you fucking little shit, talk to me! I know you can hear me!’

  A click, then a familiar voice on the line, an eerie electronic distortion behind it. ‘Hello, Eddie.’

  ‘Let Holly go, right now,’ Chase barked. ‘Or I will fucking kill you.’

  ‘Save your threats, Eddie.’ There was another noise under Mitchell’s voice, the whine of an aircraft’s engines. He was no longer aboard the submarine.

  ‘It wasn’t a threat. It was a promise.’

  ‘Don’t waste my time and I won’t waste yours. I want Nina. Or rather, I need Nina. I know this is kinda drastic, but I needed to show that I’m one hundred per cent serious.’

  ‘By kidnapping a teenage girl?’ Chase cried. ‘The British government’ll go apeshit!’

  ‘The British government will shut the fuck up and do as they’re told, like always. But they won’t even need to hear about this if you do what I tell you. Bring me Nina, and you get your niece back.’

  ‘Eddie, what is it?’

  Chase whirled to see Nina standing in the doorway. ‘That fucker’s kidnapped Holly!’

  ‘Is that Nina?’ Mitchell asked as she reacted with shock. ‘Put her on, Eddie.’

  Tight-lipped with anger, Chase put the phone on speaker. ‘She’s here.’

  ‘Nina, hi. I’m sure you’ve guessed what I want already, but I’ll tell you anyway so there’s no ambiguity - I want you to turn yourself over to my people. In return, I’ll let Eddie’s niece go.’

  ‘Your people?’ Nina said in disgust. ‘Kidnappers and killers? I’m ashamed to be an American right now. DARPA’ll be finished when this gets out.’

  Mitchell almost laughed. ‘You still think I actually work for DARPA? I didn’t realise you were so naive.’

  ‘A black project,’ Chase growled.

  ‘Blackest of the black. This is way too important to be put in the hands of any official agency. Or politician.’

  ‘So you’ve just unilaterally declared yourself the guardian of American interests?’ Nina asked, appalled.

  ‘Someone has to do it. But I’m not here to debate idealism versus realpolitik - I’m here to do a job, and for that I need you. Get back to England. Once you’re there, call this number again. We’re monitoring it; I’ll hear you. And then we can make the exchange.’

  ‘No!’ Chase shouted. ‘You want me to trade my fiancée for my niece? Fuck you! I can’t - I can’t make a choice like that!’

  ‘I can,’ Nina said quietly. ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said I’ll do it.’

  ‘No you fucking won’t!’

  Her voice was firm. ‘I have to. And you know it. It’s the only way to get Holly back safely. She’s your niece . . . and she’s going to be mine too.’ She took his hand. ‘She’s going to be part of my family, Eddie. And you have to do whatever’s necessary to protect your family.’ She turned to face the phone. ‘Jack, we’ll do it. I’ll do it. If I have your absolute assurance that Holly will be released unharmed.’


  ‘You have it,’ Mitchell replied. ‘Now get to England. And make it soon.’ The line went dead.

  Chase swept the phone off the table. ‘Fuck! I don’t fucking believe him, he’ll kill her anyway. He can’t risk anyone finding out what he’s done.’

  Maximov grunted. ‘The man is a shit. I should have crushed his head! But at least you know he is not all-powerful, or he could have left men here to wait for you.’

  ‘Powerful enough,’ Nina said, worried. She shared a look with Chase, a look that betrayed their fears for Holly . . . and each other.

  32

  England

  The New Forest covered over two hundred and twenty square miles, a national park beginning ten miles east of Bournemouth that contained some of England’s oldest heaths and pastures. But it was in one of the swathes of forest that gave the region its name that Nina and Chase now waited, Elizabeth’s car parked in a clearing. Chase had checked the area in satellite photos; the nearest house was over a mile away, the spot Mitchell had selected for the exchange as isolated as it was possible to get on the densely populated south coast.

  Night had fallen. The only illumination came from the car’s headlights, casting stark shadows across the ground. Chase surveyed the trees, but couldn’t see anyone.

  He knew they were not alone, though.

  ‘I hear something,’ said Nina, looking northwards. It took a few more seconds before Chase was able to pick it out, his hearing still not fully recovered from the pounding it took in Russia. But the whine and chatter of an approaching helicopter was unmistakable.

  It came in low, a flickering light through the trees before it swept into the open, turning side-on to the car as it descended. A man leaned out of a door, directing a circular antenna at them.

  ‘Get rid of the gun, Eddie.’ Mitchell’s voice boomed from a speaker as the chopper hovered just above tree level. The antenna was part of a millimetre-wave radar system, showing the helicopter’s occupants exactly what Chase and Nina were carrying under their clothes. ‘And Nina, that thing in your left pocket, I assume it’s a tracker. Ditch it. Then both of you step away from the car.’