Return to Atlantis: A Novel (3 page)

Through the door, he heard muted gasping. Anything else was masked by the bells and his own less-than-perfect
hearing, damaged by years of exposure to gunfire and explosions. “Open it,” he muttered to Boodu.

The Zimbabwean glowered, but pushed the door open. “It’s Boodu,” he announced.

There was no answer. Surprised, Boodu stepped cautiously into the chamber. Eddie followed a couple of steps behind. On the far side of the shadowed room he saw the man he had come to rescue: Johnny Strutter, an overweight Kenyan man in his forties. Strutter was shackled face-first against the wall, his bare back marked with savage weals and bleeding lines where he had been whipped. There was also a strong, sickly smell like scorched meat. Burn marks dotted across Strutter’s shoulders and upper back told Eddie that it wasn’t from a barbecue. A bench beside him was home to numerous instruments of torture, some of which had been demonstrated to—and upon—Eddie the previous day.

Their user was gone, however. The torturer had fled like a coward at the first sign of danger. Whips and hooks and soldering irons were no defense against bombs and bullets.

Eddie gestured at Strutter. “Get him down.”

At gunpoint, Boodu unlocked the shackles. The overweight man collapsed when the last one was released, moaning. “Into the corner,” snapped Eddie, signaling for Boodu to back away as he checked the prisoner.

Strutter forced open his pain-clenched eyes. “Chase?” he rasped in disbelief. “Eddie Chase! God above, it
is
you! I almost didn’t recognize you with the beard …”

“Can you walk?” Eddie demanded curtly.

Strutter flexed his legs and grimaced. “I don’t know. I’ve been through a lot since I was arrested, old friend. You’ll have to carry me.”

Eddie fixed him with a cold glare. “Let’s get this straight, Strutter. I’m not your
old friend
, and I’m not fucking carrying your fat arse anywhere. I want one thing out of you—information—and if you can’t move, I’ll chain you back to that wall and carry on where the last guy left off to get it.”

Strutter hurriedly got up. “On the other hand, I could walk.”

“Glad we’re on the same page.” Eddie turned back to Boodu. “All right, dickhead, let’s go. Strutter, take this machete. If he tries anything, stab him.”

Strutter took the blade and eyed Boodu. “It would be a grand thing for the entire world if I just stabbed him anyway.”

“I know, but I’ll get a few quid for handing him over.”

“You are back in the mercenary business? I thought you left for good.”

“It’s just temporary,” Eddie said as he returned to the door. The only people he saw outside were prisoners, a few of whom had acquired weapons from the guards and were exchanging intermittent fire through a door to the courtyard. Fort Helena was still in turmoil.

But even with the governor dead, there was a chain of command. Somebody would soon take charge; every minute brought a counterattack closer. The armory might have been destroyed, but the guards still had firepower on their side.

Boodu knew this too. “You can’t get out,” he said, sneering at the prisoners. “You think these starving dogs can break through the gate?”

“Nope,” said Eddie, heading for the exit. “But I know someone who can.”

As if on cue, more gunfire erupted outside—though from the prisoners’ confusion, it was clear that it wasn’t being aimed at them. Eddie cautiously peered into the courtyard. The watchtowers were smoldering wrecks, and a column of black smoke rose from the remains of the administration block. A car nearby was also ablaze. But what about the guards?

He saw several uniformed men race across the courtyard to scale the steps built into the fort’s thick defensive wall, joining others along the ramparts—and firing on something outside the prison.

Something getting closer.

A deep rumbling growl filled the air. Boodu’s eyes went wide. “You
do have
a tank!”

“Not quite,” said Eddie, “but the next best thing.” He smiled. “Check out my killdozer.”

The great gates burst apart.

Roaring through a cloud of dust and black diesel smoke was a large bulldozer, its front blade raised like a battering ram—but this was no ordinary construction vehicle. The engine compartment and cabin were covered by steel plates. The guards’ bullets clanked harmlessly off the armor as the behemoth ground over the ruined gates into the courtyard.

The killdozer was not simply an impenetrable bullet magnet, however. It had weapons of its own. Slots in the cabin’s shields dropped open—and the muzzles of machine guns poked out, firing up at the fort’s defenders. Guards flailed and fell under the hail of fire. The machine rumbled on, flattening a car into unrecognizable scrap.

Eddie called to the prisoners. “Okay! That’s your way out of here—there are trucks coming to the gate. When I tell you, run for it!”

Boodu raged impotently. “English
bastard
! You’re helping these traitors escape? You’ll die for this—no, you’ll
beg
me to kill you after I’m finished with you!”

The prisoners’ own fury rose as they realized who he was. Eddie reasserted who was in charge by cracking his gun against Boodu’s head. “Keep your fucking mouth shut—or I’ll give you to this lot. We’ll see who’s begging then.” Seeing the vengeance-filled eyes of the men surrounding him, Boodu wisely decided to stay silent.

A thunderous explosion shook the building, and the lights went out. Eddie saw the killdozer backing away from the blazing remains of the prison’s generators. Through the gates, he spotted a pickup truck barreling down the dusty road to the fort. “If you’ve got a gun, get ready to use it!” he called. “If you haven’t, then run for the gate … 
now
!”

He broke from the doorway into the courtyard, gun at
the ready. Strutter followed, forcing Boodu along at machete-point. The prisoners spilled out behind them.

The killdozer was growling back to the gate, but Eddie was only concerned with the remaining guards. A man leaned around a corner and fired into the fleeing crowd—then dropped with a spurting chest wound as Eddie returned the favor.

Another two guards rose from cover behind a wall and opened up with rifles. There were screams as prisoners were hit. Eddie turned to deal with the new threat, but the men in the killdozer beat him to it, the machine guns unleashing furious bursts of automatic fire. The wall pocked and splintered under the barrage, both guards tumbling amid bright red sprays of blood as bullets ripped into their bodies.

Shots cracked out from the escapees. The other guards realized they were overmatched and tried to retreat. Spitting lines of fire from the killdozer tracked them.

Eddie was almost at the gate. The pickup had stopped outside, more vehicles pulling up behind it. Inside them were resistance members opposed to Zimbabwe’s brutal government, many of whom had been driven to direct action by the imprisonment of family or friends in places like Fort Helena. A man jumped from the pickup and waved frantically to him: Banga Nandoro, one of those with whom Eddie had planned the whole operation.

“Come on, hurry!” Banga yelled as Eddie charged through the gate, the prisoners following him. More men jumped from the arriving trucks to help pile the escapees aboard.

Eddie ran to Banga, gun still raised as he watched the fort’s walls for snipers. “Glad you could make it,” he told the Zimbabwean as Boodu and Strutter caught up.

Banga nodded, eyes fixed on the men emerging from the gate. At the sight of one in particular, he gasped. “Chinouyazue!” he cried, running to his brother.

Eddie patted his heart. “Makes you feel all warm in here, doesn’t it?” Boodu’s expression twisted into a glower.

The killdozer reached the gate, the remaining prisoners streaming past as it turned on its tracks to prevent any surviving vehicles from leaving the compound. A steel slab dropped from the cabin’s side, hitting the ground with a bang. Two Zimbabweans holding machine guns emerged, followed by a huge Caucasian man who unfolded himself from the cramped confines and squeezed out. He saw Eddie and gave him a cheery wave, then hopped down and produced a hand grenade, pulling the pin and tossing it over his shoulder into the killdozer as he jogged away. An explosion ripped apart the controls, turning the makeshift tank into an extremely solid barricade.

“Little man!” Oleg Maximov called as he approached Eddie. “You okay,
da
?” The bearded Russian scooped him up in a crushing embrace.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Eddie grunted. “Okay, okay, that’s hurting now!” Grinning, Maximov released him. Eddie saw numerous red marks on his face and arms: He had been scorched by the spent bullet casings pinging around inside the cabin. “Did you get burned?”

“
Da
, a little,” said Maximov, tugging out a pair of silicone earplugs; without protection, the gunfire inside the metal-walled cabin would have been deafening. He smiled. “It felt good.”

“You’re weird, Max.” Years earlier, the muscular giant had survived a bullet to the head, with the side effect that his pain response had become scrambled. Getting hurt now actually gave him pleasure, making the ex-Spetsnaz mercenary an extremely dangerous opponent, as Eddie had discovered.

But they were on the same side for this job. “Nice work,” he told Maximov before turning his attention back to the escapees. Almost a hundred prisoners had been freed, he estimated—so many that it might be touch and go whether they could all fit in the waiting trucks. “Come on, move it!” he shouted, waving for the stragglers to hurry.

“And where do you think they will all go?” Boodu
demanded with condescending sarcasm. He glanced to the west; Botswana was only ten miles away. “The border is too well guarded—they will never get across it. And if they stay in Zimbabwe, we will find them. There is nowhere they can hide.”

“That’s not gonna be your problem,” said Eddie. The last of the men squeezed aboard the trucks, some dangling from the sides, held by their former cellmates. The first vehicle started to lumber away. “Right, Banga, we’d better shift. I don’t want to miss my flight.”

Banga helped his weary brother into the pickup’s cab, then climbed into the driver’s seat. Eddie hopped into the rear bed, keeping his gun on Boodu as the Zimbabwean, Strutter, and Maximov followed suit. The pickup set off, but instead of following the other trucks back along the dirt road, it angled away into open scrubland. Shots from the fort followed them, but they were quickly beyond the range of the guards’ weapons.

Banga kept driving across the windy plain. After a few minutes, structures appeared ahead. Skeletal frames rose from the ground like hands clawing from a grave, the part-built beginnings of what had been planned as a cement works before Zimbabwe’s ruined economy forced construction to be suspended. The killdozer, in its original peaceful guise, had been one of the pieces of equipment abandoned in situ.

A long road ran from the site to a highway a few miles to the south, widened and flattened to allow the passage of heavy machinery. Eddie hoped it would also be wide enough for another form of transport …

“There she is!” shouted Maximov, pointing into the sky. Eddie looked up to see a bright yellow aircraft approaching at low altitude.

It wasn’t the one he had expected, however. “What the bloody hell’s that?” he demanded as the large, ponderous biplane made a lazy descent toward the road. The closer it came to the ground, the slower it moved, to the point where it seemed to be hanging impossibly in the air. Then, with an upward twitch of its nose, it
dropped the last few feet and bounced along the dirt track before trundling to a stop near the unfinished buildings.

Banga drove the pickup to meet it. Strutter prodded Boodu out of the back with the machete as Eddie jumped out and ran to the aircraft. A hatch opened in the biplane’s rear flank. “TD!” he yelled over the engine’s sputtering growl. “What the fuck’s this piece of old crap?”

Tamara Defendé looked offended. “And it’s nice to see you too, Eddie,” she said in her melodious Namibian accent.

“What happened to the Piper?” He had expected her to be flying her Twin Comanche air taxi.

“Didn’t I tell you? I’ve got two planes now—my business is expanding. I thought you might need something bigger for this.” She nodded at Maximov as he accompanied Strutter and Boodu to the aircraft. “I don’t think he would even fit in the Piper.”

Eddie was still far from impressed. “But … but it’s fucking
prehistoric!
It’s a biplane, for Christ’s sake. Who built it, the Wright brothers?”

“It’s Russian,” said TD, pouting in defense of her plane’s honor. “It’s an Antonov—”

“Antonov An-2, yeah, I know.” Eddie’s military training had included aircraft recognition. He clambered into the surprisingly capacious hold, moving aside to let the three other men in. “I meant, why the hell would you buy this thing? It must be sixty years old!”

“Hah! It’s only thirty-nine, so it’s younger than you—”

“It’s the same age, actually,” he protested. “I’m not forty yet.”

“—and it’s cheap and simple and I can repair it with a wrench and a hammer out in the bush if I need to. And it can carry a lot of cargo and land just about anywhere, so it’s perfect for my work.”

“Main thing I want to know is: Is it fast?” Eddie asked as he waved good-bye to Banga and shut the hatch.

“Not really, but this is Africa. Things don’t happen in a rush here.”

“They will once the government finds out what just happened at the prison.”

The attractive young pilot took the hint and hurried up the cabin to clamber through an arched opening into the cockpit. Eddie checked on the other passengers. Strutter, evidently as unconvinced by the Antonov’s supposed airworthiness as Eddie, had already strapped himself firmly in. The only thing keeping Boodu down, however, was Maximov’s scowl from the neighboring seat.

“You’ll never get away,” the Zimbabwean snarled as Eddie took the seat next to Strutter, facing him across the cabin. “Not in this antique.”

“Ten miles and we’re across the border,” Eddie reminded him. “Even this thing can make it before any of your fighters reach us.”

TD revved the engine, applying full rudder to turn the elderly aircraft back down the road. The Antonov lurched over the bumps. Strutter nervously pulled his straps even tighter. “
If
it can make it,” said Boodu.