The Midas Legacy

48

The remains of the truck at last succumbed to gravity and tumbled away. Its release suddenly made the Antonov’s load several tons lighter — and the great plane lurched upwards into a steep climb, the pilots caught off guard.

Both Eddie and the soldier fell to the deck, startled cries coming from the other side of the missile as Sek and his men were also knocked down. The Yorkshireman grabbed the nearest missile cradle. The soldier was less fortunate, scrabbling at the floor as he slid backwards towards the open doors. The unconscious man followed, as did the gold bar that had knocked him out — and its scattered companions from the broken crate.

Nina held on to one of the straps securing the bullion container and looked over its top. More men tumbled screaming towards the ramp from the other side of the hold.

The man who had run at Eddie cried out in relief as he found a handhold. He clung to it as his teammates skidded past and dropped from the ramp, howls of raw terror receding into the darkness. Gold bars clattered after them, one almost hitting him. He jerked aside, then looked up to see Nina and Eddie higher up the sloping floor.

North Korean military training was brutal, the punishment for a soldier who lost his weapon severe, and the man had taken the harsh lessons to heart. He was still clutching his rifle in his other hand, and now he swung it towards them—

Nina yanked at the quick-release buckles on the straps securing the gold crate, grabbing one of the floor rings as the heavy wooden box fell away behind her.

It hurtled down the hold straight at the soldier. He fired, but the bullets hit only wood and precious metal—

The crate hit him with a bone-breaking crack and swept him away. It flipped over and its contents flew out, dozens of gleaming golden bricks cascading from the Antonov’s rear doors.

Jet engines thundered overhead as the North Korean soldiers who had returned from the muster point closed on their fleeing quarry. The slave workers from Facility 17 had existed on a starvation level, given barely as much food as they needed to perform their back-breaking tasks; now only the adrenalin of fear kept them moving through the dark woods.

But the hunt was almost over, stumbling figures picked out by their pursuers’ flashlight beams. ‘Stay where you are!’ the squad commander yelled. Several prisoners reacted with fearful obedience to his voice, halting and cowering. The braver ones kept going. ‘If you surrender now, you will live! If you run, you will die! This is your only warning!’

More of the exhausted fugitives stopped. ‘Round them up and kill them,’ the commander told his men quietly as they advanced—

One of the soldiers beside him burst apart as something fell from the sky and hit him like a meteorite.

The commander had just enough time to register the gleam of gold in the bottom of the crater that had erupted where the man had been standing — before he and the rest of his troops were obliterated by a hard rain of bullion.

The multi-million-dollar downpour ceased just before it reached the slave workers. They stared in bewilderment at the carnage, still afraid… but the fear gradually evaporated to be replaced by jubilation as they realised that not only were they now armed, most of the soldiers’ weapons still intact, but they were also very, very rich.

Even in North Korea, gold could buy freedom.

The metal hill from which Nina and Eddie were hanging flattened out as the pilots regained control and pushed the Antonov back to a level attitude. The missile slipped in its cradle, metal grinding on metal.

Eddie stood and looked around. Nina was still gripping a cargo ring where the gold crate had been. A couple of spilled bars had ended up wedged behind the second container next to it. He turned to see how many of the North Koreans had escaped plunging out into the void—

A soldier hurled himself over the rocket at the Yorkshireman.

Eddie fell on to his back. The man straddled his chest and clamped his hands around his throat, snarling in Korean. Eddie tried to force him away, but the pain from his cracked rib was like a red-hot spearhead. The man squeezed harder—

A shadow swept over the pair. The Korean looked up — as Nina clapped his skull between two gold bars. The crack of bone was loud over the ringing thud of the double impact. He slumped on top of Eddie, his clutching hands going limp.

The Englishman gasped, then shoved the unconscious man away. Nina dropped the gold and crouched beside him, seeing the bloody cut across his chest. ‘You’re bleeding!’

‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ he wheezed. ‘Least I hope it’s not, or I’m in trouble! Are there any more of ’em?’

Nina checked the hold’s other side. Nobody was in sight. She looked beneath the cradles to see if anyone was crouching behind the missile. The deck was clear. ‘Can’t see anybody.’

‘Okay, help me up.’ She brought him to a sitting position. ‘Ow! God, that hurt. I’ve cracked a rib. As if I wasn’t in a bad enough way already.’

‘We’ve got to bandage that cut. There must be a first-aid kit somewhere.’

‘Probably in the cockpit, and I doubt they’ll just let us in if we knock politely.’ Another pained groan as he used the cradle to lever himself upright. Nina stood as well. ‘We’ll have to—’

He saw movement behind her, someone coming around the stacks of cargo at the front of the hold.

Sek.

Eddie shoved Nina away as the captain fired. The bullet tore into his upper thigh. She crashed against the damaged plutonium case, her husband collapsing beside the fallen soldier.

Sek advanced on them. With Eddie down, he turned his gun towards Nina—

She remembered how he had acted in the particle accelerator’s control room — and threw open the case’s lid to expose the plutonium sphere inside.

He recoiled like a vampire from a crucifix. The ingrained secrecy and compartmentalisation of the activities at Facility 17 and the North Korean military in general meant that all he knew about nuclear materials was that anything marked with the black-and-yellow radiation warning symbol was dangerous, an invisible killer. It took a moment for him to overcome his fear and realise that Nina had not melted or burst into flames—

A moment of which Eddie took full advantage.

The unconscious soldier’s sidearm was still in its holster. The Yorkshireman snatched it out and fired three rapid shots into Sek’s chest. The Korean fell back against the crates, blood spouting from the closely spaced entry wounds over his heart.

‘Oh, Jesus!’ Nina cried as she saw Eddie’s own bullet hole. She scrambled back to him, pressing her palm over it. He roared in pain. ‘I think the bullet’s still in there!’

‘Leave it, leave it,’ he rasped, clenching his jaw. ‘Get the gun and go up to the cockpit. We can’t let ’em land back at the airbase, or anywhere else in North Korea. If they do, we’re dead.’

She took the pistol. ‘You’re giving up on the kamikaze mission, then?’

‘We survived hanging from the back of a fucking jet in a truck, so I’m not going to let some malnourished little cock-end in a stupid hat kill me after all that!’ He glanced towards Sek’s corpse. ‘I’ll get his gun and follow you up.’

‘Will you be able to climb the ladder with a bullet in your leg?’

‘I’ll have to if I don’t want a bullet in my head. Go on.’

‘Okay. Oh, and by the way?’ She kissed him. ‘I love you.’

He smiled. ‘Never doubted it for a second.’ Nina grinned back, then waited for him to put his own hand over the wound before starting towards the rear ladder.

She had just passed the missile when a voice boomed through the hold. ‘Attention! Attention!’ said a man with a strong Russian accent. ‘The cockpit is locked, and we will not let you enter. We will land at Tonyong airbase as soon as the runway is clear. You cannot escape. Drop your guns and surrender.’

Nina spotted a loudspeaker mounted on a ceiling beam, a closed-circuit camera beside it. Other cameras covered the rest of the cavernous space. ‘You think he’s bluffing?’ she called back to Eddie.

He supported himself against the cradle, wincing as torn muscle pressed against the bullet in his leg. ‘This used to be a military plane, so the cockpit door’s probably bulletproof. Shit!’ He slumped back, defeated. ‘Maybe we should just blow up the missile after all, make sure nobody gets it. Or chuck the warheads and the plutonium out of the back. We might get lucky and have ’em land where nobody can reach—’

‘The plutonium,’ Nina interrupted with inspired urgency. ‘The plutonium!’ She ran back — not to her husband, but to the open container. The sinister grey sphere squatted within.

‘What about it?’ Eddie asked, puzzled. ‘You going to blow the door open with a nuclear bomb?’

‘Not quite.’ She went to one of the other metal cases and unlatched it, revealing a second sphere inside. ‘But I did some research about nuclear weapons on the flight to China.’ She gave him the dark smile of someone who had exhausted all other options but the desperate — or demented. ‘You know how much plutonium you need to achieve critical mass? Because I do.’

The freighter’s whole crew, including the loadmaster, were now sealed inside the cockpit. ‘I can’t tell what they’re doing,’ said one man, watching his CCTV monitor intently. ‘Why the hell didn’t we get this upgraded to HD?’

‘Take over,’ Petrov told his co-pilot, leaving his seat to see for himself. The other man continued to guide the An-124 on its long, slow circle of the airbase; the last update from the control tower maintained that the wreckage would be cleared from the runway within minutes, and troops were working flat out to fill the hole in the concrete with earth. Landing would still be risky, but if the North Koreans packed it firmly enough, there was a good chance that the Antonov — built to operate from battle-damaged runways — would make it over the crater with minimal damage.

Minimal extra damage, at least; the aircraft had already suffered plenty, one landing wheel all but wrenched off and the rear doors and ramp jammed open. His clients would be paying through the nose for all the repairs…

He put financial reparations to the back of his mind as he studied the screen. It showed the front of the hold, looking towards the nose. The bald man appeared injured, bloody patches on his chest and thigh, but he had moved to hunch against the remaining wooden crate. The woman, who seemed somehow familiar, had opened up two other cases.

‘Oh, shit,’ he whispered. He didn’t need high definition to identify the warning trefoils on them. ‘She’s messing with the nukes!’

The co-pilot, like all the crew a Russian air force veteran, looked around in alarm. ‘She can’t set one off, can she?’

‘I don’t think so, but…’ He watched as the woman lifted out one case’s contents and placed it on the deck. It looked like a ball, but from her strained movements it was much heavier than its small size suggested… ‘Fuck me!’ he said, suddenly afraid. ‘It must be uranium, or plutonium — it’s the only thing that could weigh so much.’

‘She won’t blow anything up that way,’ said the crewman, mystified, as she wrapped the sphere in a cargo strap, then tied it to one of the rings in the floor.

‘I still don’t like it. We should try to take them out ourselves before landing.’

‘The bald guy’s still got a gun,’ the loadmaster pointed out. The stowaway was in a good position to cover the ladder, and even wounded seemed fully capable of defending himself.

‘We can’t just sit here and wait for them to do whatever it is they’re doing.’ Petrov regarded the monitor again as the woman moved to the other open case. Rather than take out its sphere, though, she used a second strap to secure it inside, then carefully tipped the container on its side. She then pushed it across the deck until it was lined up with the sphere on the floor and tied another strap to it. ‘Whatever they are doing.’

It became clear that an answer would soon arrive as the woman checked her handiwork, then hurried to an intercom system at the side of the hold. She lifted the handset, and a buzzer sounded in the cockpit.

Petrov was still wearing his headset. ‘I’ll take it,’ he said, watching the screen closely as the crewman switched him in. ‘This is the captain,’ he said in English. ‘What do you want?’

‘Hi,’ the woman replied, her accent American. ‘We want a couple of things. First, let us into the cockpit. Second, fly us to South Korea. Sorry for wrecking your plane, by the way.’

‘I will not let you into the cockpit, and I will not fly you to South Korea!’ Petrov told her firmly. ‘We will land at Tonyong in a few minutes. I suggest you jump out the back, it will be quicker and less painful.’ The crew, listening in on their own headphones, smiled at his grim joke.

‘You know what else is painful?’ said the woman. ‘Dying of radiation poisoning.’

‘You can’t set off the bombs. There are safety features.’

‘I’m not going to set off the bombs. But what I am going to do is get down behind that big box full of gold bars,’ she pointed at the crate against which her companion was sheltering, ‘while I pull these two plutonium spheres together. They’re both just below the size at which they’ll reach critical mass so if they touch, or even get too close to each other, they’ll release a big burst of gamma radiation. You know what that is, I assume?’

The pilot had not worked directly with nuclear weapons during his time in the military, but he had become familiar with their basics. ‘Yes, I do,’ he said uncomfortably.

‘And what it’ll do to you?’

‘It ain’t gonna turn you into the Hulk!’ the bald man called out in the background.

‘It will kill you too,’ said Petrov, starting to sweat.

‘Not necessarily. Gold’s just as good as lead at blocking radiation. A lot more expensive, obviously, but we’ve got something like thirty million dollars’ worth of it here. We’ll be safe behind it, but the gamma rays’ll go straight through aluminum like it’s tissue paper. Planes are made of aluminum, right? Including the floor?’ She pointed at the hold’s ceiling above the first sphere, directly beneath the cockpit.

‘If we die, the plane will crash! You will die too!’

‘You won’t die right away. It might take hours, days, even weeks. But from everything I’ve heard about radiation poisoning, you’ll wish you’d died instantly. The North Koreans will have killed us by then… but if you take us to South Korea, we can all stay alive.’

The Antonov’s crew exchanged worried looks. ‘You would not do this!’ said Petrov, trying not to let his concern show in his voice, but not succeeding.

‘I would. Because it’s the only way we have to get out of this. So are you going to do what I say?’

‘No!’

‘Your choice.’ The figure on the screen hung up the handset, the captain hearing a loud click in his headphones as she disconnected.

‘She’s bluffing,’ he assured his crew, watching her toss the long strap attached to the case over the gold crate and join the man behind it. ‘She must be!’

‘You know this is the most fucking insane thing you’ve ever done, right?’ said Eddie as Nina crouched beside him.

‘I don’t even know if it’ll work,’ she admitted. ‘As far as I know it should, but I’m not a nuclear physicist.’

‘Shame we haven’t got that arsehole Fenrir Mikkelsson here to test it on. And will this gold really block the radiation?’

‘Again, I think it should, but…’ She gave him a resigned look. ‘Hopefully we won’t have to find out.’

She pulled the strap. The case, the plutonium protruding from its open top, slowly scraped along the deck towards the other sphere.

‘She’s doing it!’ cried the loadmaster, staring in horror at the screen. ‘She’s fucking doing it!’

The co-pilot turned in his seat. ‘Will it really kill us?’

‘I don’t know!’ said the pilot. ‘She seems to know what she’s talking about, but… I don’t know!’

The sphere in the case inched ever closer to its twin. All eyes were fixed upon it, the Antonov’s crew all too aware that it was less than five metres beneath their feet — and that the woman was right about the aluminium floor. ‘We can’t go to South Korea,’ said the co-pilot. ‘We’re carrying a damn nuclear missile! They’ll lock us up for breaking the arms embargo!’

‘We could dump it out of the rear ramp before we cross the border and say the Koreans never told us what we were transporting,’ the loadmaster suggested.

‘You think they’d believe that?’

‘That doesn’t matter right now!’ Petrov cut in, close to panic. The spheres were now only a hand-span apart, and still edging nearer. He watched them, paralysed by indecision… then hurriedly darted to activate the internal speaker system. ‘Okay! Okay! Stop! Don’t do it! We’ll take you to South Korea!’

Nina and Eddie both looked up at the source of the echoing, panicked voice. ‘You think they’ll really do it?’ he asked, dubious.

‘There isn’t much we can do if he’s lying,’ she admitted. ‘But he sounds pretty scared, so…’ She stood and rounded the crate, relievedly pushing the case away from the tied sphere, then returned to the intercom. ‘Okay, I’ve moved the plutonium apart. Now would be a good time to show some good faith, because I can always push them right back.’

‘We’re changing course now,’ said the captain. Seconds passed, the An-124 continuing to circle — then it banked, much less steeply than before, and increased power. The lights of the airbase receded into the distance beyond the rear doors as it levelled out again.

Nina allowed herself a tired smile. ‘They’re doing it! We’re actually going to get out of here!’

Eddie grunted as he stood, keeping one hand over his leg wound. ‘This probably isn’t the best time to mention that the border between North and South Korea is the most heavily defended in the world, is it?’