Man On Fire Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Humphrey Hawksley

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Author’s Note

  Also by Humphrey Hawksley

  The Rake Ozenna series

  MAN ON ICE *

  MAN ON EDGE *

  The Kat Polinski series

  SECURITY BREACH

  HOME RUN

  FRIENDS AND ENEMIES

  The Future History series

  DRAGON STRIKE

  DRAGON FIRE

  THE THIRD WORLD WAR

  * available from Severn House

  MAN ON FIRE

  Humphrey Hawksley

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First world edition published in Great Britain and the USA in 2021

  by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE.

  Trade paperback edition first published in Great Britain and the USA in 2022

  by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.

  This eBook edition first published in 2021 by Severn House,

  an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.

  severnhouse.com

  Copyright © Humphrey Hawksley, 2021

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The right of Humphrey Hawksley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-9034-4 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-790-3 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0529-2 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  To Jonie and Christopher

  ONE

  Bering Strait, Alaska

  Rake Ozenna eased the throttle of his fourteen-foot aluminum fishing dinghy and scanned the dense fog that slid fast across the still water. Visibility shifted, sometimes down to a hundred feet or less, sometimes clear to show dark granite rock protruding from the treeless wind-battered landscape of Big Diomede, an island the Russians called Ratmanova. It covered eleven square miles and rose fifteen hundred feet from the sea. No civilians lived there. This was Russia’s easternmost military base and along its ridge stood a line of military watch posts facing America.

  Behind Rake was Little Diomede, three square miles and as high as the Empire State Building, the smaller, pyramid-shaped island where he had been born and raised, his home community of fewer than a hundred souls.

  Rake listened for the sound of an outboard motor, careful to keep his own dinghy inside American waters. Technically, he was on leave after a Syria deployment. But because of where he lived, and his familiarity with the environment, he had been asked to handle a speed-boat crossing from Russia. The boat should be leaving from the small helicopter base around the western side of Big Diomede, taking only minutes to reach the American border. His instructions were to guide the power boat to the other side of Little Diomede, where a bigger vessel, a disguised trawler, would take its occupants on board. He did not know who they were or how many. Rake had been told the crossing was part of a joint US-Russian intelligence-gathering exercise of which the base commander was completely aware.

  The border was closed and unmarked. There were no national flags on either island, no buoys in the water, nothing to indicate that this was the frontier between two antagonistic world powers. There was no government security of any kind on Little Diomede, no police, no military, no US Customs and Border people. Border defense against air and sea threats was run by the North American Aerospace Defense Command out of the Elmendorf-Richardson base outside of the Alaskan city of Anchorage, 650 miles to the southeast.

  The Diomedes were two dots in the many remote island clusters that ran down from the Arctic into the Pacific Ocean. Since 1867, when the United States bought Alaska from Russia, there had been an understanding that Moscow and Washington should keep this border quiet. Direct confrontation should be unthinkable. The region was too sparsely populated for war, the environment too hostile, and military supply lines would be a nightmare. Far better to settle differences in proxy conflicts elsewhere. During the Cold War, the border had been referred to as the Ice Curtain. Apart from a few tense days some years earlier, when a rogue Russian commander had tried to take the American island, the understanding had held well.

  There was the occasional splash of water against the side of the dinghy. Sunlight splayed through the fog. With him was Mikki Wekstatt, whom Rake saw as an older brother. As often happened in remote parts of Alaska, babies were born, families broke up and parents vanished. Both Rake and Mikki had been abandoned by their parents and raised by a couple on the island. Mikki, ten years older, had convinced Rake to join the army, first the Alaska National Guard and from there a series of secondments to special forces units, mainly to Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

  Mikki got out
tackle. If they had a three-hour wait, they might as well do some fishing. Mikki was tall, slim and wide-shouldered, and a decorated army marksman. He had stayed sergeant, while Rake had broken through to officer class. Now Mikki was a detective with the Alaska State Troopers and trying to persuade Rake to quit the military and join him. Mikki wanted Rake home, where he belonged, leading their tiny community. There was talk of the government shutting down Little Diomede and moving people out as they had done on the Russian side. Rake and Mikki were the new tribal leaders. They had to keep the community alive. Rake listened but wasn’t convinced. Sure, he wanted one foot in his community, but he also wanted the outside world, which was why he had brought a longtime on-again off-again girlfriend back to the island with him.

  Carrie Walker and Rake had once been engaged to be married That was five years ago and it hadn’t worked out. As a trauma surgeon, Carrie worked war zones and they had met in Afghanistan. But, after that, they were barely together. Rake was constantly on deployment. Now, Carrie was trying to settle down at a big hospital in Washington, DC, but that was proving a challenge. She was too restless for an institution. She fought with management to get patients better treatment. A relationship with another doctor had hit the rocks. Rake had suggested Carrie join him for a week or so on Little Diomede, which had no doctor of its own. She was staying in Rake’s house, a government-built stilted cabin on the island’s hillside, in a separate room, which was fine with Rake who was decompressing from a tough three months in Syria. Over the past few days, she had been giving the islanders a free check-up. Carrie was the only woman he had been unable to shake from his mind. One time she had said she needed to know what he was feeling and what he wanted. Rake didn’t have an answer. Those things had never been much part of his world.

  Maybe she was that other world he wanted to keep. Maybe he did want to end up changing, becoming someone else. Didn’t everyone? Maybe he and Carrie would end up in bed again. Maybe not.

  Rake focused on the blue-gray water occasionally rippling with a light breeze between the two islands. At this time of summer, the sun barely dipped below the horizon, leaving the islands and sea perpetually bathed in light.

  ‘So, we wait?’ asked Mikki.

  ‘We do.’ Rake wore an earpiece with a line open to Washington, DC, from where the operation was being run. There was drone surveillance – Rake did not know exactly what – and the long-range radar station at Tin City was monitoring. Rake’s orders were to report only the successful meeting-up and then the safe delivery to the trawler.

  Through gaps in the fog, Rake spotted circling birds which flew out of hillsides with the sound of engines. At one time, the Diomede islands had more than six million birds between them. Now, Rake wasn’t so sure. Climate change had skewed fish stocks, which had damaged bird life. Halibut were way down. Cod and pollock were coming up from hundreds of miles south as the waters there got too warm. Rake was seeing more and more seabirds too emaciated and weak to fly because their staple diet of smelts was vanishing.

  ‘So, what’s with you and Carrie?’ Mikki stretched out a line and speared its fishhook with bait made up of crab meat and walrus blubber. Mikki and Carrie got on well, but he never liked the pull she had on Rake.

  ‘She’s trying to settle in DC.’ Rake didn’t move his gaze from the water. ‘Finding it bumpy.’

  ‘Thought they wanted you to do something at West Point.’

  ‘They call it a mid-career officer’s course.’ Rake read the fog, how it worked with water, sun and temperature, dense and slow moving. With so little wind it would stretch for a mile, probably more.

  ‘You need to give Carrie space to find someone,’ Mikki was saying. ‘She’s at that stage of life. They’ll go white picket fence, all that crap you can’t stand …’ He broke off and raised his hand. ‘Fuck! Was that a .50 cal?’

  They both heard gunfire, a single burst, six rapid rounds that could have come from a Russian heavy machine gun. A .50 caliber was an American designation. The Russian equivalent was slightly larger, at .57 caliber, with a range of more than two miles. They heard an engine. Rake eased up the throttle. Mikki glanced curiously at him. ‘You said that us and them know what’s going on?’

  ‘That’s what I was told.’ Rake quietened the engine and guided the dinghy to keep as out of sight as possible within the fog cloud. There was another burst, ten rounds.

  Mikki dropped the fishing tackle, unzipped a waterproof rifle case and brought out an M40 he had kept after an Afghan tour.

  TWO

  ‘Two o’clock.’ Rake pointed to his right.

  Mikki sighted the weapon through thick fog.

  Rake saw a blur, texture changing in the mist. Sound was clearer. The high, incoming pitch of an engine travelling at a speed. On normal days, if a Little Diomede fishing dinghy came too close, the Russians would use a massive public address system to yell at them to keep back. Today, they stayed silent.

  The approaching engine missed a beat and picked up again, increasing power. From behind came a siren, not the usual one, more screaming like an emergency vehicle.

  ‘Two vessels.’ Mikki’s right eye was on the rifle’s scope.

  Rake moved the dinghy forward. The GPS said they were a hundred and fifty meters inside American territory. They were not permitted to cross into Russia. They could touch the line. A red flare went up, its glow scattering through mist cloud. Rake identified the outboard as the sort used on a fast, long-range river craft. Somewhere nearby he heard the second vessel, the familiar inboard hum of a Russian military patrol boat.

  ‘Ten o’clock,’ said Mikki.

  To their left, an inflatable ribbed craft came into sight, going fast and erratically. Someone was either leaning or collapsed over the wheel. A flash of white yellow blazed from behind, followed by a streak of tracer and the roar of machine-gun fire that tore into the inflatable, shredding fiberglass and rubber. The vessel tilted back, weighed down by the outboard. The person in it clawed at the sides, failing to get a grip, tearing at frayed rubber.

  ‘Go back, Americans.’ A patrol boat voice in broken English. ‘This is Russian territory.’

  The GPS put the sinking inflatable thirty feet inside Russia, moving east toward the American line. Rake eased back his throttle. The patrol boat had used a weapon he recognized as the 7.62-mm general-purpose machine gun, standard issue on Russian coastal vessels. The more powerful heavy machine gun would have been from the Russian island itself, two weapons deployed simultaneously on a border where guns were usually quiet.

  The command again: ‘Go back, Americans, or we will open fire on you.’

  They would not shoot him, thought Rake. Not here, not with the way the American President was cozying up to Russia.

  ‘Distract them,’ Rake instructed Mikki. He clipped a rope to his belt, took out his earpiece, sheathed his fishing knife and slipped into the sea. Cold water rushed around him, pumping his heart. He swam, barely breaking a ripple. Mikki turned on a recording they used to irritate Russian border guards, a mix of speeches by Stalin, Gorbachev, Putin, military music, a local Alaska radio talk show, people yelling at each other about Arctic drilling, all jumbled together, speakers turned up full volume.

  Rake reached the inflatable. A limp hand, a woman’s, hung over the side. He pushed himself up. The rubber tore more, and the craft dipped. Water poured in. She toppled over him, her fingers gripping his, and fell dead-weight into the sea, taking Rake under with her. He surfaced and hooked his arms under hers, lifeguard style. He kicked his way back to the dinghy, using the belt rope to guide him. Blood trailed from her. The sea-water temperature was low enough to kill within minutes. She grasped him, feeling for his hand. She was alive, with energy. Mikki pulled in the rope. Rake swam hard toward the dinghy.

  Mikki stretched down, taking her weight from Rake, who let go just as a fist struck the right side of his head, glancing across the temple. Arms wrapped around his neck and dragged him backward. Water flooded into his mouth, ca
tching in his throat, choking him. A second blow smashed into the left side of his head, blurring his concentration.

  There were two swimmers, in wetsuits, goggles, oxygen tanks, flippers, the works. One had an arm locked skillfully around his neck. The other had the woman. Water swept over him, the swell from the patrol boat coming toward them, men on deck, shouting instructions.

  Rake let himself be taken. They could have killed him. They hadn’t, but that didn’t apply to the woman. They had shot her with intention to kill. Rake would try to get away once he’d worked out how to neutralize both swimmers simultaneously. The Russian plan must be to bring back all three of them. They would portray it as a rescue operation for a fishing dinghy in trouble. They would cite the International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue under which Russia and America operated. There was cooperation in the Bering Strait, which made what was unfolding so strange and out of place.

  A Russian search lamp, bouncing through the fog, succeeded only in splaying light into a glare. The second swimmer let go of the woman. She floated free, probably unconscious, left to die. The swimmer had two hands clasped to the bow of the dinghy to stop Mikki going into the water after her. The patrol boat was close, water splashing through from its propellers. Mikki drew his state-trooper-issue Glock 22.

  Unexpectedly, Rake’s swimmer turned to look back, his arm loosening enough for Rake to unsheathe his knife. The swimmer saw the glint of steel, lit by the search lamp. Rake’s blade moved through the water. Instead of blocking it, the Russian pushed himself back.

  ‘Udachi,’ he shouted through the mouthpiece. Good luck.

  On the dinghy, Mikki had his pistol poised to fire. But his swimmer let go of the bow, ducking under the water and away, two military frogmen following a sudden reversal of orders to leave. Rake guessed what was happening: forget about the Americans, too much trouble. Deal with the woman, floating between Rake and the dinghy. Her leg kicked. A Russian frogman broke surface inches from her, a knife in his right hand, raised to strike and kill her.