Page 102 of Savage Warrior

“Tests for what?” Brain damage?

“That’s all the information I have, I’m afraid. The woman has suffered a serious leg injury. She is in theatre now.”

I drag in a breath, taking this all in.

“Can I see them?”

“Soon, when we’ve finished our assessments. For now, let’s get you to the plaster room and sort out that wrist. You’ll be waiting for a theatre slot, though, for your ankle. There’s a few in front of you in the queue.”

Natalija and I are sipping stale, rancid hospital coffee in the relatives’ room in Intensive Care when Jack, Cristina, Megan, and Arina burst in. Natalija leaps to her feet and rushes to her sister, sobbing all over again and babbling in Russian. I leave them to it and exchange hugs with Jack and Cristina. Megan heads straight through the door marked ‘staff only’.

“So? How is everyone?” Jack demands.

I provide the latest, which is pretty much no change since I first spoke to the nurse. Ethan is still out cold, Aaron remains stable for now, and Magda is out of surgery. That last, apparently, did not go as well as they’d hoped.

“There’s a chance she’ll lose the leg,” I add.

“Shit.” Jack drops into one of the plastic seats. “So, what happened?”

I fill him in on what I heard and saw, just before and after the crash.

“There’s an investigation team crawling all over the site now,” Jack tells me. “Sounds like they’re going to find evidence of foul play.”

“I’d say so. Some fuckhead was firing at us. The first hit was at high altitude and just glanced us. The next, Magda dodged. The third hit us at closer range because she’d started to descend.”

“If she hadn’t, you’d probably all be dead now,” Jack points out.

Having already arrived at that conclusion, I simply nod my acknowledgement. “What now?”

“I’ve ordered guards on the site and here. If one of our enemies has gone as far as acquiring a rocket launcher to take out our top brass, they won’t be stopping now. They’ll probably assume all on board are dead, but they’re sure to check. Once they find out there were survivors they’ll want to complete the job. You and I are the front line, until reinforcements get here.”

“Ethan and Aaron are both in there.” I jerk my thumb towards the IT ward. “Magda is on a general surgical ward downstairs.”

“We’ll protect her, too, but the main targets will be Ethan and Aaron.”

“Agreed.” I rake my fingers through my hair. “Who the fuck was it? Who did this?”

“Casey’s on her way here, but it’s a long way from New York. She’ll be on the web looking for any intel that might help us. There can’t be many firms with the wherewithal to acquire that sort of weaponry and the ability to launch a strike right here in the UK.”

That had been my thinking, too. “Who have we pissed off, who has that sort of cash to chuck about?”

“The Sokolovs,” Arina suggests. She has been listening but remained silent up to now.

We all regard her thoughtfully.

“Well, we certainly annoyed old Olaf,” Jack agrees, “But does he have that sort of clout?”

“Wouldn’t have thought so, but perhaps…”

We’re interrupted by the trilling of Jack’s phone.

“It’s Casey.” He hits ‘answer’.

Jack relays the latest news on the casualties, then asks her what she’s found out, if anything. He puts her on loudspeaker.

“Sokolov is in Moscow,” Casey tells us. “The word is, he’s spitting rivets over the deaths of the men in the forest and demanding retribution. He’s issuing instructions for some sort of counterstrike if he can work out who to go after, but his main enforcer has gone AWOL.”

“That’d be Fedor Morozov,” I chip in. “He met an untimely demise in Belarus yesterday.”

---