Ark Angel

pass but Alex knew they wouldn’t be so lucky on the second. He looked at Shulsky, wondering what the CIA agent was planning to do. They might be able to make it into the house. But what about Paul? Moving him too quickly would kill him.
    The plane began to turn. The canoes dipped down. Drevin was directly over the forest. He hadn’t seen the canoes, so had no idea how low they were. There were two trees close to one another. As Alex watched—
    with a shiver of horror—the canoes collided with the trunks and became stuck between them, caught sideways on.
    The plane came to an abrupt halt. It was as if it had anchored itself in mid-air. There was the sound of breaking wood. The canoes had smashed—but so had the floats. In fact, the entire undercarriage of the plane had been torn away, and Drevin was left sitting on thin air, surrounded by half a plane. One moment he had been flying forward. The next he simply rotated ninety degrees and swooped vertically down towards the ground. There was a scream from what was left of the engine; the Cessna’s propeller turned uselessly. Alex saw the plane disappear into the forest. There was a crash and then, seconds later, a ball of flame. It leapt up into the sky almost as if it was trying to escape from the devastation below. Two more explosions. Then silence.
    For what seemed like an eternity, Alex stared towards the crash site. A fire still raged among the trees and he wondered if it would spread across the island. But even as he watched, the flames started to flicker and die down, to be replaced by a plume of smoke that rose up in the shape of a final exclamation mark. Drevin was dead. There could be no doubt about that.

    Alex felt an immense weariness. It seemed to him that everything that had happened, from the moment he had met Nikolei Drevin at the Waterfront Hotel in London, had somehow been leading to this moment. He thought back to the luxury of Neverglade, the go-kart race, the football match that had ended in murder, the flight to America. Drevin had been a monster and he’d deserved to die. Washington was no longer in any danger. Gabriel 7 and the bomb it was carrying would be blown up long before it reached Ark Angel.
    But Alex couldn’t feel any sense of victory. He looked back at Paul Drevin. The two agents were busy working on him, one of them wrapping pressure bandages around his wounds while the other fed an IV
    needle into his arm. Paul’s eyes were closed. Mercifully he had slipped into unconsciousness and so hadn’t seen what had just happened.
    Alex turned back and watched the smoke spread through the air, and suddenly he wanted to be far away from Flamingo Bay. He wanted to be with Jack. The two of them would take a plane home.
    It was finally over.
    He realized that Ed Shulsky and Tamara were staring at him.
    “What is it?” he asked.
    The two CIA agents exchanged a look. Then Shulsky spoke. “I wish you hadn’t done that,” he said. “We wanted to have a word with Mr Drevin.”
    Alex shrugged. “I don’t think he was planning to hang around for a chat.”
    “You may be right,” Shulsky agreed. “But we still needed to speak to him.” He paused. “You remember that red button I was telling you about?”
    Alex nodded. “Yes.”
    “Well, it seems I was wrong. There isn’t one. We can’t blow up Gabriel 7. There’s nothing we can do to stop it.”

    “What?” Alex’s head spun. “But you just said that you’re in control of the island. There must be something you can do.”
    Tamara shook her head. “After the launch, Drevin locked down all the computer systems,” she explained.
    “He was the only one with the codes. It’s not your fault, Alex. By the time we’d caught up with him it probably would’ve been too late. But right now Gabriel 7 is on its way and we can’t communicate with it.
    We can’t bring it back and we can’t divert it. It’s going to dock with Ark Angel in less than three hours from now. The bomb is on a timer. It’s all going to happen exactly as Drevin planned.”
    “So what are you going to do?” Alex asked.
    Tamara didn’t have the heart to say it. She glanced at Shulsky.
    “Alex,” he said. “I’m afraid we need your help.”

ARK ANGEL

    “No,” Alex said. “No way. Forget it. The answer is no!”
    “Let’s go over this again,” Ed Shulsky suggested.
    They were sitting in the control centre on the western stretch of Flamingo Bay. Alex had been driven there from Drevin’s