Chapter 9

Château Falaises Brumeux.

Everyone scattered to go and pack what was their belongings. Giles and Boetie took Volkov to retrieve their luggage out of the abandoned rental car, left the car unlocked and with the keys in the ignition. A call to the local police about a “suspicious vehicle” standing parked in the forest along Phantom Pass Road, would take care of it.

I was looking at the weather system and planning my route.

I zoomed in on the synoptic chart, the screen glowing cold blue in the half-lit kitchen. The others kept arguing over the maps behind me, but all I could see was the monster churning directly south of the Cape.

There it was—an angry, coiled low-pressure system sitting like a clenched fist at roughly 45°S, 20°E, pushing its way northward. You didn’t need a meteorology degree to know trouble when you saw it, but as a pilot, I could read its fingerprints like a criminal record.

The central pressure was sitting around 980 hectopascal, maybe a touch lower, the isobars wrapped tight—too tight. They spiralled inward like someone had dropped a stone into the atmosphere and the whole ocean of air was folding around it. Tight isobars mean only one thing: wind. And not the friendly kind you fly kites in. The kind that knocks aircraft out of the sky if they’re stupid enough to cruise above the cloud deck.

The storm had two distinct fronts, both ugly in their own ways: The cold front, that blue triangles pointed north-eastward, the whole line curling like a hooked finger reaching toward the Cape. Classic strong mid-latitude cold front—sharp, fast-moving, and ready to hit the coast like a hammer. The outward point of the front already reaching 3°S, 5°E, in-line with Port Nolloth on the west coast. When it pivots east on its clockwise path, it will lash across South Africa as far as Kimberly and Bloemfontein. We must be out of its reach by then.

The spacing of the isobars on the western side told me the winds behind it were screaming in from the south-west—cold Antarctic air dragged up by the rotation around the low.

Wedged between two high pressure systems of 1020 hectopascal each, one in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean north of Gough Island, and one east of the country around Marion Island. And being pushed northwards by a second low pressure system just south of our main worry.

That would be the first punch.

The purple section of our main worry, an occlusion, was already tightening into the low’s center. That told me the storm had matured. This wasn’t a baby system. It had teeth. The warm sector had been lifted entirely off the surface, piling its moisture into dense, rolling layers. That meant turbulence, the kind that makes a cockpit feel like a washing machine.

The whole system was angled like a battering ram aimed directly at the Cape. The pressure gradient was steepening, and I could see the cold front pushing ahead faster than normal. That meant it was accelerating.

A pilot’s nightmare ... unless you could use it.

Most pilots avoid storms like this. I’ve flown long enough to know you don’t take them head-on. You don’t go over them. You don’t go through them. You go under them—if you have the guts and a low enough terrain profile to survive it.

And looking at the chart, I knew exactly what I was seeing:

A giant, rotating wall of air hundreds of kilometres across, and the perfect cover.

The radar would be a mess. The noise floor would spike. Any airborne asset searching for us would be grounded or blind.

The others didn’t understand yet. But I did.

This storm wasn’t our enemy.

It was our escape route.

I turned the laptop so Volkov and Lena could see the swirling mass of black and red.

“There,” I said. “That’s the storm that’s going to save us.”

Both looked at me in disbelief.

A flight from Volynia to George in the Western Cape.

The IL-76 thundered southward through the upper reaches of the Indian Ocean sky, a vast gray leviathan carving a solitary path between Mozambique and Madagascar. At thirty-eight thousand feet the air was thin and mercilessly cold, sunlight glinting off the aircraft’s wings in hard flashes of steel and ice. Far below, the ocean rolled endlessly, dark and restless, indifferent to the machine passing far above it.

In the cockpit, the transport felt less like an aircraft and more like a moving stronghold. The four Soloviev turbofan engines droned with a deep, unbroken growl that vibrated through the fuselage and into the crew’s bones. Instrument panels glowed steadily—greens, ambers, calm numbers that suggested routine.

The IL-76 had been built for warzones and catastrophe, for carrying weight and absorbing punishment, and it cruised now with the confidence of something that expected trouble and welcomed it.

Behind the cockpit, separated by a bulkhead thick with wiring and insulation, sat the six passengers. They occupied the forward section of the cargo bay, seated on webbed jump seats bolted to the aircraft’s ribs. No one spoke. Their weapons were locked into travel cases at their feet, gear stowed with exacting care.

The clean-up team—men who did not officially exist, whose deployments never appeared on manifests or after-action reports. Retrieve the princess and her guards if possible. Eliminate them if necessary. The wording had been precise. The intent unmistakable.

They were veterans all—faces marked by old scars, eyes flat and watchful. Ex-Recce, ex-Legion, contractors in name only. Men accustomed to being dropped into places where the rules had already collapsed. The vibration of the aircraft was familiar, almost comforting. Flights like this always came before violence. It was the calm inhale before the strike.

The aircraft’s route kept it well offshore, skirting civilian airways and curious radar coverage. Its transponder told a story that raised no questions, wrapped in bureaucratic legitimacy and forged permissions. To the outside world, it was just another long-range transport sliding south between hemispheres. Inside, everyone knew better. This flight had only one real destination: a problem that needed to disappear.

Ahead, the sky began to change. High above the horizon, cloud tops spread and thickened, forming a vast, curling system that hinted at chaos below. From this altitude the storm looked almost elegant—an immense spiral of white and gray—but the sharp edges of the anvils betrayed violent air beneath. The crew watched it closely. Weather like that complicated time lines. It also created opportunities.

The morning sun struggled against the thickening cloud deck, staining the clouds beneath the aircraft with dull gold and bruised purple. The curvature of the Earth became faintly visible, a reminder of scale and distance. Somewhere far ahead lay the Western Cape, its mountains and forests hidden beneath cloud and wind, waiting.

As the IL-76 pressed on, the six men remained silent, each alone with his thoughts. They did not debate the mission. They did not question it. Whether they would be extracting a living princess or erasing a line of succession entirely was not for them to decide. That decision would be made on the ground. And when it was, they would carry it out—cleanly, efficiently, and without witnesses.

Château Falaises Brumeux.

I stared at the weather radar on the laptop, then shifted my focus to the flight-tracking app Volkov had pulled up on his tablet. The two screens told the same story from different angles, and neither of them was comforting. One showed raw violence—colour-coded reds and purples swirling up from the Southern Ocean like a living thing. The other showed cold intent: a single, purposeful track sliding south over the Indian Ocean.

“An Ilyushin IL-76,” Volkov muttered, leaning closer, his finger hovering just above the glass. “Heavy transport. Russian registration but operating out of a base in Tanzania.”

I let out a slow breath through my nose. “They aren’t coming to arrest you,” I said dryly. “With an IL-76, they’re coming to invade.”

Lena stood between us, arms folded tight against herself, eyes flicking between the screens. “ETA?” she asked quietly.

Volkov did the math in his head, the way career officers do. “They’re over the Mozambique Channel now. Cruise speed, altitude ... they’ll reach South African airspace in roughly two hours. Cape Town or George by eleven hundred.”