Underneath Tallis’s impassive expression, his brain was spring-loaded. What change in tactics?
‘There are fewer head-on collisions with federal forces,’ Ruslan argued.
‘That’s true,’ Katya conceded, ‘but the guerrillas are fighting on their terms now. More ambushes, hidden bombs, targeted attacks. Don’t you see, the situation cannot continue? The Russian government will respond the way it always does, with a crackdown. We’ve already seen the signs—more military presence in the streets, checkpoints, spot checks. You know all this for yourself.’
‘What are you saying, Aunt?’
She looked up imploringly at Tallis. ‘Go back with this man. He will look after you.’
Tallis opened his mouth to say that it was out of the question. Ruslan beat him to it.
‘No, absolutely, definitely—’
‘It’s for the best,’ Katya said. ‘Perhaps you could get to England, to be with your mother.’
Ruslan was adamant. ‘No. This is my home.’
‘Your home is where you make it,’ Katya said, an urgent expression in her eyes.
Ruslan jerked away, angry. ‘Then come with me.’
She shook her head.
‘Why not?’ he said, grabbing hold of both her hands.
She didn’t answer. Her gaze fixed on Tallis. Christ, he could willingly drown in those eyes. ‘You’ll take him, won’t you?’ she said, beseeching.
I’d willingly take all of you, Tallis thought wildly. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t.’
‘Please,’ Katya said, a pleading note in her voice.
‘I already told you,’ Tallis said elliptically, aware that Chaikova’s eyes were boring into the side of his face.
‘Oh, that.’ Katya let out a sad laugh. ‘A foolhardy mission.’
‘Maybe, but—’
‘Danger is everywhere.’
Tallis looked at Chaikova. Chaikova stared back, shrugged his large shoulders, and rubbed a paw of a hand over his grey-stubble jaw. ‘I’ll take him back if that’s what you want,’ he told Katya gruffly.
‘Stop it!’ Ruslan shouted, his voice more child than man. ‘I am not going back.’
‘Ruslan,’ Katya began, but Ruslan was unyielding. He turned to Tallis. ‘I’m coming with you into the mountains.’
Katya put the heel of her hand to her forehead. She looked anguished. ‘No,’ Tallis said. ‘That’s not a good idea.’
‘I can help you,’ Ruslan argued, his voice hard and grainy. ‘I know my way through. I’ve been there many times before. You won’t make it without me. Not now.’
‘I travel alone,’ Tallis said, firm.
‘You don’t understand,’ Ruslan said, drawing himself up to his full height. ‘The mountains are like no other place on earth. They are greedy. They will devour you.’
‘The answer is still the same,’ Tallis said. ‘I’m sorry.’
The rap at the door came at three in the morning. Tallis, who’d been asleep on the narrow landing, stirred in time to see a glimpse of naked thigh as Katya dragged on a robe over her nightshirt. Ruslan, too, was out of bed, Chaikova snoring open-mouthed, oblivious, on the floor.
‘Soldiers,’ she hissed, putting a finger to her lips, and motioned for Ruslan and Tallis to hide in the cellar.
‘What about Chaikova?’ Ruslan whispered.
‘It’s OK,’ Tallis said. ‘Give me two seconds.’
‘We don’t have two seconds,’ Katya said, anxious.
Undeterred, Tallis roughly woke Chaikova, and whispered hurriedly in his ear. Chaikova rubbed his eyes, then grinned and nodded. ‘OK. Let’s go,’ Tallis said, at the sound of more banging on the door.
The cellar consisted of two chambers that extended across the perimeter of the house. One side was full of gardening implements, the other, further along, food provisions. Tallis and Ruslan hid in the furthest part. For good measure, Tallis dragged a sheet of garden netting over the pair of them to break up their body shapes should anyone enter. Both fell silent. Tallis suddenly remembered Lena’s account of the massacre at Aldy, the grenades thrown into the cellars. He wondered what he’d do in such circumstances: stay and be blown to pieces in an orgy of torn flesh, or run into a waiting wave of machine-gun fire. He could tell from Ruslan’s expression that he was thinking the same. The atmosphere ratcheted up several notches.
Tallis craned his ears, listening for sounds of trouble. After the first barked orders, he heard nothing more. Seconds thudded by, then minutes. Ruslan looked at Tallis with a questioning expression. Tallis shook his head. At last, a peal of laughter followed by the sound of a door banging shut. Minutes later, the trapdoor opened and they were released.
Katya was smiling broadly. ‘Your friend deserves an Oscar.’ She laughed, glancing from Tallis to Chaikova who looked almost punch-drunk with glee.
‘It worked, then?’ Tallis said, wishing he didn’t feel so pissed off.
‘Like a charm,’ Chaikova said.
‘Would someone tell me what’s going on?’ Ruslan scratched his head.
‘I’m your aunt’s new Russian lover,’ Chaikova announced proudly. ‘As part of the new offensive, I, in my official capacity as an officer belonging to the Central Intelligence Directorate, am familiarising myself with the enemy.’
‘And they believed you?’ Ruslan said, astonished.
Chaikova flashed a grin. Then he turned to Tallis, his expression cool and muscular. ‘The soldiers also delivered a warning.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Two intelligence officers were killed in Rostov-on-Don two days ago.’
‘Really?’ Tallis said. ‘Extraordinary coincidence.’
‘Both were shot.’ Chaikova said. ‘Looked like a professional job. Someone who really knew what they were doing.’
Silence briefly invaded the room. ‘Like Katya said…’ Tallis glanced at her with an easy smile ‘…danger is everywhere.’
CHAPTER TEN
FIRST light.
Tallis headed east towards Khankala, keeping strictly to the main road. He’d already spotted anti-personnel mines in a ditch running alongside. Cold, sleety rain filled the air. That was good, Tallis thought. It would deaden the sound, deepen the shadows, and obscure the vision of anyone with evil intent. He didn’t think about the young man he’d left behind, still less about Katya. He couldn’t afford to. His focus now was on Darke.
Khankala, in the rear of both wars, possessed all the hallmarks of a place that had grown: new three-storey dwellings; cafes and restaurants. As he walked through unnervingly quiet streets, he found it hard to believe that during the first conflict rebels had shot a helicopter to pieces there, that during the second wave of hostilities fleeing refugees stormed military helicopters to hitch the forty-minute ride to Mozdok and what they hoped was freedom.
With each step events loomed from the past to haunt the present so that when, in a blast of bitterly cold wind, he eventually dropped down to Argun, skirting a canning factory and military detention centre, he could almost smell the burn of human flesh when a decade before a truck filled with explosives had been driven into the barracks where police officers were stationed.
By early afternoon, he was tracking alongside the winding road, close to the Argun River, the ground shale and stone beneath his feet. Mud built, virtually windowless dwellings spotted the landscape. Barns with bushes and rushes growing out of the roofs huddled together. The contrast between the capital and the outer region couldn’t have been starker.
There were few people. Those he saw were women, gypsy-like, dark and flashing. There were no men, apart from several oldtimers with crevassed, wind-burnt faces. There were no children. He wondered about the disappeared, about the twenty-to-thirty-something men his age, who’d covered the same terrain, walked where he was walking. Maybe they had made it as far as Urus-Martan, a place where there were frequent ambushes, according to Lena and Ruslan, only to be picked up and stamped out as though they’d never existed. Except to those who loved them.<
br />
With the wind whispering in his ears, he continued through cheerless villages, mountains gathering ahead, and on towards Chiri-Yurt, in the Shali district, the foothills below the Argun Gorge. Rocks and grass underfoot, he briefly travelled through a thick forested area before swiftly cutting back onto a more cultivated track after spotting an arms cache that contained a number of anti-personnel mines, including a PMN-2 with fuse, the sort that would propel the surrounding boulders and earth into the victim by sheer explosive force. Beyond the woods, he found many scratching a living in the shale, refugees from mountain villages, refugees from life. They paid him the same attention they’d have bestowed on an elephant walking past. Here was a single man, a foreigner, walking alone, but nobody spoke, nobody asked questions. With every pace, he wondered if he was going to receive a bullet or a blade in the back. The adrenalin was coursing so hard it hurt.
Stopping to rest in a nearby cemetery on the edge of the village, his back against the gnarled bark of a tree, he was suddenly aware he had company. Slowly, he slipped his hand inside his jacket, took the Glock from his shoulder holster then looked round, and cursed.
‘I told you I travel alone.’
‘You need someone to watch your back.’ Ruslan had a mutinous look in his eye as he squatted down next to him. He had some colour in his face as if he’d run through the wind. His eyes danced with fire.
‘You followed me all the way?’ Tallis was seriously afraid he was losing his powers of observation and that was worrying.
‘Not exactly. Chaikova gave me a lift.’
Tallis shook his head and smiled. Yuri Chaikova was even more of an enigma than Grigori Orlov. Somewhere in that rough old frame of his beat a human heart.
‘The road ahead is extremely dangerous, full of troops in vehicles,’ Ruslan said. ‘It’s rumoured there are soldiers in the village. I will take you to where you need to be then I will return.’
Tallis let out a sigh. He could see that argument was a waste of energy. Ruslan interpreted his silence as a good sign. ‘Here,’ he said, rummaging through his backpack, ‘I brought you these.’ He handed Tallis a plastic bottle filled with water and a neatly wrapped parcel. Tallis took them, drinking the water straight off. Inside the paper was a meat pie, freshly made by the look of it. Suddenly ravenous, he broke off a piece and ate. It was excellent. He wondered whether Katya had prepared it. My God, he thought, what would she say when she discovered Ruslan gone? He posed the question.
Ruslan shrugged. ‘It will be alright. She will forgive me.’ A slow smile spread over his face. ‘Especially when I return.’
By the time they started off again, the rain had settled to a slow steady patter. Skies and earth, tree and leaf were grey. And there was mud. Thick, humus-rich, it sucked at his boots. As they skirted the river, a badly bloated corpse floated face down in the water. Christ, Tallis thought, giving a start. Originally he’d mistaken it for a piece of junk until he’d made out the clothing and a pair of putrefied hands. Neither he nor Ruslan passed comment or exchanged a word.
The landscape here was one of jagged silhouettes with trees clinging to cliffs and rocky outposts. At every turn they faced peaks and gorges, forests and jutting edges. The spectre of the mountains, hovering in black, was all around them. Tallis understood then Ruslan’s remark about the voracity of their appetite, their need for fresh blood. This strange, rebellious land of baying animals and women with avian faces, their menfolk gone, felt as foreign to him as anything or anywhere he’d ever known. He felt as if he was walking through a land of ghosts.
Without warning, the chop-chop sound of rotors hammered his ears. Tallis looked up and saw two Mi-8Ts, military-transport helicopters, hacking through the sky. Grabbing hold of Ruslan, he dragged him into the trees and waited for them to pass over.
Night fell quickly due to the increasingly appalling weather conditions. With it came the sound of repeated automatic gunfire. Tallis decided he needed a change in balance: concealment was called for. Although he was happy to keep moving at a reduced pace, he could tell that Ruslan, although a decade younger, was flagging—a major reason for Tallis wanting to travel unencumbered.
Taking out a pair of night-vision binoculars, he looked about him and saw a solid shape ahead with what looked like a fence around it. He pointed it out to Ruslan. It was a shepherd’s hut and it was deserted. Had been for some time, Tallis thought, clocking the log fence around the perimeter, as he stepped inside. It had an earth floor, one window. Against the walls, which were a maze of rat holes, a single broken spade rested. It wasn’t the Ritz but it was dry and sheltered. While Ruslan dropped to his knees to pray, Tallis took out his sleeping bag and removed his wet-weather jacket, spreading it out on the ground, leaving his holstered Glock in place. Then he heard a noise, brief, in the distance, like the sound of tyres on mud.
‘What?’ Ruslan said, his eyebrows arching in surprise.
‘Noise.’
‘I didn’t hear anything.’
Tallis put a finger to his lips. The air hummed with silence. Forty seconds later, he heard it again, nearer this time. It was coming from the direction of their destination, from the mountains. Ruslan craned his ears, shook his head.
‘You didn’t hear it?’
‘No.’
Tallis grabbed his night-vision binoculars and the Kurtz. ‘Stay here.’
‘Wait…’
‘Stay here.’
Tallis went outside, creeping low, keeping his body parallel to the fence to break up his body shape and obscure visibility, the pouring rain providing extra cover. As he suspected, they definitely had company. Two beams of light were bumping along the track, the engine note denoting a 4x4. Maybe they were people passing through like him, but a strong gut feeling told him otherwise. Why else was the place deserted? Because it wasn’t safe to stay.
Switching the combined safety and fire selector down one notch to single shots, he dived across the track to the relative safety of a patch of trees and, putting the binoculars to his eyes, watched, listened and waited. The noise increased. Gone the on/off jerking sound. This was more of a slip and judder. As feared, the vehicle, an ugly-looking Nissan, came into view, slowed, skidded a bit, and came to a bumpy stop. It was right outside the hut. Three doors opened. Three men got out. They were all dressed in tracksuits and running shoes. None of them appeared obviously armed but it was hard to tell. One, the driver, walked a couple of metres away, let his pants down and started to take a leak while the other two went to the back and pulled out a box, obviously heavy, judging by the way their bodies strained and heaved. And, oh, God, Tallis thought, they were heading inside the hut with it.
Shouts broke across the night sky. The driver, who had finished his pee, dashed towards the hut. Within seconds Ruslan was dragged painfully outside on his knees, the three of them starting in on him with questions that didn’t require answers. Next came fists. Ruslan started to protest but it was no good. Tallis had seen this over and over again—in kids of fifteen, young males and sometimes young women, the pack in action, cowardly and self-serving—and it sickened him to his bones. Using the commotion as cover, he scooted back towards the fence. By now Ruslan was on the ground, his body balled, hands over his head, grunting as the boots went in. The blokes were laughing, jeering, high on cruelty, their intention clear enough—they wanted to kill him. When the driver stood back and pulled out a weapon, Tallis took aim and fired the first shot, dropping him. Two more shots followed, slotting each man so fast neither had time to process what was happening, let alone react. Tallis ran over, checked for vital signs in all three targets: none.
Ruslan let out a long groan as Tallis pulled him to his feet. His face was bleeding and swollen and his clothes were spattered with blood and bone from his assailants.
‘Come on, let’s get you cleaned up,’ Tallis said, hauling him back inside. ‘Who the hell were they?’
‘Gangsters,’ Ruslan spat, losing part of a tooth.
‘Russians?�
� Tallis reached into his backpack for some medi-wipes, which he handed over.
‘Chechens,’ Ruslan said, dispirited. He dabbed at his face, tentatively exploring his injuries, spat out another gobbet of blood. ‘What are we going to do with them?’ he said at last.
Chuck them in the river, Tallis thought. As for the 4x4, it was probably worth commandeering, but maybe not. Frankly, he was more interested in what was in the box. It didn’t take long to jemmy it open, revealing a bumper pack of automatic rifles and sub-machine-guns, grenades and bullets. Useful.
Half an hour later, they’d dragged the bodies of the three men to the side of the river and pushed them into the water, Tallis removing every trace of their existence by raking over the ground with the broken tip of the spade. The weaponry he decided to keep for a rainy day. Using the tree as a marker, it took him a couple of laborious hours to bury the box, the soil sticky and unyielding. By the time he staggered into his sleeping bag, he was exhausted. Graham Darke, he thought, plunging into sleep, you’d better be bloody worth it.
The next morning they awoke to a sky of cerulean blue and the sound of songbirds. There was no wind. ‘This is what I came back for,’ Ruslan said, gazing out wistfully across the countryside. ‘The land here is beautiful. It’s what men do to it that makes it seem so ugly.’
Tallis nodded and took a gulp of liquid from his water bottle. Privately, he thought it a perfect day for snipers. ‘The future lies in your grasp, Ruslan,’ he said, resting a hand lightly on the boy’s shoulders. ‘This place needs people like you.’
Ruslan gave a big sigh as if the responsibility was too onerous and daunting for one man. ‘Perhaps, with the help of others, and God willing, we may be able to change things.’
After covering the fresh earth with stones, they drove for no more than six kilometres, the vehicle running out of petrol near the verdant pastures of Chishki. Abandoning it there, and with no time to remove their traces, they went on foot, and set a course for the mountain village of Shatoi.
The higher they climbed, the more intimidating the scenery. The road had become a track then a path. Tallis felt his temple pulse with concentration, his entire focus on the ground beneath his feet and on the lookout for tripwires. Venturing into the mountains felt as if he was entering Tolkien’s Mordor in The Lord of the Rings.
Land of Ghosts Page 18