The deadly serious look on his face had been enough to send a chill through her that had nothing to do with the cold weather.
She felt a momentary sense of relief that her current level was still hovering around 8 rads, though she didn’t expect it to stay that way for long. It had been slowly creeping up since their arrival here, and she caught herself wondering how much of a hit the team would take before they pulled out.
‘Staring at that thing ain’t going to stop it going up,’ Keegan said, watching her from the shadows on the other side of the compartment.
They were the first words he’d spoken to her since boarding the van.
‘Wouldn’t you rather know what you’re getting into?’
She thought she saw him shrug. ‘I know what I’m getting into, and so should you. You don’t sign up for this kind of duty if you’re planning on a comfortable retirement.’
Easy for him to say, she thought. Keegan had to be 50 years old if he was a day. Maybe he no longer gave a shit about his health, but at barely half his age she didn’t yet share his sense of fatalism. Still, she could tell further debate on the matter was neither wanted nor likely to change his view, and wisely held her tongue.
Just take it and get through this, she told herself yet again. It seemed to have become her mantra for this mission.
She had just closed the cover on her radiation meter when the driver stomped on the brakes without warning, bringing the van to a lurching, shuddering halt. With no latches or handles to grip for support, Frost could do little more than brace herself against the deck to avoid being pitched over.
The driver twisted around in his seat and lit up a cigarette, his unappealing features momentarily cast into sharp relief by the glow of the flame. A high forehead covered by sparse strands of hair, a thick beard, heavy brows and a broken nose that spoke of a violent personal history. Not the kind of man she planned on staying in touch with after this op had concluded.
They’d met up with him just outside Kiev, where he’d exchanged a few short sentences with Drake before beckoning them into his van. Frost knew nothing about him except that he was a trusted Agency contact in the region who was supposedly familiar with the best ways into the Exclusion Zone.
He eyed her for a moment or two as if she were something he’d just scraped off his shoe, tobacco smoke drifting up through the long hairs of his beard, then grunted a single command.
‘Out.’
Drake was already out, hurrying around to the van’s rear doors and hauling them open. ‘Let’s go.’
Keegan and Mason went first, with Frost bringing up the rear.
It was dark outside, with only a thin sliver of moonlight overhead to light the way, but compared to the shadowy interior of the van it seemed as bright as day. Grabbing her gear and leaping down from the tailgate, Frost quickly took stock of their surroundings.
They were parked on a narrow track between dense stands of fir and spruce trees that stretched off as far as she could see. She assumed it was little more than an unpaved forest trail, until her boots touched down on crumbling tarmac and she realised this had once been a main road. Twenty years of neglect had seen nature gradually break apart and overwhelm the manmade roadway, so that it was now barely wide enough for a single vehicle to pass.
The temperature had fallen further since departing Kiev she realised, as the chill night air touched her exposed skin. With few clouds overhead, most of the day’s meagre heat had already dissipated. It was also unnervingly quiet. Aside from the slight movement of wind through the trees and the quiet tick-tick of the cooling engine, there was not a sound to be heard anywhere amongst the darkened woods.
Their driver had exited the cab to join them, and pointed off toward the south, where the heavily forested ground sloped gently downhill.
‘Pripyat is that way, five miles,’ he said, taking another deep draw of his cigarette before going on. ‘The ground is rough and boggy along the way, so the Zone guards are not coming here so much.’
‘What’s the radiation like?’ Mason asked.
The driver shrugged as if this consideration was of no consequence. ‘No worse than the rest of the Zone, man, but there are hot spots everywhere. Stay away from deep pools of water. They have the worst contamination.’
‘No swimming trips, then,’ Keegan remarked sourly.
The driver didn’t smile. ‘I will come back in five hours, and wait for thirty minutes. If you’re not here by then, it’s not my problem.’ He paused. ‘You sure you want to do this? Other guys try to sneak into the Zone at night. Some don’t come back.’
‘We will,’ Drake said firmly.
‘We’ll see.’
And that was that, as far as he was concerned. Without saying another word, he hauled himself back into the driver’s cab and fired up the rough old diesel engine. Frost watched the van trundle off down the remnants of the road until its rear lights were lost amongst the thick forest. She couldn’t help but feel a twinge of foreboding as the sound of its motor faded off into the distance, leaving the team alone in the midst of a hostile wilderness.
Still, if Drake was harbouring similar thoughts, he gave no evidence of it.
‘All right, gear up,’ he said, shouldering the silenced 9mm MP5 submachine gun he’d been issued with. Dating back to the late 1960s, it was compact, reliable and highly proven in combat, making it an ideal weapon for the kind of room-to-room fighting their mission might well call for.
Mason, his fellow assault specialist was similarly armed, while Keegan was hauling a long-barrelled M40 sniper rifle, fitted with a telescopic night-vision scope. Raising the big weapon, he worked the bolt action to chamber the first round.
Frost by comparison had been grudgingly issued with a Heckler & Koch USP .45 pistol by Drake, accompanied of course by a derisive warning to try not to shoot herself in the foot. She wasn’t expected to take part in the assault on the factory, and so had been allocated this minimal protection only as a last resort.
The choice of sidearm could scarcely have been worse. USPs were bulky, powerful weapons that were too large for her to grip properly. She preferred smaller automatics like the Beretta M9, which more comfortably fit her hand. If she were a cynical person, she’d have said that Drake had chosen the weapon specifically because he knew it would cause her problems.
Removing the weapon from its holster, she pulled back the slide far enough to catch a glimpse of brass in the chamber, then checked the safety was still engaged. Drake’s blunt safety advice might have been rooted in bigotry and prejudice, but it held true all the same. Many a soldier had been injured by negligent discharges from unsafetied weapons over the years, and she didn’t intend to become one of them.
Reaching up to the radio mic strapped around his throat, Drake pressed the little transmit button. ‘Alpha. Radio check.’
His slightly tinny voice sounded through the radio unit in Frost’s ear. ‘Good copy,’ she responded, followed by Keegan and Mason.
All four radios were tied into a secure network and broadcast via encrypted burst transmissions cycling on random frequencies, allowing the team to communicate freely without fear of detection. Without knowing the specific decryption key, anyone attempting to listen in on their conversation would hear nothing but an occasional blast of static mush.
Nodding, Drake consulted his watch. ‘All right, we’ve got four hours and fifty-eight minutes to find Flashback, get him out and make it back here in one piece. John, take point. Cole, watch our arses. Frost, you stay by me. Questions?’
He gave Frost a particularly hard look, as if challenging her to speak up. When she didn’t, he continued.
‘It’s a long walk to the target area and the clock’s ticking, so let’s move.’
Without further comment, the group started out on their long march through the dark forest toward their distant objective.
Chapter 5
They moved fast despite the darkness and the rough terrain, with Drake setting a brisk an
d unrelenting pace. Five hours wasn’t much time to cover ten miles of untamed wilderness at night, before conducting a building infiltration and then a target extraction.
As their driver had explained, the downhill slope eventually gave way to damp, boggy low-lying ground that probably formed the floodplain of a nearby river in the rainy season. It was difficult going, and though Drake seemed to have threaded a good path around the worst of the marshland, it was impossible to avoid altogether.
Occasionally they passed stagnant pools of foul-smelling water, which they did their best to give a wide berth, the driver’s grim warning still fresh in their minds. Nonetheless, mud squelched beneath their boots and occasionally tried to ensnare them, forcing them to laboriously pull their feet free lest they become caught or slip. The tree canopy overhead blotted out much of the moon’s weak light, making navigation even more treacherous.
Weighed down with a heavy equipment pack, Frost was hard-pressed to keep up. She was a good few years younger than her teammates and generally considered herself as fit as could be expected of a young woman, but there was a difference between running a well-trodden training course in broad daylight, and humping it through boggy ground at night. Her breathing was growing laboured, and she could feel perspiration trickling down her back despite the cold breeze.
‘You even going to make it to Pripyat, Frost?’ Drake asked, observing her discomfort without sympathy. ‘Thought you passed your physical.’
‘I’m fine,’ she replied a little too quickly as she yanked her boot free from the mud’s cloying hold. ‘It’s just difficult ground.’
He didn’t look convinced. ‘Well, suck it up. You’re making enough noise to alert any sentries within half a mile.’
He wasn’t wrong. Small noises could carry a long distance in the dead of night; something she was very much aware of at that moment.
Before she could reply, they were alerted by Keegan’s voice over the radio net. ‘Heads-up, Alpha.’
‘Sitrep,’ Drake said, speaking quietly into his radio.
‘Got some vehicles up here.’
‘How many?’
‘Lots. You’d better come take a look,’ their scout advised.
Drake rose slowly to his feet and glanced at the young woman. ‘Stay low and follow me. Let’s go.’
Venturing forward in a low crouch with their weapons at the ready, they found the ground slowly rising beneath them, and much to Frost’s relief the worst of the marshland soon receded. Keegan was waiting for them, kneeling down behind a stand of skeletal bushes, the long sniper rifle cradled in his arms.
‘Over there,’ he said, indicating the open ground beyond.
Easing herself up high enough to snatch a look, Frost almost let out a gasp of amazement at the incongruous sight that confronted her. Sitting there in the midst of what appeared to be a flat, open field rose the towering grey shape of a Russian Mi-24 attack helicopter, its fuselage clearly emblazoned with the red star of the Russian military, its long rotor blades flexing idly in the night breeze as if it were just warming up for its first flight. A second machine sat about fifty yards astern of it, similarly silent and inactive.
Better known by their NATO codename ‘Hind’, the Mi-24 had been around since the early 1970s, its design barely changing in thirty years. They were nicknamed ‘flying tanks’ by their crews, and for good reason: their armour was some of the thickest ever mounted on a helicopter, able to withstand all but the heaviest and most prolonged ground fire. Their offensive weaponry could lay waste to entire villages, seed wide tracks of territory with landmines or even engage enemy aircraft.
The sight of these two powerful attack choppers alone would have been enough to put the fear in any casual observer, but they were far from the only vehicles present. Parked in neat rows alongside the massive aircraft were other assorted machines of war: armoured personnel carriers and military transport trucks of different makes and models, bulldozers and even a few old T-72 tanks, their long barrels pointed skyward as if to engage some long-forgotten foe.
Enough hardware to equip an entire division, and all of it had decayed into uselessness. Trucks sat on flat tyres, their windshields broken years ago, weeds growing up through their rusting drive trains. Tanks and armoured personnel carriers designed to ferry troops into combat were slowly rotting as corrosion ate away at their armour plating. Only the choppers, constructed largely from aluminium, had been spared the worst ravages of time, though Frost knew that they too would eventually succumb.
‘Quite a sight, huh?’ Mason said, having caught up with the small group.
‘It’s a graveyard,’ she whispered in awe.
‘Don’t think we need to worry too much about these guys,’ Keegan observed.
‘They ain’t going anywhere.’
‘The Soviets drafted in the military to help with the clean-up operation,’ Drake explained. ‘Tanks, choppers, anything they could lay their hands on. By the time they were done, their vehicles were too irradiated to use, so they dumped them here and forgot about them.’
‘And they’ve been sitting here ever since,’ said Keegan. ‘Freaky shit.’
Frost felt a chill run down her spine as the night breeze rose once more, whipping through the turbine blades of one of the derelict choppers with a low, mournful sigh, as if the machine itself were lamenting its fate. She wondered what had become of the unlucky souls forced to fly them, how many had succumbed to radiation sickness in the months and years since the disaster.
‘Come on, let’s keep moving,’ Drake said, urging the group on.
They resumed their advance through the machine graveyard, keeping low and using the abandoned vehicles for cover. As they passed the rusting shell of a transport truck, Frost stole a glance at her radiation counter, noting that it had jumped up to 16 rads. Even all these years later, the machines were still hot.
‘We’re taking a hit passing this way,’ she warned, subconsciously moving a little further away from the nearest vehicle.
‘We don’t have time to circle around,’ Drake replied without slowing. ‘Anyway, the worst of the radiation’s decayed away. If we’d been here twenty years ago, we’d have taken lethal doses by now.’
That was hardly a comforting thought, Frost reflected. However, before she could respond, Drake stopped, alerted by a sound nearby. Frost immediately did the same, following his instruction to stay close.
Neither operative said or did a thing, just listening and waiting for something to happen. As the seconds stretched out, Frost strained to hear anything unusual above the rustle of dead grass in the breeze, and the fast and urgent pounding of her own heart.
Nothing happened, and she felt herself relax fractionally.
At last she felt emboldened enough to speak. ‘Maybe it was—’
‘Quiet!’ Drake hissed.
Then she heard something. A muted thump and the scrape of movement on a metal surface. It was coming from inside the hulk of an abandoned armoured personnel carrier off to their right. Someone or something was moving in there.
Drake’s weapon went up, trained on the access hatch at the vehicle’s rear. His gaze flicked to Frost as he pointed toward it with his free hand. She nodded understanding, and raised the USP to cover him as he crept slowly forward.
The machine in question was a BMP-1, a Soviet armoured fighting vehicle designed to transport soldiers into combat. Resembling a squat, low-slung tank with a miniature gun turret, they were capable of carrying up to eight men in addition to the crew. They were also amphibious, and therefore a logical choice to assist in the Chernobyl clean-up operation since their crew spaces could be sealed from the outside world.
The hull was intact, though the tracks seemed to have fused into a solid rusted mass of metal through decades of contact with the wet ground. The firing ports along the sides had been closed and latched from the inside, probably in the hopes of keeping out the worst of the radiation. It also meant that the interior was hidden from view.
Frost’s heart leapt again as the noise was repeated. She could plainly hear the low thud of a heavy body moving inside the vehicle, and felt her grip on the USP tighten as she and Drake crept closer.
Reaching out for the starboard door, Drake gripped the release latch and glanced up at Frost, silently mouthing the countdown.
Three, two, one…
Twisting the latch hard, he yanked the door open with all the force he could command. There was a split second of resistance as the rusted hinges fought his efforts, before they suddenly broke free and the armoured hatch popped open with a loud, grating screech.
Frost’s weapon was trained on the darkened void beyond, the safety off, her finger tight on the trigger. Her breath was coming in short, shallow gasps as she scanned the darkness. Her only trace of illumination was the ghostly green glow of the weapon’s tritium night sight.
As soon as the hatch was opened, she was assaulted by a potent combination of odours that almost caused her to back away: the rich scent of engine oil, the acrid tang of unknown chemicals, the stench of decay and mould and old leather. But beneath it, something more recent and far more unsettling.
It was the smell of rotting meat.
Then she saw them – a pair of yellowish points gleaming faintly in the cold moonlight. Eyes, feral and dangerous, and focussed on her.
Something hurled itself out of the hatchway at her. A dark mass, moving quickly and snarling with vicious intent. Fear and instinct took hold in that moment, and her finger tightened involuntarily on the trigger as she fired a round at its centre mass.
But just as she heard the thump of the suppressed round and the USP snapped backward against her wrist, a hand swept up, pushing the weapon aside so that the round went wide, disappearing off into the darkness. And then Drake was standing before her, big and intimidating, his eyes filled with anger.
Trial by Fire Page 4