by Andy McNab
I grabbed Rune’s arm as he rushed past me. ‘Mate, you’ve got to stop. Sort out your own kit. The team gets it. We know what we’re doing. We understand.’
He switched direction but then stood stock still as he heard the same thing I did. The others stopped what they were doing.
From the other side of the ridge came a slight murmur, which grew into a thrum and finally a clatter of rotors.
The emergency pick-up. Time for the team to get out their disabled discount cards.
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The heli broke low over the crest. It was small and blue and white. Non-military. Large yellow pontoons for water landings.
This wasn’t any pick-up.
It rattled straight over us, then hurtled past, low enough for us to see it was packed with bodies. It flared about twenty metres from the camp and prepared to land, the down-draught blasting us with a storm of ice shards.
I’d spread-eagled myself over the tent and most of the poles to stop them being blown away. Jules and Will were on top of their pulks, hanging onto our sleeping bags and anything else that needed to be pinned down. Rune had thrown himself across mine. Billy’s Big Top crew hadn’t been so lucky. There weren’t enough limbs to go round. Part of their tent hadn’t been collapsed, and was caught in the gale. It tumbled away into the distance like a massive empty carrier-bag.
Five incomers stepped out of the cloud of snow and ice. They sported a dazzling array of different-coloured duvets, masks and goggles. But they had one thing in common. They had assault rifles – and they were up and in the shoulder.
There wasn’t anything we could do. We had no weapons. We had nowhere to run. Even those of us who could still run.
The heli took off again as soon as it had dropped its cargo, and the ice cloud began to settle.
Weapons …
I lifted my head and scanned the surrounding area.
The Quislings were nowhere to be seen. Nothing was coming out of their tent. Its poles were still up; last night’s ice mound was still keeping everything anchored.
Three of the incoming duvets advanced purposefully towards it. Yellow and Green in the lead. Red two paces behind. Another pair came our way, their faces obscured by dark blue goggles and black face masks.
‘Get down! Stay down! Do not move!’
The shouts were both male and female. Their accent was American, as were their M4 assault rifles. Tactical butts, fully extended, carried in the shoulder, left glove on the forward handle, no guard on the trigger so they could operate them with their gloved right.
Yellow, Green and Red moved relentlessly onwards. No hesitation, just forward movement, weapons up, bearing down on their target.
The heli orbited above them. Still no hesitation. No concern about fire coming back their way.
It was a long time since I’d seen such total intent.
Red wore a day sack with an umbilical cord snaking out of it. He or she was staring into the glass sphere connected to the end of it. I knew what it was. First the weapons, now this. Without a doubt, these were military.
They were a couple of strides from their target. Their body language said it all. They weren’t just on the offensive. They were planning an execution.
Rune looked up at the two who were now covering us, trying to make contact. ‘We’re not doing anything illegal. We are—’
‘Rune, shut the fuck up. If they were going to kill us, they’d have done it by now. Don’t make them change their minds.’ I flicked my head round as Yellow and Green came to a halt and fired a series of rapid shots through the Gore-Tex top sheet.
Their next moves were just as methodical. Yellow stood, weapon in the shoulder, while Green dragged out the Quislings’ bodies. Then he went back inside, dropped to his knees, and got to work with a shovel. It wasn’t long before the bling box followed them out onto the ice. Only this time there was no trail of blood.
They didn’t bother to look inside the sleeping compartment. They’d known what they were there for, and they’d found it. Mission accomplished.
The two covering us didn’t react.
Rune shivered. Either he was still flapping, or his core temperature had dropped. But we hadn’t been out that long, and had our warm kit on.
The Quislings lay on the ice outside their tent, like a couple of seal cubs that had been clubbed and dragged. Green plunged a knife into the top sheet and started ripping the material apart. Yellow put down his weapon and stepped back to join Red, who was in the middle of a staccato radio exchange. It had to be with the helicopter. The five-seater Enstrom was still orbiting above us.
Green was in the guts of the tent and throwing the contents of the sleeping compartment onto the ice.
So they hadn’t finished after all.
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Green’s frenzy had exposed the whole area where the tent had stood. Kit was strewn all over the ice, like a bomb had gone off.
Red was still barking at the heli, peering skywards now, as if that was going to help, and holding out the glass sphere. Yellow looked into it, grabbed the shovel and went to work. He knelt down and swung into the ice, lobbing chunks into the air. It wasn’t long before it jarred on something. Moments later the sunlight glinted off the tenth RPG bling.
The Quislings must have planned to dig them in each night under cover of the tent. Now I knew why they’d added those two extra munchie stops yesterday, then had to fuck about with their sat-nav before pitching camp. For whatever reason, the ‘monitors’ had to be inserted at precise locations along the route.
Rune was still keeping his mouth shut, along with the rest of us. At last he’d seen the light. If somebody was pointing a weapon at you, and you didn’t do what they said, you didn’t need to be ex-military to work out the probable consequences.
I watched as Yellow carried the RPG bling away from the tent area. There was no ceremony about it: he just placed it in the box with the rest of them and closed it down.
So, what next? And, more importantly still, what about us? Clearly they had a plan – if they hadn’t, we would now be lying beside the seal pups. Whatever it was, we were all still breathing. At least for now.
Red snapped on the radio yet again, and all three of them moved towards us. So did the two who were covering.
I could hear Red’s voice now. A woman’s, from one of the Southern states, and she was telling the heli to come on in. It was now our turn. She barked out the deal: ‘If you have a weapon on you, say so now.’
She waited a couple of seconds.
‘If you do what we say, all of you will be safe. Do not talk to each other. Do not do anything unless we tell you. If you resist, if we see a weapon, we will retaliate. We will take action.’
That was good enough for me. Crystal clear. I stayed belly-down as they ran their gloves over us, and plasticuffed our wrists behind our backs.
They didn’t take my neck wallet, but they must have seen the para cord around my neck. It made me feel that I had won a very small battle, and the importance of very small battles should never be underestimated. Hanging onto my passport and cash gave me some hope. Maybe they’d let me keep it because there was fuck-all to do with it up here.
Yellow’s eyes were hidden behind mirrored goggle lenses, but he was undoubtedly the boss. He checked out our team one by one, pushing up their chin, pulling up their goggles so he could check each face, then releasing them. One or two sets didn’t reseat themselves, and could be manoeuvred back into place only with difficulty, by the rubbing of a head against a pulk.
Soon it was my turn. Head lifted, goggles yanked away, face registered. Then they were slammed back painfully onto the bridge of my nose and I had to perform the same contortions to get them back into position.
The heli came in to land and blew up another storm. Yellow jabbed a gloved finger at the team members he wanted to lift first. Rio and Gabriel were the pick of the bunch, but Gabriel wasn’t having any of it. He arched his back. ‘I can’t walk, mate. Let me get my fucking leg o
n. I cannot walk.’
Yellow didn’t acknowledge him but turned and muttered something to one of his sidekicks, then gestured towards Will, Jules and Stedman. They were hauled to their feet and herded into the maelstrom of snow and ice by Red and Green. The heli took off, kept low, banked and headed straight back, keeping really low, towards the ridge. It disappeared over the crest, and so did the sound of its rotors.
But the rumble coming from wherever it was heading still hung in the air.
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Rio and Gabriel had their plasticuffs cut away so that Rio could help Gabriel sort his shit out. Yellow sent one of his team over to retrieve a sleeping bag that had snagged on one of the Quislings’ boots, then threw it over Gabriel’s leg to keep it warm. He was rewarded with a thank-you in a weird Jock accent he’d probably never heard before.
It was the most polite I’d heard Gabriel be, but he knew the score. Smile. Be nice when people point guns at you. There’s fuck-all that can be done about it, so keep everyone happy and onside.
It had definitely been an execution. They’d known who they wanted, without a shadow of doubt. The tenth ‘monitor’ had been buried, so I presumed it had been activated, and that was how they’d worked out exactly where their target would be.
That must have been why Red was talking to the heli. They’d have had a location device onboard, and in her day sack I’d seen the bit of kit used by the Marine Corps to bring in air support. A screen inside the sphere relayed the imagery on the pilot’s target-acquisition screen, so the two were in synch. A few shovelfuls of snow and ice weren’t going to stop the ground team knowing exactly where to dig.
We were still in the shit – perhaps not up to our necks, like the seal pups had been, but all we could do was wait, do as we were told, and see what the next phase brought.
The low rumble that had sent Rune into a spin still filled the air and the ice continued to tremble beneath us as the heli returned.
It was Rio, Gabriel and Jack’s turn to be dragged off their pulks and herded into the ice twister kicked up by the down-draught. I couldn’t tell if they were flapping behind their masks and goggles.
Moments later the heli lifted off again, and disappeared back over the ridge. Which left Rune and me, watched over by Yellow. I gave the Norwegian a kick when our guard was still out of earshot. ‘Keep it shut. Not a word.’
Yellow came closer, but only to dump the trophy cabinet at the end of our pulk. After that, he ignored us. I could see the reflection of the pressure ridge in his mirrored lenses. Icicles dangled from the breathing holes in his face mask.
He reached into his hood and fucked about with something at the back of his head. The Velcro of his face mask came undone and he took it off. He tilted his head to clear his nostrils into the snow, and I recognized his skin, as brown as a grizzly bear, and the hedge of beard that constituted his first line of defence. I didn’t know what to think, apart from betting that the Owl wasn’t out on the ice shooting people. It had been pretty clear from the word go that this shit was likely to be Munnelly’s territory. Munnelly: cut him and he bled oil.
I took a very deep breath. I had no control, and until that changed, I had to go with whatever they decided – which I now knew meant whatever Munnelly had in mind.
He fixed his gaze on the ridge again, and I could see the heli in his goggles, cresting the ridge, then heard the whine of its rotors.
He pulled Rune to his feet without a word, then grabbed my arms, wrenched them back and made me lever myself up. He gave us both a shove as the Enstrom landed.
Red emerged from the ice cloud and took over the task of getting us aboard. Munnelly stayed behind us.
The rear compartment of the heli was empty. There was room for four, but no seats: a cargo area. There were two seats in front, one of which was occupied by the pilot. He didn’t give us so much as a backward glance. He had his own stuff to do.
The air was thick with snow and ice. Munnelly materialized from its midst, shoved the trophy cabinet in alongside us for Red to sit on, then climbed into the spare seat up front. As soon as he was aboard, the pilot opened the throttle, pulled back on the collective, and we lifted off.
The first thing I thought was: This is warm.
As we climbed, I noticed a small screen attached to the centre console, a bit like a sat nav stuck to a car’s windscreen. It looked out of place, unlike standard factory kit.
The front of the aircraft bristled with antennae, which all seem to have been attached at different angles. The sat nav device had to be the monitors’ locator.
As we passed low over the pressure ridge and I caught my first glimpse of the terrain beyond, Rune and I discovered exactly what the rumbling was all about.
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The icebreaker was seventy or eighty metres long and looked at first glance like an old factory ship, but without the gantry, the nets and all the other fishing gear at the back. Instead, above deck level, there was a platform with a big H painted on it.
Steel steps led three or four metres down to the main deck, which took up about three-quarters of the ship’s surface area. It was probably where all the fish or crabs used to go before they were cut up and put into tins.
Up front, just short of the bow, was the bridge tower. It had three levels. The top one was solid glass with bridge wings, balcony-like protrusions that stuck out on each side like bats’ ears. As we got closer, I could see that the windows on the lower two levels were frosted.
The deck space was taken up by ISO shipping containers with antennae of all shapes and sizes. The name on the bow was Lisandro. There were no flags flying, no numbers, no indication of where Lisandro was registered, or to whom. But much of the structure was sheathed in battleship grey ice that would have obliterated any identification markings anyway. The only things that had retained any hint of colour were the four orange fibre-glass lifeboat capsules, two on each side of the deck, suspended on steel derricks. They would have been an add-on since Lisandro’s fishing days.
The helicopter rattled past the bridge, coming in on finals, flared, and finally settled its skids on the platform. The rotors were still turning; the pilot was still doing his stuff. No one moved in the back. No way was I doing anything unless I was told to. There was a body in the back with an M4 on her lap and not even the ghost of a smile on her face.
Munnelly jumped out, came round to the side of the heli and pulled open the rear door. There was a rush of cold wind. Red lifted her arse off the trophy cabinet; Munnelly grabbed a handle and pulled it out. He didn’t give us even a look of recognition.
The rotors were still turning. The pilot carried on doing his checks as casually as if he’d just landed at Ascot with a group of race-goers.
We still weren’t told to move. I could feel my wrists chafing against the plasticuffs and my hands starting to swell, but I didn’t protest. I stared down at my boots, playing the grey man.
We finally took a couple of kicks into our legs from Red – nothing malicious, simply a message to get going. I wanted to obey. I just wanted to make sure I didn’t slip. A four-metre fall could fuck you up big-time if your hands were cuffed behind your back. And if I was going to get out of there, I’d need to keep myself fully intact and functioning.
I shuffled my arse to the edge of the aircraft, swung out my legs and planted my feet on the platform. I scanned the surrounding area as three duvet-clad bodies climbed on board the heli. Apart from the landing pad, the deck was all on one level.
I could feel the vibration from Lisandro’s engines through the deck, and the ice groaned and rumbled as the ship continued to cut a path through it, leaving a ribbon of open sea behind it. The five or six crew on deck didn’t bother to glance at us as we walked past.
The ISO shipping containers were brand new. So were the power cables that ran across the deck and fed into the new wooden cloakrooms fixed to their entrances, a bit like the ones in Barneo, where people could get their kit off. Close up, the mass of antennae and dish
es sprouting from their roofs was like a tangle of weeds that had sprung up randomly, each fighting for its own space.
The heli relaunched and headed back over the pressure ridge, probably to clean up the mess that had been made on the ice.
A body emerged from one of the containers, and through its open door, I saw some kind of mobile office or command centre. It looked like a geeks’ convention in there. The people inside were wearing sweatshirts, metal-framed glasses and designer stubble, and seemed to have a whole heap of technology at their disposal.
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We were shepherded past the ISO containers, on towards the bow and then through a door in the base of the bridge tower. Even before we’d crossed the bulkhead, I was mugged by the heat and the loud thrum of the engines.
Red pulled off her goggles the moment we were inside, then pulled off ours without bothering to remove our hoods first. What did I care? It was warm down there – that was all that mattered.
‘Down. Move it.’
We were bundled onto a wide steel stairway and taken deeper into the bowels of the ship. Everything about its interior was harsh and utilitarian. Years and years of red and white gloss paint covered every surface. Each of the huge rectangular bulkhead doors had four big lever handles to make sure that if water dared to force entry it wasn’t going anywhere.
We clanked along a narrow passageway with bare strip lighting and foam-padded pipework overhead. Health and safety instructions were plastered everywhere. The smell of oil and diesel exhaust caught in the soft tissue at the back of my throat.
The further we went, the more worn the paint became, the more the walls were streaked with orange rust marks. The engines hummed in my ears and vibrated under my boots, and the closer we came to the sharp end of the ship, the louder the crunch as it carved its way through the ice.