by Alex Dryden
The leader now withdrew a pair of Baigish night vision binoculars from inside his pack and surveyed the terrain between the trucks and the border. He was no longer looking for anything as obvious as lights. The land between him and the border was a flat expanse of grass steppe that stretched across to the other, Ukrainian side. In both directions he therefore had a wide and long field of view. The lake that straddled the border was to their left. They had no need of maps. Everything was contained inside the colonel’s head. When he was satisfied they were alone, that no unlit human presence lay ahead of them, he signalled without words to the men.
Two ramps were slid out of the rear of the trucks. From each truck a light amphibious vehicle was then wheeled down the ramps. Each vehicle was fully loaded and fitted with electric engines. As the colonel swung the binoculars across the terrain a second time, the other five men checked the batteries on the vehicles for the third or fourth time that evening and gave the strapping that attached the loads a final twist. The leader then let the binoculars hang on its strap, stepped back into the truck, and opened a metal case. He took out a computer, opened it up, and tapped in a code. Then he waited. There was a pause of maybe seven to ten minutes. Finally, he received the coded response they were hoping for. So it would be tonight. He shut down the computer, removed the hard disc, and placed it in a lead-lined box.
The electric engines on the amphibious vehicles were switched on, and the men climbed aboard. In almost total silence they then headed into the blackness, towards the lake and the border.
11
THE ROAD THAT FOLLOWED the borderland on the Ukrainian side of the border was no more than a cart track. The grass where it appeared through the snow was grey and brown and grew down the center of the track, providing a visible line to follow in the failing light and would also do so when darkness fell. Ruts created by farm vehicles in the previous autumn had frozen into deep, hard crevices and the ice in them was thick enough to walk on. The snow lay across what would be deep green meadows when the spring came, and these would-be meadows undulated on either side of the track.
Anna looked up ahead. Through her frozen breath she dimly spotted the large lake, which barely stood out as a colourless grey shape in the winter light against the dark sky that threatened another snowstorm and against the paler snow. She saw that the lake was fringed by thick reed beds that waved from the motion of the water rather than the wind. There was no wind. The lake seemed to wind its way through low-lying, waterlogged islands—darker than the water—so that it seemed more like a river. She stopped on the track and looked behind her. To the north of where she’d stopped, the forest steppe stretched away for three hundred miles while, to the south, steppe grasslands flattened the landscape for another eight hundred miles to the Black Sea. To her left, eastwards, was the border.
Anna set off again and kept to the left-hand, deeper rut of the track and walked southwards at a steady pace. The GPS told her she was six miles north of where Burt believed, from previous satellite pictures, that a rendezvous was to take place, another smuggling operation across from the Russian side.
Three-quarters of a mile out to her left, she occasionally saw glimpses of the border posts on the Ukrainian side and beyond that there were another few hundred yards to the KONTROL signs that marked the territory of Russia. Then there was the no-man’s-land inside Russia, which varied in depth, depending on which part of the huge frontier you were on; some parts were considered more dangerous to Russia than others.
She carried a small pack and wore hiking clothes. She had a tent in a roll at the bottom of the pack, despite the unlikely existence of hikers or campers in the area in January. More important, she also carried the bare minimum of small arms: a Thompson Contender handgun with a twelve-inch barrel and a separate silencer, ammunition, a bowie knife, and two grenades that might provide enough mayhem to distance herself from any trouble if things went wrong.
The sun, when it appeared, gave off a feeble light—it was the semidarkness of a late winter afternoon with a storm-laden sky. But the sun was now sinking to the west and the winter air was turning to a deep chill that would probably, she thought, fall at least ten degrees below freezing after darkness fell. But now, as the sun began to set, the sky was turning a soft pink between breaks in the clouds and the landscape was becoming clearer, more delineated without the flat white winter light, like a photographic negative. She found a hollow on the right-hand side of the track, scraped out the snow, and squatted down out of sight until the sun disappeared altogether and the lights of the scattered border posts were switched on and then glittered across the cold steppe.
Rumours, that was how it had started, Burt had told her. That was how it always started. Or perhaps the antecedents to the rumours were the belligerent statements of the Russian government that had inflamed, cooled, and then inflamed again the tensions between the two countries for twenty years, ever since the Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed, and Ukraine became independent of Russia for the first time in centuries. But though these inflammatory words of Russia’s KGB leaders had kept conflict rumbling just beneath the surface, the initial cause of Anna’s assignment to this remote border area were the rumours. It was only when they had circulated through the border areas and finally reached the corridors of Cougar that Burt had concentrated one of Cougar’s spy satellites on the region.
While Vladimir Putin had declared that Ukraine was not a real state, Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow’s mayor, had said it was time that Russia seized the Ukrainian Crimea, way to the south of where she was now. But the rumours were beginning to flesh out the Kremlin’s aggressive words and the pictures Anna had studied on Burt’s yacht began to turn the rumours into solid facts. First, the Russians were said to be distributing Russian passports to the Ukrainian population in the east of the country that bordered Russia. The purpose of this, if true, was to provide an excuse for Russia to defend its own in case of crisis. And Burt had said it was undoubtedly true.
It was the same tactic the Kremlin had used as a casus belli to invade the Republic of Georgia two years before.
Then came stories of weapons caches in the border areas, and an infiltration of Russian spetsnaz troops, disguised as farm workers. After that, it was said that the Russian workers at the Malyshev Tank Factory in Kharkov, on the Ukrainian side, were to stage an uprising, initially disguised as a labour dispute, but then developing into full-scale violence.
But the rumour that drew Anna to the borders on this particular evening in January at Burt’s behest was that a consignment of unidentified materials was to be smuggled across the border in one of the long stretches of land where the border posts were stretched to the limit. It was the fourth or fifth such consignment that Cougar knew of. American satellites, including Cougar’s, had detected unusual movements on the Russian side for months, but Burt Miller never put his trust in technology. The ubiquitous eyes in the sky were supposedly all-seeing, but even the giant American WorldView satellite, which could pick out a car’s licence plate from space, was, in Burt’s opinion, highly flawed and relied upon to an insane degree by the CIA. How many remote-controlled Predator missiles did it take to kill one suspected terrorist in Afghanistan? Up to half a dozen—and this because the all-seeing eyes didn’t see all.
Anna drank some water from a flask, then strapped the Contender onto her body inside her thick jacket, its barrel extending behind her and over her waist. It was strapped for a rear draw, her favoured stance when shooting in tight circumstances. But the length of the barrel necessitated that anyway. It would have been impossible to walk with the gun strapped to the front. Then she stood and, once she was satisfied that it had gotten as dark as it was going to get, she strapped on the pack and began to walk the remaining miles to the rendezvous.
Burt wanted intelligence on the ground, human intelligence, not push-button intelligence from a video console in Virginia, so Anna continued to follow the rut on the left side of the track at first, its lighter shade of ice ag
ainst the slightly darker snow making it just visible, and the tufted broken line of grass down the centre showed the way. After three miles she took out night vision binoculars and surveyed the terrain for three hundred and sixty degrees around her position. Finally satisfied she was alone, she turned off the track and, in almost complete darkness, set off at an angle in the direction of the border where copses of trees afforded some protection as she approached the foreseen rendezvous. She made the next three miles at a slow pace, in just under an hour, stopping at regular intervals to search in the dark with the aid of the binoculars. Then she found herself at the edge of another lake, bigger than the one that she’d passed earlier, and which, she knew, was the one that straddled the border itself.
She made a hollow in the reeds on the shore and, when she was satisfied she was concealed from all sides, she took out the night vision binoculars once again. She trained them first on the Ukrainian side. She needed to know first that behind her she was well protected.
To her alarm, she immediately picked out what looked like an old wooden agricultural cart of the kind still used by farmers in the area. It was stopped at the edge of a wood on a slight incline about a quarter of a mile behind her and above the lake. It was less than half a mile inside Ukrainian territory. At first she thought it had simply been abandoned there for the winter, but, on closer inspection, she picked out a horse grazing on a bag of hay tied around its neck, a little farther from the cart. She wondered if her arrival had already been seen.
Anna stayed in the cover of the reeds. One advantage of the cart’s presence was that she now believed she needed only to observe it if the rendezvous took place. It must be connected. At just after nine o’clock, several hours after dark and with the temperature now well below freezing and still falling, she saw movement up in the wood. There were three men wearing what appeared to be camouflage jackets and caps. She studied them closely to see if there were any insignia to say they were from the Ukrainian army—border guards in some kind of rear position, perhaps. But she could see nothing of any such detail through the binoculars. They were dressed as hunters, she guessed, not military, that was the reason behind the camouflage. They were using the cover of hunting.
She watched as one of the men took a piss in the grass at the edge of the wood and then walked to where the horse was standing, passively chewing, took away the hay bag, and led the horse towards the cart. Then he harnessed it to the cart, while the other two men began to descend towards the lake. They walked slowly, purposefully, apparently knowing where they were going. They reached the edge of the lake about two hundred yards from her and now she noticed they were carrying fishing rods.
She turned in the cramped space of the reed nest to look in the other direction, across the lake towards the border. She listened for the sound of an engine, but the stillness was complete and the silence unbroken with the exception of a duck calling in alarm from where the men stood.
The first sign she had of anything coming from the border was the light outline of water apparently pushed up by the prow of a boat. Then another white line appeared just behind the first. The binoculars began to pick out the darker shape of a craft against the water, and then a second craft. She fit the silencer to the handgun, placed the two grenades in a pocket of her jacket, and began to crawl through the reeds just above the waterline. It would be best if she could allow the transfer to take place, and let the Russian side of it retreat to the border. That way she would have only three men to contend with.
As the craft drew nearer, she recognised them as tracked amphibious vehicles, but there was no sound of an engine. Only now did the wave caused by the boats begin to ripple outwards and finally to reach the water below the reeds where she crawled. She was thirty yards from the men on the shore.
She dimly made out the shadows of the craft as they silently pushed through the reeds and finally rested on the snow with solid earth beneath it. She saw six men disembark, three from each of the craft, and then turn the craft around to make it easier to unload the cargo. When the covers came off she thought there were four boxes on each.
In her intense study of the bank ahead, and the contents of the craft, she hadn’t noticed that two of the men had walked to either side of the boats and were searching the area with binoculars. One of them was now approaching along the bank, on the other side of the reeds where she was hiding. She held her breath. The man came closer and finally stopped, standing just two feet from her, still concealed by thick reeds. She waited, considering the options; by remaining silent she would almost certainly be unobserved. But there was still a risk. She quietly drew the bowie knife from its sheath on her leg. The man didn’t move. It seemed as if this was his prearranged station. She gripped the knife and drove it into his calf muscle.
With her free hand she pulled him down by his wounded leg and, clamping one hand around his mouth, she drove the knife again into his throat. But the brief cry had already escaped his lips before she could silence him. She lay in silence on top of the dying man and felt the blood seeping from his throat and covering her hand. At last, he lay still.
She rolled away from him and snatched up the binoculars, training them on the spot where she’d previously been looking. She saw that all the men were stationary and looking in her direction. They were professionals, she now saw—special forces, not amateur smugglers. Nobody panicked. Nobody called out the dead man’s name. She watched as they went into crouched positions and drew weapons. She saw the leader wave his arm. Two of the men began to crawl fast on their bellies up the hill towards the wood and the cart. Two others crawled along the edge of the reed bed towards her. She couldn’t see the other three men. They might be with the men coming towards her, but behind them and invisible to her. Or they might be coming through the water, making use of the reed cover. Despite the nearly freezing temperature of the water, that was the way she would have done it in their position, form a pincer movement, even if it meant descending into the freezing lake where ice was now forming. Wherever they were, she watched what she believed to be a highly skilled formation growing around her.
The men who had gone up the hill were now separated and, twenty yards apart, were coming down the hill directly above where she lay. They had some height and were covering their fellows at the water’s edge. If she turned for an escape route now, she would lose sight of the formation—and there was nowhere to go, anyway.
The men coming towards her on their stomachs alongside the reeds were now less than twenty yards from her. Then the men on the hill skirted around again and were behind her. She sensed a man, certainly more than one now, somewhere out there in the water. They were slowly surrounding her position.
When the men had formed almost a complete circle around her she realised that now their firing line went directly through her and towards each other. In any exchange of fire they would be firing at each other as well as at her. It was a brief moment of advantage, perhaps the only one she would get. Her other advantage was that they didn’t know what was happening and, if there was a trap laid for them, how many opponents they had. But now she also saw a way to confuse them.
Making no noise, she put a round into the barrel and fired a single shot into the water where she believed some of the others to be. She then fired in the opposite direction, up the hill, a direct shot that entered the cheek of one of the crawling men and came out through the back of his skull.
She unscrewed the silencer and now fired two more rounds at the water and the hill. The sudden explosion of noise without the silencer blew apart any pretence of her position. She thrust the gun and one grenade into the waterproof pack. Then she lobbed the second grenade towards the water, waited for the explosion, then slid off the bank like a snake and disappeared under the freezing surface.
Despite their training, the men reacted with an instant display of fire that they swiftly realised was dangerously close to becoming a firefight between the two groups. The guns went silent almost immediately. In the dista
nce, over by the Ukrainian border posts, a searchlight came on and panned across the sky.
Anna swam under the water and bumped a half-submerged body above her. She kept swimming until she felt the bottom of the first craft. She felt her way underneath it and came up for air behind the second craft. The men were all behind her now, she supposed. But whatever happened in the next minute or two, she knew that the remainder of the men would, at some point, return to their cache of smuggled goods. She retreated behind the cover of the second craft, and then realised her muscles were seizing from the icy water.
She didn’t know how long she could survive in the water. Her body was becoming completely numb. Soon her muscles would be useless. Most worryingly, her hands were almost frozen now and her finger wouldn’t be able to clamp around the trigger. She had to get out of the water to stand a chance of survival.
She broke away from the craft and swam into another bank of reeds behind it. She could barely move her arms and legs. She crawled into the reeds, found the bank jutting out inside them, and dragged herself onto it. She began to rub her arms and legs. It took five minutes for any feeling to return, and still none of the men had returned.
She took the binoculars and found a gap in the reeds where she could get a view up to the wood. The cart was still there, the horse harnessed to it. There was no sign of the men. She wondered how many she had killed in the water with the grenade and what their fallback position would be. There were, she thought, still three men out there somewhere, but no more. She also wondered how long it would take for a border patrol, alerted by the firing and the explosion, to reach the remote spot. At that moment she saw twin headlights approaching from maybe a mile away, then another pair, and another.
She crawled into the water towards the craft again. With the knife, she cut away the straps that bound the boxes from one of them. She picked up one box. It was heavy, the contents packed tightly. But it fit in her pack. She was sure now that the men who were left alive wouldn’t risk returning to the craft, not with the patrol approaching. They would have another means of escape.