by Andy McNab
As the Mil Mi-24 lost height he could see them, like ants crawling on the surface of the mud, the new recruits being put through their paces. How many would last? How many would end it all with a bullet — for themselves, unable to bear the shame of failure, or if their anger got the better of them, a particularly hostile stariki? It was an unspoken agreement between Spetsnaz graduates — and those who’d fallen by the wayside — never to speak about the training. Dima exchanged glances with Kroll, a look that needed no explanation. Each knew exactly what the other was thinking. Soldiers learn to work together, Spetsnaz learn to operate alone. Once he believed it had been a good training for his life — the best possible. But then maybe if he hadn’t been one of the élite, he wouldn’t have ended up alone — might have had a real life. But there was no time to think about that now.
Today, it wasn’t recruits Dima was after: he had come for the instructors, the hardest and the smartest, full of pent-up energy for a return to the field, men to whom he could leave the more basic task of clearing the compound. Paliov had set no limits on how many men or how much kit, but that in itself bothered Dima. Paliov had made his name as a master of efficiency, never one to use a regiment where a platoon would do, who had fought long and hard against campaigns for better, more expensive, equipment. Why was he suddenly splashing out like this? Was this his last stand? Or something else?
He glanced at the other passengers, all eight of them Paliov’s underlings: Baryshev — surveillance, Burdukovsky — logistics, Gavrilov and Deniken, Yegalin and Mazlak — human doorstops. Only Burdukovsky, despite his girth, had the look of a field man, beady-eyed, his expression one of permanent quiet amusement, as if in on a joke to which only he knew the punchline. The rest looked like Aquarium lifers, unaccustomed to being let out into the daylight. He thought of Omorova’s blink — what exactly was it she’d hinted at in the Ops Room? All day the news had been full of Iran, Americans on alert along the Iraq border, the PLR consolidating control of at least three centres. And to cap it all, more earth tremors in the east. It was all happening in Iran, and they were going in to snatch a single rogue arms dealer with a small airborne army. Something wasn’t right.
They disembarked on to the apron outside the main building. Dima and Kroll were ushered straight to a prepared interview room. Three chairs, one table, a jug of water, two glasses. It was all eerily familiar. The only sign Dima could detect that put them in the post-Soviet era was the slice of lemon floating in the jug.
The door swung open to reveal the Camp Commandant, Vaslov. His gleaming hairless scalp was reminiscent of a baby’s, but the resemblance ended there. He had no neck to speak of, so that his head appeared to rise out of his collar like one of those wide, pillar-shaped rock formations Dima had seen once in a picture of Arizona. On his face, the features were crowded round a broken nose, as if reluctant to spread out. The famous glass eye stared fixedly into the middle distance, its predecessor taken out by an Afghan sniper’s bullet that was reputed to be still lodged in his brain — some said because it didn’t dare ask permission to leave. It was this injury, the last of several, which had eventually condemned him to this administrative role. Now and then, the bullet — or something — provoked him to uncontrollable bursts of temper, victims of which included a clerk, whose wrist had been broken when a document was found in the wrong file. He ran a tight ship, you could say. He lived on the camp all year round; he had nowhere else and no one else. Spetsnaz was his life, his family, his reason for being.
Vaslov glared at Dima, who didn’t rise. He was just a contractor now. No need for military niceties.
Without meeting his glare Dima spoke.
‘I thought someone would have killed you by now.’
What little there was of Vaslov’s lips disappeared altogether as he stepped into the room.
‘I’d shake you by the hand but I may have some use for it after.’
‘I’m glad we see eye to eye, at last.’
Dima couldn’t resist the joke. When they had first encountered each other he had just stepped on to the towel. Vaslov was an instructor and from day one he had had it in for him. Dima was smarter than him and they both knew it. Vaslov had made it his mission to break him. He never managed it, but what eventually evolved was a grudging mutual respect.
‘Still growing roses?’
Vaslov gave a lipless grin as he nodded and patted his tunic side pocket. He was known to carry a pair of secateurs with him at all times. His favourite humiliation was to order anyone who flunked an exercise to strip in front of his fellow recruits, whereupon he would produce his rose cutters and close them round the offender’s cock until he wet himself. He even had a pickle jar on view in his office that contained items closely resembling human penises. No one had ever got close enough to be sure.
He put his hands on the table and leaned forward until his face was almost touching Dima’s.
‘You seem to have a lot of clout for someone who was let go’, he said. For once both eyes were looking the same way. ‘The powers that be appear to have signed off your request for the pick of my best instructors.’ He leaned even closer. ‘If any of them don’t come back in showroom condition you know what the consequences will be.’
‘I’ve got my titanium underpants on.’
He stood up, dropped a stack of files on the table, turned and marched out. Kroll rolled his eyes, reached for the files and started rifling through them.
Dima felt his phone vibrate. He examined the message and then turned the display towards Kroll. A gallery of pictures of the compound walls appeared.
Kroll’s eyes widened. ‘Who the fuck sent these?’
‘Darwish, lives north of Tabriz. I called him this morning. Got him to drive up and have a look-see.’
‘Trust you to have your own spies.’
Kroll took the phone and pored over the images. ‘Those walls are massive.’
‘Yes, but look closer. Parts of them are patched with brick and breeze block. And see where those cracks are — they’re from the tremors. You could knock it down with a mallet.’
Kroll looked up. ‘Confirms my feeling — no call for heavy metal. A big entrance, with lots of bangs, bullets flying everywhere — more likelihood of Kaffarov not making it out in one piece. We really don’t need all these men.’
They were both spooked by the same thing. Dima was silent for a moment, lost in thought.
Kroll shuffled the files. ‘So how many do you want?’
‘Three to lead the Go Teams.’
Kroll shrugged. ‘Have it your way.’
Dima lifted a finger. ‘No, wait: change of plan. Three for an advance team with us.’
Kroll’s face brightened. ‘By road?’
Dima got up, paced, thinking aloud. ‘A heavy Mil drops us first in a neighbouring valley. On board, two cars. We’ll recce, confirm what we need, then call in the Go units once we’ve cut the power. That way we’ve got more options if there’s a change of plan.’
‘Change of what plan?’
Dima looked at Kroll. Inside, he wondered what he was getting his old friend into. ‘I don’t know. I just want to be prepared — in case.’
He nodded at the files. Kroll picked up the phone on the desk. ‘Okay, we’re ready. Lenkov first.’
The first one marched in. Two metres plus: sandy hair, Nordic features. He didn’t even make it to the table.
Dima shook his head. ‘We’re invading Iran, not Finland.’
Lenkov obediently turned on his heel and left.
Kroll frowned. ‘He might be a good fighter though.’
‘He looks like a poster boy for the Waffen S S. They need to blend in.’
‘Fair enough. Next is Hassan Zirak.’
‘Good Kurdish name.’
‘A Shi’a from Lachin.’
Zirak entered and stood to attention in front of the table, his eyes fixed on the wall. He was short, no more than 165 centimetres. His prematurely aged face and slightly bowed legs betraye
d his peasant origins.
Dima addressed him in Farsi. ‘I’ll give you four hundred rials to drive me from Tabriz to Teheran.’
Zirak blinked then answered. ‘I shit on my mother first. Four thousand, plus your daughter for the night.’
Kroll tried to hide his smile, but Dima stared back thunderously, then switched to Tajik.
‘A Persian goes on holiday to Africa. Right as he’s about to take a swim a gorilla jumps out of a tree and rapes him. He’s in a coma for three months; when he comes home reporters are waiting at the airport. One asks if he was hurt. How does he answer?’
Zirak looked down, stroked his chin then looked up.
‘He didn’t call, didn’t write, sent no flowers. Of course I was hurt!’
Dima allowed himself a smile. ‘Wait outside.’
The next two flunked the question, either because their languages weren’t up to it or they were too distracted by the gorilla. Dima and Kroll examined the remaining files. When they looked up again the next was standing in front of them: Gregorin, another blond candidate. Kroll was about to send him away but Dima spoke first.
‘I didn’t hear you come in. Go out and come back in.’ The soldier obliged, returned to position.
Dima turned to Kroll. ‘Did you hear anything?’
‘No.’
‘Neither did I. How did you develop that skill, Gregorin?’
Gregorin stared at the wall behind them, his face devoid of expression, like an actor waiting to be given a part. ‘I studied ballet before I enlisted, Sir.’
‘A red rag to the stariki. How did you deal with that?’
‘After I killed one of them it ceased to be a problem.’
‘In a fight?’
He lowered his eyes and met Dima’s. They looked cold and dead. ‘I made it look like that.’
‘Premeditated? Why weren’t you court-martialled?’
Gregorin kept his gaze on Dima. ‘No one found out.’
‘But you’re telling me.’
‘If I’m to be accepted for this mission Sir, it’s probably better we have no secrets.’
Kroll looked up from Gregorin’s file. ‘Impressive. How did you do it exactly?’
‘Following the fight, the man in question was hospitalised. I was concerned that he might make a full recovery, so I obtained access to the facility and administered a lethal dose of diamorphine.’
Dima reached for his file. Nothing run of the mill in there either. As well as tours in Afghanistan and Bosnia, he had worked undercover in Brussels, infiltrated a drug cartel in Dubai, carried out assassinations in the Dominican Republic and had been put in quarantine for a period over allegations, unproven, of collusion with the CIA while operational in Pakistan. Most commanders, Dima knew, would keep this man at a distance. He was perfect.
‘Thank you for being so candid. Wait outside.’
Gregorin saluted and left without a sound.
Kroll took a deep breath. ‘Better not get on the wrong side of him.’
Dima ignored him. His mind was elsewhere. Eventually he spoke. ‘I want Vladimir.’
‘You said you’d never work with him again.’
‘I said the same about you. Look where that got me. Do you have an actual objection?’
Kroll pushed out his lower lip. ‘Not at all. He’s in prison though. Drug trafficking.’
‘Then let’s get him out.’
‘Paliov could have a problem with that.’
‘He needn’t know. Which facility is he in?’
‘Butyrka.’
Dima let out a long breath.
‘Great. We’ll be lucky if he’s not dead from TB or AIDS.’
‘We’ll get Vaslov to order him transferred to a military facility and stop off on the way.’
‘He considers Paliov to have been a brake on his career. It’ll be an opportunity to get one over on him.’
‘You know everyone’s weak spot, don’t you?’
‘Except my own.’ Paliov’s photos had flashed up again.
Kroll stood up. ‘While I get it sorted, don’t you think you should put those two through their paces?’
Dima nodded. Kroll picked up the phone. ‘Send Zirak and Gregorin back in.’
The two candidates stood side by side, an unlikely pair. That was good, thought Dima.
He peered at each one. ‘The mission starts now. Your first task is to deliver Vladimir Kamarivsky to me by first light tomorrow. He’s incarcerated in Butyrka. You’ll find his details on the database. If there’s anything blocked to your report level, Vaslov will open it. I don’t care how you do it. Just bring him to me.’
Zirak looked mystified.
‘The “Jewish Ayatollah”?’
Vladimir, a Latvian Jew, was a legend at Spetsnaz for infiltrating the Iranian Supreme Leader’s staff. He prided himself on his knowledge of the Koran and his grasp of the intricacies of Iranian power was second to none.
Dima nodded. ‘Yup, that’s the one. Be back here by dawn.’
When they’d gone, Kroll turned to Dima and looked at him warily. ‘Is there something you’re not telling me? Don’t fuck about now.’
‘Just a feeling that this is going to be my last mission. I want my favourite people with me.’
9
Iraqi Kurdistan/Iran Border
Black had lost all track of time. His watch was gone, his radio smashed, his headset also gone. To escape the cavity in the rubble he’d had to strip himself of all the things that were designed to keep him alive. The sixty extra pounds of weaponry and bulletproofing the soldiers carried was useful, but also a liability. Even his water bottle had gone. His mouth felt as if someone had emptied a sack of brick dust into it, and the wind was full of particles that shot-blasted his features. The light was failing fast: it had to be around 1900 hours. That meant he’d lost six hours in the rubble. Once he managed to get on his feet he found cover under a pair of pillars that were drunkenly holding each other up. He stood still. He couldn’t hear anything so he looked for movement. The devastation was total. It reminded him of his grandfather’s pictures of Dresden, an entire living, breathing city reduced to nothing but rubble.
A dog came past, skinny and limping. It looked at him, hesitated as if uncertain as to whether he was friend or foe, thought better of it and padded away. Blackburn thought about his crew. Buried as well, or had they made their escape? The wind noise of his deafness was lessening. He became aware of a low intermittent moan and decided to head towards it. Perhaps there was something he could do. The street was strewn with debris and his balance was still uncertain. As his eyes began to focus he was able to pinpoint the source of the sound. A figure in military fatigues lay sprawled on the street, half hanging into one of the fissures that the quake had unzipped. Once he recognised the battledress as US he quickened his pace.
Black was less than a block away from the stricken soldier when he heard the vehicle. Definitely heavy duty, probably military. Help on the way? Something about the sound slowed him to a halt. The engine note — not the Stryker’s familiar Caterpillar diesel but a lower guttural thrum, more like a V8. Definitely not a Stryker or any other friendly vehicle he could think of. He crouched down behind a half-crushed van as the first of three Russian-made BTR-152s — six-wheeled APCs — nosed into view, alongside them a crowd of young men in improvised combat gear.
What followed was something he would never forget. Like all soldiers, he had seen some things in Iraq that he would have preferred not to, but that was part of the job. If you didn’t like seeing innocent people get killed and mutilated, don’t join the army. Then seeing the light go out of that girl’s eyes in that kitchen had upped the ante somehow: he had held her, the first and last man in her life, in a single intimate embrace before death. And now, even that would soon be subsumed by what came next. Sometime later he would grimly acknowledge that it had served his purpose. After that, he would no longer entertain any of that shit about the nobility and rightness of war.
The injured soldier, hearing the convoy, had managed to haul himself up on one elbow and was waving. The BTR shuddered to a halt. One of its armoured doors flew open and a figure clad in a shalwar kameez, face masked by part of his turban, jumped down and spoke to him. Several others armed with AKs tumbled out of the machine and took up positions around him. More young men, similarly dressed, crowded round. The turbanned guy and the Marine appeared to have found a common language — presumably English — but then the turbanned guy signalled to one of the crowd, who came forward with a camcorder and started filming. The turban stepped back and produced a blade, serrated like a breadknife but longer, as if specifically designed for what he was about to do. He grabbed the Marine by the hair and slashed at his neck, blood flying as he sawed with such ferocity that the decapitation was over in twenty seconds. Blackburn felt his lungs fill with breath for a shout, but self-preservation took over. As the man held the Marine’s head aloft for his comrades to admire, the flap of his turban slipped and Blackburn took a mental picture of the face — clean-shaven, which was unusual, high cheekbones and small eyes narrowed to slits. He bared his teeth and bit off the nose of the beheaded Marine and spat it out. His crew went wild, firing their AKs in the air and chanting something Blackburn couldn’t make out, then he waved them back into the vehicle and it moved off east at walking pace, the crowd chanting behind.
10
Ryazan, Russia
However good it looked, Dima didn’t like what he was seeing. He watched from his temporary Ops Room as the giant Mi-26 ‘flying slug’ he’d ordered, the world’s largest chopper, eased its way down on to the apron. Able to carry eighty troops with ease, it could even swallow an eight-wheeled APC. He wondered briefly whether Zirak and Gregorin would arrive to find Vladimir with his bags packed, all ready and waiting for them at the gates of Butyrka.
Half of him marvelled at the speed with which whatever he wanted was provided. The other half — the doubter, the sceptic, the half he listened to the hardest — knew this was all too good to be true, which was why he had called Paliov.
‘We have to talk.’
‘We’re talking now.’