by Craig Thomas
His legs buckled under him, and he felt tears prick against his eyes as his thinking returned fully. He could have escaped in the chopper, and instead he had killed the pilot.
Voices, querulous and puzzled, demanded reply from the MIL's cabin speaker. Idem codes, positions, movements, details of force strength — spinning in his head.
He looked around. Specks to the west, lifting clear of a rise. Bigger helicopters. Away to the east, down a long slope, as far as a mile away, dots moving across a field, out of the cover of trees. Men on the ground already. A road away to the north of them. Olive-green APCs moving swiftly.
He was watching his encirclement.
Nothing, as yet, south of him, down towards the village of Nikoleyev that he could now see, nestling in gentler folds of country; not as flat as he had thought from the map, better for him. Dotted clumps of trees. He began to run again, the unfamiliar AK-47 banging against his thigh. The tussocky grass seemed longer on this long downslope — something to do with drainage, he wondered incongruously — and it seemed to wrestle with his tired legs, continually throwing the body too far forward, out of balance.
Bending low as he ran, he watched the sky. Only the air concerned him for the moment. Nothing on wheels or afoot was close enough.
Except that he knew they would put men down in Nikoleyev now. If they hadn't already done so.
Something had happened to him, however. Probably a result of the killing he had done, the evident superiority given him by two dead bodies that belonged to the enemy. He no longer thought ahead more than minutes. He had no sense of distances other than the little way to the village, the seventeen or eighteen miles to Khabarovsk. No promises, none of the luxuries of larger thought. Only the body moving, its imperatives occupying him.
He paused behind a rock, near the bottom of a stretch down from the hut. Below him, the road into the village wound through a shallow defile, cracked with frost, icy puddles in the shadows of trees. Empty. He paused long enough to regain something like casual breath, then jumped down on to the road. The hard earth jarred his legs and spine, and he groaned. More in fear of injury than in pain.
He crossed the road, which was lined with dark trees, and began to trot carefully, under their shadow, towards Nikoleyev. He stopped only once, hearing behind him the dull thump of in explosion. He knew what it was, and shuddered with knowledge. The first gunship at the hut had destroyed it with rocket fire. Probably simply because of the dead pilot, and the dive drab spot of a body below them. Incensed anger transmitted to firepower before reason could interfere. He consciously stopped the trembling of his body.
The road dropped down into the village — a straggle of houses, peasant dwellings of wood, single-storeyed and ramshackle. He bit his glove as his hand wiped his face. A car — thereIt was like a grainy photograph from some old album; from Gorochenko's pictures of his peasant origins on the steppes. Chickens flicked across the road, and a cow ambled I between two houses. Straggling dead gardens, patches of dark, cultivated earth marking the properties, darker than the packed earth of the village's one street. He looked for a store. Yes.
He breathed deeply, as if he had gained some kind of victory. There had to be some kind of delivery van. Unless they still delivered by cart.
He waited, his body eager, the legs quivering with the need move; but he had to be sure of troops, yet the longer he waited the more surely they would come. As he stood up, caution finally satisfied, an olive-green APC rolled up and over the rise at the other end of the village street, He dropped back into the shadow of a fir with a groan. He had waited too bloody long.
Twelve: The Train
The APC rolled to a halt at what the driver considered the centre of the tiny hamlet. There was almost a contempt about the reluctant way in which the vehicle slowed, then stopped. It was a BTR-152, standard model without roof armour. Vorontsyev could see the heads of the troops it carried, bobbing up and down, two rows of flattish Red Army helmets, like mushrooms or Chinese straw hats painted green.
When it stopped, the gun mounted at the front began to swivel threateningly. There was no one on the street. Only the officer stood up, a Stechkin automatic in his hand. His movements were lazy, confident. Either he hadn't heard about the two dead men, or he had accepted the unchanged, sleepy parameters of the scene before him. Nothing could happen there, in the precise middle of nowhere.
Eventually, he barked an order, and the soldiers began to dismount from the back of the personnel carrier. Vorontsyev clutched the AK-47 tighter, as if it were a talisman.
There were twelve men. Some women, one or two old men, began to emerge from the low wooden houses. The officer spoke to one of the women, who seemed undeterred by his tone of voice. A large woman, great bosom and dragged-back hair, wiping her hands on a check apron. Vorontsyev, relaxed by the slow pace of the scene, the indifference of the troops who fanned out slowly, and the NCO who was already smoking a cigarette, watched the encounter. He could almost see the scowl on the woman's face.
The officer walked away eventually, then questioned another villager, an old man; he shrugged repeatedly, and appeared simple-minded. The officer's step expressed frustration as he rejoined the NCO. He gave his orders with a deal of arm-waving, and it was as if the projector showing a film had slipped into another speed. The whole scene speeded up. Men went now from house to house with a purpose, and much noise. The officer and the NCO stood by the APC, where they were joined by the driver, who also lit a cigarette. The officer, as if the habit was somehow beneath him, walked a little apart, watching the search.
It took little more than ten minutes. Then, at an order from the NCO, the men doubled back to the APC. For one moment, Vorontsyev thought he might be given the unbelievable luck of their leaving the hamlet of Nikoleyev.
Then he saw that they were detailed to fall out, except for individuals posted one at either end of the village, on the road. There seemed, then, nothing more to do, and the officer cast about, his head turning like that on a doll. Vorontsyev thought he must be looking for a drink, or a chair.
He had to move now. Soon, the men would drift towards the store, which might proffer food, or something to drink. The officer would, having absorbed the motionless innocence of the hamlet, allow them to relax as the afternoon wore on. They were obviously detailed to remain in the hamlet, and until they received new orders they were no longer part of the search.
He studied the land immediately round the village. He could, by moving carefully around the southern perimeter, use such things as wood-stacks, outhouses, to shield him. Only if one of the villagers saw him would he be in danger.
He stood up, let his cramped legs relax, then moved off to his right through the thin belt of trees until he was overlooking, from a slight rise, a stack of logs behind the most outlying of the poor wooden houses. This one appeared deserted, he could see a cracked window and there was no smoke from the thin chimney. Cautiously, he moved out of the trees and half-slid down the slope, resting only when he was concealed by the logs.
A few moments, then he raised his head cautiously. Here, he could not see the APC nor the soldiers. He fished out the map, and studied it carefully. The nearest village was three., perhaps four miles away, and in the wrong direction. He looked at his watch and made a swift calculation. He would not have enough time, unless he took a vehicle of some kind from Nikoleyev.
He considered, uselessly, the APC. He could not overpower twelve men, an NCO, a driver and an officer, not even with surprise and an AK-47. The store had to have some kind of van.
He looked at the roads on the map, fully marked even to farm tracks. He thought he could see a way of keeping away from any road that might be carrying troops, or have a roadblock in operation. He would be safe from everything, perhaps, except aerial patrols. Which might, or might not, investigate a civilian vehicle.
But the APC..
He wished he had taken the dead soldier's grenades.
How could he leave, without bein
g followed, and captured? It was an impossibility, so impossible that his body became weak, his mind irresolute. He sat with his back against the wood, its rough bark pressing into him, the rifle upright between his legs like a prop — he gripped it tightly.
Stupid, stupid.
The soldier who had come to relieve himself behind the pile of logs was as surprised to see Vorontsyev as the KGB man was to be stumbled upon.
It was a ridiculous moment. The soldier's hand was in his flies, and his rifle was over his shoulder. He was helpless, his mouth opening and closing like that of a fish. He appeared at every instant to be about to cry out, but no sound would come. Vorontsyev himself, moving as if through a great pressure of water, or clinging nets, moved the gun to his hip, turned his body so slowly, levelled the gun, and squeezed the trigger. The soldier jumped back, his hand and his penis appearing from his trousers, and then he lay still on his back.
A single, loud shot.
This time Vorontsyev scrabbled in the combat dress, and unfastened the two RGD-5 fragmentation grenades the man carried. He could hear, at a distance, shouted orders, and perhaps the soldier's name being called. He ducked behind the togs again, then leaned forward, caught hold of the dead man's boot, and pulled the body awkwardly towards him, out of sight.
Twelve men.
Ridiculous.
They came at the run, disorganised and unprepared, because they might have been mistaken and the officer was evidently panicking and they had had to throw away cigarettes Vorontsyev raised his arm, swung back and then forward, and lobbed the grenade into them. Then the second one. Five of them, not bunched, but the grenades, more like fat tins than pineapples, carried heavy charges and an effective fragmentation radius of twenty-five metres. The first one exploded, and he heard something thud into the logs on the other side. The second explosion. A thin scream, then he was on his feet, all but head and shoulders masked by the logs, and firing at the two men still moving, staggering though they were. He did not miss.
He could hear one of the wounded men behind him, screaming something incoherent and terrible about his guts, and then he pressed against the wall of a house twenty yards away, his head bobbing round the corner of the house, cheek rubbing against the rough board — and the APC, a background to the stunned officer and the NCO, who looked white, was fifty yards from him.
Then the officer screamed rather than shouted some confused orders. It was as if he did not realise that his force had been cut to half, and he no longer had sufficient men to perform the demanded tasks.
Vorontsyev grinned. Death, violent death, and winning, even temporarily, charged him with new energy. It was one he would despise later, if he lived. But not now.
One soldier came at a reckless run, because his officer was screaming behind him, down the earthen alleyway between two of the larger houses in the hamlet. His boots pounded on the packed, dark earth, cracked by frost. Vorontsyev waited until he was level, then fired. There was no thought of silent disposal — noise was a part of it, part of the electricity that now galvanised him. It was as if the man had been shoved in the back — arms thrown out, legs going, then face down in a chicken run. Vorontsyev wanted to laugh, because that, too, was a source of energy, of destructive confidence — ways of dying. One man burying his face in chicken-shit, another pulling his pisser out as he died. It had to be good, that.
He ran up the alleyway, seeing the officer confronting him, the NCO already moving away towards the place where the grenade had exploded. He could see no one else now — a face at a little window, barely glanced as he raced past it, then the stutter of the AK-47 on semi-automatic, forty rounds a minute, quicker than single, aimed shots. Vulgar, untrained destruction.
The officer was sliding down the side of the APC even as the NCO dived into the hard dirt of the street. Both of them were dead. He trained the gun, trigger pressed against the back of the guard, until he was sure they had been hit repeatedly. He was ten yards from them, still in the narrow alleyway. Eight dead, and the driver, who had been climbing back into the seat of the APC, perhaps to move it forward, clutching his leg, still bent as if to mount the side of the carrier, knuckles of the hand gripping the rung above him turning white with the pain, and the effort of hanging on. He was afraid to drop on the wounded leg.
Vorontsyev felt the dangerous energy flag. He had known the mood only once before, in a brief KGB firefight with a hijack team surprised in their warehouse headquarters. He had killed two of them, and received a commendation. It had helped to obtain his transfer to SID. He felt exhausted now, as if slipping into sleep or coma. There was little time left, as if the effects of some drug were wearing off.
He dashed to the APC, and bundled the driver out of the way. The man screamed as he fell on his wounded leg, and Vorontsyev saw the hand red with gouted blood. He hauled himself up and tumbled into the body of the carrier, bruising his ribs against the hard edge of a seat.
Bullets puckered and whined against the side of the APC. But he was safe now, the armour of the vehicle protecting him. As he lifted his head cautiously, he saw a soldier's head peer from behind a wooden wall, and he pumped four rounds, heard the scream as the high-velocity bullets passed through the two walls of the building that met at the corner concealing the soldier and hit their target; then the rifle clicked twice.
He tore the magazine off, and struggled with the one in his pocket, which threatened to snag awkwardly. Then it was dipped in, and he raised his head again.
The street was empty.
He felt desperately tired.
With his back against the armoured side of the APC, he raised his head and shouted into the silence of the street:
'Everyone else is dead! How many more of you are there — four, five? You won't get close enough to throw a grenade in! Give it up. Let some other bastard take me on!'
He listened. Nothing, for a long time.
'You bastard!' he heard someone shout, away to the left of the APC, 'You killed all our mates, you bloody terrorist!'
He wanted to laugh. They were dying, and prepared to die, for the same fiction that had killed the KGB team in Khabarovsk — the Separatists. And then he hated Ossipov. Not the men out there, but Ossipov.
He tried to think coolly, because the mention of grenades had been deliberate. There would be only a few moments more of cold logic, before thought became muddy, indefinite.
He shouted: 'Give up, you stupid bastards! I'll kill the lot of you unless you do!' Then he raised his head. The right arm, half the frame, of a soldier had appeared, hand raised with a grenade. The soldier moved to get a freer throw, and Vorontsyev fired. The arm disappeared, and the grenade bounced twice, then exploded. He heard a scream.
They would have used grenades anyway. He had made them try on his terms, in the moment of his choosing. He did not know how many he had killed or disabled. Probably two.
'Come out, you stupid bastards!' he repeated. 'Give yourselves up!'
It had to be now, in the next few seconds, while their minds clogged still with the number of the dead, with their own lack of safety in diminishing numbers. Had to be.
From one side of the street, two soldiers appeared. Across from the APC, another. One of them was holding a bloody, torn sleeve. He must have been behind the others when the grenade went off. They ostentatiously dropped their guns. The wounded driver wriggled on the ground.
Vorontsyev stood up, almost swaying with weariness. He motioned with the gun.
'Come on!' he barked. 'Get in! Get in or I'll kill you!' He should have done, but he was beginning to be appalled at the slaughter. It was no longer a gratuitous feeling, but wrenched at his stomach. There seemed a stench in his nostrils. The perspective he had rigidly bound in the toil of action loosened and came free, and he was still eighteen miles from the only airport, and thousands of miles from safety. He waggled the gun down at the young peasant faces. Men on military service, without sophistication or great intelligence. Badly frightened automata, shocked out of
their normal machine-like operation, their officer dead.
'Get hi!' he barked. 'One of you drive!'
They seemed to hold a silent debate, and then one of them climbed into the driving-seat.
Tick him up!' he shouted, pointing at the wounded figure on the ground. They did so, bundling him gently into the back of the APC, the double doors opened. One of them examined the wound, and took out a field dressing, binding the calf that had been torn by a bullet. 'Get moving!' Vorontsyev called, sitting down next to the driver hi the officer's accustomed seat, turning so that he could watch the two men and the driver, and the wounded man supported in one of the seats.
'Where?' the driver asked, his hands gripping the wheel to still fear.
'Turn round — back the way you came. I'll give directions.'
The APC's engine roared, and then they turned on the dirt of the street, picking up speed as if to leave the carnage behind. Vorontsyev felt the weariness leave him, feeding instead on the shocked, stunned faces of the men he had captured, lifting himself up from the level of their self-abnegation. Now they did not even hate him. They were feeling nothing.
The APC left the village behind. Still no one had come out of any of the houses as they bumped over the rise and the village dropped out of sight. Within a quarter of a mile, Vorontsyev barked, 'Right here!' They turned off the road, down a narrow dirt track. The driver appeared puzzled. The rifle prodded against his arm, which quivered as at the touch of an electrode, and he changed down. The surface of the track was pitted with craters, in some of which icy pools remained.
Vorontsyev watched the sky, and the road ahead. It would be some time before the men became dangerous again with renewed hatred; and by that time he would have dumped them, and the driver. He would not kill them. He would simply leave them, in the middle of nowhere, on foot.