Marine I SBS

by David Monnery

  Colhoun paused to take a sip of tea, and to watch the size of the task percolate into McClure’s consciousness. ‘Major Galloway here will be in overall command of the operation, and you’ll lead the insertion team. But before you get too excited,’ he added, seeing the excitement in McClure’s eyes, ‘I should tell you that the woman is going in as part of the team.’

  McClure was surprised, and looked it. But contrary to Colhoun’s expectations he didn’t kick up a fuss. He didn’t even protest.

  ‘Is she physically capable?’ he asked. The idea of taking her with them actually appealed to him, although he wasn’t sure why. Maybe just because it increased the challenge.

  ‘I’m told she is.’

  ‘Why does she have to go?’ McClure asked, more because he thought the question was expected than because he really cared.

  Colhoun smiled. ‘First off, because she’s refused to give us the exact location until we promise to take her along. And second, because I think she’ll probably be more of a plus than a minus – she knows the local geography, she’s an expert on the Caspian Sea – it was her job – and as well as fair English she speaks Azeri Turkish, which I assume you don’t.’

  ‘No,’ McClure said, as if it was a straight question. ‘But why does she want to go? What’s in it for her?’

  ‘She was Shadmanov’s mistress before the Iraqis snatched him and his wife. And I think she feels we may just destroy the place without caring too much about who gets hurt in the process.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like too bad an idea,’ McClure commented.

  ‘It may come to that. First, we have to be sure what’s going on there.’

  ‘Makes sense. So do I get any say in who else goes along?’

  ‘I’m afraid not – CO’s privilege. You’ll take Noonan, whom you already know, and Stuart Finn. Do you know him?’

  ‘Only by sight.’

  ‘He’s young but he’s got experience, including combat. He was in the team that was sent to Singapore to help with the anti-piracy campaign.’

  ‘I thought they were still out there.’

  ‘They got back a few days ago.’

  ‘He sounds fine,’ McClure said, wondering why Colhoun hadn’t asked Callum Marker to lead this mission. Someone up there was obviously smiling down at him.

  Darkness had fallen over the Caspian, leaving the distant lights of Baku to shine like a forest of enchantment on the horizon. ‘I’m sick of this place,’ Farida Shadmanova said, turning away from the window and pacing across the large room she shared with her husband. ‘There’s nothing to do, and no chance of getting any exercise – I’ve put on two kilos in less than a month.’

  Shadmanov looked up from his book, but didn’t think it was worth reminding her that there was a well-stocked library or that she had never taken any exercise in her life. ‘I thought you were pleased that I was working for the military again,’ he said.

  ‘I am. Though of course if you had agreed to stay on in Moscow where we had a good life . . . But no, you had to come back to Baku, which we outgrew twenty years ago.’

  ‘We are Azeris, not Russians.’

  ‘I know.’ She stopped pacing for a moment. ‘I was talking to someone in the recreation room. He said that once we have nuclear weapons and the Armenians are forced back, the West will help us develop the oilfields and Azerbaijan will become rich, like one of the Arab oil states. Do you think that’s true?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘And if you are the nation’s top nuclear scientist . . .’ She let the thought fade, but her husband knew where it was headed. The two of them would be back among the privileged elite again – not the second-class intellectual elite of university life, but the real thing, like in the old Soviet days when he was one of the highest-ranking military scientists and she had rubbed shoulders with the wives of astronauts and politburo members.

  She had started nervously pacing again. He could remember how exciting her overflowing energy had once seemed to him – that and her body had been attraction enough nearly thirty years ago – but nowadays it just made him feel tired. He supposed being locked up here was harder for her than him – he at least had work to occupy his time – but with any luck she would find someone to have an affair with. Pulling it off with discretion in such a small space and community should keep her busy for at least some of the time.

  He sighed and went back to his book, thinking how unimportant such things were in the grand scheme of a nuclear universe.

  The first team conference took place in the SBS briefing room on the day after Colhoun’s initial meeting with McClure. Noonan and Finn had been given the time and place the previous evening, but neither had any idea what it was about. Raisa Karayeva had been brought down on the train by her MI6 minders, and eyed with a mixture of interest and concern the four men whom fate had thrown across her path.

  All but the major were younger than her, and he didn’t seem much older. None of them was particularly big, but they all looked tough and fit, and somewhat to her surprise there also seemed to be a watchful intelligence in each man’s eyes.

  The major cheerfully introduced them in turn. The team leader – the one who would actually be in charge where it mattered – acknowledged her with a diffidence which could have been shyness, could have been simple indifference. No doubt she would soon find out which. He told her to simply call him ‘McClure’, and seemed amused by her difficulty with the unfamiliar double consonant. As a colleague of male scientists she was used to men who were experts at shutting down their emotions, but within minutes of meeting McClure she knew she was in the presence of a master.

  The other two were a different matter. The curly-haired one – ‘call me Paul’ – seemed the most uncertain of the three, but he had a friendly smile, and she felt right away that she could count on him to do the right thing in any given situation. The one with the slicked-back hair – ‘just Finn’ – was obviously a bit of a flirt, and it was hard to tell what the man inside was like.

  The three SBS men were also taking her measure, almost literally in Finn’s case. He and Noonan didn’t yet know who she was; McClure, by contrast, was pleasantly surprised by what he saw. She looked fit enough, and she didn’t look stupid.

  Galloway began by outlining the background to the intended operation, casting occasional glances at Raisa to see if she wanted to correct anything, and then bluntly stated the bare bones of what was expected of them. Noonan seemed a bit taken aback, but Finn seemed almost amused by it all. McClure just sat there, only his eyes betraying his obvious excitement. ‘This is just a preliminary briefing,’ the major told them. ‘We’re not in any rush – this is one of those times when doing it properly is more important than doing it fast. What we have to work out today is a rough plan of action. Once we have that we’ll have a better idea of what we still need to know.’

  He reached behind him for a map, and spread it out on the table. It was an old Soviet map, Raisa immediately realized, covering the central third of the Caspian, with English translations neatly added in pencil alongside the Cyrillic Russian annotations.

  ‘So where exactly are we going?’ Galloway asked her.

  She hesitated for only a second – Constantine and Clarke had both given their word, and if they betrayed her now it was just too bad. ‘Here,’ she said, pointing it out with her right index finger. ‘There are two rigs, joined by a bridge. Aliyev A and Aliyev B.’

  They asked her questions about the rigs themselves, the other man-made structures nearby, the local weather conditions, the Caspian itself. She answered them all without hesitation, and could see that they were impressed.

  ‘So how do we get in, boss?’ Finn asked Galloway.

  ‘My preference is a HAHO drop. That means high altitude, high opening,’ he explained to Raisa. ‘We leave the plane at about 30,000 feet, open the parachutes immediately, and glide for about an hour before touching down. The advantages of this method are that the chances of the plane being seen are neg
ligible, because it’s so high up and because it doesn’t have to come closer than forty kilometres to the target area.’

  ‘The disadvantages are that your balls both freeze,’ Noonan murmured. ‘But that won’t affect you . . .’

  ‘I see from your records that you two both took refresher courses last year,’ Galloway said to McClure and Noonan. ‘But Finn here . . .’

  ‘I haven’t jumped out of a plane since initial training,’ the man in question admitted.

  ‘Well, assuming we take this route, you and Raisa can go up to Brize Norton together. Either way, I don’t think we’ll have any problems getting in. The difficult part would seem to be getting out again.’

  ‘I don’t suppose we could just row to the nearest friendly port?’ Noonan wondered.

  Raisa suppressed a giggle, but Galloway didn’t seem to see the funny side. ‘The countries bordering the Caspian,’ he said, ‘are Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Iran. None of them are what you’d call friendly. The nearest friendly country is Turkey.’

  ‘And that’s stretching the definition of friendly,’ Finn observed. ‘How far away is it?’

  Galloway produced another map, one that took in the wider region. ‘About seven hundred kilometres,’ he said. ‘A Sea King could probably be fitted up to make the distance. But it would have to fly over either Armenia or Iran. Probably Armenia.’

  ‘And it would have to fly damn low,’ Finn added. ‘Over this lot,’ he added, running a finger down the spine of the mountains which lay across the potential route.

  ‘Across Nagorno-Karabakh,’ Raisa pointed out.

  ‘Oh-oh,’ Finn muttered. ‘Is that war still going on?’

  ‘It is peaceful now,’ she said, ‘but the war cannot end.’

  ‘They’ve just stopped for a breather,’ Finn suggested.

  ‘We’d better find out what sort of anti-aircraft weaponry they’ve been using down there,’ McClure suggested softly.

  ‘Right. This is obviously not going to be a cakewalk, but let’s just assume for the moment we can get ourselves in and out. The next question is, how long do we need on the ground? We might be able to manage a HAHO drop, check out the place, grab the professor, get to a pick-up point and fly back to Turkey, all in the one night, but a schedule like that sounds too tight for comfort. So . . . maybe we should think about spending one whole day on one of the rigs. Set up a concealed OP, get an idea of the routines and then do the business as early as we can on the second night.’ He turned to Raisa. ‘I’m assuming these rigs are big enough to hide out on?’

  ‘They are big, like a house with ten floors, yes?’ She shrugged. ‘I think there are many places for hiding.’

  ‘Some satellite photographs should be coming through tomorrow,’ Galloway added. ‘They should give us a better idea.’ He looked at a map for a moment. ‘OK. It seems to me that the professor and his wife could turn into another problem. They’ve no idea we’re coming, and there’s no way of letting them know. It’s going to be a shock for both of them. How are they going to react?’

  He was looking at her again.

  ‘It is difficult to say,’ she said. ‘Tamarlan . . . I think . . . I am not certain of this, but I think he will be unhappy to work in this place making the nuclear bombs. He will be pleased to escape this.’

  ‘And his wife?’ Galloway asked. How would she react to the sudden arrival of her husband’s mistress with a bunch of foreign soldiers. Did she even know a mistress existed?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Raisa admitted. ‘I never met her.’

  There was a silence while everyone tried to imagine themselves in Farida Shadmanova’s shoes at the crucial moment. But there was simply no way of knowing.

  ‘We shall need a plan which covers every possibility,’ Galloway said eventually. ‘Including knocking her cold and leaving her behind, or, if her husband objects to that, bringing her with us whether she’s willing or not.’ He turned to Raisa. ‘Will he want her to come, do you think?’

  She shook her head. ‘I do not know.’ She should know, she thought.

  ‘OK. Third problem. We need a location for the pick-up. Not too far from the rig, but not too close either. Say, between twenty and thirty kilometres away.’

  ‘Narghin,’ she said without hesitation. ‘It is here,’ she added, pointing it out on the map. ‘It was Soviet prison island, but now no one is there.’

  It was twenty-four kilometres from the target, and twenty-four kilometres nearer to the Turkish border. ‘Looks good,’ Galloway said. ‘Any thoughts?’ he asked the other three.

  Noonan looked up with a start. He’d been thinking that this particular jaunt was a far cry from boarding a ship in mid-Channel. This time it looked like they were going to be out on a very long and very rickety limb. With no sign of a safety net.

  It was Finn who asked the question, though. ‘Do we have any idea what sort of opposition we can expect?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Galloway admitted.

  ‘There will be KGB,’ Raisa volunteered. ‘They have new name, but I forget. They are same KGB as always.’

  ‘And the Iraqis may have their own security people involved,’ McClure added. ‘From the Mukhabarat, probably. The same bastards who tortured our prisoners during the Gulf War.’

  Hearing this, Noonan decided that his previous thoughts had been unduly optimistic. This was beginning to sound like one of those adventure-book missions in which most of the medals were awarded posthumously.

  * * *

  The club was on one of the small streets between the Strand and the Embankment, and Manny Salewicz arrived for lunch not expecting much in the way of culinary joy. ‘What the English can cook, they cook well,’ as one of his fellow US Embassy colleagues had remarked, adding that they could only cook two dishes – roast beef and roast lamb.

  Both, Salewicz was pleased to see, were on the menu. He chose the latter – there was no point in risking Mad Cow Disease – and asked Hanson to what he owed the pleasure of the invitation.

  Hanson smiled, for he had grown rather fond of the CIA man over the last few months. ‘Let’s eat first,’ he said, and for the next half-hour they did just that, filling in the spaces between mouthfuls with topics as diverse as the O. J. Simpson trial, the latest Prime Suspect and the rumoured government plan to sell off the Houses of Parliament. It was a full hour before Hanson brought them back to business, as they relaxed over a glass of excellent port in a secluded corner of the members’ lounge.

  ‘We’ve received some rather interesting intelligence,’ the MI6 chief began. ‘It seems that Saddam has decided to become a cuckoo and lay his nuclear eggs in someone else’s nest.’

  ‘Whose, for Chrissake?’

  ‘Azerbaijan’s.’

  Salewicz looked stunned.

  ‘It’s a Muslim country, but not a fundamentalist one. It was part of the Soviet Union, so it has the necessary technological base, but it’s in a region which no one’s very interested in these days – there are too many problems and the only thing they have which anyone else wants is offshore oil. And they’re frightened enough of the Armenians to accept Saddam as a nuclear partner.’

  The American seemed less than convinced. ‘What’s the intelligence source?’ he wanted to know.

  Hanson told him about Raisa Karayeva, omitting only her name, and then widened the picture to include Constantine’s theories and other circumstantial evidence that had been gathered over the past couple of weeks.

  ‘Where is the woman now?’ Salewicz asked when Hanson had finished.

  ‘In a safe house. We’re going to check out her story on the ground,’ he went on. ‘That’s why I asked you to lunch – consultation between allies, I think it’s called.’

  ‘Uh-huh. And exactly how are you planning to check it out?’

  Hanson sipped at the rose-red nectar. ‘We’re sending some people in. Special forces people.’

  Salewicz nearly choked on his port. ‘How? From where?’

&n
bsp; ‘By plane from Cyprus.’

  The American studied a mental map. ‘Across Turkey. The Turks’ll go apeshit if they find out.’ He reached for his glass and another thought struck him. ‘You can put ’em in with a Hercules, but you can’t pull ’em out the same way. How are you planning to get these guys back?’

  Hanson told him.

  ‘And I suppose the Turks won’t notice this flight from their own airfield?’ Salewicz asked sarcastically.

  ‘It’s a NATO airfield,’ Hanson corrected him. ‘And I’m sure we can come up with a story which will satisfy them. The helicopter can be on a humanitarian mission – one of our gallant nurses lost in Nagorno-Karabakh – something like that. We’ll think of . . . What?’ he asked, seeing the smile spreading on the American’s face.

  ‘And exactly which airfield are you planning to use?’ he asked.

  ‘Dogubayazit. It’s the only one close enough.’

  ‘And it just happens to be the one the US Air Force uses for patrolling the Iraqi no-fly zone. If the Turks find out they will be hanging our guts out on a line. They take this Pan-Turkic crap really seriously, you know? The Azeris are their long-lost brothers, like the Uzbeks and God knows who else . . .’

  ‘I can’t believe anyone in Ankara will want Saddam to build up a nuclear arsenal, in Azerbaijan or anywhere else.’

  Salewicz shook his head. ‘They wouldn’t give a damn. And they have a lot more in common with Iraq than people realize – not only the Muslim angle but a mutual interest in killing off the Kurds. And of course Turkey and Azerbaijan have the same relationship to the Armenians. I wouldn’t put it past the Turks to demand a share of these nukes, and use them to threaten the Greeks. These are not people who understand power in the real world – they still think it comes out of the barrel of a gun.’

  ‘Doesn’t it?’

  Salewicz grinned at him. ‘You know, talking to you, I always get the feeling I know exactly how the British both won and lost their empire.’

  Hanson smiled back. ‘So you’ll let us use your strip of Turkish tarmac?’

  ‘Hey, this is a Special Relationship, right?’