Marine I SBS

by David Monnery

  10

  The countryside beneath her was a patchwork of muted greens and browns, so unlike any part of the land she called home. There was a softness, a moistness, almost a sensuousness about the English landscape. It was like a puppy, she thought, friendly and comforting.

  The first time she had stepped forward on to the edge of the C-130’s open ramp she had been terrified, and knowing that the young men all around were feeling much the same had been only marginally helpful. They were hiding their first-jump fears in near-hysterical humour, but her grasp of the language still wasn’t good enough to let her share in the jokes, and she had found it hard to remember ever feeling more alone. But Finn had squeezed her hand at just the right moment, and after the first petrifying moments – plummeting towards the earth, trying to stabilize her body posture, hoping that her parachute wasn’t going to be the first to fail at No. 1 Parachute Training School for years – she had pulled the rip-cord, heard and felt the chute billow open above her, and started to float.

  And it had felt more wonderful than she could ever have imagined. In that moment she had understood how incredible it must have felt to fly in the days before air-pressurized cabins and Perspex cockpits.

  Here and now, halfway through her fifth jump in three days, it still felt like magic. The spiralling line of men below, the others above, all floating down towards the runway-bisected green expanse of Brize Norton airfield. Off to the right, in the clear, late-afternoon air, she could see the sunlight washing the spires of distant Oxford.

  The ground, meanwhile, was leaping to meet her. The main danger in parachuting, she had decided after her very first jump, was in getting so wrapped up in the wonder of flight that the business of landing properly got relegated to an afterthought.

  She concentrated, hitting the grass with legs bending and body rolling, as the instructors had taught them on the practice harness. A perfect landing, she told herself – she was getting good at this. It seemed a shame that when it came to the real thing they would be landing on water.

  She got up and started gathering in the chute. Twenty metres away Finn was landing, his roll somewhat less graceful than hers. He grinned at her from the ground.

  As they walked back across the grass towards the base buildings she remembered seeing Oxford in the distance, and asked him if there was any chance of a visit. She felt like a child asking for a treat, but that was the way she was being treated; everything was supplied – food, a bed, a programme of events for each day.

  ‘Don’t see why not,’ Finn said. ‘If we’re going to go, we’d better do it this evening. Tomorrow we’ve got the night drop, and then we’re finished.’

  ‘Then we are ready?’ she asked, surprised.

  ‘Not quite. We’ll be practising HAHO drops over the Mediterranean once we get to Cyprus.’

  ‘Into the sea,’ she murmured.

  Finn looked at her. ‘You’ve enjoyed this, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, smiling. There was one obvious advantage to being treated like a child – you got to play.

  He smiled back. Against his expectations, Finn had come to like her over the last few days. She had guts, and she also had a sense of humour. If he ever got kidnapped by the government and locked up on a North Sea oil rig he hoped that there would be someone like her to come and rescue him. ‘I’ll try and wangle us some private transport,’ he told her.

  ‘Wangle?’ she echoed, but he was already gone.

  An hour later they were driving through the twilit Oxfordshire countryside in a covered jeep, the last of the day’s sunlight flickering through the lines of bare trees. ‘So what do you think of England?’ he asked her.

  ‘It is beautiful,’ she said. And it was, but it was the beauty of shadows, not of light. ‘I do not meet many people, and they are not ordinary, yes? You are not ordinary.’

  ‘I suppose I’m better-looking and cleverer than most,’ Finn said, grinning. ‘Are you ordinary in Azerbaijan?’

  ‘No, I do not think I am. It is a traditional country, yes? Most people live outside the city. They are poor and religious and have the narrow minds. Baku is different, but still the tradition is very important. Only a few women have jobs – you go in the streets and there is only men. And of course I am half Armenian,’ she added, almost as an afterthought.

  ‘Have you ever lived in Armenia?’

  ‘No, but I often go to visit my mother’s family in the old Soviet days, before the trouble in Nagorno-Karabakh. It is good in the mountains, but I like the sea too much. And in Armenia now I will be half Azeri,’ she added.

  Finn glanced across but there was no self-pity in her face. He supposed that now ethnic cleansing was all the fashion there had to be millions of people like her, people who had once had a foot in both camps, and who now had nowhere at all to put so much as a toe. ‘This is Oxford,’ he announced, pulling out to pass a stationary town bus.

  While the other two members of the team were honing their jumping, McClure and Noonan were applying their detective skills to the twin rig in the Caspian. It didn’t take long to discover that it had been constructed in situ by the South Koreans, but diplomatically reinforced enquiries of the firm in question failed to produce the original plans. It was no surprise that the Soviet buyers had included a non-disclosure clause in the original contract – in Cold War terms the rigs would have been a significant military target – but the South Koreans’ refusal to consider the clause as redundant as the original purchasers was rather more irritating.

  But there was a silver lining to this particular cloud. The rigs in the Caspian, as the South Korean firm’s PR admitted to the British military attaché in Seoul, were very similar to another pair which the company had erected in the North Sea. Tempests Alpha and Bravo, the oil company had named them.

  When the attaché pressed him on the differences between these rigs and the pair in the Caspian the South Korean smiled coyly and said that he presumed the Soviets had given theirs Russian names.

  Armed with this information, McClure and Noonan flew to Aberdeen and took a chopper out to Tempest Alpha, where the rig boss, alerted by Galloway in advance, gave them a free run of the installation. On the day of their arrival this wasn’t such a boon as it seemed, for rain was pouring out of a leaden sky, considerably reducing visibility and the rig’s photogenicity, and borrowing one of the divers’ boats to take a closer look at the underside was out of the question.

  The two men spent the day drinking tea in the canteen and watching crap films on the recreation room video. For over a decade undercover SBS men had held the primary responsibility for security on Britain’s North Sea installations, and McClure had already spent several months of his life on a rig similar to this one. Now, sandwiching an umpteenth viewing of The Dirty Dozen between scarcely distinguishable porn flicks, he was forcibly reminded of what a miserable experience it had been.

  By the next morning the weather had cleared and the two men were able to examine both rigs, inside and out, top and bottom, hindered only by the banter of the workforce. ‘They must be from interior decorating,’ one man observed, as they checked out the residential quarters. ‘In that case we’d like tartan carpets and apricot-white walls and gold-lamé curtains,’ his friend remarked, helpfully adding that the style was known as ‘Scottish brothel’. ‘It usually has a crossed thistle and condom motif,’ the first man explained.

  Back in Poole the next day they found Galloway had the American satellite photographs waiting for them, and once the North Sea photos had been developed the three men eagerly compared the two twin rigs. Of course the American pictures could only offer an aerial view, but even so the identical nature of the two basic structures was clear enough. The differences were mostly cosmetic: Aliyev B had lost both its drilling tower and crane derrick, Aliyev A its flare stack. The former actually looked deserted.

  ‘There’s our OP,’ McClure murmured.

  ‘I’ll get the illustrators to run up a model,’ Galloway said, r
eferring to the branch of the Royal Marines which provided the corps with the maps, plans and models needed for the fulfilment of its operational duties. ‘Now, what’s next?’ he asked. ‘How are you doing with the shopping list?’

  McClure pulled a notebook out of his shirt pocket. ‘There doesn’t seem much point in going in equipped to fight the Azeri army,’ he said. ‘If nothing goes badly wrong it’ll all be down to stealth, and if we do trigger an alarm then it’ll all be down to speed. So, the usual light weapons – silenced MP5s, silenced Brownings, a little C4, a few stun grenades for that certain moment . . .’ He smiled. ‘But I’d like to take a couple of M16/M203 combos, just in case the party gets rough and we need to slow down the pursuit. And an Accuracy International for taking out any guards that we can’t get close enough to. We can stack most of this stuff on the pallet with the Geminis.’

  ‘You want to take two Geminis?’ Galloway asked.

  ‘Two of the 3.8s with the new silencers. They’re so quiet that two sound hardly any louder than one. And it’ll give us more flexibility.’

  ‘And a backup,’ Noonan added.

  Galloway nodded. ‘OK,’ he agreed, gathering up the photographs. ‘I’ll get these across to the illustrators.’

  Outside the sun was shining, offering a fair reflection of his optimism. McClure was proving as thorough as Galloway had expected, and a job which he had originally thought offered no better than a fifty-fifty chance of success was now looking decidedly doable.

  The completed model was the first thing that Raisa and Finn saw on their return from Brize Norton two mornings later. She looked buoyant, Noonan thought, and infinitely more at ease than she had at the first team meeting a week before. ‘You two look like you’ve been having fun,’ he said.

  McClure just nodded a greeting and moved straight to business. ‘Is this what it looks like?’ he asked her.

  ‘I only see from long way,’ she said, ‘but yes, I think so.’

  ‘That’s a relief,’ Noonan said. ‘I don’t think the illustrators fancy another all-nighter.’

  ‘It is very good,’ she added, as if she thought aesthetic approval was being asked for.

  ‘The one thing we don’t know for sure,’ McClure said, ‘is where things are inside. We assume the professor and his wife will have a room somewhere in the residential section here’ – he pointed it out – ‘but there are four floors of rooms in the original design, and they could have converted other areas. The scientists could be sleeping in their labs for all we know.’

  Raisa examined the cutaway side of the model. ‘Where are the way outs from the living quarters?’ she asked.

  ‘Here and here,’ Noonan said, pointing them out.

  ‘Then the scientists will be here, on bottom level, far away from the way outs. And security people, they have the rooms near the way outs. That is the way, the old Soviet way, in the military places,’ she added. She could remember Tamarlan telling her about it, the usual wry smile on his face, as they sat in his car looking out over the Caspian.

  That afternoon, as McClure and Finn scoured the operational plan for potential problems, Noonan took Raisa across to the indoor firing range. When the team had first discussed weaponry she had left them to it, assuming that she wouldn’t be carrying any. But the others, and particularly McClure, had persuaded her that she should at least carry a handgun. If they were caught the Brits would stand a chance of a diplomatically arranged return home, but she would in all likelihood have to face a treason trial. She owed it to herself, they told her, not to surrender her life so cheaply.

  Which probably made sense, she thought, as Noonan handed her the 9mm Browning High Power and showed her how to load the thirteen-round magazine. It was not as heavy as she’d expected, and neither was the recoil hard to cope with. She stood as Noonan told her – legs braced and apart, both hands holding the gun at eye level with outstretched arms – and emptied the magazine in the direction of the target some twenty-five metres distant.

  The two of them walked down to see how she’d done, and Noonan let out a whistle of appreciation. All thirteen bullets had hit the card, and several of them had torn a jagged hole in the innermost circle.

  ‘Incredible,’ Noonan said. ‘I’ve never seen anyone do better. You didn’t work for a circus in your spare time, did you?’

  She laughed. First the parachuting, now this. She was discovering things about herself that seemed to belong to somebody else.

  The next day, a Friday, those concerned gathered in the Poole briefing room for the last time. The model of the Aliyev rigs again took centre stage, with the four-person team arranged in a rough semicircle on one side and Colhoun and Galloway on the other, separated by an easel with a large-scale map of the Caucasus area.

  Galloway ran through the entire operation from the starting gate in Cyprus to the finishing post in eastern Turkey, more as an exercise in clarification than because there were any major decisions still to be taken. Few questions were asked, and all of these were concerned with matters of detail.

  Colhoun then picked out a few points which he thought needed emphasizing. ‘One,’ he said, counting off a finger, ‘it is important that this mission remains our little secret, both before and after the event, and particularly from the Turks . . .’

  ‘Our gallant NATO partners,’ Finn murmured.

  ‘Whatever they are, they won’t like us invading their airspace or using their airfield to conduct a clandestine mission against a country which they consider a virtual ally. I don’t expect we’d think much of it if the situation was reversed. So keep the lid on it, both in Cyprus – where there are plenty of Turkish ears to the ground – and in Turkey itself. No celebrations until you get back to Poole, right?’

  They all nodded their acquiescence.

  ‘Two,’ Colhoun continued. ‘This may sound obvious, but getting out with a minimal amount of information will be a lot more use than getting caught with a perfectly framed photo of Saddam himself lighting the blue touch-paper. Shadmanov is the prime target – get him and everything else will be a bonus. He’ll be able to tell us everything we need to know. Any photos you can get of the rigs and the work in progress will be useful if it comes to further action in the future, but if we have Shadmanov’s testimony I doubt if any will be necessary – the politicos should be able to pressurize the Azeris into closing the place down and kicking the Iraqis out.’

  He checked the notes he’d made. ‘Point three. It may all go as smoothly as Derek made it sound, but if so it’ll be the first deep-penetration recce in history which didn’t throw up a single surprise. You’ve got a good plan, but don’t get trapped by it. Times and places can be changed. If you feel the need to stay a second day, you’ll be in radio contact with Derek at Dog-whatever – I can never remember the name.’

  ‘Dogubayazit, boss,’ Finn said fluently.

  ‘Thank you. And the same goes for the pick-up point – you can always change it. These burst-facility radios give us the flexibility, but you have to remember to make use of it.’ He looked round at the assembled faces – McClure blank, Finn smiling, Noonan and the woman serious and attentive. ‘OK, I know I’ve probably been telling you stuff you tell yourselves in your sleep – it just gives me the illusion of being involved. Any questions?’

  There were none, or at least none that anyone felt they could ask. There were too many variables for anyone to feel certain of success, at least in the manner they were envisaging, and they all knew it. Only time could answer the questions they really wanted to ask.

  ‘Right,’ Colhoun said, shuffling the papers on his knees and coming up with a particular sheet. ‘Last item. Now with any luck there’ll be no need for any of you to come within ten kilometres of the coast, but just in case . . . Apologies to you, Raisa, but these ignorant lads had probably never heard of Azerbaijan before the beginning of last week.’

  ‘It’s pronounced Azerbaijan, boss,’ Finn said mischievously, putting the accent on the last syllable.


  ‘With the exception of Mr Know-it-all, of course,’ Colhoun went on. ‘So I phoned the Foreign Office for a regional state of play. Tourists, you will be glad to know, are strongly recommended not to travel anywhere in the Caucasus. There’s one intermittent civil war going on in Georgia, and another in the Chechen region just across the mountains’ – he got up and pointed it out on the map – ‘which the Russians are still trying to stamp out. The war between Azerbaijan and Armenia has died down considerably over the last few months, but I’m told it could flare up again at any time. The Armenians are still occupying most of Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh region, so it’s not over. Most of the fighting is small-arms stuff, but there are some tanks and planes involved, most of them operated by Russians who hire themselves out to the highest bidder. It’s nasty stuff – the same sort of ethnic cleansing that’s going on in Bosnia. The numbers involved are a lot smaller, and there doesn’t seem to be the same predilection for atrocities, but it’s hard to be sure, as our media people seem to have lost interest in this war a couple of years ago.’

  ‘Moving south, Iran is a mellower place than it was ten years ago, but tourists are not advised to go there either, and the FO doesn’t think the current regime would welcome a British military team with open arms – except of course as potential hostages. On the eastern side of the Caspian there’s Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, both of which, like Azerbaijan, are states with large Muslim populations run by ex-communists. Your chances of getting out of either with the Shadmanovs and Raisa here are not good.’

  ‘Lastly, there’s Russia, and the Foreign Office doesn’t seem to have much of a clue as to how the authorities there might react. Yeltsin’s regime seems friendly to the one in Baku, but the FO finds it hard to believe that he would condone an Azeri nuclear programme. One thing they are certain of: the Russians will not be happy to find NATO soldiers paddling in their backyard, however good our reasons might be. And their reaction might not be very rational. For everyone’s sake the FO would prefer that they didn’t find out.’