Galloway finished up with the weather report. ‘It couldn’t be much better,’ he told them. ‘The overnight low will be around ten to twelve degrees, thin cloud at around three thousand metres, not much in the way of wind at any level, and the sea should be calm.’
‘That is good,’ Raisa said, seeing it in her mind’s eye.
‘Any last questions?’ Galloway asked.
There were none. He led them outside, where they piled into the two waiting jeeps and started off across the wide expanse of empty tarmac. It was a cool evening for Cyprus, with a light breeze blowing and a clear sky overhead. The crescent moon hung in the western sky, lighting the distant Mediterranean. It would be below the horizon in a couple of hours.
Ahead of them the camouflaged Hercules was warming up its engines beneath the yellow floodlights. They clambered out of the jeeps, half heard the good-luck wishes of the two squaddie drivers, and climbed up into the belly of the monster. After the training runs of the previous week the interior was familiar, but not completely so. This was an MC130, the special forces variant with electronic jamming gear, secure communications and precision navigation systems. It had been designed for the insertion of deep-penetration missions and its maintenance crew had obviously taken such an exalted purpose to heart, for the plane was spotless.
The seating was just as cramped though, and no one was in a hurry to strap themselves in. While Galloway and McClure checked the equipment on the two pallets the other three shuffled from foot to foot, listening to the roar of the four engines outside.
The RAF crew of four each came back to say hello. They seemed friendly enough, and not at all nervous about their forthcoming intrusion into Turkish, Armenian and Azeri airspace. But that was hardly surprising, Finn thought – pilots were known to be the craziest people alive.
Once the ten-minute warning had been given, the four members of the team went through the checking procedures they had been taught, giving a thorough once-over to the main and reserve parachutes, and all the various straps, ties and releases which they would be using. Satisfied, they strapped themselves into the webbed seats and waited. Within a few minutes the plane was in motion, taxiing across the airfield. The Alison turboprop engines hit a higher note and the giant plane accelerated down the runway, creaking and rumbling with discontent, before allowing itself to be lifted into the sky. It was like a fat woman getting out of a chair, Noonan thought – you knew she could do it, but it took so much fucking effort.
For the first few minutes, as the plane gained height, no one tried to compete with the roar of the engines. Finn was the first to speak, wondering out loud why the RAF couldn’t lay on a film for long flights.
‘I suppose you’d like ice-creams, too,’ one of the crew said from the cabin door.
‘Popcorn would do.’
Noonan and Raisa laughed, and even McClure managed a thin smile.
This was more like it, Galloway thought. The funereal atmosphere had started him wondering how many of the four would be coming back. He took a trip round the faces, trying to gauge what was going on in the minds behind them. Who needed encouragement? Who needed lightening up? Who needed calming down?
All three men seemed self-absorbed, but Galloway could detect no signs of incipient panic, or, what would be worse, massive overconfidence. They had been trained for moments like this, and indeed they would have stood little chance of qualifying for membership of the SBS if they hadn’t demonstrated such capacities in initial training. Sometimes the jump from the training ground to the real thing exposed an unsuspected flaw in a man’s make-up, but not often. All three of these men had made this jump at least once without faltering, and Galloway saw no reason to believe that they would do so now.
As for the woman, she seemed remarkably calm and collected for someone who had never done anything remotely comparable before, but then she had been that way ever since she joined the team. If it was all a façade, then it was a damn good one.
Raisa momentarily felt his eyes on her and smiled back. She was feeling a host of conflicting emotions, some positive, some negative, some neither one nor the other. She had never really been a team player, and, crazy as it seemed, she felt as close to these three men as any group of people she had ever known. It felt good to be part of a team, really good – like an ideal halfway house between solitude and the intimacy of one-to-one relationships. It felt like a new world, a new life, almost as if she was being reborn.
But where was this new life taking her? Where else but back home, back towards the old life, her beloved sea and her married lover. She really didn’t know how she’d feel about Tamarlan when the moment came – all that seemed so long ago. But maybe she was kidding herself, maybe the old life was the real one, and this playing at soldiers was just a momentary madness.
She supposed she would find out soon enough, and in the meantime there were more important things to worry about, like jumping out of a plane at ten thousand metres and rescuing Tamarlan from the KGB. The plane didn’t actually worry her – she was rather looking forward to it – but she did feel anxious about the imminent confrontation with him and his wife. It seemed so utterly unpredictable.
As far as she knew, they were under orders to take Tamarlan with them only if he agreed to go, but such a policy seemed scarcely credible, and she suspected that McClure probably had secret instructions to bring the scientist out whether or not he was willing. If this was indeed the case, she really didn’t know what to think. If Tamarlan proved unwilling to leave on his wife’s account, then she knew she would find it hard to be sympathetic, considering what else was at stake. But if he had a better reason, one that had not yet occurred to her, then . . .
She was looking forward to the descent, but the real problems would start around sea level.
Sitting a metre or so to her left, Noonan was thinking about the telephone conversation he had had with Julie earlier that evening. It had been OK, but she had seemed so far away, or at least that was the way it had felt to him. According to her, it had been him who had sounded like his mind was somewhere else.
He thought about the night they’d made love, as he often had over the past eight days. It had been so incredible, so much better than anything he’d ever experienced before, and the thought that it might never happen again was almost more than he could bear. If she met someone else . . . The mere thought sent his stomach into free fall.
He’d be back in a few days. Provided he made it.
This one was real, he thought. The cling-wrapped grenade-launchers and MP5s on the pallet were real. At the time he had thought the business in the Channel had been the real thing – it had been for that poor Russian bastard – but even before they’d found out it was all a set-up it had been hard to see that op as anything out of the ordinary. They’d only been sixty kilometres from Poole, for fuck’s sake. It had felt like a tougher-than-usual training exercise.
Parachuting into a sea surrounded by hostile countries was something else again. There’d be real opposition, a good chance of a real baptism of fire. All those guys in the pubs back home could take their next night of passion pretty much for granted – all they had to do was look left and right before they crossed the road and not get their dicks caught in their zip. Whereas he’d only get another chance to feel Julie’s lovely body up against his if he was quick and lucky enough when it came to the crunch.
Funny thing was, he’d never appreciated before just how safe other people’s lives were.
‘You get used to it,’ Finn said softly. He was sitting facing Noonan, a slight smile on his face, looking as though he did this sort of thing twice a week just to keep himself in shape.
‘I’ll let you know,’ Noonan said ruefully.
‘You won’t need to,’ Finn told him, and shut his eyes again. Like fuck you got used to it, he told himself. But maybe saying so would make Noonan feel better. The anxiety in the boy’s eyes had been getting to him.
He always found himself asking the same du
mb question at times like this: what the fuck was he doing here? It had occurred to him in the helicopter as they headed for the Haitian island the previous summer, and again as he climbed aboard the pirated freighter less than a month before. He was no nearer an answer on this occasion than he had been on those.
There had been three other men on the Haitian and the South China Sea missions: Callum Marker, Rob Cafell and Ian Dubery. Rob and Ian were both in love with the sea, and either of them could have found any number of sea-related jobs which didn’t involve such frequent dicing with death. Marker was both clever and competent, and, false modesty aside, Finn thought he could say the same for himself. There was any number of things either of them could have done with their lives, so why this?
He could say the same of Noonan, he thought, though McClure was something else again. Out of the corner of his eye, Finn could see the team leader conscientiously cleaning his Browning High Power, his face an absolute mask. No, it was hard to imagine McClure as anything but a soldier.
But the rest of them . . . they had chosen. He himself could have gone to university, or gone into business – only a couple of months ago he had spent most of a weekend sorting out his cousin’s recording studio accounts for him. Or he could have been an adventure holidays tour guide, with interesting information coming out of his ears. Or a gigolo specializing in young heiresses.
He could have gone for anything. So why was he sitting in the belly of this rumbling metal bucket with wings, about to risk getting his balls shot off by diverse foreigners, and all for the greater glory of a Queen and Country which he found about as convincing as Chelsea’s back four? He had no more idea this time than last. The only difference was a growing suspicion that he never would.
To Finn’s left, McClure was finding that the rumble of the Hercules provided an almost musical accompaniment to his state of mind. Years ago, as a teenager, he had seen the Vietnam film Apocalypse Now, and been really taken by the US Air Cav’s use of chopper-borne loudspeakers to blast out stirring music during their airborne attacks. He had found out later that the piece in question was called The Ride of the Valkyries, but he supposed it didn’t matter much which music was used – anything that provided an adrenalin rush would do.
Not that the SBS was ever likely to need any such accompaniment – their missions, almost without exception, relied on stealth for their success.
This one would be no exception. If there was to be any contact with the enemy it would have to be both silent and invisible, at least up until the moment they had the scientist safely in the bag.
McClure looked round briefly at the other members of his team – the woman, the cocky Londoner, the kid. In a couple of hours they would all be heading into the unknown, where, no matter how many contingencies you planned for, every moment was beautifully unpredictable. It was like stepping out on to a high wire on a windy day, and only the best made it across.
He was one of the best, and a big part of the reason why was a willingness to risk his own life. He had nothing to lose – it was as simple as that.
As always, the thought seemed to prise him open, to offer a fleeting glimpse of unbearable loss. One more heartbeat and it was gone, leaving him staring across the fuselage at Raisa.
He carried on cleaning the Browning.
The minutes went by, and the hours. They were told when they had entered Turkish airspace, then told when they were passing over Mount Ararat and crossing into Armenian skies. Another half-hour and they were nearly ten thousand metres above the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh enclave and heading out over Azerbaijan proper. A few minutes later the officer who was doubling as the dispatcher emerged from the crew cabin and gave them the fifteen-minute warning.
The four team members unstrapped themselves and reached for the dry suits which they would be wearing over their combat fatigues until they reached the rig. Each of them fought their way into the tight rubber garment, pinching their ears as they pushed their heads through the skin-tight neck seal, and then set about hoisting themselves into the parachute harnesses. This done, they cracked the shells of the chemical lights on the back of one another’s helmets, put on the Passive Night Goggles, and offered themselves to each other for a thorough check.
‘It’s time to hook up,’ the dispatcher shouted, attaching the plastic hose from his own mask to one of the two oxygen consoles in the centre of the plane. Galloway and the team followed suit, and at a word from the dispatcher the pilot began the process of depressurization. Ears began popping and the air grew steadily colder.
‘Switch,’ the dispatcher ordered, and they all shifted their hose connectors from the central console to the bottles attached to their belts, each of which contained thirty minutes’ worth of oxygen. An additional rumble served notice that the tailgate doors were being opened, but within seconds this symphonic variation had been lost in the overall roar of the Hercules’s slipstream. Stars appeared in the widening jaws.
As the ramp settled into place McClure and Noonan pulled the two pallets into position, and then did a final check on the remote units they would be using to manoeuvre the Controlled Air Delivery chutes. Each pallet bore a deflated Gemini and rocket-launcher; one carried two MP5s, the other an MP5 and the sniper rifle. It would all have fitted easily enough on one pallet, but, as with the boats, Galloway had decided that a backup was advisable.
‘Two minutes,’ the dispatcher yelled over the roar of the engines and slipstream, holding up two fingers in confirmation.
The four of them waited beneath the glowing red lamp, right hands gripping the parachute static line, left hands resting on top of the reserve chutes strapped to their chests. There was a forest of stars visible through the opening, tailing down into the dark vagueness of clouds far below. Galloway was patting each of them on the back, grinning encouragement through his oxygen mask.
The light turned green. The dispatcher and his assistant heaved the first pallet forward across the rattling rollers and out into space. The second swiftly followed, and then the four team members, with what seemed hardly a step between them, were throwing themselves out into the thin air. The slipstream grabbed them, threw them forward, and then, as if deciding it no longer wanted them, allowed them to fall.
Each mentally counted second seemed like an eternity as they struggled to stabilize their plummeting bodies, face down with backs arched, legs and arms extended. Each second count reached ten, each hand reached for the rip-cord, and each chute billowed open, jerking its human cargo upright. Below them the CAD chutes had halted the plunge of the two pallets, and as McClure and Noonan took control of both their own and the equipment’s downward trajectory, the less experienced Finn and Raisa concentrated on using their control toggles to keep in line of glide behind the others. Above them the fiercely glittering stars only emphasized how cold it was, while the world beneath their feet seemed composed of dark-grey smoke. It reminded Finn of a black hole as envisaged by the makers of Star Trek. Against this emptiness the chutes below seemed like pale-grey flowers, the green pinpoints of chemical light on the helmets like sheltering fireflies.
As the minutes went by this view seemed not to change one iota, and if it hadn’t been for the perceptible warming of the air around them the foursome could have been forgiven for believing that they were in orbit around the earth rather than falling towards it.
At the rear of the line, Raisa found that even the daunting prospect of the next thirty-six hours couldn’t drain the pleasure from the experience. According to the plan, they would be in the air for around fifty-seven minutes, gliding something like thirty kilometres before splashdown, and there wasn’t a lot she had to do in the meantime but keep in line and enjoy the view. There wasn’t much to see yet, but the feeling . . . well, it had to be something like the weightlessness astronauts enjoyed, a kind of physical freedom which had no earthbound parallels. From the first jump at Brize Norton she had loved it, and she was damned if this was going to be her last such experience.
For McClure and Noonan there was less time for such thoughts . . . controlling both their own and the pallets’ descent was a rather more demanding business. And as they fell towards the thin layer of cloud McClure felt his anxiety building. The one thing which could abort the mission before it started – and see the four of them swiftly marched off to jail or worse – was the presence of unfriendly eyes in their drop zone. The Caspian was not a crowded sea where shipping was concerned, and they had chosen a DZ removed from all the known lanes, but there was no way of knowing where or when any of the various navies might choose to exercise or what sudden whim might motivate the master of a single fishing boat.
An increase in the dampness of the air and a slight fading of upward visibility told McClure that they had entered the highest layer of cloud. The chutes began to sway more as the water vapour grew denser, and for about five minutes the team found themselves gliding silently down through the wet mist, devoid of all reference points save the position of their own bodies.
And then suddenly McClure was out in the open, about three thousand metres above a dark and apparently empty sea. He could see faint and scattered lights far away to the west, and others, closer, to the north, but there were none in the wide expanse of water towards which they were falling. So far so good. He glanced up quickly to check that the others were still holding their positions. They were.
The final fifteen minutes of their descent seemed to pass quickly. McClure’s altimeter was showing two hundred metres when the pallet under his control hit the surface. He released his bergen to hang beneath his feet on the bungee cord and pulled on both toggles to break his forward speed. At a hundred metres above the water he jettisoned the reserve chute and positioned his hands above the cape-well releases. A second before hitting the water he pressed down, the shoulder-straps fell away and the slight breeze carried the billowing chute to one side.
Marine I SBS Page 12