There was no doubt in McClure’s mind. Alive, the driver was a possible threat to their mission. He abruptly raised the Browning to the man’s forehead, saw the light of terror leap from his eyes, and squeezed the trigger.
‘What the fuck . . . ?’ Finn exclaimed as the corpse collapsed on to the tarmac, but his voice trailed off. He heard Noonan gasp behind him, and saw Raisa’s lower lip hanging loose in surprise. It made sense, he thought. If the only thing that concerned you, the only thing, was maximizing the odds on their making a successful escape, then it made perfect sense.
So why did it feel so wrong?
This was not a good time to get philosophical. McClure was already dragging the body towards the nearest gap in the dunes, apparently unaware that he had upset the feelings of anyone other than the dead driver.
Finn exhaled noisily and checked the road in both directions. ‘Get in the back,’ he told Noonan.
‘But I want to . . .’
‘Yeah, I know. But get in the back.’
Through the wide window of the control tower Uday al-Dulaini watched as the refuelled Mi-8 lifted off and headed back out across the dimly lit tarmac towards the black emptiness of the Caspian. Behind him, Barzan al-Hassan and Azad Vezirov were leaning back in their chairs at either end of the table which held the open map. The Azeri was nursing his third glass of vodka, the Iraqi his second can of Coke.
Uday turned back to the map and looked at his watch. It was twenty past eight. ‘Almost twenty hours without a sighting,’ he said angrily.
Vezirov shrugged his shoulders. ‘They have gone to ground, that’s all. When they try to move we shall have them.’
‘It’s been dark for more than two hours,’ Uday snapped. ‘Unless they’re waiting to be picked up they’ll be on the move now.’
‘But the Turks have promised there will be no pick-up,’ Barzan said.
‘That’s what they said,’ Uday told him. ‘Who knows what deal they might have done with the Americans?’
‘I believe them,’ Vezirov said. ‘But it doesn’t matter anyway – our defence forces are on full alert. If a second helicopter did enter our airspace it would be shot down even quicker than the first.’
‘So we are back at the beginning,’ Uday argued. ‘If they are not waiting for a rescue then they will be moving.’ He leaned over the map again, and tried to put himself in the intruders’ shoes. Which way would he head? According to Vezirov’s experts the boats they were using had a limited range – they wouldn’t be able to reach the Turkmen or Iranian shores to the east and south, much less the Russian or Kazakh coasts to the north.
‘Perhaps they intend to stay where they are, give us the chance to tire of the search and convince ourselves that they are long gone. They could stay hidden for days, a week even.’ Vezirov looked at his empty glass and reluctantly placed it on the table. ‘Tomorrow we will search the islands again,’ he decided. ‘More thoroughly.’
‘You might be right,’ Uday conceded, ‘but I don’t think so. They were only expecting to be here for twenty-four hours – they will have some emergency rations but not that much. And there are at least five of them – six, according to the pilot they shot down. No, I think they are moving. The British, the Americans, whoever they are, they don’t have the temperament of the desert. They are only happy when they are active. They are moving. I feel it.’
‘If they cannot go north, south or east, they must go west,’ Barzan volunteered.
‘It seems crazy, but I think they have no other options,’ Uday agreed.
‘They have plenty of options on land,’ Vezirov said, leaning across the map. ‘They can head north towards Russia, south towards Iran, west towards Georgia or Armenia. But they won’t get far – there are road blocks on all the major roads.’
‘What if they don’t use the major roads?’
Vezirov smiled. ‘In Azerbaijan these are the only roads. If they try to escape overland we shall catch them.’
Uday looked at the Azeri, hoping his confidence wasn’t misplaced. He wondered what price Vezirov would pay for failure. Demotion? Retirement? His own punishment was likely to be more severe.
He went back to the map, staring fiercely down at it, as if he was hoping to force a disclosure of the enemy’s location by sheer will-power. The map stared back at him, its symbols beginning to blur in his tired vision. Through the connecting door he could hear another pilot reporting in: ‘No sighting, repeat, no sighting.’
In London it was shortly after half-past four in the afternoon. Outside it was raining, but in Martin Clarke’s room at the Foreign Office he and his research assistant were oblivious to just about everything but the insistent ring of the phone.
Since he had given his secretary strict instructions that their preparation of a written reply was not to be interrupted, Clarke could only assume the caller was someone who mattered. It turned out to be the SBS chief, whom he supposed just about qualified.
‘Will this take long?’ he asked, looking down at his naked partner. ‘I’m very busy.’
‘As long as it takes,’ Colhoun said, ‘unless you’d rather I take it up with the PM in person.’
That was the access which qualified him, Clarke thought. ‘Go on, then,’ he said.
Colhoun gave him an update on the SBS team’s situation.
‘Let me get this straight,’ Clarke said, caressing his research assistant’s nipple with the palm of his hand. ‘They have decided to walk through Azerbaijan to Armenia?’ He tried to remember any geographical facts about Azerbaijan’s interior, and came up empty. Was it a desert, a jungle, mountains?
‘I don’t expect they’ll do the whole distance on foot,’ Colhoun said, struggling and failing to keep the sarcasm out of his tone.
A hand was reaching between his legs, but Clarke, suddenly aware of what Colhoun’s information implied, pushed it away. ‘Are they intending to fight their way across the country?’ he asked coldly.
No, they’re planning to give a string of benefit concerts, Colhoun thought acerbically. ‘I am sure they’ll be bending over backwards to avoid the use of force,’ he said. ‘They don’t want to bring attention to themselves. And if they do find it necessary, they won’t use any more than the minimum required to ensure their own safety.’
‘In other words, they are planning to fight their way out. Lieutenant Colonel, I don’t think you quite appreciate what is at stake here . . .’
‘Minister, I don’t think you quite appreciate . . .’ Colhoun stopped himself. His men needed this bastard’s help, and he wouldn’t be doing them any service by letting his own temper get the better of him. ‘I understand,’ he went on more calmly, ‘why Her Majesty’s Government have found it necessary to abandon these men, but abandoned they have most definitely been. If we can’t extricate them, the least they deserve is the chance to extricate themselves, a chance to get home.’
Clarke was silent for a moment. He could probably get the PM to force either Colhoun’s removal or his acquiescence in ordering the men to surrender, but without the SBS chief’s goodwill he suspected there was no way of actually influencing the men themselves. And there was certainly no political capital to be gained from publicly disowning national heroes. In which case, damage limitation seemed to be the name of the game. ‘What do you actually want?’ he asked Colhoun.
‘What I want is for our embassy in Armenia – I presume we have one – to start preparing the Armenian government for my men’s arrival at the border. Given the nature of their mission I see no reason why they shouldn’t expect a parade in their honour through the streets of the capital, whatever that is.’
‘Yerevan,’ Clarke told him.
‘It won’t look too good if British soldiers are shot dead because no one thought to tell the Armenians they were coming.’
‘I get the point.’
‘They could get there before dawn tomorrow,’ Colhoun persisted.
‘I’ll get on it straight away,’ Clarke said, somewhat eco
nomically with the truth. First, he had some research to do.
In his Poole office Colhoun put the phone down and reached for the more prosaic comfort of a Kit-Kat. He would keep pestering the politicians until it was no longer necessary, but the only people who could help his men to reach the border were the men themselves.
The stolen lorry motored down the Caspian coast road. The view from the front seat was less than inspiring: empty sea to their left, an empty ribbon of tarmac ahead, an empty steppe on their right. They would be on this road for another twenty-five kilometres, before turning inland at the small town of Alyat.
In the back of the lorry, hidden from a cursory examination by the late driver’s load, Finn, Noonan and Farida were each wrapped in their private worlds. Noonan was still seething with the anger and confusion brought on by McClure’s summary execution of the driver, going round and round the arguments in his head, trying and failing to convince himself that the man’s death had been necessary. And yet there was Finn, his face a mask of innocence. How could he be so unconcerned? Had he seen such things so many times that he no longer cared?
In the front seat the other three sat in an unbroken silence. Shadmanov was concentrating on his driving. Raisa was asking herself the same question as Noonan, and finding just as little in the way of clear-cut answers. McClure, meanwhile, had put himself in neutral.
The lorry continued to eat up the kilometres. There was not much traffic on the road, but enough to prevent a single vehicle becoming an object of suspicion. No train passed by on the adjacent tracks, and the few seaside villages which the road skirted seemed dark and devoid of life.
It was just after half-past nine when they entered Alyat. Here there was a semblance of night-life, most noticeably in the vicinity of one well-lit and obviously smoky bar, and a couple of hundred metres farther down the main street they found a garage. It was closed, but the owner and his wife could be seen playing cards with another couple through the open door of their living quarters. He proved more than happy to sell Shadmanov a tankful at twice the normal rate, and on hearing that Raisa’s car had run out of petrol a couple of kilometres down the road gallantly sold her a couple of cans at not much more than cost.
Walking back to the lorry, Raisa couldn’t resist a last look back at the Azeri foursome gathered round the table, the half-finished bottle of wine shining in the yellow light, their laughter rippling in the silence. She would miss Azerbaijan, she thought with a pang. Not the Caspian, not the bigotry, but the wonderful simplicity of life, the appreciation of basic things, like the smell of pilaff on a warm evening.
They drove out of the town, turning inland at the point where both road and railway bifurcated, and saw the checkpoint a few hundred metres in front of them. No attempt had been made to block the road, and for a very simple reason: the two cars and one lorry were all being used for the purpose of illuminating a makeshift football pitch beside the road. About a dozen men were involved in the game itself, leaving only a couple to man the checkpoint.
McClure clambered over the back of the seat and squeezed himself into the space behind it, rapping out the prearranged warning to Finn and Noonan on the partition wall.
One of the two soldiers waved them down. He was not much more than sixteen, Raisa thought, and the effect of the cradled Kalashnikov was offset by a boyish grin. His partner, who looked even younger, stayed back a few paces.
‘Licence, Grandpa,’ the older boy told Shadmanov, and then caught sight of her. She smiled at him.
‘What’s all this about then?’ Shadmanov asked, handing down the dead driver’s licence.
‘Foreign terrorists,’ the boy said importantly. He gave the licence a cursory glance and then looked at Raisa again.
‘She’s my wife’s sister,’ Shadmanov explained conspiratorially.
‘Oh yeah?’ the boy said, grinning back at him.
‘You want to look in the back for terrorists?’ the scientist asked.
‘I’d probably find the rest of your harem,’ the boy said. ‘Go on, on your way.’
Shadmanov ground the lorry back into gear, gave him a salute and set off again.
‘There’s such a thing as overplaying a scene,’ Raisa told Shadmanov sternly, but he could tell she had enjoyed it as much as he had. They looked at each other and burst out laughing, both remembering in that moment what they had once enjoyed in each other’s company.
McClure clambered back into his seat, breaking the spell. ‘No problems?’ he asked her.
‘No problems,’ she agreed. Maybe this was going to be easier than they expected.
For the next half-hour they drove west along a fairly straight road, across an expanse of rolling steppe studded with plants which looked like stunted cacti. A few kilometres from Kazi Magomed – the only sizeable town in their intended itinerary – they entered an irrigated area, with the neatly dug channels criss-crossing the tidy grids of fruit trees. An occasional light shone in the distance, but there was no one on the roads, and the town itself, when they reached it, seemed even deader than Alyat.
The main street was deserted, and the two visible garages were closed and dark. McClure thought about waking someone but decided against it – they certainly had enough petrol for the lorry, and if there were no more roadblocks then there seemed nothing to stop them driving all the way to the border. Not that he wanted it to be that easy.
After one false turn they found the road which led south towards the nearest bridge across the Kura. Since the pipeline and railway had continued in a westerly direction, there was now nothing to look at but the empty road, the dry steppe and the overcast sky. Half an hour later they reached the small town of Ali Bayramly, a mere kilometre from the bridge, and just beyond the town they sighted a second, more imposing checkpoint.
This time the road had been blocked by a V-shaped arrangement of two cars, and the five men who had been sitting round a roadside fire were now walking forward to meet them, cradling their weapons as they did so. In the lorry’s headlights they didn’t look to Raisa like regular army.
‘Militia,’ she whispered to McClure, who was already hidden behind the seat.
Shadmanov pulled the lorry to a halt some ten metres from the cars and leaned out of the window with a grin. ‘Looking for foreign terrorists?’ he asked.
The leader of the militiamen, a man in his mid-twenties with a short moustache, white teeth and limpid eyes, ignored the question. ‘Get down,’ he told Shadmanov, ‘And you,’ he told Raisa.
She hadn’t missed the flash of interest in his eyes, and she didn’t much like the looks on his companions’ faces, but she complied with a smile. Up closer, she could see that the other four ‘men’ were probably in their late teens. She could also smell the liquor on their breath.
Looking round she could see the sleeping town half a kilometre to the north, but in every other direction the flat steppe stretched away into the darkness. It didn’t feel like the safest place in the world.
‘Papers!’ the leader ordered, crushing his cigarette underfoot.
Shadmanov showed him.
‘And yours,’ the man demanded of Raisa.
‘I left mine at home,’ she said calmly.
‘She’s my wife’s sister. I can vouch for her,’ Shadmanov told the man.
A slight smile was creasing the leader’s mouth. ‘You can go,’ he replied. ‘But we will have to hold the woman until her identity can be verified.’ He turned to his men. ‘Move the cars,’ he told two of them.
‘But you can see she is not a foreign terrorist,’ Shadmanov insisted.
The leader curled his lip. ‘Go,’ he told him, one hand on the holstered automatic. The other man, having grabbed Raisa by the upper arm, was pulling her away.
As Shadmanov took a step towards her abductor, the leader rammed the barrel of his automatic into the scientist’s stomach, pushing him back with enough violence to make him lose his balance. ‘You animal,’ Shadmanov said from his position on the ground, and the l
eader put two bullets into his chest.
Several things happened at once. The two men who had been sent to move the cars stopped in their tracks, one with his hand on the door handle. Raisa tried to break away from the man who was holding her, her eyes fixed on the body of her former lover. And the man who had shot him walked into McClure’s field of fire.
McClure had caught the tone of the exchange between Shadmanov and the militia leader, but had understood none of the particulars, and from his position deep inside the cab interior he had been unable to fill them in with his eyes. He had seen the two men walk towards the cars, but the other two were still out of sight, and he couldn’t remember if both had been holding weapons. He could rap out the agreed signal on the partition for activating Finn and Noonan, but the noise would give the enemy the gift of a precious second’s warning. He was still computing the odds of a successful intervention when the automatic barked twice, Raisa let out her cry of distress, and the leader’s head appeared perfectly framed in the open cab window.
McClure sent a double tap through the man’s left ear, and then lunged forward across the seat towards the window, the Browning in his hand desperately in search of its second target.
Raisa felt a spray of something hit her face, and realized it came from the leader’s shattered head. At the same moment she felt her booted heel make violent contact with the shin of the man who was holding her. In that instant her brain seemed to be racing in several different directions – wondering at her own instinctive reaction, crying for Shadmanov, wanting to scream for the blood and brains splattered across her face.
McClure’s Browning coughed again, she felt the man behind her suck in air like a vacuum cleaner, and suddenly all she could see was the militia leader’s automatic lying where he had dropped it. She lunged forward, grabbed the gun and rolled on towards the shelter of the standing lorry, just as McClure landed nimbly on the ground nearby.
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