Marine I SBS

by David Monnery

  At the same moment an engine sprang to life and one of the cars accelerated backwards on squealing tyres. McClure braced his legs, grasped the Browning in both hands with arms extended, and fired. The windscreen exploded, and the car ran backwards another ten metres or so, crushing a cactus-like plant before expiring with its back wheels in a dip and the nose pointing slightly upwards.

  The fourth man had vanished into the darkness, and the sound of his progress across the steppe was fading fast.

  ‘Shit!’ McClure hissed, looking down at the dead scientist. ‘I’ll get the others,’ he told Raisa, but she wasn’t listening. Kneeling down beside Shadmanov, she gently closed his eyes, and stared at the familiar face. There was a touch of a smile on his lips, she thought. He had enjoyed the last twenty-four hours.

  A few paces behind Raisa, Farida was staring down at her dead husband, lips pursed, an angry confusion swimming in her eyes. He had only ever wanted her for her body, and she had never been able to forgive him for that. The fact that he had later reneged on their marital bargain – denying her the money and status when he no longer wanted sex – had just been a twisting of the knife. Even in death, she thought, he had contrived to let her down. The West would have no interest in her on her own. She turned away with a sigh.

  McClure was checking the bodies of the militiamen. Finn and Noonan, who had heard the initial shots and then spent several very nasty moments waiting for the signal that never came, were now grimly surveying the carnage their leader had wrought in their absence.

  ‘They’re all dead,’ McClure reported with evident satisfaction. ‘See if you can find some way of siphoning the petrol out of the cars,’ he told Noonan. ‘And get that one off the road.’ He turned to Finn. ‘One of them got away on foot,’ he said, nodding in the direction the man had gone. ‘He went that way, but presumably he’ll double back towards the town, so we haven’t got much time. Any ideas?’

  ‘I don’t know. I guess there’s no point trying to clear this up. Get the bodies out of sight?’

  ‘I’d rather get moving.’

  Finn stroked his chin. ‘How far are we from the river?’

  ‘Only a few minutes.’

  ‘Time to take to the boat, then?’

  McClure nodded. ‘Seems like the best place.’

  ‘We are the SBS,’ Finn added facetiously.

  McClure’s answering grin turned into a frown. Noonan had found the necessary piece of tubing and was busy siphoning petrol, Raisa was still bent over Shadmanov. ‘Where’s the wife?’ McClure asked.

  ‘In the back?’

  She wasn’t. And there was no sign of her on the road until McClure thought to use the nightscope. There she was, already several hundred metres away, walking briskly towards the sleeping town.

  McClure walked back up to where Raisa was mopping her face with water from the militiamen’s enamel pot. She looked shell-shocked, but this was not the time or place to deal with that. ‘She’s gone,’ he told her. ‘How much does she know?’

  Raisa took a deep breath. ‘She knows we go to Armenia,’ she said. Her voice sounded like someone else’s.

  McClure thought about it as he watched Noonan back the car off the road. They were ready to go. And there seemed nothing to be gained by going back for Farida, only time to be lost. ‘Let’s go,’ he ordered.

  Finn took Shadmanov’s place at the wheel, which left Noonan alone in the back, tasting the petrol on his tongue and acutely aware that his emotions were having a hard job keeping up with events. His anger at McClure over the shooting of the driver already seemed ancient history.

  In the front seat the other three were watching the dry steppe give way to scattered stands of trees and farmland as the river grew nearer. Raisa was still in the middle of telling Finn what had happened back at the roadblock when the tower of a suspension bridge loomed out of the darkness ahead, and at almost the same moment McClure spotted a dirt track leading off to the right through an orchard. ‘That way,’ he told Finn. ‘And cut the engine,’ he added, as it became apparent that the track ran downhill.

  The lorry rumbled slowly down the rutted road, with Finn’s foot on the brake each time his eyes had trouble seeing the way. The only other sound was the swish of overhanging branches being parted.

  If there was a farm nearby they didn’t see it. The track ended in a copse of acacias beside the wide and silent Kura. A couple of hundred metres downstream a car was crossing the long bridge which stretched gracefully between the low banks.

  It seemed like a good place, McClure thought. With any luck, no one would find the lorry before dawn.

  Fifteen minutes later Noonan was easing the fully laden Gemini out into the centre of the river. Finn sat beside him in the stern, Raisa and McClure on either side of the bow. Between them, weaponry and spare cans of petrol had been arranged for optimum weight distribution.

  By Finn’s reckoning there was enough fuel to take them about a hundred kilometres, so they shouldn’t have any trouble reaching the middle of nowhere.

  17

  It was a couple of minutes to eight in Poole, and strains of the Coronation Street theme music could be heard seeping out from somewhere on the base. His wife and daughter would have been watching it at home, Colhoun thought. He wondered if Marie had any notion of the mess her latest boyfriend was currently in, and realized there was no way she could. Which, in the unlikely event that she was serious about him, was a damn good thing.

  Colhoun was sitting with Galloway and Constantine in the little-used guest lounge, not so much for the use of its comfortable chairs as for its proximity to the base radio room. Galloway had been declared persona non grata by the Turkish government earlier that day, and, taking advantage of a lift from the USAF, had managed to reach Poole soon after six. Constantine had insisted on staying on in case Shadmanov remembered something else to tell him, but a stronger, more personal motive, was a desire to share vicariously in Raisa’s run for home. He knew it was ridiculous, a fifty-eight-year-old man mooning over a woman who was younger than his own daughters, but there it was. And Shadmanov was about the same age as he was, so she obviously liked older men.

  ‘Incoming transmission,’ the duty officer told them from the doorway, and the three men hurriedly followed him back into the radio room.

  The team was heading up the Kura, McClure told them. Shadmanov was dead, killed by militia at a checkpoint. His wife had run off. Another four of the enemy had been killed.

  Colhoun winced at the use of the word ‘enemy’, and could well imagine Clarke’s reaction to what he would see, rightly or wrongly, as a killing spree. Maybe McClure was exceeding the needs of the situation, but Colhoun was damned if he was going to tie his men’s hands to mollify the same government which had washed its hands of them.

  McClure’s report ended with a request for better geographical information, since the map they were using would be adequate only for as long as they stayed on the river.

  Colhoun told him they would do the best they could, and once the transmission was over got straight on to the chief of the RM Illustrators Branch, who seemed less than hopeful that they would find anything. ‘If you can’t dig up anything here, get on to the Foreign Office,’ Colhoun suggested. ‘The embassy in Moscow may be able to fax us something.’

  By this time Constantine and Galloway were back in their comfortable chairs, each sipping at their glass of the CO’s malt, trying to draw mental pictures of the team’s boat as it journeyed up a river neither of them had ever seen. Unable to satisfy himself in this respect, Constantine found himself thinking about Shadmanov. During their conversations earlier that day the scientist had sounded incredibly tired, but it had seemed to Constantine more a weariness of the spirit than a tiredness of the body. And after nearly forty years in the same line of work he had thought he recognized a fellow-sufferer. Working on nuclear weaponry in almost any capacity seemed to have a soul-sapping effect, as if those concerned were obliged to bear the full moral burden of the
horror they had dutifully unleashed.

  The Azeri Air Force helicopter landed in the centre of Ali Bayramly shortly after one in the morning, giving new life to the wave of local interest which had followed the ‘Armenians-are-coming’ scare of an hour earlier. Vezirov, Uday and Barzan were escorted across to the old Soviet hall, where the young militiaman and the mystery woman were being held. ‘Madame Shadmanova,’ Vezirov greeted her. ‘Where is your husband?’

  ‘He’s dead,’ she said.

  ‘How?’ Uday asked angrily. The loss of the scientist was bound to add several months to the project, which wouldn’t please either Kusai or Saddam.

  ‘These idiots shot him,’ she said contemptuously. ‘He was probably trying to defend his mistress,’ she added, and shook her head with apparent amusement.

  Vezirov stared at her in amazement.

  ‘Do you want to see where it happened?’ the local man asked him. ‘There’s a car you can use . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ Vezirov said wearily. ‘You,’ he said, pointing at the militiaman, ‘come with us. And you too, Madame.’

  In the car he extracted the boy’s story. It had seemed like there was just an old man and a younger woman in the lorry’s cab – she was dressed like a man but a bit of a looker just the same – but suddenly this other man who’d been hidden just started shooting. He hadn’t seen that man’s face.

  Vezirov turned to Farida for confirmation. ‘I don’t know what happened,’ she said. ‘I was a prisoner in the back of the lorry.’

  At the scene of the confrontation nothing had been moved. Three bodies were arranged in a neat row by the side of the road, each with fatal bullet wounds. Another dead man, his throat blown away beneath a face planted with shards of glass, sat behind the driving wheel of the car farther from the road.

  ‘What the fuck were you doing here?’ Vezirov asked the militiaman.

  The boy looked at him with the air of someone who had just been asked a particularly stupid question. ‘It’s a checkpoint,’ he said.

  ‘Right. But what were you checking for?’

  The young brow creased in thought. ‘Armenians?’ he suggested.

  Vezirov smiled to himself as he watched Uday walk towards him.

  ‘There’s petrol on the ground,’ the Iraqi said. ‘They’ve siphoned the tanks.’ He reached inside the car for the large-scale map of Azerbaijan and spread it across the Volga’s bonnet. ‘They don’t seem to have many choices,’ he said eventually.

  ‘They don’t,’ Vezirov agreed. He looked at his watch. ‘They can’t have gone more than fifty kilometres in the time they’ve had, and if they’re heading west they only have two roads to choose from for at least a hundred kilometres. If it’s south there’s only one. And all three roads will soon be blocked by troops and armour, if they aren’t already.’

  ‘Looks like we’ve got them,’ Uday said.

  ‘Looks like it,’ Vezirov replied. And all because some local toughs tried to kidnap a woman, he thought.

  Uday’s mind was already on another tack, scanning down a mental list of missile engineers, trying to decide on a replacement for the corpse laid out on the other side of the road.

  The Gemini purred up the centre of the Kura. The river was about half a kilometre wide, but in places the banks were so low that it was hard to make them out, and then it was only the strength of the smooth current which gave the lie to the impression that they were skimming across a vast lake. It was the spring thaw in the mountains, Raisa told them; at any other time of the year the river would be half this size.

  In the three hours since they took to the water, they had seen little in the way of human presence. Sixty kilometres had passed without a bridge, and the clusters of buildings on the distant banks were few and far between. The nightscope would reveal squat cottages, a rickety landing-stage and a few moored boats, most of them unpowered, but with an occasional outboard thrown in for good measure. In the event that they needed petrol there seemed likely to be a source to hand.

  It was hard to make calculations without a better idea of exactly where they were. The lazy twists and turns of the Kura seemed to bear little relation to the twists and turns on their map, and there was nothing to distinguish the settlements from each other. McClure had the distinct feeling that the next bridge would give them their first real fix, and that was still a couple of hours away. Or at least he hoped it was.

  Their other problem was the weather. As predicted, the cloud cover had thinned to almost nothing, leaving large stretches of starry sky. The moon was down at least, but there was still more light than McClure felt comfortable with. Out in the centre of the river they would still be hard to spot by accident, but they were now far from invisible to anyone looking.

  Still, all in all, he felt good about the way things were going, the way they had gone. Reviewing the mission to date, he could think of only one major mistake – their over-reliance on air rescue – and that had been made before they left England. It had been a mistake borne of necessity, moreover, since there had been no other available method of extraction. Given that, they had got the professor out and kept him alive long enough to get his intelligence home. The team had suffered no casualties. Yet McClure had few doubts that the difficult bit was still to come. Now that they’d left their tracks in the sand the hunt would begin to close in.

  The plan was to leave the river at a small town called Nadzha-something – the name was as long and unpronounceable as the famous Welsh station’s – borrow a suitable car or lorry and drive some way into the mountains before daybreak. But it was beginning to look as if they would be lucky to reach the town much before dawn, in which case they wouldn’t have time to do much more than find a suitable spot to hide up for the day. And even if they did get there with an hour or so to spare there was no guarantee of finding the transport.

  The difficult bit was still to come, all right.

  On the other side of the bows, Raisa was brooding about her responsibility for Shadmanov’s death. If she hadn’t set off to England, told them about the rig, insisted on taking part in this mad adventure, then he would still be working out in the Caspian. Not happily perhaps, feeling a little guilty even, but in a year or so he would have been back in Baku, able to go hiking in the mountains . . .

  Not with Arif Akhundov though. What was she telling herself? She hadn’t set up the project on the rig, or jumped into bed with Saddam Hussein. She hadn’t kidnapped Tamarlan, or killed his friend to stop him talking.

  And he wouldn’t have blamed her. She knew he wouldn’t.

  Sitting at the tiller, Finn had let his thoughts drift into anger, which was rare. Mrs Finn had raised a happy-go-lucky lad, who took life pretty much as it came, enjoying the bits worth enjoying and just getting on with the bits that weren’t. Politics wasn’t something that usually concerned him, but for once, here on a river a very long way from home, he felt distinctly pissed off with the British government. Not because they had left the team in the lurch – he would have understood them not wanting to risk another Sea King crew even if the Turks had agreed to it. No, it was an old decision that was making him angry – the one that had led to Saddam getting away with the Gulf War, when they could have gone in and finished the bastard once and for all. If they had done that then none of this would have been necessary, and he could have been doing something slightly less dangerous, like climbing into a back seat with Colhoun’s daughter.

  * * *

  On the other side of the purring motor, Noonan watched the featureless landscape slide past. He was thinking about the dead bodies at the checkpoint, the first he had ever seen properly. Of course there had been the Russian on the boat, but what with the rain and the mist and everything happening so fast it had seemed almost like a scene in a film. Then there was the lorry driver, but McClure had started dragging him away the moment he hit the ground.

  He had seen the ones at the checkpoint though, really seen them, particularly the one in the car, whose glass-encrusted face
had stared out at him through the shattered windscreen. One minute sitting by the brazier with his mates, the next . . . And it was over, just like that. It was so simple, yet so hard to really grasp. This had been that boy’s last night on earth, and it might be his too. And this river would keep on rolling, and the stars would keep shining. It would go on without him.

  He shivered, and dipped his hand in the water to remind himself he was still alive.

  Uday paced to and fro across the dusty space in front of the old local Soviet headquarters, headphones clamped across his black hair, but only half conscious of the sweet nothings which Madonna was whispering in his ear. Vezirov was sitting with the pilot in their helicopter, laughing at something or other. Barzan was nowhere to be seen – probably hiding somewhere with a cigarette. Didn’t the idiot know that his breath stank from the stuff?

  Vezirov laughed again, further angering Uday, who walked across to the helicopter, tugging the earphones off his head as he went. ‘Something’s wrong,’ the Iraqi snapped. ‘We should have had a sighting by now. There must be other roads.’

  ‘There are no other roads,’ Vezirov said placidly. ‘Either the lorry’s broken down or they’ve gone to ground again. Hoping that we’ll get impatient and make a mistake,’ he added pointedly.

  Uday shook his head. ‘I don’t . . .’ he began, just as a message started coming in on the Mi-8’s radio. It wasn’t the hoped-for sighting, though – just the discovery of the lorry driver’s body on the Caspian shore.

  Vezirov was about to break contact when a light suddenly appeared in Uday’s eyes. ‘What about the boats?’ the Iraqi asked.

  They hadn’t found them.

  ‘Look again,’ Vezirov suggested. ‘A couple of hundred metres in each direction.’

  Uday was already headed for the open door of the Soviet building. He found Farida walking listlessly round the room in which she had been confined. ‘Did they have a boat with them?’ he asked without preamble.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘They buried one and took the other with them.’