They had less than five hours. Both Finn and Raisa could walk, but both had been weakened by loss of blood, and an uphill trek of ten kilometres or more was hardly what the doctor would have ordered. One of them could be carried on a makeshift stretcher by himself and Noonan, but the team’s speed would still be dictated by the one who wasn’t, and such an arrangement would deprive it of both forward and rear defence. McClure doubted whether there would be other ambushes higher up the path, but he wasn’t prepared to count on it. The two casualties would have to struggle up the mountain under their own steam.
He explained his thinking to Finn and Raisa as he bandaged the other man’s leg.
Raisa just nodded, as if it was all self-evident.
Finn stood up, wincing as he put weight on his injured leg. ‘Fuck,’ he said with feeling. ‘If the worst comes to the worst you and Paul can leave us behind. We can dig in, rest up . . .’
‘Forget it,’ McClure said.
‘It’s important someone gets through,’ Finn insisted.
‘Not that important. And we’ll only start worrying about it when we have to,’ he added, cutting off the conversation.
Twenty metres away Noonan could hear the voices of both his comrades and the Azeris still alive on the other side of the broken bridge. He hadn’t looked at the corpses strewn all around him since McClure’s departure, but his mind’s eye seemed unable to leave them alone. There had been at least six of them, maybe seven or eight, and the two SBS men, emerging above and behind them, had simply mown them down. For some reason it had reminded Noonan of watching his mother pour boiling water on ants. He had been about six years old, and the utter helplessness of the insects had made him want to cry.
It was us or them, his brain told him. They had fired first, and that, as any Western hero knew, made anything OK.
So why did he feel like crying?
He found himself feeling angry at the Azeri commander, who, half an hour earlier, had probably been congratulating himself on setting the perfect ambush.
‘Time to go,’ McClure whispered out of the dark, and Noonan edged away from the position, crawling backwards through the spread-eagled bodies of the dead.
The valley opened out again, the stream slowed its rush downhill and the trees on the slopes around them began to thicken. McClure led the way up the moonlit path, the two invalids behind him, with Noonan bringing up the rear. It was just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other, Finn told himself, but his body proved increasingly reluctant to cooperate.
McClure called frequent rest-stops, checking the bandages while Noonan scanned the slopes above and below them with the nightscope. There was no sign of pursuit on the ground, but during one such stop, sometime around three o’clock, a helicopter appeared to the north of them, heading up the mountain on a parallel course to their own. McClure identified it as a Kamov Ka-27 Helix-B, one of the newer Soviet helicopters. They were capable of carrying sixteen troops.
The sky was completely clear now, the moon nearly down behind the mountain, and the air was growing colder with each upward step. The wind seemed to be rising too, particularly as the forest thinned, and bald patches of rock-strewn meadow began alternating with ever-smaller swathes of pine.
By four o’clock McClure reckoned they were only an hour away from the top, but at that point Finn’s thigh wound reopened and they had to stop again. McClure sent Noonan back down the path to check on any possible pursuit while he struggled to stem the flow of blood. By this time both Raisa and Finn bore more than a passing resemblance to ghosts, but there was nothing wrong with them that a few pints of blood and the odd day in hospital wouldn’t cure. If only he could get them to one.
It was fifteen minutes before he was sure that the bleeding had stopped, and at that point Noonan returned with the unwelcome news that there were troops on the path below. ‘They’re a long way behind us, but . . .’
‘They’re moving a lot faster,’ McClure completed the thought.
They started off again, their pace even slower, fighting their way up and across what had become an almost barren wilderness of rocky slopes. For a while the path was hard to follow, but as they neared the summit it dug itself deeper and deeper into a rocky cleft, restricting their view of what lay ahead and creating the opposite problem – it was now impossible to get off.
They were several hundred metres up this narrow channel when a faint glow in the sky ahead announced the existence of an artificial light source. McClure was still digesting this information when the sound of another helicopter emerged through the whistle of the wind. The craft – a Kamov Ka-26 ‘Hoodlum’ – loomed into view for a few seconds before disappearing behind the glow which emanated from the horizon ahead. But there was no stilling of the rotors, and a few minutes later the helicopter made another brief appearance, before the sound of its passage faded down the mountain.
Another delivery, McClure thought. But at least the ‘Hoodlum’ only carried half a dozen passengers.
He looked at the others, two of whom were obviously glad of the unscheduled break. He looked at his watch; it would start to get light in less than half an hour. ‘I’m going to do a forward recce,’ he told Noonan.
‘OK,’ Noonan said. ‘If you pass a newsagent, I could use a bag of Hula Hoops. Original flavour.’
McClure grinned and started off up the cleft. The glow in the sky grew rapidly bright, indicating that its source was even nearer than he had thought, but there was still no way off the path which didn’t involve some serious climbing, and neither of the invalids was up to that sort of exercise.
Rounding a bend in the almost tunnel-like gorge McClure suddenly noticed light on the walls ahead. He cautiously advanced to a position from which he could see around the next bend and found that his worst fears had been realized. He had reached the end of the cleft, which opened out into an almost bowl-like space some thirty metres wide and a hundred metres long. At its far end it narrowed once more, into a gap between the upraised teeth of two ridges. A concrete pillbox had recently been placed on the high ground to the right, as a modern companion piece to the ancient stone tower which perched on the ridge to the left.
The only good news about this arrangement was that the pillbox had obviously been built by the Azeris. The Muslim moon and stars painted on its side were one giveaway; the fact that it was facing away from McClure was the other. On this side there was only the doorway, and the steps which had been blasted from the rock leading up to it.
The sixteen troops brought up by the Helix-B were much in evidence. Two of them were manning an old-fashioned, but doubtless well-oiled, machine-gun on the open roof of the stone tower, and most of the rest seemed to be lining the walls of the gap, taking what shelter they could from the topography of the rock. There might be more troops in the pillbox itself, but it seemed more likely that it was being used to shelter their commander from the cold wind.
It was not a good defensive position, McClure thought. The searchlights behind the Azeris made them harder to pick out, but they had little in the way of physical protection.
Trouble was, the odds against a successful attack could hardly have been worse. There was only one way forward, and that led into an almost perfect killing field, where, both blinded and illuminated by the lights, they would have to charge across a hundred metres of open ground in the face of concentrated fire from upwards of twenty automatic weapons. It would be a highly efficient way of committing suicide.
McClure crouched in the shadows, searching for the inspiration that would turn reality upside down, turn black into white, failure into success.
None came.
There was no way forward, no way back. In a few minutes the sky would begin to lighten. He and Noonan might still be able to make a run for it across the rocks, but not Finn or Raisa.
There was nothing for it but to surrender.
The word tasted bitter on his tongue.
His eyes examined the Azeri positions one more time, willing
a chink in the armour. There had to be some way of profiting from their lack of physical protection.
And then he saw it. For almost a minute he stood there, thinking it through, trying to make it real. He calculated times and distances, ran through an imaginary sequence of events, put himself in the enemy’s place. And then, his mind made up, he retreated a few metres down the path, took off his bergen and began rummaging around for what he needed.
Five minutes later he was back with the others, explaining the hopelessness of their situation. ‘We’ll have to give up,’ he told them, and the others could think of no good reason to argue the point.
‘But I don’t want us lined up like ducks in a shooting gallery,’ McClure went on. ‘We’ll walk up the path, me out front, with you two’ – he indicated Finn and Noonan – ‘supporting Raisa like she’s badly injured. As we walk forward I want the gap between us to widen, right? Because if they just decide to open up I want you lot far enough back to take some of the bastards with you. And just in case they’re the worst shots in creation, Paul, you take out the men on the tower to the left. Got that? The tower on the left. Sling your MP5 across your back.’
‘Yeah,’ Noonan said. He felt almost disoriented by this sudden let-down. Thirty-six hours of adrenalin-pumping flight, and here they were trying to survive a surrender.
‘Let’s do it,’ McClure said.
The four of them walked slowly up the path, stopping in the final, tunnel-like section to arrange themselves in the formation McClure had suggested. Then he strode purposefully out into the open, both hands high above his head, one of them grasping his MP5. As he entered the edge of the searchlit area there was a shout from up ahead, and he involuntarily braced himself against a fusillade of bullets, but no one fired. Squinting against the lights he could see the Azeri troops with their guns raised, and three men emerging from the pillbox, one of whom was the Iraqi he’d seen at the rig.
Without breaking stride McClure ostentatiously tossed his MP5 to one side. Glancing backwards he saw that the others were already ten metres behind him.
The three men were still watching his approach from the top steps. Come down, he pleaded silently, and, as if in response, the man in the Azeri uniform brushed past the Iraqi and began descending. The Iraqi said something to him, which he seemed to brush off with a wave of the hand.
McClure was thirty metres away now, Bobby Charlton range. He took another glance back over his shoulder, found that the others were almost as far behind him, and quickened his pace.
The sky was lightening at last, and through the gap in front of him, way across the invisible valley beyond, he could see the rising sun strike a spark on one towering, snow-capped peak. It was beautiful, he thought, but far beyond his reach.
It didn’t matter. There was nothing for him on the other side of the gap. Jobs like this came only once in a lifetime.
The Azeri commander and the Iraqi were now at the foot of the steps. The latter spoke again, causing the former to raise a hand and shout ‘stop’ in English.
He was fifteen metres away from them. The spread was as good as he could have hoped for – there was only the pair in the stone tower, and if Noonan kept his wits about him . . .
McClure pressed the trigger on the electronic timer and burst into a run.
The Iraqi was quicker than he had expected, and the first bullet hit him somewhere in the chest just as he was reaching full speed, but he kept going, absorbing hits like an American footballer surging and stumbling his way through tackles, before bullets to the head and the heart dropped him dead at Uday’s feet.
A split second later the world exploded.
Noonan, Finn and Raisa were knocked backwards by the force of the blast. ‘Jesus Christ!’ Noonan half yelled, scrambling to his feet a lot easier than the other two. The smoke was already being blown away by the wind, and in the nick of time he understood what McClure had been getting at. As the two reeling figures on the stone tower swam into view he opened up with the MP5, dropping them both with a single burst.
And now there were excited voices on the path behind them, and only death in front.
‘Come on,’ he shouted, pulling Finn to his feet. ‘He’s given us a chance.’
Finn and Raisa looked at him as if he was mad, but allowed themselves to be hustled forward through the cleft and on to the downward slope beyond, apparently oblivious to the coating of human remains which lined the walls of their escape route.
Noonan was not so lucky. Here and there he could make out a uniformed arm or leg, but there was no identifiable trace of McClure.
19
Galloway raised himself up one shoulder to finish the story.
‘The three of them had only been walking a few minutes when the Armenians showed up. They carried Raisa and Finn down the mountain and drove them to the hospital in Stepanakert. The two of them were kept in for a couple of days, leaving Noonan to cope with the gratitude and congratulations. The way he tells it, the whole town was queuing up to buy him a drink. And then the three of them were taken to Yerevan, where the British consul arranged their flights home via Moscow.’
‘Will McClure get a medal?’ his wife asked.
‘I should think so.’
The two of them lay there in the dark, listening to a late train going by on the Weymouth line. As that sound receded they could hear their neighbour’s daughter giggling on the pavement outside. A cat suddenly began to howl.
It all sounded so normal.
‘What sort of man was he?’ she asked.
Many of those who attended the memorial service in Poole were asking themselves the same question, and Neil Colhoun was no exception. His feelings towards McClure remained as ambivalent as ever. In the most difficult of circumstances the man had been resourceful, decisive, effective. From a purely military standpoint it was hard to imagine the job being done any better.
And yet . . . There was no excuse that Colhoun could find for the killing of the Azeri driver. Murdering the man had just been more convenient than any of the alternatives.
Was there any way of separating the brilliant soldier from the murderer?
Colhoun sighed. He had been hoping that this service would let him lay the ghost, but life wasn’t that simple. Gary McClure wasn’t responsible for the frayed edges of Colhoun’s moral universe; he had merely been the means by which they were pointed out.
And maybe growing older was about learning to act without that kind of certainty.
Almost a month had passed since the events in Azerbaijan, and though he was still walking with a noticeable limp, in all other respects Finn seemed fully recovered. He was a bit older, and maybe a bit wiser, though he wouldn’t have put money on the latter.
As he listened to the usual string of platitudes Finn could see the expression on McClure’s face as they all set off on the last lap. There had been a smile in the man’s eyes, and it hadn’t been ignited by anything as boring as bravado. McClure had been going home. He had wanted to die.
Finn couldn’t understand that. Over the past couple of months he had seen more than his share of violent death, and it had only served to make him more aware of how much he enjoyed life.
There was so much to fucking live for.
And so much fucking to live for, come to that.
The night before he had been the only person in the pub to remember the make of Steve McQueen’s motorbike in The Great Escape. The tie-breaker had won them the quiz, and he’d been rewarded with more than a share of the pot. If life had anything better to offer than the feeling of easing himself into Marie Colhoun’s naked embrace then he wanted to know what it was.
Raisa had slept with David Constantine on the team’s return, but more as an expression of affection and gratitude than from any real desire. She had found it hard to tell him that there was nothing more on offer, but after a week or so he had said it for her. And if he harboured any ill feelings he hid them well, pulling every string he could find to secure her a research
assistant’s job in nearby Cambridge.
Her co-workers seemed nice, the work was interesting, the city was more cosmopolitan than Baku. She found the variety of consumer goods truly amazing, the variety of culture even more so. One night she discovered that an old Soviet comedy set in Azerbaijan was showing at one of the art cinemas, and while the rest of the audience laughed at the jokes she cried her way through half a box of tissues. Coming out of the cinema she felt as she had on her first day in England. There was no sea to smell, no purple mountains in the distance, no groups of people sat outside to share their evening. Here the streets were for movement, not life. The people were all inside, watching TV.
She had smiled to herself at that moment, and she did so again now, emerging from the church into the spring sunshine. This was a different world, but she would adapt. If the past couple of months had given her anything, it was freedom from the fear of change.
Soon after his return to England, Paul Noonan had begun having nightmares. By day his experiences in Azerbaijan seemed long ago and almost unreal, but at night they returned to haunt him. It didn’t take a genius to work out that his unconscious was making hay with what his conscious mind was trying to repress, but knowing it and changing it were not the same thing, and after a week of wallowing in death he had been worried enough to ask Finn’s advice. The Londoner had told him the Marines didn’t employ a psychiatric counsellor out of any concern for political correctness.
The counsellor helped, and so did talking to Julie. ‘Sometimes when a patient dies,’ she told him one evening, ‘I have this stupid sense that he or she has let me down, as if there’s some cosmic battle going on between life and death and we can’t bear to see life lose a single round. I suppose we can’t, but it’s crazy just the same. Life and death are just two sides of the same coin – you can’t have one without the other.’
Marine I SBS Page 23