by Andrew Grant
I glanced at my watch. It was now 11:45.I would allow half an hour for Bernard to get back in touch with Chekhov then give him the co-ordinates. Then it would be another hour for Chekhov to organise an aircraft out of Udon Thani, Vientiane, Chiang Mai, Lampang or anywhere else he had people. The satellite image Sami had shown me of the Russian’s jungle compound hadn’t included any landing strip other than for a chopper, maybe. That didn’t mean Chekhov didn’t have an airfield elsewhere in the area. Was there one by the boat landing where his vehicles were parked?
I stood looking at the map of the north and did some basic maths. Flight time from Udon Thani was fifteen minutes max and probably less than ten from Vientiane. Chiang Mai was a long shot as it was maybe an hour in a single-engine fixed-wing plane with the hammer down. Bangkok was about an hour and a half to two hours away by small plane, I guessed. Our chopper had done it in two and a half but we hadn’t been racing.
My guestimate was out by half an hour. The small Cessna appeared from the direction of Vientiane a few minutes before 14:00. It didn’t come across above us. Instead it flew on by between our position and the Mekong. It was possibly a mile away to the north of us. A scenic flight, perhaps? I could imagine that the passenger was taking a lot of photographs with a very big camera. The Cessna carried on out of sight while our fake villagers did their thing.
‘A million baht he’ll come back,’ said Sami jokingly from outside where he was pretending to be an old man resting. Karl and I were sitting in the shadows back in the living area.
‘No takers,’ I replied.
We were both right. Five minutes later the Cessna came back. This time it was half a mile closer and down country of us. Just a pilot doing a big floppy tourist circuit. It was pretty crude. If I hadn’t been expecting it I would have gone onto high alert anyway. Maybe Chekhov’s hired help up this way wasn’t up to standard? Either that or my paranoia was running on full alert. Of course, when a mad, head-hunting Russian wants you dead, what’s not to get paranoid about?
We played out the rest of the day with our people doing their thing around the village while the guys from The A Team did theirs. Some slept, the others sat in their positions, watching and waiting. As always, the waiting was the hardest part.
After our evening meal, Alex, Karl, Jo, Sami and I sat on the veranda of the big hut and discussed the drill for the possible night games to come. Sami would have three men in the lab building along with Jo. The other three village guys would be in a bunker under a hut halfway between the lab and us. There would be two sets of Special Forces troopers in the perimeter bunkers and one pair at the top of the track with the imager and the mincer. Another pair would be further along the face of the plateau close to the lab, with the remaining duo in a bunker on the back side of the hill. Alex and one of the others would man the electronics.
‘One on watch in each position,’ Alex explained. ‘The rest sleep. Two-hour spells. See anything, hear anything, call it in on the open channel. No shooting until ordered or shot at. Direct orders come from me.’ The Special Forces leader paused but there was no argument coming. He allowed himself half a smile. ‘That’s it folks. Let’s hope we have a quiet night.’
‘What about us?’ Sami said meaning himself, Karl and I.
‘Stay put and look after each other,’ came the reply. ‘It’s you guys he’s pissed at. If it goes down, get your arses in there.’ The Special Ops man indicated the temporary HQ. ‘Worst case and it’s into the bunker.’ With that Alex went to speak to his crew who were getting ready to roll out to their perimeter positions.
Now I’ve been in firefights of various kinds in many countries, but I’ve never seen so few guys carry so many weapons. Each pair of The A Team could equip a battalion. Each duo had a Minimi—what we Brits called a light squad machine gun with a 200-round box magazine. This was essentially a one-man weapon, which meant the number-two man was free to use his state-of-the-art M16 variant with its grenade launcher and magic optics to seek and destroy at will. On top of that, each trooper carried a sidearm in a thigh holster along with a fighting knife, handle-down, on the harness on his left chest. At each position there were several of the shoulder-fired light anti-tank rockets, the old familiar LAWs, along with conventional grenades. Add to those the mincer, the tank busters and the Stingers and we had the makings of a real war.
The A Team guys vanished into the gloom and Jo moved out with his lot, who all looked to be lacking in weaponry with just a single M16 or AK and a couple of pouches of magazines each. I knew there were RPGs in the lab as well but these guys were still lightly armed compared to Alex’s boys. Even Karl admitted he had been impressed by the firepower the team had arrived with. ‘When I said prepare for a siege, I wasn’t necessarily thinking of Stalingrad revisted,’ he said to me with a wry grin as the last of the warriors vanished into the night.
I didn’t voice my thoughts aloud, but I was beginning to wonder if Chekhov would come at all. It was too damned predictable. I considered the rather transparent scenario we’d set up. Was the mad Russian mad enough to stick his head in our bear trap? I just didn’t know if he was or not. Point was, however, he wanted Sami and I dead and it seemed that his obsession was total. Time would tell, I guessed.
When I did find sleep that night, it was very uneasy. It had been a long day of waiting, and waiting was something I wasn’t big on. I had dreams. No, cancel that, they were nightmares. There were a lot of people running around in my night without heads, and bugger, I was one of them.
35
Chekhov didn’t show that night and a cool dawn followed one of the longest nights of my life. A mist was rising from the valley below and wet clouds clung to the dense green of the bush. None of the sensors had been triggered and no one had ventured up the track towards us from the village below. ‘Where the fuck are you?’ I muttered as I stood at the edge of the plateau taking an early morning piss. It was 07:00.I felt gritty, irritable and very, very bloody apprehensive. Where was Chekhov? I’d expected an early morning raid. We all had. Was he coming or was he not?
‘Movement to the north! No visual!’
The voice in my ear was Alex’s. I’d stuck my head in HQ and he’d been sitting at one of the control screens in his sandbagged nest. I threw away my cigarette butt and went back inside, staying well away from the magic boxes. Karl was standing looking over Alex’s shoulder, so I guessed his security clearance wasn’t in question. Sami was hovering nearby, a cup of tea in his hand. Even from where I was standing I could see lights blinking on the screen Karl was watching.
‘Too regular. Large animal,’ said Alex after some time. ‘Human contact gives a shorter, sharper pulse. This is big, elephant maybe.’
‘There is an elephant training camp about five clicks back towards Vientiane,’ Sami called across the room. ‘They might be moving through.’
‘They might also have some of Chekhov’s guys in tow,’ Alex replied. ‘Trojan fucking horse. We need a visual.’ The Special Forces leader didn’t need to give the order. One of The A Team in the bunker on the back side of the ridge announced he was on his way. Alex confirmed.
We waited for five minutes, each of us dealing with the nervous suspense in our own way. I lit another smoke. Karl chewed a pen while Alex sat totally motionless, his eyes on the screen. As for Sami, he had found a seat and sat sipping his tea, an AK47 beside him. I’d left the Colt by the door. I went and retrieved it and sat down beside Sami.
‘Elephants, three, and their handlers. No bandits,’ came the eventual reply.
We all breathed a huge sigh of relief, at least I think it was all of us—it might just have been me. Then we heard it, a distant aircraft breaking the near silence of our misty dawn high up in the countryside.
‘Twin engine aircraft approaching from the west,’ came the call from another of The A Team.
‘Definitely for us?’
‘Affirmative. On present course and altitude it will pass directly over us at not more than 200 feet.
’
‘ETA?’
‘One minute.’
‘Ready a Stinger. Get a lock and hold. Fire only on my order.’
‘Roger that.’
As I sat and listened to the conversation in my headset I felt as useless as tits on a bull, as a rurally orientated colonial friend of mine from years ago was inclined to say in moments like this. I picked up my carbine and went to the window opening to watch the approaching aircraft.
The plane was a small civilian commuter and yes, it was flying directly towards us, straight up the valley. Was it going to drop a fucking bomb, Napalm perhaps, or was it going to strafe us? If Chekhov suspected that I was with Sami and we were tooled up big time, he wouldn’t just fly in and risk getting his Russian arse shot right out of the sky. What was he playing at?
The aircraft slowed as it approached. I could hear the noise of the engine drop against the echo it made as it bounced back from the hills all around us. The side door opened and a white cloth trailed in the doorway. A signal of surrender? I doubted it. Maybe Chekhov was calling for a cease-fire?
‘Locked,’ a voice was saying in my headset.
‘Hold.’ Alex commanded.
We all watched as the plane cruised over our heads and the white cloth became a ribbon that trailed an object to the ground. It hit the ground, bouncing and rolling, the white ribbon cartwheeling in a pretty looping pattern, reminiscent of ribbon-dancing gymnasts. Then the whole thing hit the side of one of the pigpens and stopped, the ribbon fluttering limply to the ground.
I moved to another window opening and watched the aircraft turn slowly beyond the river and start flying back the way it had come. What was the message in the bottle?
‘Make safe!’ Alex ordered the man with the Stinger when the aircraft was just a speck on the grey horizon. The trooper acknowledged. I saw Jo leave his cover of the lab and go down the slope towards the object that was lying in the dust. Gingerly he squatted beside it, examining it without touching it. Then he removed the combat knife from the sheath on his hip and used it to slowly prise open the layers of cloth which held the bundle together. When he eventually finished, he stood and turned towards us, his face shining and pale.
‘Sami,’ he called in a voice that sounded choked and deep in his throat.
‘What?’ Sami replied getting out of his seat, alarm registering on his face with that single word.
‘You must come here,’ Jo said as he squatted back down in the dirt, his head turned in the direction in which the aircraft had vanished. Sami started out of the hut and Karl, Alex and I went with him. I knew what it was that had been dropped from the aircraft and shaken Jo. I wanted to grab Sami, to hold him back and tell him I was sorry I had started this whole damned thing. But short of shooting him I couldn’t have stopped him if I had tried. I could tell by the way that Sami moved that he knew what he would find, and nothing or no one on this earth was going to stop him reaching the small bundle that lay at Jo’s feet.
Her face was a pale oval surrounded by black hair. It was untouched by the dust and dirt it lay on. The fabric that it had been wrapped in had saved it that indignity at least. She had been young, nineteen, and in life she had been beautiful. In death, her blank eyes were wide. They stared up at me accusingly. The lips, which were drawn back to bare her perfect teeth, were coloured with blood. I thought I could hear her screaming at me.
‘Oh, Kim,’ Sami fell to his knees in the dirt and reached for the head of his child. ‘Oh, Kim,’ he repeated as he picked it up and cradled it to his cheek. The long, blood-soaked hair hung down Sami’s chest. I remembered Kim as a child. Her hair had been her pride and joy, a long gleaming curtain that trailed behind her as she ran beside her father, laughing and chattering. Now the hair hung down in straggly, blood-thickened strands.
Sami got to his feet, helped by Jo. Then, with Jo on his arm, he staggered away from us, walking blindly. Jo steered him towards the nearest hut and kept him on his feet as he stumbled inside. The sounds of Sami’s grief started. Karl, Alex and I stayed standing by the stinking pigpen, staring at everything and nothing. Both of the hard-bitten warriors looked shaken by what had just happened. I knew how I must have looked to them. I felt so responsible and so fucking helpless. I wanted—no, I needed—to find Chekhov and batter him into the slime of his own soulless being. I needed to run to Sami and beg his forgiveness and that of Kim. I didn’t. I just stood staring at nothing until my eyes hurt. I would have my revenge on Chekhov. That was my silent promise. All I had to do was survive the next few hours.
‘Who was she?’ Alex wanted to know.
‘Kim was one of his daughters,’ I replied. ‘She was his favourite.’ All of Sami’s countless children were his favourites, but Kim had been special. I remembered her as an eight or nine year old. A beautiful child, precociously bright and destined for great things. Kim Somsak was a rare combination of beauty and brains. When Sami had visited me in the UK he had told me she was an honour’s student at university in Singapore and well on her way to a degree in science. Singapore! That was why Sami hadn’t called Kim home for protection. He’d obviously thought she’d be safe there, but Chekhov, in his lust for revenge, had gone after her.
‘She wants to discover a cure for cancer,’ Sami had told me over dinner one night. ‘And I believe she will, Daniel,’ he had added, a proud father acknowledging his daughter’s dream. Now that dream was over—forever. I was to blame, so was Bernard. If he had appeared in front of me at that very moment in time I think I would have killed him, and it would have been in the slowest, dirtiest, meanest way that I knew how, and I knew plenty of those.
‘There is something else,’ Alex said, breaking my session of self-hatred. He had seen an object in the folds of Kim’s shroud. He knelt and, using his own combat knife, he separated further layers of cloth. Then with a grunt he reached down and picked up a hand-held radio. It was a standard, cheap Motorola clone. Carefully the Special Forces man opened the casing of the radio and looked inside. After a minute he snapped it closed. ‘No bombs or poison pins that I can see,’ he said as he passed the handset to Karl.
The sounds of Sami’s grief were becoming more subdued, which perhaps made things worse. Still, I didn’t want to hear his lament for his beautiful daughter. I myself was crying inside for Kim, Babs and the others. I walked blindly away from Karl and Alex, moving towards the drop-off point, groping out a cigarette as I went. The two Americans followed, whether I wanted them to or not. Karl came to my shoulder and handed me the radio.
‘We’ve got to get this maniac, Danny,’ he said grimly.
‘Oh yes,’ I agreed. ‘We have to do that.’ I lit the cigarette, either to calm myself down or give myself courage. When it was lit I took a deep lungful of smoke and blew it slowly out into the morning sky. I so wanted to kill Chekhov. I wanted to skin him alive, inch by fucking inch. I pressed the send button.
‘Chekhov!’ I snarled, letting the button go. There was a pause of perhaps five or six seconds.
‘Mr Swann … So nice to talk … to you … at long last.’ The voice was strange, very strange. ‘On our first meeting … you were very impolite … Mr Swann … You shot at me … from a great range … and you … killed my wife and my son … That was not … a nice thing … to do.’ I couldn’t place the voice as I tried to remember the sound references I’d heard but that had been, at best, very distorted surveillance recordings. On those recordings the voice had been big, a bear of a voice for a bear of a man. But this was different. This voice was high-pitched and stilted, broken by uneven pauses, and there was a light, almost breathless quality to it. Chekhov sounded like an asthmatic fighting for breath. ‘We never did … meet face to … face. I would … like to remedy that.’ The talk button was released. It was my turn to talk but to say what?
‘What do you suggest?’ I replied. ‘Come on up to my hill top, why don’t you?’
I released the button and waited. The man was laughing when he came back on air. The thin wheezing sou
nd was like that of a kiddy cartoon character.
‘You have … Mr Somsak and … some friends of … his … with you …’ It wasn’t a question. ‘I would prefer … just you and I … to meet. That … would be most … interesting.’ The button at his end was released. I was fighting to suppress my anger, and I was failing, badly.
‘Stop fucking around Chekhov. You’re down below somewhere, and you have a plan. What do you want to do?’ I snarled.
‘Yes, Mr Swann … I have a … plan … You start … walking down … the road from the hill … I will start … from the bottom … village … and we will meet in the middle.’ Chekhov clicked off the transmit button.
‘Fine,’ I snapped. ‘Your choice of weapon?’ I was prepared to give him that to ensure he did his part. I wanted him that badly.
‘Knives, Mr Swann … you might have … gathered that I like … knives … cane knives … You bring a … cane knife … I bring … a cane knife … and then … we see who is the … man who … walks away … You agree?’
‘I agree,’ I snapped. ‘I’ll start walking at 10:00. Just me and my knife.’
‘I will also start walking … at 10:00 … just me … and my knife,’ Chekhov replied with a wheezing chuckle. ‘No one else … Mr Swann … just … you and me.’
‘Just you and me, Chekhov,’ I released the transmit button and stood with the walkie-talkie in my hand. I looked down at it for a moment before lobbing it into the jungle below.
‘You going with a cane knife?’ Alex asked.
‘Yes,’ I replied. There was no alternative and I wanted him. I would have gone naked into hell for a chance at Chekhov.