The trouser-leg was sopping wet with blood, but in the hope the flow might stop now he let Juffu roll it down, to give it a chance of drying. Then with a lot of help he got into his sleeping bag with the bivvy-bag outside it, but only up to his armpits because he needed to have his arms free to handle the gun. The temperature was about minus thirty, he guessed. Being incapable of much movement one needed to be as well wrapped-up as possible, and there was no way he could leave just that leg out. Juffu, having fixed him up, roamed about, going frequently to the head of the stream to watch and listen, moving as quietly as any wolf could have moved. The pinkish light was less actual light, it seemed to Ollie, than a tinting of the darkness. Or maybe his sight had been affected. But Juffu was either close by or he was somewhere distant, he didn’t ever see him come or go.
There were other routes by which this hill could be climbed, he thought; they wouldn’t have to come up the line of the stream. They’d only be more likely to come that way because it was the easy way up and they’d be led to it by the blood-trail he’d provided. But then again, if they started up that way and found one of their own people dead or dying from the grenades, if they weren’t stupid they’d try another way.
He had his bergen behind him as a bolster, and the MKS on his lap on top of the bivvy-bag, and he kept exercising his hands inside the gloves and mittens in the hope they’d work when he needed them. The pinkness in the dark was less and less noticeable as fires died down.
Juffu was here again. Ollie felt as if he’d slept, woken to find him close against him, actually in contact. Throbbing agony in the knee. Trying to get his thoughts together, concentrate… ‘Make a fire? Tea? Stove’s no good, I used all the naptha, but there’s tea and stuff.’
‘I’ll make a fire.’
It couldn’t do much harm. If there were any Spetsnazi still around they’d know where they were, by now. He heard his own voice muttering, ‘Tea would be marvellous… But then you clear off, Juffu, while the goings good. No point both—’
‘Ja.’ Juffu was gathering wood. ‘You’re right.’
‘Tea’s in my pack here. Pocket on that side. Sugar’s in there too.’
Talking seemed to make the leg hurt more. Or maybe it was just hurting more all the time. It throbbed, pain seeming to travel through the bone while drumbeats kept in step with it in his skull. The thigh felt as if it had ballooned, and if it had been easier to get out of the bag he’d have looked to see if the bleeding had stopped, so he could have loosened the tourniquet. Juffu had begun to talk to him again: ‘Juobmo… And if I had a bear’s gall I‘d put some on that wound, you’d see how the pain would go. You don’t believe me, but you’d see. The old folk knew many useful things that are now forgotten.’ He seemed to have been talking from some distance and through ice-water, and Ollie knew his own voice wouldn’t carry that far so he didn’t bother to reply. He remembered that juobmo had an unpleasant taste but a strengthening effect, and if that was what the old guy wanted to give him, OK, no problem, and you could ignore the bit about the bear’s gall. He seemed to have some kind of fixation about bears. There was an interval of silence then, possibly a long one, before he became aware of a fire’s light and warmth and a broad-shouldered, ape-like figure hunched over it, a face like a yellow mask with two chips of broken glass thumbed into it as if into clay. He was stirring something in a pot. Juobmo, that would be. He had Ollie’s mug there too, must have extracted it from the top part of the bergen without waking him.
‘That’s a strange-sounding language, yours.’
‘What?’
He’d been raving in his sleep, apparently. It didn’t surprise him to hear this. The leg was hurting very badly indeed, really insufferably, and he told Juffu he thought the best thing might be to amputate it. However painful the process might be it couldn’t be any worse than it was already. Then he’d be mobile, too, he’d be able to hop along on the good leg, using a ski-pole to support himself on that side. He couldn’t see why this shouldn’t work quite well, although Juffu told him he wasn’t thinking straight. Ollie insisted: he had a very good knife, razor-sharp carbon steel…
‘Rubbish. You don’t know what you’re saying.’ Moving closer. ‘Here…’
Juobmo. He’d forgotten how foul it was, and it made him retch. When the spasm was over Juffu held the mug to his lips again: ‘Drink it all. If you don’t you won’t hear the cuckoo.’
That was an expression he’d used before, meaning, ‘Won’t live out the winter, won’t see another spring’. And he did want to live that long, at least, to see Sophie again. There were a lot of things he wanted to say to her, and there was also the prospect of that fishing trip. So he drank the juobmo. He thought Juffu very likely did have wolf’s blood in him. He said, ‘Could have sworn the Ivan I shot down there was the guy you were after.’
‘I told you, I killed mine. But if you hadn’t shot the one you did shoot, he’d have had you with his next bullet.’ Juffu touched the bivvy-bag in the area of the shattered knee. ‘It was a bullet from him that did this, nicht wahr?’
It might have been. He was probably right. That one downslope behind him, etched black against the glare of burning. ‘I suppose…’
‘You truly believed me to be dead?’
‘Sure. When you went after him I expected it, then I heard the shooting.’
‘If I’d thought, I’d have brought you proof, I could have worn his face.’
Gibberish — and darkness like black water. Face — nose, mouth — only fractionally above the icy surface. If the wind got up at all you wouldn’t have a prayer, you’d drown. He heard Juffu telling him that in the old days it was the custom, the way ritual demanded they should go about it.
‘Go about what?’
‘The hunter who had ringed his bear and then speared it—’
‘Christ. On about bears again…’
‘— would receive certain honours.’ Juffu refilled the mug with juobmo. ‘Drink this, while I describe the form they took. The women, to start with — they’d chew alder-bark and spit the juice at him, also at the dogs and the other people so that it stained them. Clothes, faces, everything, people and dogs alike. And the men could not have sex with their wives for three days, the hunter for five days—‘
‘Some honour.’
‘— and the hunter would cut off the bear’s muzzle and tie it to his own face, so he became a bear, for that time. The remainder of the animal would be cut up and cooked, to provide a feast that would last three days. The greatest delicacy, which would be offered first to the hunter, would be the soles of the bear’s feet. Then the blood which had been collected would be smeared on the tents, dogs, people—’
‘Oh, Jesus Christ…’
The knee was throbbing like an engine, pumping pain through the leg, and the drumbeats were so violent they were shaking his whole body. He was having to fight impulses to scream. He thought he probably did make some noise. Juffu was telling him — rasping into his ear, close up against him — ‘When it begins to get light we’ll start down, and from the siida who are close by I will obtain a pulka and a draught-reindeer to pull it. In the meantime since you don’t like to be told about bears I will speak of wolves and of the different ways there are of hunting them. To start at the beginning — well, it was accepted by all our people in the old days that Baergalak made the wolf. Baergalak is our name for the devil. He made him, and Ibmel — who is God — breathed life into him through his nostrils…’
*
Tony Beale’s SBS team, as well as others in the border area, had seen the dump blow up, in their case from a distance of about sixty kilometres. They’d had the big Clansman radio with them for communications with COMNON, and the same Sea King crew flew them in, not landing because even over-flying Finnish territory was a breach of that country’s neutrality and of NATO regulations. But this was an emergency, a far from normal situation, and the helicopter’s first pilot — whom the Marines called a ‘jungly’, their parlance for a flyer
who’s been everywhere, a term originating in the Borneo confrontation of 1963 — this ‘jungly’ agreed to take them in but he didn’t want to land if it could possibly be avoided, so the three of them abseiled in from a hover at fifty metres. And in fact as the machine hammered across the frontier in the steely glimmerings of that dawn they’d seen Finnish Army units already deploying, heavy transport all the way down the highway from Karigasniemi south to Angeli.
(The other area of intense border activity was in the west, south of Kautokeino and around the border crossing at Kivilompolo, which was where the other thrust of the invasion would have come, up to Kautokeino and on from there to Alta. The Soviets had set up a forward base there as well, and in that sector one Kola Lapp, a Spetsnaz conscript, crossed alone into Norway and surrendered, requesting asylum. He’d been a member of the team which A.N. Belyak had brought up with him — into the Karasjok district initially — after the murder of the three Finnish special force men, and in a later series of debriefings a lot was learnt not only about recent activities but also about Spetsnaz organisation, training and operational procedures. The Lopar was also able to identify photographs and in some cases the frozen corpses of former Spetsnaz comrades.)
The SBS men who abseiled into Finland in the first hour after dawn found a blackened acreage of forest and in the centre of it a smouldering crater which had been an ammunition and fuel dump. There was one burnt-out Boievaya Machina Pieleboti and a number of bodies. Some of these would only have been recognisable to their dentists, but two were later identified (by that Kola Lapp, from photographs) as Spetsnaz troopers Pereudin and Kunaiev. Continuing the search, Beale found tracks which were copiously bloodstained, and followed them across rising ground to where a rocky stream led up to the summit of a hill. The stream was still solid ice; this part of the hillside faced southwest, so the heat of the blazing dump hadn’t got to it.
There was a track leading up beside the stream, and they could see that the wounded man had begun to climb here, although it looked as if he’d been losing even more blood than he had lower down. In fact Tony Beale concluded at this stage that if the man they were trailing was Ollie Lyle they were almost surely too late.
Two hundred metres up, they found a body sprawled across the ice. He’d been of average height, with dark complexion, narrow face, black beard, and he smelt of onions. Beale took a photograph, and the Lopar defector later identified this one as Yuri Dmitrovich Grintsov, a Spetsnaz leitnant. He’d been killed by a grenade, and nearby was a baked—bean tin with another grenade still in it, short length of string attached. The ring and split-pin had been removed, so if the grenade had been pulled out of the tin it would have exploded as the other had. They’d been linked by string, and both should have gone off; the idea was by no means a new one to the SB party. Beale took the tin along with him. The grenade was a West German Diehl, a DM-51, which he remembered contained nearly six thousand ball splinters each of 2-mm diameter. He also took the dead Russian’s Swedish submachine gun and a SIG-Sauer automatic from a shoulder holster. He took the grenade only so that someone else, less knowledgeable, wouldn’t come across it and tip it out of the bean can; he’d get rid of it later, but not yet, in case they ran into opposition. This seemed unlikely, because the Soviets were pulling out now, retreating to their own borders, but you couldn’t take anything for granted, some idiot Spetsnaz could have stayed behind. Wounded, for instance. In fact the whistle had been blown last night. Moscow had been told that the invasion plan had for some time been no secret and that defensive deployments were now complete, that any further infringement of Norway’s borders would be regarded as an act of war against the NATO alliance as a whole. A few hours earlier the Helsinki government had been informed of the situation and supplied with details of Soviet deployments in their country; the Finns had given their Russian neighbours twenty-four hours to remove all their personnel from Suomi soil.
At the top of the hill, by which time it was more or less daylight, the SBS men found evidence of recent occupation — ashes of a fire still warm, to start with, then Ollie Lyle’s bergen and pusser’s planks. Ski-tracks led down the hill’s south side. They followed these down the steep, thickly-wooded slope, and not far down came across a pair of Lapp skis propped against a tree. Simmerton put them on his shoulder. Howie was carrying Ollie’s. The tracks continued down, one set only, boot tracks deeply indenting the snow although this southeast face was crusted hard; like the route they’d come up by, it hadn’t been warmed and melted by the inferno that had raged for hours on the north side.
They carried on, hurrying, and when they were near the bottom they sighted a bear-like creature shambling through the sparse trees on the valley floor with a man’s body on its shoulders. Beale shouted, Juffu whipped round — letting his burden slip down on to the snow — and took a snap-shot at them. Luckily, he missed — Ollie being no lightweight, the hillside steep and tricky to negotiate, Juffu for all his wiry strength had been breathless and unsteady. Otherwise he would not have missed such an easy shot. The SBS men wisely raised their arms above their heads, shedding various burdens in order to do so, and stood still, allowing Juffu time to have a good look at them before they continued down towards him.
Beale had morphine ampoules with his field-dressing kit. It was as well he had, since in his intervals of consciousness Ollie was in extremes of pain. While Beale and Howie attended to him, Simmerton called up the Sea King on the Clansman 351 which they’d brought with them. They’d left the big set, the 320, in Norway. The 351 was much more easily portable and its ground range of about twenty kilometres went up to about thirty when it was slant-range, to the airborne helicopter. Their ‘jungly’ pilot was waiting for a call, and within minutes he put the helo down beside them. It was on the ground for only about one minute, and Juffu declined the offer of a lift. He explained in Norwegian, of which Tony Beale had a smattering, that his interests were here in Finland and he had no wish to be transported north.
Epilogue
‘He came to our wedding, though.’
I looked at him — wondering if I’d heard right. I was in a London club, talking to — or rather, listening to — this former Royal Marine, former SBS man who’d taken early retirement after a parachute accident and was now deputy to the director in charge of security in one of the major international airlines. He’d agreed to meet me because he’d read a book of mine which described — fictionally — an SBS operation in which he’d been involved, and he was curious to know where I’d got my information; I’d explained that I’d had no single source, only more or less scratched around, putting two and two together to make five. I added, ‘I wouldn’t tell you, anyway. Any more than if I were to turn your Northern flank adventure into a novel I’d name you.’
‘Right.’ He nodded. ‘But obviously I can’t give you more than just the bare bones of it, right here and now.’
‘Well, sure. But if we then decided to go on with it — well, I’d fit into your schedule, whatever time you could spare… Incidentally — why would you want to do this?’
He’d like to see it in narrative form, on paper and between covers, he told me. Partly as a surprise present for his wife. They hadn’t been married long, she was Norwegian and she’d played a major part in the action, apparently.
‘But anyway — posterity, you know. Like What did you do on the Northern flank, Grandfather?’
‘Even though it would have to be presented as fiction.’
‘Absolutely. From my point of view it would have to be… And we’ll need a fictional name for me, I suppose. How about Oliver — Ollie for short — for the first name?’
‘All right.’
‘Don’t want to bore you with domestic trivia, but the fact is my wife — call her Sophie, shall we? — well, she’s—’ he smiled ‘— if it’s a boy we’re calling him Oliver, and if it’s a girl, Sophie.’
‘Arrival of one or other being imminent?’
‘Not long now.’
‘C
ongratulations.’
‘Thanks. And for a surname, how about Lyle? Open Champion, ’eighty-five? Connection is that I have ambitions in that direction. Golf’s one of the few sports I can aspire to, with this plastic knee.’
At that stage I was attributing his limp to the parachute accident. Soon after he’d begun his story I’d realised this wasn’t the case, but only near the end had he mentioned that it was a Soviet 5.45-mm bullet that had smashed his knee-joint into pulp. That tiny slug has an airspace in its nose, shifting the centre of gravity right back so that on impact it tumbles, with viciously destructive effect.
But now he’d made this statement about his wedding, and the old Lapp hunter attending it…
‘Did you say Juffu came to your wedding?’
‘Right.’ He grinned. ‘We borrowed a car from Sophie’s brother, drove up there and tracked him down. Car, then boat. He has a shack on the Lemmenjoki river where he pans for gold, and we more or less kidnapped him. In the summer, this was. I was still on crutches, Sophie did most of the work. Long trip — the wedding was down in Kristiansund, where her parents live. Her brother says his car still smells of wet dog.’
*
That might be a happy note on which to finish. But it leaves a contrastingly sombre question smouldering.
How long before they try again?
Maybe the deal touched on this. There must have been a deal. Neither side wanting war, they’d have settled for speedy withdrawal in return for no public humiliation. It would explain the hush-up; and some assurance for the future may have been included.
May have. But on the 196 kilometres of the Norwegian/Soviet frontier there are still only 150 Norwegian riflemen facing 1,500 border guards, two motorised infantry divisions, one brigade of naval infantry and two brigades of Spetsnazi.
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