Soldier M: Invisible Enemy in Kazakhstan

by Peter Cave

  ‘Damn,’ the Thinker hissed under his breath. ‘That means they’re going to stay ahead of us. That’ll give them the advantage of the high ground and all the cover they need to spring an ambush if they feel like it.’

  Andrew nodded morosely. Those had been his thoughts exactly.

  ‘So, what do you reckon?’ the Thinker asked.

  ‘About the only thing we can do is to give them enough headstart so we stay outside the range of those rifles,’ Andrew replied with a sigh. ‘But if they do decide to set an ambush, we’re not going to know about it until the shooting starts. And even if they have only got a few rifles, that gives them one hell of an edge.’

  ‘In short, a bit of a bastard,’ the corporal observed. ‘Looks like we got hold of the shitty end of the stick, boss.’

  It was an understatement. ‘And those fucking Chinks handed it to use,’ Andrew said bitterly. ‘What the fuck were they playing at?’

  The Thinker was silent for a few seconds, pondering. Finally, he said: ‘Maybe they knew something we don’t.’

  Andrew grunted. ‘Yeah, and something they maybe didn’t want us to know, either.’ He stiffened suddenly, raising one hand for silence. Holding his breath, he looked up, his eyes scanning the sky. ‘Can you hear what I hear?’

  The other soldier strained his ears. Sure enough, echoing down from the hills, he could hear a distant, faint, but unmistakable sound. Both men waited with bated breath as the muted pocka-pocka-pocka of a helicopter became gradually louder.

  The chopper appeared from nowhere. One moment it was just a distant sound, and the next it was in clear view, rising from behind a high ridge of hills to the far right of the refugee encampment. Andrew snatched up his binoculars again, training them on the black shape silhouetted against the golden sky.

  ‘Soviet-built Mil Mi-24 Hind-A,’ he muttered, identifying the craft almost at once.

  ‘Christ,’ the Thinker spat out, realizing the implications at once. The Hind-A was strictly an assault helicopter, invariably armed with a large-calibre machine-gun in the nose, three other guns on each of the auxiliary wings and four underwing pods equipped with up to thirty-two 57mm rockets. The Soviets had used them extensively during the Afghanistan conflict, to devastating effect. Their destructive capability and sheer fire-power were awesome. One thing was certain, the Thinker realized: it sure as hell was not on a reconnaissance mission.

  The noise from the helicopter’s engines was over-powering now, wiping out the need to whisper. Andrew whistled loudly through his teeth. ‘Christ Almighty – so that’s what the fucking Chinks wanted to keep quiet about,’ he exploded. ‘It looks like Republican forces are gunning these bloody hills as a matter of course.’

  The noise of the helicopter had brought Jimmy and Barry scrambling up the side of the gully.

  ‘Heard we had company, boss,’ Jimmy said. ‘Want us to break out a gimpy, just in case?’

  Andrew shook his head. ‘We’ve got to remember – this isn’t our bloody war,’ he reminded them. ‘You heard the orders – we stay out of trouble unless it comes looking for us.’

  The other trooper looked up at the Hind-A as it began to curve round on a banking sweep, losing height rapidly. ‘Well that bastard’s not looking for a couple of pals to play with, I can tell you that for nothing,’ he said sardonically. ‘And if one of them’s not trouble, I don’t know what is.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re probably right,’ Andrew agreed, keeping a wary eye on the flight path of the chopper as he spoke. It was completing its turn now, and beginning to drop straight down into the narrow pass between the two ridges of hills where the refugees were. ‘And I’ve got a nasty feeling that it’s just found exactly what it’s looking for.’

  Even as he spoke, they all saw the flashes of flame spit out from the nose and the wings of the helicopter. A split second later, the staccato crackle of heavy gunfire echoed out across the steppe, rolling off the sides of the hills like thunder.

  ‘Jesus wept,’ Andrew blurted out, snatching up the binoculars and training them on the tiny camp. ‘Those poor bastards don’t stand a chance.’

  Andrew watched panicking figures running everywhere, desperately trying to seek some sort of cover as the helicopter’s blanket fire-power chewed up the dusty soil all around them, creating what looked like a small-scale sandstorm. He saw several of the fleeing figures tossed aside like rag dolls as heavy-calibre slugs from the chopper’s nose-gun tore into their bodies. Others just dropped where they stood, as armour-piercing bullets passed straight through them. There was no attempt to return fire. It was a strictly one-way massacre.

  Perhaps half the victims of the attack died in the first few blistering seconds of the aerial assault. Through the binoculars, Andrew could see at least three women among the dead. Then, suddenly, the bodies were all there was to be seen, as the survivors disappeared behind rocks and found fissures in the hillside to hide in.

  The sounds of heavy gunfire ceased abruptly and the Hind-A climbed away from the gully, circling round until its pilot had a side view of what had been the encampment. As the helicopter hovered like a malevolent insect, Andrew watched the nose drop and the tail section come up until it resembled a scorpion about to strike.

  And strike it did. Four bursts of flame and streaking smoke trails presaged the rapid descent of rockets into the rocky foothills, where they exploded like short, sharp thunderclaps.

  ‘Fuck this for a game of soldiers,’ Andrew screamed suddenly. He threw himself back down the gully into the dug-out, emerging a moment later with the Stinger launcher and two missiles tucked under his arm. Grunting with exertion, he hauled them back up to the lip of the ridge and began to make the launcher ready for combat.

  ‘I thought you said this wasn’t our war?’ the Thinker said laconically, as Andrew slipped a missile canister into the rear end of the launcher and hefted it into position over his shoulder.

  The sergeant clapped his eyes to the optical sight. ‘This isn’t war, it’s sheer fucking slaughter,’ he grunted, his fingers tightening around the stock and trigger. Bypassing the optional IFF ‘friend or foe’ identification transponder, he lined up the Hind-A in the sights straight away and locked on.

  The launcher bucked in his hands as he squeezed the firing mechanism, launching the infrared missile. As if in slow motion, the warhead streaked unerringly towards its target, homing in on the hot exhaust gases from the twin Isotov turboshaft engines mounted above the helicopter’s cabin.

  The Hind-A exploded in a red and orange ball of fire, spewing down shattered and smoking pieces of scrap metal in a deadly rain. Then it was gone, with only a few oily black streamers of smoke to mark the fact that there had ever been an aircraft in that particular patch of the sky.

  Andrew lowered the launcher to the ground, glancing sideways at Jimmy, Barry and the Thinker with an unspoken question in his eyes. The satisfied smiles on their faces answered him more than adequately. They were all equally glad that the phoney, invisible war was over at last. Now they had a real fight on their hands, with a real and clearly identifiable enemy. They were soldiers again, doing what they were trained to do, and what they did best.

  The sergeant grinned broadly at all of them, sharing their relief. ‘I think you might say we just chose sides,’ he said. ‘Let’s just hope we chose the right one.’

  Two miles away, Major Hailsham watched the last smoking fragments of the Hind-A snaking to the ground and felt a similar sense of elation. He could not fault Sergeant Winston’s decision to shoot down the helicopter. Under the circumstances he would have done exactly the same – on purely tactical if not humanitarian grounds. Sooner or later, the pilot would have tired of shooting fish in a barrel and gone looking for other targets. The war would have come to them anyway – Winston had merely pre-empted the fact.

  Hailsham reviewed his next move in light of the development. It was extremely unlikely that the pilot or crew had had time to send any sort of message to base. From the moment their
on-board sensors had registered a missile locked on to them to the moment of impact had been less than five seconds. Allowing for at least three seconds of surprise and confusion at the completely unexpected attack, the helicopter crew would have been dead before any of them could push the panic button, let alone relay any information.

  Hailsham’s thoughts turned to the people in the hills, whoever they were. The fact that there had been no attempt to return fire during the attack suggested that they were only lightly armed, if at all. And Hailsham guessed that by now they would either be retreating higher into the hills or digging into cover to tend their wounded. They might be confused, even worried about the source and nature of the sudden new players in the game, although such considerations would not be foremost in their thoughts. Tactically then, Hailsham reckoned, it was as good a time as any to make a forward move, and he automatically made the assumption that his sergeant would think exactly the same way. All things being equal, they would simply RV earlier than planned.

  He stretched himself luxuriously, throwing back the crude sage-brush roof of the hide. ‘Well, gentlemen, I think it’s time to bug out and head for the hills,’ he announced breezily.

  Tweedledum, Tweedledee and Cyclops scrambled to their feet gratefully, relieved to be able to stretch their cramped bodies. ‘Reckon there are any more of those things about, boss?’ Cyclops asked.

  Hailsham shrugged, although personally he doubted it. All the intelligence information he had received at the secondary briefing indicated that the official Kazakh Republican forces were stretched pretty thinly, trying to cover a vast area in which multiple and sporadic outbreaks of guerrilla activity and ethnic clashes kept them constantly on the hop. It seemed more than likely that the Hind-A had been a lone bird on a simple search-and-destroy mission, probably from a safe base well inside the border, such as Leninogorsk or Blisk. If that assumption was correct, then the helicopter would not be due back at base for at least an hour and a half, so it would be a minimum of two hours before anything else could be sent to the area to find out what had happened to it.

  But this was pure speculation, and Hailsham was not going to swear to it under oath. ‘Let’s just put it this way,’ he said. ‘The easiest way to find out would be to hang around here waiting.’

  It was a good point. Cyclops set about helping Tweedledum and Tweedledee unload their equipment from the trench hide, after which they hastily filled it in again and covered all traces of its existence as best they could. There was no point in giving the enemy an obvious point from which to track them.

  Finally packed up and ready to march, they assembled behind Hailsham as he scanned the lowest foothills, searching for the best route to their destination. The obvious, and the easiest, path was the most direct – straight across the steppe towards the gully where the refugees had made camp. Such a route had clear advantages. First, it represented the shortest possible distance between them and the cover of the hills, and secondly it would save a considerable amount of climbing through difficult terrain.

  But the obvious solution to a problem is not necessarily the best, and the SAS had never been noted for taking the easy option. The attractions of the route were balanced by the potential dangers, Hailsham realized. He was only assuming that the group already in the hills had limited weaponry. They may have deliberately chosen not to return fire upon the helicopter to conceal their true strength, he reflected. Equally, they may simply not have had enough time to prepare an adequate defence against the attack. So they remained a largely unknown quantity.

  With all these factors in mind, Hailsham struck out on a path which would take them well to the left of the encampment and into a stair-like series of rising hills towards the mountains proper. It was a circuitous route, but he reckoned that, with the initial climbing done, it should be possible to cut across what appeared to be a fairly easy plateau towards the RV. He could only hope that his sergeant was making a similar decision.

  Chapter 12

  In fact, Andrew’s decision was much more straight-forward and easy to make. Daylight had revealed that the shallow gully which had afforded them protection would also offer a straight and easy route directly into the mountains.

  It appeared that Jimmy’s initial assessment of the geological oddity had been correct. The gully was a natural channel scoured out of the plain by the annual spring floods of melt water which had poured down out of the mountains over thousands, perhaps millions of years. Now down into its deepest part, Andrew gazed along the floor of the depression to where it began to incline into the foothills with a smile of satisfaction on his black face.

  ‘Looks like Mother Nature’s given us our own private motorway,’ he said to the Thinker.

  ‘Pity she didn’t think to put in a couple of rest stops,’ the big Mancunian muttered. ‘I’m bloody starving.’

  ‘Stop worrying about your belly,’ Jimmy grunted, humping his heavy bergen up on to his broad back. ‘Let’s just get the hell out of here before the fucking Russkies come to find out what’s happened to their nice whirlybird.’

  ‘Bloody good idea,’ Barry Naughton agreed. ‘We can worry about scran when we’re off this fucking plain. Anyway, there’s bound to be a McDonald’s sooner or later. There always is.’

  The Thinker did not appreciate the humour. He glowered at the trooper. ‘Yeah, bloody dream on,’ he growled, but set about loading up his own equipment with a new sense of urgency. He held back as the others began to move out, taking his turn as Tail-end Charlie.

  They had covered less than a mile, but Hailsham was sweating profusely under his multiple layers of thermal clothing. The sun was still low in the sky, but the wide difference between daytime and night-time temperatures was already apparent. The major stopped, holding up his hand to bring the patrol to a halt.

  ‘I think we ought to strip off a couple of layers,’ he suggested, dropping his bergen to the ground.

  The suggestion was gratefully received by everyone, as was the chance of a brief rest while they were complying with it. And, of course, it provided a natural break for another bout of the inevitable bullshit.

  ‘I reckon we’ll all have a bloody good dose of crotch-rot before we get out of this weird fucking country,’ Tweedledum complained. ‘One minute it’s trying to freeze your bollocks off, next minute it’s trying to cook ’em.’

  Cyclops grinned at him. ‘You’re not supposed to still have any. Somebody back at Training Wing must have fucked up.’ He glanced over at Hailsham. ‘Ain’t that right, boss?’

  Hailsham finished packing the garments he had taken off back into his bergen. After glancing at Tweedledum and Tweedledee, he smiled at Cyclops. ‘Well, I was promised a pair of bollockless bastards,’ he agreed. ‘And so far I’ve had no cause to complain.’

  Caught in a trap of his own making, Tweedledum was uncharacteristically silent, temporarily stumped for a suitable rejoinder. Grinning sheepishly, he shrugged on his heavy pack once again and turned to face the foothills.

  The four-man patrol set out again to trudge the last two miles across the steppe.

  In the Chinese operations room back in Tacheng, General Chang had a satisfied smile on his face as he replaced the telephone receiver. He glanced across at Leng Pui, who was eyeing him quizzically.

  ‘Yes, that was the British authorities,’ he confirmed with a nod. ‘They were requesting an update on the operation.’

  ‘And what did you tell them?’ Leng Pui asked.

  Chang shrugged. ‘What should I tell them? That everything is proceeding according to plan.’ He broke off, to leer at his fellow officer. ‘But our plan, of course – not theirs. No point in mentioning that.’

  ‘No point at all,’ Leng Pui agreed, echoing Chang’s devious smile. ‘I think perhaps they might not be too pleased if they knew we were using their precious SAS as pawns in our own game. I must commend you, General. This scheme of yours seems to be working remarkably well.’

  Chang preened himself. He was not one for
false modesty. ‘As I knew it would,’ he said. ‘This business with the Russian research facility was an unexpected gift from the gods. I could not let it pass without turning it to our advantage. We have everything to gain, and nothing to lose.’

  ‘And if the SAS soldiers survive?’ Leng Pui asked.

  Chang affected a careless shrug. ‘Unlikely,’ he said quietly. ‘But even if they do, what will they know, and what can they prove?’ He shook his head, smiling even more confidently. ‘No, the cards are firmly stacked in our favour, my dear Captain. The British SAS are merely playing out the game to my rules. The outcome does not really matter one way or the other. We shall have achieved our objective.’

  Leng Pui regarded his superior with a look of frank admiration. ‘You should have been a diplomat, not a soldier,’ he ventured.

  ‘In these changing times, it is perhaps most prudent to be both,’ Chang observed, nodding thoughtfully.

  Andrew’s reference to the wadi as a motorway was proving to be strangely accurate, for the further they progressed along the dried-out watercourse the clearer it became that it had served as a major route for others in the past. The patrol had already passed several long-abandoned camp-sites, and caches of dumped waste and discarded equipment. They had also noted at least two sites in which loosely piled mounds of rocks and stones suggested makeshift graves. Andrew had assumed them to be civilian, probably marking the passage of nomadic tribesmen or goatherds down to the sparse grazing of the plain during the summer months.

  The latest find, however, looked considerably more recent, and was definitely more military in nature. Andrew pulled up the patrol, gazing around at the obvious signs of a recent battleground. One side of the gully bore unmistakable signs of entrenched positions, and there were several patches of scorched and blackened earth where it was clear that mortars had been positioned. The surface of the ground was littered with spent cartridge and shell cases. This had been no band of refugees with a few rifles, Andrew thought. The site betrayed the fairly recent presence of a very well-armed and well-trained fighting unit.