Soldier M: Invisible Enemy in Kazakhstan

by Peter Cave

  Nobody thought of inviting Safar, who seemed content to sit on his own in the teeth of the wind, studying them with a faintly pitying smile.

  Chapter 16

  It was with mixed feelings that Major Osipov studied the latest piece of intelligence intercepted by the Alma-Ata military base. While on the surface it appeared to offer him a perfect chance to act on his own initiative, he was all too aware of the possible dangers of sticking his neck out. Premier Kuloschow might be weak as a politician, and lacking any vestige of respect within the military, but he still had strong Party connections, some of whom still wielded considerable power behind the scenes. The time and circumstances for a military coup were rapidly ripening, but had yet to reach their best season for plucking. To bite too deeply, too soon, could be to taste the hard sourness of unripened fruit instead of the soft succulence of sweet flesh.

  Osipov made a mental effort to control the impetuosity which fuelled his boundless ambition. For once, it would do no harm to err on the side of caution, bide his time until he had more pieces of the strange jigsaw puzzle which had been thrown down in front of him. For if, as the coded message suggested, the British SAS had now become involved, then he would need to be very sure of his ground before making any move at all. It was not even certain that the information was genuine. Perhaps it was nothing more than a deliberately leaked piece of disinformation put out by the Chinese for reasons of their own. Certainly that would not be a new trick, or a ruse which had not succeeded in the past. Much as Osipov despised the Chinese, he had a healthy respect for their cunning. In truth, they were a worthy enemy, which only sweetened the game.

  Osipov considered the matter objectively. It was clear that he needed more answers, which, paradoxically, meant that he first needed more questions. But who to ask? Where to start looking? His whole body tensed with the sheer frustration of it all. For Kuloschow was probably nearer to the essential information than anyone, even though he was probably still unaware of it. And to give the politician the slightest hint that the mysterious research facility in the Sailyukem Mountains might be the key to something of international importance would be to show his own hand prematurely, and lose the initiative which he had now gained.

  That the research station was the key to the mystery, Osipov no longer had any doubts. Whether the Chinese message was genuine or not made little difference. The fact remained that a military assault helicopter had been destroyed while on a routine surveillance mission – and that made it a military matter demanding a military response. And in that response lay the means to achieve his own ends – simple, direct and myopically brutal. For given a credible pretext, Osipov felt sure that he could justify an all-out genocidal war against the Birlik and any of the other rebel factions which threatened the fragile status quo. It would be a move which would at once restore the morale and the ambition of the military hierarchy who even now were poised for a return to the power and the glories of the old regime. And Major Yuri Osipov would be at the head of that power, the triumphant returning warrior in whose face all that glory was reflected.

  That, in essence, was the crux of Osipov’s grandiose but essentially simple plan. It also incorporated his essential weakness, his own personal blind spot. For his thinking was strictly conditioned by the limitations of his military training and background. There had never been anything else. He saw everything in direct and simplistic terms. The roots of power lay in strength and control, and the only reference point was the strength of the old and familiar past. His conditioning, both by his military upbringing and his political convictions, left little room for any understanding of diplomacy, certainly not any acceptance of its possible role in the scheme of things. The major was ill-equipped to deal with even the basic politics of a simple and authoritarian regime, let alone the increasingly complex, fragmented and subtle influences now at work within an embryonic democracy. So he simply ignored them. It was a philosophy which, up till now, had always worked well enough.

  Osipov returned his full attention to the business of the intelligence report and how he was going to use it to his best advantage. It was decided, then, that he would keep the information from Premier Kuloschow, at least for the time being. With that as a starting point, his primary task seemed clear enough. Somehow he had to find out more about the suddenly important Phoenix Project and what might possibly lie behind the wall of secrecy which surrounded it. Until he had some answers on that score, any questions as to the reasons behind the involvement of the British SAS were superfluous.

  Which brought him back to his original problem: where to start looking. Someone must have access to the information he needed. His own military intelligence seemed to be the most logical place to initiate the search. It was, after all, inconceivable that the secretive structure of his own system could work against him. Surely the slave could never be turned against the master – even in these turbulent times. Secure in this conviction, Osipov applied himself to the task in hand.

  The storm seemed to fall down from the overhanging mountains with the sudden ferocity of a surprise mortar attack. One moment Hailsham and his men were huddled together against the icy blast of a strong but steady wind. The next they were engulfed by elemental forces of unbelievable fury. The wind no longer seemed to have a definite direction. It wheeled and whirled above them like a demonic, crazed, living thing – out of control and seemingly hell-bent on destroying any other form of life which dared to defy it. Swirling, cyclonic gusts approaching eighty miles an hour ripped first along the length of the narrow ravine and then quartered to roar across its width, creating within the trench a temporary vacuum which sucked the very breath out of their mouths and lungs as it scoured the ravine floor and drew up grit and small rocks with the force of missiles.

  Rolling waves of thick black cloud gathered from nowhere to hang like a blanket over their heads. Day was suddenly night, but a night which was pierced every few seconds by the blinding glare of sheet and streak lightning raging both above and between the higher mountains. Each flash was almost immediately followed by the deafening clap of thunder and the rolling echoes which followed it, confirming that they were in the very eye of the storm.

  Hailsham’s limited knowledge of meteorology told him that the storm was caused by a sudden and severe temperature inversion and not uncommon to mountainous regions. This piece of information led inevitably to two further conclusions – one good, one bad. Although among the most violent and destructive of all weather extremes, such storms were essentially short-lived, sometimes lasting only a few minutes. But they were almost certain to lead to a further temperature inversion, bringing savage cold and the strong likelihood of blizzard conditions in their wake. With the reasonable expectancy that the fierce winds would persist for several hours after the actual storm had subsided, the wind-chill factor would be horrendous, and heavy snow and drifting could soon turn the mountain path which had been their friend into a new and terrible enemy. Already the bucketing mix of hail, sleet and freezing rain was beginning to churn up the floor of the ravine, threatening to turn the steep incline ahead of them into one vast mud-slide.

  To stand up and remain upright for more than a few seconds would have been virtually impossible, so Hailsham did not even try. With considerable effort, he managed to drag himself towards Safar on his hands and knees, his body rocked from side to side by the buffeting winds. The little Uzbek had dropped from his exposed position on a large flat rock at the first sight of the looming clouds, and was now curled, foetus-like, beneath its scant shelter.

  Hailsham curled up beside him. Normal conversation, even shouting, was out of the question above the roar of the wind and the now almost continuous thunder. Cupping his hands around the man’s ear, Hailsham used them as a megaphone.

  ‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ he shouted in Russian. ‘Can we make it to anywhere more sheltered?’

  Safar appeared to think for a few moments, finally nodding his head. Mutely, he pointed further up along the rav
ine in the direction they had been travelling and then closed and opened both hands, extending all his fingers stiffly. It was a gesture which was obviously meant to convey the number ten, Hailsham realized. But whether the man meant ten kilometres, ten miles or ten minutes’ travelling time was unclear. He shouted again into Safar’s ear: ‘I don’t understand.’

  The young man uncurled himself, copying Hailsham’s improvised ear-trumpet technique. ‘There is a cave. Perhaps ten minutes from here. But we will have to climb to it. It will not be easy.’

  Whipping hailstones stung Hailsham’s face like shotgun pellets. He could almost feel the air temperature dropping again, as the expected inversion started to take place. Soon the hail and sleet would start to give way to driving snow and they would all be trapped in a total white-out. There was really no choice: they had to make a move and they had to make it now. He jabbed one finger up the ravine, nodding his head. Turning, he began to scramble back towards the huddled knot of his men as Safar attempted to push himself to his feet.

  Heads bowed, the tight circle of troopers looked for all the world like a bunch of Buddhist monks crouched in prayer. Only Jimmy dared to look up as Hailsham slithered into the group. Teeth gritted against the rasping wind and the sting of hail, the Scot tried to contort his face into a grin.

  ‘Fucking hell, boss – and I thought the weather in the Highlands was changeable,’ he screamed out at the top of his voice, but the words were snatched away on the teeth of the wind.

  Hailsham made no attempt to shout, merely signalling the intention to move out with a complicated series of hand gestures which would have put a mime artist to shame. They served their purpose well enough. With a series of shoves and nudges, the message was passed around the huddled circle and the men started to struggle to their feet and retrieve their stacked bergens.

  Picking up the heavy and unwieldy backpacks was one thing; trying to put them on again was something else. The men might just as well have been attempting to light cigarettes under water. As fast as a man managed to hook his bergen over one shoulder, a blast of wind would catch against it and either sweep it over his head or throw man and backpack to the ground together. It might have been funny in a silent film; here it was merely a useless and painful waste of energy. As was so often the case in times of shared difficulty, the only answer lay in teamwork. Sorting themselves into twos and threes, the men helped each other to shrug on their backpacks and equipment until they were all fully laden again and ready to move out.

  Hailsham had hoped that the additional weight of the bergens would give them all a little more stability. Instead they created a larger area of wind resistance, and the two opposing forces more or less cancelled each other out. Crouched over like a small band of misshapen dwarves, the men fell into a ragged line behind Hailsham and began to shamble up the increasingly treacherous floor of the ravine path. Virtually no one managed to remain on both feet for more than a few moments at a time. Before they had covered a quarter of a mile, all were caked in thick mud, soaked through and bruised from frequent and painful contact with the ground, the rocky sides of the ravine, or each other. Their senses numbed by the ear-splitting crashes of thunder and the roaring wind, and physically exhausted by the uphill struggle and the constant battle for a decent lungful of air, they had only the harshness of their survival training to drive them on in conditions where lesser men might have given up any hopes of survival.

  Not that similar thoughts did not occur to them, training or no training. Perhaps for the third time in as many minutes, Hailsham considered calling a halt to the agonizingly slow forward march and huddling down again in the hopes of sitting out the storm. But common sense and a dogged determination to survive prevailed each time, and he forced his unwilling feet to shuffle on, one leaden step at a time. Apart from the physical difficulty of forward movement, the element of mental frustration was itself challenging. He might take ten or so forward steps before one foot slipped on a patch of icy mud, or a savage gust of wind from an unexpected quarter knocked him sideways. Then it would be a question of scrabbling with hands and fingernails against the slippery floor of the ravine, trying to arrest the downhill and backward slide which would rob him of the few precious feet he had gained. But slowly progress was made, and the small party dragged itself on towards its unknown goal as the storm continued to rage about them.

  The mountain path began to widen out, the enclosing walls of the ravine becoming less high. With this diminishing protection came a new challenge which seemed wildly out of proportion to the comparatively minor change in the surrounding terrain. The wind assaulted them now with renewed fury, forming an invisible wall across their path. Ahead of him, Hailsham could see the slight figure of Safar pressed forward at a seemingly impossible angle, as though he were a puppet suspended on wires. Straining into the teeth of the gale, his feet scrabbling along the slimy floor of the path, he looked like a mime artist telling the tale of a man suddenly confronted with a huge but imaginary plate-glass window. Only when the fierce wind abruptly dropped, or veered off in another direction for a split second, was it possible for the little Uzbek to make any forward movement at all – and that would only be in clumsy, lurching steps which might take him all of three or four feet before the invisible obstacle returned to block his progress once again.

  It was obvious that Safar was finding the task beyond him. Crouching down even lower and pushing his broad shoulders into the wall of wind like a rugby player scrumming down, Hailsham threw himself forward with dredged-up reserves of energy, gradually closing the gap between them. Motioning over his back with one arm, Hailsham urged the rest of the men to close ranks behind him, tightening up from a strung-out, ragged line into a physically connected knot of brawn, muscle and sinew. Their combined weight and force seemed to make quite a difference. Rather like a tug-of-war team in reverse, they began to make steady forward progress once again, pushing the blanket-clad Safar out in front of them like a colourful standard.

  Another seven or eight minutes of struggling along in this concerted fashion brought them to a place where the path opened out even wider, dipping down to form a shallow bowl at the base of a massive and towering pinnacle of rock. Grateful for the limited amount of shelter it provided, the entire party collapsed weakly in the lee of the cliff-like rock to regain some strength.

  The raging eye of the storm seemed to have passed over them now. Hailsham found himself counting off the seconds between lightning flashes and the thunderclaps which followed, applying the old formula of five seconds to a mile. The interval between light and sound was clearly noticeable now, and extending rapidly. Hailsham estimated that the centre of the storm was now at least three-quarters of a mile behind them, and moving away at a speed of around forty miles an hour. Conversation was now possible again, provided it was conducted at fairly close range in short, shouted bursts.

  ‘Where now?’ he yelled to Safar.

  The man’s swarthy face cracked into the semblance of a grin. Glancing upwards, he jabbed one finger vertically into the air along the line of the almost sheer rock face towering over their heads.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’

  Hailsham’s explosive curse was delivered for his own benefit, but for some reason it seemed to increase Safar’s sense of amusement. Grinning like a monkey, he shook his head from side to side as if to offer Hailsham some welcome reassurance.

  ‘Easy,’ the Uzbek blurted out. ‘I show you easy way.’ He pressed his back against the rocky wall behind him and began to push himself to his feet again. Beckoning for Hailsham to follow him, he started to edge along the base of the pinnacle to where it disappeared behind a couple of huge, weather-worn boulders.

  The base of the rock face began to curve to the right. Following Safar around it, Hailsham finally saw the reason for the guide’s enthusiasm: a giant jagged cleft in the main structure of the massif which cleaved almost vertically upwards. The effect was to create a vast chimney which was more than generously provided with
craggy outcrops forming a crude but negotiable stairway. Looking up it, Hailsham tried to estimate its height – a calculation somewhat complicated by the fact that the cleft tapered towards the top, distorting the natural sense of perspective which would have allowed a true assessment. He guessed that the main fissure rose a good three hundred feet before narrowing into little more than a split in the rock. Seen from this level, the last thirty feet or so looked like being a rather tight squeeze for an average-sized man. Hailsham could not help feeling slightly dubious, particularly when he considered the Thinker’s bulky frame.

  He gestured up towards the top, shouting to Safar. ‘How wide?’ he asked, moving his outspread hands in from arm’s length to just over a foot apart.

  Safar held out his hands about eighteen inches apart. ‘Is easy,’ he insisted again. ‘Even for big man.’

  The Uzbek seemed to be confident enough, Hailsham decided. No doubt he had used the chimney before, either as an emergency escape route or a temporary bolt-hole. Assuming he was right, even the Thinker or Andrew should have no trouble in squeezing through the narrow gap, although they would all have to take off their bergens and equipment before starting the climb.

  Jimmy had slithered up to join them. He looked up, following Hailsham’s point of view to the top of the cleft and smiling happily. ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ he shouted almost exultantly.

  Hailsham failed to understand the Scot’s obvious enthusiasm for a moment, finally remembering that rock climbing and mountaineering were his favourite forms of leisure pursuit. On his periods of leave, he did this sort of thing for fun. There was no accounting for taste.

  ‘You crazy bastard,’ Hailsham yelled at him. ‘You’re actually going to enjoy this, aren’t you?’

  Jimmy nodded, his eyes gleaming. ‘Want me to lead?’ It was a request rather than an offer.

  ‘Too bloody right,’ Hailsham screamed back. ‘Only let Safar up first. He will be at the top by the time we get our bergens roped up. Each man will have to pull them through behind him, but it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.’