by James Steel
Neither side won, but simply by staying operational, Yamba’s unit prevented the fall of Namibia. The action took its toll on him as well and his men often regarded him as a narrow-minded stickler. He could not care less; he understood that military victory required obsessive attention to detail in planning.
With the fall of apartheid, The Buffaloes were once again faced with rejection. They were regarded as race traitors by the new, black ANC government for having fought for the old white regime and were sent into internal exile in an old asbestos mining town and left to die—a situation that Yamba was not going to accept.
So here he was taking on another job for Alex Devereux. As a rootless man, all that anchored him now in the world was his sense of professionalism. His identity came from doing a good job at the one thing that he had known since he was a young man—war. He respected both Alex and Colin; they were also exiles in their own ways who found identity through their jobs. They were the only people he felt he could relax and laugh with because he knew they shared his high standards. Anyone else he regarded with suspicion.
So, as he took his passport back from the immigration official, he looked at her but neither smiled nor said anything and she felt a chill run through her.
Yamba turned away to collect his bags and made his way into London.
Chapter Thirteen
MONDAY 8 DECEMBER
Lara looked down from the front of the helicopter at the frozen landscape, and felt afraid.
The bare, twisted trees and endless fields of snow seemed barren and hostile. In her few trips to England she had never been outside the small world of Russian oligarchs in Chelsea, Kensington and Mayfair.
Now, as she flew out to Alex’s country house to liaise with him, she was suddenly aware that there was so much more to the country. Under her beautiful, confident veneer she felt alone; exposed in a foreign land and very conscious of the risks involved in the operation.
Her discomfort was increased by the presence of the four men in the helicopter with her. She had never met any of them before. All she knew about them was that their main business involved killing people and consequently to her they all radiated a menacing air of suppressed violence.
They had been polite but taciturn when they met up at the heliport in London. Most of them hadn’t met each other before either, but none seemed to feel the urge to make small talk. After a round of handshakes and grunted greetings they had loaded their kitbags and some crates into Sergey’s executive helicopter, climbed onboard and then settled into watchful silence or fallen asleep once they were airborne.
The pilot sitting across from Lara had been the most forthcoming. He was also Russian and had grinned, with a cigarette sticking out of the corner of his mouth, as he shook her hand enthusiastically: ‘Arkady Voloshin—pleased to meet you. I’m a big fan of your shows!’
She had smiled weakly at him. He seemed a typical, working-class Russian thug and she didn’t want to encourage him. He was about thirty, stockily built, with a broad face, a gold tooth, pale crew-cut hair and stubble. He wore a chunky gold necklace and bracelet, smelled of stale cigarettes and body odour, and wore scruffy jeans, trainers and an old green sweatshirt under his heavy black parka.
Another of the men, also in his thirties, was tall and thin with a narrow face, neatly trimmed blond hair and blue eyes. He dropped his eyes when they shook hands. ‘Magnus Løndahl,’ he said in a quiet, precise voice.
The third man introduced himself with a nod of the head and grunted, ‘I’m Pete,’ in a strange accent. He looked younger than the others—mid-twenties, Lara thought—and had a strong physical presence about him: heavy jaw line and shaggy sideburns, six foot, with broad shoulders and neck muscles that showed at the loose opening of his snowboarder jacket. His brown, shoulder-length hair curled into ringlets and was tied back behind his head with a strip of ethnic-patterned cloth.
She found the last man the most intimidating, partly because, having lived her whole life in Russia, she had never personally met a black person before. He seemed to know Arkady and cackled with laughter as they shook hands like old friends. However, when he turned to face her he became stern, his black eyes cut into her and he spoke formally with a heavy African accent.
‘I am Yamba Douala. How do you do?’ His large hand felt leathery and tough when she shook it.
Once they were on their way, Arkady focused on flying and navigation, occasionally checking a map on his knees against a GPS system, so, with nothing to do and no one to talk to, Lara was left alone with her thoughts.
She had told Sergey before they left that she was worried about his recall to Moscow. He had been as blasé as usual, brushing her concern aside.
‘Krymov just wants to go Christmas shopping with me. It’ll be fine. You go and meet your nice Englishman,’ he grinned, and cocked an eyebrow at her.
She flamed red, infuriated with herself that she had allowed her attraction to Alex to show, but doubly angry with Sergey for being so cruel as to mention it, especially at a time when she was so vulnerable. But then, he always liked playing emotional games. Why did she feel it was her duty to put up with it?
When she was scared like this she wanted to be with him again, like they had been before, when she was young and capable of trust. He had found her when she was at a low point in her life: beautiful but fragile, confident that she was meant for great things but unsure what they were.
Circumstances had conspired against her. In the madness of Yeltsin’s Russia she had finished her degree but there were no jobs to go to. Like many young Russian women she had had to resort to virtual prostitution in Moscow, hanging around in hotel bars, trying to find a businessman with money to get her out of her dire straits.
Sergey had been on his way up in those days; the whole of Russia was a whirlwind that he’d seemed to be able to reap to his own advantage. He’d been even more erratic and compulsive then; he had spotted her in the bar of the Hotel Ukraine and drunkenly lurched over to her. Something about the fine balance of strength and tenderness in her face had gripped him instantly: it seemed the embodiment of Russkaya dusha.
She was initially alarmed by his dishevelled appearance but she found that his stream of banter had a strangely compelling intensity about it and she listened to his ridiculous jokes with growing amusement. Apart from which, he was so rich she couldn’t take it in. He recruited her to work in his TV station and launched her media career.
Their relationship burned with the white intensity of magnesium, the light so bright she couldn’t see what was happening. She loved him dearly—his crazy, manic energy, but also his immense tenderness when they were alone together and he would whisper special words to her; each one flooded her with such meaning that she felt she had been carried away on a tide and ceased to exist. He told her about his love of Russkaya dusha, and how for him she personified it.
Lara caught herself remembering those times and forced herself to stop; she knew it was indulgent and unreal to think of them now. It had been hard enough living through the break-up without torturing herself again about it. Those special memories had been locked away deep inside her. She couldn’t face the pain of loving Sergey again so she forced herself to look out of the helicopter window and away from them.
They were descending now. Arkady pointed down and to the left.
‘Should be over there somewhere,’ he said through her headphones over the noise of the rotors. She followed his finger and saw a rolling landscape of white forests and hills.
A red signal flare shot up from it, the colour burning bright against the white background. She focused in on where it had come from and saw an area of parkland with huge old oak trees scattered across it.
Arkady banked the helicopter round and she made out a large, yellow stone country house at the bottom of a hill, with stables and outbuildings behind it. Two men were standing outside, waving and pointing to where an orange, day-glo landing zone indicator had been laid out on the lawn in front of them.
The helicopter flared as it came in to land and blew a storm of snow over the men. Lara felt it bump slightly but then experienced a different jolt go through her as she saw Alex make his way through the rotor wash towards her.
Alex had been waiting outside for them to arrive at Akerly for a while, his ear cocked for the sound of the rotors. He paced back and forth along the front terrace, partly to keep warm but also because of the sheer amount of nervous energy inside him.
One of Sergey’s pilots had flown him and Colin and a load of supplies in the day before, and then returned to London. The two of them had been hard at it setting the house up, brainstorming ideas and preparing the planning meeting that they were going to hold shortly. As the commanding officer for the op, Alex knew he had to appear in charge of events at all times even if he was making it up as he went along.
There was so much that had to be done. His mind whirred. He not only had to come up with ideas for how to launch the attack, but then had to think through and organise the logistics of making it happen: payment, weapons, ammunition, rations, transport, medevac, communications and security issues all had yet to be thrashed out.
In addition, this was the first time he had been back to Akerly since his father’s death and he felt like a stranger. The huge house smelled musty and deserted. His father had lived in it alone for years—apart from the odd prostitute he had hired when he had the money—since Alex’s mother had died of stomach cancer when Alex was in his early teens.
Alex had wandered around, opening doors into long forgotten rooms, filled with dustsheets and the mixed-up memories of his childhood. Of coming back from glorious summer days rampaging around the estate with his friends, to find the furniture in the living room all knocked over and his father passed out drunk in the middle of the huge main hall, with his dogs curled up asleep around him. Mrs Repton, the cook, looking shaken in the kitchen: ‘Your mother has a headache and has gone to bed.’
In the way that children do, he had blamed himself for it all. He wasn’t conscious of this but he had internalised the conflict and assumed it was his fault. It had darkened his otherwise free-spirited character and made him intense in everything he did. He was driven to succeed in order to compensate for the failure around him.
He had been brought up to be dutiful and had followed his father into the Blues and Royals without going to university first, at his father’s insistence, because he saw it as unnecessary and full of ‘dangerous ideas’. This was partly the reason that Alex had not been promoted beyond major. The other reason was that the Household Cavalry Division is a very small and exclusive world, and his father’s reputation as a disgraceful drunkard had hung over him like a storm cloud. ‘Like father, like son’ had never been said to his face but he knew from gossip that it had effectively finished off his prospects. This prejudice had added to his legacy of bitterness against the army and his class.
He had always argued with his father that they should sell the house. It was falling apart and they couldn’t afford to keep it. That was what their last big argument had been about before Alex’s father had died, before the Central African Republic operation.
However, now that his father was gone and he was the sole male heir to the Devereux title and estate, the responsibility for it had shifted onto his shoulders and he felt a strong affection for the place. It was a ramshackle dog’s dinner of a house that had been cobbled together over the centuries by generations of his forebears, starting with the stone tower in the northeast corner, with its Saxon foundations.
As he waited around outside it, he found his mind switching from the operation to thinking about what he would do with the millions of pounds he stood to gain from it. The roof would need doing first of all; as soon as he got that fixed he would have some time to work out what to do next. This sort of calculation wasn’t the sort of thing he had expected to be making when he went into the army as an idealistic young man, but it had a sort of grubby glory about it now.
His thoughts were interrupted as his ear caught the faint hum of distant rotors. He pulled the sailing flare from his coat pocket and fired it off.
‘They’re here!’ he shouted to Colin, who was inside in the dining room tacking up maps for the planning session. He ran out and together they waved Arkady in.
As the machine settled in a blizzard of snow the two of them took shelter in the large Gothic porch of the house that a Victorian forebear had slapped on the Regency façade, completely ruining it.
Once the rotors died down, Alex ran out, bent double, sheltering his eyes from the snowstorm. He pulled open the door and came face to face with Lara. She had the hood up on her thick white parka; it was fringed with fur and framed her pale face, emphasising its bleakly beautiful lines. He was once again startled by how blue her eyes were; set back inside the large hood they looked timid and even more alluring than before. He felt the same kick as when he had first seen her.
‘Welcome to Akerly!’ he shouted, and grinned and took her bags. He shook hands with the others as they climbed out, grinning and slapping Yamba’s back—‘Good to see you, matey!’
The group walked in through the porch and along the grand, wood-panelled entrance corridor. It was hung with trophies and antlers from the deer park. In the presence of newcomers, Alex was suddenly conscious of how shabby it all looked: many of the antlers had cobwebs, the red Persian rug was threadbare in places and the Dervish shields and spears, collected from the battle of Omdurman by his great-great-grandfather, were covered in dust. He noticed for the first time in years the dents in the panelling at the end of the hall where he used to play cricket with friends during rainy holidays.
The visitors, though, were impressed. They walked through into the medieval hall behind the Regency rooms stuck along its side. The stone-flagged room was sixty feet long and twenty high, with a stained-glass window at one end over a massive fireplace with half a tree trunk burning in it. Huge portraits of Devereux ancestors peered down at them from the walls.
Alex walked over to the staircase on the other side to take them up to their rooms but the team ignored him and stood around looking at the portraits.
Pete put his rucksack down, folded his arms and stared up at a picture of an arrogant-looking Elizabethan knight. ‘“Sir James Devereux, 1589,”’ he read out loud in a thick Australian accent and nodded approvingly. ‘Sweet.’
Lara pushed her hood back and looked around, wide-eyed. ‘This is your house? Here you grow up?’ she asked in heavily accented English.
‘Erm, yes,’ Alex replied with equally heavy English reserve.
She laughed. ‘I grow up in Soviet apartment; we have four rooms for five people, so…’ She gestured around her and laughed again delightfully.
Yamba was with Colin at the far end of the hall, looking up at a pompous Georgian portrait.
The Angolan clapped his hands and cackled with glee as Alex approached. ‘We think you look like this fellow up here.’ He pointed up at it and laughed again.
‘Yeah, posh booger, in’t ’e!’ Col agreed.
Alex laughed; it was good to be working with them again.
When the team had dumped their gear in their rooms they assembled downstairs in the Regency dining room, overlooking the lawn where the helicopter was parked.
All seven of them seated themselves at one end of the long polished dining table.
Alex stood up at the head of the table with his hands on his hips and began his briefing.
‘OK, so first of all, welcome to Team Devereux,’ he grinned, enjoying being back in charge. ‘Some of us have worked together a lot before, but for those of you who haven’t, let me do the intros so we all know where we are coming from.’
He gestured first to the tall, slim man sitting at the edge of the group. ‘This is Captain Magnus Løndahl, formerly of the Royal Norwegian Army.’
Magnus nodded to the others but his face remained immobile.
‘I met Magnus years ago when I did an arctic warfare
training course up in northern Norway. He was an NCO then, helping run NATO courses, and we ended up spending a lot of time together freezing our arses off in snow holes.’
The faintest flicker of a smile flitted across Magnus’s face.
The two men had got on well and Alex had developed a huge respect for the Norwegian’s quiet strength and integrity. His main memory was of trying to keep up with him on gruelling, day-long, cross-country ski marches. The lanky figure would always be ahead of him in white camouflage gear, his rifle on his back, sometimes lost in gusts of snow, but always re-emerging with arms and legs still gliding forwards in an easy rhythm. The more he had to endure, the quieter and more committed he became.
The understated exterior, however, belied an adventurous heart. Magnus had gone on to serve in the Forsvarets Spesialkommando, the Norwegian Special Forces, as a sniper, and had seen action in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. Alex had stayed in touch with him over the years and helped him get some defence contractor work when he had left the Norwegian army two years previously. When a mission in the middle of a Siberian winter had come up, he was the first person who had come to Alex’s mind as an arctic warfare specialist.
Alex moved on now to the man sitting next to Magnus, who looked like a cross between a surfer and a builder. Just as he was about to start his introduction, the man stood up and gave his own mock intro.
‘Hi, my name’s Peter Bridges and I’m an alcoholic,’ he said, and then sat down again.
A worried look crossed Lara’s face and she looked across anxiously at Alex.
The others laughed. As experienced mercenaries they were confident enough in their professional abilities not to care a great deal about military formalities; in fact they hated them.