December

by James Steel

  He looked straight at Alex, who stared back at him, grappling with the dilemma. Magnus’s logic was faultless but he was thinking, It’s not your fucking finger!

  Magnus continued, ‘We cut it away and put the field dressing on. No problem.’

  Alex remained silent.

  He could see what Magnus meant about there being no time to operate once the op was underway, and the idea of septicaemia didn’t appeal. He had seen cases in Africa—the rigors it caused were not pleasant and usually fatal.

  But still, it was his little finger and he suddenly felt very attached to it. Every fibre urged him to just leave it for now. However, one of his traits, both in his personal life and as a commander, was not shirking when it came to making hard decisions.

  Alex didn’t say anything but slowly drew his bayonet from its scabbard on his shoulder webbing and gave it to Magnus. It was the same blade that Lara had used to cut her hair off; the irony of its different purpose now was not lost on him.

  He stretched his hand out.

  Magnus hefted the knife. ‘I am afraid I have to cut into the living flesh or there is no point in doing it.’

  ‘I’ll help you, yeah?’ Pete asked Alex, who nodded slowly.

  They lay Pete’s assault rifle on its side on the floor of the cave; Alex sat down next to it and put his finger on the metal breech casing. Pete kneeled behind him, reached both arms around him and held his hand firmly in place.

  Magnus touched the edge of the blade on the skin just below the second joint; Alex felt how cold it was. Every instinct screamed at him to pull his hand away.

  Magnus tried to do it quickly before he could register what was happening but the bone was too tough to slice through and he ended up having to saw and hack at it. Alex bellowed with pain and tried to pull his hand away but Pete’s grip was too hard. Eventually the bone cracked and the knife sliced through the remaining flesh.

  Alex moaned through gritted teeth and clutched his wrist, blood jetted in pulses across the narrow confines of the cave.

  Magnus quickly wrapped a pressure dressing over the stump. ‘Grip your wrist here,’ he instructed calmly to get Alex to reduce the blood flow to his hand. He then set about binding the dressing onto the stump with bandages.

  Eventually he had stanched the bleeding and he sat back to admire his handiwork. He nodded with quiet satisfaction. ‘Yes, this will do.’

  Alex’s face was screwed up and his eyes closed as he fought against the pain.

  Things were not going according to plan.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Lara lay in bed in her luxurious flat and wondered what was happening to Alex.

  He might have started the attack by now. She knew it was cold, dark and dangerous where he was. Siberia was a frozen hell and the MVD didn’t mess about with people who opposed it.

  And what was happening to Sergey, drinking with Krymov? The President frightened her—he was a creep and a sadist. She wanted Sergey to be away from him.

  She wasn’t sure who she was more worried about—Sergey or Alex. The two men were both so different: Sergey loud and manic, Alex quiet and brooding. One had conceived this whole crazy plan and the other was now effecting it.

  But they both meant so much to her. Was she a terrible person because she loved them both? That guilty question harried her as much as her concern for them.

  She knew she had a big day ahead of her and had tried going to bed early but the thoughts chasing themselves around her head were like a record stuck on one lyric. Eventually they so unsettled her that she sat up and put the light on.

  She needed something to take the needle off the record—a short, intense experience to distract her. She pushed aside the covers and walked naked across to the huge bookshelves she had had fitted—following Cicero’s dictum that a room without books is like a body without a soul.

  She stared up at a row of spines and dragged her fingers lovingly across them, sensing the physicality of the words they contained.

  Anton Chekhov, Selected Short Stories.

  Perfect.

  An elegant index finger curled over the top of the book and hooked it down.

  She settled back into bed and flicked through the pages.

  Two friends once met in a railway station; one was lean and the other was fat. The fat man had just finished dinner at the station; his lips were still buttery and as glossy as ripe cherries.

  She never quite knew how Chekhov did it. How he slipped a character under her skin, without her noticing it. However he did it, it worked.

  After reading three short stories Lara’s eyelids were drooping. She folded the page and put the book in the empty space next to her in the bed. She leaned over it to switch off the light and then lay on her side, pressed her cheek into her pillow, pushed her hand under it and drew her legs up.

  She turned her head quickly and kissed her pillow good night, still unsure which name to whisper.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  3 A.M. CHITA PROVINCE TIME ZONE, TUESDAY 16 DECEMBER

  The noise of the storm outside the snow cave had begun to die down.

  Alex was feeling more able to function with all the hot drinks and rations inside him and a couple of hours’ rest. His finger hurt like hell but it was hardly an incapacitating wound. He wrapped it up well and stuffed his hand back in his mitten.

  They still had four miles to go to the camp and then a lot of business to attend to before the prisoners were on parade at 6 a.m. They strapped their kit back on and prepared to go outside. The wind was still strong but without the fury it had had before.

  Magnus led off, followed by Alex. They skied hard, conscious that they had lost a lot of time and still had much to do.

  On the way in to the camp they went through a logged clearing about two miles out that was large enough for the helicopter to get into. Magnus worked out the eight-figure grid reference on his GPS and they designated it as LZ 2. As they got nearer the camp, the clearings increased and Alex selected another extraction point, called LZ 1. He had to play off the balance between needing to be able to reach the helicopter as fast as possible whilst at the same time not wanting to land it near all the machine guns in the camp. LZ 1 was the nearest he wanted to land. If they lost the chopper then they would be spending a lot of time in MVD prison cells having the shit beaten out of them, and he wasn’t keen on that.

  In the clearing, Alex got his VHF set out and transmitted both sets of LZ co-ordinates in an encrypted burst to Arkady and then to Colin.

  At 4 a.m. they arrived at the camp. The forest edge thinned out as it neared the two-hundred-metre cleared zone around it. They buried their skis and Alex crept forward on his stomach to observe the outer perimeter from under a tree with his binoculars. It was still dark but with night sights he could see enough. The main problem was flurries of snow that swept in overhead from the forest behind him, obscuring his view. In the gaps between them he could make out the watchtowers, single razor-wire fence and some of the support buildings in the outer area behind it.

  They were on the north side of the camp that had borne the brunt of the storm, and he could see snowdrifts piled up on the sides of the buildings and a snowmobile antenna poking up out of a drift. A glance at the windows of watchtowers showed them covered over with a rime of ice that the guards had not yet cleared away.

  Also, as Magnus had predicted, the ground blizzard was in full swing. The open space in front of him was covered in snowdrifts like the waves of the sea; the wind was whipping ice particles over them, creating the effect of a rapid fog streaming across the ground. With that, the snow flurries and the iced-up windows he doubted the guards could see anything. It was time to find out.

  He headed back into the woods and found the others. They all stripped off their outer parkas so that they had just their snow smocks over their webbing. Then they quickly pulled the Gortex camouflage sheets out of their rucksacks and fitted the elastic straps over their hands and feet so that the sheet covered the who
le of the back of their bodies and heads. A last check of their radios and rifles, a round of silent, grim nods and they were ready.

  Alex used the compass strapped on his left forearm to take a bearing that he could follow to a point exactly between two of the towers and then led the way. They crawled out of the forest in a line behind him so as to minimise the frontal area they presented to the enemy. With the sheets stretched over them, they were just a patch of white on a white background with a white fog blowing over them. He felt sure they wouldn’t be detected visually. Their experiments with the space blankets had shown that they couldn’t be seen with infrared either.

  Moving on elbows and knees across two hundred metres was hard work at the best of times. With his head down under the sheet Alex couldn’t see anything, and had to keep checking his compass. The last thing he wanted to do was crawl around in circles under the eyes of the MVD.

  After his recent experience he was also very concerned about the frostbite risk. The Gortex sheeting kept most the stinging ice particles off him, he could hear them drumming on it, but some whipped in under it and he could feel his legs and crotch beginning to grow very cold. He increased his pace, huffing and puffing now as he shuffled along. He paused in the dip between two drifts, twisted round and lifted the sheet to peer out and check that the others were still with him. A blast of ice particles hit his face and rattled on his goggles but he saw Magnus and then Pete slip over the crest and crawl down next to him.

  He stuck his head under Magnus’s sheet and shouted, ‘Halfway,’ in his ear. He could feel the familiar cold ache setting in on his exposed ankles and calves. He and his men couldn’t stay here long. He scuttled over the remaining ground as fast as he could.

  When they finally arrived at the perimeter fence there was a drift of snow up against it. Alex wriggled down into the soft upper layers so that he was less exposed to view; the others did the same as they waited for him to cut through. He pulled the wire cutters out of a pocket in his smock and attacked the razor fence. His hands were shaking again with cold but he got both mittens on the long handles and yanked at them hard, wincing at the pain from his missing finger. He was careful to cut only three of the lowest strands once, so that the team could crawl through and then bend the pieces back into place.

  They wriggled through one by one and then shuffled over to a gap between two machine sheds just inside the perimeter. Alex felt hugely relieved; they had not been detected and were inside.

  It was 4.30 a.m.—they had an hour and half to get their tasks done and be in place for roll call. After a quick round of silent thumbs up and a slap on the back each from Alex, the other two men melted away into the darkness. The lights on the inner perimeter fence illuminated it but everything else was dark. Apart from the guards in the watchtowers overlooking it, the prison was deserted and quiet, the main body of MVD soldiers still in bed in their barracks.

  Alex pulled the VHF out of his rucksack and sent a single command word to Arkady. He then packed the set up and slipped around the corner of the shed, his senses coming alive like an animal on the hunt. Objects were sharply defined and the smallest sounds became loud as his adrenalin flowed.

  He had a map of the camp in his mind and a list of objectives to achieve. He looked around for the first of these, crouched down and then ran towards it.

  Fifteen miles north of the camp in a clearing in the forest, a huge set of helicopter rotors stuck up out of a snowdrift.

  The Euromil-17-1V was five metres high from the bottom of its wheels to the top of the rotor shaft, but all but the rotors and the last metre of engine casing were hidden.

  After they had dropped the assault team off, Arkady had gone in search of a place to land, lie up and wait until he was contacted again by Alex. He and Yamba had spent the night on the freezing floor of the cargo bay with the VHF set next to their heads.

  As soon as the codeword came through, Yamba acknowledged it and shrugged out of his bag.

  ‘OK, my friend, let’s go,’ he muttered. He connected a large fan heater to a car battery, climbed up the access ladder to the engine compartment over his head and shoved it inside to warm the engines up.

  Arkady went through to the cockpit to start pre-flight checks; it was dark because of the snow pressed up against the windows. After ten minutes, when he thought the engines would be warm enough, he pressed the starter motor button and the AI-9V auxiliary power unit whined.

  In the darkness above the snowdrift the rotors began to turn slowly.

  After he left Alex, Magnus followed his memorised map of the camp and made his way west, keeping in the shadows and scuttling, bent double, between buildings.

  He headed for the sawmill complex. Outside this there was a large lumberyard where the logs were brought in and piled up in stacks. No one was at work at this time, but he did a double check around the yard before he clambered up a twenty-foot-high pile of logs. The ends pointed in towards the parade ground.

  A thick layer of snow had built up on top of these and he walked carefully through it, balancing on the slippery surface, until he was at the end. Once there, he quickly made a nest in the snow with an insulated groundsheet and lay down so that he was out of sight from anyone below and was not overlooked by a watchtower.

  He pulled the rucksack off his back containing his sniper equipment. His L115A3 Long-Range Rifle came out first; he unfolded the stock, screwed the suppressor on the muzzle and balanced it on its bipod in front of him. A box magazine of five 8.59mm rounds was already clipped into it.

  Peering down the SIMRAD night filter, which was attached to his normal Schmidt & Bender sights, he could see a ghostly green image of the parade ground platform between the crosshairs. He then pulled out his laser range finder and measured the distance accurately: 400 metres, which was fine—the rifle could go out to 1100 metres.

  He set about estimating the windage; he was west of the parade ground now with the wind blowing from the north so there would be some effect on the round. The wind speed was dropping all the time as the storm exhausted itself but he still reckoned it was Force 5, so he clicked the windage drum on the sights up to the appropriate setting and looked back down them at his target. He could adjust it again as the wind dropped.

  Having got the rifle ready he pulled his white Gortex sheet over him so he was completely covered, wrapped himself up in the insulated groundsheet and waited.

  Pete and Alex were also busy. They both moved quickly and silently between buildings, hurrying to get their jobs done before the guards started rousing the prisoners at 5.30 a.m.

  When everything was complete they settled into positions near the inner perimeter wire and waited.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The MVD colonel straightened his peaked cap, brushed his gold epaulettes down on his greatcoat and nodded to his driver sitting across the other side of the cab.

  He engaged the tracks and the huge Vityaz ATV lumbered forward through the forest, crushing small trees in its way. It was painted in standard Russian army white camouflage with a large MVD flag flying from the radio antenna. They broke out onto the open ground around the camp and headed for the gate on the north side, snow spewing out from the tracks and the vehicle rising and falling over the undulating snowdrifts like a ship in a heavy sea.

  The guard corporal sat up in his watchtower as they emerged and called down to the gate: ‘MVD Vityaz approaching. Is anyone expected?’

  The sergeant in the hut next to the gate sounded surprised. ‘No, get the Kord out.’ He pressed a buzzer to the main guardroom. It was just before 6 a.m., when parade started, so most of the shift were busy with that. He would have to use the men in his guardroom here to deal with the arrivals.

  The corporal and the two privates with him in the tower swung the Kord 12.7mm heavy machine gun out. The gunner slapped a fresh ammo belt into it, cocked the weapon and aimed it at the ATV.

  It was driving slowly and steadily towards them. When it reached the gate it was illuminated b
y the floodlights under the tower and stopped at the large razor-wire barrier. The sergeant came out of the guardroom next to it and walked forwards, looking at the huge machine suspiciously. Other guards came out and stood around the gate watching uncertainly.

  The passenger door in the high cab opened and the MVD colonel clambered down onto the tracks and then jumped onto the snow.

  Bogdan and Colin had driven all night across country from Krasnokamensk. The Para had a lot of experience driving tracked Russian vehicles in Africa and the Vityaz had the same steering system.

  Likewise, Bogdan had been in the Russian army long enough to be able to do a good impression of an imperious officer.

  ‘Who’s in charge here?’ he barked at the sergeant on the other side of the wire.

  The man shifted the assault rifle on his shoulder nervously. ‘I am, sir!’ he snapped back.

  Bogdan surveyed him disdainfully. ‘I’m Colonel Bulgakov of the Interior Ministry Far Eastern Command; I have special information to give to Commandant Bolkonsky in person.’

  ‘What’s it about, sir?’

  Bogdan kept his voice curt and only just under control. ‘It’s with regard to a certain prisoner. We have been patrolling the area for a team of saboteurs. This is an official matter.’

  The sergeant sounded distrustful but slightly nervous. ‘Right, why didn’t you radio it in, sir?’

  Bogdan exploded, ‘If I could have got the clearance to fucking well radio it in, don’t you think I would have done? It’s an official investigation! Do you think I like riding around in this weather! Just open the fucking gate, Sergeant. Bolkonsky will shoot you if I don’t get this information to him now!’

  The sergeant paused and then gestured to the guards next to him, who pulled the long metal bar back from across the gates and swung them open.