December

by James Steel

  Bogdan gave a heavy gasp and his grip went slack.

  Alex grabbed him under the arms; Col was moving off and he couldn’t drop him now.

  ‘Give us a hand!’ he yelled, and Magnus quickly moved next to him. Between them they dragged the limp body up into the cab, slammed the door and got on the deck as more rounds smashed the window above them and punched puffs of insulation out of the door over their heads.

  ‘Drive!’

  Col floored the accelerators and the huge machine lurched forward, smashing through the side of a storage hut and bringing it crashing down in its wake.

  ‘Get some rounds down!’ Alex yelled at Pete, and pointed at the top hatch.

  The Aussie shoved it open and jumped up onto the platform between two seats, bracing himself against them as they roared off. He brought his rifle up and fired long suppressive bursts back over the roof at the guards behind them.

  The Vityaz lumbered on, gaining speed.

  ‘Fence! Get yer fooking head down!’ Colin shouted and Pete ducked inside just in time.

  The blunt snout of the machine hit the razor wire and took out a twenty-metre section as if it were peeling cotton threads from their posts. The higher strands above the cab were left in place and swept over it like a lethal cheese cutter.

  Pete popped straight back up and continued firing; behind him the orange flames of the burning camp were impressive. He grinned as he admired his handiwork, slapped a fresh magazine into place and opened up again.

  Magnus grabbed Alex’s rifle and hung out of the side window, putting down more suppressive fire on the guards. Col was doing thirty m.p.h.—maximum cross-country speed—as he charged towards the first LZ extraction point in the forest. The vehicle ploughed across the snow drifts, rearing up like a behemoth on the facing slopes, the front of the tracks clawing at thin air, and then tilting over the crest and crashing down.

  Alex was on the floor of the cab, desperately trying to save Bogdan. His body bounced around with the motion but Alex managed to unbutton the heavy greatcoat, uniform jacket and shirt, and push them back off both his shoulders. The Russian was bleeding heavily from a large exit wound.

  Fuck, this doesn’t look good.

  Hot, sticky arterial blood jetted out and covered Alex’s face and the front of his jacket. He blinked it aside, reached inside his smock and ripped the field dressing off his webbing strap, put there for exactly this sort of situation.

  He pulled the wrapper off and stuck it in the hole; it would soak up a pint of blood. After a minute he shouted, ‘Dressing!’

  ‘Here you go!’ Col ripped his own one off and chucked it across the cab. Alex tore it open and again stuck it on the wound. He didn’t have much hope, though. He reached for Bogdan’s pulse on the other side of his throat. It was weakening and his eyes were going hazy, the lids slowly closing like coffins.

  ‘Three snowmobiles, six o’clock! Two blokes on each of them!’ Pete yelled down from his vantage point in the hatch.

  Fuck.

  Decision time.

  Should he try to save this probably about-to-die person or organise defence against the new threat to the rest of the currently alive-and-well team?

  Commander’s dilemma. This was what he got paid for.

  Alex let go of the field dressing, grabbed Col’s rifle and leaned out of the other side window.

  Bogdan quietly bled to death on the floor of the cab.

  Just before they plunged into the forest, Alex got a glimpse of three Skidoo snowmobiles roaring over the snowdrifts towards them. The soldiers mounted behind the drivers were touting PKM light machine guns with 250-round ammo boxes.

  He knew those guns could not go anywhere near the helicopter.

  The Vityaz continued to plunge deeper into the forest. Col was still driving at full speed in the dark using his NVGs and working the two track-steering levers like a maniac to zigzag them between large trees and crash through the smaller ones. Lower branches scythed over the cab, forcing Pete down from the hatch and dumping their loads of snow on them.

  The three Skidoos switched on their headlights, which flickered through the trees, and roared after them. Alex could hear engines snarling as gears changed and spiked rotary tracks bit deep into the snow, propelling them forward. The gunners on the back leaned their machine-gun barrels on the shoulder of the driver and began cracking off bursts of red tracer after them.

  They couldn’t do much to stop such a large machine, but if they weren’t taken out by the time they reached the LZ then they would cause problems when the Mil came in to get them. Alex reached over Bogdan’s body for the VHF set and called up Yamba. He had to shout over the noise of the engines.

  ‘Two, this is Baba Yaga. Come in.’

  ‘Baba Yaga, this is Two. Over.’

  ‘Extract at LZ 2! Repeat—extract at LZ 2!’

  ‘Roger, Baba Yaga, will extract at LZ 2. Out.’

  He had bought them some room for manoeuvre.

  Now, what to do about the Skidoos?

  They were not going to be able to take them out from the moving vehicle—the terrain was too rugged and they had no stable firing points.

  They were a couple of hundred yards ahead of them; they could just about do it.

  Alex shouted, ‘Snap ambush! Stop when we’re in cover!’

  ‘Right-oh!’ Col called back.

  He jerked the levers and they headed for a thick stand of pines. Once they were behind it he braked hard; the whole machine dipped forward and bucked on its tracks but kept moving.

  ‘Debus!’

  Alex, Magnus and Pete jumped out of the side doors, rolled over in the snow and then got up as Colin roared on in a wide loop to come back to the wood after the ambush.

  They waded through deep snow back into the trees and spread out, each pressing their rifles hard against a tree trunk to stabilise their aim and waited.

  The Skidoos didn’t seem to have noticed their slowing down; Alex could hear their engines roaring and see the flicker of their headlights through the dark trees as they came nearer.

  Alex tried to remember how many rounds he had in this magazine—about half full he thought. Fifteen rounds. He had thirteen more magazines in bandoliers but there wasn’t time to switch now. He brought the rifle up to his shoulder to fire, hugging the backsight close in against his cheek, feeling the freezing metal stick to his skin.

  In an ambush situation like this there was no time for subtlety and the carefully aimed shots that he would normally have liked. He slid his hand down the casing and flicked the selector on full auto.

  They waited until all three machines had burst into view, the blinding headlights making easy targets as they weaved towards them.

  Alex squeezed the trigger and the weapon went cyclic, roaring and bucking hard in his hands this time, spitting out rounds at a rate of 600 per minute.

  Two seconds and the magazine clicked empty. The other two guys kept up longer bursts.

  The snowmobile Alex had targeted gave a surge of revs as the driver collapsed forward and then ploughed into a drift and stopped. The passenger tumbled off the far side.

  Alex whipped a fresh mag out from his webbing, yanked the old one off, slapped it into place and cocked the weapon hurriedly. The other two snowmobiles had also been stopped dead; he didn’t know where their soldiers were.

  Silence settled slowly over the great wood like a cover thrown gently over a bed.

  His breathing sounded obscenely loud after all the engine noise and crashing gunfire. He knew now there were at least two enemies out there in the wood.

  He suddenly remembered Sergey rambling about dark woods in your head and finding the place of courage where the wolf drank from the river at midnight.

  Well, he was in one dark forest now and he’d better find that place fast. He forced himself to be calm and use his fear; it was always there, it was just that over the years he had learned to make it work for him.

  He tried to settle his breathing. Better t
o stay still and listen for them; any movement would just give away his position.

  A huge burst of red tracer came out of a drift on his left and slapped into the tree trunk next to him, he felt it judder with the impacts that chewed off chunks of wet, white wood and sprayed them over him.

  He threw himself down on the ground.

  Fuck.

  That was close.

  Would have been better to move to a new firing position after all. They had clocked him.

  He wriggled back away from the tree. At least the guy had now given his position away for Pete and Magnus to fire at.

  There was a flash of brilliant white light behind him and the guy started screaming.

  Phosphorous grenade; that’ll shut him up.

  Alex continued extracting himself rearwards from the danger zone as Pete and Magnus did pairs fire and manoeuvre. An Aussie shout of ‘Left flanking!’ drifted through the trees to tell him what they were doing.

  ‘Roger!’ Alex shouted back.

  He’d better go right then.

  He got up and stumbled forward into some open ground in front of the pines in a crouch, trying to be as quiet as possible, ever conscious of the two PKMs still out there and pointing at him.

  Flashes of red gunfire stabbed out at him from his right. He threw himself down into the snow and could hear Pete and Magnus shouting: ‘Prepare to move!’ and ‘Move!’, interspersed with bursts of suppressive fire as they tried to outflank and kill their enemy.

  Alex immediately wanted to stick his head up and see what was going on but the old infantry skills mantra came back to him: dash, down, crawl, advance, sights, fire.

  He wriggled sideways away from the position where he had gone to ground so the enemy didn’t blow his head off if he just stuck it back up in the same place. Then he shuffled forward to gain some ground and pressurise his opponent. He quickly popped up with his rifle in place, scanning forward over his sights. He was lucky he had bothered with his drills.

  The PKM burst of red tracer scythed across his old position from behind a tree on his right, sending up puffs of snow.

  The next burst walked its way in towards him.

  This is going to get me.

  He started running back for cover in his original position in the pine trees, but stumbled over a branch hidden under the snow.

  The PKM gunner knew he had him on the run and chased after him across the open ground. He stopped and raised his weapon to his shoulder, all senses fixed on firing at Alex’s prone figure.

  A noise to his left made him look over his shoulder as the Vityaz burst out of a screen of birch trees and roared over him.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  ‘Where are they?’ Yamba barked into his headset in frustration.

  Arkady shrugged next to him in the cockpit, and they both continued scanning the ground out of the windscreen.

  The Russian scratched his stubbly chin anxiously and grunted. His hands were cold on the controls, despite the heating being on full blast; they had the rear ramp open, ready for the extraction, and the wind howled around the cockpit.

  The Mil had been circling for five minutes, burning up precious fuel. Yamba got out of the co-pilot seat and looked out of the side door just behind the cabin, scanning the woods in the grey dawn light for some sign of the Vityaz.

  Arkady shouted, ‘There! Portside!’

  He had seen its broad headlights flick on and off three times. He swooped in low and flared hard over the LZ. As he hovered, the heavy rotors thumped away and blew a blizzard of snow off the ground, exposing the two-foot tree stumps left after logging; there was no way he could land.

  Yamba stood at the side door, peering out and shouting directions back over his helmet mike on the intercom. Arkady couldn’t make out the ground in the weak dawn light and the mass of snow blasting up around them. It was crucial to be able to hover low enough for the men to climb onboard, but at the same time not hit a stump. The slightest bump would tilt the whole machine, meaning that the rotors would then hit the ground, shredding them and flipping the machine on its back.

  ‘Thirty feet!’

  ‘Twenty feet!’

  ‘Ten!’

  ‘Five!’

  ‘Hold!’

  The Vityaz had pulled up on the edge of the clearing and the five remaining men jumped down—four in white combat smocks and one in ragged black prison garb. They stood next to it, shielding their faces from the blast of snow.

  Once it was obvious they could go no lower, Yamba waved across to them from the rear ramp and they stumbled forward, clutching their weapons; one hand over their faces against the wind.

  Alex clambered up on a stump, pulled Roman up next to him and gave him a leg up to Yamba, who grabbed his jacket and pulled him onboard.

  The rest of the team clambered up and lay exhausted on the floor of the cargo bay as Yamba hit the hydraulic switch to close the door.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

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

  The helicopter swooped in out of the dark sky over Krasnokamensk airport.

  Alex watched the control tower closely from the co-pilot seat, using binoculars to see if the news of the raid had reached the MVD guards there. The mercenaries had blown up the phone lines, radio hut, helicopters and Vityazs at the camp to make sure that it was sealed off from the world. He knew they would have auxiliary radios and generators somewhere but, with the chaos caused by the armed prisoners, it would take them a while to get them working and then raise the airport.

  The plan was that they would have bought at least the half-hour it took to fly from the camp to the airport and take off. If they hadn’t, and the guards came out shooting, then there would be a hell of a firefight before they managed to take off—if they did at all.

  They had fired off all their rockets, their main armament, and then landed quickly en route to detach the pods so they weren’t seen by the tower. However, they still had a lot of firepower. Colin and Pete waited with their Shmel launchers ready by the rear door and Yamba had the AGS-30 30mm grenade launcher set up there. If there was any resistance then Arkady would spin the tail round, drop the ramp and they would unload a lot of munitions.

  Arkady called up the tower.

  ‘Krasnokamensk Tower, this is GeoScan team, landing for outbound flight to Novosibirsk in Gulfstream G550. Request permission to take off.’

  No response.

  Alex twisted the magnification slightly to improve the focus; he could see the wide windows on the tower overlooking the runway. The lights were on inside but from this angle above he couldn’t see if there was anyone there.

  Was this just a sleepy provincial airport at 7 a.m. or a trap?

  ‘Try them again,’ he instructed Arkady without taking his binoculars off the tower.

  ‘Krasnokamensk Tower, this is GeoScan team, landing…’

  ‘GeoScan team, this is Krasnokamensk Tower, you are cleared to take off.’ The man sounded groggy as if he had just woken up.

  Alex exhaled and then turned round in his seat and shouted through to the cargo bay, ‘Stand down!’

  Arkady took them in behind the large hangar and they quickly hurried over to the side door.

  Stepping inside and seeing the white plane all fuelled up and ready to go was a huge relief. But they weren’t out of it yet. Yamba hit the switch on the main door motors and Arkady fired the engines and then taxied them forward.

  They strapped themselves into the big white seats for take off.

  It was only when they had passed the tower and Arkady eased back on the yoke, the wheels lifted up and they rocketed away skywards that the whole team let out a huge whoop.

  In his blood and smoke-stained battle gear, Alex jumped out of his seat and punched the air, yelling with the others. They all danced around the cabin, jumping up and down and shouting.

  ‘Fucking did it!’

  ‘Fook you, yer bastards!’ Col jabbed a V-sign back at the airport.

&
nbsp; Pete ran into the cockpit and slapped Arkady on the shoulder. The Russian was celebrating with them and trying to fly at the same time.

  Pete came back through the galley and found some champagne bottles in a rack, which got sprayed all over Sergey’s expensive white carpet, walls and ceiling. Eventually they sank back down into their seats, exhausted.

  Roman was still sitting in his filthy black clothes looking shocked but pleased. After two years in hell this was a monumental change for him.

  When the assault team had calmed down, Alex was able to stop laughing and actually think straight. He pulled his mobile phone out of his webbing, but had to wait until they flew over Irkutsk until it acquired a signal. First he sent a text to Sergey, Lara and Grigory: ‘Baba Yaga is returning with her stupa’—Sergey’s idea, as ever: something about the bronze pestle that she flew round Russia in. Alex grimaced and pressed send.

  Then his phone bleeped as incoming texts registered. He opened the one from Grigory, which told him to get to Moscow as fast as possible so Raskolnikov could make the morning news programmes. If they landed on schedule at 7.30 a.m. it would be a tight squeeze to make the 7.45 bulletins. Roman would need to be prepared to go on air as soon as he arrived.

  Alex sent an acknowledgement and then turned to Roman to explain what was going on. He took him into the aft section of the aircraft and told him who was behind the raid and what the plan was when they got to Moscow. Roman gaped as he grappled with the enormity of what was being planned for him. Grigory had prepared a pack of cuttings and a briefing paper to bring him up to date on what had happened over the last two years so that he could write his speech.

  Before he settled to that, though, Roman disappeared into the shower unit and, for the first time in two years, was able to wash without using freezing cold water out of a concrete trough. He shaved and, looking in the mirror, was horrified by how emaciated his face looked: eye sockets hollowed out and cheekbones sticking up into his skin. He scrubbed the filth out from under his fingernails, trimmed his overgrown, yellowing toenails, and luxuriated in being warm and clean. A fresh suit of clothes was laid out there ready for him and he changed into the dark suit and tie, baggy because of his weight loss. He felt the texture of the cloth of his shirt and suddenly felt the urge to cry at how clean and soft it was after so much dirt and hardship.