Tenth Man Down

by Chris Ryan

  ‘Listen,’ I told him. ‘I haven’t got time to trade insults with a pig. We’re going back on board your chopper. Your pilot will then fly us back to the stockpile of warheads. Understood?’

  Again the guy didn’t answer, but again I saw that flicker of comprehension.

  ‘Get moving.’ I jerked the muzzle of my rifle in the direction of the heli.

  The South African shot his mate a look. I could see he was calculating his chances if he lunged at me with a head butt.

  ‘Don’t try anything,’ I warned him. Suddenly, I put a three-round burst past him within inches of his right cheek. The noise and blast made him flinch, but he stood his ground: a hard case. ‘Any trouble,’ I told him, ‘I’ll make the sun shine through you. Now go!’

  He turned and began to walk to the chopper. The Russian fell in behind him. As we came round the starboard side of the body, I saw a 7.62 gympi mounted on an extended arm. Danny was standing behind the pilot, another white, on the flight-deck.

  ‘Okay, Danny?’ I called.

  ‘No problem, except that this guy doesn’t speak any known language.’

  ‘Of course he does. To be a pilot, he must do. Another bloody Russian, for sure.’

  I helped Stringer tether our prisoners to safety rings in the heli, well apart from each other, then told him, ‘Keep an eye on them while I stir up Biggles.’

  I nipped up the two steps to the flight-deck and sat in the co-pilot’s seat. I could see at once the pilot was another Russian. He reminded me of Sasha, the great guy who’d got us out of trouble when the Kremlin mission went to ratshit. He had brown hair and a flat, wide face. He even had a couple of grey metal false teeth, one up, one down, in much the same places.

  ‘I got this off him,’ said Danny, handing me another pistol.

  ‘Thanks.’

  I slipped it into the thigh pocket of my DPMs, where it made a heavy bulge along with the others. Then I waded into the pilot.

  ‘Don’t fuck about,’ I told him. ‘Just start up and take off.’

  With the barrel of Danny’s 203 below his ear, he was already looking like a beaten spaniel. Now he spread his hands, and said miserably, ‘No fuel.’

  ‘Of course you’ve got fuel. You were airborne just now, no problem then.’

  He shrugged, leant forward and flicked a couple of switches, lighting up the instrument panel. He jabbed a finger at the dials. The lettering was Cyrillic, but after our Russian task I could read basic words. The fuel gauges were showing about a third – plenty for a short trip.

  ‘Your fuel state’s fine,’ I shouted. ‘Get going!’

  He stared at me as if I was mad – and probably, at that moment, I was a bit mad. I think stress and anger had sent me temporarily off the rails. The pilot seemed to sense it; he appeared to realise that no good would come of trying to resist me. He shrugged, and said, ‘Maybe we crash.’

  ‘Maybe we do,’ I told him. ‘I couldn’t give a monkey’s.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Back to where you’ve just been.’

  Again he made a hopeless gesture. ‘Today we are in many places.’

  ‘The weapons store.’

  This time he tapped his head. I glanced back into the body of the chopper.

  Stringer was crouched beside the open door, covering the two others.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, as menacingly as I could. ‘If you want to stay alive, get moving. And don’t try to pull any phoney malfunctions shit on me.’

  ‘Okay’. He shrugged again, and went into his startup routine.

  ‘Danny,’ I went. ‘Stringer and me can handle this. Hop out. Get on the inter-vehicle radio. Call up Pav. Tell him we’re hijacking the heli to find the cache. Ask him to bring the mother wagon forward and RV with you here.’

  ‘Roger. What’ll you do?’

  ‘Depends on what we find.’

  FOURTEEN

  The heli’s turbines fired. The pilot let the engines warm up for half a minute, then engaged the rotor, increased revs, put on pitch and lifted away. Below us, dust boiled out to fill the football field.

  Back in the cabin, I buckled myself into a safety harness on a long tether. Next, ostentatiously, I threw all three pistols out through the open door, one by one. Looking quickly round, I saw two sub-machine guns in clips on the bulkhead, and hurled them out as well. Then I went close up in front of the fat Afrikaaner, and shouted, ‘Tell him to go back to the cache!’

  My only answer was a bear-like glare. A glance through the door told me we were heading out over the line of bunkers. The pilot was deliberately going the wrong way. I waited a minute, letting the aircraft gain height. Then, without another word, I jumped across the cabin, whipped out my knife, cut the South African free from the shackle and propelled him physically towards the open door.

  As soon as he saw what I was planning, he began to struggle and bellow obscenities, half in English, half in Afrikaans. ‘Jou moer!’ he shouted. ‘You shit!’ And then, ‘Vokken soutpiel!’ He was a big guy, and heavy with it, but I was so fired up that I held him like a child, standing behind him in the middle of the gap, with his bristly, bull neck in front of my face.

  ‘I’ll count three!’ I yelled. ‘If you don’t give the pilot an order, you go out. One!’

  He tried to zap me again, this time whipping his shaven head backwards in the hope of catching me in the face, but I’d anticipated the move and leant away to my right, out of his range.

  ‘Talk, cunt!’ I yelled, punching him in the back of his meaty ribs. ‘It’s your last chance. Two!’

  I left a gap of two or three seconds, then shouted, ‘Three!’

  At the same instant I gave his shoulders a violent shove and kneed him in the small of the back. His hands were still well tied behind him, but somehow he managed to grab hold of my DPMs around my right knee. By then his weight was carrying him out and down, already he was falling, but his grip was so desperate that he dragged me out with him. The next I knew, I was dangling face-down in mid-air on the end of the tether, with the South African below me, also face-down, clinging like a lead weight to my right knee, and the slipstream tearing past.

  The guy was screaming like a lunatic. So was I, because I felt like I was being torn in half, with the tether heaving at its anchor-point high on the back of my waist, and a two-hundred-pound burden dragging at my leg. I had a moment of panic that the combined weight was going to snap the nylon strop or drag it from its moorings.

  There was no way I could reach down with my hands to unlock those desperate fingers. With a terrific effort I brought up my free left foot, and stamped at the guy’s shoulder. He must have been strong as a gorilla. I caught him a savage kick, but still he hung on. Stamp! I went. Stamp! Stamp! At last, by luck, my heel caught him on the base of the neck: his grip dissolved and he dropped away towards the ground. With his hands still tied behind him, he immediately went unstable. His screams faded as he tumbled head over heels, hurtling downwards.

  I’d hardly had time to feel scared. All the same, it was a fantastic relief to be rid of the weight. I felt jerks coming down the tether. The slipstream was so ferocious that my eyes were streaming. Twisting round, I had a blurred vision of Stringer crouched at the side of the open door, hauling me up, a foot at a time. We seemed to be travelling at a phenomenal speed. The air pressure was horrendous, and I was swinging around like a leaf in the wind.

  ‘Tell the pilot to slow down!’ I roared.

  Stringer cupped a hand to his ear, showing he couldn’t hear.

  I bellowed the same thing again. That time he nodded his head.

  At last I came within reach of the doorway, grabbed the sill, dragged myself back on to the metal floor and lay there like a stranded fish.

  ‘Why’s he going so fucking fast?’ I gasped.

  ‘I told him to hover, but he did the opposite.’

  ‘Lucky we need the bastard to fly this thing. Otherwise he’d be next.’

  By then we were at least five hundr
ed feet up. Unless by a miracle the South African had landed in a springy tree – and there wasn’t a tree in sight – he stood no chance. I had a vision of his gut bursting like a ripe melon as he hit the deck, and derived a moment’s satisfaction from it. Whinger, I thought, I’ve got our own back on one of them.

  ‘Your turn next!’ I yelled at the Rasputin character. ‘Fucking talk!’

  I cut him free and started wrestling him towards the doorway. He seemed to be paralysed by terror and didn’t resist at all.

  Then I happened to glance at Stringer. The look on his face was so awful – horror mixed with disbelief – that it stopped me half-way across the cabin. It came home to me that I’d just committed a cold-blooded murder. I hesitated for a couple of seconds, then decided I couldn’t give a damn. The man I’d pushed out had stood by and seen Whinger killed, and was as guilty as anyone else.

  I pulled Rasputin back into the centre of the cabin and tied him to a shackle again. He began screaming hysterically in Russian. In spite of the racket, the pilot heard him and put the heli into a hard turn to starboard. I had the impression we’d already flown halfway to Namibia, but in fact we were only a few kilometres off course, and in a minute or two we were back over the main drag of the training area. Another minute brought us over a major junction, with six earth roads radiating off it to all points of the compass.

  Rasputin was shouting something at me.

  ‘Say again.’

  ‘Number twenty-one. You need road number twenty-one.’

  ‘Okay. Is this it?’

  He nodded. The pilot had gone down low and was flying up a narrow valley, almost a ravine, with big grey boulders sticking out of the dead grass on either side. After two more minutes he turned his head and shouted something over his shoulder.

  ‘Here the site,’ Rasputin translated.

  ‘Tell him to land.’

  We made one left-handed circuit, which gave us a good view of the valley-end through the open door: a natural cul-de-sac with walls maybe a hundred feet high enclosing a large, circular area of level ground. From the air it was obvious that the site had been shaped artificially: the ground had been bulldozed flat, and the bank at the northern end of the ravine had been cut or blasted off to form a vertical wall, in the middle of which was a big doorway.

  We touched down gently in the inevitable cloud of dust. I motioned to the pilot to switch off. He made his gesture of futility, meaning he didn’t have enough fuel for repeated start-ups. What he was thinking, I could see, was that if I got out to check things on the ground, he’d do a quick take-off.

  ‘Off!’ I bellowed, reinforcing the command with a thrust of my 203 towards the back of his neck. Reluctantly, he obeyed. As the noise died away, I said to Rasputin, ‘All right. What have we got here?’

  This time there was no pissing about. ‘Medium-range warheads,’ he replied. ‘For small rocket.’

  ‘What state are they in?’

  ‘Bad. Already dangerous. You should wear clothes.’ He pushed up his right shoulder, as if offering to take off his protective suit and hand it over. I waved the offer off. No way was I going to untie him.

  ‘I’ll just take a look,’ I said. ‘You have keys?’

  This time he stuck out his right hip, and I found two keys on a ring in his overall pocket.

  ‘I’ll do a quick recce,’ I told Stringer.

  ‘For Christ’s sake be careful.’

  ‘Don’t worry. And if the pilot goes to start up without me, whack him.’

  The padlock on the door was new and shiny. I guessed Rasputin had brought it with him and put it in place as he was leaving. Yes, there on the ground was an old one, forced open somehow.

  This installation was far more solid than the one we’d looked at before, but, bar the new lock, everything was in a state of advanced decay: the heavy metal frame of the doorway was rusted, the concrete-block wall surrounding it cracked and pitted. The outer cladding of the double-skinned, corrugated-iron doors had rusted right through in places.

  All that remained of a warning notice-board was the ghost of a skull and crossbones on a sheet of tin which had fallen to the ground.

  The doors were too heavy to slide. They swung outwards from the centre, each on a broad metal wheel which ran along a curved rail. Somebody, presumably Rasputin, had already scraped most of the accumulated sand out of the first couple of metres of the track; I cleared the rest with the toe of my boot, and then with a big heave got the right-hand door open enough to slip through the gap.

  Inside, I immediately became aware of a sharp, acidic smell. At first I could see nothing. Then, at the furthest reach of the torch beam, something light-coloured showed up. A few steps forward, and I made out pointed white nose-cones facing towards me.

  A shiver went down my back. Shells about six inches in diameter had been stored on heavy-duty wooden shelves, a honeycomb with partitions like a giant wine rack. The top shelf was half empty and carried only five, but the other four shelves were full: forty-five missiles in all. At the right-hand end of the stack some of the lower woodwork had collapsed, so that all the rows were tilted, on a slope, and the missiles in the bottom corner had been forced down into a tight-packed heap. Even from a distance I could see that liquid of some kind had seeped out of one or more of them and had crystallised on the casings.

  I stood and stared at them, holding my breath, hoping that would protect me from the worst of the radiation. The points of the warheads were within fifteen feet of me.

  I backed out, hauled the door shut behind me and turned the key in the lock. My mind was moving at speed. I assumed Rasputin, or the South African, had radioed news of the cache back to base the moment they’d checked it, and that Muende’s snatch party was already well on its way. Back in the chopper, I greeted Stringer with a non-committal ‘okay’ and said to Rasputin, as a matter of fact, ‘Muende’s force is coming to pick these things up.’

  He nodded.

  ‘When?’

  ‘They are coming now.’

  ‘What time will they arrive?’

  ‘One hour, two hour.’ He pointed at his wrist, with circling movements of his forefinger.

  ‘Is Muende with them?’

  Rasputin shook his head.

  ‘What’s he doing, then?’

  ‘He goes to other place.’

  ‘What about the white woman?’

  ‘She goes with him.’

  ‘So neither of them’s in the convoy?’

  ‘Nyet.’

  I took a deep breath. They must have gone looking for the diamond. I felt a stab of disappointment. I’d really been hoping to clobber the pair of them. Too bad. Sod the diamond. That was only a personal vendetta. We were on to something bigger now. We’d committed ourselves to the nuclear snatch and had to go through with it.

  ‘Start up,’ I told the pilot.

  The guy seemed to have run out of arguments; this time he went through his checks without protest, and only when he had the engines running did he ask where he was to go.

  ‘Back to the place you found us.’

  The flight lasted no more than two or three minutes. Throughout the short transit Stringer stared at me as though I was lit up by radioactivity. All I could manage in return was a sickly grin. Was I feeling ill already, or was it my imagination? I had a headache, for sure, but I’d had that ever since I could remember. Also, I had that leaden feeling brought on by prolonged loss of sleep. But was this lethargy something worse than mere exhaustion? Don’t be stupid, I kept telling myself. Even if you are contaminated, you wouldn’t be feeling the effects yet.

  Morale lifted when I saw our two vehicles side by side on what we’d called the football field. Pav had done his stuff and brought the mother wagon forward, and Danny had driven the pinkie out beside it. Someone had dragged the two black bodies out of sight.

  ‘Over there!’ I shouted to the pilot, pointing at the far end of the open space. He put down in the usual cloud of dust.

  As t
he rotor slowed, I told Stringer to stay put, jumped out and ran across to the mother wagon. There, perched on the passenger’s side of the bench seat, was Jason. In the general panic I’d forgotten all about him.

  ‘Mabonzo!’ I went. ‘What the hell are you doing there?’

  ‘I come with you, sir. I help.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Get out! It’s far too fucking dangerous. You’d risk getting contaminated.’

  ‘I have medicine.’ He gave a slow smile and patted the breast pocket of his DPMs. ‘Medicine make me safe.’

  ‘No!’ I told him. ‘You don’t understand. Radiation can kill you. You can’t see it, but still it can kill you.’

  ‘I know,’ he said calmly. ‘We have lecture on atomicals. Sir take medicine.’

  He was holding something out in his long, thin fingers. Abruptly I felt on the verge of tears, choked by this man’s loyalty, his determination to stick with me. Jesus, I thought, never mind the warheads, it’s me who’s going unstable. I took the offering – a small, grey, rough-cut block the size of one square of chocolate. What if it’s hyena shit? I thought. But I put it in my mouth and took a gulp of water to wash it down. For a second I had a sharp, bitter taste, and then it was gone.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘You’d better come as co-driver and security, on the basis you don’t go into the silo, and don’t try to touch the warheads. All right?’

  Jason nodded, again giving that secret smile. There was something about his unshakeable confidence that bolstered my morale. Even if his imperturbability was based on ignorance, it was still reassuring. I felt that, whatever happened, he would never panic.

  I noticed a few odd looks as I joined the rest of the team. There was evidently something about my appearance that spooked them. But I ignored it, and said, ‘Right. We’re going for the weapons.’

  ‘Who’s going?’ Pav demanded.

  ‘Me and Jason. We’ve captured two Russians. We’ll take them with us and make them do the loading. I’ll keep one tied up while the other works.’

  ‘What?’ Pav spoke for all the lads when he yelled. ‘You’re fucking mad!’