by Chris Ryan
Ivan grinned. 'Bombs I know about.'
'Malenkov, you can get your men to us by three this afternoon?'
The Ukrainian smiled. 'They'll be here,' he said. 'Three boys, all ex-army. They'll be good men, don't worry. Brave and hungry, which is the way a soldier should be.'
Matt jabbed his finger down on the map. 'OK, here's what we do. There's a manhole cover outside the compound, and another one just inside. I reckon there's some kind of drainage tunnel taking waste from the factory down to the river, which according to our maps is two miles to the west. Tonight, after dark, we get down into that tunnel and make sure we can get through it. Then we'll leave a guard overnight, just to make sure it hasn't been compromised. Ivan makes us a set of bombs. We sneak two men inside, and place the devices around the main factory. That blows the place up to the sky. The rest of us can move in, and finish off whoever is left, and secure the main administrative building. Once we've finished everyone off inside the building, then we can take that down as well.'
'How about casualties?' asked Ivan. 'Are we bothered about killing these guys?'
Matt paused. As usual, Ivan got straight to the point: that issue had been troubling him as well. 'The factory should be empty at night bar the guards. When it goes off, they can all run away into the woods if they want to. If they stay and fight, they'll have to take their chances. Besides, they look like trained soldiers.'
He looked up towards Malenkov. 'What kind of weapons can you get us?' he asked. 'AK-47s? There must be plenty of those around this part of the world.'
'There are,' replied Malenkov. 'But I can get hold of some of the newer AN-49s.'
'I've heard of them, but I've never tried one.'
'Nice piece of machinery. It was adopted by the Russian Army as the standard-issue assault rifle in 1994, although they never had enough money to get rid of all their old AKs.
'What's the difference with the AK-47?' asked Ivan.
'A much faster rate of fire,' said Malenkov. 'And much greater accuracy. The recoil has been completely redesigned, so the gun hits back after the bullet has left the chamber. That allows for a far greater hit rate. Don't worry, you'll like it. It's a fine gun.'
'What about the sights?' asked Matt. 'We may be picking targets off from distance.'
'It's got a proper rear-mounted peep sight. Not the old notch and post you had on the AK-47. So long as the man holding it knows how to shoot, the gun won't let him down.'
'I like the sound of it,' said Matt. 'We'll need one for each man, and at least twenty magazines of ammunition per man. Plus we'll need at least one back-up gun each. We're going to use American tactics on this job. Ridiculous and cowardly firepower to overwhelm the opposition. The last thing we want is to take casualties ourselves.' He paused, taking another hunk of the black bread and chewing it quickly. 'Everyone happy?'
Malenkov and Ivan both nodded. Matt looked up towards Orlena. 'Happy?'
'So long as the factory gets destroyed,' she replied. 'That's all that matters.'
'You have two new messages,' intoned the Orange answering-machine voice after a long and tedious wait. 'Press . . .'
Matt hit the button, too impatient to listen to the list of options. The Imarsat satellite phones connected perfectly to Matt's mobile, allowing him to pick up his messages, and make calls. Out here, there was no land line, and no mobile connection. But the satellite phone meant you could stay in touch with the world as easily as if you were in London.
Probably easier.
'Matt, it's Bob here, Bob Crowden,' started a familiar Geordie voice. 'About what we were talking about the other day. I did hear something. Guy down in Swindon, called Barry Legg. Passed through my unit. Lovely fellow. Apparently he disappeared a few days ago. Then he was found dead yesterday. Murdered. Maybe nothing in it. Just a bit odd, that's all. I thought you might be interested.'
Matt pressed three to delete the message. A soldier gets killed down in Swindon? He shrugged to himself. Happens all the time. Could have been muggers. Could have owed some money to the wrong people. Could have been some random psycho who had decided to start killing former soldiers.
Guys get their number called all the time. It doesn't usually mean anything.
He pressed for the next message. 'Matt, it's me.' He recognised the voice immediately. 'I just wanted to see if you were all right.' She paused. 'And I guess I wanted to see if you'd found anything.'
Matt hit the button for redialling the last caller. The phone rang three times before it was answered. Before she even spoke, he could hear the heavy roar of traffic in the background. 'Where are you?' he asked.
'Waiting for the bus,' she answered. 'Fulham Palace Road. You OK?'
Matt couldn't help himself nodding into the phone, even though he knew she couldn't see him. 'OK, yes. I heard something.'
There was a pause on the line, and he could hear the honking of a lorry. 'Tell me,' she said eventually.
'A former soldier down in Swindon, called Barry Legg. He died a few days ago, murdered apparently.'
'Could that have anything to do with the men going crazy?'
'I don't know,' answered Matt. 'That's all I've heard. Maybe it's connected, maybe it isn't.' He paused. 'Look, I'll be back in a couple of days, let's speak then.'
Matt snapped the phone shut. It was almost noon, and the sun was beating down fiercely. The morning breeze had dropped, and the few acres of wheat and barley growing around the empty farmhouse were completely still.
Nikita, Josef and Andrei had arrived twenty minutes earlier, delivered in the back of Malenkov's Land Rover. Nikita was twenty-five, Andrei twenty-nine, but Josef looked younger, maybe nineteen or twenty. All three of them had dark hair, and gentle Slavic looks, but with dark brown eyes and a slope of the shoulders that suggested they could decide for themselves which orders they wanted to obey. He knew they were being well paid. Orlena was giving them a thousand American dollars each, a fortune by local standards. And for that kind of money the job would be rough and dirty.
That's as it should be. A soldier is always entitled to know what sort of risk he's taking. It's his life after all.
'The older two look OK,' said Matt. 'Not Josef, he's too young. We need men, not boys.'
Malenkov glared back at him. 'Josef's OK,' he said. 'He stays.'
'No, someone else.'
Malenkov shook his head, and from the look on his face, Matt could tell he wasn't going to budge. 'He stays,' he said firmly. 'Or else we all go.'
Matt looked up as they completed the second circuit of the field. They stopped by a cattle trough, flooding their faces with the dirty water. He tossed a water canister in their direction. Josef was the slowest, and might be carrying a couple of pounds too many on his stomach, and Andrei might not have kept his muscles as trim as he could, but none of them had flagged during the physical test, and none of them showed any sign of giving up.
They were fit, and they needed the work. What more could you ask of any mercenary?
'OK, we go with these three,' said Matt, looking across to Malenkov. 'Let's run through the plan, then get some kip. We've a long night ahead of us.'
The three men sat in a semicircle, Malenkov translating, while Matt and Ivan ran through the plan. They listened closely, watching as Matt pointed to the map, explaining how they were going to get in, and how they were going to blow the factory.
It was straightforward enough. They all claimed to have been in the Russian Army, and the older two had fought in Chechnya. By the standards of that war, this shouldn't be much more than punch-up in the playground.
'OK,' said Matt when he'd finished. 'Let's get some kip. Then when it gets dark we'll see how good we are at squeezing through tunnels.'
The smell was brutal: a stale, fetid mixture of human excrement, rotten food, and the heavy suffocating odour of industrial chemicals. Matt could feel his lungs choking on the air, the fumes crawling into every wrinkle in his clothes.
It's going to take a hundred hot sho
wers to get this stink off my skin.
They had slipped down through the manhole cover they had spotted the night before. The tunnel, as Matt had expected, led due west from the compound towards the river: environmentalists had a chance to clear up Belarus yet, thought Matt with a grin. The tunnel was taking the waste from both the compound and the factory. It measured four feet across, built in a half circle. It had originally been built from concrete, but was now in a bad state of disrepair. Flakes of stone were crumbling from its walls, and thick piles of silt and waste had built up along the sides, making it virtually impassable.
We're going to have to hack our way through, realised Matt as soon as they got inside.
The work was hard and slow, the earth tougher than Matt had expected. It was now past one in the morning, and they had already been digging for two back-breaking hours.
Matt paused for breath, pulling back his shovel. The tunnel was at least ten feet beneath the surface. As the man with the most experience of digging tunnels, he'd taken the lead. He placed a tiny hand-held torch on the ground, positioning it so its beam shone upwards. With a pick, he hacked into the silt blocking the tunnel, letting it crumble and tumble to the floor. Then he kicked it back with his feet, letting Andrei scoop the earth up into a bucket, and pass it back along the line.
Some water started to wash through the tunnel. It ran in a tiny river around his boots, lapping up and drenching his socks. Matt forced himself not to think about what might be in it.
Let's hope those bastards don't keep running to the loo all night.
'Himmo,' cried the Ukrainian as he fell backwards.
You don't need to have learnt much of the language to know what that means: Shit.
Matt remained completely still. He looked up at Andrei, raising his fingers to his lips. The sound of the fall, and the cry that followed might easily be heard above the ground. He kept his breathing steady and even, waiting and listening. Above, he could hear some feet slow and steady across the ground. One of the guards. From the tread, Matt judged the man was walking slowly towards the fence: he was probably directly above them just now. Not running – that was a good sign – but heading out to take a look.
Matt flashed the torch three times down the tunnel: the prearranged signal that they could have been compromised. Ivan, Malenkov and the rest of them knew to melt away into the wood, and ready themselves for a firefight.
Matt gripped the AN-49 he had slung over his back. He held it between his forearms, his finger ready on the trigger: he'd spent an hour this afternoon in the woods familiarising himself with the weapon, but it was still a new gun for him, and it took a moment to remember where everything was and how it worked.
If we're discovered, our only hope is to shoot our way out of the darkness.
'Tam,' shouted the guard.
Even down here in the ground, ten feet beneath the surface, the sound was clear enough. Matt didn't know much Russian, but he'd picked up a few words on a regiment training course: Who's there?
'Tarn,' shouted the guard, louder this time.
Matt remained still. He looked towards Andrei, and could see the boy fingering the trigger of his gun nervously. Matt smiled. He wouldn't claim to know much about commanding a troop of men – only what he'd picked up in the field of combat – but he knew the best way to calm everyone down in a flap was to look relaxed and cheerful yourself. Even when your stomach was churning, and your nerve endings felt like someone had just poured raw alcohol on to them.
Fear spreads quickly. So does confidence.
Another voice. Matt couldn't make out what the man was saying, but he guessed it was one of the other guards asking what was going on. More footsteps. The guard seemed to be moving sideways, along the perimeter of the fence. Then he started walking backwards again, towards the interior of the compound.
Matt took a deep breath, feeling the oxygen fill his lungs. Even the stale air of the tunnel felt good. The guard had decided it was nothing, just a stray wolf or some other animal rampaging through the forest.
We're in the clear. For now.
Matt nodded towards Andrei, and repositioned his torch so its light was shining up to the front of the tunnel. He could see the manhole inside the compound ahead of him, and there was just one more pile of waste to be cleared away before they could reach it. He picked up his shovel, and started hacking into it.
Another five feet and we can get out of this graveyard.
Matt took a hit of the vodka, swilling it around his mouth, enjoying its crisp, chunky flavour before letting it hit his bloodstream.
'We know the guards are doing their jobs,' he said, looking across at Ivan and Malenkov. 'That guy who heard the noise was making a proper check of the area. He's not just some clock-watching security guard sitting around drinking vodka and doing the crossword until he can knock off for the night.'
'We can deal with them,' said Malenkov gruffly. 'Our men are good, and we can take them by surprise.'
'Right,' added Ivan. 'And they can take us by surprise as well.'
'Let's get some sleep then,' said Matt. 'We're going to need our wits about us.'
He checked his watch. It was just after four in the morning. It had taken three hours to dig through the tunnel they needed, and they had left Nikita in the forest to keep watch, and make sure the tunnel wasn't discovered. He'd be relieved by one of the other men after three hours.
'Everyone get as much sleep as they can. We start work again at two tomorrow afternoon.'
Matt walked alone through to his room. Somewhere through the forest he could see the first glimmers of dawn starting to break through. He chucked a towel up against the window, catching it on the lock to block out as much sunshine as possible. Back in the regiment, he could lie down anywhere, close his eyes and go straight to sleep, any time of the day or night. But his body, he realised, had become used to the gentler rhythms of civilian life. He was used to going to bed at night, getting up in the morning, getting on with the day. Breaking back into the old pattern was disorientating him.
It takes weeks, sometimes months to be combat-ready. Whatever the idiots at the Firm might think, you can't just switch it on and off.
Matt stripped off his clothes, and lay down on the mattress. He could feel his eyes shutting, and as they closed, he thought of Gill. It was so long since he'd heard from her, and he was starting to fear this time the break might be permanent. She had disappeared from his life so suddenly, so completely, it was hard to get used to.
Wait until this job is done. Then I'll know whether we can get hack together or not.
He rolled over, his eyes closing. Orlena was somewhere down the hallway, and Matt felt a mixture of guilt and desire as he wondered if she might join him on the mattress. He was listening for the sounds of footsteps in the corridors, but the house was completely silent. Within seconds, he was sleeping.
ELEVEN
The sunset melted slowly into the line of trees stretching out beyond the fields. Matt remained still, watching the light of the day seep away. In the regiment, all his toughest firefights had been at night. In the Philippines, he'd taken a flesh wound in the leg during an attack on a communist camp; in Bosnia, he'd held a man face down in the mud, and put a bullet through his head, even though he wasn't sure he'd got the right man; in Ulster, he'd come under sniper fire during a border patrol, and dived for cover as the man next to him had dropped down stone dead.
For most people, night is a time of peace. For men like us, it's a time of war.
The surveillance of the factory was now complete: Malenkov had made notes of when the shifts of guards at the factory changed, and how many men came on each rota. It was twelve in total. Two were on towers, six in the admin block and four in the factory. They had been carrying a lot more weaponry than Matt had expected: how tough this was going to be, he couldn't say, but he knew he had to prepare for the worst.