Aggressor (11 page)

‘The Navy was over-confident, it seems.'

‘Then what's happened? Has the boat sunk? Is Franklin dead?'

Anything was a possibility, Jacobson admitted. Nothing was as it seemed in the Middle East. His exhaustive studies of the area, its history and culture, had provided him with that much, gratis.

‘But the Soviets believe he's alive,' Jacobson said.

‘They've communicated again?'

‘Aushev called a few minutes ago. Same message. They have specific intelligence on the whereabouts of Franklin and the rest of our people.'

‘Well, where the hell are they?'

‘That's all the Soviets are saying, sir. They're pressing us to respond.'

Newhouse fell silent for a few moments. ‘Has the NSC contacted you about this yet?'

‘Not yet.'

‘Then it seems we're in time. We've got to pull ourselves out of this shit.'

‘Sir?'

‘Contact Aushev on the Romeo channel and tell him we accept his offer. We await his further instructions.'

Jacobson smiled.

‘Do it quickly,' Newhouse said. ‘We'll worry about the consequences later.'

CHAPTER 7

Shabanov flexed his upper arms in a vain bid to restore their failing circulation. With both his hands clamped to the top of his head for something over two hours - although not having access to his watch it was impossible to be precise about elapsed time - he had long lost the ability to feel any sensation in his muscles, which was probably a blessing. The pain was focused in his shoulder joints instead. He began to imagine that the limbs had been wrenched from their sockets, but chastised himself as soon as he became conscious of these wild and irresponsible thoughts; it was best not to drift.

‘Move again and I'll shoot, you Russian son of a whore,' the woman screamed in Arabic. He understood enough to stop the movement.

Shabanov raised his eyes to hers. The .45 was pointing straight at the centre of his forehead. He held her gaze and noticed the deep brown eyes flash angrily again. She was startlingly attractive. Her long black hair had tumbled over her face, but she made no effort to sweep it aside. Beneath those soft dark strands, the silky complexion, full lips and perfect straight nose were strangely at odds with the bitch's demeanour.

‘You haven't got the guts to use that thing,' he said, the edges of his mouth breaking into a smile. ‘It is just a toy in your hands.' He spoke a dialect different from hers, but it was good Arabic none the less.

He saw the confusion sweeping her face. She brushed the hair away from her eyes, cocked the gun, and rammed the barrel up against his jawbone.

‘Keep your mouth shut,' she screamed, ‘or I'll blow it off.'

She adjusted her stance. Out of the corner of his eye, Shabanov could see her wiggling her hips as she settled into the new position against the bulkhead of the airliner. He was captivated by the shape of her body. He could picture every inch of it beneath the rough texture of her combat fatigues.

Rarely had Shabanov felt so alive. They had told him at training school that the feeling was not uncommon during moments of acute danger. But they had not prepared him for this. He felt he could do anything, he was better than all of them. And he would take that bitch afterwards for his pleasure.

About three seat-rows behind him one of his fellow hostages, a woman, groaned. Her husband asked the man known as Mahmoud for water again. He was greeted with the light sound of the Kalashnikov's safety catch slipping off.

‘No water till the aircraft is refuelled,' Mahmoud shouted in English.

Shabanov thought there were four of them, but he couldn't be sure. There was Mahmoud, the girl Layla, a lanky gun-toting youth at the back of the aircraft and another man with a grenade on the flight deck. There was always a chance that there were others, but because he had not been able to turn round since the beginning of the ordeal, it was impossible to tell.

Layla pulled the .45 away from his face and leant back. Although the blinds were still pulled down over the windows, Shabanov could see the last rays of sunlight slipping behind the horizon beyond the cockpit windshield. It was probably three hours since the terrorists had made their move. Something had to break soon.

He heard a brief commotion on the flight deck, then saw the man with the grenade beckon Mahmoud up to the front of the airliner.

The tower on the line again.

‘Fuel, I want fuel,' Mahmoud screamed, pressing a communications set to his head. ‘If we do not receive it within the next five minutes, another hostage will be killed.'

Shabanov had not seen the execution. He had heard the man's screams and the sharp crack of the Kalashnikov on single shot; that had been enough. From the way Layla was looking at him, he reckoned he was up next.

Mahmoud walked down the gangway towards his position, roughly in the centre of the airliner. The manual said to avoid eye contact with these people. You had to believe you were invisible to avoid being singled out for special attention. Shabanov met Mah-moud's gaze and held it. Fuck the book.

Mahmoud looked at Layla, then nodded to Shabanov. She grabbed him by the collar and pulled him out of his seat. Shabanov twisted and wrested her grip from him. For a moment she seemed captivated by his appearance. He was wearing the full uniform of a Guards airborne assault colonel in the Soviet Army. There were three rows of medal ribbons on his chest. He was tall, lean faced, with cropped black hair that accentuated the lines of his skull. A small scar on the bridge of his nose marked the point where an Afghan tribesman had slashed him during hand-to-hand fighting in the hills above Jalalabad. Shabanov knew that his greatest strength in a hostage situation where there were women among his captors lay in his looks. They could gain him vital seconds in any confrontation. He gave her a half smile and let her catch a fleeting glimpse into the depths of his blue eyes. She seemed to draw back a little, until a low growl from Mahmoud stopped her in her tracks.

She thrust the gun up against his temple. ‘Move,' she hissed, ‘to the front of the plane.'

Shabanov was about to take a step forward when the lights in the roof went out. He knew what was happening. The next moment he was on the ground, his hands clamped over his ears, his eyes screwed shut. A split-second later the two doors over the wings, about four rows forward from him, blew into the airliner. Even though his eyes were shut, he saw the intensity of the flashes through his eyelids.

Shabanov looked up to see a figure clad in black, clutching a machine-gun/flashlight combination, his outline faintly illuminated by the sidelobes from the torch beam.

‘Everybody stay down, stay down,' the figure shouted, voice muffled by the gas mask.

Layla was still standing in the aisle. Shabanov saw a look, like that of a frightened animal caught in a car's headlights, etched on her face. The Heckler and Koch jumped twice in the hands of the assault commando and she fell to the ground, a deep red stain over her T-shirt.

Behind the lead commando, a second figure fired two shots into the prostrate body of Mahmoud, who had been knocked off his feet by one of the doors.

The first commando probed the smoke with the beam of his flashlight and fired twice again. That took care of the stick insect behind him.

There was another explosion at the front of the aircraft, the flash and blast catching Shabanov unawares. When his vision and hearing returned, the man with the grenade lay sprawled on the floor by the forward toilet. The commando who shot him kicked the grenade from his hand out into the dawn air through the still smoking doorway.

The man behind him tried to move. His wife began screaming.

‘Keep down,' a remote voice shouted.

The black figures roamed up and down the aisle, the light from their torches stitching across the seats and the startled faces of the passengers.

‘Everybody make their way to the escape chutes,' a muffled voice said. It was calm, but authoritative.

Shabanov got to his feet and helped the woman in the row behind to hers. He ushered her to the nearest exit, picked her up and threw her on to the chute, which had already been fully deployed from the fuselage to the ground. Then he jumped himself.

He ran across the tarmac to the minibus, which had not moved from its position at the outset of the incident, and rapped on the door. There was a brief pause, some muffled sounds from within, then it slid back on its rails.

Shabanov found himself staring into the face of a USAF officer.

‘How long?' the Russian asked him.

Colonel Elliot Ulm, commander of the USAF's 1725th Combat Control Detachment, better known as the Pathfinders, looked again at the stop-watch. ‘One minute thirty-five seconds from the moment the doors blew to your knock.'

‘Congratulations, Colonel,' Shabanov said. ‘That's quick.'

Ulm jumped down onto the tarmac. ‘Thanks.'

He looked over to the airliner, an old Boeing 727 the unit had managed to scrounge off one of the airlines for next to nothing. It was in the airlines' interest for the Pathfinders to get it right. One day soon it would be for real. The Gulf War had shown what terrorism, or even the threat of it, could do to revenue.

The last of the eighty-two passengers was coming down the rear exit chute. This time, they had lost only one. Only wasn't good enough. But it was doubtful if there was any way they could have avoided it. The officer from PsyOps had warned him of Mahmoud's instability, but until they received political clearance, there was no way of going in. The go-ahead came, as was so often the case in real hijackings, only after the shooting had started.

Still, Ulm thought. They were getting better. Not as good as the Soviets in all-round terms, maybe, but they were improving.

Ulm turned to face Shabanov. ‘Did you survive your ordeal, Colonel?'

‘More than that, I enjoyed it,' the Russian said.

‘Hardly a term I would have used.'

Ulm couldn't make the guy out, even after several weeks of exchange visits between their two units. Shabanov was engaging, beguiling almost, but still one of the hardest bastards he had ever come across in almost twenty years of the SOF business. Maybe he'd get that officer from PsyOps to have a look inside the Russian's head.

Ulm took the evening air deep into his lungs. A light wind had sprung up with the setting sun, scattering the tumbleweed across the New Mexico desert and over the crumbling concrete of the runway. The 727 was flanked a little way off by the disintegrating carcasses of combat aircraft. The sun found a single piece of shiny metal on an old F-106 and reflected it in Ulm's face. The special forces colonel let the light dance in his eyes for a moment. The pinprick of warmth on his skin felt good, but it could not compensate for his malaise.

An old boneyard, a scrap metal dump - the epitome of his worth in the eyes of the Pentagon. The Red Rio Range, part of the White Sands reservation in New Mexico, was a weapons training area for A-10 ground-attack aircraft. The dilapidated combat aircraft on the disused runway gave them something to aim at. Ulm's unit, based at nearby Kirtland Air Force Base, shared the Red Rio training ground with rusting relics of the Vietnam era.

He wondered if Shabanov had any idea to what extent the Romeo Protocol was a sham.

A black-suited figure loomed out of the gathering darkness. Master Sergeant Nolan Jones pulled the mask and Balaclava from his head. Jones was from the Everglades, scalp and gristle above the neck line, muscle from collar to feet.

‘All passengers present and accounted for, Colonel. Four terrorists dead. Aircraft safe from explosives.' He smiled at his commander, exposing a row of chipped, stubby teeth. ‘We took the mother down, sir.'

Ulm congratulated him. ‘See you at the debrief in a half hour, Spades.'

Shabanov watched Jones amble back to the team's minibus, which had drawn up under the wing of the 727. ‘Spades?' he said.

Ulm had almost forgotten about his guest.

‘During his selection test, Jones listed axe-throwing as a special skill. They encourage individual talents in the special forces, so they put him to the test. During his trial they discovered he could slice a melon into halves with a trench spade at twenty yards. We look for people like that in the Pathfinders.'

‘I see,' Shabanov said. ‘There is a master sergeant in my unit, Starshina Bitov, that I would like him to meet. They would be quite a team.'

Beyond Ulm's shoulder, Layla appeared at the doorway of the aircraft. The wet stain on her T-shirt accentuated the shape of a perfect left breast.

Ulm caught the direction of Shabanov's stare. ‘Normally we would put a couple of shots straight between the eyes,' he said. ‘These training sessions are meant to sacrifice nothing for realism, only those dye-filled capsules we use can blind if they hit you in the eyes. So in training we go for the heart.'

Shabanov followed Layla's progress across the weeds and the concrete. ‘And where do you find your terrorists?'

‘Layla's an air force captain,' Ulm said. ‘Second-generation American. Her grandparents were Lebanese. The others are all seconded from various branches of the armed forces. They'll go back to their units tonight.'

As she strolled past, Layla gave Shabanov a smouldering look. Then she smiled warmly. He flexed his fingers behind his back and returned her grin. Another time, perhaps.

‘In the Soviet Union we have many ethnic minorities. I myself am descended from the tribesmen of Uzbekistan in Soviet Central Asia. With so many republics, it is hardly surprising that our recruit come from different cultures and backgrounds. But I had no idea the make-up of the American services was so... diverse.'

‘Uzbeks. They've been involved in all that unrest down south, haven't they? I was reading an article in
Time
about -'

Shabanov cut him off. ‘There are many peoples in Central Asia. Turkmens, Khirgiz, Tadzhiks, Azeris, Uygurzt... There are bound to be tensions as my country moves towards democracy, Colonel,' Shabanov said stiffly.

‘The march of Islam,' Ulm said. ‘It seems unstoppable.'

‘And nationalism, Colonel. This is the price Moscow has to pay for giving us our democratic rights. It is not easy for us seeing our country torn apart.'

Ulm was surprised by Shabanov's candour.
Torn apart
. It was an apt description of the state of the disunion in the USSR. There were flashpoints across the country as the Russian Empire collapsed like a dying star. The last of the rioting republics were constantly in the news. During his exchange, a few weeks before, Ulm had witnessed a very vocal demonstration by Baltic separatists in Moscow. But not once had Shabanov or any other Spetsnaz officer raised the issue during his stay and so he had let the subject be. Russians were still sensitive about the August coup.

Ulm thought he might have touched a raw nerve. ‘That was insensitive of me. As an Uzbek, you're probably a Muslim, too, I'll bet.'

Shabanov remained impassive. ‘I was an Uzbek. But now I am a Russian - second generation, like your Layla, Colonel. My family has been living inside the Russian Federation for almost fifty years.'