December (21 page)

Bogdan was sounding tense; this couldn’t go on for much longer.

They were fifty yards away. Alex reckoned he could slot the two guards but Bogdan was now standing between him and the sergeant.

The sound of snow being scuffled by footsteps came from behind him. Alex turned round to see that Pete had it covered
and had allowed Magnus to slide into the shadows with them, his sniper rifle held in front of him.

‘Right, we’ve got three guards. I can hit two on auto; Magnus, can you take the one Bogdan is talking to? It’s fifty yards.’

The Norwegian looked round the corner and saw the face of the sergeant, partially obscured by the back of Bogdan’s head.

He turned back to Alex. ‘Sure.’

They both crept to the corner and took up firing positions. Magnus kneeled with the barrel of his rifle wedged against the corner of the hut for extra stability and Alex stood, hunched over his sights, above him. The sergeant’s head was still half hidden behind Bogdan’s.

Alex clicked his rifle’s selector onto full auto and took aim. ‘After you,’ he muttered.

Magnus’s rifle coughed and the sergeant’s head split in two.

Bogdan ducked and involuntarily threw his hands up around his head at the terrible sight right in front of his face.

Alex pulled the trigger and swept a long burst across the other guards, throwing them back against the machine’s tracks.

They ran out from behind the hut and over to Bogdan.

‘OK, let’s go!’ Alex yelled, and pushed Roman up into the high cab. Inside, Col hit the starter and the huge diesel roared into life, belching smoke. He spun one track forward and the other in reverse so the vehicle turned on the spot, churning snow as it went.

By the gate, the remaining guards looked towards them. They had seen their sergeant go behind the machine and then heard shots. Two men began hurrying over towards them.

‘Hit the towers!’ Alex shouted to Pete. The two towers along the perimeter nearest the north gate overlooked their escape route back into the woods and from there, prison guards would easily be able to fire at them. Alex didn’t want to have to have to drive off in the Vityaz with two heavy machine guns chewing it up.

‘Right-oh,’ said Pete in his laconic way, and they both swung the Shmel launchers off their shoulders. Alex ripped a new round out of its plastic twin pack and shoved it into the tube, before they kneeled either side of the Vityaz and sighted up.

Alex squinted through the simple iron sight and saw the wooden hut on its high legs.

‘Fire!’ he barked.

The two rockets streaked out in different directions trailing propellant sparks and slammed into their targets. Alex’s went slightly high and hit just under the roofline, but both structures exploded with orange fireballs.

‘Bonza,’ said Pete with a satisfied smile.

Alex grinned back at him. It was always like this when the fighting got going. It wasn’t perverted bloodlust, just the high spirits of being caught in a near-death experience.

‘Let’s go!’ he shouted, and Magnus and Pete clambered up into the cab.

‘You go!’ Bogdan yelled at Alex, insisting, with typical Russian machismo, on being the last in.

Alex wasn’t going to have a fight with
him
as well, so he shouldered his weapon and pulled himself up.

The two guards from the gate were in range of them now and opened fire. Bogdan picked up the sergeant’s rifle, dropped to one knee and snapped quick bursts back, forcing them to take cover. He turned and grabbed the handles to get up to the cab; Alex reached out to help pull him in.

The 5.45mm high-velocity round went through his chest just under his right collarbone. Alex’s head was next to him and he heard the deep thud and clang as the round went through him and hit the cab metalwork.

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 to 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.