B00DSDUWIQ EBOK (13 page)

He
was making a mental list of things they would need, food items, water, extra batteries.
Somewhere he had a list of the hundred things to disappear first, and oddly,
toilet paper was one of them. The once called it “mountain money” when they
would go camping, one of those little necessities that you never gave a second
thought. What else was he overlooking? Should he take the pistol with him when
he went out? Where did he keep the ammo?

He
sat down in his office, dejected, flustered, and beset with the feeling that he
had a thousand things to do and too little time to get any of them done. Think!
He imposed a moment of quiet on his mind. Sit down and think this through. What
do you really need? It wasn’t Zest, or that new power shaver. It wasn’t Aqua Fresh,
those 50 unforgettable getaways or a mid-sized sedan. It wasn’t a new iPad or
HDTV. All those desires had been swept away in a single moment in his mind.

It
was just three things now: Food, Fuel and security.

Day
5

“I
came into a place mute of all light,
Which bellows as the sea does in a tempest,
If by opposing winds 't is combated.

The
infernal hurricane that never rests
Hurtles the spirits onward in its rapine;
Whirling them round, and smiting, it molests them.

When
they arrive before the precipice,
There are the shrieks, the plaints, and the laments,
There they blaspheme the puissance divine.”

Dante Alighieri, The
Inferno - Canto V

Part V

Night
Stalkers

“Since
well before the Kung's engine noise first penetrated the forest, a conversation
of sorts has been unfolding in this lonesome hollow. It is not a language like Russian
or Chinese but it is a language nonetheless, and it is older than the forest.
The crows speak it; the dog speaks it; the tiger speaks it, and so do the
men—some more fluently than others.”

―
John Vaillant, The Tiger

Chapter 13

They
crouched low, waiting. The sound of voices
came to them in the night, edged with frustration. One voice was louder, sharp
and demanding, obviously the officer in charge of the NKVD column upset over
Sutherland’s handiwork on the bridge. Haselden looked over at his mate and winked,
giving him a thumbs up. But what would the Russians try to do now?

Then
they heard it, a low growl of motors in the still air, faint and far off, but drawing
closer. Haselden craned his neck, looking over his shoulder, eyes puckered to
see anything in the murky darkness. The sound of bullfrogs and other night
creatures seemed to rise in a frustrating chorus before he heard the distinctive
rumble of trucks on the road behind them.

“Hold
on Cobber,” he rasped to Sutherland. “We’ve got company—behind us on the road!”

They
could now hear another truck column coming up, and Haselden thought he could make
out a line of squarish shadows on the thin track of the road. ‘Bloody hell!” he
said sharply. “This is no damn good. Who would have thought we get traffic on a
road like this. They’ll come right up on our ass.” He leaned out of his cover,
clicker in hand and snapped off a signal to Sergeant Terry on the other side of
the road—
abort—abort—abort.
The Sergeant wasted no time, and half a
minute later he was rushing across the road, crouching low, Bren gun in hand.

“Unexpected
company,” Haselden whispered when he arrived, his face set and serious.

“Now
what?”

“It’s
no good here. We’ll have to get down there and take cover in those reeds. Make sure
you don’t leave anything. Let’s get moving!” He turned his head. “Nice and quiet
like now.”

“Right-O,
Jock. Always did like a midnight belly crawl with the frogs.” Sutherland winked
at him, and the three commandos crept silently away from the road, seeking better
cover in the reedy fringes of the marshland to the east. The bridge they had
selected as a choke point was right at the narrowest neck of the Terek River as
it flowed east to the Caspian. They had to move about a hundred yards to the
reeds, but once there they found good concealment. Behind them there was nothing
but murky, wet ground descending to marshland now.

The
fens fell off to a wide lake, festooned with reeds and floating muck. It separated
the river from a long spit of sandy ground beyond it that pointed to the north
like a great finger, marking the place where Corporal Severn waited on the
coast with the swift boats. Haselden had radioed him earlier on the wireless
and told him to move south that night under cover of darkness. With any luck
Severn was due east of their position by now, though he wondered how things
would play out from this point.

“This
is no good here,” said Sutherland. “We’ve no decent field of fire. Sergeant Terry’s
Bren won’t do us any good at all down here.” They could see the trucks coming
up the road to the very place where they had been concealed just moments ago,
and then slowly maneuvering to turn about. Sergeant Terry shook his head, unhappy.

“How
in the world did I find myself lying here in a muddy bog on a night like this,”
he muttered.

“You
were most likely a troubled youth,” Sutherland jibed. Then they hushed, heads low
as they watched the trucks pull up. Haselden was fishing about in his jacket
for the map, and the wan gleam of moonlight gave him just enough light to read
it.

“Nothing
behind us, mates. Just a whole lot more of this muck and mire. That there is the
delta of the Terek, six bloody miles of it to the coast.”

“They’ll
get cross that river in half an hour and onto those trucks. This must have been
arranged,” Sutherland whispered.

“Right
you are. The only question is what do we do now? We can’t move south on their flank
from here. The damn road is going to skirt the edge of that marsh lake behind us
for a good eight miles, and we’d be easily seen. We could wait here and then follow
them south, but they’ll leave us well behind them in no time.”

“Then
we’ve no choice,” said Sutherland. “They’ll have to turn all those trucks about
and will most likely load up. We’ll have to jump the last one in the line. Maybe
we’ll get lucky and our man will be riding that one.”

“Maybe
not,” said Haselden, “but I don’t see any other way now, Davey. Let’s work round
to the right a bit. Good cover in these reeds but move slow. Fix silencers and
it’s pistols and knives now. We can keep our Stens, but that Bren isn’t going
to do us any good in a situation like this, Sergeant. I’m afraid we’ll have to
leave it.”

Sergeant
Terry nodded grimly, and was already looking to find a spot to conceal the weapon
and ammo belts in the reeds. Now it was coming down to stealth and subterfuge,
not firepower and ambush. Their faces were painted black beneath their dark
berets, and each man lightened his load, keeping nothing more than food, water
and ammo. Haselden handed off his Sten and numerous ammo clips to Sergeant Terry
to compensate him for the lost Bren. “I’ll lead with pistol and knife,” he whispered.
“Let’s move.”

They
worked their way slowly through the reeds, careful not to let them rustle and move
as they passed. It was move, wait, listen, move again, slithering along the
damp ground like snakes, but in this way they were able to get to a position on
the Terek, very close to the bridge that Sutherland had blown. Now he saw that
his demolition charges had only damaged the bridge itself, and the span
remained largely intact. There was a gaping hole in the wood of the bridge bed,
but still enough room to one side for a man to edge by and carefully cross. The
NKVD were rigging ropes to provide additional hand holds at this spot, and they
were sending the women from the column across first.

“Must
have had a dodgy charge,” Sutherland whispered.

“Hush
up, Davey. I count five men there, and there’s probably that many or more with those
trucks. See that tall fellow? I think that’s our man. Look, there he goes now.”

They
could see a tall, stocky man making his way over the bridge, with two NKVD soldiers
following behind him. Haselden strained to see him as he crossed, and noted
that he continued on past the last truck. Just our luck, he thought. Now we
won’t know which truck the man is in. But he decided not to curse his luck just
yet. It remained to be seen just how this situation would develop. There would
certainly be soldiers assigned to the last truck, but how many?

“Look,
lads,” he said quietly. “When we move it will have to be quick and dirty. “There
will be men for that last truck, and we’ll have to get them all, and quiet
like. What we don’t want is for one of those bastards to fire his weapon and
warn the others up front, so I’ll want to move just as the last of this lot begins
to mount that truck. Move on my hand signal.”

The
other men nodded, realizing this was perhaps the most dangerous moment of their
trek thus far. Yet it was their stock in trade, as each man was a highly trained
expert in close combat, and ready for the job at hand. They were settling down
on instincts born of training, reflex and adrenaline now, an ancient language
of muscle and nerve. Another part of their brains took over, and they became
low, stealthy prowling things in the night, their senses keened up to a razor
sharpness, eyes moving, minds calculating without words or logic; limbs ready
to spring for the kill.

The
soldiers had herded all the women forward, waiting for all the trucks to slowly
back and turn themselves around on the narrow road. One man was issuing loud commands,
pointing at men and gesturing. They loaded five or six women in the back of
each truck, seven vehicles in all, and then two NKVD men boarded to keep watch
on them. The officer walked forward, obviously to take up a position in the
first truck. There were three men left over.

Haselden
tensed up, hearing the engines gunning as the lead trucks in the column began to
move out. The last of the three men had come from the bridge, a cigarette hanging
from his lips as he hefted his rifle onto his shoulder. Two others were getting
ready to mount the tailgate of the truck. It was now or never. The noise of the
other trucks would provide perfect sound cover. He moved.

Haselden
just crawled up onto his knees, stood up and casually walked to the back of the
truck. The man with the cigarette turned his head, dumbfounded. The British Captain
was holding out a pack of fresh cigarettes, smiling as he stepped up to the
man. Then that moment of confused surprise became a blur. Haselden drove the
base of his hand right into the man’s nose, thrusting up in a hard blow. A second
soldier had one knee up on the tailgate and a swift kick took out the support
of his other leg. Both men were down and Sutherland was up next to the Captain
now, easily handling the third soldier, parrying the blow of his rifle butt,
slipping inside and getting the man’s neck and head in a hold that saw him go
slack in no time at all. A swift chop to the neck settled the man who had
fallen with Haselden’s kick.

The
three NKVD soldiers were down and out, nice and quiet like, just as Seventeen wanted
it. Then the three British commandos quickly removed the fallen soldiers’
jackets and hats, and mounted the truck in their place.

Haselden
tapped lightly near the back of the driver’s cabin and the engine growled as the
truck started down the road. He settled in with Sutherland and Sergeant Terry.

“Those
three back there will have a long walk home,” he whispered. “And a good long sleep
until they wake up. Good that we didn’t have to break any necks.”

“Right,
Jock,” said Sutherland. “Allies and all. But where is this lot going?”

“We’ll
find that out soon enough, Davey Boy. For now, get the mud off your boots, slip
into these nice warm coats and put on those Ushankas. We’re proper NKVD soldiers
now. Enjoy the scenery.”

“Yeah?
Well what’s the plan, Jock?”

“We
wait a bit. It looks like ten miles to the next river. There’s a small town on the
coast there as I read it, a place called Sulak. South is Makhachkala, another
fifteen miles. This column won’t do much more than thirty miles an hour on
these roads. It’s 10:40 hours now, so I’d say we’ll probably get down there
before midnight, and perhaps they’ll stop.”

“Then
what? That cigarette trick of yours was handy, but I counted eleven more men forward
of this truck, including our driver. Lucky for us there’s no window in the back
of that cab.”

“No
worries. We can play this one of two ways now. We could work our way forward and
find this man before we reach town, but that won’t be easy unless they stop again,
and any slip up would blow our cover and start a row here. The other thing is
to slip away just as we reach the outskirts of town. Then we work our way in
under cover of these hats and jackets, looking all proper and such. We find this
man in town and try to get him before dawn.”

“Right,”
said Sutherland.

“Assuming
they stop here.” Sergeant Terry wasn’t one for words, but he squeezed that out from
beneath his thick mustache, eyeing Haselden in the dark.

“The
Sergeant has a point,” said Haselden. “Well if they don’t stop, and roll right on
through town, then they’re probably bound for Baku. We won’t know that one way
or another until we get to Makhachkala and see what they do.”

“So
we can’t very well slip away before then,” said Sutherland. “If they push on to
Baku we’d be stuck. We’ll lose them for sure.”

 “So
we stay with the column,” Haselden concluded. “It’ll be dangerous. If they do stop
and that officer comes mucking about we may have to act, and quickly. Eleven men
or no, we’ll have to make our play.”

“In
that event, let’s just hope they stop somewhere nice and secluded. I’d hate to start
a brawl in the middle of town square.” Sutherland shook his head, the difficulty
of their situation apparent. “Alright, suppose we pull this off and we do get
this man. What then?”

“We
get him east to the coast. If we’re in a settled area we look for a boat, any boat,
and head north up the coast to that finger of land where Corporal Severn is
waiting. Still packing that wireless in one piece, Sergeant?”

“Aye,
sir.”

“Good
enough. We get this man, call up Corporal Severn with the swift boats and have him
come south to meet us if things get hot. Then we get across to Ft. Shevchenko
as fast as we can.”

“Sounds
easy enough when you say it like that, Jock. Yet as you can see, things happen.
This column could meet up with another. There might be a full company of NKVD at
the other end of this road for all we know. We go in undercover and suppose we
run into some hothead officer. What then?”

“If
it comes to that then we’ll have to rely on our wits, stealth and the weapons we’re
still carrying. As I see the odds now, the three of us should be able to handle
the men in this column. After all, we’re 30 Commando.”

“Here,
here,” said Sergeant Terry. “Wish I had a battalion of the lads with us now. Then
it wouldn’t matter what we run into.”

“If
wishes were horses, Sergeant Terry.”

“Aye,
sir.”