by Andy Maslen
Both men swaggered back to the car and climbed in. No safety belts needed now, they lounged in their seats and exchanged compliments in Russian. Konstantin poked Gabriel in the right arm.
“Russian soldiers stronger than British. Better, yes?”
“Yeah, Russian soldiers fucking monsters. You win, Ivan.” For now.
Seemingly satisfied with Gabriel’s capitulation in the face of superior physical prowess, Erik and Konstantin resumed their noisy silence, breathing heavily from their exertions but saying nothing, not even to each other.
The road must have been regularly used at one time – it was metalled and largely free of potholes. Now it was being narrowed by nature, as brambles, nettles, cow parsley and blackthorn threatened to engulf it completely. Gabriel eased the big estate down the centre of the road, but the thorns and spines of the burgeoning greenery still etched their signatures down the shining grey sides of the car with a thin screeching. Tall hedges on both sides prevented Gabriel from seeing the target site. All he could do was to keep moving forward until he reached the dilapidated but still padlocked gates at the end of the track. Above the road, a bird of prey soared in lazy circles on a thermal, too high for Gabriel to identify it. He didn’t know which raptors were native to Estonia, but he wanted it to be an eagle, something majestic and free from fear of predation.
Then a tap on his shoulder from Erik brought him back to the present.
“Look,” the Russian said, pointing between Gabriel and Konstantin and through the windscreen.
There they were. The rusted and chained steel gates of the scrapyard.
Gabriel slowed the car and pulled over behind an untidy tangle of scrubby thorn bushes. He went to the rear of the car and waited for the tailgate to finish its self-propelled ascent. From the load space, he retrieved a pair of bolt-cutters he’d bought the previous day. He walked up to the gates, slid the jaws of the bolt cutters around the chain, and squeezed the plastic-sheathed handles together. The sensation was like cutting through thick rubber: a steady pressure followed by a sudden yielding, accompanied by a double-chink as the quarter-inch steel links parted and fell to the ground. He pulled the remaining length of chain through the frame of the gate and slung it to one side. But when he tried to open the gates they held stubbornly in place.
“Look,” Erik said, pointing at the vertical, black gap where the gate frames butted up against each other. “Weld.”
He was right. Someone had gone belt-and-braces on security. To the rear of the join, he could make out a thick, vertical bead of rippled steel: the gates had been welded shut and then chained, presumably to deter casual visitors. Konstantin grunted a confirmatory phrase from the hinge end of the right-hand gate.
“Is welded, also.”
“OK,” Gabriel said. “We brought C-4. Now we’re going to use it.”
The Russians’ eyes lit up at the mention of C-4. They high-fived like children excited at the prospect of some unexpected destruction of property.
Gabriel returned to the boot and pulled out the shrink-wrapped package of C-4 plastic explosive. Using his switchblade, he slit the thick plastic wrapping, exposing the dull-grey, greasy material within. It had a smell equal parts hot plastic and window putty. He carved off a thin slice about four inches long, divided this into eight stock cube-sized pieces, and pushed them methodically into the gaps in the centre of the gates, starting at head height and working his way down to ground level.
The plastique in place, he unwound a length of twin-core, copper bell-wire from a white cardboard reel, stuck the two exposed ends into the topmost cube of explosive, and then crimped the wire every foot or so and stripped off an inch of the plastic insulation, before pushing a copper V into the remaining lumps. Finally, he unspooled another thirty feet of the bell-wire before cutting it off from the reel, which he stowed back in the Merc’s boot. He stripped a half-inch of the insulation from each of the two conjoined wires with his teeth, pulled them apart and clipped them into the firing device. This was a small aluminium box the size of a cigarette packet with a set of red and black terminals protected by knurled plastic dust caps, and a red firing button on the side.
“These will be small bangs,” he said to the other men, who had watched him lay the charges with interest and were now crouching on the far side of the Merc. “We’re at least a mile and a half from the buildings, so we should be fine. But if we attract some attention, be ready to deal with it, yes?”
Konstantin and Erik both stood, walked round to the Merc’s boot and unwrapped three canvas bundles, revealing what appeared to be brand-new, American-made M16s. These were desert warfare models, their hand guards and other furniture painted in black, sand and white camouflage. They sat side by side on the boot lip and began loading magazines, first sliding thirty 5.56mm rounds onto the thin, steel stripper clips that gripped them by the grooves at the base of the cartridges, then mounting the clips on the empty magazines with a loading guide, and finally pushing down with their thumbs to slot all thirty rounds home. They worked in silence apart from the ratcheting noises as the rounds were pushed down, zig-zagging their way into the pressed-steel magazines. With six magazines apiece loaded, they slotted one into all three of the M16s, slapping the bases to ensure they were correctly seated and wouldn’t come loose in firing. They took a rifle each and resumed their cover positions behind the Merc.
Gabriel looked at them and signalled with the flat of his left hand to keep their heads down. He crouched, counted down from three with the fingers of the same hand, turned away from the gates, and pressed the red fire button.
The six tiny charges blew instantaneously, with a noise like the rockets you’d find in a domestic fireworks set. Out in the open air, with nothing to catch and reflect the shock waves, the sound dissipated quickly. The charges did their work: the gates had been blown apart and off their hinges, and had flown back a few yards to lie on the roadway, their frames buckled, the chain-link infill shredded and torn.
The explosions were loud, but Gabriel hoped the Chechens were too far away to have heard them. Nevertheless, he pulled the P226 out from his waistband, slid out and checked the magazine before reseating it, and screwed on the suppressor.
The men maintained their cover for a full five minutes before moving. Once he was sure they had managed this infiltration without alerting the kidnappers, Gabriel motioned for the other two to get back into the car. He opened the boot with the remote and they stowed the M16s before joining him.
Driving on a feathered throttle so that the engine was barely more than idling, he drove along the access road, crunching over the ruined gates. To their left and right, stacks of flattened cars formed a steel canyon, cutting off the sunlight apart from a narrow strip of sky directly above them. Then, way up ahead, he caught sight of the small cluster of prefabricated buildings that formed the heart of the scrapyard.
He pointed out of the windscreen at the buildings.
“Target acquired, boys,” he said. “Out you get.”
The three men left the car and went round to the boot. Konstantin and Erik grabbed an M16 each, and shoved a couple of spare magazines into their trouser pockets. They unwrapped the smallest canvas package and took out Glock 19 semi-automatic pistols. The Glocks held nineteen rounds, and they each pocketed two spare magazines. One hundred and forty-seven rounds to a man, across two weapons, making two hundred and ninety-four. Gabriel had forty-five rounds for the SIG, making a grand total of three hundred and thirty-nine rounds. In the heat of battle, an infantryman could expend that amount of ammunition in seconds, but he hoped they could avoid the chaos of a full-blown firefight with the Chechens, not least because he wanted the Bryant women alive and not the victims of trigger-happy Russian mercenaries or the murderous Chechen kidnappers.
And then there was the Dragunov.
Gabriel unwrapped the third canvas package and spread the loose flaps of fabric to the sides of the rifle. Less advanced than the US-manufactured Barrett Light-Fifty or t
he Accuracy International L96 he’d used in combat, the Dragunov resembled a more conventional weapon. A weapon that members of the general public would probably describe, were they to be prompted, with the word “rifle”. It had a combination wooden stock and pistol grip, a two-foot barrel tipped with an iron sight, a ten-shot magazine and a PSO-1 telescopic sight. Despite the rifle’s Soviet design, all the usual controls – from the lever safety selector to the magazine latch – were where he expected to find them. Experimental trigger-pulls, once the magazine was ejected and the chamber checked, revealed a weapon that was easy and smooth to fire. Gabriel slotted the magazine back into the receiver, cocked it, then slid on the safety. He doubted he’d have time or opportunity for more than one kill with it, but that would immediately level up the odds to three against three.
Gabriel looked around and up, trying to find the best sniping position. The stacks of cars gave height, but they looked unstable and he didn’t want to be stuck somewhere with poor access if he needed to get out in a hurry.
“Take five,” he said to the Russians, holding his right hand up, fingers outspread. They seemed to understand him, judging by the speed with which they sat on the ground, fished cigarettes out of their jackets and lit up. “I need to find a firing position. Dragunov, yes?”
Konstantin blew out a cloud of harsh-smelling smoke. “Yes. Sniper nest. Got it, Boss.”
Carrying the Dragunov by the hand-guard, Gabriel set off down one of the alleys running perpendicularly off the access road. More piles of cars, missing everything but their bodywork, chassis and running gear. Then he saw it. The perfect spot to set up.
With great care, someone had lined up two rust-red train carriages next to each other, and then piled two further carriages on top of them at right angles. The smashed-in windows and gaping doorways offered plenty of climbing aids, and it was a simple matter to clamber up the outside of this improvised steel-and-iron fortress, and onto the roof of the topmost carriage closest to the scrapyard buildings. There was a hatch let into the roof, and when Gabriel tried it, he found he could open it and pull it back on itself. The hinges permitted it to travel back to an angle of forty-five degrees, where it locked. Now he had a firing position and cover. Bulletproof cover at that.
Gabriel left the Dragunov on the roof and scrambled down like a monkey leaving a fruit tree. He found what he needed in a pile of odd scraps of steel, brass and other metals lying beside a pyramid of crumpled washing machines: a straight piece of aluminium stock, white with leached metal salts, about thirty inches long, one inch wide and a quarter-inch thick. He ripped an electric motor out of the back of one of the washing machines, and used it to hammer a V-shaped dent in the centre of the piece of aluminium. Threading one end into a narrow gap between two of the washing machines, he bent it back on the V and repeated the process for the other end. Now he had a crude bipod: M-shaped but with much longer legs than the central dent. He yanked out half of the wiring loom for the washing machine and stuffed the multicoloured strands into his trouser pocket.
He was concentrating so hard on fabricating the bipod for the Dragunov that the dogs were within eighty yards of him before he picked up the sound of their paws drumming on the road surface. He stood and whirled round, simultaneously reaching for his KA-BAR and threading the fingers of his left hand into the holes of the knuckleduster. Eight seconds later the dogs were on him.
The leading dog leapt up towards his throat, its pulled-back lips exposing long, yellow fangs. Gabriel thought how odd it was that guard dogs should be silent. You’d think half the point of guard dogs was to warn intruders off and let the owners know that they had company. But then, if your dogs were supposed to kill the company, maybe doing it quietly was a good thing.
He braced his right leg against the door of the car behind him, lightly bent his left knee and thrust the KA-BAR, point uppermost, into the dog’s abdomen. Its momentum carried it forward against the pressure of the blade, which unzipped its belly from throat to groin. Now it did make a sound, a high-pitched wheezing cry that died out as the hot mass of viscera splashed down onto the ground beneath it.
The other dog leapt up at the same moment, but with the favoured target of the throat obscured by the other animal, it lunged for Gabriel’s left forearm. This forearm ended in a fist enveloped in half a kilo of milled steel. With his right hand half-buried in the lead dog’s torso, Gabriel punched down with his left hand, catching the second dog a glancing blow on its skull that slit its scalp, a huge flap of its short-haired pelt falling forwards over its eyes. It yelped with pain and fell back, skidding and spinning in the pool of blood surging from its mate’s arteries. The dog backed away, growling, unsure whether to run or fight. Gabriel pulled the knife free from the other dog’s body and stabbed the second animal in the side, angling the blade so it slid between the ribs and burst the heart. The dog fell sideways with a thump.
Gabriel staggered back against a wrecked car and sat heavily in the hollow steel cage where the passenger seats would normally be, looking at the bright red pool beneath the corpses. He’d killed animals in war before, for food, mostly. But he hated doing it. It felt shameful, somehow. A sudden breeze wafted the coppery smell of the dogs’ blood up into his nostrils and reminded him of the mantra Master Zhao had taught him whenever their bow-hunts ended in a kill: “I honour your life”.
The harsh buzz of a fat bluebottle jolted him back to the present, and he became aware of his heartbeat knocking in his chest.
He cleaned and sheathed the knife, then dragged the bodies of the dogs away from the road and towards a pile of fridges. Most had their doors removed, but at the back of the pile, he found one that was intact. He lifted the door, gagging at the rank smell of rotted vegetables and soured milk that rolled out, and let it down gently till it rested on the ground. In went the dogs, one by one, and down went the door on top of them, sealing them into their deluxe, five-hundred euro coffin.
There wasn’t much to be done about the blood, and he hoped by the time it was noticed, it would be government troops or the local police doing the discovering and not the Chechens. He kicked some debris into the darkening pool, briefly scattering the growing cloud of flies.
Back on top of the rusted carriage, he wired the end of the Dragunov’s barrel into the bipod and pulled the assembly tight against the fore-end of the handguard. There was plenty of room to lie down, and Gabriel adjusted the rifle’s position until, when he looked through the telescopic sight, he had a clear view of the scrapyard buildings and the rough square of ground they enclosed. According to the curved rangefinder in the sight, the distance to the target was about five hundred yards, two hundred and fifty less than the distance it was zeroed for. An easy-enough compensation to make.
As he watched through the sight, mentally calculating the sighting adjustments, the door to the central cabin opened and a short, fat, barrel-chested man walked off the narrow front step and into the yard. He had several days’ growth of stubble, and this, combined with the shaggy mop of dark brown hair, gave him a wild look. He stood still with the pale-grey wall of the cabin behind him, as if he’d been ordered there by a gunnery instructor intent on giving new recruits an easy target.
The man was wearing a dark shirt with white buttons. Gabriel sighted on the man’s chest, moving the centre chevron until he had its point stuck to the button just over his sternum. He moved it fractionally to the right, over the heart.
The Dragunov was loaded with Soviet-designed 7N14 rounds tipped with hardened steel-core projectiles, each weighing 9.8 grammes.
At this range, the 7.62mm round would hit the target travelling at roughly nineteen hundred miles per hour. The transfer of kinetic energy on impact would be sufficient to ream out his ribcage, leaving a hole big enough to kick a football through. Or there was the sniper’s glory shot: a round to the head. Then the pressure wave generated by the round piercing the skull would explode it like a ripe fruit, transforming eleven pounds of blood, bone and soft tissue into a
cloud of wet, red dust.
Later.
For now, Gabriel needed to get back to Erik and Konstantin and lay out the plan of attack. He climbed down from his sniping position, careful to replace the steel hatch in the roof of the carriage, carrying the Dragunov in one hand. Keeping to the shadows cast by one enormous wall of crushed cars, he made his way back to the Mercedes. As he drew closer, he picked up the sound of the two men arguing in Russian. He stopped, turned around and backtracked until he came to a narrow pathway leading off the access road. He followed it for fifty feet then propped the Dragunov against the smashed-in side of an old Nissan saloon and slipped between its rear end and the front bumper of the car behind. Arching and twisting his body, he squeezed himself through a series of tight gaps until he was close enough to the two men to make out exactly what they were arguing about.
It wasn’t good news.
Chapter 42
“Yuri said he doesn’t care about the Englishman, or the women,” Erik was saying to Konstantin. “He just wants Drezna and his gang dead, with proof. So I say we waste him now. I’m tired of taking orders from a little prick like him. Do him, use the grenades and the M16s on the Chechens, and then party time with those English cunts!”
“Don’t be such an idiot. If you stopped thinking with your dick for two minutes, you’d see what a fucking awful idea that is,” Konstantin said. “Number one, he’s ex-SAS. That means he’s going to be handy in a firefight or if it gets personal. Number two, they’re Chechens. Did you forget what those animals are like? Were you not there when we found Andrei hanging upside down from a tree with his cock and balls cut off and stuffed into his mouth? Those were village women who did that to him, Erik. Fucking milkmaids and farm girls and old babushkas. That lot over there are soldiers. Drezna himself was in Afghanistan. On our fucking side! So I say we keep him alive for now. That makes it three against four, which are odds I prefer.”
