The Hijack

by Duncan Falconer

  Zhilev stared at the picture as his thoughts went back to those glorious days. He looked at himself in the photograph, the handsome youth in the centre, clean-shaven, straight-backed, short hair parted neatly at the side, a proud warrior of the highest order in the prime of his life. The nostalgia washed over him and he remembered the day the photograph was taken as if it were yesterday and, as always, found it hard to believe so much time had gone by so quickly.

  Zhilev disconnected from the picture which always managed to fill him with despondency and loss rather than pride. He turned to the task of cleaning his kit, the first thing a good soldier did as soon as he returned from the field, and hung the belt with its attached pouches and knife on another hook beside his coat and opened the rucksack to empty it. Everything had an old army surplus look about it: no bright colours, earthy, sturdy and practical. The last items at the bottom were a sleeping bag and poncho. He pulled out the poncho and put it to one side, picked up the rucksack and carried it to a cupboard under the stairs. The small space was crammed with military equipment that looked more suited to a museum than any modern Western army. Hanging on hooks or placed neatly on a shelf were items such as compasses, maps, flashlights, a folding spade, knives and a pile of rations. There was also a variety of camouflage outfits, boots and cold and wet-weather gear. Several semi-automatic pistols were laid out neatly on a shelf with their magazines and boxes of cartridges beside them: a Tokarev, a more recent Makarov and a WW2 Luger, all in fine condition. He draped the sleeping bag over a line, hung the rucksack on a nail and closed the door. He put the poncho on a chair by the back door since it would need hosing down before it was put away.There was no tent. Zhilev preferred to sleep on the ground in the open no matter what the conditions and under a poncho only when it snowed or rained. In the field he liked to travel with the bare necessities and sleep with all-round visibility. It was a behaviour he had formed after years of operating in small intelligence-gathering teams, often in the most inhospitable weather and terrain.

  Satisfied his gear was sorted out and organised, he filled a chipped enamel kettle from the sink tap and placed it on an old stove. He lit the gas that gushed from the ancient cast-iron ring and sat down at the table to sort through his mail.

  The majority of it he tossed into a bin without reading beyond the first clue that it was junk, and when the sorting was complete he was left with three letters of any significance.That was about average for the two weeks he had been away walking in the hills.

  Zhilev went alone on long camping expeditions at least twice a year, sometimes three. He had left the military twelve years earlier, medically discharged as unfit for duty, and even though he was often in great discomfort he refused to become a ‘soft civilian’. His legacy of pain from those days of service to his country was accompanied by an unhealthy level of hate and loathing for those who had caused it. Looking back, he had loved his life in the Spetsnaz, Russian Special Forces, but he had been cheated out of at least three more years of active service, and perhaps more importantly the opportunity to work with naval intelligence as a rear-echelon field adviser, a posting ideal for older, experienced men, and one that could have kept him employed in a special forces capacity into his sixties. The doctors had given him a zero physical rating in his final report with the added comment that his damaged neck could one day cause him paralysis and perhaps, due to the extent of the damage which was close to his skull, even death. Zhilev refused to accept it and pleaded with them to let him prove they were wrong and that he was strong enough to do any task they set him. But they refused to even consider his plea and furthermore warned him to discontinue any strenuous physical activity for the rest of his life. There was no measure of how much he loathed those fools for first using him like a guinea pig and then, after almost killing him, deciding he was no longer good enough even to teach new recruits from the vast pool of experience he had gained over twenty years and countless operations in the service.

  The National Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Medicine of the Defence Ministry of the Russian Federation was the lofty banner these scientists operated under, and they often used Spetsnaz to test their concoctions designed to do a variety of things such as raise physical endurance, remove the feeling of fear, increase tolerance against harsh environments and allow a soldier to operate for up to a week without sleep. The experimental drug that poleaxed Zhilev was a serum created to delay death after receiving a lethal dose of radiation such as during a nuclear attack. Whereas an untreated person would collapse within hours as their brain and internal organs swelled and rapidly degenerated, and their skin blistered and broke apart causing an horrifically painful death, the drug allowed a soldier to operate almost normally for up to four days, giving him the strength to carry out his mission before suddenly dropping dead.

  Zhilev was given the newly developed drug in pill form, one every four hours, and ordered to conduct a gruelling map march with forty kilos of equipment over mountainous terrain to test its effects. After two days he became delirious and fell down the side of a crag fracturing his neck. He would have died of exposure had he not been found that evening by his comrades after he failed to make a checkpoint. He lay in a hospital bed for six weeks recovering from the fall and the effects of the drug. When he learned he was to be kicked out of the military he wanted to blow the entire experimental medicine institute to bits. He might have done so too, for Zhilev was certainly a most vengeful man and he had the knowledge and training as well as access to the explosives and equipment necessary.The only reason he did not was because he was not completely certain the door to the service was shut to him. He had high hopes that his colleagues would succeed in an appeal against the decision.

  It took more than a year, while Zhilev moped around his brother’s house, before he learned the appeal had been denied. Only then did he accept finally that his career was truly over. He had been thrown out and tossed on to the scrap heap like so many before him. He always knew it would happen one day, but when he was old, not thirty-eight and in his prime.

  After his unceremonious dismissal from the service, a hero of the now Russian Federation, he was given a small amount of money in compensation as well as his pension which, even though it was one and a half times that of a regular soldier, was not much to live on. It was Vladimir who gave him the money to buy the house he now lived in. Not having to pay a monthly rent meant his pension could go a lot further. His brother had been a vital crutch for him in the years immediately after his untimely retirement and the only voice of comfort and reason. Zhilev would be in a military prison had it not been for Vladimir who spent an entire night talking him out of his planned demolition raid against the medical institute.

  Zhilev tried to remember when his brother said he might be home. There was never a firm date. So many factors could delay him, the most common ones being the weather and late arrival of his replacement. He checked the cheap plastic clock on the wall. As soon as he was finished with his chores, he would call on Vladimir’s wife. They lived only a few miles away in a nice, large house that backed on to a wood where their children loved to play. Vladimir would have telephoned from the ship and told her when he was coming home. But first, he would go to the shops and buy some meat and potatoes for the supper she would insist he stayed for, and then some toys for the children who loved to see Uncle Mikhail, if for no other reason than he always had a gift for them.

  Zhilev held up the letters and read the return addresses. One was from the bank, a statement no doubt, since it was due about now. The second was a gas bill and the third was from the oil company his brother worked for, based in Dubai. Zhilev thought it strange the letter from the oil company was addressed to him. He had never had anything to do with it. It was possible the letter was from his brother, but the address was typed, not handwritten as usual, and besides, Vladimir was not in Dubai. He flew to his ship wherever it was in the world then, three or four months later, he would get off at the first available port and f
ly back home to Riga.

  Zhilev opened the envelope from Dubai that contained a single sheet with the company’s letterhead and no more than a few typed lines. His heart skipped a beat and he filled with dread as he saw the first few words: I regret to inform you . . .

  When he got to the part that confirmed his fear that his brother was dead, he put the letter down and spread his hands out either side of it to steady himself. He started from the top again and read it through slowly, and when he got to the end, he lowered his head into his hands and began to gently weep, his heavy shoulders shaking.

  Zhilev remained at the table for a long time after he had stopped crying while steam gushed from the bubbling kettle on the stove.When he eventually got to his feet, he went to a cupboard and took out a mug, placed a spoonful of instant coffee into it and filled it with the boiling water, stirring it slowly as if in a trance. All he could see and hear were memories of his brother.

  Zhilev was a year younger than Vladimir although most people thought they were twins. They were inseparable throughout their youth.Vladimir was the quiet, intelligent one while Zhilev was the adventurer and very much the risk-taker. When Zhilev accepted a bet one day from fellow schoolboys that he could not ride his bicycle off a ramp and over a ditch from a culvert that gushed vile black water from the old generating station, it was only because Vladimir had inspected the width of the ditch, the angle of the ramp, the mechanics of the bike and told his brother it was possible. The first time they were apart was the day Vladimir was called up to serve his mandatory time in the military. Vladimir was more fortunate than most since, as a gifted engineer, he went directly to an engineer battalion and spent virtually his entire three years in an armoured depot on the outskirts of Moscow thus missing active service. Zhilev considered his military career just as fortunate and for quite the opposite reasons. From the day he joined he dreamed of a future filled with adventure and exciting operations behind enemy lines, gathering information and carrying out direct action.

  The day after Vladimir left home for the army, Zhilev walked into town and joined the local military youth school where he learned to scuba dive. By the time his call-up papers arrived a year later, he had some idea of what he wanted to do and even a vague plan. Rumours abounded of special units that carried out clandestine operations in enemy lands and every youth soldier and conscript had at least one exaggerated story he had heard of their derring do. What nobody seemed to have a clue about was where the mysterious groups were based and how a person joined them. It was generally understood that they came to you, but for that to happen a man had to stand out in some way, be different, exceptional. Zhilev had learned from his old diving instructor in the youth military school that the best route to ‘special forces work’ was through military intelligence. That would open many doors for anyone who was successful in that department. First Zhilev had to get through the basic military-training course and then take it from there.

  The three-month induction training was easy for him and made him all the more determined not to end up serving with the kind of men he had joined up with, most of whom were unmotivated and got drunk at every opportunity. All he could think of was getting to the end of the course and applying for a specialist aptitude test which, if he passed, would allow him to attend a selection process for military intelligence.Within a week of completing basic training he was invited to take the week-long series of mental aptitude tests with some short map marches thrown in to assess the recruits’ physical condition. He passed the course with ease and received orders to study radio communications under OSNAZ, the Special Forces unit of the Intelligence Directorate of the Navy, in Kiev. This was the first big step towards his goal but he still had no idea how he was going to break into the actual operational units. Zhilev spent a year at the vast old concrete complex built after the Second World War under Stalin’s directive, learning radio technology and how to operate the various ‘special’ radios used by Special Forces and field agents - or spies for want of a better term - learning their construction and the many complex coding systems.

  At the end of this course he sat a final test and passed with honours. His intelligence as well as Sambo skills, which highlighted his physical abilities, did not go unnoticed and a week after the exams he was called to see his commanding officer who personally handed him a military assignment, voluntary in nature, which was simply two words: marine intelligence. The brevity of the offer suggested it was far beyond ordinary military duty. In fact, it was a career directive and, as the commander pointed out, a great honour to receive. There was one slight obstacle Zhilev had to clear before he could accept the offer: he could not embark on an intelligence career as a conscript and would have to sign up for twenty years, which also included signing a contract that stated he understood the punishment for disclosing official secrets was death. These were not even issues for Zhilev and he promptly signed on the dotted line. He was finally on his way to realising his childhood dream and within days was on a train to the Black Sea where he would join the OMRP and one of the legendary and highly secret reconnaissance and sabotage units that came under the general banner of Spetsnaz, which simply translated means ‘of special purpose’. He knew his life was going to change in every conceivable way and he marched eagerly, albeit blindly, into it.

  Had he known where the great adventure would eventually lead he would have remained in Riga and become a metal worker like his father, marry, and have a family and take holidays in Yalta once a year like everyone else in the factory. But he did not.

  Zhilev took the two hundred mile train journey south from Kiev to the city of Ochakov on the Black Sea, a hundred miles north of Sevastopol, the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet, which was to be his parent command. From Ochakov, he was taken in an army truck into the wilderness to eventually arrive at Pervomayskiy, an artificial island at the mouth of the rivers Dnepr and Bug. Called Mayskiy for short, the island was a stone fortress constructed in 1881 and used as such until World War Two. It was taken over by the Spetsnaz in the 1960s and the interior reconstructed to provide classrooms, a small hospital, helicopter pad, sports facilities and accommodation for two hundred and fifty men, and included a water-processing plant and enough food and supplies to comfortably sustain the men inside its walls for up to a year without contact with the outside world in the event of a nuclear attack. This was the home of the 17th Brigade of the OMPR and where Zhilev was to be based for much of his career.

  The following two years were spent training extensively in all forms of intelligence gathering, both technical and physical, as well as advanced small arms and sabotage. He learned Special Forces diving skills, which included the use of bubble-less re-breather diving apparatus as well as mixed gas options for deep-water operations, and how to drive and navigate a number of different miniature submarines. He studied intensively a variety of Western commercial and military targets, from oil platforms to missile silos, so that he could report on them as well as mount sabotage operations against them. This was where he also learned to use several different kinds of chemical, biological and man-portable nuclear weapons or suitcase bombs.

  The only negative aspect of that period was he could not see as much of his brother as he would have liked. When either of them were on leave, and that was rarely at the same time, they would make their way to the other’s nearest base town, in Vladimir’s case, Moscow, and in Zhilev’s, Ochakov, and spend as much time as they could together. By the time Zhilev’s two-year training programme was complete, Vladimir was a civilian once again, and with Zhilev’s probationary period over, it was easier for them to meet. In fact Zhilev spent every leave period back in Riga with his brother, attended his wedding as best man, and was at every one of their three children’s christenings.

  During Zhilev’s operational years he took part in missions and so-called rehearsals all over the world from Cuba to China, England and America, and was involved in the training of several renowned terrorist groups and the passing of weapons
to, among others, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. The day he realised his career in Spetsnaz was over was the worst in his life, until the arrival of this letter. Nothing in the world meant more to him than his brother, not even his own life. He would have given it gladly if it meant Vladimir could come back home.

  Zhilev’s thoughts went to Vladimir’s wife and daughter. He wondered if they knew. Vladimir had elected Zhilev as his next of kin in the event of an emergency because there was no one in the world he trusted more. As an engineer on an oil tanker travelling all over the world, there was always the chance he might have an accident and he wanted his brother to be the first to know before his wife and children.

  Zhilev decided to drive over to the house and tell Marla, Vladimir’s wife, the grave news. But first he had to recover a little more himself. She would be devastated and he wanted to have full control of his own emotions so that he could concentrate on comforting her.

  He checked the letterhead for the phone number of the office in Dubai. Before going over to see Marla he would make arrangements for his brother’s body to be brought home for burial, and also find out how he died. Then he noticed the date at the top of the letter.

  ‘My God,’ he murmured. Vladimir had been dead for more than a week.