Gray Salvation

by Alan McDermott

  Notley found the preset number and hit the Call button.

  He’d expected a loud bang, but not one that shattered the night. Seconds after detonation, he could still hear the echo reverberating around the valley below. Conscious that someone must have heard it, he quickly jumped into the next field and checked the scene.

  The device was nothing but a lump of twisted metal, and a huge black scar adorned the tree where the bomb had been sitting. Screws embedded in the bark glinted as he examined the scene more closely. There was now little doubt that when he wore the other device around his neck and detonated it, he would not survive the blast.

  That no longer mattered.

  The good news was that the melon hadn’t fared any better. It lay in a dozen pieces, ripped apart by the explosion and home-made shrapnel.

  Notley quickly gathered as much of the evidence as he could and stuffed it back in the bag, then jogged back towards the car. A vehicle’s headlights crested the hill a few hundred yards away, causing him to freeze in fear. Notley threw himself to the ground and watched the two white discs approach him.

  Was it the police? Had they tailed him here, and were now closing in to catch him in the act?

  The vehicle was nearing the gate, but instead of stopping, it maintained its speed and he watched its red tail lights disappear around the corner.

  For the next few seconds, the only sound he could hear was the pulse pounding inside his skull. He forced himself to his feet and got back to the car as quickly as he could. After throwing the bag onto the back seat, he opened the gate and got behind the wheel. There was no sign of any traffic as he pulled out of the field and back onto the road, and he kept his foot to the floor, putting as much distance between himself and the blast site as quickly as possible.

  Notley came to a main road a few minutes later, and he eased off the accelerator to stay under the speed limit.

  Adrenalin continued to course through his body, though he felt a little calmer now that he was heading home. All he had to do was dump the bag somewhere. Then he could relax completely.

  The test had gone better than expected, and only a few days remained before he would take his remaining device and give Marian the justice she deserved.

  The sun was offering up its last rays when Ivan Zhabin walked into Ezeiza International Airport, carrying only a holdall containing two changes of clothes and a bag of toiletries.

  He’d spent the fifteen-mile journey from his apartment on the outskirts of Buenos Aires on his phone, studying overheads of London. It gave him a starting point, but he wouldn’t be able to get a proper feel for the location until he was on the ground, and able to walk around and see the buildings up close. Despite the advances in online map technology, he couldn’t get a true sense of the angles, even using Google Street View.

  At the check-in desk, he produced a German passport in the name of Alec Stutz. It was one of five identities he used, each belonging to a different nationality. Apart from his native Russian, he also spoke fluent German, along with Spanish, French and English. Languages had come easily to him as a child, and even now, in his late forties, he was expanding into Mandarin Chinese and Arabic.

  After collecting his boarding pass, Zhabin was forced to suffer the boredom of airport security. Fifteen minutes later, he was browsing the duty-free shops, and a paperback about an American sniper caught his eye. It was a book he’d read the previous year, its military aspect mirroring his own experience, decades earlier.

  Zhabin had been a wiry seventeen-year-old when he’d been shipped out to Afghanistan towards the end of the Soviet war. For one so young and inexperienced to be assigned to a Spetsnaz unit would have been unheard of if it hadn’t been for the remarkable skills he’d shown with a rifle during basic training. After excelling with the standard AK-47, he’d been introduced to the VSS Vintorez, or ‘thread cutter’. Grouping five rounds in a one-inch target had been a piece of cake, even at the outside of the rifle’s effective firing range of four hundred yards. When tested with a Dragunov SVD, which had double the range, he’d managed to maintain his accuracy. Eventual progression to the KSVK 2.7, with a maximum range of two thousand yards, had seen him break numerous army records.

  Zhabin vividly remembered his first kill, in the Panjshir Valley. It had been in 1985, when through a heat haze he’d watched five armed members of the Mujahideen snake their way through a mountain pass. He’d been on forward lookout, alongside a surly sergeant who’d made his dislike for the rookie well known.

  Zhabin had tried to explain that it wasn’t his fault he’d been parachuted into the Special Forces while everyone else had been forced to undergo months of specialised training, but his words fell on deaf ears. He’d soon realised that the only way to win the team’s trust was to show his worth in combat, and that day on the ridge gave him the opportunity.

  While the sergeant called in the enemy location and requested air support, Zhabin had picked the first of his targets: a bearded man with an American-supplied FIM-92 Stinger thrown over his shoulder. The shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile had been responsible for bringing down more than two hundred helicopter gunships in the preceding six years. Zhabin’s job was to take it out of the fight before it added another chopper to the list.

  He’d calculated the range at seventeen hundred yards, adjusted for the slight breeze, and let loose his first round of the war. For a second nothing happened, until the bullet reached its target.

  Zhabin’s armour-piercing round penetrated the tube and struck the explosive warhead, vaporising the man carrying it. Before his companions could understand what had happened, another had fallen to a headshot, with a third struck in the chest as he dived for cover. The remaining pair had gone to ground by this time, only to be mopped up by a pair of MIL Mi-24 choppers a few minutes later.

  The sergeant had grudgingly conceded that it had been a fine display of marksmanship, but Zhabin hadn’t been looking for accolades. As long as they accepted him into the unit, he’d known that they would watch his back.

  The war hadn’t been about a glorious Soviet victory. Not for Zhabin, at least. He’d seen it as a legitimate way to hone his natural talent, which would one day see him earn more than $100,000 per kill.

  The boarding announcement brought Zhabin back to the present, and he made his way to the gate. A blonde woman sitting in the departure lounge smiled as he walked past, clearly attracted to the lithe six-footer with the chiselled jaw and designer stubble. But Zhabin only had business on his mind.

  Besides, she wasn’t his type. He preferred brunettes, and the younger the better. Not illegal-young, but well before gravity and the ravages of time had a chance to ruin their bodies. There’d been many such women in his life, but he’d never been in a proper relationship with any of them.

  He ignored the woman’s gaze and took a seat a few rows away from her, then sat back and closed his eyes as he waited for his row to be called. The blonde’s attention had stirred something in him, and his mind drifted back, as it often did, to his first sexual encounter.

  It had been a few days after his first kill in Afghanistan, and the patrol had been tasked with clearing a small village suspected of housing Mujahideen fighters. They’d met no resistance, and only found two men capable of fighting, along with a dozen others of varying age. There was nothing to suggest they were anything than goat herders – no weapons or communication equipment – but that hadn’t stopped his sergeant. He’d summarily executed the men and had his team round up everyone else.

  A young girl, barely sixteen, had been discovered hiding in a locked cupboard in one of the ruined houses. Zhabin had been called in from his position on a mountainside overlooking the buildings, and after a thirty-minute hike to the village, the sergeant had handed her to him with a wicked grin.

  ‘Time to lose your cherry.’

  Noticing Zhabin’s initial hesitance, his sergeant had drawn his knife and slashed the girl’s clothing, then stripped her naked. To Zhabin, she’d looke
d exactly as he’d imagined a woman to look. He’d looked up at his sergeant.

  ‘Quick, cherry, take her inside before your pants explode!’

  Ignoring the jibes of the other soldiers, Zhabin dragged the girl into one of the houses, the hoots of laughter muted as he slammed the door shut and pushed her towards a bed, watching her hungrily as he fumbled at his clothing. He was naked in seconds and advanced on her, pushing her onto her back and forcing her legs apart. It might have been his first time, but he’d seen enough videos to know where everything went, and he pushed himself inside her, ignoring her cries. As he rode her, she clenched her eyes shut, her face turned to the side. It was only when he was close to climaxing that she turned to look at him. The raw hatred in her brown eyes was something he’d never forget.

  That wasn’t how it was meant to be. Nothing in the porn he’d seen had conveyed such a message, and he hated her for spoiling what was, for him, a special moment. His hands had gone to her throat, squeezing as he shouted at her in Russian to take it back, but the girl obviously didn’t understand or was refusing to do so.

  Zhabin had kept up the pressure on her windpipe, and it was only when the life had been drained from her that the hatred vanished. With it had come the most glorious explosion from the pit of his stomach, enough to make him see stars.

  Around him now, passengers had begun walking to the departure gate. Zhabin realised he’d missed the announcement for his row. He hurried to join them, and promised himself that, although the trip to London was purely business, he’d find time to add a little pleasure.

  Chapter 21

  25 January 2016

  Tom Gray sent another three-round burst downrange and waited for Sonny to call out the result.

  ‘Still a couple of inches to the right.’

  Gray made a small adjustment and tried again. This time he was rewarded with the thumbs-up.

  With each man having zeroed their rifles and handguns, Gray set about putting Doc through his paces with the Sentinels. He set up four units and had Doc toggle between them to pick his targets.

  ‘One, double tap!’

  A second later, two rounds left the machine, scored chest shots in the improvised cardboard cut-outs.

  ‘Three, single shot!’

  It took Doc a few seconds to switch screens and adjust his aim, but he managed to get a round through the middle of a crudely drawn head.

  Gray called out a dozen more commands, until Doc was able to go from one Sentinel to the next in under two seconds.

  ‘Not bad for a nurse.’ Sonny smiled.

  ‘Ignore him,’ Smart said. ‘He’s just jealous.’

  ‘Len’s right,’ Gray added. ‘That was good work. After we’ve had a bite to eat, we’ll give it another go.’

  McGregor had provided a picnic of breads and cold meats, as well as an icebox full of water and soft drinks. Gray made a sandwich and looked around, seeing nothing for miles in any direction. The entire area was flat, with just a few clumps of trees breaking up the horizon. The ideal place to get to know their weapons without interruption.

  ‘So who’s this Harvey guy?’ Doc asked. ‘I mean, I know he’s a friend, but what’s his story?’

  Smart swallowed a mouthful of cold sausage. ‘Remember a few years ago, when Tom was holed up in that building for a few days?’

  ‘Who could forget?’

  ‘Well, Andrew was the one sent to talk him down.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘That’s when I first met him,’ Gray said, ‘but later on, after I’d been living in the Philippines for some months, I was taken hostage by militants in the south. Sonny and Len came to get me, but on the way back there were elements of the government who wanted us all dead. Andrew stopped them. He saved our lives.’

  ‘But to be fair, he didn’t know who he was saving at the time,’ Sonny said. ‘Just that British citizens were in the firing line.’

  ‘After that, we became close friends with Andrew,’ Smart added. ‘We’ve even carried out a mission together, in Cuba.’

  ‘Andrew’s a good man,’ Gray said. ‘He’s one of the few I’d do this for.’

  At Doc’s request, Gray spent the rest of the meal telling them about his time in the Philippines, and how Sonny and Len had come to mount their own rescue mission, only to become targets themselves.

  ‘Enough of the chit-chat,’ McGregor said, breaking up the party. ‘I need to get back soon. There’s still some maintenance work to be done on the chopper before we go.’

  They packed away the food and Gray gave Doc another thirty minutes of practice on the Sentinels. Ideally, he would have liked another hour, but apart from McGregor’s concerns about time, they were getting low on ammunition. Of the two thousand rounds of 7.62 mm that McGregor had managed to get his hands on, a little more than a thousand remained. That gave them three thirty-round clips each for their assault rifles, plus a hundred for each Sentinel.

  After gathering up the targets and spent cartridge cases, the team climbed into the van for the thirty-minute drive back to the airfield. Doc had his headphones on, listening to music, but the rest sat in silence, contemplating the battle ahead.

  Tom Gray crept along the narrow street, keeping close to the wall. The night was one of the darkest he’d ever known, and even the night-vision goggles had trouble finding enough ambient light to illuminate the scene.

  Behind him, Smart was checking the rooftops while Sonny kept an eye on the rear.

  When he reached the building on the corner, he gazed out onto nothingness. They were on the outskirts of town, and where the man-made structures ended, a flat, endless expanse began.

  Gray walked out into the black, his goggles now unable to even discern the horizon. Sonny and Smart followed, weapons seeking out targets that none of them could see.

  Suddenly, the horizon appeared, the line between land and sky a single row of bright flashes.

  ‘Incoming!’

  Gray heard the staccato retorts of distant rifles, and watched immobile as tracer rounds began walking a path towards him, each one throwing up spurts of dirt as the bullets chewed the ground in front of him.

  Tat-tat-tat-tat!

  Closer, closer, until the first of them reached the toe of his boot.

  Tat-tat-tat-tat!

  Gray woke with a jolt, though he couldn’t be sure he wasn’t still dreaming. The tat-tat-tat continued, no longer just a memory of a distant time.

  ‘Pissing down outside,’ McGregor said, as he stirred a cup of tea.

  Gray realised that the sound was large drops of rain bouncing off the corrugated iron roof of the hangar, not enemy gunfire.

  ‘Bad dream?’

  Gray looked up at the Scot. ‘A night patrol in Iraq,’ he said. ‘The village was supposed to be cleared and secure, but as we passed through we came across a company of Iraqi regulars. Thankfully they weren’t Republican Guard and couldn’t shoot straight to save their lives. A few rounds came close, but we put down cover fire, retreated and called in the A-10s.’

  ‘There’s nothing like shitty intel to fuck up a stroll in the badlands.’

  Gray couldn’t agree more, and he knew that the mission they were about to undertake was based on best-guesses and shaky estimates of enemy numbers. The latest reports on the news had confirmed Ellis’s report: Russian heavy arms were leaving Tagrilistan, despite President Demidov’s insistence that there had never been any there in the first place. Whether they had all departed was the unknown factor.

  If Ellis’s numbers were correct and they only faced four hundred armed civilians, their chances of pulling it off were high. If the Russians had decided to leave a battalion behind, the odds of success nose-dived.

  His watch told Gray that it was nine in the evening, two hours before they were due to set off. He woke the other four and told them to grab a brew, then get their gear ready.

  As with the ride back from target practice earlier that morning, final preparations were done with minimal conversa
tion. All thoughts were turned to the next few hours, during which time lives would be lost. Only by focusing could they increase the chances of not being included in that number. Even the normally cheerful Sonny was going about the job of securing his gear in silence.

  Gray had nothing but Melissa on his mind. He began to doubt the wisdom of his decision to take part in this rescue attempt, but it was too late now. He was committed, and all he could do was pray that the information Ellis had supplied was close to accurate.

  If it weren’t, Melissa would likely grow up without the father she needed.

  The sound of a motor broke into Gray’s thoughts, and he looked towards the hangar entrance to see McGregor backing a small vehicle into the bay. He nudged it up to the nose of the helicopter, then climbed out and secured a metal arm from the back of the tow tractor to the wheeled platform the bird was sitting on.

  ‘Stand clear while I take her out,’ McGregor said, climbing back onto the compact machine. He slowly pulled the chopper out of the hangar and into the driving rain, then disengaged the tug and drove it out of the way. He then hit a button to lower the platform and rolled it back into the bay.

  ‘Grab your gear,’ McGregor shouted as he climbed into the pilot’s seat.

  Gray picked up his rifle and led the others out to their transport, a single line of figures dressed entirely in black. McGregor already had the engine cycling up, and the rotors on the tail and overhead began rotating, slowly at first, then faster as the mechanism got up to speed.

  Gray climbed in the back and strapped himself into the seat, then put on a pair of headphones so that he could communicate with the pilot. Smart was the last aboard, and the skids left the tarmac the instant he slammed the door shut.

  A gust of wind slammed into the chopper as it hovered above the pad, but McGregor expertly compensated and turned the nose ninety degrees, climbing quickly.

  Within seconds, the ground was lost from sight, and Gray began to suffer from vertigo. With nothing to distinguish land from sky, up from down, his body couldn’t be sure of its own orientation. It was something he’d experienced before, and to compensate he pulled the night-vision goggles down from his forehead and powered them up. It took a second for the unit to spring to life, but Gray was then able to make out the landscape below. Fields crawled past a thousand feet beneath them, and a swelling river cut a lazy path through dense woodland.