Cold Blood

by Andy McNab

  The first thing they did was check the dead on the ice. There was lots of shouting and gesticulating. One figure pointed towards what was left of the survival capsules.

  I saw the biggest puff of smoke yet spew out of the lead vehicle’s exhaust stack and heard the engine rev. The top turret opened and a head emerged. The vehicle crept forwards. These things were amphibious, but they wouldn’t want to get swamped by their own bow wave. It tipped into the water and made its way to the nearest capsule. No grateful survivors jumped out to thank their saviours.

  Jack shivered. ‘Nick, what next?’

  ‘We wait.’

  I watched as the Russians dragged the casualties out of the craft and tossed them overboard. Half a dozen squaddies clustered around the wreckage of the heli, pushing, pulling, shifting it half a metre at a time. It didn’t take them long to give it the same treatment.

  I had a last look around to see if anybody was breaking cover. Either there were no survivors, or they were being as cautious as we were.

  I motioned Jack back into the igloo. Both of us were shivering big-time. I had to lay it on the line. ‘We’ve got to give ourselves up, mate. There’s no other option. If we stay here, we’re dead. I don’t think anyone else is coming.’

  ‘But the boat – it must have sent …’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ And now wasn’t the time to explain that if the Americans were coming, we might be in even more danger.

  ‘No, we have to go now. Otherwise, we’ve got twenty-four hours, thirty-six at best, before we’re history. The heli didn’t make it. We’re getting no help from anywhere else.’

  Jack nodded slowly. He was really starting to suffer.

  ‘Your leg OK?’

  He nodded again, but I could see that he was thinking the same as I was: maybe they’d have a medic under one of those smokestacks.

  We clambered out and started walking. His leg was really hurting him. I hoped that the movement would get some blood running around that stump.

  I gripped his arm. ‘Stick to the truth, OK? Tell them exactly what happened. Tell them why you’re here. Tell them what you know.’ I started waving my arms.

  ‘Over here! Help, help, help!’

  I’d stick to the truth, too. Well, Jack’s truth, anyway.

  72

  They didn’t hear us at first. Their engines drowned our shouts. We were sixty metres away when a couple of squaddies finally turned and saw us.

  I ran towards them, like the most grateful survivor on earth – or that’s how I hoped it looked. I pulled down my face mask and pushed back my hood. The cold immediately rushed in to attack my bare skin, but I didn’t want to be confused with an incoming threat. And if it all went wrong, at least I was heading towards the rounds rather than running away.

  We kept moving forwards.

  Four weapons were eased off their slings and into four pairs of hands.

  I kept going, faster and faster, waving and yelling, incredibly happy to see them.

  Jack was a few paces behind, doing much the same.

  Weapons were still in hand, not in the shoulder.

  I got to within about five metres of them, then checked behind me. Jack was still trying to keep up, but he was lagging. I was all smiles and gratitude. ‘Thank you! English! Does anybody speak English? My friend, he’s in pain. His leg …’

  I pointed down at my own. Two of the squaddies advanced, but not to help me – to grab and search. I had no problems with that.

  I felt my zips being pulled down, my Velcro fasteners being ripped open. Mitten-clad hands probed and tested every angle and crevice, checking for a weapon.

  Jack moved closer, hands up, waiting for his turn.

  They removed my passport and neck wallet and showed no intention of wanting to return them. I didn’t give a shit. Anywhere else on the planet, that would have been a problem. But not here, not now. I read it as a sign that they were going to keep us alive. At least for now.

  One of the squaddies searching Jack gave a shout. I turned round to see him pointing at the prosthetic leg beneath the Gore-Tex.

  ‘My friend, he’s in pain. Much pain!’ I mimed much pain. ‘My friend Jack – he has no leg. Much, much pain …’

  As I worked on the sympathy vote, I saw out of the corner of my eye the last of the rotors being sent to join the icebreaker. The pontoons would be staying where they were. They wouldn’t sink.

  The second of the wrecked survival boats had been tied up alongside the floating wagon, and bits and pieces of kit were being loaded aboard. The rest of the bodies had already been hauled out and tipped into the sea.

  They didn’t seem that keen to have an audience. Almost immedi ately we were turned away and guided – not manhandled – to the rear of the wagon that had been dragging the heli. A gust of hot air hit us as the door was thrown open and we were motioned inside.

  We were not alone.

  Gabriel was seated on one of the benches that ran along the side of the vehicle and Rio was on the floor, sorting out his Jock mate’s stump with a dressing from one of the vehicle’s trauma packs. Both had lacerations on their faces. They were in shit state. The windburn on Gabriel’s nose and forehead was starting to bubble up into a rash of little blisters. Rio’s lips were severely cracked. Jack and I probably weren’t in mint condition either.

  Cracked lips or not, it didn’t stop us grinning from ear to ear. The fact was, we were in a large aluminium insulated box, they had large insulated mugs in their hands, and whatever they contained, it was steaming. We climbed in and the door was closed behind us.

  One of our escorts swung himself up into the cab in front of us, and started gobbing off. It wasn’t the first sign of madness: I could see a wire twirling between the dash and his head. He was reporting in to the boss, who must have been on the floating wagon because this guy kept looking out towards the channel, where the last of the geeks’ shiny stuff was being transferred into Russian hands.

  I looked down to get eye-to-eye with Rio as he offered me his brew. I didn’t even need to ask the question.

  He shook his head. ‘No, mate. Gone.’ He gestured over his shoulder to where the last bits of the Enstrom had just been chucked into the water. ‘Burial at sea.’

  We were all silent for a moment. Gabriel concentrated hard on his dressing.

  ‘Stedman?’

  ‘Same. The cold fucked him.’

  Gabriel reached out to Jack, took his arm and gripped it. ‘I’m sorry.’

  I took a gulp of Rio’s brew. It was coffee, powdered milk, lots of sugar. I could feel it travel down my throat and into my stomach, creating much-needed warmth as it went. I took another. Jack did the same from Gabriel’s brew.

  ‘So?’

  Gabriel focused two hundred per cent on the process of removing Jack’s carbon-fibre leg. He still didn’t look up. ‘We were sorting the rotor restraints when a couple of guys tried to stop us. I had to drop one. The other suddenly decided he didn’t need to get involved. We climbed onboard. Will was a star. He got the aircraft up, gave you lot the warning and headed south for Barneo. Then, at around the fifteen K mark …’

  He paused. When he continued, his voice was huskier. ‘The explosion at the stern of the boat, it must have fucked the engine. We were losing height. Will fought it. As soon as the thing started to malfunction, the freewheeling unit should have cut in, so he could auto-rotate and land. But it didn’t.

  ‘Will … somehow kept it stable. And as we came in, he tried to flare, but something happened and the tail hit first and we crashed. Fucking nightmare. Jules …’

  He tailed off again, and Jack gripped his shoulder.

  ‘She … died instantly. So did Will. Rune lasted another twenty minutes. Long enough to say sorry about three hundred times. We’d have been dead within a day if we’d stayed out in the open. We had nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. Then the Russians turned up. Like you, we had to take our chances with these lads.

  ‘But Will. What a star.’<
br />
  He wasn’t wrong there.

  No one spoke.

  The silence was broken by Jack’s gasp when Gabriel finally managed to liberate his stump from the socket of his prosthesis, and unwrap it. I only needed one glance to know that Jack was a fucking star, too. The last ten centimetres of it was like a plate of chopped liver.

  73

  As I finished Rio’s brew I looked round for the BV. Every military vehicle had a boiling vessel, a steel kettle to heat up water, and this one was no exception. Beside it was a jar of coffee with a bright yellow label, the powdered milk, and a can of sugar.

  I took both mugs, and as I started to fill them, I glanced through the porthole that separated us from the front cab. On the dash was a GPS screen. I tried to focus on the glow, tried to read the latitude and longitude, and find out where exactly all this shit had happened.

  ‘Nick?’ Gabriel finished unrolling a bandage. ‘What about you three?’

  I shared the broad detail. It was all they needed. And, however much of a dickhead he’d been before the trip, Stedman was Jack’s best mate. Chapter and verse wouldn’t help him either.

  We lost ourselves in the healing ritual of creams and dressings. Even the Russian version of zinc-oxide tape smelt reassuringly the same. Two freshly covered amputated legs were now enjoying the warming air, and some of the tension was seeping out of four sets of shoulder muscles. The engines of those vehicles were kept running constantly out there, in case they didn’t restart. It was fantastic. My face was starting to sting, and I knew that my fingers and toes soon would as well, when they began the journey back to life.

  I pushed the valve at the base of the BV and released steaming water into the mugs while the rest watched the squaddies moving about on the ice in their massive insulated boots. ‘There’ll be no sign of anything within the hour. Just like the Americans at our camp. There’ll be fuck-all left – I’d bet the farm on it. Any idea what happened to the ship?’

  I took a sip of the first brew and handed it to Gabriel to pass around.

  ‘The engine went up. Fuck knows, the list is endless.’

  Gabriel was pissed off with himself. ‘That’s when all the damage was done. I should have checked the airframe, just a quick look, but with those guys coming up, trying to keep everyone back …’ He shook his head. ‘Will was on it. We were motoring. I just didn’t have time to check.’

  ‘It’s not your fault.’ And it wasn’t. It was mine.

  Rio passed the brew back to me once it had gone full circle, then turned his head to check what was happening on the water.

  ‘That wagon’s coming back. It’s been out there for ever, checking those lifeboats. See all that kit they dragged on board?’

  The amphibian clawed its way back onto the ice. A white-covered body jumped out of the front passenger seat when it came to a stop beside us. He was wearing a neoprene face mask, but the way he was ordering people about said ‘Rupert’ to me without a doubt. He started towards us.

  ‘Lads, whatever happens, we just tell them the truth, yeah?’

  Gabriel and Rio shot me a collective What the fuck?

  ‘Not that. The truth about the trip. Who you are, why you’re here. We aren’t part of all this shit, all right? That’s all you’ve got to say.’

  Jack looked across to me, steam rising from his hair, as it probably was from mine. ‘What? Nothing about what?’

  The door opened and the white-clad officer climbed in, swinging a small bin-liner. He sat down on Gabriel’s bench and handed it to him. I could now see that it had some lumpy bits at the bottom.

  Gabriel looked inside as the officer took off his headgear. Gabriel grinned and displayed the contents – bars and bars of Alenka chocolate. It was one of the few luxuries that were shared around – though not with everybody – during the Soviet era, and still a Russian favourite. Gabriel continued the tradition. ‘Great – thank you.’

  I handed a bar to the officer, whom I now recognized as the kapitan who’d dealt with our passports in Barneo. He didn’t acknowledge the connection but nodded his thanks, and admired it with the eager anticipation of a seven-year-old. Myth had it that the doll-like girl on the wrapper was Stalin’s grandchild. It was open at each end, like a sleeve. Even after all these years, tradition demanded that it should be removed intact, with appropriate reverence.

  In their haste, Gabriel, Rio and Jack simply ripped Stalin’s granddaughter in half, and our compartment was soon filled with a sweet vanilla smell. Even bad chocolate tasted good at such times – and this wasn’t bad at all.

  The kapitan turned down a drink from a mug that was now chocolate-rimmed, and I thanked him again.

  He gave a curt nod. ‘No problem.’

  The door opened and a squaddie handed him something. When it closed again, his expression was a whole lot sterner. ‘One of your group is … unaccounted for.’

  No one answered. Rio was finishing off his chocolate bar. Jack was adjusting his leg. He’d inserted the bandaged stump into the socket. Gabriel was doing the same.

  I took a big gulp of coffee in case it turned out to be my last. ‘He’s dead. Hypothermia. He’s in a shelter about a hundred and fifty away – just follow our tracks. You’ll want the body, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I will.’ Then he broke off a chunk of Alenka and spent longer than was necessary enjoying its taste. ‘I’m very conflicted. I’m not sure if I should feel sorry for you and your group. Or if I wish I was about to make you disappear.’

  He held up his hand, palm outwards, when he saw that I was about to reply.

  ‘But the truth is that whatever happens to you now is out of my hands. I’m a soldier. I respect you as soldiers. I respect you all for your courage and determination. I hope that I have as much of both if I’m ever wounded.’

  He leaned across, opened the door again and let in the cold, engine noise and clinking of tracks as he shouted a series of commands. Three squaddies arrived at the double and lined up outside.

  ‘If you really are who you say you are, I’m sorry. This war should not be for your eyes. You are …’

  He searched for the right words. I had them for him. Munnelly had already put them there for me. ‘We’re just real people in a very precarious position.’

  He smiled, but it soon faded. ‘Yes, thank you.’ He pointed at Jack, Rio, Gabriel and their injuries. ‘I hope I’m not wrong. I want to be right.’ The kapitan nodded a gracious farewell and headed out into the snow, where he waved an arm to indicate the general area of the igloo and issued another string of commands.

  Without exchanging a word, we got the rest of the chocolate down our necks and into our pockets as fast as we could. None of us knew when we were going to get fed next. If at all.

  Rio got more brews on the go as the vehicle picked up revs, and more squaddies piled into our front cab. Seconds later, we were on the move.

  Two dull explosions kicked off about a hundred metres behind us as the driver paralleled the Lisandro’s channel. I looked through a porthole to see water pluming into the blue sky, along with the wreckage of the two survival capsules. It wasn’t long before they followed everything else to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.

  Rio thrust the mugs back into our hands, full to the brim with hot coffee. Lumps of powdered milk floated on top. There was no time to get fancy. We just wanted to get food and liquid down us before whatever happened happened.

  After maybe five hundred metres we stopped.

  We all pressed our faces to the nearest portholes as an antenna the size of a flag-pole emerged from the thin ice in the centre of the channel. Others, stubbier, followed. The Empire State Building was erupting from the bottom of the ocean.

  Next came a massive jet black cylinder, covered with anti-sonar pads, the latest stealth technology. It pushed its way up into the sky, blocking the sun.

  Bodies began to swarm out of a top hatch. As they did so, Rio said what we were all thinking: ‘Fuck me. No need for a list, then, eh?’


  74

  Russian submarines had always seemed a lot fatter to me than Western ones. As we walked up the gangway, I could see that this Dolgorukiy class was no exception. The deck was two or three metres above the waterline, the width of a football pitch and the length of several more.

  Those monsters rarely came up for air in the outside world. They didn’t enjoy the exposure – which suggested that the body in the peaked cap I could see at the top of the conning tower was pretty sure the Americans weren’t heading our way. I hoped he was right. Sinking the ship was an act of war, and I didn’t want to be caught up in the middle of it.

  Gabriel and Jack were finding it hard to negotiate the slope. Rio and I stopped and gave them a helping hand.

  Two divers stood by at the top of the gangway with dry-bags and fins. They weren’t there especially for us, though. We weren’t honoured guests. It was a standard operating procedure in case someone fell into the sea.

  There was an arch in front of the conning tower, and we were handed a brush to knock the ice off our boots, then ushered through it. I went first, and immediately felt the heat. I also felt the all-pervading calm, which submarines need. And because this was a nuclear-attack boat, there was no smell of diesel. After the icebreaker, this thing was a seven-star Hilton.

  Two of the crew helped steady Jack as he stumbled down the last couple of rungs of the ladder. I blamed the cheap rubber flip-flops we’d had to put on whichever of our feet still had toes before being allowed to come aboard. It was like being invited onto an oligarch’s plaything – which in a way I supposed this was.

  I’d kept my socks on, though, and would keep my boots close to hand at all times now. The others did the same. But it still took me back to my time on a British frigate in the Mediterranean, wearing trainers on duty for the first time in my military career. I’d thought it was great – you didn’t have to be able to see your face in the toecaps. That Type 21 vessel would have been built in the seventies. This was one of the new generation of attack boats I’d seen on the news in Moscow every week – another part of the process of restoring pride to the Motherland.