‘Why didn’t you tell us this earlier?’
She shrugged. ‘You didn’t ask.’
Uday slapped her so hard across the face that she lost her footing. Back at the helicopter he told Vezirov that the fugitives had taken one of the boats with them. ‘They must be on the river.’
Vezirov sighed. ‘Maybe,’ he said after a few moments.
‘We need to send a helicopter upstream to look for them,’ Uday insisted.
Vezirov grimaced. ‘To see anything they’ll need to fly low, and you know what happened out near the rig.’
Uday shook his head impatiently. ‘Then have the pilot transmit continuously . . . no, better still, send two helicopters, with one hanging back behind the other. That way, if the first gets shot down finding them, the second will be able to keep the boat in sight.’
It was a quarter past three, and by McClure’s reckoning they had travelled over eighty kilometres. For a while now he had been approaching each new bend hoping to find the bridge looming into view, but so far there had been nothing more to see than another empty stretch of river. In fact, over the last few kilometres the river’s course had seemed to grow even more contorted, as if the water was prolonging its journey just for the sake of it. And to make matters worse the last clouds had vanished from the sky. There were still nearly two hours of darkness, but already he was beginning to feel like a sitting duck.
At least the fuel problem had been solved. A few kilometres back, spotting two outboards tied up at a small jetty, they had cut their own, paddled silently across and helped themselves to the contents of the fuel tanks. Unless the river really did disappear up its own arse they would get to where they were going. The problem was when.
McClure was studying the map for the hundredth time when the noise of the approaching helicopter seeped out above the dull purr of the outboard. ‘Fuck,’ he muttered. They were traversing a long bend in the river, quite a bit closer to the shorter south bank, but there were no sheltering trees on either side, and not a cloud in the sky to dim the ghostly starlight.
He could see the helicopter through the nightscope. A cone of faint light was shining beneath it, like one of those beams for stealing humans which flying saucers always used in science-fiction films. It seemed to be moving slowly, probably zigzagging slightly to cover as much of the wide river as possible.
‘Move in towards the bank,’ he told Noonan, working on the assumption that either side offered better odds than the middle of the stream. ‘Grenade-launcher,’ he told Finn, who bent forward to extract one of the M16s and attachable M203s from the canvas holdall.
It was about three kilometres away, McClure thought, looking back with the naked eye. And then he noticed the second light, moving in the opposite direction from the first, presumably in response to a bend of the river. He picked out the second helicopter with the nightscope, and reckoned it was flying at least half a kilometre behind the first, which put it way beyond rocket-launcher range. The bastards had learnt their lesson.
He quickly explained the situation to the others. ‘If neither of them see us,’ he summed up, ‘that’s fine. But if either of them does, then we have to get both of them, or our chances of getting off this river sink to just about zero.’ He dug into the holdall for the Accuracy International sniper rifle. ‘This is going to take a hell of a shot,’ he said. ‘At least five hundred metres, in the dark. We can stop the boat but there’s no way of holding it still. Raisa, you had the best scores in Cyprus.’
She hesitated for only a second before reaching out her hand.
McClure took the other M16 and M203.
The first helicopter was about a kilometre away now, and obviously flying a zigzag course. In less than a minute it would be passing by or over them.
‘Cut the motor,’ McClure told Noonan. ‘And sit still,’ he added unnecessarily.
Raisa had attached the ten-round box magazine and was cradling the adjustable rubber butt against her right shoulder. The first helicopter loomed large in the Schmidt and Bender telescopic sight, the starlight reflecting silver on the bulbous windscreen.
‘Fire on my command,’ McClure rapped out. ‘Raisa, just put as many bullets into the cockpit as you can.’
The leading helicopter was about six hundred metres away, trailing its cone of light across the black water . . .
Four hundred . . .
The zigzag was going to take it very close to them . . .
Two hundred . . .
The other helicopter was more like seven hundred metres behind the first, but it was flying even more slowly to compensate for the other’s zigzags. Raisa rested her finger on the trigger, glad that she couldn’t see any human shapes. With its inhuman sheen the helicopter looked more like a giant insect . . .
The cone of light swept over them.
‘Fire,’ McClure shouted.
The whoosh of the two grenade-launchers was instantaneous, the crack of the Accuracy International only a split second behind.
There was a blinding flash fifty metres upstream as the first helicopter exploded, showering burning debris down into the river.
Ramming the bolt home, Raisa fired again, and this time the second helicopter seemed to buck slightly in the air before arcing downwards with sudden venom, like a bird swooping for the kill. It hit the ground close to the water’s edge, igniting another orange fireball.
‘The helicopter industry’s gonna love us,’ Finn said drily.
‘We know where they are,’ Uday said triumphantly, his finger jabbing at the point on the map which corresponded with the last reported position of the helicopter search party.
‘For the moment,’ Vezirov agreed. He was still finding it hard to believe that both helicopters had gone off the air at precisely the same moment.
‘The idiots in the second helicopter must have got too close,’ Uday said, as if reading the Azeri’s mind.
‘Maybe,’ Vezirov muttered. But he doubted it. There was something about these Englishmen, something almost superhuman. Unless of course they were armed with a hand-held missile launcher. But if they were, then why hadn’t they used it before? The experts all agreed that the helicopter in the Caspian had been brought down by nothing more esoteric than a grenade-launcher.
‘Have you got men on this bridge?’ Uday asked, breaking the reverie.
Vezirov followed the finger on the map. ‘They’re on their way,’ he said. ‘This is Azerbaijan,’ he added, sensing that the Iraqi’s frustration was building towards another angry outburst. ‘We haven’t got an unlimited supply of troops, and we don’t have sufficient means to move the ones we have. Added to which, we’ve lost three helicopters in a single day.’
Uday restricted himself to an angry sigh. ‘Well, at least we should be on our way,’ he said.
‘Agreed,’ Vezirov said. ‘The Zardob bridge,’ he told the pilot. ‘And keep us at least a kilometre north of the river.’
* * *
Two more bends of the Kura brought the bridge into view. The sight of the graceful black silhouette was cause for relief in itself, and the sensation was amplified by the evident lack of waiting troops. There wasn’t even any lighting on the bridge, just a dim yellow lamp on each of the approaches, and no sign of a settlement nearby.
All of which begged a new series of questions. Now that their presence on the river was known, should they immediately take to the land once more? The local traffic at three-thirty in the morning would be light to the point of non-existent, and they were still almost a hundred kilometres from the presumed safety of Armenian-held territory. On the other hand, Nadzha-something was only about forty minutes upstream. They would arrive quite a while before dawn, and there was likely to be a choice of transport for stealing. The Azeri military would probably be slow to react to their latest losses, and even if they weren’t, it seemed unlikely they would have a surfeit of available helicopters in the immediate area.
Spending another forty minutes on the river, McClure decided, would
be marginally less risky than setting out across flat, open country with no guarantee of transport. He would stick to the original plan.
A couple of minutes later they passed under the long bridge without sight or sound of the enemy. The Gemini was almost half a kilometre upstream and approaching the next bend when the lights of several lorries appeared behind them, edging out on to the bridge and coming to an eventual halt. Through the nightscope McClure could see men tumbling out of them, and taking up position along the parapet. They were clearly under orders to face east, but McClure had no fear that the Gemini, which was now hidden in the silhouette of the winding river’s higher banks, would be visible to any westward-straying gaze. A few seconds later the bridge was gone from view.
This mission was in danger of mimicking one of those Indiana Jones films, he thought, in which the hero was rarely more than half a step ahead of the pursuit, and a succession of doors clanged shut at his heels. Only this wasn’t a movie, and the odds were that sooner or later one of these doors would slam shut in their faces.
Still, McClure thought, as he rigged the satcom radio for transmission, it hadn’t happened yet. And glancing round the faces of the other members of his team he found himself thinking that they still had a pretty good chance of making it. He gave Poole a rundown of the latest developments, their current position and immediate plans, and signed off.
The next half-hour passed with agonizing slowness, but their passage was uninterrupted from either riverbank or sky – with any luck their pursuers were still waiting at the bridge downstream. The Kura meandered as aimlessly as ever, but there were more trees visible on the banks, more small landing docks lining the water’s edge, and more evidence of agriculture in the wide irrigation channels which had been dug away from the river.
At twenty past four a sprinkling of dim lights up ahead gave notice that they were close to their immediate destination, and about four hundred metres from the outskirts of the riverside town McClure gestured for Finn to take them off the Kura and up a convenient channel. They found no effective hiding-place for the Gemini, but at least it was off the river, and the hours of darkness were running out.
They unloaded the bergens, weaponry and cans of spare fuel, pulled the inflatable ashore and left it sitting innocently beneath a tree. Then, after distributing the burden between them, they started off up the riverside track towards the town, which, hopefully, was still sleeping. Just as the track turned into a road a helicopter emerged from the silence, flying down the river at a height which suggested the pilot was more interested in a long life than finding a boatload of foreign soldiers.
The hum of its rotors faded into nothing just as they reached the first houses, one-storey affairs which faced the street with walls broken only by narrow gateways. The street had the look of the Third World about it, but there were power lines to each dwelling, and no smell of sewage in the streets.
From a couple of houses they could hear sounds of movement, and once their passage set off a dog, but the street ahead remained empty. Finn found himself wondering what McClure’s reaction would be if some innocent civilian suddenly emerged from one of the gateways and found himself face to face with this strange band of heavily armed foreigners.
A parked car swam into view some fifty metres ahead of them, and as they walked towards it another appeared some thirty metres farther down the road. People were moving in the house beside the first car, but the owners of the second, a new-looking Lada, still seemed dead to the world. The doors were not locked.
‘Let’s push it out of earshot,’ Finn suggested, and McClure nodded. The four of them bundled their handheld gear on to the back seat and pushed the car some thirty metres. They were now outside a largish building which looked like a school. A crossroads was visible about a hundred metres ahead, and as Finn hot-wired the engine, McClure counted lights going on in different dwellings. The town was waking up.
The car’s motor burst into life. ‘The tank looks more than half full,’ Finn said.
A minute later they were heading in towards the town’s centre, eyes peeled for any sign of the road to the west which was on their map. The town was bigger than McClure had expected, and they passed by several medium-sized industrial premises before reaching the older buildings at its heart.
‘That way,’ Raisa said, pointing over McClure’s shoulder to where an old Soviet signpost in Cyrillic script announced the road to Agdam.
They started heading back out of town, passing the police station, where a man in plain clothes had just climbed out of his car. He glanced up as they passed, and raised a hand in greeting before turning away. Presumably he knew the owner of the car.
The town abruptly ended, and the road angled away across the plain, straight as an arrow. The dark line of the distant horizon seemed higher than it had, offering the promise of mountains. There was still no break in the darkness behind them, but the sunrise was only forty minutes away, and the sky would start to lighten in not much more than ten. After that they would have to pay for each extra kilometre with an ever-increasing risk of being sighted or stopped.
Finn was coaxing eighty-five kilometres an hour out of the Lada, and it took only ten minutes for them to reach and speed through the small town of Agdzhabedi, where a couple of sleepy-looking men watched them pass.
It was definitely getting lighter now, and the wall of hills ahead seemed to be slowly climbing out of the horizon. So near and yet so far, Finn thought to himself. The distance was still too great to risk driving on.
‘There’s another crossroads in a couple of kilometres,’ McClure announced. ‘We’ll dump the car nearby, keep ’em guessing.’
‘I was afraid you were going to say something like that,’ Finn murmured. He couldn’t argue with the decision, though. Another fifteen minutes and they would be sitting ducks.
The road was even climbing slightly, its first deviation from the flat, and their first view of the crossroads came from above, through a welcome curtain of trees.
‘Stop the car,’ McClure told Finn.
They all looked down at the meeting of ways, which lay in the middle of a shallow valley, surrounded by the buildings of a large farm. There was smoke pouring from a couple of chimneys, and moving figures visible on the road beyond.
‘It’s one of the old state farms,’ Raisa said.
‘Time to get out and walk,’ McClure decided. To the south of the farm buildings a wide swathe of trees would give them the cover they needed to pass by without being seen.
They pushed the car off into the inadequate cover of the roadside trees and spent a couple of precious minutes draping enough foliage across its roof to fool any airborne eyes, but there wasn’t enough time to shield it from searchers on the ground.
There was still half an hour’s worth of twilight, McClure reckoned. More if there was tree cover. They could get another five kilometres closer.
He lifted his eyes away to the west, where the highest slopes of the distant hills were now awash with sunlight, beckoning them forward. The last lap, he thought. The last fucking lap.
18
Vezirov briefly examined the interior of the stolen car, and found what he had expected – nothing. There were no traces of the men who had been inside, no clear proofs of English occupation, like a picture of the Queen or a pile of empty beer cans.
The Azeri security chief smiled to himself. It wasn’t as if there was any doubt as to the vehicle’s last occupants. The policeman in Nadzhafkulubayl had seen the car leave town on the Agdam road at around the right time, and its owner had reported it stolen a couple of hours later. Two men had seen it race through Agdzhabedi, and one of the workers at the farm below had seen it stop on the road nearby just before dawn. He had not seen anyone get out though, nor any strangers walking across country.
Vezirov crunched back through the undergrowth to his own car, and the familiar sight of Uday al-Dulaini poring over a map. ‘At least the scale is getting larger,’ the Azeri said cheerfully. The
y had started the day with a map of Azerbaijan, and now Uday was using Map 10 of the national 1:150,000 series, which covered only the currently occupied autonomous region of Nagorno-Karabakh and the western rim of the Kura lowlands.
The Iraqi had already marked their current position with a neat X. ‘These roads,’ he said, indicating them with twitches of his index finger, ‘they are all sealed off?’
‘Yes, but our friends must be on foot. Where could they have got another car? And why would they have wanted one? They ran out of darkness, so they’ve gone to ground again. Tonight they will try to reach the armistice line. I suppose they might try to steal another car, but I doubt it – they will know that all the roads are blocked. Their only chance is on foot.’
‘So what about the paths into the mountains? How many of them are there?’
‘Not many. Even less that strangers could find. And first they have to reach the mountains. I’d lay odds they’re not more than five kilometres from where we’re standing – they wouldn’t have risked going on once the sun was up. These are not men who take unnecessary chances.’ He smiled. ‘They might even be watching us at this very moment.’ Vezirov raised a hand. ‘But before you ask, there is no way I can block all the routes into Nagorno-Karabakh and comb up to a hundred square kilometres of hills.’
Uday looked up at the faint line of mountains some thirty kilometres to the west. ‘You are beginning to sound more confident,’ he said.
Vezirov shrugged. ‘They may be supermen, but they don’t know this country. There are a lot of paths up into those mountains but they funnel through only a handful of passes. With another two hours of darkness I think they might have made it, but not now. They’ve given us a whole day to put the cork back in the bottle.’
Four hundred kilometres to the west, in the Armenian capital of Yerevan, Garnik Mangasaryan listened to the British consul with a sinking heart. It was Friday, and he had hoped to leave early for the family’s first weekend in their new summer cottage, but now it seemed as if he was unlikely to be leaving at all.
Marine I SBS Page 21
