‘Let me get this straight,’ he said in the American-accented English he had polished for three years as a Soviet diplomat at the UN. ‘These four men have . . .’
‘Three men and one woman,’ Brian Dickson corrected him. ‘And the woman’s half Armenian.’
‘What’s the other half?’
‘Azeri,’ Dickson admitted. He had been hoping that the Foreign Ministry official wouldn’t ask.
Mangasaryan sighed. ‘Not the luckiest combination these days.’
‘No.’
‘So, this group has verified the existence of a nuclear weapons plant in the Caspian, which you say has been set up as a joint project between Azerbaijan and Iraq, the aim being to provide them both with nuclear missiles?’
‘That’s the essence of it.’
Mangasaryan let out a sound which was half laugh, half snort. ‘The Azeris are crazy enough to use them, you know?’
In Dickson’s view it would have been hard to find someone in this corner of the world who wasn’t, but that didn’t seem an appropriate response. He went into his prearranged spiel, pointing out how important living witnesses would be when it came to gathering support for some sort of action, and stressing how obstructive the Turks had been in the matter of rescuing them. The Armenians had a double opportunity here, Dickson argued: in picking up the international kudos which their old enemy to the west had spurned, they would be paving the way for punitive action against their current enemy to the east.
Mangasaryan had no trouble identifying the self-interest behind Dickson’s arguments – no doubt the British Government was wetting itself at the prospect of publicly losing these men – but there was no denying that Armenia would benefit from the international discrediting of Azerbaijan. ‘What exactly do you want from us?’ he asked.
‘Your people in Nagorno-Karabakh . . .’
‘They are not part of the Armenian Defence Forces.’
‘Of course. But just between the two of us, let’s not split hairs. You can get in touch with them, right?’
‘Probably. Where and when do you expect . . . ?’
‘We don’t know yet. What our men need is an accurate idea of where the Azeri border posts are. Once they have that information they’ll be able to decide on the best place to cross.’ He looked enquiringly at the Armenian.
‘That shouldn’t be too difficult,’ Mangasaryan agreed. ‘And once we know where they intend to cross we can start arranging a friendly welcome.’
In Poole Colhoun and Galloway had been trying to fill McClure’s shopping list. The Illustrators Branch had been drafting an operational chart of the relevant area, but until that morning the only available source material consisted of two maps which had been privately purchased by a member interested in the Nagorno-Karabakh war. One of the two maps was annotated in Russian Cyrillic script and showed relief, the other was in English and didn’t.
Between nine and nine-fifteen this situation took a marked turn for the better. First, a copy of Map 10 of the Azeri national series – the same map which Uday and Vezirov were using – was faxed from the British Embassy in Moscow; then one of Colhoun’s contacts on the other side of the Atlantic came up trumps. Having realized that any attempt to involve the politicians would be a fraught and lengthy business, the SBS boss had simply phoned an old Gulf War colleague. Stephen McGriff had recently taken over as CO of the SEAL Training School at Coronado, in the USA, and he obviously recognized a friend in need, because the latest American satellite photos were arriving on the Poole fax machine within minutes of the Moscow Embassy’s contribution.
While the Illustrators visually collated all the new information, the Meteorological Office in London was passing on detailed weather updates from its sister organizations in the former Soviet Union. And as far as Galloway could see it was good news all the way: the afternoon and early evening in western Azerbaijan would see an overcast sky, allowing the team to cross the first stretch of open country in pitch-darkness, while the clearing of the sky by midnight would illuminate their journey through the more difficult terrain of the mountains.
At around ten Her Majesty’s Consul in Yerevan was patched through with Armenian intelligence of the Azeri positions on the border, and the final touches were added to the Illustrators’ creation. If the team had been equipped with one of the latest American satcom devices, Colhoun thought sourly, the completed map could have been digitally transmitted to the hillside hide five thousand kilometres away. As it was, one of the team would have to transfer it on to a pre-drawn grid, square by square, over the radio link.
Still, it was better than waiting for the Pony Express, Colhoun thought, ordering tea for himself and Galloway. With the completion of the map their work seemed more or less done. It was going to be a long day.
The SBS team had travelled almost six kilometres through the brightening twilight before McClure called a halt on what seemed a reasonably secluded and adequately forested hillside. Lacking any real entrenching tools, they had taken rather longer to dig even a basic rectangular hide than seemed safe, but no one had come wandering over the hill, and there seemed little reason why anyone should.
McClure had given himself the first watch, and had spent much of the morning staring out through the roof of rearranged foliage at the tree-broken vista of the plain below. As the hours had passed the lack of enemy activity had made him increasingly suspicious. He had seen one helicopter and heard a couple of others, but there had been no line of troops beating their way across the distant grassland or up through the trees. Either the man in charge hadn’t seen The Thirty-Nine Steps or he had other fish to fry.
And McClure had a pretty shrewd idea which fish these might be. His opposite number had decided to employ all his available resources in blocking the routes to the border. Which was both good news and bad news. Their chances of being discovered during the hours of daylight were lower, but their chances of running into the enemy after dark were that much greater.
At noon he woke Noonan and Finn, then raised Poole on the satellite link. After receiving the unexpected bonus of a perfect weather forecast, he handed over to Noonan and lay down beside the still-sleeping Raisa to get some rest.
While Finn kept watch, Noonan began the laborious task of transcribing the map on to the grid which McClure had prepared. It took the best part of an hour, but by the end of that time he had a pretty good idea of the country which lay between them and the armistice line in the mountains.
About ten kilometres east of their current position lay the town of Agdam, and from there a road ran due south for about forty kilometres through the foothills of the mountains to the much smaller town of Fizuli. From these towns two thirty-kilometre roads ran respectively south-south-west and east-north-east through deep river valleys to Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh. Both roads were blocked by heavy concentrations of the Azeri army.
There was no other road across the mountains between these two pincer-like highways, but three smaller roads wound up from the Agdam–Fizuli road to villages perched high above the Azri plain, and beyond each of these settlements a path led across the mountains. There were Azeri military positions on all three paths, but only two of them were manned: the strongpoint covering the highest of the passes was deserted. The Armenians said so, and the satellite photos confirmed it. Better still, many of the slopes which this particular path traversed seemed heavily wooded.
‘Why would they leave this door open?’ Finn murmured.
‘The pass is over fifteen hundred metres up,’ Noonan observed. ‘It’ll be fucking cold.’
‘Mmm. Maybe they only guard it in summer. What’s the distance from here to there?’
Noonan did some calculations. ‘Between thirty-five and forty kilometres. And mostly uphill.’
Finn grunted. ‘A mere stroll.’
‘It’s a good job Mrs Shadmanov decided to go walkabout,’ Noonan said.
‘Yeah. Pity about her husband though. He seemed like a good bloke.’
‘Yeah, he did.’
A few feet away Raisa was lying awake, listening to them. Tamarlan had been a good man, she thought. And if the manner of his life had left him with any outstanding moral debts, then the manner of his death had paid them in full.
When the darkness was full the team set off in single file across the landscape of low hills. McClure had found nothing to argue with in Finn and Noonan’s plan, and they were aiming for that point on the Agdam–Fizuli road from which their chosen route led up into the mountains. In the interests of speed and mobility they had dispensed with one of the M16-M203 combinations and one of the MP5s, leaving both unloaded in the hide. Noonan and Finn, as lead scout and Tail-end Charlie, were carrying the other MP5s, McClure the remaining rifle and grenade-launcher, Raisa the Accuracy International.
The landscape alternated stretches of obvious farmland with grassy slopes that seemed, despite the lack of animals, ideal for grazing. There were small vineyards in some of the valleys, fields recently planted for arable crops, stands of acacia trees on the banks of small rivers. Even through the bilious glow of the Passive Night Goggles it seemed a nice area, and Raisa found herself wishing that she had visited it in daylight when she still had the chance.
The walking was certainly easy, with fences, streams and the occasional irrigation channel the only real obstacles. There were farm tracks but no paved roads, and they gave a wide berth to any light which appeared in the distance. The kilometres slipped away behind them, and up ahead the denser shadow of the mountain wall grew ever more distinct.
They reached the vicinity of the Agdam–Fizuli road shortly before nine, and the others waited while McClure conducted a forward recce. Ten minutes later he returned with the news of a T-62 standing guard at the junction with the mountain road. Both routes were effectively blocked to wheeled traffic, but there seemed no comparable impediment to pedestrians. The tank’s crew, moreover, were playing cards in a nearby bus shelter.
McClure led the team off at an oblique angle, aiming to cross the road some two hundred metres from the stationary T-62. Five minutes later they were slipping across the tarmac and up through the wooded slope on the other side, before breasting a low ridge and finding themselves just above the river and road which shared the climbing valley. The river lay between them and the vulnerability of the road, but the ruggedness of the terrain soon made it obvious that they had little choice in the matter. They forded the fast-flowing stream and set off up the dark road, ears straining for the sounds of traffic above or below, eyes peeled for any indications that they were walking into an ambush.
The sky above them was beginning to break up, and every now and then a patch of thin cloud would glow with primrose light as it passed across the invisible moon. The tank at the road junction worried McClure. Getting past it had been much too easy, which suggested that the real problems still lay ahead.
For the next hour and a half the road crossed and recrossed the river as it climbed, and soon the members of the team could look back out across the plain on which they had spent the last twenty-four hours. Twice approaching traffic forced them to take cover in the deeper shadows, but neither the driver of the empty bus nor the motorcyclist seemed interested in anything more than the road ahead.
Shortly before eleven the lights of the village which marked the road’s end appeared a couple of hundred metres above them, and once that distance had been halved the team struck off across a bare slope with the intention of giving the settlement a wide berth. The terrain soon became difficult, and they took over an hour to circumvent the village, finally reaching the path above it, looking down at the sprinkling of lights below, glowing green through the PNGs.
It was almost midnight.
‘Ten minutes’ rest,’ McClure decreed, and used the time to bring Poole up to date. ‘The boss is arranging our Armenian welcoming committee,’ he told the others, and lurking there, inside the pride he felt for a job well done, he could also feel the first intimations of panic. Soon it would all be over.
Now the moon was riding high in a rapidly clearing sky, and there was more than enough light to dispense with the goggles. The four of them forced their weary limbs back into action and set off up the path, climbing alongside a tributary of the river which had accompanied them up the road. At this point it was leaping and falling as the valley steepened and narrowed into a virtual gorge, and after only a few minutes a long wooden bridge came into view, carrying the path across the top of a high waterfall.
It looked like a textbook spot for an ambush, but as far as McClure could see there was only the one way of checking it out. On this side of the stream the valley sides were too steep to climb, and the only way over to the other side was via the bridge itself.
‘When we reach the near end of the bridge, run like hell,’ McClure said conversationally. He thought he heard Finn grunt with amusement behind him, and he had to admit the words had sounded pretty ridiculous coming out of his mouth, but there was no point in taking chances.
As it happened, the admonition probably saved more than one of their lives.
The moment Noonan set his front foot on the planking several other things seemed to happen at once. Two searchlights sprang simultaneously to life, bathing the wooden structure, the rushing water and the walls of the valley in a dazzling white glow, the SBS team broke into the preordained run and a megaphone-enhanced voice started talking in heavily accented English. ‘Eeengleeesh soldiers,’ it began, but the rest was drowned in gunfire.
If the Azeri unit commander had expected his quarry to be frozen like so many startled rabbits by the bright lights and the music of his own voice, he was doomed to be disappointed. The team were almost across the twenty-metre bridge before the Azeri soldiers opened fire, and both Noonan and McClure escaped unscathed.
Raisa was not so lucky. A bullet slammed into the left side of her back, exiting just below and to the side of her left breast. She went down as if she’d been tripped, and it wasn’t until Finn saw her face that he realized she’d been hit.
‘Fuck,’ he muttered, just as the ambient light was cut in half by Noonan’s destruction of a searchlight. As he covered Raisa with his own body Finn felt a bullet catch him in the fleshier part of the inner thigh, and a split second later the whoosh of McClure’s grenade-launcher signalled the onset of a darkness deeper than any that night. The gunfire stopped, then started again, more hesitantly this time.
‘Can you move?’ he asked Raisa.
‘Yes,’ she whispered.
Her breath was ragged but he’d heard worse. ‘Let’s go then,’ he said, and the two of them, she on her hands and knees, he pulling himself along on his stomach, started forward across the five or so metres of planks which separated them from solid ground.
They had gone only a metre when more gunfire erupted up ahead, and then the Azeris behind them opened up in earnest once more. Most of the bullets passed above the two of them, but several slammed into the woodwork of the bridge, showering splinters, and one gouged a neat little groove across Finn’s back, like a particularly painful whiplash. He cried out involuntarily, then muttered a few choice curses as he resumed his forward progress.
A few moments later and they were both off the bridge and crawling into what looked like a sheltered niche in the rocky walls of the gorge. Somewhere above them Finn heard the mingling of two familiar sounds – the spitting cough of Noonan’s MP5 and the crack of McClure’s Browning – and hoped that the enemy on this side of the river would soon be history.
Raisa’s breathing seemed better now, but even with the moonlight reasserting its sway it was hard to see how serious her wound was. His own both hurt like hell, and he was probably losing more blood than Tony Hancock could spare, but he didn’t think either of their wounds was anywhere close to life-threatening. How he was going to walk another ten kilometres up a mountain was something else again.
There was a slight noise somewhere above him. He brought the MP5 into firing position and
waited.
‘Finn,’ a voice whispered.
‘We’re down here,’ he whispered back.
‘How bad is it?’
‘Raisa’s worse. I’m just not as mobile as I was.’
‘We’ve taken care of everyone on this side,’ McClure said matter-of-factly. ‘We’ve got the bridge covered, and we’ve got a pretty good idea where the rest of them are. Those that are left, that is – I heard someone heading down the path as fast as he could go.’
There was something distinctly crazy about the tone of the man’s voice, Finn thought.
‘So if you can get yourself and Raisa about twenty metres up the path you should be in the clear.’
‘OK.’ It was only the length of a cricket pitch, after all. Sticking his head out for a brief glance up the path, he could see where it bent out of sight. ‘We’ve gotta move,’ he told Raisa.
She opened her eyes and managed a smile.
A solitary burst of gunfire chipped away pieces of rock above their heads as they started off, but an instant reply in kind from Noonan and McClure deterred a repeat, and the twenty-metre crawl became solely a test of physical endurance. It took almost ten minutes, and utterly exhausted both of them. Once around the bend in the path Finn just lay on his side waiting for the others to come, staring up at the stars scattered across the heavens and wondering which was supposed to be his lucky one.
Suddenly lightning seemed to leap past him, and an explosion engulfed the silence. The bridge, he realised. McClure had blown the bridge.
A few minutes later McClure was examining his comrades’ wounds. He had a surprisingly gentle touch, Raisa thought, and for a moment she found herself wondering what it was in his past that had hurt him so irreparably. She was recovering from the shock, she realized. Being shot was not an experience she had ever really expected to have.
He had managed to stanch the bleeding, and was now carefully wrapping the bandage around her, his mind racing through possibilities and options. The enemy now knew where they were, and could concentrate against them. Blowing the bridge had removed the immediate threat of pursuit, but there was no way of knowing for how long. Also, now that their intentions were known, there seemed nothing to stop the enemy from using helicopter-borne troops to leapfrog ahead and block their escape route. But there was obviously no going back, and there was still a chance they could evade any cordon higher up the mountain, for the enemy couldn’t cover every square metre of ground. If they could reach the top before dawn . . .
Marine I SBS Page 22
