December

by James Steel

  Alex laughed and then continued the joke. ‘Well, as you can see, Pete has some issues to deal with, but I hope we can all help him work through them on the op. He has been working on his problems with the Australian SAS on a rehab course in Iraq for a couple of years but finally became clean and serene and decided to join the mercenary fraternity.’

  Colin, Yamba and Arkady cheered and Pete acknowledged them with a facetious nod. Alex had worked with him on only one previous operation, in Africa, but he had been impressed by the grit he displayed there.

  With his heavy-boned face, shaggy sideburns and long hair tied back, Pete looked like a pirate, but he came from a rare group of men, such as racing drivers and extreme sports fanatics, who only responded to events that occur above a certain threshold of violence. Anything below this level didn’t register with him as being significant enough to merit a response. However, once events did go over it he acted very fast indeed.

  He had been born on a sheep farm near the small town of Dagaragu on the edge of the Tanami Desert. The life was hard there and had taught him self-reliance, but it had not been able to satisfy his thirst for danger and he had left for the army aged seventeen.

  Alex continued, ‘Pete also has a lot of experience of kicking in doors in Iraq so he will be advising us on the latest FIBUA tactics just in case events develop further.’

  Fighting In Built Up Areas was something that Alex was conscious of not having much experience in. He knew the basics from a tour in Northern Ireland, but his more recent African work had been in savannah or jungle environments and he knew that if things did get messy in Moscow then they would need someone with more up-to-date knowledge.

  He moved on. ‘Now, Col and Yamba have already worked with Arkady a lot but for those who haven’t, this is Captain Arkady Voloshin.’

  The Russian grinned broadly at them, his slanted eyes creased up and the gold tooth winked in his mouth, which for once he didn’t have a cigarette in.

  ‘Formerly in the Russian airforce, then spent many years flying anything that moved—fixed-wing and rotary—for Viktor Bout in Africa, supplying various wars. Whatever you want, Arkady will fly it in or out for you: arms, drugs, diamonds, TVs, fags, hookers. You name it, he’ll get it.’

  Arkady took it as a compliment that he worked for a man labelled ‘The Merchant of Death’ and continued grinning in a shameless manner. Like a lot of Russian men he’d had any sense of morality removed by the experience of communism, and would do anything for money without asking questions.

  However, over the years of working with Alex he had developed a strong personal loyalty to him. Through numerous combat operations he had come to respect the Englishman’s leadership as intelligent but decisive.

  When Alex had initially outlined the plan to him he had had a brief moment of doubt because of the massive political implications for his homeland, but, when the huge amount of money on offer was mentioned, any personal scruples died instantly.

  Alex then faced the tricky task of what to say about Lara. He didn’t want to give any details of the political side of the operation. To emphasise this point he kept it very brief, introducing her quickly and adding, ‘Lara is here to act as liaison with our political partners.’

  She looked down at the table nervously as all eyes scrutinised her carefully. Alex could see a lot of thinking going on but no one said a word.

  He quickly moved on to the final two regular members of his team, Colin and Yamba, who sat together and grinned back at everyone else.

  ‘The two old-age pensioners over here are Colin Thwaites, formerly sergeant major in the Parachute Regiment, and Yamba Douala, of the South African Defence Force, 32 Battalion. Both of whom have been selected so we can make use of their free bus passes.’

  This met with giggles from Yamba and, ‘Ah, booger off,’ from Colin.

  Alex ignored them. ‘Right, let’s get on with planning then.’ He motioned behind them and they all stood up and moved to the middle of the long table, which was covered in the maps and photos that Alex and Colin had spent much of yesterday laying out.

  ‘OK, so first of all, Arkady will fly us out in a Gulfstream jet to Transdneister.’

  The mercenaries were all familiar with the tiny breakaway republic between Moldova and Ukraine. It had declared independence from the USSR in 1991 but after a short war had been left with an ambiguous international status ever since, which made it a major transshipment point for drugs, weapons and people trafficking.

  ‘Arkady is well connected in smuggling circles there and has already been in touch with his suppliers, so they will have our weapons and ammunition order ready for us to collect quickly and then fly straight on to our Forward Operating Base. The whole flight from here to Siberia will be eight hours and four thousand miles, so we are going to be a long way from home.’

  There were a lot of serious expressions around the circle as the enormity of the distance sank in.

  ‘OK, that’s the big picture. So let’s switch to the detail. We are going to assault the Yag 14/10 Krasnokamensk Penal Colony.’

  He pointed to a regional map laid out in the middle of the table with the location marked on it.

  ‘The camp itself is actually located fifty miles north of Krasnokamensk. There just isn’t anything else nearer to name it after.’ His finger looped over the empty terrain around the camp. ‘That’s because the camp is in a Closed Area roughly a third the size of England, where no one but the prisoners and their guards are allowed. Our FOB will be here on the outskirts of the town on the east side.’ He pointed to some sparsely distributed huts and warehouses that petered out into the woods.

  ‘Right, that’s the background for you. From now on this is a planning session. It’s not going to be an easy job so I want your suggestions.’

  They all leaned in over the table around him, faces serious now, eyes darting back and forth, taking in the locations and distances on the maps. They were comparing what was in front of them with countless raids they had been on, balancing theories and practicalities, trying to envisage conditions on the ground: the terrain, the weather, infiltration and exfiltration routes, enemy positions and responses.

  Alex continued to feed their busy minds with details.

  ‘Our FOB is the operations base for a mining company in the region belonging to our political contact.’ Again he didn’t elaborate and no one asked.

  ‘We will have access to a company helicopter.’ His eyes flicked across to Arkady. ‘Mil Mi-17 IV?’

  The Russian shrugged and nodded. ‘No problem.’

  ‘We have access to a hangar and a repair shop for any military modifications we want to make on it, plus full refuelling facilities. We’ll also have access to a Vityaz all-terrain vehicle for any cross-country movement.’

  He pointed them back to the location of the penal colony itself.

  ‘The camp is located on a flat, forested plain. They cut timber from it at the camp so we should find a clearing that will be big enough to act as an insertion landing zone.’

  Arkady grunted. ‘Rotor diameter on new Mil is twenty-one meters. It’s a big fucker.’

  Alex nodded and then moved along the table to the far end where a map of the camp was laid out. He had stuck a series of A3 sheets together to provide a detailed plan. Around the edge of these were a number of large format photos, each one with a piece of string Blu-Tacked to the point where it had been taken inside the camp. Alex and Colin had spent a lot of time getting them laid out and orientated correctly.

  ‘Right, now, we are lucky to have some very detailed int on the inside of the camp. This plan is a copy of an official one so it’s accurate and these photos were taken last winter so are pretty up to date.’

  ‘Where does this int come from?’ Yamba said abruptly, both looking and sounding fierce as he sought to confirm the accuracy of the details. Overconfident assessments by intelligence officers had caused many deaths on missions he had been on.

  Alex was unruffled by h
is challenging tone, knowing that he was just being thorough.

  ‘The photos come from our political contact. He runs a company that supplies the site and is a big local player.’ He didn’t want to give the whole game away and say he was the regional governor. ‘So he was able to get taken on a tour of it. He has been planning to get the prisoner out for a couple of years now so he used the visit to take covert photos. They were snapped from a camera hidden in his coat so they’re not perfect but they give us a good idea.

  ‘We are also lucky because we have some information on the prisoner—his name is Roman Raskolnikov, remember him?’—there were nods from around the table—‘from a source inside the camp.’ He looked at Yamba. ‘I can’t say who, but the intelligence is good.’

  Yamba refrained from questioning this.

  Alex continued, ‘Now, the approach to the camp is going to be tricky. They have got a two-hundred-metre-wide area cleared from the forest all around it, no tree stumps, no cover, no nothing.’

  Colin gave a sharp intake of breath and there were pained expressions from the others. They could all see in their mind’s eye the view from a watchtower out over a flat white expanse and then imagined trying to get across it without being seen. An infrared imager would make it impossible, even in the dark.

  Alex saw their looks and held up a hand. ‘OK, I know, but we’ll work it out. Let me just show you the inside of the camp. It’s made up of two rectangular areas, one set inside the other. The perimeter of the outer zone is a kilometre along its longest side, so it is a lengthy fence that they have to guard. It encloses all the support buildings for the camp—like the garages, store sheds, oil tanks and the sawmill. The actual prison is inside the inner fence.’ He circled the rectangle in the middle of the camp. ‘This inner perimeter is made up of three fences of razor wire with a three-foot gap between each. The middle wire is lit by arc lamps and electrified so we can’t even touch it without getting frazzled or being seen from the watchtowers. There are four gates in it, one in the middle of each side of the rectangle, and each has got a watchtower with a machine gun.

  ‘Inside the wire there’s a kitchen and canteen here, and the armoury here, but mainly it’s these nine barrack huts. They’re just numbered one, two, three, etc.’ He ran his finger round the rectangle of long, single-storey buildings. ‘Each one has about a hundred prisoners in it and its own lot of guards in a block on each end so that no one can get in or out without going through a guardroom. There are one hundred and ninety guards in total, armed with assault rifles, and there are machine guns in all the watchtowers.

  ‘Apart from them, our other problem will be actually finding Raskolnikov. There are nine hundred guys in there and they all wear the same black uniforms so he will be hard to spot. We do know his prison number is D-504 and we think he is in Barrack 9 but we don’t know exactly where he will be inside the hut. The only time we know where he will be is during morning parade. For security reasons he is always put right in front of the commandant’s platform because they have a machine-gunner up there detailed to slot him at the first sign of any escape attempt.’

  ‘Oh, great,’ muttered Col.

  ‘Hmm,’ nodded Alex, ‘so basically we have to get in there quietly and strike fast when we do go for him, or we will just have one dead opposition leader to fly to Moscow.’

  He returned to his original track of describing the camp routines.

  ‘As soon as the work parties for the day have been allocated, Raskolnikov could be dragged off to one of several locations—logging in the forests, construction sites, the sawmill, and so on—so we really won’t have a clue where he will be.’

  ‘Flippin’ ’eck,’ muttered Colin. ‘I’m just wondering when you’re going to give us the good news.’

  Alex stood back and looked at them. ‘Right, well, I did say it wasn’t going to be easy. We’ve got six blokes and a helicopter against a hundred and ninety armed guards in a heavily fortified prison camp.’ He paused. ‘Suggestions, anyone?’

  The discussion began with all the team members chipping in ideas, pacing around the table picking up photos and looking at them from different angles, trying to get new perspectives on the problem. Proposals were put forward and debated; some were chucked out, others kept in play.

  Alex surveyed the room, pleased with the way it was going. Having laid the problem out in front of them they were now really stuck in to solving it.

  He was feeling increasingly certain that they would come up with a plan to get Raskolnikov out.

  Chapter Fourteen

  TUESDAY 9 DECEMBER

  Raskolnikov and the other nine men of the 33rd work team climbed up into the Vityaz.

  They had just been through another roll call parade. Once he and the men were packed into the enclosed cab, a guard slammed the door shut and they were locked in.

  They quickly huddled together on the floor over the vehicle’s massive diesel engines. The metal plates were warm and they were out of the wind. This was the best part of the day.

  The vehicle grunted and jerked, they were on their way. The DT-30 Vityaz was a huge beast with a wide body like the hull of a tank with a square cab covering the top. An all-terrain, tracked, amphibious vehicle the size of a large truck, it was the only thing that could withstand all the rigours of Siberian terrain from snowdrifts to forests and bogs. Behind them it dragged a separate, tracked, flatbed unit with a knuckle crane for the logs.

  Shubin, the team leader, sat up front in the cab with the drivers, guards and crane operator, a ‘trustie’ or prisoner trusted to work on his own. Shubin was an experienced forester and used a remotely operated searchlight on top of the cab to spot stands of trees with the correct diameter for the Chinese timber merchants that they supplied. The team would then dismount, cut them down and load the trunks onto the flatbed unit.

  The prison camp lay fifty miles north of Krasnokamensk on a plain covered in mixed woods of pine, larch and birch, but all the decent pine near the camp had already been cut so the teams had to be sent further and further out over the snowy wastes to find wood.

  The prison was very remote; in winter the deep snow meant that they could only really be resupplied by helicopter, as it took at least ten hours by snowmobile. With the murderous December weather, very few precautions were taken to prevent escape; just leaving the shelter of the camp was a death sentence. Prisoners were transported there in the short summer when trucks could actually get through and then just dumped for years. Very few made the return journey.

  The ATV belched black diesel smoke from the pipes on either side of the cab, like a pair of horns, and drove out through the inner prison gates of the camp and then on through the second pair of gates set in the perimeter fence of the whole site. Snow spewed out of the back of its tracks as the driver picked up speed and they flowed over the undulating terrain through the forest.

  After half an hour, Shubin spotted a stand of correctly sized pine, up on a small hillock, and they stopped. The team was let out of the lockup and walked over to the trees with guards covering them with assault rifles.

  Shubin revved up his chainsaw and began working away at a tree. When he had nearly cut through it, he stepped away and the snarl of the chainsaw halted. There followed a second’s silence and then the heavy crack and soft crash of the tree falling. The rest of the team closed in on the fallen trunk like workers stripping the body of a whale and used axes to cut away the branches.

  Roman became absorbed in the work, swinging his axe and enjoying the brief flood of warmth throughout his body. When the trunk was bare, each man got out a dragging tool with a spike on the end at right angles to the long handle. Roman swung his hard into the trunk and kicked it home with his heavy boot. All ten of them lined up either side of the trunk and did the same. Shubin looked down the line of black-clad figures in the half-light of early morning and shouted: ‘One, two, three!’

  They all hauled at once, dragging the two tons of wood through the snow a few feet a
t a time, out of the stand towards the crawler. Big Danni was opposite Roman, his huge shoulders bent as he strained at the load. Sweat broke out on Roman’s body and he gasped at the raw air. He felt as if his arms were being pulled out of their sockets as he dug his heels in and tried to stop the log breaking away and sliding down into the crawler.

  Finally, they got it down alongside the flatbed trailer unit. The trustie was sitting up on the little crane seat at one end, wrapped up in his hat and facecloths like the rest of them, but having spent the interim inside the warm cab. The team stepped back from the log and looked up at him with silent contempt.

  He powered up the crane and the heavy arm unfolded itself. A huge pair of metal jaws on the end of it reached out and grasped the log firmly in the middle, the hydraulics whined as the crane lifted it high over their heads ready to swing it in over the large metal supports along the edge of the flatbed that held the logs in place.

  The steady inbound movement stopped and the arm jerked towards them. All ten men leaped backwards as the huge tree slammed into the ground right in front of them, sending a heavy jolt through the soles of their feet. Roman tripped and fell over on his back. The tree rose again in the air over his head, he frantically tried to push himself backwards with his heels and elbows but it moved with him, poised to strike again.

  There was a shout and a heavy thud as the crane operator was pulled bodily off his seat and hit the ground. Danni smashed a fist into his face before one of the guards ran over and swung the butt of his rifle into the big robber’s kidneys. He crumpled with an involuntary ‘Oof!’ as the air was forced out of him.

  Getmanov rolled on the ground, put both hands to his face and held the cloths against it to stem the flow of blood.

  The guard commander ran over and took in the failed murder attempt with one glance. He looked down at Danni squirming on the ground, trying to get breath back into his body.

  ‘That’ll be the cold and the dark for you, I-331.’