Exit Wound (30 page)

107

One K further on a red flag hung limply at the roadside, a big old cotton thing weighed down with rain – a warning that the ranges were active. Even the most rough and ready set-up of this kind has worked out its safety templates. They cater for the rounds going down the range at the target, with a safety margin each side to cover fuck-ups. Templates normally look like big, open fans, at the base of which are the firing positions. Anywhere inside that fan is the danger area.

Another hundred down, we came across a second red flag and, soon afterwards, a red and white barrier across the road, next to a small shed. I really was back in Brecon.

I could see movement inside. Whoever the sentry was, he’d be bored out of his skull spending all day on stag. I knew the feeling. I’d done range-sentry duty a million times.

He came out reluctantly to see what the deal was with this bike and sidecar. The look on his face said he was already getting ready to turn us back or fuck me off onto another route.

He noticed the civvy clothes and all the gear hanging off the Ural, like we were on some kind of eccentric cross-country rally. He didn’t have a weapon, but why should he? He was just a lad on stag. He’d drawn the short straw. Or, in this weather, maybe not. At least he was nice and dry.

He didn’t have a clue who we were, but he didn’t look overly concerned. Nine times out of ten, the deeper you are inside an area, the safer you feel.

I dismounted nonchalantly and treated him to a five-hundred-watt smile. ‘Hello, mate, how’s it going? Fucking wet, eh?’

His brow creased. He was in his early twenties and had goofy teeth. I could see the sides of a crew-cut under his helmet, which he wore tipped back. I could almost hear the cogs turning.

Was that English?

He pointed behind me and spun his hand.

‘Yes, mate, that’s right. Anna – give me a helmet.’

She reached into the nose of the sidecar and passed it up to me. I showed him the helmet in my right hand as I walked towards him. He stared at me from behind the barrier, inquisitive more than intimidated.

I kept on talking. ‘Listen, mate . . .’ His eyes were bloodshot. He’d probably been hitting the vodka bottle in one of those shacks opposite the camp. ‘I’m going to fuck you over. I’m sorry.’

I focused on his eyes.

And then I swung my helmet hard at the centre of everything I could see that was flesh rather than metal.

He didn’t have time to react. He took the full force of the blow and he buckled. I threw myself on top of him as he went down, my knees in his chest. I pounded the bike helmet a couple more times into the side of his face, once hitting the ridge of his helmet and missing, once connecting. I didn’t want to hurt him badly. All I wanted to do was keep him out of it for a while. I yanked his helmet off and gave him one more good whack.

Anna went ape-shit. She tried to drag me off. ‘Nick, stop! You’ll kill him. What’s he done? Stop it!’

I stood up. ‘Look for a map in his hut. Go, go!’

Of course I wasn’t going to kill him. I just needed to control him. I had to be short, sharp and aggressive – there’s no other way to do this sort of thing. If you hesitate, he might turn out to be Russia’s cage-fighting king. If you don’t control him straight away, you could land up in a prolonged fight, with the only way out being to kill or be killed.

So, short, sharp and aggressive it had been. Anna wasn’t going to understand this right now – all she could see was another poor bloody squaddie at the sharp end of a fight he hadn’t asked for – but it was the best way to get what I wanted and still keep him alive.

He had a big lump on his head, but he’d be back having a few bevvies with his mates in no time at all.

108

I was dragging him towards the sidecar when Anna came out of the shed. She had two maps in her hands. One was a folded sheet, the other fixed to a board and covered with plastic film.

The sentry wasn’t fully conscious, but he was compliant. I half slapped, half pushed him down into the seat. I shoved his head between his legs and held it there. I didn’t have to use much force. The lad’s survival instincts had kicked in now and he knew which side his bread was buttered. ‘Anna, I need his helmet.’

She handed it to me, concern etched all over her face.

‘Don’t worry, he’s coming with us.’ I tossed it into the sidecar, along with Semyon’s bloodstained one. ‘You ride, OK? We need somewhere off the track.’

I climbed on behind her with the board in my left hand. My right stayed on the sentry’s head. He needed to know somebody was controlling him. It would make him feel safer, and therefore more obedient. It didn’t mean he wouldn’t be scared. He’d know by now that if he tried anything he’d be on the receiving end of a lot more pain.

We carried on to the next junction. Anna turned right, out of line-of-sight of the road the trucks had careered down. She found another firebreak and started down it. I stopped her before we’d gone ten paces. We couldn’t risk running into deep mud. We were off the track; that would do.

I jumped off and undid all the gear on the back. I needed the rope. I got the sentry to sit up and looped it round his neck. It was too much for him. His chest heaved and he gave a couple of loud sobs. Tears started to run down his face, to join the rain and the blood. The poor fucker thought I was going to hang him. ‘Anna, tell him to shut up. I’m not going to hurt him – but if he fucks about I will kill him.’

The colour drained from her face. ‘Nick, I—’

‘We don’t have a choice. I have to keep control. I have to let him know who’s boss.’

She gobbed off to him. Her message seemed to be a whole lot longer than mine. I guessed it didn’t really matter, as long as she managed to calm him down.

‘OK, now ask him if he knows where the testing ground is. The restricted area, the proving ground, whatever you want to call it – does he know where it is?’

She gobbed off some more, while I fastened his hands to his ankles and brought the rope back up and around his neck. I tied it off to one of the connecting rods between the bike and the sidecar. I put his helmet back on his head to protect him as we bounced around.

By now he was sobbing big-time.

‘He doesn’t know, Nick. He hasn’t got a clue. Look at him, he’s just a boy. What would he know?’

I tucked the chainsaw down beside him and secured it with another length of rope, then turned my attention to the maps. There were a lot of fan-shaped areas outlined in red but none of them stretched more than a couple of kilometres. They were everyday, bog-standard rifle ranges. They weren’t big fuck-off testing grounds. A couple of much larger, irregular-shaped areas were outlined in blue. One looked big enough to be Wales.

‘What does this say?’ I jabbed my finger at a heap of Cyrillic.

The boy let out another agonized plea from the footwell. I slapped a hand on his back. ‘Shut up, mate. You’re all right.’

It was going to be a nightmare for him. It was something he would remember for the rest of his life. He’d probably have bad dreams about this day – the day he’d thought he was going to die – but he would be alive. He stood more chance of getting shot by his own troops in a compromise than of me doing him any permanent damage.

Anna finished reading. ‘The whole of that area is restricted – it’s got to be the proving ground.’

I held the folding version open in front of me. ‘So we’ve found the haystack. Now where’s the fucking needle?’ I scoured the area. There were bits and bobs of markings, no more than the major tracks. But then I spotted a short, isolated line, too straight to be a track. ‘That’s got to be a runway . . .’ The board map showed us the shed we’d nicked it from. There was a big red ‘You are here’ blob for the sentry to show people.

I looked back to my folding map. ‘OK, line-of-sight, it’s about a hundred and forty K from here to the proving ground.’

‘You sure that’s it?’

‘Of course I’m not sure. I just don’t know. But neither do you, and he doesn’t either – or he’s not telling. And where else could it be? You’ve got a proving ground, you’ve got a private company coming in – they’re going to use their own airfield. We’ve got a possible – let’s go for it. On the way we might find something we prefer the look of.’

‘And what about him?’

‘He’s coming with – it’ll reduce the temptation to let the world know exactly where we are and where we’re headed. Get on the back.’

I binned the board map and had a last quick look at the folding one before shoving it inside my jacket. I checked the compass and drove back down to the five-way junction.

I took the track that headed north.

109

1457 hrs

I cut my way through yet another chain-link fence. It felt as though I was making progress. It was our third since we’d entered the training area. We’d used the forestry tracks, going cross-country when the ground opened up. We’d got bogged down once. I’d had to get the squaddie out to help. His name was Zar – a great name and an enthusiastic pusher before I tied him up again.

This had to be the proving ground. The other fences hadn’t carried any signs, but this one did. Instead of being red with the usual ‘Fuck off or we’ll shoot you’ warning, this one was yellow. It looked civilian even before Anna translated: ‘Private property – no military allowed without a permit.’

We were in the inner sanctum.

We’d done just over 160 K to get there. If I’d got this right, the airstrip should be about forty K further north. And if the maps were to be believed, the drones could only take off from the main air base to our south or the airstrip itself. And the same went for the Falcon. It didn’t matter where they took off. I had no control over that. But the drones would still have to get up in the air, and they would still have to do a fly-past to get shot down.

I pulled back the link for Anna to squeeze the bike through. Zar kept his head down. He was switched on. He was a good lad.

Once through, I got back on the driving seat, checked the compass and then the sky. The cloud was starting to lift. A breeze was moving things along. Ominously, shafts of light broke through in the distance, like someone up there had a fucking great torch.

The ground had been getting boggier so there’d be no more cross-country. I took the first track I found running north, up to higher ground. From there, we’d be able to get better eyes on the target ground.

There were no signs or coloured markers on this track. We climbed through forestry blocks and undulating grassland. The valves chattered but Cuckoo plugged on gamely. I stopped to watch the sky and listen, but saw and heard nothing.

We’d been going about an hour since the last fence when I checked the fuel gauge and pulled off to one side to top up the tank.

The cloud was almost gone. The wet fir trees glinted in the unexpected light, and steam rose from the leaf litter on the ground. Shadows appeared at the roadside as the sun burnt through the mist.

Anna dismounted and drank direct from a stream. ‘I’ll untie Zar and let him stretch his legs.’

‘No. Too much time. I’ll make sure he—’ I held up my hand. ‘Listen . . .’

It wasn’t the thunder of an Antonov. It was the sound of something much smaller, coming from behind us, from the south. I couldn’t see it. The fir trees blocked the view.

I screwed up the cap and threw the can back at Zar’s feet. ‘That’s it – it’s started.’

Anna leapt on the bike behind me. I kick-started it and pointed to the sky. ‘Keep looking up, keep looking up.’

We bounced back the way we’d come, heading south, as I dodged and wove among the potholes. I stopped about ten metres short of the edge of the forest and rolled the Ural the rest of the way to the tree-line.

110

Two aircraft were approaching from the south. The second was flying about four hundred metres behind the first. It was hard to judge the altitude, but I knew it couldn’t be any higher than ten thousand feet. That was the limit of the 16’s effective range.

The gap between them suddenly increased. The lead aircraft had cut away the drone. It banked left, orbiting back towards the air base. Almost simultaneously, the drone’s jet engine sparked up, creating a heat signature as it surged towards us. It passed over us, heading north, its engine giving out a deep, throaty roar. Sunlight glinted off its wings.

All of a sudden, flares burst out either side of the fuselage – brilliant, blindingly white balls of magnesium that decorated the sky like a Roman candle.

The white smoke trail from the SA-16’s power pack streaked across the tree canopy about two K to my half-right. Then it screamed up into the air and towards the balls of light.

The missile jinked left and right.

It locked onto a flare, rejected it, moved onto the next, rejected that too, moved on up, defeating the dark flares like they weren’t even there.

The explosion, when it came, wasn’t massive. Ground-to-air missiles rely on kinetic energy as much as their warhead to down an aircraft. The rear of the drone disintegrated. Splinters of it showered from the sky as the main body started to spin towards earth.

I started running. ‘Back to the bike. We carry on down the track.’

Zar must have been flapping about the explosion, but he didn’t budge.

I kick-started and we were off. The back wheel lost a bit of traction, and slid out. I corrected, and the whole bike shuddered as the sidecar wheel hit a rut. I stood up on the foot pegs to get a better view. I had to keep the power on to keep that back wheel spinning, and I had to keep looking the way I wanted to go – not pointing, but looking. Start worrying about where you’re putting your wheels and the bike stops doing the thinking for you.

The track opened up from the forestry a couple of hundred metres ahead. I could see clear sky.

Legs and arms still straight, I eased back on the throttle. We were close to the end of the firs. I trickled forward another ten metres and nosed it as far into the trees on the right as it would go, then closed down.

Zar didn’t take much coaxing to climb out.

‘Anna, bring the cameras.’

She gripped the kit while I dragged Zar to the nearest tree and retied him. He looked happy just to be breathing.

I waved to Anna. ‘Give me your scarf.’

I stuffed one end of it into his mouth to fill the cavity and make sure he couldn’t develop any sort of sound. I tied the free end round his eyes. Then I grabbed one of the cameras from Anna and we moved forward. When we reached the end of the firs, I stopped and listened. I could hear the buzz of another aircraft. I started running. I wasn’t going to wait for her and I didn’t have to – she had done her bit. Now it was time to do mine.

I hit the next tree-line after twenty metres and slowed. I was sweating big-time under the heavy bike gear but I didn’t give a shit. We were nearly there.