Gray Salvation (12 page)

Chapter 19

24 January 2016

A slate-grey sky and bitter winds welcomed Gray and his team to Kazakhstan. They passed through immigration without a problem, but Gray knew the real fun would start when they reached security.

‘Are you sure this is going to convince them?’ Gray asked Smart.

‘Guaranteed.’

Gray didn’t share his optimism. Planning is like a house of cards, and just one mistake can bring the whole lot crashing down. The concern on Gray’s face didn’t go unnoticed.

‘I watched Sonny create it,’ Smart said. ‘It’s a masterpiece.’

Smart explained how Sonny had taken a copy of a fax he’d received from the Kazakh interior ministry and doctored it to look like the certificate they needed. ‘It was the PIC they sent us back in 2011, when we were protecting the BP people, remember?’

Gray did indeed. The Prior Import Consent document had enabled them to take their own weapons to Kazakhstan five years earlier, as part of a security detachment guarding oil workers who were operating near the Russian border at a time of high tensions. The certificate was the counterpart to the SIEL Smart had used to get the Sentinels out of the UK, with this part authorising them to be brought into the Kazakh capital, Astana.

‘Sonny cut the header off the old one,’ Smart said, ‘you know, the bit with the sender and date stamp. He altered it, then stuck it onto a blank PIC and filled in the details. He then ran it through the fax machine on copy, and
voilà
.’

‘Well, after what you told me about Heathrow, let’s hope the guys here aren’t as thorough.’

Gray needn’t have been concerned. They produced the document at customs and, after a cursory examination of the luggage in a private room, the team were allowed on their way.

Out in the arrivals area, it wasn’t difficult to spot McGregor. He towered above everyone else, his bushy black beard making him look like a grizzly bear.

‘I see you found some backbone.’ The giant smiled, grabbing Gray’s hand with paws the size of dinner plates.

‘I had some wise words thrown at me.’ Gray winced as his fingers were crushed. ‘Some of them must have stuck.’

Gray handled the introductions. McGregor already knew Smart and Sonny, having served with them before, but the rest were new faces.

‘Looks to me like you can’t count,’ McGregor said. ‘I told you I only have room for five.’

‘I was a last-minute addition,’ Gray apologised. ‘It was too late to send one of the others home. Besides, I was hoping you could manage six, what with Sonny and Edgar being so small.’

‘It’s not about weight,’ McGregor said. ‘We’ll be using a Bell Jet Ranger, and with your gear, there’ll be no room for a sixth man, no matter how small they are.’

‘We’re not taking that much in with us,’ Gray argued. ‘Can’t it go in the luggage compartment?’

McGregor shook his head. ‘From here to Dubrany is two hundred and fifty miles and the chopper’s range is only three hundred. I’ve had to fit an auxiliary fuel pod in the hold to get us there and back.’

That left Gray with an awkward choice to make. There was no way Sonny or Smart would stand down, which left the other three. Mark Howard’s CQB skills would be much needed on the mission, but then so would the language skills of the other two.

He decided to keep Butterworth, mainly for his medic skills. With one Russian speaker chosen, it then became easier to pick the last member of the squad.

‘Sorry, Edgar, but I’m going to have to send you home. You can keep the money I paid you up front, but you’ll have to make your own way back to the UK.’

Melling looked a little deflated, but he nodded gamely. ‘No worries. Five grand to take a couple of flights is no great hardship. Are you sure you don’t want to keep me in reserve, though?’

Gray considered the idea, but not for long. ‘If anything does go wrong, we’ll be dead by the time Mac here manages to get you on the scene. No, go home, mate, and thanks for volunteering.’

Melling shook hands all round and wished them all a safe return, then threw his bag over his shoulder and headed for the ticket desk.

McGregor led the team outside, where a biting wind tugged at their clothes. Rain added to the misery, but thankfully they didn’t have to walk far to McGregor’s minivan. They dumped their gear in the back and piled in, then McGregor drove them past the glass-fronted terminal building with the huge blue dome on top and down Qabanbay Batyr Avenue. The road seemed to go on for ever, just a right-hand bend to break up the monotony. Eventually, they arrived in the capital, and Gray was surprised by the architecture. He’d expected block-like Soviet-era buildings everywhere, but the place was a mass of curves and spires. To his right he saw a pair of gold towers, and beyond that the blue-domed roof of the Presidential Palace.

‘I must say, I wasn’t expecting this,’ he said to McGregor. ‘This place puts London to shame.’

‘It certainly is beautiful,’ the Scotsman agreed. ‘Now you can see why I left Glasgow behind.’

Twenty minutes and one left turn later, they were back in the countryside. Green rolled by on either side for another few miles, until the aerodrome came into view. McGregor turned down the approach road and pulled into a hangar, killing the engine. The men climbed out and found themselves sharing the space with a black helicopter, its engine port open and tools strewn on the floor. Spots of rust on the skids suggested it wasn’t the newest of machines.

‘Throw your things in the corner,’ McGregor said, pointing to an area of the hangar that contained five sleeping bags. ‘I’m afraid that’s your digs for the night.’

The Scotsman led them over to the sleeping area and turned on two industrial heaters – Gray immediately felt the difference. Large pieces of cardboard had been spread on the stone floor to stop the cold from seeping upwards as they slept, and an ancient kettle stood next to coffee and tea canisters on a metal workbench nearby.

‘What about the weapons?’ Gray asked.

‘On their way,’ McGregor assured him. ‘They’ll be here tonight.’

‘We’ll need somewhere to prepare,’ Gray said, as he dumped his bag on the floor and pulled out a file containing screenshots taken from Ellis’s laptop. McGregor cleared a table and pulled it away from the wall so that everyone could gather round, then filled the kettle and produced some cracked and stained mugs, telling the team to help themselves.

Once everyone had a beverage, Gray outlined the plan.

‘Mac will drop us off here,’ he said, pointing to an open expanse to the east of Dubrany. ‘Our approach doesn’t take us over Russian-held territory, but there’s still a chance the Tagrilistani army might want to take potshots at us. We won’t be filing a flight plan, so both sides will probably treat us as hostiles.’

‘You always start off with good news,’ Sonny said with a wink.

‘What happens after we land?’ Howard asked.

‘We’ll be dropped off a couple of miles from the edge of town. Any closer and we risk someone hearing the chopper. From there we tab to this area.’ Another spot on the map marked a disused petrol station, along with GPS coordinates. ‘Sonny and Len will plant an incendiary, then we make our way around the town to our infiltration point. It’s a six-mile hike, so I hope you’ve been staying in shape. We’ll be going in at oh three hundred tomorrow, so we don’t expect too many people to be around at that time. A few sentries at most. If we come across anyone, we try and skirt round them. If we can’t, we take them out as silently as possible. Most of them should already be preoccupied with the explosion, anyway.’

‘What weapons are we taking in?’ Doc asked.

‘AKs and suppressed Glocks,’ Smart said, looking at McGregor, who nodded confirmation.

‘I’ve also got half a dozen concussion grenades and a dozen frags, plus night-vision glasses, comms units and a block of C4. Everything Mr Gray asked for. I’ve even got a little surprise for you.’

‘What’s that?’

‘If I tell you, it won’t be a surprise.’ McGregor tutted.

‘On the way into town,’ Gray continued, ‘we’ll set up the Sentinels along this route. Doc, you’ve used them before, right?’

‘A couple of times.’

‘Good. There’s an alleyway here. I want you to remain there and control the Sentinels to cover our retreat.’

‘That’ll leave us a man short,’ Sonny pointed out.

‘I know, but it’s not easy to control these things when you’re running for your life. It’ll only take four of us to go in and get Andrew. Two to carry him, if need be, the other two to provide cover.’

Gray showed them overheads of the police station where they believed Harvey was being held captive. ‘We don’t have schematics, only word that the building contains holding cells. So when we get inside we’ll have to do our best to locate him. Once he’s found, we make our way back out the same way and rendezvous with Mac at the drop-off point.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ Smart said.

‘Yeah,’ Sonny added. ‘What could possibly go wrong?’

They all ignored the rhetorical question, knowing that plenty could send the plan sideways before they even landed in Tagrilistan.

All heads turned to the entrance as a truck pulled up. A man wearing jeans and white shirt climbed out of the cab, dark glasses on despite the sun having disappeared a couple of hours earlier.

Gray watched McGregor go out to meet him, and noticed the man wasn’t exactly enamoured with having an audience. McGregor spoke to the man quietly, and his words seemed to have a calming effect.

Their host walked back inside the hangar and asked a couple of the men to help unload the vehicle. They happily obliged, and within a couple of minutes the boxes were stacked on the floor and the truck drove off into the night.

‘Let’s see what we’ve got,’ McGregor said, using a screwdriver to prise open the largest box. Inside were five AK-47s.

Gray took one and examined it. ‘Looks pretty new,’ he said as he stripped it down to check for dirt.

‘Marek only delivers the best,’ McGregor said.

The rest of the boxes were opened one by one, until their armoury was accounted for.

‘Here’s your little surprise,’ McGregor said, holding a box of 9mm ammunition. ‘For the Glocks I got ya.’

‘What the hell are these?’ Smart asked, examining the strange-looking rounds. The bullet itself was hollow with a copper jacket. It looked like someone had taken a thin blade and cut through the head four times, creating eight pointed prongs and a crown resembling the teeth of a saw.

‘G2R RIP rounds,’ McGregor said, turning a cartridge in his hand. ‘Stands for “radically invasive projectile”. See these little strips of copper? They shear off when the bullet strikes the target. The rest of the slug continues on like a normal round, but these fly off in eight different directions and give someone a really bad day. Hit someone in the centre of the chest and you damage the heart, lungs, liver, stomach, spleen – you name it.’

‘Sounds like major stopping power.’

‘It’ll turn people to mincemeat,’ McGregor said. ‘Speaking of which, I’ll go and get some food in. You guys clean those weapons and we’ll test them first thing in the morning.’

Chapter 20

24 January 2016

Veronica Ellis looked out on the main office and saw a sea of empty desks. A light illuminated a corner of the room, where Thompson was predictably working late into the night.

Ellis turned off her laptop and secured it in her bag, then locked her office door and went over to see how her temporary section lead was getting on with the latest search. Following Harvey’s disappearance, it hadn’t taken long for the paperwork confirming Thompson’s temporary reassignment to Five to go through, and her experience made her the ideal choice to take over the reins from Solomon.

‘Still nothing on the inbound flights,’ Thompson said.

Ellis knew that if Bessonov had sent his entire kill squad home, there was bound to be someone to replace them. Either that, or he’d decided to cancel the assassination attempt, which she didn’t consider likely.

‘Maybe you should expand the search to all flights from the East, not just Russia.’

‘I already did that,’ Thompson said. She sat back in her chair and ran her hands through her long blonde hair. ‘Any news from Gray?’

‘Nothing yet. They only landed a couple of hours ago, so give them time to get ready for the mission. Don’t worry, Tom knows what he’s doing.’

Thompson offered a weak smile. ‘I know, I’ve seen him in action. It’s different, though, with Andrew the one being held prisoner.’

Ellis felt the same. It was hard to stay detached when someone close was in danger.

‘How’s Hamad?’ Thompson asked.

‘Stable, the last I heard. I’ll be going to see him tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll get to talk to him this time.’ Ellis put a hand on Thompson’s shoulder. ‘Don’t stay too long. You need your sleep.’

She left the office, swiping her card at the door. It had been another long day, and further attempts to reach a diplomatic resolution had proven pointless, leaving Harvey’s fate in Tom Gray’s hands.

Richard Notley pulled off the country road and opened the gate to the field, then got back in the car and drove through, parking behind the tall hedge.

As with every journey he made in his car, he’d done his checks before setting off. Nothing under the hood and no tracking devices secured beneath the car. Still, he rolled the window down a couple of inches and waited for ten minutes.

Not a single vehicle passed his hiding place. Satisfied that he hadn’t been followed or tracked, he got out of the driver’s seat and climbed in the back, where his bag waited. He carefully took out the small device and laid it on the seat, then found the tube containing the detonator. It wasn’t the most sophisticated bomb ever conceived, but tonight he would discover if it was enough to achieve his aims.

The small roasting tin had been filled with gunpowder taken from the fireworks he’d purchased at the end of October, just before Bonfire Night. He’d also added some screws, then used a soldering kit to weld a small metal plate over the contents, creating an improvised Claymore mine. On this test unit he’d forgone the hooks that would allow him to thread a string through and hang the device around his neck. If tonight were a success, it would be the last adjustment to make on the one remaining bomb, which remained safely stashed in his garage in a hole dug under a loose flagstone.

Notley put the detonator in his pocket, then carried the device and the bag into the night, sticking close to the hedge that ran away from the road. He took his time, with only the faint moonlight to guide his way. When he reached the far corner of the field, he climbed over a stile and into the next field, where a tree stood proud but naked, its leaves shed months earlier.

Marian had loved this place. He recalled how they used to picnic here during the summers, enjoying sandwiches and a bottle of wine before lying back and savouring the peace and quiet, far away from the bustling capital.

They’d planned to move out here once they retired. Get a little place of their own, perhaps grow vegetables and have a few chickens and goats roaming around.

That plan had been destroyed the day she’d been stolen from him.

Notley cleared away the image and concentrated on the job in hand. He placed the bomb at the base of the tree, then removed the detonator from its tube. Wires trailed from one end, attached to a small circuit board. He stuck the other end into the hole in the side of the casing, then took the watermelon from the bag and placed it on the ground ten feet in front of the tree.

Once he was happy with the angle, he walked back to the hedge and climbed over the stile once more, then took the phone from his pocket and turned it on. Turning it off earlier had been a necessary precaution to avoid blowing himself up as he prepared the test.

He listened once more for sounds of anyone in the area, but heard nothing but a few night creatures in search of food or love.

Notley found the preset number and hit the Call button.

He’d expected a loud bang, but not one that shattered the night. Seconds after detonation, he could still hear the echo reverberating around the valley below. Conscious that someone must have heard it, he quickly jumped into the next field and checked the scene.

The device was nothing but a lump of twisted metal, and a huge black scar adorned the tree where the bomb had been sitting. Screws embedded in the bark glinted as he examined the scene more closely. There was now little doubt that when he wore the other device around his neck and detonated it, he would not survive the blast.

That no longer mattered.

The good news was that the melon hadn’t fared any better. It lay in a dozen pieces, ripped apart by the explosion and home-made shrapnel.

Notley quickly gathered as much of the evidence as he could and stuffed it back in the bag, then jogged back towards the car. A vehicle’s headlights crested the hill a few hundred yards away, causing him to freeze in fear. Notley threw himself to the ground and watched the two white discs approach him.

Was it the police? Had they tailed him here, and were now closing in to catch him in the act?

The vehicle was nearing the gate, but instead of stopping, it maintained its speed and he watched its red tail lights disappear around the corner.

For the next few seconds, the only sound he could hear was the pulse pounding inside his skull. He forced himself to his feet and got back to the car as quickly as he could. After throwing the bag onto the back seat, he opened the gate and got behind the wheel. There was no sign of any traffic as he pulled out of the field and back onto the road, and he kept his foot to the floor, putting as much distance between himself and the blast site as quickly as possible.

Notley came to a main road a few minutes later, and he eased off the accelerator to stay under the speed limit.

Adrenalin continued to course through his body, though he felt a little calmer now that he was heading home. All he had to do was dump the bag somewhere. Then he could relax completely.

The test had gone better than expected, and only a few days remained before he would take his remaining device and give Marian the justice she deserved.

The sun was offering up its last rays when Ivan Zhabin walked into Ezeiza International Airport, carrying only a holdall containing two changes of clothes and a bag of toiletries.

He’d spent the fifteen-mile journey from his apartment on the outskirts of Buenos Aires on his phone, studying overheads of London. It gave him a starting point, but he wouldn’t be able to get a proper feel for the location until he was on the ground, and able to walk around and see the buildings up close. Despite the advances in online map technology, he couldn’t get a true sense of the angles, even using Google Street View.

At the check-in desk, he produced a German passport in the name of Alec Stutz. It was one of five identities he used, each belonging to a different nationality. Apart from his native Russian, he also spoke fluent German, along with Spanish, French and English. Languages had come easily to him as a child, and even now, in his late forties, he was expanding into Mandarin Chinese and Arabic.

After collecting his boarding pass, Zhabin was forced to suffer the boredom of airport security. Fifteen minutes later, he was browsing the duty-free shops, and a paperback about an American sniper caught his eye. It was a book he’d read the previous year, its military aspect mirroring his own experience, decades earlier.

Zhabin had been a wiry seventeen-year-old when he’d been shipped out to Afghanistan towards the end of the Soviet war. For one so young and inexperienced to be assigned to a Spetsnaz unit would have been unheard of if it hadn’t been for the remarkable skills he’d shown with a rifle during basic training. After excelling with the standard AK-47, he’d been introduced to the VSS Vintorez, or ‘thread cutter’. Grouping five rounds in a one-inch target had been a piece of cake, even at the outside of the rifle’s effective firing range of four hundred yards. When tested with a Dragunov SVD, which had double the range, he’d managed to maintain his accuracy. Eventual progression to the KSVK 2.7, with a maximum range of two thousand yards, had seen him break numerous army records.

Zhabin vividly remembered his first kill, in the Panjshir Valley. It had been in 1985, when through a heat haze he’d watched five armed members of the Mujahideen snake their way through a mountain pass. He’d been on forward lookout, alongside a surly sergeant who’d made his dislike for the rookie well known.

Zhabin had tried to explain that it wasn’t his fault he’d been parachuted into the Special Forces while everyone else had been forced to undergo months of specialised training, but his words fell on deaf ears. He’d soon realised that the only way to win the team’s trust was to show his worth in combat, and that day on the ridge gave him the opportunity.

While the sergeant called in the enemy location and requested air support, Zhabin had picked the first of his targets: a bearded man with an American-supplied FIM-92 Stinger thrown over his shoulder. The shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile had been responsible for bringing down more than two hundred helicopter gunships in the preceding six years. Zhabin’s job was to take it out of the fight before it added another chopper to the list.

He’d calculated the range at seventeen hundred yards, adjusted for the slight breeze, and let loose his first round of the war. For a second nothing happened, until the bullet reached its target.

Zhabin’s armour-piercing round penetrated the tube and struck the explosive warhead, vaporising the man carrying it. Before his companions could understand what had happened, another had fallen to a headshot, with a third struck in the chest as he dived for cover. The remaining pair had gone to ground by this time, only to be mopped up by a pair of MIL Mi-24 choppers a few minutes later.

The sergeant had grudgingly conceded that it had been a fine display of marksmanship, but Zhabin hadn’t been looking for accolades. As long as they accepted him into the unit, he’d known that they would watch his back.

The war hadn’t been about a glorious Soviet victory. Not for Zhabin, at least. He’d seen it as a legitimate way to hone his natural talent, which would one day see him earn more than $100,000 per kill.

The boarding announcement brought Zhabin back to the present, and he made his way to the gate. A blonde woman sitting in the departure lounge smiled as he walked past, clearly attracted to the lithe six-footer with the chiselled jaw and designer stubble. But Zhabin only had business on his mind.

Besides, she wasn’t his type. He preferred brunettes, and the younger the better. Not illegal-young, but well before gravity and the ravages of time had a chance to ruin their bodies. There’d been many such women in his life, but he’d never been in a proper relationship with any of them.

He ignored the woman’s gaze and took a seat a few rows away from her, then sat back and closed his eyes as he waited for his row to be called. The blonde’s attention had stirred something in him, and his mind drifted back, as it often did, to his first sexual encounter.

It had been a few days after his first kill in Afghanistan, and the patrol had been tasked with clearing a small village suspected of housing Mujahideen fighters. They’d met no resistance, and only found two men capable of fighting, along with a dozen others of varying age. There was nothing to suggest they were anything than goat herders – no weapons or communication equipment – but that hadn’t stopped his sergeant. He’d summarily executed the men and had his team round up everyone else.