Gray Salvation (13 page)

A young girl, barely sixteen, had been discovered hiding in a locked cupboard in one of the ruined houses. Zhabin had been called in from his position on a mountainside overlooking the buildings, and after a thirty-minute hike to the village, the sergeant had handed her to him with a wicked grin.

‘Time to lose your cherry.’

Noticing Zhabin’s initial hesitance, his sergeant had drawn his knife and slashed the girl’s clothing, then stripped her naked. To Zhabin, she’d looked exactly as he’d imagined a woman to look. He’d looked up at his sergeant.

‘Quick, cherry, take her inside before your pants explode!’

Ignoring the jibes of the other soldiers, Zhabin dragged the girl into one of the houses, the hoots of laughter muted as he slammed the door shut and pushed her towards a bed, watching her hungrily as he fumbled at his clothing. He was naked in seconds and advanced on her, pushing her onto her back and forcing her legs apart. It might have been his first time, but he’d seen enough videos to know where everything went, and he pushed himself inside her, ignoring her cries. As he rode her, she clenched her eyes shut, her face turned to the side. It was only when he was close to climaxing that she turned to look at him. The raw hatred in her brown eyes was something he’d never forget.

That wasn’t how it was meant to be. Nothing in the porn he’d seen had conveyed such a message, and he hated her for spoiling what was, for him, a special moment. His hands had gone to her throat, squeezing as he shouted at her in Russian to take it back, but the girl obviously didn’t understand or was refusing to do so.

Zhabin had kept up the pressure on her windpipe, and it was only when the life had been drained from her that the hatred vanished. With it had come the most glorious explosion from the pit of his stomach, enough to make him see stars.

Around him now, passengers had begun walking to the departure gate. Zhabin realised he’d missed the announcement for his row. He hurried to join them, and promised himself that, although the trip to London was purely business, he’d find time to add a little pleasure.

Chapter 21

25 January 2016

Tom Gray sent another three-round burst downrange and waited for Sonny to call out the result.

‘Still a couple of inches to the right.’

Gray made a small adjustment and tried again. This time he was rewarded with the thumbs-up.

With each man having zeroed their rifles and handguns, Gray set about putting Doc through his paces with the Sentinels. He set up four units and had Doc toggle between them to pick his targets.

‘One, double tap!’

A second later, two rounds left the machine, scored chest shots in the improvised cardboard cut-outs.

‘Three, single shot!’

It took Doc a few seconds to switch screens and adjust his aim, but he managed to get a round through the middle of a crudely drawn head.

Gray called out a dozen more commands, until Doc was able to go from one Sentinel to the next in under two seconds.

‘Not bad for a nurse.’ Sonny smiled.

‘Ignore him,’ Smart said. ‘He’s just jealous.’

‘Len’s right,’ Gray added. ‘That was good work. After we’ve had a bite to eat, we’ll give it another go.’

McGregor had provided a picnic of breads and cold meats, as well as an icebox full of water and soft drinks. Gray made a sandwich and looked around, seeing nothing for miles in any direction. The entire area was flat, with just a few clumps of trees breaking up the horizon. The ideal place to get to know their weapons without interruption.

‘So who’s this Harvey guy?’ Doc asked. ‘I mean, I know he’s a friend, but what’s his story?’

Smart swallowed a mouthful of cold sausage. ‘Remember a few years ago, when Tom was holed up in that building for a few days?’

‘Who could forget?’

‘Well, Andrew was the one sent to talk him down.’

‘Seriously?’

‘That’s when I first met him,’ Gray said, ‘but later on, after I’d been living in the Philippines for some months, I was taken hostage by militants in the south. Sonny and Len came to get me, but on the way back there were elements of the government who wanted us all dead. Andrew stopped them. He saved our lives.’

‘But to be fair, he didn’t know who he was saving at the time,’ Sonny said. ‘Just that British citizens were in the firing line.’

‘After that, we became close friends with Andrew,’ Smart added. ‘We’ve even carried out a mission together, in Cuba.’

‘Andrew’s a good man,’ Gray said. ‘He’s one of the few I’d do this for.’

At Doc’s request, Gray spent the rest of the meal telling them about his time in the Philippines, and how Sonny and Len had come to mount their own rescue mission, only to become targets themselves.

‘Enough of the chit-chat,’ McGregor said, breaking up the party. ‘I need to get back soon. There’s still some maintenance work to be done on the chopper before we go.’

They packed away the food and Gray gave Doc another thirty minutes of practice on the Sentinels. Ideally, he would have liked another hour, but apart from McGregor’s concerns about time, they were getting low on ammunition. Of the two thousand rounds of 7.62 mm that McGregor had managed to get his hands on, a little more than a thousand remained. That gave them three thirty-round clips each for their assault rifles, plus a hundred for each Sentinel.

After gathering up the targets and spent cartridge cases, the team climbed into the van for the thirty-minute drive back to the airfield. Doc had his headphones on, listening to music, but the rest sat in silence, contemplating the battle ahead.

Tom Gray crept along the narrow street, keeping close to the wall. The night was one of the darkest he’d ever known, and even the night-vision goggles had trouble finding enough ambient light to illuminate the scene.

Behind him, Smart was checking the rooftops while Sonny kept an eye on the rear.

When he reached the building on the corner, he gazed out onto nothingness. They were on the outskirts of town, and where the man-made structures ended, a flat, endless expanse began.

Gray walked out into the black, his goggles now unable to even discern the horizon. Sonny and Smart followed, weapons seeking out targets that none of them could see.

Suddenly, the horizon appeared, the line between land and sky a single row of bright flashes.

‘Incoming!’

Gray heard the staccato retorts of distant rifles, and watched immobile as tracer rounds began walking a path towards him, each one throwing up spurts of dirt as the bullets chewed the ground in front of him.

Tat-tat-tat-tat!

Closer, closer, until the first of them reached the toe of his boot.

Tat-tat-tat-tat!

Gray woke with a jolt, though he couldn’t be sure he wasn’t still dreaming. The
tat-tat-tat
continued, no longer just a memory of a distant time.

‘Pissing down outside,’ McGregor said, as he stirred a cup of tea.

Gray realised that the sound was large drops of rain bouncing off the corrugated iron roof of the hangar, not enemy gunfire.

‘Bad dream?’

Gray looked up at the Scot. ‘A night patrol in Iraq,’ he said. ‘The village was supposed to be cleared and secure, but as we passed through we came across a company of Iraqi regulars. Thankfully they weren’t Republican Guard and couldn’t shoot straight to save their lives. A few rounds came close, but we put down cover fire, retreated and called in the A-10s.’

‘There’s nothing like shitty intel to fuck up a stroll in the badlands.’

Gray couldn’t agree more, and he knew that the mission they were about to undertake was based on best-guesses and shaky estimates of enemy numbers. The latest reports on the news had confirmed Ellis’s report: Russian heavy arms were leaving Tagrilistan, despite President Demidov’s insistence that there had never been any there in the first place. Whether they had all departed was the unknown factor.

If Ellis’s numbers were correct and they only faced four hundred armed civilians, their chances of pulling it off were high. If the Russians had decided to leave a battalion behind, the odds of success nose-dived.

His watch told Gray that it was nine in the evening, two hours before they were due to set off. He woke the other four and told them to grab a brew, then get their gear ready.

As with the ride back from target practice earlier that morning, final preparations were done with minimal conversation. All thoughts were turned to the next few hours, during which time lives would be lost. Only by focusing could they increase the chances of not being included in that number. Even the normally cheerful Sonny was going about the job of securing his gear in silence.

Gray had nothing but Melissa on his mind. He began to doubt the wisdom of his decision to take part in this rescue attempt, but it was too late now. He was committed, and all he could do was pray that the information Ellis had supplied was close to accurate.

If it weren’t, Melissa would likely grow up without the father she needed.

The sound of a motor broke into Gray’s thoughts, and he looked towards the hangar entrance to see McGregor backing a small vehicle into the bay. He nudged it up to the nose of the helicopter, then climbed out and secured a metal arm from the back of the tow tractor to the wheeled platform the bird was sitting on.

‘Stand clear while I take her out,’ McGregor said, climbing back onto the compact machine. He slowly pulled the chopper out of the hangar and into the driving rain, then disengaged the tug and drove it out of the way. He then hit a button to lower the platform and rolled it back into the bay.

‘Grab your gear,’ McGregor shouted as he climbed into the pilot’s seat.

Gray picked up his rifle and led the others out to their transport, a single line of figures dressed entirely in black. McGregor already had the engine cycling up, and the rotors on the tail and overhead began rotating, slowly at first, then faster as the mechanism got up to speed.

Gray climbed in the back and strapped himself into the seat, then put on a pair of headphones so that he could communicate with the pilot. Smart was the last aboard, and the skids left the tarmac the instant he slammed the door shut.

A gust of wind slammed into the chopper as it hovered above the pad, but McGregor expertly compensated and turned the nose ninety degrees, climbing quickly.

Within seconds, the ground was lost from sight, and Gray began to suffer from vertigo. With nothing to distinguish land from sky, up from down, his body couldn’t be sure of its own orientation. It was something he’d experienced before, and to compensate he pulled the night-vision goggles down from his forehead and powered them up. It took a second for the unit to spring to life, but Gray was then able to make out the landscape below. Fields crawled past a thousand feet beneath them, and a swelling river cut a lazy path through dense woodland.

Once his body readjusted to the surroundings, Gray flicked off the NVGs to conserve the battery, then closed his eyes to try and grab some sleep. The constant whine of the engine and hypnotic
thwack
of the rotor blades as they sliced through the air produced the soporific effect he needed to drift off.

What seemed like only seconds later, McGregor’s voice exploded in his headset: ‘Fifteen minutes out!’

Gray was instantly alert. The others were already carrying out their final checks, ensuring rounds were chambered in their rifles and handguns, and that their grenades and knives were secure. Gray went over his own gear one more time, then put his face against the window. The rain was still lashing the bird, but through the rivers obfuscating the glass he could still make out lights on the ground in the distance.

McGregor let the altitude bleed off, then warned his passengers that they had ten seconds to exit the bird once they hit dirt.

Gray powered on his night-sights and braced himself, one hand on the door handle while the other gripped his AK-47. When the aircraft touched down, it was with a gentle kiss, and Gray threw the door open and jumped to the ground. He ran twenty yards through slick mud and brought his rifle up, searching for any signs that their approach had been detected. As he’d hoped, the landscape was clear.

Seconds later, the downdraught blew rain sideways as McGregor took their transport a safe distance from the landing zone. Gray waited for silence to return, then gathered the men and checked his GPS to guide them in the right direction.

The rain and sodden ground made it heavy going, and they arrived at their first port of call twenty minutes behind schedule. Gray was the first to see the canopy covering the petrol pumps and the small shop adjacent. The station was based on the edge of Dubrany, one of those last-stop-for-a-hundred-miles places before civilisation gave way to endless taiga. He ordered the men to take a knee and scoped it out. As expected, there was no sign of life. It looked like the fuel station had been abandoned, but there was still a chance some petrol remained in the underground reservoirs. If not, it would be the most pitiful diversion in history.

Sonny and Smart stooped and ran forward, while the rest of the team covered them. Gray watched them check the shop for signs of life, and then run to the two fuel pumps. Sonny extracted the first of the shaped charges and fastened it to the base of the dispenser, while Smart mirrored his actions on the other pump. Seconds later they were on their way back.

‘We gave them an extra thirty minutes because of the conditions,’ Smart said. ‘We don’t want them to go off too early.’

‘Good thinking.’

Gray put Mark Howard on point and told him to set a decent pace. Normal walking pace was about three miles per hour, and they would need to manage at least double that to get to the kick-off point on time. The slippery conditions underfoot didn’t help, and Howard soon had them all blowing as they covered the first mile in just seven minutes. By that time their clothes were saturated, and wind chill brought the temperature down to well below zero.

Howard suddenly stopped and raised a hand, causing the rest of the team to freeze. Gray went up front to find out what was causing the hold-up.

‘Over there,’ Howard said, pointing towards the town. They were skirting it at a range of five hundred yards, far enough away to have the rain dampen the sound of their passage.

Gray saw a light coming from one of the buildings. ‘Looks like a fire,’ he noted. His goggles showed a couple of figures standing around it, obviously trying to stay warm. The idea that everyone would be asleep when they attacked had been more in hope than anything else, and Gray warned the men to expect more sentries along the way.

‘Let’s move further out,’ he told Howard.

The point man took them another two hundred yards from the nearest building before continuing to circumnavigate the town. It added a few minutes to the time, and Gray urged him to up the pace a little.

By the time they reached the insertion point, a few legs were suffering from the sapping march, but they’d made it a few minutes ahead of schedule. That gave them time to rub cramped calves and catch their breath.

They would be entering the town between two buildings, and for the first time they saw that a large chain-link fence stood in their way. It hadn’t shown up on the overhead satellite images, but a closer inspection showed that it wouldn’t be too much of a problem. The metal was rusty and there were several spots where it had pulled away from the supporting posts. Gray tugged at a corner and made a hole big enough for Smart to crawl through, then urged the others to follow. When the last man was through, he slipped into the gap and pulled the fence back into place as best he could.