Flying the Storm (25 page)

Aiden was pushing oil around on his plate with a sodden piece of bread, lost in thought.
Maybe mercenary work was just the best way to make money with an aircraft. It was a conclusion he had been trying to avoid, ever since he’d seen hiring posters pinned to the noticeboard at Pivdenna docks months before. Looking for pilots, gunners, engineers and aircraft owners to join the Black Sea Corps, effectively an air force-for-hire, specialising in shipping protection and feud resolution. At best, it was morally dubious, but as Aiden had passed the sign countless times after barely scraping even, it had become more and more attractive.

It wasn’t long after that the
Gilgamesh
rolled in like an angry thundercloud over the Crimea, and violently put an end to such ventures. With it hanging in the sky above, there was suddenly no such thing as small-time piracy. By controlling the Crimea, it controlled the Black Sea. Its reach was long.

“What would be expected of me?” asked Aiden.

“To protect the caravan, of course. Vehicle maintenance while on the road, peace-keeping between the various private merchants. If you have the right skills, scouting ahead of the convoy. It might sound like a lot, but if you watch my men you won’t see too much activity. I pay them so that they are there when they are needed. Other than that, I only ask that they stay alert.”

It was sounding like a better and better deal. It would mean giving up flying, though.
Maybe even selling his half of the
Iolaire
. Not only that, but Fredrick and him were close friends now. It’d be hard to break that up.

“I don’t suppose you’d have much use for a crewed mercantile aircraft?” ventured Aiden hopefully. “We’re a little out of work at the moment. Prefer to stay away f
rom the Black Sea if possible.”

Malkasar laughed heartily at that. “I won’t ask why you’d rather stay away,” he said, still chuckling, “but I will think on it. Nothing springs to mind immediately
though, so don’t count on it.”

Ileana
had been sitting watching the exchange. Finished eating, she stood up brusquely and climbed back into the wagon. Aiden watched her go.

“Any other children?” he asked.

“I mentioned my son, he owns a merchant ship on the Black Sea. He is the eldest, obviously. Ileana is with me because she wants to learn the trade. There are no others that I am aware of.” Malkasar snorted quietly. “My wife lives in Bucharest. I keep her rich and fat, and she leaves me alone. It is a good arrangement.”

Aiden smiled at that. Malkasar seemed to find favourable deals in all walks of life.
Aiden sensed he could learn a lot from the old man.

They sat in amiable silence for a few moments, before
Ileana opened the door to the wagon and spoke to her father in a language Aiden didn’t understand. Malkasar replied and waved her back into the cab.

“Good,” he said. “The scouts have reported in. No obstacles, the way into the hills is clear.
A two-hour haul and we’ll stop for the night.”

Malkasar stood and a helper thus far unseen came to clear away the table. The merchant turned to his followers and shouted. “We leave in five minutes! Be ready or
be left behind!”

People all around the semi-circle of vehicles stood and stretched, stubb
ed out cigarettes and quickly finished meals. Doors and bonnets slammed, engines started. The smell of ‘nol filled the air. The lead vehicle, a four-by-four carrying a trio of caravan guards, left the semi-circle first and took its position on the crumbling highway. It had a heavy machine gun mounted on a ring on its roof, manned by one of the guards. He lifted the lid of his ammo box, seemed satisfied with what he saw, and cranked a round into the chamber.

To Aiden, standing in the middle of it all, it didn’t feel like a trading caravan preparing to move. It felt like they were going into battle.

Elias was watching the man across the fire closely. He knew he had understood the proposition. These men, though they spoke a strange mix of Georgian and Armenian, still seemed to understand both well. The man grunted finally, and looked at the other
two chieftains gathered around the fire. They nodded back.

“Why don’t we just kill him and take it?” demanded a voice behind the flames
, one of the tribesmen. Some of the others grumbled agreement.

Maybe they hadn’t understood it after all. Elias smiled and spoke as if teaching a small child. “Because then, you will have no gold. I have little of value on my person, but the man in that convoy is worth very much. You need me, because without me, he is worthless. I will pay you a share of the bounty, and you can keep anything you find in the convoy.”

“That convoy is big,” said the first chieftain. “We do not normally raid the big ones. There is too much risk, too many guns. There will be deaths.”

Elias used his best shocked expression.
“But you are the Guns of Kazreti!” He looked at the other chieftains. “The Marked Men, and the Ravagers of Kvemo Bolnisi! What is a single convoy to you? Are you
afraid
?”

The chieftains bristled at this. “We are not afraid,” growled one of them. “The Guns of Kazreti will take this convoy, even without these
milk-drinking cowards.” He gestured at the other chieftains. There was laughter and shouting from the tribesmen in the shadows.

Elias
knew he was winning. The other chieftains swiftly declared their agreement to Elias’ proposal.

Elias stood then, waving the tribesmen quiet. “Then we must leave soo
n, to get ahead of the convoy!”

“
Just like all the other convoys, they do not travel by night - my scouts report,” said the chieftain of the Guns. “The convoy will be more vulnerable in the day. At night, they pull into a ring and put guards out. We must take them while they are on the move, strung out in a line.”

Elias nodded. He, of course, knew this. Sometimes though, it was necessary to let people reach the correct conclusion on their own.
The highway through the hills was slow going, he knew. Night-time travel was dangerous and even slower, so most convoys would stop. These bandits knew the back roads in the hills and would have little trouble getting ahead of the convoy. Then it was just a matter of timing and violence.

As for Elias, he could take a back seat and spectate for the most part. Of course, he’d have to make sure that nobody killed the Scot. That might be troublesome. He would have to stress that point to the chieftains. The westerner
had
to be taken alive.

He left the fireside and the arguments of the tribesmen, returning to his vehicle. The
flatbed’s load of chickens had been useful for buying his way into an audience with the hill tribes, but he was sure the smell was lingering in his clothes. Certainly, the previous owner’s blood would have been easier to get out of the seats.

Devrim was sitting in the passenger seat as Elias climbed in. The battered Azeri had somehow survived the ordeal at Ashtarak,
when not one of the
Gilgamesh
’s men had, cowering in a hole by the roadside as the morning went from bad to worse. If Elias was honest, he wasn’t sure why he was keeping the man around. In his state, with cracked ribs and a severely swollen face, he wasn’t much use to anybody. It might have been a mercy if Elias had put a bullet in his skull at the old fortress, but he found he was getting used to having the wretch around. Funny, Elias didn’t normally like company.

“What did they say?” asked Devrim
.

“Exactly what I wanted them to say,” replied Elias.

Devrim nodded, his fluid-impaired gaze returning to the darkness outside the truck. Then, the shouts and laughter getting louder, the first engines ignited. Headlights flicked on and shadowy figures climbed aboard their vehicles. A few shots cracked up into the night sky.

The hill tribes were moving out.

Aiden slept well that night, oddly.
No dreams plagued him in his bed atop the crates, and the night was quiet. The convoy vehicles had pulled into a circle across the eight lanes of the old military highway, the guards had drawn lots for sentry duty and the rest had slept.

In the cool light of the morning, Malkasar had emerged from his cab
, roused the caravan with shouts and curses, and the morning rituals had begun. Within twenty minutes, the convoy was formed up and ready to move, the scouts having left some time before. With a wet growl of engines, it moved off.

Aiden came forward to the cab of the wagon, taking a seat behind Malkasar and
Ileana. Malkasar’s big armoured wagon was the lead mercantile vehicle of the convoy, so Aiden had a good view of the road ahead. The radio on the console crackled with a man’s voice and Malkasar replied into the mouthpiece.

“The scouts tell us to stick to the inside lane here,” he said to Aiden. “There is unexplode
d ordnance in the other lanes.”

Aiden nodded. Th
e road was treacherous, right enough. He wondered how much ordnance the wooded slopes of the hills hid. Lots, probably, even though the road had been the focal point for the fighting.

And so the morning wore on. The convoy
trundled past a couple of nameless villages, inhabited by people trying to scrape a living from the ravaged land. Some fled indoors as the vehicles approached, but others stood and watched sullenly. Malkasar waved from the cab to show them no ill will, but few returned the gesture.

“Gloomy bastards,” grumbled the old merchant. Aiden had to agree.

After a time, the radio crackled again. It was a different voice this time. Malkasar took the mouthpiece and craned to look out of the right hand window of the cab. Ileana and Aiden followed his gaze.

There, on the ridg
e high to the right of the road was a vehicle. It looked like a small all-terrain buggy, silhouetted by the sun. The occupant was clearly visible, sitting watching them pass. Malkasar replied to the radio call.

He returned his eyes to the road, and spoke to the pair in the cab. “That was the
tail guards. They spotted the car on the hill. I have told them to be alert, and to watch for more.”

Ileana
looked at her father. They shared a silent communication that Aiden couldn’t read. Neither looked happy. Aiden became uneasy, turning to look out at the vehicle on the ridge.

Except it wasn’t there anymore.

“It’s gone,” he said.

Malkasar just
nodded, as if he had expected that. Ileana left her seat and disappeared into the back of the cab. Aiden could hear her clanking away at something heavy.

“Do you still have that pistol?” asked Malkasar. Aid
en’s unease reached a new high.

“Yes,” he replied
.

“Good,” said the old man. “Keep it close.”

“Mind if I ask why?”

The old merchant sighed. “Just
a precaution,” he said. “It is unlikely that there will be an attack, but if there is, you should be ready.”

“Bandits?”

“Yes.” 

More violence.
Just what Aiden needed. He slid the pistol from his pocket and checked the magazine. It was full, and he had a handful of loose rounds in his pocket. It still didn’t feel like much.

“Do you have weapons in the wagon?”

Malkasar actually smiled at this. “Oh yes,” he said.

Ileana
returned then with a pair of vicious looking shotguns, sitting one on the dashboard in front of her father. Then she stabbed at a button on the console, which popped open a cup holder. Into this she poured a box of shotgun cartridges.

“Not bad,” sa
id Aiden.

“Oh, that isn’t all.
Ileana, introduce him to
Balaur
.”

Ileana
stood up again, grinning, and showed Aiden to the rear of the cab. She pulled a folding ladder down from the wall and opened a hatch in the vehicle’s thick roof. She motioned for him to climb the ladder. Hesitantly, Aiden did as she wanted.

On top of the wagon’s cab, mounted to a heavy ring, was a
big, fat gun. It looked home-made almost; at least, it was visibly built from pieces of other weapons. Its barrel was only about half a metre long, but it was as wide as his fist. A simple breech-loading mechanism formed the back of the gun, and the handle was the grip of an old assault rifle. There was no obvious way to aim it.

The wind was rushing past Aiden’s head, so he didn’t hear
Ileana tell him to load the weapon. Instead he felt a very heavy, metal weight pushed into his hand. It was a shell, made of beaten brass, with a plastic folded mouth that would presumably open to release the shot, just like a shotgun cartridge. He prised the plastic open a little and saw that its load was an assortment of nuts, bolts and other metal detritus. Brutal. The shell had to be at least seventy millimetres in diameter.

He felt a tug at his leg.
Ileana pointed to the shell and the breech. Aiden took her meaning, and looked for a way to open the cannon. A chunky latch looked right, so he flipped it open and the breech door swung ajar. The shell slid in easily; in fact it was a little loose. Aiden swung the door shut, which sealed around the proud lip at the base of the shell, and closed the latch. Ileana gave him a thumbs-up. He climbed down from the hatch.

“Bloody hell,” was all he
said as he returned to the cab.

Malkasar snorted. “You like
Balaur
?”

“Like maybe isn’t the right word,” said Aiden.
Am terrified of
would be more accurate. It looked like a death-trap.

“I find it is a powerful dissuader,” said Malkasar. “One shot from
Balaur
is usually enough to break a raid. It will disable a car and all of its occupants in a single shot.”

O
f that, Aiden had little doubt. He dreaded to think of the mess it left.

The convoy kept moving, its speed constant despite the sighting of the car on the hill. Aiden wondered if the other merchants in the caravan were even aware of the threat. Maybe Malkasar th
ought it best to keep it quiet.

The hills were getting taller and wilder looking. The ground was becoming
surely too steep for farming of any kind, though every so often they passed the ruins of a house or homestead. It seemed like nobody had yet moved back into this area. Nobody visible, anyway. The forest that grew thick on the slopes could have concealed many people, if they had wanted to hide. As far as bandit country went, this was looking pretty ideal.

Gradually, the forest was thinning as the road climbed.
Malkasar told Aiden that they would soon reach the highest point of the highway, from where the descent to the plains around Tbilisi would begin. The ridges to either side were getting closer, until only a shallow slope of maybe two hundred metres was all that separated ridge and road, scattered with boulders and the odd gnarled tree. The ground was very dry here. Dust dominated grass.

Then, from a side track hidden by boulders, a heavy four-by-four came hurtling out. In a second it had crossed the highway and smashed into the slow-moving lead vehicle. The truck with the three caravan guards barrelled sideways, pinned to the central barrier by the big raider. A hatch was thrown open and a bandit stood out, a machinegun in hand. He opened fire on the crumpled cab of the lead truck, shredding the occupants mercilessly with a long burst.
Blood and glass flew from the cab.

Malkasar was braking hard.
Ileana was leaning from her window, shotgun levelled at the bandit vehicle. She fired once, racked in another shell, and fired again. The shot was long, but some of it caught the bandit in the shoulder, doubling him over the hatch with a little spray of scarlet. She fired again and again, and the bandit slumped back into the vehicle.

Malkasar had changed his mind. He revved the engine and drove straight at the raider. Dozens of ton
nes of armoured mercantile wagon hit the bandit vehicle at speed, crumpling it and bouncing it across the highway. Ileana kept firing at its cab. The windows shattered and the bandits inside were filled with balls of lead shot. She ducked back in to the wagon, her magazine empty and barrel smoking.

Only then, did Aiden think to draw his own pistol.
Ileana was calmly pushing cartridges into her shotgun. She’d done this before.

“All convoy vehicles, keep moving!” Malkasar shouted into the radio. “Don’t
let the bastards bog us down!”

Aiden could hear gunshots ringing out behind the wagon. More raiders were descending on the convoy.
The steady thumping of the tail guards’ heavy machinegun cut through it all. Bullets started to hit the armoured skin. They sounded like hammer strikes, ringing and pealing the steel like a bell. Aiden flinched every time. Surely one would get through.

On the dashboard in front of him,
Malkasar’s radio was alive with shouts and calls. It seemed like every driver in the convoy was yelling about something, and over it all was the screaming of engines and the bark of gunfire. They were running as fast as they could go, but the raiders were keeping up easily.

Were they supposed to drive all the way to Tbilisi like this?
It couldn’t continue. It just couldn’t. And the caravan guards in the lead car? What about them? Were they just to be left to the bandits? They were almost certainly dead, but the thought of leaving the bodies behind troubled Aiden.

“W
hat’s the plan?” shouted Aiden.

“The scouts will get back to us soon!” replied Malkasar, squinting at the road ahead. “Th
ey will drive off the raiders!”

Aiden looked in the wing mirror. There were a lot of vehicles harassing the convoy, at least eight or nine. They were driving along side, weaving and shooting. One or two had pulled right up next to the convoy vehicles, so that bandits could jump aboard.
If Malkasar believed that a couple of car loads of guards could scare them off, Aiden thought he was very much mistaken.

He leaned forward, looking out of
Ileana’s window while she reloaded. As he peeked out, a big, fast looking raider pulled up alongside the wagon. Its open back showed three bandits, one of whom pointed at Aiden and yelled into the cab.

The other bandits fumbled with their weapons.
Aiden’s pistol came up. He fired a quick volley of shots into the back of the car, watching as two of the bandits jumped and twitched as they were hit. He could hear them screaming even over the din of the battling vehicles.

The third bandit threw himself to the floor, his sub-machinegun ripping out a wild burst
that rang from the cab’s armour; though one shot missed Aiden’s head by a hair, ricocheted from the ceiling and smashed into Malkasar’s toughened window.

Aiden kept shooting, but at the
raider’s cab this time. His bullets pierced the thin steel and caused the driver to swerve violently, careering the vehicle off of the highway and into the rocky ground beside it. It smashed to a halt, its axle broken by a boulder. Aiden watched as it shrank away behind them.

Ileana
looked out then. “Very good!” she said, seeing the broken raider.

Aiden’s heart was thumping in his chest. He felt good. He wasn’t thinking about
who he’d just killed, or why; all he felt was alive. Very alive.

“Are you sure you don’t want a job
,
Jura
?” shouted Malkasar, a slight smile touching his face despite it all.

Aiden laughed.
“No, friend, I think I’ll pass.”

“Father, should we use
Balaur
?” asked Ileana.

“Yes I think we should.” He nodded at Aiden. “You use it
. You are a gunner, after all!”

Aiden looked from Malkasar to
Ileana. The girl was grinning slyly at him. “I will help you load it,
Jura
,” she said.

Aiden sat for a moment, trying to think of an excuse. His mind was blank.
Who else could do it? Malkasar was driving, and he didn’t want to think of the cannon exploding in Ileana’s face. She was still young, and no matter how much grime she covered herself with, it wouldn’t protect her. He would do it. He nodded to the old merchant and clambered through to the back of the cab again.

With his head and shoulders clear of the hatch, the sound of the raid was much louder.
One of the private merchant trucks swerved suddenly out of line, a bandit fighting with the driver in the cab, before jackknifing and toppling onto its side, spilling crates and barrels across the four lanes of highway. The following vehicles ploughed straight through, heedless. The gunfire had intensified.

Aiden grasped the pistol grip of the
Balaur
, and cranked a lever that looked like a cocking handle. He mashed the catch labelled “SAFETY” with his thumb, and eyed along the length of the stumpy barrel. Dragging the gun around on its oily track, he chose the raider vehicle closest to him and started to squeeze the trigger. He screwed up his face and squinted his eyes, shying away from what he half-expected to be a misfire.