Flying the Storm (6 page)

Tovmas looked at him suspiciously. Rifle reassembled, he de-cocked it with a click.
“My daughter?” he asked.

Fredrick nodded, taking another swig of his drink.

Tovmas set the rifle down, hesitating for a moment as he thought over the question.

“
She is very smart. She always was. You only ever had to show her something once, and she could do it better than you. I taught her as a child: taught her how to read and write, taught her English, how to cook, how to hunt, how to help the sick. But she overtook me when she was still young, you know? I’d been a soldier from the age of fourteen, until just a year before she was born. War does not teach you much that you would want your child to know.

“So, by the time she was twelve, she knew everything I could teach her.
I was thirty-seven, with the useful knowledge of a teenager. They had a name for it in the infantry.
Arrested Development
. The brass could see that it was going to be a problem when all these conscripts were finally discharged. We were only used to the company of men, entering middle-age with the social development of a fourteen-year-old.”

Fredrick snorted quietly.

“
They’d known about the problem for a long time. I mean, when a war lasts thirty years, it becomes everything that most people have ever known, myself included. They worried society wouldn’t remember how to function after so long. And they were right. Look what happened after the Armistice: the collapse of the Union, the breakup of the Asian Territorial Concord. World economies had come to rely on war, and they collapsed catastrophically. Whole countries dissolved into anarchy.” Tovmas began rolling his blanket up. “I tried to raise her free of it all. I failed.” He strapped the perfectly rolled blanket to his pack.

“You raised her on your own?”

Tovmas nodded. “Her mother died giving birth.”

“I’m sorry,” said Fredrick.

Tovmas shook his head. “I don’t need sympathy. It was a long time ago, now. She is twenty-one years old.”

Aiden
finished his rice. The three men sat, gazing at the lake and the mountains.

“What will you do, once you rescue her?”
Aiden asked finally.

“
I will make sure this can never happen again. To any Armenian. Somebody has to make us into a country once more. It’s the only way we can be strong enough.”

Night fell around them
as they sat in the mountain meadow. All chatter had stopped, but nobody slept. The militia’s fires died to embers slowly as the sky deepened above them, and the silver of the stars grew brighter. Then, when the night was at its deepest, Tovmas stood and gathered his men.

They kicked dust over their fires and moved off down the mountain, silent as shadows.

Tovmas rested his elbows on the cool rock and lift
ed the binoculars to his eyes.

He
guessed that there was still an hour until dawn, but the diffused light was enough to make out the long wall and squat towers of the old fortress. The foremost tower, built onto a sharp outcrop of rock, had the dim light of a dwindling campfire at its top, and in the flickering glow Tovmas could make out the hump of a sleeping sentry. The only entrance, a crumbling gap in the stonework, lay at the foot of that tower. The rest of the tenth-century wall was frustratingly intact and required the crossing of a wooded ravine to reach.

He reassured himself: t
his had to be the only sensible way to get into the fortress, since it was built atop a mountainous spur, approachable on only one side. Tovmas had considered climbing from the deep valley floor on the other side of the crag, having his men scale the rocky cliffs to come up behind the fortifications, but the danger of losing men to falling or to being caught out on the exposed rock faces did not appeal to him: the militia were hardly trained fighters, let alone mountaineers. Tovmas much preferred his current choice of perch which, on the rim of the hills overlooking the fortress crag, allowed him to see right into the raiders’ encampment.

Great gorges
yawned on either side of the fortress, the northern one rimmed with jagged cliff faces that peered across the vast ravine and over the Kakavaberd crag. Tovmas shifted his binoculars to the right, and squinted at the boulders lining the top of the cliffs. There he could see his rocket team setting up their throwaway tubes amongst the rocks. Neither of them had fired one before, but Tovmas had explained their operation as clearly as he could.

He hoped they’d make the few rockets they had count.
However, now that they were in position, he could move.

His legs protested as he stood up: the overnight hike down from the landing site had left him aching in places he’d forgotten he had. He sighed; he was getting too old for this.  

He took the radio the pilots had given him from his pocket, and pressing the transmit button he whispered in English, “We’re moving to the fortress now.”

“OK,
” the pilot murmured in Tovmas’ earphone.

Tovmas checked his rifle’s magazine and cocked the weapon, leaving the safety on. He
signalled to the rest of his men, the sixteen who were to attack with him, to follow as he clambered past the boulder and silently began moving down the hill. The group of militiamen stood up from their resting spots and spread out behind him, following as quietly as they could manage.

This, Tovmas
knew, was the most dangerous part of the plan. They had to cross three hundred metres of open ground, exposed on the grassy ridge leading out to the crag, in order to reach the wall. If they were caught out here, the casualties would be terrible.

His pulse quickened and the familiar thrill of anticipation
crept outwards from his stomach. The temptation to simply run to the wall was enormous; the steep downwards slope urged him on, and the nagging sense of exposure was getting hard to control. Tovmas knew he had to restrain himself, if not for his own sake but for that of the men following him. He stolidly continued his rapid and quiet walk, and if his pace quickened at all, it was impossible to tell. 

The grass beneath Tovmas’ feet was dry and it rustled
slightly as he walked. He cursed the dry weather. He could feel his heartbeat in his throat, and the rushing of blood in his ears was deafeningly loud. Surely, between the dry grass and his pounding pulse, the sentry would hear him?

H
is foot struck the loose pebbles of a patch of scree, and he froze as two or three of the small stones tumbled off down the slope, bouncing and clattering loudly. The men behind him froze as well, and some of the more experienced ones crouched with their weapons up and ready. Tovmas’ eyes flickered as they scanned the shadowy fortress wall ahead. By now it was within two hundred metres, but he could see no movement. The dim light of the campfire was obscured now as they had descended past the level of the tower. After a few tense seconds, he gingerly took a step back up the hill, off of the loose scree. Feeling with his feet, he eventually found a path around the stones. His men followed in single file.

The sky was getting worryingly light
, turning from purple to deep orange as they walked on. High, feathery cirrus clouds above him had turned salmon-pink as the sun’s rays touched them. Tovmas knew it was a matter of minutes before the sun would break over the Geghama Mountains to their rear, illuminating the crag and the fortress wall for all to see. He hoped desperately to be inside by then.

As they drew closer, the sentry’s tower on its outcrop
grew taller, and dread writhed in the pit of Tovmas’ stomach. It was so imposing, so sinisterly still that he couldn’t take his eyes off it, and at every step he expected to see the dark silhouette of the sentry’s head appear over the battlement, exposing them at their most vulnerable.

And yet it didn’t happen. No sentry appeared, and no alarm was raised. Tovmas and his sixteen men
had reached the foot of the tower’s outcrop, just a few metres from the tumbled-down gap in the wall. He shepherded his men into a file around the head of the ravine on one side of the outcrop, ready for the attack into the raider’s camp. The man at the front, a big man named Lernig, was braced against the stones, ready. Tovmas could see the big man’s face was steely, but his eyes were tellingly wide.

S
eeing that all were in place, Tovmas fished in his pocket for his torch. Praying silently, he flashed it three times in the direction of the rocket team. Then he tapped Lernig on the shoulder.

The big man hurled himself through the gap, and Tovmas and the rest of the men followed in twos and threes. Inside, they spread out and tucked themselves behind boulders and tumbled pieces of the wall, not moving more than a few metres from the gap. The interior of the fortress was
no more than a large grassy hill, littered with stones from long-gone buildings, intermingled here and there with the tents and lean-tos of the slavers. Tovmas knew from his recce that there was an anti-aircraft gun near the top of the hill and a makeshift landing site on the far side for the slavers’ aircraft. The rocket team was to target those first.

Still, nothing moved in the camp.
Tovmas sent one of the smaller men, Magar, to climb the ladder to the sentry tower. Another man covered the lip of the battlement with his rifle, should the sentry finally make an appearance.
So far, so good
, thought Tovmas. But where were the rockets?

Just as that thought crossed his mind
, there was a blinding magnesium flash and a ferocious boom at the top of the hill as a fiery plume of dirt and smoke exploded into the sky. The sentry, wakened by the explosion, threw himself against the battlement, staring open-mouthed at the summit.

The
n the man covering the battlement shot him in the jaw. 

The rifle shot was an ear-splitting crack
. A burst of pink spat from the top of the sentry’s skull, shimmering gruesomely as it was caught in the rays of the rising sun. Magar, still some way from the top, carried on regardless as the warm mist settled on his face and arms, and the limp form of the sentry with his ruined, flapping head tumbled past him.

The
slavers were awake now, their shouts of alarm echoing from the hill and the walls, and as the first movement was spotted amongst the tents, Tovmas and his sixteen men sighted their weapons and opened fire.

Rifles cracked and shotguns boomed.
Bullets tore through tent sheets, splintered wood and bit into the flesh of many of the slavers as they stumbled from their shelters in panic. Tovmas loosed burst after burst at anything that moved, revelling in the precise destruction and drawing a deep pleasure from the screams that marked his hits. He embraced the joy of it like an old friend, welcoming it back into his bones as he brought death to the groggy and terrified slavers.

It was a familiar sensation, one
he had tasted through countless terrible fights in dark jungles and blinding deserts, like some lingering demon that welled up to possess him when there was blood to be spilled and lives to be taken.

These men had
stolen from him his only child, the one thing he had left, and now they felt his wrath. He wanted nothing but to destroy them all.

The militia
men fired until their magazines were empty, and as they paused to reload the first return shots cracked down from the hilltop. Even though the rising sun was without doubt in the slavers’ eyes and the militia were deep in shadow, their shots were beginning to find their marks.

Tovmas was fumbling for a fresh magazin
e when Lernig, who was sharing a boulder with him, was struck in the neck. The big man slumped senselessly at Tovmas’ feet, his dark blood soaking into the dry grass. Tovmas could see by the gaping exit that the shot had severed Lernig’s spine. White pieces of vertebrae poked from the wound.

For a moment
he could do nothing but stare. His blood lust had gone as quickly as it had come when he realised that he was starting to lose men. Men who trusted him. Men who were relying on him to keep them alive.

A second Ashtarak man was hit, this time in the hand as he aimed his shotgun up the hill. He stumbled backwards, clutching his
ruined hand. His friend reached out to pull him back, but the screaming man was caught in a hail of gunfire. He twitched and jerked awfully as several bullets thumped into his chest and limbs. Blood spattered the stones of the wall behind him. His legs gave way and he crumpled into the dirt, dead.

It was brutal,
and the message was clear to Tovmas. The slavers were going to fight hard.

With their opening volley
the militia had decimated the slavers on the near face of the hill, but those who had been fortunate enough to camp on the other side had amassed and dug in around the summit: they were now pouring steady fire onto the pinned militia. The ground around Tovmas and his men leapt and spat as it was raked with automatic fire, probing for weaknesses in their cover.

“When I give the signal
, you fire everything at the top of the hill, understand?” he shouted to four men to his right. Turning to his left, he yelled, “When I go, you follow me!”

The men closest nodded fearfully. They passed the
order down to those furthest away. All looked at Tovmas, waiting for the signal.

Tovmas
, his back to the boulder and his rifle across his chest, was frantically searching for options. He knew the charge would probably fail, and they could all be gunned down as they struggled up the slope. The summit was still over fifty metres away and these men had never fought together before. For most this was their first taste of combat. Tovmas knew they simply didn’t have the discipline to sustain a charge, but his mind was blank. He could not think of an alternative. If he told them to retreat, they would be caught at the gap in the wall, bunched up perfectly for the slavers’ bullets. The retreat would without doubt become a rout, with most slaughtered as they fled.

Then suddenly, a second rocket
boomed at the top of the hill, out of sight of the militia. Tovmas guessed it was aimed at the aircraft sitting on the far side.
The aircraft!
With a start, he remembered the radio in his pocket.

“
We need support!” he shouted into the handset.

“Already on our way,
have you destroyed all their anti-air?” asked the calm pilot.

“Yes, yes!” replied Tovmas, though he had no idea. “You must hit t
he top of the hill! Inside the fortress!”

“Got it, be there in
two minutes.”

Tovmas shouted to his cowering me
n, “The westerners are coming!”

The slavers’ fire
had withered slightly. Tovmas looked around for the cause, and saw that at the top of the sentry tower, Magar was still very much alive. He was calmly firing burst after burst from his assault rifle, which was resting on the lip of the battlement, methodically picking off any slavers who left their cover. His lofty position was more or less on a level with the summit, and as such he appeared to be causing the defenders no end of trouble. The odd return round pocked Magar’s tower wall, but the slavers couldn’t seem to keep their heads up long enough to draw a bead on him.

The lull
allowed Tovmas to peek around his cover and check out the area of the camp now illuminated by the sun. There had been no women among the slavers’ tents, and although convenient from a fighter’s point of view, Tovmas was becoming increasingly worried for the whereabouts of his daughter. If the women weren’t being held on the other side of the hill, he hadn’t any idea where they’d been taken.

“We need to take one of them alive!” he yelled to the men closest to him. “We nee
d to know where the women are!”

The men nodded soberly, as the
possibility that their loved ones might not be there hit home.

“Keep shooting, damn it!” Tovmas urged them, since they had unconsciously lowered their weapons.
He raised his own rifle and began plugging away at the defenders’ positions, seeing dust and soil jump in plumes where his rounds bit into the dirt. He swore, as his near misses drove a pair of the slavers back into hiding. Their cover wouldn’t matter much when the westerners arrived.