Flying the Storm (7 page)

The
Iolaire
screamed in low, passed over the hills Tovmas and his men had come from and thundered across the summit of the fortress crag with its tail gun thumping out an opening salvo. The heavy rounds and streaking tracers churned great spouts of earth into the air around the summit, and a couple of the slavers fell shredded and burst by the big bullets. A third rocket, perfectly timed, exploded amidst the defenders, hurling a torn body into the air in a shower of soil. Tovmas knew this was his chance.

“We are attacking the hill now, watch your fire!” he yelled into the rad
io. He dimly heard a reply of assent, before rising with a roar of “Cover!” and charging out onto the open hill side, his weapon slung low. His men, caught out by the sudden rush, picked themselves up and followed after him, adding their own war cries to the din, while the few that remained blasted a rattling volley at the hilltop.

Tovmas ran on up the slope, his body tense
d as at every step he expected the bite of bullets in his flesh. It was both terrifying and exhilarating, another sensation he knew well. He felt so alive as he pounded up the hill, painfully aware of the fact that death might come to him very suddenly. And yet he heard no shots being fired from the hilltop. The support-gunners seemed to be doing their job.

His
run was coming to an end; all too soon he had reached the rocks of the summit and with one last leap he was atop them and looking down on the sheltering defenders. He let rip with his rifle, strafing the crouching group, his bullets cutting down several as they fumbled for their weapons and covered their heads with their arms. His magazine ran dry, and he hurled himself amongst them, drawing his knife as he landed, spinning and thrashing and stabbing in a blur of motion as they wrestled with him, too close to bring their own weapons to bear. Though he was without doubt much older than them, they could not match his ferocity.

When the rest of Tovm
as’ men appeared over the rocks howling and firing, the surviving slavers, the ones whom Tovmas was not fighting with, turned and fled down the other side of the hill. It was a rout, and those who ran were gunned down by the militia.

The shooting
had stopped. All became quiet. Panting, Tovmas wrenched his knife from the ribs of the last hilltop slaver.

The man
looked at the soaking gash in his chest, his breath coming in ragged, hacking gasps. As if remembering something, he turned his head to the east, his dark eyes shining in the sun that had climbed above the mountains. He stood there for a moment, as Tovmas watched, before his legs buckled and he fell to his knees. Still he faced the sun, though he was slumped and sagging and Tovmas did not think his eyes saw anything anymore. Blood dribbled in a long string from his lips, and slowly, as if fighting sleep, the man’s eyes closed. Tovmas nudged him with his boot, and the man fell back limply onto the grass.

The silence was
utter. The hills on the far side of the valley were ochre in the dawn light. The white summit of Ararat sat above the haze far to the west. What a place to die.

Tovma
s’ men now lined the rocks on the western side of the summit, their weapons pointing at the smoking pieces of a light aircraft on the landing pad, a couple of hundred metres out on the most extreme spur of the crag. He could see the last of the slavers had taken cover around it, behind stacks of crates, amongst the rocks and inside the last corrugated steel shed. The single survivor from the hilltop was still running across the stony, undulating ground, towards his friends by the aircraft. He wore nothing but his vest, no doubt all he had slept in, and he had no weapon. For some reason, the militia hadn’t shot him.

In the silence, Tovmas realised he was standing very much in t
he open, and promptly sat down. A few of his men were looking at him. “What now?” one of them, a young man named Nardos, asked.

Tovma
s wiped some blood from his eye and looked out west, across the yawning valley, seeing in the distance that the
Iolaire
was returning. Its twin fans were almost vertical, so it was coming in slowly and at an angle. Not far from where Tovmas sat lay the mangled remains of the slavers’ autocannon. The rocket team had hit their target, somehow.

Tovmas picked up his rifle, slid out the empty magazine and replace
d it with a fresh one, releasing the bolt with an oily click. Then he raised himself into a crouch, and looked down the iron sights. Aiming at the bare legs of the fleeing slaver, he exhaled, relaxed, and released a shot. The rifle bucked slightly in his calm grip, and the round flew straight, hitting the running man in the thigh. The slaver tumbled head-first into a dip in the ground, disappearing from sight.

“You
just winged him, Tovmas,” said Nardos.

“We’re going to take him alive,
” replied Tovmas, resting himself against the rock and taking the radio from his pocket. “He’ll tell us where they take their captives.”

Then he switched to English as he spoke into the radio,
“We’ve taken the top of the hill; the last slavers are all bunched around the landing pad at the far end of the spur. Don’t shoot near the metal shed; we don’t know if there are women in there.”

“Alright, we’ll
start circling the hilltop, you call the shots.”

As the
Iolaire
drew closer to the fortress, the slavers out on the spur began shooting at it. Tracers streaked past the aircraft in long arcs, burning out and disappearing far across the valley. The aircraft accelerated, climbing and diving in short bursts as it brought the fortress into its tail gunner’s arc of fire.

Accelerating further, the
Iolaire
howled past the fortress crag, tail gun roaring and rotors lowering for conventional flight once more.

“
We aren’t being paid enough to get shot down!” barked Tovmas’ earphone. “We’ll bank wide and make some high-speed passes, but we aren’t landing ‘till you clear them out!”

Flyboys always were precious about their aircraft
. Tovmas turned to his men. They were tired, but seemed to be in good spirits. A few were watching the slavers out by the landing pad, wary of the lack of shots coming their way.

“I don’t see any point in charging them yet,” said Tovmas finally. His men looked at him, relieved. “I
think we can pick a few of them off, and then move in. Let the westerners soften them up a bit. Who knows, maybe the bastards will want to surrender!” A couple of men laughed nervously. The rest were silent.

Magar and the support gunners clambered over th
e summit rocks to join the rest of the men. Tovmas took Magar by the shoulder.

“Do you think you could hit them from here?” he asked, pointing at
the slavers at the landing pad.

“Maybe,” replied Magar, breathing heavily from the climb.
“I’m a little out of practice.” He sat down cross-legged and rested his rifle on the lip of the broken little wall that most of the militia were sheltering behind. He fiddled with the rear sight on his weapon, setting the range, before shouldering it tightly and taking aim. Tovmas took out his binoculars.

Magar’s judgement was good. Through the binoculars, Tovmas saw that his first shot blew open the skull of a
submachine-gun wielding slaver, whose body slumped against the crate he was leaning on. Tovmas left Magar to it and returned his attention to his men.

“How
is everybody’s ammo?” he asked. The men began rummaging in pockets and pouches, and Tovmas was not surprised to find that most were running low. Around half of them had ex-NAU six-point-five millimetre assault rifles; the rest had an assortment of pump-shotguns, hunting rifles and pistols. Tovmas had assigned the one eager crossbowman to his rocket team. The dead slavers probably had some six-point-fives, but the rest were going to have to improvise. Magar’s rifle barked.

Just as he was telling the men to search the slavers’ bodies for ammo, shots began cracking over from the landing pa
d. Magar had drawn a response.

“Save your ammunition
!” Tovmas shouted to his men, who had begun to return fire. “Let Magar piss them off a bit more!”

The men tucked themselves low and continued searching the bodies, while rounds whined
and snapped above their heads.

“I think I’ll re-locate, if you don’t mind!” shouted Magar, ducking behind the wall as a bullet
split one of the stones near his head. Tovmas nodded, and Magar slid along to the far end of the wall, sitting up and taking aim once more.

The
Iolaire
howled overhead again, banking around above the crag, a stream of fire spitting from its tail gun. The slavers’ positions were hammered with rounds; great plumes of dust and soil leapt into the air once more.

Tovmas’ men had finished searching the dead. He shouted to them, “We are going to attack them now!” He pointed at three of them. “You co
ver us, keep their heads down!”

Switching to English, he yelled into the radio, “Give us cover! We’re attacking them now!” Then he stood up
with a cry of “With me!” and clambered over the ruined wall. Once again, he was running in the open, quietly this time, with his men following a few metres behind. His long shadow ran before him, undulating with the ground.

Tovmas’ blood was up, and he did not fear the slavers’ guns. Shots cracked by on his right, but from friend or foe he couldn’t tell. He crossed the lip of a depression in the ground, and saw where the slaver he’d wounded had fallen. Tovmas paused for a moment, crouching next to the body. The eyes were glassy, and the chest was still. He saw the gaping exit in the man’s thigh, and swore as he realised he’d cut the femoral artery. Flaps of muscle splayed from the wound.
The man was beyond help. Tovmas stood up and started running with his men as they crossed into the depression.

It wasn’t much longer before the slavers saw the charging men and realised what was happening. Despite the withering fire from the men on the hill top, they
still managed to shoot sporadically at Tovmas and his followers. Although at around a hundred metres, and mostly fired wild, some shots were finding their marks. As Tovmas glanced over his shoulder, he saw that two of his men had been hit; one had fallen face-down in the grass and the other was stumbling onwards, a hand pressed to his stomach.

Infuriated, Tovmas fired his rifle as he ran, spraying shots wildly at the defenders. He knew he wasn’t hitting anything, but he squeezed the trigger anyway, his gun kicking against his chest
.

A bullet thumped into the ground in front of him
, spraying grit into his eyes. He stumbled blindly forwards for a few paces before dropping to the ground, unable to continue.

He lay on his back in the grass, fumbling for his water bottle. Holding his eyes open, he poured the water over them. It stung, and his vision was blurred, but at least he could see. Nardos and the others had reached him, and Nardos himself knelt down by Tovmas. “Are
you all right?” he shouted over the militiamen’s gunfire.

“I’m fine, just
got dirt in my eyes,” Tovmas shouted back. He rolled over and got up into a crouch, eager to continue the attack before all momentum was lost. “We need to keep moving!”

“
Come on!” cried Nardos, rising to his feet with the rest of them and charging onwards.

The
Iolaire
made another pass. The thumping impacts of its heavy shells were terrifyingly close to Tovmas and his men.

Then Tovmas, Nardos, Magar and the others were amongst the defenders,
beating, hacking and firing their weapons. The dozen or so slavers by the crates and rocks were cut down by the furious Ashtarak men, standing little chance against their onslaught. The firing died away once more and the attackers spread out, all facing the sturdy little corrugated building: the last refuge of the slavers. Tovmas waved to his men to cease-fire.

“Come out
unarmed, and you’ll live!” shouted Tovmas.

A man shouted back, but Tovmas couldn’t understand him.
He recognised the language, however.

“
Does anybody speak Azeri?” he asked along his line of men.

“I can speak it,” said Nardos.

“Tell them to come out with their hands on their heads, and we’ll let them live.”

N
ardos shouted at the building. The man inside shouted back.

“He says he doesn’t believe you,” translated Nardos. “He also
says there are women in there.”

“Of course he says that, otherwise we’d j
ust shoot him through the tin.”

“Can we
take that risk?” asked Nardos.

“No.”

“Well, what then?”

Tovmas thought for a moment. “Ask
him how many men are in there.”

Nardos shouted at the building again. This time there was a pause
before the man inside replied.

“He says there are fi
ve of them,” translated Nardos.

“And what about
the women?”