Tenth Man Down (43 page)
Authors: Chris Ryan
Rasputin nodded. I changed down into second, hauled the wheel over and accelerated up the overgrown dirt road.
Sweat was pouring down my face and torso. The cab of the truck was an oven on wheels, and the four of us were crammed tight together. Luckily I’d had the foresight to load up two full water-bottles. I got Jason to unscrew the cap of one and hand it to me. After I’d drunk, I unhooked the mike of the inter-vehicle radio from the dash, and called, ‘Green One. How’re you doing?’
‘Green Two.’ It was Stringer’s voice. ‘We’re in the OP with a good view of the road junction. Well cammed up.’
‘Roger. Nothing showing yet?’
‘Negative.’
‘What’s the range to the junction?’
‘About seven fifty.’
‘Brilliant.’
‘Where are you?’ he asked.
‘Approaching the cache. Wait out.’
I probably sounded quite cool, but in fact I was shitting bricks that we were on the wrong road and were going to have to turn back, wasting more time. The terrain looked too flat. Then at last we reached the beginning of a deep gully, and I recognised the ravine with big, smooth boulders along its flanks. At the point where the sides closed in, we came to a wooden pole-barrier carrying one of the blue-and-white danger signs. I didn’t even slow down to look at it, but drove straight through. Under the impact of our bullbar the flimsy pole exploded. Pieces flew into the air and landed among the rocks.
The time was 1347.
‘Nearly there,’ I said, half to myself, half to Jason. ‘But Jesus! It’s going to take twenty minutes just to get back as far as the OP.’
My stomach contracted as the battered grey doors of the cache came into sight. I pulled up opposite them, switched off, and said, ‘Okay, Jason. We’ll both get out. You cover these two while I separate them.’
I opened the driver’s door and slid to the ground.
‘Out!’ I told the two Russians.
They both began shifting and wriggling along the seat towards me. It had been awkward enough getting them in. I’d foreseen that getting them out was going to be worse, and I was expecting them both to tumble on to the deck before they got themselves sorted.
Far from it. Suddenly Rasputin was on the ground, free, and running. Somehow, during all the bumping of the journey, he’d worked himself loose. Before I could react he was well away down the approach road. The pilot was still on the seat. I gave a yell, dragged him forward out of the way and snatched my 203 from its clips. By then, Rasputin was fifty metres off.
‘Stop!’
I yelled.
I yelled.
But I knew he wasn’t going to. I was too hot, too worked up, too mad to piss about any longer. Instinctively I opened fire. The first short burst missed. The second knocked him down, head over heels, and he lay kicking violently in the road.
By then the pilot was also on the move, running as best he could with hands still tied behind his back, not making much progress. Dimly I realised that if I went after him I could catch him easily enough. But I wasn’t in the mood for running anywhere.
‘Stop!’
I yelled again.
I yelled again.
He kept going a few more unsteady paces. I brought the rifle up and put the sight on the centre of his back. Suddenly he pulled up and started turning towards me, but it was too late. At that very instant I squeezed the trigger, and the burst caught him full in the chest. He crumpled to his knees, went down into the dust and lay there hardly moving.
I was trembling violently – hands, arms, knees. I glanced to my left and realised Jason was standing close to me. He didn’t speak, but his eyes said it loud and clear: I should never have mown down that defenceless man, at the very moment when he was surrendering.
‘Jason,’ I went. ‘I know. I know. But I’m out of my fucking mind with fright.’
All he said was ‘Yassir,’ but from the way he nodded, and from the expression on his face, I knew he wasn’t blaming me. He understood.
I realised I was hyperventilating, and made a deliberate effort to steady myself down. I was horrified by what I’d done, though more for practical reasons than for moral ones. Feelings of guilt came later. The immediate problem was that I’d killed both the men I was going to use as human shields. In committing a double murder, I’d reduced our options to two: either we had to cut and run for it – and allow a stockpile of nuclear warheads to drop straight into the lap of a mad silvery – or I had to load the weapons myself.
I took the decision in seconds, without conscious effort. No way was I going to quit now. I didn’t feel martyred or heroic or any shit like that; it was just the way things had turned out, this was something I had to do, no matter what the consequences might be.
‘I’ll handle the weapons,’ I told Jason. ‘But first I need that overall.’ I pointed at Rasputin’s body and set off towards it, expecting to find the torso perforated by bullet holes. In fact my rounds had gone high, and only one had hit him, in the back of the neck, so the suit was intact except for a single puncture in the collar.
I rolled the dead man on to his back. His black eyes were wide open, and I had to avoid their stare. There was one long zip down the front of the suit, and others up the inside of the legs, from ankle to knee. Limb by floppy limb, I worked the body out of it. Underneath, Rasputin had been wearing a green linen shirt and thin DPM trousers. All his garments were sodden with sweat. So was the lining of the protective suit, and its collar was sticky with warm blood.
The garment was made of cotton, with a rubberised finish on the outside. It looked far too flimsy to be capable of blocking radiation – and maybe, I thought, the manky thing was radioactive already, from when Rasputin inspected the weapons earlier. Did I really need to wear this filthy thing? I hesitated, then pulled it on. In a pouch on the front I found a pair of gloves and a floppy helmet made of the same material, which zipped on to the collar.
Back at the wagon, I said to Jason, ‘Whatever happens, you are
not
to enter the silo, you understand?’
not
to enter the silo, you understand?’
‘Yassir.’
‘Equally, you’re not to help me load, or get into the back of the truck. Okay?’
He nodded.
‘Get back up in the cab. Monitor the radio. If any message comes, relay it to me. Watch out for anyone approaching the site. If you see anybody, drop him.’
Again Jason nodded.
My first task was to open the heavy doors. I knew it couldn’t be done by hand, so I started up, swung the wagon round and backed up right close. As I made to get out, Jason also started shifting his arse.
‘No!’ I said sharply. ‘I told you, stay put!’
My hands were shaking again as I brought out Rasputin’s key and fumbled it into the new padlock. With that open, I attached a tow-rope to the big hasps on the right-hand door, jumped back into the cab and drove forward in bottom gear, dragging the inner end of the heavy door round its track. Then I had to repeat the process: back up, unhook rope, re-hook it to second door, climb into cab, crawl forward again. All that took up what seemed desperate amounts of time.
At last, the entrance was clear. Cautiously, I backed in until the tail of the wagon was under the roof, within three metres of the racks. It was a relief – not much, but something – to find that the cab was still just outside the doorway. One last time I ordered Jason to keep still. Then I brought out the helmet and pulled it on over my head, zipping the bottom rim to the collar of the suit. Instantly, I was hit by a sense of claustrophobia. The thick plastic of the visor was so scratched and hazy that I could hardly see through it, and the primitive filter mask made every breath a labour. My instinct was to rip the damned thing off, but I told myself I had to try it. With my watch buried beneath the tight cuff of the protective suit, I couldn’t read the time, and I had to keep asking Jason what it was. As I pulled on the gauntlets, I held up my left wrist for another check.
‘Thirteen fifty-nine,’ Jason called.
Taking a deep breath, I slid to the ground and walked into the silo. The truck took up so much of the open doorway that little light could filter in round it. After the blazing sun outside, the interior of the cache seemed dim as night.
It must have been temporary madness that drove me on. On the road I’d been wondering how I could force Rasputin to close in on the weapons without getting too close to them myself. Now I seemed to have got a terrific psychological boost from Jason’s dose. For the time being, I felt impervious to harm.
I advanced on the rack of warheads and checked the number. As I thought, there were five in the top layer and ten in each of the four lower layers: forty-five all told. I grabbed the nose cone of the one on the left in the uppermost row. The white enamelled surface was so slippery that I couldn’t get a firm enough grip to pull the whole shell forward. Looking closer, leaning right over the stack, I realised that the thing was being held in place by a set of four stubby fins which sprouted from the fuselage a third of the way down. When I lifted the nose vertically, the fins came clear of the timber cradle in which they’d been laid. Chocks of wood, curved to match the diameter of the barrel, fell away, and the warhead was free.
At its rear end was another set of fins, long and slender, and round the centre Cyrillic letters were stencilled in black. I didn’t waste time trying to read the message. Drawing the missile forward, I held it in my arms, balanced across my chest, and moved crabwise to the tailboard of the truck. The weight was about what I’d estimated, and manageable: maybe seventy-five pounds. The length of the carry was only three metres, but Jesus Christ! The mental pressure of having that amount of warhead right up against my body!
The lads’ last action, before the parties split, had been to clear the rearmost seven or eight feet of cargo space in the back of the wagon. Non-urgent kit had been binned, and the rest piled up further forward. All I had to do, then, was slide the warhead in along the floor, tail first. The fins scraped over the bare steel, and I thought, shit: by the time we’ve driven them to the Mall, these things are going to end up bent and deformed. Then immediately I realised that if we got the weapons out of the country, nobody would want to use them anyway; they’d be scrapped in some safe location, so that minor damage was of no significance.
I got the first six warheads loaded without too much difficulty. But all the time my body temperature was rising; inside that damned suit I was being boiled alive. I could hardly breathe, and there came a point when the volume of sweat on the inside of the visor made it impossible to see what I was doing. There was no way I could continue with the helmet on, so I ripped it off and threw it to one side. My hair was plastered to my head, and rivulets were coursing down my neck and back, but the return of fresh air revived me, and I carried on.
The ninth warhead completed the first layer across the floor of the wagon. They didn’t fit together neatly, like pencils, but were held apart by their fins. At this rate, I could see, there were going to be five layers, the top one at the height of my head.
‘Time, Jason?’ I shouted.
‘Fourteen eleven.’
Christ! I ran back to the stack, snatched the warhead next in line, cradled it, scuttled across, decanted it, ran back. Some of the casings felt rough and puckered; brown spots showed where rust had pitted the surface. Three more like that, and I was panting desperately. The chemical smell in the air seemed to be accumulating in my mouth, producing an acid taste and making my throat sore.
With the score at fifteen, there came a sudden shout from the cab.
‘What is it?’
‘Radio, sah. They seen the convoy.’
I ran out into the open, stood on the step below the open driver’s door and reached up for the mike.
‘Green One, say again.’
‘Green Two.’ Now it was Pav on the other end. ‘The fuckers are in sight.’
‘How many?’
‘Two Gaz jeeps at the front. Then three big wagons – four- or five-tonners. Another jeep at the back.’
‘What are you planning?’
‘We’re going to let them come nearly to the junction, then hit the lead vehicle.’
‘Roger. Who’s on the five-oh?’
‘Phil.’
‘Great.’
‘How are things your end?’
‘Tough. But we’re winning. Loaded a third already. Done in twenty minutes.’
‘Roger. Wait out.’
I wasn’t going to tell him about the Russians’ death. That could wait.
Jason pulled the mike back up on its springy, coiled lead.
‘Water!’ I croaked. ‘Throw me a bottle.’
He lobbed one out. I filled my mouth, swilled the water round and spat it out, then drained the rest at a single swallow. The liquid revived me and I tore back to work, pulling, lifting, carrying, loading, shoving.
I’d just shifted the twenty-fifth warhead, clearing the third row down, when Jason shouted again. This time, when I emerged, he yelled just one word: ‘Shooting!’
I stood by the cab door and listened. Even without a commentary I could tell what was happening from the noise exploding over the open radio link. The .50 was firing in short bursts, four or five rounds at a time, its heavy hammer roaring out of our loudspeaker. In my mind I could see the green tracer, every fifth round, looping away into the distance, to curl in and smack the target.
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