Davenport gave a low whistle. ‘Serious bit of kit for a stroll through the woods.’
‘Yeah,’ Andrews added. ‘Bit much for shooting pigeons.’
‘Spetsnaz?’ Mac suggested. He avoided Sam’s eye and it was clear that the tension between them had far from dissipated.
‘That’s my guess.’
An unsettling silence descended upon the four of them as they grappled with the implications, a silence made only deeper by the presence of their dead colleague. When Tyler and Webb returned with the freefall rigs, Mac brought them up to speed. Tyler listened to the news with an expression of increasing bitterness. ‘Fucking Russki bastards!’ he spat, walking away from them before suddenly and violently kicking the body of the pick-up truck. Craven had been his friend, and no amount of training could teach a man how to deal with losing his mate.
There was no time to stand around consoling him, though. 03.45. Dawn was approaching. ‘Get to the road,’ Mac ordered. ‘The bird’s on stand-by. Let’s get out of here.’
Nobody argued with that. They gathered up their gear and their fallen colleague and hurried away from the camp, towards the road which was about fifty metres to the north. Cullen was waiting for them, a solitary figure, short and squat. ‘You took your fucking time,’ he observed, before looking up and down the road and indicating the somewhat rickety-looking telegraph poles that lined both sides. If the Hercules tried to land along this stretch of road, its wings would be damaged by the poles and they’d be walking home. They would have to come down.
‘Det cord?’ Mac announced. ‘Who’s got it?’
It was Tyler. From his pack he pulled two reels of what looked for all the world like white washing line. Hang your clothes on this, though, and you’d get a nasty surprise. Tyler threw one of the reels to Sam, who quickly started to unfurl it. On the far side of the road he ran to the closest pole, wound the det cord five times around the wood, then trailed it on to the next pole and repeated the process. Tyler did the same on the other side of the road. They each had enough cord to wrap it around eight telegraph poles; they were widely spaced, however. It would give the Hercules enough space to land.
Sam and Tyler ran back to where the others were waiting for them. Tyler removed two detonators from his pack – small silver tubes, each about the size of a pencil – and a roll of tape. Expertly taping the detonators to the cord, he then fished out his clacker – a small, handheld electrical generator – and a roll of wire. He connected the clacker to the detonator, then turned round and nodded at the rest of them.
The team jogged back to a safe twenty-metre distance. Tyler held up one hand and they prepared themselves for the bang.
The det cord exploded with a ferocious, deafening crack, like a hundred rounds all being fired at the same time. It echoed in the air, an immense clap of thunder, and would have been heard, Sam reckoned, for miles around.
By Jacob, no doubt, wherever he was.
The very instant the noise of the exploding det cord slammed into their eardrums, the telegraph poles toppled, falling away from the road and turning it into a perfectly serviceable runway. Instantly Mac was on the radio, reading out their exact coordinates from his small GPS device and requesting immediate extraction. Then he turned to the men. ‘Five minutes!’ he shouted. ‘Get in position.’
Sam checked his watch. 03.56. Only minutes till dawn. It had been a long, dark night. One of the longest Sam could remember. The blackness, though, was just starting to give way to a faint glimmer of morning. It was only the vaguest hint of daylight, but it was enough to remind Sam of everything that had happened during the preceding hours of darkness. He suddenly felt exhausted, mentally and physically. But flagging now wasn’t an option. They were still on the ground and the operation was not yet completed. Not until they were safely back in the belly of the Hercules could he even think of letting the pace drop.
The unit divided into two, three on one side of the road, four on the other. The bird might have their coordinates, and they might have a clear landing space. But there was still something they could do to help guide it safely to earth. Each man removed his torch from his pack. They then lay on the ground, spaced out at regular intervals along either side of the road, and shone the torches upwards. From the air, it would mark their positions as clearly as the lights along an ordinary runway.
Sam lay there uncomfortably in the almost-darkness. They would get scant warning, he knew, about the plane’s arrivaclass="underline" the roar of its engines would only be audible to them when the Hercules had emerged from the dark sky and its wings were practically above them.
He waited. Waiting was always the worst. It somehow felt as though you weren’t in control. Five minutes ticked by, excruciatingly slowly.
Sure enough, the boom of the engines was sudden and thunderous. It seemed to come from nowhere. As the dark shadow of the wings passed over them, Sam felt his whole body tremble with the proximity of the aircraft. The landing wheels screeched as they hit firm ground. Sam heard an immediate change in the timbre of the engines as they were thrust into reverse to bring the bird to a sudden, abrupt halt. He pushed himself to his feet, as did the others. Half a mile down the road, the Hercules was already turning. They raced around and gathered up their gear and Craven’s body bag, waited for the aircraft to come to a standstill and then rushed towards it. The tailgate was lowered and, with the loadmaster ushering them on with urgent sweeps of his arms, they hurried up into the plane.
Craven’s body was strapped to a stretcher bed attached to the side of the plane; the rest of the gear was stowed underneath. As the men prepared for take-off, the tailgate was already closing. The aircraft had barely been on the ground a couple of minutes before it started to retrace its steps, accelerating quickly up the road. Once it was airborne, it started a sudden, steep incline, ferrying the unit speedily away from the location of their op and back to the relative safety – if safety it was – of the base back in Bagram.
And as the Hercules soared into the air, Sam’s mind was concentrated on only one thing. It was not the op – that was past history now, water under the bridge; it wasn’t the grisly collection of assassinated corpses they’d left in the training camp and on the twiggy floor of the surrounding woods; it wasn’t even Craven’s death, though he carried with him the same nagging sense of loss and anger that he knew they were all experiencing.
It was this: the image of one man, bearded and dark-eyed, running with fierce desperation through the unfamiliar surroundings of Kazakhstan. His blood would be pumping. Most likely he would be more than a little scared. His mind would be focussed on the road ahead; on surviving; but equally he would be keeping one eye behind him.
Because once somebody has been sent to kill you, you never stop looking over your shoulder.
PART TWO
TWELVE
Run.
Jacob Redman kept that one thought in his mind. It was difficult, because other thoughts were jostling for attention. The Regiment, out there to kill him. To kill all of them. Sam. Jesus, Sam. When his brother had appeared, Jacob had thought he was seeing a ghost. What other explanation could there have been for Sam randomly turning up in one of the most obscure corners of central Asia? He didn’t know what the noise was that had woken him up; he did know that if he was in charge of a Regiment unit like that, nobody would have been allowed to stir until the job was well and truly underway. And they wouldn’t be stirring afterwards. No, somebody had made a noise to warn him. It must have been his brother.
He put that thought from his head. Just keep running. It’s all you can do.