Resurrection, p.11
Resurrection, page 11
Poor old Golyev. He had once had authority and power but the existence of someone with such responsibility in the FSB can often be measured in months. Existence not as a career term but in life expectancy if they stepped on the wrong toes. Golyev had been lucky. Yet he was not a born survivor. He was too intelligent. Insufficiently feral. Not like Verskiy, the longest-serving and -surviving deputy head of the GRU, who had caused more trouble for the world than any of his predecessors. Rumour and legend about his power and influence had turned into fact. It seemed he could ask for anything and get it. Unlike the other intelligence services, the GRU did not report directly to the President. Verskiy was responsible to the Minister of Defence and the Chief of the General Staff. Not exactly arm’s length from the President and the FSB, more of a hand’s width, but it gave him space to manoeuvre. What he could not do was get into the old KGB files that might help him discover whether that rumour from another time was true. His pulse quickened. If it was, then he would unmask a traitor and reap his rewards.
By the time he had sipped his second cup of coffee and was halfway through the honey cake, Golyev found his booth. He slid on to the green leather bench seat.
‘You must try this, Andrei. It’s delicious.’
‘I don’t have long,’ said Golyev, casting a wary look over his shoulder. The coffee shop was a favourite with Muscovites and tourists alike. Verskiy had pre-ordered Golyev’s cappuccino. He signalled to the waitress.
‘Safety in numbers, Andrei. Relax. They’re tourists.’ He swallowed a mouthful. ‘You have become more nervous these past years.’
‘Can you blame me? If someone sees me talking to you, I’ll have some explaining to do.’
‘Now, now, Andrei. You are still a serving FSB officer, not with the rank you once had, I grant you, but you are still sufficiently senior to be believed that you came across here and bumped into me. They know your son is one of us at GRU. What could be more natural than you asking me how he’s doing?’
‘I haven’t heard from Yuri for months. Is he all right?’
‘Yes. I sent him to London on a job. He pulled it off admirably.’
‘Good, good. Is he still there? Does he still work with Galina?’
‘You know I can’t tell you that.’
‘Of course. Stupid of me. Thank you, Alexei.’ The coffee arrived. He sipped it nervously.
‘You see, Andrei, it’s asking the wrong questions that got you into trouble. The mistake you made was you thought that the President really wanted you to do your job when he put you in charge of the Internal Security Directorate. I know it was an independent body for five years but you investigated senior FSB officials on the take – and had them arrested. Friends of his. My God, what were you thinking? You were the best, I grant you that. When you went after someone you brought them down.’ Verskiy wiped his lips with his cloth napkin and sipped the cappuccino. ‘And that is why I come to you asking for your help because you were – no, you still are our best investigator.’ Verskiy’s tone altered. Crisp, concise. ‘Six KGB officers in Africa. Mid-eighties into ’91. I need to know who they were.’ He gazed at Golyev. ‘And of course I shall see to it that your son receives a benefit in kind. He’s a good agent. One of my best. Get me what I want and I shall promote him.’
‘KGB days?’ said Golyev. ‘Alexei, it will take time.’
‘Which is something I do not have a great deal of.’
Golyev nodded. ‘Leave it with me.’ He slid out of the booth.
Verskiy dabbed his mouth and smiled. ‘One more thing, Andrei.’
‘Yes?’
‘You have chocolate on your mouth.’
19
The man had watched them for an hour.
The soldiers came through the heat haze like holy men from the wilderness. The dust had risen and covered them. Their eyes, irritated by heat and dirt, watered, streaking the caked mask on their faces. The watcher could not understand who they were or why they were on foot with no equipment. Were they French? He had fought Frenchmen before, but they were always well armed; their vehicles made them fast, mobile and fearless. He thought about the local warlord Faraj Hamad’s indiscriminate torture and killing: did he now have an alliance with the French? Were these the vicious dogs of a sadistic master? But why so few of them in this wilderness?
He waited, unmoving despite the flies around his eyes. Movement was the way to die in the wilderness. At least the loose-fitting Arab-style dress afforded some protection from the heat.
He lowered the binoculars; they were close enough now for him to watch with his own eyes. The desert soldiers stopped to rest. He pulled the cowl further around his face. He had been careful to make sure the lens of the binoculars did not reflect the sun by wrapping a piece of cotton camouflage netting around them. He had learnt that when he fought the French. He had seen enough. He moved back slowly, never taking his eyes from the invaders and keeping a firm grip on his Kalashnikov assault rifle.
*
It was hard going. Although Dragonovic´’s men needed to conserve energy they would not reach their objective if they moved at a snail’s pace. The Serb led and they followed. Three hours since the last stop and now they were at the foot of the escarpment. He called a halt. He noticed the Englishman hadn’t faltered.
Raglan stabbed a finger at the map. ‘Al-Kadique’s the nearest settlement, I reckon.’
‘Do you know that place?’ said Dragonovic´.
Raglan shook his head.
‘If he’s still around, there’s a warlord, Faraj Hamad, who had a place somewhere near there. The French government helped him years ago. His base is built like an old legion fort with adobe walls and reeds. He thinks he’s some kind of prince of the desert. It’s next to a lake. The only good thing about it is that it’s cooler there.’ Dragonovic´ did not hide his distaste for the warlord.
‘He’s still pro-French, do you think?’
‘These bastards change their mind every day. He’s not to be trusted, I know that. He plays one side against the other. Six years ago we helped him boot out the Janjaweed militia. Then he made an alliance with local Al-Qaeda fighters to control a bigger area and France gave the thumbs down. The last thing they wanted was to support anyone associated with a terrorist group. Rather than risk the terrorists turning against him he invited the local commander for dinner and slaughtered him and thirty of his men. He became more powerful. And when he burnt out their villagers’ reed huts with the women and kids inside, Paris gave a definite non! No, Raglan, he’s definitely not pro-French.’
‘We need supplies and vehicles.’
Dragonovic´ squatted on his haunches. ‘Not from him. I don’t want to get cornered there.’ He scratched a crude map in the sand. ‘If Hamad’s between us and the objective we should skirt his stronghold. There’s a plateau runs up to a thousand metres, here. We climb it. Then the nearest tribe are the Masalit. They’re busy killing Arab nomads.’ He shrugged. ‘Choose your poison. They might supply us. What about your people and ours? We haven’t checked in; they’ll know we’re in trouble. Do you think they’ll send people in for us?’
‘Not unless we can make contact. We might be on our own for a while.’
Dragonovic´ was about to drag out the exact location they sought when a gunshot felled one of the men and all hell broke loose.
*
They were caught unprepared and off guard. The volley of gunfire that followed was from semi-automatic and automatic weapons. That knowledge penetrated the men’s consciousness as they saw Dragonovic´ moving to one flank of the escarpment and the Englishman to the other. It was obvious he knew what to do and Jordain peeled off to join him. Jarnac commanded two men to lay down covering fire as Raglan and Dragonovic´ attacked on opposite flanks. Adrenaline banished exhaustion. Dragonovic´ skirmished with two men, while Raglan and Jordain moved rapidly across the broken ground. The enemy firing was wild, undisciplined and mostly badly aimed. That did not stop another man being killed before the first rocky protection could be gained.
Jarnac and the two men with him chased after Dragonovic´ when Raglan threw a smoke grenade and gave the men cover. They fell on to the enemy’s position. Some turned and ran, terrified at the unexpected response to their ambush. Raglan and the survivors were quickly among the rest. Close-quarter killing.
Jordain took refuge behind a rocky outcrop to get a better firing position. He did not see the tribesman aiming his AK-47 in his blind spot. Raglan slowed and fired. The man tumbled. Then Raglan pursued those who had broken from the contact. Lungs burning, he crested the rise to find two tribesmen turning towards him. He fired a quick burst. The rounds shattered rock face but caught one of the gunmen. A third loomed up from cover and aimed directly at him. Raglan was moving fast, his vision blurred, but a voice was yelling in his brain that he stood no chance against the two men’s crossfire. The cowled figure rose higher to take a clearer aim but was punched backwards as Jordain, who had followed Raglan, shot him.
Raglan ran hard, trying to get a clear shot at the surviving gunman, who turned and ran for one of two abandoned pickup trucks in the dry wadi below. Raglan wanted to stop, to gulp air; his injured arm pulled his back muscles into a knife-cut of pain. The others stormed through the gunmen’s position. Eight bodies lay in the sand at the ambush site, three more where Raglan had gone in pursuit. It was likely a patrol of six men in each of the two vehicles. Raglan’s quarry was the last tribesman. His foot caught a low rock; he stumbled, fell, rolled, felt the searing pain in his back and lungs as his fall winded him. Ignoring the pain he clambered to his feet again but saw the man had escaped in a trail of dust.
*
They buried their dead comrades and left the other corpses for the raptors. They stripped the bodies of their weapons and ammunition. There was no telling how much firepower they might need before reaching their objective. Cold hessian sacks of water slung on the pickup’s bonnet revived them. They did a weapons check, dressed what cuts and wounds they had and clambered on to the remaining pickup.
Jordain grinned. ‘Not too many of those bastards around, I hope, boss.’
‘I wouldn’t bet on it,’ said Raglan.
Jordain shielded his eyes and looked across the landscape. ‘Just hope they haven’t got any women with them. They’re harder than the men – they’ll cut your balls off before breakfast. Especially white men’s balls.’
‘I’ll do my best to keep a tan going,’ said Raglan.
Dragonovic´ took the wheel with Raglan next to him. The surviving tribesman would obviously head for his base. Once there another force would be assembled to come after them. Their only course of action was to drive as hard and fast as they could away from the enemy. Whoever they were. They were in an internecine war zone. The men looked done for. One man next to Jordain couldn’t stop his body trembling. There was nothing anyone could do. He had to fight that one on his own.
Raglan had spent years in the wasteland in his legion days. It offered sculptured beauty and a timeless silence. It was also a lousy place to die.
20
Dragonovic´ did not ease off the accelerator until they were twenty kilometres from the ambush site. The sun was lower, almost setting, and the orange light softened the harsh, shrub-covered terrain.
They rounded a bend in the track and their way was blocked by a long-wheelbase 4x4 with a heavy-calibre machine gun straddling its load bed, the long barrel aimed directly at them. Dragonovic´ braked sharply as two more camouflaged 4x4s burst through the undergrowth and well-armed militia levelled their weapons at the pickup. The Serb stalled the engine. In the silence they heard the water gurgling through the engine block.
After a moment of no one doing or saying anything, Jordain spoke quietly. ‘Well, I could always be a eunuch in a bloody harem.’
*
They had no choice but to follow the order given by the militants’ leader to follow his lead vehicle, their own boxed in by the other two behind them. The convoy moved through the African night. The time between daylight and darkness was brief, the twilight barely existent. They drove through a reed-and-mud-hut village, swollen with refugees who had constructed lean-tos of corrugated iron sheets nailed together for shelter. Animal skins hung stretched across drying frames; bleached animal skulls caught the moonlight. Torches burnt, casting shadows into the urine-soaked alleyways. Here and there a figure could be discerned in the shadows, cautiously staying back from the attention of the armed militia.
Raglan glanced at Dragonovic´. On the plus side, they were still alive; on the negative, they were angling away from the direction they needed.
‘Faraj Hamad’s people, you reckon?’ said Jordain from the back.
‘Could be,’ said Dragonovic´. ‘Not Janjaweed. If they were, we’d be dead.’
‘That’s a Utyos gun. Russian-made,’ said Jordain, pointing at the malevolent-looking weapon aimed at them. ‘I didn’t think the Russians were in this neck of the woods.’
‘You can buy them online from Libya. Once Gaddafi was killed, it was a buyer’s market. Did you see the assault rifles they were carrying? American. The US equipped the African Union UN peacekeeping forces in Somalia, who sold them on to Al-Shabab. Arm the so-called good guys, then fight the bad guys with the weapons you gave the good guys in the first place. The Pentagon procurement budget is as healthy as ever,’ said Raglan.
The vehicles kicked up dust on the winding road until an hour later they reached a lake; reflected moonlight shimmered on its surface. A boathouse nestled into the bank. The horizon was darker on one side of the water. It was the walls of a compound.
‘That’s one of Hamad’s bases that I told you about,’ said Dragonovic´.
Arc lamps hummed with power as they surged on. Four of them, each one at a strategic corner of the compound, now illuminating Dragonovic´’s unarmed men. High metal gates strung with razor wire opened, letting the vehicles into what could have been a parade square. They climbed down from the 4x4 and waited. Militia patrolled the wooden ramparts and they, along with the men on the ground, casually levelled their weapons at Raglan and the others. Raglan took the place in. A side yard had several pickup trucks parked with machine-gun mountings in place. That meant there were probably forty men in the place.
‘I bet he didn’t bring us all the way here to shoot us on his front doorstep,’ said Jordain. ‘Very messy. Take a while to clean up afterwards.’
Faraj Hamad’s summer base was, as Dragonovic´ had described, built like an old Foreign Legion fort, with clay-covered wattle-and-timber walls. Cool breezes from the lake eased the suffocating heat. There was the fragrant scent of neem trees close to the lake’s bank. Raglan looked up to a double-storey building from where a balcony jutted beyond the regular catwalk. A black, round-faced man appeared; he wore a strikingly white cotton kaftan-like garment. Another man accompanied him. Open-necked white shirt and slacks. Taller, fitter and harder. Faraj was powerful and wealthy and the easy living showed.
‘Man in the white shirt is Hamad’s right-hand man,’ said Dragonovic´. ‘If Hamad says stop the world I want to get off, White Shirt is the one who puts the brake on. Look the wrong way at these people and he’ll have your head.’ Dragonovic´ called up to the man looking down at them. ‘Faraj Hamad, sir, we’ve stumbled into your territory. No offence was meant.’
Hamad stayed where he was, surveying the sweat-stained, bloodied men. ‘You look in need of rest. We are always pleased to offer hospitality to our French friends. I welcome you.’ He offered a benign, slow-moving gesture.
Like a sluggish snake, thought Raglan, still to be treated with caution.
Faraj Hamad watched as his men unloaded the AK-47s taken from the ambush site. ‘You have cleared out a nest of Janjaweed vipers who are our enemy. We are grateful. Avail yourself of our humble surroundings. There is food. We will speak to you in the morning.’
Hamad turned back; his henchman gestured to the men in the courtyard. Their weapons raised waist-high, the men stepped forward, indicating their captives should drop their webbing, which was scooped up and taken to a room across the yard. Now that the men were disarmed Raglan hoped Maguire’s phone, which he’d hidden in one of the pouches, would not be discovered. The soldiers ushered Raglan and the men towards one of the buildings. Raglan saw the radio antenna above a room on the far side of the courtyard. Dragonovic´ nodded. ‘Basic comms, but that’s all we need.’
*
The disarmed men were billeted in a barrack room. Straw mattress cots would serve their purpose and like all soldiers Raglan and the others could sleep wherever and whenever the opportunity presented itself. They sat elbow to elbow at a long wooden table finishing the hot food that Hamad’s men had provided. Goat stew with plateloads of the corn porridge common in Africa. They ate with their hands, soaking the meat of the stew into the malleable putu. The men ate their fill in a continent where food is a privilege.
Jarnac plucked a bone from the liquid on his plate. ‘You have to watch old Faraj Hamad, I’ve heard he’s partial to a bit of cannibalism once in a while,’ he said through a mouthful of food.
Raglan swilled the food down with the water provided. ‘Then whoever it was must have tasted good enough to eat.’
Jarnac laughed, and the men grinned their approval.
Dragonovic´ sat opposite Raglan, and his voice was meant only for him. ‘Hamad could turn at any time. I’ve no idea why his men didn’t kill us on the road.’
‘Maybe he’s getting lonely out here in the middle of nowhere,’ said Raglan.
Dragonovic´ grunted. ‘Neurotic as hell. We won’t get our weapons back until we leave, or he lets us go – there is a difference.’
‘We need to get into that radio room.’
Dragonovic´ shrugged, wiped his hand and tapped a cigarette free from the cellophane packet. ‘You’d need his personal authority, and you won’t get that until tomorrow.’
‘That shows our hand. I need to make contact tonight.’
