Aushev’s appearance, combined with his rank, was enough to put fear into the heart of any officer his junior.
Except one. Colonel Roman Makhmadzhanovich Shabanov was different.
Aushev reached the office block on Krasnovodsk Street and sprang up the stairs to the second floor. He punched in the combination on the push-button entry system and opened the door. He greeted the energy of the open-plan office enthusiastically. Few of the twenty-five computer console operators looked up from their work.
The general proceeded straight to his office and shut the door behind him. He picked up the phone and dialled a number that had long been etched in his memory. One advantage of working at the 2nd Chief Directorate was the newly installed digital network, which obviated the need to wait for a line on the ailing national telephone grid. He heard the click as the receiver was lifted.
‘Roman Makhmadzhanovich? Get your arse on a flight to Khodynka. We have things to discuss. The Beirut operation starts today.’
Sinitsky never saw who barged him from behind. In the throng of people lining the platform, the movement went unnoticed by everyone else. He sprawled headlong into the path of the train, his mind too numb to hear the screams of the onlookers, his eyes locked on the wheels that scythed him into three neat parts a moment later.
CHAPTER 2
The juddering had begun as a tremor soon after the Tornado slowed to subsonic speed and descended below the clouds on its final dash to the target. Girling thought it would pass. But as the aircraft left the clouds behind and hugged the con-tours of the ground, so that shaking had intensified. Now it was relentless.
The electronic picture swam in and out of focus. Every jolt of turbulence jarred his bones.
Like a powerboat on a rough sea, the Tornado ploughed on, its nose carving a swath through invisible pockets of air that flexed the wing tips and bucked the fuselage.
Half of him wanted to tear his gaze from the radar screen, but a voice in the back of his head told him not to break concentration.
He had invoked everyone and everything he had ever held dear in a vain plea for the sickness to leave him, but it persisted, a cold ball in the pit of his stomach.
There was always the bag.
He had glanced at it a minute before. The writing had swum before his eyes: ‘Bag, Air Sickness, Nato Stock № 8105-99-130-2180.’
They had given him two in the briefing room. Just in case.
He would hold on. It had to pass.
He saw the objects grow in the centre of the screen and braced himself. Another hill. A second later and the Tornado pulled up sharply, pushing three gs on his shoulders, then rolled on to its back. Girling opened his eyes and looked up to see a treetop flashing past the canopy at over five hundred knots.
Girling forced his chin onto his chest. He inched his gaze back to the instrument panel and found the radar picture again. The concentration helped.
They were still upside down. Although his attention was seized by the screen, depriving him of spatial awareness, he could feel the sweat dribbling down past his hairline into his helmet.
The pilot burst through over the headset, his voice strangled and distorted from the strike aircraft’s fight with gravity.
‘Terrain-following system. State of the art. Hands optional.’
Girling swore as he heard Rantz laugh.
He forced his gaze ahead. Behind the top of the ejection seat, the pilot was waving his arms about the cockpit.
He wanted the strength to record the surreal scene before him. The aircraft was upside down, the ground rushing past less than a hundred feet from his head with his pilot suspended from his straps shaking his hands around like a lunatic.
The sickness paralysed him. Finding the camera was out of the question.
The Tornado rolled back to the horizontal. The nausea washed over him.
Girling unclipped his oxygen mask, remembering to turn the intercom switch on its snout to the off position. He did not want Rantz to hear him retch.
Girling sucked in ambient air from the cockpit, not caring that it was thick and rancid with sweat. It was good to get the rubber mask off, good to feel the swish of recycled air from the conditioning system on his face. He couldn’t give a fuck for Rantz and his orders about keeping his helmet visor down at all times. A bird strike, right then, the bones, feathers and mashed flesh exploding into the cockpit with the force of a high-velocity projectile, would be the least of his problems.
Throwing up was easy. It was what Rantz wanted him to do.
He pictured himself descending the ladder from the cockpit holding the full blue and white bag, and Rantz smiling. Another puking hack to chalk on the side of the fuselage.
He gritted his teeth and thrust the bag into the thigh pocket of his flight suit. A small point of honour, perhaps, but he wasn’t going to give the arsehole the satisfaction.
He took a glove off, pulled a biro from his top pocket, and pushed the point into the open palm of his left hand.
Girling clamped the mask back to his face, locked the catch down over the snout and felt it seal against his sweat-soaked cheeks. He breathed in and waited for the pervading smell of rubber to bring the bile to the back of his throat.
Instead, he felt the sickness ebb, replaced by a dull ache in his hand. He looked down to see the point of the biro lost in his torn flesh.
Girling pocketed the pen, slid the gloves back on, and concentrated on the pain until the sickness became a memory.
His hand moved up to the intercom switch. ‘How far to the target?’
‘You’re supposed to tell me.’
‘Give me a break,’ Girling muttered. The words were lost in the relentless battering of the slipstream. He knew that most of his instruments were duplicated in the front cockpit.
‘Five minutes, fifteen seconds to the IP,’ Rantz said. ‘Switch TF radar to stand-by.’
Girling moved the dial on the radar console. The Tornado was out of its automatic terrain-following mode now. Another jagged Highland peak loomed beyond the nose of the fighter-bomber. This time Rantz saw a gap and pushed the aircraft towards it.
The grey, scree-strewn slopes of the mountain whistled past the right-hand wing-tip. He pressed himself back into his seat and flexed his feet. His straps had been pulled so tight he could barely feel his legs any more.
The Tornado belted out from behind the mountain and a screech, like a fingernail pulled across a black-board, filled his headset.
‘What’s that?’
Rantz’s voice came calmly back to him.
‘Search radar. Probably from a SAM battery at the target. Sky Shadow should take care of it.’
Girling knew from the pre-mission briefing that the Sky Shadow pod beneath the Tornado would be classifying the nature of the threat and jamming it.
The screech wavered for a second, then steadied. The ‘enemy’ was either employing electronic counter-counter-measures, ECCM, or the pod didn’t work.
Rantz came through over the electronic howl. ‘Get a fix on it from the threat-warner.’
Girling’s mind raced. Threat-warner. He thought back to the simulator at Marham. A whole afternoon spent in the damned thing and he couldn’t remember where the threat-warner was. If he was going to participate in Exercise Stalwart Divider sitting in a navigator’s seat of one of Her Majesty’s twenty-million-pound aircraft, then he was going to have to learn a navigator’s duties, Rantz had said.
The screech was piercing his head. The turbulence blowing off the Highland mountain ridges was making the Tornado buck like a stallion. The whole instrument panel was still little more than a blur.