Schofield felt his insides tighten.
Fairfax said, 'There's a notation here. It says that the voice on the intercept had a British accent, and that its owner is—whoa 'Keep talking.' Fairfax started reading: 'Voice identified as that of Damon F.
Larkham, call-sign "The Demon", former colonel in the British SAS.' Fairfax paused. 'He was big in the '90s, but was court-martialled in '99 because of his links with the former head of the SAS, a real bad dude named Trevor J. Barnaby.'
'Yeah, I've met Barnaby,' Schofield said.
'Larkham was sentenced to eleven years' jail but he escaped en route to Whitemoor Prison, killing nine guards in the process.
'Now alleged to be a principal in the freelance bounty hunting organisation known as the Intercontinental Guards, Unit 88, or "IG-88", based in Portugal. Jesus, Scarecrow, what the hell have you got yourself into}'
'Something that could lose me my head if I'm not careful.' Schofield swapped a look with Book II.
'As for that place you mentioned, Krask-8,' Fairfax said, 'the only thing I could find was this: in June 1997, the whole town of Krask, plus its surrounding maintenance facilities, was sold to an American company, the Atlantic Shipping Corporation. In addition to its shipping businesses, Atlantic also has oil interests. It got Krask-8 when it purchased about 10,000 hectares of northern Siberia for oil exploration.'
Schofield thought about that. 'Nope. Doesn't help me.'
Fairfax said, 'Oh, and I haven't found anything on that Black Knight guy on the regular ex-military databases. I'm running a search program now on some of the classified intelligence databases.'
'Thanks, David. Keep at it. Let me know when you find something. I've got to go now.'
He hit the afterburners.
Nine minutes later, the Yak-141 landed vertically in a cloud of dust in a clearing not far from a large gathering of American desert vehicles and command tents.
Schofield had heard that the campaign in Afghanistan had become like Vietnam all over again—principally because Afghanistan, even in war, was one of the world's foremost producers of heroin.
Not only did the Afghan mountain-men have the uncanny ability to vanish into hidden cave systems, but every now and then, when they were cornered, they would try to bribe Allied soldiers with bricks of 100% pure heroin. And when one such brick was worth about a million dollars on the street, it sometimes worked.
Why, only last week, Schofield had heard of a Russian unit going AWOL. A whole unit of special forces Spetsnaz soldiers—24 men in total, supposedly there as an observer unit—just stole an Mi-17 Russian-made transport helicopter and disappeared in search of a cavern reputedly filled with thirty pallets of heroin bricks.
Welcome to Afghanistan.
Schofield's plane was met by a ring of heavily-armed Marines who didn't take kindly to an unauthorised Russian fighter landing in their midst. But within seconds they recognised Schofield and Book II and escorted them to the tent of the base commander, Colonel Clarence Walker, USMC.
The command tent stood at the bottom of a low hill, beyond which lay the entrance to the Al-Qaeda mine.
Colonel Walker was standing at a map table yelling into a radio when Schofield and Book entered: 'Well, find a way to restore radio signals down there! Lay an antenna cable! Use fucking cups and a piece of string if you have to! I need to talk to my men down in that mine before the bombers arrive!'
'Colonel Walker,' Schofield said, 'I'm sorry to barge in on you like this, but this is very important. My name is Captain Shane Schofield and I have to find Lieutenant G—'
Walker spun, glowering. 'What? Who the fuck are you?' 'Sir, my name is Captain Shane Schofield, and I think there's more in that cave than just Islamist terrorists. There are probably
also bounty hu—'
'Captain, unless you're flying a C-130 Hercules with a laser-guided MOAB bomb on board, 1 don't want to talk to you right now. Take a seat and take a fucking number—'
'Hey! What the hell is that!' someone yelled.
Everyone charged out of the tent and peered out into the gauntlet just in time to see a huge Russian transport helicopter swoop down in front of the mine entrance and land in the dust.
About twenty masked men leapt out of the chopper and disappeared inside the mine under fire from the terrorist emplacements on the mountainside.
No sooner were the men inside the mine than the chopper lifted off, blasting the sniper holes with its side-mounted cannons before disappearing over a hill to the north.
'What in God's name was that?' Colonel Walker yelled.
'It was an Mi-17! With Russian insignia on its flanks!' a spotter called. 'It was that rogue Spetsnaz unit!'
'This place is nuts, fucking nuts . . .' Walker muttered. He turned. 'Okay, Captain Schofield. Do you know anything about this—?'
But Schofield and Book II were nowhere to be seen.
Indeed, the only thing Walker saw was a nearby Light Strike Vehicle skidding off the mark and speeding into the gauntlet with Schofield and Book II inside it.
The Light Strike Vehicle whipped across the stretch of no-man's-land in front of the mine entrance, kicking up a billowing cloud of dust behind it.
Gunfire erupted from the slopes above the mine entrance, smacking into the dirt next to its wheels.
A Light Strike Vehicle is like a dune buggy. It has no windscreens and no armour. It consists merely of a series of roll bars which form a cage around the driver and passenger. It is light, it is fast and it is supremely agile.
Schofield swung his LSV in a wide circle, raising a billowing dustcloud around himself, hiding his car from view. The snipers' shots began to miss by a larger margin.
Then he zeroed in on the mine entrance.
The bullet-fire became more intense—
—before suddenly there came several explosions from the mountainside above the mine's entrance, six sniper emplacements blasting outward in simultaneous showers of dirt.
And in an instant there was no more gunfire. Someone had blown up the emplacements from within the mine itself.
Schofield jammed the accelerator to the floor and zoomed into the darkness of the mine.
Six hundred metres below the surface, Libby Gant hurried on foot down a long rocky tunnel guided by flashlights attached to her helmet and MP-7.
She was followed by her three Marines, and she constantly checked her methanometer, a device that measured the levels of methane in the atmosphere.
At the moment, it read 5.9%.
That was bad. They were still in the mine's outer protective ring.
It was a maze down here—a series of low square-shaped tunnels, each about the width of a train tunnel, and all possessed of rigidly right-angled corners. Some tunnels seemed to go off into the darkness forever, others ended in abrupt dead-ends.
And everything was grey. The rock walls, the low horizontal ceilings, even the creaky wooden posts that supported the roof—all were covered in a ghostly grey powder.
Nothing escaped the powder. It was limestone dust, an inert substance designed to prevent highly flammable coal dust from flaking out from the walls and creating an even greater firetrap.
When Gant and her team had reached the bottom of the steep drift tunnel, they'd been met by an SAS commando. After the radio comms had dropped out, he'd been sent back as a verbal messenger.
'Turn left here, then go straight until you hit the conveyor belt! Then follow the belt to the barricade! Don't stray from the belt, because it's easy to get lost!' he'd said.