Captain Kizel nodded once. He touched his throat mike again. ‘Execute manoeuvre number two on my mark … Now!’
The helicopters reformed into a diamond with Gogol’s machine at its head and swung down to their left. Below, at the line of convergence between the camps and the shanties a great square of open ground suddenly appeared. The sounds from Kizel’s headphones reached a piercing shrillness. The words ‘illegal use of airspace’, ‘invasion’ and ‘act of war’ could be heard as the officials in the control tower immediately below suddenly realised where the unidentified invaders on their radar were heading for. But the occupants of the control tower need not have worried. The diamond of Hinds swept across the buildings, over the hangars and across to the far side of the field where they settled into a high-wired compound. Here the aviation fuel reserved for the exclusive use of Nimrod Chala’s Black Hawks was stored. It was usually kept under guard, but the guards had run away as soon as it seemed likely to them that the helicopters would attack.
No sooner were the Hinds on the ground than their occupants were out and forming two groups, both busy. One group ran out to set up a defensive perimeter. The other group broke into the storage facility and began loading fuel into the Hinds, filling main tanks and long-range auxiliary tanks to overflowing as quickly as they could.
As soon as Illych Kizel had calculated a realistic work rate he crossed to General Gogol. ‘It will take twenty minutes, just as we calculated.’
‘Is there enough?’
‘Yes, General. It is just as you said — he sent die extra fuel from the bush landing strip back here before he burned it. Well, all he could load into the trucks he had with him, at any rate.’
‘All except the petrol that the man Parkinson had hidden away. That was such a good trap. I could have had them all then. If only…’
He stopped abruptly. The morphine was making him talk too much. The morphine mixed with die adrenaline being pumped out by those few glands in his irradiated body which still worked adequately.
‘General!’ One of die perimeter guards was hurrying across towards him.
‘Yes?’
The man handed him a pair of field glasses and gestured across at the main gate.
Gogol pressed the binoculars to his eyes and adjusted the focus. ‘Ah, there he is. Right on time.’
In through the main gate came Nimrod Chala’s armoured command reconnaissance vehicle. It was the latest of the series, adapted to carry the new generation 14.5mm KPVT turret and the coaxial 7.62mm PKT machine-gun. Gogol knew it well; it was the type of vehicle that had been his headquarters in every tank battle he had commanded. He knew this particular vehicle well, too, for Chala had showed him over it more than once and he had noted all the details he could. Such details as the command radio frequency, for instance.
Gogol lowered the binoculars and walked across to his helicopter. He switched the radio to the correct frequency, put the earphones to his ear and pressed SEND on the handset.
‘Chala?’ he barked. ‘Please put General Chala on.’ He spoke English.
‘Who is this?’ The voice of the ACRV’s radio operator answered in the same language.
‘This is General Valerii Gogol. Put General Chala on now.’
There was the sound of whispering, the movement of large bodies in a constricted place, the passage of a radio handset from hand to hand.
‘Gogol! What is going on?’ General Chala was a man of bulk and significant physical impact, but he had a high, child-like voice.
‘Just a little misunderstanding, my friend.’ Gogol lifted his thumb and said to Captain Kizel, ‘Illych, tell me what the vehicle’s movements are.’
‘Gogol? What was that?’
‘Why did your Black Hawk helicopter attack us without warning, Nimrod?’
‘The vehicle is still approaching, General.’
‘It did not! It had orders simply to investigate—’
‘It launched something at us. Looked like a Hellfire missile to me.’
‘But that’s impossible …’
‘It’s still coming in, General, less than fifteen hundred metres now.’
‘That’s what it looked like, Nimrod. I’m sorry but I guess we might have overreacted a little …’
‘But what are you doing here, Gogol? Stop the vehicle. Do you hear me, driver? I do not understand what you are doing here, Gogol.’
‘He’s stopped now, General. Sideways on, a thousand metres out.’
‘Fool,’ said Gogol, wearily.
He dropped the handset and reached into the belly of the helicopter.
‘Gogol?’ came Nimrod Chala’s voice from the radio, rising from a treble to a petulant whine. ‘Can you hear me?’
Gogol walked to the perimeter and looked across the flat airfield to the vehicle. As Kizel had said, it was sitting sideways on. The turret was pointing straight ahead, covering the southern edge of the field as though the real danger lay in the withered palm trees there. It was in the middle of the roadway connecting the compound with the main gate and thus Gogol was able to look at it over the low barrier which crossed the black tarmac at the perimeter line.
‘Valerii?’ whined Chala, ‘I don’t understand… What…’
With a little movement climaxing in a guttural grunt, Gogol swung the SA-7 Grail anti-tank missile onto his shoulder. It was the latest version, brought in with the T-80 main battle tanks. It had a 2.5 kg high-explosive head in a smooth fragmentation armour-piercing warhead with both graze and impact fuses. It had an accurate range of five thousand metres and it moved faster than sound. With the apparently casual fluidity of total, long practised control, Gogol swung the missile onto target and pressed the firing mechanism.
‘What…’ screamed Nimrod Chala at the moment the missile was launched. The word was only half out of the Hind’s radio when the command vehicle erupted in a ball of shocking yellow flame, its iron sides seeming to stretch out and burst like an overfilled balloon. The turret spun lazily up into the air and turned on its axis, still pointing the wrong way. The thunder of Chala’s passing rolled over the compound, then there was only the hissing of the vacant channel on the radio and the slurp of fuel gushing into thirsty tanks.
The sound of helicopters jerked Ann Cable out of a nightmare and out of her hospital bed both at once. Although she was still swollen, stiff and sore and her long body was bound up in the tangle of sheets and hospital gown which resulted from her nightmare, she was standing at her window before she was properly awake. The window was wide and right in the middle of the topmost floor of the tallest tower in downtown Mawanga. It looked westwards across the last of the city before the sea began. It had been modelled on St Thomas’s, the great teaching hospital in London, and was built upon the bank of the river. But where the Thames was a couple of hundred metres wide, the Mau was a couple of kilometres. And where the Thames was full, the Mau was dry.
As Ann looked down on the desolation of dry mud which split the dying city apart, she saw a diamond-shaped formation of helicopters sweep past. They were large machines, but they were flying low, following the river bed at zero metres. They were so low, in fact, that the stunned woman could look down on them as they hurled past the hospital tower. So fast were they moving, any glimpse she might have caught of General Gogol in the front of the lead helicopter must surely have been subliminal. Helicopters were associated with such disturbing events in her still shaken mind that she watched the desert-coloured diamond as though it was some kind of repulsive thing, the head of a rattlesnake.