The Reluctant Hero

  ‘Life’s a bitch, eh, Harry Jones?’

  Her voice was weak, little more than a gasp. Harry noticed that her breath didn’t condense into a warm fog the way his did.

  ‘Morning, Martha.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Of course. This is the day we get out of here.’

  ‘That’s great, Harry . . .’

  ‘Get you fixed up. Then take you off on a long holiday. Somewhere warm, I’m thinking. Mauritius. Seychelles. Wherever you want. Plenty of sand and sea. Get you in a bikini.’

  ‘Compare scars.’

  Her eyelids were closing once again, her strength almost gone, but he couldn’t let her sleep. He was terrified she might never wake up. He shook her gently. The eyes flickered open once more.

  ‘So much to find out about each other,’ she whispered, ‘so little time to find it.’ She knew she’d never make it.

  ‘Martha . . .?’ He didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Thanks for trying, Harry.’

  ‘Don’t give up on me, don’t you dare!’

  ‘Silly man, you still think you’re in charge, don’t you?’ She tried to smile, but it didn’t work. A puzzled look crept slowly across her face. ‘Do you mind . . .?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If I made friends with Julia? Would that . . . be all right with you?’

  He wanted to scream, to rage, to tear the world apart.

  Her voice was almost inaudible. ‘Don’t let the weeds grow on my grave, Harry,’ she whispered. ‘No weeds.’

  ‘I don’t . . .?’

  He didn’t understand. What did she mean? But her eyes had closed and she wouldn’t respond.

  All through the night he had tried to keep the fire going and the stones reheated, but now he ignored them. They weren’t working. He knew there was something else going on, something inside her, guessed there was bleeding. And he didn’t want to leave her, not for a second, even to tend the fire. He lay down, his body across her, his arms around her, protecting her.

  Her breathing grew more shallow, until it was all but impossible to detect. Almost an hour later she stirred. Her eyes opened, but did not see. The lips parted, but at first he could not hear what she was trying to say.

  ‘Martha? Stay with me, Martha!’

  Then the words came, in a wretched sigh.

  ‘For a moment, I thought we were going to make the earth shake, you and me.’

  And her hand reached out for him, but there was no strength, flailing, like a ribbon in a draught, barely touching him, yet causing more pain than he thought he could endure. Then her arm fell gently to her side. When next he looked, her eyes had closed.

  For another hour he lay there, holding her. Only then, when the fire outside was long spent and he found his own body growing cold inside, did he give up hope, and finally let her go.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Harry was no stranger to death. They’d been travelling companions for much of his adult life and he had grown familiar with its many forms, yet such uncomfortably close acquaintance hadn’t made him lose his reverence for life. There was, to Harry’s mind, no such thing as a good death, only the ending of a good life, and Martha’s had been one of those. Death was a cheat, a charlatan who offered eternal peace but so often left behind nothing but perpetual torment. In Harry’s view, death never deserved the final word, yet he knew that death, in the form of its surrogate, Sydykov, would be back. That bastard didn’t deserve the final word, either. He owed that much to Martha.

  The heavy, cloying mists left by the storm were beginning to break as the morning took a firm hold on the skies. He hadn’t much time. With a sense of desolation he took apart their shelter and laid Martha on a bier of young branches, her skin as pale as the snow that surrounded her. He set about emptying her pockets of everything they contained – her purse, a pen, a few scraps of paper, which would make excellent kindling if only he could find something to light it with, the reading glasses she so hated to wear, and a nail file she had probably forgotten was ever there.

  She lay stretched on her bed of green. He didn’t know if Martha had been religious but offered up a short, silent prayer in any case, and not just for her. If there were a God, Harry was going to need him, too. As he stared down upon her the sun, freshly hauled above the mountaintops, filtered through the trees and brushed gently across her face. She was at peace, yet he had never been further from it, and he let forth a pitiful cry of fury, like a wounded animal. Then he picked up Martha’s body and began walking.

  The avalanche had kicked all sense out of the countryside and everything it had touched was left in ugly, ragged confusion. Several times Harry almost stumbled as he made his way through the mounds of boulders and broken snow. Further up the valley, beyond the footprint of the landslide, the mountains drew together to create a ravine, deep and filled with massive boulders fallen from above, and barely wide enough for a road to pass through. Between the rubble of the avalanche and the ravine ahead lay a stretch of the valley floor that offered the only section of flat, undamaged snow in sight. This, Harry reckoned, was where Sydykov would come, the only spot where a helicopter could land safely.

  Harry took Martha’s body to a point near the middle of the area torn apart by the avalanche. He found an exposed spot – in the sunlight, she deserved that – and laid her down in the snow. In the rapidly clearing air she could be seen for miles. He knelt down, brushed his fingers through her hair, pushed a stray wisp tenderly into place, kissed her lips. There were tears on her cheeks, but they were his own.

  Then he left her. He scrambled into the shadows and waited.

  They came out of the early morning sun, even while the mists still clung to the hollows of the valley floor. He heard them before he saw them, the thump-thump-thump of the rotor blades, then, as they drew closer, the whine of the turbines. Two of them again, the Hinds, powering their way up the valley but slowing as they came close to the broken mountainside. They began circling, high up; it wasn’t long before they spotted Martha’s body.

  Harry knew this was where he had to take his stand. He had few enough options, and there was no point in trying to outrun them all the way to Afghanistan. They would pursue him like a rat in a barn, so better that it be here, where Martha had died.

  The Hinds were cautious after yesterday’s confusion. They spent several minutes circling, before one dropped slowly from the sky and, as Harry had suspected, came to rest on the section of the valley floor before the ravine. The other stayed aloft and at some distance; they didn’t want to risk another avalanche. The lead Hind settled slowly, testing the snow before trusting its full weight, and even when it was on the ground the pilots kept the rotors turning. For a while the scene was enveloped in a blanket of snow thrown up by the downdraught, but as the rotor blades slowed, so the squall subsided and the rear door was hauled back. A grim smile of satisfaction tugged at Harry’s lips. Framed in the opening was the unmistakable figure of Sydykov.

  He jumped onto the snow, testing it, kicking at it with his heel, then his toe, sending small splinters of ice flying. His men followed, crouching beneath the circling rotor blades until they had gathered at a safe distance beyond. Harry watched them from his position, hidden behind boulders less than a hundred and fifty yards away. He could see Sydykov gesticulating, his breath forming vapour trails as he gave his men their instructions. Then they spread out and advanced upon the rubble left by the avalanche, beginning their search for Martha. Harry knew their progress would be slow. They would be forced to clamber over the chaos of destruction, as he had done. In any event, they were in no hurry. Martha wasn’t going anywhere.

  He tried to calculate how much time he had. Perhaps five minutes? Once they had found Martha they would search around for any trace of him – he hoped he had obliterated any sign of his presence. They would seek, not find, then they would be back. Yes, five minutes max.

  He approached the Hind from the rear, hidden out of sight of the pilots in their pods, using
what little cover he could. It would take no more than one backward glance and it would be over. He left a trail of footprints behind him, no chance of hiding those, but as he drew close to the helicopter his tracks disappeared, mixed in amongst those left by Sydykov and his men. He crept up behind the rear rotor, kept as close as he dared, the whine of the blades thrashing in his ears, scything at him, trying to suck him in. Neither of the pilots climbed out, none of the troops looked back; he hauled himself into the rear compartment.

  The space was small, little more than five feet in height, not sufficient for a man to stand upright and able to hold no more than eight men, tightly squashed. Harry was familiar with Hinds. Way back, during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he’d trained the mujahedin to use Stinger missiles, those grey hawks of the battlefield, preying upon the Hinds, smashing them out of the sky, but that familiarity had been at a considerable distance. He’d never been this close, never inside. He moved to the rear, next to the rotor shaft. The walls were covered with thick soundproofing material to dampen the brutal battering from the engines and rotors; he pulled at it, there was a ripping sound as it came away from its Velcro fixings to expose a metal panel about two feet square, hinged at the bottom. He flipped the latches at the top and the panel fell away. He caught his breath in anticipation. Behind it was a cat’s cradle of wires, hoses and pipes running up towards the rotor head.

  If the turbines were the heart of a Hind and the electronics its brain, the hydraulics were its backbone. Without the hydraulics, nothing worked; it became little more than a load of tin. And there, in front of him, were the system’s guts. The layout was similar to a NATO Apache – not surprising, given the plagiarism and outright theft indulged in by Soviet designers. A dual system, two sets of everything, so that if the main system failed or was damaged, the secondary system would take over. That’s how vital the hydraulics were. In-built redundancy, nothing left to chance, an essential precaution when you’re being shot at by a bunch of hairyarsed Afghan mountain men.

  But Harry had no gun, hadn’t even a knife. He came armed with nothing more than Martha’s nail file. Somehow he would have to make it enough. He had no difficulty picking out the hydraulic pipes from amongst the scramble of electrical cabling and oil and fuel pipes. They were high-pressure hoses braided with stainless steel, capable of dealing with intense internal forces, even if they did look at least fifteen years old. These pipes gave him his chance, his only chance; if he could knock out the hydraulics, he would cripple the entire craft.

  He examined the nail file then tore his eyes away; he didn’t want to dwell on how pathetic it seemed. He held it like a bayonet, placed the point in the centre of the hose, and pushed. It made not the slightest mark. He pushed harder, with exactly the same result. He twisted it like a screwdriver, round and round; it didn’t leave a scratch. He stabbed as though with a dagger, but it was futile. No matter how old the hose was, it was a match for Martha’s nail file. With a final desperate lunge he thrust at the hydraulics once more. The nail file struck, then bent in abject surrender.

  His head was pounding, his ear screaming, his time running out. He began to rifle through his pockets for anything he might use. ‘Martha, don’t let me down, not now,’ he pleaded. He found her credit cards, reading glasses, the pen, everything she had left, and all of it totally bloody useless. He cast around the cabin in despair, what else was there? He searched his pockets once more. Julia’s Rolex. A small key for a locker, the only item he’d found in the prison officer’s uniform. Nothing else. It was pointless. He slumped back against the wall of the compartment, his eyes closed. ‘I’m so sorry, Martha,’ he whispered. He felt drained, his knees refused to support him any more, he slid slowly to the floor, defeated. Sydykov would be back in moments. It was over. Everything.

  It might have been different. He had been a brilliant soldier, an inspiring politician, a man who could have made a real difference, and perhaps he already had, in many ways, but there could have been so much more – would have been more, if Julia had survived, or Martha. It shouldn’t have finished like this. He’d already won so many honours, more than any man of his age, yet they meant nothing now, for it was all going to come to an end, here, in this frozen waste of Central Asia. And no one would even know about it. No more medals for Harry Jones, not even posthumously. They didn’t hand out medals for failure.

  Random images collided inside his exhausted mind. And he remembered Martha’s medal, tucked away in his top pocket. Her gift, from the Battle of Berlin. He pulled it out. It was made of dull brass that glistened as he turned it. Za Bzyteey Berleena. For Defeating Berlin. It had on it a red star and oak leaves, dangling from a begrimed ribbon of red, black and gold stripes.

  And the ribbon had a pin. A sixty-something-year-old pin, manufactured in some Siberian gulag and rusted to match, yet nonetheless a pin. A pin . . . He was armed once more! He hauled himself to his feet, reached yet again for the tangle of cables and pipes, his fingers closing on one of the hydraulic hoses. He forced the point of the pin into it, and pushed. And pushed, and pushed still more.

  He felt it move. Only a fraction, a little like those butterfly wings on the mountainside, but it was enough. He pulled the pin out of the casing, and escaping behind it came the faintest mist. The second pipe took longer, offered more resistance, perhaps the pin had been blunted, but he got through that, too. Slowly, the access tunnel with its cabling and pipes was filling with a fine mist, tiny droplets, of hydraulic fluid.

  He knew he hadn’t much time, Sydykov would be back very soon; it might already be too late. He snapped the cover into place, reattached the soundproofing that hid it, swiftly checked that he had left no sign of his presence. Then he returned the medal to his pocket. ‘Thank you, Martha. Now just a little bit more of your magic, please?’

  He stuck his head out of the compartment. He could see signs of movement, a head bobbing through the jungle of moraine left by the avalanche. He jumped down to the snow, and within seconds was gone.

  He only just made it back to the cover of the boulders before Sydykov and his men reappeared, like bathers emerging from a sea. Four of them were carrying Martha. They had made a perfunctory search around the body for Harry, but found no sign. The situation was clear, he had been buried beneath the mountainside, and no one would find his body until they came to clear the road after the spring melt, and even then they would find only what the wolves had left. Beg would have to make do with just one trophy. Martha. They threw her into the back of the helicopter with as little grace as a sack of coal.

  Harry watched, transfixed. The sound of the engines grew louder, the rotor blades turned faster, drifting snow blew into a storm as cautiously, hesitantly, the Hind lifted into the air. A hundred. Two hundred. Three hundred feet into the air.

  The puncture holes were minute, but the hydraulic system in the Hind operated at extreme pressure. It was slowly losing that pressure, not so much yet that the alarm was activated, but enough to make the craft a little more cumbersome to handle, as if things weren’t bad enough in these conditions, at such high altitudes, towards the limits of the Hind’s service ceiling, which made the controls sluggish and unresponsive, difficult to read. That’s why the pilots didn’t notice, at first – that, and the fact they had so few flying hours up here that they couldn’t tell the difference between altitude sickness and a bad curry. There were so many things to take care of – updraughts, downdraughts, ice on the blades, the viz shot to crap. Didn’t help that they were packed behind with all these bodies. It was normal for the craft to wallow like a mother pig. Things would be better when they got up a little airspeed.

  It is when a helicopter is travelling at its slowest that it is most vulnerable. The controls don’t respond so well, it is more difficult to fly, more unstable. So the pilots noticed nothing out of the ordinary until the hydraulic alarm started to scream at them. The senior pilot’s first instinct was to drop the nose, put on power and throw his craft away from the mountainsid
e. Yet, inevitably, as he grabbed anxiously at his sticks, he over-controlled and over-torqued massively. This would, perhaps, have been no more than a momentary discomfort, had it not been for the hydraulics. As the pilot demanded more of his systems, the hydraulic fluid was pushed around at still greater pressure, which meant that more of it escaped – and that made the craft still more difficult to handle, which meant the pilot demanded ever more of his systems . . .

  It was like an inexperienced driver trying to control his first skid on ice, except this was several hundred feet above the ground. As Harry watched, the Hind began to pirouette and stumble through the sky, lurching forward, up, aft, as the pilot yanked at his controls in ever-growing panic. He might still have been able to stick the Hind on the ground, but he never got the chance. The fine mist of hydraulic fluid was floating around the engine and gearbox. It was highly inflammable, and they were exceedingly hot. The Hind blew up with terrifying explosive anger. Harry threw himself behind the boulders as a firestorm of hot gases and debris shot across the valley. He was burying his head in the snow when there was a second explosion as the Hind hit the ground. By the time he looked up again, he could see nothing but flames.

  High above the scene the second Hind circled, inspected, hovered in indecision then flew away.

  It seemed forever before Harry could approach the scene. The fire burned with an extraordinary ferocity and there were several more minor explosions, yet contrary to his first impressions, not everything was in flames. The explosion had scattered chunks of wreckage across a wide area, and as soon as it became safe, he began a methodical search. What he found in many places sickened him; pieces of charred and torn wreckage, not just of the machine, but of those on board. The explosions had shown no mercy. He had to try to find Martha, but there was nothing, except for a single sleeve of her bright green jacket that seemed almost spotless and unsoiled, as if it had just come from her wardrobe. It was all that was left of Martha Riley, except the memories. He took the sleeve and dropped it into her funeral pyre.