The Reluctant Hero (35 page)

Harry knew of the dangers of hypothermia, he’d been trained by some of the best people in some of the worst places. And his improvised heating system was working remarkably well. The plastic sheeting and insulation from the branches had trapped the heat given off by the
stones and his own body, and although it was minus 25 degrees outside he’d been in far worse situations. Yet still it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t just the hypothermia; Martha’s system had to cope with a bullet through her guts. Unknown to Harry, the bullet had nicked the spleen, and it was slowly leaking. While the cold caused the entrance and exit wounds to constrict and all but close, the wounds inside proved more stubborn. Even as Martha lay silent and asleep, she was bleeding.

Harry had fallen asleep, too, despite his determination to watch over her. His own body had been put through the wringer, and while Martha felt nothing, every muscle and joint in his own body was screaming in protest. Sleep was the only protection. When he woke in the middle of the night, his arms were still folded gently around her, his body sharing its warmth, but he found that she was colder than ever.

He knew she wouldn’t be able to walk. He would have to carry her. He’d done that before, carried a man much heavier than Martha, two days and two nights. But that had been through the deserts of Iraq in the lead up to the first war, not through ice-covered mountains. It had also been more than twenty years ago, and the man had died anyhow. Yet if the sun was strong in the morning, and he could get Martha up to a spot where she might draw from its strength, then anything was possible. Hell, what did it matter if he had to carry her all the way to Afghanistan? Anyway, what choice did he have?

As the light of the new day began to penetrate the forest and trickle inside their makeshift shelter, Harry examined the still-sleeping Martha. He hated what he saw. The skin was not only unnaturally cold but luridly pale, like wax. The flesh around her eyes had shrunk, turned grey, the lips blue. The defences of the body were turned inwards, locked in what was clearly a monumental fight. She desperately needed that sun. He rubbed his thumbs across her forehead, trying to wake her, but there was no response. He pinched her cheeks – still nothing – tried again, began shouting in her face, growing more anxious with every breath, until eventually her eyelids flickered and opened. She was awake but very confused. The eyes took many seconds before they were able to focus on him and she remembered where she was.

‘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.

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.