Special Purposes: First Strike Weapon

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

0823 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), 24th November 1987

The Dietrich, The Irish Sea

THEY WERE SKIRTING the coast of north-western England, east of the Isle of Man, looking for a place to anchor, if not dock. Not that you could tell they were off the coast of anywhere through the thick fog that had enveloped them.

Since his reanimation, and in the solitude imposed on him by the squad since Mongol’s death, it seemed to Vadim that his imagination had gone into overdrive: the dark, red sky gave the thick clouds a strange otherworldly feel. It was easy to imagine that the ship had sailed into Hell.

Colstein had slowed the ship right down; apparently they were picking their way through the Irish Sea using marine radar. Colstein was in charge of the bridge now, with Schiller spending most of his time belowdecks. It seemed the captain had worked his way up the ranks from the engine room, and with the help of some of the more mechanically-minded longshoremen was keeping the ship running. They were, however, perilously low on fuel. They would need to find a port, and soon; but since entering UK territorial waters, they had been completely fogbound.

What Vadim didn’t understand was, where was the navy? Either the Soviet Navy or the Royal Navy? They had picked up very little radio traffic, and most of that had been a garbled mess.

It had been an unpleasant thirty-six hours for everyone. Mongol had been well liked, and between losing him and Genadi, it seemed like the squad had lost its glue. The two snipers had always been distant; snipers had to be. New Boy was too new, Gulag was an arsehole, and the Fräulein, though respected, and liked to a degree, was still a senior NCO.

As for Vadim himself, informal as the Spetsnaz might be, he was still in command, and had to make the difficult decisions. Like shooting Mongol. Even dead, even with everything but the hunger muted, Vadim still saw the hole appearing in Mongol’s head, the shock on the medic’s face, every time he closed his eyes. It had been Farm Boy and Mongol who had provided the squad’s sense of camaraderie. Their friendship with Gulag had gone a long way to keeping the criminal in line.

The Muscovite’s scorn, never far from the surface, had become more obvious. Princess was even more standoffish, to the point of monosyllabic; and it was anybody’s guess what Skull thought about the whole affair. New Boy was the least affected by Mongol’s death – he’d known him the least – but even the scout was looking at Vadim differently. But it was the loss of the Fräulein’s trust that was the hardest to bear. She continued to carry out her duties, but regardless of Mongol’s crimes it was clear that she felt the execution was a monstrous betrayal.

Nor had it been easy for the refugees. Harris and Maria had very much become their spokespeople. They had been honest with the refugees about what had happened, and the response to the outbreak. When the commandos walked by, even the living ones, they were looked at as though they were overseers on a slave galley. The ever-present gore hadn’t helped, but with so little fresh water it hadn’t been possible to clean the castle bridge. They’d done their best with fire hoses and seawater, but with the heating on, the place stank, and flies were starting to gather. If they didn’t get off the Dietrich soon, disease could become a real issue. And Vadim didn’t like how the charnel stench made him feel.

He was standing in the port walkway towards the bow of the ship, staring into the fog towards unseen Britain. Even looking back along the ship, the sternward crane was just a shadow, and the castle bridge was little more than an apparition.

The fog did odd things to sound. He could hear the muffled thumps and moaning from the containers, in the top level of the stacks now, locked between other containers. Even secured like that, nobody was happy about their presence: not the squad, not the refugees, not the crew. It had been the only time Captain Schiller had become openly angry with him.

Vadim had seen the containers they’d dropped off the ship, bobbing in the waves, and had had a horrible vision of the zombies washing ashore and spreading their disease to a new continent. The soldier in him wanted to make sure that the contents of the containers were destroyed. Now he realised that it was a mistake. The middle of the Atlantic Ocean might not have been the perfect place to get rid of them, but it had undoubtedly been their best choice.

He heard footsteps shuffling through the snow towards him and looked up to see the Fräulein approach. She was looking fixedly ahead, trying to ignore him.

“Liesl?” he said as she drew level with him. She stopped and didn’t quite stand to attention.

“Yes, comrade captain,” she said through gritted teeth. He’d been trying to think of something conciliatory to say, but the attitude irked him. He expected better of her.

“Two rules!” Vadim said. “I had two rules. We don’t eat the meat, and we protect the living.”

“We protect our living,” the Fräulein said stiffly.

“Mongol broke that rule, and killed over a hundred people!”

“Not our people!” Now the Fräulein was shouting.

“Well then go and finish it off!” he shouted, pointing through the fog towards the castle bridge. “What fucking difference does it make?”

The Fräulein stared at him.

“We need them to steer the ship,” she finally said.

It was Vadim’s turn to stare.

The Fräulein smiled and then sat down on one of the equipment lockers. “More than anything else, it was the way you just walked off. He was our friend, Vadim.”

And then he saw it. She knew he’d done the right thing, but she couldn’t get past it because Mongol was her friend.

“I had to walk away,” Vadim told her. “I liked Mongol as well, but I made a promise to him in New York. Liesl, he killed a child.”

She sighed. “He didn’t,” she said quietly. “That gnawing, screaming thing inside us did it.”

She turned to look at Vadim. “I think maybe the Spanish girl was right,” she said. “We should kill ourselves.”

He was surprised; out of all of them, the Fräulein had seemed to be handling this the best.

“Well what do you want to do?” he asked. “Because Liesl, I need you.” She met his eyes, and he couldn’t read her expression.

“There can’t be any give in your two rules, can there?” she asked. He didn’t answer because she already knew. “That includes you, right?”

He nodded.

“I’m with you, Vadim.”

“Then I need you to get the squad back in li—” he began.

“Boss?” Both of them looked up. New Boy was standing a little further along the walkway. Neither of them had been aware of his approach, which worried Vadim. “The captain wants to see you up in the bridge.” Vadim frowned. If Schiller was back in the bridge, it had to be pretty serious.

VADIM AND THE Fräulein leaned over the marine radar’s display with Schiller. The captain was wearing oil-stained overalls; his face drawn with fatigue. Princess was leaning next to the starboard hatch and the Fräulein had sent New Boy to fetch Gulag and Skull as well.

“There,” the uncomfortable-looking radar operator said. Vadim saw a blip on the screen. The image looked distorted, unclear, but it was definitely a ship.

“Are you having problems with the radar?” the Fräulein asked the operator.

“It works on radio waves,” the operator told her. “Heat from the fireballs, or beta particles from the blast, can turn the air opaque to the waves. That’s how they got so close. Frankly, I’m surprised it’s working this well.” The ship was less than two miles south of their current position.

“Does that mean that Britain’s been hit?” Vadim asked. The operator turned to look at him, unhappily.

“Almost certainly,” he said.

“Any idea what kind of ship it is?” the Fräulein asked. The radar operator shook his head.

Schiller straightened up. “What do you want to do?” he asked Vadim.

“What do you want to do?” Vadim returned.

“Find the safest port possible,” he said. “But I suspect that will require time we just don’t have. Liverpool and Manchester are the closest large ports, but there is every chance they’ve been destroyed by nuclear weapons. There are other, smaller ports. Barrow-in-Furness, but there’s a naval shipyard there…”

“Find me a smaller port that was unlikely to have been a target, and head towards the coast. Let’s see if it follows.”

“With patchy radar, in fog, these waters are very treacherous,” Schiller warned. Vadim opened his mouth to ask for a better suggestion but the radio crackled into life. After a few seconds of static and garbled words, it gave way to heavily accented English.

“To unidentified ship running north of us, this is the Ushkuinik. Please bring your vessel to a full stop and prepared to be boarded.” Oddly, there was laughing in the background. The accent was Russian. The captain turned to Vadim.

“Fräulein, give the refugees back their weapons. Assemble the squad with a full combat load, as much ammunition as we have left.”

The Fräulein didn’t move.

“We’re going to fire on our own people?” Princess asked, an edge in her voice.

“My mother was in Berlin in 1945,” the radar operator said. “I do not want to be turned over to the Red Army.”

Princess ignored him. Vadim turned to Schiller.

“Captain, you need to run from that ship,” Vadim said.

“I agree with Hans, but isn’t this what you wanted?” he asked.

“Captain, there’s no way there is a ship in the Soviet Navy called the Ushkuinik,” he said.

“You can’t know that,” Princess said.

“The Soviet Navy does not name ships after twelfth-century Viking pirates,” he told the sniper.

“They’re still our people,” Princess insisted. Vadim turned on her.

“Our own people did this!” he roared at her, pointing at his own deathly pallor and making the bridge crew jump. Princess looked angry and opened her mouth to retort as the radio crackled into life. This time it sounded much clearer.

“Please line up all female crew and passengers ready for inspection,” the voice said. There was more laughter in the background. The radio went quiet. Everybody stared at it for a moment or two and then started moving. Schiller issued orders and the Dietrich began turning towards the coast.

“It’s picking up speed,” the radar operator said. “Twenty knots, still increasing.”

“A ship that size? It’s military,” Schiller muttered. “We can’t outrun it.”

“I’m going to need some of your people,” Vadim told him, outlining his plan to the captain and the Fräulein. Schiller’s face became graver and graver, but at length he nodded. Vadim made for the hatch, Princess a little ahead of him.

“I’m sorry I shouted at you,” he said as they made their way down the stairs.

“I’m not made of crystal, captain. I’ve been shouted at before,” she said as they turned the corner onto the next flight of stairs. “Tell me, would you be apologising to Gulag, or New Boy, if you’d shouted at them?”

“I was once told by a defecting Contra that the CIA death squad members that trained them had advised them to target female combatants first when fighting the Sandinistas, because—”

“They’d worked harder to get there,” Princess muttered, splitting off on the third deck and heading for the cabin she shared with New Boy. “And have to put up with patronising nicknames!” she shouted over her shoulder.

THE USHKUINIK PUT a shot across their bows, the large-calibre gun echoed over the sea. Vadim didn’t see the shell itself, but he saw the eddies it left in the fog. It was Schiller’s cue to cut the engines and slow down; Vadim felt the thrum of the engines die beneath him, where he was lying on top of a container. They had one advantage and one advantage only: that the crew of the Ushkuinik wouldn’t be expecting six highly trained and experienced commandos on board.

They couldn’t afford to hold back, although they were getting very low on ammunition. They had given the crew and Harris back their weapons, but frankly that was a last resort. The civilians were barricaded in the bridge castle.

Everything else was in the other ship’s favour.

The Ushkuinik glided out of the fog, the low, sleek, predatory shape of a Burevestnik-class frigate. He was no expert on naval weapon systems, but it looked like their surface-to-surface missile launchers and torpedo tubes were empty, which just left the four 76mm guns behind the bridge castle; and of course the men now lining the deck of the frigate. Some wore naval uniforms, though they carried weapons against Soviet Navy rules. More worrying were the Naval Infantry among them, a well-trained conventional force with an excellent reputation.

The frigate was slowing down, coming alongside. Vadim could see someone in a second-rank captain’s uniform he suspected the man hadn’t earned. He was shouting at them through a loudhailer, demanding they prepare to be boarded and bring out the booze and the women. Vadim waited until they were nearly level. Then, as one, he, Gulag, New Boy and the Fräulein rose to their knees. The snipers – Princess on top of the bridge castle and Skull on the forward crane – began killing. Suppressed, nearly silent subsonic rounds targeted anyone on the frigate with heavy weapons: RPGs, machine guns, grenade launchers. The pirates hadn’t even realised the fight had started; their comrades just started falling over. Vadim, Gulag and New Boy threw grenades down onto the frigate’s deck and brought their AK-74s up. Let’s see if you can still shoot, old man, Vadim thought, aiming at the man with the loudhailer. He squeezed the trigger; the loudhailer exploded and the pirate fell back.

He heard the whoosh of the Fräulein’s RPG-18. He’d been sure the rocket was going to be useless against the ship’s armour, so the Fräulein aimed the weapon at the window of the bridge. He felt the heat and pressure wave from the explosion as the 64mm high explosive anti-tank warhead impacted with the frigate’s bridge. Then their fragmentation grenades started to explode. People were torn apart by the shrapnel, flung into the air by the force of the explosion, some of them over the side.

Vadim and his team capitalised on the sudden chaos, firing into the enemy crew. He heard the chatter of the Fräulein’s RPKS-74. He was trying to pick individuals off, but found that, his first shot notwithstanding, his marksmanship wasn’t as good as it needed to be at this distance, firing between moving ships. He switched the selector on his rifle and started firing three-round bursts into groups of people. He’d leave the detailed work to the snipers. The other crew hadn’t even started to return fire yet.

The cranes started to move, lifting two of the forty-foot containers up into the air. Leary was on the sternward crane, another longshoreman on the fore. The cranes’ booms swung out over the other ship just as the return fire finally started. Vadim moved back as bullets sparked off the edge of the stacks and shifted position, leaning over the containers and firing again and again. New Boy and the Fräulein were doing the same. There was an explosion as Gulag fired a grenade from the launcher mounted under the barrel of his rifle. Then came the boom of one of the frigate’s 76mm guns. Vadim watched in horror as the forward crane was hit. The operator’s cab ceased to exist. The force of the explosion knocked Gulag flying across the top of the containers and took Vadim off his feet. The crane toppled towards the deck. Skull leapt from the boom, falling some twenty feet onto the top of the stacks and crying out as he hit a container, hard.

Vadim crawled to the edge of the stacks. He heard a machine gun firing, saw tracers striking the cab of the aft crane that Leary was driving. Vadim reached the edge of the stacks and risked a peek: the boom of the destroyed forward crane, still holding the container, hit the edge of the Dietrich, bounced off the frigate with a deafening clang, and much to Vadim’s relief plummeted into the Irish Sea. The main deck of the enemy frigate was lit up by muzzle flashes. The Dietrich’s stacks were wreathed in sparks. He found the machine-gunner shooting at Leary’s crane and fired his own underslung grenade launcher at him; the grenade exploded and the gunner was no longer there. A bullet ripped into the dead flesh of his left arm and he rolled back from the edge. He grabbed another hand grenade, removed the pin and threw it over the edge of the stacks. He heard it explode as he switched magazine, his second-to-last one.

Further along the stacks, closer to the bridge castle, he saw the Fräulein pull the last drum mag out of her RPKS-74 and replace it with a forty-round magazine. Her head snapped back as she was hit, but she barely seemed to acknowledge the wound as she started firing again. Just a graze. Not nearly enough to kill her.

Skull was pulling himself towards the edge of the stacks, his left leg at an odd angle. Gulag finished reloading and started firing again, roaring at the crew of the frigate. Vadim rolled up onto his knee to fire, and noticed that one of the rear guns seemed to be pointing straight at him. Leary must have hit the releases on the container his crane was holding, as it dropped like a bomb onto the deck of the frigate. The 76mm gun fired. Vadim was running. The force of the blast hit him in the back like the hand of an angry god. Containers went tumbling into the air.

HE WASN’T SURE if he’d lost consciousness or not. He was lying face down, still on top of the stacks, looking at the forward crane. The glass on the operator’s cab was holed and bloody, but he could still make out Leary slumped forward, clearly dead, over the controls. Over the ringing in his ears, over the gunfire, Vadim could just about make out the screams that always followed when the living met the dead.

He pushed himself up onto all fours. The dead had spilled out of the container Leary had dropped onto the pirates’ deck. They had rigged the containers with grenades and cords, and Harris and Maria – watching from concealed positions down on the main deck – were supposed to pull the pins, exploding the grenades and blowing the locks. In theory. There was a lot that could have gone wrong with the plan, but Vadim watched as something that had once been a Brooklyn dockworker took down a deserter from the Soviet Naval Infantry, biting a chunk out of his screaming face. Leary had done it. He had probably saved them all.

The crew of the pirate frigate had turned their attention to the zombies amongst them now. Vadim saw the top of another infantryman’s head come off: he assumed Princess had shot him for being too efficient in dealing with the dead. He looked back along the stacks to see where the rest of the squad was. Where the frigate’s gun had hit it looked like someone had taken a bite out of the containers. The Fräulein was still kneeling, firing into the frigate below. He couldn’t see the others.

There was the awful shriek of tortured metal as the frigate collided with the Dietrich. Vadim was flung forward. He grabbed the edge of the stacks and found himself hanging one-handed, forty feet above the main deck. A shadow fell across him and suddenly he was looking up at Gulag. The Muscovite wasn’t exactly pointing his weapon at the captain, looking down at him as though thinking, weighing up a decision. Vadim remained silent. He didn’t think anything he could say would help his predicament. He also gave serious thought to just letting go, but for the moment he looked up at Gulag. Finally the gangster seemed to come to a decision, kneeling down and dragging Vadim back up onto the top of the stacks. Vadim heard the boom of Skull’s .303 as he rolled onto the top of the container. The sniper was still alive and presumably didn’t feel there was any further call for stealth. Vadim could see New Boy wandering around on top of the stack as well. The scout looked dazed. Vadim pushed himself back up onto his knees. The Ushkuinik was drifting away from them. The screaming and the gunfire had fallen off. They had fought dirty and won. Vadim wasn’t sure that ‘winning’ was a label you could apply to a situation like this, but his squad were all still moving around.

The harsh squeal of the PA actually made him jump.

“This is your captain speaking. Abandon ship. I repeat: abandon ship.”