Andy McNab: Exit wound

We throbbed away at the Ural’s top speed of 100 k.p.h. Its basic 750cc twin-cylinder sounded like a diesel truck. These machines hadn’t changed a bit since the Russians reverse-engineered the German Army’s BMW in 1939 – and Cuckoo was the real deal, one of the originals. It was designed to go to war, take a pounding and still come back for more.

Like most of the really good squaddies I knew, it was also a pain in the arse. Taking orders was not what it was about, and I rather liked that. There was plenty of feedback from the handlebars. It had its own way of doing things, and it didn’t care who knew.

It wanted to turn right whenever I accelerated, so I began steering left to counteract the pull. But easing off the throttle for a shift of gear made the bike yaw back to its original axis. I had to learn to feather my steering according to throttle input in order to keep the thing heading in the direction we needed to go.

Braking and turning were also no picnic. Hitting the front brakes pulled the Ural to the left, whether or not you wanted to go there. Right turns were even more hair-raising. If the change of direction was too sudden, the bike would start to lift.

We passed a barrack block overlooking a wet parade-ground. An endless line of wooden shacks stretched along its furthest edge, probably selling everything from beer to women. Neat lines of trucks and APCs glistened in the rain. Soldiers drilled or ran around at the double, all the normal business. It could have been any fortified military compound anywhere on the planet. It was exactly what I’d been hoping for.

We cracked on. I checked the odometer, watching it move up to the ten K mark. Anna slapped my left leg. We’d reached the truck stop she’d been told about. I pulled in.

This one had a hardware store. There were rows of shovels and picks lined up against a wall in some kind of display, next to knackered tractors that had probably left the production line in Stalin’s time.

I waited outside in the rain while Anna went in. I took off the helmet to get some air. My whole body felt grimy and stiff, like I’d spent the night in a trench. For some reason, a night in the open always feels worse after first light. It was the bit I’d hated most about being a squaddie.

Anna came out twenty minutes later, laden with gear. ‘Shall we fill it up at the pump?’

‘Not here. Let’s get on target.’

I put the helmet back on and we rode for another thirty K along the fence line. The skull and crossbones still made regular appearances every twenty-five metres or so. The occasional building materialized out of the drizzle beyond the wire. I didn’t have a problem with the bad weather. There would be no test firing until it cleared.

At the thirty-five K mark we reached the guts of the air base, and barrack block after barrack block, all drab concrete and flat-roofed, interspersed with semi-circular huts made of corrugated iron. The whole place was heaving with lads in uniform trying to look as though they were on the way to somewhere important.

We passed the main gates. A MiG fighter and a Hind helicopter gunship were mounted on plinths either side of them. Two sentries in fur hats and camouflage waterproofs stood to attention beneath them, AKs across their chests. Their pissed-off expressions reminded me that there was something about being a squaddie that I’d hated even more than waking up after a night in the open.

Runway lights throbbed in the gloom behind them, fading away into the distance. Several massive Antonovs were lined up on a concrete apron alongside jets and helicopters. Jeeps buzzed between them. I slowed down as much as I could without drawing attention to us. I gave my visor a wipe and scanned the place for a smaller white jet among the grey.

Nothing.

We pushed on, passing armoured fighting vehicles and general military traffic.

About a K further on, a dense block of trees came right up to the fence line and crossed over it. The chain link disappeared among its branches.

I braked and shouted down to Anna. ‘What do those signs mean? They saying the place is mined?’

‘No – just that you’ll be shot if you trespass into the training area.’

I slowed some more and checked behind us for possible observers. There were none. The road was deserted. I swung Cuckoo to the right, across a thin strip of wet grass, then manoeuvred between the trunks of the firs until we reached cover up against the fence. I turned off the engine, dismounted and pulled off my helmet. ‘Now you can fill it.’

I lifted a whole lot of gear off her legs and undid the rope clamping the full petrol cans to the rear parcel rack. As she tried to haul herself out, I dropped one of the cans by the sidecar and left her to it.

The fence was easy enough to climb. I used one of the pickets as support. I wasn’t worried about sensors. This thing stretched for hundreds of miles.

From the top, all I could hear was the gentle glug of fuel into our new Chinese chainsaw. I couldn’t see anything of the runway through the trees. That was good: it meant they couldn’t see us.

I jumped back down and grabbed the other can. We’d topped up the bike at every filling station we’d come across over the last six hours, even if the tank was three-quarters full. If we had to leg it, the last thing we needed was a fuel gauge on zero.

Anna was done. She screwed the filler cap tight. ‘What are we going to do now, Nick?’

‘They’re going to shoot down drones, right?’

She nodded. ‘When the clouds clear. They’ll want to do it at near maximum altitude.’

A MiG screamed off the runway to our right.

‘Maybe they’re going to take off from here. It’s the main base and the only airstrip we know about so far. We should penetrate as far as we can into the area, and check out where the drones are heading.’

‘Is that it?’

‘No, we’ve got to keep on pushing forward. The more we do that, the more we can find out – and the more chance we have of getting on target.’

I pointed to the clear plastic bubble on the side of the chainsaw. ‘Pump that thing until it fills with fuel.’

I went and tied everything back onto the bike. It was beginning to look like a really bad Cub Scout’s rucksack – all we were missing was a frying-pan and a bunch of tin mugs. ‘OK, on the bike. You’re going to ride through the hole.’

I picked up the chainsaw and after ten or twelve wrenches on the starter cord, and finally working out how the choke operated, the thing sparked up. I stuck the eighteen-inch blade against the chain link to the right of the steel post I’d just used to climb up, and throttled up to full revs. It was pointless worrying about the noise. If we were heard, we were heard. There was nothing I could do about it. What I could do was cut the fence and keep cracking on.

The thing didn’t cut that well – they never do at first. The chain bounced and snagged, but we got there. By stretching my arms as far as I could above my head, I cut a strip about two and a half metres high.

I turned off the saw and handed it to Anna. ‘Lash everything down – even the helmets. We have to look as normal as possible when we get back on the road.’

She nodded. We were definitely going to do this job and then escape. Everything would go like clockwork. That was part of the forward-momentum thing. You did your best to make yourself sound as if it was going to work, as if the job was going to be done. With luck, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I laced my fingers through the bottom of the fence and tried to drag it upwards.

It resisted at first, but came up easily once I’d wrenched the lower links clear of the undergrowth that had twisted its way through them. We were left with a gap like a badly drawn, inverted V.