Gavin Smith: Special Purposes: First Strike Weapon

“What do you think?” the colonel asked.

THE COLONEL HAD returned to the Antonov; there were more members of the 15th to pick up from various airstrips in the north. Then they would return to Bagram before joining the rest of the brigade to fly west en masse. The colonel felt that it should be Vadim himself who told his men.

He could hear them arguing, good-naturedly. The Fräulein was divvying out the Spaniard’s belongings to the rest of the squad. They would have given Razin any gear that he needed, and the rest would be shared out according to sentimentality and requirement. The Spaniard didn’t have much family. Given his off-duty habits, he almost certainly had bastard children everywhere he’d served, but they’d been unknown to him. Farm Boy had his parents and siblings back in Georgia, Mongol had a large extended family back in Mongolia, and, oddly, Gulag spoke of his father with near holy reverence, but none of them had immediate family. Their life wasn’t really conducive to partners and children.

As he approached he could hear them calling Razin ‘New Boy’. That’s what he’d be called now until he earned back the nickname he’d been given in basic training, or a new one. He was new in from Kiev, so the rest of the squad would be going through his gear, looking for anything that was difficult to get hold of in Afghanistan – which was just about everything, but particularly sweets, alcohol, pornography and cigarettes. How New Boy took this blatant theft would play a large part in how he was accepted by the squad. You had to strike a balance between generosity and assertiveness. Even so, the rest of the squad would keep their distance until he had proven he wasn’t a fool.

Their tent was pitched in a hole and surrounded by sand bags; you had to walk through a warren of trenches to reach it. It tended to turn into a boggy swamp when it rained, but in the snow, it was just cold. Gulag was lying across the top of the sandbags, smoking what Vadim assumed was one of New Boy’s cigarettes.

“He didn’t have any porn. I can only assume he’s a monk. Didn’t Marx have some quite strong things to say about religion?” Gulag took another drag of the cigarette. Vadim wasn’t really in the mood for Gulag’s brand of humour tonight. He started down the crumbling earthen steps into the tent. “Cosy little chat with the colonel: you both being heroes and everything?”

The Spetsnaz may have been more relaxed than the regular army, but even so, this crossed the line.

“You weren’t beaten enough during basic training, were you?” Vadim asked. He was wondering if at his age he still had it in him to deliver a beating to a savage like Gulag. He wasn’t sure he would like the answer.

“Oh, I was beaten,” Gulag told him.

“I get that, just not enough .”

“I was beaten growing up, I was beaten in the gulag, and I was beaten in basic training.” He took another drag of his cigarette. He wasn’t wearing his gloves now, despite the cold. Vadim could see the stumps of the two fingers on his left hand. “Made me the man I am today.” Gulag sat up on the sandbags and grinned down at Vadim. “They don’t beat me anymore, though. Now they just try and kill me. Tell me, captain, how many men under your command have made it back to Russia, or whatever disgusting shithole they come from?”

Vadim stared up at Gulag.

The criminal smiled back at him. “You’re going to try and kill us all, aren’t you?”

Not me , he wanted to tell Gulag, except it was his command, they were his people.

Gulag pushed himself off the sandbags, landing right in front of Vadim. He leaned in close, smelling of sweat, cigarettes and bad breath.

“Well you’re not going to kill me, do you understand?”

Then he turned and stalked into the tent.

1117 EST, 14th November 1987

The Volga , Lenok (India) Class Submarine, Laurentian Fan, Atlantic Ocean, off the East Coast of Canada

THE SQUAD JOINED Colonel Krychenko in the Antonov, and the short-take-off-and-landing transport aircraft hopped from one airfield to the next, collecting the scattered 15th Spetsnaz Brigade. Vadim assumed that he would know most of the men and women that had joined them on the plane, but the rate of attrition had been such that a lot of the faces where new to him.

They landed at Bagram Airbase just outside Kabul, the main headquarters of the Soviet military effort in Afghanistan. The 15th Brigade had just about enough personnel left to warrant a heavy-lift Antonov AN-124 Ruslan aircraft. Even with them all in there, the huge cargo aircraft’s interior seemed cavernous. The other men and women all looked like Vadim felt, tired and without hope. There was much speculation, but nobody was telling them anything. He’d used the time to catch up with those members of the brigade that he still knew. They shared the same stories: soldiers’ lives wasted, the villainy of the KGB.

The plane landed a number of times to refuel and to drop people off. Initially Vadim wasn’t sure where their final destination was, though he suspected East Germany. It was warmer here than it had been in Afghanistan, despite its being November. They were loaded into trucks, and eventually debussed at the Baltic port of Rostock.

They were led into covered submarine pens to see two docked Lenok Class boats. They looked like most submarines Vadim had seen or operated from, except these had raised structures on their backs, carrying submersibles of a type Vadim didn’t recognise. He could feel the questioning eyes of the rest of the squad, but this wasn’t a good time to discuss anything.

There had been enough Spetsnaz in Rostock to form a patchwork company, which was split between the two subs and then broken down into squads. They were then ordered to give up their equipment, causing some heated discussion. No sailor had been permitted to carry a weapon in the Soviet fleet since the Kronstadt Mutiny, but Vadim and a number of other officers, backed by some increasingly angry soldiers, had pointed out that they weren’t sailors. The naval officers had replied that a pressurised environment 700 feet beneath the surface is not a good place for high-velocity weapons and grenades. In all honesty, Vadim could see their point.

It was cramped on the sub, which smelled of diesel, sweat, military cooking and shit. The sub seemed to be running on a reduced crew to make room for the Spetsnaz commandos. The squads had been separated and isolated. This was standard operating procedure, helping compartmentalise what little information they knew. They had been at sea for more than seven days now. At least they had all managed to catch up on some much-needed sleep.

Vadim made his way through the narrow corridor from the commander’s state room back towards the cramped bunk area his squad had been assigned. He had no idea how Farm Boy, Mongol and the Fräulein were managing to get around.

They were all sitting around a wooden crate, except for Gulag who was in his bunk, furtively masturbating.

“Fuck’s sake, Gulag,” Vadim muttered.

“I can’t help it, boss, I can see Fräulein.”

“I will tear it off and choke you with it, little man,” the Fräulein threatened.

“Promises, promises…”

“Speaking as your medic, you’re supposed to leave it alone when it starts to bleed,” Mongol pointed out. There was some laughter. Gulag’s mercifully dry hand emerged from beneath the sheets and he tried to wipe it on a protesting Farm Boy.

“Enough!” Vadim snapped. After the meeting he’d just had with the sub-commander and the political officer, he really wasn’t in the mood. Even Gulag was paying attention now. The criminal sorted himself out and shifted to sit on the side of the bunk. Vadim nodded to Skull, who moved to stand by the curtain between the corridor and their bunkroom.