23

I KICKED ALL the shit further back to clear a space and opened the shutter. A gale rushed in. It was like standing at a station with an express train thundering past. I tried sticking my head out. My face got buffeted like I was in freefall. I couldn’t see through my streaming eyes.

I pulled my head back in. All the wrappers from the field dressings and all other bits of crap were caught in a whirlwind around me.

Mr Lover Man had taken my place between the cockpit seats. He shouted at Joe: he wanted to know what was happening. He followed Joe’s pointing finger to the Skyvan on our right. Then he looked back at Genghis working on Tracy.

I cleared more shit out of the way. I wanted a good stable platform for the weapon.

Mr Lover Man tilted his head so he didn’t bang it on the top of the fuselage and stormed towards me. Joe gave me the heads-up in my cans. ‘He doesn’t like you, man. He’s fucking mad. Those hands are massive. Be careful.’

I came forward to meet him. I wanted metal fuselage between me and the sky in case he got weird and tried to chuck me out.

I pulled one of the cans off my ear. ‘Listen, this is the only way to stop them. We don’t know how much fuel they’ve got. We don’t know if we can outrun them. They might have extra tanks. We don’t know what they’re up to. We don’t know what they’re going to do when we get there. So we’ve got to stop them while we can.’

A big finger jabbed into my chest. ‘You kill Stefan …’ It pressed even harder and his face came closer. ‘I kill you.’

I let him get on with it. Now wasn’t the time. Let him make the threat. If I fucked up, we’d see. I nodded and turned back towards the open door. He was good at jabbing and doing the threats but he wasn’t exactly pushing me out of the way to take the shots himself.

I put the can back on as I reached the howling gap. ‘All sorted. Where the fuck are they?’

I was looking out as best I could, craning my neck beyond the cargo door. All I could see was clear blue sky, and ocean below.

‘They’re still half-right. They’re about half a klick forward and higher.’

‘OK.’

I hauled myself back inside. I braced my back against the fuselage opposite the opening, my knees up and my elbows just inside the creases of the knees so I didn’t have bone on bone. I wanted good firm support for the weapon. Legs pressed together, I got the butt of the AK in my shoulder. As the aircraft bumped and buffeted, I pushed the safety to first click.

I was going to have to be good. The AK was designed to deliver massive firepower by hundreds of thousands of Russians advancing over the plains of Western Europe, brassing up whatever was in their way. The AK is at its best firing short bursts on automatic at ranges below about fifty metres. Beyond that, they go wild.

The calibre of the round was in my favour. The 7.62 was designed to take an enemy down first time and keep him down. If Joe could get me in range, whatever I sent across should punch holes in the Skyvan the size of my fist.

I cocked the weapon and pulled the selector down again, onto single shot. I got back on the mike. ‘Joe, mate, you’ve got to get close and level.’

‘No problem, man. They got any weapons apart from that M4?’

‘We’ll find out soon enough. Make it look like we’re trying to push them towards the land or some shit. I need to find out exactly where the boy is on that thing.’

The revs picked up a notch and I could feel the airframe increase speed. Moments later I saw the Skyvan out of the door. It was forward of us, to the right, and higher in the clear blue sky. We were about a hundred metres away.

‘Get up more, Joe. We need to be at the same level. We need to see through those cockpit windows.’

‘They’ve seen us, Nick.’ Joe’s voice had gone up a notch too. ‘The ramp is coming down.’