FIRST light.
Tallis headed east towards Khankala, keeping strictly to the main road. He’d already spotted anti-personnel mines in a ditch running alongside. Cold, sleety rain filled the air. That was good, Tallis thought. It would deaden the sound, deepen the shadows, and obscure the vision of anyone with evil intent. He didn’t think about the young man he’d left behind, still less about Katya. He couldn’t afford to. His focus now was on Darke.
Khankala, in the rear of both wars, possessed all the hallmarks of a place that had grown: new three-storey dwellings; cafes and restaurants. As he walked through unnervingly quiet streets, he found it hard to believe that during the first conflict rebels had shot a helicopter to pieces there, that during the second wave of hostilities fleeing refugees stormed military helicopters to hitch the forty-minute ride to Mozdok and what they hoped was freedom.
With each step events loomed from the past to haunt the present so that when, in a blast of bitterly cold wind, he eventually dropped down to Argun, skirting a canning factory and military detention centre, he could almost smell the burn of human flesh when a decade before a truck filled with explosives had been driven into the barracks where police officers were stationed.
By early afternoon, he was tracking alongside the winding road, close to the Argun River, the ground shale and stone beneath his feet. Mud built, virtually windowless dwellings spotted the landscape. Barns with bushes and rushes growing out of the roofs huddled together. The contrast between the capital and the outer region couldn’t have been starker.
There were few people. Those he saw were women, gypsy-like, dark and flashing. There were no men, apart from several oldtimers with crevassed, wind-burnt faces. There were no children. He wondered about the disappeared, about the twenty-to-thirty-something men his age, who’d covered the same terrain, walked where he was walking. Maybe they had made it as far as Urus-Martan, a place where there were frequent ambushes, according to Lena and Ruslan, only to be picked up and stamped out as though they’d never existed. Except to those who loved them.
With the wind whispering in his ears, he continued through cheerless villages, mountains gathering ahead, and on towards Chiri-Yurt, in the Shali district, the foothills below the Argun Gorge. Rocks and grass underfoot, he briefly travelled through a thick forested area before swiftly cutting back onto a more cultivated track after spotting an arms cache that contained a number of anti-personnel mines, including a PMN-2 with fuse, the sort that would propel the surrounding boulders and earth into the victim by sheer explosive force. Beyond the woods, he found many scratching a living in the shale, refugees from mountain villages, refugees from life. They paid him the same attention they’d have bestowed on an elephant walking past. Here was a single man, a foreigner, walking alone, but nobody spoke, nobody asked questions. With every pace, he wondered if he was going to receive a bullet or a blade in the back. The adrenalin was coursing so hard it hurt.
Stopping to rest in a nearby cemetery on the edge of the village, his back against the gnarled bark of a tree, he was suddenly aware he had company. Slowly, he slipped his hand inside his jacket, took the Glock from his shoulder holster then looked round, and cursed.
‘I told you I travel alone.’
‘You need someone to watch your back.’ Ruslan had a mutinous look in his eye as he squatted down next to him. He had some colour in his face as if he’d run through the wind. His eyes danced with fire.
‘You followed me all the way?’ Tallis was seriously afraid he was losing his powers of observation and that was worrying.
‘Not exactly. Chaikova gave me a lift.’
Tallis shook his head and smiled. Yuri Chaikova was even more of an enigma than Grigori Orlov. Somewhere in that rough old frame of his beat a human heart.
‘The road ahead is extremely dangerous, full of troops in vehicles,’ Ruslan said. ‘It’s rumoured there are soldiers in the village. I will take you to where you need to be then I will return.’
Tallis let out a sigh. He could see that argument was a waste of energy. Ruslan interpreted his silence as a good sign. ‘Here,’ he said, rummaging through his backpack, ‘I brought you these.’ He handed Tallis a plastic bottle filled with water and a neatly wrapped parcel. Tallis took them, drinking the water straight off. Inside the paper was a meat pie, freshly made by the look of it. Suddenly ravenous, he broke off a piece and ate. It was excellent. He wondered whether Katya had prepared it. My God, he thought, what would she say when she discovered Ruslan gone? He posed the question.
Ruslan shrugged. ‘It will be alright. She will forgive me.’ A slow smile spread over his face. ‘Especially when I return.’
By the time they started off again, the rain had settled to a slow steady patter. Skies and earth, tree and leaf were grey. And there was mud. Thick, humus-rich, it sucked at his boots. As they skirted the river, a badly bloated corpse floated face down in the water. Christ, Tallis thought, giving a start. Originally he’d mistaken it for a piece of junk until he’d made out the clothing and a pair of putrefied hands. Neither he nor Ruslan passed comment or exchanged a word.
The landscape here was one of jagged silhouettes with trees clinging to cliffs and rocky outposts. At every turn they faced peaks and gorges, forests and jutting edges. The spectre of the mountains, hovering in black, was all around them. Tallis understood then Ruslan’s remark about the voracity of their appetite, their need for fresh blood. This strange, rebellious land of baying animals and women with avian faces, their menfolk gone, felt as foreign to him as anything or anywhere he’d ever known. He felt as if he was walking through a land of ghosts.
Without warning, the chop-chop sound of rotors hammered his ears. Tallis looked up and saw two Mi-8Ts, military-transport helicopters, hacking through the sky. Grabbing hold of Ruslan, he dragged him into the trees and waited for them to pass over.
Night fell quickly due to the increasingly appalling weather conditions. With it came the sound of repeated automatic gunfire. Tallis decided he needed a change in balance: concealment was called for. Although he was happy to keep moving at a reduced pace, he could tell that Ruslan, although a decade younger, was flagging—a major reason for Tallis wanting to travel unencumbered.
Taking out a pair of night-vision binoculars, he looked about him and saw a solid shape ahead with what looked like a fence around it. He pointed it out to Ruslan. It was a shepherd’s hut and it was deserted. Had been for some time, Tallis thought, clocking the log fence around the perimeter, as he stepped inside. It had an earth floor, one window. Against the walls, which were a maze of rat holes, a single broken spade rested. It wasn’t the Ritz but it was dry and sheltered. While Ruslan dropped to his knees to pray, Tallis took out his sleeping bag and removed his wet-weather jacket, spreading it out on the ground, leaving his holstered Glock in place. Then he heard a noise, brief, in the distance, like the sound of tyres on mud.
‘What?’ Ruslan said, his eyebrows arching in surprise.
‘Noise.’
‘I didn’t hear anything.’
Tallis put a finger to his lips. The air hummed with silence. Forty seconds later, he heard it again, nearer this time. It was coming from the direction of their destination, from the mountains. Ruslan craned his ears, shook his head.
‘You didn’t hear it?’
‘No.’
Tallis grabbed his night-vision binoculars and the Kurtz. ‘Stay here.’
‘Wait…’
‘Stay here.’
Tallis went outside, creeping low, keeping his body parallel to the fence to break up his body shape and obscure visibility, the pouring rain providing extra cover. As he suspected, they definitely had company. Two beams of light were bumping along the track, the engine note denoting a 4x4. Maybe they were people passing through like him, but a strong gut feeling told him otherwise. Why else was the place deserted? Because it wasn’t safe to stay.
Switching the combined safety and fire selector down one notch to single shots, he dived across the track to the relative safety of a patch of trees and, putting the binoculars to his eyes, watched, listened and waited. The noise increased. Gone the on/off jerking sound. This was more of a slip and judder. As feared, the vehicle, an ugly-looking Nissan, came into view, slowed, skidded a bit, and came to a bumpy stop. It was right outside the hut. Three doors opened. Three men got out. They were all dressed in tracksuits and running shoes. None of them appeared obviously armed but it was hard to tell. One, the driver, walked a couple of metres away, let his pants down and started to take a leak while the other two went to the back and pulled out a box, obviously heavy, judging by the way their bodies strained and heaved. And, oh, God, Tallis thought, they were heading inside the hut with it.
Shouts broke across the night sky. The driver, who had finished his pee, dashed towards the hut. Within seconds Ruslan was dragged painfully outside on his knees, the three of them starting in on him with questions that didn’t require answers. Next came fists. Ruslan started to protest but it was no good. Tallis had seen this over and over again—in kids of fifteen, young males and sometimes young women, the pack in action, cowardly and self-serving—and it sickened him to his bones. Using the commotion as cover, he scooted back towards the fence. By now Ruslan was on the ground, his body balled, hands over his head, grunting as the boots went in. The blokes were laughing, jeering, high on cruelty, their intention clear enough—they wanted to kill him. When the driver stood back and pulled out a weapon, Tallis took aim and fired the first shot, dropping him. Two more shots followed, slotting each man so fast neither had time to process what was happening, let alone react. Tallis ran over, checked for vital signs in all three targets: none.
Ruslan let out a long groan as Tallis pulled him to his feet. His face was bleeding and swollen and his clothes were spattered with blood and bone from his assailants.
‘Come on, let’s get you cleaned up,’ Tallis said, hauling him back inside. ‘Who the hell were they?’
‘Gangsters,’ Ruslan spat, losing part of a tooth.
‘Russians?’ Tallis reached into his backpack for some medi-wipes, which he handed over.
‘Chechens,’ Ruslan said, dispirited. He dabbed at his face, tentatively exploring his injuries, spat out another gobbet of blood. ‘What are we going to do with them?’ he said at last.
Chuck them in the river, Tallis thought. As for the 4x4, it was probably worth commandeering, but maybe not. Frankly, he was more interested in what was in the box. It didn’t take long to jemmy it open, revealing a bumper pack of automatic rifles and sub-machine-guns, grenades and bullets. Useful.
Half an hour later, they’d dragged the bodies of the three men to the side of the river and pushed them into the water, Tallis removing every trace of their existence by raking over the ground with the broken tip of the spade. The weaponry he decided to keep for a rainy day. Using the tree as a marker, it took him a couple of laborious hours to bury the box, the soil sticky and unyielding. By the time he staggered into his sleeping bag, he was exhausted. Graham Darke, he thought, plunging into sleep, you’d better be bloody worth it.
The next morning they awoke to a sky of cerulean blue and the sound of songbirds. There was no wind. ‘This is what I came back for,’ Ruslan said, gazing out wistfully across the countryside. ‘The land here is beautiful. It’s what men do to it that makes it seem so ugly.’
Tallis nodded and took a gulp of liquid from his water bottle. Privately, he thought it a perfect day for snipers. ‘The future lies in your grasp, Ruslan,’ he said, resting a hand lightly on the boy’s shoulders. ‘This place needs people like you.’
Ruslan gave a big sigh as if the responsibility was too onerous and daunting for one man. ‘Perhaps, with the help of others, and God willing, we may be able to change things.’
After covering the fresh earth with stones, they drove for no more than six kilometres, the vehicle running out of petrol near the verdant pastures of Chishki. Abandoning it there, and with no time to remove their traces, they went on foot, and set a course for the mountain village of Shatoi.
The higher they climbed, the more intimidating the scenery. The road had become a track then a path. Tallis felt his temple pulse with concentration, his entire focus on the ground beneath his feet and on the lookout for tripwires. Venturing into the mountains felt as if he was entering Tolkien’s Mordor in The Lord of the Rings.
Eventually, the path opened out again and back onto a potholed road that crested a thickly wooded ridge. Rebellion hardwired into the topography, the forested mountains lent the best possible cover for resistance.
He started to breathe more easily. More stone dwellings. More grim-looking villages, clinging for dear life, it seemed, to the cliff edges. In spite of the sunshine, the place echoed with sadness. It was in the earth and in the air.
‘Shit,’ Tallis said, stopping dead in his tracks.
Ruslan looked up. He was out of breath, wheezing slightly. ‘Checkpoint,’ he muttered.
‘And they’ve seen us,’ Tallis said, slowly walking towards the soldiers, silently counting: four scared and jumpy-looking boys, probably no older than Ruslan, and one hard-faced bloke who was prematurely grey and had the strutting gait of a rooster. Tallis reckoned he was their commanding officer. The closer he got, the clearer the view of the badges the man wore, including one of a Scorpion that Tallis thought was only worn by the Russian Special Forces, the Spetsnaz.
‘Leave them to me,’ Ruslan murmured, pulling his hat down over his face and striding past Tallis before he could stop him.
Ruslan pulled out his papers, flashed them under the nose of the older man. Jerking his thumb in Tallis’s direction, his voice riddled with disdain, Ruslan spoke in Russian. ‘I am charged with bringing this man into the mountains so that he can witness the rebels’ attacks on the motherland for himself.’
The older guy handed the papers to one of the young soldiers and looked Ruslan in the eye. He’s not buying it, Tallis thought. He’s seen the cuts and bruises and knows that Ruslan’s lying. Tallis drew up alongside.
‘You have the necessary written permission from the Kremlin?’ the officer said, addressing Ruslan.
‘We do.’
‘Let me see.’
‘Unfortunately, we were jumped by Chechen gangsters,’ Tallis intervened, ‘They stole some of our papers.’
‘But not these,’ the officer said, thrusting Ruslan’s papers back in his hand and snatching up Tallis’s, including the press pass for one Nikolai Redko.
He barely looked at them but he looked at Tallis. Tallis looked straight back. He didn’t like the coldness in the man’s eyes. Something in them reminded him of Timur, the FSB guy and State assassin. The officer’s eyes travelled down to Tallis’s wrist. ‘Nice watch.’
The four inexperienced soldiers, srochniki, conscripts, had picked up the mood. All fiddled nervously with their weapons.
‘Have it,’ Tallis said, undoing the clasp and handing the watch over.
The man pocketed it without looking. ‘Go,’ he said, his dry red lips curled with contempt.
‘Thanks,’ Ruslan said.
Both of them started to walk away. The road ahead was empty. The air hung thin and still. Sun was shining. Sky was blue. An eerie silence descended. Exactly what Tallis most feared. Instinct kicking in, he pulled the Glock from his holster and wheeled round a split second after they opened fire, the first burst of machine-gun tearing through the air, ripping up the ground beneath his feet and singeing his hair. Everything slowed. Ruslan went down. The officer, his pistol smoking, shouted to his men to spread out. Bullets whizzed haphazardly. An intense flash of pain caught Tallis under his ribs, almost lifting him off his feet. Gasping with shock, Tallis shot the commanding officer in the face, blowing half of it away, his body jackknifing in the dirt. The trauma of losing their boss turned the soldiers into headless chickens. Two began to run for their lives. The remaining two took off, then turned, letting off another round of machine-gun fire that went high and wide. It was the biggest mistake of their short lives. Two shots later, both were dead. Tallis, ignoring the pain in his side, sprinted to Ruslan, whose legs below the knee were peppered with bullet-holes. He was bleeding profusely. Tallis grabbed both his legs, making him scream, and held them in the air to try to limit the blood flow. That’s when he noticed the wound in Ruslan’s chest from where the officer’s bullet had made its exit.
‘You weren’t wearing your Kevlar.’
‘I thought it would frighten Katya,’ Ruslan grunted, wincing with pain. ‘That’s why I left it behind.’
Fuck, fuck, fuck, Tallis thought, diving into his bag for dressings, knowing it wasn’t enough.
‘I’m dying,’ Ruslan said, his eyelids fluttering.
‘No, you’re not.’
‘Leave me here,’ Ruslan said. In seconds, his face had become as white as a sheet. ‘You can’t carry an injured man through the mountains.’
‘I’m not leaving you. I’m taking you back. I’ll get help.’
‘No point. I won’t make it,’ Ruslan said, his breathing scratchy and laboured. ‘If you go back, they’ll arrest you and you will never find your friend.’
He was right. But what choice did he have? If he took Ruslan into the mountains, the lad stood no chance of survival. ‘We’re in this together,’ was all Tallis could think to say.
Ruslan smiled, already, it seemed, looking into the angel face of his sister. Tallis did his best to patch him up. It had been too long since he’d worked in battle conditions. He thought about giving him morphine, then decided against it—it would be the quickest way to kill him. And though it might be kinder in the long run, he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
‘I’m cold,’ Ruslan complained.
‘Soon get you warm.’ Tallis picked Ruslan up as gently as he could, the pain in his side searing from where a bullet had torn through his jacket and bounced off his Kevlar. No doubt he’d have an ugly bruise on his ribcage, but that was all. As he put the injured man over his shoulder, Ruslan groaned, then went quiet.
Straightening his back, Tallis moved east in a big detour, his sights set on Haracoj. He tried not to think of the two soldiers he’d allowed to get away, the inevitable raised alarm and subsequent pursuit by soldier and tracker dog. And the trail of blood he was conveniently leaving behind for them to follow. All his thoughts were directed at the injured man on his back. Against all the odds, he willed Ruslan to survive. Somehow, he promised, he would find help.
For several kilometres, Tallis moved forwards. It was slow going and arduous. The weight on his back grew heavier and heavier, and the sun, which had up until then been his friend, was starting to burn a hole in his head.
On he went, his feet slipping and sliding. The smell of the river was strong in his nostrils and he knew at some stage he’d have to get across. He seemed to be in a no-man’s land, the ground ahead unpopulated and barren, without life. Part of him was afraid to stop. He didn’t want his worst fears confirmed. But when he could go no further, when his vision was starting to blur, he decided he had to. At last, up ahead, he spotted a lean-to for animals. It would be an obvious place for the soldiers to look, but…
He did the calculation: the most efficient time for them to send out their trackers would be that evening or early the following morning when the sun was low. Added to that, they wouldn’t necessarily think that he’d adopt a contradictory route. It was a gamble but one he was prepared to take. He reckoned he had a couple of hours to rest before moving on.
Tallis set Ruslan down gently on the charred ground. The young Chechen’s trousers and sweater were soaked in blood where it had oozed through the dressings. Remarkably, he was still breathing, just, but his pulse was weak and erratic. Tallis knew then that it was only a matter of time.
He took out a bottle of water and, cradling him in his arms, gently put it to Ruslan’s cracked lips. The dying man’s eyelids fluttered. Water trickled down his chin.
‘You were right, Tallis. You travel alone.’ Then Ruslan’s eyes rolled up into his head and he was still.
You’re wrong. I travel with ghosts, Tallis thought sadly.