That’s for sure, thought Ollie.
He could feel a smattering of rain on his cheeks.
‘Christ,’ he muttered quietly. There were just specks of rain. But they were damp and cold, and blown sideways in the wind: the kind of raindrops that warned of stormy weather ahead.
The Alouette lifted jerkily into the sky.
David was crouched over the controls, pulling on the throttle to coax more power out of the engine. The clouds were thick, and the wind was starting to howl up from the lake, buffeting the chopper as it groaned and heaved itself upwards.
Steve was sitting right behind him, with Dan at his side. Opposite them, Maksim and Ian were hanging onto the metal handlebars. Ian had lined up his six stun grenades in a neat row, ready to be tossed onto the ground. The Alouette had open doors for ease of access, but that meant it was a far from pleasant ride. The chopper was rocking from side to side as it climbed, and Steve’s insides were starting to feel as if they’d been put through a washing machine. Clutching the handlebars, he closed his eyes for a second. Just punch your way through this, he told himself, gritting his teeth.
At 5,000 feet the standard cruising altitude for the Alouette, the chopper started to level out. They had pulled through the low-lying clouds, and were suddenly bathed in the light of the moon. To the east, the sun was starting to rise. It was a brilliant orange, sending shafts of light bouncing across the clouds beneath them. For a moment, Steve just stared into it, breathless at the beauty of the scene. It was strange how the world often looked at its most stunning in the moment before you went into battle. A reminder, he reflected, of what you might be about to leave behind.
David had already charted their course across to Elephant’s Foot. They were flying due east, straight into the sunrise, and tracking the contours of the lake. Then they’d tack south, before turning around and attacking the fort. They’d drop down low for the last three miles, skimming the surface of the ground, flying at between seventy-five and a hundred feet. They had no intelligence on whether the fort was equipped with radar, but they had to assume that it was: at that height, they’d be flying low enough to stay safely below any radar screens.
Ian was looking down into the clouds below them. The rising gale was swirling through the sky, slowing the chopper down as it struggled to press through the headwinds. ‘It looks like a storm to me,’ he shouted above the roar of the three-blade rotor.
‘When we’re ten miles out, we contact Ollie on the radio,’ yelled Steve. ‘We’ll make a decision on the weather when we’ve spoken to him.’
He didn’t want to abort. None of them did. Once you’d psyched yourself up to go into battle, there was nothing worse than having to stand down.
But a helicopter drop in a full-blown storm?
That was madness.
The rain was starting to lash into Ollie’s face.
The sun was rising in the east, creating a soft, hazy glow across the lake. Ganju had turned the engine right down, so it was running at little more than a murmur. He’d steered the boat out to a couple of hundred yards from the shore, but the rain was making so much noise as it hit the lake it was unlikely they’d be heard even up close.
Ahead, Ollie could see a crack of lightning opening up the sky. He took a deep breath, counting the time before he heard the clap of thunder to try and get a measure of how far away the storm was. It could be centred twenty miles ahead of them, and they were still ten miles from the fort, which meant they wouldn’t be fighting right in the thick of it. But we’ll be close, decided Ollie. Maybe too damned close.
‘Get Steve on the radio,’ he said Ganju. ‘We need to see if he can get a fix on the weather from the air.’
Newton had taken the wheel whilst Ganju was fiddling with the radio. It was a simple two-way transceiver of the type used by armies right around the world for close-combat communications. There were up to 1,840 different channels, and Ganju had added a simple scrambler as well. Unless the fort was equipped with high-level detection equipment, and so long as they restricted communications to no more than four- or five-second bursts, there was very little chance of the conversation being detected. ‘Come in, come in,’ hissed Ganju into the receiver.
Ollie was staring straight ahead. As the sun rose, there was a thin layer of mist on the water. The rain was coming down harder all the time, lashing into his face, seeping into his clothes and boots. It was impossible to see more than a dozen yards ahead, but from the charts, he could see they were approaching the final bend that would take them in close to the fort.
He checked his watch. Ten minutes to six . . .