Flying the Storm

7.





Kakavaberd

Tovmas rested his elbows on the cool rock and lifted the binoculars to his eyes.

He guessed that there was still an hour until dawn, but the diffused light was enough to make out the long wall and squat towers of the old fortress. The foremost tower, built onto a sharp outcrop of rock, had the dim light of a dwindling campfire at its top, and in the flickering glow Tovmas could make out the hump of a sleeping sentry. The only entrance, a crumbling gap in the stonework, lay at the foot of that tower. The rest of the tenth-century wall was frustratingly intact and required the crossing of a wooded ravine to reach.

He reassured himself: this had to be the only sensible way to get into the fortress, since it was built atop a mountainous spur, approachable on only one side. Tovmas had considered climbing from the deep valley floor on the other side of the crag, having his men scale the rocky cliffs to come up behind the fortifications, but the danger of losing men to falling or to being caught out on the exposed rock faces did not appeal to him: the militia were hardly trained fighters, let alone mountaineers. Tovmas much preferred his current choice of perch which, on the rim of the hills overlooking the fortress crag, allowed him to see right into the raiders’ encampment.

Great gorges yawned on either side of the fortress, the northern one rimmed with jagged cliff faces that peered across the vast ravine and over the Kakavaberd crag. Tovmas shifted his binoculars to the right, and squinted at the boulders lining the top of the cliffs. There he could see his rocket team setting up their throwaway tubes amongst the rocks. Neither of them had fired one before, but Tovmas had explained their operation as clearly as he could.

He hoped they’d make the few rockets they had count. However, now that they were in position, he could move.

His legs protested as he stood up: the overnight hike down from the landing site had left him aching in places he’d forgotten he had. He sighed; he was getting too old for this.

He took the radio the pilots had given him from his pocket, and pressing the transmit button he whispered in English, “We’re moving to the fortress now.”

“OK,” the pilot murmured in Tovmas’ earphone.

Tovmas checked his rifle’s magazine and cocked the weapon, leaving the safety on. He signalled to the rest of his men, the sixteen who were to attack with him, to follow as he clambered past the boulder and silently began moving down the hill. The group of militiamen stood up from their resting spots and spread out behind him, following as quietly as they could manage.

This, Tovmas knew, was the most dangerous part of the plan. They had to cross three hundred metres of open ground, exposed on the grassy ridge leading out to the crag, in order to reach the wall. If they were caught out here, the casualties would be terrible.

His pulse quickened and the familiar thrill of anticipation crept outwards from his stomach. The temptation to simply run to the wall was enormous; the steep downwards slope urged him on, and the nagging sense of exposure was getting hard to control. Tovmas knew he had to restrain himself, if not for his own sake but for that of the men following him. He stolidly continued his rapid and quiet walk, and if his pace quickened at all, it was impossible to tell.

The grass beneath Tovmas’ feet was dry and it rustled slightly as he walked. He cursed the dry weather. He could feel his heartbeat in his throat, and the rushing of blood in his ears was deafeningly loud. Surely, between the dry grass and his pounding pulse, the sentry would hear him?


His foot struck the loose pebbles of a patch of scree, and he froze as two or three of the small stones tumbled off down the slope, bouncing and clattering loudly. The men behind him froze as well, and some of the more experienced ones crouched with their weapons up and ready. Tovmas’ eyes flickered as they scanned the shadowy fortress wall ahead. By now it was within two hundred metres, but he could see no movement. The dim light of the campfire was obscured now as they had descended past the level of the tower. After a few tense seconds, he gingerly took a step back up the hill, off of the loose scree. Feeling with his feet, he eventually found a path around the stones. His men followed in single file.

The sky was getting worryingly light, turning from purple to deep orange as they walked on. High, feathery cirrus clouds above him had turned salmon-pink as the sun’s rays touched them. Tovmas knew it was a matter of minutes before the sun would break over the Geghama Mountains to their rear, illuminating the crag and the fortress wall for all to see. He hoped desperately to be inside by then.

As they drew closer, the sentry’s tower on its outcrop grew taller, and dread writhed in the pit of Tovmas’ stomach. It was so imposing, so sinisterly still that he couldn’t take his eyes off it, and at every step he expected to see the dark silhouette of the sentry’s head appear over the battlement, exposing them at their most vulnerable.

And yet it didn’t happen. No sentry appeared, and no alarm was raised. Tovmas and his sixteen men had reached the foot of the tower’s outcrop, just a few metres from the tumbled-down gap in the wall. He shepherded his men into a file around the head of the ravine on one side of the outcrop, ready for the attack into the raider’s camp. The man at the front, a big man named Lernig, was braced against the stones, ready. Tovmas could see the big man’s face was steely, but his eyes were tellingly wide.

Seeing that all were in place, Tovmas fished in his pocket for his torch. Praying silently, he flashed it three times in the direction of the rocket team. Then he tapped Lernig on the shoulder.

The big man hurled himself through the gap, and Tovmas and the rest of the men followed in twos and threes. Inside, they spread out and tucked themselves behind boulders and tumbled pieces of the wall, not moving more than a few metres from the gap. The interior of the fortress was no more than a large grassy hill, littered with stones from long-gone buildings, intermingled here and there with the tents and lean-tos of the slavers. Tovmas knew from his recce that there was an anti-aircraft gun near the top of the hill and a makeshift landing site on the far side for the slavers’ aircraft. The rocket team was to target those first.

Still, nothing moved in the camp. Tovmas sent one of the smaller men, Magar, to climb the ladder to the sentry tower. Another man covered the lip of the battlement with his rifle, should the sentry finally make an appearance. So far, so good, thought Tovmas. But where were the rockets?

Just as that thought crossed his mind, there was a blinding magnesium flash and a ferocious boom at the top of the hill as a fiery plume of dirt and smoke exploded into the sky. The sentry, wakened by the explosion, threw himself against the battlement, staring open-mouthed at the summit.

Then the man covering the battlement shot him in the jaw.

The rifle shot was an ear-splitting crack. A burst of pink spat from the top of the sentry’s skull, shimmering gruesomely as it was caught in the rays of the rising sun. Magar, still some way from the top, carried on regardless as the warm mist settled on his face and arms, and the limp form of the sentry with his ruined, flapping head tumbled past him.

The slavers were awake now, their shouts of alarm echoing from the hill and the walls, and as the first movement was spotted amongst the tents, Tovmas and his sixteen men sighted their weapons and opened fire.

Rifles cracked and shotguns boomed. Bullets tore through tent sheets, splintered wood and bit into the flesh of many of the slavers as they stumbled from their shelters in panic. Tovmas loosed burst after burst at anything that moved, revelling in the precise destruction and drawing a deep pleasure from the screams that marked his hits. He embraced the joy of it like an old friend, welcoming it back into his bones as he brought death to the groggy and terrified slavers.

It was a familiar sensation, one he had tasted through countless terrible fights in dark jungles and blinding deserts, like some lingering demon that welled up to possess him when there was blood to be spilled and lives to be taken.

These men had stolen from him his only child, the one thing he had left, and now they felt his wrath. He wanted nothing but to destroy them all.

The militiamen fired until their magazines were empty, and as they paused to reload the first return shots cracked down from the hilltop. Even though the rising sun was without doubt in the slavers’ eyes and the militia were deep in shadow, their shots were beginning to find their marks.

Tovmas was fumbling for a fresh magazine when Lernig, who was sharing a boulder with him, was struck in the neck. The big man slumped senselessly at Tovmas’ feet, his dark blood soaking into the dry grass. Tovmas could see by the gaping exit that the shot had severed Lernig’s spine. White pieces of vertebrae poked from the wound.

For a moment he could do nothing but stare. His blood lust had gone as quickly as it had come when he realised that he was starting to lose men. Men who trusted him. Men who were relying on him to keep them alive.

A second Ashtarak man was hit, this time in the hand as he aimed his shotgun up the hill. He stumbled backwards, clutching his ruined hand. His friend reached out to pull him back, but the screaming man was caught in a hail of gunfire. He twitched and jerked awfully as several bullets thumped into his chest and limbs. Blood spattered the stones of the wall behind him. His legs gave way and he crumpled into the dirt, dead.

It was brutal, and the message was clear to Tovmas. The slavers were going to fight hard.

With their opening volley the militia had decimated the slavers on the near face of the hill, but those who had been fortunate enough to camp on the other side had amassed and dug in around the summit: they were now pouring steady fire onto the pinned militia. The ground around Tovmas and his men leapt and spat as it was raked with automatic fire, probing for weaknesses in their cover.

“When I give the signal, you fire everything at the top of the hill, understand?” he shouted to four men to his right. Turning to his left, he yelled, “When I go, you follow me!”

The men closest nodded fearfully. They passed the order down to those furthest away. All looked at Tovmas, waiting for the signal.

Tovmas, his back to the boulder and his rifle across his chest, was frantically searching for options. He knew the charge would probably fail, and they could all be gunned down as they struggled up the slope. The summit was still over fifty metres away and these men had never fought together before. For most this was their first taste of combat. Tovmas knew they simply didn’t have the discipline to sustain a charge, but his mind was blank. He could not think of an alternative. If he told them to retreat, they would be caught at the gap in the wall, bunched up perfectly for the slavers’ bullets. The retreat would without doubt become a rout, with most slaughtered as they fled.

Then suddenly, a second rocket boomed at the top of the hill, out of sight of the militia. Tovmas guessed it was aimed at the aircraft sitting on the far side. The aircraft! With a start, he remembered the radio in his pocket.


“We need support!” he shouted into the handset.

“Already on our way, have you destroyed all their anti-air?” asked the calm pilot.

“Yes, yes!” replied Tovmas, though he had no idea. “You must hit the top of the hill! Inside the fortress!”

“Got it, be there in two minutes.”

Tovmas shouted to his cowering men, “The westerners are coming!”

The slavers’ fire had withered slightly. Tovmas looked around for the cause, and saw that at the top of the sentry tower, Magar was still very much alive. He was calmly firing burst after burst from his assault rifle, which was resting on the lip of the battlement, methodically picking off any slavers who left their cover. His lofty position was more or less on a level with the summit, and as such he appeared to be causing the defenders no end of trouble. The odd return round pocked Magar’s tower wall, but the slavers couldn’t seem to keep their heads up long enough to draw a bead on him.

The lull allowed Tovmas to peek around his cover and check out the area of the camp now illuminated by the sun. There had been no women among the slavers’ tents, and although convenient from a fighter’s point of view, Tovmas was becoming increasingly worried for the whereabouts of his daughter. If the women weren’t being held on the other side of the hill, he hadn’t any idea where they’d been taken.

“We need to take one of them alive!” he yelled to the men closest to him. “We need to know where the women are!”

The men nodded soberly, as the possibility that their loved ones might not be there hit home.

“Keep shooting, damn it!” Tovmas urged them, since they had unconsciously lowered their weapons. He raised his own rifle and began plugging away at the defenders’ positions, seeing dust and soil jump in plumes where his rounds bit into the dirt. He swore, as his near misses drove a pair of the slavers back into hiding. Their cover wouldn’t matter much when the westerners arrived.

The Iolaire screamed in low, passed over the hills Tovmas and his men had come from and thundered across the summit of the fortress crag with its tail gun thumping out an opening salvo. The heavy rounds and streaking tracers churned great spouts of earth into the air around the summit, and a couple of the slavers fell shredded and burst by the big bullets. A third rocket, perfectly timed, exploded amidst the defenders, hurling a torn body into the air in a shower of soil. Tovmas knew this was his chance.

“We are attacking the hill now, watch your fire!” he yelled into the radio. He dimly heard a reply of assent, before rising with a roar of “Cover!” and charging out onto the open hill side, his weapon slung low. His men, caught out by the sudden rush, picked themselves up and followed after him, adding their own war cries to the din, while the few that remained blasted a rattling volley at the hilltop.

Tovmas ran on up the slope, his body tensed as at every step he expected the bite of bullets in his flesh. It was both terrifying and exhilarating, another sensation he knew well. He felt so alive as he pounded up the hill, painfully aware of the fact that death might come to him very suddenly. And yet he heard no shots being fired from the hilltop. The support-gunners seemed to be doing their job.

His run was coming to an end; all too soon he had reached the rocks of the summit and with one last leap he was atop them and looking down on the sheltering defenders. He let rip with his rifle, strafing the crouching group, his bullets cutting down several as they fumbled for their weapons and covered their heads with their arms. His magazine ran dry, and he hurled himself amongst them, drawing his knife as he landed, spinning and thrashing and stabbing in a blur of motion as they wrestled with him, too close to bring their own weapons to bear. Though he was without doubt much older than them, they could not match his ferocity.

When the rest of Tovmas’ men appeared over the rocks howling and firing, the surviving slavers, the ones whom Tovmas was not fighting with, turned and fled down the other side of the hill. It was a rout, and those who ran were gunned down by the militia.

The shooting had stopped. All became quiet. Panting, Tovmas wrenched his knife from the ribs of the last hilltop slaver.

The man looked at the soaking gash in his chest, his breath coming in ragged, hacking gasps. As if remembering something, he turned his head to the east, his dark eyes shining in the sun that had climbed above the mountains. He stood there for a moment, as Tovmas watched, before his legs buckled and he fell to his knees. Still he faced the sun, though he was slumped and sagging and Tovmas did not think his eyes saw anything anymore. Blood dribbled in a long string from his lips, and slowly, as if fighting sleep, the man’s eyes closed. Tovmas nudged him with his boot, and the man fell back limply onto the grass.

The silence was utter. The hills on the far side of the valley were ochre in the dawn light. The white summit of Ararat sat above the haze far to the west. What a place to die.

Tovmas’ men now lined the rocks on the western side of the summit, their weapons pointing at the smoking pieces of a light aircraft on the landing pad, a couple of hundred metres out on the most extreme spur of the crag. He could see the last of the slavers had taken cover around it, behind stacks of crates, amongst the rocks and inside the last corrugated steel shed. The single survivor from the hilltop was still running across the stony, undulating ground, towards his friends by the aircraft. He wore nothing but his vest, no doubt all he had slept in, and he had no weapon. For some reason, the militia hadn’t shot him.

In the silence, Tovmas realised he was standing very much in the open, and promptly sat down. A few of his men were looking at him. “What now?” one of them, a young man named Nardos, asked.

Tovmas wiped some blood from his eye and looked out west, across the yawning valley, seeing in the distance that the Iolaire was returning. Its twin fans were almost vertical, so it was coming in slowly and at an angle. Not far from where Tovmas sat lay the mangled remains of the slavers’ autocannon. The rocket team had hit their target, somehow.

Tovmas picked up his rifle, slid out the empty magazine and replaced it with a fresh one, releasing the bolt with an oily click. Then he raised himself into a crouch, and looked down the iron sights. Aiming at the bare legs of the fleeing slaver, he exhaled, relaxed, and released a shot. The rifle bucked slightly in his calm grip, and the round flew straight, hitting the running man in the thigh. The slaver tumbled head-first into a dip in the ground, disappearing from sight.

“You just winged him, Tovmas,” said Nardos.

“We’re going to take him alive,” replied Tovmas, resting himself against the rock and taking the radio from his pocket. “He’ll tell us where they take their captives.”

Then he switched to English as he spoke into the radio, “We’ve taken the top of the hill; the last slavers are all bunched around the landing pad at the far end of the spur. Don’t shoot near the metal shed; we don’t know if there are women in there.”

“Alright, we’ll start circling the hilltop, you call the shots.”

As the Iolaire drew closer to the fortress, the slavers out on the spur began shooting at it. Tracers streaked past the aircraft in long arcs, burning out and disappearing far across the valley. The aircraft accelerated, climbing and diving in short bursts as it brought the fortress into its tail gunner’s arc of fire.

Accelerating further, the Iolaire howled past the fortress crag, tail gun roaring and rotors lowering for conventional flight once more.


“We aren’t being paid enough to get shot down!” barked Tovmas’ earphone. “We’ll bank wide and make some high-speed passes, but we aren’t landing ‘till you clear them out!”

Flyboys always were precious about their aircraft. Tovmas turned to his men. They were tired, but seemed to be in good spirits. A few were watching the slavers out by the landing pad, wary of the lack of shots coming their way.

“I don’t see any point in charging them yet,” said Tovmas finally. His men looked at him, relieved. “I think we can pick a few of them off, and then move in. Let the westerners soften them up a bit. Who knows, maybe the bastards will want to surrender!” A couple of men laughed nervously. The rest were silent.

Magar and the support gunners clambered over the summit rocks to join the rest of the men. Tovmas took Magar by the shoulder.

“Do you think you could hit them from here?” he asked, pointing at the slavers at the landing pad.

“Maybe,” replied Magar, breathing heavily from the climb. “I’m a little out of practice.” He sat down cross-legged and rested his rifle on the lip of the broken little wall that most of the militia were sheltering behind. He fiddled with the rear sight on his weapon, setting the range, before shouldering it tightly and taking aim. Tovmas took out his binoculars.

Magar’s judgement was good. Through the binoculars, Tovmas saw that his first shot blew open the skull of a submachine-gun wielding slaver, whose body slumped against the crate he was leaning on. Tovmas left Magar to it and returned his attention to his men.

“How is everybody’s ammo?” he asked. The men began rummaging in pockets and pouches, and Tovmas was not surprised to find that most were running low. Around half of them had ex-NAU six-point-five millimetre assault rifles; the rest had an assortment of pump-shotguns, hunting rifles and pistols. Tovmas had assigned the one eager crossbowman to his rocket team. The dead slavers probably had some six-point-fives, but the rest were going to have to improvise. Magar’s rifle barked.

Just as he was telling the men to search the slavers’ bodies for ammo, shots began cracking over from the landing pad. Magar had drawn a response.

“Save your ammunition!” Tovmas shouted to his men, who had begun to return fire. “Let Magar piss them off a bit more!”

The men tucked themselves low and continued searching the bodies, while rounds whined and snapped above their heads.

“I think I’ll re-locate, if you don’t mind!” shouted Magar, ducking behind the wall as a bullet split one of the stones near his head. Tovmas nodded, and Magar slid along to the far end of the wall, sitting up and taking aim once more.

The Iolaire howled overhead again, banking around above the crag, a stream of fire spitting from its tail gun. The slavers’ positions were hammered with rounds; great plumes of dust and soil leapt into the air once more.

Tovmas’ men had finished searching the dead. He shouted to them, “We are going to attack them now!” He pointed at three of them. “You cover us, keep their heads down!”

Switching to English, he yelled into the radio, “Give us cover! We’re attacking them now!” Then he stood up with a cry of “With me!” and clambered over the ruined wall. Once again, he was running in the open, quietly this time, with his men following a few metres behind. His long shadow ran before him, undulating with the ground.

Tovmas’ blood was up, and he did not fear the slavers’ guns. Shots cracked by on his right, but from friend or foe he couldn’t tell. He crossed the lip of a depression in the ground, and saw where the slaver he’d wounded had fallen. Tovmas paused for a moment, crouching next to the body. The eyes were glassy, and the chest was still. He saw the gaping exit in the man’s thigh, and swore as he realised he’d cut the femoral artery. Flaps of muscle splayed from the wound. The man was beyond help. Tovmas stood up and started running with his men as they crossed into the depression.

It wasn’t much longer before the slavers saw the charging men and realised what was happening. Despite the withering fire from the men on the hill top, they still managed to shoot sporadically at Tovmas and his followers. Although at around a hundred metres, and mostly fired wild, some shots were finding their marks. As Tovmas glanced over his shoulder, he saw that two of his men had been hit; one had fallen face-down in the grass and the other was stumbling onwards, a hand pressed to his stomach.

Infuriated, Tovmas fired his rifle as he ran, spraying shots wildly at the defenders. He knew he wasn’t hitting anything, but he squeezed the trigger anyway, his gun kicking against his chest.

A bullet thumped into the ground in front of him, spraying grit into his eyes. He stumbled blindly forwards for a few paces before dropping to the ground, unable to continue.

He lay on his back in the grass, fumbling for his water bottle. Holding his eyes open, he poured the water over them. It stung, and his vision was blurred, but at least he could see. Nardos and the others had reached him, and Nardos himself knelt down by Tovmas. “Are you all right?” he shouted over the militiamen’s gunfire.

“I’m fine, just got dirt in my eyes,” Tovmas shouted back. He rolled over and got up into a crouch, eager to continue the attack before all momentum was lost. “We need to keep moving!”

“Come on!” cried Nardos, rising to his feet with the rest of them and charging onwards.

The Iolaire made another pass. The thumping impacts of its heavy shells were terrifyingly close to Tovmas and his men.

Then Tovmas, Nardos, Magar and the others were amongst the defenders, beating, hacking and firing their weapons. The dozen or so slavers by the crates and rocks were cut down by the furious Ashtarak men, standing little chance against their onslaught. The firing died away once more and the attackers spread out, all facing the sturdy little corrugated building: the last refuge of the slavers. Tovmas waved to his men to cease-fire.

“Come out unarmed, and you’ll live!” shouted Tovmas.

A man shouted back, but Tovmas couldn’t understand him. He recognised the language, however.

“Does anybody speak Azeri?” he asked along his line of men.

“I can speak it,” said Nardos.

“Tell them to come out with their hands on their heads, and we’ll let them live.”

Nardos shouted at the building. The man inside shouted back.

“He says he doesn’t believe you,” translated Nardos. “He also says there are women in there.”

“Of course he says that, otherwise we’d just shoot him through the tin.”

“Can we take that risk?” asked Nardos.

“No.”

“Well, what then?”

Tovmas thought for a moment. “Ask him how many men are in there.”

Nardos shouted at the building again. This time there was a pause before the man inside replied.

“He says there are five of them,” translated Nardos.

“And what about the women?”

This time the man was quicker with his answer.

“He says six.”

“So there are eleven people in there,” Tovmas almost laughed. The shed would be unbelievably cramped with eleven people.

“Tell him to make one of the women speak, or we shoot the shed to pieces,” he said.

Nardos smiled. He shouted the command to the Azeri-speaking man. When the reply finally came, he laughed out loud.

“Apparently my Azeri is very bad, and he couldn’t understand the question,” Nardos sneered.


“How convenient,” sighed Tovmas. An idea struck him. He thumbed the transmit button of his radio. “Fredrick, could you bring the Iolaire close to the building on the point?”

“What for?” was the suspicious reply.

“Do you think you could blow it down?”

“Oh, I’ll huff and I’ll puff,” laughed the pilot.

Tovmas moved his line of men back thirty paces or so as the Iolaire swooped in once more, this time flaring and coming to a hover a hundred metres above the crag. It descended slowly and ponderously, pressing the grass of the hilltop flat and blowing away several of the slavers’ tents. Soon it was above the corrugated shack, and the thunderous wash of its props shook the small structure violently. Then, with a deafening roar, Fredrick opened up the throttle, blasting it with the full force of the Iolaire’s twin wave-rotor engines. As the aircraft accelerated away, there was a terrible tearing sound and the roof of the structure lifted. It flipped off and the walls caved in, with pieces of debris flying out over the wooded valley. Then the Iolaire was gone, far across the valley and climbing hard. Amongst the pile of twisted metal and broken wood it left in its wake, nothing moved. Tovmas stood up and walked over to the wreckage with his men in tow.

Kicking away a corrugated steel sheet revealed the occupant of the shed. It was one man, not five, and there were no women with him. Tovmas grabbed him by the hair and heaved him from the wreckage. It was no small feat either: the man struggled like a mad thing. Nardos stepped forward and pressed a pistol to the man’s groin.

Understandably, he stopped struggling.

“Now,” Tovmas said to Nardos, “Ask him where they take the women.”