Chapter 5

Geoff:

We were flying from Poland, east across Ukraine, gaining height slowly as we prebreathed oxygen. Eugenie seemed calm, relaxed. I was working on that. Prebreathing is a pain in the backside. The pressure is low, so you feel as if you’re strangling. The moisture in your breath tickles your nose, but you can’t scratch it. We were to drop into a sparsely populated area north of Luhansk, leaving the aircraft at around zero one hundred hours local. I was, and am, uncomfortable jumping out of a perfectly good aeroplane. Strangely, doing so at night was less troubling than when we’d done our training jumps in daylight. I looked across at Eugenie, who winked. I pursed my lips before realising she couldn’t see them, and shrugged. But the time came after an eternity of noise, and on the jump oxygen we lined up at the ramp; I just followed the guy in front. My first combat jump. But training held and I found myself adopting the boxman position, following the man in front. Concentrating too hard to worry about Eugenie, who was in the other stick. Curious, feeling stationary in the dark, just the gleam of glow tape on the gear of the man in front. Changing position as necessary to maintain the right separation. Where was the pull cord? A momentary panic. ‘Yes, the chute opens automatically at the set altitude, but always be ready to pull in case you’re off course over higher ground’.

For once, everything happens as it should: the whole party was down with no injuries. At least, no injuries anyone was reporting to me. Chutes were packed up as they were, and we found a suitable LUP* to get out of sight for daylight. That turned out to be an apparently abandoned barn, associated with a derelict farm house. We set a watch, and settled down to sleep.

*Laying up point. A place to rest out of sight.

In the morning, we investigated the farmhouse. The house itself was not habitable, but it had a solid cellar, which we appropriated. It might have been built as a bunker, with a reinforced concrete ‘roof’. We were out of sight and somewhat protected from stray munitions. Eugenie set up in a corner of the cellar, but found that she needed an external antenna in view of the steel reinforcement in the ‘ceiling’.

The Captain organised his troops in three shifts, so there was always a group alert. Two watched the approaches and the building, with short-range encrypted radios to warn us of possible problems. Another two were sent out to discreetly check out the area. One group slept, and the last dealt with practical issues of life, such as cooking. I was going to suggest I needed an assignment, but the Captain vetoed that.

“You are Ginger’s security, Chalky, and I don’t want you wandering around out there distracted by worrying about your wife’s safety. Not to mention you are our medic.”

I took a deep breath absorbing the wisdom in that. “Thank you, Captain. I’ll probably feel guilty, but I’m grateful.”

Eugenie was immersed in her technology, so I explored the site. Somehow the water supply had survived, not, of course, the power. We didn’t trust the water, but we had tablets to deal with that and it was good to have water for hygiene purposes and cooking. The house had been stripped of anything portable and useful. I ventured carefully upstairs, and apart from creaking, the floors seemed sound. The roof wasn’t, and the windows had all gone, but the upper floors offered a vantage. Pairs of scouts went cautiously into the surrounding area, under orders to avoid contact. If there were any residents in the vicinity, there was about a fifty percent chance that they were Russian sympathisers.

After about twenty-four hours, Eugenie had established the contacts she needed. Another operator, Russian speaking, took over a listening watch, and my wife crashed out and slept fifteen hours. She roused – mainly as a bladder call – just as I was making a batch of coffee.

“Oh, Geoff! I love you! How did you manage to time that so well?”

I just laughed.

“Some glory in their birth, some in their skill,
Some in their wealth, some in their body’s force;
Some in their garments, though new-fangled ill;
Some in their hawks and hounds, some in their horse;
And every humour hath his adjunct pleasure,
Wherein it finds a joy above the rest:
But these particulars are not my measure;
All these I better in one general best.
Thy love is better than high birth to me,
Richer than wealth, prouder than garments’ cost,
Of more delight than hawks or horses be;
And having thee, of all men’s pride I boast:
Wretched in this alone, that thou mayst take
All this away, and me most wretched make.”

She stared at me. “You quote Shakespeare?”

“Not often,” I laughed, “but I saved that for you, for a suitable moment.”

She grabbed me and laid a kiss on me that normally would have had us heading for the bedroom. Happily we were both responsible enough to limit ourselves to the kiss, and coffee. Those of our companions who were not sleeping or patrolling must have smelt the coffee, because they appeared like vultures over the battlefield.

“You make a great brew, Chalky,” one of them said, lifting his mug in salute.

“It’s a good thing I can do something useful,” I responded.

He shook his head. “I really hope we don’t need your skills, though we’re happy we’ve got you along.”

“Me too,” I said.

That was the day one of the patrols returned with news of a small assembly of tracked vehicles a few miles away, two T72s and two BTR70 APCs, plus, of course, the personnel associated with them. They were concealed by trees and camouflage netting. The Captain was sceptical, but the descriptions were clear enough. Obsolete vehicles? Were the Russians that short of equipment? It was not difficult for Eugenie to pass the information up, though, once the commander was persuaded. When that information reached the Ukrainian military, they did not delay in dispatching a pair of Su25 attack aircraft. We only heard the explosions, but a later patrol noted the burnt-out hulks of the tracks, and there was no sign of human occupation. There was a further complication: the personnel in the camp had apparently sought entertainment at a nearby smallholding. Two bodies were sprawled, an adult male and female outside the building, and the door had been kicked in. The patrol searched the building, which had been stripped of anything valuable or useful, and the rest of the contents torn or soiled to make them useless. In one of the rooms, though, the corporal thought he heard something – a whimper – and a search revealed a hidey hole containing two small children, who looked up with fear in their eyes. Left there, the kids would have had little chance of survival, so quite against orders, the pair carried the two back to base: carried because it was apparent that they were in no state to walk. The soldiers covered the kids’ eyes as they left the house, regretting that they couldn’t bury the bodies.

Back at the old house, the Captain was unhappy about the development, and made that clear. He wasn’t as angry as he might have been. The two kids were then presented to me to deal with.

The two were emaciated, hungry and dehydrated, so I started a glucose drip on both immediately, and got the two soldiers to come up with something warm and easily digested, which turned out to be porridge. However, as soon as food got into their stomachs, their systems went into overdrive and, unsurprisingly, they had diarrhoea. The two soldiers who’d brought them in hung around, so I set them to fetching hot water, rags and towelling, and between us we kept them clean, dry and warm.

Meanwhile, Eugenie was at work, and received an encrypted message for us, or at least, for the commander.

“What’ve ya got for me?”

“Encrypted message, sir. Just finished decrypting it.” She handed it to him.

“Okay...” he frowned. “You’d better get back to your corner, Ginger. Thanks.” He rounded up the team, including me, though I wasn’t entirely happy about leaving the kids, even with Private Johnson watching them.

“We’re getting a supply drop,” the captain told us, “enough for at least another month. I’m sure we’ll all be happy to enjoy the facilities of this hotel for another few weeks.” He looked around at us. I saw a few grimaces which might, at a stretch, be described as smiles. “They’re pleased with the information they’re getting from us, and an attaboys from them about finding those tracks. They’re working on an alternative to helo extraction, it seems.”

“The cheque is in the post,” someone muttered, followed by, “The drop zone will be clear,” and “Transport back to barracks...” and a few more in the same vein.