Deep Black - Andy McNab [3]
Even in this fucked-up place, some situations were more fucked-up than others. The old woman had been wearing a once-pink anorak many sizes too small for her. Her face was barely visible under the hood’s fringe of white nylon fur, but I could see in her eyes that she was dying.
‘Here.’ I was still several Ks short of the cache – where the LTD and all the other kit I’d need had been dug in by the Regiment as soon as the cement works became a possible target – but I couldn’t just leave the young girl like that. I took off my red ski jacket and gloves and handed them over.
She thanked me. Then, as if she had forgotten her plight for a few seconds, she struck a pose, right shoulder towards me, head flicked to the side as she zipped up her new jacket. ‘Kate Moss, no?’
I brought the camera up to my eye but I couldn’t bring myself to press the shutter release. Tears were suddenly streaming from very clear brown eyes and down her face. She was already back in the real world.
2
The football game had really warmed up now. Today’s ball had mud caked on its matted grey hair and beard. I lowered my binos. I didn’t want to see that shit. If they found me, the next head could be mine.
The ground below me was soft but sappingly cold. I wished the Regiment boys had left me a roll mat. Tensing my body, I wiggled my toes again and again, trying to generate some heat, but it wasn’t working. Mladic had better turn up soon. I didn’t have a picture of him with me because of opsec, but I’d burned one into my memory before I came out. I’d know his ugly fat face when I saw it.
The LTD was housed in a green metal box about the size of a breeze block. The tripod it was mounted on was extendable to about two feet, though I had it just inches off the ground. It had a viewfinder at the back, and a lens at the front, protected for now by a plastic cap, which would fire a laser about ten miles. There was also a laser range-finder, which was how I knew the target building was exactly 217 metres away.
The theory behind this kind of attack was very simple. A jet would come in from behind me, roughly in line with the beam from the LTD, but low, the other side of the mountain, out of sight and sound of the factory. When it was about nine or ten miles away, the on-board computer would tell the pilot to pull into a steep climb. At just the right moment he would let go of the Paveway, very much like bowling a ball underarm. By the time it had cleared the mountain, the jet would have turned and be on its way home.
The Paveway wasn’t so much a missile as a standard 2000-pound lump of metal and explosive, with some fins strapped on its tail. Once it had been lobbed, the nose-mounted detector would look for the laser beam splashing on the target, lock on, and freefall to the target. This man-in-the-loop technology was all very well, but as I watched the soccer match, hoping I wasn’t going to fuck up and become their next ball, I wished someone would hurry up and invent no-man-in-the-loop technology.
I had to be this close because of the mountains behind me. When the LTD fired its laser, the beam would break up at the point it hit the target, giving the splash the Paveway would be looking for. Had it been aimed down at an angle from high ground, there would have been less splash, and the Paveway might have trouble locking on as it came over the mountain. I had only one chance of getting Mladic. To maximize the splash, I had to aim the laser at as near to a right angle to the target as possible, which meant being virtually on top of the factory – in fact, in tactical terms,