by James Steel
Alex has a three-dimensional model of the battlefield in his head. His problem is having to split his force in three directions: the mortars and ten rifles are to engage the enemy east across the valley, the remaining thirty men are split into two groups of fifteen, each countering fifty men coming down from the north and fifty from the south.
‘I want the PKMs in Fire Support Groups over there and there to cover each side of the bluff.’
In the trees just down the slope from Tac’s position, Matt Hooper is getting Two Platoon sorted out. He is feeling nervous and conscious of the fact that he froze during their crucial assault on the Lubonga ridge. He glances across at where Corporal Stein is getting his section into cover behind trees and bushes where they can look down onto the stream. Matt wants to do better this time, both for himself and for his men. He forces thoughts of Danielle out of his head and just tries to get on with the job.
He positions his two men armed with the AA-12 machine shotguns down the slope so they are nearer the enemy, their bursts of buckshot will be lethal in this sort of close country where the enemy is hard to detect.
Major Delacroix’s voice crackles in his platoon radio earpiece. It’s as calm and controlled as ever. ‘Enemy are one minute away.’
All is silent in the woods as they wait for the troops to appear. Jason is one of the men with an AA-12 and pulls the bulky rifle tight into his shoulder; he’s hyped up and itching to use it.
He scans forward across the narrow valley watching the bushes fifty yards away carefully and waiting for the first man to emerge. The plan that has been whispered along the line to him is to wait until a decent number of the enemy are across the stream and then open up on them so they can be cut off and killed when they are trapped on the lower slopes.
He hears some sounds across the stream, the cracking of twigs breaking, heavy breathing and thudding feet as men run on the soft ground. A bush downhill from him twitches, its leaves shaking, and his eyes lock onto it immediately.
A head wearing a black cloth balaclava with ragged holes for eyes and mouth emerges. It looks inhuman, like something from a horror film. Jason holds his fire, finger on the trigger, tensed and waiting for more of the men to emerge and cross the stream.
A single rifle spits from the slope above him and the man ducks back into cover.
Fuck! Who fired? Fucking twat!
Jason fires a couple of rounds into the bush and the leaves blast off it in a five-foot wide circle as the buckshot hits home.
Matt Hooper knows he has spoilt the ambush by firing too early. The other men open up and long bursts of automatic fire rake across the other side of the valley, but the enemy can’t be seen. The battle has broken out on both sides of the bluff now and he hears the two mortars at the top of it booming out as they lob shells over the other side of the main valley. He doesn’t want another failure to dog him; they need to engage the enemy more closely.
‘Two Platoon, follow me!’ His voice booms out through the trees and he runs down the slope, yelling at the surprised men to follow him.
They jump up from cover behind trees and run after their platoon leader. Stein sees him go past but it’s too late to stop him so he screams at his section, ‘Give covering fire!’
Matt and his men dash across the stream splashing through the water. Bullets zip past them as the enemy rallies and fires back. A grenade sails out above him, plops into a patch of the mud and explodes with a ragged splash, directing its shrapnel up into the air. The mud crater smokes gently.
Jason splashes through the stream and runs into the gloom of the trees opposite. He’s got tunnel vision; everything in the rest of creation has ceased to exist. His sight, hearing and smell are all sharpened. The blood thunders in his veins and the rifle feels alive and dangerous in his hands. Fire stabs out at him above and from the right. He swings the barrel round and squeezes the trigger; the weapon convulses smoothly in his hands and he pumps out three rounds at the man. Screams in the gloom indicate a hit.
Then he hears the shout through the trees to his left. ‘Man down! Man down!’
Shit.
‘Who’s hit?’
Chapter Forty
Up on top of the bluff in Tac’s position, Sophie cringes down in the dip. Mayhem is breaking out all around her. Enemy fire pours into the bluff from across the valley, bullets zip overhead and thunk into the tree trunks blowing off chunks of wood. RPG rockets scream in and explode in the tree canopy scattering shrapnel and branches on them.
On either side of her, the two PKM machine guns are clattering out long bursts supporting the troops lower down the slope. The two mortars next to her boom out again. White flame blossoms momentarily in the gloom illuminating the large tree trunks around them. The crews duck down their heads away from the blasts and the shells fire off over the other side of the valley. The violence is another order of magnitude of experience, above and beyond anything she’s experienced in civilian life.
‘Come west fifty metres!’ Jean-Baptiste shouts over to the mortar crews as he watches the shell bursts on the other side of the valley.
Alex is next to him in the dugout. He is following the flow of the battle through the crackling radio traffic on the net and the noises all around him, the heavy thudding of the PKM machine guns, the lighter cracks of the assault rifles, the sharp explosions of grenades and the shouts and screams echoing through the trees. He feels alive and alert, all his senses switched on and pulsing with energy, the Devereux instinct flowing in him as he barks orders and conducts his hellish orchestra in the strange music of battle.
Hooper’s rash attack across the stream has caused casualties.
Alex yells into the radio, ‘Corporal Stein, I want you to cross the stream and get the casualties back over this side. I will get additional fire to cover you.’
He pulls the two PKMs off the north flank and all four machine guns pour fire down into the trees below them as Alex watches Stein lead his section across the stream. They disappear into the trees and emerge a few minutes later dragging three casualties.
His south flank is now disorganised and weakened. As Stein retreats back uphill black hooded figures slip across the stream and start approaching up the slope towards them, making weird animal screams that echo around the woods. Alex is unperturbed and gets on the net to Col to organise his response.
Sophie glimpses Stein as he races up the hill with an inert Matt Hooper on his back in a fireman’s lift. He runs past Tac and dumps him down at the RAP and then turns back. He is puffing hard from the climb and his face and back are red and wet with Matt’s blood. Another two groups of soldiers carry screaming casualties past her.
As the battle closes in, she glances across at Alex as he gives his orders. ‘Right, you four, follow me, the rest of you stay here. Major Delacroix, you’re in charge if I don’t come back.’
He grabs his rifle with one hand and slips over the lip of their shelter, moving nimbly for a big man, a look of murderous calm on his face.
He leads his close protection squad down the slope towards the enemy. Confused firing and screaming is coming through the trees. His assault rifle is up in front of him, his face set hard over the sights, eyes narrowed and all senses focused along it. He signals to the men to fan out into a line and wait for the enemy to approach.
His senses speed up so that every movement slows down a hundred times. In the gloom he sees a ragged head shape emerge from behind a tree and run up towards him, howling as it comes. He puts the tip of the iron foresight of his rifle onto the figure’s chest as it runs and squeezes the trigger twice. The rounds hit home and the figure flies backwards down the slope. The automatic action spits two smoking cases out of the ejection port onto the ground next to him.
His men open up with jagged bursts of fire and more come from their left as Col leads his squad in a flanking attack at the same time.
Caught between the two fires the enemy turn and flee back down the slope. As they run across the stream the four P
KMs at last have clear targets and cut them down. The enemy are forced to turn back into the cover of the trees and Alex and Col’s two squads and the rallied remainder of Two Platoon, Jason amongst them, all move down the slope and close in on the survivors. Grenades and murderous fire pour down at them but the men do not surrender and are all gradually pinned down and shot.
Next to Tac a shout from one of the two medics goes up from the cover of their tree root. ‘Anyone free, give us a hand!’
Sophie forces herself out of the dugout and scuttles across to them. They have triaged the casualties. One is hit in the arm and bleeding heavily but not about to die so they are concentrating on the other two.
Matt Hooper was next to a tree when an RPG hit it. His left arm is severed at the elbow, he took a load of shrapnel in the guts and his face is half blown off. He’s thrashing around on the ground delirious with pain and screaming. Sophie comes round the large root buttress and sees the horrific sight of his arm stump flailing around, the bone gleaming white and wet and spraying blood. The medic is struggling to get a tourniquet on him.
‘Hold him still!’ he shouts at her. She grabs his other arm and the medic gets to work on him as blood splatters over both of them.
‘You’re OK, mate, you’re gonna make it! Just keep still!’
An RPG bangs overhead and they both duck down.
Alex runs back up the hill with his squad and jumps back into the dugout.
‘Baker! Where’s the air?’
‘Just talking to them now, sir, they’re wheels up and inbound.’
‘Tell ’em we’re going to need a danger close airstrike on the northern flank. We’ve just sorted out the southern side, but we can’t dislodge that lot without air.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Bullets are still snapping above them from the enemy east across the valley and from the northern flank.
In the middle of this mayhem, Baker has the radio telephone held tight against his ear, and is talking calmly and authoritatively to the Russian pilot of Shakira as he streaks in ahead of the two slower troopships, racing to get to them at two hundred miles an hour.
‘Shakira, this is Widow Three Three, we need a danger close airstrike to clear troops opposite the north flank of our position. Suggest you circle and watch my tracers.’
The Russian pilot speaks calmly and with intense concentration so that he sounds almost bored. ‘Roger that, Widow Three Three, we are inbound with full ordnance load of rockets and flechettes from east.’
The battle goes on for five minutes and then they hear the scouring sound of the big gunship overhead and the tree branches thrash about madly under its downdraught.
Baker pops a red smoke grenade and throws it forward through the trees away from Tac. The curls of smoke pour up out of the canopy as the Mi-24 circles overhead.
‘Widow Three Three, I have eyes on your smoke. Can you indicate target?’
‘Roger that, Shakira, firing red tracer now. Watch my tracer.’
Baker holds his thumbs up to Sean who fires a long burst across the hillside to the north across from them.
‘Widow, that is very close, I will have to dive onto enemy position from above to minimise spread of flechettes.’
Baker confers with Alex. ‘Happy with that, Shakira. Black Hal has given permission for danger close flechette strike on north flank of our position.’
‘Roger that, Widow, gaining altitude now.’
Baker sticks his head up out of the dugout and screams to the men down the slope, ‘Air thirty seconds! Take cover!’
The pilot hauls back on the cyclic and the two massive turbofans pull the aircraft vertically up at a stomach-churning rate. His eyes watch the altimeter and when he judges he has enough altitude he circles, leaning the cockpit over so that his gunner can get a clear view of the small puff of red smoke amidst the green forest down below them.
When they dive down at it, the gunner will have to laser the target for range, get the sights set on it and then fire the rockets in a couple of seconds before the pilot has to pull out of the dive or they will embed themselves in the hillside at over two hundred miles an hour.
The pilot leans the chopper over into a vertical dive; the small front window of his canopy completely fills with solid, green earth. As they plummet towards it, the gunner gets the sights on his heads-up display onto the tiny area of hillside a hundred metres away from Tac’s position. He lases, sights, clicks the cover off his red firing button with his thumb and presses it.
Six large rockets blast away from the pods under the wings on each side of the aircraft. Bursting charges explode and each rocket breaks open sending out a cone-shaped spread of five-inch long tungsten darts with fins at one end, tapering down to a needle-sharp point.
Hundreds of darts strike the wooded area like a huge shotgun blast from above. A funnel of death saturates the side of the small valley and the whole target area convulses and jumps up into the air in a cloud of splintered white wood as if a giant chainsaw has suddenly chewed it up.
The darts are small but moving so fast their kinetic energy slashes through wood, metal and bone, slicing limbs and internal organs.
The pilot hauls back on the stick and the ten-tonne helicopter screams in protest as the huge forces pull at its main rotor. Blood drains from his head and his vision blurs.
Corporal Baker watches the strike go in from the dugout, stands up, punches the air and yells, ‘Go on, yer brute!’
The massive gunship roars over his head at two hundred miles an hour and the downdraught smashes branches off the trees.
‘Fucking ’ell!’ someone in Tac squawks in high-pitched alarm.
Sean peers over his machine gun at the awesome display of power he has just witnessed as bits of white wood and green leaves float back down to earth. He is ecstatic with relief and shouts contemptuously, ‘See yer later, mate!’
Col’s battlefield voice bellows from the woods below him, ‘Get up! Go! Go! Go! Move yerselves!’
One Platoon shake off the shock and dash down the slope, across the stream and up into the jagged remains of the trees, stripped of their leaves. The enemy troops left alive are stunned, standing gawping around them or crouching down in terror. Bursts of fire cut them down, the slope is covered in bodies lying still or twisting on the ground in agony.
Col comes across one as it writhes making a wet gasping noise, and looks down at it in surprise over his rifle sights. It is the body of a man lying on his back with the large horned head of a kudu rising out of its shoulders.
‘Hodges, cover me!’ Col barks at a soldier who runs over and sights his rifle on the body as Col moves round to come at it from the head, out of Hodge’s line of fire. He stares at the creature as he approaches cautiously; it is a conjunction of a man and an animal, as fascinating as it is appalling. His hand reaches out slowly towards one of the thick twisted horns.
He pulls slowly and the mask comes off the man. It is a heavy object with a wicker frame underneath the skin of the neck that holds it steady on his shoulders. Col can see what the man’s injury is now – arterial blood is jetting out of the left side of his neck. A flechette has cut down through him, slashed his trachea and exited through his ribs on the right-hand side. He is drowning in his own blood.
The man gapes like a landed fish and his wide-open eyes stare at Col, the whites of them glaring in desperation.
Col knows there is no way they can treat a serious casualty like that now – even if they didn’t have to pull out immediately the bloke would be finished. He looks at him and thinks, do I let him suffocate slowly or do I do him a favour and finish him off?
‘He’s not gonna make it,’ he mutters to Hodges.
He stands back and drags the mask away from the man, brings his rifle up to his shoulder and bangs two rounds out into the top of his head.
He can hear other shots and shouting as the men clear the hillside. He grabs the mask in one hand and takes it with him as he oversees the sweep and then pul
ls the troops back up onto the bluff.
Alex twists around in the dugout, looking away from the devastation across from them. The huge build-up of pressure has been released. He catches Sophie’s eye and shakes his head and grins. ‘Bloody hell,’ he says, and starts laughing with relief.
The need to release the tension is so great that Sophie finds it weirdly hilarious as well and bends double with spasms of laughter, her ribs tensing in on her painfully. The shudders break up the solid block of fear in her stomach.
Everyone in Tac bursts into hoots of laughter. Jean-Baptiste is shaking his head, giggling and repeating, ‘Merde, merde, merde.’
Alex eventually collects himself. ‘OK, Baker, now for the other side of the valley.’
A second airstrike is set up. Sean indicates the target area with more tracer along the treeline across the main valley from them.
Shakira radios back. ‘Widow Three Three, target in treeline seen. I circle and launch strike from west over your heads.’
The sound of the chopper whirs away from them as he circles and comes back in a shallow dive on the target.
‘Widow Three Three, commencing run-in, range good, two pods 80mm rockets, get head down! Firing now!’
The thunderous roar of the Mil is overhead and there is a scouring, ripping noise as the rockets fire off in a stream and smash into the valley side in a succession of violent red flashes. The treeline explodes in flame and dust, branches and chunks of wood, bits of bodies and guns are blown high into the air. Sharp secondary explosions start as RPG rockets explode.
More whoops and yells come from the troops all over the bluff. They are clear to go home.
Chapter Forty-One
Alex looks at Sophie.
‘Are you going to be OK?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine.’
She doesn’t look it. Her face is pale and streaked with blood and dirt. She nods towards the white clapboard bungalow next to hers. ‘I’ll go and see Nats.’