Warlord

by James Steel

  The besiegers around the camp hear the truck coming and increase their rate of fire at the Americans.

  ‘Give it another one!’ Reilly yells and Jackson slots another grenade into the launcher. The truck is nearly at the gates.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  A shout comes through the trees to Alex’s right.

  ‘Man down!’

  Shit! They cannot leave any men behind with the Kudu Noir; he has seen the photos of what they do to their captives.

  He has made his command decisions now; with nineteen men left in action he needs to join the fight.

  ‘Right, let’s get him!’ he says to Jean-Baptiste and his signaller and they start moving towards the casualty. Alex pulls his machete from its scabbard on his webbing and cuts his way through a patch of hanging vines. They reach the soldier – it’s Sean Potts, he’s on the ground with one leg blown off at the knee from the grenade explosion and a load of shrapnel in his groin and the other leg. Arterial blood jets out of him in long regular pulses.

  Jason is on his knees in front of him desperately trying to get a tourniquet on the stump, his face and front covered in blood. Sean is out of it, his head lolling back and his eyes rolled over to show the whites.

  Jason is shouting, ‘Yer gonna make it, mate! Yer gonna make it!’ He pulls the belt loop fast on Sean’s lower thigh and strips off his friend’s webbing. Alex grabs his PKM light machine gun and gathers up the ammo belts.

  With the strength of desperation Jason hauls his friend up onto his back in a fireman’s lift and the group of five of them set off through the foliage following the sound of Col’s huge voice bellowing, ‘Two Section, covering fire! One Section, prepare to move! Move!’

  A fresh round of muzzle flashes and banging breaks out and they scuttle and stumble forward.

  They get through to where Col is in cover behind a tree; Alex crouches next to him. Jason slumps down and Sean’s body falls off his shoulder and lolls on the ground. Col takes one look at the white, blood-drained face, catches Alex’s eye and shakes his head.

  Jason is frantically fumbling in his webbing and pulls out his morphine injector. He yanks the yellow cap off the top and plunges it into Sean’s thigh. Col puts his hand on his shoulder and looks at him seriously, ‘Tell you what, mate, let’s give him mine too, eh?’

  Jason looks at his friend with tears in his eyes and knows full well what Col is saying. He can see that they’re not going to get him out. He nods silently and Col thumps his injector into Sean’s arm.

  There’s a lull in the firing and Alex and Jean-Baptiste gather the remaining men together into a better formation. It starts raining heavily and the sound of the drops drums loudly on the leaves above them. Water pours down off his helmet rim and Alex wipes it off his face and checks his watch. It’s 5.45 p.m., the light is already fading fast in the trees and they’ve got fifteen minutes to fight their way through the remaining jungle to the extraction point. The situation is desperate and extreme measures are needed. Alex calls loudly so all the men can hear.

  ‘Right, everybody, fix bayonets and buddy up! No one gets taken alive, if you’ve got to use your last bullet then do it!’

  Jean-Baptiste is next to Alex and looks at him and nods. Col grabs Jason’s shoulder and says, ‘Right, you’re coming with me, lad.’

  Long bursts of gunfire start up in front of them. The reason for the lull becomes apparent – the Kudu Noir have filtered round between them and the meadow.

  ‘Right, let’s get at them! Two Section, covering fire! One Section, move!’ Alex bellows and stands to fire forward. About thirty yards away he sees a black hooded figure emerge from behind a tree trunk, lit up by the strobing muzzle flashes of its rifle.

  Alex leans over his weapon, squints through his sights, lines up the stub of the backsight in the circle of the foresight and pulls the trigger. The burst cuts across the man’s head and he goes down.

  They move forward but in the intense, confused firefight the platoon formation breaks down and the men begin pairs fire and manoeuvre. It’s pitch black now and raining hard. The fighting is close quarters and vicious, randomly lit by muzzle flashes and the blast of grenades. The Kudu Noir are howling as they fire long, scything bursts through the forest.

  Jason has got Sean’s PKM machine gun and stands up and blasts a long burst to their rear before he takes two bullets in the face and goes over backwards. Col scuttles forwards, checks his pulse, and shouts, ‘Bollocks!’

  He crabs away from the body to the cover of a tree and then stands up to check forward. A bullet hits the Kevlar plate in his body armour over his heart and it feels like a baseball bat has hit him and knocked him off his feet. His ribs crack; he is knocked backward and lies on the ground winded.

  The Kudu Noir soldier runs forward, his rifle up, scanning over his sights. He gets to the tree and sees Col lying behind it on his back, one hand clutching his chest and his mouth gaping as he tries to suck in air. His other hand frantically scrabbles for the rifle lying next to him. The Kudu soldier stamps on his hand, then puts his head back and howls in triumph and others run forward to look at their prisoner.

  Stein leads his buddy forward and uses the platoon AA-12 that he has taken from a dead soldier. He stands and fires a burst of six shots into a patch of bushes that strips the leaves from them and riddles two Kudu Noir men with buckshot. He charges forward and finishes them with blasts to their heads as they twist in pain on the ground.

  Alex and Jean-Baptiste are doing well, gaining ground and moving expertly. The superior battlecraft of the First Regiment troops is showing through and the enemy numbers are thinning as they get towards the meadow.

  The former Foreign Legionnaire expertly cracks two rounds into a man ahead of them and Alex moves forward. Jean-Baptiste pauses and lobs a grenade towards the noise of movement behind him and then waits for the loud bang and fizz of splinters over his head.

  Alex loads a new magazine quickly and yells, ‘Prepare to move! Move!’ stands and fires forward covering him. Shots ring out behind, there’s a loud crack as Jean-Baptiste is hit in the thigh and his femur snaps. He screams and falls forward.

  Alex runs back to where he is twisting on the ground in agony. He gets his morphine ampoule out quickly and jabs it into his thigh opposite the wound and then whips a webbing strap around the injured leg as a tourniquet. The Frenchman makes a huge effort to get a grip on the pain, bringing all of his ferocious discipline to bear on it.

  Alex bends down and starts trying to get him up into a fireman’s lift. Jean-Baptiste pushes him off. ‘No, you must fight! We won’t make it.’ The Frenchman grabs the front of his combat jacket. ‘We can’t both die. Give me your grenades, I will hold them!’

  Alex stares back at him, he can’t see his face in the darkness but he can hear the furious intensity in his voice. He glances ahead, and knows Jean-Baptiste is right, there is firing coming from ahead and he’ll need to fight to get to the meadow. He checks the luminous dial of his watch, six o’clock, the chopper will be here any minute and it can’t hang around with ground fire coming at it. He cannot bring himself to say yes to one more betrayal so he just fumbles in his webbing packs and hands the four hard metal grenades to him.

  Jean-Baptiste groans and pushes himself up against a tree trunk. Alex is silent but the Frenchman wants to say something, ‘Colonel, when I met you, you asked me why I joined the Legion?’

  Alex croaks a quiet, ‘Yes.’

  ‘I did it because I killed someone.’ Alex doesn’t want to hear his confession, he has had too much horror. ‘I loved her very much but …’ He stops; there’s no time for the detail.

  ‘I have never told anyone that …’ He grabs Alex’s arm and hisses at him with a fury, ‘Stay alive, Colonel, stay alive!’ He shoves him away, pulls the pin out of the first grenade and lets the lever ping off into the darkness.

  ‘Go, Colonel, or we both go!’

  Alex puts his hand on his shoulder. ‘You are a great man, Jean-Bapt
iste.’

  ‘Thank you, now go.’ Alex cannot see the tears mixing with the rain on his face. He gets up and runs forward, it’s all he can do.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  The second rifle grenade smashes through the windscreen of the approaching truck and explodes on the back of the cab. The front of the truck pulses with the explosion, the roof is blown off and the driver killed outright. Shrapnel punches through into the troops in the back and Joseph hears three men fall down and start screaming.

  He feels the truck lurch as it runs out of control, the momentum hurrying it along. It swerves off the road and crashes at an oblique angle into the razor-wire fence around the compound, smashing down the metal stanchions and tearing a long strip of wire away.

  The right-hand side of the truck is now side on to the Americans who rake it with machine-gun fire. The darkness is lit by the flames from the burning cab and Joseph scrambles desperately over the wooden sideboards away from the gunfire and crouches down in the shelter of the truck.

  Bullets continue to pour into the base from the darkness encircling it. Joseph presses his back up against the shot-out rear tyres of the truck and holds his rifle in front of him, ready to make a break through the broken fence.

  A burst of gunfire comes from his left; Alex turns and listens to the heavy thudding as the AA-12 fires back.

  Through the rain and the trees he sees Stein’s huge figure lit up by the muzzle flashes and then his weapon clicks empty. The German flings a grenade forward and then there is a bright flash as one explodes next to him.

  Alex turns and runs on, bullets zipping past him from behind and hammering into a tree. He spins and fires back at the man who screams and falls. All around him in the darkness are the dwindling sounds of the gun battle as the remnant of the platoon are isolated and cut down one by one. A series of grenade explosions, shots and screams behind him mark the end of Jean-Baptiste.

  The noise of the helicopter overhead cuts through the mayhem and Alex looks up. Arkady switches on the landing light to find the meadow and the single bright beam of light shoots out from under the helicopter through the darkness, lighting up each flying raindrop. To Alex, lost in a welter of darkness and horror, dazed and disorientated by pain and failure, it is the purest and most sacred light he had ever seen. The light moves on ahead of him over the trees and he stumbles forward. It steadies over the meadow and he begins to run towards it.

  A shape darts between the trees on the edge of the meadow just in front of him. Backlit by the helicopter light, the figure stands out starkly – the twisted kudu horns and rifle make it look like the devil hurrying across the face of the earth. Alex brings up his rifle and fires a burst at it. It turns and fires towards him, unable to see him because of the bright light and the thrashing of the helicopter rotor wash behind it.

  Alex’s magazine clicks empty but he runs headlong forward, his bright bayonet on the tip of his rifle seeking out the hateful figure. It sees him too late dashing between the trees and parries the bayonet charge with its own weapon. Alex crashes into the figure and they fall onto the ground. His rifle is knocked from his hands and he punches it in the chest, the ghastly figure stares up at him and punches him in the side of the head. Alex feels the blow jar his upper teeth and it knocks him off. He yanks his machete from its scabbard, spins round to face the Kudu and they hurl themselves at each other, grappling in the mud.

  Arkady holds the chopper a few feet off the ground ready for a quick takeoff. He kills the landing light so as not to illuminate them for longer than he needs to. Yamba is at the side door with a light machine gun ready to cover anyone who comes out of the treeline.

  He peers through the darkness trying to see any movement. The grass under the machine is thrashing in the downdraught and he glimpses a figure as it emerges from the trees and stumbles towards him. It doesn’t have a weapon but is carrying something.

  Muzzle flashes burst from the trees and the figure drops onto all fours and crawls forward dragging its burden. Yamba braces the machine-gun muzzle on a door bracket and fires a long burst of suppressive fire over it and the enemy firing cuts off.

  The figure crawls towards the lowered ramp at the back of the aircraft, hovering four feet off the ground, and then staggers to its legs and throws something heavy into the cargo bay. Yamba stays on his gun firing bursts into the trees but glances back at the figure as it hauls itself up onto the ramp and then crawls towards him.

  He sets his machine gun down and runs back to it. In the dim light of the cargo bay he sees a sodden, mud-covered creature on the floor. It twists its face up to him and he sees crazed eyes and a blood-streaked visage. He knows it is Alex but cannot recognise him. He crouches down and shouts, ‘How many more?’

  Alex looks up at him and shouts weakly, ‘None.’

  Bullets start thudding through the side of the chopper, knocking puffs of insulation out of the walls as the remaining Kudu Noir fire at them. Yamba glances up. One round in the fuel tank and they’ve had it.

  He looks back down at the heavy object and sees that it is a kudu mask with blood leaking out of the severed head inside it. He looks away from it in horror and shouts at Alex, ‘What about Col?’

  Alex slumps on the floor. ‘Dead. We’re all dead.’

  Inside the American compound, Major Reilly yells over the din of the firefight, ‘Jackson, keep them pinned down behind the truck. How many rounds have you got left?’

  Jackson glances down and checks the bandolier on his chest. ‘Two mags, sir!’

  ‘Great, sixty rounds’, Reilly thinks, but gives him a thumbs up nonetheless. ‘Good shooting.’

  He turns and crawls to the edge of the roof, swings himself over it, drops down and scuttles, bent double, back to the hut in the middle of the compound where Secretary Johnson and the journalists are all flat on the floor in the dark listening to the bangs and explosions going on around them and trying to guess if they are going to get out alive.

  Reilly ducks in through the door and crawls over to Johnson. ‘OK, we held off a truck assault, I think that will keep them at bay for a while.’

  ‘Great.’ She manages to sound in control. ‘How long till the missiles get here?’

  He checks his watch: 6.10 p.m. ‘Twenty minutes till they hit; I think we can do this. I’ll check with Heaven and see if they can see any other threats on the drone. Signaller!’ He yells in the dark and the man crawls over to him. ‘Get me Heaven on the command net.’

  The six cruise missiles scream through the night over northern Kenya at 550mph. Their terrain-following radar holds them at a hundred feet altitude and they jink and twist as they follow the contours of the land. Satellite controls direct them to fly in a V formation like a flock of geese.

  Some Masai herdsmen look up in alarm from their campfire as they howl overhead, deadly and intent on their target.

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Yamba pours water from his canteen over Alex’s face and wipes away some of the mud and the blood smeared over it. In the dim light of the helicopter cargo bay his commander is battered and exhausted. He’s slumped on the floor, leaning against the wall, a ghost staring into space, as they thump back to Heaven in the nearly empty aircraft.

  Arkady’s voice crackles in Yamba’s headset. ‘It’s Mordechai on the radio, wants to speak to you.’

  ‘OK.’ He hands the canteen to Alex who grasps it numbly and doesn’t move as Yamba walks back to the cockpit.

  A minute later he returns quickly and Alex is still staring ahead into space.

  Yamba comes close and shouts, ‘Alex, they’ve got Col!’ His eyes are wide and staring.

  Alex’s eyes focus and he looks at Yamba who continues shouting, ‘Bilal’s pilot, Captain Mahmood, is flying him back to Mukungu now; the Kudus got Mahmood and used his helicopter to fly to Bahomba. Mordechai said Mahmood called him on the command net when no one was in the cockpit with him.’

  Alex blinks and looks at him. ‘Col’s alive?’

 
; ‘Yes, Mahmood said it was him, he saw him at the party you went to.’

  Alex sits up. A pack instinct somewhere deep inside has told him to protect one of his own. ‘We’ve got to go and get him.’

  Yamba is in a more rational state than Alex. He pauses and looks at his friend, thinking about the risks of going back into Mukungu. But he hesitates only for a moment, his loyalty to Alex and Col overcomes any doubts – they cannot leave Col to be tortured by the Kudus. He knows both of them would do the same for him. He looks Alex in the eye, gives a silent nod and commits himself.

  Yamba keys the mike on his headset. ‘Arkady, take us back into Mukungu.’ The Russian grunts with surprise but he too is loyal to Col and they have been through too much for him to abandon the man. He checks his maps and banks the chopper round on a new course.

  Alex hauls himself up and starts looking around him, trying to think how he will take on a whole base full of enemy troops.

  Joseph crouches behind the back wheels of the burning truck. He can’t see much because he is cramped in with Simon and three other men all clutching rifles and hiding from the bullets that thud into the truck body making it vibrate against his shoulder. Black smoke pours out of the cab at the front of the lorry and flames light up the bullet-riddled prefab buildings defended by a handful of remaining American soldiers.

  He is trapped in no man’s land with the Americans firing at him from the front and bullets snapping around him from his fellow fighters shooting back at them from behind him. In the distance, back towards Mukungu, he hears another truck engine rev up, the engine note rising as it approaches.

  Inside the camp, Reilly has just been told by Mordechai that Alex is approaching Mukungu. ‘Oh shit,’ he mutters quietly – he doesn’t want to broadcast the fact that cruise missiles are about to be used. ‘What frequency is he on?’