First Casualty (The Gabriel Wolfe Thrillers Book 4)

by Andy Maslen

  Far in the distance there was a high yip-yip. Then a deeper coughing grunt. Night hunters on the move.

  *

  Gabriel’s watch said 5.45. Sunrise. Away to the east, over a range of mountains the colour of heather, the sun was climbing steadily higher, sending rose-pink fingers across the sky. A breeze was whipping along, moving the upper branches of the acacia trees on the plain and ruffling the surface of the lake. The birds were still in residence, cackling noisily as they squabbled over fishing rights. Down by the water’s edge, Gabriel watched as a herd of zebra drank, taking turns to lift their dripping muzzles from the water and watch for trouble.

  While he waited for Britta to wake up, he walked over to the Land Rover and opened a pouch of the field rations, squeezing the muddy meat paste into his mouth and then washing it down with some of their precious stash of bottled water, not wanting to start the day with the taste of bleach in his mouth.

  Gabriel stripped and cleaned the pistols, then the assault rifles, using the familiar sequences of movements to quiet his mind. Then he checked over the Land Rover using an old mnemonic his very first army instructor had taught him. POWER: petrol, oil, water, electrics, rubber.

  The gas tank was half-full and when he untied and shook the jerry cans on the roof, they sloshed reassuringly. Under the bonnet, everything was as it should be. The dipstick revealed a slick of clearish yellow oil between the MIN and MAX marks, and the radiator was topped up to just below the tops of the metal strips beneath the cap. Gabriel twisted the key in the ignition. All the dials flicked to life and, not that he thought they’d be needing them, but the indicators and all the headlamps and sidelights were operational. Finally, he inspected the tyres, visually, and by feel, running the palms of his hands around the deeply grooved treads. No thorns, sharp stones or random metal spikes greeted his questing fingertips. OK, good to go.

  He wandered over to Britta’s hunched form inside her sleeping bag and prodded her experimentally with the toe of his right boot.

  “Fuck off,” she grunted.

  *

  Ten minutes later, they were sitting in the Land Rover, Britta behind the wheel, the engine idling. He plugged the satnav into the cigarette lighter socket and held it on his lap. As they waited for it to boot up, Britta turned to him.

  “Are you ready for this?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you’ve been torturing yourself over Smudge’s death ever since you left the Army and now you’re so close to where it all happened. I just hope you’re all right, you know?”

  She reached over and squeezed his thigh. Her lips were compressed and she was frowning, the tiny muscles surrounding her eyes tight with concern.

  “I am all right. Really.” He ran a mental check of his emotions as he said this. Found he was surprisingly calm. No elevated heart rate. No anxiety fluttering in his stomach. No self-doubt. We go in. We find something that proves it was Smudge. We go. I do my duty. “Can we go now?”

  “But what if there’s nothing left?” Britta asked. “It’s been a long time. You know, scavengers, on four legs, or two. Maybe he’s gone.”

  “I know all about the odds. But I’m not leaving without proof we found him. There will be something, even if it’s just the tip of one of those damned machetes embedded in a knuckle bone. Now, let’s go. Please.”

  Gabriel did his best to smile but found his face had become inert. Inside he felt . . . nothing. Not hope. Not fear. Just an emptiness. Because he was beginning to suspect something awful. That this entire business had never been about Smudge at all. He was on the wrong continent, looking for the wrong body. A voice, faint as the breeze, whispered in his ear.

  “Gable. Come and get me. Come and find me.”

  He nodded. I will, Michael. Just let me do this first.

  Taking his nod for the signal to go, Britta, still frowning, pushed the gear lever into first and pulled away.

  26

  Infiltration Complete

  TWO hours later, having driven cross-country the whole way through alternating tracts of open savannah and thickly forested land, the female voice from the satnav piped up.

  “You have reached your destination.”

  They were in a clearing surrounded by acacias, maybe one hundred feet by fifty. Big enough to land a helicopter.

  Britta stopped the Land Rover and yanked on the handbrake, which emitted a protesting squawk. They got out, stretching and easing off the stiffness in muscles battered by the warring between the rough terrain and the Land Rover’s suspension.

  “This is the place?” Britta asked, shading her eyes as she scanned a circle around their position.

  “It looks the same, but there’s not much to get a fix on. We were in a hurry to get out and we’d just lost Smudge.”

  “Can you remember which way you came?”

  He paused before answering, repeating Britta’s action and turning in a circle, straining to dig back into his memory for a clue as to where they should aim for.

  He shook his head.

  “There’s nothing. But I have an idea how I can get it back. Let’s have a brew first though. I’m gasping.”

  “A brew?”

  “Tea.” He smiled. “Being back here, dressed in camo, it feels just like it did then. Back in uniform. The Army jargon. Tea was always a brew.”

  While the water in the little aluminium billycan came to a boil, they unloaded their gear: two assault rifles, two MP5K sub-machine guns, two pistols, grenades, extra clips of ammunition.

  “Do we really need all this?” Britta asked. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. We haven’t seen a human soul or even a sign of one since we took care of those mercenaries.”

  Gabriel thought back to the plume of smoke he’d seen the previous night, spotting for Britta.

  “Could be a waste of energy. But there are still elephants in Mozambique, rhino, too. Where there’s ivory, there’s poachers. Those guys are hardcore. They’re all ex-militia or gangsters. Poaching’s more profitable than fighting, but they keep their shooters. So it’s . . .”

  “I know, I know. Better safe than sorry. Right. Let’s check these, drink our tea and then go. You going to tell me how you’re going to recover your memory?”

  Gabriel poured boiling water into the two tin mugs they’d brought, added teabags and powdered milk. He handed one to Britta, then took a cautious sip.

  “Self-hypnosis. I need ten minutes. Perfect quiet, perfect stillness. Can you keep guard?”

  “Sure. I’ll be over there by the stand of trees.”

  Britta got up and walked over to a cluster of acacias. She set her back against the trunk of one of them, put her tea by her side and laid her SA80 over her lap. Gabriel watched her go, focusing on the thick red plait of hair that descended from the nape of her neck, and the way it glinted like newly stripped copper wire as the sun hit it. He nodded at her and smiled, then sat, cross-legged, in the shade of the Land Rover.

  *

  Gabriel closed his eyes, allowing the orange blobs of light swirling across his eyelids to distract him.

  Then he drew in a deep breath and held it for a couple of seconds, before letting it out slowly through his mouth.

  Little by little, he let go of conscious thoughts, using the old technique Master Zhao had taught him as a rebellious teenager in Hong Kong. He heard his mentor’s voice now, a soft whisper from long ago and far away, firm, but loving, instructing his younger self. “Do not fight for calm, young Wolfe Cub. Let it find you. Focus on the breath. Only the breath. In for four. Hold for one. Out for four. Hold for one.”

  In this way, he had learned to slow his pulse and visit parts of his mind that were inaccessible when he was ruled by his teenage instincts to grab for everything, seize it, fight for it.

  Gabriel felt a settling, physical, yes, but also mental, as if he had entered a lift and found a new floor below the one he lived on. He could still hear the sounds of the exterior world – wind moving leaves in the tre
es and the distant keening of a bird of prey somewhere high above his position – but they seemed to belong to a different place to the one he now inhabited. Now was the time to ask: “Which direction do we go from here?”

  A snatch of shouted instructions floated just beyond reach. Gabriel knew better than to strain for it. He returned to his breathing and waited. There! Stronger now. Audible. “Northwest from here, boss!” It was the voice of Corporal Ben “Dusty” Rhodes – a five-year-old echo from a time when Gabriel had served Queen and Country openly, as a Captain in the SAS, not clandestinely, as an operative in The Department.

  A picture swam into view in his mind, as if he were watching himself on TV.

  Gabriel Wolfe and Ben Rhodes move away from the scene of the firefight where they just lost Smudge. They stagger along, supporting a one-armed man between them. The casualty is Trooper Damon “Daisy” Cheaney, the troop’s medic. His face is white with shock. Where his left arm ought to be, there is simply an absence. Unless you count the bloody stump trailing tatters of flesh around an ugly, fractured bone, half-covered with a field dressing and cinched tight with a tourniquet to stop the bleeding.

  They reach the clearing where a helicopter waits, rotors chopping the air, its skids barely kissing the ground, impatient to get away. The aircrew in their drab, green flight suits and white helmets like eggshells pull them aboard, and up rears the helicopter, lurching over as the pilot turns sharply to head away, out of reach of the 12.7 mm rounds from the Dushka heavy machine gun mounted on the warlord’s Land Cruiser.

  And Gabriel looks down.

  The enemy fighters have left the village.

  They have left Smudge, too.

  They have left him crucified on a tree, his hands pinioned to its fat, bulging trunk by machetes.

  His head hangs down onto his chest.

  A buzzard perches on his left shoulder, feeding steadily on reddish-grey morsels of the exposed brain.

  The chopper falls away to the left and flies them to safety.

  *

  Gabriel let his eyelids flutter open. The afterimages dancing across his vision rendered the scene in front of him in shades of pale blue and green. Standing, he called over to Britta.

  “It’s southeast from here. The village, I mean. Once we get there, we can work our way out looking for the tree.”

  “Right,” she called back, getting to her feet. “Where do we start?”

  “Over there, those trees. I think we came from that direction. The village should be through there, maybe half a mile.”

  “Come on, then. Let’s get going. And we should turn these on.” She pointed at the portable GPS unit clipped to her belt. “Didn’t you say we had back-up?”

  “Yes. Don told me he’d lined up support from the Zambian side of the border.”

  They switched on the units, which immediately began pinging their position to the US-owned Global Positioning System of orbiting satellites.

  The SA80s slung across their backs, and the MP5Ks under their armpits, they walked side by side, through the screening acacias towards the site of Gabriel’s last, fateful mission for the SAS.

  27

  A Bird’s-Eye View

  ONE thousand feet above the forest, soaring on a thermal, a black-shouldered kite flies lazy circles. The raptor is watching the land beneath, searching for the plumes of smoke that might mean human habitation and therefore food. Or the remains of a kill from one of the ground-dwelling predators. It will hunt when it needs to, but scavenging is easier – less energy to expend and less risk of damaging its fragile flight feathers and light but brittle bones.

  Directly below its right wing, it catches movement. Three vehicles are throwing up dust trails as they move southwards. The kite watches, tilting its head this way and that, as the vehicles, and the humans riding inside or on top of them, drive through the scrub.

  A few seconds’ flying from the position of the moving vehicles is a fourth. This one is not moving. Two humans are walking away from it.

  The humans are hard to pick out against the ground. Their coverings blend in with the earth and scrub.

  They are carrying the guns – black and charcoal, straight lines and sharp corners – that have destroyed so many of the birds and mammals on which the kite relies for food. Long ones strapped across their backs, small ones across their chests, and smaller ones still on their hips.

  The moving vehicles stop. Humans dismount and begin spreading out in a line as they creep towards the hunting pair. One remains in the back of the open vehicle, standing behind a big gun fixed on a pole. The fourteen on the ground also carry guns.

  The guns spit flame and thin wisps of smoke drift up towards the kite, acrid on the warm wind. Having observed similar skirmishes in its three-year life, it senses the possibility of a meal and flies tighter circles over the warring humans.

  The humans begin falling. The kite sees the bright blood. Synapses flash in its brain. The blood in its muscles pumps faster and it allows itself to lose a few hundred feet as it watches the humans killing each other.

  Two of the humans, the ones from the fourth vehicle, are retreating. This is only right. The kite itself has often retreated in the face of attacks from jackals, wild dogs and the much larger vultures that bully their way to the front whenever a kill is discovered.

  They hide themselves behind a fallen tree and fire their guns from there. More of their pursuers fall. More blood splashes onto the ground, its vivid hue setting off sensory explosions in the kite’s brain.

  Puffs of smoke, grey and white, blossom in the clearing. Bodies fall.

  Then the human that has stayed behind in the vehicle begins firing the long gun. Flame bursts from one end and the kite picks up the distant chatter of its voice, even at this height.

  More firing. More deaths. More beautiful bright beads of blood.

  Then, as if lions had arrived and scared off bickering jackals, all movement stops. The air falls silent, just the rustle of wind through the kite’s pinions.

  Far below, one human stands over another. It points a small gun down at the other’s head.

  28

  “You’re All Out of Moments”

  FROM his position kneeling beside Britta’s body, Gabriel looked up into a brown face, incised with dozens of V-shaped scars on both cheeks. The man grinned – all his front teeth were gold. Then he drew a pistol, a geriatric, Russian-made Makarov. He spoke.

  “Time to go soldier-boy. Your bitch is dead. On your feet.”

  Waggling the pistol, the lean fighter stood back. Without a wound, Gabriel would have eased closer and then disarmed him. It wasn’t difficult. You just had to be prepared to strike quickly and without fear. But the blood running down his thigh and into his boot was slowing him down. He stood, wincing with the pain from the gunshot.

  “You should take me to your boss,” Gabriel said. “You could get a nice, fat ransom.”

  “That’s General Rambo to you!” the man spat back, cuffing Gabriel across the temple with his non-gun hand, a hard blow that unbalanced him and forced him to put his weight on his injured leg. “I fight for him on my home ground. Not like you. Another lily-white, racist mercenary come out to Mozambique to kill Africans for money.”

  “You have me all wrong,” Gabriel said, grunting with the pain and the effort of not showing it. “I came out here to bring a friend home.”

  “Ha! What friend? You have no friends here. This is a land for black men.”

  “He was a black man. His name was Michael Smith. We called him Mickey. Sometimes we called him Smudge.”

  The militiaman relaxed a couple of degrees and some of the aggression in his manner left him: the muzzle of the Makarov dropped a fraction.

  “What sort of name is that? Smudge? Because he was black? You’re a racist, man. Like I said.”

  “No. He was a friend. We called him Smudge because of his surname. Smith – like a blacksmith. They get smudges on their faces from the forge.”

  “S
o how you going to bring him home? Sounds like he’s dead to me.”

  Gabriel tried to stand erect, despite the pain. He needed to get on the same level as the militiaman physically as much as psychologically.

  “He is. He died a long time ago. Out here. I want to find whatever’s left of him and take it back to his daughter in England.”

  Gabriel watched as the man’s grin changed into a thoughtful expression. The man pulled at his lower lip. His gun arm dropped another inch or so. Any moment now and you’re mine, Gabriel thought.

  The man laughed. A hard cynical sound.

  “You know how big the forest is? Hyena or buzzard will have eaten your friend by now. No. He’s gone and soon you’ll be joining him. You can explain man to man why you left him to rot so far from home. Now move!” The Makarov’s barrel had jerked up to the horizontal again and was pointing straight at Gabriel’s stomach.

  Gabriel moved ahead and limped along in front of his captor towards a clearing.

  When they arrived in the trampled-flat circle, they were met by a ragtag band of heavily-armed fighters, aged, in Gabriel’s judgement, from ten to thirty. Each man, and boy, carried a Kalashnikov assault rifle – crude assemblages of varnished plywood and pressed steel, yet reliable enough to be the battle rifle of choice for dozens of countries and hundreds of militias all over the continent, and far beyond. The Soviet-made rifles looked comically oversized in the hands of the boys. Yet he knew only too well how African warlords depersonalised their captives until they were ready not only to carry guns but to use them without compunction. It kept food in their bellies and clothes on their backs. And, more importantly, blood flowing in their veins.

  The fighters were wearing an assortment of clothing, from military fatigues to sportswear, the camouflage completely at odds with the neon colours and bright logos of the T-shirts and tracksuit trousers. Several were wearing mirror-lensed, Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses, or, at any rate, cheap knockoffs bought in Maputo. All of them wore machetes at their hips. One man, a rangy six-footer with a striking afro held in place with a strip of bright scarlet satin, was toting a light machinegun. A belt of long brass cartridges dangled from the breech and he wore two further belts crossed over his torso. He caught Gabriel looking at the weapon and grinned. Then he called over.