Decisive Measures

by Decisive Measures (retail) (epub)

  ‘The word of the soldiers we pay to guard it.’ He paused. ‘If we don’t get them back, those weapons will be sold to the rebels who have been robbing, raping and killing in Freetown, while your men sit here doing nothing. Are you here to protect the people or are you waiting for the rebels to leave so that you and your men can take their turn at whatever is left?’

  The Nigerian strode from behind his desk and stood toe to toe with Grizz. ‘We are Africans.’ He jabbed his stubby thumb into his chest. ‘I am African. These are my people; they have my protection. We Africans know who the real oppressors are. Get out before I have you arrested.’

  ‘Go ahead. See how much shit hits the fan after that. With the amount we pay in bribes to Nigerian generals, I don’t think we’ll have any difficulty in finding one willing to bust you back down to private.’ He paused. ‘We want those weapons back, Major, and if any of those other bunkers are tampered with again, we’ll be asking our generals for a favour.’

  ‘Do Decisive Measures really have some Nigerian generals on the payroll?’ I asked as we walked back across the airfield.

  Grizz laughed. ‘I don’t know, but you’d have to be a brave major to call the bluff, wouldn’t you?’ He opened one of the other bunkers and we loaded more ammunition for the garrison at Bohara. Then I fired up the engines and took off, staying above the safe haven of the airport as I maintained a tight spiral climb to height.

  I levelled at two thousand feet and set the nose of the Huey directly towards Bohara. The landscape had been transformed into a scene of devastation. Villages had become blackened ruins, their fields stripped bare of crops. Everywhere there were fleeing figures, scattering in panic at the sight of the helicopter. Whether they were rebels, government troops or simply refugees it was impossible to know.

  We dropped into the Bohara Valley. Grizz and I began a three-way conversation with the radio operator at the mine compound. Grizz was also talking to Rudi on the net.

  ‘We need to get the expats out,’ the operator said. ‘The mines have been shut down for the last week anyway and we’re taking a storm of incoming fire. We can’t guarantee their safety any longer.’

  ‘Have them ready to ship out,’ I said.

  Grizz chipped in. ‘Hostiles are reported advancing twelve miles. Let’s see if we can quieten those bastards down first before we start worrying about the expats.’

  We passed over the compound and swung away on to the bearing Grizz indicated. We swooped over a ridgeline and down towards the target valley. As if my Kosovo nightmare had again become reality, I saw a burning hamlet ahead of me, the ruined buildings standing stark among the flames and smoke. Beyond it was dense woodland and forest.

  As I skimmed along the tree line, the downwash lashing at the branches revealed shapes moving in the shadows of the trees. There were no muzzle flashes, no tick of rounds against the Huey’s skin. I could see figures running between the trees but I had no way of telling if they were refugees from the burning village or rebel soldiers.

  Not again, please God, not again, I thought. I made another, slower pass. Still there was no fire from the woods.

  I flicked the intercom switch. ‘What do you get, Grizz?’

  ‘Figures. Hostiles.’

  ‘They could be villagers.’

  ‘Negative. I can see men with weapons.’

  ‘They might be sticks or spears,’ I said. ‘Hold your fire, I’ll make another pass.’ I did, and then another, putting the heli into a hover directly in front of the half-hidden figures, inviting them to shoot.

  I heard the clank of the ammunition links for the door gun.

  ‘Hold your fire.’

  ‘What?’ Grizz said. ‘Jesus, Jack. What are you trying to do?’

  I ignored him, my thoughts echoing in my brain: Why don’t they shoot? Why don’t they shoot?

  I glanced at Layla. Her face showed her fear, but her voice was firm and level. ‘This isn’t Kosovo, Jack,’ she said. ‘Trust your judgement. Do what you have to do.’

  I strained to look beyond the camouflage of the foliage. I saw a few angular shapes and what might have been the glint of metal. Then the sunlight glancing from the metal fuselage of the heli was picked up and reflected by a score of tiny mirrors, gleaming like Christmas lights in the darkness of the forest.

  That decided me. I had seen enough rebels with mirror fragments woven into their hair or dangling from their clothing, part of the juju they believed would ward off evil and keep them alive.

  I swung the heli away from the forest then banked in a sweeping turn. ‘Are you ready in the back?’ I said.

  The answer from Grizz was immediate. ‘Just give me the word.’

  ‘On my shot.’ My finger began to close on the trigger. A microsecond before I fired, a figure came sprinting from the tree line – a woman blundering directly into the cross hairs of my sights.

  The vision of the burning woman from Kosovo flooded my mind. ‘Abort! Abort! Abort!’ I pulled my hand from the trigger as if it had been burned, and banked us up and left, away from the wood.

  ‘Jack? What’s going on? Jack?’

  I couldn’t answer him for a moment. My hands were trembling so much I could barely grip the controls and my body shook with shivers. I offered a silent prayer of thanks that I’d been saved from repeating the terrible crime I’d committed in Kosovo.

  I glanced back over my shoulder and saw the woman still running. Then she stopped, jerking from side to side as if some giant invisible hand was shaking her. She toppled forward and lay still.

  Then there was a red flash from the edge of the wood and I heard Grizz’s warning shout. ‘Missile launch! Evade! Evade! Evade!’ I was already throwing the Huey into a savage right-hand break as the RPG round blasted up at me trailing a plume of dirty grey smoke. I watched it with a curious detachment as it knifed past us, so close it appeared to pass through the whirling disc of the rotors. Then it was gone, diminishing to a black speck in the sky, before it exploded in a ball of orange flame.

  I glanced down. At once I glimpsed the stooping figure of a rebel soldier, a squat black tube extending from his shoulder. I swung the heli back to face the forest.

  The rebel soldier had reloaded and was raising the launcher back to his shoulder. He froze as he saw the Huey blasting in towards him. I nudged the nose of the heli right a shade, and as the cross hairs intersected, I squeezed the firing trigger. There was a whoosh as the rocket blasted from the pod. The soldier disappeared in a burst of crimson flame and clods of earth were blasted into the air.

  I heard the clatter of the GPMG as Grizz began raking the tree line. He gave a warning shout. ‘Muzzle flashes four o’clock.’ I swung the heli right to bring my weapons to bear and squeezed the trigger of the rocket pod again. Driven by a cold rage, I attacked over and over, indifferent to danger, as I laid the ghosts of my past. I was wreaking vengeance as much for what I had done in Kosovo as for the terror the rebels had inflicted here.

  I launched all the rockets from the pod and kept firing the nose gun long after every sign of movement from the rebels had ceased, then I turned away, back towards Bohara.

  Suddenly there was a flash and a blast strong enough to throw the Huey sideways. Shrapnel ripped into the side of the cab.

  ‘What the—’ I froze. In the corner of my eye I glimpsed a black shape just above the forest canopy, as sinister and ugly as a tarantula, but far more deadly.

  It was a Hind helicopter gunship. The markings on its flanks had been painted out, but there was little doubt where it had come from. The Liberians had obviously decided to gamble on an intervention to tip the fight for the diamond mines in favour of their protégés.

  There was another flash and a streak of smoke and flame. ‘Flares! Flares! Flares!’ I yelled.

  Layla’s hand hovered over the buttons, then pressed one.

  ‘Not chaff, flares! The next button!’

  She pressed the correct button and the fierce light of miniature stars burned at the
periphery of my vision as a burst of flares ignited in our slipstream.

  I put us into a dive even as I spun the heli round to mask the heat of the engines from the missile streaking towards us.

  The Huey screamed downwards. I held the dive until my vision was filled with the sight of onrushing trees, then almost broke the Huey’s back as I pulled the steepest climbing turn I could manage. I could feel the blood draining from my brain as the G force bit, but I held the turn until the colour began to wash from my vision. It was the greyout – the prelude to unconsciousness’.

  I eased back on the controls and, as my full vision returned, I whipped my head round searching for the Hind. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘In your five,’ Grizz said, hanging out of the door of the cab to keep the enemy in sight. ‘Go left. Go left.’

  I stamped down on the rudder again, forcing the Huey into another juddering turn. The Hind flashed across my sights. I’d have given a year’s wages for just one of the rockets I’d blasted into the forest only a few minutes before, but the pod was empty.

  As the cross hairs intersected on the Hind I squeezed the trigger of the nose guns and rounds spat out, punching a rising line though the Hind’s fuselage. Then the firing stopped abruptly. I squeezed the trigger again, holding the turn to keep the enemy heli in my sights, but the guns were useless – empty or jammed.

  I could barely control a mounting wave of panic. I had no rockets and now no guns – no armaments of any sort to take into a duel with one of the deadliest gunships ever built. And the Hind was already turning to bring its own weapons to bear once more.

  I tried to manoeuvre to bring Grizz’s guns to bear, but though he loosed off a couple of bursts, sighting through the doorway of the cab barely gave him enough time before the Hind was out of his line of sight again.

  The Hind flashed towards me. I faked a left turn, then kicked hard right and dived, passing under the Hind, its blind spot. We were so close that its downwash shook the Huey like a terrier on a rat and my own rotors scythed the air within feet of its metal belly.

  In that instant, I saw one glimmer of hope. I accelerated and set the nose due west as if bugging out from the fight and running for home. The Hind immediately turned in pursuit and the gap that had begun to open narrowed again. He was now in perfect position to plant a heat-seeking missile straight into the exhaust of the Huey’s straining engines.

  I dumped the collective and booted the right rudder, sending the Huey into the most savage break yet. There was a strangled cry from Layla alongside me as the force of the turn threw her against the side of the cockpit and I heard a thud and a curse behind me as Grizz lost his footing and fell against the wall of the cab.

  The Huey’s momentum carried it through the turn and as the nose dipped and we started to drop, a flash of fire trailing smoke blasted past the cockpit mere feet from my face.

  It detonated with a blinding flash behind us, but I had no time to spare it a thought. We were now nose to nose, a mile apart and closing fast. If neither of us evaded, we would impact in seconds.

  The Hind opened up again with a burst from its nose gun and then jinked left. I matched the move exactly. We were still nose to nose. He went right and left again, then climbed, and each time I matched him, focusing only on the helmeted figure I could just glimpse through the tinted Perspex bubble of the Hind’s canopy. We were now no more than two hundred yards apart. I sensed as much as saw him start to climb and once more matched his move.

  ‘Jack! What are you doing?’ Layla screamed. ‘You’ll kill us all!’

  A fraction of a second later I saw the Hind’s nose dip. I twitched the cyclic upwards as its ugly black shape filled my vision. The disturbed air threw the Huey around, but I held the controls with rigid arms as I saw the nose of the Hind slide towards us. I could see the pilot’s expression freeze as I jerked the cyclic forward and the Huey began to drop towards the blur of razor-edged motion – the rotors of the Hind.

  There was no margin for error. A couple of feet too low or too high, a fraction of a second early or late, and we would all die together. I started to panic. I had left it too late. I had missed.

  My hands twitched instinctively on the controls even though I knew the Hind would be long gone before any correction I made now could take effect. Then there was the crack and whine of metal on metal from behind and below me. The back of our skids had caught the tips of the Hind’s main rotors.

  I was powerless to do anything but wait. If I had misjudged our angle of dive, I would have set us on an irreversible path to destruction. Our own tail rotor would be destroyed, cut to pieces by the massive blades of the Hind’s main rotors.

  There was a deafening crash and my helmet smacked against the edge of the canopy as the Huey was thrown sideways. The floor of the cockpit beneath my feet was buckled by the impact.

  I heard Grizz curse and yell as he was thrown around. The force of the impact had spun us round so that the Hind again filled my vision. Its main rotors were still turning at blinding speed, but the tail had disappeared, smashed away like rotten wood. With no tail rotor to control the torque, the giant body of the Hind was already beginning to spin out of control. Whipping around its own axis, it drilled downwards towards the ground and then disappeared in a massive orange and yellow flash.

  I pushed up my visor to wipe the sweat from my eyes. ‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘That’s the first and last dogfight I ever want to go into with no ammunition. If they’ve got another Hind, we’re finished.’ I heard Grizz’s rumbling laugh over the intercom. ‘I think you just wrecked at least fifty per cent of the Liberian air force. I don’t think there’s much danger of them risking the other half as well.’

  Layla, too, joined in the laughter, but her face was deathly pale.

  Chapter Eleven

  I set the heli climbing to clear the ridge, sighting on a notch in the skyline where a landslip had cut away a section like a small quarry. Beneath it the slopes were barren and strewn with scree. ‘A great place to hide,’ I said as we flashed over it. ‘You could lie up there for weeks and never be found.’

  We cleared the ridge and flashed down towards Bohara. The ground fire from the rebels began at once and rounds clipped the rotor blades, tracing a brief fiery trail of sparks in the sky.

  I pressed down lower and kept the heli weaving from side to side as I radioed the compound, ‘Grizzly One, coming in.’

  Almost at once the garrison put out a barrage of fire at the rebels. As I dropped fast and low towards the helipad, I could make out people gathered in knots around the perimeter wire, and a jostling mass pressing against the gates of the inner compound. The rebels had driven villagers and mineworkers alike towards Bohara. They were pinned between the advancing rebels and the mercenary garrison. I could see them shouting, pleading and waving fistfuls of leone bills. It felt like the fall of Saigon.

  We landed. As the engines wound down, I looked at Layla. ‘Your patients are waiting,’ I said. ‘You haven’t got long, though.’

  As I spoke, I cast an uneasy glance out of the cockpit. The arrival of the helicopter seemed to have driven the people into a frenzy. They were clawing at the razor wire, indifferent to the cuts on their hands as they tried to haul themselves up and over.

  One boy succeeded. He sprawled in the dust and then pulled himself to his feet only to be clubbed to the ground again by a mercenary. I recognised Rudi’s powerful figure standing over the prone figure. As the boy raised his face from the dust, Layla stared through the cockpit, then began tearing at her harness.

  She jumped down from the cockpit and sprinted towards the fence, ignoring the crackle of small-arms fire. I hurried after her. She was crouching over the boy. I helped her carry him towards the two-storey container building at the centre of the compound.

  We laid him down at the side of the doorway and, screened by the wall of sandbags, Layla first tested his skull for fractures and then began to bandage his torn hands. Only when he opened his eyes and spoke did I r
ealise that the boy was Kaba.

  Layla was trying to calm him, but he kept gabbling out the same refrain, ‘You must come to Boroyende. Njama is wounded.’

  ‘What happened?’ I said.

  He turned his bleak gaze on me. ‘The rebels came. They knew you had been to the village; they’d seen your truck. They said we were spying for you.’ He stared me out. ‘They found the knife you gave him. They said it was payment for spying. They tried to kill everyone. A few of us managed to get away and hide.’

  A sick feeling grew in my stomach. ‘But Njama? He is alive?’

  He nodded. ‘He was in the fields; otherwise they would have killed him too. But he is sick, wounded. He needs medicine.’ He turned back to Layla. ‘He needs you. You must come.’

  Layla took my arm and led me off to one side. ‘We have to go there,’ she said. ‘What’s happened is our fault, our responsibility.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I have to take the expat workers out of here.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Whatever my orders are next.’

  ‘And the black mineworkers?’

  ‘You know the answer to that, I’m afraid. They’re on their own.’

  ‘In other words, you’re going to leave them to die.’

  I couldn’t hold her gaze.

  ‘And Boroyende?’

  Again, I couldn’t meet her eyes as I answered. ‘The same.’

  ‘So, you look after the expats and the diamonds and leave the people themselves to die.’

  ‘It’s not that black and white.’

  ‘You’re wrong, Jack. Black and white is exactly what it is.’

  She stared at me for a moment. There was a look in her eyes I could not read.

  ‘What is it?’ I said.

  She looked away. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I made a mistake, that’s all.’ She turned her back on me before I could reply.

  Grizz had been conferring with Rudi and now came racing back to the Huey. ‘Let’s get things moving, fast.’

  A group of white expatriates, each clutching a single case, stood waiting for the signal to load. Fear and anger vied for control of their faces as they stared at the mob outside the compound, held back only by the threat of the mercenaries’ guns.