by Tony Park
‘I’m not going to argue with you about this,’ Brand said.
‘And I’m not your wife, Brand.’
‘No more “Hudson”?’
‘No more anything. I’m younger than you, faster than you, and the last time I saw combat wasn’t thirty years ago.’
‘I killed a rhino poacher in Kruger last year,’ Brand said. As he said the words he felt foolish for letting her draw him into such an argument, and for making such a statement. He felt off balance around her.
‘Pah!’ she said. ‘That’s nothing. You do what you want. I’m going to be outside the castle walls and on the move when they arrive – if they arrive.’
Brand could see from her eyes there was no point arguing with her. She probably could move faster than him, though he hated to admit it. ‘All right. We’ll be ready for you, covering you when you fall back.’
She gave a curt nod. ‘Good.’
‘Tell me, how’s Stirling going to hold up, if we get in the shit?’
Sonja’s face softened and she looked, he thought, as concerned as he was. ‘He’s no killer, Hudson. I’ll talk to him.’ She looked up at the sun, unfiltered by even a skerrick of cloud. ‘Damn, it’s hot.’
‘Only going to get hotter,’ Brand said. ‘Appreciate it, if you talk to him.’
Sonja nodded. ‘I’ll do it now.’
Chapter 33
Brand said he was going to move the Hilux, to better block the entrance to the old fort. Stirling was standing in the doorway of the restaurant and bar, leaning against the door frame.
Sonja knew she didn’t have time to stop for a shower, but she felt disgusting. She sat on a chair in the courtyard of the fort, put her AK on a table, unlaced her boots and kicked them off. She emptied her pockets, stood, went to the edge of the swimming pool and dived in. She swam a couple of laps, fully clothed, and when she came back to the same end where she’d started, Isaac was waiting for her with a pool towel.
‘Thank you.’
‘A pleasure, madam.’
Sonja walked across the small square of well-tended grass to where she’d left her things. As she put her foot down she felt a stab of fire in her toes. ‘Ow, fuck!’
‘What is it?’ Stirling asked, his hand at her elbow.
Instinctively she shrugged away his offer of assistance, but the burning pain wouldn’t stop. ‘Ouch!’
‘Here, stop struggling.’ Stirling got down on one knee. ‘It’s a bee.’
She felt foolish. ‘Let me sit down.’
‘No, stop. Don’t move. It’s still there, between your toes.’ He shooed the bee away, but the pain remained. ‘The stinger’s still in you, I’ll get it out.’
Sonja reluctantly put a hand on Stirling’s shoulder to steady herself. ‘Hurry.’
‘Patience, patience.’ Stirling had taken out his wallet and from it he’d taken a credit card.
At least he knew what he was doing. If he’d grabbed the stinger with his fingers, or, worse, a pair of tweezers, he would have squeezed in more venom from the stinger while trying to pull it out. Instead, he used the edge of the plastic card to brush the stinger out from between her toes, sweeping away from the puncture point to stop any more poison being forced into her.
‘Lean on me and we’ll get you to your chair.’
She did, reluctantly. Her toe still throbbed mightily as she sat down. ‘I sometimes get a reaction to bee stings.’
‘No need to sound so embarrassed. You are only human, Sonja.’
He was making fun of her, and that made her angry.
Stirling looked into her eyes. ‘I’m not making fun of you, Sonja.’
How, she wondered, had he known what she was thinking? She wanted to look away from him, but she found herself looking into his face, still youthful, still full of innocence. He’d lived a good life, devoting himself to the environment and wildlife he loved. He was handsome and sweet and she had to put her anger aside and make sure he was ready to kill.
*
The pilot, Swanevelder, pointed at the cluster of flat-roofed buildings ahead. ‘Wilfriedstein. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it.’
Irina raised her binoculars to her eyes. It was the first town they had come to, and unless Brand and Allchurch and the others had cleverly hidden in a dry riverbed or ravine, this was where they would be heading. The blood they’d seen on the sand told her Brand’s group had at least one person wounded, so they would be looking for a doctor.
‘The fuel station is near the castle bed and breakfast,’ Swanevelder said. ‘If they’re still here, that’s where they’ll be, or if they’ve passed through someone down there will know. There’s not so much through traffic that three vehicles full of white people wouldn’t be remembered.’
‘We will set down in any case,’ Irina said. ‘Circle the castle.’
‘Roger.’
The pilot brought the Bell over the town then executed a wide turn. Irina lowered the binoculars and picked out the orderly, angular walls of the castle ahead amid the more ramshackle later developments. It was also the only green space in town, surrounded by tall palms and with little chequers of watered lawn. First, though, they passed over the filling station, which was so small Irina didn’t notice it until Swanevelder pointed out the above-ground fuel tanks.
‘I can’t see any vehicles there,’ she said.
They carried on, over the short dirt road between the pumps and the station. ‘Nothing in the castle’s car park, either,’ Swanevelder said.
Irina was about to concur when she saw the irregular shapes at the gateway to the fort. ‘No, wait. Look, a vehicle is parked in the gate of the castle and two inside the courtyard. That must be them – no tourists would park like that.’
Swanevelder nodded. ‘They’ve used their trucks to block the entrance. Looks like they’re getting ready for a siege.’
‘And we are about to give them one. Though it’ll be the quickest siege in the history of warfare.’ Irina looked over her shoulder to her marine troops. ‘Lock and load,’ she said in Russian. ‘Prepare for battle.’
‘How do we do this?’ the pilot asked.
Irina looked back into the cargo area and motioned for Mikhail to put on the spare set of intercom headphones. When he had them on he gave her a thumbs-up. ‘Swanevelder, you land by the filling station. Mikhail, you’re in charge of the ground force. Close on the fort, disable their vehicles. I will use the helicopter to command and control and I’ll use the Dragunov to take out as many of them as I can, or at least make sure they keep their heads down. They will have posted people on the roof of the castle – that’s what I would have done. But they’ll soon move inside once I start firing. I’ll give you cover while you rush the front. Do not burn any of the vehicles – I want all that rhino horn intact.’
‘Understood,’ Mikhail said.
*
Brand was striding down the dirt road from the castle to the filling station, just a couple of hundred metres away.
He’d only pretended to agree to let Sonja be on the outside; she needed to be with her daughter. Brand tried to convince himself that it had nothing to do with an urge to keep her safe, but seeing her distracted by Stirling had sent a jolt of relief through him and given him the chance to head off.
He heard the deep thwap-thwap of a helicopter’s blades. He sidestepped off the road and dived for cover in the shade at the base of a palm tree. The chopper circled overhead.
When the aircraft had its rear to him he got up and sprinted through the trees and the rubbish at the side of the road to the filling station hut. The attendant was still sitting on a plastic chair out the front.
‘I’d clear out if I were you, sister,’ he said to her.
She looked at his rifle, and then up to the sky, nodded, got up, and walked away towards the cluster of shops that passed for the town of Wilfriedste
in. Brand watched the helicopter continue in its arc. The logical place for it to land would be right here, on the road. The castle hotel’s car park was too tight, he reckoned, and surrounded by trees, but here it was a little more open. He needed to take out as many of them as he could as they were getting off the helicopter. But how? He had no explosives, no rocket-propelled grenades and no anti-aircraft missiles; besides, he was unwilling to shoot down the helicopter in case the pilot was an innocent. There was even a slim chance that it could be the medical evacuation aircraft, though it would have put down by now if it was.
Sonja would have to stay in the castle now, which was one consolation. Brand felt better being outside, on the move. Sonja would do as good a job as he in organising the garrison, and she would be close to her daughter.
Brand looked around him for a suitable spot with enough cover and concealment. Then from inside the hut he heard a distinct click and a whirring noise. The motor on the air compressor outside the hut burst into its puttering song, bringing the pressure back up to a useable level. The electricity in Wilfriedstein had just come back on.
He darted across to the pumps under their simple metal awning. Fortunately they were the old style that didn’t require the operator to use a security tag to get them going. Brand pulled out the nozzle from the petrol pump, reset the meter, and pulled on the lever. The pump clattered to life and fuel jetted from the nozzle. He flicked the catch on the handle that would allow the attendant to leave the pump running while he or she was checking the oil or cleaning a windscreen.
Brand surveyed the land around him. Running alongside the road that led to the castle was a depression, a natural or hand-dug drain for the little rain this part of Namibia could expect during the wet summer. Brand pulled the pump’s nozzle as far as the black rubber hose would allow and set the handpiece in the ground, with the spout facing along the ditch, towards the fort. The chopper was coming around again.
Brand ran back across the road to the attendant’s hut. He tried the handle, but it was locked. He flicked the safety catch on his AK-47 to fire and shot the lock off with a single round and kicked open the door. Inside he found a one-litre glass Coke bottle and a rag. He returned to the pump, filled the bottle and soaked the rag in petrol, then ran down the road and crossed over once more. He took up a position fifty metres towards the hotel, behind a stout palm tree.
The helicopter pilot swooped around then aligned his machine with the course of the road. He came in, flaring the nose up to bleed off speed, his tail rotor dipping close to the ground. Brand slitted his eyes against the wall of grit, grass, sand and twigs that the big rotors washed towards him. The sliding rear cargo doors opened and he could see that the interior was crowded with men dressed in green fatigues. Each seemed to have a rifle.
As the skids touched the ground the men inside started piling out. Each took two or three steps then hit the ground on his belly. These were trained military men, Brand realised. Another person, slightly built, perhaps even a woman, opened the co-pilot’s door, jumped out, and then got back into the empty rear compartment. As soon as that was done, just seconds after touchdown, the Bell helicopter was lifting off, nose down as it climbed away.
The men who had deplaned were on their feet now, moving, no doubt looking for the nearest cover. Brand knew the drill they were following – he’d learned it himself. They would run for no more than three seconds, not enough time for a sniper to draw a bead on them, then hit the deck and crawl to a piece of cover. They would work in pairs, one covering his buddy while the other got up and repeated the basic manoeuvre.
They were all moving now, though, to get off the exposed piece of road where the chopper had just dropped them. Brand thumbed the safety catch on his AK-47 to automatic and squeezed the trigger. A man yelled something in Russian and Brand guessed that one of the ten rounds in the long burst had hit its mark as one of the green-clad figures stumbled and pitched forward.
The rest of them, Brand saw, had done exactly as he hoped. The man who had yelled out had presumably identified the fire as coming from ahead and to the right of them. The troops had broken left and were seeking cover on the opposite side of the road to him. Brand put down his rifle and picked up the bottle filled with petrol. He took out his Zippo, lit the petrol-soaked rag stuffed in the neck, stood and threw the Molotov cocktail across the road, aiming for the fuel-filled ditch.
Brand’s movement and the fiery arc of the burning wick attracted the attention of at least one, maybe two, of the Russian gunmen. Bullets slammed into the trunk of the palm and whizzed over Brand’s head as he dived again for cover. The fusillade was stopped, however, when the bottle struck the ground and burst into flames with a thump and a whoosh. The Molotov had missed the ditch, but the fire spread through the dry grass within seconds and the fuel-filled drain erupted into a wall of fire. Two gunmen stood, their uniforms ablaze. They ran, screaming, trying to escape their terrible pain. Level-headed comrades stood and tackled the men to the ground and rolled them in the sand. Men yelled to each other and in the confusion, Brand stood again, fired another long burst at the Russians to keep their heads down, and fell back towards the fort, running as fast as he could, parallel to the road.
*
Sonja watched Brand’s escapades from the roof of the castle, through binoculars. ‘That’s three out of action at least; two men on fire and another wounded on the road.’
‘He did well,’ Stirling said.
Sonja looked at him. ‘He did. But this is a long way from over. Alex, Professor, Matthew,’ she called to the other men on the roof, ‘get ready to put down some covering fire. Here comes Brand!’
When the electricity had come back on Sonja had sent Alex to call the police on the hotel telephone, but before he could get through, the power had cut out again. They were still very much alone.
Hudson was running to them, but the Russians were emerging from the smoke and flames of the grass fire Brand had started, advancing on the castle in a ragged extended line formation.
‘Wait until they get closer, or until they start firing on Brand before you open fire,’ Sonja told them. Stirling was down on one knee, his rifle pointed between the fort’s stone crenellations.
Sonja heard the deep bass thump of the helicopter again and looked up to see it approaching them. ‘Stay close to the walls everyone. Keep your heads down.’
The helicopter slowed, however, and settled into a hover. Sonja heard the pop-pop of shots, partly muffled by the chopper’s engines, and saw two puffs of dust erupt just ahead of Brand’s pumping legs. He zigged left then zagged right, but the next two shots were even closer. Brand sprinted to the mud-brick building and barrelled his way through the closed door, splintering the timbers with his shoulder. Sonja raised her AK-47 and fired a burst at the helicopter, but if her shots passed close they had no effect.
‘Everyone,’ Sonja called, ‘two aimed shots at the helicopter. Fire!’
The rifles on the roof all swung towards the aircraft, and the volley of deliberate fire must have either had some impact or whizzed close enough for the pilot to take evasive action. He tilted his machine and dipped away.
Brand emerged from the hut and ran towards them. Sonja noticed one of the Russians stop and raise his rifle, aiming at Brand. She fired two quick shots at the man and he moved to cover behind a palm tree. ‘Run, Hudson!’
‘What do you think I’m doing?’ he yelled back.
Bullets smacked into the rendered walls of the castle, dislodging sheets of plaster, and Sonja and the others on the roof popped out from behind their stone walls to return fire. ‘Keep moving along the wall, on your hands and knees, under cover,’ Sonja said. ‘Don’t let them draw a bead on you.’
Brand came running up the steps from the courtyard to the roof of the building. Below them the fire from the Russians eased off, but was soon directed elsewhere. Sonja heard the ping of bullets striking metal. Brand
turned and ran to the wall above the entrance to the courtyard and peeked over the edge. ‘They’re shooting the shit out of the trucks. Tyres are going down and the engines are taking fire. They’re closing off our means of escape.’
‘Select your targets,’ Sonja called. The Russians had gone to ground and were concentrating their fire for the time being on the trucks, but she knew they would rush the castle soon. ‘Wait until they’re between fifty and a hundred metres out. Aim for the centre of the body. Don’t miss.’
‘Chopper’s moving behind us,’ Brand called.
‘Scheisse!’ Alex yelled as a bullet smacked into the wall next to him.
‘Are you hit?’ Sonja asked.
Brand rushed to the younger man, who was lying on his back, his face white. Another round slapped into the roof of the castle by Alex’s feet as Brand knelt by him. ‘Talk to me, boy, you OK?’
Alex held up his arm and Brand saw the hole in his shirt. A bullet had passed through the fabric of Alex’s sleeve. ‘It missed you. You’re fine. Shit.’ Two more rounds bracketed them. Brand turned on his knee and fired a burst of three rounds towards the helicopter, which hovered, side on, about two hundred metres from them.
The shooter temporarily switched targets, putting five or six quick rounds into the engine area of the Amarok parked in the courtyard. It fitted with the strategy of trying to bottle them into the castle.
‘Someone up there’s a good shot. We’re sitting ducks here,’ Brand called to Sonja.
As if to reinforce the point Sonja was forced to drop to her belly in the lee of a wall when two rounds searched for her. ‘Agreed. We’ve got to take this downstairs.’
‘They’re coming!’ Sutton yelled. He held his AK-47 over his head, firing blindly over the stone wall at the men below who had begun advancing.
‘Don’t waste your ammo,’ Brand chided the professor.
‘Five of them down there, on the move,’ Stirling reported.