by Chris Ryan
"Search teams will be dropped off at Millwall at 2330 hours tonight," Ross continued.
"By the time they reach their recce points, judging by past experience, the bulk of the RUF soldiery will be off their heads on dope and palm wine, and security around the camps will be piss-poor. We could approach earlier but the risk of the patrols being discovered would be much greater, with concomitant increase of risk to the hostages." He steepled his fingers and regarded them levelly.
"As it is you're going to have to go bloody carefully, and remember that just because these buggers are part-time cannibals who like dressing up in weird costumes and chopping toddlers' arms off with machetes, it doesn't mean they aren't at home with sophisticated weaponry. They've got RPGs and all sorts in those camps, thanks to their income from those bloody diamond mines they control, and I don't repeat don't want to lose any men. You will not, under any circumstances, risk a contact, is that understood?"
Everyone nodded. Alex glanced at the other patrol members. He was the only officer.
"From Millwall," Ross continued, 'patrols will tab in to their respective targets. Whether or not there's any sign of any hostages, we're going to need full reports concerning numbers, weaponry, fields of fire, disposition of buildings and all the rest of it, OK? By 0230 hours tomorrow, if we haven't located the TV people, I want both patrols back at Millwall for evacuation by Puma. If we have found them I want both patrols to converge on the camp in question and remain eyes-on. Alex, you and one other will then tab back to Miillwall and be choppered back to Freetown to brief the Squadron. Any questions so far?"
Along with the others, Alex shook his head.
"The timing of the assault will depend on the intelligence you get back to us and the outcome of any negotiations that take place," Ross continued.
"It's still perfectly possible that the RUF can be persuaded to return the hostages Roberts and Co. are an international press team, after all, and the RUF aren't completely indifferent to world opinion."
Oh no? thought Alex, who had seen the school-age amputees on the streets of Freetown and Masiaka. You could have fuckin' fooled me.
"Assuming the negotiations fail, the "D" Squadron assault team will go in between twenty-four hours and a week from tonight. Again, any questions?"
And again there were none.
At 11 p.m." the two RWW search patrols boarded a Puma. Showing no lights, fitted with low-noise rotor blades and flown by a pilot in night-vision goggles, the helicopter slipped silently inland, overflew Masiaka and swung eastwards into RUF territory. At 1130, precisely on schedule, the twelve soldiers de bussed crouching in the rotor wash as the Puma lifted away from the ridge line and turned back towards Freetown.
Thirty minutes after caching the Bergans the patrol halted for a scheduled comms burst from base. As Ricky Sutton looped a plastic-coated aerial wire over a tree branch, a damp, overbearing heat pressed around them. The sporadic bursts of rifle fire were clearly audible now and over the smell of decomposing vegetation the air carried a faint drift of woodsmoke.
Were the ITN team being held at the camp ahead of them? As always in the presence of danger, Alex felt tautly, intensely alive.
Checking his watch, he joined Don Hammond and Ricky Sutton who were huddled over the 319 patrol radio, waiting for the burst to decrypt. In silence, the three men stared at the miniature green-lit VDU screen.
Black letters leapt into view. Ricky Sutton wiped away the rain.
"HOSTAGES TO BE EXECUTED 14th 1200.
INFORM WHEN LOCATED. SEARCH PATROLS
TO SUPPORT D SQN ASSAULT AT 1ST LIGHT.
ROSS'
"Fuck me!" breathed Alex, his heart pounding.
"The fourteenth is today. First light's in about four hours.
And we haven't even found them yet."
He'd wanted an adventure.
He'd got one.
TWO.
Assault at first light.
That turned everything everything on its head. The RUF must have issued some impossible ultimatum the freeing of all prisoners taken by the Sierra Leone army, for example.
The patrol had moved through the remaining jungle as fast as humanly possible. They were very close to the camp now and Alex recognised the random discharges as being those of British-issued SLRs. The sound was a good sign. Unless the RUF were fighting among themselves it meant that they were in party mood, emptying their 7.62 rounds into the river and the surrounding jungle out of a kind of stoned machismo. And perhaps, Alex thought, in anticipation of the killing of the news crew at midday.
"Left a bit," murmured Don Hammond behind him.
Alex raised a hand in thanks. As lead scout, he was the only member of the team not responsible for navigation all his concentration went into watching and listening: for the unexplained movement, the shadow that wasn't a shadow, the tiny suck of a boot in clay, the oily straining of a cocking lever.
Listening was becoming harder. In addition to the rifle fire, there was the faint thump and whisper of music. Straining his ears, Alex recognised one of Sierra Leone's big summer tunes -a favourite of the RUF, the SLA and the militias alike called "Titti Shaggah'.
Had they posted sentries, he wondered, stilling the five men behind him with a hand gesture. For two minutes the patrol crouched unmoving in the animal track, but there was no sound that shouldn't have been there. They moved on and the ridge line began its gradual descent towards the Rokel river.
Step by silent step, Alex negotiated the gradient. The rain was still holding off, but splashing rivulets streaked the treacherous clay incline. They were five hundred yards away from the camp now and through the dense foliage below them Alex could see the yellowish flickering of electric lights. Surely, he thought, they must at least have some bloke on stag.
They had and Alex almost missed him. All he saw, in fact, was the tiny swing of a cigarette coal at the side of the track twenty yards ahead. Stilling the patrol again and deliberately steadying his breathing as the adrenalin flooded his system, Alex moved silently down the skiddy clay, feeling with his feet for the rocks and tree roots that would noiselessly support his weight. One squelch, he thought one snapped branch or kicked stone and we're buggered.
Ten yards now and he could see in the moonlight that the sentry was leaning against the other side of a tree trunk. A tree trunk whose thickness was approximately that of a man's chest. Once again, the arm swung sideways. The hand held a ganja spliff, not a cigarette.
Quietly, Alex drew a short Mauser stabbing knife from his belt webbing. It took him three agonised heart-thudding minutes to cover the last sodden yards of the descent and then finally he was behind the trunk, his nose and eyes full of drifting ganja smoke but his feet secure on the slippery twisting tree roots.
Like a striking snake, as his right hand reached across with the knife, Alex's left hand clapped across the sentry's mouth. At the last moment, though, with a desperate outrush of breath, the SAS officer checked his blade. The face beneath his hands was smooth, the neck slender, the struggling body pitifully small. The sentry was a kid might even have been a girl couldn't have been more than ten, and almost immediately went limp with terror in his arms. The spliff fell to the ground and went out with a tiny hiss.
Keeping a hand firmly across his captive's mouth, Alex gestured to Don Hammond to join him. The sergeant quickly gagged the child with a sweat rag, tied the slender wrists and ankles with a length of para cord from his belt kit, and concealed the immobiised figure beneath a dense bush in the darkness to one side of the track.
The patrol proceeded warily with the descent. They encountered no more sentries and, as they neared the lights and the music, the ground began to level out until they found themselves close to the edge of the tree line. In front of them a parapet of knotted roots supported a thick tangle of rotting vegetation, beneath which was a drop of about six feet. Beneath this, either drunk or stoned but unquestionably asleep, lay two RUF soldiers. One was wearing a white nylon wedding dress,
the other threadbare tracksuit trousers and a combat smock hung with plastic dolls' heads.
Ricky Sutton, keen as ever, drew his commando knife.
"Shall I do 'em?" he mouthed, but Alex shook his head. If the bodies were found the whole camp would go to a state of alert, jeopardising any potential rescue mission. As Ricky sheathed his blade, Alex scanned the area with his binoculars.
Below them, contained within the dark curving sweep of the Rokel river, lay the camp. Roughly ovalshaped, it occupied an area slightly greater than a football pitch. At the nearer, lower end was a large bonfire on to which, at intervals, silhouetted figures heaped wet branches and tree roots, encouraging a thick column of grey-brown smoke. On the higher ground to the east, lit by strings of low-wattage bulbs, two windowless cinder-block huts stood at right angles to the river. Beyond them was a cluster of mud-walled outhouses. On the far side of the river the jungle rose steeply for a hundred metres or so to the ridge line.
Of the hundred and fifty-odd figures visible in the camp, perhaps a score were dancing and drinking around the bonfire, while at least twice that number were milling around the far end, near the huts. The remainder staggered about, singly and in large drunken groups, at the river's edge. Most carried SLR 7.62 rifles, but there were a few AK 47s and RPGs in evidence too. Several of the men appeared to be so attached to their weapons that they were dancing with them.
The sheer numbers of the RUF made any assault of less than company strength hazardous. The cinder-block huts would provide cover for anything up to fifty soldiers each and if the hostages were in this camp they were probably situated close to or inside the huts. Bringing fire to bear on the RUF without injuring them would be difficult. The most positive factor, in Alex's view, was the topography of the camp. Surrounded as they were on three sides by the vast grey-green bulk of the river, the RUF were like rats in a bag. If all of the SAS firepower was positioned along a single front in the tree line, the bag could be drawn shut. The difficult part was going to be finding, and then extracting, the hostages.
Another plus point was that despite the recent incursion into the Kissuna area by the West Side Boys militia, no serious attempt had been made to implement any form of camp security. The noise, for a start, was considerable. The crack of random discharges tore the air, as did the answering, echoing smack as these impacted in the surrounding jungle.
No wonder no one wants to go out on stag, thought Alex, with all this random shooting you'd take your bloody life in your hands. From beneath the sound system, which continued to belt out "Titti Shaggali' and other local hits, came the steady thump of a generator.
"If I'd known it was a party," muttered Stan Clayton, "I'd 'ave worn my dancin' trousers!"
Alex smiled and beckoned the men around him.
"No sign of our people so far," he whispered, 'but I want to take a closer look. Those huts up the end look promising for a start. Don, I want you to stay here with three of the guys and count heads and weapons.
Stan, I want you to come with me. We're going for a swim."
The cockney grinned, grasping the plan immediately. Quickly the two men stripped off their webbing, leaving their kit in two neat piles. Then, creeping past the unconscious RUF soldiers, they lowered themselves down the tree roots to ground level.
In front of them, bordered by the river, was the camp. To their right were the black-shadowed margins of the jungle.
Ahead of them, and falling away behind them into the jungle, was a rough, mud-churned road. Swiftly the two men turned right, paced off twenty yards into the swampy foliage, turned through ninety degrees, took bearings from their wrist compasses and set off through the darkness on a fast-paced eastbound course parallel to the road. Ten minutes later they exited the jungle. The dark sweep of the river was now at their feet and they were well upstream of the camp.
"We'll 'ave to tuck in tight," murmured Clayton thoughtfully. Alex nodded. Close up, the Rokel was a vast and terrifying force of nature. The flash floods that accompanied the early days of the rainy season had torn its winter banks away and the normally placid river was now an angry torrent hundreds of yards wide. If Alex and Stan strayed out of the side eddies they could be hurtled miles downstream or drowned outright. Hard in to the bank, however, the risk of detection was much greater. The whole undertaking was very much more dangerous than it had first appeared, but it represented the SAS team's only chance of locating the hostages.
"Let's find ourselves a raft," whispered Alex.
Soundlessly, they waded into the warm, soupy water, where a regular procession of tree limbs, bushes and other vegetation uprooted by the floods was washing past them in the current.
Within a couple of minutes they had secured the perfect vehicle - a twenty-foot branch hung with decomposing foliage.
"Ready?" asked Alex.
"Sure." Clayton nodded.
"I can always use a few dozen more leeches round my bollocks!"
Carefully they steered the branch a short distance away from the bank and began the smooth, inexorable drift towards the camp. Only their heads showed above water and behind the festoon of rotting weeds they were effectively invisible to the guards on the riverside. Slowly they rounded the bend past the camp's first outposts. It was shallower here and Alex could feel his feet dragging on the river's muddy bed.
Close up, the scene was very much more threatening than at a distance. On the bank, less than ten yards away, a crowd of drunken soldiery staggered around, clutching rifles, machetes and beakers of palm wine. Even over the muddy tang of the river the SAS men could smell the cloying reek of the homemade spirit. From the speakers the RUF anthem "No Living Thing' punched out, bouncing from the cliffs opposite with a thudding reverberation. Along the shore the glazed-eyed soldiers screamed the choruses.
His face inches from the corporal's, Alex was conscious of Stan Clayton's attempts to still his breathing, to remain absolutely motionless behind the branch. If they see us, thought Alex ~f the branch catches on something and swings around we're dead.
They'll hack us to pieces in seconds. Stan's wife will be a widow, his son will be without a dad and it will all be my fault. My fault for turning an important search mission into a juvenile, hairy-arsed, straight to-video personal fucking adventure.
The random shooting continued. One man, standing on the bank no more than eight feet from them, casually loosed off a couple of rounds from his SLR as he urinated into the river, and the SAS men flickered an expressionless glance at each other as the 7.62 rounds passed inches over their heads and tore into the far bank. A few yards further on a woman with her dress pulled up over her back crouched listlessly in the mud as a bearded soldier drove into her from behind. Around her, a surly and impatient knot of men watched and waited, and masturbated to make themselves hard for when their own turns came.
This hellish scene was repeated at intervals along the bank and more than once Alex caught himself or so it seemed staring mesmerised into the eyes of an RUF warrior. His heart appeared to be beating hard enough to disturb the greasy surface of the water. It seemed impossible that he had not been seen.
But the soldiers, it turned out, were less interested in driftwood than in the slopping palm wine buckets from which, at intervals, they refilled their half gourds and plastic beakers. Those and the half-dozen wretchedly prostrate women on the shore refugees, Alex guessed, displaced by the fighting.
The current, perceptibly faster now, swept them past the outhouses. The first, Alex guessed from the rhythmic chugging sound, housed the generator. In a second, from which the buckets were being carried, he supposed that they had some kind of distillery. The third, a mud-walled dwelling whose palm-frond roof had collapsed inwards, was anyone's guess, but as they drifted past it the palm wine stink was joined by that of slit.
And then, for no more than five seconds, Alex saw them:
three pale-skinned figures, their heads bowed, their hands tied behind them, kneeling in the narrow passage between the two cinder
-block huts. They were being guarded by a single uniformed soldier carrying an SLR, smoking a joint and wearing a pink bubble cut wig.
Alex's eyes widened and he turned to Stan Clayton, saw that the other man had clocked the guard and the captives too. Then they were passing the speakers, and taking the full thumping force and screaming distortion of "No Living Thing'.
"I think I prefer the Martine McCutcheon version," murmured Clayton thoughtfully, as an RUF man heaved a wet tree root on to the bonfire and a shower of bright-orange sparks whirled skywards. They were only eight or nine yards from the nearest whooping, rifle-waving soldiers now, but the amplification from the sound system was such that the corporal could probably have yelled at the top of his voice without being heard.
And then, as the firelight dimmed and a column of dense brown smoke replaced the flames, Alex felt the current take sudden hold, swinging the branch and themselves into deeper water. The two men silently struggled to remain concealed and to keep the branch parallel to the shore. They were clearing the camp fast now the bonfire was already well behind them but they were moving inexorably towards the Rokel's racing central channel.
"We're going to have to let go," gasped Alex and heard Clayton's grunt of agreement beside him.
"On three, underwater and kick for the side. One, two .
Alex released the branch, dived, and felt himself lifted by the current and swung with doll-like helplessness through the dark, churning water. There was a roar at his ears, a sense of vast and indifferent force, then a rock or a boot exploded in a vicious flash of light against the side of his head.
Somehow, even as he briefly lost consciousness, he managed to keep his mouth shut. Hours or maybe seconds later, desperate to breathe, he clawed his way to what he thought was the surface, struck mud and felt himself dragged downwards again by a hand at his collar. For some reason, there seemed to be air at the bottom of the river. He tried to inhale, gagged and found that a mud-tasting hand was clamped over his mouth. Water streamed from his nose. He could breathe again. He opened his eyes.