by Chris Ryan
Well, he reflected wryly, flipping up the backsight on his M16 and taking a sip of tepid water from his canteen, he might as well enjoy it while it lasted. The system gave, but the system also took away, and took away faster than slit off a hot chrome shovel. At heart, Alex knew, he was not an Establishment man.
THREE.
Shortly after 3.30 there was movement in the camp. A tall soldier carrying some kind of hooked knife was walking amongst the prostrate soldiers, stepping over outflung arms and legs. As he reached the camp perimeter he paused to kick one of the sleeping figures.
It was one of the women, Alex saw through his binoculars. With infinite slowness, the woman began to get to her feet, only for the soldier to take her by the hair, wave his bill-hook, and start violently pulling her towards the jungle. Hastily, fearfully, she matched her pace to his. This looks tricky, thought Alex. This looks very tricky indeed. They're making straight for us.
"Coming our way, Alex," murmured Ricky Sutton beside him.
"Seen," replied Alex. For the second time that night he drew his Mauser knife. The pair were no more than fifty yards from him now. Whatever you're going to do to her, Alex pleaded silently with the soldier, do it right there. Don't come any closer.
But the man kept on coming. Whatever it was that he intended the curved knife almost certainly had something to do with it it was going to make a lot of noise. There were going to be screams. So he was taking the woman into the bush where her evil-spirit howling wouldn't wake the camp up.
Twenty-five yards now, and Alex could hear the woman s terrified keening and the soldier's muttering as he forced her forward. If they tried to evade, to crawl sideways out of their way, the soldier would see them.
And if they stayed put... When it came to the moment, instinct took over.
Tripping the soldier with his rifle, avoiding the scything blade as both the man and the woman fell, Alex leapt on top of him. For a critical moment the soldier must have thought that a tree root was to blame for the confusion, and that the melee consisted only of himself and the woman, for he made no noise beyond an stifled curse. And then the butt of Alex's M16 met the back of his head with bone-smashing force, and he was still.
Ricky Sutton, meanwhile, had grabbed the woman.
Behind his hand she was still keening, the sound a tiny sustained ribbon of anguish. Deliberately, Sutton moved his face into a shaft of moonlight, so that she could see at a glance that despite the black cain-cream he was European, and urgently shushed her. Their eyes met his taut and pale, hers tear-rimmed and terrified and she nodded once. She was wearing a thin cotton dress and plastic sandals.
The soldier had to be dealt with and Alex had no choice but to do it in front of the woman. Lifting the unconscious man's head by the hair, he chopped inwards and dragged the blade of the Mauser knife hard through the front of his throat. There was a rushing wet heat from the jugular, a clicking gasp from the severed windpipe, and a brief shivering dance of the legs.
Within half a minute exsanguination was complete. The sticky blackness was everywhere Sutton, meanwhile, gagged the shocked, unresisting Woman with a sweat-rag. Wrists and ankles trussed with para cord she lay against a shallow incline behind them. Six feet away, the corpse of her late admirer stiffened in the cooling tar of his blood. The SAS officer and the trooper settled back to wait.
At 0350, Alex noticed a tiny shift in the quality of the darkness at the head of the Rokel valley to the east. If he looked a little to one side he could make out a ridge, a tree line, where previously there had been nothing.
The minutes passed, the cyclorama paled a further degree, and the misted, dew-charged vastness of the jungle began to reveal itself. There was nothing on earth, thought Alex, to beat the grandeur of the African dawn.
Not even the front at Clacton
He raised his binoculars. There was the command post there were the huts, there were the embers of the bonfire. And there everywhere were the sleeping soldiers and their weapons.
Quickly the men re-checked the sightings on their M16 203s. As well as a conventionally calibrated rifle-sights, which they had set to two hundred yards, their weapons had sextant-sights screwed to their carrying handles.
0355, and the pilot of Hotel Alpha, the lead Puma, was now audible on the patrol's UHF sets. His voice was relaxed.
"Coming in on schedule, Zero Three Six.
You should see us in three or four minutes. Over."
"We hear you, Hotel Alpha. Ready when you are.
Over."
Raising his rifle, Alex took up aim on the door of the left-hand of the two barracks-huts. Hut One.
0358. The pilot's voice again.
"Touch-down in two minutes, Zulu Three Six. Repeat, touch-down in two minutes."
"Everyone ready?" Alex whispered. It was unlikely that anyone had fallen asleep, but it had been known to happen.
They all heard it at the same time. At first it was just a pulse, distant and low. Could have been a heartbeat.
And then, with shocking suddenness, the lead Puma was racing towards them over the grey jungle canopy.
A sentry holding a Kalashnikov was the first to stir, and Alex dropped him with a single high-velocity round to the chest.
"Boyakasha!" breathed Ricky Sutton to his left and opened up with a long stream of tracer at the guards around the bonfire. The other sentries ran for the cover of the huts, but met a series of lethally aimed bursts from Stan and Dog. As they fell, Alex saw Don Hammond lean coolly out of the side of the helicopter and heard the distinctive boom boom of the heavy 5.5" gun. Chunks of masonry seemed to leap from the walls of Hut One and, as the RUF soldiers poured out like angry ants, Alex snapped off a fast series of shots into the doorway. The area between the huts also held armed men, but these he left alone for fear of hitting the hostages.
Fire was being returned now and with interest.
Volleys of 7.62 SLR rounds were snapping through the tree line,
shredding the foliage around them and kicking up great gouts of earth. Unpeturbed, Stan Clayton and Dog Kenilworth kept up a lethal assault with their Mi6s. Behind them Andy Maddocks' patrol put down steady fire.
Lowering his rifle so that he was cradling it in his arms, Alex slipped one of the small, egg-like grenades from his bandolier into the launcher tube below the main barrel and swung the weapon towards the eastern-most point of the camp. A glance at the sextant and he fired. The grenade dropped some two hundred and fifty yards away and burst with a fierce crack amongst a group of soldiers who were attempting to bring fire to bear on the helicopter.
Returning the rifle to his shoulder, Alex stilled the survivors with a series of single shots.
Working the slide to discharge the used shell-case, he loaded a second grenade into the tube, and aimed it in the direction of the generator-hut. Another miniature schrapnel storm, sending several men running from cover into the open, where Ricky Sutton's unhurried shooting dropped them in fast succession. The camp was in chaos now. The Puma had landed, its rotors still turning, and the 12-man SAS team was pouring out of it, diving for cover and snapping aimed bursts at the RUF rebels who surrounded them.
In response several of the rebels dropped their SLRs and ran. A handful threw themselves on the uncertain mercy of the river. Most, however, making up in aggression and outrage what they lacked in preparedness and training, determined to make a fight of it and attempted to fall back on the cover of the two cinder-block barracks huts. Lacking any coherent command-and-control system, however, they found themselves retreating into their own side's defensive arcs of fire. Several of them only managed to make it into cover because their colleagues' long uncleaned SLRs had jammed.
For a moment, Alex held his fire. As he watched, the incoming SAS team split up. Half raced for the hostages, disappearing behind the huts, half assaulted Hut One. The whooinf of a grenade, a long burst of fire, a staccato flurry of single shots and the building was theirs. A moment later the rescue team reappeared at the spri
nt, ducking through the rebel fire towards the helicopter. Three of them had limp, half-dressed figures slung over their shoulders.
"Go!" prayed Alex.
"Get them on the chopper and out of here. Go!"
The Puma, as if alive to the urgency of the situation, seemed to dance with impatience on her struts as enemy rounds snapped about her. At the controls, Alex could see the helmeted pilot, motionless a brave man, he thought and the silhouetted figure of Don Hammond poised at the open door, waiting to haul up the hostages.
The RPG must have been fired somewhere behind the generator. It whooshed a couple of feet over the heads of the rescue team, impacted against the Puma's slanting plexiglas windshield and vapourised the cockpit and the pilot in an orange-white bloom of flame. The blast threw the oncoming rescue team and the hostages to the ground and, as they lay there, the SAS men instinctively covering the journalists with their bodies, a second missile struck the rear of the Puma's cargo compartment. The buckled and burning remains of the helicopter canted sideways and Don Hammond pitched face forwards from the doorway his clothes, his head and his remaining arm aflame.
Powerless to help from two hundred yards distance, his mind a stunned blank, Alex watched as Hammond tried unsuccessfully to get to his feet. The two members of the rescue team who had not been carrying hostages rose from the ground, raced forward and between them attempted to stifle the flames on the burning sergeant and drag him into cover.
But the RUF were beginning to rally. And while the hostages and the rescuers were covered from fire by the bulk of Hut One, Hammond and the men who had run out to help him were far enough forward to be exposed. Shots snapped around them and Alex heard a lethal-sounding double smack. One of the SAS men staggered and fell. Somehow, supporting his wounded mate with one arm and half-dragging the sergeant's blackened remains with? the other, the third man made it to the cover of Hut One, where the hostages were being scrambled through the doorway over the sprawled corpses of dead RUF soldiers.
The SAS team had barely vanished inside the hut when the Puma's fuel tanks went up in a third roaring explosion, and oily black smoke began to twist into the grey dawn sky.
"Zulu Three Six, this is Hotel Bravo, what is the situation?"
It was the pilot of the support Puma.
"Hotel Alpha is down, Hotel Bravo. Repeat, Hotel Alpha is down. Stay back until my signal."
"Will do, Zulu Three Six." The pilot's voice was expressionless. There was a brief hiatus and, forcing himself to postpone all thoughts concerning Don Hammond, Alex undertook a swift assessment.
At least twenty rebels lay out in the open, dead, while a dozen more twitched and gaped and bled amongst them. A further dozen RUF casualties were almost certainly concealed amongst the outbuildings to the east of the camp. Even allowing for a few runners and swimmers that still left a hundred-odd rebels in good combat order.
"Dog," Alex murmured into his UHF mouthpiece.
"I
want you and Stan to cut through the jungle to the point where we got into the river and work your way back towards the camp from the east. We've got to take out that grenade-launcher before the support helicopter arrives.
"Heard."
"On our way."
Still on his UHF set, Alex then called up the assault and rescue team, requested the sergeant in charge and explained that he had sent in two men from the eastern end of the camp to try and force the RUF soldiers to keep their heads down.
"Understood," came the reply.
"I'll put another four in from this end. If you keep laying down fire from the bush we should be able to keep 'em busy enough to get the chopper in and out.
A moment later, however, a long volley of 7.62 SLR and Kalashnikov rounds smacked into Alex's position. Heady with the destruction of Puma Alpha, the defending RUF troops had decided to take the battle back to their tormentors in the jungle.
As the firestorm swept their position, spattering himself and Sutton with bark and falling leaf fragments, Alex pressed his face and body into the damp coffee-ground soil. Beside him he heard the unmistakeable whip crack of physical impact and a shocked gasp.
"Ricky?" he said, fearing the worst.
"I'm hit," muttered Sutton through clenched teeth, 'in the fuckin' arse.
Alex's heart sank. How many bloody more, he thought. If I run into Sally Roberts, the bitch'll wish she'd never been born.
Another volley raked the tree line. Somewhere behind him, the bound woman keened with fear.
Reaching for the shell-dressing pack in Sutton's smock pocket and the clasp-knife in his own, Alex cut through the young signaller's blood-sodden DPM trousers, slapped on the dressing, and ordered him to sit tight. To his right Stan and Dog returned fire, pouring a steady stream of armour-piercing rounds on to the RUF positions around Hut Two.
A moment later Alex saw four SAS men slip out of the door of Hut One and disappear around the far side.
From the generator area he heard the crack of 203 grenades launched by Dog and Stan and a moment later the familiar stutter of Mi6s on rapid fire as the assaulters completed the movement. The RUF were now under sustained assault from three directions, trapped in a lethal cage of noise and shrapnel. No RUF man was going to risk standing up for long enough to aim and correctly discharge an RPG in all of that, Alex reckoned. Quickly, he called in the reserve Puma.
The pilot acknowledged the signal and sixty seconds later the big snout-nosed chopper swung in fast and steep, dropping down next to the twisted and still burning wreck of the first. It had hardly touched the ground when the rescue team sprinted out of the barracks-block with the ITN crew over their shoulders. Hurling the journalists through the open doorway like so many sacks of coal and dragging themselves in afterwards, they were away within seconds, dipping and swaying across the grey-green jungle canopy to safety.
On the sat-com, Alex called up Ross.
"Hostages airborne," he told the GO, 'but we've taken casualties." Quickly, he brought him up to speed with events.
"Keep me posted," said Ross tersely, and broke the connection.
Silence now from the RUF all of their remaining strength pinned down in and around Hut Two. Above them, the sky seemed to be darkening again. Stalemate.
Alex slotted a fresh 30-round magazine into the belly of his weapon.
Does the fight have to be to the death, he wondered. The fierce anticipation of the night before was entirely spent. The camp was a butcher's shop now and one or two of the RUF corpses looked horrifjingly young. All that he felt now was revulsion a desperate longing for the whole thing to be over.
And then Dog Kenilworth's Brummie tones were in his earpiece.
"They're jacking it in. Slinging their rifles out."
Alex exhaled, permitted himself a moment of relief "Any men followed the rifles?"
"No, not so far. Yeah, hang on, one's just shouting to Stan now.
"What's he saying?"
"Dunno. Something meaning "No shooting!", I'd guess. He's coming out."
"Watch yourselves, OK?"
"Don't worry, Alex."
One by one the RUF soldiers processed out of Hut Two and the other outbuildings at the eastern end of the camp. From the tree line Alex saw the line of disarmed men, hands raised, shuffling towards the smoking wreck of the first Puma. There, under the watchful eye and trained Mi6s of the assault team, they waited in disconsolate ranks.
"Andy," Alex ordered, 'cut across and join Stan and Dog. When it looks as if all the prisoners are under guard, I want the three of you to do a quick house-to-house, check for stay behinds
"Understood," said Maddocks.
Alex turned back to Ricky Sutton. The trooper was pale and clearly in shock, but managed a wry grin. An SLR round had torn a furrow over the hamstring muscle at the back of his thigh, and despite the two shell-dressings blood was still welling hotly through the gauze.
"Right," murmured Alex briskly.
"Who had the patrol med pack
"I'm lyi
ng on it."
Carefully, Alex eased the pack from beneath the trooper's chest, found a morphine stick, and angled it into Sutton's thigh. Within seconds, the taut, fearful strain in the young trooper's eyes was replaced with a dreamy vagueness.
Reaching for his UHF set, Alex pressed the transmit button.
"How's it going, lads?" he asked.
"Fine," came Andy Maddocks' voice.
"No stay-behinds, all bad boys disarmed. What shall we do with the weapons? We've got a hundred-odd SLRs, few AKs, RPGs, odds and sods."
Alex removed a saline drip assembly from the med-pack.
"All weapons, amino, and comms kit goes into the river." He thought of the women and children who, raped, traumatised and with one or both arms hacked off by men such as these, were still arriving daily in Freetown.
"And that includes all pan gas machetes, bilihooks, whatever. Anything with a blade."
"Understood."
Turning to the bound woman, whom he now saw was probably no more than 16 or 17, he fingered the gag from her mouth and tied it round Sutton's thigh to reinforce the shell-dressing. Then finding a vein at the trooper's wrist, he worked in the IV needle. Beside him, crooning distractedly to herself as if to comfort a child, the girl sat blank-eyed.
Within minutes the secured camp had taken on an ordered and familiar aspect, with sentries posted, SAS casualties stretchered and ammunition checks underway. The mood was sombre even the irrepressible Ricky Sutton lay in morphined silence on his stretcher. Where the bonfire had raged the night before, the captured RUF soldiers sat in subdued lines with their hands plasticuffed behind their backs. Others, moving with dreamlike slowness, stacked the bodies of their dead comrades.
Beyond them the rain hissed and steamed as it met the smoking shell of the Puma.
On the sat-coin, Alex arranged the details of the return to base with David Ross. It would probably be a question of two Chinooks, they decided one for the SAS team, one to deliver the RUF dead to the government forces HQ. A few yards away, Stan Clayton and Dog Kenilworth manoeuvred Don Hammond into a black body-bag.