Soldier N: Gambian Bluff

by David Monnery

  ‘Advisory or not, I can’t send my men into such a situation completely unprotected. They’ll need clearance to carry handguns, at the very least.’

  ‘I’m sure that can be arranged. Look, for all we know at the moment, the whole business may be over by this afternoon. I’ll call you back, say around five, with the latest information. In the meantime, if you can come up with a game-plan …’

  ‘Will do.’

  ‘Thank you, Lieutenant-Colonel,’ Matheson said before replacing the receiver.

  Weighell stared idly out of the window for a few seconds, and then summoned his adjutant. ‘Get hold of Major Caskey,’ he said, ‘and tell him I want to see him. As soon as he can manage. And get me a cup of tea. And a copy of the wretched Times.’

  He took a quick look through the tabloid, on the off-chance there was any real news in it, and then resumed staring out of the window, this time thinking about his second in command – and the current duty officer – Alan Caskey.

  The two of them really ought to get on better than they did, Weighell thought. They had two important things in common – the SAS and fucked-up marriages. It was not as if he disliked Caskey – he just did not feel drawn to him. The man seemed to have lots of close friends in the Regiment, but Weighell wondered how deep the friendships were. Caskey had always struck him as an archetypal loner, a law unto himself offering others little hope of real contact. Or was he just describing himself, Weighell wondered. It was an unwelcome thought.

  The tea arrived, along with the Times. He read the front page report of the coup, and found it somewhat deficient in precise timings. Today was Friday, but the report could not even make up its mind whether the coup had taken place on Wednesday or Thursday. There were hints of dubious foreign involvement – the ubiquitous Libyans and Cubans, of course – but precious little in the way of proof. It was also suggested that majorities of the local armed forces both supported and opposed the new government.

  He had never much liked the Times anyway, though Linda had sworn by its absorbent properties when it came to changing the cat litter.

  He looked across to the photograph of her and the children which still held pride of place above the map cabinet. He supposed it was somewhat inappropriate now. He would have to get a new one of just the children. Or do what they had done in Stalin’s Russia, and have her invisibly removed from the current photograph, and perhaps even replaced by someone new. First, though, he would have to find someone.

  The two Mirages of the Senegalese Air Force had certainly made everyone jump when they first buzzed the airport, but no bombs had been dropped, no sticks of napalm unleashed, no missiles fired. For those in the trenches, like Moussa Diba, they represented a possible future threat, whose seriousness was completely unknown. Maybe all they were capable of was making a loud noise as they flew by.

  On the other hand, the long lines of paratroops swinging down to earth from the giant transport planes a mile or so to the north looked like posing a depressingly immediate problem. It did not take a military genius to work out that their target had to be the airport. And once they had secured that, any number of troop-filled planes could land.

  In the air control tower Junaidi Taal watched the descent of the airborne troops with a sinking feeling. There had to be at least five hundred, as many as he had available to face them, and the incoming Senegalese were trained soldiers, not a mixed bunch of policemen, Party activists and convicts who had been issued with rifles. At that moment, if Taal could have taken the coup back, he would have.

  But he was not a man given to dwelling on what might have been. Their hopes might be fast receding, but they had not disappeared – not yet. He had an hour or so before the invaders got themselves organized enough to begin advancing on the airport. How could he use the time?

  He picked up the phone which connected him with the officer he had left in charge of the airport terminal. ‘Have the explosives arrived yet?’ he asked, knowing full well the answer would be no. The man would have phoned him if they had.

  ‘No, sir, not yet.’

  ‘Call me the moment they do,’ Taal said.

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  It was truly ironic, Taal thought. Because The Gambia had never had an army, it had never had a central ordnance depot, and no stockpile of military explosives. And since the coup had seriously disrupted communications and shut down work on most official projects, it had proved extremely difficult to track down any civilian sources. The nearest one that Taal’s subordinates had been able to find was in Soma, a hundred miles away, where explosives were being used to blast irrigation channels for rice cultivation. Plans to fetch a supply by helicopter had fallen through due to the lack of anyone capable of flying one of the several machines parked on the tarmac. Instead, a taxi had been dispatched along the pothole-and rut-strewn highway to the east. If the explosive was at all volatile then Taal would not have fancied being the driver making the return trip.

  All in all, their chances of rendering the runway unusable before the Senegalese captured it seemed less than good. Like their chances overall. If Taal had been a betting man he would have put money on the Senegalese taking the airport by mid-afternoon, and Banjul by the following noon.

  A mile to the north Diba’s thoughts were more personally oriented. The flow of transport planes and parachutists had seemed depressingly relentless for a while, but the staunching of the flow, and the promise of imminent contact with armed troops made him wish for more planes.

  He doubted whether those in charge on his own side had any idea of what they were doing. The big chief back at the airport was just a converted policeman, and the man in charge of this small company dug in behind the runway guide lights – a Wollof zealot named Jahumpa – seemed endowed with more enthusiasm than brains. In fact Jahumpa had the idiot eyes of someone who was willing to die for a cause, and Diba was fucked if he was going to join him for the ride.

  ‘That cell of ours would look pretty good now,’ Konko muttered beside him.

  Diba was opening his mouth to reply when the silence was shattered by a swelling, high-pitched whooshing sound. A blinding flash and an exploding fountain of earth some forty yards behind them preceded, by a split second, the deafening crash of the explosion. Diba instinctively clasped his hands to his ears, which were already humming with the impact.

  ‘Fuck,’ he grunted, pulling himself as low as he could in the trench, just as another mortar landed in almost the same spot, providing a second white splash on his retinae and more whirring in his ears. He could just about hear Jahumpa, two trenches away, talking excitedly into the walkie-talkie.

  Up in the air control tower Taal thought he could make out the Senegalese mortar positions a mile or so to the north. The enemy had no high ground and no air reconnaissance – not yet, at least – so it would be difficult for them to zero in on the defending positions, but that would slow them up rather than stop them. Already he could see groups of distant infantry on the move in wide flanking directions to either side of the airport. Even if the explosives arrived now he could see no hope of their being laid and detonated in time to cause any significant damage to the runway. The airport was a lost cause. And if he did not move fast the Senegalese would reach the Banjul road, and cut him and his men off from the capital.

  ‘Pull them back,’ he told his immediate subordinate. ‘As quickly and as invisibly as you can. Then start moving them into the fall-back positions. I’m going to Banjul, but I’ll be back in a couple of hours.’ He turned to descend the spiral staircase, hesitated on the top step, then continued down. He had been about to order the destruction of all the aircraft on the tarmac, but had thought better of it. In the circumstances such an action would be little more than vandalism.

  It was five past eleven, and the Australians had successfully survived the first over of the second day. The weather at Edgbaston looked much as it did outside Caskey’s window – depressingly sunny. The English bowlers needed a few clouds, or the team a
s a whole would pay dearly for batting so ineptly on such a good wicket the day before.

  Always assuming Botham did not provide another miracle.

  It could hardly happen twice, Caskey thought. And anyway, once was enough. He would carry that innings at Headingley to his grave, smiling at the memory every time it surfaced.

  He reached for the bottle of claret he had been allowing to breathe, and poured himself a small glass. It might be a dull time for the Regiment, and to describe his personal life as a disaster area might legitimately be considered an understatement, but there were still test matches which he could sink himself into, body and soul. There were still twenty-five days a year, rain permitting, when he could forget about the real world.

  Cricket was like marijuana, as he had once explained to a shocked New Zealander. It slowed everything down. Once you accepted cricket time and forgot real time, accustomed yourself to the new pace, it became as beautiful to the spectator as a Grateful Dead concert did to a dopehead. Needless to say, every West Indian he had ever met understood this instinctively.

  He sipped appreciatively at the wine and willed the nightwatchman Bright to lose his concentration. Without success. He had a bad feeling about the coming day – he could see the Australians making four hundred on a wicket like this, and then skittling England out for half as much. Botham’s innings at Headingley deserved better.

  He had just put his feet up on the coffee table when the phone rang.

  Chapter 6

  The knock on Lieutenant-Colonel Weighell’s door was swiftly succeeded by the appearance of Caskey’s willowy figure.

  ‘Good morning, boss,’ Caskey said, taking the proffered chair on the other side of his CO’s desk.

  ‘Good morning, Alan,’ Weighell said. Somehow, Caskey’s use of the SAS’s customary ‘boss’ when addressing a superior officer always grated on him. Perhaps it just sounded too working-class for Caskey, whose background, unlike that of most men in the Regiment, was colonial and public school. ‘I take it you’ve got nothing important on right now?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing. What’s up?’ Caskey asked.

  ‘Read this,’ Weighell said, handing him the Times and pointing out the story.

  Caskey read it through, and looked up quizzically.

  Weighell explained the Prime Minister’s request. ‘And I thought with your African experience …’ he concluded.

  ‘I’d be delighted,’ Caskey said. Even five days of cricket could hardly compete with a mission abroad, always supposing England’s batsmen held out that long. It would put a distance between him and his wife, and between him and Liz. He could forget the whole damn business for a few precious days or weeks, and enjoy some real excitement while he was at it.

  ‘The Foreign Office are ringing me back this afternoon. Can you dig up a third man for the party …’

  ‘Third?’

  ‘I’ve already picked a second. Trooper Franklin of G Squadron.’

  ‘Because he’s black?’

  ‘Yes. I think putting three white faces into a situation like this might be less than diplomatic, don’t you?’

  ‘Did the Gambian Government request it?’

  ‘No. I doubt if it occurred to them that the SAS might have black soldiers.’

  ‘There are only two. West Indians, that is.’

  ‘I know. And you know as well as I do that we’ve made no effort to increase the number, mostly because it would be hard to use West Indians in the sort of operations we’ve been involved in lately. They tend to be rather conspicuous in rural Fermanagh. But in Africa …’

  ‘In Africa they give us credibility?’

  Weighell grunted. ‘Something like that. But Franklin’s a damn fine soldier. If he wasn’t, I wouldn’t send him. The fact that he’s black is just a bonus as far as this operation’s concerned.’

  ‘OK. I get the picture. And if he’s as good as you say, I’ll have no trouble with him.’ He got to his feet. ‘For the third man I’ll see if I can find someone who’s actually been to The Gambia.’

  Joss Wynwood stretched his legs as silently as he could manage within the confines of the hedge. It was more than six hours now since dawn had rendered movement inadvisable. After all, who knew what Irish eyes might be smiling at him down the end of a sniper’s ’scope?

  Admittedly it was unlikely. From where he lay, half in the hedgerow, half in the long grass behind it, Wynwood could see empty country stretch away to the north, down to the distant glimmer of Lough Neagh some fifteen miles away. In the foreground, and not much more than twenty-five yards away, the road from Armagh to Newry ran from left to right. Parked off the road on his near side, and apparently changing a tyre on his Leyland van, a man in a blue woolly hat was happily whistling ‘Danny Boy’.

  It was a lovely day for an ambush. The sun shone intermittently, as fluffy white clouds sailed majestically across the blue sky, trailing their vast shadows across the green hills like a fleet of Zeppelins.

  It all looked a lot more peaceful than Wynwood felt. He had been a badged member of the SAS for only a few months, and this was his first major action with the Regiment. His nerves were all on edge, from what felt like a tick in his eyelids to the prickling sensation on his skin. Every now and then he had to wipe the sweat from the stock of the Heckler & Koch MP5 sub-machine-gun he was holding.

  He stole a glance to his right, where Trooper Davey Matthews – Stanley to his friends – seemed immune to such anxiety. He was probably fantasizing about the barmaid in Newry, Wynwood thought, for apart from football, Stanley’s only interest in life seemed to be sex. Getting it, having it, talking about it, imagining it.

  ‘What do you think the Pope does with an erection?’ Stanley had asked him in the middle of the previous night. Wynwood had been too dumbstruck by the incongruity of the question to think up an answer. ‘Takes it to confession,’ Stanley had told him.

  Wynwood smiled at the memory. Everyone in the SAS was fucking crazy, he thought. And he must be fucking crazy too.

  When in Rome …, he thought. Making love with Susan had been wonderful from the very first time, half-pissed out of their skulls in her room at the training college. It had been wonderful in the back of his car, wonderful on that Gower beach with the moon coming up, wonderful in their Gambian honeymoon hotel, the fan whirring lazily above them.

  Jesus, why does Stanley do this, he asked himself. What did he do with his own hard-ons?

  Wynwood turned his attention back to the scene in front of him. The man in the woolly hat had now been changing his tyre for almost an hour, performing each task in the process with a speed that would have embarrassed a snail. Soon he would have no choice but to start changing the two tyres back again. His name was Martin Langan, and he was a corporal in the Regiment’s B Squadron.

  Watching him reminded Wynwood of how nice it felt to be cramped up in a hedge. It was always better to be the trap than the bait. Though this particular trap seemed unlikely to spring. If the Provos were coming, they should have come by now. Like all the old hands said: for every successful ambush you got ten that just end in premature arthritis.

  The preparations for this one had taken a lot of time and effort. About a fortnight before, 14th Intelligence Company had got word from one of its informers that the IRA had plans to murder an ex-UDR officer. This man, William O’Connor, was now in the building trade, and currently engaged in a restoration job in Markethill, a small town halfway between Armagh and Newry. Each day he would drive there from his home in Armagh, in the Leyland van now sitting in front of Wynwood, wearing the blue woolly hat now clamped over Corporal Langan’s head.

  O’Connor had been persuaded by 14th Intelligence to keep to his usual pattern while they kept tabs on the local IRA brigade and mounted a round-the-clock observation at the already discovered site of their arms cache. Yesterday, one man had come to collect the guns in a Renault 4. Overnight, Wynwood, Stanley and a third man – Trooper Sansom, who was concealed in the derelict barn to Wynwoo
d’s left – had walked to the site of the intended ambush and concealed themselves. That morning O’Connor had happily surrendered his van and cap to Corporal Langan. It was now an hour and a quarter since the latter had faked his punctured tyre, and if the Nationalist grapevine worked half as well as everyone thought it did, the IRA men – lying in wait further up the road – should have known about it by now.

  Out of the corner of his eye Wynwood saw Stanley pick up the walkie-talkie which connected them with Sansom. Maybe this was it. He waited while Stanley listened, watched the other man’s face tighten with anger, heard the repressed frustration in his voice as he signed off.

  ‘The useless bastards have lost them,’ he hissed to Wynwood. ‘So they may be on their way. They were in a blue Sierra, but Christ knows what they’re in now.’

  Langan went on tightening the bolts on the wheel, having presumably heard the same message from the walkie-talkie in the van’s front seat. A car could be heard approaching from the right, which was the way they would come. Wynwood’s grip on the MP5 perceptibly tightened. It was a Sierra, but red. And it went right past, the driver flashing a single sympathetic look in Langan’s direction.

  Wynwood did not envy Langan – that look could just as easily have been a gunshot.

  Another car was approaching – it must be rush hour. This time it was a white Fiat, and as it slowed down Wynwood thought he saw the metallic gleam of a gun. Perhaps they had hoped to get a clear shot from the car, but Langan had arranged matters so that he was protected by the van from any but the most oblique angle.

  The thought that it still might not be enough flashed through Wynwood’s mind as the doors of the still-moving car swung open to eject two men in boiler suits, their heads covered by slitted balaclavas, gloved hands holding AK47 assault rifles. A third man was close behind them, dressed the same, but brandishing only a Webley revolver.