Marine J SBS

by Peter Corrigan

  ‘Where are you going? You can’t just . . .’

  But Willan and Prentiss were already out of the door, sprinting down the hotel corridor, the SBS man buckling his belt as he ran.

  ‘Jesus,’ Willan said. ‘What a shambles.’

  ‘It spread too fast, what with the wind off the lake,’ Geary explained. ‘The buildings went up like bonfires.’

  The camp was little more than a square of blackened shells. Smoke still trickled from the burnt-out buildings and the remains of the helicopter were scattered everywhere, ragged shards of blackened metal. The place stank.

  ‘What about casualties?’ Willan asked.

  Geary wiped his brow. He was black with soot and ash and the sweat was cutting pale streaks down his face.

  ‘Fourteen dead, twenty-nine wounded. Of the wounded, at least twenty are never going to be any use to us again. They’ve been shipped to Mwanza. I have burial details at work as we speak, though Kigoma reckons that some of the families will want the bodies to dispose of themselves.’

  ‘Best make it quick then. We don’t want dead bodies lying around in this heat. What about equipment?’

  ‘I’d say we saved about two-thirds of it. We lost a lot of ammo, and nearly all the stores, but we got the weapons away all right.’

  ‘How are we for ammo then?’

  Geary shrugged apologetically. ‘Sorry, Sarge, no idea. It’s been chaos here all day.’

  Willan nodded grimly. ‘Of course. I’ll get Morgan on to it.’

  ‘Sarge, I’m sorry. I wish I could have thought of something . . .’

  ‘Don’t blame yourself, Willy. You did all you could. At least you shot down one of the bastards. That may make them think twice before they try anything like this again.’

  ‘That was Hill, with an RPG no less. Bloody lovely shot.’

  There was a loud, echoing rumble off in the sky that seemed to roll from horizon to horizon. Willan raised his head and studied the heavy clouds that had been obscuring more and more of the sky even as they spoke.

  ‘If I didn’t know any better, I’d say it was about to rain.’

  ‘They’ve been building up all day. Any fresh orders, Sarge?’

  ‘Keep the men at the clean-up, and have all the salvaged equipment stockpiled near the trucks. How are we for petrol?’ The camp’s petrol supply had been stored a few hundred yards away in a camouflaged dump in the bush.

  ‘Tons of the stuff. Thank Christ we didn’t set the dump nearer the camp.’

  ‘Amen.’ Willan looked at his watch. ‘Are any of the buildings still habitable?’

  ‘One of the long sleeping huts still has a bit of roof at one end.’

  ‘Right. O-Group there in one hour. We have to put our heads together and figure out what the hell to do next. Tell the others. I want Jock and Morgan there.’

  ‘Right, Sarge.’ Geary marched off.

  More thunder. The clouds were darkening by the minute. Willan didn’t like the look of them at all.

  An hour later, Willan had finally rid himself of the ridiculous civvies that Prentiss had obtained for him and was back in uniform again. He sat on a rough bunk-bed in the only building of the camp which still had a fragment of a roof and most of its walls. Around him sat or squatted Geary, Morgan, Fraser, Prentiss, Kigoma and Okello. Everyone had a notebook open and ready, except Prentiss, who smoked cigarette after cigarette.

  ‘First things first,’ Willan said. ‘Adjutant Geary, what’s the situation with regard to the men?’

  ‘We have 740 men in camp at the moment who have had some rudimentary training,’ Geary told him, reading figures from his notebook. ‘Of those 740, perhaps three hundred are well enough trained to be front-line troops – the two companies of Okello and Kigoma here. They’re nearly all Ugandan exiles. These two companies are well equipped. As for the rest, they’re a little raw, and we’re short over a hundred weapons. The three hundred – less now – new recruits who arrived in the last couple of days have done virtually nothing at all. They are untrained and totally without equipment.’

  Willan nodded. ‘So, two strong companies and another three weak ones. What about equipment, QM?’

  Morgan cleared his throat. He was looking a little the worse for wear.

  ‘We’ve lost three-quarters of our food stores, just under half our ammunition, all our bedding and spare uniforms, and thirty-six rifles which we couldn’t get out of the armoury in time.’

  ‘How many rounds per man do we have?’ Willan asked.

  Morgan scribbled in his notebook for a second.

  ‘About six mags per head – 180 rounds. Plus RPG rounds – plenty of those – and some two thousand links for the GPMGs.’

  ‘So we can fight a battle, but not a war,’ Willan said.

  ‘Right. And it had better not be a long battle.’

  ‘All the vehicles OK?’

  ‘Yes, no problem there. But we’ve only a thousand rounds for the three Brownings on the M3s. The rest went up in the fire.’

  Willan cursed softly but viciously for a second. Then he turned to Prentiss and Kigoma.

  ‘Right, what’s the chance of resupply from Mwanza in the very near future?’

  Kigoma looked at the ground. Prentiss stared at the glowing tip of his cigarette.

  ‘Mwanza is cleaned out,’ the Intelligence agent said quietly. ‘We may be able to get something from Dodoma, I’m not sure. If we can’t, then it’ll have to come from Dar-es-Salaam.’

  ‘Ten days to get here, minimum,’ Morgan said in disgust. ‘Are you saying we can expect nothing?’

  ‘Very little. For a couple of weeks, at least, we’ll just have to get by on what we’ve got.’

  There was a great tearing roar of thunder which appeared to erupt right overhead. It seemed to have grown very dark outside.

  ‘Is it my imagination, or is there a fuck of a storm brewing?’ Morgan asked.

  ‘The rains. I think they may be coming early,’ Okello said. He was still in his smart civilian clothes but they were grimed with soot.

  ‘Terrific. We have almost a thousand men with no roof over their heads,’ Willan growled. ‘Things just get better and better.’

  ‘Might I make a suggestion?’ Prentiss asked.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘We knew that we were due to move up to the Kagera salient within a month anyway. I suggest that we make the move at once and get the men dug in - especially if the rains are indeed coming early. There’s not a lot we can do here in a month. We certainly can’t rebuild the camp.’

  ‘What about the new recruits?’ Geary asked. ‘They’ve had no training whatsoever.’

  ‘Discharge them,’ Prentiss said promptly. ‘We’ve no weapons or uniforms for them, and we no longer have the facilities to train them. They’re just more mouths to feed.’

  Kigoma and Okello started to protest at this, but Willan held up a hand. He had to wait for another peal of thunder to pass before speaking. As he did, lightning flashed outside.

  ‘Prentiss may be right. We must cut our losses. It’ll be hard enough looking after the men we have. As I see it, we have five companies of effectives: a good-sized battalion. We’ll take it north and dig in. If nothing else, we can give anything that meets us a very bloody nose. Kigoma, will your superiors approve an early move north?’

  Kigoma looked sullen, but after a moment he nodded reluctantly. ‘The Ugandans will invade before the rains make the ground too soft for their tanks. My superiors will want our force disposed to halt them as soon as is practicable. But we are too few. We need more men.’

  ‘We need trained and armed men, not an unarmed rabble,’ Willan said firmly. ‘That settles it. We’ll change location as soon as we are able. Morgan, Fraser, your job is to hunt up as much in the way of provisions as you can. Kigoma and Okello, give them details for foraging parties. Geary, I want those recruits who joined us recently to be discharged – but after they’ve helped with the loading of the equipment. I reckon it’ll take abo
ut three trips to get everything into position.’

  Another rattle of thunder and flash of lightning from outside. They paused a second, and soon they could hear something else: the sound of rain hitting the roof above them.

  Fraser leaned out of a window and whistled softly. Cool air was coming in the open end of the hut, along with a fine water vapour.

  ‘It’s fucking tipping it down,’ the Scot said. ‘Rain like you wouldn’t believe.’

  ‘Great,’ Willan said with heavy sarcasm. ‘It’ll make digging trenches even more fun. Still, it’ll ground their aircraft, with any luck. Prentiss, any ideas on why they attacked, and how they found us?’

  The rain was a thundering roar outside. Prentiss had to raise his voice to be heard.

  ‘Stragglers from the steamer probably gave away the camp’s location. I have a feeling the choppers were doing a reconnaissance. Maybe they got trigger-happy, or maybe they had orders to level the camp; my bet is the former. If they really wanted this place taken out, they’d have used MiGs. We just got unlucky, that’s all.’

  ‘Unlucky,’ Willan repeated, angry. ‘That’s one way of putting it, I guess. Tell me, Prentiss – and Kigoma – when we finally take our positions in the Kagera salient, will we be completely on our own, or is there hope of reinforcement?’

  Kigoma said nothing. It was Prentiss who spoke again.

  ‘Your job is to buy time, Willan. At worst, you will blunt the Ugandan advance long enough for the militias that Nyerere is setting up to come into play. At best, you may even hold the enemy long enough for the rains to bog down his vehicles and give him second thoughts about the whole enterprise.’

  ‘Just so we know,’ Willan said. ‘Okello, what about you? You’ll be fighting against your countrymen.’

  ‘I want to see Amin dead,’ the Ugandan exile said simply. ‘I want to see my country free of death squads. I will fight whoever tries to stop me.’

  The rain poured down outside, a steady torrent. It sounded like a waterfall.

  ‘Gentlemen, you have your orders,’ Willan said at last. If there are no questions, then I suggest we get to work. There’s a lot to do.’

  The meeting broke up, the assembled men exiting the half-ruined hut to battle their way through the downpour outside. In minutes the camp was heaving with hundreds of armed men who worked steadily and relentlessly to load up the trucks with what had been salvaged from the ruin of their camp.

  Less than three hours later the first long convoy began splashing and grinding its way along the muddy track to the north, to where they were to make their stand. Silent people watched them from the roadside as the heavy trucks and half-tracks rolled along, and all the while the rain fell without let-up, turning the roads into deepening quagmires and shrouding the horizon. Miles ahead, in the thick of the rain shadow, the Kagera foamed brown and white between its banks, and beyond that the Ugandan–Tanzanian border lay quiet and empty under the rain.

  * * *

  Lieutenant-Colonel Kasese stared out at the rain. Across the parade ground the T-55 tanks of his regiment were parked in rows, looking like great prehistoric beasts squatting asleep, the mud thickening around their tracks.

  He turned and looked at Flight Lieutenant Ngoro again.

  ‘You’re quite sure it was a training camp?’

  ‘Yes, sir. On our first pass they had several hundred men lined up for parade – no uniforms or weapons, just civilian men. But there were uniformed NCOs and officers. It looked like an intake of recruits. We also saw an assault course.’

  ‘How much damage did you do?’

  ‘We killed scores of them. And when we left the entire place was on fire. Must have been our tracers.’

  ‘You said that Oyite’s helicopter was destroyed by a missile.’

  ‘Yes, sir, or a rocket. Probably shoulder-launched. After that, we decided it would be prudent to leave.’

  Kasese nodded silently. Both good and bad. He would be able to confirm to his superiors that the Tanzanians were training large numbers of men, and that one training camp had almost certainly been destroyed. But he would also have to admit that Ugandan Army helicopters had openly and without provocation launched an attack on Tanzanian soil, inflicted high casualties and suffered some in return. He could not quite decide if the good and the bad cancelled each other out, and so was decidedly cool with Ngoro. The orders he had given the pilot had been ambiguous enough – just – for him to wash his hands of the affair if need be and declare that the man had exceeded his authority. That was why Ngoro was sweating and uneasy.

  ‘I take it you cannot fly in this weather.’

  ‘No, sir. All aircraft are grounded while the rain lasts.’

  Kasese swore – a rare thing for him. He could not send an aircraft out to verify the camp’s destruction then. Best to play it safe.

  He was about to lean forward and tell Ngoro in no uncertain terms that the pilot had exceeded his authority, thereby earning himself a probable death sentence, when there was a knock at the door.

  ‘Yes!’ he barked, angry at being interrupted.

  The orderly came in bearing a note.

  ‘Your pardon, sir, but this just came by dispatch rider from Kampala.’

  ‘Dispatch rider!’ Kasese snorted. The rains must have brought down the lines.

  He opened the note. It contained a terse set of instructions, and at the bottom, the signature of Amin himself. Kasese read through it once, twice, then sat down. Within seconds he stood up again. He was smiling. Ngoro breathed a little easier.

  Kasese looked up from the note at last, still smiling.

  ‘You may go, Flight Lieutenant. I attach no blame to you for your little skirmish; in fact you did well. Kindly ask my adjutant to step in on your way out.’

  Vastly relieved, Ngoro stood up, saluted, then exited swiftly. A few minutes later Captain Bukima stepped in.

  ‘Colonel?’

  ‘Sit down, Bukima. We have orders from Kampala, from Amin himself. The invasion is on.’

  Bukima leaned forward in his chair. ‘When?’

  ‘We must be ready to move in two days. The Simba Regiment will be the vanguard for the entire army.’

  Bukima looked suddenly thoughtful.

  ‘Two days – that should be enough to get everything organized. But if the rains keep up, the Kyaka road will be a swamp in two days. We could have problems with the tanks.’

  ‘I know. Our advance must be swift and irresistible. The weather will probably be our greatest foe; there are no Tanzanian formations worth mentioning between here and Dodoma.’

  ‘A pity the rains are early.’

  ‘Indeed. From now until the new year the roads will only get worse – you know what they are like after several weeks of rain. Even the hard-surfaced highways will be swept with floods, mudslides and fallen trees. So we must move as rapidly as possible.’

  ‘What about air support?’ Bukima asked. ‘Can MiGs fly in this?’

  ‘No. If the rains ease a little, then we can expect some close-combat support, but not until then.’

  ‘Our objective?’

  ‘Initially, at least, the Kagera.’

  ‘So. We have almost twenty miles to penetrate. How long do we have?’

  Kasese looked at the note he still held in one hand.

  ‘He is following the scenario we planned earlier in the summer, but is giving us more time due to the weather. Two days at most to the Kagera. Within four we must be dug in in force along the river.’

  ‘That should not be a problem,’ Bukima said, ‘if resistance is light.’

  ‘It will be.’

  ‘What about these mercenary camps we have been hearing about, Colonel?’

  ‘The one whose existence we confirmed was destroyed by Ngoro’s helicopters.’

  ‘Excellent. Then we will face nothing but a few hastily assembled militias.’

  ‘Indeed. It promises to be a glorious campaign, Bukima.’

  The two men looked at one anothe
r. They both knew that the only reason Idi Amin was sending his army into Tanzania was to head off troubles closer to home. The regime was shaky; there had been news of a regiment mutinying up north only last week. But still, they were both soldiers. The prospect of an easy war was rather pleasing; it was their raison d’être, after all.

  ‘Will you want the officers assembled for a preliminary briefing?’ Bukima asked.

  ‘Yes. This evening. And have a Warning Order made up. Two days’ notice to move. I want all the vehicles prepped and the necessary stores issued.’

  ‘What about a reconnaissance, Colonel? Do you want me to send out a company in advance of the main body?’ Bukima was following classic Soviet military doctrine.

  ‘No, not this time. A small troop perhaps, but no more. Surprise must be total. Ngoro’s mission confirmed that there is virtually nothing to oppose us for two hundred miles south of the border. I trust his information.’

  ‘Very well, Colonel. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll start making the necessary arrangements.’

  Bukima stood up and saluted, then left with a spring in his step.

  Kasese rose and went to the window again. The rain seemed unending, like a precursor to some biblical flood. But it came every year; it was just early this time. A pity. It would not affect the end result of the campaign, though. Soon his tanks would be rolling across the border into Tanzania.

  10

  ‘Bastard,’ Mick Morgan hissed. ‘Bastard, bastard, bastard.’

  He kicked the firmly embedded wheel of the M35 Studebaker truck one last time, then wiped his face with his bush hat and raised his voice to a commanding shout.

  ‘All right, lads: spades and planks. Let’s get to it.’

  The convoy was halted along a swamp-like stretch of unsurfaced road. The heavy trucks had carved deep ruts in the slippery mud, and now yet another of them had bogged down. It happened with infuriating frequency, and the men had become practised at freeing the big vehicles from the clutch of the mud. They jumped down now with planks, sheets of corrugated iron and spades, and went to work. Ordinarily, they would have attached a cable to the vehicle in front and towed the stuck Studebaker free, but they had found more and more that this tactic resulted in two vehicles being bogged down instead of one. So instead they resorted to the filthy, laborious, time-consuming work of freeing the embedded wheels by hand.