Marine J SBS

by Peter Corrigan

  The APCs halted at last, and the enemy infantry debussed scant yards in front of the river. An RPG flashed and one of the enemy vehicles exploded into fragments. Rounds began to tear up the ground all along the southern bank of the Kagera, and splashed white water from the river itself.

  The Ugandan infantry ran into the first of the buried petrol-enhanced mines. Globes of fire erupted from the ground and engulfed whole sections of them as they advanced. Blazing figures threw themselves into the river or writhed on the muddy ground shrieking until the fire from Willan’s men silenced them. For a few minutes it seemed that the air hanging over the position was full of nothing but noise and bullets and the roar of explosions as the tank rounds zoomed in. Some men took shelter in the deep craters left by the airstrike, forsaking the shallow scrapes they had dug for themselves. There was no time for orders; it was a grim, relentless fire-fight that seemed to go on for ever, the opposing forces battling it out within two hundred yards of each other like two boxers locked in a clinch.

  But Willan’s men were low on ammunition. Already some of them were cowering in their scrapes, keeping their heads down, their eyes shut tight. Others were scavenging for spare magazines from the bodies of the dead.

  The Ugandans were rushing the bridge in fire teams and squads, but there was no cover there. Okello and a determined group of other Ugandan exiles were laying down a fierce fire that swept the enemy off the bridge and sent them reeling back, looking frantically for cover on the northern bank. But the enemy were moving up more APCs now, with infantry advancing at a crouch behind them.

  Petrol bombs exploded in orange glory across the bridge as Geary led a handful of men to engage the advancing vehicles at point-blank range. Two of them went up in flames, their crews abandoning them only to be cut down by the fire from the southern bank. The bridge was a blazing inferno of dead bodies and blackened hulks. But more enemy vehicles were coming forward, and now the tanks left off their bombardment and began advancing down from the northern slopes above the river.

  Geary’s men, or what was left of them, came running back off the burning bridge. A tank made it to the northern end and came powering over the flaming concrete, knocking aside destroyed vehicles in its path. Willan had nothing left with which to stop it. Some of his men were running for the rear; only isolated groups were still holding out around their officers.

  Something streaked past Willan’s left shoulder and the tank on the bridge was rocked back by a massive explosion. The turret was blown off and went careering backwards.

  He turned to look and saw a mass of vehicles halted on the ground behind the position. They were big American trucks, half-tracks and, absurdly, a small white civilian car. Men were jumping out of the trucks and running forward carrying boxes and weapons.

  Morgan cannoned into him, a smoking RPG7 still on his shoulder. He looked amazingly clean to Willan. He was grinning.

  ‘Better late than never, eh, Sarge?’

  Willan was lost for words. He stared in dawning elation at the hundreds of men who were filing forward into his battered positions, all of them bearing ammo boxes, some carrying anti-tank weapons. Within a couple of minutes the fire from his side of the river increased five-fold, and anti-tank rounds were slamming into APCs and tanks on the northern bank.

  The Ugandans began to pull back hurriedly, their infantry cut down by the dozen as they tried to rejoin their vehicles, the vehicles themselves scattering mud to all sides as they reversed frenziedly out of the killing zone. In moments the entire Ugandan formation was in full retreat, heading in a panicked crowd for the dead ground on the other side of the hills to the north. They left the northern bank of the Kagera littered with bodies and burning wrecks.

  The firing tailed off. Even the tanks had ceased their bombardment. The silence was broken only by the crackle of flames and the groans of the wounded.

  12

  Willan drank deeply from the water bottle, trying to wash the filth and smoke reek out of his mouth. The exhaustion was like a weight of lead in his marrow. He could not remember ever feeling so tired, even on SBS selection.

  He was standing to the rear of one of the trucks which had transported Morgan, Kigoma and the reinforcements from Mwanza. The vehicle’s wheels had six inches of red mud on them and the windscreen wipers had carved solid Vs out of the dirt on the glass. Clearly, they had had a hard time getting here.

  But not as hard a time as we had staying here, Willan thought vaguely. He drank from the water bottle again.

  ‘We meet once more, Sergeant Willan,’ a woman’s voice said.

  It was the Australian photojournalist.

  ‘Aren’t you going to say hello?’

  What was her name? He couldn’t remember – so much seemed to have happened since then.

  ‘Hi,’ he mumbled.

  ‘I see you’ve been busy.’

  Prentiss came up. Both he and the young woman seemed incredibly clean and alert. Willan had got used to the filth and blood and vermin that were an everyday fact of life in the bush. He knew he looked like three pounds of shit stuffed in a two-pound bag, but that did not matter – not now. He was alive, and they had won. They had held the bridge and beaten the Ugandans. For the moment. It was something to savour.

  ‘Here,’ the young woman said, and handed him a hip-flask. ‘You look as though you could do with it.’

  He unscrewed the top and drank. Whisky. It seared his throat and set up a glow in his gullet. His head seemed to clear.

  ‘Thanks.’ He handed it back. She smiled at him. Sue – that was her name. ‘Thanks, Sue.’

  ‘Oh, so you remember?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Prentiss was looking at the position Willan’s men had fought and died for, particularly the two great bomb craters which dominated the centre of it. He whistled softly, the first time Willan could recall seeing him visibly impressed.

  ‘How many of you are left?’

  Willan wiped his face with one filthy hand. The sweat was cutting through the grime and stinging the small scratches and abrasions which covered his forehead and cheeks. He had not felt them before.

  ‘We’ve got at least eighty wounded, as far as I can count. A lot of desertions, both on the withdrawal last night and when things looked pretty bad earlier today. I’d say we were down to about 150 effectives before the reinforcements turned up in the nick of time. Just like the bloody cavalry in a bad western. We’d have folded otherwise. We were at the end of our rope.’

  ‘I believe you,’ Prentiss murmured.

  ‘I lost two of my own section, Tony Parker and Jock Fraser. They’re lying somewhere on the road to the north.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Sue said.

  ‘They took their chances, like the rest of us. Pity about their families, though. They’ll probably never know just how and where they died.’ Here Willan stared at Prentiss.

  The MI6 man would not meet his eyes.

  ‘What are you doing here anyway?’ Willan asked Sue.

  ‘I’m covering the war of course. I’m an official correspondent. The government here wants lots of pictures – evidence of Ugandan aggression.’

  ‘Well, there’s plenty of bodies to snap if you want to,’ Willan said disgustedly. He turned away.

  ‘Wait!’ Prentiss said.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘Can your men hold the bridge for another day, Willan?’

  The SBS sergeant looked at the crumbling, muddy trenches that the men were digging, the burial parties at work, the piles of bodies. While those who had been doing the fighting for the past two days rested, the fresh men under Morgan and Kigoma were rebuilding the crude defences and redistributing the reserve ammunition. Some were handing out boxes of rations which were being greedily consumed by the ragged, bloody scarecrows of soldiers who had had almost nothing to eat in two days.

  ‘Who’s asking?’ Willan wanted to know.

  ‘The government, let’s say.’

  ‘Well, if they don’t launch
a fresh armoured attack, if they don’t bomb us again, if we get more ammunition and food, then maybe. Why?’

  ‘By tomorrow the first of the militias will be here to relieve your men, and ammunition will have been forwarded from Dodoma.’

  ‘You mean we’ll be taken out of the line?’

  ‘Not all of you. Some of you.’

  ‘What do you mean, Prentiss? I’m in no fucking mood for mind games.’

  ‘All right. There may be another mission for your SBS men.’

  ‘You mean you’ll take us away from the battalion?’

  ‘Yes. That part of your mission is accomplished, and accomplished well. Whitehall will be pleased.’

  Willan laughed, and turned away.

  ‘Well, fucking hooray,’ he said.

  The Ugandan Army seemed to be satisfied with its gains of the past two days. It had taken almost 800 square miles of Tanzanian soil at the cost of a crippled armoured regiment, and was now consolidating its gains. Though the men on the river saw the occasional Savarin on the skyline, the rest of the enemy were keeping a low profile for the moment, no doubt resting and refitting for the next attack.

  The militias arrived the next morning in a fantastic assortment of vehicles. Civilian cars, trailer-pulling tractors, vans, trucks, even mopeds. There were hundreds of them, and they clogged up the road all the way back to Kyaka.

  Most were armed with AK47s, some of them so new the preserving grease was still on them. They all carried spare magazines and bundles of food. They were without uniforms, most of them without shoes. They stared in wonder at the site of the previous day’s battle, the burnt-out vehicles, the mass grave.

  ‘Who the hell are they?’ Willan asked as he watched them come in. They looked as carefree as schoolboys in a playground.

  ‘Ugandans, most of them,’ Okello told him. ‘There are thousands like them in Tanzania, all exiles. These are only the youngest, the ones who want to fight back. They have seen now that the Ugandan Army is not invincible, so they have come to volunteer.’

  ‘I take it you’ll be in charge of them, Okello.’

  ‘I believe so – they are my people, after all. You have done us all a very great service, Colonel Willan. You have shown us how to fight. Now we have to go and reclaim our country.’

  Fine talk, Willan thought, but he couldn’t see these ragged, barefoot soldiers prevailing against the tanks and MiGs of Idi Amin. He did not say so, however.

  ‘My men and I will be leaving you soon, I think,’ he said instead.

  ‘So I gathered. I believe that man Prentiss has a job for you to do elsewhere.’

  ‘That’s us, troubleshooters for hire,’ Willan said with sour humour.

  ‘Be careful, Colonel Willan.’

  ‘I’m only a sergeant, you know. We’re none of us officers – just grunts.’

  Okello saluted him. ‘In England, you may be a sergeant; here you are a colonel. You have earned the rank. Now if you will excuse me, sir, I must go and see to my men.’

  He walked off, carrying himself as though he were on a parade ground, though he looked like a ragged vagabond, his once-immaculate uniform in stinking tatters. Willan watched him go, knowing he would miss Okello, and the battalion he had helped build up and whose baptism of fire he had taken part in.

  Geary joined him.

  ‘Prentiss is after us. He has a truck ready back on the road. He’s ready to leave.’

  ‘So soon?’ Willan asked, surprised.

  ‘He’s been on the blower in Kyaka to some bigwigs in the government. Seems they require our presence urgently elsewhere.’

  ‘Nice to be wanted,’ Willan snarled.

  ‘I’ve got the other lads together – what’s left of them. What about Fraser and Parker’s bodies, Sarge? Are they just going to be left there?’

  Willan shrugged. ‘There’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it, Willy. Come on, let’s not keep the spook waiting.’

  ‘You all packed?’ Geary asked him in a lighter tone.

  Willan held up his AK47. ‘I’m sending the other luggage separately.’

  ‘Don’t forget your dinner-jacket,’ Geary retorted.

  The pair of them made their way through the mob of newly arrived militiamen, leaving behind the position they had defended to such cost. The other SBS men were waiting on board a rickety, wooden-sided farm truck which stank of dung. Prentiss and Sue were in the cab.

  ‘We’re leaving in style, eh, Sarge?’ Morgan called out cheerily.

  Willan bent to the driver’s window.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he asked Prentiss.

  ‘Mwanza, for starters. You men could do with a cold beer and a bath.’

  ‘I fucking second that,’ Geary said with feeling.

  ‘What about them?’ Willan asked, gesturing to the defenders of the bridge and the men he had trained himself.

  ‘They’ll get by. Okello has been given overall command, and there are more militia units on the way, as well as some heavy equipment from Dodoma.’

  ‘I don’t like just walking away like this,’ Willan said stubbornly.

  ‘Believe me, Sergeant, what you are going to do next is the best way of helping them you could find.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ Willan said. Then he raised his eyes to the sky. A drop of water hit him on the forehead. Then another. Soon the rain was falling more heavily, and the sky was becoming dark with grey cloud.

  ‘Oh, great,’ Morgan said from the back of the truck. ‘Just on fucking schedule.’

  ‘It could be worse,’ Breckenridge quipped. ‘You could be in one of those bloody trenches.’

  Willan clambered into the back of the old pick-up truck without another word. Prentiss started the engine and pointed its nose south, against the flow of men on foot and other vehicles that were coming up the Kyaka road.

  The rain began to come down in torrents, turning the road into a muddy red river. The back of the pick-up began to fill with water, to the weary disgust of the SBS men. Their battered vehicle bumped and lurched south, away from the war and the battlefields they had fought over. But Willan had a feeling they were not leaving the war behind. They would be back in it again soon enough, if Prentiss had his way.

  He nodded off to sleep, the rain pouring down unheeded on his blackened face.

  Willan was alone at the bar. Prentiss had booked them into the Deluxe Hotel again and, unbelievably, had come up with more garish civilian clothing for them all. The other SBS men were still in their rooms, sleeping. Willan had had a two-hour bath to soak out the dirt, but sleep was something that would not come to him. He kept thinking of the youngsters dug in along the Kagera, their trenches filling up with rain. He felt he had deserted them, and his dislike for the MI6 agent who had engineered his departure was rapidly intensifying into hatred. Several times during the day he had wondered what it would be like to punch Prentiss very hard on the nose.

  Sue Morris entered the bar looking like the proverbial million dollars. She was wearing a long, flowery dress with bare arms and a low neckline. She looked tanned, fit, wholesome – as though she had just stepped out of the pages of a magazine. Memories of her well-toned body came back to Willan. A pity he had been so drunk; he could remember hardly anything from their encounter.

  ‘I see your taste in shirts has not improved,’ she said, taking a seat next to him.

  ‘It’s that bastard Prentiss. I think he does it just to piss me off.’

  She held up a hand, cutting off further conversation. ‘Turn it up, will you?’ she asked the barman.

  The barman dutifully turned up the volume on the flickering black and white television that was perched above the bar. Willan and Sue watched it in silence.

  News of the war, for what it was worth. There was no footage of the actual fighting; no film crews had made it as far north as the Kagera salient yet. But there were still shots of the Kagera bridge with a destroyed T-55 in the middle of it, and the trenches on the south side of the river. A government spokesm
an said that Tanzanian forces, in conjunction with elements of exiled Ugandans, had halted the Ugandan invasion in its tracks and were now holding the Kagera in strength. President Nyerere appeared and promised that before the end of the year Ugandan troops would be expelled from every foot of Tanzanian territory, and that military units were being raised all over the country to that end. He warned his countrymen that they could be in for a protracted struggle.

  Then, remarkably, Idi Amin appeared, interviewed in Kampala. He in turn promised that his army would press on south as soon as it had consolidated its gains, and he laughed off the suggestion that the Tanzanians would mount a counter-offensive soon. He reminded the interviewer that his country possessed the best army in East Africa, and that he had the support of the governments of Libya and Zaire, both of whom had promised to aid him militarily if he so desired. He poked fun at the Tanzanian forces and the Ugandan exiles, whom he called traitors to their country.

  The programme ended with the news that Ugandan planes had heavily bombed the ports of Bukoba and Musoma and had also buzzed Mwanza. Willan knew that. He had seen a few ruined buildings on his way to the hotel in the back of Prentiss’s commandeered truck. But at least the rains had now grounded the dictator’s planes again.

  ‘Turn it off, for fuck’s sake,’ Willan barked at the barman. Idi Amin’s posturings had begun to wind him up. The worst thing was that everything he had said was true.

  ‘Those shots of the Kagera bridge . . .’ he said to his companion.

  ‘Mine,’ Sue replied smugly. ‘A world exclusive. They’ve provided me with a tidy little nest-egg.’

  ‘So why aren’t you still up at the river, getting more?’

  ‘Two reasons. Firstly, there’s not much going on up there at the moment, and any shots I took would just be more of the same. Secondly, the world and his wife, in press terms, are now trekking north to be in on the action. I need a different angle.’