Marine J SBS

by Peter Corrigan

  They rearranged the wire so that at a casual glance it would look undisturbed. Then Willan stopped to plant a four-inch twig upright in the ground by the breach so they would be able to find their exit on the return journey.

  They moved on. The fuel tanks were to their left now but their own objective was farther away: the lines of planes parked adjacent to the southern runway.

  Willan threw himself to the ground.

  There was a jeep rumbling up the runway itself, headlights blazing. He closed one eye to preserve his night vision. Behind him, Gordon and Morgan lay as still as statues.

  The jeep rumbled past barely eighty yards away, illuminating twin cones of falling rain as it went. Willan started breathing again.

  They got to their feet and continued, only to pause and go to ground again two minutes later. There was the glow of a cigarette in the darkness. A man was standing there smoking, his hand protecting the cigarette from the rain. They saw his face illuminated in the tiny red glow for a second as he dragged on it. He wore a bush hat and his rifle was slung on his shoulder.

  Willan turned and gave the thumbs down, meaning ‘enemy’, to the others. Then he pointed to himself and made a chopping motion with his hand, telling them he was going to take him out. He saw Gordon and Morgan nod, then moved into a crouch with the silenced Ingrams held high. He clicked the selector to single shot and began padding towards the smoking sentry as silently as a cat.

  Closer, closer. He distrusted the accuracy of the stubby little sub-machine-gun and wanted to get as near as possible to the target.

  Twenty yards, fifteen.

  Willan’s foot slid in mud. He staggered, and the mines in his shoulder bags clanked together.

  The sentry turned, and caught sight of the dark figure stalking him, barely forty feet away.

  Willan raised the Ingrams and fired. There was a low thump, a minute spark of flame from the muzzle, and the sentry was hurled backwards to land on his back in the mud.

  The bullet had taken him squarely in the chest; visibility was too bad for Willan to have tried for a head shot and he had not wanted to risk a ‘double-tap’ because of the noise. The man was gurgling, still moving.

  Willan was on him in a flash. He dropped his weapon to its sling and whipped out his knife from the thigh scabbard. He held one hand over the man’s mouth and slit his throat from ear to ear. He held the sentry down as the man thrashed about frantically. But his struggles did not last long, and when he was completely still, Willan resheathed the knife and took up the Ingrams again, listening. He could feel the blood on his face; the man’s jugular had spouted like a hose.

  Nothing. He clicked his fingers three times and Gordon and Morgan joined him. They grabbed the body and the AK47, which had fallen from his shoulder. They popped the still-smoking cigarette in the man’s open mouth. It hissed in blood.

  There were a series of shacks nearby, down beside the runway – probably maintenance sheds. They hid the body behind one of them and paused to listen again.

  A jeep engine in the distance. Patrolling the other runway perhaps. The night was quiet but for the continual hiss of the rain and the faint, far-off rumble of nocturnal traffic on the Kampala road.

  The aircraft were just in front of them, shining in the wet. Willan consulted his watch, lifting off the cover to peer at the luminous dial. They were behind schedule. He gave the thumbs up to the other two men and then the team split up, each one of them moving like a shadow to his own designated area of operation.

  They would place a mine on every third plane. The limpets were compact but powerful and if, as Prentiss had assured them, there was still fuel in the aircraft’s tanks, then it should prove easy enough to cripple nearby planes as well as the mined ones.

  The limpets were fixed so as to go off at set times, and all of them were staggered so that they would explode in a series, for maximum confusion. They were also arranged so that Geary and Breckenridge’s charges on the fuel tanks would go off first, hopefully spraying this area of the field with blazing high-octane fuel. The ensuing fireball should be impressive, to say the least.

  Willan clicked the first mine into place under the fuselage of a MiG 16, then twisted the cap to arm it, and pressed in the timer. It could just be heard ticking.

  He moved on to the next aircraft, watching and listening constantly for signs of the enemy. No problem. This area of the field was silent as a grave; the Ugandans were either incredibly confident or unforgivably lax.

  ‘This is for Jock,’ Willan murmured as he clicked the second mine into place. ‘This is for Parker,’ he said for the third. ‘And this is from me, you cunts,’ as he clicked the fourth and last into place.

  He was done.

  Just then he heard the roar of a vehicle engine accelerating nearby, and immediately after, the shockingly loud sound of heavy-calibre machine-gun fire ripping the night apart.

  Willan ran swiftly through the maze of planes towards the bright flare of automatic fire that was flashing down by the runway. There was a jeep there, its occupants manning a fifty-calibre Browning and blasting off rounds for all they were worth.

  He saw tracer bouncing off tarmac, zooming all over the night sky. There was a shadow ducking in among the parked aircraft much as he was himself. Was it Gordon or Morgan?

  Return fire, the low thumping of a silenced Ingrams. Willan crept under the wing of a plane, looking for a fire position.

  There. Got you, you bastards.

  He opened up on the jeep, spraying it with an entire magazine. The three occupants were thrown about like dolls, one hurled off the vehicle entirely. The firing stopped.

  There was the high whine of a siren, like an old anti-aircraft warning. Willan could hear other vehicle engines starting, men shouting in confusion. It sounded as though they had disturbed the Ugandans’ beauty sleep.

  ‘Thanks, Sarge. The fucker came out of nowhere with his lights off, just coasting down the runway. Caught me napping.’

  It was Gordon.

  ‘Where’s Mick?’

  ‘Here,’ another voice said, and the massive figure of Morgan came hulking out of the darkness.

  ‘The shit’s hit the fan now. Time to fuck off. All charges placed?’ Willan asked.

  The other two men nodded.

  ‘Let’s grab the jeep then. Mick, man the Browning. Gordy, you drive.’

  They threw off the two bodies still on the vehicle and Gordon gunned the engine, then sped off, kicking up dirt with the spinning rear wheels. Behind them, the whole airfield was coming alive with running men and roaring vehicles, but the pursuit was as yet uncoordinated. Hopefully, they’d mistake the jeep for one of their own.

  Automatic fire stitched the ground to their left. A crowd of Ugandan soldiers were rattling along to one side in an old truck, leaning their elbows on the cab and firing as they came. Gordon spun the jeep off to the right while Morgan swung the heavy Browning and got off a burst which made the other vehicle skid and swerve in the wet ground.

  ‘So much for mistaken identity,’ Willan growled, and lobbed off a phosphorus grenade behind them to complicate matters for the opposition.

  There was a flash up ahead, followed by a roaring boom as the charges on the fuel tanks went up. Geary and Breckenridge had done their job at any rate. Another flash, the thunder of another detonation. The eastern sky became filled with a sheet of flame a hundred feet high. Burning high-octane fuel was flung through the air and splashed in blazing torrents over the southern runway and the planes parked beside it. Gordon swung the jeep crazily to the left to avoid the flames. The entire night was a vast furnace of light and secondary explosions.

  ‘We’re cut off, Sarge!’ Gordon yelled. ‘The whole fucking eastern perimeter is on fire!’

  ‘Head north,’ Willan told him. In the back, Morgan was firing burst after burst of heavy-calibre rounds at their pursuers.

  More explosions, from the rows of parked planes this time. Willan saw a wing blasted into the air, tailplanes t
hrown across the runway.

  ‘Holy shit!’ Prentiss had been right: there had indeed been fuel left in the aircraft. Detonation after detonation went off in sequence, causing havoc, spraying wreckage and burning petrol for hundreds of yards around the airfield. They could feel the heat of the fires like the African sun heating their faces.

  Three other jeeps behind them, their on-board weapons twinkling with muzzle flashes. The noise of the fires and the explosions was too great for Willan to hear the gunfire.

  A geyser of earth blew up on one side of the jeep. Gravel sliced into Willan’s wetsuit and tore the flesh over one eye.

  ‘Fuck! What was that?’

  Morgan shouted an answer.

  ‘They’ve got a couple of M-79s on those jeeps. They’re ranging in on us, Sarge!’ He gritted his teeth and laid down a storm of heavy fire to their rear. One jeep caught the full impact of a dozen rounds. The driver was cut almost in two. He slumped over the wheel and the vehicle skidded, slid and toppled over on one side, spinning round and scattering its occupants until it came to rest with its wheels spinning lazily in the air. Morgan whooped.

  ‘One for the good guys!’

  Then a burst of fire caught him across the chest and blasted him into the front seat. He landed almost on Willan’s lap.

  ‘Mick! Fuck! Step on it, Gordy. Evade that fucking fire.’

  ‘How is he?’

  Morgan’s eyes were open in surprise. His chest had taken three rounds; half of his back had been blown away by the exit wounds. Willan closed the blood-filled eyes.

  ‘He’s dead, Gordy.’

  They roared along without speaking. Willan clambered into the back. There was no ammunition left for the Browning.

  ‘They’re closing in to the front, Sarge,’ Gordon told him. The jeep lurched and bumped over the uneven ground. To their right, the perimeter of the airfield was still a sea of flames.

  ‘Head for the fence,’ Willan told him. ‘Try and burst through. We’re fucked now, anyway.’

  Gordon wrenched the wheel round and the jeep arced to the right, the offside wheels leaving the ground for a second. Tracer sped over Willan’s head. He fired back with the Ingrams, but he was almost out of ammo for that too.

  ‘Here we go!’ Gordon yelled.

  Fire all about them, flames taking away Willan’s breath. The skin of his face was seared by the heat.

  Then there was a crash. They impacted with the perimeter fence and went right through it. The wire and posts swept over them, tearing through the windscreen, ripping the Browning from its mount. Gordon was knocked out of the driving seat and landed in the back with Willan. The jeep careered on, the tyres on fire now, rotating circles of flame.

  The vehicle hit a bank. The nose thudded hard, throwing Willan and Gordon forward again; then it zoomed up into the air. There was a moment of weightlessness, followed by a horrendous crash, and they came to a halt.

  Flames all about them. Gordon was unconscious, something sticking out the front of his wetsuit. Willan grabbed him and hauled him from the burning vehicle. He staggered through the fire and found himself walking through reeds, with mud and water sucking at his calves. His wetsuit was on fire, as was Gordon’s. He flopped down among the reeds, dragging his comrade with him. The cooling water put out the flames. He felt rather than heard the jeep explode. Before him, sand-dunes were pale and firelit down to the sea.

  ‘Gordy.’

  But Gordon was dead. A post from the perimeter fence had transfixed him through the heart like a spear.

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ Willan groaned.

  He took Gordon’s spare magazines, then lurched away, loading his Ingrams. The entire sky behind him was a wall of flame; it looked like the end of the world. There were still explosions going off in the airfield, but none of his pursuers had dared to follow him through the flames. The beach before him was deserted. He reckoned he was almost a mile north of the insertion point.

  Willan walked out into the water, checking behind him for pursuit. There was none. He blew into the buoyancy bags on the shoulders of his suit, and struck out into the lake. The water seemed very cold, but it was welcome on his seared skin. His eyebrows and eyelashes were gone, and it was agony to hold on to his weapon; he could see skin falling from his fingers in white folds.

  When he was at least three hundred yards out from the shore he looked back, puffing. The coast was a line of yellow and orange flame. He could see nothing beyond the inferno. Well, they had done a fucking good job of eliminating the Ugandan Air Force. He wondered if Geary and Breckenridge had made it.

  He swam as quickly as he could southwards, consulting his wrist compass as he went. After a while he found he could no longer hold on to the Ingrams: his fingers were too swollen and painful. He dropped it, his only weapons now the Browning High Power and his sheath knife.

  Time went by endlessly. He was incredibly tired. It would be so easy to give up, to lie there and drift peacefully under the stars. But he kept going.

  When he thought he had reached the approximate latitude of the insertion point, he dug out his pencil torch from his wetsuit pocket and began flashing it towards the shore. Bloody silly thing to do, but he was near the end of his rope. He could swim no farther. Besides, hopefully the Ugandans wouldn’t notice such a tiny light out in the lake since they had such great fuck-off illumination on the shore to ruin their vision.

  More time went by. The pain in his hands and face came and went in great sickening waves. He shut Morgan and Gordon out of his mind. Time enough to grieve later. For now he had to concentrate on survival.

  Was there something out on the water? A splash of foam perhaps. He prayed it was not a curious crocodile. They were not common in this part of the lake, but that would just be the last straw.

  Definitely something there. He thought he saw shapes backlit by the inferno of the coast. He blinked the little torch on and off.

  Men in canoes. He grinned wearily. Fucking A.

  That looked like Willy Geary in front. He’d know that little runt anywhere.

  ‘Sarge?’ Geary’s voice asked. The paddling stopped.

  ‘Yes,’ Willan croaked. ‘Give us a hand, for fuck’s sake.’

  The canoes came to a halt on either side of him. There were three of them. So Geary’s team had made it, and Hill too. Thank God.

  Someone grabbed his arm and hauled him up across the bow of the canoe. He cried out in pain, feeling blisters bursting under the wetsuit.

  ‘Sarge, you all right? Where are the others?’

  ‘They’re dead, Willy. And I’m fucked. Get us the hell out of here.’

  Without another word, Geary began paddling again. Willan’s weight kept the bow of the Klepper low in the water, slowing them down.

  ‘Any pursuit?’ he asked at last when the pain had died down a little.

  ‘No. I think they were all chasing you lot up to the north. We waited as long as we could. We sank the spare Kleppers offshore.’

  ‘You did a good job, Willy.’

  ‘How did Mick and Gordy get it?’

  ‘We went through the flames and the fence. Mick got shot. Gordy got it in the crash. It was a massive fuck-up. They were all over us.’

  ‘They were good lads,’ Geary said quietly, paddling on like a machine. Willan could just hear the dip and splash of the other paddles. Hill and Breckenridge had drawn closer to listen.

  ‘We’ll be late for the RV with Prentiss. Think he’ll hang around?’ Geary asked.

  ‘He’d better, or I’ll fucking shoot him myself,’ Willan snarled. Then he clenched his teeth, fighting the pain of his burns. He bent his forehead into the cool waters of the lake and closed his eyes.

  14

  Prentiss was nervous. He had heard the explosions to the north, and had subsequently seen the sky light up orange and red all along the horizon, like an early sunrise. So the mission was accomplished. That was something. But the SBS were over an hour late for the rendezvous, and it would be dawn very soon. If
he was to get the steamer back in the shelter of the Ssese Islands before daylight he would have to leave in the next few minutes. The Ugandan Air Force might or might not be crippled by the raid, but Amin still had patrol boats based fairly close by, and the old steamer wasn’t built for speed.

  He raged at himself for coming along on this damn-fool trip. He was an intelligence gatherer, not a ‘hot’ operative. He had let his absurd sense of adventure and, if truth be told, the pleasure of captaining this antique boat, override his common sense. He should have given one of the men basic instructions on piloting the ship and awaited the turn of events in a bar in Mwanza.

  But he was here now, and he had a decision to make. Just how much longer should he remain on station, endangering the lives of the crew and himself, waiting for the return of men who might be dead even as he stood here in the wheelhouse? He’d give it a few more minutes at any rate.

  ‘Is the masthead light on?’ he asked Ukune, the helmsman.

  ‘Yes, skipper. Turned it on myself over an hour ago. How much longer will we wait, skipper?’

  ‘As long as it takes,’ Prentiss said with more resolve than he felt.

  He began wondering what kind of diplomatic ramifications there would be if Amin found out that British soldiers had been helping out the Tanzanian government with a little sabotage. It would hurt Nyerere’s standing with his neighbours, possibly damage the war effort. It would not be an easy job to convince the world that soldiers as well-trained and efficient as the SBS were in fact nothing more than mercenaries.

  ‘The hell with it,’ he said at last. ‘Let’s get out of here. They’ve had it.’

  ‘No, skipper – I see something out there.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Off the port bow, maybe a hundred yards. Something is moving.’

  Prentiss went out on deck and peered into the darkness. There was a glow on the eastern horizon now, but that was the sun coming up, not the inferno that the SBS had made of the Ugandan coastline.