The Spoilers / Juggernaut

by Desmond Bagley

  As we considered this he went on, ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve got a bit more bad news for you.’

  ‘What now?’

  ‘Max Otterman’s dead.’

  Dr Kat said, ‘I should have been with him.’

  McGrath said gently, ‘He was murdered.’

  We stood rigid with shock.

  ‘I saw the soldiers going over the rig after they brought you in here. They were pretty rough on everybody, even their own sick people. Then Max started convulsing and calling out, the way he’s been doing, and they…Well, they booted him off the rig. I think his neck’s broken.’

  ‘Oh my God!’ Wingstead whispered.

  ‘I think the fall may have killed him. But one of the troops put a bullet in him as well. I’m sorry to have to tell you.’

  The change in everyone’s attitude was almost tangible. Neither the war, the bombing in Kodowa, our own capture, nor the death of Russ Burns had had this effect. It had come closer with the news of the intended burning of our prison. But the callous murder of our pilot had done the trick; it had roused them to fighting pitch.

  Wingstead said, ‘You’ve got a plan, McGrath, haven’t you?’

  ‘Carry on as though the Colonel were still here.’ McGrath adjusted his uniform. Sam Wilson was getting into the other. Dr Kat bent over Burns’ body.

  McGrath said, ‘Leave Russ where he is. He’s evidence if anyone comes in. They know there was a shooting.’ He picked up the sergeant’s Uzi. ‘Anyone know how to use this?’

  ‘I do,’ Wilson and Zimmerman both said. McGrath tossed it to Wilson. ‘That’s fine. It fits your image. Here, add this.’ He tossed Wilson a small pot of blacking. ‘It stinks but it’ll do.’ Wilson started to smear the stuff on his face and hands.

  I held on to the shotgun, and Wingstead took the Colonel’s pistol. That made four guns plus McGrath’s cosh and God knows what else he had in the way of knives or other lethal instruments. It wasn’t much to start a war with.

  Wingstead said, ‘Mick, how did you get in here?’

  He pointed upwards. ‘Easy. Through the roof. It’s corrugated iron but some of it’s so old it’s soft as butter. But we’re not going out that way. There’s a door at the back of this shed. I couldn’t open it from the outside, it’s bolted. And from the inside it’s hidden behind the cotton. But we can leave that way.’

  Hammond said eagerly, ‘Then let’s go.’

  ‘Not yet, Ben. We can reduce the odds out there a bit first. Now listen. When I saw what was likely to happen I ducked out; didn’t like the idea of waiting to be rounded up.

  I went into the bush to look for Sadiq. I damn near got shot by his lads. They’re trigger-happy.’

  ‘How far away is he?’ Wingstead asked.

  ‘Not far. He’s been scouting and these are his conclusions. This Fifteenth Battalion has been in action, probably against the loyalist Seventh Brigade, and came off worst. There are about two hundred men, a quarter of the battalion.’

  ‘It’s a hell of a lot more than we can handle,’ Zimmerman said.

  ‘Will you wait a minute, now,’ McGrath said irritably. ‘Maksa has sent most of them across the bridge, leaving about fifty men and a few vehicles on this side. Many of them are wounded. There are only two officers outside. Sadiq’s ready to attack. His mortars can drop bombs on them like confetti at a wedding when he gets the signal.’

  ‘Let’s hear your plan,’ I said.

  ‘It goes like this. We take out the officers first. That way the men have nobody to direct them, and they’ll run or surrender.’

  ‘Just how do we do that?’ Hammond asked.

  ‘Well, as you see, I borrowed a dab or two of boot polish from the Captain, and here I am like a bloody nigger minstrel in the Colonel’s uniform. If I put his cap on I reckon I can get away with it for as long as it takes to call them in here, one by one.’

  ‘It won’t work,’ said Zimmerman. ‘You haven’t the voice for it.’

  Lang said, ‘We’ve got Doctor Kat though.’

  McGrath took a piece of paper from his old jacket. ‘Most of the officers are on the other side of the water. The ones here are Captain Mosira, that’s the laddie in the dark glasses, and Lieutenant Chawa. We get them in here and deal with them. Then we go out the back way, smuggle the nurses back onto the rig, it’s got a light guard but they’ll be no problem, and then signal to Sadiq to start his action.’

  Wingstead had a tough time of it with Katabisirua. The Doctor was concerned about violating his noncombatant status as a medical man.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Doctor, we’re not asking you to kill anyone. Just talk to them,’ McGrath said. Eventually Dr Kat agreed to do what we wanted.

  I said to McGrath, ‘What happens after we knock off the officers?’

  McGrath took out a knife and squatted on the floor. ‘When Sadiq makes his attack he doesn’t want any interference from across the bridge. So our job is to hold the bridge.’ He scratched lines in the dirt floor. ‘Here’s the river and here’s the bridge. On it near the other side they’ve stationed a Saracen armoured troop carrier. We have to stop it coming across and at the same time block the bridge somehow.’

  ‘What’s it armed with?’

  ‘A heavy machine gun in a turret, and twin light machine guns on a Scarfe ring.’

  Hammond blew out his cheeks. ‘How in hell do we stop a thing like that? Bullets will bounce off. It’ll be moving as soon as Sadiq attacks.’

  ‘I stop it,’ said McGrath. ‘With Barry Lang’s help.’

  Lang stared at him.

  ‘Look, here’s the rig. All our tractors bar one have been coupled, ready to take it across the river. The free tractor is here, near the bridge. We take it onto the bridge and ram that bloody Saracen with it.’

  Wingstead said sharply, ‘You won’t have a chance, Mick. The heavy machine gun will shoot hell out of you.’

  ‘Not if we go backwards,’ said McGrath simply.

  Lang’s face lit up.

  ‘Behind that cab are twenty tons of steel plate set in cement. The thing’s armoured like a tank. Nothing they’ve got will penetrate it and it outweighs the Saracen by a long chalk. What we need is covering fire. The cab windows aren’t armoured and we’ll have to lean out to see our way backwards. The rebels on this side will be busy but there may be some shooting and it’ll be up to the rest of you to give us protection.’

  Kemp said, ‘With what?’

  I said, ‘We’ve already got three guns and a pistol and we’ll get more from each officer. And there are four or five guards out there with sub-machine-guns that we can pick up too. I think the time for talking is over.’

  ‘I agree,’ McGrath said briskly, standing up. ‘I want everybody lined up again, except for a couple of you behind the doors.’

  ‘What about me?’ I asked.

  ‘When an officer walks through that door he’ll expect to see Maksa, you and Mister Wingstead, because you’re the boss men. So you’ll be right there in line, under the guns.’ He gave his knife to Lang and the cosh to Bert Proctor. ‘You two take anyone coming through that door but only after the doors are closed. Harry, you take the other machine-gun and go stand up there where I was. If the guards do come in you can fire over our heads, and if that happens everyone ducks fast. Doctor Kat, you’re in line too. Think your voice can carry outside?’

  The doctor nodded reluctantly.

  ‘I’ll take the shotgun, Mister Mannix, if you don’t mind,’ McGrath said. I handed it over to him with some hesitation, but he was right, he had to look the part. It left me feeling vulnerable again.

  We stood like actors waiting for a curtain to rise. Facing me was McGrath looking surprisingly like Maksa even from where I stood. Just as I had taken over from Kemp and Wingstead in one crisis, so now McGrath had as easily taken over from me. He was a natural leader and afterwards he would be damned hard to control. If there was an afterwards.

  TWENTY-ONE

  McGrath went and opened one o
f the doors. He put his arm through the narrow opening, holding the shotgun at the ready. Dr Kat stood immediately behind him out of sight, so that the voice should seem to come from the bogus colonel. McGrath’s head was averted as though he were keeping an eye on his prisoners, but light fell on his shoulder tabs and brassarded arm. When Dr Kat spoke it didn’t sound much like Maksa but we could only hope that the soldiers would accept it. McGrath closed the door and breathed a sigh of relief.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Two officers are coming in. You ready, you three?’

  The attack team nodded silently, and at the rear of the warehouse Zimmerman waved his machine-gun and dropped out of sight behind the topmost stack of cotton. McGrath strode across to Burns’ body and stood beside it with his back to the doors. His legs were apart and he held the shotgun so that it pointed down towards the shattered skull. It was a nice piece of stage setting; anyone entering would see his back and then their eyes would be drawn to Burns, a particularly nasty sight.

  McGrath judged it was too quiet.

  ‘Say something, Mister Mannix,’ he said. ‘Carry on your conversation with the Colonel.’

  ‘I don’t want your bloody oil,’ I improvised. ‘I’m not in the oil business. I work for a firm of electrical engineers.’ Behind McGrath Proctor had his ear to the door and the cosh raised. I carried on, ‘We’re certainly not responsible for how you run your country…’

  The door opened and two officers walked in, Mosira still wearing his dark glasses and a much younger officer following him. I went on speaking. ‘Colonel Maksa, I demand that you allow our medical people to see their…’

  Proctor hit the lieutenant hard with the cosh and he went straight down. Captain Mosira was putting up a struggle, groping for his pistol. Lang had an arm round the Captain’s neck but his knife waved wildly in the air. Mosira couldn’t shout because of the stranglehold but it was not until McGrath turned and drove the butt of the shotgun against his head that he collapsed.

  Outside all was quiet, and in the warehouse nobody spoke either. McGrath turned to Barry Lang and held out his hand for the knife. ‘I said, don’t be squeamish,’ he said coldly.

  Lang gave him the knife. ‘I’m sorry, Mick, I just—’

  ‘Who can use this?’

  ‘I can,’ said Hammond.

  McGrath instantly tossed him the knife. ‘Right, lads, let’s pick up our loot and get this lot out of the way.’

  Both officers had worn pistols and the lieutenant had a grenade at his belt. In the distribution I got one of the pistols. We looked to McGrath for guidance.

  ‘Let’s get those guards, lads. There are only six or seven of them. It’ll be easy.’

  It was entirely McGrath who made it work, his drive and coolness that kept the exercise moving. But paradoxically Maksa’s own personality also helped us. He was clearly a martinet and no enlisted man was going to question his orders. The guards entered on demand and were easy to deal with.

  We looked round the warehouse. The soldiers were laid in a row behind the cotton bales, together with the body of Russ Burns. The door in the rear was opened with ease and we were ready to leave.

  McGrath said, ‘As soon as possible we get that signal off. You know the drill, Mister Mannix?’

  I nodded. The back of the warehouse faced away from our camp so we’d have to go around it and might run into enemy soldiers at any moment. One group was to get the medical team and Dan Atheridge to the rig and then rejoin the rest of us, who’d be in cover as close to the bridge as we could get. We’d leapfrog one another to get in place, ready to protect McGrath and his tractor team-mate. There had been some doubt as to who that would be.

  McGrath looked at Barry Lang speculatively. He had jibbed at knifing Mosira and this made McGrath uncertain of his mettle. But they usually teamed up, and it was safer to work with a man one knew, so McGrath said to him, ‘Right then, Barry, you’re with me in the cab. Just stick close, you hear me?’

  ‘What’s the signal for Sadiq to attack? The Very pistol?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, a red flare the way you planned.’

  ‘The Very pistol’s still in a suitcase by the rig, unless they found it.’

  He grinned, swarmed up on top of the cotton and came down again with the Very pistol in his hand. ‘Full of surprises, aren’t I?’ he said.

  I didn’t ask him how he knew where it was. He’d obviously been hiding nearby when I hid the thing. He might have seen me go off with the shotgun too, and I wondered again how Maksa had come by it.

  ‘You take it,’ McGrath said, handing me the signal pistol. ‘You’ll be in charge of this exercise, Mister Mannix.’

  I said, ‘Just what are you going to do?’

  He grinned. ‘I’m going to march Barry out of here at gunpoint. I still look like the Colonel, and I’ve got Sam as my sergeant. We’re going to take Lang down to the bridge and when we’re near enough we’ll make a break for the tractor. Sam will get into cover and wait for you to come up, if you’re not there already.’

  It was audacious but it could work. Wingstead said, ‘You’ll have every eye on you.’

  ‘Well, it’s a chance, I’ll grant you. But it should get us to the cab. You get off the signal the instant we make our break, so that Sadiq can keep those laddies too busy to think for a bit.’

  As quietly as possible we barricaded the front doors with cotton bales, and were ready to go. I opened the rear door a crack and looked out. There was some moonlight, which would help McGrath in the tractor later on, and the night was fairly quiet. We left cautiously.

  As we rounded the warehouse we could see the fires from the rebels’ camp, and brighter lights around our rig. I could see soldiers in the light near the rig but there weren’t many of them. There was plenty of cover all the way to the bridge, just as we had visualized.

  ‘OK, Mick, start walking,’ I whispered.

  We moved away from the warehouse according to plan. McGrath and his party stepped out, Lang first with a submachine-gun jammed into his spine. Next was Wilson, his sergeant’s cap pulled well down over his face. McGrath followed with the shotgun. It looked pretty good to me. I paced myself so that I was not too far ahead of McGrath, and the rest passed me to fan out ahead.

  The marchers were almost opposite the rig when a soldier called out. I heard an indistinguishable answer from McGrath and a sharp retort, and then the soldier raised his gun. He didn’t fire but was clearly puzzled.

  Then there came the rip fire of an Uzi from beyond the rig. Someone had been spotted. The soldier turned uncertainly and McGrath cut him down with the shotgun. Then he and Lang bolted for their tractor. Wilson disappeared into the roadside cover. The shotgun blasted again and then gunfire crackled all around us, lighting up the night with flashes. I pointed the Very pistol skywards and the cartridge blossomed as I ran for cover, Bert Proctor at my side.

  Soldiers tumbled out everywhere and guns were popping off all over the place. Then there was an ear-splitting roar as engines churned and a confusion of lights as headlamps came on. The night was split by the explosions of mortar bombs landing in the rebels’ camp.

  We left the cover of the bushes and charged towards our convoy. The nearest vehicle was Kemp’s Land Rover and we flung ourselves down beside it. An engine rumbled as a vehicle came towards us and when I saw what it was I groaned aloud. It was a Saracen. Maksa’s men must have already got it off the bridge. It moved slowly and the gun turret swung uncertainly from side to side, seeking a target.

  ‘It’s coming this way!’ Proctor gasped.

  Behind us the deeper voice of our tractor roared as McGrath fired its engine. The Saracen was bearing down on it. We had to do something to stop its progress. The Uzi wouldn’t be much good against armour but perhaps a Very cartridge slamming against the turret would at least startle and confuse the driver. As the Saracen passed us, already opening fire on the tractor, I took aim and let fly. The missile grazed the spinning turret and hit the armoured casing behind it, ignitin
g as it landed. I must have done something right; there was a flash and a vast explosion which threw us sideways and rocked the Land Rover. When we staggered up the Saracen was on fire and inside someone was screaming.

  I groped for my pistol but couldn’t find it, and watched the burning Saracen run off the road into the bushes as our tractor passed it. McGrath leaned out and yelled at me.

  ‘Lang’s bought it. Get him out of here!’

  I ran to the passenger side of the cab. The Saracen had set bushes burning and in the flaring light I saw blood on Lang’s chest as I hauled him out of his seat. Proctor took him from me as we ran alongside the tractor.

  McGrath yelled at me, ‘Stay with me. Get in!’ I clung onto the swinging cab door, hooked a foot over the seat and threw myself inside.

  ‘Welcome aboard,’ McGrath grunted. ‘Watch our rear. Say if anything gets in our way.’ He looked rearwards out of his own window. I followed suit.

  Driving backwards can be tricky on a quiet Sunday morning in the suburbs, In these conditions it was terrifying. The tractor swayed from side to side, weaving down the road and onto the bridge. In the rear mirror I could see the second Saracen at the far end. There were heavy thumps on the tractor casing; we were being fired on by the Saracen as it retreated ahead of us. The driver had decided that he’d have more room to manoeuvre and fight off the bridge. We wanted to ram him before he could leave. We made it by a hair.

  The Saracen’s driver misjudged and reversed into the parapet; his correction cost him the race. The tractor bucked and slammed with an almighty wrench into the front of the Saracen, and there was a shower of sparks in the air. Our engine nearly stalled but McGrath poured on power and ground the tractor into the Saracen.

  ‘Go, you bastard, go!’ McGrath’s face was savage with joy as he wrestled with wheel and accelerator.

  There wasn’t much doubt that we’d won. The armoured car was a solid lump of metal but it didn’t weigh much over ten tons to the tractor’s forty. The impact must have knocked the Saracen’s crew out because the shooting stopped at once. The turret was buckled and useless.