I whistled silently. It was a tall order. All he wanted to know was absolutely everything.
‘If you are caught,’ he went on, ‘make as much outcry as you can, to alarm the others. But try not to reveal that they exist. If the opportunity arises for you to steal weapons do so, but do not use them.’
He looked intently at McGrath who showed no reaction but that of careful attention. Sadiq said, ‘I think that is all. Good luck, gentlemen.’
The astounding thing was that it worked exactly as he planned it. In my imagination I had seen a hundred things going drastically wrong: ourselves captured, tortured, shot, the site overrun with soldiers armed to the teeth, the ferry incapacitated or nonexistent…every obstacle under the sun placed between us and success. In fact it was all extremely easy and may well have been the most fruitful reconnaissance mission in the annals of warfare.
This was because there were so few men there. Our team made a count of fifteen, McGrath said seventeen, and the highest-ranking soldier we could spot was a corporal. They had rifles and one light machine-gun but no other weapons that we could see. There was a radio equipped with headphones and another in one of the cars, but it was defunct; Hammond reported having seen its guts strewn about the passenger seat. There were two trucks, one with a shattered windscreen, a Suzuki four-wheel drive workhorse and a beat-up elderly Volvo.
This was a token detachment, set there to guard something that nobody thought to be of the least importance. After all, nobody from Manzu was going to come willingly into a neighbouring battle zone, especially when the craft to bring them was on the wrong side of the water.
The two teams met an hour and a half later back at the dinghy and compared notes. We were extremely pleased with ourselves, having covered all Sadiq’s requirements, and heady with relief at having got away with it. Perhaps only McGrath was a little deflated at the ease of the mission.
I would have liked another look at that ferry but anchored as she was out in midstream there was no way we could approach her unseen. Whatever it was about her that bothered me would have to wait.
We did some energetic baling with the beer cans and set off upriver, again keeping close to the bank and using oars until we were out of earshot of the ferry point. It was harder work rowing upstream, but once the outboard was persuaded to run we made good time. It was midday when we got back.
We reported briefly on our findings which cheered everyone enormously. We had discovered that the landing point was called Kanjali, although the joke of trying to call it the Fort Pirie Ferry, a genuine tongue twister, had not yet palled. But we didn’t know if the ferry itself was in good running order. It might have been sabotaged or put out of action officially as a safeguard. And the problem of who was to run it was crucial.
After a light meal we went to see the raft builders at work.
Dufour had a dry, authoritative manner which compensated for his lack of Nyalan, which was supplemented by Atheridge. With Sadiq’s men as interpreters they had rounded up a number of Nyalans who were willing to help in return for a ride to Manzu, and some who didn’t want even that form of payment. These people were free in a sense we could hardly understand, free to melt back into the bush country they knew, to go back to their villages where they were left to get along unassisted by government programmes, but also untrammelled by red tape and regulations. But the rig had come to mean something extra to them, and because of it they chose to help us. It was as simple as that.
One of our problems was how to fasten the outer ring of ‘B’-gons together. We’d not got anywhere with this until Hammond gave us the solution.
‘You’d think we could come up with something,’ he said, ‘with all the friends we’ve got here pulling for us.’
‘Friends,’ I murmured. ‘Polonius.’
‘What?’
‘I was just thinking about a quote from Hamlet. Polonius was giving Laertes advice about friendship.’ I felt rather pleased with myself; it wasn’t only the British who could play literary games. ‘He said, “Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.” I could do with some hoops of steel right now.’
Hammond said, ‘Would mild steel do?’
‘You mean you’ve got some?’ I asked incredulously.
He pointed to an empty drum. ‘Cut as many hoops as you like from one of these things.’
‘By God, so we can! Well done, Ben. Is there a cutting nozzle with the oxyacetylene outfit?’
‘Hold on, Neil,’ he said. ‘Those drums will be full of petrol vapour. You put a flame near one and it’ll explode. We have to do it another way.’
‘Then we need a can opener.’
‘You’ll have one,’ he promised.
Hammond’s idea of a can opener was interesting. If you can’t invent the necessary technology then you fall back on muscle. Within an hour he had twenty Nyalan men hammering hell out of the empty drums, using whatever they could find in the way of tools, old chisels, hacksaw blades, sharp-edged stones. They made the devil of a row but they flayed the drums open, cutting them literally into ribbons.
At the ‘A’-gon construction site Dufour had assembled four teams and it took each team about one hour to make one ‘A’-gon. In a factory it would have been quicker, but here the work force chatted and sang its way through the allotted tasks at a pace not exactly leisurely but certainly undemanding. Dufour knew better than to turn martinet and try to hurry them.
In some of the old school textbooks there were problems such as this; if it takes one man six hours to dig a pit seven feet long by six feet deep by two feet wide, then how long will it take three men to perform the same task? The textbook answer is two hours, which is dead wrong. Those who have done the dismal job know that it’s a one-man operation because two men get in each other’s way and three men can hardly work at all.
Dufour, knowing this, had seen to it that nobody could get in each other’s way and not one motion was wasted. For an inexperienced work force it was miraculous, any efficiency expert would have been proud of it. Altogether it was a remarkable operation.
It started at the sawmill where a team cut timber into precise measurements, and the wood was hauled down to the shore. Sufficient pieces were doled out to the construction groups, each one a fair way from the next along the shore. Each team consisted of one Wyvern man, three Nyalan men and a few women, including even those with babies on their backs or toddlers at their sides.
The four men would each lay a beam on the ground, setting them between pegs driven into the sand so that they would be in exactly the right place. Meantime another force was rolling empty, tight-bunged drums along the shore from the compound and stacking them at each site, seven at a time. The four men would stand the drums on the crossbeams inside the circle of vertical stakes which formed the primitive jig. Little pegs were being whittled by some of the elderly folk, and these went into holes drilled in the ends of each crossbeam. The sidebeams would then be dropped to stand at right angles to the bases, the pegs slotting into holes drilled close to the bottom. Another set of pegs at the top of each side beam held the top cross-members in position, and halfway up yet another set of horizontal struts completed the cage.
At this stage the ‘A’-gon was held together only by the pegs and the jig in which it rested. Now the women bound it all together with cordage. This was the longest part of the operation so the men would move to a second jig.
Once the ‘A’-gon was finished a strong-arm team would heave it out of the jig. It was here that the binding sometimes failed and had to be redone. They would dump it on a rubber car mat and drag it the short distance to the water to be floated off. Then the whole process started again. The guy called Taylor who pioneered the science of time and motion study would have approved.
In the water a bunch of teenagers, treating the whole thing as a glorious water carnival, floated the ‘A’-gons to the ‘B’-gon construction site. Four teams took about an hour to make enough basic components for one ‘B’-gon. I reckoned that w
e’d have both ‘B’-gons, plus a few spare ‘A’-gons, finished before nightfall.
I went to visit Wingstead on the rig during the early afternoon. I filled him in on progress. He was wan but cheerful, and that description also precisely suited his nurse, Sister Mary, of whom he seemed in some awe. I also looked in on Lang and was saddened by his deterioration. All the nursing in the world couldn’t make up for the lack of medical necessities. I found Grafton on the rig as well. He had broken his ankle slipping between two ‘A’-gon drums, and this accentuated the need for decking our extraordinary craft.
This was solved by a trip to the logging mill. There were tall young trees which had been cut and trimmed for use as telegraph poles, and it was a fairly easy job to run them through the cutters so that the half-sections would form perfect decking. Getting them back proved simple, with so many hands available. This operation was in the hands of Zimmerman and Vashily, who had emptied enough empty drums for both ‘A’-gons and the steel lashings. Zimmerman said that he never wanted to have anything more to do with oil for the rest of his life.
The day wore on. The Nyalan foragers had found some food for everybody. Teams of swimmers were lifting floating planks onto the deck of the first completed ‘B’-gon. It was an ungainly structure, with odd scalloped edges and splintery sides, but it floated high and lay fairly steadily in the water. On measuring we found that we could get one truck of not more than an eight foot beam on to it. Provided it could be driven on board.
Zimmerman, still scrounging about the camp for useful materials, came to me for a word in private.
‘Neil, you’d better know about this,’ he said. ‘I checked all the trucks including the Frog’s.’ Dufour had been careful with his truck, always driving it himself and parking it away from the others at camp stops.
‘He’s carrying a mixed cargo of basic supplies. Ben will be happy to know that there is some oxygen and acetylene and some welding rods. But that’s not all. The guy is breaking the law. He’s carrying six cases of forty per cent blasting gelignite and they aren’t on his manifest. That’s illegal, explosives should never be carried with a mixed cargo.’
‘We ought to stop him carrying it, but what the hell can we do with it? Dump it?’
‘Must we?’ he asked wistfully. Explosives were his profession.
‘OK, not yet. But don’t let Dufour know you’re on to him. Just make sure nobody smokes around his truck. No wonder he parks it way off.’ It was a possible weapon with Zimmerman’s expertise to make the best use of it.
Progress on the second ‘B’-gon was going well, but I called a halt. We were getting tired and this was when accidents were most likely to occur.
It was time for a council of war.
After the evening meal the crew gathered round and I counted and assessed them. There were fifteen men but I discounted two at once.
‘Geoff, you’re not coming.’ Wingstead had been allowed to eat with us and afterwards he must have given his watchdog nurse the slip. He was very drawn but his eyes were brighter and he looked more like the man I’d first met.
He said ruefully, ‘I’m not quite the idiot I was a couple of days ago. But I can sit on your council, Neil. I have to know what you plan to do, and I might be able to contribute.’
‘Fair enough,’ I said. Just having Wingstead there was a boost.
‘And Derek’s also out of it. He can’t walk, ankle’s swollen like a balloon,’ Wingstead said. ‘He’s pretty mad.’
‘Tell him I’ll trade places,’ offered Thorpe.
I said, ‘Not a chance, Ritchie—you’re stuck with this. You should never have been around in Port Luard when I needed a co-driver.’
‘Wouldn’t have missed it for the world,’ he said bravely.
I turned to the next lame duck.
‘Dan,’ I said gently, ‘it’s not on, you know.’
He glanced down at his still splinted arm and heaved a sigh. ‘I know. But you take bloody good care of Antoine here, you hear me?’ He and the Frenchman exchanged smiles.
‘Bert, how’s your leg?’
Proctor said, ‘Good as new, Mister Mannix. No problem, I promise you,’ for which I was grateful. He was one of the stalwarts and we needed him. Kemp’s shoulder would not hamper him, and there were no other injuries among us.
I said, ‘Sadiq has got twenty-one men. There’s one down with dysentery. With twelve of us that makes thirty-four to their seventeen: two to one. With those odds, I don’t see how we can fail.’
A figure slid into the circle and I made room for him to sit beside me. It was Captain Sadiq.
I said, ‘Basically what we have to do is this. We’re going downriver on the “B”-gon. We get there before first light. We try to overpower them without much fighting. We’ve got a few weapons and we’ll be able to get theirs if our surprise is complete. Ideally we don’t want any shooting at all.’
‘Squeamish, Mannix?’ asked McGrath.
‘Not at all,’ I said coldly. ‘But we don’t know how near any reinforcements might be. We keep this as quiet as possible.’
There was a slight stir around the circle at our exchange.
‘We have to get their radio under control, don’t we?’ Bing asked.
I had refrained, against my first instincts, from forbidding him to join the expedition. He was nineteen and by medieval standards a grown man ripe for blooding, and this was as near to medieval warfare as you could get. He was fit, intelligent and fully aware of the danger.
‘Yes, that’s going to be your baby,’ I said. ‘Your group’s first priority will be to keep it undamaged and prevent their using it. The one in the car looks out of action but you’ll make sure of that too. Brad, you run the interference for Sandy, OK?’ He may not know American football terms, but the inference was obvious and he nodded fervently. Bing was his responsibility.
‘Captain?’ I turned to Sadiq.
‘My men will make the first sortie,’ he said. ‘We have weapons and training which you do not have. We should be able to take the whole detachment without much trouble.’
Zimmerman whispered hasty translations to Kirilenko,
‘Bert, you and Ben and Antoine immobilize all the transport you can find,’ I said. ‘Something temporary, a little more refined than a crowbar through the transmission.’
‘Not a problem,’ Bert said, his usual phlegmatic response.
‘Mick, you cover Bing in the radio room and then check their weapon store; pile up everything you can. Use…’ I was about to assign Bob Pitman to him, but remembered that Pitman had no reason to trust McGrath. ‘Use Harry and Kirilenko.’ They would make a good team.
I waited to see if McGrath was going to make any suggestions of his own but he remained silent. He didn’t make me feel easy but then nothing about McGrath ever did.
I turned to Pitman.
‘Bob, you stick with me and help me secure the raft. Then we cover the ramp where they load the ferry, you, me and Kemp. We’ll want you to look at it from a transportation point of view, Basil.’ If he thought for one second that he could get his rig on board the ferry he’d be crazy but he needed to be given at least some faint reason for hope in that direction. I looked round.
‘Ritchie, I need a gofer and you’re the lucky man. You liaise between me, Captain Sadiq and the other teams. I hope you’re good at broken field running.’
‘Me? Run? I used to come last at everything, Mister Mannix,’ he said earnestly. ‘But I’ll run away any time you tell me to!’
Again laughter eased the tension a little. I was dead tired and my mind had gone a total blank. Anything we hadn’t covered would have to wait for the next day. The conference broke up leaving me and Sadiq facing one another in the firelight.
‘Do you think we can do it, Captain?’ I asked.
‘I think it is not very likely, sir,’ he said politely. ‘But on the other hand I do not know what else we can do. Feeding women and pushing oil drums and caring for the sick—that is not a sol
dier’s work. It will be good to have a chance to fight again.’
He rose, excused himself and vanished into the darkness, leaving me to stare into the firelight and wonder at the way different minds worked. What I was dreading he anticipated with some pleasure. I remembered wryly a saying from one of the world’s lesser literary figures, Bugs Bunny: Humans are the craziest people.
TWENTY-SIX
By late afternoon the next day the lakeside was in a state of barely controlled turmoil. Tethered to the shore as close as possible without grounding lay the first ‘B’-gon. It was held by makeshift anchors, large rocks on the end of some rusty chains. A gangplank of half-sectioned logs formed a causeway along which a truck could be driven on to the raft. Beyond it lay the second raft, just finished.
Nyalans clustered around full of pride and excitement at seeing their home-made contraptions being put to use. A few had volunteered to come with us but Sadiq had wisely vetoed this idea. I don’t think he was any happier about us either but here he had no choice.
From the rig patients and nurses watched with interest. Our intention was to have the truck ready on board rather than manoeuvre it in the dark of the following morning.
‘Why a truck at all?’ Wingstead had asked. ‘If you take Kanjali there’ll be transport in plenty there for you. And there’ll be no means to unload this one.’
‘Think of it as a Trojan Horse, Geoff,’ I’d said. ‘For one thing it’ll have some men in it and the others concealed behind it If the rebels see us drifting towards them then all they’ll see is a truck on a raft and a couple of men waving and looking helpless. For another, it’ll take quite a bit of equipment, weapons and so on. They’ll be safer covered up. It’s not a truck for the time being, it’s a ship’s bridge.’
Hammond approved. He was the nearest thing to a naval man we had, having served in a merchant ship for a short time. I had appointed him skipper of the ‘B’-gon. ‘Inside the cab I’ve a much better view than from deck.’
There was a fourth reason, but even Hammond didn’t know it.
The Spoilers / Juggernaut Page 59