by Chris Ryan
I punched in the figures, waited a few seconds, then squeezed the button on the hand-set, and said, ‘Hullo, Zero. This is Sierra Five Four. Sierra Five Four.’
Holding my breath, I released the button. Nothing but a rush of static. I waited a minute, then tried again, with the same result.
‘You little fucker,’ said Stringer quietly, gazing at the brilliant stars as he addressed the satellite. ‘You’re up there somewhere. I can almost see you with the naked eye.’ Then he turned to me, and said, ‘With the sky this clear, you’d think we’d have continuous comms — nothing to block them.’
‘I know. Maybe it’s to do with the ionosphere.’
‘Check all the connections, anyway.’
We did that next, undoing every one and tightening it again before we tried once more. I imagined the signallers sitting in the bomb-proof Comms Centre in the Kremlin, monitoring calls from all over the world. Why in hell weren’t they responding to ours? There was no question of them having gone for a piss, or being asleep. The centre was run to the highest professional standards and continuously manned. The fault must lie in the atmospherics, or in our set.
‘Try again in an hour,’ I said, and on we went.
For the next stage it was my turn to drive the lead pinkie, and I needed all my concentration to avoid rocks, skirt depressions and weave between trees whenever the bush grew thicker. Towards the end I had a headache, and I felt so shattered I told Pav to keep talking to me so that I didn’t fall asleep at the wheel.
Midnight brought a badly needed respite. We reckoned we’d put fifteen kilometres between us and our last campsite. Because there’d been no sign of any pursuit, it seemed safe to stop and get a brew on, so we lit up our solid fuel stoves and set about making hot drinks. The person who needed liquid most was Whinger. By then he’d more or less stopped talking; he’d only respond to a remark if really pressed, and we had to haul him into a sitting position to get some warm, sweet tea down his neck.
‘Hang in there, mate,’ I told him. ‘We’ll get you to the Krankenhaus first thing in the morning.’ I made my voice sound cheerful, but it choked me to see my old mate sunk so low.
I’d just taken my first sip of cocoa when, very faintly, a dull splutter of small-arms fire popped off in the distance far behind us, then another. The sounds seemed to come from somewhere to the right of the line we’d been driving on.
‘It is a battle? Yes?’ Inge loomed out of the dark. She’d gone walkabout to have a pee, and I noticed she was moving more freely.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, genially. ‘It was a long way off, any road. I see your foot’s on the mend.’
‘It is stronger, yes. I think there is nothing broken. Only bruises.’
The distant noises spurred us on. Whether or not Jason’s version of events had been correct, we knew now that some action was in progress behind us, so we reckoned we’d done the right thing, and I had no regrets as we motored on through the rest of the night, with the moon gradually moving across the sky until it was low over the horizon to our left front.
At the four o’clock halt Stringer came up to me, and said, ‘Still no comms, but I think I’ve hacked Boisset’s message.’
His normal handwriting was small and neat, but on the sheet of paper he handed me the letters were all over the place, thrown by the jolting of the vehicle. Even so, I had no trouble reading them by torchlight. What he’d done was to decipher the condensed French text by opening it out into separate words; then he’d added a translation.
J(OSS)’S VOLTE-FACE PARCE QU’ IL CHERCHE (UNE) PIERRE EXCEPT (IONNELLEMENT) GRANDE TROUVÉE IL Y A QUEL(QUES) JOURS
JOSS’S ABOUT-TURN BECAUSE HE’S LOOKING FOR AN EXCEPTIONALLY LARGE STONE FOUND A FEW DAYS AGO
‘Good on yer, Stringer,’ I went. ‘Hey, Phil, look at this.’
‘What does he mean,’ growled Phil, ‘“an exceptionally large stone”?’
‘Don’t you remember? The old Belgian told us that sometimes rocks the size of pigeons’ eggs come up out of the river. I reckon they found one of those. If it doesn’t have too many faults, it’ll be worth a fucking fortune. This explains Joss’s crazy behaviour. It’s got to be this that flipped him.’
‘No wonder the bastard wanted us out, then,’ went Phil. ‘He’s after the stone himself.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘He couldn’t afford to have us know anything about it. That’s why he had those two guys shot by the kangaroo court. Must be. He reckoned they’d got the big one, or knew something about it. You know how he kept shouting the same question at the second guy? I bet he was asking, “Where is it? Where is it?” He’ll be doing his nut by now.’
‘Fuck him,’ said Phil, savagely. ‘It’s too much to hope that noise just then was him running into the rebels.’
‘Not him,’ I said. ‘Not Joss. He’ll be down there digging holes all over the compound, trying to find his magic rock.’
When we drove on again, I kept thinking about the diamond. If Boisset had been working in the heart of the mine, why hadn’t he seen it when it came up out of the river? Maybe he’d been locked away in his cell at the time. And then, how had Joss found out about it? From one of the technicians we’d released, I supposed. They were the guys who would have seen it. And what had happened to them? If they’d refused to say where it had been hidden, they’d probably been fed to the crocs by now. The one fact of which I felt certain was that Joss himself wouldn’t leave the mine until he’d found the big one.
Our plan was to keep moving until first light, and then take stock of our position. But things didn’t quite work out that way. By 0430 we’d reached a dead flat area. The ground was smooth and level, and sandy to the touch, with patches of tall, dense grass scattered about. I realised we might be near the edge of what the map called the Zebra Pans, and that therefore the ground might be soft, so for a while we had a couple of guys walking ahead to test the going. Then, because it seemed firm enough, they climbed back aboard.
Trouble came without warning. Pavarotti, at the wheel of the lead pinkie, suddenly began cursing.
‘Fucking hell!’ he went. ‘Puncture… no it isn’t. We’re going down!’
He slammed the gear lever down into second and gunned the engine, but the vehicle wallowed as if it was afloat and settled on to its belly. Pav revved some more, went into reverse, gunned again, and gave up with a yell of ‘Shit!’
Twisting round, I saw the blunt bonnet of the mother wagon just behind us, also stationary. The roar of its engine instantly told me that it, too, was stuck.
‘Switch off a minute,’ I shouted. I jumped out, expecting my boots to sink in. To my surprise, the ground felt firm. But when I shone a torch at the pinkie’s wheels, I immediately saw what had happened. We’d driven on to a crust of dried-out earth, and the weight of the vehicles had taken them through it. Round the tyres liquid mud was oozing up, glistening in the torch beam.
‘Jesus!’ I said. ‘This is all we need.’
Genesis was still gunning the engine of the mother truck, which heaved and shuddered like a stranded elephant as all four wheels churned in the morass. Already our predicament was bad enough, and the mechanical scream made it intolerable. I waved my torch violently at him, shouting, ‘Switch off, for fuck’s sake!’ Thank God, Stringer, driving the second pinkie, had been far enough behind to stop and back off before he too sank into the quagmire.
Behind us the sky was already starting to lighten. Looking all round, I couldn’t make out a tree anywhere, only grass, grass, grass. Nothing to winch on to. Nothing to hide under. In every possible sense of the phrase, we’d landed in the shit. The only factor in our favour was that the ground round the vehicles was solid enough to bear human beings: we could walk about without our boots going through the crust. But the bedded vehicles were over their axles, down on their bellies.
‘Pav,’ I called. ‘I vote we wait for daylight before we start any winching. What do you reckon?’
‘Good decision,’
he answered. ‘Otherwise we could end up worse than we are.’
‘Let’s get some breakfast, then.’
Before I looked out some food, I went to check on Whinger. I found Mart with him in the back of the mother wagon, propping him half upright to make him drink some water. The right side of his head was still covered with gauze, but the other half of his face looked puffed-out and swollen. When I went, ‘How’re you doing, Whinge?’ he didn’t answer, and Mart had to fill in for him.
‘He’s going down,’ he said. ‘Unless we get him into a better environment, he’s not going to last the day.’
For a few moments I couldn’t speak. Then I took refuge in practicalities, and said loudly, ‘We’ve got to get out of this mess, first. Then we’ll see what we can do.’
I drew Pav aside, and said, ‘I know we’re wanting north. But I reckon the priority now is definitely to get old Whinge into dock.’
‘Agreed.’
‘Best if we can all go on to Msisi together then. But if we can’t, it may come down to a couple of us taking the good pinkie and leaving the rest of you here. I don’t like the idea of those turds following our trail and finding you stuck — but there it is.’
‘No sweat,’ said Pav. ‘I don’t think they’ll come anyway. But somebody can nip back a couple of kilometress and mine the track. At least that’d give us early warning. Christ, look at that.’
Straight behind us, in precisely the direction from which we’d come, the rim of the sun was coming over the horizon, a blood-red crescent sitting on the rim of a black world. As we stared, it grew rapidly into a crimson hemisphere, then into a complete ball, and our surroundings took on a ruddy glow.
A GPS check gave coordinates that tallied closely with the location shown on our good map as the eastern end of the first Zebra Pan. We reckoned the river couldn’t be more than a couple of kilometres due south, and the convent no more than fifteen downstream to the south-west.
With daylight strengthening, we recced outwards on foot and confirmed that we’d driven into the edge of the easternmost pan. The land round the stranded vehicles had obviously been flooded during the rains: although the surface was dry now, we could see it had been levelled and puddled by sheets of water. Genesis, returning from a quick sortie, reported that reeds eight or ten feet tall were growing in water a few hundred metres ahead. Behind us, in contrast, the terrain was quite different. Only fifty metres from the big wagon we found a definite demarcation line, where the bare mud ended and thick grass was established. Easy enough to see it now, but if we’d stopped half an hour earlier, and waited for dawn to break, we’d have been okay. As it was, exhaustion had blunted my judgement and let me blunder on.
All three vehicles were equipped with front-end winches. In theory the way to recover the stranded pair was to winch out the pinkie first, and then use both jeeps to pull the mother wagon out backwards. The trouble was, truck and jeep were one behind the other, in line ahead, both facing away from the pinkie on dry land. There was no way we could drive round in front, to give a pull from that direction, because the treacherous ground extended for hundreds of metres, becoming softer and softer as it approached the reeds. The only solution seemed to be to attach both pinkies’ winch cables to each other and try, by pulling at an angle, to drag the bogged one round in its own length.
So began a dire struggle. While Pav went back along our tracks to cover our backsides, the rest of us dug, heaved and sweated until we were on our knees with filth and exhaustion. The mud beneath the crust was grey-brown and glutinous. The moment we began to dig, we were covered in it from top to toe, and as the temperature mounted, we got into a hell of a state, so plastered in slime that we looked like aboriginals going through some initiation ceremony.
Progress was alarmingly slow. Once the mud was disturbed, it exercised terrific suction: when our boots went down into it, we had the devil’s own job to pull them out, and the vehicles were held as if by glue. When we linked the two winch cables together with shackles and pulled in opposite directions, trying to heave the front of the stranded pinkie round, all that happened was that the free vehicle got dragged bodily forward, with the clutches of both winches squealing and overheating. Next we tried digging so that we could get our perforated steel strips of sand-track under the wheels, but as soon as we opened a trench, water seeped into it and dissolved the mud into thick soup, leaving the tyres nothing to grip on, with the belly of the vehicle held as fast as ever.
As the sun rose, tsetse flies swarmed out of the grass and increased our desperation. Their easiest target was Whinger, who was too comatose to notice when they landed on him, so we carried his cot out of the back of the stranded pinkie and set it in the shadow of a clump of grass, with mozzie nets rigged up over him. He never made a sound while we were moving him, but every now and then, as we worked, he’d start shouting gibberish.
The nightmare would have been bad enough without the German woman, but she nearly sent us ballistic, hopping about, making idiotic remarks, apparently panicking about the time, as if she was going to miss a plane.
‘I think we are late,’ she kept saying. ‘We should go now. Push harder, please.’
‘Late for what?’ I replied, only just managing to keep expletives out of it. ‘And can’t you see we’re doing our best?’
At around 0830 Pavarotti reappeared, chuffed to bollocks at having laid what he called ‘a couple of nice ones’. He’d buried the mines at places where we’d driven through dry river beds, and he’d raked out the sand above them so that our wheel-tracks appeared to run straight through the hollows. When he saw the state we were in, he was amazed. ‘Christ!’ he exclaimed. ‘You lot remind me of that cabaret we went to in Berlin: hermaphrodites wrestling in mud.’
‘You come and try it, mate,’ Chalky snapped. ‘You won’t think it so fucking funny.’
Pav got stuck in. By 0900, after repeatedly digging away the mud beside the wheels, rather than in front of them, and then winching, we’d dragged the stranded pinkie about halfway round. But the guys looked totally knackered, covered in mud and sweat and visibly drooping, so I called a break and lay down flat on my back, looking up at the sky. High above us two large birds of prey were effortlessly circling, gliding round and round in huge sweeps with no perceptible movement of their wings. There was something faintly ridiculous about their shape: their tails were so short that it looked as though they were flying backwards.
‘What are those, Jason?’
‘Bateleur eagles,’ he answered. ‘Snake eaters.’
‘Some flyers. If we could fly like that, we’d be at Msisi in a couple of minutes.’
When I closed my eyes, I got a sudden, clear vision of the convent hospital. I saw a compound shaded by trees, an airy ward open to the breeze, nuns in white habits ministering to the sick, a sister in an office working the radio. I knew it was wishful thinking, but the pictures were startlingly real, and as I lay there some sort of compulsion took hold of me. We couldn’t wait any longer. We had to get Whinger to this place. We had to get the woman out, for her own safety. We had to send a radio message to the outside world.
I opened my eyes. The eagles were still circling, as if keeping an eye on our puny struggles, or maybe hoping we would flush out some prey.
‘Pav,’ I croaked.
‘Hullo.’
I turned my head and realised he was lying on the ground a few feet away.
‘We can’t fuck about any more. We’ve got to get Whinger into dock. As soon as we get the pinkie out, I’m going to drive on with him and Genesis, and leave you to carry on extracting the mother wagon. D’you have any problem with that?’
‘Fine by me,’ he went, ‘but take the woman with you too, eh? She’s driving the guys round the bend, and if the Alpha guys follow up, the last thing we need in the middle of a fire-fight is a hysterical Kraut.’
‘Will do, mate.’
‘How long will you be?’
‘Can’t say. We’ve got to find the place
first. But I’ll be surprised if it’s much more than an hour ahead of us. Maybe three hours for the round trip.’ I looked at my watch. ‘If we leave at midday, we should be back by 1600 at the latest. Well before dark, anyway.’
‘Okay.’ Pav sat up and slapped at a tsetse fly that had landed on his shin. ‘Supposing we get out, what d’you want us to do?’
‘Stick around,’ I said. ‘If there’s anything wrong with the hospital’s radio — if we can’t get Whinger casevacked, for any reason — we can’t just leave him there. We’ll get what drugs we can for him, but we may have to bring him back for the time being.’
‘We’d better RV on higher ground,’ said Pav. ‘Up there, for instance.’ He pointed to the north, where a tree-covered ridge formed the skyline. ‘See that single tree standing out on the little shelf? If we get clear, we’ll make for that and get cammed up in the best location near it.’
‘Fine,’ I agreed. ‘Provided we get back in daylight, no problem.’
Pav asked, ‘What’s your route going to be?’
‘Good question.’
I dug out our reliable map. Its scale was too small for it to be much use, but it gave the general lie of the land.
‘All we can do is head straight south, for the river, which I reckon should be just out of our sight.’ I indicated the spot where I thought we were. ‘Then we turn right and follow the north bank, as closely as we can.’
Looking back on that terrible day, I realise how vague and speculative our plans were. We didn’t have any precise idea of where we were; we didn’t know where the convent was; we weren’t confident that the mother wagon could be rescued; and we knew that a strong Alpha force might well come on the scene. Our little party was in an extremely dangerous situation. Yet necessity drove us on. Necessity and exhaustion: we were all too worn out to see the risks or take rational decisions.
At last we managed to turn the bogged pinkie round. Once we’d got it lined up in the right direction, we started to make slow progress by digging in front of its wheels, slipping sand-tracks under the tyres at a slight upward angle, and winching the vehicle forward two or three feet at a time. The process was desperately laborious, but it worked. Gradually, as we drew near the edge of the pan, the mud became shallower and the rate of advance speeded up. At last Phil gunned the pinkie the final few yards under its own power, and a cheer went up, half ironic, half relieved, as it went up on to dry land under its own power. The time was 1145. Every part of the under-carriage was packed with mud — axles, steering arms, track rods, hubs, brake-tubes — but nothing seemed to be damaged, and as we had no spare water, any attempt to wash parts clean was out of the question.