by Chris Ryan
‘Midnight,’ Stringer said.
‘Hell of a struggle.’
‘You can say that again. Everyone’s creased. Who’s this bloke who got you out, then?’
‘The Yank? Sam something. Former SEAL. That poor bastard’s gone as well. They dropped him just as we were lining up for take-off.’
Phil handed me more water. ‘So the villains are going for the diamond.’
‘No. I mean, I don’t know. I’m sure they will, in time. But without a chopper it’ll take them days to find the wrecked plane. Even if they get hold of my GPS, they may not make anything of the waypoints. In the meantime, there’s a new deal.’
I told them about the cache of nuclear warheads. Then I amazed them, and myself, by saying, ‘I reckon we’d better go for that and clean it up before Muende does.’
Where the idea came from, I’ll never know. It just jumped into my mind, fully formed.
‘What?’ Pav was astounded. ‘Have you gone fucking mad? I thought we were on our way out of here.’
‘We were,’ I agreed. ‘But now the goalposts have moved. We need to pull our fingers out and get after those missiles.’
As I said that, I felt myself changing. It was as though I’d been supercharged with rage at Whinger’s death. In the past I’d never been really vindictive, but now I felt mean as sin: I’d dedicate myself to rubbing out the German woman and Muende, along with all his plans, if it was the last thing I did.
‘He’s not fucking getting away with it,’ I announced to the company in general. ‘There’s no way he’s going to get these weapons. You’ll see.’
Pav shot me a peculiar look, as though he thought I’d gone round the twist. By then rehydration had got my brain going again, and I felt well in control of the situation.
I reckoned I’d better give the lads a minute to adjust their ideas, so I said, ‘The first thing is to clear out of here. If the people at the convent have had a message about our escape, they could be out like a swarm of bees at any moment. Before we commit ourselves anywhere else, I need to talk to the Kremlin. Where’s the best place for a temporary LUP? Pav? Phil?’
‘Back up on that ledge at the RV point. Apart from anything else, it’s a great OP, with a view down over the pans and the river. If anyone’s coming, we’ll see them.’
‘That’s it, then. Let’s go.’
‘What about this?’ Mart pointed at the aircraft.
The thing was knackered. Without fuel, it had no future. We couldn’t hide it, and even if we tried to burn it, the tell-tale skeleton would remain.
‘Leave it,’ I said. ‘It’s done its job.’
Half an hour later we were up on the ledge, with the vehicles cammed up between two thorn bushes. As Phil had said, the outlook was brilliant: through binoculars we could see baboons feeding on the river bank, hippos feuding in the water, crocs crawling out onto sandbanks to bask in the sun. If any vehicle had moved, we’d have spotted it at once.
When I first looked into a mirror, I got a shock: my left eye was nearly closed, my mouth stuck out in a pout, and much of the rest of my face was covered by Mart’s dressings. My ribs were bruised black and blue all down my left side, but a check showed none was broken.
I made a quick inventory of the weapons and equipment we’d lost: one pinkie and all its gear, including the Milan post and half a dozen missiles; two 203s, two pistols and six badly needed jerricans of fuel. Needing to re-equip myself, I dug out Andy’s watch, which I’d stowed in the mother wagon for safekeeping, and took over Whinger’s 203, commando knife and GPS. I still had the Colt .45 which I’d taken off the white mercenary.
‘Eh, Stringer,’ I went. ‘Any joy with the satcom?’
‘Yeah, it’s fine. Didn’t you hear? The Kremlin told us about Pretorius and so on?’
‘Oh yeah. What was wrong with it?’
‘I took the handset apart and found a wire had broken inside.’
‘No wonder the bastard wouldn’t work. So you’ve been through to Hereford?’
‘Sure.’
‘What’s the buzz?’
‘We asked for an exfil. There’s a Herc on its way down. It’s going to stage through Harare and wait for us to call it in.’
‘What’s its ETA?’
‘Dunno yet. We need to get confirmation.’
I thought for a moment, then called, ‘Phil, where’s the good map?’
‘It was in your pinkie.’
‘Ah, shit. What about the other?’
‘Here.’ He brought it over. ‘What are you looking for?’
‘Place called Ichembo. Somewhere to the west. Christ, there it is. I found it straight away. That must be a sign.’
‘A sign of what?’
‘That we’re supposed to go there.’
Phil shot me a hard look as he asked, ‘What is it?’
‘The dump where these nuclear warheads are lying.’
By the time I’d got sorted, Andy’s watch was reading 0745.
‘What time will it be in Hereford?’ I asked Stringer.
‘Minus two — 0545.’
‘Let’s go through to them.’
‘What, now?’
‘Yeah. I need to catch up on things.’
This time the satcom worked perfectly, and in a few seconds I was talking to a signaller in the Comcen at Stirling Lines.
‘Who’s the Orderly Officer?’ I asked.
‘Max Davidson.’
‘Oh, right.’ I’d met the man — a tall, sandy-haired rupert who’d recently joined from the Parachute Regiment — but I hardly knew him. ‘Put him on, then.’
‘There’s been a runner sent to get him. He was talking to the DA in some dump called Mulongwe.’
‘Christ, that’s us. I mean, it’s to do with us. I’ll hold.’
From where I stood waiting, I could see the body-bag in the back of the truck. I was thinking, we can’t take Gen with us in this heat. We’re going to have to bury him, and then, if we can, come back for him later.
‘Orderly Officer speaking,’ said a Scots voice in my ear.
‘Hello. Geordie Sharp here.’
‘I’ve just been talking about you.’
‘What was the buzz?’
‘You’re blacked,’ said Davidson, jokily.
‘Great! What have we done?’
‘You attacked the Kamangan government forces without provocation and ran away. Now you’re deliberately fomenting civil war.’
‘Like fuck we are. Listen, you’ve not swallowed any of that shit, I hope?’
‘Of course not.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. Reality’s different. The Alpha commander suddenly turned round and told us to bugger off. We heard he was sending an assassination squad after us in the middle of the night, so we did a flit.’
‘Quite right,’ went Davidson. ‘Where are you now?’
I gave him our coordinates, and filled in more background. Then he said, ‘We’ve got problems at this end as well. Kamanga’s broken off diplomatic relations with the UK.’
‘Charming,’ I said.
‘Yeah. They’re refusing landing rights to British aircraft. The FCO are trying to negotiate. But if push comes to shove, the Herc can nip in across the Namibian border, permission or not. How are things with you?’
‘Bloody awful. We’ve lost two more.’
‘Oh, God! Since midnight?’
‘One before, one after.’
‘Who? Tell me.’
As quickly as I could, I brought him up to speed. I didn’t tell him about the diamond, and I didn’t say exactly what had happened to Whinger. I couldn’t. I just said he’d been murdered at the instigation of the German, that Gen and I had escaped in the light aircraft, but that Gen had collected a bullet.
‘But listen,’ I ended up. ‘The thing now’s this dump of nuclear missile heads. We’ve got to go for it.’
‘Say that again.’
‘We’ve got to grab the stuff before this nutter Muende gets his hands on i
t. We’re well placed. The location’s only about three hours west of where we are now. We can beat the opposition to it.’
‘Wait one. I think you need to talk to the Ops Officer and the CO before you go ahead on that.’
‘If we’re going, we can’t piss about. It’s now or never.’
‘What are you proposing?’
‘To lift the stuff out before anyone else gets there. What we need to do is find an LZ near the site and guide the Herc in.’
‘Geordie,’ went Davidson, as if he was speaking to a kid. ‘Take it easy. Your ideas are running away with you. All we’re looking to do is pull the remains of the team out before anyone else goes down.’
‘Where’s the Herc, then?’
‘Right now’ — he paused, as if looking at some schedule — ‘it’s en route to Harare. ETA there zero five hundred Zulu.’
‘That’s all right then. It can easily make it here by midday. But we’re going to need NBC suits for all crew members, and our own guys.’
‘Geordie, I say again: you need clearance on this one.’
‘Clearance!’ I shouted. ‘For Christ’s sake, we need help, not clearance. We’re trying to avert a fucking nuclear catastrophe.’
As I broke off the call, I again saw Pav looking at me in a strange way, but he didn’t make any comment, and I said, ‘Before we do anything else, we’d better get Gen underground.’
Nobody argued about that; we’d all seen what the heat and flies did to a body. Flies would be into the nose, eyes and mouth and lay eggs in a matter of hours. In a day or so the eggs would hatch into maggots, the maggots would start eating away, and the belly would explode with gas. Our immediate future was so uncertain that burial was essential. The only question was, where to excavate the grave. We could see that digging would be easiest down in the sand and mud around the pans, but for one thing we didn’t want to go down there, close to the river, and for another we reckoned there would be less risk of animals digging the body up again if we put it in the rocky ground high up. I kept remembering how the warthog had erupted from a hole at the site of the training ambush, and how Joss had told us that aardvarks make enormous excavations every night.
After a search, Phil found a site which he reckoned would do — a level patch, with a little grass growing out of sand — but Jason immediately told him there was rock close beneath the surface.
‘How far down is it?’ Phil asked.
‘Like this.’ The tracker held his hands about a foot apart.
‘How do you know?’
‘I feel.’
Phil glared at him, not liking to be contradicted, and started to dig anyway, with one of the short-handled, pointed shovels that we carried on the pinkies. Sure enough, just over a foot down he hit solid rock and had to admit defeat.
His second choice of site met with Jason’s approval, and there, taking turns, sweating like slaves, we got down nearly four feet before we again hit living rock, while those not digging assembled enough flat pieces of stone to cover the body.
‘That’ll do him,’ said Pav. ‘Nothing can come at him from underneath. If we put these lumps on top, he’ll be fine.’
Sorting through Genesis’s kit, we found his precious bible in the mother wagon. Our first idea was to bury it with him. Then I thought, no, there’s a good chance we’ll come back for him, so we’ll keep it with us and return it to his family.
I don’t think any of us had actually buried a mate before. Going to a funeral is one thing, doing the work another — and anyway, the body is usually inside a coffin. For Genesis we had no such luxury: he had to go under as he was, and there was no rush to take hold of him. In the end it was Pav and myself who picked up the body-bag and lowered it into the rough-cut hole. We’d dug it only just wide enough for his shoulders; his body had already gone stiff, and we had to wriggle it about to make it go down to the bottom. Once he was settled I leant over and pulled the toggle of the zip down far enough for us to see his face. His eyes were closed, and apart from some dried blood on his forehead, he looked peaceful enough
All eight of us — me, Pav, Danny, Chalky, Mart, Stringer, Phil and Jason — were shoulder to shoulder in a tight semi-circle, looking down. Nobody wanted to be the first to shovel earth in, to put him out of sight.
‘Give him our thoughts for a minute,’ I said gruffly. ‘Say goodbye.’
Seconds ticked past. I was conscious of the sun growing hotter on the back of my neck, of bird calls and insect noises. I was grateful to Pav when he broke the silence.
‘If it’d been one of us, he’d be praying,’ he said. ‘Let’s pray for him now.’
‘Yes,’ I went. ‘And save a thought for Whinger.’ Then I added, ‘The last thing Gen said, after he was hit, was, “To give light to them that sit in darkness, and in the shadow of death.”’
‘He would,’ said Pav. ‘And that’s where he is now: in the shadow of death. RIP.’
That cracked Stringer up. I saw tears come into his eyes. I bent down, gave the pallid, freckled cheek a pat, and ran the zip of the black bag shut. Then I started lowering flat rocks into place above the body and shovelling like there was no tomorrow.
THIRTEEN
In retrospect, I can see we were crazy to carry on. We were all so shattered by exhaustion that our judgement was seriously flawed. We still had the .50 machine gun and nearly a thousand rounds of ammunition, as well as one RPG and a couple of dozen grenades, besides our personal weapons, but with our team down to seven men — eight including Jason — and only two vehicles, we were hardly an effective fighting unit, and certainly not strong enough to take on a major Kamangan force. We should have sat tight in our elevated LUP, waited until the incoming Herc was poised for a short last leg, and then gone out to find an LZ to mark with smoke grenades to guide the pilot in.
We did none of those things. Instead, we held an impromptu Chinese parliament in the shade of a leadwood tree and by a unanimous vote decided to head for Ichembo.
For me, the decision was easy. By then I was being driven by personal hatred of Muende and the German woman. I was rational enough to recognise this compulsion and see its dangers, but reason wasn’t strong enough to prevent me trying to gain revenge for Whinger’s death by topping both of them. After what they’d done, I’d have walked the length of the continent to get level with them, but after listening to Sam, I’d got it firmly in my head that the rebel leader would be leading the raid on the nuclear cache in person. Furthermore, having seen how he and Inge worked together, I felt certain she’d be coming with him. Therefore, if we reached Ichembo first, we’d have a good chance of ambushing the pair of them.
I was also needled by a dislike of failure. With our training task in ruins, and three of our lads dead, we’d got nothing to show for our month in Africa. It went against the grain to head for home with three lives lost and bugger all achieved. If, on the other hand, we managed to avert a nuclear showdown among such volatile states, we’d have a big plus to our credit. If we secured the weapons and topped Muende at the same time, all my goals would be achieved at once.
I was perfectly open with the rest of the guys. I told them exactly what I was thinking. Like me, they felt frustrated at the way the original task had collapsed under them, through no fault of their own; to have quit at that stage would have left a bad taste in their mouths. They also saw that immediate action was needed to secure the nuclear arsenal, and that to let it fall into Muende’s hands would be criminally irresponsible.
Yet beyond these practical considerations there lay a different pressure. I didn’t realise it at the time, but Pav told me later that from the moment I tumbled out of that little aircraft and collapsed on the deck, the rest of the team thought I’d changed. They felt I was somehow different: more ruthless than usual, almost fanatical. There were moments when they feared I’d lost the plot completely. They put it down to the experience I’d been through during the night, and luckily they were sympathetic. If they hadn’t been basically on-side, t
hey might have mutinied. I know, now, that at one stage, when my behaviour became too outrageous, they did discuss ganging up on me and putting me under open arrest, but because they felt nearly as bad about Whinger and Genesis as I did, team loyalty held everyone together.
When I say ‘everyone’, that included our new recruit, Jason. He was as loyal as anybody, but again, his reasons were different. Having thrown in his lot with us, he seemed determined to come with us wherever we went, to stick with us to the bitter end, whatever that might be, and then come back to the UK. ‘I come work for you in England’ became his constant refrain. He had no conception of the difficulties involved: immigration laws, work permits, the northern climate — all way beyond his ken. But none of that fazed him in the least, and as for us, because he’d saved all our lives, we felt bound to do our best for him, and we kidded him along with jokey enquiries as to how he’d deal with his family if he did leave Africa.
‘How many wives have you got, Jason?’ Danny asked once.
‘Two, sir.’
‘What about children?’
‘No children.’
‘What, none at all?’
‘No sir.’
‘How’s that, then?’
‘Woman’s no good!’ He flipped up a skeletal hand, as though throwing one of the useless creatures over his shoulder, and everybody laughed. The fact that he had no young family to support made the idea of him emigrating seem less far-fetched, but still none of us took it seriously.
Yet he was the one who finally tipped us over in the direction of carrying on. We’d held the usual discussion of pros and cons, reviewing our options, and when I went to sum up, I expected opinions to be evenly divided.
‘So,’ I began, ‘we’re okay for ammunition and food. Water — have to be careful, but we can manage. Fuel’s the diciest. We’ve got enough to reach the area of the cache, but not much more. What we need is to hijack another vehicle without blowing it up, and nick its supply. We haven’t the fuel to return to Mulongwe, and in any case, my guess is we’d be thoroughly bloody unwelcome there. The main problem is to find the nuclear site. I vote we carry on to Ichembo and grab somebody with local knowledge who can give us directions. What does everyone think?’