by Chris Ryan
‘A colonel!’ I laughed. ‘Heavens no. A colonel’s a rupert.’
‘What’s a rupert?’
‘An officer. I’m a warrant officer, a sergeant-major. It’s people like me who run the show.’
‘What do ruperts do, then?’
‘Make a lot of noise and sign forms.’
‘I’ve got a friend called Rupert. Does that mean his father’s a colonel?’
‘Oh no. It’s only an army word – a kind of slang. A rupert’s any officer, from a second lieutenant to a general.’
Suddenly I spotted movement in the valley beneath us. Two RAF Tornados were heading almost straight for us. Their dappled camouflage made them hard to pick out against the variegated background. They’d slipped round a shoulder of the mountain in a tight turn, below our level, and were climbing hard in our direction.
‘Look out!’ I shouted. ‘This is going to be noisy. Cover your ears!’
I was just in time. If we hadn’t been prepared, the jets would have given us a bad fright. Even with hands clasped to our heads we were rocked by the thunderclap of their engines as they roared past, with fire blazing from the tails as their re-heats blasted them upwards and over the ridge.
For a moment Tim was shaken, but he recovered immediately and said, ‘That’s what I want to do.’
‘Be a pilot? Well, if you could hack it, at least you’d see some action. The fast-jet boys are always the ones who get deployed.’
We talked about the G-forces the pilots would be experiencing – how, if you pull five G, you can hardly lift your hands off your knees, your head weighs the equivalent of fifty pounds, and all your blood tries to run down to your feet, so that only the special suit you’re wearing prevents you passing out.
By then the clouds were thinning and breaking, and I pointed out various landmarks as they came into sight. At last we skirted Cribben and moved out on to the short, dry grass that sloped gently up to the summit. I almost said, ‘Race you to the top,’ but I knew I couldn’t accelerate to save my life. Tim was ahead anyway, so I just called, ‘On you go. I’ll see you up there.’
Five minutes later we were sitting in bright sunshine on top of the mountain, where the trig stone used to stand, with a 360-degree panorama spread out below us. I felt a little flutter of elation at having reached the highest point and seeing all the familiar landmarks, even if it was for the last time.
‘Chicken or BLT?’ I said, breaking out the sandwiches.
‘What’s BLT?’
‘Bacon, lettuce and tomato, with mayonnaise.’
‘Chicken, please.’
‘There you go.’ I handed him the packet, along with a can of Coke. ‘Get that down you, and I’ll tell you about the witch doctor.’
‘What’s a witch doctor?’
‘Someone who puts spells on you.’
‘Why does he do it, though?’
‘Well – for money. He’s like a combination of doctor and magician. People pay him to cure them of diseases and suchlike.’
‘What does he look like?’
‘I expect they are all different. But the one we saw was tall and thin.’
‘Like Rasputin?’
‘Let’s see.’ I was thrown for a moment, because that was the name we’d given one of the Russian mercenaries we came across in Kamanga. Then I said, ‘The mad monk, you mean?’
‘In Anastasia.’
‘Oh, that one. No, not like him. For one thing our witch doctor was black, and for another he didn’t have a beard.’
The boy was staring at me, full of curiosity. ‘Were you scared of him, Dad?’
‘Not at first. I thought he was a phoney. But later, yes. I did get very scared, with all the things that happened. Come on, now, eat your lunch, and I’ll tell you.’
TWO
Every day for the past couple of weeks the sun had grown slightly hotter, until at noon the temperature had started to hit the low nineties. But the nights were still quite chilly, and now once again, as full darkness closed in, the air was cooling quickly.
As if reacting to a command, several of the lads moved closer to the fire, all at the same moment, dragging their seats forward so that the steel ammunition boxes grated over the beaten earth. We’d made the fire in typical Kamangan fashion, with branches of dead mopane wood pointing inwards like the spokes of a cartwheel, so that all you had to do to stoke the blaze from time to time was to push a piece inwards towards the hub. Mopane, we’d soon discovered, was an ideal fuel. The sticks burned so steadily that they’d smoulder all night, but you could make them flare up again into a hot fire when you revived them in the morning.
Above us, the leaves of two big mahogany trees shivered as a breeze ran through them, and all around in the bush crickets were sounding off a continuous, zinging buzz. From the edge of the village, a hundred metres away, came bursts of laughter and chat as the locals brewed up supper, separated from us only by a grass stockade they’d built in a pathetic attempt to deter elephants from raiding their little stores of maize.
I looked round the circle of familiar faces. Including myself, there were eight of us, all with low-mow haircuts. One of the traditions in the Regiment is that nobody need have a squaddie’s traditional short back-and-sides. Recently, it was true, one or two officious individuals had crept up through ranks and gone about fining people anything from £50 to £100 for looking unkempt. But that was exceptional. It was also ridiculous, because one of the SAS’s skills has always been to blend in with the local population. Here in Africa there was no chance of that, and for this trip to a hot and bug-ridden country everyone had opted for crew-cuts, so the guys had a vaguely American appearance.
The glow of the flames was softening their complexions, even Whinger Watson’s. The ruddy light seemed to iron some of the wrinkles out of his face; certainly it disguised the grey bristles in his Mexican-type moustache. Like me, he was heading for forty, and had that strained, heavily lined appearance which SAS guys tend to get from repeatedly pushing themselves to their physical limits, and also from the mental stress of working and playing hard; but now he looked ten years younger. He and I were so much the senior members of the party that we spent a lot of time together, and tended to compare notes about the younger guys, almost as if they were apprentices in our trade.
After a fortnight of African winter sun, everyone had started to acquire a serious tan. Everyone, that is, except Pete Jones, known to all as Genesis from his tireless reading of the Bible. He, poor bugger, with his gingery hair and freckled skin, had immediately started to burn: he’d had to wear a wide-brimmed hat and keep his sleeves rolled down to stop himself being sizzled. Also, he’d reacted violently to the bites of mozzies and tsetse flies. All of us had got bitten, but whereas the rest had developed nothing worse than itchy bumps, Genesis had come up in horrific-looking blisters full of yellow fluid, all along the insides of his forearms.
‘How are the bites, Gen?’ I asked.
‘So-so,’ he replied – from which I knew they must be itching horrendously, because he always played down any problem he had. Lately he’d started carrying on about how the Lord had inflicted Job with boils, and my enquiry set him off again.
‘“Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth,”’ he went in his singsong Welsh lilt, shining a pencil torch into the pages of his little bible, with its battered cover of white leather, which he kept about his person twenty-four hours a day. ‘“Therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty. For he maketh sore, and bindeth up; he woundeth and his hands make whole.”’
‘But what have you done to annoy the Big Boss?’ I asked.
‘Our sins are not to be accounted for,’ he replied. But Pavarotti Price, our other Welshman, who was twice Genesis’s size and famous for the fact that he had a Chinese-looking eye tattooed on either cheek of his arse, groaned, ‘Ah, for fuck’s sake! Give over.’
Genesis looked at him coolly over the top of his bible, then closed the book without remonstrating. That wa
s typical of him: he had such a forgiving nature that he could rise above any number of obscenities, and never resorted to any himself. Sometimes one of the lads got seriously pissed off with his pious attitude, but everyone had to respect the guy for his integrity and professional skills. Now Pav, having bollocked him, gave him a friendly grin to show he meant no harm. He was amused by the fact that Genesis obviously felt at home in Kamanga, where the colonial missionary influence had left many of the men with biblical Christian names: David, James, Joseph, Philemon, Isaac.
Tilting the face of his watch towards the fire, Pav said, ‘They’re late.’
‘Yep,’ I went. ‘Another air-lock in the fuel, I expect.’
At lunchtime the seven-ton Zyl truck had gone off on its weekly supply run to Chiwembe, the nearest town. Most of us had never been there, but Pav, who’d master-minded the first trip, described the place as ‘the arsehole of Africa’. When somebody remarked that we were already in that location, Pav came back with, ‘In that case, Chiwembe’s a hundred and something ks up it.’ Although it was only 120 km to the east, the dirt roads were so diabolical that the journey took over four hours each way. That day’s drivers, Joseph and Sanford, were African, but two of our guys had gone with them to ride shotgun and make sure that no sell-offs took place on the way home. Even allowing an hour for loading, they should have been back by now: they’d left at midday, and already it was past eight.
Meals had been kept back for them, but the rest of us had already eaten: impala curry with rice – and very good, too. Like everyone else, the Kamangan soldiers preferred fresh meat to their rations, which were mostly canned, and they shot whatever they could. One of them had gunned down two antelopes with his AK47, and Stringer Simpson, our comms specialist, had helped him skin and butcher the animals, because before he joined the army he’d worked in a slaughterhouse and was an ace at handling meat. The local cooks also knew what they were at, especially when it came to spices. Pondani, the kitchen boss, had done two versions of the curry, billed as ‘hot’ and ‘nuclear’, and the nuclear version had been enough to blow your head off.
Round the fire, uncomfortably full, we chitchatted about our task in Kamanga. At the briefing in Hereford everything had sounded simple and straightforward. Our role was to bolster the government army by training their select Alpha Commando, and we’d come out under the impression that they just wanted general instruction. But as soon as we reached camp, out in the bush, it became clear that Alpha was preparing for a particular operation: an attack on Gutu, a diamond mine in the south of the country captured by rebel forces the year before, and it was in planning this that they needed our help.
Equally clear was the fact that the officers expected us to accompany them into battle when the time came. This we’d been specifically forbidden to do: our orders were to act as advisers only, and not to get involved in any fighting. On paper, that was fine, but from previous operations Whinger and I knew all too well how the best of intentions go to ratshit in the field. It had happened in a big way during our time in Russia, a year before. There, too, we’d been told not to tangle with local villains, specifically the mafia, but circumstances had got the better of us, and we’d ended up fully engaged. Back in Hereford, we’d taken a token bollocking, but we got away with bending the rules because we were judged to have done far more good than harm.
This time, we hadn’t made any firm decision. Whinger and I both liked the Alpha CO, Major Joss Mvula, and wanted to keep our options open. Joss was a lively, likeable guy, a bit younger than me, with crinkly black hair already receding from his forehead. He’d never been out of Kamanga, but he’d studied at the military academy in the capital, Mulongwe, and seemed well educated. He had quite a clear idea of world politics: he knew about the special relationship between Britain and America, and the tension between East and West during the Cold War. He’d seen for himself the mess the Russians had made of things when they were empire-building in Africa, and the speed with which they abandoned ship, leaving most of their equipment behind. He’d had enough communist ideology to last him a lifetime, so he was predisposed in our favour. Just as important, from our point of view, he had plenty of common sense and a reasonable grip over his men. Also, he saw the funny side of things, so he was good gas to work with.
As we waited for the truck, our talk turned to the training ambush due to go down next day. We’d already hammered out most details, both on our own and with Joss, but, as always, doubts niggled. We’d seen what happened when the Kamangans started firing live rounds: they got so over-excited they were liable to lose control. On a simple fire-and-movement exercise one guy had already gone completely hyper, screaming and shouting as he squirted off a whole twenty-round magazine, waving the weapon around in one hand like a pistol and spraying rounds through 360 degrees. Tomorrow night they were going to be firing live rounds in the dark.
During our first week we’d done what we could to steady the guys down, taking them through the various stages of range work. Then we’d started teaching them to move through the bush – individually, in pairs, finally in patrol groups. They’d learnt quite fast, and improved to the point where we’d made them do a dry attack on a dummy camp we’d built for the purpose – an exercise which went off better than we’d expected. But still I felt sure that in a real battle a lot of them would go ballistic.
The country was ideal for training. The land consisted of low hills covered in bush and forest, with rivers of pale sand winding through. We’d heard that in the rains, from November to March, these shallow channels filled up and became tributaries of the Nasangua, a big river to the south. But now, in July – the middle of the African winter – they were bone dry and easy to cross on foot, although dodgy for vehicles, which easily became bedded in the fine sand.
Before the civil war the area had been a game-park. The villages had been cleared out of it thirty years earlier, and there were no humans living in a block of at least five million acres. The Kamangans told us that, once we got outside the park, we’d find burnt-out villlages by the score, fields uncultivated, everything gone to waste; but in the country we’d seen so far, there had been no inhabitants anyway. This meant we could fire live ammunition in any direction we fancied without endangering anybody – a fantastic freedom from restrictions. In that environment it was hardly surprising that the Kamangans were trigger-happy. Whenever they had weapons loaded, they’d loose off at anything that moved, whether they themselves were on foot or riding in the backs of vehicles.
After two years of war, the park had gone to ruin. The village where we were camped had been just outside the boundary, beside the main gate. Somehow the grass huts had escaped destruction, but inside the park the tourist lodges had been burnt, and the tracks used for game drives had either grown over or been washed away by flash floods during the rains. Most of the animals had been shot out. The rhinos had gone first, killed for their horns, and hundreds of elephants had been poached for their ivory. Already we’d found gaunt hulks of elephant carcasses, eaten to the skeleton by vultures, hyenas, jackals and insects. Joss told us that normally the hyenas would have eaten the bones as well, or carried them away, but the war had produced such carnage that the scavengers couldn’t keep pace with the supply of rotting bodies. Everywhere we found heaps of hyena droppings – so white, from all the calcium the animals ate, that they were known as ‘missionaries’ chalk’ – and at night eerie howling sounded off from all points of the compass.
For the ambush exercise Whinger and I had recced a perfect site, where a dirt road crossed one of the sand rivers. On the home side of the crossing the terrain was open, with scattered trees and shrubs growing from stony ground, but the far bank of the river – enemy territory – was cloaked with thick bush, and it was from there – according to the scenario we’d devised – that the terrorists would appear.
‘The second lot of pop-up targets,’ said Whinger. ‘It might pay us to move them another hundred metres along the bank. That’d give the ki
ller group a better arc.’
‘Okay,’ I agreed. ‘We’ll have time to take another look at it in the morning. What’s that?’
I broke off as a hefty, low-pitched hoo-hoo sounded somewhere close above us, and I looked up to see a huge bird pass silently overhead, a fast-moving silhouette, black against the stars.
‘Jesus!’ exclaimed Chalky White. ‘A bloody great owl.’
‘Where?’ Everyone started craning their necks around.
‘It went thataway.’ Chalky pointed towards the village.
Seconds later, from among the grass huts, there burst an eruption of noise: people yelling, pots and pans being hammered. We stood up to get a better view, and Pavarotti nipped across to the nearest pinkie, where he grabbed a spot-lamp, switched it on and swept the beam over the shiny, dark-green canopy of the mango trees which rose above the settlement.
‘It must be a great eagle owl,’ said Mart Stanning, our medic, who’d got talking about birds to one of the Alpha guys. ‘The locals don’t like them. They reckon the devil uses owls for transport, so it’s bad news if one comes into the village. If it sits on the roof of a house, it means someone in that family’s going to die before morning.’
‘Cheerful lot, these buggers,’ said Pavarotti. ‘With that racket under it, I don’t reckon the bird’ll so much as touch down, let alone stay long enough to organise a funeral—’
The rest of his sentence was cut off by a hollow report, and we saw a spurt of flame shoot into the air.
‘Christ!’ exclaimed Danny Stewart. ‘The headman’s let drive with that bloody old muzzle-loader he showed us. I hope it hasn’t killed him.’
We’d seen the weapon a couple of days earlier – a fearsome, home-made contraption about six feet long, held together with rusty wire and leather thongs, which the owner displayed proudly, showing us how much powder he would load: two fingers’ width for an antelope, three for a buffalo, four for an elephant. We reckoned any discharge would be a greater threat to him than to whatever he fired at, but clearly the gun was his pride and joy. At the same time, we couldn’t help noticing that he’d lost his left thumb.