by Chris Ryan
‘I can’t figure out the rebels’ strategy,’ I said as I sat beside Whinger in the front of one of the pinkies. ‘Bakunda reckoned they’ve got five hundred armed men, at most. With a force that size there’s no way they could control an area as vast as this.’
‘Not a chance,’ Whinger agreed. ‘All they can do is hold on to one or two key points. If they’re getting diamonds from the mine, they can buy in weapons from other countries. Meanwhile, they terrorise the population by burning villages while they build up their strength. The arms convoy was supposed to be part of that build-up. Even if we only delayed it, we may have done ourselves a favour.’
‘I wish to hell we’d hit it, though,’ I said. ‘It would have been nice to see a few tons of ammo go up in smoke.’
‘By the way,’ said Whinger, ‘what did you make of Joss last night?’
‘I don’t know. Until then I’d thought the guy was all for us. But I suddenly got the feeling he doesn’t like us that much.’
‘Not a lot we can do about it.’ Whinger beat a tattoo on the wheel with his fingers spread. ‘And anyway, in about three weeks we can say goodbye to him.’
By noon that day we were well into rebel territory, and everyone was getting hyped up with the feeling that we were driving into danger. Our relatively carefree time of training, pure and simple, was over. From now on we might come under attack at any moment. Already we were exceeding our brief from Hereford, but I told myself that if anything did develop, we’d pull back and let the Kamangans handle it.
The overgrown track had swung more to the east than we wanted, but for the time being it still seemed our best option, and we followed it, moving cautiously in short bounds, conscious of the fact that somebody might be coming out to meet the missing convoy. One of our pinkies ranged ahead, with Pavarotti driving, Joss beside him, Phil on the .50 in the back, and two silveries sitting on the bonnet to watch the surface of the road for any sign of disturbance. It seemed unlikely the Afundis would have mined a track their own vehicles were using – but we weren’t taking any chances.
The speed of our advance depended on the terrain. In places where the bush was thick, we moved slowly, but when vegetation was sparser and visibility better, we accelerated. The scout vehicle would press ahead until it came to a natural look-out point; there it would halt, and once Pav had satisfied himself the coast was clear, he’d call up the rest of the force by radio.
Stopping and starting, we progressed without incident until late in the afternoon. All the way Pav was following the single set of wheel marks left by the truck from which the wounded refugee had escaped. But then at about 1630, with the sun turning red as it sank towards the horizon behind us, he called a halt after only a short stretch on the move.
‘Wait out,’ he called. ‘We’ve got more tracks here.’ A couple of minutes later he came through with: ‘We’re on a Y junction. There’s one road coming from the east, and another heading south. Quite heavily used. Fresh tracks. Several different vehicle types. Looks like the remains of a village in the distance as well.’
‘Nothing on the map,’ I told him.
‘I know. But the place is real enough on the ground.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Stay where you are. We’ll close on you.’
By the time we reached the burnt-out village, dusk was already falling. All that remained of the grass huts were black circles of ash, with an occasional stick of charred wood – the relics of home-made furniture – poking out of the pile in the centre. The one brick building, a single room, had evidently been a shop of sorts, for although its roof had gone, the remnants of two pathetic metal signs still hung over the open doorway: HOT CENTRE GROCERY and TWO BARS HEAVEN. There was no smoke rising, but when one of the Kamangans pushed a stick into a heap of ash, he found the middle of it still warm.
‘We’re pulling back out of here until we get a better look at the area,’ I told Joss. ‘The rebels can’t have gone far.’
‘Agreed.’ He looked round and gave a shout of ‘Mabonzo!’, calling up the beanpole tracker.
‘How long have the people been gone?’
Mabonzo examined various footprints and tyre marks, then held up his right hand, tilting his open palm alternately right and left. ‘Maybe last night. Maybe this morning.’
‘That settles it,’ I said. ‘That, and the evidence of traffic on the road. We’ll take up a defensive position on the rise back there, and move on in the morning.’
The night passed uneventfully. We heard hyenas, but no engines, and in the morning, as soon as the light was strong, we checked out the village more thoroughly.
‘Look at this,’ I said to Genesis, as we found the blackened skeletons of maize stores – little round enclosures with grass walls, built up on stilts to keep their contents safe from rats. The remains of charred cobs showed that the contents had been incinerated along with the structures. ‘What sort of bastards deliberately burn people’s food supplies? If they’d wanted the maize for themselves, they could have taken it. But why destroy it?’
‘There’s no accounting for human wickedness,’ he said. ‘Innate evil is the greatest problem in the world.’
I looked at him. His pale, freckled skin was glistening with sweat, and an angry-looking red lump had come up from a fresh bite on his throat beside his Adam’s apple. From anyone else, remarks like that would have seemed platitudinous and balls-aching. But Gen radiated a kind of calm that usually had a soothing effect on everyone else. I never did understand how he reconciled his religious beliefs with his job, which was basically to be a killing machine, but somehow he managed it.
It was Genesis who made the worst discovery. In a hollow behind the remains of the village store he came on what looked like an innocent heap of brushwood, but, seeing that everything around it was black, and this pile of sticks was unburnt, he realised that something was odd and went over to it. The next thing I heard was the sound of him retching violently.
‘Eh, Gen,’ I called. ‘What’s up?’
I found him staring at a tangled pile of black bodies, half hidden beneath the wood. The flies were at them already, but they hadn’t been dead much longer than the elephants. I felt my own gorge rising. The corpse nearest to us was that of a young woman, naked. Whatever else she’d been raped with first, she’d been terminally violated with a knife or a bayonet, and her whole torso was split open from crutch to breastbone. The violence of the attack, which had carved her pelvis clean in half, was appalling. They hadn’t spared the babies, either: several tiny, mangled corpses lay among the big ones.
I thought Genesis was going to start pulling bodies out, to see how many there were, so I said sharply, ‘Don’t touch them! There’s nothing you can do for them now.’
‘But we can’t just leave them,’ Gen began.
‘We can, and we’re going to. The only useful thing we can do is take the coordinates and hand them over to the UN when we get back. How many are there?’
‘Looks like five or six women and three children – no, make it four.’
‘Okay, then.’ I scribbled the figures into my notebook, along with the GPS fix of the village. Was there any point in recording one small atrocity in the middle of a civil war? Not much, but you never know. Then I turned round and shouted, ‘Joss! Look at this!’
I thought he was shaken when he saw the bodies, but he kept a hold on himself and just said, ‘This is what they do, I’m afraid.’
‘D’you want to bury them, or anything?’
He shook his head. ‘We could spend the rest of the year burying bodies, and still there’d be thousands above ground.’
‘Right, then,’ I said. ‘We’re moving on.’
No doubt the village had had a name, but because the map was blank, we had only our GPS to give us our position. That put us almost due north of Gutu, which looked as though it was about fifty kilometres off. According to the map, a range of hills ran north-east to south-west across our front, with the river Kameni flowing parallel
beyond them, and Gutu on its south bank – the far side from us.
‘Ought to be able to see those hills from here,’ said Mart.
‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘We probably could if it weren’t for all the fires. The air’s full of smoke and dust.’
Abandoning the road, we motored slowly across country, this time with a Kamangan scout vehicle out ahead. The terrain was changing. We’d left the open mopane scrub behind us and were in tall grassland, with clumps of big trees dotted about. Not until midday did we start to see the hills; then gradually, through the haze that masked the horizon, we began to get glimpses of a high, dark-looking barrier which seemed to advance and recede as we moved towards it, depending on the clarity of the air. The closer we came, the rougher it looked, with a lot of grey rock showing among the scrub.
At 1230 Joss called a break. The vehicles pulled into the shade of trees for a quick brew, and it was because all the drivers had switched off that Chalky, who had the sharpest ears in our party, heard the noise of an engine.
‘Aircraft!’ he called.
I’d heard nothing, but I knew that years of firing weapons had left me slightly deaf. ‘Sure it isn’t a truck?’
He shook his head. ‘Definitely an aircraft, and it’s got problems. There – look!’
He shot out an arm, pointing to our left. In the distance a small white plane had appeared, flying very low on our side of the hills. My first thought, quite illogical, was that Steve, the Aussie pilot, had brought his Cessna back to pick up another body. Then I saw that this aircraft was larger, and twin-engined.
At once we knew it was in trouble. Its engines were running rough, spluttering and hiccuping, and it was losing height. As it came closer, we could see puffs of black smoke trailing behind it and hear its engines back-firing.
‘That fucker’s going in,’ went Pavarotti.
‘It’s a Beechcraft,’ said Danny, who had his binoculars on it. ‘South African.’ He read out the registration on the fuselage. ‘G-SAF. The pilot’s got his undercarriage down. He knows he’s in the shit.’
For a minute the Beechcraft flew more or less level with the contours, but it was sinking gently as it passed across our front from left to right. Then the pilot turned away from us, towards the hills, as if trying to nurse his crippled machine back over the ridge.
‘He’ll never make it!’ shouted Pav again. ‘He’s knackered.’
We stood in a line and watched, awaiting the inevitable. The end came quicker than I expected. With a final volley of back-firing the engines cut, and for a few hundred metres the plane glided on. Through my glasses I saw its starboard wing flick through the top of a tree. Debris flew – whether branches or parts of the wing, I couldn’t tell. Then, in an instant, the aircraft vanished from view.
‘It’s down!’ exclaimed Stringer.
‘Wait for the bang,’ said Whinger.
To our surprise, none came.
I’d seen aircraft go down in open country before – choppers, too – and every one had exploded. A pilot can get away with a belly-landing if he finishes up skimming a road or a level field, but in rough terrain like that, the plane had no chance. For several seconds we fully expected to see a cloud of smoke erupt, and hear the boom of a distant explosion. Yet neither materialised. Nothing further happened. The aircraft just disappeared silently into the hillside.
‘Well damn!’ said Pavarotti. ‘Where in hell did it go?’
‘Into a deep, dark hole,’ I told him. ‘Listen, I’m going up there to see if there are any survivors. I’ll take Whinger and Phil. Pav, set up an LUP and get everybody under cover, okay?’
I took a bearing on the spot we’d last seen the plane, and we set off in one of the pinkies, weaving our way forward between trees and shrubs. But at the foot of the hills we found our way blocked by a series of rocky ledges; though each was only a few feet high, we kept being confronted by small vertical cliffs. There came a point at which we could drive no further, and for the last half a kilometre or so Whinger and I took to our feet, leaving Phil to guard the vehicle.
The chance that somebody might still be alive made us run, and by the time we reached the impact area we were sweating like pigs. Up there the terrain was still more broken. The shoulder, which looked smooth from a distance, turned out to be a series of shallow, scrub-covered, rocky ravines aligned up and down the slope. I stopped, panting, on a high point and took a back-bearing on to the grove of trees under which our force was parked. This showed we’d strayed a bit to the left of our line, so we struck out again right-handed.
The further we climbed into that harsh wilderness, the more certain I became that nobody could have survived the crash. The Beechcraft must have gone in with an annihilating impact. At last, as we came up on to yet another little ridge, we saw a single wheel sticking up above some rocks.
‘Upside down,’ Whinger gasped.
We scrambled on a few more yards. The aircraft was lying on its back in a grassy hollow dotted with bushes. Its dented nose was high in the air towards us. The outer end of the port wing had been torn off, the leading edges were full of dents, the glass of the landing lights smashed, both props crumpled. One wheel had disappeared, together with its mounting, and the tail fin was crushed down nearly to the level of the fuselage. Doors on both sides of the cabin were hanging open.
‘Arse over tit,’ I went. ‘It must have hit these rocks we’re standing on, and flipped. Yeah – look at this.’
Right under our feet were fresh, white scrape-marks. I glanced behind me and spotted the tree I’d seen the wing slice through: fresh white splinters jutted from the ends of smashed branches. The air around us was saturated with the high-octane smell of aviation gas.
‘Watch yourself, Whinge,’ I said. ‘This fucker could go up any minute. Look at that – there’s fuel dripping out of the wing tanks.’
The vapour seared our throats as we tried to recover our breath. Then Whinger said, ‘If it hasn’t gone already, it probably won’t go now.’
‘You’d better be right.’
Two more steps forward, and I could see a body lying face-down on the ground, then another, both well clear of the plane: two white men, both dressed much the same, in tan-coloured bush shirts and shorts, with knee-length stockings and desert boots. I ran to the first and started to roll him over. When I pulled at his shoulders, his torso turned, but his head didn’t come with it, because it was only hanging on by a couple of strands of gristle.
‘Nothing to be done for this bugger,’ I said.
‘Dead as a dodo,’ Whinger agreed.
‘We’ll need to ID him,’ I said. ‘Grab his passport. There, in his shirt pocket. What about the other?’
The second casualty’s crew-cut, mouse-coloured hair was a mass of blood; the top of his skull was pulp.
‘Instantaneous,’ went Whinger. ‘Big impact. Flung on to a rock. I guess this guy was the pilot.’ He pointed at the breast pocket, still full of ball-point pens. Then he added, ‘South Africans. They must be.’
‘Yeah.’ I looked at the big, heavy whites, with legs like tree trunks. What else but Afrikaaners?
The smell of avgas was stronger than ever.
‘Let’s get out,’ I said. ‘Leave ’em.’
Just as I spoke, a noise came from the plane.
‘Shit!’ exclaimed Whinger. ‘There’s some other bastard in there.’
He started towards the fuselage.
‘You’re not going in there!’ I snapped.
‘I fucking am!’
A second later he was hauling himself up into the cabin through the open door.
‘It’s a woman!’ he shouted. ‘Hanging in the straps.’
‘Alive or dead?’
‘Alive.’
‘Cut her down, then. But for Christ’s sake, hurry.’
I heard him grunting with effort as he hauled himself upwards. On the ground, I watched fuel dripping from the port wing. The sun was beating down. If one piece of glass from a smashed light f
ocused it, grass might start to smoulder, and in a flash the whole wreck would be alight. Whinger and the woman would be roasted. So would I, if I stayed where I was.
Every instinct told me to get back. I withdrew three or four paces, then heard Whinger cursing. I thought, I’ll give him another ten seconds, then fuck off. But suddenly, he said, ‘Coming down. Catch her.’
Legs clad in sand-coloured slacks appeared, dangling from the cabin. I ran in and grabbed them. A second later I had a woman’s soft, inert body in my arms. I turned and stumbled away, half running, moving as fast as I could. I’d made about ten steps when whumf! a hot blast hit me from behind. I tottered forward another yard or two, then fell on to a patch of bare ground, coming down on top of the casualty.
I looked back. The aircraft was a ball of flame. Between it and me stood Whinger. He too was on fire, all down his right side. Suddenly he began to run, or tried to. He tripped over a rock, fell, struggled up, set off again, yelling and screaming. I’d seen this before and knew what to do. Guys on fire always run like lunatics, and you’ve got to stop them, cut off the air. Leaving the woman, I ran at him, dropped him with a rugby tackle and rolled on top of him, smothering the flames. Still he was yelling like a madman, fighting me, fighting the fire, fighting everything in creation. I held him tight, rolling over and over until the flickering flames were out.
Boom! Up went one of the tanks – thank God the one on the wing furthest from us. A fresh burst of fire seared up. Shooting out at ground level, it ignited the clothes of the man with the severed neck.
‘Get up! Get up!’ I shouted. ‘Run!’
Holding on to each other, we staggered clear of the fireball. ‘That way!’ I pointed. ‘Keep going.’
Whinger reeled away and collapsed on the deck. I darted back to the woman, lying stretched out on the ground. Even at that distance from the plane the heat was ferocious. Grabbing her by the hands I dragged her after me, face up, her backside bumping over the rough grass.
I found Whinger sitting on the ground, doubled up, holding his head in his hands, cursing all out. I left my burden and ran to him.