Tenth Man Down

by Chris Ryan

  ‘You didn’t hear Joss carrying on,’ I told him. ‘It was horrific. I’m not chicken. I’m just trying to be realistic.’

  ‘All right,’ he persisted. ‘So what are we going to do? Tell the Kremlin we don’t like it?’

  ‘I’m not doing anything unless everyone agrees.’ I looked round the darkened faces. ‘Usual drill. We need a majority verdict. It’s just our silvery friends are starting to behave like fucking apes. If you’d seen them shoot that guy . . .’

  ‘Let’s all of us go down in the morning and give Joss a right bollocking,’ Phil suggested.

  ‘That’d send him totally ballistic.’

  ‘What if we do carry on?’ Stringer asked. ‘What’s next on the agenda?’

  ‘When the aircraft comes in with the relief garrison, Joss’s guys are supposed to hand the mine over to them,’ I said. ‘Then, in theory, they’ll be free to move on, and we’re supposed to go with them.’

  ‘To?’

  ‘Good question. The next enemy base is reported to be at Kapani. That’s a town about three days south of here. On another river. The objective is the bridge bringing the main road in from the south. If Alpha can capture that, or cut it, they’ll have a stranglehold on the rebels’ main supply route. I was planning to carry on with them at least as far as that.’

  ‘Help them plan that attack, too,’ went Phil.

  ‘That’s the obvious option.’

  ‘And what if we quit?’ Stringer persisted.

  ‘We piss off back to Mulongwe under our own steam.’

  ‘HMG wouldn’t like that,’ went Whinger. ‘What if Muende gets the upper hand, takes over the uranium mines and starts shipping the stuff to Gadaffi? Then we’d look a right bunch of pricks.’

  ‘Too bad,’ I said. ‘What does anyone think?’

  Stringer began to say something, but before he got it out Genesis asked, ‘What about the woman? She’s hell-bent on getting to the convent at Msisi.’

  ‘Don’t I fucking know it,’ I told him. ‘But we can’t head that way. If we’re splitting with Alpha, we need to get our arses away to the north pronto.’

  ‘Don’t you think we ought to go and check things?’ Gen persisted. ‘I mean, if there’s twelve holy sisters there, they could be in trouble.’

  I looked at our walking bible and saw him staring into the darkness. Obviously he was fancying the chance of visiting a religious retreat and helping the nuns out. That’d give him a bigger kick than shagging them.

  ‘What are Poor Clares, anyway?’ I asked, playing for time.

  ‘They’re Franciscan nuns,’ he replied, immediately. ‘Named after St Clare of Assisi, who was a disciple of St Francis. They lead a life of prayer and spend most of their days in silence.’

  Phil was fanning himself with one hand in sarcastic appreciation of such great knowledge. ‘What the fuck do we do when we get there?’ he demanded. ‘Sing a few hymns, dig in, and spend the next six months defending the holy sisters, without talking to anybody?’

  ‘They may be wanting out,’ said Gen. ‘We might need to organise an airlift.’

  I turned to Danny, who was in charge of our transport, and said, ‘By the way, make sure there’s no keys left in dashboards tonight. I wouldn’t put it past the Kraut to try doing a runner in one of the vehicles. Even if she can’t walk, she could probably drive.’

  ‘Sure, sure.’ Danny looked faintly peeved at the suggestion that he couldn’t be trusted to do his job. ‘She’ll not get far.’

  ‘To hell with the convent,’ Whinger announced. ‘She’s going out on the fucking relief aircraft, even if you have to carry her aboard kicking and screaming.’

  ‘At least Msisi exists,’ I said. ‘I asked the Belgian. Apparently he’s been there, and it’s only a couple of hours downstream from here.’

  ‘Eh, Geordie,’ went Whinger. ‘You gone soft on the woman or something?’

  ‘Piss off, mate,’ I told him. ‘I’m just considering options. What if the plane doesn’t come tomorrow, for instance? What if it goes U/S? There’s a very good chance of that. Then we’ll be stuck with her.’

  I paused, looking round the circle. Various ideas were chasing each other round my head.

  ‘Try the satcom again,’ I told Stringer. ‘I wish to hell we could have a word with the Kremlin.’

  Stringer stood up, went over to the pinkie with the comms equipment on board and began to fiddle with his aerials.

  ‘Leave the woman out of this for the moment,’ I said. ‘She’s only a side issue. We haven’t answered the main question. What do we want to do? Go on or pull out? What’s the crack on that? Whinger?’

  ‘It depends on Joss,’ he replied, his voice heavy and slow. ‘He may have settled down by tomorrow. If he has, carry on. We’ve only lost one guy, and that was to an elephant. Pure bad luck. If we watch ourselves, there shouldn’t be a problem.’

  ‘But if he’s still the same?’

  ‘Then fuck off, fastest.’

  ‘Okay. That’s you. Danny?’

  ‘I agree. If Joss pulls round, no reason not to carry on.’ He shot me a look, and went on, ‘I dunno about you, Geordie, but it strikes me there’s something big going down here.’

  ‘Like what?’ I waited, knowing that Danny often had good ideas, but was slow to articulate them.

  ‘The South African involvement. This company, Interaction. These guys wouldn’t be pissing about with the rebels if it was just a question of diamonds. Southern Africa’s full of diamonds.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘There must be some other agenda. Something that’s really got them going.’

  ‘Okay, I agree. But what are you saying? That we should stick with it, or what?’

  ‘If Joss comes back on-side, yes, we should.’

  ‘Right. Genesis?’

  ‘I disagree. If we go any further south we could land ourselves in the shit. We might not be able to get back at all. And as we know, the chances of getting lifted out of the bush are zero. I’m for pulling off, first to the convent, then to Mulongwe. Bollocks to the uranium, and to the agreement.’

  Next round the circle was Phil, and I knew before I asked him what his answer would be.

  ‘Fuck Joss. Go for it! Get stuck in with Alpha and go for the bridge. Let’s have another good shoot-out and hit the rebels where it hurts.’

  Before I could say anything else, Mart’s voice abruptly came up in my earpiece with ‘Green One’.

  ‘Green One, roger,’ I answered.

  ‘Got an intruder,’ he said quietly.

  I held up a hand to stop anyone talking, and asked, ‘What is it?’

  ‘Somebody coming up the track from below.’

  ‘Sure it’s not an animal?’

  ‘Definitely human. I had him in the kite-sight.’

  ‘Stand by. I’ll be with you.’

  Our meeting broke up as though a bomb had landed in the middle of the group. In seconds the guys vanished outwards into the darkness and took up prearranged positions – all except Gen, who grabbed Whinger’s cot by the head-end and dragged it alongside one of the pinkies. I ran the few yards to the seven-tonner and hissed at Inge, ‘Stay where you are. Don’t move. We’ve got problems.’

  Mart was about two hundred metres to the east. He’d stationed himself on a bank where the track came up over a steep little rise. He’d told us that from that vantage point he could see out over an expanse of open bush.

  We hadn’t expected any visitors, certainly no friendly ones. But the one thing we needed to avoid, above all, was any risk of a blue-on-blue – a clash between our own people.

  My boots made no sound in the dust as I scurried forward. The moon was still low in the sky, but the starlight was strong, and I could see quite well. When I reckoned I was halfway to Mart’s position I called him on the radio, and said, ‘Closing on you from behind.’

  ‘Roger,’ he answered.

  ‘Anyone in sight?’

  ‘Negative.’

  He mu
st have been watching me through the kite-sight. Long before I could see him, he came on the air with, ‘I have you visual. Keep walking.’ A few seconds later I saw his head come up from behind a rock and I crouched beside him, looking out over the drop.

  ‘Where was the guy?’ I whispered.

  ‘See the big tree?’ He handed the sight over. ‘Just to the left of it. The track’s coming nearly straight towards us at that point.’

  ‘What was he doing?’

  ‘Walking slowly. Carefully.’

  ‘Weapon?’

  ‘Yep. At the ready. Looked like an AK47.’

  ‘Where did he go?’

  ‘Disappeared into that dead ground on our right.’

  As he whispered, I was scanning with the sight, which gave out a faint, high hum. I searched the ground to our front, checking every shape, looking for a black figure moving across the fluorescent green background.

  ‘Nothing,’ I breathed. I switched the sight off. Its tiny scream died, and we crouched side by side without speaking, listening to the cicadas grinding away all round. The air was comfortably cool, but the mozzies were out and about. Every few seconds, one came whining past.

  If any of the other guys got a contact nearer camp, we’d hear immediately over the radio, so I felt that our rear was covered. But who the hell was this, on the move out front? Because the area was devoid of civilians, it could only be someone from Alpha Commando. My stretched nerves told me it must be a scout, sent up to spy on us, or the lead man in an assassination squad.

  Minutes passed. Nothing stirred in the dark landscape below us. Up above, the stars were bright as diamonds. Diamonds. The trouble they caused. I thought of the prisoner slumping under a hail of bullets at the kangaroo court. Seeing the guy killed like that had shaken me more than I liked to admit. It was one thing to be hit by rounds in the middle of a battle, another to be deliberately murdered in front of an audience.

  Could Mart have made a mistake? I didn’t think so – and I wasn’t going to ask him again. He took the sight back and switched it on once more, waited for it to warm up, scanned, switched off. There was no point in calling the other guys to find out if they’d seen anything; they’d tell us soon enough if anything showed.

  Suddenly, there was a noise behind us, a voice. Somebody had spoken, very close. We both leapt round, weapons levelled. A black human shadow was standing on the track about six feet away. My finger was on the trigger. I came within a split-second of firing, but in the last instant I realised that anybody planning aggression wouldn’t have spoken in the first place – he’d have fired a round or come at me silently with a knife.

  ‘Sir!’ The voice was high, frightened, African. ‘Sergeant Geordie.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I am Jason. Jason Phiri.’

  ‘Mabonzo!’

  ‘Yassir.’

  ‘Jesus!’ I let out my breath with relief and took a step forward. Even in the starlight, Jason’s scarecrow frame was recognisable. At close quarters I could smell his body odour, acrid with fear. ‘You nearly bought it then. What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘I come warn you.’

  ‘What of?’

  ‘Major Mvula, he has bad spirits.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘They make him mad. He send men to kill you.’

  ‘Kill me?’

  ‘Cut throat. All British soldiers.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tonight. Twelve o’clock, a killing party will come.’

  ‘Fucking hell!’ I looked at Mart, then back at Jason, then at my watch, which was saying 2135. A shiver ran up my spine at the way the tracker had come round behind us and got in so close without our having the faintest inkling of his proximity. I supposed he must have heard the tiny whine of the kite-sight, and worked on that.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Come back to camp. We need to talk.’ Then I went on the radio with, ‘Green One. We’ve found the intruder. He’s friendly. We’re bringing him back. All stations recover to base.’

  In less than a minute we were back in our temporary camp, and in another couple we’d heard Jason’s story. Joss had detailed an assassination squad, under Lieutenant Akuli, to come up and wipe out our entire contingent, and burn our bodies on a big fire.

  ‘They coming with knives, guns,’ the tracker added.

  ‘Great!’ I said.

  ‘Fucking hell!’ went Phil. ‘Let’s booby-trap them. Light a good fire to draw them in, and let ’em have it.’

  ‘No thanks,’ I told him. ‘If we haven’t got an international incident already, we’d definitely have one after that.’ I looked round the anxious faces. ‘Forget that. We’re leaving now. I’m not messing with these turds any more. Pack up and get moving west. Where’s the woman?’

  ‘In the truck,’ said Mart.

  ‘Okay. She can stay there. Eh, Jason.’

  ‘Yassir?’

  ‘How did you know where we were?’

  ‘I track you. Major Mvula send me tracking Brits.’

  ‘Have you told him where we are?’

  ‘Yassir.’ He nodded.

  ‘So you’ve been up and down, and up a second time?’

  Again, he nodded.

  ‘You must have shifted your arse. What are you going to do now?’

  ‘Come with you, sir.’

  I stared at him. His sharp cheekbones glinted faintly in the moonlight, but apart from them and his eyes, he was almost invisible.

  ‘You’re quitting? Changing sides?’

  ‘Yassir. The major, he got real bad spirits.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Evil got into him. I come with you.’

  Suddenly I felt choked. This guy had probably saved our lives, and was risking his on our behalf. I reached out and brought my hand down on his bony shoulder.

  ‘Good on yer, Jason.’ Then a thought occurred to me. ‘What about your kit? Have you left it behind?’

  ‘No sir. Backpack here.’ He pointed into the bush behind him, then started rummaging in a trouser pocket. ‘Old whitey, he say give this.’

  ‘The Belgian?’

  ‘Yassir.’

  He pulled out a crumpled scrap of paper and handed it across. Opening it carefully, I turned the sheet to the fire. Obviously it was a message, but the handwriting was so small and scrawly that in the flickering firelight I couldn’t read it.

  ‘Torch, somebody,’ I said.

  Pav handed one over and I shone the beam on the paper. There were two short lines of irregular pencil scribble that seemed to be some sort of code.

  Jvoltefaceparcequilcherchepierre

  exceptgrandetrouveeilyaquelqjours

  Jesus!’ I went, ‘What the hell is this?’

  Stringer, peering over my shoulder, said, ‘It’s French, or a sort of French. He’s run the words together to make sure the blacks can’t understand it. Give it here. I’ll sort it.’

  I handed the note over with, ‘Rather you than me.’

  Apart from speaking some French, Stringer was a brilliant cryptographer, always working at his codes and doing crossword puzzles when he wasn’t on the weights. If anyone could decipher the message, he would.

  ‘Get everything squared away,’ I said. ‘We’re rolling in five minutes.’

  ‘Why we go now?’ Inge’s nagging voice grated out behind me at a moment when I least wanted to hear it. ‘It is playing, yes?’

  ‘Playing? You mean an exercise? Far from it. The blacks have turned nasty, and we’ve got to get out.’

  TEN

  We were away just after 2200, hoping we had nearly two hours’ start, driving our two pinkies and the mother wagon we’d been using for our kit. This, of course, belonged to the Kamangans, but I told myself we’d hand it back to them at some later stage.

  What would the Alpha guys do when they found our campsite deserted? Joss had overheard part of my conversation with the Belgian, so he knew we might have our sights on the convent and be heading that way. Almost
certainly he’d order a squad to follow us up, and inevitably the tracks of our vehicles would show where we’d gone. But would the blacks have the guts to come after us in the dark? Would they wait around until daylight? Or would they let us go, pull back to the mine and sit there until the relief aircraft arrived?

  ‘Hundred to one against them doing a follow-up at night,’ I said to Pavarotti as we set out. ‘All the same, we’ll go off at a bit of a tangent. Head due west instead of south-west. As soon as it’s light, we’ll tack back down.’

  The track we’d followed from the Kamangans’ camp out to our temporary staging post was so overgrown that even in daylight it had been hard to pick out. Lack of use had allowed saplings and shrubs to spring up all over it, blending it back into the bush. Now in the dark it was untraceable – and in any case, it was no longer heading in the direction we wanted.

  We piled up the fire, to make a good marker for the assassins, and slipped away into the night. Driving across country without lights was tricky until the moon climbed higher. Later its bright glare, coming at first from behind us, threw inky shadows across the ground ahead and made it difficult to spot holes. For the first hour the land kept falling away, and apart from a few short climbs out of gullies, we were mostly going downhill. Then the terrain flattened out, and I guessed we were back on a level with the river, which lay somewhere off to our left.

  On difficult stretches, where we had to cross numerous small ravines, we had guys ranging ahead on foot, but whenever the going was better we kept the vehicles rolling at seven or eight kilometres an hour. It was a miracle that we had Jason with us: an extra driver, and the best spotter of obstacles anyone could hope for. All the same, with three men driving, three spotting and three tabbing ahead, we were stretched to the limit. Every hour we swapped around, but there was never a chance for anyone to get his head down properly.

  One factor in our favour was the heavy dew, which had damped down the dust; without it, the trip would have been a nightmare for the guys at number two and three in the column. As it was, even for those in the rear, the night air felt cool and clean. The people I felt sorry for were the two invalids, who were being continually bounced around in the backs of the vehicles. Afterwards I suspected that the rough passage did a lot to accelerate Whinger’s deterioration.