Tenth Man Down

by Chris Ryan

  We were coming off the ridge when first light began to break in the sky ahead of us. At ground level the dark was still too intense for any landmark to be visible, but as soon as we started down over that series of ledges, the terrain felt familiar, even though we were approaching the site from the opposite direction. When the GPS began giving us four hundred metres to target, I put it away so that I could concentrate on eyeballing the slope ahead.

  I knew the remains of the Beechcraft were lying in one of the hollows beneath us. The more I’d thought things over during the night, the more I’d convinced myself that we were going to find Muende and the woman bashaed up on the site. I just felt sure they’d reached the place as dark was falling, and made a camp beside the wreck. The danger was that we’d come on them suddenly, with our heads showing over the skyline, so we moved down inches at a time. As I’d expected, Jason was excellent at stalking: his feet made no sound, and his eyes never stopped ranging about.

  In the end, it was the smell that told us we’d reached journey’s end. Jason, a step ahead of me, turned his head, pointedly holding his nose between thumb and forefinger. Then I got it: a stench of rotting meat foul enough to make my gorge rise. When he held out a hand, indicating to our right, I just made out the hunched form of a hyena skulking away up the hill.

  The light was still grey and thick when I eased my head round a rock and peeped over into the hollow, fifty metres below. There was the wreck, just as I remembered it. I was seeing it from above rather than below, but everything corresponded to the images in my mind: the broken fuselage, upside-down, with its nose high off the ground, the crumpled tail fin, the skeletal, blackened wings with the left tip ripped away, the scorched grass. The sight brought back a searing memory of Whinger on fire. I fought it down and continued to search.

  The only pieces missing from the picture were the bodies of the South Africans. They’d been moved. No – they’d been torn apart. In the growing light I made out a scatter of bones and, further off, a heap of what had been sand-coloured clothes. That was the source of the stench. The bundle contained the last small remnant of a body, no doubt now heaving with maggots.

  For five minutes I stood still, watching for any movement in the hollow or on the hillside below. The eastern horizon was flaring crimson. Then, I whispered, ‘Stay here and cover me while I take a closer look.’ Jason nodded, and settled his 203 over a rock.

  I was just starting to move when a noise brought me to a halt. It was very faint – a soft, distant pop – but definitely not natural.

  ‘That sounded like a shot,’ I said. ‘A long way off, but a shot all the same.’

  Jason didn’t answer. After another wait, I set off. Carefully picking my way down, I came out into the hollow – and part of my fantasy died. Nobody could have bashaed up there: the smell of death was suffocating. Trying to ignore it, I moved towards the front of the plane.

  I stopped short. Under the nose cone was a pile of rocks. With horrible certainty I knew they hadn’t been there before; somebody had collected them and piled them to a height of half a metre to make a platform, so that he or she could reach up to the front of the fuselage. I looked up. Sure enough, the small door in the side of the nose, giving access to the luggage compartment, was slightly open. I slipped off my Bergen, stood on the rock pile, reached up, pulled myself up on my hands and looked in. The small, white-walled compartment was empty.

  Bastards! They’d beaten us to it. Disappointment and anger crashed down on me like a ton of lead. All the fantastic effort we’d made, only to reach the site too late.

  I looked up towards Jason and waved at him to come down. In a few seconds, he was beside me.

  ‘They’ve been already,’ I said, quietly. ‘That pile of stones wasn’t there before. They built it so they could reach up high enough.’

  Jason said nothing, but dropped into a squat and studied the ground intently, first round the stones, then in a wider circle. I moved off and got behind a rock that commanded the immediate area. As I leant on it, feeling knackered, the sun burst over the horizon with its usual flamboyance and flooded the hillside with light. My mind flew to Genesis and his final utterance.

  Presently, Jason moved up to me, and said, ‘Three persons come.’

  ‘Three?’

  ‘Yassir. Two mens, one woman. Woman with bad foot.’

  I felt the hair on my neck bristling. The woman with the bad foot was Inge, presumably with Muende. But who was the second man?

  ‘How can you tell?’ I asked.

  Leading me, he pointed at a faint mark in a patch of dust. ‘This woman foot. Left side, turning in.’ With his hand he demonstrated a twisted ankle. Then he moved on and showed me two other marks, one in some grass, one among pebbles, both almost invisible. ‘One man here, one here.’

  ‘When were they here? Yesterday?’

  ‘No sah. In the night-time.’

  ‘Just now?’

  ‘Yassir.’

  ‘Jesus! Let’s get after them. They must have gone down. And listen, Jason.’

  ‘Yassir?’

  ‘If we catch up with them, we’re going to drop all three. Okay?’

  ‘Sure, sure!’

  That was the most enthusiastic remark I’d ever heard him make.

  SEVENTEEN

  We went forward to the next little ridge, scanning down. By then the sun was fully up, shining right in our faces, making it difficult to see.

  ‘That’s where the rest of you waited while we came to investigate the crash,’ I said, indicating the stand of trees under which Alpha had parked.

  Jason nodded, but he seemed disinclined to head that way. I stood still, on the lookout, while he made a few casts downhill. He came back frowning and moved off in the opposite direction, going left-handed along the contour. Almost at once he looked back with a grin and beckoned me forward.

  Once again, I could scarcely make out the evidence he’d spotted, but he was confident. ‘All come this way.’ He pointed ahead decisively. He was speaking in a very low voice, as if he thought our quarry was close in front.

  Soon I realised how phenomenally sharp his eyes must be. He would point to a single stalk of grass bent over, the faintest impression in dry gravel, and read a whole story from it. His method was basically the same as mine, but his perception was on a different level. It was as if he could see everything through a magnifying glass – and, of course, he’d been practising every day of his life.

  Now, with the early sun on our backs, the ground ahead was brilliantly illuminated. My instinct was to hustle on and overtake the party ahead of us. The trouble was, our forward visibility was limited by the curve of the hill bending away from us, and by the constant rock ledges, dropping down; if we hurried, we might lose the trail or, worse, come on the others unexpectedly. Our paramount need was to move so stealthily that we took them by surprise. If we managed that, we’d catch them with the diamond on them, whereas if they got any warning, they might have time to drop it, throw it into the bush or conceal it under a rock.

  Jason was advancing in small spurts: he’d gaze at the ground, go forward a few metres, pause and gaze again. Then he stopped altogether. His body stiffened. Looking ahead intently, he unshipped his 203 and brought it to bear. I followed his gaze and caught a flicker of movement beside a shrub, fifty metres ahead. It hadn’t been grass waving – there wasn’t a breath of wind.

  We stood still, watching. Another movement, uphill to the left. Something came up above a smooth rock. Pointed ears, then a whole head, looking back at us. Another hyena, or the same one circled back. It watched us for a few moments, then ducked and disappeared.

  Jason lowered his weapon, but still he did not move. Clearly he was puzzled by the scavenger’s behaviour. When nothing else stirred, he at last went forward again. Fifty metres on, part of the mystery was explained. In a depression among the rocks lay a body: a black soldier, face down, wearing DPMs, with an AK47 on the ground beside him.

  For fully a minute
Jason kept still. From my position beside him I could see his eyes flickering back and forth as he studied our immediate surroundings, searching, calculating possibilities. Only when he felt secure did he go down to the casualty.

  One glance was enough to tell us what had happened. The man had been shot between the shoulderblades, point-blank. The muzzle of the weapon that killed him had been pressed right against his back: around the bullet hole in his tunic scorch marks radiated. At our approach flies rose in a cloud from the wound, but the body was still warm. When we turned it over, we saw the blood from the exit wound had hardly started to congeal.

  ‘How long?’ I asked.

  ‘One hour,’ went Jason. ‘Maybe less.’

  ‘That was the shot I heard.’

  He nodded. The man looked young – barely twenty – and fit, with a lean face and just the shadow of a moustache. Obviously a squaddie. But why had he been murdered out here?

  My imagination, working overtime, rapidly constructed a scenario. Muende had brought this guy along as a bodyguard, maybe because he understood how to use a GPS. Perhaps this was the very guy who’d nicked my GPS off me at the convent, and he’d been forced into the expedition as a penance. Anyway, once they’d got the diamond, Muende decided to dispense with him, to stop him talking. Or maybe he became scared that his bodyguard might turn on him and the woman and murder both of them, to get the big rock for himself. Whatever the precise motivation, the fact that the others had left the AK47 lying by the body showed they themselves were well armed, and needed no more weapons.

  All this I communicated to Jason in short takes. Several times he nodded agreement. As I talked, a peculiar look came into his eyes as his normal calm gaze turned into a glare of hatred or anger.

  We left the body and rifle where they were and moved on. After four or five steps Jason bent down and retrieved something from the grass – an empty 9mm cartridge case ejected from a pistol or a sub-machine gun. Even I could tell that the smell of cordite coming out of it was absolutely fresh.

  The line Jason was following began to take us down across the slope and towards the trees. Now we could look out from the side of the hill over the flatter terrain below, but the scattered forest covered quite a large proportion of the ground and provided any number of hiding places.

  We moved on yet again. Then the changing perspective abruptly revealed something shiny, something man-made, showing through a gap in the canopy of a sausage tree. I touched Jason’s shoulder and pointed. At once he sank down on his haunches.

  ‘Car,’ he said, quietly.

  The shiny object was the windscreen of a vehicle. The leaves on the tree were so still that we had to keep going forward, a few metres at a time, before we lined up on an opening that allowed us to see more of it. The fifth or sixth short advance revealed the outlines of a Gaz jeep.

  ‘That’s them,’ I whispered.

  Looking back below us, I saw that if we withdrew out of sight and dropped down, we’d be able to close in on the vehicle unseen from behind a gravelly mound that lay below us. I started to whisper my plan to Jason, but I’d hardly started when he nodded vigorously, and I knew he’d had the same idea.

  Ten minutes later we crept up the back of the mound, raised our heads with infinite caution, and peered round the loose stones on the top. The jeep was rear end-on to us. It had a canvas top, but the back was rolled up so that we could see straight through it, over the front seats and out through the windscreen. There was no human in it or near it.

  For five minutes we lay and watched. As the seconds ticked by, I became possessed by the feeling that somebody was watching us from the clumps of trees and bush round about. I convinced myself the jeep had been left there as a decoy or booby-trap, that if we approached it the enemy would open fire on us from somewhere close, or it would blow up.

  ‘D’you think there’s anyone around?’ I whispered.

  Jason shook his head. ‘People gone, sah.’

  Maybe my own feeling was sheer imagination. By then I’d learned to respect Jason’s intuition. I knew he could notice things and pick up vibes that passed me by. So I didn’t ask, ‘How d’you know?’ Instead, I said quietly, ‘Okay, then. Cover me while I go forward.’

  There was no point in moving slowly now. I hustled into the open quite fast, 203 at the ready, ran to the vehicle, dropped down beside it. Lying there, I could see under its belly. As I looked out through the opening framed by the front wheels, I realised something was out of place: a slender rod, coming down to the ground at an angle. The track-rod was broken. The jeep’s steering was knackered. It had been abandoned.

  I jumped up. Sure enough, the key was in the dash. I beckoned Jason forward and showed him what I’d found. We opened the bonnet and laid hands on the engine. Its temperature was hardly higher than that of the air.

  ‘This happened on their way in,’ I said. ‘In the early hours of the morning. They walked from here, and now they’re walking out.’

  We made a quick check of the vehicle, but there was nothing in it to give a clue as to the nature of its crew. The occupants had taken whatever kit they had with them.

  ‘Where can they be heading?’ I asked.

  Jason spread his hands.

  ‘No town anywhere near? No villages?’

  He shook his head. ‘Next place is Narombo – small town.’

  ‘How far’s that?’

  ‘Four day good walker. Sick woman six, seven day.’

  ‘They’ll never make that. Muende can’t walk that far. He’s fat as butter.’

  For the first time in days Jason gave a little laugh. I grinned back, and pulled a water-bottle out of my belt-kit. We were going to have to watch it with our water; expecting a short, sharp contact, I hadn’t brought very much.

  ‘They won’t walk all day,’ I said. ‘They’ll stop soon and sit out the midday heat. We’ll catch up with them then.’

  The diversion caused by the vehicle cost us dearly. By the time we’d climbed back up the hill, the trail had gone cool, almost cold. Bent stalks of grass had straightened, and the dew had long since burnt off. Even Jason had a job to detect traces, and he made frequent moves that turned out to be false: he’d go ahead on a speculative quest while I stood still to mark the end of the sure route, then come back and cast about again.

  I kept thinking, Muende must have been desperate, to come out here with a lone woman, one jeep and no back-up, and then to shoot his only able-bodied accomplice. Once again I saw what damage colossal wealth, or even the promise of it, does to you. It stops you trusting anybody else, so that you immediately become isolated and get forced into crazy actions.

  By 1100 the heat was ferocious. The sun was beating straight down on us, and tsetse flies were bombing out of every bush we passed. Lines of sweat were running down Jason’s scrawny neck from behind his ears, and he was stinking like cat’s piss. High above us enormous birds had begun to ride the thermals, swinging in wide, wide circles. When I pointed up at them and suggested, ‘Eagles?’, Jason said, ‘Vultures. White-headed vultures.’ Any minute now, I thought, they’ll be plummeting on to the fresh corpse behind us.

  I happened to have looked at Andy’s watch a moment earlier, so I know it was 1124 when, in the middle of quite a fast advance, my tracker stopped short and raised his right hand with index finger extended to our right front.

  ‘Go-away bird,’ he said, softly.

  I had to listen for several seconds before I heard it. Then I picked up the raucous go-wee, go-wee of a grey lourie scolding some interloper who had trespassed into its territory.

  ‘Has it seen us?’ I whispered.

  Jason shook his head. ‘Too far. Other persons.’

  That bird was a star. For the next half hour, as we worked our way steadily forward, it kept calling. Every now and then it moved to a different tree, but it hung around the same area, persistently giving out its mocking cry. We saw it once – a flash of pale grey, with a spiky tuft on the back of its head, as it looped from one
perch to another – and at the end we knew there was a chance it had started to mob us as well. But by then it had done a brilliant job, leading us to a particular spot and putting us on maximum alert.

  It was Jason who saw the pair first. They were sitting on the ground in an ebony grove, their backs against a big tree, looking utterly knackered. Inge had her head thrown back, resting against the trunk; Muende’s was hanging down, chin on chest, as if he were asleep. His peculiar, yellowish hair was unmistakable. Beside each of them was an open haversack.

  The sight sent a huge surge of adrenalin round my system, part excitement, part hatred of the pair who had murdered Whinger. We could easily have dropped both of them from where we stood, behind some bushes sixty metres off. They had no clue that anyone was near them, and there was no way we could have missed. A couple of bursts from the 203s, and that would have been that. But it would also have been too easy. Before I killed them, I wanted to look in their faces and let them see me. I wanted to tell them what I thought of them. I wanted them to know that retribution had caught up with them and run them down. So I breathed ‘This way’ to Jason, and we moved silently round to our left until we were behind them, hidden by the trunk of their own tree. Then we walked straight in. Whatever else happened, I was going to make them shit themselves with fright.

  Twenty metres short of the tree, I motioned Jason to stay put and cover me. I eased myself out of the straps of my Bergen and lowered it gently to the ground. Then I crept forward alone with my 203 at the ready. The lourie was still calling away to our right front. Apart from that there was no sound.

  I came to within four metres of the tree. Three. It may have been a slight scuffle that my boot made on a dry leaf. It may have been a sixth sense of danger. Whatever triggered her reflex, Inge suddenly leapt into view, going to my left with amazing agility. Already she was facing my way, and there was a pistol in her right hand.

  Before she could bring it to bear, before I could raise my own rifle, a three-round burst hammered out behind me. The rounds cracked like thunderbolts as they passed my ear and put the woman flat on her back. For a moment she writhed about, struggling to get up, but the pistol had fallen from her hand and I could see she was dying.