Defender (15 page)

"Don't drop me, John," Morgan bellowed, an endless stream of red and grey rushing by hundreds of feet below him. "I'll come back to bloody haunt you, I swear."

"I don't doubt it," Stanley yelled back down. Then Stanley felt somebody scramble over his legs and, looking left, saw Arena jostling into position beside him.

"John?" she yelled.

With a nod to her, Stanley bellowed, "Ari's gonna grab your other arm, then we'll haul you in. OK?"

"OK!" shouted back Morgan, "But hurry, I think I'm going to pass out."

Morgan was racked with pain. Suspended beneath the helicopter by one arm, the full length of his muscular frame was stretched to capacity, threatening to wrench his cracked ribs apart with every roll and turn in flight. Over the engine noise, the wail of the slipstream and the shouting, the chaos of the cockpit found its way down to him. Jesus! More trouble? Mason's flying had become erratic. The pilot was obviously fighting with another problem. Morgan's mind raced, searching for any notion of what emergency might now be confronting Mason at the controls. The helicopter began to yaw and Morgan swung uncontrollably, still clinging for life to the folds of Stanley's tough canvas sleeve. He knew Stanley had him securely, but the prospect of a mechanical fault on-board had Morgan wondering humourlessly if he wasn't better off taking his chances outside.

The chopper felt as though it was about to drop from the sky. "Alex!" called Stanley. "Take her hand."

Morgan looked up to see Ari's big blue eyes as she was stretching down to grab for him.

"Come on, Mister," Ari cried, "take my hand."

Morgan reached up with his right arm and Stanley began to swing him from side to side across to Arena's waiting grasp. Morgan recoiled at the tortuous effort. His ribcage screamed as it expanded
to
make the grab, the bones tearing at his insides. But after half a dozen gruelling attempts, their arms finally locked solid. Stanley and Arena instantly heaved upwards, launching Morgan straight over them and into the cargo hold.

Morgan catapulted headfirst into the cargo hold, the others cheered. Winded and bloodied, barely able to speak, he made out a sound crossed between a sob and squeal and realized his landing had been softened by Arena.

For a few seconds they lay dead still, worn out, before he rolled off. Arena grabbed him, holding him tightly around the head and shoulders. Then gently, she eased him around, holding his head to her breast, tears of relief streaming down her cheeks.

With an overwhelming sense of reprieve, hands came from everywhere, patting him in welcome. Morgan's entire body was on fire, but as he reclined in the surreal peace of Arena's unexpected embrace, he was swiftly dragged back to reality by the flashing red lights of the cockpit instrument panel. He let out a long, exhausted laugh.

"You bastard, Morgan," Arena reproved. "I thought we were going to lose you."

"No way," he began between deep breaths. "It'd take more than that to get rid of me. Anyway, you'd miss me too much."

With that, Morgan got to his knees, took Arena's face in both hands, released her with a smile, shook Stanley's hand, then burrowed his way through the throng and up to the cockpit.

At the controls, Mason's expression was grim. Morgan didn't like it. "Steve, what now?" Morgan yelled.

"Don't ask," came the languid South African drawl of the pilot.
"If
you've finished horsing around, crawl up here and get into the copilot's seat."

Morgan eased his way cautiously into the cockpit, carefully avoiding the cyclic in the centre of the seats. To knock it would only complicate things further, if that were possible. By the look on Mason's face, it wasn't. "When I got up this morning, I should have just shot myself in the head and been done with it," Morgan said as he slumped into the seat, grabbing at his ribs. "This day couldn't have turned to shit any more if

we'd wanted it to."

Mason didn't reply, just motioned for Morgan to put on the spare radio headset. Once the headset was on, he flipped the talk switch to 'ICS'. Mason and Morgan could now speak directly to each other without the others on-board, or anyone on outside frequencies hearing them.

"So, what's going on, mate?" Morgan asked breathlessly.

"Fuel leak," Mason replied, "We must have taken a hit in a fuel line somewhere when those bastards were shooting at us."

He was still inspecting the instrument panel. The persistence of the flashing red lights was disturbing and the evacuees were agitated. Looking back at them, Morgan could see it. There was no more exhilaration at finally getting everyone on-board and away from the danger. That moment had passed. Instead they were silent. They knew something was wrong, seriously wrong.

"What's the prognosis?" Morgan asked.

"Well, at this point it's not pouring out. The gauges are staying pretty level and we don't seem to be losing fuel at a rate that should worry us. We just have to pray that we can keep enough on board to get us back to Cullentown. I refuelled at Pallarup before we started this sortie, so we should have about 800 Ks up our sleeve, give or take. Normally I'd put her down somewhere straight away. But out here, in the middle of nowhere and with the bush full of CLPA and any other variety of lunatic you'd care to mention, we'd all be dead before sundown, and you don't even want to think about what they'd do to the women."

"Agreed," Morgan replied. He looked back to Arena, sitting in the cargo hold, watching his every move. He smiled. She didn't smile back. It seemed she could already read him well enough to know something was seriously wrong.
In
the few days he'd been in-country, Morgan had heard enough about CLPA barbarity to last him ten lifetimes. Mike Fredericks had relayed a story to Morgan and Arena about driving through a local village one morning when he and Sean Collins had come across a cluster of distraught locals standing and kneeling around the body of a dead woman and her baby at the side of the road. Collins had leapt from the truck even before Fredericks had pulled over, and after a brief exchange with the locals, Collins discovered that the dead woman had been slashed across her torso and the unborn baby ripped from her womb. The barely coherent locals explained that she had been murdered because rebel soldiers had been betting on the child's sex.

''I'll go tell everybody what's happening," Morgan continued, "they should know."

"Go ahead," said Mason, 'Tve got more on my mind than a 'This is your Captain' speech."

"Rather you than me, Steve. Just keep flying this bucket and get us back to Cullentown in one piece."

"Roger that," Mason replied. "Alex, if any of them :pray, tell 'em now would be a good time."

Morgan grinned and, slipping the headset down around his neck, turned back
to
break the news.

"Mike, check these bastards out. They're everywhere."

Taking cover on the rooftop of the Francis Hotel, Adam Garrett, a former Royal Marine, tossed the battered Zeiss binoculars across to Mike Fredericks. Stabbing a dirty, gloved finger into view, he directed Fredericks' gaze to the battle now raging to their north. "If we don't get out of here, they'll be crawling all over us by sundown."

Fredericks snatched the binos from the air and grimly surveyed the area surrounding their hotel, "What a disaster!"

From their vantage point, the two ex-soldiers took in the carnage. Troops - mostly untrained conscripts drawn from local militias loyal to the elected Government and struggling to resemble an army - were fighting futile running gun-battles against the seemingly unstoppable rebel force of Baptiste's CLPA. The rebels were advancing through the streets of the capital, Cullentown, cutting a red swath through the startled conscripts. Pitched battles had broken out across the city. Dismembered bodies littered the streets amidst pools of blood. Locals were fleeing the capital en masse, herding their children ahead of them.

With a string of expletives Garrett pointed to the street below. Fredericks saw a trio of young men, no more than boys, attacking an old woman, savagely hacking at her with machetes. Garrett's weapon was up and into his shoulder. He let off a burst into the middle of the boys, but missed. They scattered, not knowing where the rounds had come from. Somehow the old woman had survived having her hands all but cut off and began dragging her mutilated body into the shadows of a burning building, searching for a private place to die. Everywhere else, buildings and vehicles were ablaze. Flames leapt high into the air. Fires raging out of control spewed vast pillars of smoke into the sky, forming an oppressive black canopy, shrouding the city in darkness. At the rate they were advancing, the rebels would reach the hotel within the hour. The government's army was as good as finished, and Cullentown as good as lost.

The coup d'etat had been launched by the Algerian-born Baptiste at dawn that morning, and only an hour ago the rebel troops had stormed the Parliament. In the absence of Namakobo, the Vice-President and senior ministers had been rounded up, taken out into the public square and then shot through the head by Baptiste, personally. It took minutes to gain executive control of the country. Domestic security arrangements collapsed. The local army and police dissolved, and many of them had run off to join the rebels. Anarchy reigned - and it hadn't even reached midday. Crouching on the roof of the Francis Hotel with a ringside seat to history, Fredericks knew he and his team had been called in too late. With the UN unwilling to act preemptively, the atrocities had been mounting day after day, month after month. In desperation, the Malfajiri Government had turned to their former colonial master, Britain, for help. Unable to redeploy troops from commitments in the Middle East, Britain turned to Chiltonford,

hot on the heels of the company's recent successes across the border.

Chiltonford International had taken the contract to support the democratically-elected government of Malfajiri a year earlier, with a mission to train the local army to fight against the brutal campaign being waged by Baptiste's CLPA rebels who were trying to wrest control of the country. Despite a fixed contract with a watertight agreement on objectives and timeframes, and a healthy percentage of the country's diamond mining interests as inducement, it was more out of a sense of moral obligation that Chiltonford's Board of Directors eventually agreed to send in a team of advisers. The establishment of a rudimentary Special Forces group with a 'shoot and scoot' mission, along with a crash course for selected Army officers in counterinsurgency operations, had been about as much as Fredericks and his team could do. They'd achieved moderate success in a year. Despite the loss of two men in the process, they had reestablished and retrained the Army, and managed to protect the country's rutile and diamond mining operations. Until today.

The reported assassination of Namakobo changed everything, literally overnight. Now, with the President apparently dead and the army in tatters, the Chiltonford crew were in it up to their necks.

"How the hell did we manage to get ourselves stuck in the middle of this?" Fredericks said, finally dropping the binoculars from his grey eyes. He ran a weary hand over his face and hair. "The US Marines aren't even ready to start the evacuation yet," he added, waving a dismissive arm in the direction of the US warship anchored 20 miles out to sea.

"They may not be coming ashore to fight, Mike," Garrett replied. "But we're lucky to have them on hand to drag us out of this shit."

Fredericks realised the time and wondered how Morgan was going getting the last lot of evacuees out of Pallarup. He hadn't worked with Morgan before, and whilst his arrival had been unexpected, he was dependable and not afraid of getting his hands dirty. That meant a lot in Fredericks' book.

"Where the hell is Morgan with that last load?" he grunted.

Suddenly, a blast like a thunderclap cut through the bedlam of the street battles and lifted the foundations of the hotel, sending Fredericks and Garrett instinctively flat on their guts. With the shockwave capped by an impenetrable umbrella of black smoke and low-lying cloud, the report of the blast flashed across the city for what seemed like minutes. A succession of huge explosions immediately followed and the two men knew that the target was just a few blocks from their position.

"The army's finally bringing some mortars down on the rebel headquarters," Fredericks yelled.

"This just gets better and better," Garrett said to no one in particular. Down by the dockyards, less than two kilometres away, local government troops had somehow reorganised and unleashed a mortar fire mission upon the rebel stronghold in the centre of the capital.

"Mike, I bet you'd rather be living the life of a ranger up in the Yukon or somewhere right now. You're always on about it. Am I right?" Garrett asked, throwing some much-needed levity at Fredericks, spread eagled on the rooftop as they were, sheltering for their lives. "Writing out infringements for campers not following the rules, helping bears out of traps."

Another barrage hammered the rebels.

"Maybe I would," Fredericks lied, knowing he wasn't quite ready for that yet. Or was he?

"Bollocks, me ol' mate," Garrett jibed.

"I've been offered a security consulting job in Vancouver, you know. Corporate gig. Even being a ranger sounds pretty damn good to me right now," grimaced Fredericks, "no amount of money is worth this."

"Ah, but we don't do it for the money. We're just too bloody stupid to do anything else," Garrett laughed as explosions continued to cascade around their hotel.

"You're right there. You're older than me, so you should know better," Fredericks grinned. "But I'm catching up, in case you hadn't noticed, and am getting far too old for this shit." Checking through the binoculars again, Fredericks silently chastised himself, for the thousandth time, for the boyish spirit of adventure, which, at the age of 41, he had yet to outgrow. 'One of these days you' re going to get yourself killed'. He could still hear his wife's words echoing from that day just a year ago when, standing half-in/half-out of their front door, kit bag and backpack at his feet, waiting for a cab, she had finally told him she wouldn't be there when he got back. Maybe Marie was right. Maybe it was time to grow up. Fredericks still missed her, badly. Perhaps, if he made it through this one and committed to staying home, she might reconsider. Looking out over Cullentown, the situation was worsening. Home was just another distant memory. "We're running out of time," Fredericks said coolly.