Jungle Kill (3 page)

Nelson continued outlining the cover story. ‘In view of this it makes sense for Spencer-Tado to hire a bunch of mercenaries as bodyguards to protect their employees. We are that bunch of mercenaries. According to the story that’s been spread all over the Niger Delta, we’re going to be helicoptered in to guard the onshore oil refinery where the threats
were received. As soon as we get there, we’re going to go undercover and watch out for the criminals or rebels who’ve made the threat.

‘In fact, the helicopter is going to touch down briefly in the jungle in the eastern area of the Delta, about twenty miles from where Mwanga was last seen, just long enough for us to drop into the jungle. Then the chopper is going to continue its journey to the refinery.

Meanwhile, the hope is that everyone will assume we’ve been dropped off at the oil refinery and are in hiding, waiting, protecting the oil workers. What we will actually be doing is trekking through the jungle looking for Mwanga and his captors,’ concluded Nelson. ‘Any questions so far?’

There was a shaking of heads.

‘Mitch has been added to the unit because he’s served tours of duty in Nigeria, including the Niger Delta. He knows the terrain and he knows the local languages. So he’s our ace in the hole.’

Two Moons and Gaz both grinned at Mitch, and
gave him the thumbs-up. Tug and Benny showed no emotion. They definitely don’t trust me, thought Mitch.

‘OK,’ said Nelson. ‘That’s it. We’ll do the rest of the briefing on the plane on the way to Africa. Pack your kit and let’s move.’

In the minibus on the way to the airfield, Mitch found himself sitting next to Benny Jaurez. They sat in silence as the minibus struggled to make its way through the busy London streets. Mitch looked out of the window, wondering when he’d be back again. Or
if
he would be back.

‘Hey, Mitch,’ said Benny, the wiry officer. Mitch turned and looked at him. ‘Am I right in guessing you got some sort of problem with me?’

‘What do you mean?’ demanded Mitch, puzzled.

‘When the colonel introduced you to us I could see you didn’t like me,’ Benny continued, his mouth a grim line.

‘That’s not true,’ responded Mitch, annoyed.

‘There was definitely something,’ insisted Benny.
‘I thought at first maybe you were just anti-American, or anti-Latino. Some sort of racist.’

Mitch couldn’t help but laugh at this. Him? A racist?

‘Yeah, OK.’ Benny nodded. ‘Then I figured if that was the case you wouldn’t want to serve under the colonel. And I saw you talking all friendly with Two Moons so then I think about it, and you were the same with Tug as you were with me. Cold. Distant.’ Benny was snapping the straps on his rucksack aggressively now.

Mitch shook his head. ‘That’s not true,’ he said again. ‘It was the other way round.’

Benny shrugged. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But I think you’ve got a thing about officers. You don’t like them. That’s why you were kicked out of the SAS.’

‘I wasn’t kicked out, I left,’ said Mitch.

‘Whatever.’ Benny shrugged again. ‘The thing is, we’re a small and tight unit. Just the six of us. We depend on each other. Every time we go out, our lives are on the line. We protect each other’s
backs. I don’t want to feel you ain’t protecting mine because I’m an officer.’

Mitch felt a stirring of anger inside him.

‘Listen,
sir
,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t care what rank a man holds. What matters is: do I trust him with my life? In my book, that trust doesn’t come automatically because someone’s got stripes on their sleeve or brass on their shoulder. That trust comes when I know the man. Comprende,
sir
?’

Benny gave Mitch a hard look. ‘Then we’ll just have to see how it goes,’ he said. ‘But let me tell you, Mitch, right now I don’t trust you as far as I can spit.’

Mitch nodded. ‘Then it’s good to know where we stand,’ he said. ‘That’s a start.’

It was another two hours before the men were on board a military plane to Lagos. Mitch took a seat between Two Moons and Gaz near the back of the plane. Nelson, Tug and Benny were near the front.

‘First class for officers,’ murmured Mitch.

‘No, pal,’ grinned Gaz. ‘Nothing like that. I’ve fought alongside all these guys.’

‘So why are we at the back of the plane?’

‘Choice,’ said Gaz. ‘I always sit at the back of a plane. I’ve never yet heard of one of these things reversing into a mountain.’

Mitch and Two Moons laughed. But Mitch still felt disappointed there was a gulf between him and Tug and Benny. But he’d just have to live with that. And it was natural that Nelson would sit with his senior officers, planning as they travelled, working out tactics.

‘So,’ said Two Moons, interrupting his thoughts. ‘You said you’d tell me what happened with your captain.’

‘OK.’ Mitch shrugged. He inhaled deeply. ‘It was in Iraq. I was part of a four-man unit, undercover in a place called Mandali, on the Iran–Iraq border.’

‘Been there,’ Gaz said. ‘East of Baghdad.’

Mitch nodded. ‘We knew arms and soldiers were coming over the border from Iran. Our job
was to find out how, and who was helping them, and target them. What we didn’t know, and no one back at HQ had picked up, was that our unit commander, Captain Danvers, was absolutely insane. None of the three of us, me, Johnny and Angel, had worked with him before. None of us even knew anything about him. He was just assigned to us.

‘Trouble kicked in almost as soon as we were inserted. Danvers was gung-ho about getting the intel swiftly. So, instead of doing the “hearts and minds” bit with the local tribespeople, he decided to take prisoners and use some muscle on them. Trouble was he had this idea that the people would talk if he threatened their kids.’

Gaz whistled. ‘A whole load of trouble,’ he said.

‘You got it,’ agreed Mitch. ‘Problem was Danvers didn’t just threaten. He took us into this tribal area and told the head man that if they didn’t tell us what he wanted to know he’d kill his children. And, to show he meant what he said, he took his gun
, aimed it at the head of this fourteen-year-old boy, a nephew of the head man, and pulled the trigger. Bang! One dead kid.’

‘He was cracked,’ said Two Moons.

‘Yup, mad in the head,’ agreed Mitch. ‘Once he’d done that, there was only one thing to do if we were going to get out of there alive. I put my gun to Danvers’ head and shot him there and then. Eye for an eye. That’s the way the tribes there see it. As soon as Danvers had pulled the trigger on that kid, any hope of us getting any intel had gone, then or ever after.’

‘I can see why you did what you did,’ said Two Moons. ‘Killing Danvers in front of them was the only way to save the situation.’

‘And get out of there alive,’ agreed Gaz. ‘I’ve been with those tribes. I know what they’re like.’

Mitch gestured towards the front of the plane, where Nelson, Tug and Benny were engaged in whispered conversation. ‘Trouble is, the brass don’t see it that way. I shot an officer. Makes me
dangerous.’

Two Moons shook his head. ‘Not here, Mitch,’ he said. ‘You had no other choice. No one holds it against you in this outfit.’

Mitch shrugged. ‘Maybe, maybe not,’ he said.

Two Moons leant across Mitch and nudged Gaz. ‘So, mate,’ he said. ‘That’s me and Mitch here both with a murky secret. You got any you want to share?’

‘Oh, I’ve got plenty of secrets, mate,’ said Gaz, grinning, ‘but none that I want to tell the likes of you!’

Mitch and Two Moons laughed. Mitch realised that was the first time in a long while he’d been able to laugh properly. Since he’d shot Captain Danvers, in fact. With a bit of luck, being with these guys could be fun, as well as hard work.

Mitch looked out the window as the plane droned.

‘The colonel says you know Nigeria,’ said Two Moons after a pause.

Mitch smiled. ‘No one knows Nigeria,’ he said, chuckling. ‘People who say they do are lying. I’ve done two tours of duty there and it’s still a mystery to me.’

‘Who runs the country?’ asked Two Moons.

‘That’s the big question,’ said Mitch. ‘It depends who’s in power, and that can change. Basically the place is about civil war, with uneasy political truces now and then to keep some sort of government, and lots of corruption. And, out in the bush, no one runs it.’

‘Big corruption?’ asked Gaz, interested.

Mitch nodded. ‘When one ruler died in suspicious circumstances they found he had several hundred million dollars stashed in different bank accounts.’

Gaz whistled appreciatively. ‘Several hundred million,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t mind laying my hands on a slice of that!’

The plane flew on, hitting a bit of turbulence as it crossed the Atlas Mountains of North Africa, and then settling down for the rest of the journey
to Lagos.

Things continued to move fast when they arrived at the Nigerian city. Within fifteen minutes of landing they were strapped into their seats in the bay of a Bell UH-1 helicopter and heading east. Inside the helicopter there was no chance for chatting. The sound of the giant rotors above them made sure of that.

Mitch looked out through the open bay doors of the chopper as it flew over the Delta. As he watched the dense jungle unfold beneath him, he thought about their mission. It wasn’t just a case of finding Mwanga. Their biggest problem would be recognising the good guys from the bad guys when they came across them.

When the chopper neared their final landing site Mitch could feel every nerve in his body alert. They were going into trouble. The one question was: how soon would they find it? On a training mission there were always ground rules. You generally knew that, unless you made a stupid mistake, you would come
out of it alive. On a real mission the threat of dying was ever-present.

The jungle through the open hatch of the chopper looked like it was getting thicker. Rainforest made for tough terrain. Beneath the thick canopy of green leaves, trees sprang up like weeds from the wet and dark forest floor, the ground uneven and filled with roots twisting like contorted snakes, bursting up out of the soil. One moment you could be on solid ground, the next up to your waist in swamp, with leeches crawling all over you, getting inside your clothes, biting into your skin and sucking your blood.

Then there were the mosquitoes, also looking for blood, and giving you malaria in exchange. Mitch knew disease was the biggest killer in the jungle.

It was a dangerous place, but western companies still came here for one simple reason: oil. Some two million barrels a day were extracted in the Niger Delta. For that kind of money, oil companies were willing to take a risk. Or, at least, they were
willing to allow their employees to take a risk. They did as much as they could for their workers. They paid for protection, they spent money locally, they bribed. But not everyone was happy. Some locals were angry that the profits from the oil were going out of the country, instead of helping to solve local problems. Some were furious about the environmental destruction to the Delta.

These were the problems that Mwanga felt he could solve. Colonel Nelson and his superiors obviously believed that Mwanga could solve them too, or they wouldn’t be here.

The noise of the rotors whirling overhead filled the chopper bay. Mitch looked around at his comrades. Like him they were kitted out in combat gear with all the gizmos: night-vision goggles, hi-tech headset communication, laser sights on their rifles. And then, of course, their major weapon, the SA80 assault rifle each man held cradled in his arms, ready for use as soon as they hit the ground. The SA80 was perfect as
a close-combat weapon: light to carry but powerful and very effective.

In addition, Two Moons was the unit’s ordnance and explosives expert and had a range of more powerful weapons and explosives in his kit, including a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and mortars.

Mitch suddenly felt the helicopter bank sharply, and then turn. They were going down. Nelson’s voice came through his headphones.

‘Here we go, guys!’

The helicopter touched down in a small clearing in the jungle. It took just seconds for the six men to jump down from the open bay doors and head for the trees, where they took cover. The helicopter soared back up into the sky, and roared away, the beat of its rotors drumming against the air. Then it was gone, back towards the refineries and the oil pipelines of the Niger Delta. It was still in view when the firing opened up: bullets from machine guns and rifles pouring into their position. They were under attack.

It was the trees that saved them.

The six men threw themselves to the ground, taking what cover they could behind tree roots and gulleys in the uneven jungle floor. The trees around them took most of the damage, wood splinters and chunks of bark flying off as bullets smashed into them.

‘It’s an ambush! We’ve been sold out!’ came Nelson’s angry voice through their headsets.

The six men already had their own guns pointed in the direction of enemy gunfire, which was wild and haphazard, suggesting they weren’t being attacked by trained soldiers. But bullets killed, no matter who was shooting.

Lying in a dip in the ground, behind a tree root,
Mitch scanned the area where most of the firing seemed to be coming from, on the other side of the clearing. It had been sheer good luck that the unit had run for the trees at this side. If they’d gone the other way, they’d have walked straight into the ambush.

How many of them? It was hard to tell.

‘I’ve got a fix on the source of most of the machine guns,’ came Two Moons’ voice. ‘I’m going to stick an RPG in the middle of them, see what shakes the tree.’

Two Moons already had the launcher ready, with the rocket-propelled grenade in place, poking out of the barrel. He levelled the rocket launcher and fired. It wasn’t an easy shot, with trees and foliage on the other side of the clearing blocking the way, but Two Moons was an expert. There was an explosion from within the trees, a huge flash of fire, followed by screams.

‘Hit ‘em!’ yelled Nelson.