Recoil (27 page)

Sam checked the watch hanging round his neck. ‘You tried, and that’s good enough. It’ll be up to Standish to explain to the big Swiss cheese. He won’t like it. That’s five of them dead now. Two out there, three of disease. The Chinese won’t be happy either. But that’s not our problem right now, is it? We got just under four hours of light left. That’s when things will kick off around here. He’d better grip that gunshot wound and get a move on.’

We moved back to Silky, who was struggling to lift the heavy jerry-can to her lips.

‘She’s fucked her ankle. I’ll have to try and sort it out.’

Sam nodded. ‘Soon as you’ve squared her away, come and find me. I’ve got work for you.’

2

Silky wasn’t the only one who needed food and fluid. I wasn’t feeling at all good. An out-of-tune military band was banging away inside my head, and my whole body felt drained. I’d been running every day in Lugano and using Stefan’s gym in the house, so it wasn’t like I was out of condition, but none of that counts for much when you’re dehydrated and fucked.

I scooped myself another helping of dirty brown sludge. Silky finished drinking and handed me the jerry-can.

‘I’ll be back in a minute.’ I headed for the boy.

I could now see that the sheets of paper were covered with crayon drawings. Sunday really did look like a schoolboy now, and that made things worse. I tossed him my rice can. He caught it and started digging hungrily.

Silky looked curious when I returned. ‘Who’s that?’

‘Sunday. A child soldier we picked up last night.’

She got up and hobbled over to the boy while I got the jerry-can to my mouth. I could feel the fluid work its way down and start to fill my stomach.

Silky wasn’t impressed. ‘Oh, my God, what are you doing? He’s not a dog!’

I tried to lower myself to the ground without my leg muscles screaming at me to stop. Then I realized what was on her mind.

‘It’s inhuman!’

‘Stop, stop, stop!’ I jumped up and ran after her. The pain had disappeared. ‘Don’t go near him!’ I grabbed her as she got within biting distance. ‘He was ripping chunks of flesh out of people last night. Just leave him alone – let him settle down.’

‘Nick, he’s just a boy.’

‘He’s getting fed, he’s getting watered. He’s OK. Come on.’ I steered her back to the fire. ‘He’s not the only one who needs sorting out.’

As she sat down, I straightened her leg and supported it on my thigh. I undid her laces and gently eased off her boot. The bruising round her ankle was now a sulphurous yellow.

I examined it as gently as I could. ‘Does it feel broken?’

She shrugged. ‘I can’t feel anything much, just pain. Can you find me some ibuprofen or something? And bandages, or some kind of strapping?’

‘Wait here,’ I said. ‘And don’t go anywhere near the kid.’

I found a basic trauma-care kit in one of the tents and, with her leg supported on my thigh again, I started to dress her ankle with a 50mm bandage. She kept telling me what needed to be done. I’d probably treated a whole lot more trauma cases as a patrol medic than she had as a trainee doctor, but I wasn’t about to argue the toss.

She sat on a log, her hands stretched out behind her. I took the strapping halfway up her calf, trying to give her ankle as much support as possible. It needed a cold compress, but they were in pretty short supply. I certainly wasn’t going to waste the drinking water, or go anywhere near the river with the LRA fucking about in the treeline.

It felt good to be doing this for her, and, well, just to be holding her leg, really. ‘We’ll get you into one of the tents in a minute. Water, food and rest, that’s what you need.’

Her mind was elsewhere. ‘Tim?’

‘I’ll find out in a minute. Let’s get you sorted first.’

I eased her arm over my shoulder, put my hand round her waist, and helped her hobble into the nearest tent. She collapsed on to a cot and I grabbed a couple of folded blankets to elevate her leg.

‘Can you still feel your toes? Wiggle your toes for me.’

She did.

‘Can you feel that?’ I gave them a pinch.

She nodded.

‘If you get pins and needles, tell me. I’ll need to loosen it off.’

I didn’t know whether to kiss her, or just go. ‘I’ll see you in a bit, OK? And leave Sunday alone. Really.’ I turned, picked up the AK and left.

I found Sam on the track, screaming and shouting at people who didn’t understand bad French in a thick Glasgow accent. ‘You ready to do something useful now?’ he asked.

‘She’s in a cot. She’ll want to come down and help Tim for sure, but she needs to stay put. Is that where you’re commanding from?’

He nodded.

‘I want to keep her up there.’

‘I’m not going to babysit. I’ll have enough on my plate.’

‘I want her safe, that’s all.’

‘As if.’ He started to laugh. ‘She speak French?’

3

Sam’s eyes were everywhere but on me as I told him about the tree fall, and that Standish would call when he got across.

‘
If
he gets across. Now, I want you on the ANFO. These guys know how to make it and kick it off but they haven’t got a clue how to place it. I need devices out there to stop the enemy coming in through the front door.’ He waved his arm at the river and trees beyond. ‘You know the score. They’ll attack head on at last light.’

‘They’ve also got the river in the way. That’ll slow ’em.’

‘Aye, maybe. But they’ll get across, one way or another – they’re probably doing it right now. Last light, that’s when it’ll kick off. That’s what they do – they’re thick as cow dung.’

I smiled. I couldn’t help it.

He pointed at the guys mixing diesel and fertilizer. ‘Just to the left of that lot there’s a dugout. Go and check the stores. I’ll get Crucial down to you once I’ve stood everybody to, OK? It’s going to have to be done double-time, Nick. I want you back up at the tents with the command wire. I’ll be making the decision when to detonate. Got it?’

He didn’t wait for an answer. He knew it would be yes. He turned to his next task and I headed towards the ANFO boys.

The noises of preparation filled the valley. Then a GPMG opened up way ahead of me, on the high ground to the left, and drowned everything else. Tracer arced into the trees the other side of the river. This wasn’t a contact: they were test firing. I watched as one of the gunners adjusted the regulator at the front of the gas chamber, just below the barrel, to slow down the rate of fire.

I speeded up. The ANFO boys were bent over the oil drums, busy crushing fertilizer granules while their mates stood by to add the diesel. There were no measuring scales or cups, and the mixing was done by hand. The boys just threw the stuff together and gave it a good stir; these were the master chefs of the explosives world. For all that, they looked like they knew what they were doing, and there must have been thirty-odd bags ready to go.

An RPG kicked off somewhere behind me and I spun round in time to see a trail of grey smoke above the tents on the high ground. I watched as the sustainer motor took the grenade into the air, on a trajectory to the rear of the valley. I lost sight of it as it dropped, then soft-detonated above the dead ground over the lip. Good idea. Probably Sam’s.

I reached the dugout just as Sam shouted the stand-to. As the order echoed round the valley, the squaddies stopped whatever they were doing and pulled on their chest harnesses, then disappeared into the sangars to take up their fire positions.

The miners looked up briefly, then went back to scratching a living as if nothing had happened. They’d seen it all before and, besides, they were probably safer than the rest of us in those holes. But they’d have to down tools any minute: I was going to commandeer them, whether they liked it or not. We’d have to get the squaddies to take them at gunpoint if necessary. I needed the metal, and fast.

They wouldn’t lose out: they’d soon be back at work – Standish would have Lex airdropping replacement picks and shovels the minute all this was over.

I looked up to the lip of the valley where Silky and I had come back in. The patrol we’d bumped into was taking up its stand-to positions. Sam jumped into one of the sangars and made sure the guys knew their arcs of fire. He’d be double-checking each and every one of them, down to their barrel clearances as they lay in their fire positions. Because the sights on an AK are high on the barrel, you might think you were aiming at a target a couple of hundred or so away, but pointing the barrel directly into the mud in front of you. And when guys get sparked up, these things happen.

Most of them would be firing from the sitting position. Not only does it take for ever to change mags on an AK but the magazine is so long and curved that firing prone is almost impossible. The mag digs into the ground, leaving the weapon too high to get into the shoulder. Mikhail Kalashnikov didn’t care – he’d designed the thing to be fired on automatic by thousands of mad Russians charging the enemy over the windswept steppes.

The stand-to wasn’t just to check on the guys but for Sam to know that every metre of mud, bush or tree in a full 360-degree circle was covered. We were definitely on the brink.

The dugout was the size of a three-car garage, burrowed into the side of the hill. As soon as I was inside it, I was hit by a combination of stifling heat and the stench of marzipan. It was so hot, glue oozed from the edges of the rolls of gaffer-tape scattered on the ground, red gravel stuck to them.

Green wooden RPG boxes with red Chinese characters stencilled on the side had been emptied and discarded. Others were covered with Cyrillic lettering, and the distinctive numbers 7.62. It felt like I’d gone back in time, and was fighting the Cold War all over again.

Wooden drums of dark brown det cord were stacked four high. A plunger initiation device, still in its knackered canvas carrysack, lay nearby. It looked like it had come straight out of a Wild West movie; this was the kind of kit Jesse James had used to fuck up a railroad track before he’d robbed the train. Once they’d dumped the contents of their bags on Lex’s Antonov, the porters obviously didn’t go back to the mine empty-handed. They must have replenished this anarchist’s warehouse every trip.

I felt a little better for getting the water down me, but it wasn’t enough. The band still banged about in my head. I helped myself to a selection of demolition kit and put some aside for later, once the devices were placed.

Crucial came in, pushing out pills from a foil blister pack and getting them down his neck, dry. He was taking quite a cocktail. Each pack had rows of white, blue and yellow capsules.

His hair and eyebrows were still caked with dry mud, but sweat had shifted most of it from his face. His wound leaked through the dressing and was turning the mud round it a darker red.

There was no time to fuck around. ‘Crucial, I want the guys to mix all this lot.’ I slapped the stacks of fertilizer. ‘I want everything they’ve already mixed, and this lot, down by the river, at the valley entrance. Start dumping it on the right-hand side as we look at it from here, yeah?’

Crucial wrinkled his nose at the smell. Maybe he’d never been in here. ‘It reminds me of a cake Sam made at the mission one Christmas when I was a kid. What’s the plan?’

I picked up a reel of detonation cord. ‘A welcome mat they won’t forget. The world’s biggest fuck-off claymores.’

The diamonds in his teeth glinted, even in the gloom. ‘Playtime!’ He was actually enjoying this.

I shook my head. ‘There’s fuck-all wrong with you, is there?’

Crucial smiled some more. ‘What have I got to lose?’

I didn’t have time to answer. ‘I want all the miners to drop off their picks and shovels. Anything metal – pots, pans, the lot. I want these claymores big and I want them dangerous. If they won’t do it, fucking stick a barrel or two up their arses. They’ll get the message. Can I get some cover down there?’

He nodded.

I set off as fast as I could, which wasn’t very. I was staggering again by the time I was back on the valley floor, my nose full of marzipan fumes, my arms full of AK, a reel of det cord, and a wooden box of HE. My head still had a regimental band drumming away inside, and to top it all, I was finding it harder to lift my boots out of the mud. My feet felt like fully loaded bergens.

Crucial screamed at the miners and the ANFO mixers behind me. Sam bounced from sangar to sangar checking arcs. Once done, the guys would stand down, but stay in their positions, with all their kit on, ready for an instant stand-to.

I passed the re-entrant where the Nuka mob were huddled. There was no sign of Tim but I was sure he’d be running around in there with the rest of his crew. A bunch of porters had now joined the gathering, some with their families. It looked like the walking wounded were being coaxed into taking cover in the mine shafts; the switched-on ones were already there, like Londoners down the tube during the Blitz. They weren’t protesting: they knew as well as we did that the shit was about to hit the fan.

Sam’s kids looked much the same as they had when I first saw them. They sat together, wrapped in blankets. Like Sunday, they stared at everything going on around them, but their expressionless eyes told me they were on another planet. Whatever it was called, it must have been a dull and scary place.