Tenth Man Down (12 page)
Authors: Chris Ryan
‘I don’t like it,’ I said to Whinger as we jolted along the sandy track. ‘If they act like that during an exercise, what are they going to be like when they get into a real, live battle?’
‘Fucking awful,’ he replied, and he pin-pointed my own worry by adding, ‘They’re all right for a bit, but then the buggers go bananas. They seem to lose their reason.’
When I had spoken to Hereford over the satcom the previous evening, I’d been deliberately vague about our plans for the next few days. I certainly didn’t tell them that I’d more or less promised the President we’d go as far as Gutu. But that, for better or worse, was what I’d done. I’d developed quite a liking for Rhino. His visit had ended happily and he’d gone off in his Puma highly chuffed, fancying Alpha Commando to win the civil war in a couple of weeks. In his estimation, the sun shone out of the backside of any member of the SAS.
‘Zikomo! Zikomo!
’ he had called, waving graciously as he boarded his chopper. Chalky had given him a few
zikomos
in return, claiming that the word meant ‘goodbye’ as well as ‘thanks’.
’ he had called, waving graciously as he boarded his chopper. Chalky had given him a few
zikomos
in return, claiming that the word meant ‘goodbye’ as well as ‘thanks’.
So here we were, driving towards the edge of the disputed zone, with the mine at Gutu our next major objective. All we knew about it was that its buildings stood on a bluff on the south bank of the Kameni river, and that diamonds were being dredged by suction from alluvial deposits in the bed of the stream. We had no information about the strength of the garrison, or about the area immediately surrounding the mine, but from the map the Kameni looked a major waterway.
Our own guys were riding in the two pinkies we’d flown out with us – long wheel-base Land Rovers, with windscreens folded down, all mirrors and lights hessianed-up, cam nets bunched and tied along the overhead roll-bars, and poles for the nets strapped along the sides. Everything had been stripped down in case we had to bomb-burst out of the vehicles. One pinkie had a .50 heavy machine gun mounted on the back, and one a Milan rocket-launcher post.
Our bulky kit was loaded into a seven-ton, four-wheel-drive Zyl lorry, sometimes driven by a local, sometimes by one of us. It was an ugly great lump of a truck, with a square-fronted radiator, a fore-mounted winch and an extra heavy angle-girder welded across the front, low down, to act as a bullbar. In spite of power steering, it was a brute to drive, but it was tough and reliable and had plenty of space. The cab was hot as hell, because it was all metal, with a turret opening in the roof on the passenger side. The back had steel sides about three feet high, and a canvas roof, rolled up on its frame to make a sun-shade. Most of Alpha Commando was travelling in similar vehicles, although they also had four Gaz jeeps of Russian origin.
One obvious problem was the inaccuracy of our maps. We already knew they were dodgy before we started south, but it wasn’t until we started covering bigger distances that we realised just how much imagination they included. That first morning we wasted a couple of hours searching in vain for a dirt road clearly marked in yellow, heading south-east in the direction we wanted; either it had never existed, or it had been over-grown by bush, and we finished up making a three-hour detour along tracks to the west. That was the morning gone, and us scarcely any closer to our objective.
Another problem, we could see, was going to be water. We were carrying our own supplies in jerricans stowed under the false floors of the pinkies, along with our rations, and we had reserves in forty-five-gallon containers aboard the big truck. But the locals went through water like they were going to land up beside a nice big clean river every night, and I kept hearing their ruperts reading the riot act about it.
Even before the civil war the country south of us had been sparsely inhabited. According to Joss, only one village in fifty had a borehole. Now most of the villages had been burned down. Some of the few wells that existed had been deliberately wrecked, and others had been polluted with the dead bodies of animals or humans thrown down them, so that once again everybody depended on rivers or springs, and people thought nothing of walking three or four kilometres in each direction to fetch water every morning.
As we went further south, the air grew steadily hotter. With only short breaks we drove right through the first afternoon after Bakunda’s departure, and on through the night. A couple of hours before dawn we came out on to a ridge commanding a big sweep of country, across which – according to our maps – ran a main road leading from the border in the direction of Gutu. So we stopped under a grove of sausage trees to get a good look at what lay ahead of us. Our vehicles deployed and cammed-up, with the heavy weapons sited in all-round defensive positions, and everybody got their heads down in turn.
When the light came up, we were disappointed to find that the ground in front consisted of a featureless sea of bush, dipping gently until it rose again to another low ridge in the distance. There were open patches of grassland between the trees and shrubs, but if the road was there, we couldn’t see it and continuous observation revealed no movement of any kind. The only development before midday came at about 1130, when a column of smoke went up from beyond the far ridge, to our left.
‘Bush fire?’ I asked Joss, who was standing with me.
‘I don’t think so,’ he answered. ‘Smoke’s too concentrated. A bush fire would be more spread out. Looks like somebody’s burnt a village.’
It was Jason, the skinny tracker, who raised the alert. He was on stag in one of the forward OPs when he gave a sudden call.
I looked across, saw him pointing, and hurried over.
‘What is it?’
‘One man.’
‘Where?
‘Two tall trees, over there.’
‘Got ’em.’
‘To the right, open space.’
‘Yes.’
‘One minute, he come out.’
I glued my binoculars to the small, stony plain, not wanting to put Mabonzo down, but hardly believing that a single man could be moving on his own through that huge wilderness.
But hell, the tracker was right.
A tiny figure struggled into view, an African, bareheaded, in rags, limping heavily, leaning on a stick, dragging himself forward a step at a time, four or five hundred yards from us. He was heading vaguely north, on course to pass to our right.
‘Hey, Whinge,’ I called. ‘Look at this.’
‘The poor bugger’s hurt,’ said Whinger immediately. Then suddenly he shouted, ‘No! For fuck’s sake!’
One of the Kamangan sentries had brought his AK47 up into the aim.
‘Don’t shoot!’ said Whinger fiercely. ‘This guy may be some use to us. He’s tabbed it from the direction of the enemy. Hey, Joss!’
The distant fugitive must have heard Whinger’s first yell, because he’d stopped and looked around.
‘Jesus!’ I said. ‘He’s going to do a runner.’
‘Like hell he is,’ said Andy, who’d appeared beside me. ‘He couldn’t run to save his life.’
‘Let’s get down to him, then,’ I went. ‘Andy and I’ll go with Joss. The rest of you keep still and cover us.’
We watched for a couple of minutes to make sure the man was on his own. In the end, unable to identify where the sound had come from, he started lurching forward again, and Andy and I set off towards him, together with Joss and a man called Kaingo, who could speak several tribal languages besides his own. As we moved I kept a patch of thick bush between us and our target, so that he didn’t see us, because I was afraid he might take fright and try to sheer off. The result was that when he finally came in view of us, he was only twenty metres off.
The sight of four armed guys in DPMs, two black, two white, gave him a horrible fright. He jumped backwards, tried to run, fell over, and then raised his hands in a pathetic gesture of surrender. By the time we got to him, he was on his knees, eyeballs rotating like crazy. We could see straight away that he was covered in cuts, with dust and dried blood crusting over them, and that he had metal shackles on his ankles. But it wasn’t until Andy went round behind him and whistled in amazement that we realised how badly he’d been injured. His tattered blue shirt had been torn into vertical strips, and so had the skin on his back. From shoulder to arse he was ripped and scarified, with shreds of skin hanging off, as if he’d been dragged over a bed of nails. The backs of his legs were the same. The wounds were fresh, with some of the blood not yet congealed, and flies crawling all over.
‘Tell him he’s safe,’ I said, and when Joss translated, the man’s fear visibly declined.
‘Water,’ I told Andy. ‘Give him a drink.’
Andy pulled a bottle out of his belt kit and handed it over.
Between gulps, the miserable creature choked out his story. His village had been destroyed by the rebels, he said.
‘First they bombed,’ Joss translated.
‘With aircraft?’
‘No aircraft. With guns. Shells. Some people were killed. Many ran away into the bush. Then the Afundis came and set fire to the huts. They raped the women – themselves first, then with knives in the belly. They cut the children into pieces.’
‘Okay, okay. Where was it?’
The man turned and made a big gesture towards the south. ‘Many days’ walking’ was the only way he could describe the location.
‘How did he get here, then?’
He’d been captured and taken for slave labour, driven off in a truck to rebuild the road from Gutu to the border. Places where floods had washed it away in the rainy season. He’d escaped during the night when a gang of workmen was being transported to a new location further west. He’d managed to secrete a hacksaw blade, and had sawed through the chain of his shackles during the journey.
At first we got the impression he’d just jumped off the truck; then he explained that he’d wriggled down over the side, between the rim of the body and the canvas top, and clung there, not daring to drop because they were travelling so fast. A minute or two later they’d come to a place where thorn bushes had grown over, nearly closing the track, and suddenly he’d found himself being ripped to pieces, all along his back. When the vehicle slowed, he’d dropped off.
‘Can you show us the road, then?’ I asked gently.
The man pointed over the sea of bush ahead of us, and his answer came back via Joss, ‘Half a day.’
‘At his rate, half a day’s only a couple of ks,’ I went. ‘Let’s get down there and have a look.’
‘Wait,’ said Joss. ‘He says he has something important to tell you.’
‘Go on, then.’
‘Tonight a convoy is coming back along this same road . . .’ The refugee talked in slow, painful sentences, and Joss patiently relayed the details. ‘From the border. It is bringing arms and ammunition for the garrison at Gutu.’
I felt a surge of excitement, but all I said was, ‘How does he know?’
‘He heard Afundi officers speaking.’
‘Tonight – is he sure?’
The man nodded vigorously.
‘How many vehicles?’
‘He thinks three or four. One of them will be the truck he jumped off.’
‘Right, then.’ I glanced at Andy and saw he was thinking the same as me. ‘Kaingo, get Mart to do what he can about his wounds. Andy and I are going down to recce that road.’
The reason we hadn’t spotted the track was that it ran across our front in a long, shallow valley, out of our sight as we were advancing. But there it was, just as the man had described it: a narrow, sandy track, so little used that seedling trees and bushes had sprouted up all over it, and in many places vegetation had closed in from the sides, halving its width. This squared with descriptions we’d heard of how, before the civil war, Bakunda had deliberately let roads serving Gutu go to pot, in a clumsy attempt to increase the security of the mine, while he himself relied on aircraft to lift supplies in and diamonds out. But now, on this one, there were tyre tracks, and a litter of broken twigs that showed a vehicle had recently forced its way through.
One thought was uppermost in all our minds: ambush. Coming so soon after the exercise, this looked like a God-given opportunity to give the Kamangans live practice and prevent a load of weapons reaching the rebels. Joss was all for it. His eyes were gleaming as he said, ‘Oh, wah! Let’s just find a good site, and we’ll get on with it.’
Our recce didn’t take long. There were no footprints in the dust of the track, and we ourselves kept off it, moving parallel with its course until we came to a point where it swung left and right as it crossed a wide hollow, and then straightened as it disappeared over some higher ground beyond. Up there, thick bush was growing, but the depression was open – a great killing ground. For ten minutes we scanned with binoculars to make sure nobody else was on the move.
‘Lovely thicket, just the ticket,’ went Andy, imitating Whinger, but letting himself down by giving both halves of the rhyme instead of one.
‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘Let ’em come well down the slope into the open, and we’ve got ’em.’
In many ways the site was better than the one we’d chosen for the exercise, and Joss didn’t need long to work out a plan. Positions for right and left cut-off groups suggested themselves immediately. For RPGs and heavy machine guns, the range was point-blank; if the enemy vehicles reached the bottom of the slope, none of them would escape. There was even a bit of a hill out to the left from which a rear cut-off group could put down fire across the track on top of the rise, to take out anyone who tried to run off along it, and also, in the opposite direction, cover our own backs.
Other books
The Polo Ground Mystery by Robin Forsythe
Copycat by Gillian White
Rebirth by Sophie Littlefield
Just Listen by Clare James
The Rivers of Zadaa by D.J. MacHale
Etta Mae's Worst Bad-Luck Day by Ann B. Ross
A History of China by Morris Rossabi
Curse of the Nandi (Society for Paranormals Book 5) by Vered Ehsani
Underneath It All (Storm Series) by Carr, Cassandra
Underground, Overground by Andrew Martin