Tenth Man Down (45 page)
Authors: Chris Ryan
My right foot was flat down. We were doing ninety again – a crazy speed on that surface. It wasn’t safe to take my eyes off the road for more than a second at a time. In spite of our pace, the jeep was going to reach the road first, before we passed the point where its line intersected ours, unless the driver suddenly stopped so that his crew could open up on us broadside as we went past. In the final seconds of convergence I realised he wasn’t going to. He’d committed himself to blocking our path. Along that stretch the road was built up on a low causeway, maybe a couple of feet high, with sandy banks sloping down into the scrub on either side. We were less than a hundred metres from convergence when the jeep reached the right-hand bank, bounced up it and slithered to a halt at an angle across the carriageway. The driver must have thought the block would make me slow down. Some chance.
Beside me, Jason hammered off three short bursts from his 203. Dust spurted on our side of the jeep.
‘Get in!’ I roared. ‘Get back in!’
He saw that impact was imminent, and wriggled back inside the cab. Just in time he dropped the weapon and braced himself, hands and feet. I did the same, gripping the wheel with all my strength and forcing myself against the backrest.
We went in at the jeep with terrifying velocity. I felt I was looking through a zoom lens, so fast did the target grow. Thank God for our bullbar, I thought. I just had time to see the guys in the back of the Gaz struggling to sort themselves and bring their weapons to bear on us when,
WHAM!
, we hit them broadside with shattering force. The impact lifted the jeep clean off its wheels and flung it away to our left like a toy. I caught a glimpse of the standing guys being jackknifed over the bars they’d been holding on to. Their vehicle was whipped sideways with such colossal energy that the bars drove into their chests and stomachs, doubling them forward. As for us, we took a terrific jolt, but the mother wagon’s weight and impetus were such that it hardly slowed. We came out of the crash still doing seventy. In the mirror I saw flames and smoke rising from the wreck.
WHAM!
, we hit them broadside with shattering force. The impact lifted the jeep clean off its wheels and flung it away to our left like a toy. I caught a glimpse of the standing guys being jackknifed over the bars they’d been holding on to. Their vehicle was whipped sideways with such colossal energy that the bars drove into their chests and stomachs, doubling them forward. As for us, we took a terrific jolt, but the mother wagon’s weight and impetus were such that it hardly slowed. We came out of the crash still doing seventy. In the mirror I saw flames and smoke rising from the wreck.
‘Fucking take that!’ I yelled in triumph. Then I shot a glance at Jason and saw blood running down his cheek. ‘Hey!’ I went. ‘You okay?’
‘Sure, sah!’ He was grinning and patting his left temple, showing where he’d nicked it against the roof of the cab.
I snatched the radio mike, and called, ‘Green One. We’ve disabled that rogue jeep you saw go cross-country. It’s on fire. But watch yourselves when you pass it. There could be survivors.’
‘Roger,’ went Pav. ‘We can see the smoke ahead of us.’
For nearly half a minute after the smash I thought we’d got clean away with it, that our truck was intact. The engine hadn’t faltered, and the steering felt fine. Then I noticed the temperature gauge, creeping up.
‘Shit!’ I yelled. ‘We’ve holed the radiator!’
At that moment, Pav came on with, ‘The Herc’s nearly round its circuit. Looking to land in figures two minutes.’
‘Roger,’ I went. ‘Which way’s he coming in?’
‘West to east, from behind you.’
‘Roger. I’m almost at the end of the Mall. Tell the pilot I’ll try to give him smoke at both ends of a good strip. Got a problem, though. Truck’s overheating. Stand by.’
Eyeballing frantically to my left, I recognised the start of the Mall and swung left-handed off the road towards the flat ground. On the temperature gauge the needle was up into the red. Before we reached the level area we had to cross an old river bed. Over the bumps I changed down into second. Steam began pouring from under the bonnet. Fifty yards short of the flat, the needle went off the dial. I sensed that if I gunned the engine for another few seconds, it would seize. Somehow I’d got to get the truck on to the flat ground so that the Herc could pull up beside it. No way would the incoming crew be able to carry every missile a hundred metres or more.
I switched off, and said to Jason, ‘Got to get some water into it. Here, take these.’ I pulled out two smoke grenades which I’d had stowed in my Bergen, down beside my feet. ‘The plane’s coming in this way.’ I made a sweeping movement, indicating an approach from behind us and to the left. ‘Run! Crack one off over there, on the flat. Then run again. Minimum five hundred metres straight along. Six hundred if you can make it before you see the Herc coming. Okay?’
‘Yassir!’ Jason’s face was all lit up. He slipped the grenades into his pouches, jumped down, and ran like a grey spider, stumbling over the tussocks.
‘Green One,’ I went on the radio. ‘Tell the Herc he’ll have one lot of smoke anyway, maybe two. If it’s only one, that’s his touch-down point; if it’s two, they’ll mark both ends of the strip. Stand by.’
I leapt to the ground. Steam was still pouring from the bonnet. With the catch released, the damage was obvious: some sharp edge driven into the front of the radiator. The whole engine was dangerously hot. I was still wearing Rasputin’s protective gloves, but first I smothered the radiator cap with a piece of sacking as well, then turned it. Jets of steam spurted sideways. I ran round to the back of the wagon, unhooked the cage that held the jerricans under the false floor, dragged a can out and lugged it to the front. The first few pints of water exploded in steam, but the rest took the temperature down and the system began to fill.
As I stood there holding the heavy can level, I heard the engines of the Herc. I glanced behind me towards the beginning of the Mall. Green smoke was billowing, going almost straight up, and in the distance Jason was running.
Fresh water started to dribble from the hole in the honeycomb of metal on the radiator front. I stopped pouring, flung the can away, stuffed sacking into the puncture, replaced the cap, slammed the bonnet down and hauled myself into the driving seat. The engine fired. I went into first, crawled forward, and changed into second.
With my own engine running, I could no longer hear the plane. How far out was it? Jason had cracked off the first grenade well out on the flat ground. Fifty yards short of it, I stopped at right angles to the line of approach and craned forward in the cab, peering to my left. Nothing in sight.
A thought struck me. If I could get the wagon to the far end of our makeshift runway, the Herc could load up from it there, without having to taxi back the length of the strip. Because there was zero wind, the pilot could take off again in the opposite direction, and not overfly the convoy approaching from the east.
I revved up, rolled forward and turned right along the designated runway. Up ahead Jason had vanished into the heat haze. Too late, I glanced down at the temperature gauge. Once more the needle was high in the red. A second later I was getting steam again – a big cloud of it this time, spurting up in front.
No chance of stopping now. I had to keep going. I was maybe halfway along the strip when I heard what I’d been dreading: a horrendous, grinding scream from the engine, followed by a noise like chains being pulled fast through iron railings, then a single, devastating crack.
The wagon hiccuped to a halt. I grabbed the radio. ‘Green One,’ I shouted. ‘I’m fucked! Where are you?’
‘Right behind you,’ came the answer. ‘We have you visual. What’s your problem?’
‘Engine’s seized. Can’t move.’
‘Stand by. We’ll get a towline on you.’
Within seconds, the pinkie came up with a rush on my right and scorched to a halt a few metres ahead. Dust swirled up round it. Pav was driving, with Stringer beside him. The rest of the guys – I noted with relief that we’d suffered no casualties in the shoot-out – jumped off the open back and ran out a rope. Above the noise of the jeep’s engine idling I could hear Stringer shouting over the satcom. I caught a glimpse of Danny with blood on his face. Holding the rope in place, he waved the jeep forward. Pav twisted round in his seat, then turned back and eased his vehicle forward to take up the strain. In the distance ahead a second column of green smoke was rising.
I already had my gear shift in neutral, and to minimise resistance I held the clutch pedal down on the floor. Still spouting steam, the mother wagon rolled forward, slow as a crippled elephant. Suddenly, from behind, from right above our heads, came an almighty roar and a blast of hot air as the Herc thundered over, not fifty feet up. Its undercarriage was down, but even as it cleared us I saw the flaps come up and heard the pilot increase power as he lifted away.
‘What’s he doing?’ I shouted.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Pav shouted back. ‘How can he land with you in the middle of the fucking runway?’
I felt faint, as though I was going to pass out. My left leg was shaking violently with the effort of holding the clutch pedal down. I let the pressure off, and we continued to roll. Without any power the steering had gone heavy as lead. We were doing only eight or nine kilometres an hour. At that speed I had time to reach out for a water-bottle and get the contents down my neck. Far out in front, the Herc was lifting away in a hard turn to the left, with black exhaust trails streaming behind its engines.
The liquid gave me new heart.
‘Tell him we’ll be ready for him next time round,’ I said to Pav. ‘And tell him the black guy on the runway’s one of ours.’
‘Roger,’ Pav answered. ‘We’re in the shit already. The plane’s just taken fire from the enemy column. The pilot reckons they’re within three ks of the strip.’
I measured the distance from us to Jason’s second smoke grenade. Two hundred metres. For another few seconds I held on. ‘Keep going,’ I called. ‘Keep going . . . This’ll do. Pull off! Pull away to the right.’
Pav turned. He had the sense to keep going until he’d towed the mother wagon well off the strip, at right angles to it, tail-on. The moment he stopped, Danny leapt off and slashed through the rope with a knife. Then Pav drove off twenty or thirty metres.
I jumped to the ground, ran to the back of the wagon and unhooked the fastenings of the tail-board. At a glance I could tell that several of the warhead casings had cracked during our violent transit. The whole load seemed to be coated in transparent slime.
The roar of aircraft engines made me look behind. There was the Herc, coming round in a hard turn, almost at zero feet, banked like a huge, heavy fighter, with the tip of its port wing flicking over the bush.
‘Shit hot!’ I shouted. ‘That’s some flying!’ But when I moved towards the pinkie and the other guys, to get the crack, they edged rapidly away, staring at me as if I were a lunatic.
‘What’s the matter?’ I called.
‘Keep your fucking distance, Geordie!’ Mart shouted. ‘There’s NBC suits for us all on board the Herc. Until we’ve got them on, just stay clear of us and the wagon.’
The Herc was already coming in. Having made the tightest possible circuit, the pilot straightened up and banged his big aircraft down just past the first smoke grenade. Smoke and dust exploded as the tyres bit. So hard was the first impact that the plane bounced and flew another fifty metres before it smacked down again. There was a terrific roar as the pilot reversed the thrust of the props, and the aircraft disappeared in a whirling cloud of dust, sand and debris.
By the time it trundled level with us it had slowed to a walking pace, and it swung hard round, right-handed, turning back to face the way it had come, before rolling to a halt no more than thirty metres from the mother wagon. Already the tail ramp was on its way down. From the side door burst a team of men in sand-coloured NBC suits, complete with helmets, masks and respirators. The two guys in the lead carried armfuls of spare suits. Ignoring me, they ran for the pinkie and threw the garments at the rest of the lads, who immediately started struggling into them.
The remainder of the NBC team came in my direction. The leader shouted something in my face, but the combination of his mask and the scream of the Herc’s engines deadened his voice, and I didn’t get what he said.
Instead of replying, I pointed at the back of the mother wagon. The guy ran towards it, stopped a couple of metres short, took one look at the load and made a colossal ‘no way’ gesture with his gloved hands, flinging his arms out wide to either side, on a level with his shoulders, like a member of a ground crew telling a pilot to shut down his engines. Then he turned and did the same towards the flight-deck of the aircraft.
He must have given a radio order to his mates. Three men ran forward with a hold-all and began rigging explosive charges on the noses of the weapons in the top layer. As they worked, the leader made violent gestures towards our team, pumping his right hand up and down and pointing at the plane. ‘Get in!’ his signals were saying. ‘Move! On the double! All aboard!’
The lads stumbled towards the pinkie, half in and half out of their sandy suits, to grab their weapons. Pav must have realised that he wasn’t going to need any protection after all, because he ripped his kit off and threw it on the ground with an angry gesture before he seized the .50 from its mount, then snatched his own 203 and ran for the plane, clutching both weapons. Stringer was already fully dressed, but Danny and Chalky moved awkwardly, with their legs encased, holding the upper halves of the suits around their waists. The Herc sat there, big and heavy, with all four props spinning.
As for me, I felt zombiefied. I couldn’t move. I stood and watched the demolition guys taping their det cord into position and setting a timer. Stringer was right: we should have blown the missiles in the cache, without ever bothering to move them.
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