The Henchmen's Book Club (5 page)

“You fucking
mother
!” he spat, “where are you?”

I didn’t say, so he stepped up his
search.

The door handle of my cupboard was given
a good hard rattle, but I’d locked and jammed it from the inside the moment I’d
climbed in, pissing over his plans somewhat. Not to be deterred, Dunbar turned
the door into Swiss cheese with his AK, but I’d seen this coming and was now
cowering with a mop bucket over my head behind a load of Kevlar vests as the
brooms around me bit the dust.

Another clip done, Dunbar spent five more
minutes trying to bluff a confrontation out of me before chucking in the towel
and killing a couple of bins on his way out. The SEO would come to view this as
one of their greatest triumphs, but on a personal note Dunbar ended his day on
a bit of a downer. Which was good.

When he was finally gone, I kicked open
the door and tumbled out into the corridor. I knew he wouldn’t be waiting for
me as big men like Dunbar didn’t do sneaky things like that, so I shook the
bucket from my head and considered my position.

I was the last man standing, with life
and limbs intact. Which was good. But I was a mile beneath several million tons
of African volcanic rock and the wrong side of an unnecessary amount of
plastique explosives. Which was less so.

I had to get out of here.
 

And I had to get out fast.

Dunbar would’ve no doubt hit the
countdown on his way out, which gave me just five minutes to get clear. SEO and
CIA detonators always counted down from five minutes for some reason. I wasn’t
sure why. Perhaps they’d got them as a job lot on the cheap or perhaps they
always set them to five minutes because this gave them just enough time to get
clear of a standard blast radius, high-five a buddy, eat a Hershey Bar and
salute a flag. Either way, I was at least fifteen minutes from the nearest exit
and all out of hard hats.

I ran around in ever decreasing circles,
pondering my fate and considered risking Dunbar’s less-than-inviting point of
entry, before accepting that my best days were behind me. See, while the base
had no end of tunnels and access ways, only a couple of them lead to the
surface. The rest just circumvented the volcano and criss-crossed back and
forth because that’s what base tunnels did. My chances of picking the right
tunnel without consulting a blueprint were less than impressive and my
prospects were rapidly going down the pan.

The pan!

That was it.

I tore down two corridors and thundered
into the men’s latrines. The place was empty. No one dead with their heads down
any of the toilets and no signs of any explosives, just a beaten up old copy of
The Miracle of Castel di Sangro
in
the last cubicle.

I pulled the trigger on my AK and
splintered the porcelain pan into a thousand pieces, then lobbed a frag grenade
into the hole.

The frag widened the hole with a
deafening thump and splattered the walls with second-hand stew. Victor Soliman
would’ve been distraught at the sight of his brilliant white walls in such a
state. I’d worked for a lot of fusspots in my time before but never one who’d
been so anal about the brilliance of his latrines. Perhaps if he’d spent a
little more money on the base’s security measures and a little less on Vim we
might’ve even got away with this one, but no, once again we all paid the price
for signing on with a man who’d once tried to patent disposable toilet door
handles.

I dived into the jagged hole the frag had
just made and slid down a tube, landing in six inches of last night’s supper.
For almost thirty seconds, I lay on my belly gagging, retching and choking
until I had nothing to add to the soup. Had I known I was leaving this way I
might’ve grabbed a gas breather from one of the emergency stations, but I’d
been in such a hurry to get out of here that the details simply hadn’t occurred
to me. In the event, I pressed on as best I could and tried to overlook the
décor. It might’ve been cramped, it might’ve been slippery, it might’ve been toxic
to the point of suffocating but at least it led to the outside world.

The pipe sloped down at an angle of about
thirty degrees, so that once I had a bit of momentum behind me I was able to
half drag, half slide my way to freedom, which might’ve been fun at WaterWorld,
but was less so the morning after Tex-Mex night. Sewage splashed in my face,
sweet corn collected under my nails and other people’s piss filled my trousers,
but at least I was making process, which was good considering I had only… two seconds
left!

The first in a series of deep thunderous
booms resounded behind me and I gave up caring about trying to keep my mouth
closed as I flung myself down the sloping pipe. I scrambled and scampered, but
it was too little too late – the blast caught up with me in a heartbeat.

It takes a lot to blow up a volcano.
Volcanoes by their very nature, can withstand mind-boggling amounts of
pressure, so building an impenetrable base in one is a smart move if you’re
setting out to annoy countries with enormous air forces. However, you encounter
a whole different set of problems when you attach a dozen blocks of plastique
to pretty much everything that’s combustible inside and light the blue touch
paper. Because once you’ve filled your impenetrable underground bunker with a
colossal store of energy, that same energy has to find a way out. And if it
can’t escape through the walls, because they’ve been forged out of Mother
Nature’s hottest furnaces, it will look elsewhere to escape.

Any nook.

Any cranny.

Any pipe.

These are places you don’t want to be
lingering when your impenetrable underground base blows up.

The sheer force of waste welled up on me
from behind and shot me along the pipe like a bullet. The walls scraped my
shoulders, the joints ripped my knees and the chilli almost drowned me, but
nothing could slow my plunge into the onrushing blackness.

For twenty terrifying seconds I lost all
control of my senses as I was propelled towards the unknown. I think I even
peed myself with fear – I’m not certain, I think some of it was mine
– but providence took pity on me and together with a thousand recycled
dinners I burst into daylight and flew fifty feet into a great septic lake of
waste at the bottom of the eastern slopes.

The cool waters were dark and cloudy, but
I managed to thrash in them enough until I popped to the surface and sucked in
a lungful of pungent air. This did little to help the situation and I continued
to gasp, splutter and drown until I noticed my presence had shaken the local
inhabitants to action.

On the far banks of the lakes, watching
me with raised eyebrows were a dozen freshwater crocs. If I’d been one of them,
I would’ve sued and possibly eaten the estate agent, because their home waters
were anything but fresh, but the crocs didn’t seem to mind. In fact, they
seemed to have grown fat on whatever Soliman had ejected from his pipes and
judging from the looks on their craggy faces, they weren’t quite full yet.

I struck out for the nearest bank as the
waters across the lake churned against the force of eager swimmers.

“Come on, give me a break!” I implored,
kicking and clawing for the rocks just twenty feet beyond the brown geyser.

I fought the urge to suck in my limbs and
instead beat them with all of my might until my fingers struck mud. I glanced
over my shoulder just in time to see a rake of jaws flash by the back of my
neck and tumbled clear to snatch my Colt from its holster. A blur of pink
exploded into red as I punched two bullets into its epicentre and then emptied
the clip into the rest of his colleagues. By the time I was done there was more
than enough fresh meat to go around and only two crocodiles left to squabble
over it, so I scrambled away to leave them to their bounty and sought a vantage
point from which to get my bearings.

The summit of the volcano was billowing
smoke and a dozen vents and pipes along the eastern ridge were spewing flames.
Dunbar hadn’t been messing about when he’d set the charges. Nothing could’ve
survived that inferno. Nothing. Not a computer chip, a lens refractor, not even
a man hiding near a Coke machine. At least with any luck this was what Dunbar
thought, though I’d probably used up my quota of luck for the day, if not the
decade, so I took nothing for granted.

Instead, I emptied my shoes, threw away
my handkerchief and started walking for home.

Whichever way that was.

6.
LUCK IS NOT ENOUGH

After only a mile or two of parched scrubland, the remorseless African sun had
baked me – and whatever had left the pipe with me – to a golden
crust. I couldn’t decide if this was better or worse, but either way I wasn’t
getting in the Ritz any time soon.

I trundled on for a couple of miles
choking on the dust of my former colleagues’ dinners until I found what passed
for a road in these parts. It was wide, dusty and rutted with gaping potholes,
but a road nonetheless. But a road to where? I didn’t know. That was the thing
about this job. It took me to far-flung and exotic locations, but I never
actually got to see them. Most bases were self-contained: bed, board,
recreation time and work, but as far as the surrounding countryside was
concerned, I could have been anywhere.

One of the guys had told me that the
local people around this way were Nguni, like my friend stick boy, but I didn’t
know where the Nguni were from. Nguniland would’ve been my best guess so I
flipped a coin, ignored how it came down and headed south whatever.

At first, I ducked off the road and hid
whenever a car came along but after four hours of murdering my feet, I decided
to risk it and see if I could hitch a ride. After a few more minutes a shimmer
of dust appeared on the horizon so I tucked my Colt into the back of my
trousers and stuck out my thumb.

The shimmer neared.

My thirst was my most pressing concern.
If I didn’t manage to negotiate a lift, or at least wangle a bottle of water,
I’d be dead by nightfall. Of course I could always hijack whoever was coming
along. A quick shot to the temple and thanks very much, but that sort of Karma
always caught a man up in the end. No good ever came of no-good deeds. If a
lifetime of Affiliating had taught me anything, it had taught me that.

Within the shimmer, a windscreen caught
the sun and glinted with solastic brilliance. Victor would’ve been very happy.

The glinting flickered and grew until I
realised the windscreen was too large for a simple car. It was a truck that was
coming my way. This changed things for the stickier but it was too late to
slide off the road. Whoever was driving had already seen me and was hooting his
horn with excitement. I clenched my teeth, clicked off my Colt’s safety and
waved back.

A surprisingly spruce Zil131 roared up
and threw a cloud of red dust in my face as it juddered to a halt in front of
me. I barely had time to clear my eyes before the driver, his passenger and
about fifteen militia all started pouring out of various exit points and
swarming around me in an excited scrum. I could tell at first glance they
weren’t regular military. The togs were Russian Army and Navy surplus, Spetsnaz
cast-offs that had been given to Oxfam when their new strip had come in circa
1978, so I figured someone local had their own little private army.

Some Johnny in a second-hand Admiral’s
uniform seemed to be in charge of these boys, judging from the surplus of stars
and paraphernalia across his shoulders, so I came to attention and gave him my
best Private Benjamin salute. This took the Admiral back a step or two but then
he broke into a broad toothy smile and rebounded a couple of fingers off his
eyebrows in response.

“You a soldier?” he asked when he’d
stopped grinning.

“Yes sir,” I confirmed, pandering to his
ego to save us wasting ammunition.

“And whose army are you in?” he asked.

“I’m currently between armies, sir,” I
told him.

“You are between armies?” he laughed. His
men looked at each other and shrugged before a tall ebony lad off to the left
translated for them and suddenly they were all doubling up theatrically as if
I’d just told the best Knock-Knock joke in the world.

The Admiral continued to cackle too, milking
it for all he was worth, while the ebony translator just stared at me with ice
in his eyes. He would be the first one I’d put down when the laughing stopped,
but the Admiral was enjoying himself way too much at the moment to let things
descend to that.

“So tell me,” he continued, his English
good, but African-taught, “how are you here? And what is that on your clothes?”

“It’s shit, sir,” I told him.

No translation necessary this time, the
boys all took to their sides once more.

“Shit?” the Admiral chortled. “And why
are you covered in shit?”

It was a good question. I just wished I
had a good answer. In the event I told him; “I’ve had a bad day, sir.”

This did the trick and it made him boom
like kiddies’ entertainer until his ebony C3PO reminded him that this wasn’t
the Comedy Store and business was pressing, calling time on the day’s
entertainment. The Admiral wound down to a thoughtful smirk, then asked me
where I was going.

“I don’t rightly know,” I told him then
played my Joker. “Perhaps you’re looking for soldiers at the moment, sir?”

“Looking for soldiers?” he blinked.

“To serve in your army, sir,” I
elaborated.

“To serve in my army?” he repeated,
giving me some insight into how he’d learn English in the first place.

“Yes sir. A very good soldier I am sir,”
I told him, saluting once more to demonstrate my pedigree. “I can help train
your men, sir.”

“Train my men? Train them to do what? Get
covered in shit?” he asked, not unreasonably under the circumstances.

“Yes sir, when necessary.”

“Ness-sess-sary? And when is it
ness-sess-sary to get covered in shit?” he grinned.

“When all else fails,” I told him. “Sir.”

The Admiral’s expression changed from
amusement to one of genuine bewilderment and he obviously came to the
conclusion that I was far too interesting to shoot for the moment because he
had a quick word with his number two then invited me to join them in the truck.

“Er, no. In the back, if you please,” he
clarified, when the man covered in shit started towards the passenger side
door.

Now, there was one of two ways this day
could unfold for me. Actually, there were dozens, but if we lumped most of them
under the umbrella of “nastily” then we were left with just two. But when
you’re in the company of a 23-year-old African Russian Naval Admiral, there’s
simply no way of telling which it’ll be. See, I was a soldier. At least I was
from the moment I’d stood to attention and saluted Teen Amin, though between
you and me I’ve never served so much as a day in any army the UN would
recognise. I’d tried of course, when I was younger. I’d had a go at joining up.
I’d caught a bus to Aldershot, stood around in my pants with a load of other
spotty Herbert’s waiting to be sexually assaulted by whichever Sergeant fancied
wearing a white coat that day and passed with flying colours, only to get sent
packing when they found out about my conviction for aggravated burglary.
Seriously. It seemed a bit like double-standards to me, but I was denied the
chance to burst in and out of Paddy’s house and push him around simply because
I’d taken the initiative and got in a bit of practice before I’d reached the
age. The Foreign Legion weren’t much friendlier. I had always thought they’d
take anyone but they wouldn’t touch me either. I don’t think it helped my cause
when I’d turned up at their recruitment centre in a stolen Renault, but then
how else was I meant to get down to Aubagne with empty pockets?

I wondered if the Admiral was as
pernickety about his troops as the Legion. From the looks of the evil looking
thug with one eye, seven fingers and the PK bi-pod machine-gun slung across his
shoulders it was a possibility.

Of course the best possible outcome from
today’s meeting would be an invitation to throw my lot in with theirs and join
their crusade. I wasn’t sure who or what they were crusading against. Anyone
who didn’t have a gun usually qualified in traditional African warfare, but
these chaps looked a cut above the box-standard bush militia. They were older,
better dressed, better equipped and better disciplined, in that they hadn’t
tried to shoot me into little pieces or burn me alive the moment they’d seen
me, so presumably they had a few proper objectives and everything. Then, when I
was fed, watered and knew where I was in the world, I could nick one of their
jeeps and an A-Z and make for the nearest airport. It wasn’t a perfect plan by
any means but it seemed to tick all the right boxes.

There was however one problem. Playing
the lowly soldier card as I had was a risky strategy because on the one hand I
was saying, “look, you’ve no reason to kill me, I’m not a threat to you” but
this often translated as “look, you’ve no reason NOT to kill me, I’m not a
threat to you”.

My only hope was the Admiral’s ego.
Because if there was one thing African bush Admirals liked better than
mindlessly killing lost westerners it was being saluted by white soldiers
– particularly white soldiers from proper armies. Nothing authenticated
their rank quite like it.