Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Chris Ryan
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgements
Glossary
Weapons
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Copyright
I wish to give special thanks to all my family and friends for their patience and understanding. To my agent, Barbara Levy; also to Mark Booth, Liz Rowlinson, Katie White and Rachael Healey and all the team at Century.
Non-fiction
The One That Got Away
Chris Ryan’s SAS Fitness Book
Chris Ryan’s Ultimate Survival Guide
Fight to Win
Fiction
Stand By, Stand By
Zero Option
The Kremlin Device
The Hit List
The Watchman
Land of Fire
Greed
The Increment
Blackout
Ultimate Weapon
Strike Back
Firefight
Agent 21
Agent 21: Reloaded
Who Dares Wins
Alpha Force Series
Survival
Rat-Catcher
Desert Pursuit
Hostage
Red Centre
Hunted
Black Gold
Blood Money
Fault Line
Untouchable
Code Red Series
Flash Flood
Wildfire
Outbreak
Vortex
Twister
Battleground
Quick Reads
One Good Turn
Typical Welsh autumn weather. The rain was just heavy enough to be annoying. If I kept the wipers going, even intermittently, they created smears, and whenever I switched them off, the windscreen soon became thickly beaded with water. Driving in those conditions was a pain. Tim was fidgeting about, twisting in his seat, punching the buttons on the stereo. Instead of looking out of the window and taking an interest in the mountains, he kept fiddling with the sound system, trying to get track five on his new Robbie Williams CD. There was something wrong with the player, which kept stalling, but he wouldn’t let it alone, so we got endless jumping of tracks and burst after burst of disjointed screeching.
But although his restlessness was distracting, I wasn’t letting it annoy me, because I knew it sprang from nerves. We hadn’t met for nearly six months, and he wasn’t at ease with me, any more than I was with him. Now I had the chance, I really wanted to get through to him, and I knew that if I talked too much I’d only make matters worse. So I told myself to stay cool, and concentrated on the road, now and then looking down sideways at his close-cropped blond head.
Because I saw him only after long intervals, whenever we did get together I was always surprised at how he’d changed. Now that he’d just turned ten, I realised how much of his mother he had in his looks: the same blue eyes and clean profile, with forehead, nose and jaw all straight and in good proportion. His hands and fingers were mine in miniature; they’d grown a lot, and looked pretty useful.
What was I doing, driving out into the Brecon Beacons with some sandwiches I’d got from Marks & Sparks, which I aimed to eat on the summit of Pen-y-Fan, with this son I hardly knew? Even I wasn’t sure. What I did know was that I was seriously ill. I knew that after this school holiday I might never see Tim again. But did I really imagine that, in one afternoon, I could influence the rest of his life? Did I really hope that he’d follow my example and go for an army career? I don’t think so. Part of me wanted him to find an easier way of making a living. Perhaps he should try to become a doctor? A lawyer? A teacher? I couldn’t wish him a road as hard as the one I’d travelled myself.
Looking back, I realise those vague ideas were at the back of my mind. At that moment, while I was still capable of climbing the hills, all I wanted was that Tim should see the country in which my SAS career had begun. In particular I wanted to introduce him to Pen-y-Fan, the mountain whose silhouette is supposed to be graven on every Special Forces man’s heart. Whatever profession he might take up in the end, I wanted him to become an open-air person. I wanted to pass on to him my feeling for the hills. I wanted him to get some idea of what my service career had meant to me.
Above all, I wanted him to know what had happened in Kamanga. I suppose I was trying to justify my conduct there – but only a shrink could have explained why I wanted to pour everything out to a ten-year-old.
After a while I couldn’t stand the racket from the stereo any longer, and said, ‘Eh, give over with that. The player’s messed up. And anyway, we’re nearly there.’
Obediently Tim hit the off button and turned to look out of the window. I didn’t sense any hostility in him: as I say, he was just covering his shyness until he got the measure of me. Back in my flat we’d already had stilted conversations about his school and his teachers. English was his best subject, he said: he liked writing, and had just done an essay on family life. I didn’t fancy asking exactly what he’d said. An easier area was football: he was obviously showing promise as a striker, and as a fan he’d transferred his affections from Chelsea to Arsenal. He was tough on the subject of football hooligans, who he thought were the pits. We’d also had a run-down on his home computer, compared notes about the Internet and discussed digital TV, but we’d exhausted every subject quite quickly.
Now, suddenly, he turned his attention to our surroundings, and said indignantly, ‘Hey, Dad, it’s raining out there. We’re not going to walk in this, are we? And boy, are these hills steep!’
I laughed, and said, ‘You wait till we’re on them! They’ll be steeper than the ones at home.’
‘Oh, sure!’
His voice had a Northern Irish twang all right, but what else could I expect? For six years now, since Kath’s death, he’d lived with her parents in the well-to-do eastern suburbs of Belfast. His school was there, his mates were there. Northern Ireland was his environment.
‘Pity about the cloud,’ I said. ‘But it’s lifting. I think we’re going to be lucky.’
A few minutes later we came down to the Storey Arms, once a pub, now an adventure centre, and pulled up in the car park opposite. I opened the back of the car, and we started to sort out our gear. Once we were in the open, the rain didn’t seem so bad. It was only drizzle, really.
On that dull morning there were only three other vehicles on the hard standing, one of them a zebra-striped minibus with a party of hikers, girls and boys, disembarking from it. Tim must have seen me staring at it, because he said, ‘What’s the matter, Dad?’
‘It’s just those black and white stripes. They reminded me of something. When we get to the top, I’ll tell you.’ And to deflect his curiosity, I asked, ‘Boots okay?’
‘Sure and all.’ He looked down at his new green-and-grey Goretex ankle-length trainers and turned his feet in and out to show them off.
‘We’re all set, then.’ I locked the car and pocketed the key. ‘Let’s go.’
My small day-sack contained a minimum of kit: our picnic lunch, a water bottle, two waterproofs and a sweater for each of us, plus a spare pair of socks for Tim. The whole thing can’t have weighed more than ten pounds, yet as soon as we started up the steep track alongside the wood, it began to feel full of lead. Jesus! I thought. Oh for the days when I used to run up here with a load of bricks in my Bergen.
For a while Tim didn’t notice that I was labouring. He was excited by the climb and skipped on ahead. I liked the athletic way he moved, and laughed to myself when he turned round to shout and tell me to hurry up. But soon I was sweating and panting too much to see the funny side of anything, and I had to call a halt.
‘Take it easy,’ I called, sitting against a bank. ‘Let’s be like the tortoise, slow but sure.’
‘Dad,’ said Tim, looking up at me, ‘how old are you?’
‘Ninety-nine.’ I pretended to be offended. ‘And mind your own business.’ Then I laughed, and said, ‘No – I’m nearly forty.’
‘That’s not very old.’
‘Old enough. Four times what you are.’
Still he was looking at me. ‘But you look nearly as old as Gramp. Your hair’s going grey.’
‘Thanks! That’s because I’ve had a hard life. Wait till we get a bit higher, and I’ll tell you a few things about it.’
‘Why’s your face so yellow?’
‘Must be the African sun.’
So began a strange but rewarding climb. Somehow I’d gained Tim’s full attention and got him hanging on my words. So, every time we slowly climbed a few hundred feet, I’d call a halt and tell another story about SAS operations – in Libya, Colombia, the Gulf, Ulster. Without planning it, I found I was working backwards through my career, and when we reached the obelisk, about halfway to the summit, I’d got to the point of explaining about SAS selection courses, and how I’d been over this very route hundreds of times, first training for my own selection, then training others.
We sat down by the obelisk, which is a memorial to Tommy Jones, a boy who got lost in the mist trying to cross the hill from one farm to another, and never reached home.
‘It was twenty-nine days before anyone knew what had become of him,’ I said. ‘Then they found him curled up in this hollow, where the pillar is now.’
‘Was he asleep?’
‘No, no. He was dead. He’d died of exposure that first night. That’s why you mustn’t ever go into the hills without a compass.’
Tim listened intently as I told the story. Then, looking round, he asked, ‘Why aren’t there any trees up here?’
‘It’s too high, and too cold. The higher you go, the colder it gets. Also, there’s hardly any soil.’ I scuffed at the grass with the toe of my boot and showed him that rock lay just beneath the roots. Then on an impulse I asked, ‘D’you remember your mum?’
He shook his head. ‘Not really. Gran’s got a picture of her, that’s all.’ After a pause, he said, ‘Dad – why did she die?’
‘I know how she died. She was killed by a terrorist bomb, out shopping in Belfast, in the city centre. But as to why – that’s a difficult question.’
‘Was it because you were in the army?’
‘No, no. They wouldn’t have known your mum was married to a soldier. She wasn’t a target. The bomb went off prematurely. It was an own-goal. The bomber was killed, along with five innocent civilians.’
‘Was it because we’re Prots, then?’
‘It was a bit to do with religion, yes. I’m afraid there’s always going to be some people who hate other people, just because of what they believe in. The bomber was a Catholic, but he wasn’t targeting your mother specially.’
To change the subject I waved around us, and said, ‘You might not believe it, but I know every rock, every bend on this path. Every yard of it holds a memory for me. Right here, by this big slab, a guy sat on an adder and got bitten in the backside. Over there, a fellow called Richard came off his quad bike and broke his leg. Now, look at that!’
Across a valley a group of eight men had appeared, walking hard in single file up a ridge, silhouetted against the cloud. They were wearing DPMs, and from their fast pace and strained attitude – leaning forward to take the weight of their Bergens – I could tell they were under pressure, hurrying to reach an RV inside the time limit.
‘Just what I was telling you,’ I said. ‘Those guys are training for selection.’
‘Where are they going?’
‘They’ve probably got to get round a set course in a given time, calling at check-points as they go.’
The sight almost made me feel young again. Yet no amount of fresh air and fine scenery could banish the knowledge that I was in lousy shape – and not just short of breath, but afflicted by a deep, leaden heaviness all over my body, and a feeling that I wanted to throw up, even though there was nothing to get rid of. Already I’d twice thought I was going to have to call off our ascent, but somehow, each time, I’d got going again.
I looked down at Tim and saw he was thinking. I couldn’t help comparing him with my own ten-year-old self At his age I was constantly fighting to defend myself against school bullies. Most days they’d pick on someone, and provoke him so the fight took place on the way out of school, where all the other kids were lined up to watch. Tim never mentioned fights; besides Kath’s looks, he’d evidently inherited her calm temperament, and that pleased me.
Presently, he asked, ‘Dad – it’s wrong to kill people, isn’t it?’
‘In peacetime, yes. But in war it’s different. You sometimes have to kill the bad guys, to stop them killing you.’
‘But people are still getting killed at home. There isn’t a war on now.’
‘Well, in a way there is. There was then, anyway.’
I felt his next question coming.
‘How many people have you killed, Dad?’
‘Not many at all.’
‘How many, though?’
‘I’d have to make a count. I’ve never tried to work it out. Often in a battle, if one of the enemy gets dropped, you can’t tell who’s done it. Guys go down, but there’s so much noise and confusion you don’t know where the bullets have come from. You haven’t got time to worry. All you know is, it’s going to be them or you. Let’s go on a bit while I think.’
Still Tim was staring at me curiously. Then he asked, ‘Are you a colonel, or what?’
‘A colonel!’ I laughed. ‘Heavens no. A colonel’s a rupert.’
‘What’s a rupert?’
‘An officer. I’m a warrant officer, a sergeant-major. It’s people like me who run the show.’
‘What do ruperts do, then?’
‘Make a lot of noise and sign forms.’
‘I’ve got a friend called Rupert. Does that mean his father’s a colonel?’
‘Oh no. It’s only an army word – a kind of slang. A rupert’s any officer, from a second lieutenant to a general.’
Suddenly I spotted movement in the valley beneath us. Two RAF Tornados were heading almost straight for us. Their dappled camouflage made them hard to pick out against the variegated background. They’d slipped round a shoulder of the mountain in a tight turn, below our level, and were climbing hard in our direction.
‘Look out!’ I shouted. ‘This is going to be noisy. Cover your ears!’
I was just in time. If we hadn’t been prepared, the jets would have given us a bad fright. Even with hands clasped to our heads we were rocked by the thunderclap of their engines as they roared past, with fire blazing from the tails as their re-heats blasted them upwards and over the ridge.
For a moment Tim was shaken, but he recovered immediately and said, ‘That’s what I want to do.’
‘Be a pilot? Well, if you could hack it, at least you’d see some action. The fast-jet boys are always the ones who get deployed.’
We talked about the G-forces the pilots would be experiencing – how, if you pull five G, you can hardly lift your hands off your knees, your head weighs the equivalent of fifty pounds, and all your blood tries to run down to your feet, so that only the special suit you’re wearing prevents you passing out.
By then the clouds were thinning and breaking, and I pointed out various landmarks as they came into sight. At last we skirted Cribben and moved out on to the short, dry grass that sloped gently up to the summit. I almost said, ‘Race you to the top,’ but I knew I couldn’t accelerate to save my life. Tim was ahead anyway, so I just called, ‘On you go. I’ll see you up there.’
Five minutes later we were sitting in bright sunshine on top of the mountain, where the trig stone used to stand, with a 360-degree panorama spread out below us. I felt a little flutter of elation at having reached the highest point and seeing all the familiar landmarks, even if it was for the last time.
‘Chicken or BLT?’ I said, breaking out the sandwiches.
‘What’s BLT?’
‘Bacon, lettuce and tomato, with mayonnaise.’
‘Chicken, please.’
‘There you go.’ I handed him the packet, along with a can of Coke. ‘Get that down you, and I’ll tell you about the witch doctor.’
‘What’s a witch doctor?’
‘Someone who puts spells on you.’
‘Why does he do it, though?’
‘Well – for money. He’s like a combination of doctor and magician. People pay him to cure them of diseases and suchlike.’
‘What does he look like?’
‘I expect they are all different. But the one we saw was tall and thin.’
‘Like Rasputin?’
‘Let’s see.’ I was thrown for a moment, because that was the name we’d given one of the Russian mercenaries we came across in Kamanga. Then I said, ‘The mad monk, you mean?’
‘In Anastasia.’
‘Oh, that one. No, not like him. For one thing our witch doctor was black, and for another he didn’t have a beard.’
The boy was staring at me, full of curiosity. ‘Were you scared of him, Dad?’
‘Not at first. I thought he was a phoney. But later, yes. I did get very scared, with all the things that happened. Come on, now, eat your lunch, and I’ll tell you.’
Every day for the past couple of weeks the sun had grown slightly hotter, until at noon the temperature had started to hit the low nineties. But the nights were still quite chilly, and now once again, as full darkness closed in, the air was cooling quickly.
As if reacting to a command, several of the lads moved closer to the fire, all at the same moment, dragging their seats forward so that the steel ammunition boxes grated over the beaten earth. We’d made the fire in typical Kamangan fashion, with branches of dead mopane wood pointing inwards like the spokes of a cartwheel, so that all you had to do to stoke the blaze from time to time was to push a piece inwards towards the hub. Mopane, we’d soon discovered, was an ideal fuel. The sticks burned so steadily that they’d smoulder all night, but you could make them flare up again into a hot fire when you revived them in the morning.
Above us, the leaves of two big mahogany trees shivered as a breeze ran through them, and all around in the bush crickets were sounding off a continuous, zinging buzz. From the edge of the village, a hundred metres away, came bursts of laughter and chat as the locals brewed up supper, separated from us only by a grass stockade they’d built in a pathetic attempt to deter elephants from raiding their little stores of maize.
I looked round the circle of familiar faces. Including myself, there were eight of us, all with low-mow haircuts. One of the traditions in the Regiment is that nobody need have a squaddie’s traditional short back-and-sides. Recently, it was true, one or two officious individuals had crept up through ranks and gone about fining people anything from £50 to £100 for looking unkempt. But that was exceptional. It was also ridiculous, because one of the SAS’s skills has always been to blend in with the local population. Here in Africa there was no chance of that, and for this trip to a hot and bug-ridden country everyone had opted for crew-cuts, so the guys had a vaguely American appearance.
The glow of the flames was softening their complexions, even Whinger Watson’s. The ruddy light seemed to iron some of the wrinkles out of his face; certainly it disguised the grey bristles in his Mexican-type moustache. Like me, he was heading for forty, and had that strained, heavily lined appearance which SAS guys tend to get from repeatedly pushing themselves to their physical limits, and also from the mental stress of working and playing hard; but now he looked ten years younger. He and I were so much the senior members of the party that we spent a lot of time together, and tended to compare notes about the younger guys, almost as if they were apprentices in our trade.
After a fortnight of African winter sun, everyone had started to acquire a serious tan. Everyone, that is, except Pete Jones, known to all as Genesis from his tireless reading of the Bible. He, poor bugger, with his gingery hair and freckled skin, had immediately started to burn: he’d had to wear a wide-brimmed hat and keep his sleeves rolled down to stop himself being sizzled. Also, he’d reacted violently to the bites of mozzies and tsetse flies. All of us had got bitten, but whereas the rest had developed nothing worse than itchy bumps, Genesis had come up in horrific-looking blisters full of yellow fluid, all along the insides of his forearms.
‘How are the bites, Gen?’ I asked.
‘So-so,’ he replied – from which I knew they must be itching horrendously, because he always played down any problem he had. Lately he’d started carrying on about how the Lord had inflicted Job with boils, and my enquiry set him off again.
‘“Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth,”’ he went in his singsong Welsh lilt, shining a pencil torch into the pages of his little bible, with its battered cover of white leather, which he kept about his person twenty-four hours a day. ‘“Therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty. For he maketh sore, and bindeth up; he woundeth and his hands make whole.”’
‘But what have you done to annoy the Big Boss?’ I asked.
‘Our sins are not to be accounted for,’ he replied. But Pavarotti Price, our other Welshman, who was twice Genesis’s size and famous for the fact that he had a Chinese-looking eye tattooed on either cheek of his arse, groaned, ‘Ah, for fuck’s sake! Give over.’
Genesis looked at him coolly over the top of his bible, then closed the book without remonstrating. That was typical of him: he had such a forgiving nature that he could rise above any number of obscenities, and never resorted to any himself. Sometimes one of the lads got seriously pissed off with his pious attitude, but everyone had to respect the guy for his integrity and professional skills. Now Pav, having bollocked him, gave him a friendly grin to show he meant no harm. He was amused by the fact that Genesis obviously felt at home in Kamanga, where the colonial missionary influence had left many of the men with biblical Christian names: David, James, Joseph, Philemon, Isaac.
Tilting the face of his watch towards the fire, Pav said, ‘They’re late.’
‘Yep,’ I went. ‘Another air-lock in the fuel, I expect.’
At lunchtime the seven-ton Zyl truck had gone off on its weekly supply run to Chiwembe, the nearest town. Most of us had never been there, but Pav, who’d master-minded the first trip, described the place as ‘the arsehole of Africa’. When somebody remarked that we were already in that location, Pav came back with, ‘In that case, Chiwembe’s a hundred and something ks up it.’ Although it was only 120 km to the east, the dirt roads were so diabolical that the journey took over four hours each way. That day’s drivers, Joseph and Sanford, were African, but two of our guys had gone with them to ride shotgun and make sure that no sell-offs took place on the way home. Even allowing an hour for loading, they should have been back by now: they’d left at midday, and already it was past eight.
Meals had been kept back for them, but the rest of us had already eaten: impala curry with rice – and very good, too. Like everyone else, the Kamangan soldiers preferred fresh meat to their rations, which were mostly canned, and they shot whatever they could. One of them had gunned down two antelopes with his AK47, and Stringer Simpson, our comms specialist, had helped him skin and butcher the animals, because before he joined the army he’d worked in a slaughterhouse and was an ace at handling meat. The local cooks also knew what they were at, especially when it came to spices. Pondani, the kitchen boss, had done two versions of the curry, billed as ‘hot’ and ‘nuclear’, and the nuclear version had been enough to blow your head off.
Round the fire, uncomfortably full, we chitchatted about our task in Kamanga. At the briefing in Hereford everything had sounded simple and straightforward. Our role was to bolster the government army by training their select Alpha Commando, and we’d come out under the impression that they just wanted general instruction. But as soon as we reached camp, out in the bush, it became clear that Alpha was preparing for a particular operation: an attack on Gutu, a diamond mine in the south of the country captured by rebel forces the year before, and it was in planning this that they needed our help.
Equally clear was the fact that the officers expected us to accompany them into battle when the time came. This we’d been specifically forbidden to do: our orders were to act as advisers only, and not to get involved in any fighting. On paper, that was fine, but from previous operations Whinger and I knew all too well how the best of intentions go to ratshit in the field. It had happened in a big way during our time in Russia, a year before. There, too, we’d been told not to tangle with local villains, specifically the mafia, but circumstances had got the better of us, and we’d ended up fully engaged. Back in Hereford, we’d taken a token bollocking, but we got away with bending the rules because we were judged to have done far more good than harm.
This time, we hadn’t made any firm decision. Whinger and I both liked the Alpha CO, Major Joss Mvula, and wanted to keep our options open. Joss was a lively, likeable guy, a bit younger than me, with crinkly black hair already receding from his forehead. He’d never been out of Kamanga, but he’d studied at the military academy in the capital, Mulongwe, and seemed well educated. He had quite a clear idea of world politics: he knew about the special relationship between Britain and America, and the tension between East and West during the Cold War. He’d seen for himself the mess the Russians had made of things when they were empire-building in Africa, and the speed with which they abandoned ship, leaving most of their equipment behind. He’d had enough communist ideology to last him a lifetime, so he was predisposed in our favour. Just as important, from our point of view, he had plenty of common sense and a reasonable grip over his men. Also, he saw the funny side of things, so he was good gas to work with.
As we waited for the truck, our talk turned to the training ambush due to go down next day. We’d already hammered out most details, both on our own and with Joss, but, as always, doubts niggled. We’d seen what happened when the Kamangans started firing live rounds: they got so over-excited they were liable to lose control. On a simple fire-and-movement exercise one guy had already gone completely hyper, screaming and shouting as he squirted off a whole twenty-round magazine, waving the weapon around in one hand like a pistol and spraying rounds through 360 degrees. Tomorrow night they were going to be firing live rounds in the dark.
During our first week we’d done what we could to steady the guys down, taking them through the various stages of range work. Then we’d started teaching them to move through the bush – individually, in pairs, finally in patrol groups. They’d learnt quite fast, and improved to the point where we’d made them do a dry attack on a dummy camp we’d built for the purpose – an exercise which went off better than we’d expected. But still I felt sure that in a real battle a lot of them would go ballistic.
The country was ideal for training. The land consisted of low hills covered in bush and forest, with rivers of pale sand winding through. We’d heard that in the rains, from November to March, these shallow channels filled up and became tributaries of the Nasangua, a big river to the south. But now, in July – the middle of the African winter – they were bone dry and easy to cross on foot, although dodgy for vehicles, which easily became bedded in the fine sand.
Before the civil war the area had been a game-park. The villages had been cleared out of it thirty years earlier, and there were no humans living in a block of at least five million acres. The Kamangans told us that, once we got outside the park, we’d find burnt-out villlages by the score, fields uncultivated, everything gone to waste; but in the country we’d seen so far, there had been no inhabitants anyway. This meant we could fire live ammunition in any direction we fancied without endangering anybody – a fantastic freedom from restrictions. In that environment it was hardly surprising that the Kamangans were trigger-happy. Whenever they had weapons loaded, they’d loose off at anything that moved, whether they themselves were on foot or riding in the backs of vehicles.
After two years of war, the park had gone to ruin. The village where we were camped had been just outside the boundary, beside the main gate. Somehow the grass huts had escaped destruction, but inside the park the tourist lodges had been burnt, and the tracks used for game drives had either grown over or been washed away by flash floods during the rains. Most of the animals had been shot out. The rhinos had gone first, killed for their horns, and hundreds of elephants had been poached for their ivory. Already we’d found gaunt hulks of elephant carcasses, eaten to the skeleton by vultures, hyenas, jackals and insects. Joss told us that normally the hyenas would have eaten the bones as well, or carried them away, but the war had produced such carnage that the scavengers couldn’t keep pace with the supply of rotting bodies. Everywhere we found heaps of hyena droppings – so white, from all the calcium the animals ate, that they were known as ‘missionaries’ chalk’ – and at night eerie howling sounded off from all points of the compass.
For the ambush exercise Whinger and I had recced a perfect site, where a dirt road crossed one of the sand rivers. On the home side of the crossing the terrain was open, with scattered trees and shrubs growing from stony ground, but the far bank of the river – enemy territory – was cloaked with thick bush, and it was from there – according to the scenario we’d devised – that the terrorists would appear.
‘The second lot of pop-up targets,’ said Whinger. ‘It might pay us to move them another hundred metres along the bank. That’d give the killer group a better arc.’
‘Okay,’ I agreed. ‘We’ll have time to take another look at it in the morning. What’s that?’
I broke off as a hefty, low-pitched hoo-hoo sounded somewhere close above us, and I looked up to see a huge bird pass silently overhead, a fast-moving silhouette, black against the stars.
‘Jesus!’ exclaimed Chalky White. ‘A bloody great owl.’
‘Where?’ Everyone started craning their necks around.
‘It went thataway.’ Chalky pointed towards the village.
Seconds later, from among the grass huts, there burst an eruption of noise: people yelling, pots and pans being hammered. We stood up to get a better view, and Pavarotti nipped across to the nearest pinkie, where he grabbed a spot-lamp, switched it on and swept the beam over the shiny, dark-green canopy of the mango trees which rose above the settlement.
‘It must be a great eagle owl,’ said Mart Stanning, our medic, who’d got talking about birds to one of the Alpha guys. ‘The locals don’t like them. They reckon the devil uses owls for transport, so it’s bad news if one comes into the village. If it sits on the roof of a house, it means someone in that family’s going to die before morning.’
‘Cheerful lot, these buggers,’ said Pavarotti. ‘With that racket under it, I don’t reckon the bird’ll so much as touch down, let alone stay long enough to organise a funeral—’
The rest of his sentence was cut off by a hollow report, and we saw a spurt of flame shoot into the air.
‘Christ!’ exclaimed Danny Stewart. ‘The headman’s let drive with that bloody old muzzle-loader he showed us. I hope it hasn’t killed him.’
We’d seen the weapon a couple of days earlier – a fearsome, home-made contraption about six feet long, held together with rusty wire and leather thongs, which the owner displayed proudly, showing us how much powder he would load: two fingers’ width for an antelope, three for a buffalo, four for an elephant. We reckoned any discharge would be a greater threat to him than to whatever he fired at, but clearly the gun was his pride and joy. At the same time, we couldn’t help noticing that he’d lost his left thumb.
Danny – a compact little Yorkshireman with fine, sandy hair – had a funny habit of dropping his chin and rotating his head through half a circle, as if he were trying to peel his neck away from his collar, whenever he came up with a commentary on anything interesting that happened. Now he did just that as he said, ‘It’s quietened the buggers, anyway, the old gun.’
‘Aye,’ Pavarotti agreed. ‘From the way the commotion’s died down, I reckon the bird’s got away. If they’d dropped it, they’d be screeching something horrible.’
We settled back round the fire and started talking about our tour. Looking at the faces again, I realised that Chalky had gone almost as dark as some of the Africans. It’s standard practice for anyone with the surname White to be called Chalky, but with this one there was some point, because he had jet black hair and a swarthy complexion. What with his tan, and the fact he hadn’t shaved for a couple of days, you could hardly see him in the firelight.
Stringer looked like the butcher’s boy he’d been: rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed, big, powerful, a fitness freak. In the UK he spent hours in the gym, and here in the bush he was constantly skipping or doing press-ups or dips between two boxes set out a couple of feet apart. Also, he couldn’t resist the long tendrils of creeper trailing from big trees in the forest; whenever he found some good ones, he was up them in a flash, earning derisive shouts of ‘Fucking Tarzan!’ He was also our best linguist, with reasonably fluent Arabic and Russian. Neither of those was any cop here, but he’d already picked up a useful amount of Nyanja, the language common to the various native tribes in the area.
Pavarotti, the biggest guy in the team, always fighting his weight, was pretty dark as well. His rubbery face – typically Welsh – seemed to have grown larger, its tan emphasising his heavy features and thick eyebrows. Apart from Whinger and myself, Pav was the oldest of the lads, at around thirty-one or thirty-two. Among many other hairy tasks, he’d taken part in our Kremlin job a year earlier, and his strength had saved the day when we were struggling to hoist a suitcase bomb into position in the tunnel under the Moscow river. That episode had finally cured his phobia about being caught in confined spaces.
As for Whinger, he and I had survived numerous dodgy situations together, in Belfast, Libya, Colombia and Grozny, not to mention England itself, and I’d come to rely on his coolness and efficiency, whatever the threat. We’d worked together for so long that I took his presence, and his bastard rhyming slang, for granted. The guys who knew him less well had been puzzled at first when he started talking about ‘silveries’, and I had to explain the derivation of the term: silver spoon – coon. The moment they got it, everyone took it up.
Aside from Whinger and Pav, the lads were all around the twenty-seven, twenty-eight mark, and although I’d never worked with any of them, I felt solidly confident about their capabilities. They were well tried and tested, and so far on this trip they’d been a hundred per cent. Mart Stanning, for instance, was an excellent operator. Slim and wiry, and so fair that people often mistook him for a Dane or a Dutchman, he stood out even among our own lads. Unlike Genesis, he tanned easily, and while the sun was bleaching his hair, it was darkening his skin, so that he looked as though he was wearing a straw-coloured cap. To the Africans he was a phenomenon, and they referred to him by a native name that meant ‘Yellow Doctor’. They quickly saw that he was a good practitioner, and every morning he had to conduct a regular surgery, treating sores and septic wounds by the dozen, and doling out harmless aspirin for things like cancerous growths which he couldn’t deal with.
The one guy I had reservations about was Andy Dean, who was away on the supply run. That May he’d got married to Penny, a farmer’s daughter from Shropshire, and most of the team had been to his wedding near Ludlow. I’m afraid we behaved in typical SAS fashion, collaring a table in a corner of the big tent and getting stuck into the champagne without bothering to make polite conversation to the other guests. Then, before we left the UK, Andy had bought a cottage in Kilpeck, a village near Hereford. The house was more than a hundred years old, and tiny. It needed a hell of a lot doing to it to make it habitable, and I knew the mortgage payments were going to stretch him to the limit. Once or twice in Kamanga I’d found him looking preoccupied. His heart didn’t seem to be in the job, and it was obvious financial worries were preying on his mind.
Except for myself, married and widowed, and Whinger, who’d been married for a couple of years, but then divorced, without any kids, Andy was the only one who’d got spliced, and with the dire record of the Regiment in this area, everyone was waiting to see how long it would last. Several of the others had woman problems, but nothing that wouldn’t wait the six weeks until we were home again. Looking round the circle again, I reckoned we were a pretty typical SAS team: all fit, all well built, all fairly undemonstrative, all quick on our feet, both physically and mentally, all able to do each other’s jobs, should the need arise.
Before we’d come out, Stringer had got quite excited about the trip, his first to Africa. He thought it was going to be a great adventure: the Dark Continent and all that. Now, by the fire, Whinger said cynically, ‘Didn’t I tell you? It’s like I said. Where’s the action? Here we are, miles from anywhere. No bar for a thousand miles. Bugger all entertainment. HIV wherever you look.’
‘Come on!’ said Pav. ‘We’re gonna have a ball!’
‘Have your motor flown out, Pav,’ Danny told him. ‘Take it for a drive on the Chiwembe highway.’
‘Thanks, mate. As long as you stump up for the repair bills.’
Just before we went to Russia, Pav had bought a second-hand XJ 120 Jaguar, flame red, and the wretched thing had become the love of his life. No matter that it had already put six points on his licence, at the slightest opportunity he was away down to Ross and the M50 for what he called a pipe-opener. The idea of driving it out here, on the dirt roads, made him groan.
‘Whinger’s right, up to a point,’ said Mart, scratching at his blond scrub. ‘That briefing I got at the med centre about not touching anybody wounded unless I’m wearing rubber gloves – they reckon one in three of the population are carrying the HIV virus.’
‘Don’t touch ’em, then,’ said Pav. ‘Just let ’em carry on.’
There was a pause, and then Stringer said, ‘I reckon they’re all right.’
‘Who?’ Pav demanded.
‘The Alpha guys.’
‘Listen,’ I told him. ‘They’ve been all right so far, but these people are volatile as hell. They can turn in a flash. When I was in Zaire in ninety-one, the whole population went fucking berserk. In Kinshasa, the capital, they started looting shops and houses like savages, trashing everything. They were even nicking amputated limbs from the skips at the back of the hospital.’
‘What for?’ Stringer looked a bit sick.
‘To eat, of course.’
‘Christ!’
There was another silence while everyone took that in. Then Chalky said, ‘At least we can’t spend any money. There’s that.’
‘You wait,’ said Whinger. ‘If we get that week of R and R they promised us at the end, and end up in Sun City, you’ll spend everything you’ve got.’
Presently, through the bush in the opposite direction, we spotted headlights flaring and swinging in the distance as our supply truck came lurching back towards base. We got up, walking towards it, and within a minute it was pulling up on the open ground in front of our tents. The whole area was pretty dark, with no illumination except the flicker of cooking fires in the distance, but from the speed at which the lorry slid to a halt, I got the impression that something was wrong.
A cloud of dust rolled forward from behind it, boiling up into the headlights, and a figure I recognised as Andy jumped down off the tailboard.
‘Eh, Andy,’ I called. ‘What’s up?’
‘Geordie!’ he went, in a strange, tight voice. ‘There’s been an accident.’
‘You all right?’
‘Fine.’
‘What about Phil?’
‘He’s okay. It wasn’t us. We ran into a group of kids.’
‘Oh, Jesus! Anyone killed?’
‘I don’t think so. But two of them are quite bad. We brought them with us – in the back.’
Immediately I yelled for Mart.
‘Right here, Geordie.’ His voice came from close behind me.
‘Hear what Andy said?’
‘Sure.’
‘Get your kit, then.’
An African came running with a hurricane lamp. Moths swirled round the light as he held it aloft. I saw Phil Foster in the back of the truck, holding something in his arms. A moment later he handed the bundle down to me – a child wrapped in a dark-coloured blanket. Instinctively, I started out towards our own tents, which were nearest to the spot. The child was warm, but limp and not moving. It felt pathetically light.
Mart had moved with commendable speed. Under the fly-leaf of his tent a hurricane lamp was burning, and he’d got some of the contents of his medical pack spread out. I laid my burden gently on the ground and opened up the blanket. Inside was a boy of maybe eight or nine, barefoot, clad in a dirty brown T-shirt and dark-blue shorts, powdered all over with pale dust. His eyes were shut, but his little chest was lifting and falling in very short, quick breaths. The sight of him immediately made me think of Tim.
‘Gloves, Mart,’ I said.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘There’s no blood. His skin’s not broken.’
He started to check the boy over, feeling carefully for broken bones. Then another blanket came to rest beside me. This one held a girl, also barefoot, wearing a simple dark-blue shift. She looked younger than the boy, perhaps only six. Blood was shining on her right temple, and down her right arm. Her eyes were open, but they were wide with fear.
‘You’re okay,’ I said gently. ‘Take it easy.’ I couldn’t tell if she understood English, but I hoped soft words would soothe her.
Looking round, I found Phil crouching beside me. In the harsh lamplight the hollows in his long, lean face were full of shadows. ‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘Joseph was driving. We were way out in the bush, well clear of the village. Already dark. Suddenly a load of kids jumped out of the grass into the road. I reckon they were after a lift.’
‘These clothes.’ I pointed to the dark blue and brown. ‘They can’t have shown up in the headlights. Arms and legs the same.’
Phil shook his head. ‘I was standing with my head out the top of the wagon. I never saw a fucking thing. It wasn’t Joseph’s fault. He stamped hell out of the brakes. Nobody could have stopped any quicker.’
‘Nothing broken,’ Mart reported of the boy. ‘But I don’t like the look of him. His breathing’s very shallow. He’s had a bad bang on the head. There – feel that.’
Gingerly I ran my fingers through the soft, furry stubble on the boy’s scalp. The skin seemed to be intact, but I could feel a large swelling high up over the left ear.
‘Is there anything you can do?’
‘Not much. Keep him wrapped up, that’s all. He needs to go to hospital soonest.’
‘Hospital!’ I exclaimed. ‘Some hope. What about the girl?’
Mart pulled on a pair of surgical gloves, took a swab and carefully wiped the blood off her forehead and arm. ‘Only scratches,’ he said. ‘Limbs seem okay. Looks like she was knocked into some thorns. It’s him we’ve got to worry about.’
Hearing voices behind us, I turned, to find we were surrounded by a crowd of maybe fifty Africans. Some of the men I recognised – members of Alpha, wrapped up in khaki cotton sweaters and tracksuit trousers – but the rest were strangers, people from the village. The lamplight glinted off white teeth and flashed on shiny black skin. As they pressed forward to see what was happening, their voices rose rapidly into an aggressive chorus. In the distance drums had started beating out some message.
I stood up, towering over most of the people, and made placatory gestures, moving my open hands gently up and down. ‘Take it easy,’ I said. ‘We’re only trying to help.’
Most of them already knew that Mart was our medic, and respected him, but now they sounded angry, as if the accident had been our fault, and they were accusing us of trying to kidnap the children.
‘What are they saying?’ I asked Godfrey, one of the Kamangan soldiers.
‘You give boy bad spirits.’
‘Bollocks. He was hit by the truck – got a blow on the head.’ I was going to remonstrate more, but I knew the guy’s English was poor. ‘Where’s Major Mvula? Get the major.’
‘Major coming.’
He was, too. I looked through the crowd and saw Joss hurrying towards us, dressed in the sky-blue tracksuit which he wore in the evenings. As usual he was grinning, eager to help.
‘Hey, Geordie,’ he went. ‘Mind if I join the party? What’s all this?’
His face fell as I explained. ‘The girl’s okay, but the boy’s pretty bad. We need a chopper, to get him to hospital.’
‘Not a chance.’ Joss used a phrase he’d picked up off me. ‘Not tonight, anyway. We can get on the radio, but they won’t fly at night. Can we send him by road?’
‘How far is it?’
‘Seven hours.’
‘The journey’d kill him.’
Joss nodded. Behind him the hubbub was getting louder. He turned and shouted something to quieten it. As the clamour dropped, he began to explain about the accident in a loud voice, and for a few moments his words seemed to be swaying opinion. Then a new wave of yelling started up, and the crowd opened to let a small woman through. With a screech she rushed past me and dropped beside the boy, lifting him up. His stick-like arms and legs hung down as she cradled him in her arms.
‘The mother,’ said Joss.
Mart knelt beside her and tried the boy’s pulse again. In his big, square hand the little black arm looked skinny as a bone.
‘He’s fading,’ he announced. ‘Not going to last long.’
The woman began screaming and shouting, repeating the word sin’ganga, sin’ganga again and again.
‘What’s she saying?’
‘Take him to the doctor,’ Joss translated.
‘I didn’t think there was a doctor.’
‘It’s the witch doctor she means.’
‘Jesus, that will kill him. Tell her he’s got a better chance if we just keep him quiet.’
Joss spoke forcefully to the woman, but she kept on with her shouts. The crowd backed her. Out in the darkness the drums were getting louder. I began feeling the sheer level of noise would finish the child off.
‘Where is he, this doctor?’ I yelled.
‘Here, in the village.’
‘How far?’
‘Two minutes’ walk. Three minutes.’
‘What’ll he do?’
Joss shrugged. ‘How do I know? Consult the spirits for a remedy.’
I shot Mart a glance. ‘What d’you reckon?’
‘Better go. There’s nothing I can do for the kid. As long as we handle him gently, a short carry won’t hurt. This crowd could turn nasty any moment.’
‘Right, then. You carry him. Phil and me’ll come with you as escort.’
Joss put a hand on the mother’s shoulder, restraining her, and said something to her while Mart took the boy from her. So we set off in an amazing procession, Mart leading, the mother wailing at his elbow, myself and Phil immediately behind with Joss, then half the village. Some of the people had oil lamps, and several were carrying torches of burning reed bundles. Any moment, I thought, these grass huts are going on fire, and the whole village will be up in smoke.
Above the hubbub, I shouted, ‘Hadn’t somebody better warn the guy we’re coming?’
‘He knows,’ Joss called back. ‘The drums have told him.’