Death in the Kingdom (37 page)

‘I'll be praying,' I replied with true feeling as I switched my communicator fully on. I looked around for Sami, but he wasn't anywhere to be seen. Anyway, I thought, any more of this farewell shit and I'll start getting dewy-eyed or chicken out.

‘Lone figure leaving the village, walking towards us.' The man on the imager was talking to me from four feet away, sans communicator.

‘Roger. Let's get this show on the road,' I replied with a hell of a lot more bravado than I felt. I could almost hear the theme from
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
playing somewhere in my head as I took that first step down towards the OK Corral, or wherever. Clint Eastwood I wasn't. I wanted another shit but I held on and prayed for the water in my gut to quickly turn to concrete.

36

Five minutes further down the track the bush crowded in. The light there was no longer as clear and bright as it was up above. This was a world of greens and browns. The clay and mud underfoot supplied the earthy tones. Everything else was a shade of green. The colours of the jungle foliage ran through the entire green spectrum, ranging from light, yellow–green tints to some so dark they were almost black. Welcome back, I thought to myself as I moved down through the mottled shadows. This was the world I had lived in for so long, once upon a time. Then it had been both a friend and a foe, but mainly a friend. This time, I hoped, it would treat me the same way.

‘I'm in position. The advancing subject is 200 metres away.' Alex had made it to his position undetected.

‘We have a big lens on our subject. We are reasonably positive it is Chekhov.' Karl was back in the act. ‘Subject is a thick-set man with a badly scarred face. Age indeterminable. He is carrying a machete in his right hand. There is no other visible sign of a weapon.'

‘Chekhov was left-handed,' I said, cutting across the commentary. I remembered the Russian's file. I also remembered Babs. I'd calculated at the time that a left-handed man had cut her throat.

‘Injuries may have forced him to change hands,' Karl responded.

‘Maybe,' I agreed. I was at the second bend in the track. Soon I would be on the river flat and Chekhov, or whoever it was advancing down the road, would be able to see me. I had no doubt that whatever big lenses we had on Chekhov, he would have some of the very same on us. I reached the flat and followed the track as it curved parallel to the stream. Now I could see him. A tiny figure dressed in white was moving in the distant haze. The track, like the stream, had carved its path out of the green of the jungle and the tall grasses. It appeared as a dark ribbon from down there. The white of Chekhov's clothes was in vivid contrast to both the brown–yellow dirt of the road and the dark green of the jungle mass.

‘I see him,' I said aloud to myself as much as anyone else. I passed the cane knife from my right to my left hand. The butt of the gun was positioned for a right-handed draw. Not that I would need the Walther for at least 150 paces. Chekhov and I were still some 300 yards apart at this stage of the game.

‘X-Ray has two figures following the line of the ridge down from the village. Sami?' It was Karl speaking.

‘Yes,' came the reply.

‘Fuck!' I thought but then I realised I'd said it aloud.

‘In case you miss him, Daniel!' Sami's voice was a whisper.

‘Stay high, Sami,' Karl urged. ‘Our killing ground is 200 yards above the track.'

‘We will,' came the reply. ‘Good hunting!'

Damn, damn, damn, I thought as I tried to refocus on what I was doing. I tried to gauge how quickly Chekhov was moving and how far and how fast I had to move to ensure that we met at the point we had designated as our own personal killing field. I quickened my pace slightly. If I reached where X marked the spot first, I would just wait there for him. If he reached it and came on beyond, how was I to get him to back up?

‘At the present rate you will arrive sixty seconds ahead of the subject,' Karl said. He had obviously been doing his maths.

‘I figured that,' I replied, slowing slightly.

‘Any activity at the lower village?' I didn't recognise the voice.

‘Negative. The lack of activity suggests that there is a lot going on,' Karl responded.

‘I concur,' Alex said in a close-miked whisper. ‘Subject has just passed me. I'm setting the Claymores.'

‘Gotcha,' Karl confirmed. ‘Recon one reports they have bandits on visual and are positioning for the kill.'

‘Roger that. Green One over,' Alex replied.

I felt a momentary shiver of relief. Once Alex's team had been vectored onto unfriendly types, they were guaranteed to take them out. Thank God these guys are on our side, I thought as I trudged on, watching Chekhov grow larger with every combined step we took. My heart gave a grateful thump thirty seconds later when the same voice came back on the line.

‘Recon One reports bandits terminated,' Karl relayed to the Special Ops boss. ‘Recon Two getting into position on bandit nest number two.'

‘Roger. Claymores are hot. Let the party begin, gentlemen!' I detected more than a degree of enthusiasm in Alex's voice. Karl came back again. ‘Recon Two reports RPGs and a heavy MG in bandit position. Cannot cull silently. Will cover and terminate at first sign of hostilities.'

‘Confirmed. Go to red on verbal Pizza or on gunshot, whichever comes first. Green One over.'

‘Roger that.'

Listening to all the rogering and stuff, the uninitiated might have thought we had a boy's-own gathering of Hooray Henrys playing scout games. They slipped in and out of civilian speak but who cared? This was serious shit, and having these guys roger my ears off, pardon the expression, was pure bliss. I wasn't totally alone in wonderland and that was fine by me.

Chekhov and I were maybe a hundred yards apart. Now it was fifty paces each until we would be in each other's faces. I squinted through my sunglasses to get a look at his face. It was just a blur. I needed to get closer, but something still wasn't sitting right. The man walking towards me had on a white shirt. The cuffs of the sleeves had been rolled back up to his elbows. His arms were bare. The machete this guy carried was still in his right hand. His left arm was moving normally as it hung at his side. He was moving too freely for a man with a breathing problem caused maybe by burnt, scarred lungs.

‘Decoy to HQ. Get X-Ray to scope our man up close. Has he got a left ear and is there hair on his arms?' I wanted to know. I only had seconds to wait.

‘Roger that. Both ears intact and there is hair on the arms, dark hair and plenty of it,' came Karl's response, relayed back from the man with the hundred power eyes. I wondered if he were the one who counted pussy hair. I almost laughed aloud.

‘It's not Chekhov,' I said. ‘Repeat, not Chekhov. He was fair-haired going grey before he was burned and he lost his left ear.'

‘Setup,' Karl jumped in.

‘I'll confirm with a voice test,' I replied. We were fifty yards apart and I was in the zone. I stopped. ‘Mr Chekhov?' I called out. The man approaching me halted in his tracks and looked expectantly at me. The face was red and silver. Whether it was scar tissue or make-up, I had no idea. I was definitely leaning towards the latter.

‘Yes, I am Chekhov,' he said in thick English.

‘Anton Chekhov,' I asked, playing out a silly dangerous game. ‘The very same Chekhov who wrote
The Cherry Orchard
?'

‘You what? I wrote nothing. No Cherry Orchard. What do you mean? I am Dimitri Chekhov!' There we had it. No asthmatic wheezing and no broken pauses, just a bluff Russian voice speaking fractured English.

It was about then that the fake Chekhov realised that whatever game he had been playing was well and truly up. He hunched and began running for cover at the side of the track as I started to grab for the Walther.

‘RPGs!' The voice was Alex's.

‘Fucking Pizza,' I yelled quite needlessly, forgetting my gun as I launched myself towards the river in a long low dive, praying I wasn't going to hit a damned rock or land on a submerged tree. Something scorched the air behind me as I crashed through the fringe of grass and weeds and hit the water with a clumsy belly flop. As I went under, I heard the world explode behind me.

Yes, the comunicators worked in water. I could hear chaos both over the earpiece and through my uncovered ear as I sank, driven by my momentum and the weight of the Kevlar vest. I had no idea how deep the stream was at this point, but I was happy to stay down just as long as I had air in my lungs. Some seriously heavy thuds vibrated through the water and the rattle of automatic weapons and voices penetrated through my headset. My eyes were open. The water was the colour of tea that had been stewed too long. I kept my mouth shut. No way was I sucking in any of that. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the arse end of something with a long tail vanish downstream.

I grabbed a tree root or branch and held on, fighting against my body's desire to float back to the surface. I rolled onto my back as my feet finally got below my head. Looking up through three or four feet of brown water, I could see what appeared to be flames back the way I had come. It was almost peaceful down here.

Eventually I had to surface for air. I came up as slowly as I could, ready to gulp a lungful of precious oxygen and dive down again. There was still gunfire in the jungle across from where I was, but the frenzy of those first few seconds was gone. Black smoke climbed lazily into the air as dried grasses on the bank above me burned. The grenades Chekhov and his cronies had fired at me had been phosphorus or some sort of incendiary. The bastard wanted me fried, fricasseed or barbecued, as well as dead. Payback! What a hell of an involved scenario for something as simple as that! The guy's hatred knew no bounds, it seemed. Problem was that I could understand that. I probably wanted him dead at that moment just as much, or even more, than he wanted me fried to a crisp.

I kicked for the cover of the bank nearest the track and hauled the Walther out of its holster. Somewhere along the line I had dropped the cane knife. From back along the track towards the crossroads there was a heavy thump. It was followed by another of the same in quick succession. Those, I guessed, were a couple of the Claymores Alex had set up.

I was about to haul myself out of the water when there was another sound. A fucking helicopter was thudding its way towards me. I made myself as small as I could and pressed my body into the clay of the bank. A very large and extremely obnoxious-looking spider was making its merry arachnidan way along an exposed tree root. It stopped and surveyed me with a multitude of eyes. I left it where it was, a scant two inches from my face, as the chopper came thumping through the air above me.

‘You okay, Danny?' It was Karl's voice.

‘Okay but for the chopper,' I replied. ‘Ours or theirs?'

‘Ours! We're about to mop up down country.'

‘Okay. I'm still in the fucking river.'

‘Stay there. We're running for the bottom village, back in five.'

I recognised the chopper now. It was the grey Jet Ranger we'd flown up in. The rear left door was off its hinges and I could see a figure hunched in the doorway. There was a whirring sound, rather like that made by a sewing machine, and I huddled more. The next sound was that of a Gatling gun stitching up the world. The chopper moved on its way. The sound of the mincer came back over the noise of the turbine as the gunner played his deadly tune. A trail of sparkling shell cases fell away behind it, some of them splashing into the water close to me. It was a variation of that fateful morning out in the Andaman.

‘Green One to Recon Units. Check in.' Now that the communicator channels were totally open, I lay there against the riverbank and listened as The A Team checked in. They had all survived and it appeared that they had taken out at least half a dozen of Chekhov's people. Alex confirmed that he had taken out the fake Chekhov and another bandit with his Claymores.

‘Green One to Decoy. You okay?'

‘Okay,' I replied. ‘Sami?' I called.

‘Okay,' came the whisper. ‘X-Ray, we are moving down parallel to the Napalm strike.'

‘Roger, Recon One and Two, copy?' The four guys doing the heavy hitting copied. They weren't going to mistake Sami and Jo for bandits.

‘We'll move back up the hill in five. Decoy, stay where you are for the moment while we sweep the area.' Alex was the man in charge. I gave an affirmative and hugged the riverbank, listening as he continued to give orders. X-Ray continued to sweep the bush while the recon guys started to double-check the couple of hundred square yards of bush across from where I lay. I wasn't about to get out of the water and have my behind shot off by a friendly. Dead was dead, no matter who pulled the trigger. As H. Norman Schwartzkopf once commented, ‘There is no such thing as friendly fire.'

The vicious-looking spider had lost interest in me and carried on about his business. I looked around for another source of entertainment but there was none, apart from a green grass snake that was wound around a tree branch across the river. I thought the damned thing was probably in a state of shock after all that had taken place, including the miniature gale whipped up by the chopper's rotor.

I could still hear the noise of the helicopter echoing back up the valley. The sound of the Minigun underscored the rotor flap. The gun was firing in short rattling bursts along with another automatic weapon I took to be a Minimi. Shit, this was a full out war. I only hoped that Karl and his happy crew kept the collateral damage to a minimum, and that none of Chekhov's men got an RPG into the Jet Ranger. Why was I so fucking worried? I was alive!

‘Clear,' came the eventual call.

I scrambled gingerly up the riverbank, glad to quit the water but definitely cautious. Back on dry ground I leaned against the trunk of a tree, gun in hand, and took a look around. There hadn't just been one missile. It looked as if there had been three, maybe four rocket grenades. There was a small smouldering crater in the road more or less where I had been standing but worse was the stench of phosphorus that filled the thick air. Three separate sticky fires burned on and around the track. I had been right in assuming that Chekhov had been trying to fry me, the barrage of phosphorus grenades had taught me that. Nasty damned things.