Authors: Chris Ryan
Tenth Man Down (27 page)
‘In the truck,’ said Mart.
‘Okay. She can stay there. Eh, Jason.’
‘Yassir?’
‘How did you know where we were?’
‘I track you. Major Mvula send me tracking Brits.’
‘Have you told him where we are?’
‘Yassir.’ He nodded.
‘So you’ve been up and down, and up a second time?’
Again, he nodded.
‘You must have shifted your arse. What are you going to do now?’
‘Come with you, sir.’
I stared at him. His sharp cheekbones glinted faintly in the moonlight, but apart from them and his eyes, he was almost invisible.
‘You’re quitting? Changing sides?’
‘Yassir. The major, he got real bad spirits.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Evil got into him. I come with you.’
Suddenly I felt choked. This guy had probably saved our lives, and was risking his on our behalf. I reached out and brought my hand down on his bony shoulder.
‘Good on yer, Jason.’ Then a thought occurred to me. ‘What about your kit? Have you left it behind?’
‘No sir. Backpack here.’ He pointed into the bush behind him, then started rummaging in a trouser pocket. ‘Old whitey, he say give this.’
‘The Belgian?’
‘Yassir.’
He pulled out a crumpled scrap of paper and handed it across. Opening it carefully, I turned the sheet to the fire. Obviously it was a message, but the handwriting was so small and scrawly that in the flickering firelight I couldn’t read it.
‘Torch, somebody,’ I said.
Pav handed one over and I shone the beam on the paper. There were two short lines of irregular pencil scribble that seemed to be some sort of code.
Jvoltefaceparcequilcherchepierre
exceptgrandetrouveeilyaquelqjours
Jesus!’ I went, ‘What the hell is this?’
Stringer, peering over my shoulder, said, ‘It’s French, or a sort of French. He’s run the words together to make sure the blacks can’t understand it. Give it here. I’ll sort it.’
I handed the note over with, ‘Rather you than me.’
Apart from speaking some French, Stringer was a brilliant cryptographer, always working at his codes and doing crossword puzzles when he wasn’t on the weights. If anyone could decipher the message, he would.
‘Get everything squared away,’ I said. ‘We’re rolling in five minutes.’
‘Why we go now?’ Inge’s nagging voice grated out behind me at a moment when I least wanted to hear it. ‘It is playing, yes?’
‘Playing? You mean an exercise? Far from it. The blacks have turned nasty, and we’ve got to get out.’
TEN
We were away just after 2200, hoping we had nearly two hours’ start, driving our two pinkies and the mother wagon we’d been using for our kit. This, of course, belonged to the Kamangans, but I told myself we’d hand it back to them at some later stage.
What would the Alpha guys do when they found our campsite deserted? Joss had overheard part of my conversation with the Belgian, so he knew we might have our sights on the convent and be heading that way. Almost certainly he’d order a squad to follow us up, and inevitably the tracks of our vehicles would show where we’d gone. But would the blacks have the guts to come after us in the dark? Would they wait around until daylight? Or would they let us go, pull back to the mine and sit there until the relief aircraft arrived?
‘Hundred to one against them doing a follow-up at night,’ I said to Pavarotti as we set out. ‘All the same, we’ll go off at a bit of a tangent. Head due west instead of south-west. As soon as it’s light, we’ll tack back down.’
The track we’d followed from the Kamangans’ camp out to our temporary staging post was so overgrown that even in daylight it had been hard to pick out. Lack of use had allowed saplings and shrubs to spring up all over it, blending it back into the bush. Now in the dark it was untraceable – and in any case, it was no longer heading in the direction we wanted.
We piled up the fire, to make a good marker for the assassins, and slipped away into the night. Driving across country without lights was tricky until the moon climbed higher. Later its bright glare, coming at first from behind us, threw inky shadows across the ground ahead and made it difficult to spot holes. For the first hour the land kept falling away, and apart from a few short climbs out of gullies, we were mostly going downhill. Then the terrain flattened out, and I guessed we were back on a level with the river, which lay somewhere off to our left.
On difficult stretches, where we had to cross numerous small ravines, we had guys ranging ahead on foot, but whenever the going was better we kept the vehicles rolling at seven or eight kilometres an hour. It was a miracle that we had Jason with us: an extra driver, and the best spotter of obstacles anyone could hope for. All the same, with three men driving, three spotting and three tabbing ahead, we were stretched to the limit. Every hour we swapped around, but there was never a chance for anyone to get his head down properly.
One factor in our favour was the heavy dew, which had damped down the dust; without it, the trip would have been a nightmare for the guys at number two and three in the column. As it was, even for those in the rear, the night air felt cool and clean. The people I felt sorry for were the two invalids, who were being continually bounced around in the backs of the vehicles. Afterwards I suspected that the rough passage did a lot to accelerate Whinger’s deterioration.
Our slow progress gave me all too much time to worry. Not only had our training task gone to ratshit, we were in deep trouble. With comms still down, we couldn’t tell Hereford what had happened; there was no chance of the Kremlin getting a Here on its way to exfil us. We weren’t carrying enough diesel to drive all three vehicles back to our original start-point out-side Mulongwe, and anyway, we’d now get a hostile reception wherever we pitched up inside Kamanga. If Joss’s radio was working, and he’d already sent back messages heaping shit on us, it would be highly dangerous for us to approach any military camp or centre of population. We’d suddenly become pariahs, to be shot, or eaten, or at best locked up, by the first native force that could catch us. We badly needed to get a true version of events back to Hereford.
I knew several of the guys were wondering about Jason. Had he made up part or all of his story? We knew he had that habit of not coming out with important facts. Chalky, in particular, had been sceptical, and Danny also voiced his suspicions. I wasn’t sure, but my instinct was to trust him. For the time being there was nothing for it but to put distance between ourselves and the assassination squad. At our first halt, soon after 2300, we switched off our engines and sat listening. After an hour of grinding movement, the silence was beautiful. Then, from somewhere not far ahead, came an extraordinary sound, a volley of harsh grunts, in and out, like somebody sawing wood.
‘What’s that, Jason?’
‘
Kaingo
. Leopard. It is male, making territorial call.’
Kaingo
. Leopard. It is male, making territorial call.’
Moments later weird squeals and shrieks erupted out to our right.
‘Hyenas,’ said Jason. ‘They dispute kill, maybe with lions.’
In the tension of getting away I’d forgotten that animals were going about their business all round us. The calls of the predators brought home to me even more clearly the fact that we, the foreign humans, were being hunted. Many times in my career I’d been on the run, and the sensation had never been a comfortable one. Now I got the feeling that takes over during escape and evasion exercises, when you have to keep going against the clock, driven by the knowledge that enemy forces are out looking for you, and that the consequences of getting caught will be extremely unpleasant. From being aggressive marauders, we’d abruptly turned into fugitives, committed to escape and evasion on a continental scale, with no safe house to aim for.
‘Try the satcom again,’ I told Stringer. ‘I’d be a lot happier if the Kremlin knew what we’re doing.’
‘Come on, then,’ he said. ‘
You
try. Check everything with me to make sure I’m not cocking up.’
You
try. Check everything with me to make sure I’m not cocking up.’
We knelt on a patch of flat, sandy ground and set up the little dish aerial.
‘What bearing do we need?’ I asked.
‘One sixty mills.’
‘Okay. Elevation?’
‘Forty-five degrees.’
I set the dish on those parameters, and went, ‘Frequency?’
‘Five point six eight nine.’
I punched in the figures, waited a few seconds, then squeezed the button on the hand-set, and said, ‘Hullo, Zero. This is Sierra Five Four. Sierra Five Four.’
Holding my breath, I released the button. Nothing but a rush of static. I waited a minute, then tried again, with the same result.
‘You little fucker,’ said Stringer quietly, gazing at the brilliant stars as he addressed the satellite. ‘You’re up there somewhere. I can almost see you with the naked eye.’ Then he turned to me, and said, ‘With the sky this clear, you’d think we’d have continuous comms – nothing to block them.’
‘I know. Maybe it’s to do with the ionosphere.’
‘Check all the connections, anyway.’
We did that next, undoing every one and tightening it again before we tried once more. I imagined the signallers sitting in the bomb-proof Comms Centre in the Kremlin, monitoring calls from all over the world. Why in hell weren’t they responding to ours? There was no question of them having gone for a piss, or being asleep. The centre was run to the highest professional standards and continuously manned. The fault must lie in the atmospherics, or in our set.
‘Try again in an hour,’ I said, and on we went.
For the next stage it was my turn to drive the lead pinkie, and I needed all my concentration to avoid rocks, skirt depressions and weave between trees whenever the bush grew thicker. Towards the end I had a headache, and I felt so shattered I told Pav to keep talking to me so that I didn’t fall asleep at the wheel.
Midnight brought a badly needed respite. We reckoned we’d put fifteen kilometres between us and our last campsite. Because there’d been no sign of any pursuit, it seemed safe to stop and get a brew on, so we lit up our solid fuel stoves and set about making hot drinks. The person who needed liquid most was Whinger. By then he’d more or less stopped talking; he’d only respond to a remark if really pressed, and we had to haul him into a sitting position to get some warm, sweet tea down his neck.
‘Hang in there, mate,’ I told him. ‘We’ll get you to the
Krankenhaus
first thing in the morning.’ I made my voice sound cheerful, but it choked me to see my old mate sunk so low.
Krankenhaus
first thing in the morning.’ I made my voice sound cheerful, but it choked me to see my old mate sunk so low.
I’d just taken my first sip of cocoa when, very faintly, a dull splutter of small-arms fire popped off in the distance far behind us, then another. The sounds seemed to come from somewhere to the right of the line we’d been driving on.
‘It is a battle? Yes?’ Inge loomed out of the dark. She’d gone walkabout to have a pee, and I noticed she was moving more freely.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, genially. ‘It was a long way off, any road. I see your foot’s on the mend.’
‘It is stronger, yes. I think there is nothing broken. Only bruises.’
The distant noises spurred us on. Whether or not Jason’s version of events had been correct, we knew now that some action was in progress behind us, so we reckoned we’d done the right thing, and I had no regrets as we motored on through the rest of the night, with the moon gradually moving across the sky until it was low over the horizon to our left front.
At the four o’clock halt Stringer came up to me, and said, ‘Still no comms, but I think I’ve hacked Boisset’s message.’
His normal handwriting was small and neat, but on the sheet of paper he handed me the letters were all over the place, thrown by the jolting of the vehicle. Even so, I had no trouble reading them by torchlight. What he’d done was to decipher the condensed French text by opening it out into separate words; then he’d added a translation.
J(OSS)’S VOLTE-FACE PARCE QU’ IL CHERCHE (UNE) PIERRE EXCEPT (IONNELLEMENT) GRANDE TROUVÉE IL Y A QUEL(QUES) JOURS
JOSS’S ABOUT-TURN BECAUSE HE’S LOOKING FOR AN EXCEPTIONALLY LARGE STONE FOUND A FEW DAYS AGO
‘Good on yer, Stringer,’ I went. ‘Hey, Phil, look at this.’
‘What does he mean,’ growled Phil, ‘“an exceptionally large stone”?’
‘Don’t you remember? The old Belgian told us that sometimes rocks the size of pigeons’ eggs come up out of the river. I reckon they found one of those. If it doesn’t have too many faults, it’ll be worth a fucking fortune. This explains Joss’s crazy behaviour. It’s got to be this that flipped him.’
‘No wonder the bastard wanted us out, then,’ went Phil. ‘He’s after the stone himself.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘He couldn’t afford to have us know anything about it. That’s why he had those two guys shot by the kangaroo court. Must be. He reckoned they’d got the big one, or knew something about it. You know how he kept shouting the same question at the second guy? I bet he was asking, “Where is it? Where is it?” He’ll be doing his nut by now.’
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