Authors: Chris Ryan
Tenth Man Down (34 page)
‘No,’ I went. ‘But this damned diamond is twisting everything. Until that came into the reckoning, Joss was okay – wasn’t he, Gen?’
‘Better than okay,’ Gen replied. ‘He was good.’
‘Well,’ said Sam. ‘Big money always talks loudest.’
A single shout came from the camp behind us. We listened for a few seconds, but the disturbance died down.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to get the fuck out of here.’
Then Sam sprang a surprise. ‘All right if I come with you?’
‘Why, are you wanting out?’
‘Too right I am. I’m through with this lot.’
‘Well, it’s up to you. It’s going to be some hike.’
‘How far’s this Msisi?’
‘It’s got to be about fifty ks from here. The Zebra Pans about the same.’
‘Sixty ks!’ The American gave a low whistle. ‘That’s over thirty miles. You have any equipment – compass, GPS?’
‘Nothing. The bastards who captured us nicked everything.’
‘Well, I’ve got a compass. Know what heading we want?’
‘Not exactly. Where’s Gutu in relation to Chimbwi?
‘Gee, let’s see. I’d say about forty ks north-east of here.’
‘Then I reckon we need to head north until we hit the river, then turn downstream. Can you get us out of camp?’
‘Oh, sure. That one’s easy. There’s plenty holes in the fence. But we’ve only got three hours of darkness. There’s no way we can make it back to the rest of your guys before first light.’
As the elation of getting free wore off, exhaustion was clamping down on me, and I sat on the ground to think.
‘Any chance of nicking a vehicle?’
‘Tough. The transport’s kept in a compound of its own and guarded pretty good. You’d stir up a hornets’ nest if you tried to get in there. Tell you what, though. Can you fly a plane?’
‘Depends what it is.’
‘A light aircraft,’ said Sam. ‘Very basic.’
‘Christ, that could be okay. Don’t tell me there’s one here.’
‘Sure is. They had it for prospecting.’
‘Is it operational?’
‘Absolutely. Somebody took it up a couple days back.’
‘Jesus!’ I felt my adrenalin stirring. ‘Where is it?’
‘Right over there.’ He pointed. ‘In an open shed.’
‘Any security on it?’
‘Nothing. There’s only one guy knows how to fly it, and he’s an officer, so they trust him.’
‘What about a strip?’
‘Right in front of it.’
‘Fuel?’
‘Should be plenty.’
‘Can we go and look at it?’
‘Sure. Come on.’
He led us to the end of the shed, took a cautious scan round the corner, and set out across the open ground beyond. The moon was already well across the sky. As I looked up at the stars, it seemed incredible that only twenty-four hours earlier our whole team had been driving though the dark. It felt like a month ago.
In three or four minutes we came to a perimeter fence, weldmesh on steel posts. As Sam had said, it was full of holes, and we found one easily enough. Behind us the camp lay silent, but out in the bush hyenas were howling. Walking was hard work for me; I was bruised all over, and my legs hurt when I moved them.
Soon, another large shed showed up ahead of us, black against the sky.
‘This is the hangar,’ Sam whispered. ‘Wait here while I check it out.’
Gen and I knelt down. Being so used to carrying weapons, I felt defenceless and vulnerable, lacking even a knife. Without thinking, I raised my left wrist to look at my watch, remembering too late that it had gone. I glanced behind us, trying to estimate how far we’d come from the main part of the camp. Half a mile, anyway.
Presently, Sam loomed up out of the dark, and announced, ‘All clear.’
The shed was open-fronted. Just inside it, with its perspex bubble of a canopy glinting in the moonlight, stood a very basic-looking aircraft.
‘Jesus!’ I went. ‘This is all right. You have a torch?’
‘Sure.’ He handed one over.
‘I’m going to have a quick look over it. Keep an eye out while I switch the torch on.’
‘Keep it short, then. Just point it away from the camp.’
I ran the beam quickly over the little plane. It wasn’t any make I recognised, but it looked much the same as other small aircraft I’d flown.
‘Only two seats,’ said Gen.
‘Don’t worry. Sam can sit on your lap. We’ll squeeze him in somehow.’
‘Will it take off with that weight?’
‘Should do.’
A quick inspection showed the plane had a nose-wheel and two main wheels, an ignition switch but no electric start – just a hand-pull on the side of the engine – and a squeeze-ball pump for priming the carburettors.
‘Think you can hack it?’ Genesis asked.
‘Try it, anyway.’
I doused the torch, eased myself into the left-hand seat and felt the controls: accelerator arm, joystick, pedals, handbrake. Everything moved freely. I shone the torch on the transparent tube that served as a fuel gauge. The level was fairly low; it looked as though there were only twenty or twenty-five litres in the tank.
‘We could do with more gas,’ I said. ‘Is there any around?’
‘In the back.’ Sam pointed into the depths of the shed. But there, for the first time, he was wrong. The day before, he said, two forty-five-gallon drums had been standing in the corner. Now they’d gone.
‘Too bad,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to make do with what we’ve got.’ I looked back towards the camp, calculating our chances. ‘It’s too dark to take off at the moment. If anything went wrong with the engine, we’d kill ourselves trying to land. Our only chance is to wait until dawn’s about to break.’
‘If we wait till it starts getting light, chances are someone will spot us,’ said Sam.
‘I know. But it’s a risk we’ve got to take.’
Because I was the only one of us who could fly, I was taking charge of the situation. But I didn’t want to put the American down, so I added, ‘If it’s light, and something does happen once we’re in the air, at least we’ll have a chance of getting down again. Okay, Sam?’
‘I’m in your hands, skipper.’
‘That’s the plan, then. What we can do meanwhile is push the thing further away from the camp, give ourselves that much more of a start, and keep the noise at a distance. How long’s the strip?’
‘Maybe five hundred yards.’
‘Better check it out. We’ll need to take off westwards. I don’t fancy flying back over the camp. Step it out to the far end, Gen.’
‘Fine. What do you need for take-off?’
‘Two fifty yards. Two hundred at a pinch. As there’s no wind, and we’ll have a heavy load, two fifty would be better.’
As Genesis set out, taking long strides, I let off the hand brake, and the two of us rolled the little aircraft forward. It trundled easily, making hardly a sound. I reckoned we’d pushed it nearly two hundred metres when we made out a dark figure coming back towards us.
‘Three hundred paces more beyond here,’ Gen said quietly.
‘This’ll do, then. What is there at the far end?’
‘Nothing. The ground just gets rough.’
More than anything else, I wanted to see if the engine would start. But I knew that the moment it fired, we’d probably be compromised: the noise would be almost bound to give us away. So all I could do was show Sam the hand-pull on the side of the engine.
‘It’s just like a lawn-mower,’ I told him. ‘All you need do is pull when I say, and keep pulling until she fires.’
‘We need a contingency plan,’ Gen said. ‘Supposing we can’t start it? What do we do then?’
‘Head north from here on foot, and keep going,’ Sam replied, pointing. ‘Right out there. There’s nothing to stop us. We’re already through the wire.’
‘You got a GPS?’
‘Sure.’ He patted his chest pocket.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Good. How’s the time?’
He glanced at his watch, and replied, ‘Twenty after four.’
‘What time’s first light?’
‘First light around here is twenty after five. Sunrise a quarter of six.’
‘An hour to go, then. What about the guard on the cell? Won’t someone miss him?’
‘His relief won’t come on till six o’clock. Then he’ll find his mate’s disappeared, along with the keys. Probably he’ll think he’s gone to sleep someplace. By then we’ll be up and gone.’
‘Touch wood.’
The tension was electric, but somehow we had to pass the time. We sat on the ground under the wing of the aircraft and chatted in quick, nervous whispers.
‘The guy they killed,’ Sam said. ‘Good buddy of yours, was he?’
‘More than that. We’d served together for fifteen years – Russia, Ulster, Colombia, everywhere.’
I began thinking about Whinger’s family. His mother was dead, but his father was still alive. If I got back, it would be down to me to go and tell him what had happened. I might never reveal
exactly
what they’d done to him; it would be bad enough without going into details. That unpleasant task was in the future, though. Our first priority was to get ourselves out. Had the lads got the satcom up and running? Was a Herc on its way to lift us out?
exactly
what they’d done to him; it would be bad enough without going into details. That unpleasant task was in the future, though. Our first priority was to get ourselves out. Had the lads got the satcom up and running? Was a Herc on its way to lift us out?
My mind kept returning to our flight. The last time I’d flown was eighteen months ago, when we’d done some pilot training with the Army Air Corps. Luckily for me, the Regiment had had a ridiculous idea that they wanted to train guys to fly, but nothing came of it, because at the end of the course one of the lads wrecked an aircraft. Now in my mind I ran through some standard drills.
‘Sam,’ I said, ‘those hills to the north. D’you know how high they are?’
‘The Makonde Hills? In the day you can see ’em in the distance. How high? Nothing great. Six, seven hundred feet. Why?’
‘I was thinking. We’re going to burn a load of fuel clearing them. It’s a question of how much we have left after that.’
I borrowed his torch again for another check of the fuel gauge. It had no calibration, just the curved, transparent pipe, so judging the supply was a matter of guesswork. By wishful thinking, I confirmed my original estimate of between twenty and twenty-five litres. Five gallons to lift us to freedom.
At about 0440 I suddenly felt ravenous and cracked into one of the ready-to-eat meals. My lip hurt as I took each mouthful, but never had cold, congealed corned-beef hash tasted so good. Genesis wasn’t so lucky: his foil pack contained spaghetti bolognese, which he said tasted like wallpaper glue, but he got it down his neck all the same.
Feeling revived, I asked, ‘Sam, were you in the Gulf?’
‘Sure,’ he replied. ‘SEAL Team Six, in the Western Desert.’
‘Never!’ I exclaimed. ‘That was our location, too. Deployed from Al Jouf? Amazing! What were you on?’
‘Air-sea rescue. Picking up downed aircrew.’
‘Some hairy trips, I bet.’
‘You said it. Had one near-miss from a SAM. Twice we nearly didn’t make it out.’
‘Ninety-one,’ I said, trying to remember a name. ‘Did you ever meet a guy called Tony Lopez?’
‘Sure did! Hell of a guy, Tony. I spent some time with him in Panama. He a pal of yours?’
‘Absolutely. He gave us a big hand in Colombia. Then he came over to the UK on attachment, and stopped a bullet at Chequers, of all places.’
‘Chequers?’
‘The Prime Minister’s country home.’
‘No kidding?’
‘Right there, in the park.’
‘What in hell were you doing?’
‘Tangling with the IRA.’
‘Oh,
those
choirboys.’
those
choirboys.’
After a short silence, Genesis asked, ‘How many of you guys are there here?’
‘Mercs? Twelve. Only one American, though. Me! The rest are hairy-assed South Africans. Supposed to be some Russians coming in, too.’
‘So what’s your brief?’
‘Good question. They hired us to help fight the war against the north, but in the past couple of days that campaign’s pretty much taken a back seat. There’s a new agenda now.’
‘Which is?’
‘The thing’s going nuclear.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Somebody’s stumbled on a cache of warheads near a place called Ichembo, out west. I don’t know who found them, or how, because the site’s outside the war zone.’
‘Warheads?’ I asked
‘Nuclear heads for tactical weapons. Muende’s desperate to get his hands on them. He’s pissed off with the slow progress of his campaign. But now he reckons with medium-range nuclear capability he could knock out the north in a couple of weeks. A few missiles into Mulongwe, and all will be dandy. The north will be on its knees.’
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