Authors: Chris Ryan
Tenth Man Down (38 page)
His second choice of site met with Jason’s approval, and there, taking turns, sweating like slaves, we got down nearly four feet before we again hit living rock, while those not digging assembled enough flat pieces of stone to cover the body.
‘That’ll do him,’ said Pav. ‘Nothing can come at him from underneath. If we put these lumps on top, he’ll be fine.’
Sorting through Genesis’s kit, we found his precious bible in the mother wagon. Our first idea was to bury it with him. Then I thought, no, there’s a good chance we’ll come back for him, so we’ll keep it with us and return it to his family.
I don’t think any of us had actually buried a mate before. Going to a funeral is one thing, doing the work another – and anyway, the body is usually inside a coffin. For Genesis we had no such luxury: he had to go under as he was, and there was no rush to take hold of him. In the end it was Pav and myself who picked up the body-bag and lowered it into the rough-cut hole. We’d dug it only just wide enough for his shoulders; his body had already gone stiff, and we had to wriggle it about to make it go down to the bottom. Once he was settled I leant over and pulled the toggle of the zip down far enough for us to see his face. His eyes were closed, and apart from some dried blood on his forehead, he looked peaceful enough
All eight of us – me, Pav, Danny, Chalky, Mart, Stringer, Phil and Jason – were shoulder to shoulder in a tight semi-circle, looking down. Nobody wanted to be the first to shovel earth in, to put him out of sight.
‘Give him our thoughts for a minute,’ I said gruffly. ‘Say goodbye.’
Seconds ticked past. I was conscious of the sun growing hotter on the back of my neck, of bird calls and insect noises. I was grateful to Pav when he broke the silence.
‘If it’d been one of us, he’d be praying,’ he said. ‘Let’s pray for him now.’
‘Yes,’ I went. ‘And save a thought for Whinger.’ Then I added, ‘The last thing Gen said, after he was hit, was, “To give light to them that sit in darkness, and in the shadow of death.”’
‘He would,’ said Pav. ‘And that’s where he is now: in the shadow of death. RIP.’
That cracked Stringer up. I saw tears come into his eyes. I bent down, gave the pallid, freckled cheek a pat, and ran the zip of the black bag shut. Then I started lowering flat rocks into place above the body and shovelling like there was no tomorrow.
THIRTEEN
In retrospect, I can see we were crazy to carry on. We were all so shattered by exhaustion that our judgement was seriously flawed. We still had the .50 machine gun and nearly a thousand rounds of ammunition, as well as one RPG and a couple of dozen grenades, besides our personal weapons, but with our team down to seven men – eight including Jason – and only two vehicles, we were hardly an effective fighting unit, and certainly not strong enough to take on a major Kamangan force. We should have sat tight in our elevated LUP, waited until the incoming Herc was poised for a short last leg, and then gone out to find an LZ to mark with smoke grenades to guide the pilot in.
We did none of those things. Instead, we held an impromptu Chinese parliament in the shade of a leadwood tree and by a unanimous vote decided to head for Ichembo.
For me, the decision was easy. By then I was being driven by personal hatred of Muende and the German woman. I was rational enough to recognise this compulsion and see its dangers, but reason wasn’t strong enough to prevent me trying to gain revenge for Whinger’s death by topping both of them. After what they’d done, I’d have walked the length of the continent to get level with them, but after listening to Sam, I’d got it firmly in my head that the rebel leader would be leading the raid on the nuclear cache in person. Furthermore, having seen how he and Inge worked together, I felt certain she’d be coming with him. Therefore, if we reached Ichembo first, we’d have a good chance of ambushing the pair of them.
I was also needled by a dislike of failure. With our training task in ruins, and three of our lads dead, we’d got nothing to show for our month in Africa. It went against the grain to head for home with three lives lost and bugger all achieved. If, on the other hand, we managed to avert a nuclear showdown among such volatile states, we’d have a big plus to our credit. If we secured the weapons and topped Muende at the same time, all my goals would be achieved at once.
I was perfectly open with the rest of the guys. I told them exactly what I was thinking. Like me, they felt frustrated at the way the original task had collapsed under them, through no fault of their own; to have quit at that stage would have left a bad taste in their mouths. They also saw that immediate action was needed to secure the nuclear arsenal, and that to let it fall into Muende’s hands would be criminally irresponsible.
Yet beyond these practical considerations there lay a different pressure. I didn’t realise it at the time, but Pav told me later that from the moment I tumbled out of that little aircraft and collapsed on the deck, the rest of the team thought I’d changed. They felt I was somehow different: more ruthless than usual, almost fanatical. There were moments when they feared I’d lost the plot completely. They put it down to the experience I’d been through during the night, and luckily they were sympathetic. If they hadn’t been basically on-side, they might have mutinied. I know, now, that at one stage, when my behaviour became too outrageous, they did discuss ganging up on me and putting me under open arrest, but because they felt nearly as bad about Whinger and Genesis as I did, team loyalty held everyone together.
When I say ‘everyone’, that included our new recruit, Jason. He was as loyal as anybody, but again, his reasons were different. Having thrown in his lot with us, he seemed determined to come with us wherever we went, to stick with us to the bitter end, whatever that might be, and then come back to the UK. ‘I come work for you in England’ became his constant refrain. He had no conception of the difficulties involved: immigration laws, work permits, the northern climate – all way beyond his ken. But none of that fazed him in the least, and as for us, because he’d saved all our lives, we felt bound to do our best for him, and we kidded him along with jokey enquiries as to how he’d deal with his family if he did leave Africa.
‘How many wives have you got, Jason?’ Danny asked once.
‘Two, sir.’
‘What about children?’
‘No children.’
‘What, none at all?’
‘No sir.’
‘How’s that, then?’
‘Woman’s no good!’ He flipped up a skeletal hand, as though throwing one of the useless creatures over his shoulder, and everybody laughed. The fact that he had no young family to support made the idea of him emigrating seem less far-fetched, but still none of us took it seriously.
Yet he was the one who finally tipped us over in the direction of carrying on. We’d held the usual discussion of pros and cons, reviewing our options, and when I went to sum up, I expected opinions to be evenly divided.
‘So,’ I began, ‘we’re okay for ammunition and food. Water – have to be careful, but we can manage. Fuel’s the diciest. We’ve got enough to reach the area of the cache, but not much more. What we need is to hijack another vehicle without blowing it up, and nick its supply. We haven’t the fuel to return to Mulongwe, and in any case, my guess is we’d be thoroughly bloody unwelcome there. The main problem is to find the nuclear site. I vote we carry on to Ichembo and grab somebody with local knowledge who can give us directions. What does everyone think?’
Phil, as always, was for pressing ahead. So were Pavarotti and, to a lesser extent, Stringer. Chalky, Danny and Mart were more cautious. But, as I say, it was Jason who swung the vote when he said quietly, ‘I know Ichembo.’
‘You know it!’ went Pavarotti. ‘How?’
‘One brother-law, he come from that place. I visit his family there.’
‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘A village?’
‘No village –
boma
. Small town.’
boma
. Small town.’
‘Can you find the way there?’
Jason nodded.
For a moment I felt seriously pissed off with him for not having divulged such vital information sooner. Again, it was out of habit of holding things back, but I didn’t bollock him on it because I knew it was his nature to be self-effacing, and also because he was shy about his limited English, and didn’t like speaking it more than he could help.
‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘I’ve just thought of something. The Yank, Sam, said the place was outside the war zone. If we beat Muende to it, maybe we can just cruise in and get some legit fuel from a garage.’
Again, Jason nodded, and said, ‘I think so.’
‘That’s it, then. Let’s go.’
‘What about the Kremlin?’ Stringer asked. ‘Shall we tell them what we’re doing?’
‘Not yet,’ I told him. ‘We’ll find out the score first and tell them after.’
‘Another suggestion,’ said Chalky. ‘Why not call your friend Back-hander and chat him up? If you went through to the embassy on the satcom, they might pull him across to talk to you. You could tell him Joss has flipped, and we’re in the shit. He might believe it, coming from you. It might stop him swallowing whatever crap Joss has sent back through his own headquarters. He might even send his chopper to lift us out. After all, you and he were great buddies when he came to the ambush.’
‘Yeah, well,’ I went. ‘It’s an idea.’ I remembered how we’d laughed when Bakunda had said, ‘Some of these fellows are not long down from the trees.’ Now I thought, too fucking right.
‘
Good
idea, Chalky,’ I said. ‘Let’s try it.’
Good
idea, Chalky,’ I said. ‘Let’s try it.’
When we punched in the number for the DA in Mulongwe, the call went through like clockwork. But the response was not what we’d hoped for: instead of a live human, we got a female voice on a tape honking, ‘The British Embassy in Mulongwe is temporarily closed. Urgent calls should be redirected to the British Embassy in Harare.’ There followed a string of numbers, but I switched off in the middle of them.
‘Cancel that one,’ I told the lads. ‘Like the Ops Officer said, they’ve broken off diplomatic relations. We’re on our own in glorious Kamanga. We’d better shift our arses, because if what Sam said was right, we’re in a race.’
Any race is easier to manage if you know what competition you’re up against. If you can see the other runners, and watch how they’re performing, you can at least pace yourself. But on that blazing hot morning we had only a hazy idea of what the enemy were up to. We believed that Muende was heading up with some sort of a force from the camp where I’d been held prisoner. Whether his South African mercenaries were still with him, or whether they’d formed a splinter group, we couldn’t tell. What we knew for sure was that Joss and his Alpha Commando were somewhere behind us, to the east, probably following our tracks. Had
they
got wind of the weapons cache, and of Muende’s new agenda? Again, we had no means of knowing. In the circumstances, all we could do was crack on as fast as possible.
they
got wind of the weapons cache, and of Muende’s new agenda? Again, we had no means of knowing. In the circumstances, all we could do was crack on as fast as possible.
Thanks to Jason, our move westwards went perfectly. How he navigated, I never quite made out. Riding in the front of the pinkie, with Pav driving, he never looked at the map, still less at a compass. His eyes were constantly sweeping the horizon, and every now and then he would glance up at the sun, as if to check his bearings. For the first hour he directed us through the bush, not on any road, but twisting and turning along one game trail after another. Then we came on to a sandy, overgrown track and followed that to the north at a good speed until we came to a T junction and joined an earth road leading east and west.
Half an hour westwards along that, and at last we saw signs of normal African life. After days without setting eyes on a civilian, it gave everyone a lift to find patches of cultivation and meet men and women walking along the road with bundles on their heads. When we stopped beside a little group and Jason made enquiries, the news was electrifying: the next village ahead possessed a borehole, and had plenty of fresh water. I was frantic to press ahead, but, whatever happened, we needed water, so I called a quick halt. The community was tiny – only twenty or thirty grass huts – but somehow it had been awarded a development grant, and there in the centre stood the borehole: a hand pump with a chute that ran water off into a galvanised metal tank, all under a conical grass roof set up high on wooden posts.
The moment we pulled up beside it, dusty, barefoot children began to assemble, struck speechless by the sight of these peculiar grey men caked in mud. Danny grabbed the pump handle and began to rock it back and forth. Up came a gush of water, cool and crystal-clear. Mart and Pavarotti started filling jerricans, but after days of mud, sand, grit and sweat, the sight of the clean water was too much for Phil, who ripped off his shirt and poured bowlfuls over his head. Stringer and Chalky followed his example. The spectacle of them furiously scrubbing away, and quickly turning white, sent the kids into paroxysms of delight.
Adults appeared from nowhere. One of them – elderly, tall and dignified – introduced himself as the head man of the village. Clearly he fancied a good exchange of news and a lengthy chat.
‘Explain we’re in a hurry,’ I told Jason. ‘And ask if he’s heard anything about the war.’
As the two were talking I dug out a handful of boiled sweets and distributed them to the junior fans. The first little boy made to put the gift straight into his mouth, paper and all, and I had to show him how to unwrap it first.
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