Authors: Chris Ryan

Tenth Man Down (46 page)

BOOK: Tenth Man Down

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One of the demo team gave me five fingers: five minutes to get clear. Still I was rooted to the spot. I watched him, and all the NBC team, sprint for the tailgate of the Herc and up the ramp. I seemed to be caught in a dream. Everyone else could move, but I was frozen. Through the swirling dust I saw Pav and Chalky come out on to the ramp and make frantic gestures, ordering me, begging me, willing me, to go aboard. Their mouths were wide open, yelling. Another guy, unrecognisable in his NBC kit, was giving a similar performance from the side door. But something made it impossible for me to do what they wanted.

At last I came to life. I grabbed my 203 from the front of the doomed mother wagon and ran – not for the Herc, but for the pinkie. I slotted my weapon into the clips above the dash and jumped into the driving seat. The ignition key was in place. I switched on, started up and scorched off towards the far smoke pillar. As I accelerated away, the note of the Herc’s engines rose and it started to move in the opposite direction. The side door had been closed; the tail ramp was going up.

I found Jason flat on his face, in a firing position, with his 203 levelled towards the east. Great guy – he was preparing to take on the Alpha column single-handed. I pulled up beside him with a yell of ‘All aboard!’, and hardly gave him time to scramble into the passenger seat before I shot forward again, hell bent on getting out of sight before the rebel convoy came into view. Instinct sent me due north, into a patch of dense bush, where thickets of thorn grew two or three times the height of the vehicle.

As soon as we were out of sight of the road, I stopped and switched off.

‘If they’ve seen us, we’re fucked,’ I said. ‘But I think we’re okay.’

We grabbed our 203s, jumped out and scuttled to the edge of the thicket, at a point where a gap in the bushes gave a view of the open ground.

The roar of the Herc’s engines under full power rumbled back at us. The aircraft was taxiing straight away into the far distance, trailing dust. Then it lifted off, leaving all the debris behind it. Seconds later a brilliant flash spurted from the mother wagon, and the
BOOM!
of a big explosion buffeted past us. Pieces of metal erupted into the air, falling back over a wide area. A grey, mushroom-shaped cloud soared upwards, and beneath it the wreck of the truck was enveloped by flames.

‘The buggers won’t fancy that,’ I said, half to myself, half to Jason. ‘Now they see the aircraft’s away, and there’s nothing left for grabs on the strip, they’ll keep going, to check the cache. They’ve nothing else to go for.’

My hunch was immediately put to the test. Within a minute the first vehicle appeared, a Gaz jeep, proceeding quite fast along the road, with two guys standing in the open back. Obviously a scout – it was well ahead of the rest. Before it came level with the burning remains of the wagon, it stopped.

‘They’re radioing back,’ I said. ‘Reporting the situation, asking for orders.’

After a pause, the jeep went forward again. When I saw it wasn’t deviating from the road, but heading on for the town, I breathed deep with relief. A minute behind it, the rest of the convoy lumbered into view: two more jeeps, four heavy trucks with their open backs full of troops, four closed lorries, a tanker and two more jeeps bringing up the rear – quite a force. Which vehicle was Joss in, I wondered? I dearly wanted to launch a 203 grenade and take the bastard out.

All Jason and I had to do was keep still until they’d disappeared, then slip away to the east. I felt momentary exultation at the thought that this lot of pricks was about to run head-on into the survivors of Muende’s convoy, but then, with the abrupt release of tension, exhaustion hit me. Lying flat out, with my face on the backs of my hands, I closed my eyes and let out a deep sigh.

‘Okay, sah?’

I opened my eyes, to see Jason staring at me with a worried expression.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ I went. ‘A bit tired, that’s all. And Mabonzo, you know what we’re going to do now, don’t you?’

‘Yassir. Go get the diamond.’

SIXTEEN

Our basic need was to head north-north-east across country. I didn’t want to use the road, for fear that Joss might have a back-up convoy coming along behind him. Alpha Commando certainly possessed more vehicles than we’d seen. At the same time, I did want to put distance between ourselves and the burnt-out truck, to get clear of any radioactivity released by the explosion. I knew I must already be contaminated to some extent, but I saw no point in taking unnecessary risks. So I pulled off Rasputin’s sodden suit, buried it as best I could, and for an hour drove carefully through the bush, parallel with the road but out of sight of it, following a gully which twisted and turned more or less in the right direction.

With the immediate threat gone, reaction set in. I realised I was physically exhausted, and knew I had probably exposed myself to a fatal dose of radiation. What I didn’t appreciate was that my mind and motives were totally confused.

To start with I felt angry with myself for screwing everything up. It was my fault entirely that I was stranded in the middle of a hostile country, my fault we’d gone after the arms cache in the first place, my fault I hadn’t boarded the Herc when I had every opportunity, and the rest were desperately urging me to shift my arse and join them. Self-pity soon gave way to guilt. Thinking back, I knew full well that I’d been secretly planning this breakaway ever since Sam sprang Genesis and me from the cell. It was in the light aircraft, just after Genesis died, that I’d conceived the idea of peeling off from the rest of the team to go in search of the diamond. I’d kept the scheme hidden in my mind all through our approach to the weapons cache. The worst thing was that I’d deliberately deceived my mates. Never before, during sixteen years in the Regiment, had I done anything like that. I’d had disagreements and rows, of course, but they’d always been in the open. I’d always remained a good member or leader of the team; never had I double-crossed the rest of the lads about my intentions.

Now I told myself that if Whinger had been alive, I wouldn’t have done it. I’d have confided fully in him, and almost certainly he would have talked me out of such a wild idea. But Whinger had gone, that was the whole point. It was his death that had thrown me off balance. If only we hadn’t rescued the German woman. If only Whinger hadn’t got burnt. If only we’d never gone to the convent. If, if, if . . . As Pavarotti was fond of saying, if my Auntie Nel had had two balls, she would have been my Uncle Arthur.

Now, of course, I had the satcom. I could always call the Kremlin. But what good would that do? Some rupert would only start in, bollocking me. Whatever else I needed at that moment, I didn’t need advice or orders from Hereford.

Contradictory thoughts whirled round and round my head until, giving in to exhaustion, I came to a temporary halt under a grove of trees bearing dark-green leaves.

‘Got to take a break,’ I told Jason. ‘We’ll stay here till dark. We’ll be safer moving at night, in any case.’

He nodded. Except for a small cut beside his left eyebrow, his long, thin face looked no different from normal; but in the past forty-eight hours he’d had as little sleep as I had, and I knew he must be worn out.

‘Get your head down too,’ I told him.

‘Yassir.’

I should have asked him to do an hour’s stag, while I had a kip. But by then I was so far gone that I’d developed a fatalistic attitude. It was a million to one against anyone finding us, I thought, and even if they did, I didn’t care. I dug out a mozzie net, rigged it over my head and chest, stretched out on the bare earth, and within seconds was dead to the world.

When I came round, I couldn’t think where I was. Then I looked out through the canopy of the sheltering trees, saw the sun was setting, and remembered.

Jason was sitting against a tree-trunk, knees drawn up, with his 203 on the ground beside him.

‘Been asleep?’ I asked.

‘Yassir.’

I didn’t believe him, especially as he said ‘Big shooting!’ and pointed into the distance towards Ichembo, indicating that some major contact had taken place while I was out cold. The noise had been too faint to rouse me. I reckoned the faithful bugger had sat there guarding me all the time. But I wasn’t going to argue. I felt one hell of a lot better. The fog of exhaustion had cleared from my head, and, except for a patch between my shoulderblades, on which I’d been lying, the sweat had dried out of my clothes.

I was hungry for food and keen to get moving, so I dug out a couple of boil-in-the-bag rations, lobbed one to Jason and got the other down my neck. Seldom had cold Irish stew tasted better, and I chased it with pears in syrup.

With the meal came new energy. My first task was to make a mental inventory of what the pinkie contained, before darkness fell. The results were encouraging. We had half a tank of fuel and three full jerricans – enough for at least 200 kilometres. We had rations for several days, plenty of fresh water, cam nets, and several of the lads’ spare sweaters. There was more 203 ammunition than two of us were likely to fire, two boxes of grenades and sixteen eight-ounce sticks of plastic explosive, together with det cord and timers. We had the satcom, and, best of all, Andy’s GPS, into which I’d punched the waypoints recorded by Stringer in his own set.

Our last map had gone up in flames with the mother wagon, but because of the GPS its disappearance hardly mattered. I plugged the leads into sockets on the dash, so that I didn’t drain the set’s batteries, and once I’d got fixes on three satellites and established our new location, I was amazed to find how close to Waypoint Seven we were. Through all the violent swings of the past few days – our advance to the mine at Gutu, our flight from Gutu to the Zebra Pans and the convent, my capture and journey to Chimbwi, then from there to Ichembo – I’d had the impression that we were moving more or less in a circle. Now it turned out I was right. The GPS revealed that we’d ended up only seventy-eight kilometres from the site of the downed Beechcraft, and needed to advance on a bearing of forty-seven degrees to reach it. We were on the wrong side of the hills, it was true, but so close we could almost walk there in a night.

Also, I had Jason. I’d already seen that he possessed outstanding skills as a tracker, but now I began to realise that he also had an uncanny sense of place and direction. When I asked him, ‘Do you remember where the Beechcraft is?’ he replied, in a matter-of-fact voice, ‘Yassir.’ And when I said, ‘Which way is it?’ he instantly stuck out an arm, with fingers outstretched. When I stood behind him with a compass, I found he was pointing within one degree of the course the GPS had given me.

‘Jason,’ I went. ‘Have you been here before?’

‘One time Ichembo.’

‘But not
here
, where we are now?’

‘No sah.’

‘Then how the hell can you be so sure about your directions?’

‘Sun,’ he said, pointing up at the sky. ‘Moon, stars – and head.’

‘Any obstacles on our route?’

‘One river.’

‘Jesus! Not that big one?’

He shook his head. ‘Small one.’

‘Can the pinkie drive across it?’

‘I think so.’

I didn’t let on that the GPS agreed precisely with his analysis of our position. I just pretended to go along with his estimate of the course we should take.

We needed to wait a few more minutes, until the moon was high enough to give good light, and as we sat in the dark, we chatted in a desultory way. I already knew about Jason’s wives, but something made me ask about his family.

‘What about your father?’ I went. ‘Is he still alive?’

‘No sah. I show you.’ He began scrabbling in the breast pocket of his DPMs and brought out a small, flat box, which he opened with a pop. I shone my torch on it, and saw it was made of aluminium, battered and dented. From it he took a piece of paper, which he unfolded delicately, with great care, before handing it across.

Like the tin, the paper had seen much service. It was a sheet torn from a ruled school exercise book, frayed at the edges and covered with smudgy finger prints. But the message, written in capital letters, was still perfectly legible:

HORNED MADAM
MAY IT PLEASE YOU TO KNOW YOUR
HUSBAND SHOOTED BY STUDENT
AUGUSTUS MUENDE IN FIGHT ON
ACADEMICAL RANGES. THIS IS
TRUTH. YOUR FATEFUL FREIND
FELLOW STUDENT A.N.OTHER
ANNO DOMINI JANUARY 1985