Effendi

CHAPTER 38 Sudan

“Safety off,” said the gun.

Lying beside Lieutenant Ka, the ghost of Bec’s little sister said nothing. She’d taken to appearing at odd moments when Sarah wasn’t around, but now Sarah was gone and so Bec’s sister was smiling but silent. In fact, the whole world was silent except for a couple of green parakeets that squawked from a telegraph wire overhead, pretty much right above where he’d set up the thermoflage netting.

Of course, Ka knew what Bec’s sister wanted to say. What she’d been saying every night in his dreams, before she did what she once did, stood up from a long-dead fire and shuffled out beyond the big camp’s pickets to find a thornbush. Only it wasn’t her bowels she needed to empty but her head, which she did by sucking on a revolver.

They weren’t going to reach the source of the river. Nobody was going to turn off the Nile. The war and the river would keep flowing: the river wherever geography took it, the war wherever it wanted to go.

“Distance?”

“Five klicks and closing . . .”

Status and range. That was about all the H&K/cw could ever manage. And Ka really didn’t know why the manufacturer had bothered. Ka had a feeling he might have got cross about that before. He was finding it increasingly hard to remember.

The Nile was out of sight, across rock and thorn. Last time he’d seen it, the river had still been grand even though Ka was now south of Omdurman City, where the Bahr el-Abiad and Bahr el-Azrak joined to become the life-giver everybody knew.

Somewhere still further south, the river split again but either Ka hadn’t reached that point or he was past it.

The Colonel could have told him, only Ka wouldn’t ask. The last time he’d wanted an answer was half an hour before, when something dark had moved in the tall rushes of the riverbank. A simple question had elicited a long lecture on the habitat of the marabou stork.

Elaborate canals had once fed the area’s rich cotton fields but the narrow canals were mostly cracked open or filled with dirt, their bottoms broken and dry.

Ahead of him, when he’d first arrived, had been mud-brick ruins and beyond those foothills, backdropped by faded and cloud-covered mountains. Now the foothills were at his back and the enemy ahead.

The ruined houses behind Ka were all that remained of a town to which a handful of nineteenth-century Mamelukes had retreated, to live under the protection of Mek Nimr, Leopard King of Shendi, after their defeat by the Albanian warlord Khedive Mohammed.

But Mohammed Ali sent his son Ismail south to subdue Nubia. And in October 1822 Ismail demanded as tribute from Mek Nimr thirty thousand Maria Theresa dollars, six thousand slaves and food for his army, all to be delivered within two days.

And when Mek Nimr protested that the Sudan already faced famine, Ismail struck him in the face. The Leopard King’s reply came that evening during banquet, when his followers set fire to Ismail’s house, incinerating the prince, who died in the flames rather than be cut down like his fleeing bodyguard.

Word of this reached the Defterdar, Ismail’s brother-in-law. First the Defterdar burned Metemma and Damer, then every village along the Nile from Sennar to Berber. Finally he reached Shendi, where his troops threw down the walls and raped and impaled its inhabitants . . . But he failed to capture Mek Nimr or his family.

Fifty thousand died.

Next the Defterdar chased Mek Nimr south along the Blue River, torturing everyone he suspected of helping the fleeing king. Men were castrated, the breasts of the women were sliced away and every wound was sealed with molten pitch . . . Ka’s uncle had always insisted that things were better in the old days. But to Ka, from what the Colonel said, it just sounded like more of the same.

Ka needed to eat, only that wasn’t possible. The food was gone and so was most of his water. Actually, it was all the water, if he didn’t count a half litre sloshing round in Sarah’s old flask, the one with the cap jammed solid. He’d tried wrenching off the top and, when that failed, had tried punching a hole in the flask with his knife, but the mesh was too hard or he was too weak, one of the two, it didn’t matter much which.

“Weapons check . . .”

Whatever. Ka did a count in his head . . . twenty-one grenades, two Heckler&Koch OI/cw, an HK21e machine gun heavy enough to require a tripod, five assorted sidearms plus a dozen boxes of bullets, some of which might actually fit, plus a fat slab of ganja and a Seraphim 4 × 4, minus gas. Unfortunately, since there was only one of him, most of his riches were wasted.

The other thing he had, of course, were his spectacles and his radio. The radio and the spectacles would only work together, although it had taken Ka days to figure this out. In fact, he wasn’t entirely sure he had figured it out; he had a feeling the radio might have told him. Sometimes Colonel Abad spoke through the radio and other times he showed Ka things through the spectacles.

As for the ganja, that was some good shit, as Sergeant Sarah would have said. He wore her bone cross now, along with both of Saul’s amulets and that bundle of feathers Zac kept pinned to his shirt. Taking Sarah’s luck had been theft but he did it to protect her. She shouldn’t have been wearing a cross in the first place and Ka didn’t know on which side the doctors would be. So he’d taken her luck just to be safe and borrowed her gun because it was so much better than his.

The doctors would make her well again and that was more than the Colonel could manage. Maybe it had been the river water or perhaps too much sun . . . Whatever it was, she’d taken to greeting each new day on her knees, vomiting. And she wouldn’t talk to Ka or even look at him, though he gave her all the food and kept every watch himself.

Now she was in a camp and he was here, staring down on a road with ruins behind him, a jagged rock off to one side, sticking up through the earth like a broken shoulder blade, and a long line of enemy trucks directly ahead.

“Approaching,” said a voice in his ear.

“Yeah, the gun’s already told me,” Ka said crossly. It wasn’t exactly news: the Colonel had first warned him an hour ago that troops were due. He’d also informed Ka that he must stop the troops in their tracks. Those were the Colonel’s words . . . Looking at the converted 4 × 4s and purpose-built half-tracks coming down the road towards him, Ka decided that was meant to be some kind of joke.

“You know what you have to do?”

Yeah, he knew. First he had to fit a feldlafetten to the HK21e, which was its tripod, and then fit a Zeiss scope, after that he had to lift the safety gate or whatever it was called and slot in a new belt of 7.62/51. (What Colonel Abad always called .38.)

The HK21e took either a 20-round mag, which was plain stupid, or a 110-round belt box. Only Ka wasn’t planning to use either of those. He had been busy knitting together a couple of belts at a time, until he had a mountain of brass all ready for the HK21e’s roller-locked bolt.

They skinned people alive, the enemy. Ate them alive too, if Bec was to be believed. Raped the youngest prisoners to ward off wasting sickness. Mind you, that happened everywhere. But eating human flesh, that was part of a fire ritual: brain for intelligence, heart for courage, liver for cunning. Bec had told them all about it, one night months back round the campfire.

“Establish . . .”

Yeah, right. Establish a position. Ka shifted the heavy gun across to a gap between two rocks, then crawled back for the long, snaking belts. To win he had to keep under the protection of the thermoflage nets, Colonel Abad was very definite about that. After the belts, Ka unwrapped an HK/cw. This was really two weapons in one and could be broken into an upper section that fired airburst munitions, colour-coded for convenience, and a lower pull-away section that functioned as a basic light machine gun.

“Distance,” Ka demanded.

Reading this off from the HK21e would have been easy enough, but Colonel Abad judged distances better. Besides, Ka liked to make the Colonel work.

“Half a klick,” said the voice in his ear. “You should be fitting the belts now.”

With trembling fingers, Ka fed the first of the bullets into the HK21e, checking again that the belt could feed in smoothly. A single kink might jam the machine gun and bring the ambush to an early end. The Colonel would hate that.

Then Ka reached for the HK/cw and slid a mag’s worth of 5.56 kinetic into a narrow slot on its underside, following this with a fat clip of bursters. Except, the first burster he fed to the upper slot wasn’t a blue meanie, it was orange with a red tip, whizbang rather than airburst.

“Take out the . . .”

He knew, God knows. The Colonel had already been over this more times than Ka could stand. “I know. All right?” Ka said flatly.

Absence whispered down the static. A silence as impossibly distant as it was brief. And then Colonel Abad was back, sounding concerned. “You’ll be all right,” he promised. “You’ll come out of this a hero.”

Ka didn’t want to be a hero and anyway . . . For a moment Ka considered pointing out that he’d rather be alive. Instead he shrugged and raised the heavy HK/cw.

“Hold it . . .”

He held. And kept holding as ants became beetles and his spectacles adjusted for focus. There were three half-tracks and two converted Seraphim followed by a solid mass that moved across the gravel like a stain. Ka had taken a while to work out that the half-tracks growled along in second gear because the officers inside were afraid, rather than kind. Afraid to be separated from the children who followed after them.

Ka knew which truck to take out first because it was suddenly circled in green. Fat neon hairs bisecting the circle. He pulled the trigger when circle and crosshairs flipped from green to red, like they always did.

The first truck disintegrated in a crunch of fire as flame punched its way through broken windows, and every single one of the remaining trucks ignored standing orders and slammed to a halt.

Idiots.

Doors swung open and uniforms tumbled out, guns unslung. Instinct made Ka duck as bees began to spit above his head but it was not necessary. The enemy’s return fire was both sporadic and random, raking into scrub, rocks and trees alike and lifting a flock of parakeets into hysterical green protest.

The officers were mostly reloading when Ka slammed off four rounds of airburst in quick succession, exploding each directly above a vehicle. Flesh shredded from bone and suddenly dying uniforms found themselves forced to their knees. The fifth and final airburst Ka expended on a lieutenant too broken to realize she couldn’t swim away to safety across the pockmarked dirt.

Officers down, Ka burned out a mag’s worth of kinetic on a red-circled movement off to his right, then rolled across to the waiting machine gun. All he was required to do then was pull the trigger and keep it pulled while the HK21e ate up the snake belt in three-bullet bursts.

Green.

Red.

Fire.

He kept the stutter going for as long as the coloured circles kept blossoming, which seemed forever. Maybe the enemy were just crazed by the heat, or maybe the green foothills behind him exerted too strong a pull after the bleakness through which they’d marched. There were no officers left to make anyone advance and yet, every time Ka cleared a gap it filled instantly, until the mass marching towards him grew smaller and the gaps began to grow.

Soon there was more gap than mass and finally there was only gap. Not silence, because what had become one with the ground kept quivering and moaning until Ka emptied all of his fat clips of airburst over its head . . .