Recoil

1

Standish was leaning against the far wall of the fire trench, arms resting on the mud at either side of it like he was floating in a jacuzzi. Sam and Crucial hunched down into the backblast channel. I sank on to my knees.

He glowered at me. ‘What went wrong with the claymores?’

‘Not sure.’ I shrugged. ‘Second reel of firing cable might have been contaminated, or the plunger didn’t kick out enough amps. Maybe even a knackered det.’

Jacuzzi over. It was like I’d thrown a switch. He pushed himself off the trench wall. ‘We nearly lost the firefight. We have lost Sam’s patrol. This nightmare is all down to you!’ He jabbed a finger at me to underline every word. ‘If you’d done your fucking job correctly, we wouldn’t have had half the fucking LRA in the valley, and Sam’s patrol unable to support us.’ He turned to face the scene of my crime. ‘We wouldn’t be in this fucking situation.’

I was tempted to suggest that next time he could rig the fucking thing up, but knew it was pointless to rise to the bait.

He switched to Sam. ‘And now we have the other half of your church here, what’s the plan? Deafen these drug-crazed heathens with semiautomatic gospel songs? Or maybe beat them off with copies of the Good News Bible?’

Sam didn’t rise to it either. ‘I’m going down there with these two. We need the guns. Bateman will cover us on the one Nick brought up. You can have the RPG.’

Standish had other ideas. ‘No, you’re not. We’re leaving. They’re going to take the mine – there aren’t enough of us. We need to use whatever darkness is left to cover us out of here right now, get back to the strip and evacuate to Cape Town.’

I heard the clanking of link as Bateman returned. He jumped into the trench and moved the weapon forward on to the parapet.

Sam kept his cool, but wasn’t giving up without a fight. ‘What about the Mercy Flight people? Both are injured – one’s a stretcher case. How can we move them in the dark? We’d land up with even more casualties. And how are we going to cross the river at night with them strapped into cots?

‘Then there’s the kids. They’re scared – they’ll get lost. We need to control the situation, not flap and run. Our best chance is to stay here and fight. At first light, we make a break for it. If it works, all well and good. If it doesn’t, well, tough. None of us is going to care, because we’ll be history. But it’s better than turning our backs on these people.’

Standish flicked his hand disdainfully. ‘Get real. Think about yourself, think about the future. We need to get back to Cape Town and reorganize, and we need to do it right now.

‘You two –’ he pointed at Sam and Crucial ‘– you can go and play golf while I go to Switzerland and devise a plan to retake the mines. I’ll get the backing. We’ll recruit, we’ll train, and then we’ll move back in-country and carry on as planned. But that’s not going to happen unless we leave now. And there’s too much at stake to mess around.’

Crucial clenched his jaw. ‘Too much cash, you mean?’

Standish thrust himself the half-metre or so to front him. ‘I’ve never seen you handing it back.’

I adjusted the AK across my thigh as I knelt in the mud. I’d had enough of this. ‘Listen, the longer you lot debate this shit, the longer we don’t have those guns up here. Moving or not, we need them. Let’s get out there while there’s still time.’

Bateman lifted up the top cover of his gun and cleared the feed-tray.

Standish turned. His face was level with Sam’s knees. ‘This is not for discussion. I’m ordering you to start moving towards the airstrip immediately. Leave everyone behind. We don’t need them. If we stay here we’ll die, and not achieve a thing by doing so.’

Sam stood up. ‘No. We’re leaving no one.’ There was quiet menace in his voice. ‘We stand our ground until first light, and then we try to break out with the wounded and the walking. You can do whatever you want.’

Bateman slammed down the top cover and gave it another smack with his clenched fist. ‘No, he isn’t going to do what the fuck he wants, man. We are all staying.’ He squared his shoulders. ‘I don’t give two shits about all these charity people.’ He encompassed the whole valley with a majestic wave of his hand. ‘All these miners, these kids – if I’m honest, I don’t give a shit. But I won’t leave other soldiers to die. That’s not the way it’s done, man.’

He was the bigger, stronger man – and this was the Congo, not the paradeground at Sandhurst or a guest slot on Newsnight – and Standish knew it.

‘My first operation was Uric. We went to destroy a training camp in Mozambique. Op Uric, you heard of it?’

Standish shook his head.

‘Well, you’d better listen good, man.’

He was going to have to do that whether he liked it or not.

‘Tooley was there with me when we flew into Mozambique – three hundred and sixty of us, man. We were going to kill everyone. Rebels, Mozambique Army, Russian advisers, everyone. We weren’t sure how many there were, maybe thousands.

‘We bombed them from the air, we gunned them from the Pumas. But it fucked up. They were dug in, just like us here. They held us down for days, man.’ Bateman was reliving it in his head. ‘We lost fifteen of our own guys but killed three hundred of those fuckers.’

Standish stifled a yawn. He didn’t want to be mistaken for a man who gave a shit.

Bateman shoved him in the chest. ‘You not finding this interesting, man? You think I’m telling you this for fun?’

Standish just stood there, no more than inches between them. He’d got the message now. It was time to listen, and listen good.

‘All but two of our guys were killed by these things.’ He kicked the launcher. ‘They work, man. But let me tell you about the other two. You need to hear this.’

Bateman leaned into him, closing the gap between their faces, eyes fixed on Standish’s.

‘They were young, just like me and Tooley, man. We were in Mozambique, detached, on our own, fighting – simply trying to stay alive.’

Their noses almost touched.

‘One guy refused to fight and decided we should surrender. He was shot by his own platoon commander before he could finish putting his hands up. The next ran, on the second day. He left other men to do the fighting. I shot him in the back of the head before he’d got ten yards.’

Bateman kept his face where it was as he pointed down into the valley. ‘Out there isn’t a place to reason why. You fight, or you don’t. It’s that simple. No questions, no excuses, no courts martial.’ He turned away. ‘You will fight.’ He rammed the butt in his shoulder and checked his arcs of fire. ‘We all stay, or we all go. And we’re staying. It’s that simple.’

Sam and Crucial lifted Tim and his cot into the tent.

I shoved two magazines into my OG map pockets and checked the safety lever was down two clicks. Then I grabbed the jerry-can and gulped as much water down my neck as I could without throwing up.