Recoil

5

Standish grabbed the RPG like a spoilt kid snatching back his football after the other side’s scored.

Crucial came and stood alongside me. Sam turned to us. ‘Right, take a gun each. We’ll handle the RPGs. Get everyone out of the tents and squeeze them into the trenches.’

I shook my head. ‘Silky and Tim, they’re staying. They need light to work on the casualties.’

He hesitated a beat. ‘OK, they’re big boys and girls.’ He glanced at Crucial. ‘Get the kids in now. Two in each trench.’

Crucial looked over at Bateman. ‘You sure, man?’

‘Why not? Let him see what we see every day.’

Standish began to shout at no one in particular, like an old meths drinker on a park bench. ‘We should leave now! Now!’

It was so loud even Bateman could hear him. He hollered back, incandescent: ‘Shut the fuck up, man! We stay and fight. When we get back, that’s me finished. I’m not working for you any more. I’ve had enough of this shit. You Brits bitch like fucking women!’

That got a laugh out of Crucial.

I kept my AK, picked up the gun and two boxes of ammo and staggered across to my position. The trench was now empty of RPG rounds; the launcher was where I’d left it. So was the jerry-can, with the remaining AK mags stacked on top.

I set the gun on the parapet so the loaded rounds lay on the crate top. Then I went back with my AK and picked up the plunger, firing cable still attached. I looked down at Sam. ‘The pigtail was good.’

He nodded. Standish had been the only one to voice it, but we all knew things would have turned out very differently had the device kicked off on command.

I jumped into my trench and started to pull in the two hundred metres or so of firing cable. It only took thirty seconds or so till the two muddy wires at the end were in my hands. I checked that the cable was still well attached to the butterfly nuts, then laid the two wires a millimetre apart on the crate top. Holding them in place with my left hand, I pulled up the plunger handle and pushed it down. A spark arced between the two wires.

It must have been a faulty det, and there was nothing I could have done about that: we didn’t have a tester. Either that, or there wasn’t enough charge to run down both lengths of cable once I’d joined them. Not that any explanation made me feel any better.

I pushed the plunger out of the way, in front of the trench.

I lifted the lid off the link boxes, pulled out a factory-made belt from the first and attached it to the rounds already queuing in the feed tray. When I fired, the link would flow out of the box like a snake out of a basket.

I tested my arcs, then there was fuck-all else I could do but wait. I picked up the jerry-can, took some more big, greedy gulps, and waited, alone with my thoughts. Anything that bought us time, anything that kept the LRA at bay, or even fucked them off completely, could only be good. Using these kids was better than us all being killed.

Standish had a point. It pissed me off, but he did.