Recoil

2

As I emerged from the re-entrant and turned towards the tents, Tim came down the valley carrying a baby in each arm, their wailing mother close behind him. I watched him with them, completely competent, completely at ease. If I’d been one of these poor little fuckers, I’d have wanted him close by. It got me thinking about the two of them, or the possibility of the two of them. I didn’t want to ask the question, but I wanted to know the answer.

I cut away again. I still had a job to do, I kept telling myself, as I headed for the tents. Miners surrounded by empty fertilizer bags and the lime-green and yellow jerry-cans of diesel were mixing ANFO in oil drums like they were stirring huge cauldrons of porridge and the three bears were arriving any minute. They had to finish before it rained again. The mix had to be kept dry: one drop of water, it lost its detonation capability. And they didn’t have much time to get the stuff back into the bags and into position before every mad LRA fuck within five hundred miles steamed into the valley.

I got to the bottom of the knoll the tents were sited on and followed the mud track up towards them. Lumps of rock had been positioned at intervals to make progress less slippery, but they didn’t help much.

The HQ was well placed. It commanded an elevated view into the valley as well as out to the river four hundred away and the treeline another thirty or so beyond it.

I scanned Sam’s defences. The canny old Jock hadn’t lost his touch. He might be putting his spiritual salvation in the hands of the Good Lord, but he was clearly in no hurry to put the man in the big white beard to the test. This was textbook stuff.

If you want to defend a position, you don’t just shove a big front door on it like they do in the movies. However dense a line of squaddies you put in the mouth of the valley, you’d be overrun in no time. Instead, you position your defence in depth across the entire area; that way you not only get protection from view and from incoming fire, but cover the valley entrance and the high ground above. If any of the sangars was overrun, others could keep the firefight going. They were everywhere.

Sam would have given each position its arcs of fire. They’d only shoot at targets within those arcs – otherwise they’d start hosing down their own guys in front of them. All the arcs would interlock, so there’d be cover in every area. The GPMGs’ arcs would overlap to make best use of their beaten zones, the stretch of ground on which the cone of fire would fall.

It was good to see that God’s best mate still knew his stuff. But I still thanked fuck I wouldn’t be here when the whole thing kicked off. However good the theory, he still needed lots more manpower to keep the fire going. Even counting Standish’s patrol, there’d be no more than a hundred bayonets. If the rapper was right, four hundred bad guys were already heading our way, with a whole lot more coming up to crash the party from the south. It would be hard enough for me, Silky and the two surveyors to stay out of their way, let alone persuade them to keep their distance.

The top of the knoll was like a scene from a First World War battlefield. Another bunch of miners were in the midst of digging four fire trenches overlooking the valley. Half a dozen or so tents had been pitched in the mud, and the whole area was criss-crossed by lopped branches, which I guessed was the closest these boys could get to duckboards.

I saw Sam pacing up and down on the far side of them, with the Iridium glued to his ear. I opened my mouth to speak, but he held up a hand to shut me the fuck up. As I got closer I could hear the news wasn’t good.

‘How many down?’

His eyes narrowed.

‘That’s bad, really bad. He’s here now . . . OK.’

Sam passed me the sat phone. ‘Standish.’ He strode to the edge of the knoll, yelling a series of instructions in the closest he got to English. Another voice translated.

‘Hello.’

Standish sounded out of breath. His voice moved from a bass roar to a treble squeak as he ran. It was like listening to a roadie tuning up a sound system before a rock concert.

‘Listen in. We’ve just hit a large LRA group ten K east of you. They’re not heading for the mine, they’re still heading north. They must be planning to link up first. You could hit more groups coming up from the south. Nothing’s changed, though. No surveyors at the airstrip – no lift out.’

Whatever else you could say about Standish, success clearly hadn’t changed him. He was still a selfish shit.

The phone went dead and I homed in on Sam. He was standing with three guys at the edge of the knoll, pointing up the west side of the valley. As I got closer, I could see the boy sitting on a branch at their feet. The rope was no longer round his neck but secured his left hand to his left ankle instead. His right leg was tethered to a stake in the ground. With his free hand he was scooping rice out of a rusty old can.

Sam issued clear and concise instructions as to where he wanted a set of new sangars; the ones they were already making had to be binned. As I closed in on him I saw two Chinese guys perched on cots in the nearest tent. One was round and chubby, the other tight and gaunt, but both pairs of eyes were as big as saucers. They had weeks of growth on their chins, but it was sparse, like wispy black beansprouts. There were two Louis Vuitton carry-on bags at their feet, and four RPG launchers on another cot behind them. The rounds were stacked in wooden boxes alongside.

Sam spun round. ‘Why so long? The kids down there yet?’

I nodded and jerked my thumb down the valley towards the ragtag bunch of villagers and Mercy Flight stragglers. ‘Standish won’t like it. Coffee shop for the stupid . . .’

Sam handed over his sat nav. ‘He’s got more to worry about right now. The patrol’s completely down, apart from him, Bateman and two others, and one of them has gunshot wounds.’

‘Tooley get dropped?’

Sam nodded. ‘At least now we’ll be able to tell them apart.’

Suddenly I understood why he was moving the sangars around. There weren’t going to be enough bayonets to fill them. He had to change the arcs of fire and spread the guys even more thinly across the ground.

‘Have you heard the fire out there? It’s getting nearer, mate.’

Sam looked down the valley and into the trees. ‘Aye. Could be probing patrols, to see if we’ve got anything out there, could be a few lads heading north, stupid enough not to know where they are, or so ghatted out of their skulls they don’t care.’ He turned back to me. ‘Whatever, it’s nothing compared to what’s coming our way.’

I could see the tension in his face.

‘Where’s the girlfriend?’

‘Silky’s down there, in that re-entrant they’re all heading for.’ I gestured in the direction of the two Chinese guys. ‘Surveyors?’

He nodded.

A black plastic jerry-can sat outside the furthest tent.

The water was brackish with chlorine but I gulped it down, careful not to let any pour down the side of my mouth. Wasting this stuff is a worse sin in the field than dumping in front of someone while they’re eating.

I lowered the jerry-can and took a breath. ‘Fuck this for a game of soldiers.’

He gave me a tight smile. ‘Listen, you’d better get yourself in gear. The bridge is still open until Standish turns up.’

I took a last couple of gulps onboard, then moved across to a blackened aluminium cooking pot sitting on a bunch of stones above a smoky fire. I lifted the lid to discover a thick, lumpy sludge of brown rice. I picked up one of the old tin cans lying beside it and helped myself to a scoop.

‘Get them back to the strip, Nick, and sort your girlfriend out. But promise me you’ll think about the offer. It’s important to me.’ He pointed to the kid. ‘And believe me, it’ll matter to him and his mates. His name’s Sunday, by the way.’

I chewed another mouthful of the gritty brown stuff from the pot and looked out over the hive of activity in the valley. ‘You reckon you’re going to be all right here?’

‘We’ve got good positions. I guess we’ll have to fight and see. I’m not leaving the kids to those animals, and I’m certainly not leaving them to Standish, so it’s all quite simple, really. We win or die. You go do your job – but think about what I said. We’d make a great team . . .’

He beckoned the two Chinese guys and they came out of the tent, both clutching their carryons. I scooped another canful of gloop out of the pot and pointed at their hand luggage. ‘No – get rid of it.’

They looked at me and each other, then at Sam.

‘They don’t understand,’ Sam said. ‘Just point and shout a lot like they do.’

I put the lid back on the pot, then pulled a bag away from one of them and shoved it on the ground. ‘No bags.’ I turned to Sam. ‘Let’s hope we’re not all history by the morning, yeah?’

‘Too right, son.’ He did his best to produce a grin. ‘If we are, someone up there has quite a lot of explaining to do.’

You don’t shake hands and hug at times like this. You save that sort of shit for reunions, weddings and funerals.

I started down the hill. After a few paces I checked behind me. Sam was back doing what he did best, soldiering, and Yin and Yang were waffling away as they unzipped their bags. By the time I’d reached the valley floor they were sliding down the hill behind me, pockets bulging.