Recoil

5

Standish and Bateman were hunched over the cooking pot. The fire was long dead, but there was still some congealed gunk in the bottom of the pan, and they were digging in like they hadn’t eaten for days. Sam stood close by, not bothering to disguise his disdain.

For the first time in history, Standish was looking rough. His hair was flat against his head, and his face, neck and arms all had long thin cuts from running through the bush after the contact. They were both in shit state, covered with mud and soaking wet. Flies buzzed round their heads, not much caring whether they got to the food, the sweat or the blood.

The cicadas were going ape-shit now that it was getting darker. The only other ambient noise came from the river and the still-distant rumbles of thunder. No firing from the LRA, none of our guys making noise, nothing even from the Nuka mob in the dead ground.

Standish and Bateman weren’t the only ones who were hungry and thirsty. I approached the huddle, the plunger still over my shoulder.

I lifted one of the four jerry-cans now by the fire. The nozzle was caked with rice from the last drinker, but that didn’t bother me. The sterilization tabs made it taste like the council swimming-pool I used to piss in when I was a kid, but I wasn’t worried about that either. I gulped hard and long, feeling the water travel all the way down to my stomach, and only stopped when I ran out of breath.

Sam waited for me to finish. ‘Take it with you.’

Standish kept scooping rice from a burned tin can and shoving it into his face with the palm of his hand. He was a long way from the Guards Club. ‘It was the skinny surveyor who went down, right?’

I lowered the jerry-can again, careful not to spill a drop. ‘Yep.’

‘We found the fat boy after we crossed the river. They’d taken his arms and legs off.’ His face contorted with anger. ‘All you had to do was get them out of here. What the fuck did you think you were doing? They’re expensive to replace, you idiot. Which fucking Chinaman with even half his marbles will want to spend months on end in a place like this once word gets out?’ He waved an arm across the skyline, then got back down to his rice.

Fuck him. It wasn’t worth getting sparked up about. There was always time for that later, once we were out of here.

I got more water down me. This wasn’t about enjoyment: this was a pit stop. ‘What about the rest of the patrol?’ I looked to Sam for an answer. ‘The gunshot wound and the other guy?’

Sam pointed at the back of Standish’s not-so-immaculate blond head, with the sort of expression that said he was one step away from cracking it like an egg. ‘He killed them.’

I brought the jerry-can down again. ‘What?’

‘They were slowing him down so he shot them.’ Sam was trying to control his anger. ‘As you do.’

Standish glanced up. He didn’t give a shit. ‘Listen in, both of you. We were going to leave the gunshot wound anyway. The other guy wouldn’t have wanted to . . . He was his brother, cousin, something like that.’

Sam bent almost double to face Standish out, but the fucker continued to give every last bit of his attention to his rice. ‘Let me tell you something, Sam,’ he grunted, between mouthfuls, ‘death solves all man’s problems. No man, no problem. Simple as that.’

‘You think quoting a couple of words from Stalin gets you off the hook?’

Even Bateman wasn’t impressed. He was sitting down, leaning over the pot, but his AK was resting carefully across his crossed legs. His body might have been in shit state, but his weapon wasn’t. Whatever else he was, this guy was a professional.

‘It was fucking outrageous, man, you know that. We should have brought them in. Don’t ever do that again when I’m there, you heartless piece of English public-school shit. I will never leave a man out there to die, no matter who he is. If he’s one of us, we take him.’ Bateman stared grimly at the sangars. ‘And if those fuckers get to find out, we’ve got a problem. An even bigger problem. They know no one else is coming to help them, man. They’ll run as soon as they can, mark my words. Without kindoki on these fuckers you have no control.’

Standish flicked his now empty can into the mud as dismissively as he must have despatched the two men. ‘Our only problem is that we lack the numbers to keep this mine. It’s as simple as that.’

He pulled himself up and grabbed his weapon. It, too, was clean. At least he had some standards, even if he was only keeping it in working order to zap his own side.