Recoil

3

The porters gathered slowly. No one knew how many of them were dead, injured, or had just done a runner. I wasn’t even sure if Sam knew how many there had been to start with, or had a list of names. I somehow thought not.

The ones who were there knew the score, and started collecting bodies. The final count was fifteen enemy and four of ours. Sam was right: they really did have a high man-hour-per-kill ratio.

Sam squatted by the feet of the rapper, who was tied up with his back against a tree. Rain splashed down his now naked body. His eyes were wide and jumpy. He knew he was about to be handed a one-way ticket to Mud City, and he begged for mercy. No matter what language is used, begging is always easy to understand.

‘What now, Sam?’

‘We stack the bodies and the next turnaround buries them.’

‘I mean this guy.’

Crucial came up behind us, AK slung, gollock in hand. He’d obviously taken a shine to the rapper’s headscarf, because he was now wearing it.

Sam stood out of the way. Crucial took an almighty swing and hit the guy on the thigh with the flat of the gollock.

The only thing louder than his screams was the next clap of thunder. But those screams weren’t going to help him. There aren’t any panic buttons in the bush, and even if there were, no one with more than two brain cells would come and help you out at a time like this.

Crucial yelled into his face. Whatever the answer was, either it wasn’t what Crucial had been wanting to hear, or there just wasn’t enough of it.

He took another swing, this time not to the thigh and not with the flat of the blade. Three severed fingers dropped into the mud. The guy’s legs collapsed beneath him, but he was held upright by the rope round his chest.

Crucial screamed into his face again. The assault team, who’d gone back to the fire-group area to retrieve their bergens, looked on as they returned. They didn’t give a shit. It was brutal, but this was war. This was what happened. None of these guys, theirs or ours, would be rushing back to camp to play Scrabble or form a debating society.

Soldiers do what soldiers do. This poor fucker needed to tell us all he knew, and that would save lives. Crucial had used the perfect expression to describe the method I’d always used to try to stop it fucking my head up afterwards: Just wipe my mouth, clear out the bad taste, and move on.

At last Crucial got something worthwhile out of him. He turned away from the whimpering, begging body and chatted to Sam as if he was keeping him abreast of the weather forecast. There are just three pieces of information you need from a prisoner in the field: How many more of you are there? What weapons have you got? And what do you plan to do with them? This was the way to get them fast.

‘They’re LRA.’ Crucial swung his gollock behind him and tapped the body on the shoulder. He flinched and screamed, expecting more. ‘These guys were coming up from the diamond mines. Kony told his guys down there to head north and join up with the main force. They’re all on the move.’

Sam was deaf to the cries for mercy. ‘Probably one of these groups the terrible twins hit last night. Get everything you can from him.’

Crucial turned and the prisoner was rewarded with a head butt, then another swing of the gollock for good measure. It was against his thigh again, but this time with the sharp end. His skin split open several inches deep. His head slumped as he broke down in fear and pain. Lightning crackled across the sky, freezing the two of them in a series of still-lifes as Crucial yelled into his face once more.

The man’s answers still weren’t to Crucial’s liking.

He took two paces away from the tree, then turned back and swung the flat of the gollock once more, this time hard into the man’s face. I heard the crunch of bone but no screams, just a horrible rasping noise as he fought for breath through his blood- and mucus-filled mouth and nostrils. I supposed you didn’t get a gob full of conflict diamonds by signing up to the Geneva Convention.

The manicured greens and crystal wine glasses of Erinvale were a world away as Crucial held up the man’s swollen and bloody head and shouted into it once more. When he got no response, he carved the blade up between the man’s legs, dug in and up.

Thank fuck, the guy started begging and talking. His body had already crumpled into the ropes. Rain streamed down his face, washing away the blood. But not for long.

Crucial pulled away from the rapper. As he listened, he held his bloodstained gollock out flat, rinsing it in the downpour.

The troops just mooched around, not at all interested in what had gone on. They were too busy cutting hair from the dead, almost scalping them, and seeing what could be robbed from their bodies that the porters hadn’t already helped themselves to.

‘They are close, too close.’ Crucial held up his wooden cross to have it cleansed of the prisoner’s blood. He walked towards Sam and me. ‘They started to hit the villages about thirty K north of the mine last night. They are maybe three, four hundred strong up there, he doesn’t really know. But he does know Kony has been bringing all his guys together, ready to hit us.

We’re the last big mine on his list.’

Crucial turned back to the prisoner.

Silky filled my mind once more. So much for three, maybe four days.

Crucial studied the body, which had now stopped breathing. ‘It gets worse. There are lots of guys heading up from the south to join the main force. We could even run into more groups tonight.’ He turned back to us, his diamonds gleaming in the lightning. ‘Well, at least that’s sixteen we won’t have to kill later.’

Sam nodded. ‘OK, get the guys ready. Let’s move on out of here. We need to get the Nuka mob into the mine with us, soon as.’

I was with him on that one. We’d lost time and distance, and the LRA hadn’t.

Crucial turned to shout at the troops but a commotion had kicked off to our left. A group of porters were bunched round a couple of bodies, kicking and punching down into them.

There was movement on the ground. One wasn’t dead, and the voice that cried out was very young.

Sam and Crucial ran towards them, yelling for them to stop.

I watched as they pushed through. The crowd parted to reveal an emaciated boy, no more than eleven or twelve years old. His head was bigger than the bag of bones beneath it.

Crucial dragged him along the mud to clear him from the body he was hiding under and away from the porters Sam was trying to calm. He talked slowly and gently to the boy, who seemed to relax – then the boy suddenly grabbed the arm that was restraining him and sank his teeth into its biceps.

Crucial’s free fist swung down. The boy’s head rocked sideways, teeth still anchored in his flesh.

I ran towards them but Sam was there first. Crucial landed another punch. The boy’s head fell back and he dropped to the ground. He spat out a mouthful of Crucial’s flesh, sprang up and attacked him again.

Sam kicked him back down into the mud and jammed a boot into his neck to control him.

Crucial dropped on to his arse, screaming up to the sky. He brought his hands up to his face and I realized he was sobbing.

Sam ripped away his headscarf and thrust it at him. He wiped his face and jammed it into the cavity in his arm.

The boy thrashed about under Sam’s boot, trying to do the same damage to his leg. ‘They’re trained to do that. If any of these kids tries to escape, the others have to bite them to death. They have to come up from the victim’s body with meat in their mouths. If not, the same happens to them.’ He pushed the kid deeper into the mud. ‘We’ve got to stop this, Nick.’

Crucial held his wound tight and began to talk gently to the boy. Sam stared at me through a curtain of rain. ‘Some of these kids are even forced to kill their parents before being taken north for training. Then they come back to take us on – and we’ve both seen what happens to them then, haven’t we?’

The boy still struggled as Crucial tried to talk him down. Sam had only one thing on his mind: ‘If you don’t help us, Standish will have thousands like him – just so the world can upgrade its mobiles every six months.’