Tenth Man Down

FIVE

As our little convoy rolled south, Whinger and I had plenty of time to discuss the situation. The morning after the ambush, Bakunda had been up at dawn, none the worse for having put away half a bottle of rum on top of ten or fifteen beers. Far from sporting a hangover, he’d come out, cocked a leg, executed a couple of rhino-power farts, and gone off chatting and laughing with his officers, handing out zikomos and compliments all round.

The fact that one of the Kamangans had lost his head didn’t seem to worry him in the least. He knew what had happened, all right; I had overheard him talking to Joss about the incident. But when I cornered Joss about it after breakfast, and suggested we should recover the body, the answer was, ‘Forget it, Geordie. All our guys knew Chidombo had been witched by a fiti. Sooner or later he was going to die. Now he’s dead, no one would touch his body even if we went looking for it. They think the spell might jump into them. Anyway, it’s probably gone already.’

‘Eaten by animals, you mean?’

Instead of answering straight, Joss gave me a peculiar look, half evasive, half angry. Then, after a pause, he said, ‘Maybe the devil’s got it.’

I wasn’t sure what he meant. There was something odd about his manner. He didn’t sound quite himself. But I sensed there was no point in arguing. The strange thing was that when Pavarotti had gone out with a recovery party to bring back the targets, he’d found no trace of a body. He, if anyone, knew exactly where the scuffle had taken place, and while the Kamangans had collected the figure-eights, he’d gone straight to the spot. As he said, if hyenas had eaten Chidombo, he’d have found traces of blood and chips of crunched-up bone — probably the head, too, or at least the remains of it. In the event, there was nothing — not even any flies around the place. It was as if something had lifted the body whole and whisked it clean away.

As Pav had reported this back, I felt the hair on my neck creep. We’d been getting too many stories about the devil using owls and hyenas for transport, too much stuff about witching.

‘Don’t mention it at the wash-up,’ I had warned Pav. ‘If one of the Africans starts in about it, okay, but otherwise, let it go. I reckon they’ll bin the whole episode and pretend it never happened.’

My hunch had soon proved right. At the debrief, which Bakunda attended, the incident was simply passed over. Joss bollocked men for other mistakes — firing at the hyena, the ND while I was away, somebody walking off his position to have a dump — but never mentioned what had been by far the worst incident of all. It, and poor old Chidombo, were wiped from the record.

‘I don’t like it,’ I said to Whinger as we jolted along the sandy track. ‘If they act like that during an exercise, what are they going to be like when they get into a real, live battle?’

‘Fucking awful,’ he replied, and he pin-pointed my own worry by adding, ‘They’re all right for a bit, but then the buggers go bananas. They seem to lose their reason.’

When I had spoken to Hereford over the satcom the previous evening, I’d been deliberately vague about our plans for the next few days. I certainly didn’t tell them that I’d more or less promised the President we’d go as far as Gutu. But that, for better or worse, was what I’d done. I’d developed quite a liking for Rhino. His visit had ended happily and he’d gone off in his Puma highly chuffed, fancying Alpha Commando to win the civil war in a couple of weeks. In his estimation, the sun shone out of the backside of any member of the SAS.

‘Zikomo! Zikomo!’ he had called, waving graciously as he boarded his chopper. Chalky had given him a few zikomos in return, claiming that the word meant ‘goodbye’ as well as ‘thanks’.

So here we were, driving towards the edge of the disputed zone, with the mine at Gutu our next major objective. All we knew about it was that its buildings stood on a bluff on the south bank of the Kameni river, and that diamonds were being dredged by suction from alluvial deposits in the bed of the stream. We had no information about the strength of the garrison, or about the area immediately surrounding the mine, but from the map the Kameni looked a major waterway.

Our own guys were riding in the two pinkies we’d flown out with us — long wheel-base Land Rovers, with windscreens folded down, all mirrors and lights hessianed-up, cam nets bunched and tied along the overhead roll-bars, and poles for the nets strapped along the sides. Everything had been stripped down in case we had to bomb-burst out of the vehicles. One pinkie had a .50 heavy machine gun mounted on the back, and one a Milan rocket-launcher post.

Our bulky kit was loaded into a seven-ton, four-wheel-drive Zyl lorry, sometimes driven by a local, sometimes by one of us. It was an ugly great lump of a truck, with a square-fronted radiator, a fore-mounted winch and an extra heavy angle-girder welded across the front, low down, to act as a bullbar. In spite of power steering, it was a brute to drive, but it was tough and reliable and had plenty of space. The cab was hot as hell, because it was all metal, with a turret opening in the roof on the passenger side. The back had steel sides about three feet high, and a canvas roof, rolled up on its frame to make a sun-shade. Most of Alpha Commando was travelling in similar vehicles, although they also had four Gaz jeeps of Russian origin.

One obvious problem was the inaccuracy of our maps. We already knew they were dodgy before we started south, but it wasn’t until we started covering bigger distances that we realised just how much imagination they included. That first morning we wasted a couple of hours searching in vain for a dirt road clearly marked in yellow, heading south-east in the direction we wanted; either it had never existed, or it had been over-grown by bush, and we finished up making a three-hour detour along tracks to the west. That was the morning gone, and us scarcely any closer to our objective.

Another problem, we could see, was going to be water. We were carrying our own supplies in jerricans stowed under the false floors of the pinkies, along with our rations, and we had reserves in forty-five-gallon containers aboard the big truck. But the locals went through water like they were going to land up beside a nice big clean river every night, and I kept hearing their ruperts reading the riot act about it.

Even before the civil war the country south of us had been sparsely inhabited. According to Joss, only one village in fifty had a borehole. Now most of the villages had been burned down. Some of the few wells that existed had been deliberately wrecked, and others had been polluted with the dead bodies of animals or humans thrown down them, so that once again everybody depended on rivers or springs, and people thought nothing of walking three or four kilometres in each direction to fetch water every morning.

As we went further south, the air grew steadily hotter. With only short breaks we drove right through the first afternoon after Bakunda’s departure, and on through the night. A couple of hours before dawn we came out on to a ridge commanding a big sweep of country, across which — according to our maps — ran a main road leading from the border in the direction of Gutu. So we stopped under a grove of sausage trees to get a good look at what lay ahead of us. Our vehicles deployed and cammed-up, with the heavy weapons sited in all-round defensive positions, and everybody got their heads down in turn.

When the light came up, we were disappointed to find that the ground in front consisted of a featureless sea of bush, dipping gently until it rose again to another low ridge in the distance. There were open patches of grassland between the trees and shrubs, but if the road was there, we couldn’t see it and continuous observation revealed no movement of any kind. The only development before midday came at about 1130, when a column of smoke went up from beyond the far ridge, to our left.

‘Bush fire?’ I asked Joss, who was standing with me.

‘I don’t think so,’ he answered. ‘Smoke’s too concentrated. A bush fire would be more spread out. Looks like somebody’s burnt a village.’

It was Jason, the skinny tracker, who raised the alert. He was on stag in one of the forward OPs when he gave a sudden call.

I looked across, saw him pointing, and hurried over.

‘What is it?’

‘One man.’

‘Where?

‘Two tall trees, over there.’

‘Got ’em.’

‘To the right, open space.’

‘Yes.’

‘One minute, he come out.’

I glued my binoculars to the small, stony plain, not wanting to put Mabonzo down, but hardly believing that a single man could be moving on his own through that huge wilderness.

But hell, the tracker was right.

A tiny figure struggled into view, an African, bareheaded, in rags, limping heavily, leaning on a stick, dragging himself forward a step at a time, four or five hundred yards from us. He was heading vaguely north, on course to pass to our right.

‘Hey, Whinge,’ I called. ‘Look at this.’

‘The poor bugger’s hurt,’ said Whinger immediately. Then suddenly he shouted, ‘No! For fuck’s sake!’

One of the Kamangan sentries had brought his AK47 up into the aim.

‘Don’t shoot!’ said Whinger fiercely. ‘This guy may be some use to us. He’s tabbed it from the direction of the enemy. Hey, Joss!’

The distant fugitive must have heard Whinger’s first yell, because he’d stopped and looked around.

‘Jesus!’ I said. ‘He’s going to do a runner.’

‘Like hell he is,’ said Andy, who’d appeared beside me. ‘He couldn’t run to save his life.’

‘Let’s get down to him, then,’ I went. ‘Andy and I’ll go with Joss. The rest of you keep still and cover us.’

We watched for a couple of minutes to make sure the man was on his own. In the end, unable to identify where the sound had come from, he started lurching forward again, and Andy and I set off towards him, together with Joss and a man called Kaingo, who could speak several tribal languages besides his own. As we moved I kept a patch of thick bush between us and our target, so that he didn’t see us, because I was afraid he might take fright and try to sheer off. The result was that when he finally came in view of us, he was only twenty metres off.

The sight of four armed guys in DPMs, two black, two white, gave him a horrible fright. He jumped backwards, tried to run, fell over, and then raised his hands in a pathetic gesture of surrender. By the time we got to him, he was on his knees, eyeballs rotating like crazy. We could see straight away that he was covered in cuts, with dust and dried blood crusting over them, and that he had metal shackles on his ankles. But it wasn’t until Andy went round behind him and whistled in amazement that we realised how badly he’d been injured. His tattered blue shirt had been torn into vertical strips, and so had the skin on his back. From shoulder to arse he was ripped and scarified, with shreds of skin hanging off, as if he’d been dragged over a bed of nails. The backs of his legs were the same. The wounds were fresh, with some of the blood not yet congealed, and flies crawling all over.

‘Tell him he’s safe,’ I said, and when Joss translated, the man’s fear visibly declined.

‘Water,’ I told Andy. ‘Give him a drink.’

Andy pulled a bottle out of his belt kit and handed it over.

Between gulps, the miserable creature choked out his story. His village had been destroyed by the rebels, he said.

‘First they bombed,’ Joss translated.

‘With aircraft?’

‘No aircraft. With guns. Shells. Some people were killed. Many ran away into the bush. Then the Afundis came and set fire to the huts. They raped the women — themselves first, then with knives in the belly. They cut the children into pieces.’

‘Okay, okay. Where was it?’

The man turned and made a big gesture towards the south. ‘Many days’ walking’ was the only way he could describe the location.

‘How did he get here, then?’

He’d been captured and taken for slave labour, driven off in a truck to rebuild the road from Gutu to the border. Places where floods had washed it away in the rainy season. He’d escaped during the night when a gang of workmen was being transported to a new location further west. He’d managed to secrete a hacksaw blade, and had sawed through the chain of his shackles during the journey.

At first we got the impression he’d just jumped off the truck; then he explained that he’d wriggled down over the side, between the rim of the body and the canvas top, and clung there, not daring to drop because they were travelling so fast. A minute or two later they’d come to a place where thorn bushes had grown over, nearly closing the track, and suddenly he’d found himself being ripped to pieces, all along his back. When the vehicle slowed, he’d dropped off.

‘Can you show us the road, then?’ I asked gently.

The man pointed over the sea of bush ahead of us, and his answer came back via Joss, ‘Half a day.’

‘At his rate, half a day’s only a couple of ks,’ I went. ‘Let’s get down there and have a look.’

‘Wait,’ said Joss. ‘He says he has something important to tell you.’

‘Go on, then.’

‘Tonight a convoy is coming back along this same road…’ The refugee talked in slow, painful sentences, and Joss patiently relayed the details. ‘From the border. It is bringing arms and ammunition for the garrison at Gutu.’

I felt a surge of excitement, but all I said was, ‘How does he know?’

‘He heard Afundi officers speaking.’

‘Tonight — is he sure?’

The man nodded vigorously.

‘How many vehicles?’

‘He thinks three or four. One of them will be the truck he jumped off.’

‘Right, then.’ I glanced at Andy and saw he was thinking the same as me. ‘Kaingo, get Mart to do what he can about his wounds. Andy and I are going down to recce that road.’

The reason we hadn’t spotted the track was that it ran across our front in a long, shallow valley, out of our sight as we were advancing. But there it was, just as the man had described it: a narrow, sandy track, so little used that seedling trees and bushes had sprouted up all over it, and in many places vegetation had closed in from the sides, halving its width. This squared with descriptions we’d heard of how, before the civil war, Bakunda had deliberately let roads serving Gutu go to pot, in a clumsy attempt to increase the security of the mine, while he himself relied on aircraft to lift supplies in and diamonds out. But now, on this one, there were tyre tracks, and a litter of broken twigs that showed a vehicle had recently forced its way through.

One thought was uppermost in all our minds: ambush. Coming so soon after the exercise, this looked like a God-given opportunity to give the Kamangans live practice and prevent a load of weapons reaching the rebels. Joss was all for it. His eyes were gleaming as he said, ‘Oh, wah! Let’s just find a good site, and we’ll get on with it.’

Our recce didn’t take long. There were no footprints in the dust of the track, and we ourselves kept off it, moving parallel with its course until we came to a point where it swung left and right as it crossed a wide hollow, and then straightened as it disappeared over some higher ground beyond. Up there, thick bush was growing, but the depression was open — a great killing ground. For ten minutes we scanned with binoculars to make sure nobody else was on the move.

‘Lovely thicket, just the ticket,’ went Andy, imitating Whinger, but letting himself down by giving both halves of the rhyme instead of one.

‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘Let ’em come well down the slope into the open, and we’ve got ’em.’

In many ways the site was better than the one we’d chosen for the exercise, and Joss didn’t need long to work out a plan. Positions for right and left cut-off groups suggested themselves immediately. For RPGs and heavy machine guns, the range was point-blank; if the enemy vehicles reached the bottom of the slope, none of them would escape. There was even a bit of a hill out to the left from which a rear cut-off group could put down fire across the track on top of the rise, to take out anyone who tried to run off along it, and also, in the opposite direction, cover our own backs.

With all the drills fresh in people’s minds, everything seemed ridiculously simple. Nevertheless, we took all sensible precautions. Only once during our recce did we set foot on the road, and then we all crossed it together, brushing out our tracks behind us.

After scarcely an hour we were back at our bivouac site, and Joss again made careful models in the sand to brief his men. Then he took the commanders forward for their own recce, and Pavarotti helped them plan a cut-off barrier of claymores, with trip-wire triggers, in the bush on the south side of the track, to catch anybody who tried to break in that direction. We’d agreed that the SAS would take no direct part in the ambush itself, but that we’d be there close behind, in the background, to advise if anything went wrong.

Our best policy was obviously to leave our vehicles where they were, under guard, well out of the way, and move into position on foot. At 1630, after a meal, I gave everybody the same kind of bollocking as before, but tougher, telling them that this time the action was going to be for real, and they couldn’t afford any NDs or general faffing about.

‘The sky’s clear,’ I told them, looking up. ‘That means it’s going to be a fairly light night. The convoy will probably be driving without lights. If the wind gets up, we may not hear the engines until the last minute. So everybody needs to be on full alert. Your aim is very simple: destroy every enemy vehicle, and make sure no one gets out alive.’

With that, everybody tabbed forward, with three Kamangans humping the gun, spare barrel and tripod of their .50 machine gun, and two other guys carring spare ammunition.

Before the sun set at 1740 the whole party was in position. To keep things simple, I’d assigned the same back-ups as in the exercise: Pav behind the left cut-off, Andy behind the right, Genesis with the rear, Mart with myself and Whinger in the centre. We’d lent Joss one of our covert comms sets so that we could keep in touch with him, and we were close enough to talk to the rest of our lads, who stayed back with the vehicles, ready to move up as and when we called them.

Night fell as quickly as if a black curtain had been drawn down over earth and sky. Apart from the background chorus of crickets, not a sound disturbed the silence. I kept thinking about the big owl that had swooped over the village, expecting to hear that low hoo-hoo any minute — but if owls were flying, none called near us.

Whinger and I were lying at a comfortable angle — heads up, feet down — on a sandy bank that gave good protection from the front. If anyone started firing in our direction, we’d only have to lower our heads to be in dead ground. Also, we were far enough back from the Kamangan line to be able to talk in whispers without being heard. Not that we had much to say to each other at that point: we were both weary, and hoping the convoy would arrive early, rather than wait till four in the morning to put in an appearance.

Time dragged. To hurry it up I tried to imagine the map of Africa, fitting in all the countries like the pieces of a jigsaw. South Africa, at the bottom, was easy enough. Next up on the left came Namibia. I’d spent a week there once, and knew most of it was barren desert. Next up again was Angola, scene of one of the longest-lasting civil wars. Inland, beside Angola, was Botswana. I’d been there, too, and had spooky experiences in the Tsodilo Hills, where one of our guys had been killed falling off a mountain. I remembered how the RAF had flown a Hercules over the spot and how, when they tried to throw a wreath out the open back door, in tribute to the dead man, it had blown back into the aircraft three times, an uncanny fluke that left the crew twitching.

It was Andy, on our right, who heard the noise first.

‘Green Two,’ said his voice in my earpiece. ‘Something moving ahead.’

‘Vehicles?’

‘Pass. Sounds more like people on foot, coming through the bush.’

‘Has your squad heard it?’

‘Sure.’

‘Wait out, then.’ I listened intently for a few moments. My watch was reading 2155. As I watched, a shooting star hurtled down the sky towards the south. Then I called, ‘Green Three? Any noise in your sector?’

‘Negative,’ came Pav.

‘You heard Andy?’

‘Roger.’

‘Green Four?’

‘Definitely,’ said Genesis. ‘There’s movement up ahead.’

‘Green Five, you heard that?’

Joss took a moment to answer, maybe feeling for his pressel switch. Then he came up with: ‘Roger. We’re ready.’

‘All stations, stand by.’

We listened, straining to catch the slightest sound. The air was completely still. The moon was well up, casting a black shadow behind every silver-grey bush and tree, pitting the land with inky patches. I held my breath and uttered a silent prayer that none of the Kamangans would open fire prematurely.

As I let my breath go, I felt wind on my right cheek, that sudden, curious night wind, starting again. Quickly a surge built up, gusting from the north, sighing through the scrub. But this little squall never reached the intensity of the one that had blown up during our exercise. In a couple of minutes it died away again, and silence returned, the huge, all-embracing silence of the African night.

Maybe, I told myself, it was only an eddy of air that the guys had heard. But soon, when nothing else happened, I got a different idea. I began to wonder if the breeze had betrayed our presence to rebel scouts, moving ahead of their convoy. Had they got our scent and quietly turned back? Surely none of the Kamangans could have been such an idiot as to light a cigarette? Most of them stank like polecats, and BO on its own might have been enough to raise the alarm.

‘What d’you reckon it was?’ I whispered.

‘Animals, I expect,’ Whinger murmured. ‘Probably an antelope.’

He’d hardly spoken when, somewhere beyond the killing ground, a branch snapped. I knew instinctively that the crack was too loud to have been made by an impala or a puku. Antelopes are delicate animals that nibble at leaves and twigs; except when running for their lives, they do not break thick branches by treading on them.

‘All stations,’ I said again, ‘stand by.’

I was expecting — hoping — to pick up the rattle of a truck travelling slowly, or the grind of engines turning steadily at low revs. The next sound we got was almost mechanical, but utterly different: a huge, raucous intake of air, like a giant snort.

‘Firekin ’ell!’ went Whinger out loud. ‘Elephants!’

Before I could hit my pressel again, the night split apart in a blinding flash and the shock-wave of an explosion buffeted us in the face.

‘Jesus!’ I shouted. ‘They’re in the trip-wires!’

Boom! went another claymore. Violent screams burst out, as harsh and loud as if giants were tearing up sheets of corrugated iron. One, two, three, four — primeval cries of fear and alarm ripped out all over, building into a chorus of panic. Another booby trap exploded, setting fire to the bush in the background. All across our front the Kamangans opened up, pouring rounds into the killing area.

‘Stop!’ roared Pavarotti. ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’

His words were lost in the uproar. From being dead quiet, the night had turned crazy with noise. Like the elephants, the Kamangans had gone hyper. They were firing bursts often or twelve rounds, half of them high into the sky. The heavy hammer of the .50 was continuous. Two RPGs went scorching into the bush and exploded in brilliant flashes. A fourth claymore detonated, then a fifth.

Why the hell hadn’t Joss switched on the ambush lights? Why hadn’t he fired a flare? He had the shamoulis. I’d hardly had time to wonder what he was doing when I realised that hefty black shapes were hurtling towards us like tanks — not three or four, but dozens — crashing headlong through any scrub in their path as they charged across the killing ground.

One of them was coming straight for me and Whinger.

‘Watch this fucker!’ I yelled. But before we could move it veered to its left and swung off in a circle, like a truck with a punctured tyre. I knew it had taken rounds and was disabled. Another went down, head over heels, and rolled to a halt like a seven-ton truck with all four wheels seized. The rest of them kept coming.

At last a rocket soared up and a flare deployed, yet the sudden illumination only increased the chaos. Presented with a clear view of fifty charging elephants, the Kamangans leapt to their feet and ran in all directions, back, sideways, forwards, loosing off wildly. Human yells merged with the louder animal noises. The effect was to increase the general panic and accelerate the stampede. Huge creatures thundered forward, ears raised, trunks up, screaming all out in a rolling cloud of dust. My instinct was to get up and run, or join in the firing, but I knew that any movement would expose us to still greater risk of getting trampled or knocked over.

‘Keep down!’ I yelled.

Whinger and I clung to the earth, on the back of our little mound. I felt the ground tremble as the nearest elephant hurtled past, three or four yards to my left. With it came a hot, fierce, animal smell, like that of cows, but more intense. Spurts of warm liquid sprayed on to us. In a few seconds the whole herd was through our position and past us, crashing away into the distance along the line of the road.

When the firing died down, I found myself shaking from a massive charge of adrenalin, and my finger trembled as I hit the pressel of my radio.

‘Come in, all stations.’

There was a pause before Pav answered, ‘Green Three.’

‘You okay?’

‘Fine.’

‘Okay. Green Four?’

‘Roger,’ went Genesis.

‘Five?’

‘No problem.’ Joss’s voice sounded high and strained.

‘Get the fucking lights on,’ I told him. ‘Keep the shamoulis going. We need maximum illumination. Two, then. Come in, Green Two.’

I waited, tried again. No reply. Andy. It was possible his radio had gone down. It might have fallen out of its pouch if he’d had to move quickly. But deep down I knew at once something bad had happened.

I’ve seen the shit hit the fan often enough, but never as messily as that. Dead or dying elephants were scattered over the killing ground, some roaring and groaning as they struggled to get up. The Kamangans’ discipline had gone like the night wind. Men had abandoned their positions and were running all over the place, putting bursts into the crippled beasts, already whacking into the dead bulls with machetes and commando knives as they started to cut out their tusks. It seemed highly unlikely that there could be an enemy force in the vicinity; if the convoy had been close, it would have turned tail by now. Just as well, because our party was wide open to attack.

‘Fuck it!’ I shouted to Whinger. ‘It’s not down to us to get these bastards back under control. I’m going to find Andy.’

Together we ran towards the spot where he’d taken station, behind the right cut-off group. ‘Andy!’ I yelled. ‘Where are you?’

In the distance the claymore explosions had ignited several bush fires, but the crackling flames only made our immediate surroundings seem darker. The last shamouli had floated off to the west, so that its flare was filling every dip in the ground with black shadow, and we had to check each inky patch individually.

It was Whinger who found him. He gave a sudden yell of ‘Here!’ and stood still, with his torch-beam pointing straight downwards.

In a second I was beside him. Andy was lying on his back, head turned to the right, with his eyes shut and a trickle of blood oozing from his mouth. It was obvious what had happened, because his chest was almost two-dimensional, only two or three inches from top to bottom, crushed flat by a tremendous weight. An elephant must have knocked him down and put a foot right on him, or rolled over him. Kneeling beside the body, I ran my hands up its sides and touched the ends of snapped ribs jagging out under his smock. I saw his 203 lying in the dust a few feet away.

I felt choked. Andy, just married. My mind flew to the day of the wedding. All the blossom had been out in an orchard next to the churchyard. I looked down at his body and thought, ‘Why in a godforsaken place like this?’ I knew we’d had our differences, but he never deserved this. I thought of Penny, a bride of only two months. Now the Families’ Officer would have to call on her. I remembered how they’d broken the terrible news about Kath’s senseless death to me.

‘Jesus!’ I went. ‘It’s that fucking witch doctor. This is his number one, the first of ten.’

‘Bollocks,’ said Whinger. ‘It was just bad luck. I bet the silveries have taken casualties as well.’

‘The more, the better,’ I said savagely. ‘Stupid bastards. Why the hell can’t they control themselves?’

‘This wasn’t their fault,’ said Whinger, doggedly. ‘It wasn’t them who cracked it off. It was the claymores that panicked the elephants.’

I knew he was right, but that didn’t make things any easier. I stood up, getting hold of myself, and used the radio to call our remaining guys together. I couldn’t help feeling irritated when Genesis started to recite a short benediction, commending Andy’s soul to the Almighty, and I shouted at him to shut up.

‘Where was God when the elephants charged?’ I said bitterly. ‘He wasn’t fucking looking after Andy.’

Genesis opened his mouth to say something, but I poked him in the chest with my forefinger and snapped, ‘Eh, just keep quiet.’

We unrolled our one para-silk stretcher and got the body into it, to carry it back to the holding area. By then darkness had settled back on the bush, except where the fires lit up patches in the distance and, closer, a couple of places where Kamangans were feverishly hacking at elephant corpses by torchlight.

‘Joss!’ I yelled. ‘Where are you?’

‘Here.’ He answered from only a few feet away. He must have been coming in search of us.

‘I went, ‘What a fuck-up!’

For the moment he didn’t reply. I think he was choked as well. Then I was aware of him standing beside me, his black face invisible, only his DPMs showing faintly in the moonlight. He pointed at the shrouded body and asked, ‘Who is this?’

‘Andy.’

‘Andy! Oh my goodness! I’m sorry. Was it an elephant?’

‘Yep. What about you? Have you got casualties?’

‘Two dead. Two broken legs, one broken arm, one flesh wound from a bullet.’

‘What about casevac?’

‘It will be difficult from here.’

‘You’ve said it. Let’s get back to the holding area and talk about it there.’

I should have bollocked him for letting his men run riot, but I let it go, because I’d seen enough of their behaviour to realise it was utterly unrealistic to expect the sort of discipline that prevails in British forces. Nor did I tell him to call off the guys who were carving up the elephants. I knew the whole Kamangan army was shit-poor, and hadn’t been paid in months, so who was I to deny them the fat haul of dollars they might get from selling tusks?

At 2300 local time — 2100 in the UK — I called Hereford on the satcom phone to report our casualty.

‘What d’you mean, it was an elephant?’ said Pete Dickson, the Duty Officer, incredulously.

‘We were on a night ex,’ I white-lied. ‘A herd of about fifty ellies wandered on to our position and stampeded. Came right through us. There wasn’t time to move or do anything. Andy got knocked down and trampled.’

‘Killed outright?’

‘Instantaneously. When you see the body, you’ll know. His chest is about two inches front to back.’

‘Jesus!’

‘Listen,’ I went on. ‘We need to get him out fast. He won’t last a day in the kind of heat we’re having.’

‘You mean a charter aircraft?’

‘Exactly. There’s a firm called Kam-Ex, in Mulongwe. You can contact them through the embassy.’

‘Are they going to be happy to fly into your area?’

I lied again. ‘There shouldn’t be any problem. We’re still well north of rebel territory.’

‘Okay. And is there a strip close by?’

‘There will be. There’s a straight bush road with a good level surface. It just needs a bit of scrub cleared, and we can do that at first light.’

I gave the coordinates, which I’d punched into my GPS as Waypoint Four.

‘Right,’ said Pete. ‘We’ll see what we can do. But we’ll need a full report on the incident in due course.’

‘Of course.’

‘D’you want to speak to the CO in the morning?’

‘Not unless he wants to speak to me.’

‘Okay, then. Until tomorrow.’

Dawn saw us back on the bush road with a force of forty Kamangans. We’d chosen a stretch on which the scrub was light anyway, and now those razor-sharp machetes came into their own. In the cool of the morning the guys worked well — I had to hand it to them — and in little more than an hour we’d cleared a strip four hundred metres long, cutting back the shrubs on either side of the track to create an open corridor about twenty metres wide. Provided no strong cross-wind got up, a reasonable pilot ought to be able to land and take off without difficulty.

At that stage — 0630 — we had no confirmation that an aircraft was available, but I went ahead preparing the strip anyway. At 0945 I was relieved to get a satcom call from Hereford via the Defence Attaché at the embassy in Mulongwe, confirming that a Kam-Ex aircraft was on its way. Its estimated flight-time, the DA said, was one hour forty minutes, and he gave us a frequency on which we could establish comms with the pilot when he was approaching.

It seemed to me that Joss was observing our preparations with a slightly cynical air. He was sending his own dead and wounded back to the nearest military base by road, and obviously reckoned our reaction was over the top. At the same time, maybe he was ashamed of the way his guys had behaved, and so felt he wasn’t in a position to start making criticisms. I didn’t feel sorry for his casualties, even the two with broken legs. In fact, I hoped they’d have a rough ride home.

Our pilot came on the air when he was twenty minutes out. His name, he told us, was Steve, and by his accent he was an Aussie or a New Zealander. He was flying a Cessna 210, at 8,000 feet, and having no problems with his navigation as he came towards our location from the north-east.

‘Hold that bearing,’ I told him. ‘We’re ready for you. The strip we’ve cleared runs roughly east and west. Four hundred metres long. Level ground all the way. Wind at the minute is zero, but we’ll light a fire at the north-eastern corner to see what the smoke does.’

‘Roger,’ he went. ‘Sounds dinkum. Where’s my passenger?’

‘We’ll have him by the fire. Suggest you come in from the west and taxi right along.’

‘Fair enough. No rebel forces in the area, I suppose?’

‘Not that we know of. We’ve had a patrol out one k to the south, and they’re reporting the area clear.’

‘Okay, then. I’ll see you in a minute.’

The scrub we collected was so dry our marker fire went off like a torch, but the blaze produced practically no smoke, so we sent one of the Kamangans running to pull some branches off a leadwood tree which was growing a couple of hundred metres away. The dusty-looking leaves crackled fiercely and gave off dense black smoke; after a quick trial, we kept the rest ready until the plane arrived.

We heard it before we saw it. The sun was already high and brilliant, and we had to screw up our eyes against its light when we detected the far-off hum. Then we picked up a little dark dot which rapidly grew into a silver and blue aircraft, already descending.

‘We have you visual,’ I called. ‘Come slightly right of your heading, and we’ll be on your nose. You should see our smoke.’

‘Okay,’ he answered, ‘but there are bush fires all over.’ Then his voice sharpened as he said, ‘Got it! Got the strip. Wait one while I take a look.’

Bringing the Cessna down low, he made a pass to the south, with the aircraft tilted over towards us as he scanned the makeshift runway. As he climbed again a covey of terrified guinea fowl exploded from the scrub beneath him, eight or ten heavy grey birds, scattering desperately.

The smoke from our fire was going up straight as a pillar.

‘Looks okay,’ he said.

I saw his undercarriage go down as he pulled round in a tight turn to line up for an easterly approach. Without further ado he came in low — so low that it looked as though his wheels were going to brush through the tops of bushes short of the strip. Then with twin puffs of dust he was down, bouncing a bit but well under control. He taxied steadily towards us, stopped about thirty metres off, closed down his engine, opened the door and jumped out — a stocky young fellow in bush shirt and shorts, with a shock of fair hair that flopped over his tanned forehead.

I went forward to shake hands, and said, ‘Thanks for coming.’

‘Don’t mention it. Sorry you needed me.’ He gestured at Andy’s body, now zipped into a black bag. ‘Trouble with elephants, I hear.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Dangerous animals.’

‘We thought there were none left. We heard they’d all been shot.’

‘Don’t you believe it. I flew over a big herd right back there.’

‘Maybe that was the lot that ran into us. Well, where d’you want him?’

‘On the floor. We’ve stripped out the seats.’

Four of us picked up the body, which had gone stiff as a board in the night, but now was floppy again, and hoisted it awkwardly through the passenger door.

‘What are you going to do with him?’ Genesis asked.

‘The embassy’s laid on an ambulance to take him straight to the city mortuary. They’re arranging a flight back to the UK as soon as possible.’

That seemed as good as we could get. Steve said a quick goodbye and got back on board, but nobody else spoke. None of us had anything to say. We watched mutely as he started up, carried out his checks, turned, taxied and took off in the opposite direction, waggling his wings in farewell as he swung right-handed and climbed away to the north. I had a strong desire to jump into the co-pilot’s seat and fly clean out of this mess, on the pretext that the body needed an escort. In reality I knew that such an action would never wash, and in any case, it wasn’t in me to leave my own guys in the shit.

We’d sent nothing with Andy, because he had practically nothing to send — no money, credit card or wallet. The only personal items I kept were his watch — a good stainless-steel Rolex, which would certainly have been nicked in the mortuary — and a small folder of green canvas holding two photos of Penny, which I found in the breast pocket of his DPMs. Whatever happened, I’d make sure that those two items got back to the UK safely.

In a couple of minutes, the Cessna vanished into the sky, and our little group was left standing in silence under the hot morning sun. Just before we moved off I noticed that Genesis was fingering the crucifix which he wore on a fine chain round his neck, and that his lips were moving in prayer.

‘Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord,’ he was murmuring. ‘Even so sayeth the spirit, for they rest from their labours.’