Tenth Man Down

SIXTEEN

Our basic need was to head north-north-east across country. I didn’t want to use the road, for fear that Joss might have a back-up convoy coming along behind him. Alpha Commando certainly possessed more vehicles than we’d seen. At the same time, I did want to put distance between ourselves and the burnt-out truck, to get clear of any radioactivity released by the explosion. I knew I must already be contaminated to some extent, but I saw no point in taking unnecessary risks. So I pulled off Rasputin’s sodden suit, buried it as best I could, and for an hour drove carefully through the bush, parallel with the road but out of sight of it, following a gully which twisted and turned more or less in the right direction.

With the immediate threat gone, reaction set in. I realised I was physically exhausted, and knew I had probably exposed myself to a fatal dose of radiation. What I didn’t appreciate was that my mind and motives were totally confused.

To start with I felt angry with myself for screwing everything up. It was my fault entirely that I was stranded in the middle of a hostile country, my fault we’d gone after the arms cache in the first place, my fault I hadn’t boarded the Herc when I had every opportunity, and the rest were desperately urging me to shift my arse and join them. Self-pity soon gave way to guilt. Thinking back, I knew full well that I’d been secretly planning this breakaway ever since Sam sprang Genesis and me from the cell. It was in the light aircraft, just after Genesis died, that I’d conceived the idea of peeling off from the rest of the team to go in search of the diamond. I’d kept the scheme hidden in my mind all through our approach to the weapons cache. The worst thing was that I’d deliberately deceived my mates. Never before, during sixteen years in the Regiment, had I done anything like that. I’d had disagreements and rows, of course, but they’d always been in the open. I’d always remained a good member or leader of the team; never had I double-crossed the rest of the lads about my intentions.

Now I told myself that if Whinger had been alive, I wouldn’t have done it. I’d have confided fully in him, and almost certainly he would have talked me out of such a wild idea. But Whinger had gone, that was the whole point. It was his death that had thrown me off balance. If only we hadn’t rescued the German woman. If only Whinger hadn’t got burnt. If only we’d never gone to the convent. If, if, if… As Pavarotti was fond of saying, if my Auntie Nel had had two balls, she would have been my Uncle Arthur.

Now, of course, I had the satcom. I could always call the Kremlin. But what good would that do? Some rupert would only start in, bollocking me. Whatever else I needed at that moment, I didn’t need advice or orders from Hereford.

Contradictory thoughts whirled round and round my head until, giving in to exhaustion, I came to a temporary halt under a grove of trees bearing dark-green leaves.

‘Got to take a break,’ I told Jason. ‘We’ll stay here till dark. We’ll be safer moving at night, in any case.’

He nodded. Except for a small cut beside his left eyebrow, his long, thin face looked no different from normal; but in the past forty-eight hours he’d had as little sleep as I had, and I knew he must be worn out.

‘Get your head down too,’ I told him.

‘Yassir.’

I should have asked him to do an hour’s stag, while I had a kip. But by then I was so far gone that I’d developed a fatalistic attitude. It was a million to one against anyone finding us, I thought, and even if they did, I didn’t care. I dug out a mozzie net, rigged it over my head and chest, stretched out on the bare earth, and within seconds was dead to the world.

When I came round, I couldn’t think where I was. Then I looked out through the canopy of the sheltering trees, saw the sun was setting, and remembered.

Jason was sitting against a tree-trunk, knees drawn up, with his 203 on the ground beside him.

‘Been asleep?’ I asked.

‘Yassir.’

I didn’t believe him, especially as he said ‘Big shooting!’ and pointed into the distance towards Ichembo, indicating that some major contact had taken place while I was out cold. The noise had been too faint to rouse me. I reckoned the faithful bugger had sat there guarding me all the time. But I wasn’t going to argue. I felt one hell of a lot better. The fog of exhaustion had cleared from my head, and, except for a patch between my shoulderblades, on which I’d been lying, the sweat had dried out of my clothes.

I was hungry for food and keen to get moving, so I dug out a couple of boil-in-the-bag rations, lobbed one to Jason and got the other down my neck. Seldom had cold Irish stew tasted better, and I chased it with pears in syrup.

With the meal came new energy. My first task was to make a mental inventory of what the pinkie contained, before darkness fell. The results were encouraging. We had half a tank of fuel and three full jerricans — enough for at least 200 kilometres. We had rations for several days, plenty of fresh water, cam nets, and several of the lads’ spare sweaters. There was more 203 ammunition than two of us were likely to fire, two boxes of grenades and sixteen eight-ounce sticks of plastic explosive, together with det cord and timers. We had the satcom, and, best of all, Andy’s GPS, into which I’d punched the waypoints recorded by Stringer in his own set.

Our last map had gone up in flames with the mother wagon, but because of the GPS its disappearance hardly mattered. I plugged the leads into sockets on the dash, so that I didn’t drain the set’s batteries, and once I’d got fixes on three satellites and established our new location, I was amazed to find how close to Waypoint Seven we were. Through all the violent swings of the past few days — our advance to the mine at Gutu, our flight from Gutu to the Zebra Pans and the convent, my capture and journey to Chimbwi, then from there to Ichembo — I’d had the impression that we were moving more or less in a circle. Now it turned out I was right. The GPS revealed that we’d ended up only seventy-eight kilometres from the site of the downed Beechcraft, and needed to advance on a bearing of forty-seven degrees to reach it. We were on the wrong side of the hills, it was true, but so close we could almost walk there in a night.

Also, I had Jason. I’d already seen that he possessed outstanding skills as a tracker, but now I began to realise that he also had an uncanny sense of place and direction. When I asked him, ‘Do you remember where the Beechcraft is?’ he replied, in a matter-of-fact voice, ‘Yassir.’ And when I said, ‘Which way is it?’ he instantly stuck out an arm, with fingers outstretched. When I stood behind him with a compass, I found he was pointing within one degree of the course the GPS had given me.

‘Jason,’ I went. ‘Have you been here before?’

‘One time Ichembo.’

‘But not here, where we are now?’

‘No sah.’

‘Then how the hell can you be so sure about your directions?’

‘Sun,’ he said, pointing up at the sky. ‘Moon, stars — and head.’

‘Any obstacles on our route?’

‘One river.’

‘Jesus! Not that big one?’

He shook his head. ‘Small one.’

‘Can the pinkie drive across it?’

‘I think so.’

I didn’t let on that the GPS agreed precisely with his analysis of our position. I just pretended to go along with his estimate of the course we should take.

We needed to wait a few more minutes, until the moon was high enough to give good light, and as we sat in the dark, we chatted in a desultory way. I already knew about Jason’s wives, but something made me ask about his family.

‘What about your father?’ I went. ‘Is he still alive?’

‘No sah. I show you.’ He began scrabbling in the breast pocket of his DPMs and brought out a small, flat box, which he opened with a pop. I shone my torch on it, and saw it was made of aluminium, battered and dented. From it he took a piece of paper, which he unfolded delicately, with great care, before handing it across.

Like the tin, the paper had seen much service. It was a sheet torn from a ruled school exercise book, frayed at the edges and covered with smudgy finger prints. But the message, written in capital letters, was still perfectly legible:

Puzzled, I skimmed through it twice, then asked, ‘Who was this addressed to?’

‘My mother.’

‘Jesus! So Muende killed your father? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘Yassir.’

‘But how?’

‘He was weapons instructor at college. Muende was student.’

‘The military academy in Mulongwe?’

Jason nodded.

‘What happened?’

He spread his hands, meaning he’d never known. ‘I was only boy then. Nine years.’

‘And now you’re out to get Muende?’

‘Yassir.’

‘So all that stuff about wanting to come to England was a load of crap? You just wanted to join our team.’

I said it in a jokey way, but he lowered his head rather than answer.

‘Don’t worry,’ I added. ‘I’m glad you did. But how the hell did you know what we were going to do? At that stage we weren’t after Muende at all.’

‘You say you make personal attack.’

‘Did I? Oh yes, that was way back, when we did the training ambush. But then it was only a joke.’ I folded the paper carefully, and handed it back. ‘Let’s go,’ I said. ‘Let’s get after him.’

For a couple on honeymoon, it would have been a perfect night. The air was pleasantly cool, the stars brilliant. The complete absence of human habitation would have given lovers the feeling they were the only people in the whole of Africa.

On me, though, all that was wasted. As Jason drove the first stint, weaving steadily through the bush, one anxiety after another crowded into my mind. Foremost was the possibility that Muende might beat us to the crashed plane. He might already have reached it, found the diamond and gone. Again, it was IF, IF, IF: IF the man who nicked my GPS had been discovered with it, or had handed it in; if Muende or Inge had had the sense to recognise the significance of Waypoint Seven; if they’d managed to cross the river, avoid the government forces, and find the site.

That was one of the needles that stopped me admiring the velvety night. The other was the witch doctor. The past twenty-four hours had been so frantic that he and his prophecy had gone largely out of my mind. But now, perhaps because we were heading back in his direction, they loomed up large again. I kept thinking about the abrupt, inexplicable blast of cold wind that had blown across the backs of our necks at the moment that kid expired.

In my head I went through the list of white deaths associated with our presence in Kamanga. Andy’s was the first. The South Africans in the Beechcraft made the score two and three. The guy Joss’s kangaroo court had shot was the fourth, Whinger the fifth, Sam the sixth, Genesis the seventh. The guy I’d pushed out of the chopper made the total eight, and the two Russians I’d topped made it ten. Or did it? It depended on whether you counted the pair in the Beechcraft. Their deaths had nothing to do with us; they happened before we arrived on the scene. But even if I left them out of the calculation, at eight we were getting perilously close to the predicted score — and now, with the rest of the lads gone, there were only two whites left in the action: the German woman and myself. Were both of us destined to go down?

It would have helped to share my anxieties with my companion, but I knew that if I started on about witchcraft, Jason would only give his secret smile and offer me dog-shit medicine to ward off spells. Instead, I tried to take my mind off the question by guessing where Pav and co. had got to. By now they must be in Namibia, at least, or on their way north towards home. They must think I’d lost the plot entirely. God alone knew what they’d tell the Kremlin about me. I couldn’t give a flying monkey’s, because it seemed unlikely I’d ever see them or Hereford again. For the time being my whole world was bounded by the need to reach the Beechcraft first.

Jason drove brilliantly, stopping to investigate every time we saw a black shadow that might conceal a deep hole, but keeping up a good pace overall. His navigation was amazing. The GPS, slotted into its cradle on the dash and framed by a shroud round its little screen, didn’t seem to interest him. As far as I could tell, he never looked at its wavering green arrow, which constantly gave us our heading; rather, he kept glancing up at the sky. However it worked, his system enabled him to hold a course with incredible accuracy; when we stopped to change over just after 2100, the magic box showed that we’d covered twenty-eight kilometres, and that Waypoint Seven was only fifty ahead.

The night air was completely still, and in the silence of our break we heard hyenas howling away to the north. Then I took over and drove up into an area with more trees, until we hit on an overgrown dirt road running nearly north and south. Its pale line showed clearly in the moonlight, and Jason indicated that I should follow it, even though its direction was far from ideal. I couldn’t make out whether he’d known about the track beforehand, or whether our finding it was a fluke, but I turned on to it, and for a while enjoyed the relief of being on a relatively smooth surface.

The further we drove to the north, the more sharply the arrow on the GPS swung to our right, until it was pointing at right angles to our line of advance. In twenty minutes the distance to target remained exactly the same, and I was on the point of remonstrating when Jason stood up, holding on to the grips on the dash, and told me to go slow. For a few seconds I crawled on in second, then he pointed sharply to the right, and said, ‘Road to river.’

We were at a T junction — although without Jason, I’d never have known it. Even when he told me to turn, I could scarcely make out any opening between walls of bush, but when I pushed the nose of the pinkie into a gap, the vegetation parted, and a moment later we were rolling along a smooth pathway, with the vehicle’s belly-plate scratching over grass and scrub.

The river took me by surprise. No dramatic valley opened out ahead; we just kept going on the level until suddenly we were on the bank, with fast-moving water glittering in the moonlight ahead of us as it flowed from left to right. The sight sent a spurt of adrenalin round my system as I tried to estimate the width of the stream. Eighty metres? A hundred?

‘Jesus!’ I went. ‘Where’s the pontoon, Jason?’

‘No pontoon, sah. Now dry season, water very shallow.’

‘How shallow?’

‘So much.’ He held his hands a foot apart. ‘It is sand river,’ he added, as if that would reassure me. ‘Sand on bottom.’

‘Crocs?’

‘No crocs, sah.’

‘Hippos?’

‘Hippos gone to big river for dry season.’

‘You’d better be right.’

‘I walk first.’

Already he had taken off his boots. Leaving them on the seat, he got out and strode down the bank ahead of me, into the stream. At once the water was up to his knees, deeper than he’d indicated. I waited till he was four or five metres out before rolling the pinkie forward in first and easing it into the river.

The stream was surprisingly fast. Even though the tyres were on the bottom, I could feel the current lifting and tugging at the vehicle, pushing it bodily to the right. Moonlight flashed and glanced and glinted off the eddying surface, with disorientating effect. My surroundings were suddenly so mobile that I found it impossible to judge speed or distance.

Jason moved steadily ahead, sometimes ankle-deep, sometimes in as far as mid-thigh. Water invaded the floor of the pinkie, but I knew the air intake was level with the top of the engine, and I wasn’t worried. Twice Jason stopped when he came to deeper holes. Each time he moved crabwise upstream to go round them, and I followed him, three or four metres behind.

Everything went fine until we were within twenty metres of the far bank. Then I felt the wheels starting to judder. Without any guidance from me the pinkie slewed round until it was facing straight upstream, and came to a halt with water surging past either front mudguard. I gunned the engine furiously: no result. The same in reverse. Even with the current helping, the vehicle wouldn’t move backwards. We’d run into a patch of softer sand and bellied.

‘Shit!’ I went. ‘Shit! Shit!’

At my shouts, Jason turned and waded back alongside.

‘Have to winch it,’ I said. ‘I need to keep the engine running fast, to stop water coming up the exhaust. D’you know how to release the cable?’

‘Yassir,’ he went.

Round the front of the vehicle he plunged his arms into the water, feeling for the catch. I felt a prick, sitting there in the dry as he waded off with the shackle in his hands. Luckily, there were trees growing on the far bank, and when Jason went ashore he disappeared among them, swallowed by the moon shadows. I waited till a call came over the water, then engaged the winch, hauled the steering wheel over to the right, in the direction of the bank, and gunned the engine. The cable juddered and jumped on the drum as tension came on it. Inch by inch the vehicle rotated. Then the tyres again got a grip and hauled it forward. In a couple of minutes I reached the bank.

Beyond the river the track continued eastwards for a couple of kilometres, then turned away to the north. By then the GPS was giving a course to target of ninety-eight degrees, south of east, and a distance to target of twenty-three kilometres.

‘We can’t afford to head any further north,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to go straight for it.’

Jason said nothing, but threw out an arm, again on precisely the right heading.

On we went, following the green arrow, climbing gently now. We were back in mopane scrub. Hundreds of slender saplings bristled up all round us, black in the moonlight, but they were growing well apart, and it was easy to weave between them. I remembered Joss telling me that areas like this had been destroyed by elephants when the population was excessive. Over-browsing had killed off huge tracts of forest. But that was before the civil war. Now that most of the elephants had been shot out, the trees were re-establishing themselves.

The ground was hard and bare and scattered with loose stones. Several times a pebble was squeezed out from under one of the tyres and flew into a larger piece of rock with a sharp crack. Again and again a smell of soot told us that we were crossing areas where fires had swept through the scrub, and at one point, as we cleared a low ridge, we saw flames on the skyline far off to our left. After that the terrain kept rising.

‘Eh, Jason,’ I went. ‘Are we on the back of the Totani Hills already?’

‘Yassir. These the hills. Broken aircraft other side.’

I felt a surge of excitement. We were closing in on the target. I was pretty certain we’d have to complete the last few kilometres of the trip on foot; remembering how steep the ground was on the north side of the range — all those rocky ledges — I reckoned it would be impossible to drive over the ridge. In any case, it would be safer to leave the pinkie on the south face of the ridge and tab over. That way, we could creep down on the site from above in a silent approach.

By 0230 the GPS was giving us a distance to target of only seventeen kilometres. With three hours to go before first light, we had time in hand. All the same, we didn’t hang about. Having changed places, we carried straight on, with Jason driving.

Fifteen minutes later, he gave a sudden exclamation. The pinkie was veering off to the right, downhill, and when he heaved on the steering wheel, trying to straighten up, it kept going.

‘Puncture?’ I went.

‘Yassir.’

‘Stop, then.’

I jumped out. Sure enough, the tyre was flat and the wheel-rim had buried itself in gravel.

‘Grab the jack,’ I told him. ‘On the bulkhead between front and back seats. The brace is there too, in the clips. I’ll get the spare.’

The spare wheel was held in place by a jumbo-sized wing-nut. I’d just started to turn it when I put a hand on the tyre itself and with a jolt realised that it, too, was flat. Obviously the lads had had a puncture earlier, and had had no chance to repair it.

‘Jason!’ I called. ‘Stop. Bin that. This one’s down as well. We’re fucked. It’s feet or nothing now.’

All at once, from being ahead of the clock, we were under pressure. I was determined to be on target at first light. Fifteen kilometres to go, and less than three hours in which to cover them. Before we started, I had to get the coordinates of our position, so that we’d be able to find the vehicle again. The wait for satellites was agonising, but in fact three came up pretty fast, and I pushed the button to save the figures as Waypoint Eleven.

Then, rapidly, we stowed essentials into belt-kits and Bergens: GPS and spare batteries, satcom, ammunition, explosive, det cord, food, water bottles, mozzie nets, torches. My final act was to pull out the ignition key and hide it under a flat stone a few metres away.

‘See that?’ I said. ‘If either of us ever comes back here, that’s where it will be.’

With that we set off uphill, walking hard across the contours as the lie of the land became steadily steeper. Thin as he was, Jason moved easily under his loaded pack. He was as wiry and tough as anyone I’d ever seen.

Somehow, the problem of getting out of there, of returning to civilisation, didn’t worry me. I was so hell-bent on nailing Muende and Inge that nothing else seemed to matter. At the back of my mind was the fact that I had the satcom, and could always call for help if I had to; but the urgency of the task in hand stopped me pursuing the idea of exfiltration very far.

We were coming off the ridge when first light began to break in the sky ahead of us. At ground level the dark was still too intense for any landmark to be visible, but as soon as we started down over that series of ledges, the terrain felt familiar, even though we were approaching the site from the opposite direction. When the GPS began giving us four hundred metres to target, I put it away so that I could concentrate on eyeballing the slope ahead.

I knew the remains of the Beechcraft were lying in one of the hollows beneath us. The more I’d thought things over during the night, the more I’d convinced myself that we were going to find Muende and the woman bashaed up on the site. I just felt sure they’d reached the place as dark was falling, and made a camp beside the wreck. The danger was that we’d come on them suddenly, with our heads showing over the skyline, so we moved down inches at a time. As I’d expected, Jason was excellent at stalking: his feet made no sound, and his eyes never stopped ranging about.

In the end, it was the smell that told us we’d reached journey’s end. Jason, a step ahead of me, turned his head, pointedly holding his nose between thumb and forefinger. Then I got it: a stench of rotting meat foul enough to make my gorge rise. When he held out a hand, indicating to our right, I just made out the hunched form of a hyena skulking away up the hill.

The light was still grey and thick when I eased my head round a rock and peeped over into the hollow, fifty metres below. There was the wreck, just as I remembered it. I was seeing it from above rather than below, but everything corresponded to the images in my mind: the broken fuselage, upside-down, with its nose high off the ground, the crumpled tail fin, the skeletal, blackened wings with the left tip ripped away, the scorched grass. The sight brought back a searing memory of Whinger on fire. I fought it down and continued to search.

The only pieces missing from the picture were the bodies of the South Africans. They’d been moved. No — they’d been torn apart. In the growing light I made out a scatter of bones and, further off, a heap of what had been sand-coloured clothes. That was the source of the stench. The bundle contained the last small remnant of a body, no doubt now heaving with maggots.

For five minutes I stood still, watching for any movement in the hollow or on the hillside below. The eastern horizon was flaring crimson. Then, I whispered, ‘Stay here and cover me while I take a closer look.’ Jason nodded, and settled his 203 over a rock.

I was just starting to move when a noise brought me to a halt. It was very faint — a soft, distant pop — but definitely not natural.

‘That sounded like a shot,’ I said. ‘A long way off, but a shot all the same.’

Jason didn’t answer. After another wait, I set off. Carefully picking my way down, I came out into the hollow — and part of my fantasy died. Nobody could have bashaed up there: the smell of death was suffocating. Trying to ignore it, I moved towards the front of the plane.

I stopped short. Under the nose cone was a pile of rocks. With horrible certainty I knew they hadn’t been there before; somebody had collected them and piled them to a height of half a metre to make a platform, so that he or she could reach up to the front of the fuselage. I looked up. Sure enough, the small door in the side of the nose, giving access to the luggage compartment, was slightly open. I slipped off my Bergen, stood on the rock pile, reached up, pulled myself up on my hands and looked in. The small, white-walled compartment was empty.

Bastards! They’d beaten us to it. Disappointment and anger crashed down on me like a ton of lead. All the fantastic effort we’d made, only to reach the site too late.

I looked up towards Jason and waved at him to come down. In a few seconds, he was beside me.

‘They’ve been already,’ I said, quietly. ‘That pile of stones wasn’t there before. They built it so they could reach up high enough.’

Jason said nothing, but dropped into a squat and studied the ground intently, first round the stones, then in a wider circle. I moved off and got behind a rock that commanded the immediate area. As I leant on it, feeling knackered, the sun burst over the horizon with its usual flamboyance and flooded the hillside with light. My mind flew to Genesis and his final utterance.

Presently, Jason moved up to me, and said, ‘Three persons come.’

‘Three?’

‘Yassir. Two mens, one woman. Woman with bad foot.’

I felt the hair on my neck bristling. The woman with the bad foot was Inge, presumably with Muende. But who was the second man?

‘How can you tell?’ I asked.

Leading me, he pointed at a faint mark in a patch of dust. ‘This woman foot. Left side, turning in.’ With his hand he demonstrated a twisted ankle. Then he moved on and showed me two other marks, one in some grass, one among pebbles, both almost invisible. ‘One man here, one here.’

‘When were they here? Yesterday?’

‘No sah. In the night-time.’

‘Just now?’

‘Yassir.’

‘Jesus! Let’s get after them. They must have gone down. And listen, Jason.’

‘Yassir?’

‘If we catch up with them, we’re going to drop all three. Okay?’

‘Sure, sure!’

That was the most enthusiastic remark I’d ever heard him make.