Tenth Man Down

SEVENTEEN

We went forward to the next little ridge, scanning down. By then the sun was fully up, shining right in our faces, making it difficult to see.

‘That’s where the rest of you waited while we came to investigate the crash,’ I said, indicating the stand of trees under which Alpha had parked.

Jason nodded, but he seemed disinclined to head that way. I stood still, on the lookout, while he made a few casts downhill. He came back frowning and moved off in the opposite direction, going left-handed along the contour. Almost at once he looked back with a grin and beckoned me forward.

Once again, I could scarcely make out the evidence he’d spotted, but he was confident. ‘All come this way.’ He pointed ahead decisively. He was speaking in a very low voice, as if he thought our quarry was close in front.

Soon I realised how phenomenally sharp his eyes must be. He would point to a single stalk of grass bent over, the faintest impression in dry gravel, and read a whole story from it. His method was basically the same as mine, but his perception was on a different level. It was as if he could see everything through a magnifying glass — and, of course, he’d been practising every day of his life.

Now, with the early sun on our backs, the ground ahead was brilliantly illuminated. My instinct was to hustle on and overtake the party ahead of us. The trouble was, our forward visibility was limited by the curve of the hill bending away from us, and by the constant rock ledges, dropping down; if we hurried, we might lose the trail or, worse, come on the others unexpectedly. Our paramount need was to move so stealthily that we took them by surprise. If we managed that, we’d catch them with the diamond on them, whereas if they got any warning, they might have time to drop it, throw it into the bush or conceal it under a rock.

Jason was advancing in small spurts: he’d gaze at the ground, go forward a few metres, pause and gaze again. Then he stopped altogether. His body stiffened. Looking ahead intently, he unshipped his 203 and brought it to bear. I followed his gaze and caught a flicker of movement beside a shrub, fifty metres ahead. It hadn’t been grass waving — there wasn’t a breath of wind.

We stood still, watching. Another movement, uphill to the left. Something came up above a smooth rock. Pointed ears, then a whole head, looking back at us. Another hyena, or the same one circled back. It watched us for a few moments, then ducked and disappeared.

Jason lowered his weapon, but still he did not move. Clearly he was puzzled by the scavenger’s behaviour. When nothing else stirred, he at last went forward again. Fifty metres on, part of the mystery was explained. In a depression among the rocks lay a body: a black soldier, face down, wearing DPMs, with an AK47 on the ground beside him.

For fully a minute Jason kept still. From my position beside him I could see his eyes flickering back and forth as he studied our immediate surroundings, searching, calculating possibilities. Only when he felt secure did he go down to the casualty.

One glance was enough to tell us what had happened. The man had been shot between the shoulderblades, point-blank. The muzzle of the weapon that killed him had been pressed right against his back: around the bullet hole in his tunic scorch marks radiated. At our approach flies rose in a cloud from the wound, but the body was still warm. When we turned it over, we saw the blood from the exit wound had hardly started to congeal.

‘How long?’ I asked.

‘One hour,’ went Jason. ‘Maybe less.’

‘That was the shot I heard.’

He nodded. The man looked young — barely twenty — and fit, with a lean face and just the shadow of a moustache. Obviously a squaddie. But why had he been murdered out here?

My imagination, working overtime, rapidly constructed a scenario. Muende had brought this guy along as a bodyguard, maybe because he understood how to use a GPS. Perhaps this was the very guy who’d nicked my GPS off me at the convent, and he’d been forced into the expedition as a penance. Anyway, once they’d got the diamond, Muende decided to dispense with him, to stop him talking. Or maybe he became scared that his bodyguard might turn on him and the woman and murder both of them, to get the big rock for himself. Whatever the precise motivation, the fact that the others had left the AK47 lying by the body showed they themselves were well armed, and needed no more weapons.

All this I communicated to Jason in short takes. Several times he nodded agreement. As I talked, a peculiar look came into his eyes as his normal calm gaze turned into a glare of hatred or anger.

We left the body and rifle where they were and moved on. After four or five steps Jason bent down and retrieved something from the grass — an empty 9mm cartridge case ejected from a pistol or a sub-machine gun. Even I could tell that the smell of cordite coming out of it was absolutely fresh.

The line Jason was following began to take us down across the slope and towards the trees. Now we could look out from the side of the hill over the flatter terrain below, but the scattered forest covered quite a large proportion of the ground and provided any number of hiding places.

We moved on yet again. Then the changing perspective abruptly revealed something shiny, something man-made, showing through a gap in the canopy of a sausage tree. I touched Jason’s shoulder and pointed. At once he sank down on his haunches.

‘Car,’ he said, quietly.

The shiny object was the windscreen of a vehicle. The leaves on the tree were so still that we had to keep going forward, a few metres at a time, before we lined up on an opening that allowed us to see more of it. The fifth or sixth short advance revealed the outlines of a Gaz jeep.

‘That’s them,’ I whispered.

Looking back below us, I saw that if we withdrew out of sight and dropped down, we’d be able to close in on the vehicle unseen from behind a gravelly mound that lay below us. I started to whisper my plan to Jason, but I’d hardly started when he nodded vigorously, and I knew he’d had the same idea.

Ten minutes later we crept up the back of the mound, raised our heads with infinite caution, and peered round the loose stones on the top. The jeep was rear end-on to us. It had a canvas top, but the back was rolled up so that we could see straight through it, over the front seats and out through the windscreen. There was no human in it or near it.

For five minutes we lay and watched. As the seconds ticked by, I became possessed by the feeling that somebody was watching us from the clumps of trees and bush round about. I convinced myself the jeep had been left there as a decoy or booby-trap, that if we approached it the enemy would open fire on us from somewhere close, or it would blow up.

‘D’you think there’s anyone around?’ I whispered.

Jason shook his head. ‘People gone, sah.’

Maybe my own feeling was sheer imagination. By then I’d learned to respect Jason’s intuition. I knew he could notice things and pick up vibes that passed me by. So I didn’t ask, ‘How d’you know?’ Instead, I said quietly, ‘Okay, then. Cover me while I go forward.’

There was no point in moving slowly now. I hustled into the open quite fast, 203 at the ready, ran to the vehicle, dropped down beside it. Lying there, I could see under its belly. As I looked out through the opening framed by the front wheels, I realised something was out of place: a slender rod, coming down to the ground at an angle. The track-rod was broken. The jeep’s steering was knackered. It had been abandoned.

I jumped up. Sure enough, the key was in the dash. I beckoned Jason forward and showed him what I’d found. We opened the bonnet and laid hands on the engine. Its temperature was hardly higher than that of the air.

‘This happened on their way in,’ I said. ‘In the early hours of the morning. They walked from here, and now they’re walking out.’

We made a quick check of the vehicle, but there was nothing in it to give a clue as to the nature of its crew. The occupants had taken whatever kit they had with them.

‘Where can they be heading?’ I asked.

Jason spread his hands.

‘No town anywhere near? No villages?’

He shook his head. ‘Next place is Narombo — small town.’

‘How far’s that?’

‘Four day good walker. Sick woman six, seven day.’

‘They’ll never make that. Muende can’t walk that far. He’s fat as butter.’

For the first time in days Jason gave a little laugh. I grinned back, and pulled a water-bottle out of my belt-kit. We were going to have to watch it with our water; expecting a short, sharp contact, I hadn’t brought very much.

‘They won’t walk all day,’ I said. ‘They’ll stop soon and sit out the midday heat. We’ll catch up with them then.’

The diversion caused by the vehicle cost us dearly. By the time we’d climbed back up the hill, the trail had gone cool, almost cold. Bent stalks of grass had straightened, and the dew had long since burnt off. Even Jason had a job to detect traces, and he made frequent moves that turned out to be false: he’d go ahead on a speculative quest while I stood still to mark the end of the sure route, then come back and cast about again.

I kept thinking, Muende must have been desperate, to come out here with a lone woman, one jeep and no back-up, and then to shoot his only able-bodied accomplice. Once again I saw what damage colossal wealth, or even the promise of it, does to you. It stops you trusting anybody else, so that you immediately become isolated and get forced into crazy actions.

By 1100 the heat was ferocious. The sun was beating straight down on us, and tsetse flies were bombing out of every bush we passed. Lines of sweat were running down Jason’s scrawny neck from behind his ears, and he was stinking like cat’s piss. High above us enormous birds had begun to ride the thermals, swinging in wide, wide circles. When I pointed up at them and suggested, ‘Eagles?’, Jason said, ‘Vultures. White-headed vultures.’ Any minute now, I thought, they’ll be plummeting on to the fresh corpse behind us.

I happened to have looked at Andy’s watch a moment earlier, so I know it was 1124 when, in the middle of quite a fast advance, my tracker stopped short and raised his right hand with index finger extended to our right front.

‘Go-away bird,’ he said, softly.

I had to listen for several seconds before I heard it. Then I picked up the raucous go-wee, go-wee of a grey lourie scolding some interloper who had trespassed into its territory.

‘Has it seen us?’ I whispered.

Jason shook his head. ‘Too far. Other persons.’

That bird was a star. For the next half hour, as we worked our way steadily forward, it kept calling. Every now and then it moved to a different tree, but it hung around the same area, persistently giving out its mocking cry. We saw it once — a flash of pale grey, with a spiky tuft on the back of its head, as it looped from one perch to another — and at the end we knew there was a chance it had started to mob us as well. But by then it had done a brilliant job, leading us to a particular spot and putting us on maximum alert.

It was Jason who saw the pair first. They were sitting on the ground in an ebony grove, their backs against a big tree, looking utterly knackered. Inge had her head thrown back, resting against the trunk; Muende’s was hanging down, chin on chest, as if he were asleep. His peculiar, yellowish hair was unmistakable. Beside each of them was an open haversack.

The sight sent a huge surge of adrenalin round my system, part excitement, part hatred of the pair who had murdered Whinger. We could easily have dropped both of them from where we stood, behind some bushes sixty metres off. They had no clue that anyone was near them, and there was no way we could have missed. A couple of bursts from the 203s, and that would have been that. But it would also have been too easy. Before I killed them, I wanted to look in their faces and let them see me. I wanted to tell them what I thought of them. I wanted them to know that retribution had caught up with them and run them down. So I breathed ‘This way’ to Jason, and we moved silently round to our left until we were behind them, hidden by the trunk of their own tree. Then we walked straight in. Whatever else happened, I was going to make them shit themselves with fright.

Twenty metres short of the tree, I motioned Jason to stay put and cover me. I eased myself out of the straps of my Bergen and lowered it gently to the ground. Then I crept forward alone with my 203 at the ready. The lourie was still calling away to our right front. Apart from that there was no sound.

I came to within four metres of the tree. Three. It may have been a slight scuffle that my boot made on a dry leaf. It may have been a sixth sense of danger. Whatever triggered her reflex, Inge suddenly leapt into view, going to my left with amazing agility. Already she was facing my way, and there was a pistol in her right hand.

Before she could bring it to bear, before I could raise my own rifle, a three-round burst hammered out behind me. The rounds cracked like thunderbolts as they passed my ear and put the woman flat on her back. For a moment she writhed about, struggling to get up, but the pistol had fallen from her hand and I could see she was dying.

I stood braced, with the rifle in my hands, finger on the trigger, ready for Muende to appear. When he didn’t, I yelled, ‘Come out!’

The trunk of the ebony was nearly a metre thick, and although I knew he was there, about ten feet from me, I couldn’t see any part of him. Glancing at Inge, I saw she’d stopped moving.

I took a step to my right, then another. After the second, I could see boots — black, army-type boots with the heels together, toes pointing downwards. The guy was stretched out on his front, grovelling into the earth. Two more steps, and his whole body was in view. He was wearing pale-coloured, lightweight DPMs, and had his face pressed into a groove between two large roots, as though he was trying to shut out the danger. His forehead was against the base of the trunk, hands clasped on top of his head. There was a sub-machine gun lying on the ground beside him, but it was out of his reach.

I went forward and kicked him in the ribs. ‘On your feet, cunt!’ I shouted.

His eyes were rolling as he looked up at me. For a few seconds he seemed paralysed by fear. Then, slowly, he hauled himself up and stood shaking with his back against the tree.

‘All right, Muende,’ I went. ‘You know who I am.’

He ran his tongue round his lips as he shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen you in my life.’

‘You fucking have. It was me you had beaten up the other night. The night you tortured my mate and ate his liver. You may have been pissed, but you can’t have forgotten.’

As comprehension dawned, the guy’s terror increased. He began to shake so violently that drops of sweat went flying in all directions off his forehead.

‘What do you want?’

‘The diamond. That’s all.’

‘What diamond?’

‘The one you’ve just recovered from the plane.’

‘Look,’ he said, ‘take it easy. There’s some mistake here.’

He sounded pure American, and for a few moments his easy natural authority started to assert itself. But I wasn’t in a mood to argue.

I drove the muzzle of the 203 hard into the top of his bulging stomach, stepped back, and said, ‘You’ve got thirty seconds to produce it.’

He doubled forward with a gasp. As he straightened up again, his bloodshot eyes went fromthe barrel of the rifle to my face and back. Then, he said, ‘You win.’

‘Where is it?’

‘On my belt.’

I looked at his midriff and saw a pouch of thick black canvas. It was too small to contain a pistol, the wrong shape for a knife.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Take the belt off and throw it to me. Then get your hands above your head.’

He did as ordered. The belt landed at my feet. I picked it up and withdrew another pace. The pouch was modern, with a Velcro fastener on the flap. With one hand I ripped it open. Inside was a suede leather bag with something hard inside.

It needed teeth as well as fingers to pull out the string round the neck of the bag, but at last I got it open and looked down. There, in the nest of blue suede, sat a lump of what looked like brilliantly flashing glass. Forget pigeon’s eggs, this thing was the size of a chicken’s egg, for God’s sake. The sight of it made my breath catch. I closed the bag by folding the long neck over and rolling it round, then stowed it in my right-hand belt pouch.

Muende’s eyes had followed every movement of the stone, as if it were magnetic. Then, suddenly, he came away from the tree a couple of paces.

‘Stop!’ I yelled.

But he was only trying to buy time. He went down on his knees, with his hands together up in front of him, like he was praying in church.

‘Look!’ he cried, in a high, beseeching voice. ‘You’ve got it! You’re going to be rich for the rest of your life. You don’t ever need to work again.’

I was too fired up to feel embarrassed at this grovelling. I just felt hatred, mixed with contempt. All I spat at him was, ‘So?’

‘Who gave you the diamond? I did! You don’t need to shoot me. It won’t get you anywhere.’

The guy was screaming pitifully. Still I just glared at him. Then, I said, ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to shoot you.’

He didn’t know what I meant. How could he? He couldn’t see what I could see. Jason was silently creeping up on him from behind. But until the last second even I didn’t realise what my trusty henchman was planning.

Suddenly, I saw that in his right hand he was holding aloft his fearsome machete. From a metre behind Muende, he sprang. The blade flashed through dappled sunlight and buried itself — thunk! — in the right-hand side of its victim’s neck. The blow was so violent that it almost severed the head. Blood spurted from the jugular, fountaining on to the ground at my feet. With half a groan the self-styled President of Free Kamanga toppled sideways to the ground. Before his limbs had stopped twitching, Jason swung in a backhanded second strike from the other side and cut through the rest of the neck. The next thing I knew, the head came rolling towards my feet with the eyes still opening and shutting.

I stood rooted, too shocked to speak. Jason was exactly the opposite. He went stomping off round the ebony glade, throwing back his head, letting off triumphant yells, leaping in the air, whirling his machete in fancy passes above his head. His wildness scared me shitless. What if he decided he wanted the diamond for himself?

The headless body kept quivering. I walked away from it and sat down heavily on a fallen log with my back to the scene of the massacre. The first thing I needed was a drink. My hands were shaking as I unscrewed the cap of the water-bottle. I took two big gulps, then steeled myself to save the rest.

It was several minutes before I’d chilled out enough to look at the diamond again, and when I got it in the palm of my hand I began to shake again, from wonder at the sheer size and brilliance of the stone. It didn’t take an expert to see that this was one in a million, worth millions. I stared into its glittering depths half mesmerised. Here in my hand I held a secure future, not only for myself and Tim, but for all the survivors of the team. I thought of the night we’d sat round the fire with Rhino Bakunda, joking about what we’d do if we won the lottery. Well, now Pav would be able to hire Concorde and go screwing in the South Seas, Chalky could buy his yacht, Danny his arms business.

Or would any of that happen? Immediately, I began to think of problems. Number one: in the SAS you’re supposed to hand in any booty that comes your way. Often, with minor gains, the lads ignore the rules, but what would I do with something of such value? Number two: the diamond would have to be cut before it was worth anything. How would I find a cutter or a dealer who could be relied on to keep quiet? Would I get landed with an asset I couldn’t cash in?

Suddenly, a gust of wind got up. I heard it coming, a stir in the ebony grove. Leaves began to flutter, branches swung, and a cool blast of air came swirling past me from behind. In that stifling noonday heat any drop in temperature should have been welcome. But to me it was sinister and full of menace, because I instantly associated it with the night that Phil, Mart and I had stood in front of the witch doctor, when the child had died.

The breeze died away as quickly as it had come. All round me the leaves settled. Except for the go-away bird, which was still calling, stillness returned to the trees. I glanced across to see what Jason was doing. He’d gone down on his knees at the foot of a tree, and appeared to be praying, giving thanks.

I looked back at the great rock. Why had that wind come at the very moment I held it in my hand? Was it a natural phenomenon, caused by the hot air rising somewhere else, and the shape of the grove we were in? A couple of months before I’d have said it was. I’d have believed the timing of it was pure coincidence. Now I wasn’t so sure. What I did know for certain was that I wanted nothing more to do with the diamond. No matter how many millions it might be worth, I knew it would only bring me bad luck. I didn’t even want to look at it any more. Hurriedly, I fumbled it back into the blue bag and drew the neck strings together.

Jason was back on his feet and walking towards me with a big grin on his face. Skirting the bodies, I went to meet him. As we met he put up his right hand, palm forward, and I smacked mine against it — high fives, like footballers celebrating a goal.

‘Fucking great!’ I went. ‘You got ’em.’

‘Yassir! They don’t make no more trouble.’

‘Not for us,’ I said. ‘Not for anyone.’

Flies were already clustering on the fresh blood. Africa would deal with the bodies in short order.

‘Jason,’ I said, holding out the blue bag, ‘you’d better have this.’

He took it in his long, elegant fingers and held it in both hands.

‘Open it,’ I told him. ‘Have a look.’

Once again the diamond blazed in a shaft of sunlight, bright as a halogen lamp, so bright that I had to look away. Jason gave a whistle, and stared in astonishment.

‘Ever seen one like that?’ I asked.

He shook his head.

‘Take it, anyway.’

‘No, sah. It is for you, not me.’ He held the damned thing out towards me.

‘I don’t want it.’ I waved it away. ‘I want you to have it. But be careful. Don’t mention it to anyone. If somebody knows you’ve got it, they’ll kill you for it. Take it to Mulongwe and sell it there, quickly. You’ll be a rich man for the rest of your life — big house, car, television, everything.’

For what seemed a long time, he held it steadily in his fingers, gazing at it. Then he looked up at me, said, ‘Zikomo, sah,’ very gracefully, and slipped it back into the bag.

As he stowed it in a belt-pouch I sensed immediate relief, as if a burden had been lifted from me. At the same time I felt entirely disorientated. I had to think hard to remember where the hell we were, and even harder to dream up some way of getting back to civilisation.

‘So,’ I began. ‘The first thing is to head for the pinkie and mend that puncture. D’you know where it is?’

‘Yassir.’ He made one of his expansive gestures, flinging out a hand and pointing back up the hill. I’d been on the point of digging in my bergen for the GPS, but by then I trusted Jason’s sense of direction implicitly, and was happy to walk on the line he gave.

I never went near the body of the German woman, or even took a close look at it. Like the diamond, she was already part of my past. We just pulled on our Bergens and left the ebony glade to the go-away bird who lived there.

Two hours later we were back at the pinkie. Jason helped mend the punctures in both tyres, and as we worked he explained how, if I skirted the hills to the west, I would pick up another dirt road running northwards. With the wheels back in place, I emptied the last jerrican of diesel into the tank, and by 1500 I was ready to move.

Until the last moment, I assumed Jason was coming with me. He’d given no indication of having any other plan. But when I said, ‘Right, all aboard,’ he replied, ‘I go this way,’ and gestured to the east.

I was taken aback. For one thing, he was an extremely valuable escort. For another, I didn’t like the thought of him alone, on foot, in that hostile environment. But when I asked, ‘Are you sure?’ he simply nodded, and I knew there was no point in arguing.

‘Good luck, then. Got plenty of water?’

He nodded, patting the full bottles in his belt-kit.

‘And thanks for all your help.’ I grinned, holding out my hand.

He took it in a firm grip, and said, with a smile, ‘Zikomo!’ and then ‘Nayenda.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I am walking away.’

I banged him on his bony shoulder, climbed into the driving seat, started up and set off downhill. The last I saw of him, he was striding away over the big rocks.

Three or four hundred metres on, I came out on to a low ridge and stopped. Looking back, I had a long view of the mountainside behind. Jason should have been in sight. He couldn’t have reached the far skyline already. Yet somehow he’d vanished. For three or four minutes I sat watching, expecting him to emerge from a gully or hollow. Yet in all that arid landscape, nothing moved. Africa seemed to have swallowed my faithful companion, and I drove on, knowing I would never see him again.