The Watchman

Forty-Five

I sat and watched while everything went quiet. What Vale had just asked me to do was a hell of a thing. But I wasn’t surprised. Asking for his own people to be taken out by a friendly bullet rather than the blade of a terrorist group would not have come easy to him. No commanding officer likes to be in that position.

The fact was, I’d been thinking along the same lines. If I couldn’t get Pryce and Tober out in one piece, the least I could do was to take the initiative away from Musa; unable to get his sick piece of propaganda, it would at least snatch a part of his plans out of his reach.

I gathered together what I needed. Waiting for developments was no longer an option; I had to take the offensive while I still could. And from what Vale had said, help was too far off to do any good. Musa was firing up his men to a fever pitch, no doubt with tales of honour and revenge and a strike against the infidels, with great rewards in heaven awaiting those who assisted him. Once he got them to a certain point, there would be no going back.

I had no doubt now that this must have been his plan all along. The offer through Xasan of negotiations for the release of hostages had been an elaborate ploy. He might not have known that two of the hostages he was already holding were UN personnel, but he knew well enough the value of luring in two members of a top western intelligence agency, one of them a woman, to use as propaganda material. And the extreme nature of the demand had worked; it had played Moresby and his colleagues into thinking Musa was some kind of desperate paranoid, so who should be surprised?

With Musa and Xasan gone, the guards had soon got tired of patrolling and settled down together at the side of the villa. That was fine by me. Laziness was good. I slipped out of my hide, this time taking the AK and the Vektor, with the C-4 strips and triggers in my backpack and the detonators in my pocket. I was loaded down more than I liked, but I’d coped with heavier supplies before. Right now I needed firepower in case things got sticky and I got cut off from my hide.

I by-passed the building by a wide margin and headed for the boxes on the beach. I got to them without seeing any guards and set about helping myself to more supplies.

I assembled two of the explosive packs and placed them under the boxes, then moved out and placed two more halfway down the beach under some old netting and cork floats. The charges were bigger than I needed, but I was looking for as big a bang as I could get. I wasn’t aiming for wholesale slaughter, but to disorientate.

I still had the three packs I’d taken first time round, and these I’d reduced in size. I grabbed three more detonators and triggers and added them to my backpack for later.

Next I made my way to the skiffs. These were a problem; they offered a means of escape, but also a means for Musa and his men to move about — and I wanted to avoid that. But since I couldn’t use them immediately, I had to look on them as a liability.

I tested the direction of the breeze. It was light and heading offshore. I took a risk that it wouldn’t change and opened one of the fuel containers. I splashed some of the contents around the bottom of each skiff and over the engines. The aroma was powerful up this close, but I was hoping none of the guards around the house had a good sense of smell.

The skiffs were too far apart for me to light them all in one go; the moment I showed a flame the game would be up. So I placed a full-size explosive pack in the middle skiff and soaked the sand between it and its neighbours with fuel. I was trusting to luck that the flame from the explosion would move across each side and complete the job.

I threw the empty fuel container aside and jogged back up the beach, and found the track leading towards Dhalib and Kamboni. I picked a point two hundred metres from the villa and laid two more small charges, then made for higher ground above my hide from where I could watch the party. It was too dark to see much detail, but I knew my field of fire was clear, and I was only a short run from the front door of the house. I made sure I had sufficient cover in case of random intruders, then laid out the remote triggers in a row and waited.

I gave it an hour. The few men left in the house would have been left buzzing by Musa’s passionate rhetoric, and I needed them to get it out of their system and go to sleep. The last thing I needed right now was a revved-up sentry with heightened nerves and an itchy trigger finger.

When the time came I selected a remote from the row in front of me. Took a deep breath and pressed the button on the side.

Nothing happened.