Recoil (19 page)

The patrols began to file past the women, who were still chanting and dancing. Trancelike, they held up the bowls for each of the boys to dip his hand in then smear the blood over his face. Even the crucifix wearers joined the queue. I didn’t blame them. In this shit-hole, you needed all the help you could get.

I followed Sam to the front, flanked by two GPMG gunners. They’d thrown the link over the top of the weapons so it didn’t get caught in the undergrowth.

I could see lightning in the west. Three or four seconds later thunder rumbled towards us. The sound was almost immediately drowned by what sounded like a chainsaw in the command tents. Jan appeared, a swing-fog in his hands, pumping out anti-mosquito smoke. It smelled a lot like diesel fumes. With any luck, the Rhodesians would choke to death on the stuff.

Sam checked the line, then raised his hand and gave the signal to move out. It was greeted by another roar of approval. They really loved this guy.

Reeking of gun oil, I fell in behind Sam.

I was happy to be on the move. From now, every step I took was one closer to Silky.

10

The track was wide and well worn, but the jungle each side was solid green.

I much preferred primary jungle to this secondary shit. In primary the canopy is much higher and thicker and the sun finds it difficult to penetrate to ground level so there’s a whole lot less vegetation – which means less cover for anyone lying in wait to kick your arse.

I soon developed a searing pain between my shoulder-blades. It had been quite a while since I’d carried anything heavy on my back, but it wasn’t the first time I’d wished someone could invent dehydrated water and weightless rounds. I had two-hundred link for the guns in my pack, and the only way to make it comfortable was to jump on tiptoe every few paces and jolt it higher up my back. To top it all, the heat and humidity were overpowering for someone who wasn’t acclimatized.

We patrolled west for nearly three hours and I checked my compass regularly to get the route into my head. The golden rule in jungle is to trust your compass, no matter what your instincts are telling you when the batteries on your sat nav have run down or the fucking thing just won’t work.

We’d entered DRC a while back, but I only knew that because Sam had said so. There were no signs saying Democratic Republic of Congo Welcomes Careful Drivers – but, then, there were no roads, and the DRC wasn’t a welcoming sort of place.

You could see it easily enough on the faces of the patrol. Heads moved from side to side as if powered by batteries, trying to spot trouble ahead before it spotted us. There had been a bit of gunfire in the distance. It had got the porters spooked, but we couldn’t do anything except crack on, and that was fine by me.

We stopped for ten minutes each hour. The patrol got in all-round defence, making sure there were eyes and weapons covering every arc. The porters would look for any dip in the ground and curl up in it for protection while they took their rest.

Sam had hardly opened his mouth, which I interpreted as ‘Shut the fuck up, I’ve more important things to do right now.’ He checked the watch hanging round his neck and got the patrol up and moving once more as the sun started to lose itself below the horizon. Very soon it was dark.

Sam halted again where the treeline thinned. The rest of us copied. He took the two gunners about ten metres further ahead, and put them on stag at the edge of the canopy. I could see the next phase was going to be an open plain of chest-high brush and grass, with the odd clump of trees. In the far distance – west – I could make out high ground. It was taking the brunt of the lightning, which was heading our way fast. There was almost no gap now between the flashes and the bangs.

I leaned my arse against a tree and eased off my daysack. Sam came up close. ‘This is a twenty-minute rest. There’ll be no more until we’ve crossed the plain and are back in cover.’

Wiping the sweat from my face, I heard the world around me clack, click and buzz once more.

The porters were subdued as they drank from their old plastic bottles. I was hot, out of breath and gagging for fluids. I slapped my face yet again to zap whatever had buzzed in to say hello.

I drank as much as I could before giving myself another dose of Deet. It made my lips numb, but it was pointless trying to rinse the stuff off; the damage was done.

A gust of wind made the trees sway at the edge of the canopy. It wouldn’t be long before the rain was with us. Thank fuck for that.

Sam sparked up his sat nav after shoving it down his shirt to hide the display.

‘We leaving the track?’

‘Not unless we have to.’ He pointed towards the high ground. ‘This is the start of the dodgy bit. Those hills have eyes.’

‘LRA?’

‘Aye.’ He closed down the sat nav again and I passed him my bottle. ‘Standish likes to call them rebels because it glosses over the fact that we’re fighting kids out there.’

Thunder reverberated across the plain, then there was silence. It felt as if the whole world was holding its breath. Two seconds later, the rain beat a tattoo on the trees and the first splashes hit my face. It felt great.

‘Standish using kids – it’s all about money, right?’

Lightning cracked and sizzled, bathing Sam’s face momentarily in brilliant blue light. I’d never seen him look more serious than when he handed me back the bottle. ‘We’ll need just over three thousand bayonets on the ground to do the job correctly. He’s worked out we can get a thousand ten-year-olds for the price of a hundred adults.’ He shook his head wearily. ‘It might keep Standish’s invisible man happy, but it’s sick. Simple as that. That’s why we have to stop it.’

Rain bounced off my head and shoulders and I had to shout to make myself heard as the thunder roared directly overhead: ‘So how would I fit into all this?’

‘You balance things up. Not only that, maybe you get the chance to drop Kony. Remember the team job? Remember what guys like him do and what happens to those poor souls?’

‘All well and good, mate, but what if Standish and his shadows get pissed off and sort things out with a couple of 7.62s?’ I took another couple of swigs, though all I really needed to do was tilt my face to the sky and open my mouth.

He shook his head and the rain flew from his hair. ‘My work is here. The LRA coming south means only two things, both bad. The kids will either be killed or taken and trained up. So, I have to ask myself, what would Jesus do? I know He’d stay and not count the cost. Then He’d keep working on Standish, trying to get him to change.’

I was pretty sure even God couldn’t do that, but I decided now wasn’t the time to say so.

Lightning strobed on Sam’s face as he stared at the high ground. He waited for an answer that wasn’t coming. I wasn’t sure whether he expected me to give it or the Man in charge of the thunder.

The porters got their sacks back on their backs while the two gunners folded their bipods and slung the webbing straps over their right shoulders so the weapons hung horizontally at waist level. The link was then thrown back over the top cover.

Sam went forward.

I jumped up and down a couple of times on tiptoe to get the pack nice and snug on my back, then checked that the safety lever on the right of my AK was fully up before I took the few paces to join them.

PART FIVE

1

We’d been snaking across the open scrubland for an hour, caught in a thunder and lightning show Ozzy Osbourne would have been proud of. The torrential rain never let up, blurring my vision, but our biggest problem was underfoot. The ground had turned into a bog.

The sun would bake the thick, sticky mud dry again by midday, but that was of no help to us now. With a six-inch layer stuck to our boots we slid more than walked. These guys were really earning their Cutty Sark and condoms. Patrolling is hard graft when the mud sucks at your boots, your clothing’s wet and weighs a ton, and when visibility’s down to no more than a few metres and you’re straining your eyeballs to see the enemy before he sees you.

I’d stopped momentarily to make another adjustment to my bergen when the two front guns suddenly opened up. I dropped to my knees, got the AK in the shoulder, flicked safety down to first click – automatic – and squeezed the trigger.

‘Contact! Contact! Contact!’

Bright yellow muzzle flashes speckled the darkness just fifteen metres ahead. Then more, from maybe a hundred, hundred and twenty. It was hard to tell through the rain.

The gunners stood their ground and kept firing from the hip, doing their job, keeping the enemy’s heads down.

Sam had already raced forward, keeping well left of the gunners as they were rocked back on their feet by the recoil. I followed.

He was static in line with the gunners when I caught up with him, weapon in the shoulder, emptying a magazine into the flashes ahead. I stopped left of him. My AK kicked in my shoulder as I loosed off a five-round burst, then another and another, into the muzzle flashes ahead.

Within seconds the volume of our fire stepped up as guys arrived right and left of the gunners – just like in rehearsals.

I squeezed the trigger again. The working parts went forward, but nothing happened. ‘Stoppage!’

The AK had a couple of Achilles’ heels, and this was one of them. I fell to my knees again. It took an eternity to change magazines on these things and I wanted to present as small a target as I could.

I pressed the magazine-release catch at the back of the housing and rocked the mag forwards until it fell out of the front lip and into the mud. Screams of command and fear echoed in the brief moments of darkness between almost continuous bolts of lightning. I could feel pressure waves from both the thunder and the weight of fire. Rain sizzled on the hot barrel.

I grabbed a replacement from my chest harness, jammed the small notch at the top of the mag into the lip at the front of the housing, then rocked the mag until it was fully home and pulled back the cocking handle to force a round into the chamber.

AKs cracked all around me. Incoming rounds thudded into the ground. A string of tracer zinged off a rock and up into the air. Like me, everybody wanted nothing more than to dig the world’s biggest hole and disappear into it, but the sergeant-majors were on top of them and drills were happening quicker and slicker than many Western infantry would have managed.

Sam shouted to his team to form a fire group. We needed to suppress the enemy fire with ours. Whatever Sam wanted to happen next, we still needed to win the qualifying round.

‘Nick! Nick! Nick! On me! On me!
On me!
’

I ran towards his voice and saw Crucial and his group coming up from the rear.

‘Guns up front! Get your guns up front with the fire group!’

While Crucial relayed the order I threw off my bergen and pulled out the link. Sam was screaming at everyone who moved, ‘We’re going left flanking! Left flanking!’

Crucial’s guys were all gathered in, on their knees. He translated, and they immediately dumped their bergens too. Their streaming faces shone in the lightning. They were set in stony resignation: they knew something had to be done or both sides would just sit there and fire at each other until one lot’s ammo ran out. Then they would die.

Crucial grabbed my link and headed towards the fire base. Sam shouted to me, above the rain and gunfire, ‘Platoon attack.’

‘Porters?’

‘Not my problem. We tell ’em to sit tight. If they’re stupid, they’ll run. You don’t have to come forward.’

‘Jesus, Sam, I gotta get to Nuka . . . Let’s get on with it.’

His face hardened, and he stormed off to the left of the fire group, yelling a warning so the guys on the flank knew we were passing. I followed with the rest of the assault group, all of us slipping and stumbling in the mud. Crucial shouted fire control orders. He’d want to make sure they conserved ammunition at the same time as keeping heads down in front of them. That way everyone didn’t just cabbie off all their rounds in the first few seconds.

Our attack was going to be straightforward. It had to be, because of the language problem and lack of comms. Crucial’s fire group needed to keep the enemy’s heads down so we could move up on their left flank to the FAP (final assault position). We’d attack the enemy from there and fight through their positions. Once that kicked off, the fire group would either switch direction or stop altogether so we could avoid getting the good news from our own guys. It was the recipe for a Gordon Ramsay-scale gangfuck, even for well-trained infantry, especially in the dark and rain, but it had to be done. We had to kill all of them before they did the same to us.

I kept close behind Sam, and the rest of the guys kept close behind me. This wasn’t a tactical move, it was all about speed. We moved as fast as we could through the mud towards the FAP. I looked around me. I was among guys I didn’t know but might end up dying alongside.

We drew level with the enemy fire to our right. Rounds from Crucial’s fire group punched into the mud and ricocheted off rocks.

Sam waited a couple of seconds for the next sheet of lightning and signalled for everyone else to stay put, but for me to go with him and recce. I dropped into the mud and crawled beside him. My OGs soon rode down to expose half my arse.