The Angels Weep (81 page)

‘She’s alive, but only just—’

‘Thank God, oh thank God,’ Craig whispered, and
Roland studied his face thoughtfully.

‘I didn’t realize that you felt that way,
Sonny.’

‘You never were very perceptive.’ At last Craig
looked up at him defiantly. ‘I loved her from the first
moment I saw her.’

‘All right, then you will want to get these bastards as
much as I do. Open that field, and hurry.’ Roland signalled
and his Scouts moved up quickly and lay along the edge of the
minefield, their weapons pointing forward. Roland turned back to
Craig.

‘Ready?’

Craig nodded.

‘You know the pattern?’

‘You’d better pray I do.’

‘Get in there, Sonny,’ Roland ordered, and Craig
stood up and walked into the minefield and started to work with
the probe and the tape-measure.

Roland contained his impatience for less than five minutes,
then he called, ‘Christ, Sonny, we have two hours of
daylight – how long is this going to take?’

Craig did not even look around. He was stooped like a potato
harvester, probing the earth gently, and the sweat had soaked
through the back of his khaki shirt in a long dark stain.

‘Can’t you hurry it up?’

With all the concentration of a surgeon clamping off an
artery, Craig snipped the piano-wire trip of a Claymore mine, and
then laid the coloured tape on the earth behind him, as he moved
forward a pace. It was their thread through the labyrinth that
Craig was laying.

Craig probed again. He had chosen an unfortunate point to
enter the pattern on an overlap of two separate systems.
Ordinarily he would have retraced his steps along the coloured
tape, and begun again at another point on the perimeter, but that
could cost him precious time, perhaps as much as twenty
minutes.

‘Craig, you are bloody standing still,’ Roland
called. ‘Christ, man, have you lost your nerve?’

Craig flinched at the accusation. He should have checked the
pattern to his left, there should be an AP at a 30-degree angle
from the last one he had found, and a twenty-four-inch gap
between them, if he had correctly read the pattern. To check it
would mean two minutes’ work.

‘Move, damn you, Mellow!’ Roland’s voice
lashed him. ‘Don’t just stand there. Move!’

Craig steeled himself, the chance was three-to-one in his
favour. He stepped forward one pace, and gingerly put his weight
onto his left foot. It was firm. He took another pace, placing
his right foot with the delicacy of a cat stalking a bird, firm
again. Now the left foot, a droplet of sweat fell from his brow
into his eye, flooding it and half-blinding him. He blinked it
away and completed the step. Safe again.

There must be a Claymore mine on his right now. His legs were
trembling, but he lowered himself into a squat. The wire, it
wasn’t there! He had mis-read the pattern. He was blind in
the middle of the field, living on chance. He blinked his eyes
rapidly, and then with a surge of relief he picked up the almost
invisible wire exactly where it should have been. It seemed to
quiver with tension like his own nerves. He reached out with the
side-cutters, and had almost touched the wire when Roland’s
voice spoke just at his shoulder.

‘Don’t waste time—’

Craig started violently and jerked his hand away from the
deadly wire. He looked back. Roland had followed the coloured
tape marker; he had come out into the minefield, and he was down
on one knee with his FN rifle across his thigh only a pace behind
Craig. His face was masked with a thick layer of camouflage
paint, like some primitive warrior from another time, savage and
monstrous.

‘I am going as fast as I dare.’ Craig used his
thumb to squeeze the heavy drops of nervous sweat from his
eyebrows.

‘You aren’t,’ Roland told him flatly.
‘You have been in here almost twenty minutes, and you
haven’t moved twenty paces. It will be dark before we get
through if you chicken it.’

‘Damn you!’ Craig whispered hoarsely.

‘Yes,’ Roland encouraged. ‘Get mad. Get
fighting mad.’

Craig reached forward and snipped the trip-wire. It made a
tiny quivering spring like a guitar string lightly plucked with a
fingernail.

‘That’s it, Sonny. Move!’ Roland’s
voice was at his back, a low monotonous litany.

‘Think of those bastards, Sonny. They are out there,
running like rabid jackals. Think of them getting
away.’

Craig moved forward, taking each pace more firmly.

‘They killed everybody on that Viscount, Craig.
Everybody, men and women and children. Everybody except
her.’ Roland did not use her name. ‘They left her
alive. But when I found her, she couldn’t speak, Sonny. She
could only scream and struggle like a wild animal.’

Craig stopped dead, and looked back. His face was icy
pale.

‘Don’t stop, Sonny. Keep going.’

Craig stooped and probed quickly. The AP was there, exactly
where it should be. He went forward into the corridor with quick
short steps and Roland’s dry cold whisper was in his
ear.

‘They had raped her, Sonny, all of them. Her leg was
broken in the crash, but that didn’t stop them. They got on
top of her, like rutting animals one after the other.’

Craig found himself running forward up the invisible corridor,
merely counting his paces, not using the tape-measure to check
the length of it, not using the compass to measure the angle of
the turn.

At the end he fell flat and stabbed frantically into the earth
with the probe, but Roland’s voice was there behind
him.

‘When they had all finished, they started again,’
he whispered. ‘But this time they rolled her over and
sodomized her, Sonny—’

Craig heard himself sob with each stroke of the probe. He hit
the casing of a mine lying just under the surface, and the force
of the blow jarred his arm. He dropped the probe and scratched
with his fingers into the earth, exposing the circular top of the
AP mine. It was the size of one of those old-fashioned tins of
fifty Players Navy Cut cigarettes. Craig lifted it out of its
cavity, set it aside and went forward, but Roland’s whisper
followed relentlessly.

‘One after the other they did it to her, Sonny, all
except the last one. He couldn’t manage it twice, so he
took his bayonet and pushed that up her instead.’

‘Stop it, Roly! For Chrissake, stop it!’

‘You say you love her, Sonny – then hurry, for her
sake, hurry!’

Craig found the second AP mine and plucked it from the earth,
he hurled it away from him down the length of the minefield and
it bounced and rolled like a rubber ball before disappearing into
a clump of grass. It did not explode. Craig clawed his way
forward, stabbing the probe ferociously as though into the heart
of one of them, and he found the third mine, the last one in the
ninety-degree corner of the corridor.

It was open all the way to the opposite perimeter of the
minefield, where there would be two Claymore trip-wires. Craig
jumped to his feet and ran down the corridor, with violent death
only inches on each side of his flying feet. He was almost
blinded by his own tears, and he sobbed in time to his run. He
reached the end of the corridor and stopped. Only the trip-wires
now, only the trip-wires of the Claymores and they would be
through the
cordon sanitaire
.

‘Well done, Sonny,’ Roland’s voice close
behind, ‘well done, you’ve got us through.’

Craig changed the side-cutters into his right hand and took
one step more. He felt it move under the sole of his right foot,
the almost infinitesimal give, as though he had stepped on a
subterranean mole-run and it had collapsed.

‘It shouldn’t have been there,’ he thought
despairingly, and time seemed to be suspended.

He heard the click of the primer. It sounded like the release
of a camera-shutter, but muted by the thin layer of sand over
it.

‘The wild one,’ he thought, and still time was
frozen. He had time to think. ‘It’s the wild one in
the pattern.’ And nothing happened, just that click. He
felt a spring of hope. ‘It’s dud, it’s a
misfire.’ He was going to get away with it.

Then the mine exploded under his right foot. It felt as though
someone had hit him with a full swing of a crow-bar under the
sole. There was no pain, just that stunning slam of shock into
his foot, driven up his spine until his jaws clashed and he felt
his tongue split between his teeth, bitten clean through.

No pain, just the deafening implosion of the shockwave into
his eardrums, as though somebody had held a double-barrelled
shotgun close to his head and fired both barrels together.

No pain, just the blinding rush of dust and smoke past his
face, and then he was flung into the air as though he were the
plaything of a callous giant, and he came down again on his
belly. The wind driven from his lungs, so he wheezed for breath,
his mouth filled with blood from his bitten tongue. His eyes were
stinging from flying grit and smoke. He wiped them clear and
Roland’s face was in front of his, hazy and wavering like a
heat mirage. Roland’s lips were moving, but Craig could not
hear the words. His ears buzzed viciously from the blast.

‘It’s all right, Roly,’ he said, and his own
voice was almost lost in the singing memory of the explosion.
‘I’m all right,’ Craig repeated.

He pushed himself up and rolled into a sitting position. His
left leg stuck straight out ahead of him, the inside of the calf
was lacerated and discoloured purple black from the explosion,
and blood oozed from out of the opening of his short khaki pants,
shrapnel must have flown up into his buttocks and lower belly,
but the velskoen was still on his left foot. He tried to move his
foot and it responded immediately, waggling at him
reassuringly.

But there was something wrong. He was dazed and groggy, his
ears still dinning, yet through it he realized there was
something dreadfully wrong – and then gradually it dawned
on him.

There was no right leg, just the short fat stump of it
sticking out of the leg of his pants. The heat of the explosion
had cauterized the raw end of the stump, and seared it white, the
dead bloodless white of frostbite. He stared at it, and knew it
was a trick of his eyesight, because he could
feel
his leg
was still there. He tried to move the missing foot, and he
felt
it move, but there was nothing there.

‘Roly.’ Even through the din in his ears, he heard
the high hysterical tone of his own voice. ‘Roly, my leg.
Oh God, my leg! It’s gone!’

Then at last the blood came, bursting through the heat-seared
flesh in bright arterial spurts.

‘Roly, help me!’

Roland stepped over him, squatting with a foot on each side of
Craig’s body, his back to Craig, screening him from his own
mutilated lower body. Roland unrolled the canvas wallet that
contained his field medical kit, and strapped the tourniquet from
it around the stump. The haemorrhage shrivelled and he bound the
field-dressing over the stump. He worked quickly, with the
dexterity of practice and experience, and the second that he
finished, he swivelled to look into Craig’s pale dusty
sweat-streaked face.

‘Sonny, the Claymores. Can you do the Claymores? For her
sake, Sonny, try!’

Craig stared at him. ‘Sonny – for Janine,’
Roland whispered, and pulled him up into a sitting position.
‘Try! For her sake, try!’

‘Side-cutters!’ Craig mumbled, staring with great
hurt eyes at the blood-soaked turban that wrapped his stump.
‘Find my side-cutters!’

Roland pressed the tool into his hand.

‘Turn me onto my belly,’ Craig said.

Roland rolled him carefully, and Craig began to slide himself
forward; walking his elbows in the torn dusty earth, he dragged
his one remaining leg over the shallow crater left by the
exploding AP mine, and then stopped and reached forward. There
was the guitar twang, as the first trip-wire parted in the jaws
of the cutter, and, laboriously as a maimed insect squashed under
a gardener’s heel, Craig dragged himself onto the very edge
of the minefield. For the last time he reached out. His hand was
shaking wildly, and he seized his own wrist with his left hand to
steady it; sobbing with the effort he guided the open jaws of the
cutter over the hair-thin steel wire, and bore down. It went with
a ping, and Craig dropped the tool.

‘Okay, it’s open,’ he sobbed, and Roland
pulled the lanyard out of the vee of his shirt, and lifted the
whistle to his lips. He blew a single crisp blast, and pumped his
arm over his head.

‘Let’s go!’

The Scouts came through the minefield at a run, keeping their
rigid ten-pace separation, following the zigzag of the tape that
Craig had laid down the corridor to guide them. As each one of
them came to where Craig still lay on his belly, they jumped
lightly over his back and melted away into the open bush, beyond
the minefield, spreading out into their running formation. Roland
lingered a second longer at Craig’s side.

‘I can’t spare anyone to stay with you,
Sonny.’ He laid the medical kit beside his head.
‘There is morphine for when it gets too bad.’

He laid something else beside the medical kit. It was a
hand-grenade. ‘The terrs may get to you before our boys do.
Don’t let them take you. A grenade is messy, but
effective.’ Then Roland leaned forward and kissed Craig on
the forehead. ‘Bless you, Sonny!’ he said, and then
he was on his feet going forward again at a run. Within seconds,
the thick riverine Zambezi bush had swallowed him, and slowly
Craig lowered his face into the crook of his arm.

Then, at last, the pain came at him like a ravening lion.

C
ommissar
Tungata Zebiwe crouched in the bottom of the slit trench, and
listened to the husky voice speaking from the portable radio.

‘They are through the minefield, coming down to the
river.’