Recoil Read online

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘No thanks needed, son. Do you want to know what happened to the others?’

  ‘No,’ I lied. I’d always wanted to know about the boy.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I know Annabel didn’t make it. Not sure I’m ready to hear the rest.’

  We rounded a bend in the dirt track. ‘OK. Just let me know when you are.’ Sam tapped the wheel. ‘In the meantime, this is us.’

  I could make out a cluster of breezeblock buildings, topped by a couple of antennas and a sat dish. The rest of the skyline was dominated by the massive silhouettes of two four-prop Antonov An12s.

  The Russian version of our C130 Hercules, the An12 had the same shape as most tactical transport aircraft, essentially a huge tube with a ramp at the back. The only real differences were the amount of glass in the nose, which made it look like a Second World War Heinkel bomber, and the pair of 23mm cannon protruding from the rear of the fuselage – it looked like Donald Duck’s bill had been stuck on the aircraft’s arse.

  The rear ramp was down on the nearest. Three or four trucks milled around, loading up what I assumed was the cargo Lex had been waiting for.

  The ageing Antonovs were relics from the bad old Cold War days. They were now dotted around every ex-Communist African country you could name, and a good few you probably couldn’t. As we got closer it was clear that this faded dark green monster had come from Mother Russia: it still had a big red star on the tail fin.

  Sam knew what my next question was going to be and laughed. ‘They look weird, don’t they? Lex got the pair on the cheap. One working,’ he pointed to the second aircraft, at the side of the strip, ‘and that one for spares. Low mileage, one careful lady owner. You know the sort of thing.’

  We drove to the rear of the building and pulled up alongside a black 4x4 Porsche. Sam shook his head. ‘Lex’s penis extension. A bit too flash for me.’ He jumped out. The sun hadn’t cleared the treeline yet and it was still a bit chilly.

  I followed him to the back of the BMW. He lifted the tailgate and pulled out his green daysack with a blue, hard-plastic wheelie suitcase, the sort that fits into overhead lockers. It was so new it still had the sale tag on the handle.

  I threw my holdall over my shoulder. ‘Does he charge for excess luggage as well?’

  Donald’s bill jutted out over a truck that was backed up to the ramp. The 23mms were still in place. The early-morning sun glinted off the scratched Perspex canopy and the oversized belts of brass link inside.

  Lex jumped down to greet us. He shoved a sat phone into its belt carrier, rubbed his hands and inspected the sky. ‘Turned out nice again, eh?’ For people working in hot climates, it was the oldest cliché in the book, but it still made me smile.

  I glanced beyond him at the long aluminium containers being stowed in the belly of the aircraft. They were offloaded on to pallet trolleys then hauled up the ramp. By the looks of it, each one weighed a ton. ‘What’s the cargo, Lex?’

  ‘Just food, water, that sort of stuff. General shit. It’s a fresh day for the lads. I tell you, I’ve got enough steak in the back there to open a restaurant chain.’

  ‘How many people work for this mining company, then?’

  He turned away. ‘Don’t bore me with that stuff, man. Me, I just play with the joystick. No names, no pack drill.’

  He jumped back on the ramp and disappeared. I wanted to ask Sam what was really in the containers, but thought better of it. They weren’t full of prime fillet, that was for sure.

  The BMW and the Porsche were being driven away. ‘Doesn’t Lex come back here after he drops off?’

  ‘He’s got to go elsewhere.’ One of the engines began to whine. ‘And I’m not due back for a few weeks myself.’

  The stench of aviation fuel filled my nostrils and a flock of startled birds lifted from the trees as the other three engines sparked up. The truck moved away and I followed Sam up the ramp. My trainers crunched on the layer of dark red grit that covered the floor. It looked as if the other place Lex had been going to was Mars.

  The interior was stripped of all essentials, not that it would have left the showroom with too many in the first place. There were no seats and no padding over the alloy skin of the fuselage. It was stacked to head height with aluminium containers and plastic iceboxes.

  I pointed at a big blue one. ‘Don’t tell me. Steaks?’

  ‘Yeah. Steaks, eggs – and it’s a dry job, but on a fresh day we have a few beers.’

  I spotted several cases of Castle. Sam grinned. ‘Aye, I’ve done the PRI shop.’

  The engines coughed and all four props spun. The PRI was a shopping system we used in the Regiment, but I’d never had a clue what the initials stood for. All I knew was that every garrison had one, and if you were in the field and it was a fresh day, people would go off to the PRI and come back with half a supermarket. Normally you’d get a fresh day in every seven or ten; you could ask for your Colgate and Ambre Solaire on top, and the bill would be raised at the end of the trip.

  A loadmaster squeezed between us and the containers, a big pair of cans over his ears and a boom mike in front of his mouth. He yanked on all the webbing straps to check.

  ‘How many guys working, Sam?’

  ‘Not enough, Nick. Not yet.’

  The ramp lifted with an electric whine. The loadmaster plugged his cable into a socket in the fuselage and spoke rapidly into his mike. I guessed Lex was at the other end.

  The four props came up to speed.

  Through one of the round portholes I could see a cloud of dirt getting kicked up behind. No wonder they’d had their shiny new vehicles taken away.

  Sam threw me a bundle of green parachute silk and para cord and unwound one of his own. It was like being back in the Regiment, in the back of a C130, except that, with only two of us, there wasn’t going to be a fight for prime position. This was normally anywhere over the ramp, because there was nothing stacked on the floor there, and you had enough room for the hammock to sag and swing.

  The props screamed and the aircraft shuddered. We rumbled down the airstrip.

  I leaned close to Sam’s ear. ‘How long’s it going to take?’

  ‘Seven hours.’ He had to shout. ‘Might as well get your head down.’

  Tactical aircraft like these things only required about seven hundred metres of runway. Within seconds the rumbling eased as the undercarriage lifted off the ground.

  5

  Sam’s hammock rocked gently with the motion of the aircraft. The parachute silk was wrapped around him so tightly he looked like a suspended green cocoon. He’d been lying there an hour and was probably snoring, but I couldn’t hear anything over the roar of the props.

  The loadie was up front with Lex in the drivers’ seats, so all I had for company was a shed-load of alloy containers and maybe twice as many insulated hampers and cardboard boxes of food. And Silky’s sleeping-bag – I’d been using it as a blanket. It was always cold at the back of these things at 12,000 feet. We couldn’t be any higher than that, otherwise with an unpressurized aircraft we’d all get hypoxia and soon be dead.

  The drone of the engines drowned any other noise. I looked out of the window, raised the bag to my nose and breathed in deeply. Her faded lemony perfume still lingered in the nylon and the rainforest canopy skimmed along below. From this height, we seemed to be flying over a field of broccoli.

  I needed a dump. I turned over in my hammock until I fell out of it, and Silky’s sleeping-bag came with me. I wiped the red grit off my palms and on to my jeans as I made my way to the sawn-off oil drum where the ramp met the fuselage. I pulled down my jeans and settled on to the two slats of wood suspended over it.

  I was facing my big aluminium companions. I’d been wondering more and more about what was inside them, and it wasn’t just idle curiosity. I wanted to know what I’d got myself involved in if the shit hit the fan when we landed. I’d heard guys were running surplus weapons from the Balkans into cent
ral Africa. If this plane was full of old AKs and anti-personnel mines, telling the Rwandans I’d just hitched a lift wouldn’t cut much mustard.

  When I’d finished, I poured bleach into the oil drum from a five-litre can, more to kill the smell than the germs, and edged my way along a stack of boxes of condensed milk. I ripped the top off one and helped myself to a can. I gave it a few whacks on the corner of one of the containers and sucked down the sweet, warm liquid. The army had made a huge mistake when it had removed this stuff from ration packs. Running down the centre of the aircraft there were maybe twenty light-blue fifty-gallon drums of aviation fuel, like the spine that supported all the other gear piled round and on top of them.

  I also counted about ten boxes of Cutty Sark; assuming twelve to a box that meant 120 bottles. Maybe Lex knew an elephant with a drink problem.

  I moved a bit further so I was out of Sam’s line of sight, and came to the cockpit bulkhead. A couple of hundred grimy, empty thirty-kilo rice sacks were piled high against it. I could just about make out the stencilling on some of them. They had once contained food gifts from either the USA or the EU, but that had been many years ago, and they had been put to other uses since. At least I now knew where the shit that covered the floor, and now my hands and jeans, had come from.

  Next to the sacks were forty or fifty fifteen-kilo bags of fertilizer. I also saw about a dozen big black drums of diesel. It was a proper little quartermaster’s store. There was even a set of golf clubs in a knackered black bag. They seemed to be required packing for pilots. I couldn’t imagine there’d be that many courses in the jungle, but that meant nothing to golf freaks. They’d play anywhere. I saw a picture once of a couple of guys playing against the backdrop of the US embassy in Saigon during the evacuation. Desperate people were hanging from helicopters trying to flee the North Vietnamese and all those two had been worried about was getting a little ball into a hole.

  But I was much more interested in the containers. The top one was at about chin level. I unlatched the two retaining clips on the lid, but even before I looked inside I knew what was in there. The smell of oil was stronger than anything coming out of the dump drum, and it was of a very specific type. I’d spent half my life inhaling it in armouries around the world, and there was no mistaking the odour.

  I peered in. Beneath a layer of old hairy blanket, I saw worn gunmetal, and shapes I recognized. A bundle of AK assault rifles and at least one GPMG were loosely packed in old grey and brown blankets.

  I closed the container and reclipped it before I moved to the next one along. I lifted the lid and pulled the blanket aside. This time I found just one weapon, a 12.7mm heavy machine-gun. The last time I’d seen one of these guys was on a Russian tank in newsreel footage of a May Day parade, next to a bloke with a very stern face and a leather helmet who was sticking out of the turret and saluting Yeltsin on the podium. They were very heavy pieces of kit, and this one had a wheeled tripod for ease of manoeuvre in the sustained-fire role.

  I’d seen enough.

  I closed everything up and pushed my way back to the tailgate. Lex might have been upgraded to first class, and the world of smoky bars was far behind him, but there was no doubting he was still involved in this continent’s second oldest profession. Was the mining job Sam had talked about just a load of bullshit?

  I reached the hammocks, but didn’t climb back in. One element was still missing from the classic equation, and I wondered if it was right under my nose. The deal always went in threes, and we had ticked the first box – the one that said ‘weapons’. We’d also ticked the second, and this particular box all had sailing ships on their labels.

  There was only one piece missing.

  I didn’t bother to check if Sam was asleep: it would take time, and I might actually wake him. Besides, he couldn’t see anything from where he was.

  I knelt under his hammock and undid the blue case. The mix was complete: Rwandan francs by the shrinkwrapped bundle, all high denomination.

  This wasn’t protecting miners and their communities, this was good old-fashioned warmongering. Give the guys guns, pay them cash, and keep them happy on firewater. The rules hadn’t changed since the days of the Wild West.

  Sam groaned. I closed the case quickly and got back to doing a green maggot impression.

  The hammock swung as the Antonov banked. Did it matter to me what the fuck they were up to? Not in the slightest. I put the sleeping-bag to my nose and filled my lungs with Silky’s perfume.

  6

  ‘Rise and shine, man!’

  I opened my eyes in a semi-daze as an unseen hand gave the para cord a shake. The loadie’s grin was only inches from my face, and by the smell of his breath he’d spent the flight smoking one of the Cape’s more exotic crops. Good job he wasn’t needed to fuck about with the 23mms.

  I flipped myself out of the hammock again. Sam was already on his feet, his hair sticking up and his face creased. I probably didn’t look any different.

  I couldn’t keep my mind off the cargo. I didn’t know where we were landing. If it was an official airstrip, I could only assume Lex and Sam had the authorities squared away. Maybe that was where the Cutty Sark was headed, or a couple of bundles of notes.

  I was just glad I wasn’t a part of it. I didn’t know if the rationale was good, bad or indifferent. All I knew was that the mixture of weapons, whisky and wonga was as volatile as a Saturday-night vindaloo.

  I looked through a window. The sun glinted on a series of waterways that snaked through my broccoli fields, but craters the size of small towns suddenly appeared, huge orange-red scars among the green, as if the jungle had a bad case of acne. Down there, somewhere under the hundreds of square miles of green that stretched as far as the horizon, was Silky. Maybe on some track or even floating down a river trying to get to Nuka with her blankets, or whatever shit she was taking for the locals.

  I unfastened the para cord from the fuselage struts and rolled the silk into a ball. Sam shook his head when I offered it to him. ‘Keep it. You might be needing it.’

  I shoved it into my holdall.

  The Antonov was on its final approach and I wanted to see what kind of landing site we were heading for – and what kind of reception committee was waiting.

  The broccoli had become big distinctive treetops, and it wasn’t long before the wheels hit a carpet of orange-red dirt.

  Tents and huts with wriggly tin roofs lined the runway, just metres from the wing-tip, and many more disappeared into the forest behind them. Smoke curled from cooking fires. Small figures darted about on the edge of the strip.

  I squatted on the ramp, rubbing my eyes back to life as the loadie reappeared and threw each of us a bottle of water. I tilted my head and took several warm gulps, trying to time them between jolts as the aircraft kangarood along the runway. A couple of scabby dogs tried to keep pace with us, looking as if they thought the tyres were made of Pedigree Chum. Decapitated oil drums had been placed at twenty-metre intervals along the sides of the strip, and had obviously had fires in them. It looked like Lex did a bit of night-flying as well.

  Sam was looking out of the window too. ‘I saw you having a sniff in them boxes . . .’ He was smiling. ‘Bet you’re thinking what I said last night about the church, orphanage, even the mine is rubbish? Bet you’re thinking we’re just in the war game?’

  ‘Pretty much.’ I nodded back at the cargo. ‘I mean—’

  ‘I haven’t lied to you, Nick. Maybe kept the odd thing back, but that’s all. Our mine is under constant threat, which means the orphanage at Nuka is too. So, to protect it, we’ve got to expand our operations and get more guys on the ground.’

  It wasn’t long before the propellers were feathered and the aircraft came to a standstill. I started to flap even more about Silky fucking about in Nuka.

  I now had a clearer view of the huts and tents. Brilliant cobalt blue was definitely the colour of choice in Africa.

  The dogs finally caught up with us and yappe
d at the cockpit as the engines closed down. They were probably just too fucked to take chunks out of the tyres. Some of the older kids followed a football on to the runway so the barefooted game could continue.

  The loadie pressed a button and the ramp whined. A horizontal shaft of daylight appeared where it left the fuselage. It hit the ground and Sam and I walked down into a solid wall of heat.

  PART FOUR

  1

  There were no trucks buzzing round the back of the aircraft this time. Here, it was down to muscle. Thirty or so guys were already trudging up the ramp. They wore ripped, dirty loincloths and T-shirts, and some had flip-flops or wellies on their feet. A few were even sporting rubber swimming caps. They had them so they wore them. Every one of them, clothed or not, was caked in dust and grime, and the skin on their knees and elbows was white and cracked.

  The flies’ welcoming committee gave us a warm reception now that the props had stopped. I started the Thai hand dance round my face; most of the others seemed happy to let the little bastards get on with it.

  The loadie shouted at the guys in French, presumably trying to marshal them to start offloading. The only equipment I could see was a couple of vegetable-market-type barrows. Kids jumped on and off them as they were trundled towards the aircraft.

  We walked along the airstrip, keeping the shanty town on our right. Piles of empty red food-aid sacks lined the verges, weighted down with logs.

  The scabby dogs were now busy scattering a flock of three or four bony old chickens. Washing hung from trees. A few of the circular huts were made from beer cans mortared with mud then painted blue. Wriggly tin roofs were clearly all the rage.

  Sam waved at the women and kids.

  They waved back and smiled. ‘Mr Sam! Mr Sam!’

  Lime-green and yellow jerry-cans were piled everywhere, and old plastic one-litre water bottles hung like strings of onions outside each hut. Everything looked like it was used until it fell apart.