Recoil Page 11

  We passed a group of young men, smoking and drinking, Czech AKs slung over their shoulders. The brown plastic furniture tried hard to be Russian wood, but failed.

  They followed us with their eyes. They were curious about the new white face in town.

  The smell of wood fires and cooking filled the air. ‘Takes you back, dunnit?’ Sam did some more smiling and waving. This was beginning to feel like a royal walkabout. ‘These people are the lucky ones. The total number of Palestinians and Israelis killed in the past six years is about four and a half thousand. Here, that’s not even the score for a long weekend. Over four million dead, Nick.’

  ‘You know what they say about records?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’re there to be broken.’

  Sam chose to ignore what he thought was a bad joke as more overexcited kids ran up and bustled round him. He shook hands and patted heads. They seemed healthy enough. The whites of their eyes were actually white. They were getting protein.

  I smiled. ‘They seem to like you.’

  ‘They know that I know what’s going on in there.’ He tapped the top of a young head with a forefinger. ‘My mother died when I was five and my father hit the drink and forgot to come home. I lived in council shelters until I joined up.’

  I wished I’d been sent to one when my dad fucked off. Instead I’d got a drunken stepdad who beat the shit out of me and my mother. But I understood where he was coming from.

  We pushed through the crowd. ‘Aren’t the UN supposed to be doing their bit to stop all this shit? And what about the aid organizations like Mercy Flight?’

  ‘Toothless, the lot of ’em.’ He checked the sun and pointed west. ‘The DRC border’s just twelve Ks that way. That’s where the nightmares begin. You got the different rebel groups fighting each other to control the mines. Even the army’s in on the act. Every man and his dog are at each other’s throats. Raping, machete-ing, and no one’s doing zip to stop it.’

  Sam gestured at the kids and the shanty town, the dust-covered goats and black pigs nosing around in the mud and trying to avoid getting kicked out of the way. ‘They butcher these people to maintain a climate of fear. Sometimes they even eat them.

  ‘Yeah, that’s right, cannibalism.’ He turned and pointed at a small girl at the back of the crowd. She couldn’t have been more than two or three, standing with her thumb shoved in her mouth. ‘Her two sisters were cooked and eaten. It’s an empowerment thing. She was only saved because she was barely six months old and there wasn’t enough meat on her.

  ‘So these people stay here. We protect them, they work for us in return and worship in my church.’

  ‘Why don’t you have the orphanage here? Wouldn’t it be safer?’

  ‘There’s fourteen kids in it at the moment. They’re scared of staying in DRC but even more scared of coming here – they’re scared of everything and everyone. They think it’s safer to be near the mine, you know, nearer local tribes. But I eventually calm them down and trickle them here.’

  I looked past the tiny little girl to the breeze-block and wriggly-tin building Sam was pointing at. The massive white wooden cross above the door told me all I needed to know.

  The An12 was being refuelled from light blue drums rolled to the aircraft and hand-pumped into the tanks. The onboard drums weren’t getting unloaded. Just like having a couple of litres of fuel in the boot, they were Lex’s back-up.

  Twenty or so people were lined up behind the ramp, manhandling the cargo out of the aircraft and on to old wooden trolleys. The blue coolers were getting thrown up on to the women’s heads as heat bounced off the aircraft wings.

  We came to a row of worn and tattered eight-man tents at the end of the shanty town. Guys sat round cigarette-scorched trestle tables, using boxes and tree-trunks as seats. Every one of them was carrying an AK; some were in a uniform of sorts, green trousers or bottoms or T-shirts, but most were in a mix of football shirts and ripped civilian clothes. Some had boots, some had flip-flops. There was no ‘Mr Sam’ being shouted in this part of town.

  A few heads emerged from behind tent flaps and disappeared as quickly. At first, they weren’t as excited as the others had been – until they saw Sam’s suitcase. Hurried orders and glances were exchanged.

  Sam led me away from the soldiers towards the end of the strip and a cluster of much newer, bigger, neater tents set back into the jungle. A big cam net had been secured between the trees. I could hear generators. We were in the high-rent part of town. ‘This is home for us, Nick.’

  It looked like a typical open-square headquarters set-up: nice area, six good-quality green-canvas tents, and an old Indian guy sweeping dust from the hardened mud with a homemade witch’s broom.

  Kids weren’t clamouring around us any more. It was like we’d crossed a line and they daren’t follow.

  Sam shepherded me in the direction of a large, slightly rusty fridge parked under the cam net. An extension cable snaked away into the trees, towards a distant generator. Folding wooden chairs were arranged round a couple of six-foot tables, on which sat a couple of big cans of Paludrin. ‘Fancy some iced tea? I’m gagging.’

  I nodded as he opened one of the fridge doors. A waft of cool air bathed my face. As I waited for my drink I extracted two Paludrin tablets. I couldn’t remember if they were good for preventing malaria or not, or gave you kidney problems either way.

  I took the tea and rattled the pills down me anyway. It was OK for Africans. Some become immune in their fifties, but only if they live that long. There weren’t many grey-haired guys in these parts.

  A loud voice rang out from one of the tents: ‘That you, Sam? Stone with you?’

  It didn’t matter how long ago I’d last heard it. A voice like that you never forget.

  ‘Aye, we’re both here.’ Sam went for a chair, and put a finger briefly to his lips. ‘I’ll explain later.’

  The voice emerged from the tent, a sat phone to his ear. He smiled, his teeth still perfect, not a hair out of place. Worst of all, he didn’t look as if he’d aged a second.

  2

  I tried to look as though this was what I’d expected all along. I certainly didn’t want to do or say anything that Miles Standish could turn to his advantage. For starters, I wasn’t going to put out my hand and give him the chance to reject it. I just nodded. ‘Thanks for letting me—’

  ‘Cut the crap. I don’t have time. I’m fighting a war.’

  I didn’t respond. Wars round here weren’t fought with sophisticated night sights, fast jets and laptops. In this neck of the woods, it was the AK, bayonet and gollock that did the business. I wasn’t interested in a dirty little war that probably didn’t even have a name, and Standish could see it.

  He jabbed a finger. ‘If you want my help, it’s going to cost. So sit down, shut up and listen in.’

  I took a chair next to Sam. It was easy to tell I was the new boy. I was leaking from every pore and sweat ran down my chest like rain down a window. Flies landed on my face by the bucketload, or settled in the sweat on my neck.

  Standish grabbed a seat the other side of the table and placed the Iridium in front of him, next to a handful of kids’ crayons. He picked up a blue one and began to draw on the bare wood. ‘Sam, we’ve got new int. The patrol had a contact last night. They’re getting closer by the day. We’ve got to step up a gear.’ He added a final flourish to his doodle, then focused on me and jabbed a finger inches from my face. ‘I’ll keep this simple.’

  Standish hadn’t gone back to the Coldstream Guards after his tour. He’d left the army and dropped out of sight, like Sam. A year later, he’d popped up on Newsnight as one of the instant experts spouting about the situation in the Middle East. The caption said he ran a security company in Africa, and called him ‘Ex-SAS Major Miles Standish DSO’. His plan to do his three years in the Regiment then get out and exploit the connection seemed to have worked.

  By the time the rest of the team got back to the UK, he’d long
since taken all the credit for saving the gold and keeping Mobutu sweet. The DSO is a big deal, only a rung or two below the VC, and his citation had gone on about bravery and leadership in the field. It went on to praise his compassionate defence of civilian lives. I wondered how Annabel’s family – and the boy’s – would have felt about that if they’d seen what I had.

  The rest of the team had honked good and hard about the decoration, but what could we do? The army was hardly going to rewrite history just because a few of the guys were pissed off that Gary hadn’t appeared on the radar screen and his kids still got fuck-all support from the MoD.

  We all agreed with Davy that we should deck him if he ever turned up for the squadron Christmas party. But he didn’t: his five minutes of TV fame had been the last any of us had seen of him. Until now.

  I glanced at his doodle on the table. He’d drawn a big T with a letter S above the top bar, an R to the right of the vertical bar, and DRC to the left of it.

  ‘OK, we are here – Rwanda.’ He tapped the crayon on the R. ‘The mine and Nuka are thirty-five Ks away in DRC, and three Ks apart. For months now the rebels have been infiltrating from the north, from Sudan –’ he jabbed the S ‘– into DRC, to hijack the mines.’

  Sam said, ‘The rebels are LRA, Nick.’

  Standish glowered. ‘You know them?’

  I nodded. I’d kept up with events in Zaïre and later the DRC, or at least as much as Time and Newsweek allowed me to. The Lord’s Resistance Army had come into the frame here about twelve months ago. Their leader, Joseph Kony, was Africa’s most wanted. His army, maybe three thousand strong, was as fanatical and ruthless as Hitler’s SS. Just a year ago the International Criminal Court had indicted Kony and four other LRA leaders for war crimes.

  He claimed to have special powers, given to him by God. His followers, and the poor fuckers he terrorized, believed he couldn’t be killed. He and his headbangers claimed to be fighting to make the Ten Commandments the law of the land. Either they’d been reading Sam’s Good Book after too many nights on the ghat, or they knew it was bollocks, but needed a good excuse to slaughter more than ten thousand civilians. They’d also abducted twice that number of kids and turned them into sex slaves or killers – drilled them with weapons to the point of exhaustion, then shoved them into the firing line as cannon fodder while the big men stood back and saved their skins.

  Two million people had fled their villages and sought refuge in foreign aid stations and refugee camps to escape Kony’s trademark combo of brutal massacre and black magic. He was so insane, he’d decided a while back that bicycles were only used to carry information of his whereabouts to the authorities, and ever since anyone caught riding one had had his feet chopped off. And now it seemed he was turning his attention to the mining business.

  ‘OK for me to continue, Sam?’ Standish said. ‘Or do you have more to say?’

  Sam waved his hand. ‘Just thought Nick should know what we’re up against.’

  Standish got back to his map. ‘Interrogations after last night’s contact suggest there’s a fresh wave of Kony’s men heading south – three, maybe four days’ march from our mine. But they will not take it. If they do, we lose everything we’ve worked for.

  ‘So, here’s the plan. Normal patrol turnaround is cancelled. We need to get all available bayonets to the mine as quickly as we can. Top priority when we get there is to safeguard the two surveyors and defend the mine. So, Sam, you take your patrol in as soon as you’ve paid them – they’ve been given a warning order. I’ll follow with the other patrol as soon as they’ve been fed and watered. They’re due back any minute. We will stand our ground. They will not take the mine. They must not take the mine. It’s as simple as that.’

  He turned to me. ‘And here’s your deal. You will go with Sam’s patrol. You can do a detour to Nuka and get this little rich girl – but make it quick. You will be on your own. I’m not risking manpower. Once you have her you will return to the mine and pick up Sam’s sat nav and the surveyors. Then you get back here with them, quick time. Lex will take you both out of the country, but only if you’ve got the two surveyors in tow. Is that clear?’

  I nodded, though he clearly hadn’t written Tim and his helpers into the equation. I wasn’t turning into Mother Teresa here: what if Silky refused to leave without them? ‘What about the Mercy Flight people in Nuka and the people they’re caring for? You protecting them?’

  It was like I’d asked Standish to eat elephant shit. ‘We’re a business,’ he said crisply, ‘not a coffee shop for the stupid. Any minute now you’ll be suggesting we take in Sam’s waifs and strays.’

  ‘I hear they’re looking after the earthquake victims. Some of them must be your guys, right? Wouldn’t it be better to evacuate them all into the mine, give them some protection?’

  It was like I’d told him the funniest joke he’d ever heard. ‘Sam here been leading you along the path of the righteous, has he?’ He roared with laughter. ‘There was no quake – a fault line ruptured when we blew some boreholes. And there’s no room for freeloaders. I only have two jobs to do here, and that’s to protect (a), the surveyors, and (b), the mine.’ He leaned across the table. ‘There’s no Chinese parliament here. The Regiment days are over for all of us. I want those surveyors out of there – soon as. That’s the deal, take it or leave it.’

  It was my cue to back down if I wanted to see Silky any time soon. He had me by the bollocks, and he knew it. ‘You’re right. I’m listening.’

  ‘I hope you’re getting paid well for this. They’re a waste of oxygen, those do-gooder charity morons. Africa’s full of them. They achieve nothing whatsoever. They’re just like the missionaries, aren’t they, Sam?’

  Sam snorted. ‘They get their blueberry muffins and bacon and eggs flown in at huge expense, then sit on their backsides and preach. They don’t get their hands dirty. Their churches even treat them to satellite TV so they don’t miss the baseball.’

  ‘Not like you, eh, Sam?’ Standish said. ‘Healing, teaching, caring for those poor nippers . . .’

  Sam glared at him. Standish sat back, arms hooked over the chair. He looked pretty pleased with himself.

  The sat phone rang, its display glowing.

  Standish got to his feet but didn’t answer it immediately. ‘Both of you, wait here. I haven’t finished yet.’ He gave us a nod and walked away to take the call. I had seen a +41 prefix. It was probably his bank manager in Zürich.

  I rounded on Sam. ‘What the fuck’s going on? Why didn’t you warn me about him? And what’s all this LRA-swarming-in-from-the-north shit? You’re supposed to be a mate, for fuck’s sake.’

  ‘I’ll explain later,’ Sam said. ‘When there are no ears. She’ll be OK. We’ll get to her in time, don’t worry.’

  I took a couple of deep breaths. There was no point getting sparked up: it wouldn’t achieve anything. If their int was on the nail, it would be three or four days before the shit really hit the fan, and it shouldn’t take more than a few hours to cover thirty-five Ks.

  To my right, near the soldiers’ tents, the jungle began to spit out one guy after another, each bent almost double under the weight of a bulked-out rice sack. Two whites in shorts used their AKs to direct the human mule train along the strip. A handful of other guys providing the escort peeled off from the snake and disappeared into their tents to dump their gear.

  ‘The other patrol?’

  Sam nodded slowly and mistook my pissed-off expression for concern. ‘Don’t worry, the route’s easy. And, anyway, you’ll have my sat nav. The way points are here and the mine.’

  ‘What’s your man-hour-per-kill, mate?’

  He shook his head. One of the best measures of success at managing risk is how few men you lose per number of hours achieved, so the shake wasn’t good news. ‘Not good, since the LRA have been active. Less than a hundred. But that’s with large numbers. With just four of you, you’ll get through easy enough.’

  Close to a couple
of hundred porters must have struggled out of the jungle by now. They worked their way across the strip in single file and up the ramp into the belly of the An12.

  ‘It’s not the job I’m worried about.’ I watched the men make their way back down the ramp empty-handed, head for the pile of empty food-aid sacks at the edge of the strip, then slope off in the direction of the shanty town. ‘If anything happens to me on the way there, I want to know Silky’s being taken care of. You’ll do that for me?’

  ‘Only if I can wear my kilt when we bury you.’

  ‘Thanks, mate.’ I tried hard to give him a grin. ‘And it’s probably best not to let Standish know what she means to me. Keep pretending it’s a job, yeah?’

  Standish would probably get me fighting his war single-handed if he knew I’d do anything to keep her safe.

  3

  Body after body, shiny with sweat and bent double under the sacks, continued to emerge from the jungle and shuffle along the airstrip. When they hit the back of the queue for the ramp their hands went straight on to their thighs to try and ease the weight, too fucked even to wipe away the sweat dripping from their faces.

  The ones who’d already shed their load were now flopped out on the sacks in the shade of the treeline. A gaggle of brightly coloured women fussed round them with refilled plastic bottles of water.

  I’d been wrong about the numbers. The snake looked as though it would never end. There must have been many more than two hundred of them – moving, queuing, or lying prone under the trees.

  Sam nodded towards a group of half a dozen escorts high-fiving each other by the entrance to one of the tents. ‘They won’t be doing that when they hear they’re going straight back in a couple of hours.’

  Soldiers shouted at porters; women and children shrieked with excitement. The guys in the snake, however, didn’t utter a sound. They were too fucked to do more than stagger to the treeline.