Silent Weapon Read online

  They took their breakfasts and sat down at the nearest table. They had both gone for the full English – sod the heat, there were traditions, and they would need the energy because they both knew that Adams hadn’t been lying about today.

  One thing that Sean had liked about Bright from the start was his attitude to food. It was for eating, not talking. So, as they concentrated on throwing their breakfast down their necks, it took them a moment to clock the new kid standing nearby.

  ‘Can I …?’ The kid indicated the seat next to them with his tray.

  Sean just grunted in a way that said ‘Sure’, so the lad slid his tray down next to him.

  ‘So, you guys were in that bust last night?’

  Sean and Bright exchanged glances. Uh-oh, talker.

  ‘Listen … can you help me out? I could really do with some guidance. You know, from the guys who know.’ The kid seemed to be concentrating on Bright, maybe because he was obviously the older of the two.

  Bright wiped his mouth and glanced at Sean. ‘Mind if I take this one?’

  Sean gave a Go-ahead wave, his mouth still full.

  ‘Always buy them a drink first, only give your phone number if you’re serious, and no means no.’

  ‘Heh. Sure. No, I meant about … out here.’

  Bright burped with a force that gave Sean and the kid fresh partings. ‘You missed the orientation lectures?’

  ‘Well, no, but … there’s always a shortcut, isn’t there? And there’s always older, wiser guys who know it. Help me get on the inside track, lads?’

  Sean and Bright looked at each other again, for half a second longer. Sean hid a smile as Bright regarded the kid thoughtfully.

  ‘OK. You got all that stuff about malaria? And about taking the anti-malarials, for a start?’

  ‘Uh – sure. The mosquito bites you and then injects parasites into you as it drinks your blood. The parasites multiply inside you. You get a fever, then you feel sick, then you get the squits and start throwing up. And it can come back again at different times throughout your life. And the anti-malarials? One a day, without fail. And you keep on taking them for weeks after you get back, because the malaria parasite stays in your bloodstream.’ The kid looked pleased with himself.

  ‘Correctamundo.’ Bright nodded in approval. ‘But what they don’t tell you is, they’re only fifty per cent effective.’

  ‘Eh?’ The kid looked sideways from Bright to Sean, not sure if he was being ragged.

  Sean thought he should help. ‘Maybe seventy-five per cent?’ he said.

  Bright shrugged. ‘Maybe. It’s all in the DNA. But the thing is, antibiotic resistance. Every year they’re less and less effective, and the MoD always lags behind the rest of the health industry. There’s defence cuts, and there’s health cuts, so we’re on the receiving end of two sets of cuts, for double the pleasure. True fact. But despair not, Grasshopper.’ He pulled a blister pack from his pocket and popped one of the blue doxycycline tablets onto the table top. ‘Thing is, you have to increase absorption through the mouth membranes. In other words, chew it well and good, don’t just swallow it straight down.’ He popped it into his mouth, and Sean heard crunching as his jaws worked together.

  Sean kept his face straight and followed suit with a pill of his own. He chucked it straight down his throat and ground his teeth, though he couldn’t produce the same sound effects as his mate.

  The kid looked from one to the other, then took out his own blister pack, popped a tablet and crunched his teeth down on it. His face twisted in revulsion and he almost gagged. ‘Christ, that’s disgusting!’

  Sean and Bright hooted and bumped fists over the table. The kid glared at them.

  ‘Mate.’ Sean shook his head and cheerfully went back to hacking up a sausage. ‘Can’t believe you fell for that one.’

  ‘OK.’ Bright put his serious face on. ‘Inside-track lesson number one: pay attention in your briefings, try and learn something new every day, and work things out with your mates so that you’re all equally proficient. And don’t listen to what anyone says in the canteen at breakfast. As for the pills – like they say, take one a day and keep doing it, and you’ll be fine. Malaria free. But swallow them whole because, as you now know, they taste like crap.’ Bright grinned. ‘Plus, doxycycline is good for all kinds of other shit too. Like zits. That’s why Harker’s skin is so silky smooth you just want to rub your face against it.’

  ‘And STDs,’ Sean added, giving Bright the finger, ‘which is why Bright no longer wakes us all up with his groans whenever he takes a midnight slash.’

  ‘Shit, yeah.’ Bright pulled a face. ‘That was not fun.’

  He tapped the kid’s plate where his breakfast – a small helping of eggs and a couple of sausages – was slowly going cold. ‘And eat up. Get second helpings. You’re going to need plenty of energy on patrol.’

  ‘It’s a twenty-k tab,’ the kid said. ‘I read the briefing. I can run twenty k on this.’

  Sean grinned. OK, so the kid was a cocky tosser. Let him learn.

  ‘Twenty k wading through a swamp,’ Bright said. ‘Think two or three times the effort you’d need normally. Plus tropical heat, sweat, every malarial mosquito you could ever hope to meet … and, you know, the possibility that reports of Boko Haram insurgents might actually be real.’

  ‘Boko Haram are stuck up in the mountains,’ the kid said. ‘They’re defeated. I read that.’

  Bright shook his head. ‘Jesus, it’s like I’m talking another language.’

  The kid looked puzzled and Sean had to fill him in.

  ‘This is a free country, mate. So insurgents can jump on a train and get from one side to another, just like you and me back home. And they don’t wear T-shirts saying Proud to Be a Fundie, Die Infidel. They look like anyone else. So, sure, BH might officially be over there. Just that some of them are over here. Right beside you. Looking at you.’

  Bright made cross hairs out of his fingers, and squinted through them across the table at the kid with one eye closed. ‘And they’re thinking, Ooh, I’ll have that one,’ he said. ‘That’s what we’re getting into in’ – he checked his watch – ‘fifty-three minutes’ time.’

  ‘Right …’ The kid thought for a moment, then pushed his chair back and took his plate to the canteen for an extra helping.

  Chapter 3

  Tuesday 1 August, 11:00 GMT+1

  The dark brown water of the mangrove swamp came up to Sean’s knees and swirled in big, lazy whirlpools with every step. The light colours of his MTP trousers were stained dark by the water and the rotting leaves that floated on top.

  Something particularly powerful bubbled around his knees. Oily water splashed up his legs and a smell like Satan’s diarrhoea hit his nose. He caught the muffled gasp of disgust from the soldier he had been paired with. It was the kid from the canteen, whose name he had learned was Private Cooke. The patrol was meant to be silent, and if an NCO’s finely tuned ears had caught it, then Cooke would be in for a bollocking.

  Sweat dripped into Sean’s eyes and he gave his head a firm shake to clear them. It was the only way that didn’t involve taking your hands off your weapon, and sometimes it could look like the whole platoon were coming down with nervous twitches. Which would probably look funny to a civilian, but Sean had long since stopped caring what civilians thought.

  He took a firmer hold of his SA80A2 assault rifle and pressed on.

  The two platoons patrolled side by side, Nine Platoon and the new lot. Ruperts – what the rest of the world called officers – at the front, sergeants at the back and other ranks in between. Sean’s peripheral vision kept a fix on Bright’s back as the patrol waded further down the channel, keeping his distance – not so close as to ram his mate up the arse and not so far away as to leave a fatal gap in the patrol’s strength. And meanwhile he scanned the vegetation on either side for signs of danger. As a kid growing up in the crappiest parts of London, Sean had learned to pay attention to his environment at a
very early age. The slightest thing out of place or unexpected could be a clue – a sign of an imminent ambush or attack. He hadn’t lost the habit in the jungle. You no longer looked at buildings and lampposts and shadowy corners. You looked at the vegetation, the nearness of the trees, the thickness of the undergrowth around you.

  The swamp was a maze of water channels between tangled clusters of trees and roots. Hundreds of square miles of water with God knew what floating about in it and rotting leaves underneath. Kamikaze mozzies that zipped past your head like rounds – and felt like one when they landed – and the certain knowledge that two or three leeches would have attached themselves to you as you waded through the water.

  An endless stretch of trees provided enough shade and shadow to hide a regiment of insurgents brave enough to try an attack. They just had to hope that two platoons’ worth of British Army would make them think twice.

  The SA80A2 carried by each lad was the finest infantry rifle known to man. Below the helmets, cam cream was smeared randomly on their faces to break up the shine of human skin so that they could blend into any background. The upper halves of their bodies were wrapped in PLCE webbing that held ammunition, bayonet, food, CamelBaks of water, cooking equipment, communications equipment and other essentials for an introductory twelve-hour patrol.

  And under it all were the bits the insurgents would never see but which made the swamp bearable. The British Army’s PCS clothing took even more care of you than your mum had. Every lad on the patrol wore anti-microbial underpants and knee-length socks. The anti-microbial component meant that they could be worn for days on end without turning your private parts and feet into fungal plague zones. Even if they didn’t keep the leeches out.

  Up ahead, the three officers – Nine Platoon’s Second Lieutenant Franklin, the new platoon’s Lieutenant Hanson, and the Nigerian liaison, Captain Kokumo – turned a corner and started to clamber up the side of the bank. The rest of the lads swung after them and, two by two, the patrol gratefully left the water behind. Now that they were out of the swamp Sean felt himself relaxing – and immediately made himself pay even more attention to his surroundings. A false sense of security might be the last sense of security you ever had.

  The more or less solid ground beneath their feet was not much more than a sandbar, but as they walked, it spread out on either side, becoming firmer as the trees thinned out. What at first looked like an animal trail through the trees was turning into something more. It was still lined with trees, but it was wider and straighter than before. The ground was getting harder. Just as Sean realized that it was a track, kind of, the broken but regular shapes of a ruined village started to emerge from the undergrowth.

  Orders rattled back down the line. A wave of snaps and clicks ran through them as selector levers on weapons were flicked from safety to single shot. Sean brought his rifle smoothly up to nestle in his shoulder, caressing the smooth plastic of the pistol grip, the front pad of his index finger resting lightly on the trigger, both eyes wide open with an unblinking stare to take in both the natural view and the enhanced view through the ACOG clamped to the top of the weapon.

  The patrol advanced slowly, weapons fanning from side to side.

  The village had once been in a clearing. There had been streets of mud-brick houses, single storey, pale yellow walls, with low roofs of corrugated iron. Now the trees had half reclaimed it – which made it twice as dangerous. Two different environments where insurgents could lurk and plot their ambushes. Two different skill sets required for smoking them out.

  The platoons broke into their sections, each taking a different part of the deserted village to check out. Wolston’s section got a group of houses on the edge that had been half retaken by the trees. He led Sean, Lance Corporal Marshall, Bright, Mitra, Burnell and West over, communicating with the sign language that they had learned to read fluently. They paired up – Sean and Bright, Marshall and West, Burnell and Mitra – and each couple approached their designated hut, eyes peeled for any movement inside the dark, empty windows, or any other sign that someone had been here recently. Wolston joined up with Mitra and Burnell, and gave the signal. Each pair burst into their hut, rifle butts in their shoulders and fingers on triggers, ready for whatever was waiting.

  Sean found himself staring at a tangled mass of leaves and branches advancing through the opposite wall. Branches and roots didn’t have to try very hard to worm their way through the mud bricks, and the sheets of rusty iron on the roof had been casually pushed aside.

  The single-room interior didn’t take long to scan. Flaky mud walls, an earth floor, a cracked bathtub, debris blown in from the jungle. Signs to look for were disturbances in the soil or the leaves, or anything that looked like it had been moved or not been there as long as the rest. After a couple of seconds Sean and Bright felt they could relax – a fraction. But they didn’t give the all-clear for their hut until they had checked out the invading jungle at the back for any signs of cut wood, or branches running the wrong way. They had experience of lurking in the undergrowth, bare metres away from an enemy (usually another platoon) that was looking for them, so there was no reason the local branch of Boko Haram shouldn’t have developed the same skill.

  But there was no one there.

  With two platoons at work it didn’t take long to declare the place clear, section by section. They rendezvoused in the open area at the front of the village. It had stood right at the edge of the mangrove swamp, on the shores of a saltwater lake which Sean’s sense of direction told him must join up with the sea somewhere to the south. The waters of the lake lapped at the foot of a small, sharp bank. The rotting remains of a wooden jetty – not something anyone would want to trust their weight to – stuck out into the water. A couple of long, thin boats had been pulled up and left upside down to protect them from the rain – but not from the termites. The hulls were half eaten. One had a football-sized hole in it; the other just looked like it might collapse if anyone breathed on it. The ground had once been dry, beaten earth, kept free of vegetation by the feet of the people of the village. Now it was knee-high grass.

  At the signal from Franklin, everyone sat down on the ground. He gave them all a minute to chug down half a litre of water from their CamelBaks, then gave the nod to Captain Kokumo.

  ‘So.’ Kokumo stood at ease in front of both platoons. ‘You’re wondering why we’re here? I wanted you to see what our country is up against. What do you think cleared this place out, almost overnight?’

  A hand went up from one of the new guys. ‘Boko Haram, sir?’

  Kokumo gave a smile to let him down gently, but it didn’t reach his eyes. He left it to the NCOs to indicate by silent glares that Private Pillock ought to pay more attention in briefings.

  ‘Boko Haram were a powerful military force in the north-east of the country, but this far south they can only send small groups on small operations. A bomb here, an ambush there. Not good, no, but also not enough to clear out an entire community. Anyone else?’

  And Sean suddenly realized, to his surprise, that he knew the answer. He had paid attention in the MO’s lectures. He put up his hand.

  ‘Disease, sir?’

  ‘Disease,’ Kokumo confirmed with a nod. ‘To be precise, cholera. The people here grew complacent. This is a malarial zone, and they knew how to deal with that. You sleep inside nets soaked in insecticide, you make sure no stagnant water accumulates where the mosquitoes can breed, and you can reduce the risk of malaria right down. But then you forget that there are other diseases out there too. Such as cholera, which comes from drinking water contaminated by human faeces, so really ought to be easy to avoid. The cause of death is severe diarrhoea which can lead to fatal dehydration within hours – and is impossible to treat without the right drugs, because even drinking clean water will make you vomit it straight up again.’

  He gestured around them. ‘This used to be a thriving fishing village, home to a couple of hundred people. A comfortable living, all things
considered. But they forgot to keep their water clean. They forgot to keep their drinking water and waste water separate. It only takes a small contamination.’

  He swept them all with a grave look. ‘The phone lines were down due to a storm. The roads were blocked by fallen trees. There was no way of calling for help apart from going and getting it. It took forty-eight hours after the first recognized case for medics to arrive. By then it was too late.’

  The platoons were quiet while the reality of an entire village population being destroyed over two days sank in. Sean tried to picture it. A village hit so badly they couldn’t do anything to save themselves, while they vommed and shat themselves to death.

  Shit. A few bad bugs could do in days what terrorists dreamed of doing in years.

  ‘This place symbolizes everything that can so easily go wrong here,’ Kokumo went on. ‘One small slip, and an unforgiving environment is poised to strike. Someone once said that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. And that is what we do, and why we do what we do …’

  The pep talk went on. It was a good introduction to the realities of life here. Sean’s own introduction had been a patrol of the Lagos slums. The same lessons had been learned. Eternal vigilance.

  Boko Haram were officially defeated – at least, the president said so, which was what made it official – but that was absolutely no reason to let go. With their scorched-earth tactics BH had displaced two million people, clearing whole communities – attacking at night, then murdering, raping, kidnapping and looting before pulling out again. Military operations with a new, improved, de-corrupted army and the help of several hundred South African mercenaries had pushed them back.

  But they were still there, lurking in the mountains on the border with Cameroon.

  Sean understood the comparison with disease. One little slip-up, one moment taking your eye off the ball, and back in the shit you went.

  It concentrated the mind.

  Finally, with the talk over, and with the area checked out, the stage everyone had been waiting for could go ahead. The stripping off and de-leeching.