Recoil Read online

  We’d soon know. Light was brushing the far horizon and the sun would follow shortly. The Renaults coughed themselves to life and the compound filled with fumes.

  At least it kept the flies off.

  16

  06:04 hours

  All of us bar Davy were aboard just three wagons. He lay prone at the open gates, bipod dug into the sand, covering the ground the other side of the wall. We could see now that most of the bodies ripped open out there were kids’, but we ignored it. Or tried to . . .

  Sam’s wagon was going to be first out, with me on the gun. Standish, Annabel and the kid were on the floor behind us. The next wagon had the general sitting in Frankenstein’s old seat, with the wooden boxes and remaining four blokes on the floor. The third wagon had just a driver, and Davy with the RPG. If he had to fire, he didn’t want to worry about live bodies getting in his way or taking the backblast. His only cargo was the Yammy 175, the three remaining RPG rounds, Gary and the royal sisters. The fourth wagon’s fuel had been siphoned and shared.

  The mush of the sat comms cut out as Standish put the handset to his ear. The plan was that the Cobras would swoop in and protect us as we headed back the way we’d come and down into the dead ground where the Seahawks would pick us up. No one was sure how it was going to work, because there weren’t any comms between us and the helis.

  ‘They’re five minutes from target.’

  Davy gave an urgent shout: ‘I’ve got vehicles at about seven or eight hundred. They’re kicking up a shitload of dust.’

  Sam jumped out of the wagon and crawled alongside Davy in the gateway.

  Almost immediately, he was up and running again. He jumped behind the wheel and reached for the ignition. ‘We got too much coming. We can’t wait for the helis. They’ll have to find us.’

  17

  06:23 hours

  Our truck was first out of the gates. Sam’s foot was hard to the floor, and it wasn’t just so he could make it over the bodies we hadn’t been able to move. The front three enemy vehicles were no more than four hundred metres away. At least another dozen were lined up in the dust trail behind them.

  ‘I can’t cover that arc!’ I was out of my seat. ‘Gonna have to shift.’

  Sam braced himself. ‘Go for it.’ He knew what I had to do.

  I jumped on to the sandbags, manoeuvring myself until I was lying at a diagonal through the dashboard and across the bonnet. My arse was just about in Sam’s face, but at least I had a solid platform, bipod wedged into the sandbags, from which the gun could point east as we raced south.

  The wagon lurched and I almost careered off it. Sam grabbed my leg and steadied me as I got back into a fire position. I wasn’t going to put down rounds yet, though: I’d be aiming at moving vehicles, from a moving vehicle. Every round had to count. It was whites-of-their-eyes time. Where the fuck were those gunships?

  Sam had to steer one-handed as he gripped me with the other. The rebels’ vehicles careered towards us like a stampeding herd. The sun was less than a third above the horizon, but it was getting hard to look east, even so.

  Davy’s wagon broke ranks behind us and aimed right, then braked so sharply that for a moment I thought it’d broken down.

  A couple of seconds later, the backblast from an RPG kicked up a storm of sand and grey smoke.

  I followed the grenade’s flight path all the way in. The leading pickup jumped a good three feet in the air. There wasn’t a fireball, just an instant sand halo around it as the shockwave expanded and blew bits of wagon in all directions.

  By the time the carcass had thumped back into the ground, the three remaining pickups at the front were less than a hundred away. I could hear the scream of their overworked engines.

  The guys in the back of them fired wildly and indiscriminately, no idea where their rounds were going.

  I wondered if Sam was praying to his God. If so, he was wasting his breath. Right now, God wasn’t creator of the universe: God was a Cobra two-ship.

  I waited until they’d closed to within fifty of us before I fired my first double-tap. I aimed for a windscreen. You try to get the driver every time.

  Davy kicked off another RPG. He had only two left.

  This time, I didn’t see where it hit. I was too busy in my own little world, checking the link, firing as best I could as the vehicles circled us like Indians round a wagon train.

  I fired again. Glass shattered. The vehicle swerved. I sent another double-tap into the front passenger door at chest height.

  The pickup slewed right round and I went to fire again, but the Renault rocked violently and I lost my aim.

  Sam had to fight the wheel, and sand blew up around us as we were buffeted by downwash.

  18

  There was an instant sandstorm and the stench of aviation fuel as the Cobra two-ship swooped overhead. The gunships swivelled to face the wave of pickups and a set of 20mm cannons got on with their job.

  The rapid thud of rounds was joined a second later by an endless metallic rattle as big, empty cases rained on to our wagon.

  They moved forward and the sandstorm moved with them. I could see the Seahawks coming in low ahead of us, a gunner hanging out at either side.

  RPGs piled in from our right and exploded in mid-air. The gunships turned and responded with short sharp bursts.

  We had just a couple of hundred metres to go. The first Seahawk disappeared into its own sand-cloud as it settled on the ground. The second was hovering, looking for a landing site between the outcrops of brush.

  Two more RPGs came in from our right, but this time well forward of us, and lower. The sustainer motors on both fizzled out.

  When I realized what they were aimed at, the next couple of seconds passed in slow motion.

  There was a dull thud as the hovering Seahawk took a hit. There were no flames, no explosions, but it tipped drunkenly, nose almost vertical, and dropped the last fifteen or twenty feet to the ground. The fuselage crumpled.

  Sam rocked backwards and forwards in the driver’s seat, as if that was going to find us some more speed. He wouldn’t have been thinking about helping survivors. He was trying to get to the remaining Seahawk before an RPG did.

  One of the Cobras roared overhead. Empty cases kept raining down. Whoever had fired that RPG was probably already shaking hands with the guy with the white beard.

  There were still no flames from the wreckage: these things are designed to take hits. The two gunners from the other Seahawk came running out of their sandstorm as survivors tumbled from the stricken aircraft.

  We halted short of the downwash. Sand and aviation fuel filled my nostrils as I followed Sam and the other wagons caught up.

  The gunners’ only thoughts were to sort out their four mates, who were in a bad way. Their faces were bloody and shocked, but they were alive.

  My only thought was that there was just one aircraft now, and four places already taken.

  Sam yelled to get the gunner’s attention, then Standish was at his shoulder. ‘Boxes! Boxes! Boxes!’

  The gunner turned, dark helmet visor covering his face. Standish mimed a rectangle with his hands. The gunner gave a curt nod. They knew what they were here for.

  We shouldered the boxes from the wagon to the Seahawk, running, bent double under the weight, our sweat-soaked bodies caked with sand.

  That was it then, fuck it, we were going to be leaving here cross-country. At least we wouldn’t be chased. The Cobras hit them with a few more long bursts, and flatbeds were scattered and burning like targets in a computer game. The 20mms even took on the bodies spilling out of the wrecked vehicles. They had an aircraft down: they wanted to kill each and every one of them now, kids or not.

  Sam and I lugged the last two boxes, and as I reached the aircraft I could see Standish and the general already on board. As soon as our load had been transferred he thumbed the pilot to get airborne.

  Sam grabbed Standish’s leg. Over the roar of the quickening rotors he yelled, ‘An
nabel and the boy! Annabel and the boy!’ He spun round to me. ‘I’ll go get ’em!’

  He disappeared into the dustcloud as I attacked the legs of one of the gunners, trying to signal to him that there were two more coming. In the end, I had to climb on board to make my point. Standish glared at me, trying to work out what was happening. Why weren’t they just lifting off?

  I showed the gunner and Standish two fingers. They got the message.

  There was a yell from below. Sam was at the door. He held up the boy like a begging bowl. Behind them, Annabel materialized out of the choking dust.

  Standish looked around him at the payload and fucked the pair of them off with the back of his hand. He yelled at the gunner and jerked his thumb skywards.

  The gunner’s helmet and visor swivelled, and there was another jerk of the thumb.

  The aircraft shuddered and started to lift.

  Dropping on to the London Delivery boxes, I held out my hands.

  Sam lifted the boy towards me as he kicked Annabel up on to the skid. She gripped the sill, ready to climb.

  Standish went ballistic. He yelled, then stamped on Annabel’s fingers.

  I grabbed the boy’s skinny wrists and he hung for a moment like a slab of dead meat as the heli lifted higher and he slid from Sam’s arms.

  I was leaving the team. This was wrong – I should be with them.

  The heli turned and dust swirled round us. I lost sight of Sam. I wanted him to know this wasn’t the way I wanted it to be; it wasn’t my fault I was on board.

  Annabel held on grimly but her fingers were slipping. Then Standish kicked again and the force of the turning heli was too much for her. She was flung away from the sill and the skid, and swallowed instantly by the blizzard of sand.

  I held the dangling boy, trying desperately to keep a grip and drag him inside. His eyes were glued to mine. It was pointless shouting at him over the scream of the rotors; I just stared back, trying to give him some hope as his legs flailed about, searching for the skid.

  I gave one final pull, but his wrists and my hands were too slippery with blood and sweat. It was like trying to grip a couple of wet eels.

  He slipped away from me. His eyes, wide and petrified, stayed fixed on mine as he fell and disappeared into the blizzard, just like Annabel.

  The Seahawk soared out of the rotors’ sandstorm. Within seconds it was a hundred feet off the ground.

  It was far too late for me to jump. I saw Sam, far below us, on his knees beside the boy. Annabel lay motionless, face down in the scrub.

  As we climbed, I saw Davy running towards them from his wagon. Beyond, burning wrecks sent plumes of black smoke into the sky. Bodies lay scattered below the Cobra two-ship that hovered to cover our withdrawal. Grey smoke puffed from their 20mms and the rounds bounced off the ground like hard rain hitting a pond.

  I turned towards Standish.

  He wasn’t interested in anything on the ground. He was already giving the general a slap on the shoulder and a big victory grin.

  PART TWO

  Café Raffaelli

  Lugano, Switzerland

  Thursday, 8 June 2006

  1

  There’s an entire street of jewellers and designer clothes shops in Lugano that probably shift half of Prada’s and Rolex’s annual output between them. You can positively smell the money walking along Riva Albertolli, or resting its rather large arse at one of the outdoor cafés beside the lake.

  The small but perfectly formed city is in the south-east, Italian-speaking region of Switzerland, just ten minutes’ drive from the border. It’s unlike anywhere else in the land of Toblerone and tax-dodging; for starters, the mountains protect it from the north wind, so the place enjoys its own temperate microclimate. In fact, the whole place is Little Italy, from the frescos in the cathedral-sized churches to the brands of ice-cream sold on the palm-tree-lined boulevards. The only thing non-Italian is the driving. This is still Switzerland, after all.

  Silky had been working at the Mercy Flight office ever since we’d got there. ‘It’s the only way I don’t feel guilty about my life,’ she said. ‘A year or two on the road, six months putting something back.’

  Her office was as close to the Gucci quarter as the charity could afford so it could tap into some of that passing wealth. She and I had got into the habit of meeting for lunch at one of the pavement restaurants; she took an hour off from saving the world, and I took an hour off from reading the English papers and wishing we were back on the road.

  We’d been in Lugano a month, and as far as I was concerned that was three and a half weeks too long. I wanted us to be in the Far East, India, any of the places we’d talked about. Maybe even back to Australia. I didn’t really care where, quite frankly, so long as she came with me.

  She’d fucked me off on that idea for a month or two, but to make sure she didn’t fuck me off altogether, my Visa card had just taken a two-thousand-Swiss-franc dent – and all I had to show for it was a little box containing a billion-billionth of the world’s gold reserves and a diamond you needed an electron microscope to see. She often said that less was more, and I hoped she’d stick to her guns on that, but in any case, it was all I could afford. I needed to keep something back for my airfare to Sydney, and a few weeks’ pocket money in case there were no freefall meets and therefore no rigs to pack to make enough to live on. She had money, of course, but that wasn’t the point.

  I’d been tempted to head straight from the jeweller’s to her office and get it over and done with, but quickly thought better of it. When it came to a sense of humour, there were some areas where she remained decidedly German. If I was going to sweep her off her feet, I had to do it correctly.

  So I wandered down the road instead, bought a copy of The Times for the price of a paperback, and pulled up a chair at Raffaelli’s, her favourite outdoor place.

  I ordered a cappuccino, put on my shades and got to grips with the day’s front page as the sun beat down on my neck. Same old, same old. Car bomb in Baghdad. Political scandal in Washington. And the big news from London? John Prescott playing croquet when he should have been running the country.

  I couldn’t be arsed to read on. I put the paper on the table and stretched my legs and arms as I looked out over the lake.

  There wasn’t a breath of wind: Lake Lugano was a mirror, reflecting the sun back at a cloudless sky. There had to be worse places on earth to sit and pass the time of day.

  A gaggle of women walked past, heads under hijabs, rattling their gold and bumping their gums. It seemed impossible to speak Arabic without sounding as if you were having an argument, and these guys were no exception. They reminded me that Lugano might only be the country’s third financial centre, but the place was still all about money, whatever continent it originated from.

  More class than Zürich or Geneva, though. Not a scrap of litter on the streets or pavements, not a fag-end in the gutter. They had guys here whose only job was to water the public flower-beds. American universities and schools had sprung up, even a research centre for artificial intelligence. Whoever they were and wherever they came from, everybody was in town to either deposit cash or spend it.

  A car horn blared. Riva Albertolli was clogged with Bentleys and Japanese tourists who’d just got off a coach and hadn’t worked out how to cross a street.

  Lugano was small, just over fifty thousand people in the city proper, but it had its own airport, with frequent flights to and from other major financial centres, including the City of London. According to Silky, Lugano was where the Cosa Nostra kept their money. They had even built a school here in the 1980s during the Mafia wars so their kids could get educated in safety while they left horses’ heads in each other’s beds at home.

  A coach the size of an airliner parked with a deafening hiss of brakes and ejected its payload of retired Americans. There was a tidal wave of plaid shorts, socks and sandals. Enough gold and diamonds dangled from liver-spotted wrists to pay off a developing country’
s national debt and still leave Bob Geldof enough change for a haircut.

  A plan started to form in my head. After lunch, I’d walk Silky back to her office, past the glittering display windows of the jewellery shops. I’d reach into my pocket, pull out the box, and say something like, ‘I’ve always preferred economy-sized, myself . . .’ Maybe I’d buy her an ice-cream at the place at the end of the street, put it behind my back, and say, ‘Which hand?’ I wondered how Hugh Grant would do it.

  Twelve thirty came and went, and Silky didn’t call. I knew she was busy, so I didn’t call her. I ordered another coffee and decided to hit the inside pages.

  There was an election crisis in Peru, and a hosepipe ban in London. Two volunteers with a medical charity had been kidnapped at gunpoint by one of the factions in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Nobody seemed to know why they were being held, and the outlook was bleak. None of the players up there was ever going to win a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

  The country’s name had changed from Zaïre since I was there on the team job in ’85, but not much else. For over seven years, the Congolese had been involved in the biggest conflict the world had seen since the Second World War. Hutus responsible for murdering nearly a million Tutsis in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide had fled across the border to escape the avenging Tutsi army. Zaïre had imploded from civil war and incursions by neighbouring states. Rwanda invaded again in 1998, sparking a war that, at its height, sucked in nine other African countries. Four million had died, and the rest of the world had barely heard about it. The only people who had were the medical charities, like Mercy Flight, who had guys on the ground doing their best to patch up the wounded and fucked-up.

  The place was a nightmare for exactly the same reasons as it had been when I was there: greed, and the struggle to control the country’s vast gold, diamond and mineral resources. If it wasn’t rival groups backed by one foreign power or another in their fight to get their hands on the mineral wealth, it was people starving to death simply because they had fuck-all to offer – no diamonds, no oil, no crops – and, as a result, no money to buy stuff from the West. So we turned our backs. Sir Bob the Knob and Bono the Dog Biscuit did their bit, but they were pissing into a force ten.