Warlord

by James Steel

  The boy peers at the map with his one good eye and eventually gestures to an area with his bound hands.

  Alex nods.

  Good, they hit the right target. He proceeds to confirm the location of ammunition dumps and barracks and then goes and cross-references the information with Col.

  ‘He’s a slimy old bastard that one.’ Col jerks his head back at Lieutenant Karuta. ‘Must be a génocidaire.’

  They confirm the locations and Alex quickly calls over the mortar platoon sergeant and briefs him. He’s now got his four 81mm tubes set up on firm, level ground and they quickly start banging bombs out down the valley.

  Alex and Tac stand and watch the black dots as they curve gentle parabolas through the sky and then land with little cotton-wool bursts. Correcting aim is simple and they start pounding the enemy targets. One smashes into an ammo dump and sets off a huge explosion near a base further down the valley.

  ‘Shit!’ Alex says and the men give a huge cheer as the blast wave rolls over them like a slap in the face. They stand at the lip of the valley and laugh and applaud.

  A grey-brown mushroom cloud of debris slowly forms and roils up into the clean air. Subsidiary explosions go off all around the area and up the sides of the valley as mortar bombs and rockets are hurled through the air.

  Col is grinning from ear to ear and shaking his head. ‘Fooking ’ell,’ he mutters in disbelief looking down at the scale of the devastation.

  The four helicopters with Bravo Company roar overhead and drop down to land in the valley and the men on the ridge jump up and down, wave and cheer them on their way.

  Major McKinley is an understated Canadian in charge of Bravo and gets his men shaken out into extended line and sweeps forward. The valley starts to echo with crackling small arms fire and the pop of grenades as they find pockets of enemy and clear them out. The Alpha Company FSG sets up on the ridge and Alex sees little lines of machine-gun tracer zipping down into any pockets of resistance.

  Echo Company take the next AA emplacement along the ridge and the two gunships are now free to operate in the upper reaches of the valley.

  Arkady zooms in tight over the ridge and drops down into a shallow dive. He puts another pod of rockets into a cluster of buildings where the enemy is making a stand and obliterates it. Bravo Company sweep on and clear out the burning huts.

  Jean-Baptiste takes a leaf out of the enemy’s book and wheels two captured AA guns along the ridge and starts a duel with the last base. Bright bursts of tracer spit back and forth but the fight has gone out of the FDLR soldiers and they quickly abandon the base and scramble down the hillside. Jean-Baptiste orders the guns turned on them as they flee and along with the hundred rifles and machine guns of Echo Company the enemy soldiers are chewed up in a huge burst of dust and explosions.

  The FDLR units are losing coherence and ceasing to function in a coordinated manner. Alex guesses that their top commanders have been killed in the artillery ambush and against overwhelming airpower and the steady mortar and machine-gun fire from an elevated position there is nothing they can do. As soon as they stand and fight they get pummelled.

  The valley is falling and the battle is moving down it and away from Alex so he calls in a chopper to lift him and Tac forwards. The mortars come with them and more ammunition is dropped in a cargo net. The pilots are working hard ferrying back and forth to base. Demon 7 has a winch attachment and gets to work on the grisly task of winching men down to recover the bodies of the three aircrew and four men who died when Demon 5 was shot down. Alex then gets it to stop off on the ridge and pick up the three prisoners and take them back to Purgatory.

  Alex’s aircraft lands in a maize field and they run out. Clouds of smoke are drifting across from the next-door field that has been set on fire by burning tracer.

  He sets up his command post under a large tree.

  The signaller calls him over. ‘Cheesehead for you, sir!’

  Alex keys the mike. ‘Cheesehead, this is Black Hal, go ahead, over.’

  He likes Major Jaap t’Hooft, a no-bullshit blond Dutchman, who takes his job, but not himself, seriously and has got Foxtrot Company in good working order.

  His heavily accented voice crackles from the speaker on the radio, full of tension. ‘Black Hal, we have … er, the issue here.’ He looks up from his position on the far side of the Oso river looking up the Lubonga valley. ‘A large enemy force is trying to cross the river via the bridge and we can’t hold them back much longer.’ He ducks down as a burst of machine-gun fire rips overhead.

  Alex hears it crackle in the background.

  He keys the mike again. ‘How many enemy do you estimate? Over.’

  Jaap looks at the hundreds of enemy soldiers crowding onto the bank on the far side of the fast-flowing river. Some are trying to swim for it and being swept downstream. He can see an outstretched arm sticking up out of the water, moving fast.

  ‘We have hundreds, I say maybe a thousand altogether, it’s mainly soldiers but there are civilians mixed in as well. I can see more coming down the valley. I have sixty guys here and we can’t get another chopper in under this fire. We are dug in but we can’t stop them getting across, small groups are getting across the bridge. If they all rush it we can’t stop them. Over.’

  Alex looks grim and keys the mike. ‘Roger that, Cheesehead, wait out.’

  He needs time to think about his options. He looks up and sees Col is watching him with his lips pressed together.

  ‘Shit,’ he says quietly, ‘they’ve got civvies mixed up in ’em.’

  Alex nods. He can’t call in the gunships to do a targeted airstrike and knock out the bridge; Arkady and his wingman have hit bingo fuel and had to return to base.

  He shakes his head, ‘We can’t let them get away. Every one of them that gets away will be another bastard we have to hunt down in the bush. That means my men’s lives and the FDLR will wreak havoc on the civvies in Kivu after this.’ He jerks his head to the burning valley around them.

  Col nods; he knows what they are both thinking. He looks at Alex closely. ‘Beelzebub?’

  Alex pauses and then speaks in a voice edged with a harsh metallic tone. ‘It’s like with Sabiti: it’s difficult but it’s for the good of the province as a whole. This is no time to get sentimental.’

  Col nods silently.

  It isn’t going to be that easy though. Alex takes a deep breath and walks away from the command post. He’s thinking about his Ten Commandment cards, the Fourth Commandment: respect civilians at all times. Should he now kill hundreds of them?

  His briefing to the Chinese and Rwandans in Kigali also comes back to him. Will this be a massacre that sparks a nationalist backlash?

  He stands with his hands on his hips and stares down the burning valley.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  ‘Beelzebub, this is Black Hal, do you copy, over?’

  ‘Copy you, Black Hal, go ahead.’

  ‘Request artillery strike, forty rounds 122mm rockets.’ Alex reads out the coordinates for the bridge. ‘Advise when you have acquired target.’

  ‘Roger that, Black Hal.’ The Rwandan artillery officer in Unit 17 reads the fire control orders back to him, ‘Ready to fire in one minute, out’, and starts entering the data into the targeting computer.

  Around the battered truck parked in the forest clearing, his men are just completing the reloading of the BM-21 launcher. It takes three men at a time to haul the six-foot-long white rockets out of their wooden boxes, hoist them up onto their shoulders and then stagger over to the launch tubes and slide them in.

  Alex keys into the command net for Foxtrot Company overlooking the bridge. ‘Cheesehead, this is Black Hal, stand by, danger close artillery strike in one minute on bridge, get your heads down. Over.’

  ‘Roger that, Black Hal. Query – is this advisable? We have multiple civilians attempting to cross the bridge with soldiers. Over.’

  Jaap peers up out of his foxhole and sees the panic-stri
cken crowd jamming the bridge, mainly soldiers but their wives and some children as well. They are carrying rifles and bundles of possessions, pushing, shoving and shouting. Some fall down and are trampled, others get pushed off the sides between the metal girders into the fast torrent and sweep downstream. The soldiers on the bank behind them are keeping up a steady covering fire on his men, bullets are thudding into the earth all around him and he ducks back down.

  Alex doesn’t want to hear his objections. He has taken the difficult decision to launch the strike; he knows he will kill innocent women and children. Does the Dutchman really think that he can sort out a place like Kivu without collateral damage?

  He is the commander who sees the bigger picture – every FDLR soldier he kills here is another problem solved. They have been dishing out punishment to the civilians of Kivu for decades and now they have to take responsibility for their actions.

  He keys the mike and says aggressively, ‘Cheesehead, this is my decision, get your men in cover. Out.’

  Jaap turns and yells, ‘Artillery incoming! Take cover!’ and his men abandon their attempts to return fire and hunker down in their shellscrapes. Jaap curls up in a ball in his foxhole, head down under his arms, helmet pressed against the earth side, mouth open so that over pressure won’t blow his lungs out and prays that the gunners have got the targeting right.

  ‘Black Hal, this is Beelzebub, we are ready to fire.’

  Alex doesn’t hesitate.

  ‘Beelzebub, fire for effect.’

  The artillery officer hits the electronic firing switch attached to a long wire running to the truck and the dreadful torrent commences. Two rockets per second scream out of their tubes, the truck jolts down on its suspension with each launch, exhaust flames and gases fill the forest clearing and the glowing procession of death arcs away into the blue sky.

  In his foxhole, Jaap doesn’t hear the rockets approach, they come in too fast, just the enormous bang of the first one as it bursts over the crowd sending a shockwave that jars his skull. Each blastwave pulls the air out of his lungs and sprays shrapnel over the valley side. A giant fist is pounding down on him twice a second for twenty seconds.

  ‘Jesus, how long will this last? I’m going to die,’ he thinks as the pummelling continues.

  Suddenly it stops.

  He slumps down and whoops air back into his body. His head is ringing with pain and he can’t hear anything.

  After a minute he uncurls and crawls to the lip of his foxhole and looks out over the valley and whispers.

  ‘Jee-sus Christ.’

  The big Mi-24 gunship roars low over Alex, its 23mm cannon clattering and sending shell casings tumbling down around him.

  Alex ducks his head under the powerful downdraught and watches the brass casings glint in the sun as they fall like gold snow. He carries on running; they have got to hurry.

  The gunships have refuelled and rearmed and are back on station overhead smashing any resistance. Mortars continue to rain down ahead of the First Regiment troops. They have fired hundreds of rounds over the day and the tubes are red hot now.

  It’s midafternoon and he needs to get to the main base, extract actionable intelligence and then get all the troops out of the valley before it gets dark at six. They have smashed the enemy and killed a lot but many have scattered into the woods and fields along the sides of the valley and it only takes one bloke with an RPG to take out a chopper.

  Alex is running along with the one hundred and twenty troops of Bravo Company. They stop to fire occasionally at enemy troops but they are scattering down the valley in the face of the gunships and mortars.

  Everyone has heard the hammering booms of the rocket strike as they rolled back up the valley from the bridge. Alex has shut it out of his mind and is concentrating on gathering the intelligence, getting it back to base and planning the next wave of strikes.

  After a mile they come to the main headquarters area of single-storey wooden buildings that took the first rocket strike in the morning.

  The base is a shambles. Roofs smashed in by a giant aerial fist, trees knocked over, cars and trucks beaten down onto their axles and burnt out. It’s silent and they walk through carefully, their feet scraping on broken glass from blown-out windows. Soldiers scuttle ahead from one piece of cover to another in teams, kicking in doors that lean drunkenly in broken frames and clearing buildings.

  There is no one left alive. Alex looks at the bodies scattered around him, either shredded into pieces by shrapnel, or externally intact but with internal organs pulped by the blast waves, dried blood trails running from their noses and ears. They died in the morning and the dogs and crows have been at them since then. Pools of blood are everywhere, the flies are drunk on it, wriggling and drowning in the congealing mess. There are so many clouds of them buzzing about that they get into his mouth and he spits them out in disgust.

  The dogs have gone feral with bloodlust, lapping it up. They growl and bare their teeth at the soldiers as they approach the corpses. Some have to be shot at to drive them off.

  The men locate the main HQ building and, after troops have swept it, Alex walks in, ducking under a caved-in roof beam and stepping over a severed head.

  ‘In here, sir.’ He walks through into an office and looks at the broken body of General Musoni lying on the floor where he was knocked backwards off his executive chair. Dried blood trails run from his ears and his satellite phone lies in a corner of the room after his fatal conversation with Rukuba.

  Alex looks around the office. Pink floral print curtains flap in the broken windows and there’s a spiderplant pot smashed on the floor. He goes over to the cheap veneer wood desk where a French copy of The Purpose Driven Life is lying in an open drawer.

  The soldiers are sombre as they look around.

  Alex knows they don’t have the time to be.

  ‘Right, get everything that looks like intelligence: I want laptops, any mobiles or satphones, maps, those filing cabinets! I want Musoni’s body and any other high value officers you can find. Come on, let’s crack on! Just bung it all in the chopper and let’s go!’

  The men get cracking and Demon 3 settles down in a cloud of dust next to the base. Relays of men run out of buildings lugging bundles of files and equipment up the ramp and dump it inside. Mordechai and the Unit 17 intelligence people will sort it out back at base. The bodies of senior officers are taken in order to prove they have been killed when they start the media war later on in the campaign.

  As RSM, Col is responsible for making sure that all the men get off the battlefield and back to base safely. He is busy on the radio coordinating with the pilots to organise the extraction. Jean-Baptiste with Echo Company and the Alpha Company FSG all need picking up off the ridge but Foxtrot is in the most exposed position across the Oso river at the bottom of the valley.

  Col shouts to Alex as he walks past lugging a computer hard-drive. ‘Colonel, do you want a lift down to the bridge? I’ve got cabs coming over in a minute.’

  Alex pauses and looks at him. He knows he should go and face up to the consequence of his decision. He nods and hurries on to the chopper.

  Demon 2 lands and he boards with the four men of his close protection team. They man the machine guns at the side and rear door, scanning the valley as they skim along it – it’s their job to keep the boss alive. Two other aircraft follow them in line astern.

  As they come towards the bridge, Alex keys the mike on his headphones. ‘Hover here, I want to see it from the air.’

  He looks down out of the side door at the devastation. Each aerial blast has scattered bodies under it like corn into a sunburst. The strike was accurate and carpeted the area up the valley from the bridge as well as the structure itself. The heavy metal girders have been blown off its sides and one half of the road surface has been smashed into the river.

  The field of death covers the approach to the bridge, fanning out from the riverbank. There must be nearly a thousand people dead down there. Bro
wn bodies with their clothes blown off by the blasts and red blood, all lying with the careless abandon of death. He can’t tell soldiers from civilians, they’ve all been pulped by the blast waves.

  The slaughter of the innocents?

  No, most of them were combat soldiers, so don’t get soft now. You’ve been through this already. This is war, this is your job, just get on with it.

  His close protection team are standing at the tailgate staring out at the destruction. One of them glances back at Alex’s face as he surveys the scene. His stare is intense and severe. What’s he thinking about?

  Horror, guilt and war crimes.

  ‘His fame and his doom went hand in hand.’

  Is this my doom?

  Alex keys the mike on the intercom to the Ukrainian pilot. ‘How much fuel have you got?’

  ‘Full load, sir, we just refuel, it’s only fifty mile here. We got enough for six hundred miles.’

  ‘Is there an emergency venting system?’ He knows full well there is one to ditch fuel in the event of a crash; he’s worked with Mi-17s for years.

  ‘Er, yes sir.’

  ‘Good, I want you to fly slowly over the site and bleed off as much fuel as you can spare.’

  He keys the mike to the other two aircraft and orders them to do the same so that the whole site is covered. They move slowly over the carnage, and thousands of gallons of clear avtur gushes out of a vent in the bottom of the aircraft and is dispersed by the strong downdraught like a sprinkler system.

  The other two aircraft repeat the trick and then all three of them land on the far side of the bridge.

  Major Jaap t’Hooft has got his men drawn up in three chalks ready to board. They are all shaken up by the bombardment and they trudge wearily into the choppers, glad to get away from the appalling sight in front of them.

  He walks over to Alex who is standing with his arms folded over his chest looking across the river. Jaap’s face still looks shocked from the blasts. He stands next to Alex, trying to think of something to say but it all just sounds trite so he keeps his mouth shut.