by James Steel
Rukuba leaps up, boiling with rage. ‘Get him out of here!’ he roars, pointing at the farmhouse. ‘Nothing will interrupt the expression of the will of my people!’
Gabriel goes limp and is frogmarched back around the side of the farmhouse and then shoved and kicked on his way on the road down the hill. He is distraught and in tears.
He stumbles along towards the village and a feeling of doom grips his soul. What will happen to them now that they have provoked the greatest military power on Earth?
Carla Schmidt has got her satellite link set up and hauled herself and Mike, her cameraman, up onto a roof; he is filming the disaster as it unfolds.
The CNN studio in Washington DC is seven hours behind Kivu, so at 10 a.m. her editor rudely barks in the anchorman’s ear as he introduces a piece on the housing market. He looks shocked for a moment and then says, ‘We have just had news of an incident unfolding in the newly established Republic of Kivu in the Congo, where the Secretary of State is on an official visit. I’m live with our correspondent Carla Schmidt now. Carla, what have you got for us there?’
The screen cuts to a low-resolution shot of Carla crouching down on the roof, one hand holding her microphone in front of her and the other pressing her earpiece in. There is a delay on the satellite line and then her mechanical, distorted voice comes back.
‘Rob, we have a major incident developing here. We’re not sure why but the compound where the Secretary of State is staying is being attacked by a large mob, there must be five, six, seven hundred men out …’ She cuts off and ducks as a burst of gunfire goes over her head, sounding like a faint popping noise on the TV screens all across America. The camera shot ducks down and shows a blurred close-up of the roof. Muffled sounds come from offscreen.
In the studio Rob barks, ‘Carla, are you OK?’
‘Shit!’ she blurts out and then puts her head up. ‘Mike, are you OK?’
‘Yeah, OK, we’re still rolling.’
She lies down flat on the roof and Mike does likewise, getting the camera back up and twisting its viewfinder round until he gets a focused shot of her again.
‘Sorry! Rob, we’re under fire here. We have a small Special Forces team protecting us but this is a big mob we are facing and …’ a soldier takes up a firing position on one knee next to her and bangs out a burst over her head ‘…this is serious. Rob, I have been in some tight spots but this is serious!’ The panic in her voice comes through the low-quality sound.
A burst of heavy bullets smashes into the side of the hut and angles up through the thin plywood of the roof into the soldier’s ankle. He screams and drops his weapon.
‘Man down! Man down!’ his partner on the roof is shouting.
‘Stay on station!’ Moretti yells. ‘They’re coming round the back!’
In the central hut in the compound the other press journalists are all flat on the floor as bullets smash through the thin walls over their heads and shower them in dust and splinters.
At one end of the hut the Secretary of State is also down on the floor, speaking via satellite phone to the President. She has to shout over the noise. ‘Asani, this is bad here!’ She hardly ever uses the President’s first name.
‘We’re holding them but I don’t know for how long. Speak to Major Reilly.’
She hands over the phone. The President has got the TV on mute in front of him and is watching what is happening; he can see the situation is grave. Admiral Harry Kruger is with him in the Oval Office listening in on a speaker phone, having run across from an adjacent building along with other key White House staff. They all know that across the country people are stopping work and switching on radios, TVs and the internet to watch the ghastly action film play out as their most senior foreign diplomat and a lot of leading journalists are threatened with death.
The President tries to keep his famed calm but doesn’t manage it. His voice snaps, ‘Major, what is your assessment?’
‘Sir, we are in big trouble here. My men are holding the perimeter just but we have limited ammunition and it’s getting dark in under an hour. They’re bringing up more weapons and the incoming is getting worse, sir.’
‘OK, OK, soldier, Admiral Kruger will explain our options.’
‘Reilly, this is Kruger.’
‘Sir!’ Reilly had not anticipated having to speak to the President and the senior military commander and is feeling out of his depth.
‘I’ve got a company of Rangers taking off in a C-130 in Kenya ready to parachute in and there’s a Spectre gunship going with them but it’s eight hundred miles and they’ll take three hours to get to you. How long can you hold?’
‘That’s too long, sir!’
‘OK, the President has agreed another option. I can launch cruise missiles from off the coast of Somalia and they can be there in an hour and twenty minutes. We can use cluster munitions from them on the area around the compound and we can hit Rukuba’s base and take the heat off you guys and try and get some in as close to you as we dare. That should give you some breathing space until the Rangers and the Spooky get to you.’
‘Yes, sir, that would be good. Right now danger close is OK with me, sir.’
‘OK, well, I don’t want to be the guy who drops a bomb on Johnson, so you gotta hang in there.’
‘Yes, sir!’ Reilly glances at his watch. It’s 5.10 p.m.; he’s got until 6.30 p.m. before the missiles arrive and he gets any hope of relief.
Chapter Fifty-Five
One thousand kilometres away to the northeast, night has just fallen and the ships of Combined Task Force 151 cruise in darkness in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Somalia.
The multinational antipiracy squadron includes vessels from twenty-one different countries assigned to different sea areas. However, two days ago the nine-thousand-six-hundred-ton Ticonderoga Class missile cruiser, the USS Gettysburg, left its allotted area and steamed south with its screening destroyers, away from other national vessels, under orders from Admiral Kruger in anticipation of an incident in Kivu.
Deep inside the huge ship in her high-tech war room, officers have been scanning satellite imagery of the area of Mukungu and preparing a range of attack options for their BGM-109 Tomahawk cruise missiles. The TLAM-D version contains one hundred and sixty-six Combined Effects Munition bomblets which spray out of ports on both sides of a missile as it passes over a target.
These plans are now put into effect.
The ship turns beam on to the target to use her fore and rear deck missile launchers. A series of large armoured hatches flip open rapidly on the decks as the Vertical Launch System prepares to fire each six-metre-long missile. Technicians complete final preparations for launch in the darkened war room and the captain mutters a laconic ‘Launch missiles.’
A flash of white light splits the night on the fore and rear decks, illuminating the ship’s high superstructure. Fire and smoke belch out of the hatches and the missiles shoot up like demons emerging out of a trapdoor from hell. One after another, six missiles are blasted up into the air by propellant charges before their motors kick in and thrust them up and away, their exhausts burning bright and trailing a long stream of smoke. They make a hideous scraping sound like a heavy weight being dragged across the sky that fades as they disappear rapidly away southwest towards the coast of Africa and Kivu.
Yamba is on the satellite phone.
‘Mr Fadoul? This is Major Douala.’
‘Ah, Major Douala, what the hell is happening? The whole world has gone mad, they’re rioting in Goma, you know, the Chinese have all fled back over the border to Rwanda.’ He utters an Arabic expletive. ‘They’ve taken one of my helicopters …’
‘What? Who’s taken your helicopter?’
‘I don’t know, soldiers, they came to the refinery this morning and stole a helicopter with Mahmood. My staff said they made him fly off but I don’t know where.’
‘Oh …’ Yamba can’t think of anything to say; the flow of bad news just keeps getting worse.
He’s back in the ops room at Camp Heaven. Arkady and the other company majors are sorting out the carnage down on the flight line though there isn’t much they can do and there are very few injured left to be saved.
‘Why? What is happening with you? This whole country is going mad.’
‘It’s bad here as well, we’ve been attacked by artillery and all our helicopters have been destroyed …’
‘What?’
‘Yes, that’s why I’m calling you. Sophie is in trouble. She went to an outstation yesterday …’
‘Yes, I know, she called me and I sent Mahmood to take her there with those goalposts …’ Another outburst in Arabic. ‘What are you telling me? Are you saying she’s in danger?’
‘Yes, Kudu Noir have attacked the village and Colonel Devereux has gone there to get her out but his helicopter has now been destroyed …’
The sound of wailing comes down the phone as Bilal realises what has happened to her.
‘Kudu Noir! No!’
‘Look, we need to get them both out of there – do you have another helicopter?’
‘Yes, take it!’ Bilal is filled with anguish. He wanted only to impress and help Sophie with his helicopter. Now the irony is killing him. ‘It’s at my house here, I’ll send it up to you now.’
‘OK, that’s good news, that’s great, thank you.’
At last something has moved in a positive direction.
‘Tell the pilot to land by the operations tent, the flight line is destroyed.’
He gets off the phone and calls Arkady on the radio. ‘Arkady, get up here fast, we’ve got a chopper and I want you flying it.’
‘Good! I’m coming!’
Yamba sets to work getting together the weaponry that he needs to make the trip to Bahomba. He’s going with Arkady but otherwise the aircraft will have to fly out empty in order to be able to pick up Alex and Sophie and the platoon of men and bring them back.
Ten minutes later a Mi-17 with the Fadoul company logo on it thumps over the ops tent and Yamba looks up at the clock on the ops room wall to check the time. It’s next to the kudu head that Col put up there and the creature looks back at him with its menacing stare.
He looks away from it and checks the clock. It’s 5.25 p.m. He runs out with Arkady who takes over from the pilot and they lift off.
Alex’s doom is now complete.
Sophie’s body hangs on the crossbar of the new goalposts.
He is a failure: public, private, professional, personal. A pariah, a war criminal, a liar, a man who makes promises to keep people safe and breaks them; he has failed to protect his lover.
He cannot look at her like that and kneels with his head down. Jean-Baptiste appears next to him, scoops up his rifle and, seeing his immobility, is about to retrieve the body.
The movement galvanises him. ‘No!’ He rises painfully to his feet and walks over to her; he must do this.
They used the canvas belt on her jeans; it digs into her long slender neck. Her face is tinged blue with deoxygenated blood, her tongue is a ghastly protrusion from her mouth. Her long legs are wet with urine.
Jean-Baptiste holds her legs to take the weight off and Alex undoes the belt and between them they lay her awkwardly down on the ground.
Alex is in shock; he kneels and stares at her distorted face and cannot reconcile it with the beautiful, funny, angry, living one he knew.
Jean-Baptiste stands next to him and puts his hand on his commander’s shoulder.
The first howl breaks out from the bush across the valley from them.
Jean-Baptiste ducks and pushes Alex down as a burst of machine-gun fire scythes across them. They crawl frantically on the ground into the cover of some trees behind the goal-post. Bullets thud into wood and shower them with wet white splinters.
Gunfire breaks out from both sides of the valley and the long howls echo back and forth across it triumphantly. The violence makes Alex focus; he’s running on instinct alone now, a blind drive from somewhere under his soul that simply forces him to put one foot in front of the other and keep on doing what he knows how to do.
He is crouching behind a tree and yells across to Jean-Baptiste. He’s separated from his signaller but the Frenchman has a platoon radio headset on. ‘Tell them to cover us back through these trees and we’ll join them. We need to extract west to the meadow!’
Jean-Baptiste relays the order to Stein who gets his sections to manoeuvre back onto the west side of the valley. Two men are killed by bursts of gunfire as they cross over. They are down to twenty men.
The remainder take up firing positions in the trees and lay down covering fire to allow Alex and Jean-Baptiste to dodge from tree to tree out of the middle of the valley and onto its western side.
Alex finds his signaller, and Col and Stein start extracting the platoon back through the trees, each section covering the other in a fighting retreat. He moves with them and his signaller tries to raise Yamba on the radio. They blunder through the dense foliage. The high tree canopy cuts out a lot of light and it’s getting dark anyway. All around them are bursts of gunfire and figures darting from tree to tree.
The Kudu Noir on the west of the valley begin to close in around them on both sides and the ones on the east side dash over and follow after them. They are fighting on three sides now as they hack their way westwards up the half-mile slope to the meadows.
‘Loyola for you, sir!’
They squat down for a moment behind a tree and Alex grabs the phone from his signaller and yells into it over the gunfire near him, ‘Loyola, this is Black Hal, what is your status?’
Yamba is in the co-pilot seat of the Mi-17, his radio headset on, his voice distorted by the loud noise of the rotors as Arkady pushes the machine hard. ‘Black Hal, we are inbound from the east in a Mi-17, ETA is 18.00 hours. What is your locstat?’
‘Roger that, we are extracting west from Bahomba village and will RV with you in the meadow half a mile west of the village. Be advised we are in contact with enemy troops and LZ will be hot.’
‘Roger that, Black Hal. Out.’
The words were easy to say but Alex now thinks, how are we going to break contact with the enemy in order to extract? Normally they would try and get an artillery or air strike to separate them and then leg it to the chopper but they can’t do that now. They need to win the firefight in the bush first but it doesn’t sound good – the volume of incoming fire is high and they are being hit from three sides. Bullets zip overhead and thunk into trees around him. An RPG explodes to his right and the orange flash cuts through the gloom momentarily. Alex glances towards it and sees a horned head move between two trees lit by the stabbing muzzle flash of a machine gun.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Joseph has his face pressed down into the wet grass. Bullets crack over him; the Americans have them pinned down with fire from the roofs of the huts. Every time anyone pops up to take a shot at them they are hit by accurate marksmanship.
Wild bursts of gunfire still zip over his head from gunmen further away behind him in the darkness. The tracers sweep across the huts and sometimes screams come as they find a target. The men in the grass around the perimeter roar when they do.
Joseph decides to crab sideways towards where someone got hit and take their weapon. He is a soldier and he knows how to fight. He is furious at these people who have come into this new land that has given him an identity, and insulted President Rukuba. Who are the Americans to tell Kivu if it can be a state or not? Drunken rage has replaced any thought for the consequences.
‘Simon, come on!’ he calls towards his friend and hears the rustle in the grass as Simon moves towards him. They crawl along together and come across the body on its back with its rifle nearby in the grass. ‘Get the magazines.’
Simon pulls them out of the man’s bandoliers and hands them over. ‘Hey, there’s a truck coming.’ He points back down the road towards Mukungu, where soldiers are bringing up the three army trucks.
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nbsp; ‘Come on! Let’s go!’ Joseph jumps up and runs back away from the besieged base towards the trucks. Out of range of the American rifles, men are climbing up into the back of one of them, some of them Kudu Noir soldiers in their black masks. All are shouting and cheering in anger, waving their guns over their heads.
The two teenagers jump up alongside them and hold on to the metal frame overhead in the back. One of the Kudu Noir heaves a box up onto the back of the truck. ‘Grenades! Everybody pass them round!’ Joseph is handed four of the hard metal balls and stuffs them into his pockets, then grabs the wooden sideboards as the truck lurches forward. The engine roars, the gears grind and they gain speed along the road towards the base.
Major Reilly is crouching on a roof inside the compound and hears the truck coming through the night. It hasn’t got its lights on but with his night vision headset he sees it accelerating towards the razor-wire gates intent on ramming them.
‘Jackson, get over here!’
The soldier scuttles over to him and he gives him the goggles. ‘I want a grenade in its cab as soon as it’s in range.’
‘Sir.’ Jackson pulls on the headset and, in the green watery light of the image intensifier, sees the large truck driving down the road, moving at speed now.
He hurriedly slots a fat 40mm grenade into the launcher tube slung underneath his carbine and sights carefully on the cab. When it’s two hundred metres away he pulls the trigger and the rifle thumps and lobs the grenade.
It strikes a glancing blow on the front wing of the long truck bonnet and explodes. The bonnet is ripped off and the shrapnel shatters the window.
The driver is wounded in the face but ducks down under the dashboard and keeps driving with one hand on the wheel. The radiator spews steam out but the truck keeps coming.
In the back, Joseph and the other twenty men all duck down at the sound and bright flash of the explosion. Bursts of machine-gun fire crack over them and they cling onto the side as the truck swerves off the road onto the grass and then bumps back onto the road.
