Little Sister (A James Palatine Novel)

by Giles O'Bryen

  He looked back and saw the VAB grinding towards him, but they couldn’t find him without their lights. He assembled the second round. Rocket, motor, grenade. Fingers feeling for pins, grooves and latches while the VAB’s engine roared in his ears. Done!

  He heaved the launcher onto his shoulder and swung round to face his target. The VAB had turned side-on, stopped. He’d blown the machine gun clean off its roof. No point hitting it again – the VAB’s flanks were specifically designed to withstand RPG grenades. Bullets from the Polisario men to his left zipped down the slope and clinked against its armour – like shooting peas at a rhino. He saw shadows moving beyond the VAB – they’d be working round to the east to outflank the Polisario position, pick them off one by one while the men in the VAB kept them pinned down. As if in confirmation, three slivers of flame spat in quick succession from gunports in the big vehicle’s side.

  It was dark and they could still slip the net. But only if they moved now. The Sherpa was turning to follow the men moving to outflank the Polisario position. That would do. A black shadow moving right to left in his sights. A large square bonnet. Angle the round into that and if it sheared off it would take out the cab. Adjust for lateral movement, hold.

  The rocket slammed out of the tube, spun down parallel with the gradient and dipped into the base of the windscreen. The explosion blew the Sherpa onto its back end. It teetered for a moment, then its fuel tank ignited and black smoke slashed with orange poured from its side.

  The RPG tube was smoking like a power station chimney – as obvious as hoisting a flag over your head. Time to get out. His instincts were screaming that he must disrupt the Moroccan position. He unslung the Parker Hale and ran into the darkness to his right, then started to crawl down parallel with the VAB, watching for the soldiers who would be working their way towards him. Pretty soon, he came across a runnel that might once have been the path of a stream. He dropped into it and crawled along lizard-style. Gunfire snapped and chattered away to the east. Then a shot cracked out so close he thought it must be Younes – the idiot had decided to follow him. . . He raised his head above the runnel and saw a Moroccan soldier lying in the sand twenty yards away, aiming a rifle at the point where he’d fired the RPG. If there was one, there’d be more. James didn’t want to give his position away because it looked as if another few minutes of crawling along the runnel would take him right round the rear of the VAB.

  It did and he didn’t like what he saw. They were setting up a mortar in the lea of the VAB, a professional little crew of three under the grainy blue halo of a battery-operated fluorescent lamp. Arrogant, to light themselves up like that. Four others were positioned at the corners of the VAB. The rest would be out there on the flanks, waiting in pairs for their assailants to break cover when the first mortar shell hit their position. An exercise straight out of the textbook. Their commander stood next to the mortar crew, four dead or injured men laid out in a row beside him.

  The Parker Hale was perfect for laying down suppressive fire. He knelt and aimed at the blue lamp, squeezed the trigger. Nothing. Misfire. He dropped down, checked the weapon as best he could in the darkness, re-fitted the clip. In seconds the mortar would start pounding the Polisario position. He pulled the trigger. Again the Parker Hale refused to shoot. He flung it aside and yanked out the P99, though at this range it wasn’t much better than a popgun. Before he could open fire, the mortar tube clunked and spat out a bilious yellow mouthful of flame. The shell spiralled into the sky, absurdly high because of the short range. A sickening wait, then the dull roar as the bomb slammed into the slope opposite, the pattering of rocks and sand falling back to earth. . .

  He emptied the handgun at the mortar crew in their little blue-lit cocoon and heard a shout of surprise as his bullets drummed against the VAB’s plating. He dived back into his runnel, started to work his way back to where he’d seen the soldier. He’d kill him and get his rifle, then go back and finish off the mortar crew. He heard men behind him, shouting as they organised the pursuit, rifle rounds scuffing the sand where he’d lain. He crawled till the sand cracked between his teeth and his elbows bled and his knee felt like it might snap. He heard a shout from behind him and stopped.

  ‘Faites gaffe, l’enculé arrive!’

  Watch out, asshole’s coming your way. Torch beams flicked across the sky. He listened intently, but the basso profondo of the Light Gun had left his ears feeling like they’d been plugged with cotton wool. He thought he saw sand shifting just ahead of him, then a voice rang out, startlingly clear. He slid the commando knife from the sheath at his waist and inched forwards. He got as close as he could get without leaving the runnel. He could sense the hunched shape of the Moroccan soldier above him, his warmth and smell. He raised his head above the edge of the runnel. The man was down on one knee, crouching low, muttering angrily to himself. He’d been spooked by the shouted warning and that made taking him out very difficult. The standard move was a knife-point plunged into the kidney, so acutely painful the victim can’t even scream. But that wouldn’t be possible. The soldiers who’d come after him were closing.

  The mortar fired again, a sound like punching a wad of sodden newspaper. Impact in three seconds. He counted off two and bounded from the ditch. The soldier turned and stared right at him. For a split-second he was transfixed. The mortar shell exploded and he flinched, then swung his rifle up. Too late. James’s left arm had already parried the barrel aside. He drove the tip of the knife in under the soldier’s chin and shucked open his voicebox, then levered the handle sideways and withdrew, slicing deep across his jugular. Blood gleamed like black treacle on his neck.

  James dragged the soldier’s shuddering body into the runnel. The firefight had intensified. A long burst of machine-gun fire answered the insistent crack of the M16s, then another mortar shell exploded in a flash of pink-orange light. He turned back to the corpse of the Moroccan soldier, extracted the rifle from his hands and put on his helmet. He set off along the runnel, back to a position where he could take out the Moroccan mortar emplacement. Dark shapes moving towards him, not seventy yards away. He froze. They’d found the runnel and were using it. Take the direct route, then: straight down to the corner of the VAB. He scrambled out of the runnel and crawled fast. He was still thirty yards off when he heard the clunk of another shell hitting the firing pin at the base of the mortar tube. Afterwards, all he could remember thinking was, That’s not where the mortar is. . .

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  A deep absence. Like driftwood on a beach, becoming rock.

  The dragging back. Nausea looming. Air whispering through chambers of stiffened tissue. Nerves gnawing themselves.

  A sledgehammer banging on an oildrum. You’re inside it inside it inside it. Limbs toiling, too thick to lift. Something squeezing your head.

  A helmet.

  How did that get there? It took minutes to drag it off. His arms were rubbery. The helmet rolled away. Dimpled like an old cooking pot. Blood trickled from his back. It felt like it had been sanded down.

  ‘It has been sanded down,’ he said out loud.

  He couldn’t hear himself above the humming and singing in his head. He got up and fell down. Crawl, then. Back to the runnel. He rolled in and recoiled as his raw back slumped against the corpse of a soldier.

  Silence, filled with noise. Like a fingernail screeching along a guitar string. He watched for flashes, but the firefight seemed to be over. He looked back over his shoulder and saw a faint sepia glow. What was that? He stood up and his head pounded so hard it made him nod. Everything was on a tilt. He dropped to his knees. Up. Walk. He shuffled forwards, bent at the waist, legs moving mechanically, as if they’d been wound up, as if they weren’t really his. His eyes were playing weird tricks, losing track when he moved his head, shapes forming and vanishing and forming again when he looked away. He stopped and everything went still, as if petrified by the cold moonlight. He meant to carry on, but found himself lying on his side in the sand in
stead. His head was belting out a rhythm that made his gums throb. Was this why he had lain down? There was a new noise inside his skull, a tuneless whistling. He realised he was confused and that this was dangerous. He had no idea where he was.

  He stood up and walked on. He was coming back to something like consciousness, not liking it too much. A stench of charred rubber drifted on the air. He changed his grip on the rifle to stop it slipping from his hand. Shreds of cotton stuck to the flesh of his back, then snatched away as his arms swung. The ground gave way and he stumbled a few steep paces downhill. Then uphill. His left foot snagged against something soft and heavy, like a sodden branch. He peered down. A roll of camouflage fabric, it looked like.

  He straightened up and found himself staring at a looming black shape, its outline fringed with flickering orange light. The VAB. Some part of it or something behind it was burning. He’d walked straight into the Moroccan position, but there didn’t seem to be anyone here. He stepped back. His heel caught on a sharp edge and he fell. The sky rolled and yawed above his head. He waited for his vision to settle, then levered himself up and studied the thing he had tripped on. Part of a steel frame, a mounting of some kind. There’d been a mortar here, set up in a circle of blue light. Where were they? The whistling was back, but now it sounded like a high-pitched, crackly voice. He lay on his side again, unable to think what else to do. His fingertips brushed against a mat of sticky hair. He prodded his fingers into the tangle. It was human. He pulled himself closer. The soldier was face down. It took James a moment to understand why he could only make out one side of the dead body. The soldier had taken a spray of somersaulting shrapnel and it had torn him in half.

  He rolled away, a column of vomit swelling in his throat. His mangled back crunched over the rock-strewn sand. What happened? He got back to his feet and tried to listen, but the zings and roars and hums inside his head shut out everything except the whiny voice. He moved on a few paces, trying not to look down because out of the corner of his eye he’d seen a boot with a bit of splintered shinbone sticking out. He came up against the VAB. It was hot to the touch and listing like a stricken tanker. Then he saw where the whiny voice was coming from: a radio handset someone had dropped in the sand, nagging for an answer.

  Movement. To his left. A big man, leaning against the rear of the VAB. The moon was behind him and James couldn’t make out his face. He brought his rifle up and aimed it, but the man didn’t react. James walked towards him, picking his way through the debris of the explosion. The man just stood there, motionless. The contours of his shoulders were familiar.

  ‘Younes? You OK?’

  Perhaps he had only whispered, because Younes made no response. All James could hear was a gurgling that seemed to be coming from Younes’s chest. He looked down and saw three white ribs gleaming from a fringe of tattered cotton. Below them, where the next rib should have been, a glistening pulp like a huge wet raspberry. Another rib stuck out from his body. The angle of it made James want to snap it off, as if it offended some macabre sense of propriety. He looked up from Younes’s shrapnel-clawed chest and saw that his jaw was moving up and down in a parody of speech. He pointed at his broken ribcage and tears rolled from his eyes.

  ‘Steady, Younes. Let’s get you comfortable, huh?’

  James helped him to lie down, then cradled the man’s head in his lap. Younes looked up, eyes still and unblinking in his big, doughy face.

  ‘You did well tonight, Younes. You can be proud.’

  He opened his mouth but James shook his head.

  ‘Don’t say anything. We blew these Moroccans away – just the five of us. A big day for the Polisario. You understand?’

  He stared up into James’s eyes, tried to nod.

  ‘They’ll know you fought like a hero. I’ll tell them.’

  He couldn’t think of anything more to say, though Younes still looked up into his eyes, hungry for the consolation of these soldierly rites.

  Several minutes passed and James became uneasy. There had been twenty or thirty Moroccan soldiers. They couldn’t all have been killed in the blast which had caused such carnage here. He ought to look for Sulamani and the others. He shifted position and Younes’s eyes snapped open. The hunger and resignation had gone: now all James saw was terror. Younes tried to inhale, but the breath caught and he coughed a spray of blood, then snorted and sucked as his lungs filled with fluid.

  ‘OK, Younes. Take it easy.’

  There was no stilling his panic. He struggled to raise himself, and the effort drew another thick, juddering cough, then a frenzied attempt to expel the coagulating blood from his lungs. His neck jerked up from James’s lap, tendons like steel cords. The lobe of his lung ballooned through the gap in his ribs. His body went into spasm.

  He held Younes while he died, then sat on the ground beside the remains of his one-time guard. You chose to stay and fight. You knew what it would be like. He had to get away. He made his way to the corner of the VAB. Sooty flames were lapping round its front wheel arch. Ahead was a hundred yards or so of level sand, then the incline. He could just see the outline of the Light Gun against the sky to the east. He reached the foot of the slope and started to labour uphill. ‘You’re getting close,’ he told himself. The sand sucked at his ankles. He stopped and looked back at the mess of shattered vehicles below, then up at the sky. The stars were dim. Dawn was not far off. A gust arrived from the west and he shivered as it brushed the torn skin of his back. Salif had set up the mortar twenty yards from the compound fence. That would be the easiest thing to find.

  He climbed to the top and set off along the gleaming curtain of steel. The serried ranks of wire-mesh diamonds seemed to open out as he passed, giving a fuzzy view of the compound buildings beyond. The effect was hypnotic, and he didn’t notice the mortar until it was a few yards away. Salif lay beside it, his body wrapped around a box of shells, the Parker Hale in his hand. He looked small, like a boy. James knelt down and lifted his head, hoping to sense some animation but feeling only its weight in death. The sights and controls on the mortar were dark with blood. Even when wounded, Salif had carried on firing. They’d been through plenty together in a few short weeks, and the sight of him guarding the mortar even after death affected James powerfully. This is the end Salif would have chosen, he thought. Destroying his enemies in defence of the cause he loved.

  He laid out Salif’s body and as he did so, found the Sahrawi man’s knife in its worn leather scabbard. He unsheathed the knife and wrapped Salif’s hands around the hilt, with the blade pointing down. That looks good, he thought. He looks proud. He looks like a warrior. He knelt down beside him and wept.

  When he’d recovered, James started to zigzag east. Ten minutes later, he found Benoit curled up in a hollow. The boy’s lips were moving haltingly around the words of a prayer. The incantation drifted up into the sky, like smoke from a guttering candle. Every ten seconds or so, he shivered, as if his life were being sucked away by a fever.

  ‘Benoit?’

  The boy stared up but seemed not to recognise him.

  ‘C’est moi, James.’

  The boy nodded, still staring.

  ‘J’ai tout manqué,’ James said, continuing in French and hoping the boy would understand. ‘I got stunned by a shell. What happened?’

  ‘My uncle is dead.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Benoit. Are you hurt?’

  ‘Colonel Sulamani is dead.’

  ‘Sulamani too. . . And Younes. I wish they had lived. . . ’ James was too overwhelmed by sadness to continue.

  ‘They were waiting in the darkness, all around us. Uncle Salif fired the mortar. We heard him cry out.’

  ‘But he went on firing.’

  ‘Colonel Sulamani kept them away. I heard him shouting. There was a big explosion.’

  James thought of the scene behind the VAB. Salif must have aimed for the halo of blue light and dropped one plumb on their little arsenal.

  ‘Your uncle was a brave man.’
r />   ‘I hid my head. I am a coward. I did not fire and now they are dead.’

  ‘No, Benoit,’ James said quickly. ‘You couldn’t have saved them. That was an evil fight, as bad as it gets. Dark, no position, outnumbered, outgunned. We were lucky, you and I. Salif hit their position just in time to save us. He did that so we could fire at the Moroccans a few more times. So let’s find the mortar and the Light Gun and do it, Benoit. For Salif, for Colonel Sulamani, for the Polisario.’

  Benoit nodded and wiped his eyes on his T-shirt. James helped him up, put an arm round his shoulders. They started back towards the place where he had found Salif’s body.

  ‘I’ve gone deaf,’ said James. ‘You hear or see anything, dive.’

  Colonel Sulamani’s body had rolled to the foot of the slope about thirty yards from where James had found Benoit. He’d taken bullets to the legs and chest and his uniform was torn and bloody; but his face was unmarked, his features grave and dignified as they had been in life.

  They laid out his body and drove a rifle into the sand above his head. Benoit said a prayer, then they walked on. When they found Salif’s body, James left him to grieve while he dragged the last of the shells over to the mortar. He set the weapon to maximum range, then he and Benoit wrapped cloth around their ears and sent over twelve rounds in quick succession. It felt like a pointless thing to do, blindly lobbing explosives into the middle of nowhere. But it was noise. The Moroccan commander would be wondering why his men had not returned, and calculating what kind of Polisario force could get the better of a fully manned infantry assault vehicle.