Recoil

by Andy McNab

  The magnesium burned out and the fire group ceased firing.

  Sam jumped up, screaming, ‘That’s us! That’s us! That’s us!’

  I followed a couple of steps to his right as he charged the enemy position. The left side of our line followed; the right stayed static, on their feet, and gave covering fire.

  Screaming at the tops of our voices, we stopped after three or four metres and fired into the positions, aiming at anything that moved. The right of our line took the cue to run three or four metres past us – then went static and laid down fire while we made our next bound. We were firing and manoeuvring, firing and manoeuvring.

  Lightning flashed across the sky. Some of the enemy were firing in confusion, others running away or on their knees begging.

  We stopped again, fired at anything that moved. I dropped two guys; one runner, one who’d stood his ground and fired.

  It was gollock time. There was no time to change mags: guys couldn’t afford to get left behind, we had to keep the momentum going. Rebel screams competed with the thunder as we charged. It was carnage, but we had to keep moving.

  I squeezed the trigger at shadows ahead of me and got the dead man’s click. ‘Stoppage!’

  On the ground I started to change mags, but I was too slow. Our team was on the move again.

  I drew my gollock, but there was a yell from Sam. ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’

  We’d done it – we were through the position.

  ‘Stop! Stop!’

  Now came the hard part, trying to control guys who had their blood up. I joined him as he ran up and down, my arms open and waving. ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’

  Gollocks slashed at the wounded. Sporadic shots were fired into dark shapes in the mud.

  Crucial and his fire group came forward to join us. Sam was busy dragging two guys away from some bodies they’d been gollocking big-time, so Crucial and I concentrated on trying to regain control and getting the rest of them to search bodies for magazines and ammo.

  A jubilant shout echoed in the darkness. Someone had been discovered hiding. They dragged him out from under a body.

  He wore a red spotted scarf wrapped round his head like he was king of the rappers.

  3

  The porters gathered slowly. No one knew how many of them were dead, injured, or had just done a runner. I wasn’t even sure if Sam knew how many there had been to start with, or had a list of names. I somehow thought not.

  The ones who were there knew the score, and started collecting bodies. The final count was fifteen enemy and four of ours. Sam was right: they really did have a high man-hour-per-kill ratio.

  Sam squatted by the feet of the rapper, who was tied up with his back against a tree. Rain splashed down his now naked body. His eyes were wide and jumpy. He knew he was about to be handed a one-way ticket to Mud City, and he begged for mercy. No matter what language is used, begging is always easy to understand.

  ‘What now, Sam?’

  ‘We stack the bodies and the next turnaround buries them.’

  ‘I mean this guy.’

  Crucial came up behind us, AK slung, gollock in hand. He’d obviously taken a shine to the rapper’s headscarf, because he was now wearing it.

  Sam stood out of the way. Crucial took an almighty swing and hit the guy on the thigh with the flat of the gollock.

  The only thing louder than his screams was the next clap of thunder. But those screams weren’t going to help him. There aren’t any panic buttons in the bush, and even if there were, no one with more than two brain cells would come and help you out at a time like this.

  Crucial yelled into his face. Whatever the answer was, either it wasn’t what Crucial had been wanting to hear, or there just wasn’t enough of it.

  He took another swing, this time not to the thigh and not with the flat of the blade. Three severed fingers dropped into the mud. The guy’s legs collapsed beneath him, but he was held upright by the rope round his chest.

  Crucial screamed into his face again. The assault team, who’d gone back to the fire-group area to retrieve their bergens, looked on as they returned. They didn’t give a shit. It was brutal, but this was war. This was what happened. None of these guys, theirs or ours, would be rushing back to camp to play Scrabble or form a debating society.

  Soldiers do what soldiers do. This poor fucker needed to tell us all he knew, and that would save lives. Crucial had used the perfect expression to describe the method I’d always used to try to stop it fucking my head up afterwards: Just wipe my mouth, clear out the bad taste, and move on.

  At last Crucial got something worthwhile out of him. He turned away from the whimpering, begging body and chatted to Sam as if he was keeping him abreast of the weather forecast. There are just three pieces of information you need from a prisoner in the field: How many more of you are there? What weapons have you got? And what do you plan to do with them? This was the way to get them fast.

  ‘They’re LRA.’ Crucial swung his gollock behind him and tapped the body on the shoulder. He flinched and screamed, expecting more. ‘These guys were coming up from the diamond mines. Kony told his guys down there to head north and join up with the main force. They’re all on the move.’

  Sam was deaf to the cries for mercy. ‘Probably one of these groups the terrible twins hit last night. Get everything you can from him.’

  Crucial turned and the prisoner was rewarded with a head butt, then another swing of the gollock for good measure. It was against his thigh again, but this time with the sharp end. His skin split open several inches deep. His head slumped as he broke down in fear and pain. Lightning crackled across the sky, freezing the two of them in a series of still-lifes as Crucial yelled into his face once more.

  The man’s answers still weren’t to Crucial’s liking.

  He took two paces away from the tree, then turned back and swung the flat of the gollock once more, this time hard into the man’s face. I heard the crunch of bone but no screams, just a horrible rasping noise as he fought for breath through his blood- and mucus-filled mouth and nostrils. I supposed you didn’t get a gob full of conflict diamonds by signing up to the Geneva Convention.

  The manicured greens and crystal wine glasses of Erinvale were a world away as Crucial held up the man’s swollen and bloody head and shouted into it once more. When he got no response, he carved the blade up between the man’s legs, dug in and up.

  Thank fuck, the guy started begging and talking. His body had already crumpled into the ropes. Rain streamed down his face, washing away the blood. But not for long.

  Crucial pulled away from the rapper. As he listened, he held his bloodstained gollock out flat, rinsing it in the downpour.

  The troops just mooched around, not at all interested in what had gone on. They were too busy cutting hair from the dead, almost scalping them, and seeing what could be robbed from their bodies that the porters hadn’t already helped themselves to.

  ‘They are close, too close.’ Crucial held up his wooden cross to have it cleansed of the prisoner’s blood. He walked towards Sam and me. ‘They started to hit the villages about thirty K north of the mine last night. They are maybe three, four hundred strong up there, he doesn’t really know. But he does know Kony has been bringing all his guys together, ready to hit us.

  We’re the last big mine on his list.’

  Crucial turned back to the prisoner.

  Silky filled my mind once more. So much for three, maybe four days.

  Crucial studied the body, which had now stopped breathing. ‘It gets worse. There are lots of guys heading up from the south to join the main force. We could even run into more groups tonight.’ He turned back to us, his diamonds gleaming in the lightning. ‘Well, at least that’s sixteen we won’t have to kill later.’

  Sam nodded. ‘OK, get the guys ready. Let’s move on out of here. We need to get the Nuka mob into the mine with us, soon as.’

  I was with him on that one. We’d lost time and distance, and the LRA hadn’t. />
  Crucial turned to shout at the troops but a commotion had kicked off to our left. A group of porters were bunched round a couple of bodies, kicking and punching down into them.

  There was movement on the ground. One wasn’t dead, and the voice that cried out was very young.

  Sam and Crucial ran towards them, yelling for them to stop.

  I watched as they pushed through. The crowd parted to reveal an emaciated boy, no more than eleven or twelve years old. His head was bigger than the bag of bones beneath it.

  Crucial dragged him along the mud to clear him from the body he was hiding under and away from the porters Sam was trying to calm. He talked slowly and gently to the boy, who seemed to relax – then the boy suddenly grabbed the arm that was restraining him and sank his teeth into its biceps.

  Crucial’s free fist swung down. The boy’s head rocked sideways, teeth still anchored in his flesh.

  I ran towards them but Sam was there first. Crucial landed another punch. The boy’s head fell back and he dropped to the ground. He spat out a mouthful of Crucial’s flesh, sprang up and attacked him again.

  Sam kicked him back down into the mud and jammed a boot into his neck to control him.

  Crucial dropped on to his arse, screaming up to the sky. He brought his hands up to his face and I realized he was sobbing.

  Sam ripped away his headscarf and thrust it at him. He wiped his face and jammed it into the cavity in his arm.

  The boy thrashed about under Sam’s boot, trying to do the same damage to his leg. ‘They’re trained to do that. If any of these kids tries to escape, the others have to bite them to death. They have to come up from the victim’s body with meat in their mouths. If not, the same happens to them.’ He pushed the kid deeper into the mud. ‘We’ve got to stop this, Nick.’

  Crucial held his wound tight and began to talk gently to the boy. Sam stared at me through a curtain of rain. ‘Some of these kids are even forced to kill their parents before being taken north for training. Then they come back to take us on – and we’ve both seen what happens to them then, haven’t we?’

  The boy still struggled as Crucial tried to talk him down. Sam had only one thing on his mind: ‘If you don’t help us, Standish will have thousands like him – just so the world can upgrade its mobiles every six months.’

  4

  Monday, 12 June

  07:08 hours

  I shoved my kangaroo-on-a-carabiner back inside my vest and let it dangle from the para cord round my neck. Thick grey cloud from last night’s storm still blanketed the sky. The sun couldn’t fight its way through to us, but that didn’t make it any cooler on the ground. Humidity was so high I felt as if I was in a pressure-cooker. The mud was going to stay sticky for a long time yet.

  My lungs felt like I was doing a fearsome workout as I lifted one heavy mud-clagged boot in front of the other. Rainwater cascaded over us as birds took flight from the branches above our heads. It was almost a relief each time a burst hit me.

  Sam hadn’t sat-phoned Standish about the contact and new int until the worst of the electrical storm had passed. He needed to keep it inside the condoms.

  Standish and the twins were punching their way forward, maybe two hours behind us. I imagined Bateman and Tooley running round, forcing the patrol on with kicks and slaps and threats of kindoki hair spells.

  I was walking like John Wayne just off his horse after a week in the saddle. My rain-soaked OGs had chafed my thighs and the skin was red raw. I also had prickly heat down my back, made worse by the bergen. Sam said it looked like a relief map of the Himalayas, but what could I do? Sit down and cry? There had been sporadic gunfire all night out there in the darkness to the north. Now and again, in the far distance, a few tracer would bounce up into the sky and disappear into the cloud base. Crucial had been right: they would be here soon.

  We hit a noisy, swollen river, and a bridge, maybe thirty metres across, constructed from tree-trunks. It could easily have supported a wagon, had one ever got here. Scores of terrified men and women clutching bundles in plastic sheeting streamed past us from the opposite direction without even looking up.

  I raised an eyebrow at Sam.

  ‘The gunfire. They’re scared. The miners will stay because they know there’s nowhere for them to go. This lot? They just want to run, and who can blame them?’

  The flat-bottomed valley in front of me ran at right angles to the river. It was horseshoe-shaped, as if someone with a giant ice-cream scoop had gouged along the ground and pulled out a chunk for dessert. A series of hills and knolls made up the high ground round it. The canopy had disappeared. The bare mud looked like it had been bombed, napalmed, then bombed again just to make sure, like the huge craters I’d seen from the An12.

  We had stepped into the land that time forgot. The whole valley was excavated from top to bottom. Men caked in mud scrambled about, looking like the pictures of Australian Aboriginals decorated with clay that I’d seen as a kid. I expected a squadron of pterodactyls to do a fly-past any minute.

  Bodies disappeared left, right and centre into holes in the red earth. One guy grabbed a rock that had been passed up through a hole only big enough for a man to squeeze through. Blood trickled into the mud from his elbows and knees. He turned and placed the rock in an old reed basket beside him.

  I had a sudden image of sharp-suited traders going frantic on the market floor as they yelled their bids for this rock pulled out of the ground with this poor fucker’s bare hands. And even that wasn’t the end of the chain. The raw-material price had probably multiplied a thousandfold by the time it reached the factory, en route to the hen parties and soccer mums.

  Squaddies stood guard, looking relieved as the patrol moved in. RPGs lay beside them or rested up against rocks. Fuck-all changed round these parts.

  The kid still had his arms and hands tied behind his back, and a rope round his neck with which Sam controlled him. Crucial had been whispering gently to him all night. At first he resisted like a trapped animal, but the big man’s soothing voice seemed to have calmed him down a bit. He must have realized nothing was going to happen to him – until he got God shoved down his neck later on.

  We dragged ourselves into the valley, only to see more of the same desolation. Smoke curled from small fires. Bodies huddled round. Some smoked; some stirred the contents of blackened pots. Others lay under makeshift shelters, thrown together from plastic sheeting and rice bags. Squaddies sat around chatting with them, AKs across their knees.

  A shout came from higher up, on the left-hand side of the valley. One group scattered immediately. The ground rumbled under my feet and a second later an explosion ripped from a shaft. Rock chips and mud showered down. Now I knew what the fertilizer and diesel oil were all about.

  Low-explosive ANFO (ammonium nitrate/ fuel oil) mix was just the stuff to carve big fuckoff holes in the ground. The fertilizer needed to have at least fifteen per cent nitrate content to detonate, and many countries didn’t produce it in such strengths any more. It wasn’t only used in mining and quarrying, but also by any self-respecting terrorist who’d done some basic training or had access to the Internet. ANFO is a lifting charge; high explosive is more for cutting, and wouldn’t be so effective in taking out a convoy of Land Rovers as they drove over a culvert or two.

  Sam didn’t even look up as the cloud of red, vaporized mud slowly settled. We followed a track in the lower ground, until the valley was all around us. Up ahead, on a knoll that stuck out maybe four hundred away, at the curve of the horseshoe, I saw rows of tents, and smoke from a cooking fire.

  ‘Which way to Nuka?’

  Sam turned back the way we’d just come. ‘Follow the river upstream. I’m gonna get on with all-round defence. I’m sending some of the porters to the orphanage to bring the kids and villagers in. You get the Mercy Flight lot, OK?’

  I turned back towards the river. The track upstream was well worn, which meant the mud was deeper. Soon every other noise was behind me and all
I could hear was the squelch of my boots and the rumble of the fast-moving water.

  I kept slipping and sliding, but what the fuck? It didn’t matter – getting to the village did.

  I wasn’t alone on the path. I overtook some of the porters, who were now making their way home as fast as their tired legs could carry them. Exhausted as they were, they wanted to drag their families to safety.

  By the time I got to the edge of the shanty I felt like I’d done ten Ks, not three. I looked around. There were no breezeblock buildings. This was wood, reed, palm-leaf and mud country. Chickens scratched around dejectedly. It made the airstrip look like mid-town Manhattan.

  My throat felt like I was drinking crisps. My back ached, the raw skin on my legs stung worse than foot blisters, but the worst pain of all was knowing there was nothing I could do about Silky being there or not. Either she would be, or she wouldn’t. And all the time the LRA were getting closer. More gunfire echoed somewhere out there in the bush, getting the porters’ legs pumping that little bit faster.

  I scrambled over the mud with the feeling I used to have in the pit of my stomach as a schoolkid, trying desperately to get home before I got caught and beaten up by a rival gang on the estates.

  I entered the village. People stared at me, terrified.

  ‘Mercy Flight!’ I yelled. ‘Anyone know Mercy Flight? The white guys? Tim? Silke?’

  5

  ‘Mercy Flight?’

  Nobody stuck around long enough to give me an answer. All I saw was terrified faces, then the backs of heads as they turned and ran. It couldn’t just have been my mad, staring eyes: it must have been the distant crackle of gunfire followed so soon by the appearance of a white man with an AK.

  Scabby chickens jumped out of my way as I slid through the mud. Scared little faces peeped out from behind their mothers’ legs before they, too, disappeared into the shadow of the huts. Rain dripped off the palm trees. Unable to evaporate in this humidity, it had nowhere else to go.