Minefield

by Andy Maslen

  “Only if they taste of coconut.”

  The man smiled and offered his hand.

  “Tran Dhuc.”

  Gabriel smiled back and shook the proffered hand.

  “Gabriel Wolfe. Vietnamese?”

  “Half. My Mom’s Cambodian.”

  “I’ve got some stuff to offload.”

  “Sure. Let me help you.”

  Tran lifted the kitbag out of the loadspace as if it weighed nothing. His ropy muscles stood out against his caramel-coloured skin.

  “You get yourself on the plane. I’ll make sure these are waiting for you.”

  With the kitbag safely stowed in the Corolla, Gabriel said goodbye to Tran, waved at the little boy, and got back into the Ranger.

  “Wait!” Tran shouted.

  Gabriel stilled his hand, which was on the point of turning the key in the ignition. Tran poked a paper-wrapped bamboo cylinder through the open window.

  “Take this. In-flight food’s not up to much, I hear.”

  Gabriel smiled, said “Ah-koon ,” and headed on towards the airport.

  He parked the Ranger and paid for a week’s parking, hoping he wouldn’t need it, then grabbed his bag from the passenger seat. The walk from the car park to the departures hall was only a couple of minutes but the temperature had already hit the early thirties and the humidity was oppressive.

  Gaining the air-conditioned comfort of the departure lounge, he looked around, getting his bearings. In a far corner he saw the familiar BA logo and strode across the polished floor. At the BA desk, he introduced himself to a dazzling attractive Cambodian woman, dressed in a smart navy jacket, white blouse and red, white and blue scarf.

  “Good morning. My name is Mark Light. I believe you’re expecting me.”

  “Good morning, Mr Light. Yes. Your colleague emailed yesterday. Would you please wait for a moment while I call for someone to collect you.”

  Gabriel nodded his assent and, while the young woman placed a call, took the opportunity to look around at the crowds. Plenty of Chinese and Indians, a few Cambodians, and hundreds of westerners, many of whom wore the cheap, baggy cotton trousers printed with elephants and lotus flowers on sale in Siem Reap market and the dozens of roadside stands selling trinkets. He smiled. He’d overheard a couple in the market at a clothing stall arguing after the man had appeared from behind a curtain, resplendent in an orange and white pair.

  Pulling the baggy trousers out sideways from his thighs, the man had asked his companion, “Well, what do you think?”

  The woman, late forties, hair pulled back into a bun, lips a vibrant pink, had placed her hands on her hips and stared long and hard at the trousers.

  “I think they’re lovely.” A beat. “But they make you look like a cunt.”

  Gabriel had laughed out loud, earning a frown from the utterly deflated man, and a complicit smile from the woman.

  “Sir? Mr Light?”

  Gabriel turned back.

  “Yes?”

  “Captain Isaacs is on his way to collect you.”

  28

  Aircrew Only

  A few minutes later, Gabriel noticed a tall sandy-haired man in a navy pilot’s outfit and peaked cap striding through the crowd. He headed straight for Gabriel and shook hands as soon as he arrived.

  “Mark, old boy. So good to see you! Come this way.”

  Gabriel followed Isaacs out of the departure hall through double doors marked “Aircrew Only” and into a grey-painted concrete corridor. Out of hearing of the tourists and, Gabriel imagined, plain-clothes police or anti-terror officers monitoring the travellers, Isaacs turned to Gabriel, without breaking step, and spoke.

  “I’m Neil. Hear you’re going in for a bit of extreme skydiving.”

  “Gabriel. And yes. How much do you know.”

  Neil shrugged.

  “Only what I need to know. I’m ex-Royal Air Force, though. Used to fly these sort of runs in Afghanistan from time to time. Big old C-130Js dropping guys out at 20,000 feet, maybe higher depending on what was happening on the ground.”

  At the far end of the corridor, Neil punched a six-digit code into a keypad, releasing the door and admitting the two men to a huge hangar containing a handful of planes of differing sizes, liveries and states of repair, from takeoff-ready to missing wings or engines.

  “Is there somewhere I can change,” Gabriel asked. “I feel a tad overdressed for today’s activities.

  “Really? I thought you looked quite the dandy. Sure,” Neil said with a grin. “There’s a crew room over there.” He pointed to a door to their left.

  Gabriel executed a quick costume change, packing his shouty tourist garb into the bag, which he left in a key-operated locker.

  Neil led Gabriel between a couple of cargo planes being loaded by forklifts. They emerged into the blinding sun. Heat haze shimmered above the apron, and Gabriel could feel the burning concrete through the soles of his boots. Both men donned sunglasses, Ray Ban Aviators for Neil and orange-lensed Oakleys for Gabriel, secured with a black cloth retainer pushed over the ear-pieces.

  Awaiting them on the apron was a Boeing 747 painted in BA’s distinctive red, white and blue livery.

  “That’s us,” Neil said.

  Inside the plane, Gabriel could see it had been used to make parachute drops before. A rail for static lines had been bolted along one side of the cargo area and a dozen simple metal seats with four-point harnesses had been welded into the airframe each side of the huge rear door.

  After making sure the equipment provided was suitable for Gabriel’s purposes, including the weapons dropped off by Tran and a couple of additional pieces of kit in a daysack, Neil headed forward to start pre-flight checks.

  Gabriel climbed into a khaki flight suit laid out on the floor between the rows of seats and zipped himself in. Next he worked his way into the parachute harness, double- and then triple-checking every buckle and strap. His kitbag lay on the floor. He unzipped it and took out the M16, checked the magazine – full – and brought out the Sig, which he stuck into the nylon tactical holster he’d strapped across the front of the flight suit.

  He placed the headphones over his ears and switched on the comms link. Resting on one of the seats was an oxygen bottle and transparent mask. Next to that was a black ballistic helmet with a facemask connected to a second oxygen bottle. He’d need to pre-breathe the pure oxygen for 35 or 40 minutes to flush the carbon dioxide from his system in preparation for the jump. The helmet tank would enable him to survive the radically deoxygenated air outside the plane at the agreed drop altitude of 28,000 feet. He buckled himself in, took the free mask and fitted it over his head.

  As the plane took off, Gabriel closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing. Pure oxygen caused lightheadedness to begin with, but he was expecting it and simply breathed his way through it, repeating one of Master Zhao’s old mantras while the gases in his bloodstream adjusted.

  “Breathe to where you need it.”

  29

  28,000 Feet

  He felt the plane level off, and settled in to wait. Neil had said flying time would be about forty minutes.

  “Gabriel? Ten minutes to drop zone,” Neil’s voice crackled over the radio.

  “Thanks. I’m ready.”

  He removed the headphones and replaced them with the ballistic helmet. He switched breathing masks and tugged on the straps as hard as he could until they were tight against his jaw. No sense losing your air supply just because you didn’t want the elastic pinching. He pulled the daysack on across his front. One more check of his harness, including the ripcord on the main and reserve chutes, concluded his pre-jump routine. He held one of the headphones against his ear and waited for final clearance. Neil’s voice sounded tinnier through a single can.

  “Two minutes to drop zone. We know you have a choice of carriers and we thank you for choosing BA. We strive to make every flight a pleasant one.”

  Gabriel smiled at the ex-RAF pilot’s rote repeti
tion of the corporate boilerplate.

  “Thanks, Neil. Maybe a beer and some nuts next time? Out. ”

  The square cargo door opened, admitting a blindingly white beam of sunlight into the dim interior of the plane. Gabriel inhaled deeply, relishing the faintly rubbery smell from the breathing mask. His mind felt as clear as the sky beyond the doorway, which had resolved into a pure blue rectangle.

  He patted the Sig and checked the press stud holding the retaining strap in place. The M16 was unwieldy. Normally paratroopers would jump armed with something more compact. A carbine, or a sub-machinegun like the Heckler & Koch MP5K. But beggars can’t be choosers.

  Gabriel strapped the assault rifle across his chest and walked to the wide-open cargo door. He checked his GPS was working. Don had told him it would be pre-programmed with Win Yah’s location. Then he backed up three steps, rocked back and forth on his heel a couple of times, ran ...

  ... and jumped...

  30

  HALO

  The lenses on his face mask steamed up as the cold air hit them. The roaring of the air past his ears was deafening. Gabriel gasped at the shock of the first half-second of jump-time, then began to adjust as countless hundreds of jumps from his days in the Paras and the SAS jostled for space at the front of his mind.

  Settling his arms into a swept-wing configuration, hands arrowing back to his feet, he adjusted his trajectory into a steep, head-down dive and started to enjoy the acceleration towards terminal velocity.

  Below him, the forests and farmland of northern Cambodia spread as far as the eye could see in every direction. He knew that, at this altitude, he’d be seeing Thailand, Vietnam and Laos, too.

  So many greens, from the bluey shade of eucalyptus to the bright lime-green of the palm trees. Then there were the browns and beiges of the paddy fields. And, in the distance, glinting amid the green like a piece of silvered glass, the Tonlé Sap lake, the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia.

  He checked his altimeter. 18,000 feet. At 5.6 seconds per thousand feet, he had 90 seconds before the 2,000 feet parachute deployment mark .

  Then an unwelcome thought entered his mind.

  This was how ex-Delta Force operator Vinnie Calder had entered the afterlife. Shot, then stuffed into the weapons bay of an F-15 and dropped over the Chihuahuan desert in Texas.

  The lenses of his face mask had cleared. Gabriel looked left and right. Five hundred yards to his left, a buzzard was circling in a thermal. Gabriel caught the edge of the rising column of warm air and felt it push him up and over. He adjusted his arms and course-corrected as best as he was able, given his airspeed of something approaching 165 miles per hour. He focused on the landing site: an area of farmland he’d identified with Eli. No mines and not too far from Win Yah’s compound.

  Just a few more seconds of free fall remained to him. He grasped the ripcord handle and readied himself mentally and physically for the abrupt decrease in velocity. He counted down.

  “Five thousand ...”

  (tighten the grip)

  “Four thousand ...”

  (squeeze the thighs, knees and feet together)

  “Three thousand ...”

  (draw in the core)

  “Two thousand ...”

  (deep breath in)

  “One thousand ...”

  PULL!

  With a sound like a gunshot, the square ram-air parachute burst free of its wrappings and unfurled. The deceleration was intense. As the chute acted as a 200 square-foot air-brake on Gabriel’s ten and a half stones, he slowed from 160 miles per hour to something approaching just 17 mph. Despite his physical preparation, he felt his insides lurch painfully as his body rotated through 170 degrees from a near-vertical dive to a head-up orientation.

  One minute and 20 seconds after that, Gabriel made landfall. He and Eli had discussed the best approach to parachuting in a country as heavily mined as Cambodia. They’d concluded that the safest landing point would be a road, followed by agricultural land. Farmers wouldn’t plant crops on land unless CMAC had either cleared it or declared it mine- and UXO-free.

  As the land rushed up to greet him, he pulled down hard on the control line toggles to slow his descent and landed on his feet in the centre of a grove of pineapple trees, crisscrossed with red paths.

  31

  Two Compounds

  He gathered the chute into a ball, wound the harness and lines round the unruly bundle of fabric and stuffed the whole lot under a thorn bush. Unlike mines, or the weapons he and Eli had taken from Win Yah’s men back in the temple, the parachute could be repurposed into something useful by anyone lucky enough to find it. Gabriel had no qualms about leaving it behind where a child or their parents might stumble across it.

  Free of the chute, he shrugged his way out of the daysack and the M16’s sling and laid them beside him before unzipping the flight suit and discarding it, together with the helmet and oxygen bottle. He untangled the Sig and its holster and refastened it over his chest. With a full canteen, the Böker, spare magazines for both guns, and the GPS unit, Gabriel Wolfe was ready for the final stage of the operation.

  He was three miles from Win Yah’s camp. A stronghold surrounded by hundreds of square miles of forest with a single road in and out.

  The voice of his dead friend and fellow SAS operator, Mickey “Smudge” Smith, floated back to him down the years.

  “Tabbin’ cross-country in this heat, boss? Piece of piss. ”

  Gabriel smiled at the memory of the southeast Londoner’s jaunty walk as he’d set off with a fifty-pound Bergen and another twenty pounds of weapons and kit through the jungle of Borneo, his deep-brown skin darkened even further with green and black stripes of camouflage makeup.

  “Yeah, piece of piss, mate,” Gabriel said out loud.

  Then he turned to face due south and started walking.

  Two hours later, Gabriel reached the patch of forest occupied by Win Yah and his men. Bounded on its northern edge by a river, its eastern by a single-track, red earth road, and its southern and western by fenced-off land with red-and-white CMAC “WARNING! MINES!” signs posted every twenty yards on the trees, the compound spread over roughly three acres. He thought back to the air conditioned briefing room in Whitehall, where, two weeks earlier, he and Eli had stood looking down at a glass-topped, digital map table with The Department’s Southeast Asia expert.

  * * *

  “Unusually for this part of the world, there are very few dangerous animals you’ll need to watch out for,” she’d said. “There are leopards, but they’re usually pretty wary of humans. Other than that, no apex predators at all, or none of a size to trouble you two. A few venomous snakes, including King Cobras, but again, you’d have to be extraordinarily unlucky to meet one. No, your main concern is the mines and UXOs.”

  You got that right , he thought, but without rancour. In truth, anyone with even a passing interest in the history of this beautiful but troubled country would have given him and Eli the same warning.

  She’d placed her fingertips about two inches apart on a spot marked with a red dot and slid them apart, zooming in on northern Cambodia, then closer still, until the map revealed roads, rivers and settlements. She leaned across Gabriel to tap a menu icon, and selected ‘SATVIEW’. As she withdrew, he caught a faint whiff of her perfume, something deep and musky. The view beneath the glass shimmered and redrew itself.

  Now they were looking at a photo of Win Yah’s compound itself. Taken by a CIA satellite, the image was so clear Gabriel could see not just individual members of the gang but their weapons and clothing. For a surreal moment, he imagined one of the men moved: he felt if he leaned over and tapped the bandit on the shoulder, he’d look up and wave.

  The analyst, Kelly, identified the different buildings and pointed to a hut she said belonged to the warlord himself, Win Yah.

  “That’s where the target lives.” She pointed to a white pickup next to the hut. “That’s his ride. A Hilux like they all drive.”
And a third time, to a rectangular thatched roof. “And that’s his armoury. A shitload of AKs, but also shorts that’re probably Makarovs or even Tokarevs. We think he may have been running his own little demining operation up there. Not to benefit the local population, I hasten to add. They’ve cleared land for their own use and have been collecting the mines they didn’t need to detonate.”

  Gabriel listened intently, staring down at the absurdly detailed images in front of him. He registered the intel about the armoury, and about Win Yah’s mine clearing efforts. But as Kelly began explaining about which hut belonged to Win Yah, Gabriel’s mind flew 5,500 miles southwest to another compound, belonging to another warlord. The Mozambican stronghold of Abel N’Tolo.

  Gabriel’s SAS patrol was the kill team, assigned the job of killing N’Tolo and retrieving a briefcase of plans. They’d been betrayed at the highest level, way beyond The Regiment’s command structure, and Smudge had lost his life. The traumatic events of that failed mission were the trigger point for Gabriel’s PTSD and his leaving The Regiment and returning to civilian life.

  Not this time , he thought grimly, as he stared at the collection of reed-roofed building comprising Win Yah’s base. Not this time.

  32

  M67

  As if someone had turned a focus knob in his brain, Gabriel’s vision, and his awareness returned from the air conditioned briefing room in London, SW1, to the oppressively hot, humid conditions of the Cambodian forest. He checked the GPS. He was within five hundred yards of the centre of the compound. The track he was using had clearly been made by livestock; dried cowpats drilled with dung-beetle holes marked it every few yards.