I clicked the little speckled stone against the backs of my front teeth and weighed anchor.
The men stood to attention.
And into the clearing stepped the white man. Walking left to right, stooped slightly, right arm crooked as if halfway to a salute. It was as if Sonny Boy’s photograph had come to life. Gray fatigues; weathered, tanned skin. A thin reed of a man bent in the morning sun.
I picked him up and tracked him through the scope as he paced from one hut toward the other, half-turned toward the men, his men. The angle was too oblique for a chest shot. I held the crosshairs in the center of his head.
One second.
The point of impact would be the middle of the right ear. He looked frailer than the photograph suggested, his hair whiter.
Two seconds.
He moved between the huts as I’d guessed he would: one meter per second, per stride.
Turn, damn you. Turn. I willed him to look dead ahead. I want to see your face. His pace faltered. He slowed. I slowed. But he looked toward the men, arm coming up to salute. First pressure.
Three seconds.
The salute was never made. The arm never raised. No command given. My heart all but stopped, the beat so slow. I was tethered to the bullet, my mind filled with one single certainty. The man was already dead even though the shot was not yet taken. The target’s name had already been written in the Book of the Dead.
Fractions of a millimeter of steel moved against one another. The trigger traveled less than the width of half a hair. And the man turned and looked out into the trees.
The clocks restarted. Blood pumped in my ears. Oxygen rushed in my throat. But there was no echo of the shot, because there was no shot to take. As I lay prone, I saw my target looking back at me: aged but unmistakable. Pressed between the dark earth and the light sky, I saw finally through the riflescope what had been in front of me all along.
I stared out across the hot African hillside and straight into my father’s face.
22
It was him.
No question.
No doubt.
I’d spent twenty-six years trying to forget him. So I remembered him perfectly.
It was shocking. But it was also inevitable. Just as the shot would have been. Of course it was him. There was only one outcome to everything.
And there are no coincidences.
The tension rippled out of my shoulders. My heart rate climbed and then fell again. My neck softened, and my head slumped. I came off the gun and laid my head on the dead leaves and sharp grasses and closed my eyes. As I lost focus—purpose—cramp and nausea set in. The pit of my stomach felt as if it were expanding across the clearing and out across the hillside, as if I were melting into the earth itself. I felt the little good-luck lion Roberts had given me dig into my wrist. I remembered the bullet wound in his side—where Ezra had shot him, to save him. His lucky wound. Sonny Boy had not tried to kill me. He’d tried to save me.
Twenty-six years of forgetting evaporated into the sweat-soaked dirt. I rolled the little pebble around in my mouth. I tried to gather the floating mosaic of my parents’ faces, trapped behind the green-red film of my eyelids. But only hers came to me.
She’d killed herself because she couldn’t bear the pain of losing him—a pain more profound even than that of leaving me an orphan. But she hadn’t lost him. And I was still an orphan.
I came back on the gun and fired.
The round hit him four centimeters above the right nipple. He spun as he fell, twisting around a spattering of his own blood, first looking out toward me and then up to the sky. The bullet punched out of his back, to the left of his shoulder blade. He came down hard, arms and legs akimbo. I took four of the others out at the knees, ankles—wounding, not killing.
Five. Six.
It was as ill-advised to fire four shots without moving as it was to fire fourteen. In for a penny, in for a pound. My rounds streaked out toward the compound. I could hear the dull slap of lead on skin, and the sharp crack of bones shearing and splintering.
Three hundred meters is dangerously close. Stand up then and their AKs would have brought me straight back down again. I worked the bolt and kept firing.
Seven. Eight.
Soldiers scrambled to cover my father, lying across him. I dropped the ones at the edge of the clearing first and worked inward. Slow, but methodical. They writhed and screamed. Blood pumped from arterial wounds arced in the morning sunlight. The dusty parade square turned into a muddy patch of bloodred sludge.
I dropped the empty magazine and reloaded. Ten rounds left.
Time to go.
I rose up onto shaky legs, racked with cramp and the pain of muscles burning back to life. But I ran hard and fast, recovering a flat sprint out of the first stumbles. Shots followed me—the rat-a-tat-tat of assault rifles hitting nothing but trees and sky. Pocahontas’s foot had come off above the ankle; his PKM stayed silent.
I had to cover five klicks without getting hit, getting caught or getting lost. I was following a hunch, but it felt like a good one. And there was nowhere else to go. Two rounds came in closer, and then a third snapped past my ear. That’s the thing about playing at being a rebel: you don’t get fancy optics or a decent rifle. It was their last and closest shot. The farther I ran, the thicker the trees grew, and although I was slowed by steep ground and underscrub, I was out of range and in deep cover before any of the mangled militia drew a bead on me. I ran as steadily as the terrain allowed, retracing as best I could the exact route I’d come in on. I needed to stay under cover. But remaining silent was no longer an issue. Speed was.
Every klick I paused, looked, listened. No dogs, no shots or shouts, nothing in the air. I kept running, stopping, running, stopping. In ten minutes I was at the bend in the river where I’d seen the orphan girl. I crouched by the cotton tree where I’d offered her the sweets. No sound. No movement. No sign of her, or that she or I had ever been there. I strained hard above the rasp of air in my throat, the drumming of my heartbeat in my ears.
Nothing.
I searched the foliage that had screened her arrival and her escape. Side to side, then back and forth, prodding with the rifle barrel, staring into every nook and cranny. One meter in. Then two. Then three deep. Within a few minutes I had searched an area twenty meters square.
Nothing.
She just simply couldn’t have got farther than that without me seeing. It wasn’t possible. I went back to the cotton tree to start over.
And then they lit me up.
Boom.
Close contact in the forest is intense. The enemy can be on you before you see or hear them. Noise distorts; your eyes betray you; your senses waylay you. A mortar bomb tore past me, a handspan from my head. With its unmistakable whistle-roar it flew parallel to the ground and exploded into the cotton tree in front of me, sending a shower of bark splinters and shrapnel back toward me. I dodged right and threw myself into the secondary scrub off the clearing. Hot metal nicked my cheek, arm, thigh. It was a young tree. Soft enough that the bomb had gone in far enough to throw most of the shrapnel straight back out past me. Then another went off ten meters to my left, and another to my right. The bombs were high, hitting tree trunks and branches, tearing boughs off in great splintering snaps that were as loud as gunshots. They were small bombs, 60mm most likely, fired by hand by troops on the move. I knew. I’d done it myself.
They kept coming like a deadly waltz.
One-two, three; one-two, three; one-two, three.
The PKMs opened up next, pumping out hundreds of rounds of burning belt-fed tracer. The gloom between the trees flared with a crazy web of high-velocity barium zinging between, through and off boughs like bright green lasers. Judging from the direction of fire, they had me on three sides. The Mong River bulged out to the west, toward the camp. They were coming at me dead on, and
from the northwest and southwest. The cotton tree and the area I’d been searching were on the east bank. There was a slight rise in the ground. I got as small as I could and got myself on the gun. Tracer whipped over me, around me. Lines of green death snapped at my ears. Fortunately the golden rule of sniping is the same as one of the fundamental laws of physics: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. You can light me up at two hundred and fifty rounds a minute, but I can see exactly where you’re hiding, soldier boy.
I had ten rounds and made them count. The machine guns fell silent. Then two of the mobile mortar teams. But all the while, the bombs still came in from my right flank, low and fast. I got small, ditched the rifle and drew the SIG.
And then I saw them.
Holy God.
Four men—if you could still call them that—broke cover at three hundred meters and ran straight toward me. Two white, two black, all unarmed and dressed in the ragged remnants of what had once been uniforms. Each man carried a traditional fly whisk in his right hand—a wooden grip finished with a length of black hair, exactly the same as the red-masked man had brandished the night before.
And how they ran. A hundred meters covered in seconds.
The nearer they got, the more manifest their hideousness. Every muscle strained, bulged, as if fit to burst, embossed with veins that stood out like tramlines riding across sinew. Their eyes were wild and rolled back, so that their irises vanished into a blur of white-eyed horror. And their mouths—wide open, lips pulled taut—sent forth waves of ululating screeches.
Two hundred meters.
The mortar teams I’d taken out were replaced by rebels firing rocket-propelled grenades. One whistle thudded into the ground next to me, very loud and extremely close. Molten copper burned me. Shrapnel sliced me. My head sang. Sweat stung my eyes. I touched my left ear. The top half was missing. My hand came back to steady the SIG wet with my own blood.
One hundred meters.
The screams of the men charging me harmonized with the screeching in my head. The forest floor began to burn—magnesium from the spent tracer rounds ignited the leaf mulch. Smoke from cordite hung between the trees, showing up the tracer.
Fifty meters.
I inhaled, drew a bead and breathed out slowly.
Thirty meters.
I put two rounds in the chest of the lead runner. No body armor. A fountain of thick red blood erupted from his sternum. It didn’t even break his stride. What were they on? PCP? Ketamine?
Fuck.
Twenty meters.
Single head shot. Down he went. The other three kept on coming.
Ten meters.
Two more head shots. One remained, running flat out toward me.
Five meters.
Everyone else stopped firing for fear of hitting their own man. I squeezed the trigger.
Nothing.
Stoppage. Dirt in the breech.
My left palm crashed into the back of the SIG’s slide. I pulled it back, hard. An unspent round leaped out, too late. He dived; I rolled at the last moment. A hundred and eighty pounds of screaming Spetsnaz crashed onto the forest floor next to me. We lay top to tail. I smashed my bootheel into his face. His nose disintegrated, blood coloring his face. I was up, and then down again, his legs sweeping mine from under me. He rolled back, and then sprang to his feet, launching himself upright off his shoulders. I kicked. He caught my boot. He was incredibly fast, and exceptionally strong. I guessed he’d try to catch, lock and break my leg. So I spun and threw my left leg around his neck. But that wasn’t his plan. Keeping hold of my right boot, he dropped the fly whisk and grabbed my left, too. I hit the ground again, on my back, staring up at his smashed, crazed face. He rotated each leg in on itself—one clockwise, one anticlockwise.
He was trying to twist my legs off.
I roared in pain. My femurs began to dislocate from my pelvis. Spit and blood gushed from his mouth; sweat cascaded off him. He looked mad—eyes rolling, mouth screaming, muscles fit to burst, bulging through the ragged strips of his fatigues. I smacked the ground with both arms to brace myself. The hot shards of an exploded mortar bomb burned my skin. My left hand found the recocked SIG. My knees and ankles were about to give way, ligaments stretched to breaking point. I fired blind. The shot tore through his right wrist, shattering the bone. My left leg fell. I twisted clockwise with him, rolled and fired twice more into his chest. The force of the rounds hitting and breaking his sternum sent a shock wave across his torso. He took half a step back, his left hand still latched firm onto my right boot, his right hand hanging from a bloody mess of mangled sinew by his side.
He appeared not even to notice that he’d been shot. Instead of staggering or falling, he threw me. Not a martial arts throw. A monster throw. As if I were a doll in a child’s hand, he flung me by the boot six feet through the air. I crumpled against the trunk of the cotton tree. I managed a crouch as he set about me again, his wounded arm coming down heavily toward me. Right arm up. I blocked. The force of his swing was so hard that I was pummeled back to the ground, and the almost-severed hand sheared off completely, hitting the ground beside us. He carried on, unchecked. He was too close for a head shot. His left hand balled into a fist. I shot it. Fingers blew off; palm flesh vaporized. I rolled, stood and brought the barrel up again, still left-handed. But he was unnaturally fast. A bloodied stump knocked my hand away. Straight kick to the right knee. Nothing. It was like striking concrete. He threw his body weight against me. I tried to sidestep and lost my footing. And then he had me, in an obscene, bloody bear hug. There was no technique anymore, just pure, brute force.
When you fight, you should think. And what you should think is, What next? And if you’re any good at fighting, you should know the answer several moves in advance. It’s not conscious thought but instinctive anticipation—from a bar brawl to the Olympics, putting down your opponent is a game of full-contact chess. I’ve spent my whole life fighting, but I didn’t know what was coming next.
Arms pinioned, he lifted me off the ground. With no hands left to hold me, he simply squeezed. I felt a rib crack. And then another. And another.
And then it happened. Holding me head and shoulders above him, my heels a good foot clear of the ground, he sank his teeth into the base of my neck. Intense nerve pain shot through me. I felt his bite go deep, grinding against my collarbone. I remembered the dead soldiers in the hut outside Kabala. And then I knew. He was going to bite through my neck. I still had the SIG, but my arms were locked, useless. I pushed down as hard as I could with my left hand, straining toward the ground. As his bite deepened, I got my elbow lower than the bulge of his biceps. I crooked my arm, pivoted my wrist . . . and fired.
His brainpan emptied into my face, the bullet grazing my chin as it exited his skull. We collapsed into a bloody heap. I spat out a mouthful of brain tissue and worked myself free from under him. I sat up, wiped the blood out of my eyes and picked a shard of bone out of my tongue. It had gone through my cheek, between my teeth. The wound in my neck was deep, but the bone wasn’t broken. The ribs hurt, but everything else did, too. My head rang. My sliced ear throbbed—even the bit of me that had been cut off still hurt. The air reeked with the smell of blood and cordite, and, very faintly, the scent of wild mint, which I thought we’d crushed in the melee.
My attacker lay still. Head shots took them out instantly—him and the runners. And thank God. Nothing else seemed to make any difference at all. His arms were thrown up akimbo. On the inside of the right arm, just above the armpit, the tattoo of a tiny black scorpion swam in the blood that drenched him. I scrambled to my feet and looked out from under what was left of the trees. Men in uniform swarmed across the open ground in tight formation. The ululating resumed, and a dozen more runners came into view, sprinting through the lines of troops moving in on me. I remembered with a jolt that I’d just shot my father. Then a rocket-propelled grenade whoo
sh-banged into the undergrowth.
Here we go again.
I ran with my back to the river. But I knew they’d outflank me. A steady stream of 7.62 snapped beside, above, around me. I kept low, SIG in hand, and dodged trees and branches. Grass burned. Hundreds of rounds ripped up the bush around me. Bit by bit my cover was being obliterated. Training will get you only so far. There comes a time when survival becomes a statistical aberration. I prepared for impact and lunged on as fast as I could, expecting to be floored at any moment.
Another RPG shrieked past, close enough to touch. I hit the ground at the same time it did, only a couple of meters in front of me. I braced for the inevitable shower of shrapnel, the blast wave, the tearing of flesh. But although the explosion was deafening—and unusually so—the ground absorbed the full force of the blast. I put my head up. The grenade had landed in a small thicket of vine-draped saplings. In the middle of them, smoking and fringed with shredded foliage, yawned a pitch-black hole. Not a blast crater or a pit, but a hole. Behind me I could hear the splashing of boots in water. The runners were crossing the river. I put my weight onto my hands, drew my knees up, kicked back and catapulted myself headlong into the darkness.
I landed in the mouth of a cave—smoking and torn up by shrapnel, but just deep and tall enough to navigate at a crouch. I reached up into the sunlight and pulled one of the felled saplings across the opening and scuttled inside. Almost immediately the passage doglegged hard right and then, after another ten meters or so, bore sharply round to the left, so that any light from the surface was killed completely.
I moved from daylight to gloom to pitch black too rapidly for my eyes to adjust at all. I stopped and listened. Two things were immediately obvious: I had not been followed, and I was not alone.
Just audible in the darkness above the singing in my blast-damaged eardrums was rapid, shallow breathing. Something or someone else was there and they were scared, injured maybe—and trying hard, most likely, not to give themselves away. I stared, myopic, into the void and tried to make out any shape or movement. But all I could see was the brightly colored patterns of night blindness that wove around my retina. In my mind’s eye, flashes of the red-masked dancer and the crucified captive sparked and died on the edges of my vision. Was that the breath of another prisoner I could hear? I brought the still-silenced barrel of the SIG up blindly into the blackness.
The Break Line Page 19
