It wasn’t pretty and wasn’t meant to win any marks for style or technique. Scoring points wasn’t the plan – survival was. This guy wanted to kill me and he didn’t care how. On the other side, I didn’t care how I stopped him as long as I did.
I felt the ground give way beneath me and realised I was close to the centre of the riverbed where the ground was mostly made up of silt. I reached down for something – anything – to use against him again and felt a large, loose rock sitting on the surface. It was the size of a soup bowl and heavy, like a discus. I waited until he was close, stepped to one side and swept it up and across. It connected with the side of his face with a squishy thud, and he went over and lay still.
I wanted to throw up, to sit there and relish still being alive and in one piece. But there wasn’t time. I hunted around until I located the AK and the SIG, then ran back along the riverbed towards the bivouac.
I saw the pickup first, with the bivouac to one side. There was no sign of Masse so I figured he was still asleep. But the second man I’d spotted wasn’t – and he was within a few paces of the vehicle with his rifle levelled at the door.
There wasn’t time to take aim and fire; I was too wobbly with the effort of the fight and running, and likely to hit Masse by mistake, apart from alerting any companions these two men might have close by. Instead I shouted, ‘Stop!’ I didn’t expect it mean anything to the man but he’d have had to be inhuman if he didn’t at least turn to see who was there.
It was enough to make him hesitate. By the time he reacted I was close enough to slam into him, knocking his rifle aside and bowling him over. He was small and skinny and smelled of sweat and alaq, and hit the ground hard. Christ, he was no more than a kid – but still dangerous if I allowed him to get up. I tapped him with the butt of the AK and he didn’t move. He was still breathing so I tore off his keffiyeh and used it to tie his upper arms with a couple of loops around his neck. It wouldn’t last long but it would give us time to get out of here and away.
I woke Masse, who looked as if he was nursing a mountainous hangover, and told him we were leaving. He began to protest but I wasn’t listening. I tore down the tarp around him and threw it into the rear of the pickup, then told him to get behind the wheel. He was holding the remains of his juice bottle, so I took it out of his hand and threw it away as far as I could.
‘What are you doing?’ he croaked. ‘I hadn’t finished that!’
‘Leave with me or stay,’ I told him. ‘Two men found us and there are possibly more nearby. Now, get in and drive.’ I jumped into the back of the pickup and showed him the AK, and he finally got the message and clambered behind the wheel.
We came up out of the riverbed, the load of truck parts shaking with every rut. The road wasn’t far, and I could see it as a vague outline from my perch on the back. There was no sign of a vehicle that might have brought the two men here, or of other armed men, and I concluded that they must have been loners who had spotted us on their way through the area and had decided to chance their luck.
I gave it a mile or so once we were on the road before leaning down and signalling Masse to pull into the side.
‘What now?’ he queried, still sore at losing his alaq.
‘We need to get rid of this load,’ I said, and began throwing the truck parts over the side. They had been useful to begin with, but Ratchman had probably identified us by now and we needed as much speed as we could get.
Once everything was gone I climbed in the passenger seat and Masse continued driving.
Forty minutes later he turned off the road onto a rough track which snaked into an area of scrubland and acacia trees, and after ten minutes bouncing over ruts and stones, finally stopped the pickup and turned off the engine.
I looked out at even more scrubland stretching away into the gloom. ‘This is it?’
He nodded slowly, nursing his headache. ‘The vegetation has grown since I was here last. But yes, this is it.’
I got out and clambered onto the roof, and did a 360˚ sweep of the horizon. It was flat and featureless, and the lack of light didn’t show much detail, but it looked empty enough. I was pretty sure that even with Ratchman’s military experience, a couple of SUVs would have stood out, so maybe they’d turned off somewhere or driven right on by. Either was a good sign. So far.
I jumped down and told Masse I was going to check the landing area. He didn’t reply but stared out towards the coming dawn.
THIRTY-SIX
The ground looked even worse close-up, and as I walked along its length carrying the AK, I began to question how Marten was going to land here and take off again. Numerous ruts and fissures showed up as shadows, too big and deep to my eyes to allow any kind of wheeled vehicle to pass over without sinking out of sight. Rocks that on first sight passed as small to middling seemed as big as footballs when standing over them.
I moved a few of the largest stones aside and kicked soil into the worst of the holes. It was too little too late but better than nothing. This place really needed a going-over with a road grader and a gang of men with shovels to make any appreciable difference.
Looking further out I could see that the land here wasn’t as flat as I’d first thought. The strip was sitting in a shallow basin surrounded by a range of low hills way into the distance. Most of the terrain consisted of coarse grass and patches of sandy soil dotted with a whiskery growth of shrubs. If it had ever been farmed it must have been too far from the water to have been useful, and must have been eventually abandoned as a dead loss in favour of land closer to the river. Away to the west I could see a spread of flat-topped trees with spindly trunks and branches, taking distinct shape as the sun did its work and flooded them with light. A few black shapes in the upper branches sat motionless like a musical score, until one of them flapped long wings and took off, revealing the gangly flight of a vulture, searching for a thermal to lift it into the windless sky.
I searched the horizon to the north-east, wanting to see a familiar dot appearing over the hills and hear the welcome buzz of an aircraft engine. I didn’t know how direct Marten was going to make his approach, but I guessed he would want to take a quick look-see first, to make sure there wasn’t the wrong kind of reception committee waiting for him.
Nothing doing.
I walked further out to where a slight rise in the land gave me a few feet of extra height over the surrounding countryside. It wasn’t much help visually, but at least I couldn’t see anything threatening heading our way, which was a plus. But it didn’t last long.
As I turned and walked back towards the pickup, something disturbed the atmosphere.
I stopped, holding my breath and cocking my ears to the sky. I was certain I’d heard a hum. It was distant, so faint I could have been imagining it. But something was there, I knew it. I jogged back to join Masse, who was squatting in the back of the pickup, head hanging down. An empty water bottle lay on the floor by his feet. ‘Do you hear that?’ he said, and nodded to the south. ‘It’s coming from that way.’
I jumped up beside him and shielded my eyes against the rising sun. If there was anything out there it wouldn’t be friendly; it was either the SUVs or worse. But all I could see was a long stretch of nothingness reaching for several gently undulating miles, dotted with the same scrubby growth I’d seen everywhere else. The only movement came from a couple of guinea fowl a hundred yards away, preening themselves in the new warmth and unfazed by our presence.
I cupped both ears with my hands and closed my eyes, focussing all my attention on the area to the south. Depending on ambient factors such as wind, weather, the movement of vegetation – even one’s own pulse rate pounding in the ears – it can extend the hearing potential to a reasonable degree, gathering up sound and movement in the atmosphere and allowing a person to dismiss the unimportant or known trivial and concentrate on the familiar.
Engines. They were a fair way off, but in this flat, windless landscape with nothing to impede it, sound can travel f
or many miles.
I looked up, half expecting to see the flash of sunlight off a windshield or the telltale puff of dust in the wake of a moving vehicle. Not a thing. But somebody was coming and of all the places they had chosen, it had to be right here.
It could only be Ratchman.
I turned to Masse. ‘We haven’t got long.’
He scrambled to his feet, the sudden movement making him wince. ‘What do we do?’ He looked suddenly helpless, as if he’d come to the end of his mental resources, and I wondered how useful he was going to be if it came to a fight. There was only one way to find out.
‘We leave the pickup here and find a place to dig in, one on each side of the landing strip. If it’s Lunnberg’s men they’ll come in fast, wanting to get this over and done with. They’ve got the firepower and the confidence to think we’ll be easy targets. But that makes them vulnerable.’
He looked sceptical. ‘Won’t it be better to stay with the pickup? At least then if we have to run we’ll be mobile.’
‘We’ll also be a bigger target and easier to hit. If they have any sharpshooters on board, all they’d have to do is blow out a tyre and we’re done for.’
He shrugged. ‘Yes, I see.’ Then he looked at me almost slyly. ‘I was thinking … we could offer to do a trade. The hard drive in exchange for our lives and our silence. It might work. What do we have to lose?’
‘Our lives,’ I said. ‘So forget it.’ It was a desperate idea by a man who wasn’t thinking straight. ‘You think these same men who killed Doney for no reason will let us go free in return for a piece of hardware?’
He looked puzzled by my mention of Doney. Then the penny dropped and I realised that for a moment he’d completely forgotten about the teacher. Was it a case of out of sight, out of mind, or simply a cold-blooded side to his nature? I’d met people with that attitude before and they had always worried me because you never could be certain they wouldn’t apply the same attitude to you if things got tough.
‘We’re not meant to come out of this, André,’ I continued. ‘Don’t you get that? The hard drive and anybody who came near it are meant to disappear so that no questions can be asked. Ever. That means you and me. We’re the last loose cannons in the chain.’
He didn’t say anything and I could see my words weren’t having much effect. Whatever else the alaq had done to him it hadn’t speeded up his instincts for caution, or his memory for what he had been sent here to accomplish. The fact that he was actively considering the idea wasn’t so much him selling out as pure desperation; of thinking he could control the eventual outcome and walk away unscathed.
I let him stew on it and jumped down from the pickup. I picked up the two tarps, which I’d kept from the scrapyard, and tossed one at Masse’s feet. It was the one with Ahmed’s blood on it, now dried to a brown crust. ‘Find yourself a position down at the end of the strip on the right-hand side and dig in. Use rocks, scrub and soil like I did at the scrapyard. Make sure you can see the approach track. They’ll be coming up there but they’ll probably split up and circle round to come up either side of the pickup, so you’ll need all-round vision. Keep your eyes on them at all times.’
‘Where will you be?’
‘I’ll be across from you and down a ways with this.’ I slapped the AK. ‘That way we’ll have them between us. If you have to open fire make sure that they’re close enough to hit and that you’re not shooting towards me.’
‘What if Marten comes?’
‘We deal with that when it happens. He’ll see the pickup so he’ll know we’re here. But he’s not going to stay on the ground longer than it takes for us to jump on board, so as soon as he touches down, make a run for it and I’ll provide cover.’
Just then I heard a distant hum overlaying the sound of the approaching SUVs, and turned to see a tiny dot in the sky approaching from the north-east.
Marten.
I spun round and checked to the south. The binoculars showed nothing at first, just an empty landscape. Then I saw a flicker of movement. Tiny to begin with, so quick I thought I’d imagined it. A bird, maybe. Then the unnatural shape of a radiator grill and headlights became clear coming along the track from the road, followed by another identical shape just behind.
Ratchman.
I turned and whistled to get Masse’s attention. He was down on the far side of the airstrip away from the approaching SUVs. When he looked up I signalled urgently for him to get under cover. He nodded and dropped to the ground, disappearing behind a dried-out shrub. It would do; if I couldn’t see him, Ratchman’s crew were unlikely to do so either.
Jogging the length of the landing strip, I veered off to the side facing the approach track, choosing a spot giving me a clear all-round view, but in rough ground where the SUVs couldn’t simply run over me. Then I threw the tarp over myself and propped it up with a couple of sticks to give myself a field of fire. I broke off more sticks ready to do the same on either side and to the rear.
Where was Marten? I stuck my head out and listened. The drone of the plane was increasing all the time, but not fast enough. At this rate the SUVs would be on top of us well before Marten began his approach run. It was too late to ask him to speed up, but I could try to slow the opposition down a bit. It was risky but the only thing I could think of.
Hell, what was the point without risk?
I rolled out from under the tarp and did a monkey-run towards the track, keeping as low as possible. It was hell on the leg and stomach muscles but I had to get close to the track to be effective. By the time I got there I was breathing hard, my thigh muscles were burning and my gut felt as if I’d been kicked by a horse.
Dropping to the ground in the middle of the track I settled my breathing as best I could to reduce any tremors. By lifting my head a fraction I could see the SUVs approaching, now about half a mile away. They were kicking up a storm of dust and moving at a fast rate, which meant they probably had a clear view of the pickup and knew that the end was in sight.
I turned my head and saw the plane losing height, the buzz of the engine changing its tone as it did so. It looked as if Marten was going for a straight landing rather than making a circuit of the area first, and I figured he must have spotted the SUVs and had decided on risk-all tactics. Maybe it hadn’t been as long since his last visit as he’d claimed, and he knew the ground sufficiently well to take a chance.
I checked the AK. Everything was good. I had a full magazine, a decent field of fire and everything to lose if I screwed up. How was that for motivation?
The first vehicle popped up large in the binoculars, churning up a cloud of dust as it bucketed along the track. It had two men standing in the back and holding on tight, assault rifles clearly visible, and they were not slowing down any but coming in fast and head-on. So where was vehicle number two?
I checked off to the side and caught a glimpse of pale bodywork just above the bushes as the second Raptor went across-country towards the far end of the landing strip. It was throwing up twin clouds of soil in its wake, the engine screaming as the driver sought to get maximum revs and forward power. I couldn’t do anything about it because it was too far off, but I could certainly throw some serious intentions towards the one approaching down the track.
The AK-47 has a rate of fire of roughly 600 rounds per minute. That’s impressive on paper and if you scare easy, but who the hell has that number of rounds at their disposal? I didn’t, so I was going to have to be more selective. There was also the question of accuracy. The AK was said to have effective range of between 300-400 yards, but I was going to err on the side of caution because this weapon had seen some action and, reputation aside, was possibly past its best.
I gathered my legs beneath me and sat up facing roughly two o’clock from the track, which was twelve, with my elbows on my knees. It wasn’t as effective as lying down, but I was going to have to present a small target while having the ability to jump up and out of the way if push came to shove.
&nbs
p; As I centred the sights on the windshield, driver’s side, they saw me. I could tell because the driver began zig-zagging, using up the full width of the track to throw off my aim. But doing that is a bit like a stopped watch; on two occasions it will be accurate. All I had to do was to hold my aim and wait for him to swing back, then squeeze the trigger.
I pumped three shots at him one after the other and saw the glass go crazy, then shatter completely. He could probably see a little through the mess, but only if I’d missed him.
I hadn’t.
Suddenly the front wheels hit a rut in the track and spun sideways. The forward momentum was too great to cope and, big as the tyres were, one of them found a deeper rut than it had ever hoped for and tipped the SUV on its side.
I stood up and fired six more shots, seeing glass and bits of jagged metal spinning off into the air. I couldn’t see what the internal damage was but one of the doors popped open and a figure tumbled out and rolled into the scrub at the side of the track. He must have been wearing his lucky rabbit foot.
Just then the plane went over my head and I felt the wind of its passing. When I looked up Marten was curving round to make another approach, and I figured he’d gone for the look-see method first. But I was impressed; at least he was staying with us instead of heading for the hills.
I heard something snap past my head and ducked. A figure had appeared down the track on the other side of the Raptor and was down on both knees. He had blood on his face and looked like he’d taken a bad knock. But he was still fighting and therefore dangerous. I aimed quickly and fired off three shots, using the full 300-yard system of aiming for the centre body mass.
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