Three miles beyond the village they reached a broad stretch of sand, bordered by low scrub, that the Head Shed had designated as the Landing Zone They carried out a recce to make sure the area was secure and then readied the air marker panels so they could mark the LZ when the chopper was close. The panels were reflective plastic which were virtually invisible from ground level but which showed up vividly from the air. Job done, they settled down to wait for the helicopter to arrive.
Just before noon they heard the sound of rotors and saw a black speck in the sky, growing rapidly larger as it flew towards them. They were astonished to see that it was not one of the usual Special Forces choppers - a Puma or Chinook - but a Russian Mi-2 helicopter, known by its NATO nickname of ‘Hoplite’. It looked clumsy and ungainly in flight with the bulge above the cab that housed its engines and air intakes almost as large as the cab itself. ‘Will you look at that?’ Jimbo said. ‘It looks like two helicopters mating.’
‘I don’t care what it looks like,’ Geordie said. ‘Just as long as it gets us the hell out of here.’
‘Keep your fingers crossed about that then,’ Jock growled. ‘From what I remember, it’s got about the same load-carrying capacity and range as a Mini.’
They laid out the air marker panels and went into all round defence mode as it came into land. The downdraught from the rotors lashed the palm fronds and whipped up flurries of sand, almost blinding them. To their amazement the pilot then shut down the engines, which went against every SF and RAF rulebook. Shepherd dashed to the pilot’s door and could immediately see the reason for the error. Instead of a fresh faced RAF SF pilot, he saw a middle-aged man in a Russian flying suit with Czech badges on both sleeves. Shepherd pointed at the rotors and made a whirling sign with his hand but the pilot simply shrugged.
When the dust and noise had finally settled, they discovered that the nationality of the pilot was as surprising as his aircraft. Jerzy was a stocky Czech who looked more like a nightclub bouncer than a pilot.
‘This is the only chopper available?’ asked Jimbo.
‘This is all there is,’ Jerzy said in heavily accented English. ‘You don’t want to fly in it, that’s fine by me. I get paid either way.’ He shrugged carelessly. ‘Anyone who doesn’t want to fly with me can stay here.’
‘No, we’ll fly in it, providing you think you can get it airborne with all of us and our kit on board,’ said Shepherd.
‘We have a lot of fuel on board which we need to get us to Freetown but the only way to find out is try, yes?’ said Jerzy. He grinned. ‘Shall we make a wager?’
‘I don’t suppose you brought any food with you?’ Geordie said. Jerzy shook his head. ‘No, I didn’t think you would have.’ Geordie gave a theatrical sigh, threw his bergen into the Hoplite and clambered aboard. ‘Come on then you guys, chop chop. If we get a move on we might just be in time for an all-day breakfast at a Freetown greasy spoon.’
‘I can see that being a recipe for disaster,’ said Jimbo. ‘I think I’ll stick with ration packs.’
‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,’ laughed Jock, slapping him on the back. The two men followed Geordie into the back of the helicopter.
Shepherd sat up front with the pilot and the initial frost between them soon thawed as Jerzy went through his pre-flight checks. ‘What brings you to Sierra Leone?’ Shepherd asked.
‘When the Cold War ended there wasn’t much demand for ex-military helicopter pilots back home so I thought I’d try my luck in Africa,’ said the pilot. ‘Until recently I was earning a reasonable living ferrying airline passengers between the airport and the capital. The airport’s at Lungi on the north side of the Sierra Leone River, Freetown’s on the opposite bank. There’s no bridge so passengers heading for the city either have to take a ferry or a very long road detour - about 180 kilometres - and the roads are far from secure. Anyway, the unrest and the Civil War here has cut the number of civilian flights - and the number of people on them - so that I’m lucky to see one or two passengers a month these days. So until the British Army arrived, I’d been whiling my time away in Freetown, making a dollar where I could, but mostly drinking too much beer and watching satellite TV whenever there wasn’t a power cut. But now I’m - how do you say it? - back on Easy Street because I have a contract with the British Army. They don’t have enough helicopters to support their operations, so I fill in for them where I can.’
‘So you’re a mercenary?’
‘A mercenary?’
‘A soldier for hire.’
Jerzy laughed and slapped his leg. ‘That’s what I am,’ he said. ‘A soldier for hire.’
There was a whining sound from the turbines as he pressed the starter, then the engines coughed like a heavy smoker clearing his lungs and rumbled into life, belching out diesel fumes. Jerzy shifted the lever into flight idle and the rotors began to turn, slowly at first but accelerating rapidly into a blur of motion as the downwash whipped up such a storm of sand and dust that the beach disappeared from view. His gaze flickered across the gauges, then he gave a thumbs up to Shepherd, and raised the collective. The helicopter lifted on its springs with an almost human groaning sound. Even though they’d been carrying minimum kit, the four passengers on board were stretching the Hoplite to its limits. The helicopter rose painfully slowly, struggling to break free of the ground effect. It juddered in the downwash, its engines screaming and its airframe vibrating so hard it sounded as if it was shaking itself apart.
‘Bloody hell!’ Shepherd said. ‘Good thing we’ve been on starvation rations for a fortnight. If we hadn’t lost a few pounds, I don’t think we’d have got airborne at all.’
‘Jimbo’s just shat himself if that’s any help,’ said Geordie.
The rotors eventually bit into cleaner air and the noise and juddering decreased as the helicopter rose sluggishly from the beach and wheeled away towards Freetown. Looking down, Shepherd could see the scorch marks and devastation as they flew over the ruined village he and his patrol had found when they carried out a recce on their first day in Sierra Leone. It was a reminder, if any was needed, that the orphaned and brutalised children they had freed from the rebels were not yet safe and he made a private vow to himself to do whatever he could to help them.
Shepherd was grateful that the flight to Freetown was a short one because the fuel gauge had been falling like a stone throughout the flight. It was showing close to empty as the helicopter breasted a ridge and approached the capital in the foothills of Mount Auriol. A small cluster of high-rise buildings at its centre rapidly giving way to ranks of ugly concrete buildings and palm-roofed shacks.
Jerzy overflew the civilian heliport and brought the Hoplite in to land at the Sierra Leone Air Force Headquarters near the head of Aberdeen Creek. As the rotors wound down and the dust settled, Shepherd and the others shook hands with Jerzy and then strolled across the cracked and weed-strewn concrete hard-standing towards the barbed wire compound where the SAS Operational Squadron had set up its headquarters.
The first thing they did was to find something to eat and they then went to report to the Operational Squadron commanding officer. He kept them waiting for twenty minutes and when he did see them, his body language and the way his gaze kept straying to the papers on his desk suggested he already had his hands full running his own squadron and the additional presence of Shepherd’s patrol was a distraction that he felt he could do without.
He nodded distractedly as Shepherd completed his report on the task that had brought them to Sierra Leone in the first place: a beach landing that the patrol had organised by what had turned out to be a troop of South African mercenaries, and then spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘I’ve nothing for you at the moment lads, and you’ve earned a bit of downtime, so why don’t you check in at the Tradewinds Hotel on Lumley Beach Road?’ He scribbled a signature on a printed form and handed it to Shepherd. ‘It’s one of the few hotels still operating. Just hand that to the owner. We have an arrangement
with him, so just relax and take it easy and if I need you for anything, I’ll give you a call.’
Shepherd knew when he was being given the bum’s rush, but it was pointless arguing about it, so he just nodded. ‘No problem, Boss. And do you mind if I raise the plight of those children with some of the aid agencies here?’
The officer frowned as he scratched his chin. ‘Children?’
‘The only survivors of the massacre of an entire village. I told you about it and gave you the map coordinates.’
The officer looked pained. ‘Ah yes, yes, a tragic business, but all too common here, I’m afraid.’
Shepherd waited for the officer to say something else, but when he didn’t Shepherd didn’t pursue the matter. Since he hadn’t been ordered not to contact the aid agencies, he kept his mouth shut and chose to take the Boss’s silence as acquiescence.
‘And is there transport to get us to this hotel?’ Jock asked. ‘Or are vehicles like choppers around here - as rare as rocking horse shit?’
The officer flashed the Scotsman a tight smile. ‘There are a few Landcruisers that the mechanics have been working on. They’re beaten-up but driveable, you can take one of those.’
They left the officer and went outside into the blistering sunshine. They chose the least battered and bullet-holed Toyota from a row parked at the side of the compound, helped themselves to some ammunition from the armoury and replenished their rations, then drove out of the base. The road on either side of the gates was lined by the ragged stalls of traders and craftsmen who had set up a sort of informal market there in the hope of attracting trade. The poverty of the country was shown in the limited range of goods on offer, with men and women sitting cross-legged in the dirt selling a handful of plantain bananas, sandals made from recycled car tyres, a couple of battered paperbacks or a few empty tins and bottles or scraps of fabric that must have been reclaimed from the city dump. There was also a metal worker there, his hammers beating out a tinny rhythm as he pounded pieces of scrap metal and flattened tin to make cooking pots and water carriers, while a sweating boy, perhaps his son, pumped the bellows of his primitive forge. Shepherd had never seen such abject poverty and understood why the West had been forced to intervene.
The road was a wasteland of potholes and crisscrossed by tank tracks that had torn up the surface. The Landcruiser bounced and jolted over the ruts as they drove on. Every mile or so they passed the rusting wrecks of vehicles, crashed or ambushed, that had been bulldozed off the road.
As they rounded the head of Aberdeen Creek and turned onto Lumley Beach Road, the views improved dramatically. The palm-fringed, pristine white sands stretched away from them for miles, towards the lighthouse at Cape Sierra Leone and Man of War Bay. The beaches looked as beautiful as any in the world but in this war-torn country there were no tourists to enjoy them and they saw not a soul as they drove along.
‘Looking on the bright side, no one’s going to be hogging the sunbeds around the pool,’ said Geordie.
They passed a few mud-and-thatch huts and an occasional concrete building on the beach side of the road, many of them with sun-faded signs advertising beer and Coke, though they looked more like jails than bars, with steel shutters covering the doors and iron bars across the windows. Almost all were closed and shuttered, vandalised or derelict, many pitted with the marks of gunfire, and with smoke-blackened windows. Several were completely burnt out.
The Tradewinds Hotel proved to be an ugly two-storey concrete block with a flat roof and the familiar bullet-marks on its stained facade. ‘Bloody hell,’ Jock said as he caught sight of it. ‘I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a building anywhere in Sierra Leone that hasn’t been shot up.’
‘At least this one’s open for business,’ said Shepherd. ‘Though I’m guessing there won’t be much in the way of room service.’
‘Mate, I’ll be happy if the bed’s got sheets and a pillow,’ said Jimbo.
The owner of the hotel, a paunchy Lebanese with a thick black moustache and slicked-back hair, eased himself out of a cane chair in the lobby, beneath a ceiling fan that turned with a slow, rusty squeak. As they watched him fumble behind the counter for the room keys, they could hear a steady dripping sound from down the corridor. ‘At least we know the water supply’s working,’ Jimbo said with a wink.
‘Even better than that,’ Jock said. ‘There’s a bar as well, and I can definitely see a bottle of whisky on the shelf.’
Geordie grinned. ‘That’s you sorted then, but what are the rest of us going to drink?’
‘Ask someone who cares,’ Jock said. ‘Right, shit, shower and shave and back in the bar in twenty minutes.’
‘Sounds like a plan,’ said Shepherd.
Shepherd let himself into his second-floor room, trying hard not to speculate on how many people might already have slept in the bed since the sheets were last changed. There was a small balcony, but there were bullet holes in the shutters, which did not seem a particularly good omen. He dragged his bed as far from the windows as it would go, exposing a thick carpet of dust where it had been standing. The tiles in the bathroom were cracked and the walls mildewed, and when he turned on the light, there was a rustling sound like dry leaves stirring in a breeze, as streams of brown cockroaches scuttled across the floor and disappeared beneath the bath and into cracks in the walls.
He turned on the shower, more in hope than expectation. To his surprise a stream of brackish water flowed, albeit erratically, and he took his first shower in more than a fortnight. He trampled his filthy clothes underfoot as he showered, killing two birds with one stone. He dried himself on a threadbare towel, hung his wet clothes over the balcony railing and put on some clean ones. Feeling human again, he went downstairs.
The other three had got there well ahead of him, and were sitting at a table in the baffa - the outdoor, tin-roofed drinking area overlooking the beach. Geordie and Jimbo were drinking bottles of beer while Jock had sequestered the bottle of whiskey. It was Jamesons.
‘Thought you only liked Scotch?’ said Shepherd, sitting down at the table.
‘Whiskey’s whiskey,’ said Jock. ‘And the Paddys make a decent enough drop of the hard stuff.’ He poured a large measure into a glass and pushed it across the table towards Shepherd.
‘Got any ice?’ asked Shepherd.
‘The ice out here’ll give you the runs for a week,’ said Jock. ‘But neat whiskey will do wonders for your digestion.’
Shepherd picked up the glass. He sniffed the whiskey and then took a cautious sip. He felt a warm glow spread out from his stomach and he grinned. ‘Nice,’ he said, then emptied the glass with one swallow.
Jock laughed. ‘A convert,’ he said, and refilled Shepherd’s glass.
Shepherd looked around the room. Despite the mosquitoes fogging the air, the relative coolness of the evening breeze was welcome. There were another dozen or so people in the outdoor bar, the usual Third World mixture of local fixers in shiny suits, Western carpetbaggers, wheeler dealers, arms traders and other dubious types who were always drawn to troubled countries like flies to shit. As the four SAS men drank and joked, Shepherd saw two men paying them particular attention. One was Arab-looking, balding and overweight with a gold Rolex on his wrist, and the other a younger man in a linen tropical suit wearing what appeared to be an orange and yellow striped MCC tie.
When Shepherd had walked in they had been sitting on stools at the end of the bar but after a while they moved to the next table and struck up a conversation with the troopers. The Arab-looking man introduced himself as Farid and described himself as a Lebanese trader.
‘And I’m Jonathan Parker,’ the other said, ‘I’m a Brit, out here looking at a couple of business opportunities.’
‘And what line of business would that be?’ Shepherd said.
‘Oh, import-export, that sort of thing,’ said Parker. ‘It’s not every day I get a chance to buy fellow-Brits a drink in this tropical hellhole, so what’ll it be? Same again?’ Shephe
rd couldn’t help but notice that Parker had cleverly managed to stop any further questioning of what he was doing in the country.
As he went to the bar, Jock and Shepherd exchanged a look. ‘We should have asked for Six drinks,’ Shepherd said.
Farid looked blank, but none of the SAS men needed the cryptic comment explained. They’d all reached the same conclusion: Parker was a member of MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service.
The sky was darkening into dusk and Shepherd could see lightning already flashing over the mountains to the east. A few moments later, the bats flitting among the palms disappeared and a curtain of rain began to fall. Within seconds it was drumming on the corrugated iron roof and sending torrents of water sweeping through the street in a foaming brown tide.
Thirty minutes later the storm ended as suddenly as it had begun, the floodwaters ebbed away and the evening chorus of frogs resumed. Clouds of mosquitoes again filled the air and the bats resumed hunting for moths drawn by the flickering glow of the lights. Street traders emerged from the doorways and shacks where they’d been sheltering and set up again around the hotel, lighting candles to illuminate their threadbare selection of goods.
The lights in the hotel and in the buildings across the city flickered and died in one of the frequent power cuts, but after a few seconds of silence there was a rapidly growing noise of generators being fired up all over the city, a metallic chorus counterpointing the incessant croaking of the frogs.
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