Rough Diamonds (A Spider Shepherd short story)

by Stephen Leather

  There were four Hip helicopters parked at the end of the runway close to the Cub transport aircraft. There were five Hind gunships in a separate wired compound away from the other aircraft; three in the open and the other two inside a hangar, its doors wide open.

  There was a guard in a hut just inside the compound, but they could hear his snores as they cut the wire. As Jimbo and Jock provided cover, Shepherd crept over and used his knife to make sure that the guard would never wake up again. He stripped off the dead man’s clothes and replaced them with the South African uniform before dragging the body across to the hangar. There he laid a rifle down next to the body. He stood and admired his handiwork and then waved Jerzy over.

  While Geordie searched the store shed for weapons and ammunition, Shepherd and Jerzy checked out each of the gunships in turn. They selected one on the grounds that it was already in the open, fully fuelled and had the pilot’s and gunner’s helmets in the cockpits. They also found some rocket pod reloads for the gunship in the hanger. Shepherd hesitated. ‘Can we re-arm the helicopter if we take these?”

  Jerzy shrugged carelessly. ‘Piece of biscuit,’ he said.

  Shepherd frowned then he realised what the pilot meant. ‘Piece of cake,’ he said, slapping him on the back. They loaded the rocket pods and then Shepherd took a moment to familiarise himself with the weapons systems of the Hind. He was on the point of calling the others over to the helicopter-gunship when Geordie came running over. ‘Quick Spider, come and give us a lift. I’ve found a couple of AT-5’s in the hangar. They’re the same as our Milan anti-tank rockets. Might be just the job for the bastard mercenaries.’

  Shepherd went over to the hanger with Geordie. Jock and Jimbo were already lifting a box and together they loaded four boxes into the passenger compartment of the Hind. ‘Sure you’ve got enough now?’ Jimbo said with more than a touch of sarcasm.

  ‘You can never have too much of a good thing,’ Jock said, adding a B10 Russian sniper rifle that he had also found to the pile of weapons and equipment.

  With Shepherd in the front gunner’s cockpit, Jock and Geordie in the cargo bay, and Jimbo still outside the helicopter, they waited for Jerzy to warm up the Hind. They braced themselves for the storm that was to come once the Liberians realised what was happening.

  Jerzy pressed the button to start the engines and they whined and then rumbled into life. The sudden noise provoked a flurry of action among the guards at the gate. Under cover of the noise, Jimbo put a double tap into the dead guard’s head, so that even his mother could not recognise him, then sprinted for the Hind. As he dived into the cargo bay, Jock slid the door shut behind him.

  Lights went on in the buildings around the airfield and within seconds the first fusillades of shots rang out of the darkness. Rounds bounced off the armour plating of the helicopter and ricocheted away into the night.

  The noise of the rounds hitting the Hind was deafening and made everyone on board flinch, but so far at least, the armour plating had held firm. Shepherd shot a glance over his shoulder at Jerzy, who was sitting in his separate cockpit behind and above him. Jerzy’s face was a couple of shades whiter than usual, but he was managing to maintain his focus on his task, his hand hovering impatiently over the controls as he waited for the engines to come up to running speed. Rounds were still crashing against the helicopter and eventually Jock could take no more. He slid open the cargo door and began blasting away at the muzzle flashes, the dotted tracks of his tracer rounds written on the darkness like a deadly Morse code. His fast and accurate shooting suppressed a lot of the incoming fire and bought Jerzy a little extra time to get used to the controls and to get the gunship airborne.

  Jerzy wound up the engines and then raised the collective. The helicopter staggered off the ground, its engines screaming as it dragged itself clear of the ground effect. A stray round struck sparks from the whirling disc of the rotors. Still familiarising himself with the controls, Jerzy steered an erratic course across the airfield and out over the perimeter fence. He was rapidly gaining confidence with the controls and brought the Hind round, gaining a little more height, in a slow turn back towards the airfield.

  ‘Right you bastards,’ Shepherd muttered under his breath. ‘Let’s see how you like a taste of your own medicine.’ Using the Hinds’ electronic selection and aiming system, he opened up first on the parked Hips, watching as each in turn disintegrated before his eyes when the rockets slammed home and engulfed them in flames.

  He saw aircrew sprinting towards two of the Hinds. He held his fire as the crew scrambled aboard and he saw the rotors of one begin to turn slowly. Then he opened up with the wing rocket pods. The first Hind disappeared in a ball of boiling flame. The second was just beginning to lift clear of the ground as the rocket struck it. It slewed sideways, its rotors bit into the concrete and the helicopter went into a frenzied spin around its own axis before smashing into the ground and erupting as its fuel tanks ignited.

  Jerzy eased the helicopter around to allow Shepherd to bring the rocket pods to bear on the remaining two Hinds in the hangar and he let loose with two more rockets, obliterating them in an instant and turning the inside of the hangar into an inferno. Only then did he turn his attention to the guards who were still trying to bring down the Hind with ground fire. A couple of bursts from the nose cannon quickly knocked the fight out of them and Jerzy turned the helicopter north-west on a bearing which would take them back across the border, making directly for the diamond mines in the Kono district of Sierra Leone.

  They crossed the border and flew on, still at low-level. As they cleared the last ridge separating them from the Kono mining districts, Jerzy brought the Hind into a hover and landed in a clearing, where they quickly re-armed the gunship.

  At the foot of the ridge, lit by the full moon, they could see the mine workings and spoil heaps that sprawled before them as far as the eye could see. As he took in the green-tinged view through his NVGs, Shepherd gasped at the scale of the devastation. The thickly forested ridges gave way instantly, as if a line had been drawn across the landscape, to a moonscape of pulverised rock, bare, torn earth and poisoned watercourses dyed a lurid, sickly-looking orange. Whole forests had been razed to the ground and the earth stripped down to the bare bedrock.

  There was none of the usual noise of the African bush, no choruses of croaking frogs or the sonar of bats at the threshold of hearing. There wasn’t even the whine of mosquitoes. In this desolate, lunar landscape there appeared to be almost no living thing at all. Except for men, of course. For miles around the mine the surface of the plain was pitted with small holes and mounds of excavated gravel each casting a small dense shadow in the moonlight and the darkness was lit by hundreds of pinpricks of light as if glowworms were flitting through the night.

  ‘Illegal miners,’ Jerzy said. ‘As fast as the mining companies expose the gravels, ready to process them, the illegal miners move in and start digging. They work at night by lantern-or candle-light, digging out the gravel and carrying it in baskets on their heads to the nearest stream. There they sieve it and jig it for any diamonds it may contain. It’s a race against time before the guards get to them. The mining companies and their mercenaries pursue them relentlessly but every night they return. They need the money, you see.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ said Shepherd.

  ‘If they strike it lucky, then can make a fortune and take care of their families forever,’ said Jerky. ‘But if they are unlucky…’ He shrugged. ‘Then they die. And a lot of them die, my friend.’

  ‘It’s a God-forsaken country, that’s for sure,’ said Shepherd.

  Jerzy nodded in agreement. ‘There is no other work because the mining companies have destroyed the land. The miners used to farm during the wet season, growing enough food to last them the year, and fished the rivers for food. They would prospect for diamonds in the dry season. They grew so much food that Sierra Leone used to be self-sufficient in rice. Now almost everything is imported because ther
e is virtually no farmland left. And even if there was farmable land, there aren’t enough able-bodied people to farm it. There are always clauses in the agreements with the mining companies requiring them to rehabilitate the land after they’ve worked it, but they’re never enforced and the companies never do.’ He nodded at the desolate landscape. ‘They leave it the way it is. Dead.’

  ‘And I don’t suppose the mercenaries will do any different,’ Shepherd said. ‘Speaking of which, it’s time to get airborne.’

  They took off and flew on again at low level, passing over and between huge man-made mountains, the tailings from the mine workings which rose hundreds of feet into the air. The mines worked around the clock and Shepherd could see huge dredges and draglines tearing at the diamond-bearing earth, rock and gravel, ripping out tens of tons with each bite. They fed lines of dumper trucks, their tyres twice the size of a man, which dumped the gravel onto a conveyor belt as wide as a road, running endlessly into a huge crushing mill. Three tall chimneys belched black smoke into the air, visible as three blacker columns against the star-strewn night sky. The relentless, deafening noise of crushed rock and tortured metal was audible even above the beat of the helicopter rotors. It was a vision of hell that chilled Shepherd to the bone.

  Shepherd knew the mining companies would pay whatever was necessary to keep the mines open. However much they had to pay in bribes and protection money, it would never put more than a modest dent in the huge profits they made and then extracted from the country as ruthlessly as they tore the diamonds from the Earth.

  From the intelligence that Parker had provided, they knew the location of the compound where the mercs had based themselves. Shepherd told Jerzy to bring the helicopter in to land two miles from their compound. As soon as they touched down, Jimbo and Geordie disembarked, taking the AT-5s with them. The made their their way on foot through the diamond fields towards the compound. ‘Did you know the Russians treat each of these as a three-man load?’ Jimbo said, grunting under the strain of lifting one of the boxes.

  ‘Yeah?’ Geordie said. ‘Well we’re not fucking Russians, we’re the Pilgrims, so get on with it.’

  They disappeared into the darkness. Shepherd, Jerzy and Jock waited in the helicopter as the minutes ticked by. Over half an hour had elapsed when they heard a burst of firing. At once Jerzy wound up the gunship and took off. They skimmed over a sprawling township that had grown up to service the mines, a sea of mud huts and tar-paper shacks lapping against a handful of concrete buildings. More shacks surrounded the razor-wired perimeter of the mining compound itself, and within that was a smaller and even more formidable-looking compound with chain-link fencing protected by triple coils of razor wire and blast-proof berms bulldozed out of the mine tailings. Floodlights and observation towers raised on wooden poles punctuated the fence, giving it the appearance of a Second World War PoW camp.

  Within the inner fence was a circle of shipping containers, their roofs protected by sandbags. They had been arranged around a patch of trampled red earth, forming the compound’s helicopter-pad. Scattered around the compound were ex-Soviet vehicles - BTR-60 armoured troop transports, BRDM combat reconnaissance vehicles and two tracked ZSU-23-4 radar-guided anti-aircraft guns.

  The helicopter rose to clear a heap of mine-tailings then swooped down in a gut-churning plummet to the floor. Jimbo and Geordie were already engaging the mercenaries in a vicious firefight. Shepherd saw muzzle flashes below the helicopter and tracer fire arcing up towards the Hind. Jerzy threw the helicopter into a violent turn, corkscrewing around as the tracer rounds scythed past, narrowly missing the gunship and flaring like explosions in Shepherd’s night vision goggles. His headset crackled into life as Jock spotted the source of the problem at once. ‘The ZSU-23-4s are radar controlled,’ he said. ‘They’re activating automatically as soon as you show up on their radar. Give me a moment and I’ll poke their eyes out.’

  As Jerzy held the helicopter in level flight for a few seconds, Jock took aim from the doorway of the cab with the B10 Russian sniper rifle he had liberated from the Liberian airfield. He squeezed off several rounds into the Radomes, putting them out of action and reducing the 23-4s to firing by line of sight. ‘Problem solved,’ Jock said laconically. ‘Your turn now.’

  Jerzy flew the Hind in towards the target in the classic Russian figure-of-eight attack pattern, giving Shepherd the opportunity to pick out targets as he needed to. Small arms fire from the mercenaries was now cracking and banging against the armoured metal skin of the Hind as Jerzy threw the helicopter around to throw off the aim of the 23-4s.

  Shepherd could hear the chatter of firing as Jock laid his sniper rifle aside and opened up with the mini-gun from the door of the cab, laying down a torrent of fire on the merc positions. There were more muzzle flashes from the mercenaries’ weapons as they returned fire. Ground fire filled the air around the helicopter with bursts of tracer rounds searing upwards, cutting through the darkness like oxyacetylene torches. Tracer rounds always looked much larger and closer at night and in the cramped gunner’s cockpit of the Hind they looked as big as footballs to Shepherd.

  There was a bigger flash as one of the 23-4s opened fire again. It seemed impossible that anything could fly through the blizzard of rounds without being hit but Jerzy managed it. As the helicopter jerked around, Shepherd heard grunts and curses from Jock who was being thrown around the cab. Rounds clipped and rattled against the fuselage, striking sparks like fireflies, and one round smashed through the Perspex windscreen only inches from Shepherd’s head, punching a second hole as it exited through the roof.

  As the gunship flew on, soaring upwards for a few seconds before the next gut-churning plunge down, Shepherd got the first 23-4 in the crosshairs of his onboard cannon and took it out with an explosive roar.

  On the helicopter’s next lift above the ground, emerging from the shadows of the spoil heaps, he took on the second 23-4 and put that out of action as well, using the cannon pods on the helicopter’s stub wings. The 23-4’s ammunition detonated in the blast and Shepherd could see tracer flying in all direction. Two of the mercenaries were blown away like rag dolls caught in a hurricane.

  With the two anti-aircraft weapons out of the fight, the attack became less stressful. Shepherd calmly cannoned and rocketed the combat reconnaissance vehicles which erupted into flame, spewing out palls of oily black smoke, Jimbo and Geordie targeted the BTR-60 troop carriers with their AT-5 anti-tank missiles. Each time they fired, Shepherd could see the jet of flame lancing out behind the weapon as the missile was fired and the white hot streak it carved through the darkness. Each missile drilled through the armour plating of its target and detonated inside the vehicle.

  The battle was short and sweet, lasting no more than a few minutes. But in that time they had reduced every one of the mercenaries’ vehicles to piles of flaming junk and burning rubber, belching out clouds of black smoke into the night sky. Jerzy kept the Hind circling over the battlefield as Shepherd and Jock targeted any remaining sources of ground fire. When all firing from the ground had ceased, they still kept the helicopter in a hover, ready to offer covering fire to Jimbo and Geordie as they moved forward, mopping up the last resistance, and methodically checking the wrecked vehicles and buildings for survivors.

  One group of three or four mercenaries had remained hidden and as Jimbo and Geordie approached they put up renewed resistance, firing from a sandbagged placement on the roof of the main compound building.

  Geordie marked the site with a couple of phosphorous rounds that emitted puffs of white smoke as they struck home. Sighting on them, Shepherd then took out the target with another strike from the wing rocket pods. There was no more firing from the mercenaries after that.

  Once Geordie and Jimbo had completed their sweep of the compound and given the all clear, Jerzy landed the Hind gunship close to where several of the bodies of the mercenaries were lying. He cut the engines, Shepherd could hear the metal pinging in the cold night air as the eng
ines cooled down. It was only then that he noticed how battered the old craft was. He had been so caught up in the combat that he had hardly been aware of the Hind being hit , but he now saw the scars, dents and patches of newly-exposed bright metal where the barrage of rounds had struck it.

  As the adrenaline-fuelled rush of combat began to fade, Shepherd felt completely deflated and demotivated. He knew that it would soon pass and while he was getting his head in shape to plan his next move, Jock jumped down from the helicopter and ran to join Jimbo and Geordie.

  They has an animated conversation and Shepherd saw Jimbo gesturing towards one of the wrecked mercenaries’ vehicles. They disappeared inside the still smoking wreckage and a couple of minutes later the re-emerged. Jock was the last to appear and as he did so, he held up a scorched leather bag in his hand, with a look of triumph on his face.

  The three men ran over to Shepherd. ‘We found this in the merc’s command vehicle,’ Jock said when he got back to the helicopter. ‘The guys inside it didn’t look like they’d have a use for it any more. Geordie told me that he was sighting the AT-5 when he spotted that one of the BTR’s had a communications rail aerial on the top. That’s always a sign that it’s a command vehicle so I thought it was worth a closer look.’ He grinned. ‘Take a look at what we found. To the victors, the spoils.’

  The bag was heavy but when Shepherd peered into it he gave Jock a puzzled smile. ‘What exactly am I looking at? It looks like a load of pebbles.’

  Jerzy took the bag from him, took one glance into it and then said ‘Not pebbles, my friend, something a lot more valuable than that. These are uncut diamonds, I’ve seen enough of them during my time in Freetown. I’m not an expert, but I’d say you were looking at least ten million dollars worth there, maybe a whole lot more.’