by Chris Ryan
For most of the way we followed a track of sorts, but for the last few minutes, once we were beyond the second ravine, we struck off on a bearing through the bush, weaving between trees and jolting over hard, dry ground until the open stretch of river bank came into view. Towards the left-hand side of our theatre stood a single baobab tree, huge and old, with its great mop-head of branches looking like roots, as though it had grown upside-down. Its massive trunk, at least six feet across, acted as a natural goal-post on that side of the playing field.
‘There you are, Joss,’ I said as we walked forward. ‘It’s all yours.’
‘Oh, wah!’ he went. ‘I like it. Great location! Enemy coming along the far bank, left to right, heh?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Okay.’
Quickly I suggested how he might dispose his forces: killer group in front of the Kopje, the others, within certain limits, where he chose. He’d never set a full-scale ambush before, but he got the idea quickly, and his questions were sensible.
‘Take the baobab as your left-hand marker,’ I told him. ‘The task of the left cut-off group’s just what it sounds: to cut off anyone trying to escape to the left of the main killing area. Their arc of fire can be from the baobab outwards. The right cut-off group has the same task on the other side. Their marker’s that side channel running away from us. Okay?
‘Fine, fine.’
‘So, while you’re sorting your plan, us lot will go forward to set up these extra targets straight out in front of us, in the middle of the killing ground. That’s where I want your guys to place their claymores when we’ve done. Back in a few minutes.’
With Whinger driving we lurched on as far as the edge of the river, then walked down the bank and out across the burning sand. We were carrying four figure-eleven targets and a crowbar with which to dig holes for their mounting posts. On the track at the far side we already had eight hinged targets laid out ready, flat on their backs, set so they’d come upright, facing the killer group, at a pull of the cords. Another three were fastened to the trunks of trees, so that a tug would swing them round into view.
Our task now was to place four static targets upright, edge-on to the firing party, so that they’d be virtually invisible at night; their purpose was to test the accuracy with which the Kamangans set their claymores, which would blast their contents horizontally into the killing zone. In a live ambush the claymores would be detonated by enemy walking into trip-wires, but for the purposes of the exercise, we’d set them off ourselves.
Genesis was first up the bank on the far side, and he’d hardly reached the road before he exclaimed, ‘Eh — what’s this?’
He stood staring down at the dusty surface. In a second Whinger was beside him, muttering, ‘Firekin’ ’ell!’
‘What’s the matter?’ I called.
‘Footprints.’
‘Ours, probably.’
‘Come off it. Our guys wear boots.’
The sandy dust all round the prostrate target was printed with the patterns of our boot-soles from the day before, but on top of them, superimposed since the previous evening, were the smooth indentations of bare human feet.
‘Keep off,’ I said. ‘Don’t spoil them. We’ll get Jason to suss them out.’
Jason Phiri, one of Joss’s sergeant-majors, had worked as a forest ranger in a game-park, and was an ace tracker. An incredibly thin man, with arms and legs like charcoal sticks, he was known to his mates as Mabonzo — Bony Person. He stood out from the rest of the Kamangans partly because of his shape, partly because of his colour: whereas the rest were various shades of brown and black, he was more grey, as if he’d been dusted with wood ash. Joss told me he was a Bididi, from the west of the country, on the fringes of the Kalahari desert, where his tribe were akin to the Bushmen. Although his English was limited, he was the friendliest of the Kamangans, always grinning, always in a sunny temper. At the same time, he was quiet and rather shy, reluctant to push himself forward, and had an annoying habit of not letting on that he knew something until it was too late for the knowledge to be of any use. Behind his good humour there was a sense of strain, as if he was being driven by some deep sorrow or anger, which was what made him so eager to please us.
Now I shouted back to Joss to bring him over.
‘Hey, Jason,’ I said, as he approached. ‘What d’you make of this?’
He looked hard at the tracks, then crossed to the next target, five metres away.
‘Here also.’ He pointed down.
‘How many people?’
‘Five, six.’
‘When were they here?’
‘Late in the night. Four, five o’clock this morning.’
‘What were they doing?’
Jason shrugged. ‘Poaching, looking for food.’
‘I thought there weren’t any people in this area.’
‘Officially, there aren’t,’ said Joss. ‘But some guys are always wandering about. These are on the move from one place to another.’
‘What weapons would they have?’
‘AKs, probably, nicked during the war. But mainly they’ll be setting snares for antelopes and stuff.’
‘They’d better look lively if they come back tonight,’ said Whinger. ‘If they walk across here in the dark, they’ll get a fucking surprise.’
Joss gave one of his high-pitched laughs, reminding me of the witch doctor’s twittering. ‘They won’t be back. I bet these targets scared the shit out of them. Cardboard men lying flat on the ground? Oh, wah!’ He rolled his eyes extravagantly. ‘Witchcraft, you betcha. Somebody making a juju. They’ll think some big fiti has been here.’
The discovery livened everyone up. Where had the barefoot guys gone? The idea that eyes might be watching us out of the bush was interesting, and as we fixed the targets for the claymores, we kept a sharp lookout. A grey lourie called persistently from tall trees in the middle distance: go-wee, go-wee. After every few calls it flew to another perch and started again, and when it was stationary, it was impossible to make out, especially when the heat haze built up and everything began to shimmer.
‘He can see somebody,’ Jason told me. ‘He only call for humans.’ But as far as we could tell, it was us, rather than anyone else, the lourie was barracking, telling us to go away.
We were coming back from the targets when Joss called us across to look at something — a tunnel about a foot in diameter, going down into the ground at an angle.
‘Hey, man!’ he said, as I stopped in front of it. ‘Don’t stand there. You might have an accident to your wedding gear.’
‘What is it?’
‘The hole was dug by an aardvark, an ant-bear. You know, with a long snout, like this?’ With his hands he sketched a downward-pointing proboscis. ‘He’s the greatest excavator in creation. He digs himself a hole like this every night. But now, I think we’ve got a warthog in residence.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘There.’ He pointed at a heap of round balls of dung, quite fresh-looking, a few feet away. ‘The thing is, warty can’t turn round in a hole like this, so he goes in backwards, and when he comes out, he comes like a—’
As he was still saying ‘rocket’ a subterranean rumble started up and with a terrific rush a bristling grey pig erupted into the open. Vicious curved tusks gleamed yellow-white on either side of its snout, and it made off at high speed, with its ridiculous tail straight up in the air.
‘You see,’ Joss giggled. ‘A hundred kilos, jet-propelled. Get that amidships, and you wouldn’t feel very well.’
By 1030 the sun was really hot and our party was glad to sit in the shade, not interfering, while the Kamangans set their claymores and ran the firing wires back. I reckoned they’d put the mines too far from the targets, and told them so, but I wanted them to learn from experience, so when they stood up for what they had done, I gave in and let things rest. Once that job was finished, we were ready to roll back to camp.
So far we’d given no ind
ications on timing. All we’d told Joss was that the exercise would go down that night. At last light his guys would move forward on foot to a forming-up point, and then, in the dark, they’d go on to occupy the ambush position itself. All they’d know was that the arms shipment might come through any time within the twenty-six hours from 2200 that day to 2400 the next. What we didn’t tell them was that we had no intention of cracking off the action during the first night. That would make things too easy. Instead, we planned to have them lie out all night and all the next day before we made anything happen.
Back in camp, we got a surprise. The British Embassy in Mulongwe had sent a message via Hereford saying that the President intended to visit our training establishment to watch Alpha Commando in action.
‘The President!’ I went. ‘For fuck’s sake! Who is he?’
‘Haven’t a clue,’ said Stringer, who’d taken the radio message. ‘It just said “The President”.’
‘He’s called Bakunda,’ said Genesis, who always did his homework. ‘General Kabwe Bakunda.’
‘Back under!’ said Phil, derisively. ‘Sure it’s not Bakongo, or Banzongo, or Bonanza? What about Canaan Banana!’
‘They put him away for getting his banana up the wrong end,’ said Pav. ‘Big joke!’
‘Wrong,’ went Mart. ‘He did a runner over the border.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘But they went after him and nicked him.’
Genesis grinned, tolerantly, and said, ‘Definitely Bakunda. And his nickname is Rhino.’
‘Firekin ’ell!’ groaned Whinger. ‘That’s all we need.’
‘What does he want,’ I asked, ‘a bloody drill parade?’
‘No, no,’ said Stringer. ‘He wants to see his guys working.’
‘He’d better get a shift on, then. We’re supposed to move south the day after tomorrow. When’s he due?’
‘They were talking about this afternoon or tomorrow.’
‘This afternoon’s no good. Tell them tomorrow. That’s his best chance. How’s he getting here, anyway? Not by road, surely?’
‘No, chopper. Apparently he’s got a Puma.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘bollocks to him. We’re not going to make any special arrangements. If he comes, he can fucking walk out to the ambush site like everyone else. I’m not having him fly in. It would make the whole thing too phoney. Tell them tomorrow afternoon, Stringer, and get an ETA. Seventeen hundred would be best for us. Tell them he’ll have to walk at least fifteen ks in the dark. And if he wants to see the ambush go down, he’d better plan to stay overnight.’
Stringer looked a bit uneasy at all my instructions. In his innocence he obviously thought everyone should go on their knees in front of the President, so I told him not to worry: just carry on.
I thought Joss might be fazed by the news, but on the contrary, he seemed quite chuffed. Although he’d never met Bakunda, he reckoned the guy was all right; apparently he’d been through Sandhurst, and had some genuine military experience. His rank was not entirely unearned.
‘No sweat,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘Let Rhino join the party!’
‘Why’s he called Rhino?’ Pav demanded. ‘Anything to do with the thickness of his skin?’
‘Could be,’ Joss agreed. ‘But it’s more to do with his shape. His height and width are exactly the same — no difference at all.’
Joss gave his briefing at 1600 in the shade of an ebony grove. By then the power of the sun was declining, and under the big trees the air was pleasantly cool. The Kamangans sat round on the earth in their four patrols of eight, each with a couple of NCOs in command. The SAS team sat in a semi-circle behind Joss, keeping a low profile while he talked.
With the Africans grouped together like that, the variations in their uniform became obvious. The guys were all wearing DPMs of a sort, but there were differences in pattern and colour which showed the garments had come from different sources. Some men wore berets, dark green or black, some had woolly balaclavas, some wide-brimmed bush hats; a few sported American pudding-basin helmets, a few more had long-peaked DPM caps, and others were bareheaded. Their weapons were more standardised: AK47s and Galils formed the main armament. In each patrol there were two RPGs and one gympi, and everyone, no matter what weapon he carried, wore bandoliers of 7.62mm ammunition slung both ways across the chest. One or two of the guys also had fearsome-looking machetes in scabbards attached to their belts. I’d seen them fanatically sharpening those knives for hours on end, until they could have shaved with them. Not that many of them did much shaving; the majority hardly seemed to grow any beard. Jason was a bugger for sharpening: he was at it day and night, as if doggedly preparing for some major carve-up.
We hadn’t liked to enquire too much about the scars most of them had on their faces. We assumed they were tribal marks, but the only man we questioned — about the row of small vertical cuts he had under each eye — claimed that they were the result of some operation he’d had for vision defects when he was a child.
Most of these men were Kaswiris, the tribe that occupied the northern half of the country. The rebels were Afundis, their traditional enemies in the south. Even though we hadn’t seen any fighting yet, we’d heard any number of stories about how each tribe hated the other’s guts. It sounded just like the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda. Given the slightest excuse, either side would start a massacre.
These, I kept telling myself, are the absolute élite of the Kamangan army. Joss had told us some hair-raising stories about recruiting practices down south, how Afundi boys of twelve or thirteen were kidnapped from their villages, taken to a different area, beaten up and forced to become killers with threats of having their arms and legs cut off if they failed to perform. How many of these guys in front of us had been co-opted by such methods? How many believed that if they smeared themselves with palm nut-oil, it would make them bullet-proof? Some did, we knew, because Joss had described a fantastic scene in which one man, having anointed himself, volunteered to act as a target for an RPG.
‘Jesus!’ Phil had said, greatly excited by the idea. ‘What happened?’
‘He stood up on a wall, and somebody fire at him from about thirty metres,’ Joss replied. ‘The rocket killed him, of course. It blew him to pieces.’
‘So how did his fellow believers explain that one?’
‘Easy. They said he’d eaten food cooked by a woman, and that had destroyed the oil’s magic powers.’
I kept thinking of that as Joss went carefully through his plan, first on a blackboard, then in the dust on the ground, using small pieces of wood as individual men. He explained how, when the ambush went down, the directing staff — that is, us, the SAS — would illuminate the area with parachute flares from a Shamouli hand-held launcher. Figure targets would spring into view for a few seconds, disappear, then come back up. He emphasised how quick and accurate the members of the killer group would have to be, and rammed home the need for discipline.
He did the job well, giving clear explanations, repeating himself just the right amount, answering questions. He talked in English, but now and then, if a man didn’t seem to have understood something, he would break into rapid volleys of Nyanja. Although all the Kamangans spoke English, some of them had such peculiar intonation that it was often hard to tell what they were on about.
When he’d finished, he asked if I’d like to say a few words, so I got up and went forward beside him.
‘Zikomo, Major,’ I began. The local word for ‘thank you’ was an easy one, and several of our guys were already using it to each other. ‘Just a couple of things,’ I began, talking slowly. ‘First, I repeat what Major Mvula just said about discipline. In any ambush, the most important thing is self-control. While you’re waiting, no matter how uncomfortable you are, you must keep still. Even if a scorpion’s attacking your bollocks, you don’t move. You’ve all been in the bush. You know how movement catches the eye. If an animal keeps still, you don’t see it. If it flaps one ear, you spot it. No matter how long y
ou have to remain in position, I don’t want to see anyone flap his ears.’
I paused, and saw one or two grins spread across the intent faces.
‘The next thing is, water. Again, it’s a matter of discipline. You must make your water last. Budget for the worst. Expect to be in position all tonight, all tomorrow and most of the next night. Drink as little as possible. Apart from anything else, the less you drink, the less you need to piss.
‘The third thing is this. There’s a chance that the exercise may turn into a live operation. As far as we know, the enemy forces are a good way to the south. But we don’t have any up-to-date intelligence. It’s possible that in the last couple of days one of the Afundi units has moved north. They may have a long-range patrol out — we don’t know. They may be creeping up the very track you’ll be watching. In other words, there’s all the more reason to remain fully alert. If an enemy patrol does come into the killing zone, you want to make sure you drop every single one of them.
‘All right, then? Do your best. We’ll be watching you.’
With that, we were ready to move. We deliberately concealed the fact that the President was due to visit, as we thought it would distract the guys and spoil their concentration. The chances were that even if he did see the ambush go down, he’d arrive on the location and leave it in the dark, so that most of his subjects wouldn’t realise he was there.
The move-up went without a hitch. The column set out on foot in single file at 1730 as the sun was going down behind the trees on the horizon, a vast, blood-red ball. In that latitude, south of the Equator, the light faded fast, and by the time the ambush party reached the site we’d chosen for the final holding area and Bergen cache, at 1910, it was fully dark. The place was easy to find, even at night, because a group of fifteen or twenty tall leadwood trees stood on their own in the middle of a sea of grass. You could see them from some distance off, no matter which way you approached.
The ambush parties left their Bergens neatly set out in formation in a glade among the trees, eight to a row, each touching the next, so that if they came back at night, every man should be able to identify his own by touch. In a last-minute check Joss made sure that everyone had full water bottles, and basic rations in his belt-kit.
