Stand By, Stand By

by Ryan, Chris

  ‘Blue One,’ he snapped. ‘Watch out. One X-ray approaching from direction ship.’

  Roger must have had a man outside on stag, because two more bursts rattled out, and the running figure dropped. Immediately afterwards they heard Roger say, ‘Let’s go. Run!’

  Men poured out of the doorway – one, two, three, four, five. A sixth sprinted from the left to join them. Four ran to the right, while two temporarily vanished, having gone down to give covering fire. Then the two were on their feet and running. Hardly had they passed out of sight to the watchers’ right when a far louder explosion – the loudest of the night – took House No. 2 apart. In a few seconds the structure was on fire, flames pouring from the roof. More men appeared, running from the ship, but the sight of the blazing house brought them to a halt. The last radio call Merv heard was Roger telling Charlie – his man down the airstrip road – not to stage any diversion, because none was necessary, but to head for base.

  The watchers were about to pull back to the beach when Merv took one more look at the Santa Maria.

  ‘Jesus!’ he cried. ‘She’s down at the stern. She’s sinking.’

  ‘Arse on the bottom, anyway,’ Terry agreed. ‘Let’s go.’

  Five minutes later the assault group tumbled on to the beach, panting but elated. Peter Black still had a shackle and a few links of chain dangling from his left wrist; for the past forty-eight hours he’d been chained to the structure of whatever gaol he’d been in – one night in a safe house used by the narcos in Bogotá, then in a cabin on the ship, then in the island building. He was still in his party gear, or at least the remains of it: the jacket of his suit had disappeared somewhere along the way, and his shirt, once white, was now filthy and torn. But his dark city trousers and black shoes looked ridiculously out of place. He was holding a pistol that Roger had thrust into his hand in case of emergency.

  ‘Good to see you, boss,’ Merv said cheerily. ‘Had a nice holiday?’

  ‘Charming, thanks. Five-star treatment.’

  ‘Seriously – are you OK?’

  ‘Absolutely. But, Christ, am I glad to see you guys. What a fantastic effort!’

  ‘All part of the service. Now, let’s go for a little voyage.’

  After a quick sweep to make sure they’d left nothing behind, they fitted the engines, launched the Geminis, and motored out into the wind. As they cleared the headland, well out to sea, they looked back and saw flames rising high above the creek. Merv switched on the satcom and went through to Tony Lopez in Bogotá to report the success of the operation.

  Somebody lent Black a sweater, because the night was quite cool, and once he’d got some food and drink down him, he seemed pretty much himself. As the party headed out to sea, they filled him in on their side of the operation, but he seemed desperately eager to find out what had happened to ‘the others’.

  ‘Who are they, boss?’ Merv asked.

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘No. We came out so bloody fast, we never got a full briefing. All we knew was that we had to lift you, off the boat or wherever it stopped.’

  ‘Well . . .’ Black seemed at a loss for words. ‘It was the DA from the embassy, and the . . . woman who runs the comms office.’

  ‘They’re at some location in the jungle, and the training team from D Squadron’s gone after them. Their operation was due to go down at the same time as ours.’

  ‘Let’s ask the embassy what’s happened, then.’

  They went through again on the satcom, and Black talked to Tony direct – but all the anchor-man could report was that no news had come up from the south.

  ‘What about the 319?’ Black asked Merv. ‘Can’t we raise them on that?’

  ‘We can try.’

  The radio was in the other boat, so they closed on it and called across. But presently the answer came back: no contact.

  At 0440 Merv took one last fix with his Magellan and saw that they were almost on their rendezvous, a few minutes early, so both coxswains throttled back their engines and cruised gently forward into the swell. Then a couple of men in each boat dangled their triangle-like signalling devices in the water, fishing for the submarine.

  In fact the Endeavor had been listening to their engines for the past half-hour, and had been shadowing them. By the time they began to signal, she was almost underneath them. A couple of minutes later they saw her periscope break the surface a hundred metres to their east; next the conning tower hove into view, and finally the long, gleaming whale-like upper body. Within quarter of an hour they, together with all their kit, were safe in the belly of the leviathan.

  It can’t have been long after that we at last managed to separate the DA’s handcuffs. All we had to sever a link of the chain between them was a hacksaw blade I’d been carrying in my ops waistcoat. Taking turns, concentrating so as not to break the blade by exerting too much pressure, we gradually cut through the link.

  At the time that seemed a bit of an achievement. Certainly it was better that he could use his hands independently. Apart from having chewed-up wrists, he didn’t seem much the worse, but he was exhausted and in shock. At any rate, he was very quiet, and it was only when I asked how he’d been lifted that he at last became articulate.

  ‘My fault entirely,’ he said. ‘We’d had a few drinks, you remember. I was driving. I stopped outside the door of the restaurant, and we stared in. Then we drove off, came back, and did the same again. The next thing we knew, we were cut out by two cars full of armed men – and that was it.’

  ‘And they brought you and Luisa here?’

  ‘Yes, but we got separated as soon as we arrived.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I’m afraid they gave her a bad time. I could hear her screaming . . .’ His voice faltered and stopped.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘You needn’t go on.’

  ‘I can,’ said Murdo. ‘Her body was lying on the floor in another room. She was naked, and it looked like she’d been badly beaten.’

  I didn’t answer, but I was thinking one name only: Farrell. That was his hallmark: rape and torture. Probably he’d been trying to make her divulge what SAS forces there were in the country. Once again my resolution to avoid personal vendettas had been blown to the winds, and I bitterly regretted my failure to take the bastard out while I’d had the chance.

  We’d withdrawn into a small open area just inside the jungle at the north end of the airstrip. The rain had held off, but the mosquitoes were a major pain. The DA was still wearing the DPMs that the Colombians had given him, so that at least his arms were covered; but he had no hat, and the only way to protect his head was to drape himself in a little tent of netting.

  We sat around miserably in the dark, debating our options. One faction, led by Murdo, was in favour of going back for a second hit on the compound. He argued that surprise would be on our side once again. The narcos and the PIRA – however many were left of them – must think that we’d somehow slipped away downriver, and they wouldn’t be expecting a repeat performance.

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘We came to lift the hostages. Now we’ve got one, and the other’s dead, we want to get the hell out. We’ve lost one guy already. We don’t want to risk any more. If any PIRA have survived, they’ll be well into the jungle by now.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Murdo, ‘for fuck’s sake let’s get back to the LZ, so that the chopper can pick us up.’

  That made good sense – and I didn’t think we’d have much difficulty navigating. Our basic need would be to head due north. Obviously we’d have to weave about, taking the easiest route through the jungle, probably along animal tracks. But if ever we seemed in danger of getting lost, we could make our way back to the river and steer by that. The trouble was the physical difficulty of making progress. As I knew from past exercises, the jungle grows thickest along river banks, and our best hope would probably be to keep in the thinner areas, further inland.

  Bitter experience, on training and previous
operations, had taught us that it was impossible to move through the jungle in the dark. All the same, Murdo insisted on having a try, and he set off in company with Mel, announcing that they would move on a northerly heading. They never made more than a couple of hundred metres. For the next twenty minutes we could hear them cursing quite close to us as they tried to push their way through the undergrowth, and in half an hour they were back, with skin and DPMs ripped into shreds by the wait-a-while thorns. We agreed that we’d start trying to blaze a trail north as soon as it was light. In the meantime, at 0500, we pulled out the pin from one of our TACBE beacons, hoping that the international distress call it put out would be picked up at Puerto Pizarro and alert our rear-party to the fact that we were in the shit.

  Thereafter, all we could do was sit and wait for the light. As we were in thick cover, we got a brew on, and that cheered things a bit, but time seemed to be moving at the pace of a constipated snail. I kept looking at the wretched bundle in the hammocks, all that was left of Sparky. You poor bugger, I was thinking. All your money-saving didn’t do you much good in the end. Also on my mind was Luisa’s naked body, lying on the floor, with flies and ants getting at it.

  ‘Let’s hope the Boat Troop have had better luck,’ I said, and everyone grunted assent.

  Eventually dawn broke, retarded by the fact that the sky was still overcast. Grey light filtered down through the tree canopy, and we were just sorting ourselves out for the off when, to our consternation, we heard an engine splutter and start up out on the strip.

  ‘Jesus!’ I cried. ‘The plane!’

  In twenty seconds we were out on the edge of the cleared ground. The Islander was some 600 metres off, at the other end of the strip and facing away from us, but even in the half-light we could see that both its props were turning.

  ‘They’re nuts!’ I shouted. ‘I fixed the tyres. They’ll never get off.’

  ‘If they do, we can drop them,’ said Murdo. ‘They’ll have to take off this way. They’ll be right over our heads. Just go on automatic and give the plane plenty of lead.’

  I watched, half-hypnotized, as the Islander started to move. Was it possible that someone had come down to the field and changed the wheels during the past couple of hours? Or was the pilot in such a panic that he hadn’t checked the tyres before he went aboard?

  Slowly the plane turned right-handed and straightened. We heard the pilot winding up his engines. But then we heard something else.

  My TACBE, which had been beeping quietly for the past hour, sending out the emergency beacon, suddenly came to life. An English voice was saying, ‘Green Four, this is the QRF. Do you read me? Over.’

  I seized the set and switched to the voice channel. ‘Authenticate!’ I shouted. ‘Authenticate!’

  ‘Operation Crocodile,’ came the answer. ‘Op Croc.’

  ‘Green Four, roger. You’re loud and clear. Where are you?’

  ‘Estimate zero eight ks from your location. We’re airborne towards you.’

  ‘Roger. We’re on the north end, repeat north end, of the new airstrip beside the river. There’s an Islander trying to take off at this moment. It’s the narcos’ transport. If it gets airborne, shoot it down.’

  ‘Roger. We have eyes on the river. Turning downstream now. There’s smoke rising from the jungle to the west. Is that you?’

  ‘Negative. That’s the laboratory. We hit it during the night. We’re one k east of the smoke, right by the river. Repeat. One k east of smoke.’

  ‘Roger. We’ll be with you in two minutes. Wait out.’

  I put the set down, hardly able to believe my ears.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ shouted Murdo. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘QRF from the Regiment. For fuck’s sake let’s not have a blue-on-blue.’

  ‘Green Four,’ I called again. ‘I confirm, our location is on the northern end of the airstrip, on the edge of the forest.’

  ‘Roger,’ called the QRF leader. ‘Location coming in sight. We have eyes on the aircraft.’

  On the ground the Islander was still teeing itself up, engines screaming at full revs. At last it started forward, towards us, but not accelerating quickly, as it should have been. Rather, it began weaving from side to side in a sluggish, drunken stagger. After no more than a couple of hundred yards of that, it veered off to its left, coming to a halt a few yards from the jungle wall.

  As the pilot doused the engines, we became aware of another sound: the heavy thudding of helicopter blades and the scream of turbines. A second later two Hueys swept overhead, with side-gunners sitting in the open doorways. We waved frantically, and one of the pair went into a hover above us. The other carried straight on, to land well beyond the stranded aircraft.

  The Islander’s door had popped open. Two men jumped to the ground and began to run. One was aiming for the end of the road, the other came our way, heading for the jungle on our right. Instantly the machine-gun overhead opened up with a heavy hammer. A line of bullets flickered across the strip, kicking up puffs of dirt ahead of the farthest runner. No warning could have been clearer: stop or you die. The man continued to run, and within seconds he’d been cut down by another burst.

  At the same moment rounds came snapping across the tops of our heads. Belatedly I saw a group of two or three Colombians way down the field. As we returned fire I suddenly realized that the single figure disappearing to our right was running with a limp. Farrell! I swung round and put in a burst from the MP 5 just as he disappeared into the trees.

  ‘Stay with the DA!’ I yelled, throwing Murdo my spare magazines. ‘Keep them off. I’m going after him.’

  Incoming fire was still cracking past, but I was possessed by the realization that this was my last chance, and I gave no thought to the rounds going past. In a few seconds I was on the edge of the jungle at the spot where I’d last seen the fugitive. There, on a big leaf, was a splash of fresh blood. He was wounded, at least. Possibly dead, but anyway wounded.

  I dropped on one knee, listening for sounds of movement. Behind me rounds were still going down, and I could hear the choppers landing, but my whole attention was focused on the wall of vegetation ahead. A wounded animal is the most dangerous of all. What weapon was Farrell carrying? I hadn’t seen any long, but he could well have a pistol.

  There was more blood on a plant ahead. On the forest floor some dead leaves had been turned over. Further on, at the edge of a clearing, I saw threads torn out of a shirt and hanging on the wait-a-while thorns. I guessed he wasn’t far in front.

  Twenty yards across the clearing, a bush moved. I whipped a burst into the foliage and heard a yell. The branches thrashed about and Farrell half fell into the open. I raised my weapon to engage him again, but when I pulled the trigger, nothing happened. With a sickening lurch of the stomach I knew I was out of rounds – and I’d given Murdo my spare magazines.

  Farrell was on all fours, struggling to stand up. I raced straight for him and kicked him full belt in the ribs. The blow sent him flying on to his back. I saw blood all down his right side – one burst had got him in the arm and flank.

  Never before in my life had I lost control, but I did then. Holding the MP 5 in both hands, I smashed the butt down on to Farrell’s jaw. With his good hand he grabbed my sleeve and tried to drag me down on to him. Caught off-balance, I toppled and landed with all my weight on my left forearm, right on the old break. A stab of pain shot through me, like a shot from my recurring nightmare.

  I gave a yell, drew back, kneed him in the bollocks, ripped free and stood up, panting. Blood had started to trickle from his mouth. I kicked him again in the side of the head and knocked him flat sideways – but still he was trying to get up. I was on the point of using the MP 5 on him again when I felt a touch on my arm. I whipped round, and there was Murdo, offering me his weapon.

  ‘Shoot the bastard, Geordie. It’s easier.’

  I took the MP 5 and levelled it at Farrell’s head. Still he was struggling to prop himself on his left elbow. He looked
straight at me and spat. Then, in a snarl, he said, ‘Don’t fucking miss.’

  ‘Go on!’ snapped Murdo. ‘Top him!’

  ‘No.’ I handed the weapon back. The hatred had suddenly drained out of me. ‘No,’ I repeated, ‘the cunt’s far more valuable alive.’

  Back on the airstrip, the occupants of the plane had given themselves up. Everybody had been searched and lined up in the open. The second Huey had landed; six more armed SAS troops in full combat kit rapidly debussed, and the pilot shut down the engine. Silence fell over the airfield.

  Murdo and I propelled our prisoner towards the commander of the QRF, whom I recognized as Billy Bracewell – big, blond, muscular, a staff sergeant with G Squadron.

  ‘Geordie!’ he shouted. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Fine. Let’s get the fuck out of here.’

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘Declan Farrell. One of the key members of the PIRA. He’s volunteered to come back with us, to help the police with their inquiries.’

  ‘OK. Hand him over to two of those guys there. What about the hostages?’

  ‘That’s the DA. He’s all right.’ I pointed to our group behind me. ‘But they killed the woman. You’ll find her body in the concrete building. Sparky’s dead as well. That’s him there.’ I gestured to a little mound under a poncho.

  A minute later, as people were milling around, I got Billy to one side and whispered fiercely: ‘Farrell. That’s the fucker who killed my wife.’ I felt choked. Suddenly I was hit by everything at once: the let-down of tension, lack of sleep, frustration over Farrell, grief over the loss of Sparky. I sat down on the deck with my head in my hands and tried to get myself together.

  Presently I felt a hand on my shoulder. There was Murdo, with his moustache drooping fearsomely in the grey dawn light.

  ‘Come on, Geordie,’ he said. ‘Let’s have a proper brew and a bloody great breakfast. Then we’ll all feel better.’

  EIGHTEEN

  They couldn’t get us out of the country fast enough. It was as if we’d created too much of a disturbance already, and the authorities feared that the narco bosses would order a revenge strike if they could find out where we were. The other worry was that the media would latch on to us and start bringing out wild stories. The big essential was that we kept our heads down, and as a result our feet hardly touched the ground.