want you and Stan to cut through the jungle to the point where we got into the river and work your way back towards the camp from the east. We've got to take out that grenade-launcher before the support helicopter arrives.
'Heard.'
'On our way.'
Still on his UHF set, Alex then called up the assault and rescue team, requested the sergeant in charge and explained that he had sent in two men from the eastern end of the camp to try and force the RUF soldiers to keep their heads down.
'Understood,' came the reply.
'I'll put another four in from this end. If you keep laying down fire from the bush we should be able to keep 'em busy enough to get the chopper in and out.
A moment later, however, a long volley of 7.62 SLR and Kalashnikov rounds smacked into Alex's position. Heady with the destruction of Puma Alpha, the defending RUF troops had decided to take the battle back to their tormentors in the jungle.
As the firestorm swept their position, spattering himself and Sutton with bark and falling leaf fragments, Alex pressed his face and body into the damp coffee-ground soil. Beside him he heard the unmistakeable whip crack of physical impact and a shocked gasp.
'Ricky?' he said, fearing the worst.
'I'm hit,' muttered Sutton through clenched teeth, 'in the fuckin' arse.
Alex's heart sank. How many bloody more, he thought. If I run into Sally Roberts, the bitch'll wish she'd never been born.
Another volley raked the tree line. Somewhere behind him, the bound woman keened with fear.
Reaching for the shell-dressing pack in Sutton's smock pocket and the clasp-knife in his own, Alex cut through the young signaller's blood-sodden DPM trousers, slapped on the dressing, and ordered him to sit tight. To his right Stan and Dog returned fire, pouring a steady stream of armour-piercing rounds on to the RUF positions around Hut Two.
A moment later Alex saw four SAS men slip out of the door of Hut One and disappear around the far side.
From the generator area he heard the crack of 203 grenades launched by Dog and Stan and a moment later the familiar stutter of Mi6s on rapid fire as the assaulters completed the movement. The RUF were now under sustained assault from three directions, trapped in a lethal cage of noise and shrapnel. No RUF man was going to risk standing up for long enough to aim and correctly discharge an RPG in all of that, Alex reckoned. Quickly, he called in the reserve Puma.
The pilot acknowledged the signal and sixty seconds later the big snout-nosed chopper swung in fast and steep, dropping down next to the twisted and still burning wreck of the first. It had hardly touched the ground when the rescue team sprinted out of the barracks-block with the ITN crew over their shoulders. Hurling the journalists through the open doorway like so many sacks of coal and dragging themselves in afterwards, they were away within seconds, dipping and swaying across the grey-green jungle canopy to safety.
On the sat-com, Alex called up Ross.
'Hostages airborne,' he told the GO, 'but we've taken casualties.' Quickly, he brought him up to speed with events.
'Keep me posted,' said Ross tersely, and broke the connection.
Silence now from the RUF all of their remaining strength pinned down in and around Hut Two. Above them, the sky seemed to be darkening again. Stalemate.
Alex slotted a fresh 30-round magazine into the belly of his weapon.
Does the fight have to be to the death, he wondered. The fierce anticipation of the night before was entirely spent. The camp was a butcher's shop now and one or two of the RUF corpses looked horrifjingly young. All that he felt now was revulsion a desperate longing for the whole thing to be over.
And then Dog Kenilworth's Brummie tones were in his earpiece.
'They're jacking it in. Slinging their rifles out.'
Alex exhaled, permitted himself a moment of relief 'Any men followed the rifles?'
'No, not so far. Yeah, hang on, one's just shouting to Stan now.
'What's he saying?'
'Dunno. Something meaning 'No shooting!', I'd guess. He's coming out.'
'Watch yourselves, OK?'
'Don't worry, Alex.'
One by one the RUF soldiers processed out of Hut Two and the other outbuildings at the eastern end of the camp. From the tree line Alex saw the line of disarmed men, hands raised, shuffling towards the smoking wreck of the first Puma. There, under the watchful eye and trained Mi6s of the assault team, they waited in disconsolate ranks.
'Andy,' Alex ordered, 'cut across and join Stan and Dog. When it looks as if all the prisoners are under guard, I want the three of you to do a quick house-to-house, check for stay behinds
'Understood,' said Maddocks.
Alex turned back to Ricky Sutton. The trooper was pale and clearly in shock, but managed a wry grin. An SLR round had torn a furrow over the hamstring muscle at the back of his thigh, and despite the two shell-dressings blood was still welling hotly through the gauze.
'Right,' murmured Alex briskly.
'Who had the patrol med pack
'I'm lying on it.'
Carefully, Alex eased the pack from beneath the trooper's chest, found a morphine stick, and angled it into Sutton's thigh. Within seconds, the taut, fearful strain in the young trooper's eyes was replaced with a dreamy vagueness.
Reaching for his UHF set, Alex pressed the transmit button.
'How's it going, lads?' he asked.
'Fine,' came Andy Maddocks' voice.
'No stay-behinds, all bad boys disarmed. What shall we do with the weapons? We've got a hundred-odd SLRs, few AKs, RPGs, odds and sods.'
Alex removed a saline drip assembly from the med-pack.
'All weapons, amino, and comms kit goes into the river.' He thought of the women and children who, raped, traumatised and with one or both arms hacked off by men such as these, were still arriving daily in Freetown.
'And that includes all pan gas machetes, bilihooks, whatever. Anything with a blade.'
'Understood.'
Turning to the bound woman, whom he now saw was probably no more than 16 or 17, he fingered the gag from her mouth and tied it round Sutton's thigh to reinforce the shell-dressing. Then finding a vein at the trooper's wrist, he worked in the IV needle. Beside him, crooning distractedly to herself as if to comfort a child, the girl sat blank-eyed.
Within minutes the secured camp had taken on an ordered and familiar aspect, with sentries posted, SAS casualties stretchered and ammunition checks underway. The mood was sombre even the irrepressible Ricky Sutton lay in morphined silence on his stretcher. Where the bonfire had raged the night before, the captured RUF soldiers sat in subdued lines with their hands plasticuffed behind their backs. Others, moving with dreamlike slowness, stacked the bodies of their dead comrades.
Beyond them the rain hissed and steamed as it met the smoking shell of the Puma.
On the sat-coin, Alex arranged the details of the return to base with David Ross. It would probably be a question of two Chinooks, they decided one for the SAS team, one to deliver the RUF dead to the government forces HQ. A few yards away, Stan Clayton and Dog Kenilworth manoeuvred Don Hammond into a black body-bag.
Four.
At breakfast the mood was sombre.
They'd de-bussed at SAS HQ shortly after 6 a.m. and, calling for hot coffee in his hut, Ross had debriefed Alex immediately. Alex's account had been detailed but unemotional and Ross had heard him out in near silence, only
