promised. 'When?' 'I want you to keep below the horizon all of tomorrow, then at nightfall you can take us in at o2oo hours.' For the Scouts, the witching hour was always two hours after midnight. It was then that the enemy would be at his lowest ebb, both physically and mentally.
At one o'clock in the morning Sean held his final briefing in the crew mess of Lancer. He checked each man separately. They were all dressed in navy-blue fisherman's jerseys and jeans, and black canvas rubber-soled combatboots. On their heads were knitted black woollen caps, and all their faces and hands were black, either naturally or with camo- cream.
The only uniform items they wore were their webbing, all of it supplied by the South African defence force from Cuban equipment captured in the south of Angola. Their weapons were Soviet AKM assault-rifles, Tokarev pistols and Bulgarian M75 anti-personnel grenades. Three men in Esau Gondele's section would carry RPG anti-rank rocket-launchers. Part of the agreement with the South Africans for their co-operation was that nothing would ever be traced back to them.
One at a time, they stepped up to the table and handed over all their personal items, signet rings and dog-tags and pay-books, wallets and wristwatches, and any other form of identification. Esau Gondele sealed them in separate envelopes and issued each of them with an identical black waterproof digital wristwatch to replace their own.
While this was happening the trawler captain called on the intercom from the bridge: 'We are seven nautical miles off the river-mouth. Bottom is shoaling nice and gently. I'll have you in position a few minutes before time.' 'Good on you,' Sean told him, and then turned back to the ring of black faces. 'Very well, gentlemen, you know what we are after. just a few airy thoughts to occupy those busy little minds of yours - if you are going to cull anybody, just make sure that you don't take out the woman or the child. She's my sister.' He let that sink in for a moment. 'Thought number two. The sketch-maps I have shown you are more fantasy than fact. Don't rely on them. Thought number three. Don't get left behind on the beach when we pull out. Chicamba is no place to spend a holiday. The food and, the accommodation are rotten.' He picked up his rifle from the bunk. 'So, my children, let's go and do it.' Lancer groped towards the shore with radar and depthsounder. All her running lights were extinguished. Her engines were ticking over, so she barely maintained steerage. In the darkness ahead Sean could make out the intermittent luminous flare of the surf breaking on the outer reef. There were no lights ashore. The land itself had been absorbed by the night. The cloud overhead was unbroken. No glimmer of star or moon came through.
Van Der Berg straightened up from the radar-hood. 'One mile off,' he said quietly. 'Water is six fathoms and shoaling.' He glanced across at the dark figure of his coloured helmsman. 'Stop engines.' The tremble of the engines through the deck beneath their feet ceased, and Lancer wallowed like a log.
'Thanks, Van,' Sean said. 'I'll bring you back a nice present.' He ran lightly down the companionway to the main deck.
They were waiting in the stern, each team standing by its own black rubber landing-boat. Sean smelt the musky odour in the air and grimaced. He didn't like it, but the use of 'boom' before a contact had become a tradition in the Scouts.
'It's an old African custom,' he consoled himself. 'The mad Mahdi's fuzzy-wuzzies smoked it before they revved old Kitchener at Khartoum.' 'Sergeant-Major, the smoking-light is out,' he grated, and he heard them shuffle in the darkness as they rubbed out their cannabis cigarettes on the deck. Sean realized that the smoke dulled the edge of their fear and bolstered that reckless bravado that was also part of the Scouts tradition, but he had never used it. He relished the sensation of fear; it throbbed in his blood and beat in his brain. He was never more alive than at a time like this, going into battle and mortal danger. He would not wish to shade that pure clean flame of fear.
One at a time the flexible rubber hulls, laden with men and equipment, slid down the stern chute of the trawler and splashed softly on to the water.
The boatme~ started the Toyota outboards and they burbled gently in the night. Even on a still and windless night like this, the sound would not carry a hundred yards.
They formed up into a long black snake, a boat's length between them. Sean was in the leading inflatable with three of his best men. The boatman shone a hooded pen light' over the stern to keep the boats that followed on station.
They moved off quietly towards the land.
Sean was standing in the stern. On a lanyard around his neck was a small luminous compass, but he relied mainly on the nightscope to bring them into the shore. It was a Zeiss image-enhancer. It looked like a large pair of plastic-coated binoculars.
Ahead of him the breaking surf flared green fire in the lens, and he made out clearly the dark spot in the line that marked the river-mouth. He touched the boatman's shoulder to redirect him. The next wave lifted and shoved them as it slid by under the hull, and they heard its hoarse susurration on either hand as they ran through the pass into the calmer waters of the lagoon.
Through the Zeiss lens he saw the shaggy tops of the palms silhouetted against the cloud-banks and the open throat of the river ahead. He flicked the pen light, and Esau Gondele's boat moved up alongside.
'There she is.' He leant over to whisper to the big Matabcle and pointed out the river-mouth.
'I see it.' Esau had his own nightscope held to his eyes.
'Tear their nuts outv The pod of three attack-boats moved off together, and Sean watched them disappear into the river and merge with the loom of the land.
He whispered to the boatman and they turned parallel with the beach. As they ran down the lagoon, Scan scanned the shore through the Zeiss lens.
Half a mile from the mouth he made out in the gloom of the palm grove the square outline of a hut and then beyond it a second. 'It fits with Bella's description,' he decided.
They ran towards the beach. Now he saw the gleam of metal above the nearest hut. It was the tall Christmastree antenna and dish of a satellite communications centre.
'That's it.' Sand grated softly beneath the keel of the inflatable and they leapt over the side into blood-warm water that reached 52e to their knees. Sean led them ashore. The beach sand was so white that he could see the little ghost crabs scuttling away ahead of them. The men raced to the edge of the palm grove and dropped into cover below the high-water ridge.
Sean took a few moments to check his bearings. According to Isabella's description of her first visit, the communications centre was where they had received and searched her. She told him there were two or three female radio operators running the centre. In addition she had counted approximately twenty para guards who were billeted in the barracks beyond the wire.
The gate to the compound was always locked at sunset. She had warned him of that. There was always a sentry posted there. He patrolled the wire, and they changed the guard every four hours.
'Here he comes now,' Sean murmured as he saw the dark shape of the sentry moving along the barbed-wire fence. He lowered the nightscope, and whispered to the Scout who lay beside him: 'Twenty paces ahead, Porky. He's moving left to right.' 'Got him.' Porky Soaves was a Portuguese Rhodesian whose speciality was the slingshot. He could hit a dove on the wing at fifty metres. At ten metres, he could drive a steel ball-bearing clean through the bone of a man's skull.
He slid forward like a night adder, and as the Cuban sentry came level he rose on one knee and drew like a longbow man. The double surgical-rubber strands of the slingshot snapped, and the sentry collapsed without a sound into the fluffy white sand.
'Gov said Sean softly, and the second Scout ran forward with the heavy wire-cutters. The strands of barbed wire made little musical pinging sounds as they parted. Sean ran to the opening.
As each of the Scouts slipped through the hole in the wire, he slapped their shoulders and pointed them to their targets. He sent two of them to the main gate to take the sentries there, two to shut down the communications centre and the rest of them to hose down the barracks at the rear of the compound and to cull the garrison guards.
If the arrangements were the same as last time, the first hut on the right of the radio room should be Isabella's. Nicky would be in the second one with his Cuban nursemaid. Isabella called her Adra. From Sean's estimate of the situation, the nursemaid was one of the uglies. She would have to go.
He would cull her at the first opportunity.
Sean ran towards the line of huts, but before he reached them a woman started to scream in the communications hut. The sharp hysterical bursts of sound raked Sean's nerve-endings. The screams were cut off by a short burst of automatic fire.
Here we go! Sean thought, and the night erupted with gunfire and flame and the mortal thrill of combat.
Isabella slept fitfully and woke a little before midnight to the sound of thunder and of jet engines passing at altitude overhead. She threw aside the mosquito-net and ran out into the night.
The wind generated by a mighty thunderstorm that was moving up- from the south flapped the skirts of her nightdress around her bare legs and rattled the palm fronds.
The sound of jet engines rose and fell as wind and cloud blanketed it. It seemed to her that there was more than one aircraft up there above the cloud. She hoped that one of them
