the man who had ignored him earlier, assuming he was a member of the Covenant.
He wasn’t ignoring him now, ducking back and yelling. More men were coming. Chase fired a last couple of shots, felling another Janjaweed, then retreated into the tent and exited through the hole.
Sophia heard gunfire from her vantage point atop the dune. She had been tracking Chase through the Lee- Enfield’s scope until losing sight of him amongst the tents; now, she swept her sights back and forth, hunting for targets.
She found one. ‘Well, well,’ she said as she lined up the crosshairs on the white hair. ‘Goodbye, Mr Callum . . .’
Callum stood with Vogler and Zamal, the latter engaged in a shouting match with Hamed. Covenant troops had moved to protect their leaders, facing off against the militiamen. ‘One of your men shot at us!’ the Janjaweed leader yelled in Arabic.
‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ Zamal replied, ‘but it wasn’t us.’
One of Hamed’s lieutenants, the man who had seen Chase, ran to them. ‘I saw him! It was a white man, like him!’ He shoved Callum in the chest, knocking him back a step—
Half the man’s head blew apart in an explosive shower that splattered across the crowd of Janjaweed.
For a moment, nobody moved, frozen in shock.
Then the guns on both sides came up.
The Covenant forces, better trained, fired first, taking down eight men in an instant.
But there were more than eight men facing them. AKs blazed, the Janjaweed firing wildly on full auto. Three Covenant troopers went down, spouting blood.
Vogler, Zamal and Callum ran, their remaining soldiers covering them as they fired into the crowd. Hamed dived the other way, using his men as shields. ‘Defensive positions!’ Vogler yelled. ‘Get to the Humvees!’
Sophia humphed at the results of her shot. She tried to track Callum, but the scene below was too chaotic. ‘Arse,’ she muttered, searching for other targets.
Chase joined Nina beneath the Humvee. ‘Not quite what I planned, but it’ll do,’ he said, hearing the thudding bark of AKs against the crisp chatter of the Covenant’s more modern weapons.
‘Great, they’re fighting each other,’ said Nina, ‘but we’re still right in the middle of them! How are we going to get out of here?’
He looked over at the parked technicals. ‘We’ll nick one of those.’
More gunfire and shouting from behind. The Covenant survivors were forming a protective circle, using the Humvees for cover. ‘If we can get to them.’
Chase saw another Janjaweed run from a tent, carrying a rocket launcher. ‘Now’s a good time to try!’ They crawled out and ran for the pickups.
Shots whipped past as a Janjaweed saw them. Chase grabbed Nina and dived behind a tent as more bullets tore through the tattered material. ‘Stay down!’ he told her, switching the gun to full auto and twisting to return fire. The spray of bullets carved across the gunman’s stomach.
A sound, close by, the clack of a rifle’s charging handle. Chase rolled to see another Janjaweed run out from behind the technicals, the fear and confusion on his face replaced by anger as he saw the Englishman.
Chase whipped up his gun, pulled the trigger—
It clicked.
Empty.
The Janjaweed gave Chase a sadistic smile - and a ragged hole blew open in his chest, the impact of a .303 rifle bullet slamming him to the ground.
The echoing crack of the Lee-Enfield reached Chase a moment later. ‘Cheers, Soph,’ he said, dropping the empty TAR-21 and drawing the Browning. ‘Okay, Nina, we—’ He saw one of the Janjaweed hoisting a rocket launcher on to his shoulder, lining it up on the Humvees. ‘—
He threw himself on to her as the rocket-propelled grenade streaked from the tubular launcher.
It slammed into one of the Humvees, the explosion tearing off the wheels and flipping the whole vehicle end over end amongst the Covenant’s tents. One trooper was torn apart by shrapnel, another crushed under the massive 4x4. It came to rest with its smouldering underbelly pointing into the air at an angle, nose half buried in the sand.
Whoops and cheers came from the Janjaweed. ‘Jesus!’ Nina gasped. ‘Glad you didn’t decide to take
‘Didn’t like the colour,’ said Chase. He helped her up, then picked his way towards the technicals, pistol at the ready. Gunfire sounded all around as the Janjaweed moved in on the Covenant, bullets clanking off the Humvees’ armour. Screams pierced the firelit night.
Chase crouched lower, coming round a half-collapsed tent to reach the technicals. He indicated the one with a key in its ignition. ‘That’s our ride.’
‘It’s pointing the wrong way.’ The Hilux was facing into the camp, towards the Humvees.
‘That’s why they invented steering wheels. Come on.’
The militiamen’s attention was focused on the Covenant, nobody watching the fringes of the camp. They reached the first technical, a rust-pocked old Ford pickup. Chase moved round the truck’s rear, seeing one of the campfires, now abandoned, not far away. Waving Nina on, he headed for the decapitated Hilux—
A Janjaweed jumped from the back of another technical near the fire, carrying a case of RPG rounds. He saw Chase - and yelled a warning, dropping the box and clutching for his AK.
Chase snapped up the Browning and fired, hitting the man’s arm and spinning him against one of the petrol cans strapped to the pickup’s side. He reeled back, shrieking, before falling on to the fire in an explosion of flying embers. The shrieks became much louder as he leapt back up, clothes and hair aflame.
Half a dozen Janjaweed ran round the first pickup, guns raised.
Chase fired again - not at the militiamen, but at the petrol can.
A jet of fuel spurted from the hole - and splashed over the burning man as he staggered in blind agony. Flames surged back along the gushing petrol—
The can exploded, liquid fire sluicing out. The screaming man was consumed, as was a second, larger can, which blew up and bowled the pickup into the approaching gunmen inside a roiling fireball.
Chase reached the Hilux, shielding his face from the heat, and looked round to see if there were any more Janjaweed posing an immediate threat.
There were. A man on the edge of a group near the Humvees pulled the pin from a grenade, about to throw it at the Hilux—
His wrist was blown in half by one of Sophia’s bullets. The severed hand plopped to the ground at his feet, still clutching the grenade . . . which exploded, lacerated Janjaweed flying in all directions.
But there were still plenty more left, and the Covenant troops to worry about as well. Chase looked at the pistol in his hand - then up at the weapon in the pickup’s rear bed. It was an old Kalashnikov PK, a light anti-aircraft gun being used here as a heavy machine gun, a belt of ammunition already loaded.
Definitely more firepower than the Browning.
‘You drive,’ he told Nina as he climbed into the back of the Hilux. ‘I’ll shoot.’
Nina entered the open cab, searching for the key. ‘Cute,’ she said, finding Hello Kitty. ‘Drive where?’
‘I’ll tell you when I’ve shot a big enough hole to fit through!’ He swung the gun round towards the Humvees - and pulled the trigger.
The machine gun roared, the recoil threatening to rip the makeshift mount from the pickup’s floor. Chase held on and swept the PK back and forth. Every fifth round was a tracer, green lines from the Russian ammunition streaking across the camp like lasers, but Chase was barely able to see them through the staccato flames erupting from the muzzle. The flanks of the Humvees cratered, tyres bursting and dropping them with a crash on to their run-flat steel inserts. The onslaught was enough to shatter even the armoured windows.
A Covenant soldier aimed at him over the bonnet of a Humvee; he hauled the gun round and hosed him with
