They'd no longer be thrashing about or firing blindly, they'd be waiting, spread out, static, for me to bumble into them. Tactical movement in the jungle is so hard. You can never use the easier high ground, never use tracks, never use water features for navigation. The enemy expects you to use them. You've got to stay in the shit, follow a compass bearing, and move slowly. It's worth it: it means you survive.
Sweat laced with Deet dripped into my eyes, not just due to the humidity inside this pressure cooker but because of the stress of slow, controlled movement, constantly straining my eyes and ears, and all the time I was thinking: What if they appear to my front? What if they come from the left? What if they fire first and I don't know where the fire is coming from? Contacts in the jungle are so close you can smell their breath.
THIRTY-TWO
It had taken me two hours to reach the loop, which was a lot quicker than I'd expected.
I dumped the bergen, and unstuck my T-shirt from my back in an attempt to relieve the chigger bites. Then I fingered my wet, greasy hair off my forehead and started moving slowly forward, butt in the shoulder. As I neared the road it was time to apply Safe and get down on the jungle floor. Using elbows and the toes of my Timberlands, I dragged myself to the edge of the canopy. The weapon lay along the right side of my body; I moved it with me, knowing that with the safety firmly on, there was no chance of a negligent discharge.
Last night's rain filled the dips and pot-holes in the tarmac, and the sky was still dull. A motley collection of black, light and dark grey clouds brooded above me as I looked and listened. If the boys had any sense, they'd have triggers out along the roads, doing a bit of channelling of their own, waiting to see what emerged from the canopy. Even if they did, I had a bearing I had to stick to.
Edging my way forward a little more so that my head was sticking out from the foliage, I couldn't see anything up the road to the right, apart from the road itself disappearing as it gradually bent left. I turned my head the other way.
No more than forty metres away was one of the wagons from the house, a gleaming black Land Cruiser, facing me and parked up on my side of the road. Leaning against the bonnet was a body with an M-16 in his hands, watching both sides of the bend. He was maybe in his twenties, in jeans, yellow T-shirt and trainers, and looking very hot and bored.
My heart pumped. A vehicle was my fast-track out of here -but did the body have mates? Were they spaced up and down the road at intervals, or was he on stag, ready to whistle up the rest of the group if he saw anything as they enjoyed a quiet smoke behind the wagon?
There was only one way to find out. I inched slowly backwards into the treeline, finally getting up on to my hands and knees before crawling to the bergen.
Shouldering it, I removed Safe and slowly closed on the wagon by paralleling the road, butt in the shoulder, eyes and ears on full power. Each time my foot touched the jungle floor and my weight crushed the leaves, the sound seemed a hundred times louder to me than it really was. Each time a bird took flight I froze in mid-stride, like a statue.
Twenty painstaking minutes had passed when I was brought to a halt once more.
From just the other side of the wall of green came the sound of his weapon banging against the side of the Land Cruiser. It seemed to be just a little forward and to my half right, but no more than about eight metres away.
For a minute or two I stood still and listened. There was no talking, no radio traffic, just the sound of him coughing and gob bing on to the tarmac. Then came the noise of metal panels buckling. He was standing on the roof or bonnet.
I wanted to be in a direct line with the wagon, so I moved on a little further.
Then, like a DVD in extreme slo-mo, I lowered myself to my knees and applied Safe, the barely audible metallic click sounding in my head as if I'd banged two hammers together. Finally I laid down the weapon and took off my bergen one strap at a time, continually looking in the direction of the wagon, knowing that if I moved forward just two metres I would be in plain sight of my new best mate and his M-16.
Once the bergen was on the ground I rested the rifle against it with the barrel sticking up in the air to make it easier to find. Fuck the zero, I didn't need it now. Then, very slowly and deliberately,
I extracted my gollock. The blade sounded as if it was running along a grinding stone instead of just gliding past the alloy lip of the canvas sheath.
Down on to my stomach once more and with the gollock in my right hand, I edged carefully forward on my toes and elbows, trying to control my erratic breathing as I wiped the Deet very slowly out of my eyes.
I neared the edge of the treeline at a point about five metres short of the wagon. I could see the nearest front wheel, its chromed alloys stained with mud at the centre of a lot of wet, shiny tyre.
I edged forward a little more, so slowly it would have made a sloth look like Linford Christie. Another couple of metres and the bottom of the door sills and the front wing came into view but in the gap between them and the grass, I saw no legs. Maybe he was sitting inside, maybe, as the buckling sound had suggested, he was standing on the roof. My eyes strained at the tops of their sockets as I tried to look up. I heard the coughing up of phlegm and spitting;
he was definitely outside, definitely up there somewhere.
I counted off sixty seconds before moving again. He was going to hear me soon. I didn't even want to swallow: I was so close I could have reached out and touched the wheel.
I still couldn't see him, but he was above me, sitting on the bonnet, and his heels had started to bang rhythmically against the wing furthest away from me.
He must be facing the road.
I knew what I needed to do, but I had to psyche myself to do it. It's never easy to take on somebody like this. Up there was virgin ground, and when I got on to it, I had to react quickly to whatever I found. What if there was another guy in the wagon, lying asleep? What if he had heard me and was just waiting for me to pop up?
For the next thirty seconds I revved myself up as mozzies hovered around my face. I checked I was holding the gollock correctly with a good firm grip, and that the blade was facing the right way. I took one last deep breath and sprang to my feet.
He was sitting on the opposite wing with his back to me, weapon on the bonnet to his left. He heard me, but it was too late to turn. I was already leaping towards him, my thighs striking the edge of the bonnet, my feet in the air. My right hand swung round and jammed the gollock across his neck; with my left I grabbed the blunt edge of the blade and pulled tight, trying to drag his head on to my chest.
The M-16 scraped over the body work as he moved back with me over the wing, my body weight starting to pull us both to the ground as his legs kicked and his body twisted. His hands came up to grab my wrists, trying to pull the gollock away, and there was a scream. I squeezed his head against my chest and committed to falling backwards off the wagon. The air exploded out of me as my back hit the ground and he landed on top of me, and we both cried out with pain.
His hands were round the gollock and he writhed like a madman, kicking out in all directions, banging against the wheel and wing. I opened my legs and wrapped them round his waist, forcing my feet between his legs, then flexed my hips in the air and thrust out my chest, trying to stretch him as I pushed the gollock against his neck. I worked my head down to his left ear.
'Ssssh!'
I could feel the gollock in the folds of his skin. The blade must have penetrated his neck a little; I felt warm blood on my hands. I shushed him again and he finally seemed to get the message.
Keeping my hips thrust out, I bent him over me in an arc. He stopped moving, apart from his chest, which heaved up and down. I could still feel his hands against mine as he gripped the blade, but he wasn't struggling any more. I kept on shushing into his ear.
He didn't say or do anything as I forced him over to the right, pulling back on the blade, murmuring, 'Come on, over you go, over you go,' not knowing if he could even understand me. Soon my chest was on his head, pressing his face into the leaf litter, and I was able to look behind me for the M-16. It wasn't far away; I got my foot into the sling and pulled it within reach. The safety catch was on, which was good: it meant the weapon was made ready, that there was a round in the chamber, because you can't apply Safe on these things otherwise. I could hardly use it to threaten him if he knew it wasn't ready to fire.
There was snorting from his nostrils as they filled up with mucus from shock, and the movement of his chest made me feel I was on a trampoline. I still had one of my legs wrapped around him and could feel the weight of his
