I shoved my kangaroo-on-a-carabiner back inside my vest and let it dangle from the para cord round my neck. Thick grey cloud from last night’s storm still blanketed the sky. The sun couldn’t fight its way through to us, but that didn’t make it any cooler on the ground. Humidity was so high I felt as if I was in a pressure-cooker. The mud was going to stay sticky for a long time yet.
My lungs felt like I was doing a fearsome workout as I lifted one heavy mud-clagged boot in front of the other. Rainwater cascaded over us as birds took flight from the branches above our heads. It was almost a relief each time a burst hit me.
Sam hadn’t sat-phoned Standish about the contact and new int until the worst of the electrical storm had passed. He needed to keep it inside the condoms.
Standish and the twins were punching their way forward, maybe two hours behind us. I imagined Bateman and Tooley running round, forcing the patrol on with kicks and slaps and threats of
I was walking like John Wayne just off his horse after a week in the saddle. My rain-soaked OGs had chafed my thighs and the skin was red raw. I also had prickly heat down my back, made worse by the bergen. Sam said it looked like a relief map of the Himalayas, but what could I do? Sit down and cry? There had been sporadic gunfire all night out there in the darkness to the north. Now and again, in the far distance, a few tracer would bounce up into the sky and disappear into the cloud base. Crucial had been right: they would be here soon.
We hit a noisy, swollen river, and a bridge, maybe thirty metres across, constructed from tree-trunks. It could easily have supported a wagon, had one ever got here. Scores of terrified men and women clutching bundles in plastic sheeting streamed past us from the opposite direction without even looking up.
I raised an eyebrow at Sam.
‘The gunfire. They’re scared. The miners will stay because they know there’s nowhere for them to go. This lot? They just want to run, and who can blame them?’
The flat-bottomed valley in front of me ran at right angles to the river. It was horseshoe-shaped, as if someone with a giant ice-cream scoop had gouged along the ground and pulled out a chunk for dessert. A series of hills and knolls made up the high ground round it. The canopy had disappeared. The bare mud looked like it had been bombed, napalmed, then bombed again just to make sure, like the huge craters I’d seen from the An12.
We had stepped into the land that time forgot. The whole valley was excavated from top to bottom. Men caked in mud scrambled about, looking like the pictures of Australian Aboriginals decorated with clay that I’d seen as a kid. I expected a squadron of pterodactyls to do a fly-past any minute.
Bodies disappeared left, right and centre into holes in the red earth. One guy grabbed a rock that had been passed up through a hole only big enough for a man to squeeze through. Blood trickled into the mud from his elbows and knees. He turned and placed the rock in an old reed basket beside him.
I had a sudden image of sharp-suited traders going frantic on the market floor as they yelled their bids for this rock pulled out of the ground with this poor fucker’s bare hands. And even that wasn’t the end of the chain. The raw-material price had probably multiplied a thousandfold by the time it reached the factory,
Squaddies stood guard, looking relieved as the patrol moved in. RPGs lay beside them or rested up against rocks. Fuck-all changed round these parts.
The kid still had his arms and hands tied behind his back, and a rope round his neck with which Sam controlled him. Crucial had been whispering gently to him all night. At first he resisted like a trapped animal, but the big man’s soothing voice seemed to have calmed him down a bit. He must have realized nothing was going to happen to him – until he got God shoved down his neck later on.
We dragged ourselves into the valley, only to see more of the same desolation. Smoke curled from small fires. Bodies huddled round. Some smoked; some stirred the contents of blackened pots. Others lay under makeshift shelters, thrown together from plastic sheeting and rice bags. Squaddies sat around chatting with them, AKs across their knees.
A shout came from higher up, on the left-hand side of the valley. One group scattered immediately. The ground rumbled under my feet and a second later an explosion ripped from a shaft. Rock chips and mud showered down. Now I knew what the fertilizer and diesel oil were all about.
Low-explosive ANFO (ammonium nitrate/ fuel oil) mix was just the stuff to carve big fuckoff holes in the ground. The fertilizer needed to have at least fifteen per cent nitrate content to detonate, and many countries didn’t produce it in such strengths any more. It wasn’t only used in mining and quarrying, but also by any self-respecting terrorist who’d done some basic training or had access to the Internet. ANFO is a lifting charge; high explosive is more for cutting, and wouldn’t be so effective in taking out a convoy of Land Rovers as they drove over a culvert or two.
Sam didn’t even look up as the cloud of red, vaporized mud slowly settled. We followed a track in the lower ground, until the valley was all around us. Up ahead, on a knoll that stuck out maybe four hundred away, at the curve of the horseshoe, I saw rows of tents, and smoke from a cooking fire.
‘Which way to Nuka?’
Sam turned back the way we’d just come. ‘Follow the river upstream. I’m gonna get on with all-round defence. I’m sending some of the porters to the orphanage to bring the kids and villagers in. You get the Mercy Flight lot, OK?’
I turned back towards the river. The track upstream was well worn, which meant the mud was deeper. Soon every other noise was behind me and all I could hear was the squelch of my boots and the rumble of the fast- moving water.
I kept slipping and sliding, but what the fuck? It didn’t matter – getting to the village did.
I wasn’t alone on the path. I overtook some of the porters, who were now making their way home as fast as their tired legs could carry them. Exhausted as they were, they wanted to drag their families to safety.
By the time I got to the edge of the shanty I felt like I’d done ten Ks, not three. I looked around. There were no breezeblock buildings. This was wood, reed, palm-leaf and mud country. Chickens scratched around dejectedly. It made the airstrip look like mid-town Manhattan.
My throat felt like I was drinking crisps. My back ached, the raw skin on my legs stung worse than foot blisters, but the worst pain of all was knowing there was nothing I could do about Silky being there or not. Either she would be, or she wouldn’t. And all the time the LRA were getting closer. More gunfire echoed somewhere out there in the bush, getting the porters’ legs pumping that little bit faster.
I scrambled over the mud with the feeling I used to have in the pit of my stomach as a schoolkid, trying desperately to get home before I got caught and beaten up by a rival gang on the estates.
I entered the village. People stared at me, terrified.
‘Mercy Flight!’ I yelled. ‘Anyone know Mercy Flight? The white guys? Tim? Silke?’
5
‘Mercy Flight?’
Nobody stuck around long enough to give me an answer. All I saw was terrified faces, then the backs of heads as they turned and ran. It couldn’t just have been my mad, staring eyes: it must have been the distant crackle of gunfire followed so soon by the appearance of a white man with an AK.
Scabby chickens jumped out of my way as I slid through the mud. Scared little faces peeped out from behind their mothers’ legs before they, too, disappeared into the shadow of the huts. Rain dripped off the palm trees. Unable to evaporate in this humidity, it had nowhere else to go.
The village disappeared into a long depression of mud and crushed huts. It was as if whoever had scooped out the valley had been playing about with his kitchen equipment here too. This time he’d got out his bread-knife and carved himself a slice of earth for breakfast. The ruptured fault line must have swallowed most of the village.
A few mud-covered bodies scavenged in the ruins. I got right to the far side of what was left of the shanty and didn’t see the huts that were hanging on Sam’s wall back at Erinvale. But I found what I’d come for.
A once-white tent the size of a marquee stood on a patch of open ground, wet and sagging, sides rolled up. A
