I finally got up, spitting out sand and grit.
Genghis sprinted past me. He disappeared into the dust-storm, weapon at the ready. Mr Lover Man was no more than a metre behind him with the axe.
I retrieved the flare pack and started to leg it after them.
29
Joe revved hard, taking off to the left of the Skyvan. The shed was static, but its engines were still running, still stirring up a maelstrom of red dust. There were shouts from inside. I could hear the signature of 5.56 being fired.
I ran to the right of the cloud, to get ahead of it, and dropped into a dip, panting, trying to get oxygen into me. My feet told me there were needles in them too.
There were more shots inside the Skyvan. The props began to wind down. One of them coughed to a halt.
BB stumbled out of the front of the storm, M4 in hand. No Stefan. Fuck.
I willed my body deeper into the sand.
BB turned and ran back, then reappeared almost immediately, dragging the boy. He threw him over his left shoulder. Weapon in the right hand, he headed west, his back to the sun, kicking up grit as he went. He knew where he was going. Even in this heat and with the weight of the boy, BB could cover the twenty K to Jilib in short order.
He didn’t look back. He knew there was no need to. He just had to make distance.
A couple more rounds went off as the second prop coughed and died and the cloud began to settle.
I set off behind them, keeping to the right, using the cover of the bush as best I could. The Skyvan soon disappeared behind me.
I pulled off the top of one of the mini-flare sets to expose the penjector. I took it out, screwed it onto a flare, and pulled it out with a gentle pop. I kept on running. It was vital that BB didn’t see me. His M4 was accurate to about three hundred metres. The flares weren’t accurate at all.
BB disappeared into a stretch of scrub and heat haze and didn’t come out again. My feet slipped in the sand as I tried to make ground, still using the cover.
BB might be fronting it. Going to ground, staying concealed. We look for him, we lose him, and at last light he moves off.
It was what his training would be telling him to do. And he would have the bottle for it. He might even know I was behind him, and be waiting for me to move into his weapon sights. What’s the point of running if there are people behind you that you can’t shake off? Stop, take me on, kill me, and then keep going.
This wasn’t a frightened animal I was chasing. It was a highly trained ex-SAS trooper with a score to settle and a big cash prize ahead of him.
I moved right of the point where he had become unsighted.
Slowing down now. Throat burning. Head burning. Relentless heat.
I kept low but fast, not daring to lose ground. Within a few seconds, I came to a dried-up watercourse. It was three metres deep and a couple wide after centuries of angry flash floods. I lay down at the wadi’s edge and scanned its bed, left and right. There was no sign. No sign at all. No one had been along here in any direction. He must still be somewhere down on my left.
Feet first, penjector in hand, I slipped slowly down the bank. When I hit the bottom, my left hand supported my right, as if I was holding my Glock. My body became a firing platform. My legs were shoulder-width apart, left foot forward so I turned forty-five degrees to the direction I was heading. I was balanced forward and back, left and right, as I started to move along the wadi.
Only my trigger thumb was free. It was the only thing I allowed to move as I kept the flare ahead of me, in my field of view.
30
Slowly, in bounds, as if I was patrolling, I kept moving, using the wadi as cover. I came to a bend. I stopped and listened before inching round it, weapon up, into the dead ground.
The watercourse twisted and turned, casting shadows, as it headed east towards the sea. The sun was now facing me. It burnt into my face, making it hard to see. I stopped short of another bend, listened again, then carried on, keeping low, hands up in the aim.
I negotiated a left-hander and heard a whisper ahead. I stopped. Leaning towards the sound, left ear pointing towards it, I held my breath so I could hear what the fuck was going on three — maybe even six or seven — metres away.
The whisper became muffled. I could only just hear it.
I dried my right hand in the dust on the side of the wadi then replaced my thumb on the cocking piece. I brought the flare back up into the firing position. Sweat dripped off my forehead and stung my eyes. I shook my head. The sun glared down even more fiercely into my face.
I started to edge round the corner. I could just see BB, sitting beneath an overhang in a stretch of shade, knees up, facing back the way he had come. He had the butt of the M4 in the shoulder, right hand around the pistol grip as he squeezed the forward firing handle between his knees to keep the barrel pointing up to the lip of the wadi. His free hand was around Stefan. He gripped the little boy’s mouth, bringing his head tight against him, to keep him quiet.
I took another pace forwards. I needed to get as close as I could before this went noisy. I thumbed back the cocking piece. Stefan was between us, in the path of a clean shot. He was going to see me first. But that was just fine. I
I kept the weapon up towards the target, my support hand still wrapped around the dominant one, my shoulder forward so my nose was closer to the target than my toes. My right arm pushed the weapon towards BB as my left exerted rearward pressure, so the platform was rigid.
I kept moving forward, closing in.
Stefan saw me, saw my weapon. He screamed into BB’s hand and struggled to free himself as I approached. Not surprisingly, after the events of the last twelve hours, he didn’t seem to know whether I was friend or foe.
I kept both eyes fixed on the target, dead centre of mass of the two bodies. The flare on the end of the tube came into my vision and became my primary focus. The target and the cocking piece were now just blurs. I focused on the flare with both eyes.
BB’s head swung round as he tried to tighten his grip on the boy. His eyes locked onto me. No surprise; no anger. Just confidence. Knowing what he needed to do. His unmoving stare didn’t leave my centre mass. The rest of his body came round, with the weapon, to align itself with his head. The M4 came up.
He let go of the boy. He needed his left hand to grip the firing handle on the forward stock. As Stefan stumbled and fell, BB’s sights came into his focus.
I kept static, keeping a stable platform for the flare.
I let go of the cocking piece and the flare kicked off with a loud bang. A split second later, a blindingly bright ball of flame was burning into his thigh like molten lava. He stumbled backwards, loosing off a short burst into the side of the gully.
The rounds thumped into the dried mud metres away from me.
31
