‘Oh Jesus, oh shit, oh shit oh shit oh shit,’ she mumbled to herself, repeating the words over and over as she began to hyperventilate.
It was then that the first shots rang out. From the far end of the village came a crackling burst of submachine gun fire, answered by a barrage of assault rifle fire from the UN troops. And then, from her side of the village, a machine gun started rattling out its baritone chatter of death. Something shrieked and hissed in an inhuman voice; a rocket-propelled-grenade streaking down from high ground. The explosion, as it struck one of the flimsy mud-and-wattle huts nearby, sent a shock wave rippling through the ground, and burst out an iridescent flash that for a split-second projected silhouettes of running soldiers and fleeing villagers against the canvas of the tent.
This was it, this was a battle, and Margaret was caught in the thick of it.
She had been briefed on what to do in a situation of combat, and had undergone training in how to react to firing and aggression, but now that she was actually in such a situation, everything she had learned simply flew out the window. All she could think of was to press herself flat against the ground, and to cover her now-ringing ears against the cannonade of gunfire that was exploding all around her. Her heart skipped a beat and she almost vomited when bullets smacked with dull thuds into the sandbags around the tent. Waves of feverish heat alternated with gusts of numbing cold in a hellish tempest that wracked her body and senses. Through a whirl of a million racing thoughts, she suddenly wondered what had happened to the two Ghanaian troops outside. It was then that she remembered that one of them had taken the satellite phone.
‘Oh shit!’ she cursed. ‘The phone, the goddamn phone!’
She wanted to call out to the soldier, but she could not; fear held her voice at bay with a steel chain. Even if she had shouted out to them, she didn’t think they would have heard her cries over the deafening barrage of gunfire, screams and yells that thickened the soup of the humid air.
Then, however, in the midst of the confusion, she heard another sound. This sound, or rather these sounds, were the very last things she had expected to hear in the heat of a gunfight: the trumpeting of an elephant, the snorting of rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses, the shrieking howls of mandrills and baboons, the bellowing of buffalos, the grunting and hooting of gorillas and chimpanzees, and the roars and barks of leopards and lions. It sounded, somehow, as if a zoo escape was in progress along with the battle.
‘What the hell is going on here, what the hell, what the hell?!’ she whimpered as tears streamed down her cheeks and panic reverberated its frenetic acid jazz dissonance through her mind.
Screams of pain and shouts of aggression cut like clarinet blasts above the clamour of gunfire, which was becoming more sporadic and scattered. A smattering of submachine gun fire peppered the sandbags outside and ripped through the top third of the tent canvas. Someone just outside cried out; probably one of the Ghanaian soldiers, Margaret thought as a flurry of panic stirred her senses with dire urgency. A lion roared in alarmingly close proximity, and then something huge crashed through the nearest clump of trees.
The tent door opened abruptly, and one of the Ghanaian troops stumbled in. His torso was a mess of bullet wounds where he had been sprayed with submachine gun fire, and blood was trickling from his lips. He stumbled towards her, trying to say something, but he did not manage to take two steps before he crashed to the floor, face-down, and stopped breathing.
Margaret screamed like a terror-stricken toddler. Through the now-open flap of the tent door, she saw, through her hyperventilation and panic-induced tunnel-vision, the surreal sight of a mass of wild animals rampaging through the village.
A UN soldier just outside the tent raised his assault rifle to his shoulder to fire at a lion that was mauling one of his comrades, but before he could squeeze the trigger a leopard sprang from the shadows and sent him reeling, clinging to his body with its sickle-claws as it sank its fangs into his throat. A massive white rhinoceros charged through the thick of the fray, running down panicked soldiers left and right, tossing them like ragdolls with slashes of its enormous horned head, and trampling them beneath its feet as it thundered along.
An overwhelming sensation was now screaming its desperate message through Margaret’s brain, and the command that it issued, that overrode everything else, was to run. She scrambled through the open door, crawling on all fours, but when she tried to rise up she found that her knees were so weak that she immediately fell over.
‘Come on Margaret, come on, come on!’ she hissed through clenched teeth, trying to will herself on through the rising tide of fear and panic.
A few feet away from her, the satellite phone was on the ground where the soldier had dropped it, and in a moment of clarity she grabbed it and stuffed it into the back pocket of her jeans.
‘Into the trees, into the trees,’ she muttered to herself, and as soon as adrenalin pumped its new strength into her muscles she jumped up and started sprinting as fast as she
