Recoil ns-9, page 11
part #9 of Nick Stone Series
Sam said, ‘The rebels are LRA, Nick.’
Standish glowered. ‘You know them?’
I nodded. I’d kept up with events in Zaïre and later the DRC, or at least as much as Time and Newsweek allowed me to. The Lord’s Resistance Army had come into the frame here about twelve months ago. Their leader, Joseph Kony, was Africa’s most wanted. His army, maybe three thousand strong, was as fanatical and ruthless as Hitler’s SS. Just a year ago the International Criminal Court had indicted Kony and four other LRA leaders for war crimes.
He claimed to have special powers, given to him by God. His followers, and the poor fuckers he terrorized, believed he couldn’t be killed. He and his headbangers claimed to be fighting to make the Ten Commandments the law of the land. Either they’d been reading Sam’s Good Book after too many nights on the ghat, or they knew it was bollocks, but needed a good excuse to slaughter more than ten thousand civilians. They’d also abducted twice that number of kids and turned them into sex slaves or killers – drilled them with weapons to the point of exhaustion, then shoved them into the firing line as cannon fodder while the big men stood back and saved their skins.
Two million people had fled their villages and sought refuge in foreign aid stations and refugee camps to escape Kony’s trademark combo of brutal massacre and black magic. He was so insane, he’d decided a while back that bicycles were only used to carry information of his whereabouts to the authorities, and ever since anyone caught riding one had had his feet chopped off. And now it seemed he was turning his attention to the mining business.
‘OK for me to continue, Sam?’ Standish said. ‘Or do you have more to say?’
Sam waved his hand. ‘Just thought Nick should know what we’re up against.’
Standish got back to his map. ‘Interrogations after last night’s contact suggest there’s a fresh wave of Kony’s men heading south – three, maybe four days’ march from our mine. But they will not take it. If they do, we lose everything we’ve worked for.
‘So, here’s the plan. Normal patrol turnaround is cancelled. We need to get all available bayonets to the mine as quickly as we can. Top priority when we get there is to safeguard the two surveyors and defend the mine. So, Sam, you take your patrol in as soon as you’ve paid them – they’ve been given a warning order. I’ll follow with the other patrol as soon as they’ve been fed and watered. They’re due back any minute. We will stand our ground. They will not take the mine. They must not take the mine. It’s as simple as that.’
He turned to me. ‘And here’s your deal. You will go with Sam’s patrol. You can do a detour to Nuka and get this little rich girl – but make it quick. You will be on your own. I’m not risking manpower. Once you have her you will return to the mine and pick up Sam’s sat nav and the surveyors. Then you get back here with them, quick time. Lex will take you both out of the country, but only if you’ve got the two surveyors in tow. Is that clear?’
I nodded, though he clearly hadn’t written Tim and his helpers into the equation. I wasn’t turning into Mother Teresa here: what if Silky refused to leave without them? ‘What about the Mercy Flight people in Nuka and the people they’re caring for? You protecting them?’
It was like I’d asked Standish to eat elephant shit. ‘We’re a business,’ he said crisply, ‘not a coffee shop for the stupid. Any minute now you’ll be suggesting we take in Sam’s waifs and strays.’
‘I hear they’re looking after the earthquake victims. Some of them must be your guys, right? Wouldn’t it be better to evacuate them all into the mine, give them some protection?’
It was like I’d told him the funniest joke he’d ever heard. ‘Sam here been leading you along the path of the righteous, has he?’ He roared with laughter. ‘There was no quake – a fault line ruptured when we blew some boreholes. And there’s no room for freeloaders. I only have two jobs to do here, and that’s to protect (a), the surveyors, and (b), the mine.’ He leaned across the table. ‘There’s no Chinese parliament here. The Regiment days are over for all of us. I want those surveyors out of there – soon as. That’s the deal, take it or leave it.’
It was my cue to back down if I wanted to see Silky any time soon. He had me by the bollocks, and he knew it. ‘You’re right. I’m listening.’
‘I hope you’re getting paid well for this. They’re a waste of oxygen, those do-gooder charity morons. Africa’s full of them. They achieve nothing whatsoever. They’re just like the missionaries, aren’t they, Sam?’
Sam snorted. ‘They get their blueberry muffins and bacon and eggs flown in at huge expense, then sit on their backsides and preach. They don’t get their hands dirty. Their churches even treat them to satellite TV so they don’t miss the baseball.’
‘Not like you, eh, Sam?’ Standish said. ‘Healing, teaching, caring for those poor nippers . . .’
Sam glared at him. Standish sat back, arms hooked over the chair. He looked pretty pleased with himself.
The sat phone rang, its display glowing.
Standish got to his feet but didn’t answer it immediately. ‘Both of you, wait here. I haven’t finished yet.’ He gave us a nod and walked away to take the call. I had seen a +41 prefix. It was probably his bank manager in Zürich.
I rounded on Sam. ‘What the fuck’s going on? Why didn’t you warn me about him? And what’s all this LRA-swarming-in-from-the-north shit? You’re supposed to be a mate, for fuck’s sake.’
‘I’ll explain later,’ Sam said. ‘When there are no ears. She’ll be OK. We’ll get to her in time, don’t worry.’
I took a couple of deep breaths. There was no point getting sparked up: it wouldn’t achieve anything. If their int was on the nail, it would be three or four days before the shit really hit the fan, and it shouldn’t take more than a few hours to cover thirty-five Ks.
To my right, near the soldiers’ tents, the jungle began to spit out one guy after another, each bent almost double under the weight of a bulked-out rice sack. Two whites in shorts used their AKs to direct the human mule train along the strip. A handful of other guys providing the escort peeled off from the snake and disappeared into their tents to dump their gear.
‘The other patrol?’
Sam nodded slowly and mistook my pissed-off expression for concern. ‘Don’t worry, the route’s easy. And, anyway, you’ll have my sat nav. The way points are here and the mine.’
‘What’s your man-hour-per-kill, mate?’
He shook his head. One of the best measures of success at managing risk is how few men you lose per number of hours achieved, so the shake wasn’t good news. ‘Not good, since the LRA have been active. Less than a hundred. But that’s with large numbers. With just four of you, you’ll get through easy enough.’
Close to a couple of hundred porters must have struggled out of the jungle by now. They worked their way across the strip in single file and up the ramp into the belly of the An12.
‘It’s not the job I’m worried about.’ I watched the men make their way back down the ramp empty-handed, head for the pile of empty food-aid sacks at the edge of the strip, then slope off in the direction of the shanty town. ‘If anything happens to me on the way there, I want to know Silky’s being taken care of. You’ll do that for me?’
‘Only if I can wear my kilt when we bury you.’
‘Thanks, mate.’ I tried hard to give him a grin. ‘And it’s probably best not to let Standish know what she means to me. Keep pretending it’s a job, yeah?’
Standish would probably get me fighting his war single-handed if he knew I’d do anything to keep her safe.
3
Body after body, shiny with sweat and bent double under the sacks, continued to emerge from the jungle and shuffle along the airstrip. When they hit the back of the queue for the ramp their hands went straight on to their thighs to try and ease the weight, too fucked even to wipe away the sweat dripping from their faces.
The ones who’d already shed their load were now flopped out on the sacks in the shade of the treeline. A gaggle of brightly coloured women fussed round them with refilled plastic bottles of water.
I’d been wrong about the numbers. The snake looked as though it would never end. There must have been many more than two hundred of them – moving, queuing, or lying prone under the trees.
Sam nodded towards a group of half a dozen escorts high-fiving each other by the entrance to one of the tents. ‘They won’t be doing that when they hear they’re going straight back in a couple of hours.’
Soldiers shouted at porters; women and children shrieked with excitement. The guys in the snake, however, didn’t utter a sound. They were too fucked to do more than stagger to the treeline.
‘So what’s being mined, Sam. Diamonds?’
Sam’s gaze was fixed on the other side of the strip, where the two white guys were now prodding the porters on the ground with their AKs. They seemed to be trying to organize the exhausted men into straight lines.
‘Tin ore. It’s the most hotly traded metal on the London Exchange these days – worth four hundred US per fifty-kilo sack. Here and South America are the only really big sources left. Did you see the old open-cast pits as we flew in?’
‘Like nuclear Ground Zeros?’
He nodded. ‘Those were the diamond mines. That war still goes on, but this is the one that’s giving a few guys happy faces.’
‘What’s the big deal about tin all of a sudden? We overdoing it with the baked beans?’
Sam kept watching the other side of the strip. ‘Supply and demand.’ He pointed at the column working its way into the back of the aircraft. The poor bastards looked like beetles as they leaned forward with the sacks on their backs. ‘The ore is casseritite. Every circuitboard on the planet uses the tin it produces. People are being killed and treated like animals here so that soccer mums can video their kids, and the kids can download Britney Spears on their PCs. Every time somebody uses a mobile, Nick, every time they use the Internet . . .’
‘How much are you shifting?’
‘About twenty tons at a time. And the plane’s flying in and out 24/7.’
‘That’s a fuck of a lot of four-hundred-dollar bags.’
‘Just over two million US a week at the moment. And the owners have plans to expand the misery once the LRA are sorted. Dodgy peerages might grab the headlines, but the real money’s in those lumps of rock.’
‘So who owns it?’
‘The Chinese, would you believe? Africa’s changing, Nick. This continent is no longer just an empty paradeground for us to come and play soldiers on. The rebel groups are slashing and burning for the multinationals now. And you know what? That makes them even more scary.’
‘The Chinese are fucking everywhere.’
‘Aye, big-time. Standish is fixed up with a guy who’s the middle man for one of their operations here.’
‘Anyone we know?’
Sam started to laugh. ‘Sure he’s going to tell us that. You know what he’s like, knowledge is power. Anyway, who cares? We can all get what we need out of this deal.’
Lex’s engines kicked into life and the props began to turn. The Antonov taxied through the heat haze before the ramp had finished closing. I knew just how he felt. I didn’t want to stick around any longer than necessary either. The wash from the huge propellers blasted any sweat-covered bodies still on the strip, whipping at tattered T-shirts and shorts and caking them in dust.
Sam had to shout: ‘Lex flies it to Kenya. From there, it’s a slow boat to China.’
Sounded good to me. Once back here, Silky and I would be on the next available flight. A couple of days’ R&R on the beach in Mombasa and then, all being well, a flight home.
Sam’s eyes hadn’t left the two white guys for one second. I could see from his face that they took their organizational skills a little too seriously for his liking.
‘How long’s the walk-in?’
‘With the kit, it’s fourteen hours in daylight or eighteen in the dark. It’s safer to move at night. These guys won’t like having to go back without a decent rest, but they’ll still want to be there before first light. If they’re not carrying weight and we don’t have a contact, we can do it in about nine hours.’
Lex’s Antonov had reached the bottom of the airstrip and turned. The props screamed and it lurched forward. Its take-off run brought it straight towards us, but even fully laden, the aircraft lifted halfway down the strip. The kids jumping and waving below it were soon engulfed in huge clouds of red dust.
The Antonov roared over our heads and banked away into the dazzling blue sky.
The women along the treeline were doling out small bowls along with the water bottles. Tired fingers scooped up the food and shoved it into hungry mouths.
‘Once they’d rested, our patrol would usually take this lot back tonight, and come back in three days’ time with full bags. Then it would be their turn again.’ He waved in the direction of the two white guys across the strip. ‘But now we’ve got to protect the assets big-time, eh?’
‘Doesn’t it ever get to you?’ I nodded towards the shanty town and the porters collapsed in the shade, eating from old tin cans. ‘These fuckers getting shit, while Standish and the middle men feed off their misery?’
He didn’t have time to answer. Standish reappeared with the Iridium still in his hand, its stubby antenna jabbing the air between us. ‘You understand exactly what you have to do?’
Obviously the call hadn’t cheered him up any. Maybe it hadn’t been his bank manager after all.
‘Yep.’
‘Don’t fuck me about or you and this little rich girl can make your own way back.’ He swung round to Sam. ‘Don’t just sit there. Get on with it.’
I followed Sam towards one of the tents. ‘I’ve got to tell you, mate, there’s only so many times I’m going to be able to turn the other cheek with that arsehole.’
‘Like I told you, Nick, I’ve got my own agenda. I have kids living near that mine and I’ve got the church here so I put up with him, the war, the crap, the hypocrisy, the greed – anything that’s thrown at me. If I didn’t, who’d protect the orphanage? Who’d prevent those kids getting lifted by the LRA?’
We reached the tent flaps but Sam didn’t go inside. ‘You sure you don’t want to know about the boy?’
I tried to read the expression on his face. ‘Only if he didn’t end up going the same way Annabel did . . .’
Sam smiled. ‘He didn’t. He lived. Only just, but he lived.’ He pointed across the strip. ‘The little feller’s over there.’
4
A guy the size of Sam’s fridge back in Erinvale strode towards us from the shanty, eyes masked behind a pair of John Lennon sun-gigs. He gave the odd wave to the miners, and got a much warmer reception from them than the white guys had.
Sam beamed. ‘Crucial!’
He looked to be in his late twenties and, apart from a barely perceptible limp in his left leg, carried himself better than any of the other soldiers I’d seen. His shaved head and arms glistened with good health. His green cargoes looked brand new, and his white T-shirt came straight off a Persil ad. He wore a holster like a cowboy, down on his right hip with some Russian thing hanging off it, maybe to save him carrying an assault rifle and getting gun oil on his top. The other thing dangling off him was a wooden cross round his neck.
Over the last twenty years Sam hadn’t wasted any time.
They headed towards each other with open arms. ‘Crucial! How are you? I’ve brought your coconut butter.’
That explained the shiny, supple skin. I’d seen a lot of Africans moisturize with the stuff – but usually just the women.
The two exchanged hugs and slaps before Sam ushered him over. ‘Nick, I want to introduce you to Crucial – Crucial Umba di Mumba.’
He took off his gigs and gazed directly into my eyes. My stomach lurched. I was hoping to see a different expression in his now, not the one that pleaded with me to hold on to his stick-thin wrists whenever I couldn’t cut away from my nightmares.
My hand disappeared into his big leathery grip.
‘I’m Nick.’
‘I know.’ His eyes sparkled. ‘We met before, man.’
His accent wasn’t as strong as a South African’s and sounded more native, and the tone was surprisingly high-pitched for a man mountain. I bet no one ever told him, though.
‘It’s good to see you, Nick. I wasn’t sure what to expect after all these years.’
He gave me the world’s biggest smile. A diamond glinted from each of his two front teeth. His eyes looked forever vigilant, as if he plugged them into the mains every night to power up his X-ray vision. I wasn’t sure if he could see through me, but he certainly knew he needed to break the ice.
‘Certified conflict diamonds, man.’ He beamed. ‘None of that wishy-washy everyday Posh Spice conflict-free stuff. These had to be fought for.’
Whatever the rights and wrongs of conflict diamonds, the ones on his teeth were a whole lot bigger than the one I’d bought for Silky.
He turned to Sam. ‘We should get the boys paid up and ready.’
Sam indicated his daysack. ‘It’s in there.’
Crucial opened the top flap. ‘I’ll start getting them on parade.’ He took out a couple of tubs of oil and tried to palm a small white box, but not before I’d spotted the typed prescription label. Sam had also been to the pharmacy for him.
Crucial headed off towards the shanty.
Sam steered me back to what I assumed was his tent. ‘That wasn’t so bad, was it?’
He picked up the suitcase and I followed him. It was muggier than a greenhouse inside, and the smell took me back to years of infantry exercises and time spent sweltering under canvas while the processed cheese from my twenty-four-hour ration pack melted to liquid in its can.
The floor was hard, brushed earth. Sam slept on a US Army folding cot with a new-looking blanket on top. A mozzie net hung loosely above it, ready to be fastened round the frame. Down by the side of the cot I saw a pile of batteries, a small radio and a rusty old fan gaffer-taped to a stick that had been jammed into the ground.
