Dead Centre - Andy McNab [140]
At least those who’d made it this far were getting fed until somebody, somewhere, somehow, got them home. It wasn’t like the Egyptians didn’t have problems of their own. They’d just had their own Arab Spring and were still trying to sort their shit out.
The Bangladeshis faced the worst hardships. There were thousands of them, and they were thousands of miles from home.
Militias controlled the main drag along the coast, and the eastern part of the country – or so rumour had it. Whatever, they looked ecstatic to see our convoy coming through. They knew we were on our way to help their brothers.
Wahid Kandawalla, the young Pakistani guy in command of the line of vehicles, was negotiating the war zone for the fifth time in ten days, bringing supplies to the hospital. His fresh face full of goodwill, he sat in the right-hand seat, still trying to grow his beard like a good Muslim.
He glanced into the rear of the van from time to time to check I was OK. I was. I’d made myself reasonably comfortable, lying on the boxes of dressings and surgical sterilization kits. I was also completely fucked. The rocking of the vehicle, the darkness and the heat had me asleep in no time at all.
And now I was just lying there relaxing. I had no control over what was happening. I couldn’t do anything about it. So: whenever there’s a lull in the battle, get your head down. You never know the next time you’re going to get the chance to sleep.
I’d thrown Awaale’s mobile away at Sallun. I wasn’t fucking him off: it was just that these ‘meet up again’ things never really work. Events had brought us together for a moment, but that was all it had been. Besides, Awaale wasn’t going back to Minneapolis for a while. He’d be too busy taking over the clan, brassing up Lucky Justice, and standing his ground against AS fighters coming from the south. That was if he stayed alive long enough. Piracy was a dangerous business on both sides of the deal.
Everything Kandy had in the way of information about what was happening on the ground was a product of the rumour mill. Rumour had it that defecting Gaddafi troops had ransacked Benghazi’s main police barracks, looting tons of weapons and ammunition. That meant the local militia had been rearmed and resupplied and could take on anything Gaddafi threw at them from the west.
There were rumours, too, that Turkey would soon be sending its navy to defend the route between Benghazi port and Crete, and their troops to take over the airport to secure humanitarian sea and air corridors.
Kandy did have one fact. Turkey already had five warships and one submarine off the coast. They were stopping Gaddafi’s navy laying mines to deny the port.
Kandy received a fresh batch of rumours at every checkpoint. The militias had just been told that the French and British fast jets had mounted raids on the oil town on Ajdabiya. Gaddafi’s forces had been hammered. The town had been retaken. Further west, however, the fighting went on.
Another low-flying rumour was that Gaddafi had offered $100,000 to anyone willing to fight for him, payable on victory. That rumour was met with the militia head-shed telling all the rebels that if they defected they would be classed as traitors and shot as soon as hostilities were over. That was the problem with this type of war. It was fast-moving, and communications were poor. There was still no signal on my iPhone, and no one really knew what the fuck was going on.
2
THE DARK STREETS of Free Benghazi were littered with the hulks of tanks that had been totalled by French and British fast jets. They were already covered with graffiti. A lot of it was in English, for external consumption. One message read: Thank You Obama, Thank You Cameron. If Sarkozy saw that on breakfast TV, there was going to be one very pissed-off Frenchman.
A poster on a shell-blasted wall showed Gaddafi looking defiant but without a hat, and blood all over his head. Words like ‘Murderer’, ‘Terrorist’ and ‘Dictator’ were scrawled