Dead Centre - Andy McNab [4]
‘Nothing’s going to happen, is it? Unless you spend too much time in your paddling pool with that lot …’ About twenty metres in front of Mong another three bloated bodies bobbed among the shit coming in on the waves. I nodded in their direction. ‘Otherwise the only thing that could go wrong on this job is that cunt ODing on protein powder.’
He didn’t laugh. He wasn’t in that kind of mood. ‘Everything’s good at home. I mean really. But the good stuff never lasts that long for me. You know what I mean?’
He got swiped by a tumbling body as he came out of the surf. He stepped aside with the deftness of a wing forward dodging a tackle. His clothes clung to him like a second skin. ‘Keep her safe, yeah?’
‘I already told you, mate, of course I will. But it’s not as if I’m going to have to.’
He gave his eyes another wipe as we walked back towards the tents.
I glanced across at him and was rewarded with a sheepish grin. ‘Fucking sand.’
5
OUR TENT WAS a four-man job we could stand up in, a minging old grey canvas thing that stuck out like a sore thumb among the Gucci Gore-Tex affairs with blow-up frames the NGOs lived in.
BB sat on an aluminium Lacon box that contained fresh supplies of food and bottled water. It had looked lonely outside somebody else’s bivvy doing jack-shit that morning so we’d decided to give it a home. We needed something to sit on and keep our kit off the ground.
BB didn’t look up as we came through the flaps. He was stuffing some padding up his nose. Mong headed straight past him to his corner and peeled off his wet kit. The hubbub of French, German, American and Spanish voices in the background even subdued the chug of the generators. The NGO crews were holding a biggest-bollocks contest to see who was doing the most caring.
I brushed the crap from my cargoes, kicked off my boots and fell onto my camp cot. I’d leave the two cage-fighters to sort themselves out. We were due to set off in about three hours. We’d get the job done and then fuck off back home.
I watched the hi-tech campsite at work through our tent flaps. Star Trek had finally met Carry on Camping. Relief warriors wearing one badge or another rushed about and spoke urgently into radios, ordering somebody somewhere to do something.
I listened to the groan of aircraft overhead. Food and water were being flown in, only some of which would get where it was needed. There were already complaints that 30 per cent of the food and shelter equipment coming into the airport had been confiscated by the military as import duty. Yesterday we’d seen soldiers selling 20-kilo bags of rice – with UN stamped all over them – to the begging locals. Then the gangs demanded their cut before it could travel down the road. Even the pirates who worked the straits between Sumatra, Thailand and Malaysia were looking for their slice now there was fuck-all left to rape and pillage at sea.
Camp Hope – I had no idea who’d given it the name but they had a sense of humour – was to the south of Banda Aceh, the provincial capital and the largest city of Aceh Province. It was right at the north-western tip of Indonesia. Until 26 December last year, the only people with any interest in the place – apart from its 250,000 population – were oil companies and the Aceh separatist fighters.
Then the Indian Ocean earthquake struck about 150 miles off the coast and this part of the world was literally turned upside down. Banda Aceh was the closest major city to the earthquake’s epicentre. So far, they reckoned on about 160,000 deaths in the area, and they were braced for more in the weeks to come, once the rubble started to be cleared and the sea brought more bodies back to land. Cholera would soon be spreading like wildfire, along with the contamination caused by the yellow and green shit leaking from the drums that came in on every tide.
To make things worse, the area had been at war since the mid-1970s. Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, the Free Aceh Movement, was trying to force Indonesia