Dead Centre - Andy McNab [6]
These twenty-first-century missionaries didn’t seem to realize that their message was going to fall on deaf ears. One press of the Google button would have told them that Islam had taken root here from the Middle East before it grew anywhere else. More than a thousand years ago Banda Aceh was known as the Port of Mecca.
Our problem was that these jokers moved around the city pretty much at will. Some of them even went out deliberately to get shot at by the army so they could blog home about how heroic they were. They could do what they wanted as far as I was concerned. But eyes and ears in the city were the last things we needed while we did what we were here to do.
Arnie and the American were still going at it hammer and tongs.
‘What is it with these lads? They’d go to war over a brew.’
Our very own Mongo was following their argument with as much bemusement as I was. He jabbed a finger at the lump in the sleeping-bag. ‘Why don’t you ask Body Beautiful? They’re all a few bricks short of a load. All loners. The only thing that brings them together is this sort of shit.’
BB sat bolt upright. ‘How many times, for fuck’s sake? I’m just as good as you cunts. What have I done that’s different? I’ll tell you. I didn’t fuck about on a drill square for ten years, that’s all. I passed Selection, all my training’s the same. The only things you can do that I can’t are polish your boots and square a blanket. Big fucking deal.’
‘You’re right.’ Mong didn’t bother getting up. ‘And to be fair, I wouldn’t have a clue how to sell someone a mobile phone.’
‘Bin the fucking sarcasm. What does all that fucking trade training you’re so proud of add up to? Nothing. You think life stands still on Civvy Street, but listen up. All the time you two were getting wet, cold and hungry playing squaddie, I was learning how the real world works. I’m in this because I want to be. You’re in it because you can’t do anything else.’ He chuckled to himself. ‘All those nights you were wet and cold, I was tucked up warm and shagging. So fuck the both of you. When we get back I’m going to find a job and run it myself.’
He turned away and pulled his sleeping-bag over his head.
I resisted the temptation to go over and wring his perfectly toned neck. ‘Be my guest. But until then I’m the boss and you will do what I say. You got it?’
BB’s mumbled reply was drowned by Mong’s snort of laughter and comment: ‘Fucking great! I feel well and truly bedded in now. We’re behaving just like real MONGOs.’
We had three hours left until last light. Then we were going to move into the city to deliver our own special brand of humanitarian aid. We were going to use the confusion of the disaster to recover or destroy a bunch of confidential documents from an office in the city centre. If they fell into the wrong hands, the energy company we were working for would be well and truly fucked. The last thing our employers wanted was the government and the military discovering that they were cutting deals with the separatists over future oil and gas concessions.
8
23.54 hrs
BANDA ACEH HAD been Ground Zero on 26 December. Only 250K from the earthquake’s epicentre, a twenty-metre-high wall of water had hit it within minutes. A third of the city, twenty-five-kilometres square, was totally destroyed. All that remained of it was a tangled mass of rubble, furniture, cars, fridges and bodies – thirty thousand of them. Many were children, who hadn’t been strong enough to resist the force of the wave. There were almost no dead animals. They’d seemed to know what was coming, and fled for high ground before the tsunami arrived.
The camp was about six K from the Krueng Aceh River, which split the city in half. It was sited so close to the sea because the roads hadn’t been that well cleared further inland. Our target building was in Kuta Raja, one of the nine districts on the city’s west side.
The NGOs had warned us not to make the trip. Looters