Dead Centre - Andy McNab [7]
To make things worse, the political conflict had also resurfaced. There’d been a firefight a couple of days ago between the army and the separatists. The separatists had hijacked relief workers and kidnapped doctors to look after their own people.
As we drove through a maze of crushed breezeblock and wriggly tin buildings and their scattered contents, we didn’t see any other 4×4s. Anyone in Aceh who owned or had managed to steal one had driven it straight to the airport the day after the wave hit. The NGOs and MONGOs streaming in from the four corners of the globe snapped them up for top dollar, especially if they boasted air-con.
There was no air-con in the last of the Toyota 4×4s that had been lined up on the airport forecourt. We left the windows open instead, but with the temperature in the high twenties and 80 per cent humidity I wasn’t sure it was worth it. Our skin was covered with sweat, and the breeze filled the car with the smell of sewage and decomposing flesh.
The power cables were down. Globes of light flickered among the devastation as far as the eye could see. Survivors huddled around cooking fires under plastic sheeting, boiling up whatever scraps the army had sold them. They had to use the wood from their own buildings to keep the fires burning.
We zigzagged through a random collection of sofas strewn across the road. The tsunami had wiped whole fishing villages off the map. Large steel vessels and flimsy wooden skiffs alike had been picked up by the wave and flung down again far inland. Two twin-engine Cessnas were flattened against a wall, nose cones pointing skywards. Big Xs had been spray-painted on cars and buildings to show there were bodies inside. There hadn’t been time to move them.
The army was on the prowl to try and stop the looting, but probably only so they could do some of their own. It didn’t matter where in the world you were at a time like this: if you’d never had a bean now was your time. My elder brother had been on News at Ten during the 1995 Brixton riots, caught on camera climbing out of a shop window with a TV under his arm. In the background a policeman was doing exactly the same.
9
THERE WAS A curfew in place, but people were moving in the darkness.
BB was at the wheel. I was on his right. Mong was tucked away in the back. We all had our nice MONGO cargoes and khaki shirts on, with brassards on our right arm emblazoned with our very own logo – a Union flag on a big white circle, with Aid 4 Tsunami proudly displayed beneath it. We wanted to look the part.
BB pointed out of his window.
Mong craned his neck between the front seats to get a better view.
‘Shit!’
Ahead of us, across a sea of bright blue tin roofs, a fishing boat rested on a mound of corrugated iron and breezeblocks. It was a traditionally built narrow wooden vessel with a modern cockpit and an engine sticking out of the back.
Mong’s arms windmilled like a madman’s. ‘Stop, BB! Stop! Look up there!’
BB spotted it before I did. ‘He’s dead. Must be.’
A skinny brown leg, bent at the knee, dangled out of a smashed window at the side of the cockpit.
Mong lunged from his seat. His hand shot forward and grabbed the wheel. ‘We don’t know that. No cross …’
‘For fuck’s sake, look at it …’
Mong gripped the wheel harder. ‘Nick, it won’t take a minute. Let me check. It’s a kid, mate.’
‘BB, pull in. If he’s alive, we’ll sort him out and pick him up on the way back. All those lads back at the camp can fight over who’ll take the credit for saving him – and maybe get themselves on the news.’
10
WE CLIMBED OUT of the wagon. I found myself standing in a morass of mud and ripped yellow plastic sachets. This bag contains one day’s complete food requirement for one person was printed across them in English, French and Spanish. And next to the Stars and Stripes and a graphic of a bloke with a moustache tucking