Deep Black - Andy McNab [105]
I stopped and waited for Salkic to draw level with me.
‘We’re going to be fucked out here on open ground.’ I nodded at Nasir. ‘Ask him how far to the cave.’
We were in shit state. My jeans were in shreds; my legs shiny with blood and sweat. Everybody was caked in mud.
Salkic and Jerry were still struggling to keep Benzil upright as we stumbled downhill.
Nasir’s eyes narrowed as he scanned the landscape below us. I could see he was getting worried, and so was I. I didn’t want to use a cave: it was obvious cover, and would probably have only one point of entry and exit. If they followed us, they would check it out for sure. But as I looked around us, I realized that if we couldn’t outrun them, it was probably our only option.
Nasir started gobbing off. Salkic nodded and turned back to me. ‘Not far, near the bottom. I know the cave he is talking about now. My father also fought there.’
This side was much steeper, and we stumbled after Nasir as he picked his way through the mud and rock, trying to find an easy route down. He stopped after another couple of hundred metres and pointed east. I followed the direction of his finger and could just make out a dark shadow on the side of the hill.
A second later, there were two high-velocity cracks above us. I looked up and saw the first of our pursuers crossing the skyline. Fuck it, the decision had been made for us.
80
It looked like it had been a natural cleft in the rock that had been given a makeover with several crates of Serb high explosive: the mouth was now big enough to take a truck. Rubble was piled up on each side, and the tyre ruts in the track leading to it were smothered by grass and weeds.
The interior was cold and dank, but at least it gave us shelter from the wind. The walls glistened with slime and puddles of water splashed around our feet. Two rusty old cars and a skip full of wood had been abandoned just inside the entrance.
The further we went inside, the more it stank of mould and decay. The darkness and a couple of mounds of rock spoil, debris from the blasting operation that had widened the cave, gave us cover, but this was going to be as much of a tactical nightmare as I’d feared: a confined space and the only way out the way we had come in.
Benzil was suffering big-time. Jerry and Salkic lowered him on to the floor behind one of the mounds and tried to make him comfortable. He hardly even had the energy to apologize.
‘Don’t worry.’ I crouched beside him to move some stone away from his head. ‘It’s OK. Just rest.’
There was no reply. His breathing was shallow and worryingly fast.
Salkic collapsed the other side of him in the gloom. Jerry just dropped where he was and fumbled with the clips of his bumbag. I crawled up the rock pile and looked through the cave mouth, about forty metres away, at the brightening sky. It was still dark this far in, and should stay that way. My eyes were already adapting.
Nasir had put himself on stag at the top of the pile to my left, and was also staring intently towards the entrance. I looked around at the other three. It’s natural for people to bunch up in situations like this, and they were tearing the arse out of it. I got them to spread out a bit. If rounds started bouncing about in here I didn’t want the flat tops getting two hits for the price of one.
‘Fuck.’ Jerry showed me what was left of his Nikon. A round had entered the left-hand corner and exited top right. He tried the power button. Not that that would help, even if the battery pack was OK. The lens was shattered.
‘The phone, Jerry – is the phone OK?’
He nodded slowly, but I could see it wasn’t much consolation.
Nasir started gobbing off and I could see movement on the hill a couple of hundred metres or so from the cave mouth. ‘Here they come.’ I turned back to the others. ‘We got five.’
Jerry scrambled up to me. ‘Coming this way?’
‘Not yet.’
I felt it; the look on Nasir’s face said it. We were fucked.
Nasir settled himself into a fire position, scooping