Pirate - Duncan Falconer [68]
‘Leave the log!’ he shouted.
Stratton crawled up the side of the ford and waded across it. The girl followed. They would be out of the way of the truck long before it reached them. Stratton could only hope the rain greatly reduced visibility and that the Somalis were looking elsewhere. Almost a dozen Somalis stood on the bank with only a couple of flashlights between them. The chance that none of them would be looking across the river, and into a light that naturally drew the eye, was a small one.
It was the driver who first spotted them as they hurried across the shallows. He pointed and shouted to the fighters.
The girl ran across the ford to catch up with Stratton. They managed to move out of the direct beams of the headlights and plunged into the deeper water once more. But the Somalis caught them in the flashlights. Stratton braced himself for what he knew would follow as he pushed on as fast as he could. He heard the Somalis shouting, the hard-sounding guttural intonation. The sound of the pelting rain went on. Then came the staccato thunder of rifle fire, bullets strafing the water around them. The riverbed continued to fall away beneath their feet and they dived under the surface. They swam hard in the blackness in a desperate effort to put as much distance between them and the enemy.
The single shots became bursts as the Somalis let rip into the night. Stratton and the girl surfaced just long enough to take a breath. The Somalis caught them in the beams and the rounds quickly followed. But an AK-47 on full automatic is a difficult weapon to hold on to a pinpoint target, even at a short distance. The weapon had always struggled to fire high and to the right, no matter how strongly you held it. And in the undisciplined hands of poorly trained militia, the inaccuracy multiplied. A few rounds struck close but the rest flew into the far bank and the sky. He and the girl dived again. Then they came up again and he looked back and saw the log. It had followed them over the ford thanks to its momentum. The Somali guys must have thought they were hiding behind it because the fire all seemed to be aimed at the tree.
Stratton broke into a firm breaststroke, pushing himself beneath the water as much as he could. The girl elected to continue duck diving although she didn’t have the breath to stay below the surface for longer than a few seconds at a time. When she realised the bullets were no longer striking close by and that Stratton was getting ahead of her, she switched to a crawl to catch up with him.
The gunfire petered out behind them and the sound of the rain hitting the water rose up again. They could hear shouts and the truck engine revving again. The alarm would be raised and the enemy would be alerted to the fact they were heading for the coast.
Stratton swam to the bank and clambered out of the water, his clothes hanging heavily from his body. The girl followed and staggered tiredly in pursuit.
‘Time for a change,’ he said, breathing heavily, as he dropped on to his knees to catch his breath and look back in the direction of the lights. She dropped to the ground beside him, breathing hard but at the same time thankful.
The gunfire became sporadic as the Somalis realised the log they been shooting at was unmanned. They started taking pot shots at anything that might be a person in the water or on the distant bank.
‘We’ll go on by land,’ Stratton said.‘If we meet an obstacle, we’ll still have the water as an option.’
She nodded in agreement. She would follow Stratton anywhere at that moment in time.
He set off. She adjusted her cloth sandals and padded after him. The rain had eased off by the time they had covered another kilometre. The river had also become much wider. Stratton thought he could hear waves crashing on a distant beach. The sound heightened their expectations, although these were tempered by the fear that the enemy was waiting for them.
They came across a small rise and Stratton climbed it to survey