Recoil - Andy McNab [107]
I smiled. ‘Mr Sam?’ I nodded towards the knoll. ‘Mr Sam? Mr Crucial? Mr Sam?’ They gazed at me blankly, eyes like saucers. ‘Mr Sam? Uncle Tom Cobbley? For fuck’s sake, get out here.’
Nothing.
Beckoning to them, I stepped over their two mates at the entrance.
‘Mr Sam and Mr Crucial, yeah?’
I pulled one of the blankets. The kid got up and another followed.
‘All right, mate? Come on, outside. Mr Sam, yeah?’
I used the side of the GPMG to coax them into the re-entrant to join the others. ‘Mr Sam? Monsieur Sam? Monsieur Sam?’
I now had seven, and not one was responding to my Mr Sam routine. I lifted the blanket from a head. ‘Listen, Mr Sam . . . We’ve got to see Monsieur Sam, yeah?’
I grasped a wrist, skinny as a broom handle, and felt a huge jolt go through my system. It was like I’d been taken back twenty-odd years and Crucial was dangling below me. I grabbed the kid’s bony hand and encouraged him to hold one corner of the blanket across his shoulders. I lifted it, gave it a twirl, and managed to persuade his mates to hang on to it at intervals. Before long, we had ourselves a seven-truck convoy.
I tightened my grip on the far end. ‘Mr Sam, yeah? We’re going to see Mr Sam, Mr Crucial.’ With the GPMG in my right hand and the launcher under my left arm, I led my little band up to the knoll. I felt like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music and wondered if I should sing a song to keep their spirits up. Only I didn’t know any.
7
The track was a river of mud, and they struggled to keep a grip on the blanket with their bony little hands, but it seemed the best way to keep them together, and allowed me at times to virtually haul them up the hill. They weighed so little, I could probably have dragged them up if they’d all lost their footing at the same time.
‘Mr Sam, we’re off to see Mr Sam.’ I kept shouting his name to enthuse them, but I couldn’t tell if it was working. Every now and again I glimpsed a face in the moonlight when there was a break in the cloud, but its owner was never exactly jumping for joy.
We reached the top and headed for the tents.
Sam was with us in seconds, AK in hand. ‘How many?’
‘Only seven, mate.’
Crucial prised their fingers gently off the blanket, waffling away in happy, favourite-uncle French.
I gripped Sam’s arm as we steered the kids into the first tent. ‘Listen, I don’t know what the fuck happened, mate. I checked everything apart from that second cable, but there were no kinks, everything was OK. It had to be the plunger.’
‘Don’t worry, you tried. Good job on the claymores, anyway. Well done. Sort yourself out and get to my fire trench. Time for Plan B.’ He managed a smile. ‘Whatever Plan B is . . .’
I left them to it, not sure if he’d made me feel any better about the fuck-up.
Back at the position, I kept above ground as I pushed the GPMG’s bipods and pistol grip into the mud, rested the link on the wooden crate top, then lowered the launcher into the corner of the trench.
‘Nick? Is that you, Nick?’
She couldn’t disguise her relief. ‘Oh, thank God, Nick. I thought—’
‘I’m OK.’
Tim sparked up from the shadows: ‘The villagers?’
‘Either dead or done a runner.’ I thought I’d leave out the bit about the women. Silky had been through enough.
Tim raised himself painfully to a sitting position. ‘Are there wounded?’
‘There must be. I’ve brought back seven of the orphanage kids. They’re the only ones I found alive. I’m sorry, I saw one of your Mercy Flight guys . . . I don’t know about the other.’
He slumped back on to the cot. ‘Get me out of this hole, Nick. Please, I want to help. I want to do something.’
I could hear a low murmur from alongside the kids’ tent. ‘In a minute, mate. I’ve got to go, but I’ll be back.’ I picked up my AK.
Sam was outside the tent with Bateman. He swung to face me. ‘You see any of the patrol down there?’
‘Just dead, and none of the sangars was firing.’
‘Not one?’
‘I saw the front sangars being overrun. So, dead or done a runner.’
Bateman muttered, ‘I told you these fuckers would do this . . . When the going gets tough, they just