Recoil - Andy McNab [124]
He slammed back the cocking handle and squeezed the trigger. His head jerked in unison with the working parts, as if he was having a fit.
I fired another long burst and felt the heat of the weapon wash over my face and hands. Crazed screams and shouts rolled ever closer.
Most of them were kids. I tried to focus to keep my mind on range and keeping a good sight picture as they ran forward and I cut them down.
I saw green. The LED on the phone was glowing.
I pressed receive as another two RPGs kicked off and Sam’s gun thundered alongside me. I crouched down in the trench and jammed a finger in my other ear.
‘Nearly there, man.’
7
I yelled into the phone, ‘The diesel’s burning. A big fuck-off column of smoke. Where are you?’
Nothing.
I scanned the skyline, hoping to see wings, fuselage, a pair of reverberating 23mms – but the sun was still too low.
‘Where are you?’
‘Shut up, man. I’m concentrating . . .’
Lex would be searching the western horizon, looking for the marker before he adjusted his bearing.
‘OK, got it, I see it. You still want me to hit the lip – or that fucking LRA tsunami coming up the valley? I don’t have an ammo store in the back. It’ll be one or the other.’
‘The lip – take out the fire group.’
‘Coming in. Stand by.’
I heard him talk to the gunner on his intercom as I sprang back up. I hoped the fucker had steered clear of the wacky-baccy this time round.
‘Cease fire!’ I yelled over to Crucial. ‘No more RPGs! Lex is coming in!’
Bodies kept pouring into the valley to bolster the assault wave and we kept hosing down the front of it.
Bodies fell. Some ran in panic, but most kept on coming.
A new sound filled the air. Lex was ahead of us at about 400, the glass bubble on the nose moving from right to left. The wings dipped as he turned and lined up on the lip, then there was a rattle and a roar as the pair of 23mm cannon kicked off like Gatling guns.
Red tracer poured down from Donald Duck’s bill like molten steel spilling from a blast furnace.
8
Small volcanoes of mud erupted into the air with the impact of the rounds, and bodies tumbled from the high ground. Survivors ran for cover. There was no more firing.
I grabbed the phone. ‘On target, on target! The LRA have advanced three hundred since you fired.’
I spun back towards the valley, adjusted my sights to 300, the minimum setting, and aimed a little low. I was feeling more confident with every burst, until I heard Crucial yell.
‘Contact rear! Contact rear!’
He’d swung through one-eighty with his AK and was firing behind.
We had the runners from the fire group streaming down from the high ground.
Sam jerked his head round and assessed. ‘I’ll keep forward – you take them, you take them!’
I grabbed my gun by the carry handle and swung it round on to the edge of the backblast channel. There must have been twenty, thirty of them coming down the hill at us, forty metres away and closing.
I squeezed off short, sharp bursts. Some went down but the rest kept coming.
The first wave screamed on to the flat of the knoll, no more than twenty away, so close I could hear the squelch of mud under their feet.
They dropped their empty weapons, and pulled gollocks.
9
The biggest, ugliest of the front runners zeroed in on me like removing my head from my shoulders was his only mission in life. I fired from point-blank. He was so close, I almost had to kneel to get the elevation up to him.
His mud-splattered face was set in a frenzied snarl as he raised his blade.
I gave him a big burst and his gollock clattered into the fire trench. His blood gushed over my face as he buckled over the gun barrel and started to sizzle.
Sam turned to back Crucial as I heaved the body off the gun and tipped him into the mud. His flesh smelled like scorched crackling.
There was another blur of movement from my left. I dipped down to grab Sam’s AK and snapped back up in the aim.
A rope flailed behind his leg as he ran.
‘Sunday! Stop!’
Crucial had a stoppage and dropped from view to change mags.
Sam stepped up his fire.
I flicked the safety