Recoil - Andy McNab [16]
‘Commissioner, I’m preparing the team now. I’ll contact you as soon as I’ve made visual contact with the aircraft.’ He passed the handset to Annabel and went to look through the hole in the wall.
The rebels were still out and about, even this close to first light. Fires burned, vehicle lights bounced around in the distance. The boys were still partying hard. But come first light, I wasn’t sure which was going to be more dangerous – that lot out there, or the Cobra two-ship escort piloted by trigger-happy Americans.
We’d soon know. Light was brushing the far horizon and the sun would follow shortly. The Renaults coughed themselves to life and the compound filled with fumes.
At least it kept the flies off.
16
06:04 hours
All of us bar Davy were aboard just three wagons. He lay prone at the open gates, bipod dug into the sand, covering the ground the other side of the wall. We could see now that most of the bodies ripped open out there were kids’, but we ignored it. Or tried to . . .
Sam’s wagon was going to be first out, with me on the gun. Standish, Annabel and the kid were on the floor behind us. The next wagon had the general sitting in Frankenstein’s old seat, with the wooden boxes and remaining four blokes on the floor. The third wagon had just a driver, and Davy with the RPG. If he had to fire, he didn’t want to worry about live bodies getting in his way or taking the backblast. His only cargo was the Yammy 175, the three remaining RPG rounds, Gary and the royal sisters. The fourth wagon’s fuel had been siphoned and shared.
The mush of the sat comms cut out as Standish put the handset to his ear. The plan was that the Cobras would swoop in and protect us as we headed back the way we’d come and down into the dead ground where the Seahawks would pick us up. No one was sure how it was going to work, because there weren’t any comms between us and the helis.
‘They’re five minutes from target.’
Davy gave an urgent shout: ‘I’ve got vehicles at about seven or eight hundred. They’re kicking up a shitload of dust.’
Sam jumped out of the wagon and crawled alongside Davy in the gateway.
Almost immediately, he was up and running again. He jumped behind the wheel and reached for the ignition. ‘We got too much coming. We can’t wait for the helis. They’ll have to find us.’
17
06:23 hours
Our truck was first out of the gates. Sam’s foot was hard to the floor, and it wasn’t just so he could make it over the bodies we hadn’t been able to move. The front three enemy vehicles were no more than four hundred metres away. At least another dozen were lined up in the dust trail behind them.
‘I can’t cover that arc!’ I was out of my seat. ‘Gonna have to shift.’
Sam braced himself. ‘Go for it.’ He knew what I had to do.
I jumped on to the sandbags, manoeuvring myself until I was lying at a diagonal through the dashboard and across the bonnet. My arse was just about in Sam’s face, but at least I had a solid platform, bipod wedged into the sandbags, from which the gun could point east as we raced south.
The wagon lurched and I almost careered off it. Sam grabbed my leg and steadied me as I got back into a fire position. I wasn’t going to put down rounds yet, though: I’d be aiming at moving vehicles, from a moving vehicle. Every round had to count. It was whites-of-their-eyes time. Where the fuck were those gunships?
Sam had to steer one-handed as he gripped me with the other. The rebels’ vehicles careered towards us like a stampeding herd. The sun was less than a third above the horizon, but it was getting hard to look east, even so.
Davy’s wagon broke ranks behind us and aimed right, then braked so sharply that for a moment I thought it’d broken down.
A couple of seconds later, the backblast from an RPG kicked up a storm of sand and grey smoke.
I followed the grenade’s flight path all the way in. The leading pickup jumped a good three feet in the air. There wasn’t a fireball, just an instant sand halo around it as the shockwave expanded and blew bits of wagon in all directions.