Recoil - Andy McNab [39]
‘He’s got to go elsewhere.’ One of the engines began to whine. ‘And I’m not due back for a few weeks myself.’
The stench of aviation fuel filled my nostrils and a flock of startled birds lifted from the trees as the other three engines sparked up. The truck moved away and I followed Sam up the ramp. My trainers crunched on the layer of dark red grit that covered the floor. It looked as if the other place Lex had been going to was Mars.
The interior was stripped of all essentials, not that it would have left the showroom with too many in the first place. There were no seats and no padding over the alloy skin of the fuselage. It was stacked to head height with aluminium containers and plastic iceboxes.
I pointed at a big blue one. ‘Don’t tell me. Steaks?’
‘Yeah. Steaks, eggs – and it’s a dry job, but on a fresh day we have a few beers.’
I spotted several cases of Castle. Sam grinned. ‘Aye, I’ve done the PRI shop.’
The engines coughed and all four props spun. The PRI was a shopping system we used in the Regiment, but I’d never had a clue what the initials stood for. All I knew was that every garrison had one, and if you were in the field and it was a fresh day, people would go off to the PRI and come back with half a supermarket. Normally you’d get a fresh day in every seven or ten; you could ask for your Colgate and Ambre Solaire on top, and the bill would be raised at the end of the trip.
A loadmaster squeezed between us and the containers, a big pair of cans over his ears and a boom mike in front of his mouth. He yanked on all the webbing straps to check.
‘How many guys working, Sam?’
‘Not enough, Nick. Not yet.’
The ramp lifted with an electric whine. The loadmaster plugged his cable into a socket in the fuselage and spoke rapidly into his mike. I guessed Lex was at the other end.
The four props came up to speed.
Through one of the round portholes I could see a cloud of dirt getting kicked up behind. No wonder they’d had their shiny new vehicles taken away.
Sam threw me a bundle of green parachute silk and para cord and unwound one of his own. It was like being back in the Regiment, in the back of a C130, except that, with only two of us, there wasn’t going to be a fight for prime position. This was normally anywhere over the ramp, because there was nothing stacked on the floor there, and you had enough room for the hammock to sag and swing.
The props screamed and the aircraft shuddered. We rumbled down the airstrip.
I leaned close to Sam’s ear. ‘How long’s it going to take?’
‘Seven hours.’ He had to shout. ‘Might as well get your head down.’
Tactical aircraft like these things only required about seven hundred metres of runway. Within seconds the rumbling eased as the undercarriage lifted off the ground.
5
Sam’s hammock rocked gently with the motion of the aircraft. The parachute silk was wrapped around him so tightly he looked like a suspended green cocoon. He’d been lying there an hour and was probably snoring, but I couldn’t hear anything over the roar of the props.
The loadie was up front with Lex in the drivers’ seats, so all I had for company was a shed-load of alloy containers and maybe twice as many insulated hampers and cardboard boxes of food. And Silky’s sleeping-bag – I’d been using it as a blanket. It was always cold at the back of these things at 12,000 feet. We couldn’t be any higher than that, otherwise with an unpressurized aircraft we’d all get hypoxia and soon be dead.
The drone of the engines drowned any other noise. I looked out of the window, raised the bag to my nose and breathed in deeply. Her faded lemony perfume still lingered in the nylon and the rainforest canopy skimmed along below. From this height, we seemed to be flying over a field of broccoli.
I needed a dump. I turned over in my hammock until I fell out of it, and Silky’s sleeping-bag came with me. I wiped the red grit off my palms and on to my jeans as I made my way to the sawn-off oil drum where the ramp met the fuselage. I pulled down my jeans and settled on to the two slats of wood