Recoil - Andy McNab [40]
I was facing my big aluminium companions. I’d been wondering more and more about what was inside them, and it wasn’t just idle curiosity. I wanted to know what I’d got myself involved in if the shit hit the fan when we landed. I’d heard guys were running surplus weapons from the Balkans into central Africa. If this plane was full of old AKs and anti-personnel mines, telling the Rwandans I’d just hitched a lift wouldn’t cut much mustard.
When I’d finished, I poured bleach into the oil drum from a five-litre can, more to kill the smell than the germs, and edged my way along a stack of boxes of condensed milk. I ripped the top off one and helped myself to a can. I gave it a few whacks on the corner of one of the containers and sucked down the sweet, warm liquid. The army had made a huge mistake when it had removed this stuff from ration packs. Running down the centre of the aircraft there were maybe twenty light-blue fifty-gallon drums of aviation fuel, like the spine that supported all the other gear piled round and on top of them.
I also counted about ten boxes of Cutty Sark; assuming twelve to a box that meant 120 bottles. Maybe Lex knew an elephant with a drink problem.
I moved a bit further so I was out of Sam’s line of sight, and came to the cockpit bulkhead. A couple of hundred grimy, empty thirty-kilo rice sacks were piled high against it. I could just about make out the stencilling on some of them. They had once contained food gifts from either the USA or the EU, but that had been many years ago, and they had been put to other uses since. At least I now knew where the shit that covered the floor, and now my hands and jeans, had come from.
Next to the sacks were forty or fifty fifteen-kilo bags of fertilizer. I also saw about a dozen big black drums of diesel. It was a proper little quartermaster’s store. There was even a set of golf clubs in a knackered black bag. They seemed to be required packing for pilots. I couldn’t imagine there’d be that many courses in the jungle, but that meant nothing to golf freaks. They’d play anywhere. I saw a picture once of a couple of guys playing against the backdrop of the US embassy in Saigon during the evacuation. Desperate people were hanging from helicopters trying to flee the North Vietnamese and all those two had been worried about was getting a little ball into a hole.
But I was much more interested in the containers. The top one was at about chin level. I unlatched the two retaining clips on the lid, but even before I looked inside I knew what was in there. The smell of oil was stronger than anything coming out of the dump drum, and it was of a very specific type. I’d spent half my life inhaling it in armouries around the world, and there was no mistaking the odour.
I peered in. Beneath a layer of old hairy blanket, I saw worn gunmetal, and shapes I recognized. A bundle of AK assault rifles and at least one GPMG were loosely packed in old grey and brown blankets.
I closed the container and reclipped it before I moved to the next one along. I lifted the lid and pulled the blanket aside. This time I found just one weapon, a 12.7mm heavy machine-gun. The last time I’d seen one of these guys was on a Russian tank in newsreel footage of a May Day parade, next to a bloke with a very stern face and a leather helmet who was sticking out of the turret and saluting Yeltsin on the podium. They were very heavy pieces of kit, and this one had a wheeled tripod for ease of manoeuvre in the sustained-fire role.
I’d seen enough.
I closed everything up and pushed my way back to the tailgate. Lex might have been upgraded to first class, and the world of smoky bars was far behind him, but there was no doubting he was still involved in this continent’s second oldest profession. Was the mining job Sam had talked about just a load of bullshit?
I reached the hammocks, but didn’t climb back in. One element was still missing from the classic equation, and I wondered if it was right under my nose. The deal always went in threes, and we had ticked the first box – the one