Recoil - Andy McNab [44]
‘Aye, we’re both here.’ Sam went for a chair, and put a finger briefly to his lips. ‘I’ll explain later.’
The voice emerged from the tent, a sat phone to his ear. He smiled, his teeth still perfect, not a hair out of place. Worst of all, he didn’t look as if he’d aged a second.
2
I tried to look as though this was what I’d expected all along. I certainly didn’t want to do or say anything that Miles Standish could turn to his advantage. For starters, I wasn’t going to put out my hand and give him the chance to reject it. I just nodded. ‘Thanks for letting me—’
‘Cut the crap. I don’t have time. I’m fighting a war.’
I didn’t respond. Wars round here weren’t fought with sophisticated night sights, fast jets and laptops. In this neck of the woods, it was the AK, bayonet and gollock that did the business. I wasn’t interested in a dirty little war that probably didn’t even have a name, and Standish could see it.
He jabbed a finger. ‘If you want my help, it’s going to cost. So sit down, shut up and listen in.’
I took a chair next to Sam. It was easy to tell I was the new boy. I was leaking from every pore and sweat ran down my chest like rain down a window. Flies landed on my face by the bucketload, or settled in the sweat on my neck.
Standish grabbed a seat the other side of the table and placed the Iridium in front of him, next to a handful of kids’ crayons. He picked up a blue one and began to draw on the bare wood. ‘Sam, we’ve got new int. The patrol had a contact last night. They’re getting closer by the day. We’ve got to step up a gear.’ He added a final flourish to his doodle, then focused on me and jabbed a finger inches from my face. ‘I’ll keep this simple.’
Standish hadn’t gone back to the Coldstream Guards after his tour. He’d left the army and dropped out of sight, like Sam. A year later, he’d popped up on Newsnight as one of the instant experts spouting about the situation in the Middle East. The caption said he ran a security company in Africa, and called him ‘Ex-SAS Major Miles Standish DSO’. His plan to do his three years in the Regiment then get out and exploit the connection seemed to have worked.
By the time the rest of the team got back to the UK, he’d long since taken all the credit for saving the gold and keeping Mobutu sweet. The DSO is a big deal, only a rung or two below the VC, and his citation had gone on about bravery and leadership in the field. It went on to praise his compassionate defence of civilian lives. I wondered how Annabel’s family – and the boy’s – would have felt about that if they’d seen what I had.
The rest of the team had honked good and hard about the decoration, but what could we do? The army was hardly going to rewrite history just because a few of the guys were pissed off that Gary hadn’t appeared on the radar screen and his kids still got fuck-all support from the MoD.
We all agreed with Davy that we should deck him if he ever turned up for the squadron Christmas party. But he didn’t: his five minutes of TV fame had been the last any of us had seen of him. Until now.
I glanced at his doodle on the table. He’d drawn a big T with a letter S above the top bar, an R to the right of the vertical bar, and DRC to the left of it.
‘OK, we are here – Rwanda.’ He tapped the crayon on the R. ‘The mine and Nuka are thirty-five Ks away in DRC, and three Ks apart. For months now the rebels have been infiltrating from the north, from Sudan –’ he jabbed the S ‘– into DRC, to hijack the mines.’
Sam said, ‘The rebels are LRA, Nick.’
Standish glowered. ‘You know them?’
I nodded. I’d kept up with events in Zaïre and later the DRC, or at least as much as Time and Newsweek allowed me to. The Lord’s Resistance Army had come into the frame here about twelve months ago. Their leader, Joseph Kony, was Africa’s most wanted. His army, maybe three thousand strong, was as fanatical and ruthless as Hitler’s SS. Just a year ago the International Criminal Court had indicted Kony and four other LRA leaders for war crimes.
He claimed to have special powers, given to him by God. His followers,