Recoil - Andy McNab [46]
‘Not like you, eh, Sam?’ Standish said. ‘Healing, teaching, caring for those poor nippers . . .’
Sam glared at him. Standish sat back, arms hooked over the chair. He looked pretty pleased with himself.
The sat phone rang, its display glowing.
Standish got to his feet but didn’t answer it immediately. ‘Both of you, wait here. I haven’t finished yet.’ He gave us a nod and walked away to take the call. I had seen a +41 prefix. It was probably his bank manager in Zürich.
I rounded on Sam. ‘What the fuck’s going on? Why didn’t you warn me about him? And what’s all this LRA-swarming-in-from-the-north shit? You’re supposed to be a mate, for fuck’s sake.’
‘I’ll explain later,’ Sam said. ‘When there are no ears. She’ll be OK. We’ll get to her in time, don’t worry.’
I took a couple of deep breaths. There was no point getting sparked up: it wouldn’t achieve anything. If their int was on the nail, it would be three or four days before the shit really hit the fan, and it shouldn’t take more than a few hours to cover thirty-five Ks.
To my right, near the soldiers’ tents, the jungle began to spit out one guy after another, each bent almost double under the weight of a bulked-out rice sack. Two whites in shorts used their AKs to direct the human mule train along the strip. A handful of other guys providing the escort peeled off from the snake and disappeared into their tents to dump their gear.
‘The other patrol?’
Sam nodded slowly and mistook my pissed-off expression for concern. ‘Don’t worry, the route’s easy. And, anyway, you’ll have my sat nav. The way points are here and the mine.’
‘What’s your man-hour-per-kill, mate?’
He shook his head. One of the best measures of success at managing risk is how few men you lose per number of hours achieved, so the shake wasn’t good news. ‘Not good, since the LRA have been active. Less than a hundred. But that’s with large numbers. With just four of you, you’ll get through easy enough.’
Close to a couple of hundred porters must have struggled out of the jungle by now. They worked their way across the strip in single file and up the ramp into the belly of the An12.
‘It’s not the job I’m worried about.’ I watched the men make their way back down the ramp empty-handed, head for the pile of empty food-aid sacks at the edge of the strip, then slope off in the direction of the shanty town. ‘If anything happens to me on the way there, I want to know Silky’s being taken care of. You’ll do that for me?’
‘Only if I can wear my kilt when we bury you.’
‘Thanks, mate.’ I tried hard to give him a grin. ‘And it’s probably best not to let Standish know what she means to me. Keep pretending it’s a job, yeah?’
Standish would probably get me fighting his war single-handed if he knew I’d do anything to keep her safe.
3
Body after body, shiny with sweat and bent double under the sacks, continued to emerge from the jungle and shuffle along the airstrip. When they hit the back of the queue for the ramp their hands went straight on to their thighs to try and ease the weight, too fucked even to wipe away the sweat dripping from their faces.
The ones who’d already shed their load were now flopped out on the sacks in the shade of the treeline. A gaggle of brightly coloured women fussed round them with refilled plastic bottles of water.
I’d been wrong about the numbers. The snake looked as though it would never end. There must have been many more than two hundred of them – moving, queuing, or lying prone under the trees.
Sam nodded towards a group of half a dozen escorts high-fiving each other by the entrance to one of the tents. ‘They won’t be doing that when they hear they’re going straight back in a couple of hours.’
Soldiers shouted at porters; women and children shrieked with excitement. The guys in the snake, however, didn’t utter a sound. They were too fucked to do more than stagger to the treeline.
‘So what’s being mined, Sam. Diamonds?’
Sam’s gaze was