Recoil - Andy McNab [57]
I leaned my arse against a tree and eased off my daysack. Sam came up close. ‘This is a twenty-minute rest. There’ll be no more until we’ve crossed the plain and are back in cover.’
Wiping the sweat from my face, I heard the world around me clack, click and buzz once more.
The porters were subdued as they drank from their old plastic bottles. I was hot, out of breath and gagging for fluids. I slapped my face yet again to zap whatever had buzzed in to say hello.
I drank as much as I could before giving myself another dose of Deet. It made my lips numb, but it was pointless trying to rinse the stuff off; the damage was done.
A gust of wind made the trees sway at the edge of the canopy. It wouldn’t be long before the rain was with us. Thank fuck for that.
Sam sparked up his sat nav after shoving it down his shirt to hide the display.
‘We leaving the track?’
‘Not unless we have to.’ He pointed towards the high ground. ‘This is the start of the dodgy bit. Those hills have eyes.’
‘LRA?’
‘Aye.’ He closed down the sat nav again and I passed him my bottle. ‘Standish likes to call them rebels because it glosses over the fact that we’re fighting kids out there.’
Thunder reverberated across the plain, then there was silence. It felt as if the whole world was holding its breath. Two seconds later, the rain beat a tattoo on the trees and the first splashes hit my face. It felt great.
‘Standish using kids – it’s all about money, right?’
Lightning cracked and sizzled, bathing Sam’s face momentarily in brilliant blue light. I’d never seen him look more serious than when he handed me back the bottle. ‘We’ll need just over three thousand bayonets on the ground to do the job correctly. He’s worked out we can get a thousand ten-year-olds for the price of a hundred adults.’ He shook his head wearily. ‘It might keep Standish’s invisible man happy, but it’s sick. Simple as that. That’s why we have to stop it.’
Rain bounced off my head and shoulders and I had to shout to make myself heard as the thunder roared directly overhead: ‘So how would I fit into all this?’
‘You balance things up. Not only that, maybe you get the chance to drop Kony. Remember the team job? Remember what guys like him do and what happens to those poor souls?’
‘All well and good, mate, but what if Standish and his shadows get pissed off and sort things out with a couple of 7.62s?’ I took another couple of swigs, though all I really needed to do was tilt my face to the sky and open my mouth.
He shook his head and the rain flew from his hair. ‘My work is here. The LRA coming south means only two things, both bad. The kids will either be killed or taken and trained up. So, I have to ask myself, what would Jesus do? I know He’d stay and not count the cost. Then He’d keep working on Standish, trying to get him to change.’
I was pretty sure even God couldn’t do that, but I decided now wasn’t the time to say so.
Lightning strobed on Sam’s face as he stared at the high ground. He waited for an answer that wasn’t coming. I wasn’t sure whether he expected me to give it or the Man in charge of the thunder.
The porters got their sacks back on their backs while the two gunners folded their bipods and slung the webbing straps over their right shoulders so the weapons hung horizontally at waist level. The link was then thrown back over the top cover.
Sam went forward.
I jumped up and down a couple of times on tiptoe to get the pack nice and snug on my back, then checked that the safety lever on the right of my AK was fully up before I took the few paces to join them.
PART FIVE
1
We’d been snaking across the open scrubland for an hour, caught in a thunder and lightning show Ozzy Osbourne would have been proud of. The torrential rain never let up, blurring my vision, but our biggest problem was underfoot. The ground had turned into a bog.
The sun would bake the thick,