Recoil - Andy McNab [61]
Crucial yelled into his face. Whatever the answer was, either it wasn’t what Crucial had been wanting to hear, or there just wasn’t enough of it.
He took another swing, this time not to the thigh and not with the flat of the blade. Three severed fingers dropped into the mud. The guy’s legs collapsed beneath him, but he was held upright by the rope round his chest.
Crucial screamed into his face again. The assault team, who’d gone back to the fire-group area to retrieve their bergens, looked on as they returned. They didn’t give a shit. It was brutal, but this was war. This was what happened. None of these guys, theirs or ours, would be rushing back to camp to play Scrabble or form a debating society.
Soldiers do what soldiers do. This poor fucker needed to tell us all he knew, and that would save lives. Crucial had used the perfect expression to describe the method I’d always used to try to stop it fucking my head up afterwards: Just wipe my mouth, clear out the bad taste, and move on.
At last Crucial got something worthwhile out of him. He turned away from the whimpering, begging body and chatted to Sam as if he was keeping him abreast of the weather forecast. There are just three pieces of information you need from a prisoner in the field: How many more of you are there? What weapons have you got? And what do you plan to do with them? This was the way to get them fast.
‘They’re LRA.’ Crucial swung his gollock behind him and tapped the body on the shoulder. He flinched and screamed, expecting more. ‘These guys were coming up from the diamond mines. Kony told his guys down there to head north and join up with the main force. They’re all on the move.’
Sam was deaf to the cries for mercy. ‘Probably one of these groups the terrible twins hit last night. Get everything you can from him.’
Crucial turned and the prisoner was rewarded with a head butt, then another swing of the gollock for good measure. It was against his thigh again, but this time with the sharp end. His skin split open several inches deep. His head slumped as he broke down in fear and pain. Lightning crackled across the sky, freezing the two of them in a series of still-lifes as Crucial yelled into his face once more.
The man’s answers still weren’t to Crucial’s liking.
He took two paces away from the tree, then turned back and swung the flat of the gollock once more, this time hard into the man’s face. I heard the crunch of bone but no screams, just a horrible rasping noise as he fought for breath through his blood- and mucus-filled mouth and nostrils. I supposed you didn’t get a gob full of conflict diamonds by signing up to the Geneva Convention.
The manicured greens and crystal wine glasses of Erinvale were a world away as Crucial held up the man’s swollen and bloody head and shouted into it once more. When he got no response, he carved the blade up between the man’s legs, dug in and up.
Thank fuck, the guy started begging and talking. His body had already crumpled into the ropes. Rain streamed down his face, washing away the blood. But not for long.
Crucial pulled away from the rapper. As he listened, he held his bloodstained gollock out flat, rinsing it in the downpour.
The troops just mooched around, not at all interested in what had gone on. They were too busy cutting hair from the dead, almost scalping them, and seeing what could be robbed from their bodies that the porters hadn’t already helped themselves to.
‘They are close, too close.’ Crucial held up his wooden cross to have it cleansed of the prisoner’s blood. He walked towards Sam and me. ‘They started to hit the villages about thirty K north of the mine last night. They are maybe three, four hundred strong up there, he doesn’t really know. But he does know Kony has been bringing all his guys together, ready to hit us.
We’re the last big mine on his list.’
Crucial turned back to the prisoner.
Silky filled my mind once