Recoil - Andy McNab [63]
We hit a noisy, swollen river, and a bridge, maybe thirty metres across, constructed from tree-trunks. It could easily have supported a wagon, had one ever got here. Scores of terrified men and women clutching bundles in plastic sheeting streamed past us from the opposite direction without even looking up.
I raised an eyebrow at Sam.
‘The gunfire. They’re scared. The miners will stay because they know there’s nowhere for them to go. This lot? They just want to run, and who can blame them?’
The flat-bottomed valley in front of me ran at right angles to the river. It was horseshoe-shaped, as if someone with a giant ice-cream scoop had gouged along the ground and pulled out a chunk for dessert. A series of hills and knolls made up the high ground round it. The canopy had disappeared. The bare mud looked like it had been bombed, napalmed, then bombed again just to make sure, like the huge craters I’d seen from the An12.
We had stepped into the land that time forgot. The whole valley was excavated from top to bottom. Men caked in mud scrambled about, looking like the pictures of Australian Aboriginals decorated with clay that I’d seen as a kid. I expected a squadron of pterodactyls to do a fly-past any minute.
Bodies disappeared left, right and centre into holes in the red earth. One guy grabbed a rock that had been passed up through a hole only big enough for a man to squeeze through. Blood trickled into the mud from his elbows and knees. He turned and placed the rock in an old reed basket beside him.
I had a sudden image of sharp-suited traders going frantic on the market floor as they yelled their bids for this rock pulled out of the ground with this poor fucker’s bare hands. And even that wasn’t the end of the chain. The raw-material price had probably multiplied a thousandfold by the time it reached the factory, en route to the hen parties and soccer mums.
Squaddies stood guard, looking relieved as the patrol moved in. RPGs lay beside them or rested up against rocks. Fuck-all changed round these parts.
The kid still had his arms and hands tied behind his back, and a rope round his neck with which Sam controlled him. Crucial had been whispering gently to him all night. At first he resisted like a trapped animal, but the big man’s soothing voice seemed to have calmed him down a bit. He must have realized nothing was going to happen to him – until he got God shoved down his neck later on.
We dragged ourselves into the valley, only to see more of the same desolation. Smoke curled from small fires. Bodies huddled round. Some smoked; some stirred the contents of blackened pots. Others lay under makeshift shelters, thrown together from plastic sheeting and rice bags. Squaddies sat around chatting with them, AKs across their knees.
A shout came from higher up, on the left-hand side of the valley. One group scattered immediately. The ground rumbled under my feet and a second later an explosion ripped from a shaft. Rock chips and mud showered down. Now I knew what the fertilizer and diesel oil were all about.
Low-explosive ANFO (ammonium nitrate/ fuel oil) mix was just the stuff to carve big fuckoff holes in the ground. The fertilizer needed to have at least fifteen per cent nitrate content to detonate, and many countries didn’t produce it in such strengths any more. It wasn’t only used in mining and quarrying, but also by any self-respecting terrorist who’d done some basic training or had access to the Internet. ANFO is a lifting charge; high explosive is more for cutting, and wouldn’t be so effective in taking out a convoy of Land Rovers as they drove over a culvert or two.
Sam didn’t even look up as the cloud of red, vaporized mud slowly settled. We