Recoil - Andy McNab [64]
‘Which way to Nuka?’
Sam turned back the way we’d just come. ‘Follow the river upstream. I’m gonna get on with all-round defence. I’m sending some of the porters to the orphanage to bring the kids and villagers in. You get the Mercy Flight lot, OK?’
I turned back towards the river. The track upstream was well worn, which meant the mud was deeper. Soon every other noise was behind me and all I could hear was the squelch of my boots and the rumble of the fast-moving water.
I kept slipping and sliding, but what the fuck? It didn’t matter – getting to the village did.
I wasn’t alone on the path. I overtook some of the porters, who were now making their way home as fast as their tired legs could carry them. Exhausted as they were, they wanted to drag their families to safety.
By the time I got to the edge of the shanty I felt like I’d done ten Ks, not three. I looked around. There were no breezeblock buildings. This was wood, reed, palm-leaf and mud country. Chickens scratched around dejectedly. It made the airstrip look like mid-town Manhattan.
My throat felt like I was drinking crisps. My back ached, the raw skin on my legs stung worse than foot blisters, but the worst pain of all was knowing there was nothing I could do about Silky being there or not. Either she would be, or she wouldn’t. And all the time the LRA were getting closer. More gunfire echoed somewhere out there in the bush, getting the porters’ legs pumping that little bit faster.
I scrambled over the mud with the feeling I used to have in the pit of my stomach as a schoolkid, trying desperately to get home before I got caught and beaten up by a rival gang on the estates.
I entered the village. People stared at me, terrified.
‘Mercy Flight!’ I yelled. ‘Anyone know Mercy Flight? The white guys? Tim? Silke?’
5
‘Mercy Flight?’
Nobody stuck around long enough to give me an answer. All I saw was terrified faces, then the backs of heads as they turned and ran. It couldn’t just have been my mad, staring eyes: it must have been the distant crackle of gunfire followed so soon by the appearance of a white man with an AK.
Scabby chickens jumped out of my way as I slid through the mud. Scared little faces peeped out from behind their mothers’ legs before they, too, disappeared into the shadow of the huts. Rain dripped off the palm trees. Unable to evaporate in this humidity, it had nowhere else to go.
The village disappeared into a long depression of mud and crushed huts. It was as if whoever had scooped out the valley had been playing about with his kitchen equipment here too. This time he’d got out his bread-knife and carved himself a slice of earth for breakfast. The ruptured fault line must have swallowed most of the village.
A few mud-covered bodies scavenged in the ruins. I got right to the far side of what was left of the shanty and didn’t see the huts that were hanging on Sam’s wall back at Erinvale. But I found what I’d come for.
A once-white tent the size of a marquee stood on a patch of open ground, wet and sagging, sides rolled up. A big red cross had been hand-painted on the roof, as if that would help them. Maybe fifty or sixty bodies lay sprawled on the dry ground inside, or sat and rocked. Old men and women, mostly, swathed in blood- and mud-stained bandages, but also some children.
Around the tent igloo-shaped shelters had been thrown together with branches and palm leaves, rice bags and plastic. One casualty had improvised himself a pair of crutches from a couple of bits of tree, and hobbled his way towards the tent.
I slid and stumbled down the hill, eyes straining for a glimpse of white amid the black. I was about sixty metres away when I finally spotted her. She was in the middle of the tent, handing out blankets from a bundle in her arms.
I felt a jolt of excitement. ‘Silky!’
A collective wail went up from the