Recoil - Andy McNab [69]
I scanned Sam’s defences. The canny old Jock hadn’t lost his touch. He might be putting his spiritual salvation in the hands of the Good Lord, but he was clearly in no hurry to put the man in the big white beard to the test. This was textbook stuff.
If you want to defend a position, you don’t just shove a big front door on it like they do in the movies. However dense a line of squaddies you put in the mouth of the valley, you’d be overrun in no time. Instead, you position your defence in depth across the entire area; that way you not only get protection from view and from incoming fire, but cover the valley entrance and the high ground above. If any of the sangars was overrun, others could keep the firefight going. They were everywhere.
Sam would have given each position its arcs of fire. They’d only shoot at targets within those arcs – otherwise they’d start hosing down their own guys in front of them. All the arcs would interlock, so there’d be cover in every area. The GPMGs’ arcs would overlap to make best use of their beaten zones, the stretch of ground on which the cone of fire would fall.
It was good to see that God’s best mate still knew his stuff. But I still thanked fuck I wouldn’t be here when the whole thing kicked off. However good the theory, he still needed lots more manpower to keep the fire going. Even counting Standish’s patrol, there’d be no more than a hundred bayonets. If the rapper was right, four hundred bad guys were already heading our way, with a whole lot more coming up to crash the party from the south. It would be hard enough for me, Silky and the two surveyors to stay out of their way, let alone persuade them to keep their distance.
The top of the knoll was like a scene from a First World War battlefield. Another bunch of miners were in the midst of digging four fire trenches overlooking the valley. Half a dozen or so tents had been pitched in the mud, and the whole area was criss-crossed by lopped branches, which I guessed was the closest these boys could get to duckboards.
I saw Sam pacing up and down on the far side of them, with the Iridium glued to his ear. I opened my mouth to speak, but he held up a hand to shut me the fuck up. As I got closer I could hear the news wasn’t good.
‘How many down?’
His eyes narrowed.
‘That’s bad, really bad. He’s here now . . . OK.’
Sam passed me the sat phone. ‘Standish.’ He strode to the edge of the knoll, yelling a series of instructions in the closest he got to English. Another voice translated.
‘Hello.’
Standish sounded out of breath. His voice moved from a bass roar to a treble squeak as he ran. It was like listening to a roadie tuning up a sound system before a rock concert.
‘Listen in. We’ve just hit a large LRA group ten K east of you. They’re not heading for the mine, they’re still heading north. They must be planning to link up first. You could hit more groups coming up from the south. Nothing’s changed, though. No surveyors at the airstrip – no lift out.’
Whatever else you could say about Standish, success clearly hadn’t changed him. He was still a selfish shit.
The phone went dead and I homed in on Sam. He was standing with three guys at the edge of the knoll, pointing up the west side of the valley. As I got closer, I could see the boy sitting on a branch at their feet. The rope was no longer round his neck but secured his left hand to his left ankle instead. His right leg was tethered to a stake in the ground. With his free hand he was scooping rice out of a rusty old can.
Sam issued clear and concise instructions as to where he wanted a set of new sangars; the ones they were already making had to be binned. As I closed in on him I saw two Chinese guys perched on cots in the nearest tent. One was round and chubby, the other tight and gaunt, but both pairs of eyes were as big as saucers. They had weeks of growth on their chins, but it was sparse, like wispy black beansprouts. There were two Louis Vuitton carry-on bags at their feet, and four RPG launchers on another cot behind them. The rounds were stacked in wooden boxes alongside.