Temple of the Gods - Andy McDermott [8]
‘Come on, hurry!’ Banga yelled as Eddie charged through the gate, the prisoners following him. More men jumped from the arriving trucks to help pile the escapees aboard.
Eddie ran to Banga, gun still raised as he watched the fort’s walls for snipers. ‘Glad you could make it,’ he told the Zimbabwean as Boodu and Strutter caught up.
Banga nodded, eyes fixed on the men emerging from the gate. At the sight of one in particular, he gasped. ‘Chinouyazue!’ he cried, running to his brother.
Eddie patted his heart. ‘Makes you feel all warm in here, doesn’t it?’ Boodu’s expression twisted into a glower.
The killdozer reached the gate, the remaining prisoners streaming past as it turned on its tracks to prevent any surviving vehicles from leaving the compound. A steel slab dropped from the cabin’s side, hitting the ground with a bang. Two Zimbabweans holding machine guns emerged, followed by a huge Caucasian man who unfolded himself from the cramped confines and squeezed out. He saw Eddie and gave him a cheery wave, then hopped down and produced a hand grenade, pulling the pin and tossing it over his shoulder into the killdozer as he jogged away. An explosion ripped apart the controls, turning the makeshift tank into an extremely solid barricade.
‘Little man!’ Oleg Maximov called as he approached Eddie. ‘You okay, da?’ The bearded Russian scooped him up in a crushing embrace.
‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ Eddie grunted. ‘Okay, okay, that’s hurting now!’ Grinning, Maximov released him. Eddie saw numerous red marks on his face and arms: he had been scorched by the spent bullet casings pinging around inside the cabin. ‘Did you get burned?’
‘Da, a little,’ said Maximov, tugging out a pair of silicone earplugs; without protection, the gunfire inside the metal-walled cabin would have been deafening. He smiled. ‘It felt good.’
‘You’re weird, Max.’ Years earlier, the muscular giant had survived a bullet to the head, with the side effect that his pain response had become scrambled. Getting hurt now actually gave him pleasure, making the ex-Spetsnaz mercenary an extremely dangerous opponent, as Eddie had discovered.
But they were on the same side for this job. ‘Nice work,’ he told Maximov, before turning his attention back to the escapees. Almost a hundred prisoners had been freed, he estimated; so many that it might be touch and go whether they could all fit in the waiting trucks. ‘Come on, move it!’ he shouted, waving for the stragglers to hurry.
‘And where do you think they will all go?’ Boodu demanded with condescending sarcasm. He glanced to the west; Botswana was only ten miles away. ‘The border is too well guarded – they will never get across it. And if they stay in Zimbabwe, we will find them. There is nowhere they can hide.’
‘That’s not gonna be your problem,’ said Eddie. The last of the men squeezed aboard the trucks, some dangling from the sides, held by their former cellmates. The first vehicle started to lumber away. ‘Right, Banga, we’d better shift. I don’t want to miss my flight.’
Banga helped his weary brother into the pickup’s cab, then climbed into the driver’s seat. Eddie hopped into the rear bed, keeping his gun on Boodu as the Zimbabwean, Strutter and Maximov followed suit. The pickup set off, but instead of following the other trucks back along the dirt road, it angled away into open scrubland. Shots from the fort followed them, but they were quickly beyond the range of the guards’ weapons.
Banga kept driving across the windy plain. After a few minutes, structures appeared ahead. Skeletal frames rose from the ground like hands clawing from a grave, the part-built beginnings of what had been planned as a cement works before Zimbabwe’s ruined economy forced construction to be suspended. The killdozer, in its original peaceful guise, had been one of the pieces of equipment abandoned in situ.
A long road ran from the site to a highway a few