87
‘How far to the border?’ asked Sonny Parkes. He was standing in the Twin Otter’s cockpit, resting his hands against the back of the co-pilot’s seat.
‘A little under two minutes,’ the pilot replied. ‘One and a half if I push it.’
‘So push it, then.’
‘Ja, well, easier said than done. Top speed in this crate is barely two hundred miles an hour. It’s a workhorse, not a racehorse.’
Parkes grunted dismissively and looked at his watch, following the second hand as it swept, or rather crawled, round the dial. Eighty seconds… seventy… a minute. They were almost safe, but still his back was crawling with prickly tension.
‘There you go,’ said the pilot. ‘Look out of the left-hand side window, about five clicks up ahead – see those long lines of trucks? They’re waiting to go through customs, either side of the border. We’re almost- Shit!’
The noises seemed to come at once: the chatter of thirty-millimetre cannons, the shattering clatter of rounds tearing through the Twin Otter’s wings and fuselage and the deafening roar of three fighter jets as they shot past their prey, throwing it around the sky as it was caught in the chaos of the displaced air they left in their wake.
‘Hang on!’ the pilot shouted as he flung his aircraft to the left, then plunged it into a precipitous dive.
Parkes was hurled against the side of the cockpit, then flung backwards, ending up on the floor, jammed up against a bulkhead and barely conscious, as the Twin Otter headed nose-first towards the ground.
Down they went, the windscreen filled with nothing but the onrushing earth. The pilot remained impassive as he maintained his suicide dive. But back in the passenger compartment, Farayi Iluko screamed with terror as the plane hurtled towards obliteration. For a few seconds her brother Canaan maintained the pretence that he was not equally terrified. But as the dive went on and on, and the brutal earth drew ever closer, he started screaming too.
Up above, the three Malemban fighters were coming to terms with an unwelcome consequence of the vast disparity between their power and that of their target. They were going so much faster than the Otter that they’d had very little time in which they could bring their guns to bear before they overshot it. Even so, their advantage was overwhelming.
The three planes looped up into the sky, twisting as they went until they were facing the way they’d come. Then they headed back towards the desperate evasions of the Twin Otter.
Now, at last, the pilot pulled back on the controls and shouted to the co-pilot sitting next to him to do the same, the two men leaning back, their arms, necks and faces flushed and contorted with effort as they desperately fought to bring the aircraft out of its dive.
It was too late. They were going to crash.
Sonny Parkes, for the first time in his life, understood the absolute certainty of death. His end was only a second away.
Canaan Iluko grabbed his sister’s hand in a grip so tight it seemed her fingers must surely snap from the pressure.
And then the Twin Otter managed to grab some purchase against the onrushing air and haul its nose up, oh so slowly, away from the ground, until there was once again clear blue sky in the pilot’s eye-line.
As the wheels of the fixed undercarriage brushed through the desiccated leaves of an ancient baobab tree, the pilot jinked right and sent the Twin Otter into a corkscrewing roll, its tumbling wingtips almost seeming to brush the ground before he spiralled back up into the sky.
And then the F-7s were on them again, coming in one after another and raking the Otter with armour-piercing rounds that ripped straight through the flimsy fuselage and out the other side, barely impeded by anything they encountered.
‘Right engine’s been hit!’ shouted the co-pilot. ‘It’s on fire!’
They’d lost half their power and now the pilot faced another problem: the same burst of fire that had knocked out his right engine had also torn through the control surfaces at the rear of the wing. He was in danger of stalling. The plane was lurching drunkenly from side to side, and he could see the fighter planes turning for one last, assuredly fatal attack run.
When he looked down, however, there was hope. The border crossing was clearly visible just a few hundred feet below, little more than a mile ahead. Beyond the customs post on the South African side stretched a narrow black ribbon of highway and the safety of home.
If he could only reach it.
88
The pilots in the F-7s were like predatory raptors eyeing a dove with a broken wing. They wheeled and swooped in ruthlessly perfect formation, screaming down towards the Twin Otter as it limped past the first trucks on the Malemban side of the border. Down the fighters roared, and beneath them cab-doors and tarpaulins were flung open as drivers and passengers desperately sought to get away from the angels of death plunging from the sky.
Again the guns spat out a continuous hail of deadly shells, strafing the Twin Otter and the trucks and customs huts below it with indiscriminate malice. A petrol tanker bound for the thirsty pumps of Malemba’s empty filling stations erupted in a ball of fire that seemed to swallow the fragile little plane before it emerged on the far side. Its wings and tail had been pierced so often they looked more like torn lace than solid metal. Its left engine had gone, too. All that its wounded, bleeding pilot could hope to do was bring a little control to the final glide as the Otter hit the top of a brilliantly painted bus, smashing several boxes filled with chickens that had been strapped there, bounced forward and crashed down on to the road surface as the F-7s roared by, less than a hundred feet above the ground.
The undercarriage collapsed, sending the aircraft skidding over the road surface, slewing round as it went. The right wing hit a fully loaded lumber truck and sheared off, but the Otter kept going, spinning like a Frisbee as it left the road, ploughed through a stretch of bare ground and then came to a halt in a cloud of thick black smoke and choking dust.
For a while, nothing moved. The crowd of people gathered on the roadside stood there motionless, too afraid to approach the crashed plane for fear of an explosion. But as the seconds passed and no eruption came, the first few figures made their tentative, nervous way towards it.
One clambered up on to the nose and peered through the cracked windscreen into the cockpit. Others tugged at the main passenger door, just to the rear of the battered remnants of the left wing and engine. Then they sprang back as the handle was operated from within the aircraft cabin.
The door swung open.
A white man was revealed in the open doorway, dressed in black combat fatigues. His face was covered in blood from an open wound across his forehead. He was only held upright by his right hand gripping the door frame. He tried to move his left hand, waving towards himself.
‘Come here,’ he croaked. ‘Please help.’
A trucker dressed in a replica Manchester United football shirt helped the white man down on to the ground. Then he started shouting exuberantly, yelling at his travelling companions to come and assist him. Very soon the crowd could see what the excitement was all about as two slender black figures were carried from the plane. One was a young man in his late teens. The other was his older sister.
And they were both alive.
89
Justus Iluko tried not to think back to the night he had first met Sam Carver. But sometimes he couldn’t avoid it, nights when his dreams were filled with images from a small town in Mozambique: the white-hot glow of a man leaning over a helpless girl; the shouts of drunken men and the giggles of prostitutes doing business in a squalid drinking den; firing guns and exploding grenades; the screams of wounded men; the clatter of an approaching helicopter; the dead weight of Captain Morrison’s body as they dragged him back aboard. But above all the sense of chaos and confusion, the pervasive grip of mortal dread, clawing at his guts. He’d wake up in a cold sweat and Nyasha would have to calm him till the night demons had vanished back into the darkness. Now Nyasha was gone, and so, he supposed, was his bed, even the very house in which he’d raised his family and dared to dream of a better future for his children.