‘You okay?’ I asked him.
He nodded. I looked around but couldn’t see Francis. There was a lot of blood on the ground. Most of the men I’d thought were dead were just wounded. They started to groan. One with a chunk of wood protruding from an eye socket began to howl. I watched as a dead man missing an arm and a large piece out of his torso impossibly raised himself up and fell to the side, and Francis was revealed as the person beneath him doing the pushing. I pulled Ryder to his feet, then went to Francis and did the same. The African’s eyes were wide and he was shaking violently.
The sound of a racing engine caused me to look up. A Dong was barreling toward us in a hurry. It clipped the back of our old wrecked truck and bunted it to one side. What the fuck now? I took aim at the driver, just as the vehicle’s horn started meep-meeping like an anxious moped in a Beijing traffic jam. A man popped out through the space where the windshield had been, and waved at us with both arms as though he were having a seizure. It took me a moment to recognize him. Jesus, I knew that guy. It was Mike, Mike West! There was a short barrel protruding from the cabin, lying flat along the vehicle’s hood. The damn truck — they’d turned it into a tank using the tube of the M224 as a cannon. The boom I’d heard had been the mortar round being fired, and it wasn’t lightning but a round of 60mm HE that had blown the huts to kindling.
The Dong drove over the remains of the wooden huts. As it turned toward us, I signaled West to keep going and pick up Twenny, Peanut and Rutherford first.
I yelled at Ryder. ‘Can you walk?’
He signaled that he was okay.
‘I have a problem,’ said Francis, looking down.
Yeah, he did — a leg wound to add to the damage to his forearm, his thigh slick with blood; the rain sluicing through it, washing it off his boot into a pale pink puddle on the ground. Using the Ka-bar, I cut his pants away from the damaged area and found a piece of wood twice the length of a pack of cigarettes embedded in the muscle. From the way his leg hung and moved around as if disconnected, his femur was fractured. Soon, once the shock wore off, Francis was going to need more help than we could give him.
‘I’m going to carry you,’ I told him and didn’t wait for permission. I took his wrist, bent down a little and hoisted him across my shoulders. He grunted as I stood up and the air was forced out of his lungs. The guy was a lightweight, maybe a couple of sacks of cement worth, but no more than that. I jogged the fifty meters to the truck, Francis grunting with every step, and arrived as West and Rutherford were helping Twenny and Peanut up into the load area. Leila, Boink and Ayesha swooped on them, and hugged it out and had a good cry and said ‘Oh my God,’ between them a dozen times or so. Meanwhile, with Rutherford’s assistance, I laid Francis out on the metal floor. The guy was in a bad way.
‘My people. My wife…’ he said, his eyes rolling around in his head. ‘You must get them. You must help, you must…’
From the tone of his voice I figured he thought I was going to welsh on my part of the deal — just another broken promise from a white guy with a First World passport.
Ryder climbed into the truck, straight into Ayesha’s arms.
Leila hugged Twenny, but then she pushed him away and smacked him hard across the face, and then pulled him close and kissed him equally hard on the lips before slapping him again.
Showbiz people.
Just for an instant I forgot where we were, but a couple of helpful supersonic cracks close enough to pull the air out of my eardrums reminded me that folks were shooting at us.
Ryder dragged Francis further into the back of the truck, and the African cried out in pain as the agent propped him up against a stack of shot-up sandbag uniforms.
‘Boink, Duke,’ I called out. ‘Lock and load! Get everyone organized.’ I turned to West. ‘I’m riding up front.’ We jumped down and ran to the front cabin. ‘Drive!’ I yelled at Cassidy as I wrestled open the door.
‘Where to?’ he replied.
‘The fuck outta here!’
Cassidy jammed the stick into gear, gave it a boot full of gas, and West and I were thrown back in the seat. The sergeant raced quickly through the gears, careless of what was going on behind us in the load area. People were going to be tossed around back there.
‘Take it easy,’ I told him. ‘We’ve got a casualty.’
‘Who?’ he yelled over the engine roar.
‘Francis. What took you so long?’
‘Those booby traps at the base of the hill?’ said Cassidy. ‘Had to detour and dismantle them. Couldn’t leave ’em lying around.’
He was right. That village was too close. I didn’t want innocent people being turned into human kebabs on my conscience.
‘What did you do back there?’ Cassidy asked. ‘A lot of dead and wounded.’
‘Shock and awe,’ I said, preferring to skip the details. We’d left a lot of widows and weeping mothers in our wake. And none of it would have happened if Lockhart hadn’t made a deal with LeDuc to make some extra cash out of our principals. I was going to make that Kornfak & Greene asshole pay. To my surprise, the asshole himself suddenly appeared behind a group of men armed with rifles and machetes surging up out of the mine ahead of us. Cassidy had three choices to avoid hitting the human roadblock: swerve into trees, drive off the road and take a lethal drop into the mine pit of around a hundred feet, or hope the men waving their blades around got the hell out of the way. He chose option three, and two men who moved too slow wore the radiator grille before sliding off and disappearing under the front axle and briefly making the road extra bumpy.
As we drove by, Lockhart and I stared at each other for what seemed an age. He was either smiling or snarling, I couldn’t tell which. I thought of all the misery he’d brought to this place with his double-dealing, weapons trading, slavery, murder, extortion and hair gel. A lot of people were dead because of this guy. I pulled up my M4 with the intention of shooting him dead right there, but before I could act on the impulse the DoD contractor was gone, slipping behind us as we sped along the road. The fuckhead would have to wait. I just hoped I’d get to him before karma beat me to it because, no doubt, there was a steaming pile of it headed his way.
The road curved around to the left and then forked.
‘Go right,’ I yelled, pointing.
Cassidy braked hard to make the two hundred and seventy degree turn, wound the steering to the stops and then let it unwind as the Dong swung around.
‘Why?’ he yelled.
Because I had a deal with Francis. We’d been lucky so far. Could we push that luck just a little further? We’d have been dead in the water without him. Say I welshed on the deal… Could I do that and ever get dreamless sleep again? ‘We have to make a pickup — civilians,’ I added before he could ask me what kind.
Occupying the front seat between Cassidy and West was the mortar tube.
‘Whose handiwork is this?’ I asked, tapping it.
Cassidy turned to me with that gummy, milk-tooth grin of his, taking ownership.
I wasn’t that familiar with the 224. It had a trigger mechanism, which was unusual on a mortar barrel. With mortars it was conventionally the weight of the round dropping onto the firing pin that ignited the propellant and sent the package on its way.
‘Works well,’ West shouted. ‘You just set the trigger, which pulls the firing pin back, fuse the round to detonate on impact, drop it down the barrel and squeeze the trigger… The round has a pretty flat trajectory over a hundred meters but then it drops away quite fast. Targeting’s a bit random and you probably won’t hit the bullseye, but with this baby you don’t have to.’