Standish turned. His face was level with Sam’s knees. ‘This is not for discussion. I’m ordering you to start moving towards the airstrip immediately. Leave everyone behind. We don’t need them. If we stay here we’ll die, and not achieve a thing by doing so.’
Sam stood up. ‘No. We’re leaving no one.’ There was quiet menace in his voice. ‘We stand our ground until first light, and then we try to break out with the wounded and the walking. You can do whatever you want.’
Bateman slammed down the top cover and gave it another smack with his clenched fist. ‘No, he isn’t going to do what the fuck he wants, man. We are all staying.’ He squared his shoulders. ‘I don’t give two shits about all these charity people.’ He encompassed the whole valley with a majestic wave of his hand. ‘All these miners, these kids – if I’m honest, I don’t give a shit. But I won’t leave other soldiers to die. That’s not the way it’s done, man.’
He was the bigger, stronger man – and this was the Congo, not the paradeground at Sandhurst or a guest slot on Newsnight – and Standish knew it.
‘My first operation was Uric. We went to destroy a training camp in Mozambique. Op Uric, you heard of it?’
Standish shook his head.
‘Well, you’d better listen good, man.’
He was going to have to do that whether he liked it or not.
‘Tooley was there with me when we flew into Mozambique – three hundred and sixty of us, man. We were going to kill everyone. Rebels, Mozambique Army, Russian advisers, everyone. We weren’t sure how many there were, maybe thousands.
‘We bombed them from the air, we gunned them from the Pumas. But it fucked up. They were dug in, just like us here. They held us down for days, man.’ Bateman was reliving it in his head. ‘We lost fifteen of our own guys but killed three hundred of those fuckers.’
Standish stifled a yawn. He didn’t want to be mistaken for a man who gave a shit.
Bateman shoved him in the chest. ‘You not finding this interesting, man? You think I’m telling you this for fun?’
Standish just stood there, no more than inches between them. He’d got the message now. It was time to listen, and listen good.
‘All but two of our guys were killed by these things.’ He kicked the launcher. ‘They work, man. But let me tell you about the other two. You need to hear this.’
Bateman leaned into him, closing the gap between their faces, eyes fixed on Standish’s.
‘They were young, just like me and Tooley, man. We were in Mozambique, detached, on our own, fighting – simply trying to stay alive.’
Their noses almost touched.
‘One guy refused to fight and decided we should surrender. He was shot by his own platoon commander before he could finish putting his hands up. The next ran, on the second day. He left other men to do the fighting. I shot him in the back of the head before he’d got ten yards.’
Bateman kept his face where it was as he pointed down into the valley. ‘Out there isn’t a place to reason why. You fight, or you don’t. It’s that simple. No questions, no excuses, no courts martial.’ He turned away. ‘You will fight.’ He rammed the butt in his shoulder and checked his arcs of fire. ‘We all stay, or we all go. And we’re staying. It’s that simple.’
Sam and Crucial lifted Tim and his cot into the tent.
I shoved two magazines into my OG map pockets and checked the safety lever was down two clicks. Then I grabbed the jerry-can and gulped as much water down my neck as I could without throwing up.
2
Weapons in the shoulder, we skidded down to the scrapyard where the ANFO had been mixed. The view down here in the stalls was scarier and more claustrophobic than the one we’d had up in the dress circle. It looked like a First World War battlefield, the sort the Germans used to call ‘the place where the Iron Crosses grow’.
Sam hunkered down among the oil drums and we closed in.
‘OK, listen – me and Crucial are going to get the two guns from those sangars. Nick, you get hold of as much link as you can from the stores dugout. We’ve cleaned it out of RPG rounds, but whatever you can find, we need it up top.’
He dug into his chest harness and handed me a cheap plastic version of a mini Maglite. I tried to shove it into my pocket next to the sat nav, but my OGs were so sodden it clung to my hand.
‘Get any link straight up to the trenches. Then come back here and wait. I want some cover down here as well, in case we have a drama on the other side.’
I nodded. ‘Got it. Listen, mate, I want to check the firing cables. That OK?’
Sam thought about it for a second, then nodded. It was going to take precious time, but he knew it would eat away at me if I didn’t find out, one way or another. Who’d fucked up, me or the kit? In my boots, he’d have wanted to do the same.
Sam led off, with Crucial behind him and to the left. I took the right. We moved as fast as we could, safety off, weapon back in the shoulder.
Sam found the cable. I picked it up and started to follow it towards the river. The other two fell in each side of me and covered.
Ahead of me I could see a haphazard arrangement of stepping-stones in the mud. As I got closer, I could see what they were: some adult, some kids, some still with weapons beside them or lying across their bodies. One had fallen face down and was almost fully submerged. His disembodied hands and feet seemed to grow out of the mud.
I got to where I’d anchored the cable, just short of the Nuka hidey-hole. Sam and Crucial knelt, covering the arcs, while I unwound the cable from the rock. I tried to pull the join apart, but the pigtails didn’t give an inch – they hadn’t let me down.
Sam wanted to move on, and I nodded. Job done. I was happy; well, sort of. I untwisted the two strands and let them fall into the mud. I still wanted to test the cable later.
Sam and Crucial aimed for the right side of the valley and I headed back the way we’d come.
When I reached the cover of the drums once more, I undid the torch and turned the bottom battery the right way round again. Old habits died hard for Sam. It saved power, and could also save your life: a torch suddenly coming on if the switch got knocked was an open invitation to any sniper within reach.
I shielded the lens in the palm of my hand. There was a dull red glow through the skin. I turned it off again and kept it in my left hand so that when I gripped the weapon it lay along the stock. When the time came, it would be my searchlight.
I moved off towards the stores dugout, trying to keep low, trying to offer as small a target as I could.
A pace or two from the mouth, it was time to hit the switch. Gripping it against the stock, I shone the beam down the barrel and into the cave.
The marzipan smell embraced me like an old friend, and as I swept the beam I could see the ground was strewn with many more empty wooden crates than last time. Bits of ordnance, the internal box packing for RPG rounds and sweaty slabs of HE covered with grit had been discarded all over the floor. Ahead of me was a stack of boxes.
As I panned the cave, there was a scuffle behind them.
I threw myself against the wall and tensed into a fire position, barrel up, both eyes open, first pressure taken. I didn’t want to give whoever was in here the chance to open up first, especially since they might not realize that if they fucked up and hit a slab we’d all be history.
‘Come out! Allez, allez!’ I didn’t expect it to happen; I just wanted whoever it was to know they’d been heard. ‘Identify yourself!’
I kept up first pressure on the trigger.
Still both eyes open, I aimed the weapon and torch towards the noise, ready for the slightest movement.
I heard it again; something between a gasp and a cough.