Timbu appeared to know their dialect. The exchange between him and the chief was loud and animated. Sergeant Wilkes glanced at the men who must have been either the chief’s sons or his bodyguards, or maybe both. The warriors, he realised, were sizing up him and his men. They appeared confident and cocky, almost haughty, but there was fear, too — fear of the unknown. How many third millennium soldiers had these people seen? Hidden way up here in the clouds, probably none.
Wilkes took in the village at a glance. The women and the children had completely vanished now. Only the men were left; a line of soldiers and a couple of civilians squared off against a much larger force of near-naked warriors looking increasingly belligerent and excited, muscles twitching with adrenalin overload.
‘Got any ideas, boss?’ asked Lance Corporal Ellis in Wilkes’s ear, keeping his eyes on the villagers.
‘Smile. Look happy,’ Wilkes replied.
Ellis did as he was told, but it was a tight smile and there was no amusement in it. He’d seen several warriors on the edge of the gathering raise their spears and point them in the direction of Timbu, Bill Loku and Andrew Pelagka, and it had taken Ellis a supreme effort of willpower not to respond by shooting the warriors dead before they got their spears off. Of course, Ellis knew had he done that, it would have been the match that blew the powder keg.
Suddenly several shots rang out, explosions from somewhere behind the treeline. ‘Jesus!’ said Littlemore. ‘Does that sound like military assault carbines to you blokes?’ No one answered. They were too busy scoping the treeline, looking for the source of the gunfire. Then followed a howling scream, a terrifying noise that sent the warriors in the village scattering for cover. Several natives threw their spears blindly at the trees as they ran helter-skelter. The PNG soldiers also ran, some even bumping into each other in their efforts to vacate the open ground of the village centre. Sergeant Wilkes and his men dropped to their knees in the confusion, sighting down their M4s and machine guns ready for whatever was about to burst into the open. The eerie howling grew louder still and then a swarm of painted and feathered warriors erupted from the cover of the dense jungle, screaming, waggling their tongues, running at full tilt towards the village centre.
Wilkes assessed the situation fast. ‘Ellis, Beck, Robson! Get the civilians under cover. Go!’
The two SAS troopers gathered up the politicians and the guide and herded them, running at a crouch, behind some heavy logs.
A spear thudded into the soft ground at Trooper Littlemore’s feet, frightening the crap out of him. Never in a million years did he expect to die on the point of a firehardened, barbed tip. The man who hurled it kept coming towards him, some kind of feathered club held high in his hand, ready for the death swing. Littlemore had no choice. He let off a short burst with his Minimi. Slugs smashed into the man, hurling him backwards into two of his mates.
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Wilkes above the din. ‘Aim fucking high!’ He saw a couple of PNG soldiers fall down as they ran, one whose leg buckled under as it broke clean below the knee.
After a moment of confusion, the SAS men recovered their equilibrium. The politicians and other civilians secured behind the logs, Ellis and Robson rejoined Wilkes and Littlemore. They then split into twos and fired close to the marauders, but not at them, pulverising the trees around them and turning the ground at their feet into boiling cauldrons of earth and hot steel jackets. The PNG soldiers had also begun to organise themselves and were returning fire.
Wilkes popped a grenade from his webbing and loaded it into the underslung M203 launcher. He aimed quickly and then fired, lofting it behind the charging tribesmen. The HE round hit the open ground where Wilkes intended, exploding with a deafening pulse that spooked a dozen warriors, who turned and fled back into the trees. The concussion stopped several more warriors, who stood and shook their heads, deafened and disoriented.
‘What the hell are these people doing with AK-47s?’ yelled Littlemore. Wilkes didn’t answer because he had no idea. But the fact was they had them, and a round fired by a primitive warrior could do as much damage as a round from a professional sniper if it hit the right spot. Fortunately, though, they had no training and hitting a target from a distance of two hundred metres with a rifle as powerful as a Kalashnikov wasn’t easy even if the finger on the trigger was experienced. Adding the confusion of battle made the task of aiming accurately even more difficult, and if the shooter was running, well-nigh impossible. It was not surprising, then, that despite the considerable amount of lead flying about, none of the SAS was killed or wounded. But Wilkes knew that this situation would change rapidly if the attackers were permitted to close with his men. No skill or experience hitting the bullseye was necessary when the bull itself was at point-blank range. ‘C’mon, you blokes. Start earning your pay,’ he said. He made a few quick hand signals and his men took the offensive. They moved about, never staying in the one place more than a few seconds. This willingness to move confused the painted warriors, making their targeting even more erratic. As soon as they stopped and took aim, Wilkes’s Warriors would fire on them from an angle they didn’t expect. With the benefit of surprise lost, the initiative passed to the defenders. Wilkes and his men kept splitting off at different angles, firing, moving. The attackers soon had no idea where to concentrate their attack. Withdrawal was their only option.
Trooper Beck had a lucky escape. He rolled out from behind a grass hut, coming to the kneeling position, and found himself looking up into the black eyes of a warrior less than three metres away, the smoking muzzle of the man’s AK-47 pointing a little over his head. The highlander had just fired a burst from the carbine. All he had to do was drop the weapon slightly, squeeze the trigger and Beck was dead. Beck brought his own weapon to bear on the warrior — it took an age to come around, turning, turning — and Beck expected at any instant to have his lights burned out as he registered the muzzle flash. But it never came. The two men glared at each other, the warrior’s nostrils flaring like something wild and dangerous as he breathed. Beck was mesmerised by the sight of the man, fierce and proud, and spectacularly adorned with technicolour feathered plumes and red, yellow and white paint. It would have been like shooting a lion or a tiger, only this man was something rarer, a migrant from an age lost to modern civilisation. In that instant, Beck felt a distant connection with the proud and dangerous warrior. The SAS trooper registered the highlander’s finger squeezing the trigger repeatedly and he realised that he should be dead. The weapon’s magazine was spent. The tribesman knew he’d lost this encounter when the rifle in his hands refused to fire. He flung it down, turned and ran, disappearing into the jungle, gone in an instant like a dream that dissolves into an uncertain waking memory.
‘Shit,’ said Beck. He blinked several times and sucked in a lungful of the wet mountain air as his heart pounded. He felt like a man who’d played dead while a bear sniffed him over, expecting the ruse to be discovered at any moment. ‘Shit,’ he said again under his breath. He stood and looked around, regaining his composure in time to see a band of naked men from the village charge into the bush, giving chase to the retreating marauders. They’d picked up some of the dropped weapons and were firing them on the run, chasing the attackers. Two warriors from the village fell from the pack as they ran, victims of friendly fire, just as the melee reached the treeline. The party giving chase disappeared from view at that instant, but their path through the dense bush was marked by the clatter of semiautomatic fire that frightened birds from the trees.