The sight of four armed guys in DPMs, two black, two white, gave him a horrible fright. He jumped backwards, tried to run, fell over, and then raised his hands in a pathetic gesture of surrender. By the time we got to him, he was on his knees, eyeballs rotating like crazy. We could see straight away that he was covered in cuts, with dust and dried blood crusting over them, and that he had metal shackles on his ankles. But it wasn’t until Andy went round behind him and whistled in amazement that we realised how badly he’d been injured. His tattered blue shirt had been torn into vertical strips, and so had the skin on his back. From shoulder to arse he was ripped and scarified, with shreds of skin hanging off, as if he’d been dragged over a bed of nails. The backs of his legs were the same. The wounds were fresh, with some of the blood not yet congealed, and flies crawling all over.
‘Tell him he’s safe,’ I said, and when Joss translated, the man’s fear visibly declined.
‘Water,’ I told Andy. ‘Give him a drink.’
Andy pulled a bottle out of his belt kit and handed it over.
Between gulps, the miserable creature choked out his story. His village had been destroyed by the rebels, he said.
‘First they bombed,’ Joss translated.
‘With aircraft?’
‘No aircraft. With guns. Shells. Some people were killed. Many ran away into the bush. Then the Afundis came and set fire to the huts. They raped the women — themselves first, then with knives in the belly. They cut the children into pieces.’
‘Okay, okay. Where was it?’
The man turned and made a big gesture towards the south. ‘Many days’ walking’ was the only way he could describe the location.
‘How did he get here, then?’
He’d been captured and taken for slave labour, driven off in a truck to rebuild the road from Gutu to the border. Places where floods had washed it away in the rainy season. He’d escaped during the night when a gang of workmen was being transported to a new location further west. He’d managed to secrete a hacksaw blade, and had sawed through the chain of his shackles during the journey.
At first we got the impression he’d just jumped off the truck; then he explained that he’d wriggled down over the side, between the rim of the body and the canvas top, and clung there, not daring to drop because they were travelling so fast. A minute or two later they’d come to a place where thorn bushes had grown over, nearly closing the track, and suddenly he’d found himself being ripped to pieces, all along his back. When the vehicle slowed, he’d dropped off.
‘Can you show us the road, then?’ I asked gently.
The man pointed over the sea of bush ahead of us, and his answer came back via Joss, ‘Half a day.’
‘At his rate, half a day’s only a couple of ks,’ I went. ‘Let’s get down there and have a look.’
‘Wait,’ said Joss. ‘He says he has something important to tell you.’
‘Go on, then.’
‘Tonight a convoy is coming back along this same road…’ The refugee talked in slow, painful sentences, and Joss patiently relayed the details. ‘From the border. It is bringing arms and ammunition for the garrison at Gutu.’
I felt a surge of excitement, but all I said was, ‘How does he know?’
‘He heard Afundi officers speaking.’
‘Tonight — is he sure?’
The man nodded vigorously.
‘How many vehicles?’
‘He thinks three or four. One of them will be the truck he jumped off.’
‘Right, then.’ I glanced at Andy and saw he was thinking the same as me. ‘Kaingo, get Mart to do what he can about his wounds. Andy and I are going down to recce that road.’
The reason we hadn’t spotted the track was that it ran across our front in a long, shallow valley, out of our sight as we were advancing. But there it was, just as the man had described it: a narrow, sandy track, so little used that seedling trees and bushes had sprouted up all over it, and in many places vegetation had closed in from the sides, halving its width. This squared with descriptions we’d heard of how, before the civil war, Bakunda had deliberately let roads serving Gutu go to pot, in a clumsy attempt to increase the security of the mine, while he himself relied on aircraft to lift supplies in and diamonds out. But now, on this one, there were tyre tracks, and a litter of broken twigs that showed a vehicle had recently forced its way through.
One thought was uppermost in all our minds: ambush. Coming so soon after the exercise, this looked like a God-given opportunity to give the Kamangans live practice and prevent a load of weapons reaching the rebels. Joss was all for it. His eyes were gleaming as he said, ‘Oh, wah! Let’s just find a good site, and we’ll get on with it.’
Our recce didn’t take long. There were no footprints in the dust of the track, and we ourselves kept off it, moving parallel with its course until we came to a point where it swung left and right as it crossed a wide hollow, and then straightened as it disappeared over some higher ground beyond. Up there, thick bush was growing, but the depression was open — a great killing ground. For ten minutes we scanned with binoculars to make sure nobody else was on the move.
‘Lovely thicket, just the ticket,’ went Andy, imitating Whinger, but letting himself down by giving both halves of the rhyme instead of one.
‘Yeah,’ I agreed. ‘Let ’em come well down the slope into the open, and we’ve got ’em.’
In many ways the site was better than the one we’d chosen for the exercise, and Joss didn’t need long to work out a plan. Positions for right and left cut-off groups suggested themselves immediately. For RPGs and heavy machine guns, the range was point-blank; if the enemy vehicles reached the bottom of the slope, none of them would escape. There was even a bit of a hill out to the left from which a rear cut-off group could put down fire across the track on top of the rise, to take out anyone who tried to run off along it, and also, in the opposite direction, cover our own backs.
With all the drills fresh in people’s minds, everything seemed ridiculously simple. Nevertheless, we took all sensible precautions. Only once during our recce did we set foot on the road, and then we all crossed it together, brushing out our tracks behind us.
After scarcely an hour we were back at our bivouac site, and Joss again made careful models in the sand to brief his men. Then he took the commanders forward for their own recce, and Pavarotti helped them plan a cut-off barrier of claymores, with trip-wire triggers, in the bush on the south side of the track, to catch anybody who tried to break in that direction. We’d agreed that the SAS would take no direct part in the ambush itself, but that we’d be there close behind, in the background, to advise if anything went wrong.
Our best policy was obviously to leave our vehicles where they were, under guard, well out of the way, and move into position on foot. At 1630, after a meal, I gave everybody the same kind of bollocking as before, but tougher, telling them that this time the action was going to be for real, and they couldn’t afford any NDs or general faffing about.
‘The sky’s clear,’ I told them, looking up. ‘That means it’s going to be a fairly light night. The convoy will probably be driving without lights. If the wind gets up, we may not hear the engines until the last minute. So everybody needs to be on full alert. Your aim is very simple: destroy every enemy vehicle, and make sure no one gets out alive.’
With that, everybody tabbed forward, with three Kamangans humping the gun, spare barrel and tripod of their .50 machine gun, and two other guys carring spare ammunition.
Before the sun set at 1740 the whole party was in position. To keep things simple, I’d assigned the same back-ups as in the exercise: Pav behind the left cut-off, Andy behind the right, Genesis with the rear, Mart with myself and Whinger in the centre. We’d lent Joss one of our covert comms sets so that we could keep in touch with him, and we were close enough to talk to the rest of our lads, who stayed back with the vehicles, ready to move up as and when we called them.