I was just in time. If we hadn’t been prepared, the jets would have given us a bad fright. Even with hands clasped to our heads we were rocked by the thunderclap of their engines as they roared past, with fire blazing from the tails as their re-heats blasted them upwards and over the ridge.
For a moment Tim was shaken, but he recovered immediately and said, ‘That’s what I want to do.’
‘Be a pilot? Well, if you could hack it, at least you’d see some action. The fast-jet boys are always the ones who get deployed.’
We talked about the G-forces the pilots would be experiencing — how, if you pull five G, you can hardly lift your hands off your knees, your head weighs the equivalent of fifty pounds, and all your blood tries to run down to your feet, so that only the special suit you’re wearing prevents you passing out.
By then the clouds were thinning and breaking, and I pointed out various landmarks as they came into sight. At last we skirted Cribben and moved out on to the short, dry grass that sloped gently up to the summit. I almost said, ‘Race you to the top,’ but I knew I couldn’t accelerate to save my life. Tim was ahead anyway, so I just called, ‘On you go. I’ll see you up there.’
Five minutes later we were sitting in bright sunshine on top of the mountain, where the trig stone used to stand, with a 360-degree panorama spread out below us. I felt a little flutter of elation at having reached the highest point and seeing all the familiar landmarks, even if it was for the last time.
‘Chicken or BLT?’ I said, breaking out the sandwiches.
‘What’s BLT?’
‘Bacon, lettuce and tomato, with mayonnaise.’
‘Chicken, please.’
‘There you go.’ I handed him the packet, along with a can of Coke. ‘Get that down you, and I’ll tell you about the witch doctor.’
‘What’s a witch doctor?’
‘Someone who puts spells on you.’
‘Why does he do it, though?’
‘Well — for money. He’s like a combination of doctor and magician. People pay him to cure them of diseases and suchlike.’
‘What does he look like?’
‘I expect they are all different. But the one we saw was tall and thin.’
‘Like Rasputin?’
‘Let’s see.’ I was thrown for a moment, because that was the name we’d given one of the Russian mercenaries we came across in Kamanga. Then I said, ‘The mad monk, you mean?’
‘In Anastasia.’
‘Oh, that one. No, not like him. For one thing our witch doctor was black, and for another he didn’t have a beard.’
The boy was staring at me, full of curiosity. ‘Were you scared of him, Dad?’
‘Not at first. I thought he was a phoney. But later, yes. I did get very scared, with all the things that happened. Come on, now, eat your lunch, and I’ll tell you.’
TWO
Every day for the past couple of weeks the sun had grown slightly hotter, until at noon the temperature had started to hit the low nineties. But the nights were still quite chilly, and now once again, as full darkness closed in, the air was cooling quickly.
As if reacting to a command, several of the lads moved closer to the fire, all at the same moment, dragging their seats forward so that the steel ammunition boxes grated over the beaten earth. We’d made the fire in typical Kamangan fashion, with branches of dead mopane wood pointing inwards like the spokes of a cartwheel, so that all you had to do to stoke the blaze from time to time was to push a piece inwards towards the hub. Mopane, we’d soon discovered, was an ideal fuel. The sticks burned so steadily that they’d smoulder all night, but you could make them flare up again into a hot fire when you revived them in the morning.
Above us, the leaves of two big mahogany trees shivered as a breeze ran through them, and all around in the bush crickets were sounding off a continuous, zinging buzz. From the edge of the village, a hundred metres away, came bursts of laughter and chat as the locals brewed up supper, separated from us only by a grass stockade they’d built in a pathetic attempt to deter elephants from raiding their little stores of maize.
I looked round the circle of familiar faces. Including myself, there were eight of us, all with low-mow haircuts. One of the traditions in the Regiment is that nobody need have a squaddie’s traditional short back-and-sides. Recently, it was true, one or two officious individuals had crept up through ranks and gone about fining people anything from £50 to £100 for looking unkempt. But that was exceptional. It was also ridiculous, because one of the SAS’s skills has always been to blend in with the local population. Here in Africa there was no chance of that, and for this trip to a hot and bug-ridden country everyone had opted for crew-cuts, so the guys had a vaguely American appearance.
The glow of the flames was softening their complexions, even Whinger Watson’s. The ruddy light seemed to iron some of the wrinkles out of his face; certainly it disguised the grey bristles in his Mexican-type moustache. Like me, he was heading for forty, and had that strained, heavily lined appearance which SAS guys tend to get from repeatedly pushing themselves to their physical limits, and also from the mental stress of working and playing hard; but now he looked ten years younger. He and I were so much the senior members of the party that we spent a lot of time together, and tended to compare notes about the younger guys, almost as if they were apprentices in our trade.
After a fortnight of African winter sun, everyone had started to acquire a serious tan. Everyone, that is, except Pete Jones, known to all as Genesis from his tireless reading of the Bible. He, poor bugger, with his gingery hair and freckled skin, had immediately started to burn: he’d had to wear a wide-brimmed hat and keep his sleeves rolled down to stop himself being sizzled. Also, he’d reacted violently to the bites of mozzies and tsetse flies. All of us had got bitten, but whereas the rest had developed nothing worse than itchy bumps, Genesis had come up in horrific-looking blisters full of yellow fluid, all along the insides of his forearms.
‘How are the bites, Gen?’ I asked.
‘So-so,’ he replied — from which I knew they must be itching horrendously, because he always played down any problem he had. Lately he’d started carrying on about how the Lord had inflicted Job with boils, and my enquiry set him off again.
‘“Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth,”’ he went in his singsong Welsh lilt, shining a pencil torch into the pages of his little bible, with its battered cover of white leather, which he kept about his person twenty-four hours a day. ‘“Therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty. For he maketh sore, and bindeth up; he woundeth and his hands make whole.”’
‘But what have you done to annoy the Big Boss?’ I asked.
‘Our sins are not to be accounted for,’ he replied. But Pavarotti Price, our other Welshman, who was twice Genesis’s size and famous for the fact that he had a Chinese-looking eye tattooed on either cheek of his arse, groaned, ‘Ah, for fuck’s sake! Give over.’
Genesis looked at him coolly over the top of his bible, then closed the book without remonstrating. That was typical of him: he had such a forgiving nature that he could rise above any number of obscenities, and never resorted to any himself. Sometimes one of the lads got seriously pissed off with his pious attitude, but everyone had to respect the guy for his integrity and professional skills. Now Pav, having bollocked him, gave him a friendly grin to show he meant no harm. He was amused by the fact that Genesis obviously felt at home in Kamanga, where the colonial missionary influence had left many of the men with biblical Christian names: David, James, Joseph, Philemon, Isaac.
Tilting the face of his watch towards the fire, Pav said, ‘They’re late.’