I broke off as a hefty, low-pitched hoo-hoo sounded somewhere close above us, and I looked up to see a huge bird pass silently overhead, a fast-moving silhouette, black against the stars.
‘Jesus!’ exclaimed Chalky White. ‘A bloody great owl.’
‘Where?’ Everyone started craning their necks around.
‘It went thataway.’ Chalky pointed towards the village.
Seconds later, from among the grass huts, there burst an eruption of noise: people yelling, pots and pans being hammered. We stood up to get a better view, and Pavarotti nipped across to the nearest pinkie, where he grabbed a spot-lamp, switched it on and swept the beam over the shiny, dark-green canopy of the mango trees which rose above the settlement.
‘It must be a great eagle owl,’ said Mart Stanning, our medic, who’d got talking about birds to one of the Alpha guys. ‘The locals don’t like them. They reckon the devil uses owls for transport, so it’s bad news if one comes into the village. If it sits on the roof of a house, it means someone in that family’s going to die before morning.’
‘Cheerful lot, these buggers,’ said Pavarotti. ‘With that racket under it, I don’t reckon the bird’ll so much as touch down, let alone stay long enough to organise a funeral—’
The rest of his sentence was cut off by a hollow report, and we saw a spurt of flame shoot into the air.
‘Christ!’ exclaimed Danny Stewart. ‘The headman’s let drive with that bloody old muzzle-loader he showed us. I hope it hasn’t killed him.’
We’d seen the weapon a couple of days earlier — a fearsome, home-made contraption about six feet long, held together with rusty wire and leather thongs, which the owner displayed proudly, showing us how much powder he would load: two fingers’ width for an antelope, three for a buffalo, four for an elephant. We reckoned any discharge would be a greater threat to him than to whatever he fired at, but clearly the gun was his pride and joy. At the same time, we couldn’t help noticing that he’d lost his left thumb.
Danny — a compact little Yorkshireman with fine, sandy hair — had a funny habit of dropping his chin and rotating his head through half a circle, as if he were trying to peel his neck away from his collar, whenever he came up with a commentary on anything interesting that happened. Now he did just that as he said, ‘It’s quietened the buggers, anyway, the old gun.’
‘Aye,’ Pavarotti agreed. ‘From the way the commotion’s died down, I reckon the bird’s got away. If they’d dropped it, they’d be screeching something horrible.’
We settled back round the fire and started talking about our tour. Looking at the faces again, I realised that Chalky had gone almost as dark as some of the Africans. It’s standard practice for anyone with the surname White to be called Chalky, but with this one there was some point, because he had jet black hair and a swarthy complexion. What with his tan, and the fact he hadn’t shaved for a couple of days, you could hardly see him in the firelight.
Stringer looked like the butcher’s boy he’d been: rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed, big, powerful, a fitness freak. In the UK he spent hours in the gym, and here in the bush he was constantly skipping or doing press-ups or dips between two boxes set out a couple of feet apart. Also, he couldn’t resist the long tendrils of creeper trailing from big trees in the forest; whenever he found some good ones, he was up them in a flash, earning derisive shouts of ‘Fucking Tarzan!’ He was also our best linguist, with reasonably fluent Arabic and Russian. Neither of those was any cop here, but he’d already picked up a useful amount of Nyanja, the language common to the various native tribes in the area.
Pavarotti, the biggest guy in the team, always fighting his weight, was pretty dark as well. His rubbery face — typically Welsh — seemed to have grown larger, its tan emphasising his heavy features and thick eyebrows. Apart from Whinger and myself, Pav was the oldest of the lads, at around thirty-one or thirty-two. Among many other hairy tasks, he’d taken part in our Kremlin job a year earlier, and his strength had saved the day when we were struggling to hoist a suitcase bomb into position in the tunnel under the Moscow river. That episode had finally cured his phobia about being caught in confined spaces.
As for Whinger, he and I had survived numerous dodgy situations together, in Belfast, Libya, Colombia and Grozny, not to mention England itself, and I’d come to rely on his coolness and efficiency, whatever the threat. We’d worked together for so long that I took his presence, and his bastard rhyming slang, for granted. The guys who knew him less well had been puzzled at first when he started talking about ‘silveries’, and I had to explain the derivation of the term: silver spoon — coon. The moment they got it, everyone took it up.
Aside from Whinger and Pav, the lads were all around the twenty-seven, twenty-eight mark, and although I’d never worked with any of them, I felt solidly confident about their capabilities. They were well tried and tested, and so far on this trip they’d been a hundred per cent. Mart Stanning, for instance, was an excellent operator. Slim and wiry, and so fair that people often mistook him for a Dane or a Dutchman, he stood out even among our own lads. Unlike Genesis, he tanned easily, and while the sun was bleaching his hair, it was darkening his skin, so that he looked as though he was wearing a straw-coloured cap. To the Africans he was a phenomenon, and they referred to him by a native name that meant ‘Yellow Doctor’. They quickly saw that he was a good practitioner, and every morning he had to conduct a regular surgery, treating sores and septic wounds by the dozen, and doling out harmless aspirin for things like cancerous growths which he couldn’t deal with.
The one guy I had reservations about was Andy Dean, who was away on the supply run. That May he’d got married to Penny, a farmer’s daughter from Shropshire, and most of the team had been to his wedding near Ludlow. I’m afraid we behaved in typical SAS fashion, collaring a table in a corner of the big tent and getting stuck into the champagne without bothering to make polite conversation to the other guests. Then, before we left the UK, Andy had bought a cottage in Kilpeck, a village near Hereford. The house was more than a hundred years old, and tiny. It needed a hell of a lot doing to it to make it habitable, and I knew the mortgage payments were going to stretch him to the limit. Once or twice in Kamanga I’d found him looking preoccupied. His heart didn’t seem to be in the job, and it was obvious financial worries were preying on his mind.
Except for myself, married and widowed, and Whinger, who’d been married for a couple of years, but then divorced, without any kids, Andy was the only one who’d got spliced, and with the dire record of the Regiment in this area, everyone was waiting to see how long it would last. Several of the others had woman problems, but nothing that wouldn’t wait the six weeks until we were home again. Looking round the circle again, I reckoned we were a pretty typical SAS team: all fit, all well built, all fairly undemonstrative, all quick on our feet, both physically and mentally, all able to do each other’s jobs, should the need arise.
Before we’d come out, Stringer had got quite excited about the trip, his first to Africa. He thought it was going to be a great adventure: the Dark Continent and all that. Now, by the fire, Whinger said cynically, ‘Didn’t I tell you? It’s like I said. Where’s the action? Here we are, miles from anywhere. No bar for a thousand miles. Bugger all entertainment. HIV wherever you look.’
‘Come on!’ said Pav. ‘We’re gonna have a ball!’
‘Have your motor flown out, Pav,’ Danny told him. ‘Take it for a drive on the Chiwembe highway.’
‘Thanks, mate. As long as you stump up for the repair bills.’
Just before we went to Russia, Pav had bought a second-hand XJ 120 Jaguar, flame red, and the wretched thing had become the love of his life. No matter that it had already put six points on his licence, at the slightest opportunity he was away down to Ross and the M50 for what he called a pipe-opener. The idea of driving it out here, on the dirt roads, made him groan.