He grinned at the wiry sergeant and glanced round at the four other members of Zulu Three Six patrol as they melted into the dank foliage. Immediately behind him was a sharp-faced trooper named Ricky Sutton, the patrol signaller. At twenty-three, Sutton was the youngest and least experienced member of the team. Covering Sutton's back as he worked was Stan Clayton, a long-serving and famously mouthy cockney corporal, and on the other side of the clearing, shadowy in the dimness, crouched Lance Wilford and Jimmy "Dog' Kenilworth, a corporal and a lance-corporal respectively. Like Alex, they were dressed in sodden jungle kit and webbing, and carrying M16 203 rifles and a sheathed parang.
Beneath the frayed rims of their bush-hats their faces were blackened with cam-stick. All had compasses attached to their wrists and rifles.
At Don Hammond's sign, the patrol members quietly lowered their heavy Bergan rucksacks and began to cache them. Mosquitoes whined around them, settling greedily on their hands and faces. A couple of the men had leeches visible at their necks and wrists, and Alex guessed that they all had at least half a dozen sucking away beneath their wet shirts and combat trousers.
Crouching in the dank foliage, Hammond unfurled the aerial of the sat-coin radio, and reported the patrol's position and the direction of the small-arms fire to the SAS base in Freetown. When Hammond had completed the report Alex resumed the lead scout position. Signing for the rest of the patrol to follow, he set off towards the distant gunfire.
This was it, he thought this had to be it and breathed a silent prayer of thanks to the gods of war.
He was thirty-five years old and a commissioned officer, and both facts militated against him. SAS officers, or "Ruperts' as they were known, were usually directed into planning roles, while the 'chopping' was done by the troopers and NCOs. As a Rupert, Alex was lucky to be here at all. Somehow, against all the odds, it seemed that he had been granted one last adventure.
Zulu Three Six patrol was searching for a missing ITN news crew.
The journalists reporter Sally Roberts, cameraman Ben Mills and sound recordist Gary Burge had been missing for more than thirty-six hours now. They had last been seen in the town of Masiaka, thirty-five miles inland from the capital, Freetown. Masiaka was a strategically important staging post, and its mildewed and flyblown bungalows had been much fought over in the dirty war between the Sierra Leone army and the Revolutionary United Front. At present it was in the hands of pro-government forces and so considered more or less safe for Western media teams.
According to the Agence France Presse people who'd been showing them around, Sally Roberts and her team had arrived in Masiaka intending to interview members of a notoriously volatile pro-government militia known as the West Side Boys. The ITN team had hoped to find the militia's commanders at the mildewed and bullet pocked bungalow that served as their HQ, but on arriving there had discovered that the occupants had decamped eastwards in pursuit of an RUF raiding party.
Undeterred, and against the advice of the other Western press agencies, the ITN team had decided to follow the West Side Boys into the RUF-held badlands and at dawn the next day had set off on the Kissuna Road in a hired car. No one in Masiaka knew what had happened to Roberts, Mills and Burge after that. No one had seen them and no one had heard from them, despite the fact that all three were carrying sat-phones.
From evidence later provided by militia members it seemed that the West Side Boys had followed the raiding party far into RUF territory and that a vicious but inconclusive firefight had taken place near Kissuna, after which the militia had withdrawn back towards Masiaka. During the battle, as usual, most of the combatants had been blind drunk; the RUF on palm wine, the West Side Boys on the plastic bags of raw gin that they habitually carried. A dozen or so fighters, several of them children, had been killed on both sides.
When the ITN team neither returned that night, nor contacted anyone in Masiaka, people began to wonder. At noon the following day, fearing the worst, a BBC news crew filmed an interview with a West Side Boys militia leader called "Colonel Self Loading. Within two hours of the interview, and following a swift triangular exchange of secure calls between Freetown, Whitehall and Hereford, an unedited video copy of the film was running at SAS HQ, Freetown. The HQ was a former security complex on the edge of Lungi airport -a scruffily anonymous cluster of tents, low Nissen-style huts and radio masts. Watching the video clip were Major David Ross, OC of the forty-strong detachment from "D' Squadron, and Captain Alex Temple of the Regiment's Revolutionary Warfare Wing.
The twenty-minute clip made for grim viewing.
Colonel Self-Loading's eyes were red with fatigue, ganja and trail dust but he was certain of his facts: no Western correspondent had spoken to any member of the West Side Boys since their departure from Masiaka two days earlier. And certainly no Western woman.
If the team had been anywhere near the Kissuna battle zone, the colonel told the BBC interviewer, then they had probably been lifted by the RUF. Even now, he said, the woman was probably being asked if she wanted 'long sleeves' or 'short sleeves' amputation above or below the elbow. Hacking off arms was the RUF's calling-card. Recently, they had extended the practice to genitals. Once mutilated, victims were made to sit in bowls of caustic soda.
"And maybe they eat them, you know." The young colonel shrugged, reaching under his Tupac Shakur Tshirt to scratch his belly.
"Food is short."
Colonel Self-Loading was in a position to know about the RUF's dietary habits. A year earlier the West Side Boys had sided with the rebels, sweeping down to occupy Freetown on a manic tide of blood and slaughter, and to the thumping beat of the RUF anthem "No Living Thing'. The conversion of the West Side Boys to the government's way of seeing things a conversion which was rewarded by British mercenaries with a thirty-five-ton sanctions-busting consignment of Bulgarian weaponry was comparatively recent. If Colonel Self-Loading said that the RUF ate human flesh, then they did.
"You see, this is a bad war," he declared to the camera with all the authority of his nineteen years.
"A
very bad war."
Excusing himself, he explained to the interviewer that he was off to find a 'popsicle' an iced lolly made of neat gin -and a woman.
"Doesn't look good," said Alex levelly, when the footage came to a close.
"Nor it does," said David Ross.
"And I've got a feeling it might be coming our way."
Alex nodded.
"I'll put my lads on standby."
"Do that," agreed Ross.
The Revolutionary Warfare Wing, from which Alex twelve-strong team had been drawn, is the most secretive element of the SAS and the unit's existence has never been officially admitted. Its purpose is the execution of officially deniable tasks and contracts, including the covert training of overseas 'friendlies'. These last have included the Mujahedin of Afghanistan and the Cambodian Khmer Rouge.
On this occasion, rather less controversially, Alex Temple's team were in Freetown as part of a training package for the Sierra Leone army. They found it uninspiring work and between exercises were glad to return to the temporary base they shared with the forty men of "D' Squadron.
At twenty minutes after 5 p.m. Alex was summoned to the OC's hut for the second time that afternoon. In a few succinct sentences David Ross put him in the picture concerning the kidnap of the ITN team. The squadron would be mounting a search operation that night, Ross informed Alex, and the RWW team would remain on standby at the base to help with the planning of a rescue.