The sergeant inclined his head towards the bush.
"Just moving the two guards that were here away from the path. We reckoned you'd be coming out about here."
"Did you kill them?"
"Yeah, course we did." He looked at Alex doubtfully.
"Are you OK? You look as if you've got some kind of head wound."
"Took a whack in the river on something. Stan dragged me in by the collar."
"Well, that'll have saved us all some paperwork.
Dead officers we don't need. Are you OK to tab back to Millwall, or do you want me to go?"
"I'm fine to go, Don."
"You sure? What's eight nines?"
Alex hesitated. The question seemed strangely unanswerable.
"And the motto of the Parachute Regiment?"
Again, Alex was silent. He'd begun his military career with the Paras but couldn't for the life of him .
Hammond nodded and glanced at Clayton.
"I'd say you're a bit concussed. I'll tab back to Millwall with Lance and pick up the home-bound chopper. You stay here and set up the assault."
Alex nodded. The sergeant was right. A single navigation error between here and Millwall more than an hour's night march through thick jungle could cost the captives their lives.
"Put it this way, Alex." Stan Clayton grinned.
"At least if you stay 'ere you're guaranteed to be here for the fireworks. Go back wiv a leakin' 'cad and Ross'll just send some other fucker."
"OK, guys, OK. I hear you," said Alex, raising his hands in mock surrender.
"Don, have you managed to draw a map of the camp?"
Hammond nodded, and pulled out a sheet of waterproof paper marked up with outlines and co-ordinates.
"Right," said Alex.
"The ITN people, when I saw them, were being held in the passage between these two cinder-block buildings here, which you've called Hut One and Hut Two. Was that how you saw it, Stan?"
"Yeah, it was."
"And from what I could see they looked very tired.
Their morale was poor. Each or any of them might be hurt, possibly badly. But I'd say that all three were definitely alive."
"Guarded?"
"One guy. Pink curly wig."
Hammond looked at Clayton, who nodded in confirmation.
"Weapons?" asked Hammond, still looking at Clayton.
"My guess would be that there are about a hundred and fifty SLRs in the camp one for each man. I saw a few AKs and RPGs, too, and there could be anything in those huts."
"Fields of fire?"
For five minutes Hammond submitted the two men to a detailed debrief Evidently suspicious of the accuracy of Alex's recall, given the captain's recent knock on the head, he made a point of verifying every fact with Clayton.
With the map filled in with as much detail as Alex and Stan Clayton could provide, Don Hammond radioed Zulu Three Five patrol who were observing the Arsenal camp ten kilo-metres away and reported that the hostages had been located. The patrol leader, a sergeant named Andy Maddocks, replied that he was pulling out immediately and estimated that he would reach Chelsea in about ninety minutes.
Alex then set off with Zulu Three Six patrol back up the track towards the Bergan cache. En route they checked the captive child-sentry, who was frightened but otherwise unharmed. Before the fighting started, Alex decided, he would release the poor little bugger into the jungle. Would that help him, or even save his life? Quite possibly not, he admitted to himself, but he couldn't play God.
When they reached the clearing where the Bergans were cached, Don Hammond radioed in a sat-coin report to David
Ross and then kept on going. It was 0145, and he and Lance Wilford had three-quarters of an hour in which to reach the Puma landing zone at Millwall. All things being equal he would be back in Freetown by 0300.
The assault the killing time -would come an hour later at first light when, with a bit of luck, the RUF forces would be sunk in drunken, exhausted sleep.
It wouldn't be a pushover, thought Alex, remembering the red-eyed fury with which the soldiers had roared out the words of "No Living Thing'. For all their gross in discipline for all their raping, mutilating, torture and murder the RUF were well-armed and they were certainly no cowards. They would fight and they would fight hard. Many of them believed themselves to be impervious to pain, and given the volume of ganja and palm wine they got through of an evening, they were probably right.
What did they intend to do to Sally Roberts and her crew if their demands were not met? Impossible to say, although given the cruelty and contempt with which the soldiers treated the African women at their disposal gang rape being the least of it he could hazard a guess at the female reporter's probable fate. The men would most likely be shot and dumped in the river.
But this, mused Alex, glancing at his wristwatch, was not going to happen. Instead, in just under two hours, Sally Roberts, Ben Mills and Gary Burge would be flown out of the camp code-named Chelsea in a Puma helicopter. And with any luck, they would be alive when it happened.
At the bottom of the slope, behind the tree roots, Zulu Three Six patrol sat tight. This time, as well as the sat-coin and the 319 patrol radio, they'd brought their individual Motorola UHF sets with them from the Bergan cache. Precisely coordinated operations like this one tended to be very comms-heavy. There was a worrying amount of movement near the hostages, Alex noticed, and he found himself straining to watch as the distant figures came and went beneath the strings of yellow light bulbs.
Cool it, he told himself. For the moment -for just afew hours more until the deadline the RUF need the news team alive.
At precisely 0230 Ricky Sutton set up the sat-coin to receive
Ross's scheduled transmission from Freetown. The incoming message was brief and to the point: Don Hammond and Lance Wilford had been ex filtrated from Millwall and were on their way back to base.
Assault time was estimated at 0400.
As the twenty-three-year-old trooper folded away the sat-coin aerial, Alex divided his team in half and disposed them in the jungle line in positions commanding broad arcs of fire over the camp. He himself took the western position with Sutton; Stan Clayton and Dog Kenilworth moved to the east.
Attaching the earpieces and throat mikes of their UHF sets, the patrol worked out their individual targets. When the time came, the impression given to the RUF had to be one of devastating force that they were under sustained attack from all sides. In truth, of course, the rebels would be heavily outgunning the SAS, but they must never be allowed to know this.
The camp's situation, Alex knew, would work against the rescue team. With the looping river at their backs the RUF had nowhere to flee to, and in the event of attack they would have no option but to face the jungle and the opposing fire team and shoot it out.
Desperation would make them very dangerous, there would be a huge volume of fire directed towards the two RWW patrols and once the helicopters were on the ground it was going to be very difficult to return that fire. The hostages and the assault and rescue teams would be right in the thick of it. They'd agreed over the radio that the incoming "D' Squadron soldiers would wear their bush-hats inside out with the orange band showing and not have any cam-cream on their faces, but it was still going to be very tricky knowing who was who first light or no first light.
The insects were silent, now, and the temperature finally falling. Around the shallow dugout that was Alex's firing position hovered the scent of the Sierra Leone night a pungent blend of wet clay, woodsmoke and rotting mangoes. To his left, manning the sat-coin and the patrol's 319 set, lay Ricky Sutton.
Alex had agreed with Don Hammond that the patrol would try a second swim past between 2.30 and 3 a.m.
to determine whether the hostages had been moved inside for the night. Stan Clayton had volunteered to go again, knowing as he did where the currents were most treacherous, and at 2.45 his narrow form slipped away eastwards, upstream of the camp. As he did so, Dog Kenilworth made his shadowy way to the downstream exit point to drag him up the river's sheer clay bank.