"That's it."
"If they begin asking questions, I reply, "Your message not understood. Your transmission breaking up and unreadable."
I repeat, "Arriving late", and then I sign off." Craig stood by anxiously while the guerrilla made the radio transmission, listening to the unintelligible bursts of Shana from the operator at Tuti camp, but he was unable to detect any trace of suspicion or alarm in the static distorted voice.
The guerrilla imposter signed off and handed the mi croP phone back to Craig. "He says it is understood. They expect us in the night." "Good. Now we can eat and rest." However, Craig could not eat. His stomach was queasy ith tension for the night ahead and from reaction to the w ghastly violence at the bridge. Those pan gas wielded with pentup hatred, had inflicted hideous mutilation. Many times during the long bush war he had witnessed death in some of its most unlovely forms, but had never become accustomed to it, it still made him sick to the guts.
here is too much moon," Craig thought as he peered out from under the canvas canopy of the leading truck. It was only four days from full and it to shadows de so high and so bright as to cast hard-edged on the earth. The truck lurched and jolted over the rough tracks and dust filtered up and clogged his throat.
He had not dared to ride in the cab, not even with his face blackened. A sharp eye would have picked him out readily. Comrade Lookout sat up beside the driver, dressed in the subaltern's spare uniform complete with beret and shoulder-flashes. Beside him was the Shana-speaker wearing the second beret. The heavy machine-guns were loaded and cocked, each served by a picked man, and eight others dressed in looted uniforms rode up on the coach work in plain view, while the remainder crouched with Craig under the canvas canopy.
"So far, everything is going well," Sarah murmured.
"So far," Craig agreed. "But I prefer bad starts and happy endings-" There were three taps on the cab, beside Craig's head.
That was Comrade Lookout's signal that the camp was in sight.
"Well, one way or the other, here we go." Craig twisted round to peer through the pee -hole he had cut in the canvas hood. p He could make out the watchtowers of the camp, looking like oil-rigs againk the moon-bright sky, and there was a glint of barbed wire Then quite suddenly the sky lit up. The floodlights -on their poles around the perimeter of the camp glowed and then bloomed with stark white light.
The entire compound was illuminated with noon-day brilliance.
"The generator," Craig groaned. "Oh, Christ, they've Started the generator to welcome us in." Craig had made his first mistake. He had planned for everything to happen in darkness, with only the truck headlights to dazzle and confuse the camp guards. And yet, he now realized how logical and obvious it was for the guards to light up the camp to check the arrival of the convoy and to facilitate the unloading.
They were committed already. They could only ride on into the glare of floodlights, and Craig was helpless, pinned by the lights beneath the canopy, not even able to communicate with Comrade Lookout in the cab in front of him. Bitterly reviling himself for not having planned for this contingency, he kept his eye to the peepholes The guards were not opening the gates, there was the sandbagged machine-gun emplacement to one side of the guard house, and Craig could see the barrel of the weapon traversing slowly to keep them covered as they approached.
The guard was turning out, four troopers and a noncommissioned officer, falling in outside the guardroom.
The sergeant stepped in front of the leading truck as it drove up to the gate and held up one hand. As the truck pulled up he came round to the offside window, asked a question in Shana, and the bereted guerrilla answered him easily. But immediately the sergeant's tone altered, clearly the reply had been incorrect. His voice rose, became hectoring and strident. He was outside Craig's limited le of vision, but Craig saw the armed guard react. They circ began to unsling their rifles, started to spread out to cover the truck, the bluff was over before it had begun.
Craig tapped the leg of the uniformed guerrilla standing above him. It was the signal, and the guerrilla lobbed the t grenade that he was holding in his right hand with the pin already drawn. It went up in a high, lazy parabola and dropped neatly into the machine-gun emplacement.
At the same instant, Craig said quietly to the man on either side of him, "Kill them." They thrust the muzzles of their AKs through the firing slits in the canopy and the range was less than ten paces.
The volley ripped into the unprepared guards before they could bring up their weapons. The sergeant raced back towards the guard-room door, but Comrade Lookout leaned out of the cab with the Tokarev pistol in a stiffarined double grip and shot him twice in the back.
As the sergeant sprawled, the grenade burst behind the sandbags, and the barrel of the heavy machinegun swivelled aimlessly towards the sky as the hidden gunner was torn by flying shrapnel.
"Drive" Craig stuck his head and shoulders through the slit in the canopy, and yelled at the driver through the open window of the cab. "Smash through the gate!" The powerful diesel of the Toyota bellowed, and the truck surged forward. There was a rending crash, and the vehicle bucked and shuddered, checked for an instant, and then roared into the brightly lit compound, dragging a tangle of barbed-wire and shattered gate-timbers behind it.
Craig scrambled up beside the machine-gunner on the cab.
t(Dri the left-" He directed his fire at the barrack room of adobe and thatch beside the gate. The machine-gunner fired a long burst into the knot of halfnaked troopers as they spilled out of the front door.
"Guard tower on the right." They were receiving fire from the two guards in the tower. It hissed and cracked around their heads like the lash of a stock whip. The machine-gunner traversed and elevated, and the belted *'nmunition fed into the clattering breech and empty ca*s poured in a glittering stream from the ejector slide. Splinters of timber and glass flew from the walls and windows of the tower, and the two guards were picked up and flung backwards by the solid strike of shot.