My only thought was that there was just one aircraft now, and four places already taken.
Sam yelled to get the gunner’s attention, then Standish was at his shoulder. ‘Boxes! Boxes! Boxes!’
The gunner turned, dark helmet visor covering his face. Standish mimed a rectangle with his hands. The gunner gave a curt nod. They knew what they were here for.
We shouldered the boxes from the wagon to the Seahawk, running, bent double under the weight, our sweat-soaked bodies caked with sand.
That was it then, fuck it, we were going to be leaving here cross-country. At least we wouldn’t be chased. The Cobras hit them with a few more long bursts, and flatbeds were scattered and burning like targets in a computer game. The 20mms even took on the bodies spilling out of the wrecked vehicles. They had an aircraft down: they wanted to kill each and every one of them now, kids or not.
Sam and I lugged the last two boxes, and as I reached the aircraft I could see Standish and the general already on board. As soon as our load had been transferred he thumbed the pilot to get airborne.
Sam grabbed Standish’s leg. Over the roar of the quickening rotors he yelled, ‘Annabel and the boy! Annabel and the boy!’ He spun round to me. ‘I’ll go get ’em!’
He disappeared into the dustcloud as I attacked the legs of one of the gunners, trying to signal to him that there were two more coming. In the end, I had to climb on board to make my point. Standish glared at me, trying to work out what was happening. Why weren’t they just lifting off?
I showed the gunner and Standish two fingers. They got the message.
There was a yell from below. Sam was at the door. He held up the boy like a begging bowl. Behind them, Annabel materialized out of the choking dust.
Standish looked around him at the payload and fucked the pair of them off with the back of his hand. He yelled at the gunner and jerked his thumb skywards.
The gunner’s helmet and visor swivelled, and there was another jerk of the thumb.
The aircraft shuddered and started to lift.
Dropping on to the London Delivery boxes, I held out my hands.
Sam lifted the boy towards me as he kicked Annabel up on to the skid. She gripped the sill, ready to climb.
Standish went ballistic. He yelled, then stamped on Annabel’s fingers.
I grabbed the boy’s skinny wrists and he hung for a moment like a slab of dead meat as the heli lifted higher and he slid from Sam’s arms.
I was leaving the team. This was wrong – I should be with them.
The heli turned and dust swirled round us. I lost sight of Sam. I wanted him to know this wasn’t the way I wanted it to be; it wasn’t my fault I was on board.
Annabel held on grimly but her fingers were slipping. Then Standish kicked again and the force of the turning heli was too much for her. She was flung away from the sill and the skid, and swallowed instantly by the blizzard of sand.
I held the dangling boy, trying desperately to keep a grip and drag him inside. His eyes were glued to mine. It was pointless shouting at him over the scream of the rotors; I just stared back, trying to give him some hope as his legs flailed about, searching for the skid.
I gave one final pull, but his wrists and my hands were too slippery with blood and sweat. It was like trying to grip a couple of wet eels.
He slipped away from me. His eyes, wide and petrified, stayed fixed on mine as he fell and disappeared into the blizzard, just like Annabel.
The Seahawk soared out of the rotors’ sandstorm. Within seconds it was a hundred feet off the ground.
It was far too late for me to jump. I saw Sam, far below us, on his knees beside the boy. Annabel lay motionless, face down in the scrub.
As we climbed, I saw Davy running towards them from his wagon. Beyond, burning wrecks sent plumes of black smoke into the sky. Bodies lay scattered below the Cobra two-ship that hovered to cover our withdrawal. Grey smoke puffed from their 20mms and the rounds bounced off the ground like hard rain hitting a pond.
I turned towards Standish.
He wasn’t interested in anything on the ground. He was already giving the general a slap on the shoulder and a big victory grin.
PART TWO
Café Raffaelli
Lugano, Switzerland
Thursday, 8 June 2006
1
There’s an entire street of jewellers and designer clothes shops in Lugano that probably shift half of Prada’s and Rolex’s annual output between them. You can positively smell the money walking along Riva Albertolli, or resting its rather large arse at one of the outdoor cafés beside the lake.
The small but perfectly formed city is in the south-east, Italian-speaking region of Switzerland, just ten minutes’ drive from the border. It’s unlike anywhere else in the land of Toblerone and tax-dodging; for starters, the mountains protect it from the north wind, so the place enjoys its own temperate microclimate. In fact, the whole place is Little Italy, from the frescos in the cathedral-sized churches to the brands of ice-cream sold on the palm-tree-lined boulevards. The only thing non-Italian is the driving. This is still Switzerland, after all.
Silky had been working at the Mercy Flight office ever since we’d got there. ‘It’s the only way I don’t feel guilty about my life,’ she said. ‘A year or two on the road, six months putting something back.’
Her office was as close to the Gucci quarter as the charity could afford so it could tap into some of that passing wealth. She and I had got into the habit of meeting for lunch at one of the pavement restaurants; she took an hour off from saving the world, and I took an hour off from reading the English papers and wishing we were back on the road.
We’d been in Lugano a month, and as far as I was concerned that was three and a half weeks too long. I wanted us to be in the Far East, India, any of the places we’d talked about. Maybe even back to Australia. I didn’t really care where, quite frankly, so long as she came with me.
She’d fucked me off on that idea for a month or two, but to make sure she didn’t fuck me off altogether, my Visa card had just taken a two-thousand-Swiss-franc dent – and all I had to show for it was a little box containing a billion-billionth of the world’s gold reserves and a diamond you needed an electron microscope to see. She often said that less was more, and I hoped she’d stick to her guns on that, but in any case, it was all I could afford. I needed to keep something back for my airfare to Sydney, and a few weeks’ pocket money in case there were no freefall meets and therefore no rigs to pack to make enough to live on. She had money, of course, but that wasn’t the point.
I’d been tempted to head straight from the jeweller’s to her office and get it over and done with, but quickly thought better of it. When it came to a sense of humour, there were some areas where she remained decidedly German. If I was going to sweep her off her feet, I had to do it correctly.
So I wandered down the road instead, bought a copy of The Times for the price of a paperback, and pulled up a chair at Raffaelli’s, her favourite outdoor place.
I ordered a cappuccino, put on my shades and got to grips with the day’s front page as the sun beat down on my neck. Same old, same old. Car bomb in Baghdad. Political scandal in Washington. And the big news from London? John Prescott playing croquet when he should have been running the country.
I couldn’t be arsed to read on. I put the paper on the table and stretched my legs and arms as I looked out over the lake.
There wasn’t a breath of wind: Lake Lugano was a mirror, reflecting the sun back at a cloudless sky. There had to be worse places on earth to sit and pass the time of day.