Standish broke the silence: ‘They’re over the coast and inbound. Let’s get on the wagons.’ He punched numbers into the pad; Sam called the guys and we started to board.
‘Commissioner, I’m preparing the team now. I’ll contact you as soon as I’ve made visual contact with the aircraft.’ He passed the handset to Annabel and went to look through the hole in the wall.
The rebels were still out and about, even this close to first light. Fires burned, vehicle lights bounced around in the distance. The boys were still partying hard. But come first light, I wasn’t sure which was going to be more dangerous – that lot out there, or the Cobra two-ship escort piloted by trigger-happy Americans.
We’d soon know. Light was brushing the far horizon and the sun would follow shortly. The Renaults coughed themselves to life and the compound filled with fumes.
At least it kept the flies off.
16
06:04 hours
All of us bar Davy were aboard just three wagons. He lay prone at the open gates, bipod dug into the sand, covering the ground the other side of the wall. We could see now that most of the bodies ripped open out there were kids’, but we ignored it. Or tried to . . .
Sam’s wagon was going to be first out, with me on the gun. Standish, Annabel and the kid were on the floor behind us. The next wagon had the general sitting in Frankenstein’s old seat, with the wooden boxes and remaining four blokes on the floor. The third wagon had just a driver, and Davy with the RPG. If he had to fire, he didn’t want to worry about live bodies getting in his way or taking the backblast. His only cargo was the Yammy 175, the three remaining RPG rounds, Gary and the royal sisters. The fourth wagon’s fuel had been siphoned and shared.
The mush of the sat comms cut out as Standish put the handset to his ear. The plan was that the Cobras would swoop in and protect us as we headed back the way we’d come and down into the dead ground where the Seahawks would pick us up. No one was sure how it was going to work, because there weren’t any comms between us and the helis.
‘They’re five minutes from target.’
Davy gave an urgent shout: ‘I’ve got vehicles at about seven or eight hundred. They’re kicking up a shitload of dust.’
Sam jumped out of the wagon and crawled alongside Davy in the gateway.
Almost immediately, he was up and running again. He jumped behind the wheel and reached for the ignition. ‘We got too much coming. We can’t wait for the helis. They’ll have to find us.’
17
06:23 hours
Our truck was first out of the gates. Sam’s foot was hard to the floor, and it wasn’t just so he could make it over the bodies we hadn’t been able to move. The front three enemy vehicles were no more than four hundred metres away. At least another dozen were lined up in the dust trail behind them.
‘I can’t cover that arc!’ I was out of my seat. ‘Gonna have to shift.’
Sam braced himself. ‘Go for it.’ He knew what I had to do.
I jumped on to the sandbags, manoeuvring myself until I was lying at a diagonal through the dashboard and across the bonnet. My arse was just about in Sam’s face, but at least I had a solid platform, bipod wedged into the sandbags, from which the gun could point east as we raced south.
The wagon lurched and I almost careered off it. Sam grabbed my leg and steadied me as I got back into a fire position. I wasn’t going to put down rounds yet, though: I’d be aiming at moving vehicles, from a moving vehicle. Every round had to count. It was whites-of-their-eyes time. Where the fuck were those gunships?
Sam had to steer one-handed as he gripped me with the other. The rebels’ vehicles careered towards us like a stampeding herd. The sun was less than a third above the horizon, but it was getting hard to look east, even so.
Davy’s wagon broke ranks behind us and aimed right, then braked so sharply that for a moment I thought it’d broken down.
A couple of seconds later, the backblast from an RPG kicked up a storm of sand and grey smoke.
I followed the grenade’s flight path all the way in. The leading pickup jumped a good three feet in the air. There wasn’t a fireball, just an instant sand halo around it as the shockwave expanded and blew bits of wagon in all directions.
By the time the carcass had thumped back into the ground, the three remaining pickups at the front were less than a hundred away. I could hear the scream of their overworked engines.
The guys in the back of them fired wildly and indiscriminately, no idea where their rounds were going.
I wondered if Sam was praying to his God. If so, he was wasting his breath. Right now, God wasn’t creator of the universe: God was a Cobra two-ship.
I waited until they’d closed to within fifty of us before I fired my first double-tap. I aimed for a windscreen. You try to get the driver every time.
Davy kicked off another RPG. He had only two left.
This time, I didn’t see where it hit. I was too busy in my own little world, checking the link, firing as best I could as the vehicles circled us like Indians round a wagon train.
I fired again. Glass shattered. The vehicle swerved. I sent another double-tap into the front passenger door at chest height.
The pickup slewed right round and I went to fire again, but the Renault rocked violently and I lost my aim.
Sam had to fight the wheel, and sand blew up around us as we were buffeted by downwash.
18
There was an instant sandstorm and the stench of aviation fuel as the Cobra two-ship swooped overhead. The gunships swivelled to face the wave of pickups and a set of 20mm cannons got on with their job.
The rapid thud of rounds was joined a second later by an endless metallic rattle as big, empty cases rained on to our wagon.
They moved forward and the sandstorm moved with them. I could see the Seahawks coming in low ahead of us, a gunner hanging out at either side.
RPGs piled in from our right and exploded in mid-air. The gunships turned and responded with short sharp bursts.
We had just a couple of hundred metres to go. The first Seahawk disappeared into its own sand-cloud as it settled on the ground. The second was hovering, looking for a landing site between the outcrops of brush.
Two more RPGs came in from our right, but this time well forward of us, and lower. The sustainer motors on both fizzled out.
When I realized what they were aimed at, the next couple of seconds passed in slow motion.
There was a dull thud as the hovering Seahawk took a hit. There were no flames, no explosions, but it tipped drunkenly, nose almost vertical, and dropped the last fifteen or twenty feet to the ground. The fuselage crumpled.
Sam rocked backwards and forwards in the driver’s seat, as if that was going to find us some more speed. He wouldn’t have been thinking about helping survivors. He was trying to get to the remaining Seahawk before an RPG did.
One of the Cobras roared overhead. Empty cases kept raining down. Whoever had fired that RPG was probably already shaking hands with the guy with the white beard.
There were still no flames from the wreckage: these things are designed to take hits. The two gunners from the other Seahawk came running out of their sandstorm as survivors tumbled from the stricken aircraft.
We halted short of the downwash. Sand and aviation fuel filled my nostrils as I followed Sam and the other wagons caught up.
The gunners’ only thoughts were to sort out their four mates, who were in a bad way. Their faces were bloody and shocked, but they were alive.