Could Mart have made a mistake? I didn’t think so — and I wasn’t going to ask him again. He took the sight back and switched it on once more, waited for it to warm up, scanned, switched off. There was no point in calling the other guys to find out if they’d seen anything; they’d tell us soon enough if anything showed.
Suddenly, there was a noise behind us, a voice. Somebody had spoken, very close. We both leapt round, weapons levelled. A black human shadow was standing on the track about six feet away. My finger was on the trigger. I came within a split-second of firing, but in the last instant I realised that anybody planning aggression wouldn’t have spoken in the first place — he’d have fired a round or come at me silently with a knife.
‘Sir!’ The voice was high, frightened, African. ‘Sergeant Geordie.’
‘Who are you?’
‘I am Jason. Jason Phiri.’
‘Mabonzo!’
‘Yassir.’
‘Jesus!’ I let out my breath with relief and took a step forward. Even in the starlight, Jason’s scarecrow frame was recognisable. At close quarters I could smell his body odour, acrid with fear. ‘You nearly bought it then. What the hell are you doing here?’
‘I come warn you.’
‘What of?’
‘Major Mvula, he has bad spirits.’
‘I know.’
‘They make him mad. He send men to kill you.’
‘Kill me?’
‘Cut throat. All British soldiers.’
‘When?’
‘Tonight. Twelve o’clock, a killing party will come.’
‘Fucking hell!’ I looked at Mart, then back at Jason, then at my watch, which was saying 2135. A shiver ran up my spine at the way the tracker had come round behind us and got in so close without our having the faintest inkling of his proximity. I supposed he must have heard the tiny whine of the kite-sight, and worked on that.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Come back to camp. We need to talk.’ Then I went on the radio with, ‘Green One. We’ve found the intruder. He’s friendly. We’re bringing him back. All stations recover to base.’
In less than a minute we were back in our temporary camp, and in another couple we’d heard Jason’s story. Joss had detailed an assassination squad, under Lieutenant Akuli, to come up and wipe out our entire contingent, and burn our bodies on a big fire.
‘They coming with knives, guns,’ the tracker added.
‘Great!’ I said.
‘Fucking hell!’ went Phil. ‘Let’s booby-trap them. Light a good fire to draw them in, and let ’em have it.’
‘No thanks,’ I told him. ‘If we haven’t got an international incident already, we’d definitely have one after that.’ I looked round the anxious faces. ‘Forget that. We’re leaving now. I’m not messing with these turds any more. Pack up and get moving west. Where’s the woman?’
‘In the truck,’ said Mart.
‘Okay. She can stay there. Eh, Jason.’
‘Yassir?’
‘How did you know where we were?’
‘I track you. Major Mvula send me tracking Brits.’
‘Have you told him where we are?’
‘Yassir.’ He nodded.
‘So you’ve been up and down, and up a second time?’
Again, he nodded.
‘You must have shifted your arse. What are you going to do now?’
‘Come with you, sir.’
I stared at him. His sharp cheekbones glinted faintly in the moonlight, but apart from them and his eyes, he was almost invisible.
‘You’re quitting? Changing sides?’
‘Yassir. The major, he got real bad spirits.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Evil got into him. I come with you.’
Suddenly I felt choked. This guy had probably saved our lives, and was risking his on our behalf. I reached out and brought my hand down on his bony shoulder.
‘Good on yer, Jason.’ Then a thought occurred to me. ‘What about your kit? Have you left it behind?’
‘No sir. Backpack here.’ He pointed into the bush behind him, then started rummaging in a trouser pocket. ‘Old whitey, he say give this.’
‘The Belgian?’
‘Yassir.’
He pulled out a crumpled scrap of paper and handed it across. Opening it carefully, I turned the sheet to the fire. Obviously it was a message, but the handwriting was so small and scrawly that in the flickering firelight I couldn’t read it.
‘Torch, somebody,’ I said.
Pav handed one over and I shone the beam on the paper. There were two short lines of irregular pencil scribble that seemed to be some sort of code.
Jvoltefaceparcequilcherchepierre
exceptgrandetrouveeilyaquelqjours
Jesus!’ I went, ‘What the hell is this?’
Stringer, peering over my shoulder, said, ‘It’s French, or a sort of French. He’s run the words together to make sure the blacks can’t understand it. Give it here. I’ll sort it.’
I handed the note over with, ‘Rather you than me.’
Apart from speaking some French, Stringer was a brilliant cryptographer, always working at his codes and doing crossword puzzles when he wasn’t on the weights. If anyone could decipher the message, he would.
‘Get everything squared away,’ I said. ‘We’re rolling in five minutes.’
‘Why we go now?’ Inge’s nagging voice grated out behind me at a moment when I least wanted to hear it. ‘It is playing, yes?’
‘Playing? You mean an exercise? Far from it. The blacks have turned nasty, and we’ve got to get out.’
TEN
We were away just after 2200, hoping we had nearly two hours’ start, driving our two pinkies and the mother wagon we’d been using for our kit. This, of course, belonged to the Kamangans, but I told myself we’d hand it back to them at some later stage.
What would the Alpha guys do when they found our campsite deserted? Joss had overheard part of my conversation with the Belgian, so he knew we might have our sights on the convent and be heading that way. Almost certainly he’d order a squad to follow us up, and inevitably the tracks of our vehicles would show where we’d gone. But would the blacks have the guts to come after us in the dark? Would they wait around until daylight? Or would they let us go, pull back to the mine and sit there until the relief aircraft arrived?
‘Hundred to one against them doing a follow-up at night,’ I said to Pavarotti as we set out. ‘All the same, we’ll go off at a bit of a tangent. Head due west instead of south-west. As soon as it’s light, we’ll tack back down.’
The track we’d followed from the Kamangans’ camp out to our temporary staging post was so overgrown that even in daylight it had been hard to pick out. Lack of use had allowed saplings and shrubs to spring up all over it, blending it back into the bush. Now in the dark it was untraceable — and in any case, it was no longer heading in the direction we wanted.
We piled up the fire, to make a good marker for the assassins, and slipped away into the night. Driving across country without lights was tricky until the moon climbed higher. Later its bright glare, coming at first from behind us, threw inky shadows across the ground ahead and made it difficult to spot holes. For the first hour the land kept falling away, and apart from a few short climbs out of gullies, we were mostly going downhill. Then the terrain flattened out, and I guessed we were back on a level with the river, which lay somewhere off to our left.
On difficult stretches, where we had to cross numerous small ravines, we had guys ranging ahead on foot, but whenever the going was better we kept the vehicles rolling at seven or eight kilometres an hour. It was a miracle that we had Jason with us: an extra driver, and the best spotter of obstacles anyone could hope for. All the same, with three men driving, three spotting and three tabbing ahead, we were stretched to the limit. Every hour we swapped around, but there was never a chance for anyone to get his head down properly.