‘Keep it short, then. Just point it away from the camp.’
I ran the beam quickly over the little plane. It wasn’t any make I recognised, but it looked much the same as other small aircraft I’d flown.
‘Only two seats,’ said Gen.
‘Don’t worry. Sam can sit on your lap. We’ll squeeze him in somehow.’
‘Will it take off with that weight?’
‘Should do.’
A quick inspection showed the plane had a nose-wheel and two main wheels, an ignition switch but no electric start — just a hand-pull on the side of the engine — and a squeeze-ball pump for priming the carburettors.
‘Think you can hack it?’ Genesis asked.
‘Try it, anyway.’
I doused the torch, eased myself into the left-hand seat and felt the controls: accelerator arm, joystick, pedals, handbrake. Everything moved freely. I shone the torch on the transparent tube that served as a fuel gauge. The level was fairly low; it looked as though there were only twenty or twenty-five litres in the tank.
‘We could do with more gas,’ I said. ‘Is there any around?’
‘In the back.’ Sam pointed into the depths of the shed. But there, for the first time, he was wrong. The day before, he said, two forty-five-gallon drums had been standing in the corner. Now they’d gone.
‘Too bad,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to make do with what we’ve got.’ I looked back towards the camp, calculating our chances. ‘It’s too dark to take off at the moment. If anything went wrong with the engine, we’d kill ourselves trying to land. Our only chance is to wait until dawn’s about to break.’
‘If we wait till it starts getting light, chances are someone will spot us,’ said Sam.
‘I know. But it’s a risk we’ve got to take.’
Because I was the only one of us who could fly, I was taking charge of the situation. But I didn’t want to put the American down, so I added, ‘If it’s light, and something does happen once we’re in the air, at least we’ll have a chance of getting down again. Okay, Sam?’
‘I’m in your hands, skipper.’
‘That’s the plan, then. What we can do meanwhile is push the thing further away from the camp, give ourselves that much more of a start, and keep the noise at a distance. How long’s the strip?’
‘Maybe five hundred yards.’
‘Better check it out. We’ll need to take off westwards. I don’t fancy flying back over the camp. Step it out to the far end, Gen.’
‘Fine. What do you need for take-off?’
‘Two fifty yards. Two hundred at a pinch. As there’s no wind, and we’ll have a heavy load, two fifty would be better.’
As Genesis set out, taking long strides, I let off the hand brake, and the two of us rolled the little aircraft forward. It trundled easily, making hardly a sound. I reckoned we’d pushed it nearly two hundred metres when we made out a dark figure coming back towards us.
‘Three hundred paces more beyond here,’ Gen said quietly.
‘This’ll do, then. What is there at the far end?’
‘Nothing. The ground just gets rough.’
More than anything else, I wanted to see if the engine would start. But I knew that the moment it fired, we’d probably be compromised: the noise would be almost bound to give us away. So all I could do was show Sam the hand-pull on the side of the engine.
‘It’s just like a lawn-mower,’ I told him. ‘All you need do is pull when I say, and keep pulling until she fires.’
‘We need a contingency plan,’ Gen said. ‘Supposing we can’t start it? What do we do then?’
‘Head north from here on foot, and keep going,’ Sam replied, pointing. ‘Right out there. There’s nothing to stop us. We’re already through the wire.’
‘You got a GPS?’
‘Sure.’ He patted his chest pocket.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Good. How’s the time?’
He glanced at his watch, and replied, ‘Twenty after four.’
‘What time’s first light?’
‘First light around here is twenty after five. Sunrise a quarter of six.’
‘An hour to go, then. What about the guard on the cell? Won’t someone miss him?’
‘His relief won’t come on till six o’clock. Then he’ll find his mate’s disappeared, along with the keys. Probably he’ll think he’s gone to sleep someplace. By then we’ll be up and gone.’
‘Touch wood.’
The tension was electric, but somehow we had to pass the time. We sat on the ground under the wing of the aircraft and chatted in quick, nervous whispers.
‘The guy they killed,’ Sam said. ‘Good buddy of yours, was he?’
‘More than that. We’d served together for fifteen years — Russia, Ulster, Colombia, everywhere.’
I began thinking about Whinger’s family. His mother was dead, but his father was still alive. If I got back, it would be down to me to go and tell him what had happened. I might never reveal exactly what they’d done to him; it would be bad enough without going into details. That unpleasant task was in the future, though. Our first priority was to get ourselves out. Had the lads got the satcom up and running? Was a Herc on its way to lift us out?
My mind kept returning to our flight. The last time I’d flown was eighteen months ago, when we’d done some pilot training with the Army Air Corps. Luckily for me, the Regiment had had a ridiculous idea that they wanted to train guys to fly, but nothing came of it, because at the end of the course one of the lads wrecked an aircraft. Now in my mind I ran through some standard drills.
‘Sam,’ I said, ‘those hills to the north. D’you know how high they are?’
‘The Makonde Hills? In the day you can see ’em in the distance. How high? Nothing great. Six, seven hundred feet. Why?’
‘I was thinking. We’re going to burn a load of fuel clearing them. It’s a question of how much we have left after that.’
I borrowed his torch again for another check of the fuel gauge. It had no calibration, just the curved, transparent pipe, so judging the supply was a matter of guesswork. By wishful thinking, I confirmed my original estimate of between twenty and twenty-five litres. Five gallons to lift us to freedom.
At about 0440 I suddenly felt ravenous and cracked into one of the ready-to-eat meals. My lip hurt as I took each mouthful, but never had cold, congealed corned-beef hash tasted so good. Genesis wasn’t so lucky: his foil pack contained spaghetti bolognese, which he said tasted like wallpaper glue, but he got it down his neck all the same.
Feeling revived, I asked, ‘Sam, were you in the Gulf?’
‘Sure,’ he replied. ‘SEAL Team Six, in the Western Desert.’
‘Never!’ I exclaimed. ‘That was our location, too. Deployed from Al Jouf? Amazing! What were you on?’
‘Air-sea rescue. Picking up downed aircrew.’
‘Some hairy trips, I bet.’
‘You said it. Had one near-miss from a SAM. Twice we nearly didn’t make it out.’
‘Ninety-one,’ I said, trying to remember a name. ‘Did you ever meet a guy called Tony Lopez?’
‘Sure did! Hell of a guy, Tony. I spent some time with him in Panama. He a pal of yours?’
‘Absolutely. He gave us a big hand in Colombia. Then he came over to the UK on attachment, and stopped a bullet at Chequers, of all places.’
‘Chequers?’
‘The Prime Minister’s country home.’
‘No kidding?’
‘Right there, in the park.’
‘What in hell were you doing?’
‘Tangling with the IRA.’
‘Oh, those choirboys.’
After a short silence, Genesis asked, ‘How many of you guys are there here?’
‘Mercs? Twelve. Only one American, though. Me! The rest are hairy-assed South Africans. Supposed to be some Russians coming in, too.’