Within seconds, the guys were all round me. Phil, Mart, Danny and Chalky on my left, Pav and Stringer beside Genesis. They were covered in dry grey mud from head to foot. There was also a fearsome noise; everyone seemed to be shouting at once.
‘Christ almighty!’ went Phil. ‘What the fuck’s happened to you?’ At the same time Pav was yelling, ‘Gen! Gen! Wake up! You’ve made it!’ and pulling at his arm.
‘He’ll not wake up,’ I said dully. ‘He’s dead.’
‘Dead?’ roared Pav, incredulously. ‘Never! Come on, boyo!’
But when he undid the harness and tugged, Gen’s body crumpled toward him and tumbled to the ground. The next thing I knew, I too was on the deck. I had no recollection of unbuckling my straps or of getting out of the seat. I seemed to have passed out, and came round flat on my back, with faces staring down at me. I felt annihilated, as if I’d had a total anaesthetic.
‘Where’s Whinger?’ Pav was asking.
‘Dead.’
‘For fuck’s sake! How? Where?’
‘I’ll tell you. Any chance of some water?’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ Danny sprang to it and started rooting about in the pinkie.
‘Get a guy on stag towards the convent,’ I croaked. ‘The bastards are in there. They may come out looking for us.’
‘Who?’
‘The rebels. The place is in rebel hands.’
The faces above me started to revolve. I’m sure Mart thought I was about to die on him, because he grabbed my wrist and held it, feeling the pulse, and opened up one of my eyelids with finger and thumb.
‘Geordie,’ he went. ‘Your face is a mess. You look like the phantom of the fucking opera.’
‘That’s how I feel.’
‘Stay there while I get something to clean up the cuts.’
I heard him get up and move away. For the time being nobody else spoke. I think they were in shock, nearly as badly as I was. Then Mart was back. He sponged the dried blood and dirt off my face with water, and when he dabbed antiseptic solution on to my cuts, the sting tweaked me sharply back to life.
‘The one on your temple’s not much,’ he said. ‘More of a bruise. The one on your cheekbone’s deeper. Ought to be stitched, really.’
‘Fuck that,’ I said. ‘Cover it over.’
He put on gauze pads and taped them in place. A couple of minutes later I was sat propped against the front wheel of the mother wagon, in the shade, gulping down water by the pint. Somebody had pulled Gen alongside the rear wheel and zipped him into a black nylon body-bag.
Except for Chalky White, who’d gone on ahead to act as an early warning, the rest of the lads crowded round to hear what had happened.
‘It’s all down to that German woman,’ I began. ‘When I catch up with her, her feet won’t fucking touch. That I guarantee.’
I looked round the haggard, unshaven faces, trying to collect my thoughts.
‘We drove right into it,’ I went on. ‘Came up to the back of the convent, and suddenly these blacks were swarming all round us. It happened so fast we never even got to our weapons. They had us on the deck, cuffed us, nicked everything — watches, GPSs, knives, the lot. They’d already massacred the nuns. There were bodies lying around everywhere. Old, white bodies. They didn’t touch her, though. She swaggered about giving orders like she was a fucking general in their army.’
‘She’s not a general,’ said Stringer. ‘She’s a crook, pure and simple.’
‘Eh? Did that come from the Kremlin?’
‘Yeah. In the end the South African police turned up trumps. That guy in the plane whose ID we got — Pretorius — he was wanted by Interpol for embezzlement, international currency rackets and so on. The woman the same. She’s got a record as long as her legs.’
‘That makes sense,’ I said. ‘Anyway, at the convent she was frightening the shit out of these blacks, bollocking them in their own lingo. Next thing, all three of us were dumped in the back of a truck and driven to some clapped-out bauxite mine.’
‘Was Whinger with it?’ Mart wanted to know.
‘Not really. He was coming and going. Mostly going — lucky for him.’ I paused, thinking back. ‘The thing was, the woman must have known where she was, all along. During the time she was with us, I mean. She was never as confused as she pretended. All that crap about needing glasses to read. It was shite. She knew bloody well we’d attacked the mine, and that the rebels had captured the convent. She was just waiting to get back there, to join up with them again.’
I held out the mug in a silent request for more water. ‘Anyway, from the convent, she went ahead in another vehicle. She was at the next place when we arrived. There was a delay — twenty minutes or half an hour. Then we were taken into a hut like a classroom, and in comes Mr Big himself.’
‘Muende?’ said Danny.
‘Him.’
‘What does he look like?’
‘A right half-caste. Pale skin, hair like tow. Yellow. Colour’s wrong, but otherwise he’s pretty much Afro-looking. Like the rest of these fuckers, only fatter. Quite sleek. Well oiled in every sense.’
In other circumstances, the lads might have laughed, but none of them even smiled. They knew something horrible was coming. Hardened though they were, the story of Whinger’s end left them looking shattered. As for me, I could hardly tell it. I kept feeling I had to make excuses for not having prevented the disaster.
‘The trouble was, the slag really had it in for him,’ I said. ‘She hated his guts. It didn’t seem to occur to her that killing him was the worst thing she could do. Because he’d got burnt dragging her out of the wreck, she was convinced he’d found the fucking diamond. She was out to get him somehow.
‘Gen and I were knackered, the pair of us. As I said, we were tied to the chairs. There was nothing we could do. Whenever we tried to help, we got hammered with rifle butts, or kicked. The way she handed Muende strips of liver — it was the filthiest thing I’ll ever see.’
Pav, who’d been fond of Whinger, suddenly turned and walked away into the distance. I think he cracked up for a moment — I couldn’t see. When he came back, he was together again, and muttering, ‘Fucking arseholes!’ over and over.
‘What time did you get out of the mud?’ I asked.
‘Midnight,’ Stringer said.
‘Hell of a struggle.’
‘You can say that again. Everyone’s creased. Who’s this bloke who got you out, then?’
‘The Yank? Sam something. Former SEAL. That poor bastard’s gone as well. They dropped him just as we were lining up for take-off.’
Phil handed me more water. ‘So the villains are going for the diamond.’
‘No. I mean, I don’t know. I’m sure they will, in time. But without a chopper it’ll take them days to find the wrecked plane. Even if they get hold of my GPS, they may not make anything of the waypoints. In the meantime, there’s a new deal.’
I told them about the cache of nuclear warheads. Then I amazed them, and myself, by saying, ‘I reckon we’d better go for that and clean it up before Muende does.’
Where the idea came from, I’ll never know. It just jumped into my mind, fully formed.
‘What?’ Pav was astounded. ‘Have you gone fucking mad? I thought we were on our way out of here.’
‘We were,’ I agreed. ‘But now the goalposts have moved. We need to pull our fingers out and get after those missiles.’