‘Clearance!’ I shouted. ‘For Christ’s sake, we need help, not clearance. We’re trying to avert a fucking nuclear catastrophe.’
As I broke off the call, I again saw Pav looking at me in a strange way, but he didn’t make any comment, and I said, ‘Before we do anything else, we’d better get Gen underground.’
Nobody argued about that; we’d all seen what the heat and flies did to a body. Flies would be into the nose, eyes and mouth and lay eggs in a matter of hours. In a day or so the eggs would hatch into maggots, the maggots would start eating away, and the belly would explode with gas. Our immediate future was so uncertain that burial was essential. The only question was, where to excavate the grave. We could see that digging would be easiest down in the sand and mud around the pans, but for one thing we didn’t want to go down there, close to the river, and for another we reckoned there would be less risk of animals digging the body up again if we put it in the rocky ground high up. I kept remembering how the warthog had erupted from a hole at the site of the training ambush, and how Joss had told us that aardvarks make enormous excavations every night.
After a search, Phil found a site which he reckoned would do — a level patch, with a little grass growing out of sand — but Jason immediately told him there was rock close beneath the surface.
‘How far down is it?’ Phil asked.
‘Like this.’ The tracker held his hands about a foot apart.
‘How do you know?’
‘I feel.’
Phil glared at him, not liking to be contradicted, and started to dig anyway, with one of the short-handled, pointed shovels that we carried on the pinkies. Sure enough, just over a foot down he hit solid rock and had to admit defeat.
His second choice of site met with Jason’s approval, and there, taking turns, sweating like slaves, we got down nearly four feet before we again hit living rock, while those not digging assembled enough flat pieces of stone to cover the body.
‘That’ll do him,’ said Pav. ‘Nothing can come at him from underneath. If we put these lumps on top, he’ll be fine.’
Sorting through Genesis’s kit, we found his precious bible in the mother wagon. Our first idea was to bury it with him. Then I thought, no, there’s a good chance we’ll come back for him, so we’ll keep it with us and return it to his family.
I don’t think any of us had actually buried a mate before. Going to a funeral is one thing, doing the work another — and anyway, the body is usually inside a coffin. For Genesis we had no such luxury: he had to go under as he was, and there was no rush to take hold of him. In the end it was Pav and myself who picked up the body-bag and lowered it into the rough-cut hole. We’d dug it only just wide enough for his shoulders; his body had already gone stiff, and we had to wriggle it about to make it go down to the bottom. Once he was settled I leant over and pulled the toggle of the zip down far enough for us to see his face. His eyes were closed, and apart from some dried blood on his forehead, he looked peaceful enough
All eight of us — me, Pav, Danny, Chalky, Mart, Stringer, Phil and Jason — were shoulder to shoulder in a tight semi-circle, looking down. Nobody wanted to be the first to shovel earth in, to put him out of sight.
‘Give him our thoughts for a minute,’ I said gruffly. ‘Say goodbye.’
Seconds ticked past. I was conscious of the sun growing hotter on the back of my neck, of bird calls and insect noises. I was grateful to Pav when he broke the silence.
‘If it’d been one of us, he’d be praying,’ he said. ‘Let’s pray for him now.’
‘Yes,’ I went. ‘And save a thought for Whinger.’ Then I added, ‘The last thing Gen said, after he was hit, was, “To give light to them that sit in darkness, and in the shadow of death.”’
‘He would,’ said Pav. ‘And that’s where he is now: in the shadow of death. RIP.’
That cracked Stringer up. I saw tears come into his eyes. I bent down, gave the pallid, freckled cheek a pat, and ran the zip of the black bag shut. Then I started lowering flat rocks into place above the body and shovelling like there was no tomorrow.
THIRTEEN
In retrospect, I can see we were crazy to carry on. We were all so shattered by exhaustion that our judgement was seriously flawed. We still had the .50 machine gun and nearly a thousand rounds of ammunition, as well as one RPG and a couple of dozen grenades, besides our personal weapons, but with our team down to seven men — eight including Jason — and only two vehicles, we were hardly an effective fighting unit, and certainly not strong enough to take on a major Kamangan force. We should have sat tight in our elevated LUP, waited until the incoming Herc was poised for a short last leg, and then gone out to find an LZ to mark with smoke grenades to guide the pilot in.
We did none of those things. Instead, we held an impromptu Chinese parliament in the shade of a leadwood tree and by a unanimous vote decided to head for Ichembo.
For me, the decision was easy. By then I was being driven by personal hatred of Muende and the German woman. I was rational enough to recognise this compulsion and see its dangers, but reason wasn’t strong enough to prevent me trying to gain revenge for Whinger’s death by topping both of them. After what they’d done, I’d have walked the length of the continent to get level with them, but after listening to Sam, I’d got it firmly in my head that the rebel leader would be leading the raid on the nuclear cache in person. Furthermore, having seen how he and Inge worked together, I felt certain she’d be coming with him. Therefore, if we reached Ichembo first, we’d have a good chance of ambushing the pair of them.
I was also needled by a dislike of failure. With our training task in ruins, and three of our lads dead, we’d got nothing to show for our month in Africa. It went against the grain to head for home with three lives lost and bugger all achieved. If, on the other hand, we managed to avert a nuclear showdown among such volatile states, we’d have a big plus to our credit. If we secured the weapons and topped Muende at the same time, all my goals would be achieved at once.
I was perfectly open with the rest of the guys. I told them exactly what I was thinking. Like me, they felt frustrated at the way the original task had collapsed under them, through no fault of their own; to have quit at that stage would have left a bad taste in their mouths. They also saw that immediate action was needed to secure the nuclear arsenal, and that to let it fall into Muende’s hands would be criminally irresponsible.
Yet beyond these practical considerations there lay a different pressure. I didn’t realise it at the time, but Pav told me later that from the moment I tumbled out of that little aircraft and collapsed on the deck, the rest of the team thought I’d changed. They felt I was somehow different: more ruthless than usual, almost fanatical. There were moments when they feared I’d lost the plot completely. They put it down to the experience I’d been through during the night, and luckily they were sympathetic. If they hadn’t been basically on-side, they might have mutinied. I know, now, that at one stage, when my behaviour became too outrageous, they did discuss ganging up on me and putting me under open arrest, but because they felt nearly as bad about Whinger and Genesis as I did, team loyalty held everyone together.
When I say ‘everyone’, that included our new recruit, Jason. He was as loyal as anybody, but again, his reasons were different. Having thrown in his lot with us, he seemed determined to come with us wherever we went, to stick with us to the bitter end, whatever that might be, and then come back to the UK. ‘I come work for you in England’ became his constant refrain. He had no conception of the difficulties involved: immigration laws, work permits, the northern climate — all way beyond his ken. But none of that fazed him in the least, and as for us, because he’d saved all our lives, we felt bound to do our best for him, and we kidded him along with jokey enquiries as to how he’d deal with his family if he did leave Africa.