‘Let’s pay for the water,’ said Pav, as we were about to roll.
The suggestion irritated me. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I told him. ‘They’re not expecting anything.’
‘No, but Christ, look how poor they are.’
‘Well…’ I saw the sense of what he was saying, and felt ashamed of my own grudging attitude. From the general float, kept in the mother wagon, I dug out a ten-dollar bill and presented it to the head man, who held it up in front of his chest in both hands, beaming as if he’d got hold of a million dollars, and bowing his head repeatedly in thanks.
‘He says he buy football for the boys,’ Jason translated.
‘Good, and thanks!’ I smiled, shook the scrawny old hand, climbed back aboard, and off we went. We’d lost ten minutes, but gained a big lift in spirits and a supply of the best water we’d seen in Africa.
Until then, members of the party not driving or navigating had tried to get their heads down and catch up on lost sleep, but after the halt the tension was too great for anyone to relax. Not knowing what lay ahead, we were going to have to rely entirely on the speed and intelligence of our reactions: stealth, speed and surprise would have to be our weapons. There was no disguising that we were some form of army unit. Two military vehicles moving in convoy, the jeep with a .50 machine gun mounted on the back — what else could we be?
Another anxiety lay heavily on me. The rebel column advancing on course to meet us was one thing, but what was going on at Gutu? Had a relief force arrived and taken over the mine? If it had, what were Joss and his crew up to? Was Alpha Commando again moving southwards, according to their original plan? Or was the assassination squad still on our tail? Or had the South African mercenaries also found out about the nuclear stockpile, and diverted Joss’s hunt towards Ichembo? We’d seen Joss having one of them shot, but had the three we chased off into the hills rejoined his force? Because we had no means of answering such questions, they were preying on my mind.
‘This cache, or silo, or whatever,’ I said to Pav as I drove the pinkie. The surface was fairly good, and we were doing thirty, so I had to pitch my voice loud. ‘It can’t be in the town, or anywhere near it. Not even the Russians would have been such cunts as to locate a nuclear dump in an inhabited area. There’s the health hazard, for one thing. And then, quite separate, there’s the question of security: people would have been walking into it all the time. No, it’s got to be tucked away in some remote area that the locals don’t have any reason to visit. Eh, Jason!’
The tracker leaned forward from his place in the back, and I explained my concept to him in short, shouted takes.
‘As soon as we get to the edge of this town… we need to grab some guy… someone who looks sensible… find out if such an area exists.’
Jason’s answer was ‘Yassir.’ He said that to almost all enquiries. But I was sure he’d got the point.
Ever since we’d come on to the east-west road the terrain had remained flat: kilometre after kilometre of featureless, fairly open bush, with dry, sandy ground showing between the vegetation. But then, through the haze far out to our right front, I began to make out higher ground — some kind of a plateau.
‘Jason,’ I called. ‘Is Ichembo down on the flat, or up there in the hills?’
‘Flat, flat,’ he said emphatically, moving his open hand from side to side.
‘So what’s all that high ground?’
‘Is called Meranga Plain.’ Again he indicated level ground, but held his hand higher.
‘Do people live up there?’
‘No people. Ground bad for crop. Too much rock. No water.’
‘So it’s empty.’
‘Yassir. Only army training.’
‘A training area?’
‘One time. Now left.’
‘And is there a barracks in town?’
‘One time,’ Jason repeated. ‘Many Russian soldiers here. Training army.’
‘You mean the camp’s closed now?’
‘Yassir.’
Again I felt pissed off with our faithful tracker. Why the hell hadn’t he said the magic words ‘Russian’ and ‘training area’ before? All the same, I felt the adrenalin rising.
‘Hear that, Pav?’ I went. ‘That’s where our stuff will be.’
‘Yeah, yeah.’ Pav’s instincts had responded the same as mine. He was sitting up high and eyeballing the country all round for a possible landing strip.
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I just had an idea.’
‘Like what?’
‘About how news of this cache suddenly came to light. If the warheads have been lying around for a dozen years, the locals must have forgotten all about them. But someone else remembered. I bet I know who it is — some bloody Russian who’s recently joined Muende’s private army.’
‘One of the mercenaries?’
‘Exactly. Sam said something about there being Russkies in the mercenary team. It’s a hundred to one there’s a guy who served out here in the Soviet army, finished his tour in the forces and signed up with Interaction, just like the South Africans, the Yanks and all the others. And now they’ve sent him to Kamanga because he knows the place.’
‘Possible.’
‘More than that: it’s bloody probable. And, of course, the trouble is, that guy will remember exactly where the stuff’s stored.’
Pav continued eyeballing for a bit, then asked, ‘You got a plan, Geordie?’
‘We need to ID the site first. Then it’ll depend on the strength of the opposition. If we find it, we’ll defend it until we can call in the Herc and an NBC crew.’
‘If, if, if,’ went Pav.
‘I know.’
In the last few minutes we’d started to meet pedestrians again, which made us think the town couldn’t be far ahead. Then came a hoot from Chalky, driving the mother wagon behind us. Stringer, standing up through the turret of the cab, was pointing energetically to our right front. From his high position he’d seen something we couldn’t. I slowed to a halt in a cloud of dust; no need to pull off the road, because we hadn’t seen another vehicle all morning.
‘What is it?’
‘On top of that bank. There’s a long open area that looks good for an LZ.’
‘Not another flood pan?’
‘Well, it could be one. But it’s worth a shufti.’
Stringer was right. Parallel with the road was a strip of ground at least two hundred metres wide which ran on for several kilometres. It appeared to have been levelled by a flood at some stage. Only a few isolated tussocks of grass grew out of the sand, and the surface turned out to be extremely hard. After our experience at the Zebra Pans we were dead cautious about driving on to it, but the seven-ton mother wagon rolled smoothly along for half a kilometre, leaving scarcely a mark.
‘This’ll do,’ I agreed. ‘Get the coordinates, Mart. And Stringer, now we’ve stopped anyway, get through to the Kremlin. First, though, let’s get under those trees, just in case Muende has got his precious chopper airborne and does a fly-past.’
The time was 1125 local — 0925 in Hereford. Because we’d been stirring the shit internationally, I guessed the bigwigs would already be at their desks. As Stringer set up the satcom dish, and I took another look at our one surviving map, Jason came across from the roadside, where he’d quizzed a passer-by, to announce, ‘Ichembo, one hour.’
‘One hour walking?’
‘Yassir.’
‘Five or six ks, then.’
I was right about the Kremlin. Everyone there was buzzing and bobbing like the shithouse fly. But the good news was they’d got their fingers out, and a Herc with crew equipped to handle NBC material was already on the ground at a military airfield just inside the border of Namibia.