To prevent it from swinging too far, two men emerged from the armoured superstructure, both of them carrying ropes which they hurriedly looped over the mooring posts at the jetty’s end.
The men were wary, keeping in shadow and staying out on deck no longer than they had to.
‘Now what?’ Heather whispered.
‘They’re waiting for something.’ Coburn could feel the sweat stinging in the cuts beneath his arm. ‘Maybe the main attack’s coming from the swamp.’
The sudden thud of exploding mines told him that it was. Simultaneously from the same area came the hammering of automatic weapons — a signal for men on the boat to open fire on the village.
Muzzle flashes from the gun slits showed that more than a dozen of them were behind the armour, all concentrating their attention on Hari’s sacrificial huts.
Whether it was because in the dark they couldn’t see anything else, Coburn didn’t know. From his own position in the ditch it was hard enough to pick out any details on the boat, let alone identify a specific target — the reason, he supposed, why along the entire length of the estuary boundary not one of Hari’s men had yet responded.
The explanation was more subtle.
Deceived into thinking the village was asleep or undefended, and relying on what they imagined was their superior fire-power, gunmen were starting to disembark — the first two getting no further than halfway along the jetty before the central section gave way beneath them, the others caught out in the open on deck, floodlit in intense white light from banks of hidden halogens.
What followed was unpleasant. The men who had fallen through the jetty were already dead, their throats cut by a villager who’d slithered out of the ditch and executed them the minute they’d reached dry land.
On board the boat, others who hadn’t been shot where they stood had taken refuge behind the steel plates where, having managed to restart their engine, they were endeavouring to get underway, firing from the gun slits once again — this time not at the village, but in a desperate attempt to sever their mooring ropes.
The idea was good, but a line of tracers streaking out of the darkness showed how untenable their situation was.
The Selina had arrived. In the light of the halogens a weakness in the armour of the enemy’s boat had been detected, Coburn realized. And to exploit it a radio message had been sent downstream.
The tracers were being directed at the unprotected front of the superstructure, turning it to matchwood in a matter of seconds and silencing every gun on board so quickly that the act amounted to a little less than slaughter.
Take no prisoners, Coburn thought, the reality of life in the marshes perhaps, but still a leftover from another century that even in a place like this seemed unnecessarily harsh and unforgiving.
Crouched in the ditch beside him, Indiri had fired her rifle twice, although at what he had no idea. She’d already put down her gun and was smiling broadly at Heather.
‘So we do well,’ she said. ‘If our marsh defences have held, it seems that the village is safe and that we now have a new boat.’
Heather didn’t answer, either unwilling to point out that the acquisition of the boat had cost the men on board their lives, or because despite her remark about being in Darfur, she’d been shocked by the level of violence. Once the Selina had opened fire, she too had put her gun down, deciding like Coburn that the outcome was inevitable. Whether she’d have ever used it in anger he couldn’t tell.
Nor could he tell how things were going on the other sides of the village. The shouting had stopped some time ago, and the gunfire was becoming more sporadic — an encouraging sign, he thought, although it might be too early to be certain.
Confirmation that the attack was over came a few minutes later, delivered by a young man who’d been charged with the responsibility of crossing the plateau to convey the good news. He was Indiri’s husband, limping from the bullet wound he’d received at sea, and so relieved to find her safe that she had to remind him to speak in English.
Hari had sent him, he explained. No one had been seriously hurt, the perimeter was secure and surviving attackers were being allowed to escape in their boat so they would spread word of the village’s true strength.
‘How bad’s the damage?’ Coburn asked.
The young man shrugged. ‘In the dark it is not so easy to be sure. The huts in which the lights were burning are beyond repair, and a fuel line to the generator has been cut, but within the hour it will be repaired so we shall soon have power again.’ He peered out at the boat in the estuary. ‘There are prisoners?’
‘No.’ Coburn was watching the Selina which was in the process of drawing up alongside the captured vessel so that men could extinguish a small fire that had broken out on board.
In the light of the flames, he could see that everything above the deck had been reduced to a splintered mess. So little of the woodwork remained intact that he began to wonder if there was a chance of the steel plates collapsing now there was nothing left to hold them up.
To warn the men of the danger, he left Heather in the care of Indiri and her husband and waded out into the estuary until he’d reached the still submerged section of the jetty and was able to clamber up one of the mooring posts to get on board.
Although the destruction was less extensive than it had appeared to be from the river-bank, as a safety measure he gathered together some lengths of broken timber and, after wedging them in place to act as braces for the plates, spent the rest of the night making himself useful in any way he could, clearing up debris, checking for unseen damage and, once the last of the bodies had been transferred to the Selina for disposal later in the deep water of the Strait, connecting up a hose to wash away the blood.
By dawn he was tired and glad when work was interrupted by the arrival of the fuel supply boat.
Coburn had never asked where the village obtained its fuel, always assuming it was purchased in bulk from one of the coastal townships — a guess that seemed to be confirmed when the captain called out to him and started waving a large manila envelope that looked as though it could be mail from the outside world.
Today the fuel boat was in the care of Hari’s trusted lieutenant, the versatile Somalian who, once he’d tied up alongside the Selina hurried across to hand the envelope to Coburn.
‘Please to deliver this,’ he said.
The envelope had been sent by courier from Singapore to Bengkalis. It was addressed to Hari, marked urgent and, by the feel of it, contained documents of some kind.
‘You do it now?’ the Somalian asked.
‘Yeah, yeah.’ Coburn was glad of the excuse to leave. ‘You worry about unloading the fuel. I’ll find Hari.’
The overnight restoration of the jetty made his return trip easy. Locating Hari was more difficult.
The Frenchman wasn’t celebrating victory with any of the village ladies he liked to call his wives. Neither was he supervising the demolition of the ruined huts nor, according to a little girl who was busy collecting spent bullet casings, had he visited either of the containers lately.
He was at Coburn’s hut, drinking coffee with Heather in the kitchenette. The strain of last night was showing on his face and he looked weary.
‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘You come from the river?’
‘Yep. This is for you.’ Coburn tossed the envelope on to the table. ‘The fuel boat brought it.’
‘Ah.’ Hari put it to one side. ‘You enjoy the fight?’
‘No.’ In the light of day, everything seemed too damn normal, Coburn thought. One of the windows in the hut had been shattered by a stray bullet, and in the corner of the room his Steyr that Heather had brought back for him was propped up against the wall beside her M16, but otherwise, in this part of the village at least, today could have been any other day.