"Left a bit," murmured Don Hammond behind him.
Alex raised a hand in thanks. As lead scout, he was the only member of the team not responsible for navigation all his concentration went into watching and listening: for the unexplained movement, the shadow that wasn't a shadow, the tiny suck of a boot in clay, the oily straining of a cocking lever.
Listening was becoming harder. In addition to the rifle fire, there was the faint thump and whisper of music. Straining his ears, Alex recognised one of Sierra Leone's big summer tunes -a favourite of the RUF, the SLA and the militias alike called "Titti Shaggah'.
Had they posted sentries, he wondered, stilling the five men behind him with a hand gesture. For two minutes the patrol crouched unmoving in the animal track, but there was no sound that shouldn't have been there. They moved on and the ridge line began its gradual descent towards the Rokel river.
Step by silent step, Alex negotiated the gradient. The rain was still holding off, but splashing rivulets streaked the treacherous clay incline. They were five hundred yards away from the camp now and through the dense foliage below them Alex could see the yellowish flickering of electric lights. Surely, he thought, they must at least have some bloke on stag.
They had and Alex almost missed him. All he saw, in fact, was the tiny swing of a cigarette coal at the side of the track twenty yards ahead. Stilling the patrol again and deliberately steadying his breathing as the adrenalin flooded his system, Alex moved silently down the skiddy clay, feeling with his feet for the rocks and tree roots that would noiselessly support his weight. One squelch, he thought one snapped branch or kicked stone and we're buggered.
Ten yards now and he could see in the moonlight that the sentry was leaning against the other side of a tree trunk. A tree trunk whose thickness was approximately that of a man's chest. Once again, the arm swung sideways. The hand held a ganja spliff, not a cigarette.
Quietly, Alex drew a short Mauser stabbing knife from his belt webbing. It took him three agonised heart-thudding minutes to cover the last sodden yards of the descent and then finally he was behind the trunk, his nose and eyes full of drifting ganja smoke but his feet secure on the slippery twisting tree roots.
Like a striking snake, as his right hand reached across with the knife, Alex's left hand clapped across the sentry's mouth. At the last moment, though, with a desperate outrush of breath, the SAS officer checked his blade. The face beneath his hands was smooth, the neck slender, the struggling body pitifully small. The sentry was a kid might even have been a girl couldn't have been more than ten, and almost immediately went limp with terror in his arms. The spliff fell to the ground and went out with a tiny hiss.
Keeping a hand firmly across his captive's mouth, Alex gestured to Don Hammond to join him. The sergeant quickly gagged the child with a sweat rag, tied the slender wrists and ankles with a length of para cord from his belt kit, and concealed the immobiised figure beneath a dense bush in the darkness to one side of the track.
The patrol proceeded warily with the descent. They encountered no more sentries and, as they neared the lights and the music, the ground began to level out until they found themselves close to the edge of the tree line. In front of them a parapet of knotted roots supported a thick tangle of rotting vegetation, beneath which was a drop of about six feet. Beneath this, either drunk or stoned but unquestionably asleep, lay two RUF soldiers. One was wearing a white nylon wedding dress, the other threadbare tracksuit trousers and a combat smock hung with plastic dolls' heads.
Ricky Sutton, keen as ever, drew his commando knife.
"Shall I do 'em?" he mouthed, but Alex shook his head. If the bodies were found the whole camp would go to a state of alert, jeopardising any potential rescue mission. As Ricky sheathed his blade, Alex scanned the area with his binoculars.
Below them, contained within the dark curving sweep of the Rokel river, lay the camp. Roughly ovalshaped, it occupied an area slightly greater than a football pitch. At the nearer, lower end was a large bonfire on to which, at intervals, silhouetted figures heaped wet branches and tree roots, encouraging a thick column of grey-brown smoke. On the higher ground to the east, lit by strings of low-wattage bulbs, two windowless cinder-block huts stood at right angles to the river. Beyond them was a cluster of mud-walled outhouses. On the far side of the river the jungle rose steeply for a hundred metres or so to the ridge line.
Of the hundred and fifty-odd figures visible in the camp, perhaps a score were dancing and drinking around the bonfire, while at least twice that number were milling around the far end, near the huts. The remainder staggered about, singly and in large drunken groups, at the river's edge. Most carried SLR 7.62 rifles, but there were a few AK 47s and RPGs in evidence too. Several of the men appeared to be so attached to their weapons that they were dancing with them.
The sheer numbers of the RUF made any assault of less than company strength hazardous. The cinder-block huts would provide cover for anything up to fifty soldiers each and if the hostages were in this camp they were probably situated close to or inside the huts. Bringing fire to bear on the RUF without injuring them would be difficult. The most positive factor, in Alex's view, was the topography of the camp. Surrounded as they were on three sides by the vast grey-green bulk of the river, the RUF were like rats in a bag. If all of the SAS firepower was positioned along a single front in the tree line, the bag could be drawn shut. The difficult part was going to be finding, and then extracting, the hostages.
Another plus point was that despite the recent incursion into the Kissuna area by the West Side Boys militia, no serious attempt had been made to implement any form of camp security. The noise, for a start, was considerable. The crack of random discharges tore the air, as did the answering, echoing smack as these impacted in the surrounding jungle.
No wonder no one wants to go out on stag, thought Alex, with all this random shooting you'd take your bloody life in your hands. From beneath the sound system, which continued to belt out "Titti Shaggali' and other local hits, came the steady thump of a generator.
"If I'd known it was a party," muttered Stan Clayton, "I'd 'ave worn my dancin' trousers!"
Alex smiled and beckoned the men around him.
"No sign of our people so far," he whispered, 'but I want to take a closer look. Those huts up the end look promising for a start. Don, I want you to stay here with three of the guys and count heads and weapons.
Stan, I want you to come with me. We're going for a swim."
The cockney grinned, grasping the plan immediately. Quickly the two men stripped off their webbing, leaving their kit in two neat piles. Then, creeping past the unconscious RUF soldiers, they lowered themselves down the tree roots to ground level.
In front of them, bordered by the river, was the camp. To their right were the black-shadowed margins of the jungle.
Ahead of them, and falling away behind them into the jungle, was a rough, mud-churned road. Swiftly the two men turned right, paced off twenty yards into the swampy foliage, turned through ninety degrees, took bearings from their wrist compasses and set off through the darkness on a fast-paced eastbound course parallel to the road. Ten minutes later they exited the jungle. The dark sweep of the river was now at their feet and they were well upstream of the camp.
"We'll 'ave to tuck in tight," murmured Clayton thoughtfully. Alex nodded. Close up, the Rokel was a vast and terrifying force of nature. The flash floods that accompanied the early days of the rainy season had torn its winter banks away and the normally placid river was now an angry torrent hundreds of yards wide. If Alex and Stan strayed out of the side eddies they could be hurtled miles downstream or drowned outright. Hard in to the bank, however, the risk of detection was much greater. The whole undertaking was very much more dangerous than it had first appeared, but it represented the SAS team's only chance of locating the hostages.