The Sixteen (22 page)

And the twenty-foot long boat was now just close enough to the shore for us to reach it with a running jump. The men on the boat watched us closely as we moved towards them, then suddenly one panicked and shouted a warning to the others as he rushed to the stern and tried to push it away from the jetty. The other two men ran towards the front as Chalky and Spot landed on board in quick succession.

The old jetty was awkward to run along and the boat was now about six feet away. I used one of the wooden supports to help launch myself towards the side of it, but as I pushed off it gave way with a loud crack. The guy at the back had picked something up off the deck and was about to try to hit Spot but he immediately spun around as I landed with one foot on the boat while the other bashed into its side. The guy raised his arm to strike me just as I managed to get my other foot on to the side of the boat and I stood up, balancing on the edge. Using a blocking, locking grip, I was able to use him to pull myself aboard but I overbalanced and fell into him, which in turn forced the guy to fall backwards and he hit his head on the other side of the boat. As he attempted to get up, I swiftly broke his neck.

Looking up, I saw that the other two boatmen were already dead, lying crumpled on the deck. One of them had his hands clutched to his stomach where blood was pouring from a knife wound and covering the sail he lay on.

Dynamo had been watching the guy with the bicycle to make sure that he didn’t see or hear anything or try to come back to the boat, but he was now standing on the jetty waiting to be picked up.
Using the oar at the rear of the boat as a rudder, I sculled it back in to the riverbank. As he jumped on board, Dynamo looked about.

‘No problems, lads. Right, let’s get rid of them quick!’ he said, and began to pull a long, white, smock-type garment off one of the dead men but it was saturated with blood and he changed his mind.

Meanwhile Spot and Chalky had weighed down two of the bodies with some heavy, metal objects they’d found lying on the deck, before dumping them overboard. There were two soft splashes and both bodies immediately disappeared under the muddy dark-brown surface.

‘I’ll try to get this damn sail to work, Geordie, if you can dump that one over the side and don’t forget to weigh it down,’ Chalky said as he set about sorting out the tangled jumble of ropes on the deck.

I searched about and found a small length of chain, which I tied around the dead man’s chest. The aft of the boat was still fairly close to the jetty as I dropped the body over it feet first, but when it hit the water the chain fell down around the legs and the top half of the body floated up; his smock had filled with air and his arm kept bobbing up to the surface. I sculled the boat nearer to the riverbank and discovered that the body had landed on a submerged ledge and lay in only about three feet of water. I grabbed at the arm, wrapped another piece of chain around the wrist and then watched as the body sank and disappeared.

‘Don’t worry about it too much, Geordie, the crocs will get them anyway,’ Chalky calmly informed me.

‘Crocs, what crocs? You’re kidding me aren’t you?’ I asked him in surprise. I’d no idea that there were crocodiles in this part of the world.

But he just grinned and carried on sorting out the sail.

The others were looking around the boat and acting as though nothing had happened, so I sat down in the aft with the oar in my hand and began to use it as a rudder, trying to look relaxed too. Spot discovered a couple of white smocks similar to the one Dynamo had tried to pull off the dead guy, which were worn by many of the locals in this area. He tried them both but they were far too small so he threw one to Dynamo then the other to me. They were a tight fit but eventually we managed to squeeze into them just as we rounded the bend and came into full view of a group of soldiers on the bank.

Chalky noticed them first. ‘Geordie, get us away from the bank, we’re getting very close and one of them is sitting watching us. We don’t want any confrontation with these guys, we haven’t got the time,’ he whispered urgently.

About five soldiers were lounging against a truck, then one of them got up from where he’d been sitting on the running board and began to stroll towards the edge of the river. He had his thumb in the strap of a sub-machine gun, which was hanging upside down on his right shoulder and a cigarette in his other hand.

The sails weren’t responding the way we’d expected them to and, for all there was only a light wind, we were being driven in even closer to the bank. I tried to steer away from the shore, almost smashing the bloody oar with the effort, but nothing seemed to happen and I could feel that the currents here were obviously very strong.

‘Come on you guys, hurry up and do something with that bloody sail. I’m losing control and the wind is pushing us further into the side,’ I urged them quietly.

By now the soldier had walked right to the edge of the riverbank and stood watching, staring at us suspiciously. We were only about fifty yards away from the embankment and I felt that any moment
now the guy was going to say or do something so, as we didn’t want to draw any further attention to ourselves, I sat back smiling at him while Chalky fiddled about with the damn sail. It looked as though we were definitely going to hit the embankment.

Dynamo spoke to me softly: ‘Listen, if we crash into the bank I’ll see if I can keep this guy talking while you make your way around to the other blokes by the truck; you know what to do. I think we’ll be able take all of them out without anyone from the road seeing us, it looks as though they’re at least five hundred yards away and that truck should block their view anyway. But we’ll need to get as close to these guys as we possibly can, it shouldn’t be a problem, they can see we aren’t armed. Leave our weapons in the bags, we don’t need them, just sit and relax, we don’t want to give him any excuse to open fire on us! We won’t be able to use our sashes because of these damn smocks, so we need to be really close, OK. You know the routine!’

As he spoke, Chalky suddenly managed to loosen something on the sail, which immediately filled out and the boat slowly began to change direction. Just then, the engine started up on the truck and the driver began to shout something to the soldier on the embankment. He drew on his cigarette then flicked it into the river before turning away and walking back towards the truck. Then he stopped and looked back at us over his shoulder for a moment. His pals on the truck started shouting at him but he seemed reluctant to leave; the driver leant out and shouted too and he quickly went back to the truck and jumped on to it. As they drove off, we could see him standing in the back still staring at us.

‘Bloody hell! That was close! Trying to get us killed, Geordie?’ Chalky laughed.

‘It had to be the currents, look, we’re moving away from the
embankment now but the sail doesn’t seem to have changed position very much,’ I explained. ‘What took you so long with it?’

‘Stupid wogs, they had their rope in a flaming granny knot.’

The deck of the boat was covered with fishing lines and nets and I couldn’t help thinking that these guys hadn’t been soldiers, just simple fisherman whose boat we’d wanted. It just didn’t seem right that we’d killed them simply because they were in our way. They would’ve had no idea just what they were up against. If they’d been armed soldiers or terrorists who didn’t care who they killed, like in the Troodos Mountains, I would have had no qualms about killing them.

We were all fairly quiet as the boat began to move slowly down the river. Because we were so very alike, and because of our training and the way we worked so closely together, I felt that we practically had the ability to read one another’s minds, and I could sense that we all felt the same about killing these people.

Spot was rummaging around and searching the front of the boat, when suddenly he stopped and pulled out a canvas bag. Turning to face me, he held up a Sten gun and service revolver.

‘Look at this, it’s a bloody good job we got the bastards before they got to these! The swine had enough weapons here to start their own private little war!’ he said, kicking the bag. ‘And we thought they were just simple fishermen!’

I sat back and felt much better when he said that. I think we had all been a little uneasy about killing these people until he found the guns. It made us all feel a lot better and the atmosphere on the boat immediately changed. Chalky turned towards me.

‘We can’t afford to take any chances with these people,’ he said. ‘They feel that they’ve been betrayed by the British and they hate our guts!’

We settled down and travelled unhindered for approximately
seven miles. It was slightly cooler on the river, but still blisteringly hot. Spot had picked up a fish knife from the deck and was cleaning it on his trouser leg.

‘You know, one of those swine tried to stick this in me,’ he said indignantly.

They all treated it so casually, as though they were out for a Sunday afternoon trip. Dynamo was so relaxed that he actually waved at people on other boats in the distance; it was just as well that they couldn’t see him properly.

‘What a bunch of miserable sods,’ he said, as none of the locals waved back.

‘Stop messing about, you’ll draw attention to us. Look, we’re going nowhere fast in this bloody thing,’ Chalky said, looking about the boat. ‘Let’s take it in there and sink it.’

He pointed at a small, nearby cove. The boat had served its purpose and got us past the danger area but the damned thing was travelling much too slowly. We had to be in Cairo by no later than 2300 hours and it was now around 1430.

Our information was that our target often worked late and slept on the same floor, he was expected to leave his office between 2200 and 2230. If we wanted to get to him on time, we would have to ditch the boat now and find some quicker form of transport.

We were approaching an area where several streams met the river and could see in the distance that it was becoming busier and there was now a lot more activity ahead of us.

As we began to pull into the cove we quickly pulled the sail down – we couldn’t take the risk that this might stick up out of the water and draw the attention of someone on the riverbank. I sculled the boat further into the cove as the others tried to undo the mast, but they had problems with a large wooden pin at the bottom of it. Dynamo searched around for a few moments before
finding a three-foot long steel bar with a ring on the end of it. Using this he began to hack away at the pin. Suddenly the whole lot came down on top of us and almost capsized the boat.

‘That’s the way it’s done, lads,’ Dynamo laughed. He barely gave us time to get near to the bank before he started to punch holes into the bottom of the boat with the steel bar.

‘Hang on, we’re not going to make it if you keep doing that,’ I shouted at him, laughing and sculling like hell to try to get the boat to the shore as water began to lap around our feet. My arms were just about dropping off as the boat crashed into the side of the embankment and we all fell about giggling. Dynamo was jumping about the boat bashing holes into the bottom of it, the water now up to his knees. He looked like a mad monk in his white smock and each time he tried to punch a hole with the metal bar the steel ring bashed his knuckles.

‘What the hell could this bloody useless thing possibly be needed for, I’ve just about broken my knuckles with it,’ he complained.

Chalky, Spot and I stood on the riverbank doubled up with laughter as he pranced about in a demented fashion.

‘I don’t know what you lot are laughing at, the bottom of this boat is like bloody concrete!’ he said, just as the stern started to slowly disappear beneath the surface. He quickly ran to the front with it sinking behind him and jumped off, to land beside us on the embankment. The four of us stood for a brief moment watching it slowly disappear, bits of cork popping up to the surface as it did.

‘Come on, let’s get a move on,’ Chalky urged. ‘We’ve got to get out of here and find some transport fast. We’re losing too much time.’

With some difficulty, I removed the tight smock, tied it around some bits of rock and threw it into the water. Spot and Dynamo stayed to ensure that all of the boat sank and disappeared, while
Chalky and I picked up the canvas bags and made our way about a hundred yards along the riverbank to check that it was clear.

There were clumps of small bushes and trees on the steep embankment, which provided us with some cover as we headed towards a slight bend in the river where we came across a stream of sorts running down the embankment. The water was dirty grey in colour and as we got closer, we could see that it had cement in it.

Silently Chalky and I crept up the embankment in case there was anyone at the top and carefully peered over. A large cement mixer stood only yards away and nearby was a truck full of workmen who must have just finished for the day. Two of the men were filling buckets with water from a water tank and throwing this into the cement mixer to wash it out, which had created the small stream of dirty water we’d seen. The men in the truck were shouting at them, presumably to hurry them up.

We ducked back below the edge of the embankment.

‘It’s a bloody good job we didn’t get here sooner, or we could have walked right into this lot,’ Chalky whispered. ‘You’d better go back and warn the other two.’

I swiftly slid back down the embankment leaving him on his own at the top with our bags, keeping an eye on the workmen. Spot was now roughly halfway between the sunken boat and the cement stream; Dynamo was a few yards behind trying to pull his smock off. I gave them the signal to take cover and they both dived into the reeds on the embankment while I quickly scrambled back up to where I’d left Chalky. Just as I reached him the two men threw their buckets into the cement mixer then ran towards the waiting truck and climbed aboard as it began to move off.

Turning around I slid back down the hill and gave the ‘OK’ and ‘all clear’ signals to Spot and Dynamo then went back again to
where Chalky now stood. Picking up our bags, we began to make our way along the top of the embankment to where we thought the other two would appear.