The Watchman (4 page)

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.

"Let's find ourselves a raft," whispered Alex.

Soundlessly, they waded into the warm, soupy water, where a regular procession of tree limbs, bushes and other vegetation uprooted by the floods was washing past them in the current.

Within a couple of minutes they had secured the perfect vehicle - a twenty-foot branch hung with decomposing foliage.

"Ready?" asked Alex.

"Sure." Clayton nodded.

"I can always use a few dozen more leeches round my bollocks!"

Carefully they steered the branch a short distance away from the bank and began the smooth, inexorable drift towards the camp. Only their heads showed above water and behind the festoon of rotting weeds they were effectively invisible to the guards on the riverside. Slowly they rounded the bend past the camp's first outposts. It was shallower here and Alex could feel his feet dragging on the river's muddy bed.

Close up, the scene was very much more threatening than at a distance. On the bank, less than ten yards away, a crowd of drunken soldiery staggered around, clutching rifles, machetes and beakers of palm wine. Even over the muddy tang of the river the SAS men could smell the cloying reek of the homemade spirit. From the speakers the RUF anthem "No Living Thing' punched out, bouncing from the cliffs opposite with a thudding reverberation. Along the shore the glazed-eyed soldiers screamed the choruses.

His face inches from the corporal's, Alex was conscious of Stan Clayton's attempts to still his breathing, to remain absolutely motionless behind the branch. If they see us, thought Alex ~f the branch catches on something and swings around we're dead.

They'll hack us to pieces in seconds. Stan's wife will be a widow, his son will be without a dad and it will all be my fault. My fault for turning an important search mission into a juvenile, hairy-arsed, straight to-video personal fucking adventure.

The random shooting continued. One man, standing on the bank no more than eight feet from them, casually loosed off a couple of rounds from his SLR as he urinated into the river, and the SAS men flickered an expressionless glance at each other as the 7.62 rounds passed inches over their heads and tore into the far bank. A few yards further on a woman with her dress pulled up over her back crouched listlessly in the mud as a bearded soldier drove into her from behind. Around her, a surly and impatient knot of men watched and waited, and masturbated to make themselves hard for when their own turns came.

This hellish scene was repeated at intervals along the bank and more than once Alex caught himself or so it seemed staring mesmerised into the eyes of an RUF warrior. His heart appeared to be beating hard enough to disturb the greasy surface of the water. It seemed impossible that he had not been seen.

But the soldiers, it turned out, were less interested in driftwood than in the slopping palm wine buckets from which, at intervals, they refilled their half gourds and plastic beakers. Those and the half-dozen wretchedly prostrate women on the shore refugees, Alex guessed, displaced by the fighting.

The current, perceptibly faster now, swept them past the outhouses. The first, Alex guessed from the rhythmic chugging sound, housed the generator. In a second, from which the buckets were being carried, he supposed that they had some kind of distillery. The third, a mud-walled dwelling whose palm-frond roof had collapsed inwards, was anyone's guess, but as they drifted past it the palm wine stink was joined by that of slit.

And then, for no more than five seconds, Alex saw them:

three pale-skinned figures, their heads bowed, their hands tied behind them, kneeling in the narrow passage between the two cinder-block huts. They were being guarded by a single uniformed soldier carrying an SLR, smoking a joint and wearing a pink bubble cut wig.

Alex's eyes widened and he turned to Stan Clayton, saw that the other man had clocked the guard and the captives too. Then they were passing the speakers, and taking the full thumping force and screaming distortion of "No Living Thing'.

"I think I prefer the Martine McCutcheon version," murmured Clayton thoughtfully, as an RUF man heaved a wet tree root on to the bonfire and a shower of bright-orange sparks whirled skywards. They were only eight or nine yards from the nearest whooping, rifle-waving soldiers now, but the amplification from the sound system was such that the corporal could probably have yelled at the top of his voice without being heard.

And then, as the firelight dimmed and a column of dense brown smoke replaced the flames, Alex felt the current take sudden hold, swinging the branch and themselves into deeper water. The two men silently struggled to remain concealed and to keep the branch parallel to the shore. They were clearing the camp fast now the bonfire was already well behind them but they were moving inexorably towards the Rokel's racing central channel.

"We're going to have to let go," gasped Alex and heard Clayton's grunt of agreement beside him.

"On three, underwater and kick for the side. One, two .

Alex released the branch, dived, and felt himself lifted by the current and swung with doll-like helplessness through the dark, churning water. There was a roar at his ears, a sense of vast and indifferent force, then a rock or a boot exploded in a vicious flash of light against the side of his head.

Somehow, even as he briefly lost consciousness, he managed to keep his mouth shut. Hours or maybe seconds later, desperate to breathe, he clawed his way to what he thought was the surface, struck mud and felt himself dragged downwards again by a hand at his collar. For some reason, there seemed to be air at the bottom of the river. He tried to inhale, gagged and found that a mud-tasting hand was clamped over his mouth. Water streamed from his nose. He could breathe again. He opened his eyes.

Clayton's worried grin was inches away.

"You all right, Alex?" They were in deep, eddying water beneath the bank. The music and din of the camp were still loud, but no longer deafening. Stan Clayton had one elbow under Alex's chin, the other anchored to a solid-looking mangrove root.

"Are you OK?" The whisper more urgent now.

Alex tried to nod and then, retching, vomited foul tasting water. There was blood in his eyes and his head hurt like hell. Somehow he found a root of his own and passed an unsteady hand over his face.

"Yeah . thanks, Stan. Lost it there for a moment. Thanks."

I was seconds away from drowning there, he told himself Seconds away from death.

"I think we're more or less clear of the camp," continued Clayton.

"The other blokes can't be far, but I'm a bit worried about them fuckers we 'ad to duck round on our way here. Bride of Frankenstein an' his mate.

"Let me have a look," said Alex and with Clayton's help hauled himself up so that his eyes were level with the bank. They were less than twenty yards from where they had descended the tree roots, but of the sleeping RUF soldiers there was no sign. Instead, Don Hammond was leopard-crawling towards him through the shadows, grabbing him under the arms, dragging him by sheer brute force up the slick clay face of the bank.

"I reckoned it was either you guys or a hippo wallowing around out there," said the sergeant.

"Come on, Stan, grab hold." When Clayton was on the bank too the three of them moved back from the river and into cover, and Alex swiftly brought the sergeant up to date concerning the ITN team.

"How did they look?" asked Hammond.

"Alive," replied Clayton tersely.

"Where are the other guys?" asked Alex.

The sergeant inclined his head towards the bush.

"Just moving the two guards that were here away from the path. We reckoned you'd be coming out about here."