Those in Peril (Unlocked) (35 page)

Some of the survivors ducked behind the bodies of the two trucks. The rest of them sprinted back around the bend in the pass. Hurriedly the drivers of the trucks disentangled themselves and executed a series of three-point turns then roared back the way they had come, with bullets from the AKs smashing into their bodywork. When both trucks had disappeared, Hector counted six bodies that the enemy had left behind them. Two of these were still moving. One man was calling to his comrades for help and the other dragged himself back with both his legs slithering uselessly behind him. The men on the wall opened fire on them with gusto. Before Hector could stop them both the stricken jihadists were dead.

Not really cricket, but out here nobody has even heard of the game.
He had not the least sympathy with the dead men. He knew he could expect as much kindness and compassion if the roles were reversed, which they very well might be in the very near future.

‘Tariq, have one of the men collect the empty magazines and give them to the women to reload. Uthmann will be coming back very soon, depend on it.’ Twice more within the next hour Uthmann tried to storm the rubble barrier. These were both expensive attempts and there were now fourteen corpses lying out in front of Hector’s position.

The silence after the second attack had been repelled was abruptly shattered by the roar of many more trucks arriving at the mouth of the pass.

‘Adam has radioed for reinforcements. Now he probably has a couple of hundred men down there,’ Hector told Hazel. ‘How much ammunition do we have left?’

‘We have about three hundred rounds left in the case you carried up here. You have been using it up rather quickly.’ After a pause she asked, ‘Why do you keep looking up at the cliffs?’

‘I’m trying to work out what Uthmann is going to do next, now that he has built up his forces.’

‘What will he do?’

‘He’s going to send thirty or forty men up there from where they can fire down on us. Once they’re in position they will keep our heads down, then Uthmann will launch another direct attack on the barrier. This time we won’t be able to repel them.’

‘So what do we do?’ she asked.

‘We get under the overhang of the cliff so the men above us can’t fire directly down on us,’ he explained. ‘Then we build some sort of rock parapet behind which we can shelter from enfilading fire.’

The three women kept watch from the top of the barrier, while Hector and the rest of the men threw up a stone parapet under the overhang. They worked fast piling stones roughly on top of each other. When they had finished they came back to their original positions beside the women to wait for the next frontal attack.

Hazel reviewed their preparations in silence for a while, and then she said softly so that Cayla could not hear, ‘This isn’t going to work, is it?’

‘No,’ he admitted, ‘not for very long, anyway.’

‘What do we do after that?’

‘How good are you at praying? I am completely out of practice.’

‘You could try to contact Paddy O’Quinn again,’ she suggested.

‘That can’t do much harm. At least it will pass the time,’ he agreed and switched on the satphone. ‘In the meantime I want you to take the other women down to shelter behind the parapet, before we come under fire from up there.’ He watched them go while he moved up and down the barrier, trying to find a place from which the phone could see a satellite. In the end he gave up.

‘It’s like being at the bottom of a well,’ he muttered to himself. He scrambled down to join the women behind the newly erected parapet and sat beside Hazel.

‘The lull before the storm,’ he told her quietly.

‘Let’s not waste a second of it. Put your arm around me.’

‘That feels good,’ he said.

‘Yes, doesn’t it just. But, you know, it’s going to be such a terrible waste if it ends here, like this. I had so many marvellous plans.’

‘So did I.’

‘If you decided to kiss me now, you would meet very little resistance,’ she admitted.

‘Cayla is watching us.’ They both smiled at Cayla, and she smiled back uncertainly.

‘Do you mind if I kiss your mother, Miss Bannock?’ Hector asked and this time Cayla shook her head and giggled.

‘You two are so damned naughty!’ She watched them kiss with interest. The kiss went on for some time, but was interrupted in the end by the sound of men’s voices echoing down from the cliffs above them. All three of them looked up.

‘Don’t go away,’ Hector whispered to Hazel. ‘I’ll be back to continue where we left off.’

He stood up and reached for his rifle. He saw that Tariq and the men were already watching the cliff tops above them for the first enemy to show himself. Hazel and Cayla crouched down at his feet behind the parapet, both of them gazing up at the cliff top in trepidation. Hazel had the AK resting on the top of the wall with the butt in her shoulder, and Cayla had the Beretta pistol in her lap, holding it with a two-handed grip. Daliyah squatted behind them.

‘Can you shoot a gun, Daliyah?’ Hector asked. She shook her head and lowered her eyes.

‘Then look after Cayla,’ he told her, and she nodded and smiled, still not looking at him. He left them and climbed to the top of the wall, squatting down beside Tariq. Now they could also hear the voices of the men assembling around the bend in the pass below them. The rock walls were acting as a sounding board so that Hector recognized Uthmann Waddah’s voice as he harangued them, working them up to fighting pitch.

Hector knew that the men on the cliff above them would show themselves first, so he concentrated his attention there. He saw a furtive movement against the blue of the sky, and he waited. The movement was repeated and he raised the rifle and mounted the butt to his shoulder. He saw a man’s head peering over the lip of the cliff and he fired a three-round tap. Chips of stone flew from the top of the cliff, and the head jerked back out of sight. Hector thought he had missed. He waited a few seconds, ready for the next target, then suddenly a disembodied rifle slid over the rock lip and dropped into the pass. It clattered on the rocks close to where Hector sat. Seconds later a lifeless human body slithered over the same place on the cliff. It fell with its white robes fluttering like a flag and landed on top of the rifle. The dead man lay on his back staring up at the sky with one eye and a startled expression. His other eye had been ripped out by Hector’s bullet.

Hector went to the body and rolled it off the rifle. He picked up the weapon and weighed it in his hands with a surge of delight. It was a Beretta SC 70/90. For a moment he wondered where it had come from; then he remembered the Cross Bow men that Uthmann had murdered at the oasis. Clearly this was one of their weapons. The one-eyed corpse had a bandolier draped around its waist. Hector pulled it off. He checked the pouches and found there were five clips, each loaded with thirty rounds of ammunition. He slung the bandolier over his own shoulder.

Quickly he checked to see if the optical sight of the rifle had been damaged by the fall. Before he could decide if it was still intact there was another movement on the cliff above him. Instinctively he swung the rifle upwards and in the magnifying lens the image of an enemy head appeared before his eyes with the crosshairs perfectly aligned. He fired. The bullet struck exactly where he had aimed. The jihadist tumbled over the edge of the cliff and dropped lifelessly into the rocks at Hector’s feet.

Hector’s pleasure at having a real rifle in his hands again was shortlived. Almost immediately dozens of other turbaned heads began popping out over the edge of the cliff and bullets drummed like tropical rain on the rocks around them. The war cries of the enemy resounded off the walls. They were coming from the assault force that Uthmann Waddah was assembling lower down the pass.

‘Come on,’ Hector yelled at Tariq and the two surviving men. ‘We can’t stay here to be picked off like fleas on a dog’s belly. We have to get under the overhang!’ They jumped up and started down the reverse side of the barrier. Almost immediately one of his men was hit by the bullets from above. He went down with that peculiar rag-doll limpness which Hector knew was death. Nevertheless Hector stopped in the middle of the firestorm to make certain that the fallen man was beyond help. Then he jumped up again and started after the other two. Before they reached the bottom of the barrier and were under the rock overhang Tariq was hit, and he went down sprawling. Hector saw the blood spring brightly on the back of his tunic and a dark shadow seemed to pass before Hector’s own eyes.

‘Not Tariq. Please God, not him.’ He changed his rifle to his left hand and with barely a check in his run he scooped Tariq up from where he had fallen. Tariq was not a heavily built man and Hector carried him easily and dropped him behind the stone parapet.

‘Do what you can for him,’ he told Hazel. He was angry again, and he stood tall and swept the cliff face above him with a long burst of fire. Three of the enemy toppled over the lip and came thudding down into the rocks. The other enemy heads jerked back behind cover. Hazel and Daliyah were already attending to Tariq. He saw that Daliyah was weeping, and even in the extremity of the moment this came as a surprise.

‘Why is she bawling?’ he blurted out.

‘Stupid question. She loves him, of course,’ Hazel replied without lifting her head.

‘My God! Everybody’s doing it.’ Hector grinned recklessly with the battle madness fizzing in his blood. ‘How bad is he hit?’ He fired twice at the heads showing on the far side of the pass, and killed another man.

‘I don’t know. It’s in his back. But there are no bubbles in the blood, so maybe it hasn’t pierced his lung.’

‘Put pressure on the wound. Try to stem the bleeding. That’s all we can do for now. But in the name of all that’s holy keep your own head down. You too, Cayla. You can’t take them on with that handgun.’ He punctuated his speech with single rifle shots.

A burst of enemy bullets splashed across the parapet, showering them with stone chips and dust. Hector ducked down and spat out a chip of stone. Then he lifted his head to listen. There were shrill Islamic war cries coming from the direction of the mouth of the pass. Uthmann’s men were scaling the far side of the rock barrier and reaching the top without being offered any resistance. Hector wriggled around on his belly under the parapet until he was in position to fire up at the top of the barrier, without having to expose his head to the men on the cliffs when he did so. He was ready when the first man raised his head above the top of the barrier, but he held his fire and waited for more of them to show themselves. The first head bobbed down again, and when there was no rifle fire it rose again cautiously. Then others came up and went down again. Hector waited for them to become careless. Three of them stood up to their full height and chanted, ‘
Allahu Akbar!
’

Hector fired five aimed shots so swiftly that they sounded like a burst of automatic fire. Men fell or threw themselves down, shouting with surprise or squealing with pain. In the uproar it was impossible to be certain, but Hector thought that he might have got all three of them.

‘Not too dusty,’ he congratulated himself in an undertone. ‘We haven’t completely lost the touch.’

The rest of the enemy reacted violently and from the top of both the cliff and the barrier they poured a stream of automatic fire into the overhang. The bullets tore chunks out of the cliff, filling the air with a white mist of dust and then whining away in ricochets. Hector put one arm around Hazel and the other around Cayla and pushed them down on the stone floor. All their faces were powdered dead-white by the fine stone dust. Through the chaos of gunfire and the shouted war cries Hector made out the distant but mounting roar of many truck engines.

What trick is Uthmann pulling now?
he asked himself.
He isn’t going to be crazy enough to try and bring his vehicles over the barrier, much as I’d love to see that.
But the engine beat grew louder, almost drowning the jihadist shrieks. Abruptly Hector realized that the engine roar was not coming from the other side of the rock barrier, but was echoing down the open pass from behind their position. The Arab gunfire began to shrivel and dwindle. Hector rolled over and, still keeping the two women pinned to the ground, sheltering them with his own body, he peered back up the open pass to the bend in the rock walls to their rear.

At that moment a column of three huge GM trucks roared into his field of vision, coming straight down the pass towards them. On their sides was blazoned the Cross Bow logo, and in the front of each was mounted a pair of 50 calibre Browning heavy machine guns. Behind the guns on the leading truck stood Paddy O’Quinn. He was grinning happily as he gripped the firing handles and swivelled the twin barrels onto the jihadists who were still swarming over the rock barrier that blocked the pass. In the truck that followed him Dave Imbiss was leaning back and aiming his heavy Brownings up at the cliffs.

‘Paddy O’Quinn and his rock and roll band will now play their famous signature tune for us,’ said Hector, laughing and hugging the two women. The guns opened with a tumultuous thunder that filled the pass with sound. Paddy’s tracer shells ripped the top off the rock barricade and filled the air with dust. Running Arabs trying to get to the top of the rock pile disappeared in the storm of shot, cut down before they reached it. In the second truck Dave swept the tops of the cliffs with his fire. Human bodies rained down into the pass, like overripe fruit shaken from the trees of an orchard by a gale of wind. Within seconds all the visible targets were destroyed and the guns fell silent. Paddy looked around and spotted them huddled behind the parapet under the overhang, and he waved cheerily.