We got to the top of the stairs and the stench of shit and death hit my nostrils.

  We carried Frankenstein down the staircase the best way we could, got him past the other bodies and the gold and on to the back of our wagon.

  Standish and Annabel were sitting against a wheel of the Renault. He was setting up the comms, and clearly brooding. We’d fucked him off big-time, but so what? He could do all the talking and organizing he liked, but he most definitely wasn’t one of us.

  ‘So what will she do?’

  ‘Fuck knows. The army’s not going to do anything – she’s not “wife of”.’

  There was a shout from Sam, up on the parapet. ‘Davy, Nick – stay there.’

  A minute later he materialized out of the gloom. ‘Get out and scavenge some mags. We’ll cover.’

  I looked through the gap I’d shot in the wall. More than a dozen bodies lay scattered in the moonlight. If Davy thought Gary’s girl had pension problems, what about the girlfriends of this lot?

  We scrambled over the rubble into no man’s land.

  13

  Davy knelt at my side, weapon in the shoulder. I lifted an AK from the sand, pressed the release lever behind its mag and pushed the mag forward until it came away from the weapon. Then I frisked the body lying a metre or so from it. There was another mag jammed in the waistband of his jeans, and one in his back pocket. I tucked in my football shirt and threw them all down the front.

  The body was covered with blood and sand, and it was still tacky. I tried to avoid it as best I could. We’d talked about the AIDS thing ever since the scare first hit the papers three or four years earlier, but none of us knew much about it. Was it transferred through blood, gay sex or kissing Rock Hudson? He had died of it last year and all his acting partners were flapping big-time after sharing so much mouth action on screen.

  I moved on. AIDS was one thing, but running out of ammo was far more life-threatening.

  The next guy had been wearing a canvas ammunition vest. Six more mags.

  The one after was on his back, eyes wide open. And he was whimpering.

  ‘We got a live one!’

  Standish shouted back, from the gap in the wall, ‘Leave him and move on.’

  ‘Sam, it’s a kid. He’s in shit state.’

  Standish repeated his order, but Sam had the last word from the parapet. ‘Bring him in.’

  I looked down. The little fucker couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven. Moonlight glistened in the dark liquid pooling beneath him. Lumps of rubble lay all around him. I picked up the bundle of skin and bones, leaving my AK for Davy to bring into the compound. Fuck the AIDS – I might be dead by morning anyway.

  Sam was already on the back of our truck, pulling on a pair of surgical gloves from the trauma pack. ‘Dear God.’ He laid his hand on the boy’s head. ‘Sssh, hey, OK . . . You’re going to be fine.’

  I went to his other side. The kid’s clothes were in shreds and it was easy to see the huge slit down his left thigh. It looked like a sausage that had split in a frying-pan. Most of his flesh was peppered with fragments of broken stone. His hair and face were caked with blood, sweat and sand.

  We didn’t have any fluids to get into him. There was nothing we could do but plug up the holes and try to stop him losing any more blood. He was going to be in a lot of pain and he’d probably get badly infected, but if we could stabilize him and get him to a hospital, all that would be sorted out later on.

  Sam had his hands on either side of the gash, squashing it back together. Pressure was the only thing that would stop the blood.

  I ripped open a dressing with my teeth and unwrapped the cotton tape that was supposed to keep it in place. The moment you applied pressure it always behaved more like a ligature. There was no way the fucking things would do what it said on the tin. I handed the dressing to Sam, who jammed it into the oozing cavity carved by the wound.

  The child screamed.

  Sam murmured soothingly, ‘Sssh, we’ve got to pack you out.’ As if he understood a word.

  A second field dressing followed the first, then a third packed down on top. I handed Sam a four-inch crêpe bandage and he began to bind up the dressings, applying constant pressure all the way down the wound.

  He took a second bandage from my outstretched hand. ‘What have we done? What have we done?’

  I thought he was talking to me, and looked up. He wasn’t. His gaze was pointing at the sky. ‘Dear God, forgive us . . .’

  14

  05:23 hours

  Standish was still sitting against the wheel, sat comms glued to his head, as he talked to a US Marine colonel bobbing up and down somewhere on the South Atlantic. Sam stood over him, working out the payload the helis would be lifting.

  The US Navy might have had helis coming out of their ears, but they weren’t going to send more than they had to into a hot zone. At least they were coming: Gary’s idea of using the Sea Knight to refuel was in train at last.

  None of the team was dancing jigs about it. We knew what was in the boxes now, and what Gary and the royal sisters had died for – everything from Mobutu’s string of houses on the French Riviera to a new private 747.

  The Saviour of the People was going to do quite well out of this little job, which no one would remember in a month’s time. Meanwhile, Gary’s kids would get fucked over by our government, as surely as this one slowly dying on the wagon had got fucked over by his. And Princess Margaret’s granddaughters would wonder why Nanny had never made it home for Christmas.

  Each of the fourteen wooden boxes weighed 162 pounds. And there were eleven of us, including Annabel, the general, Gary and the kid. The total payload was about 4200 pounds, easy in weight terms for a helicopter to lift, but not when it came to bulk.

  The carrier fleet’s UH-60 Seahawks, the Navy’s version of the Blackhawk, were designed to take eight combat troops and their gear, so a two-ship had been scrambled. Their escort was a two-ship Cobra attack force, armed with three-barrel 20mm cannon. The plan was for them to provide top cover as we screamed out of the gates to the open ground the Seahawks needed for landing. We’d load Mobutu’s gear on to one, and ourselves on to the other. Then all four aircraft would fuck off back to the coast, via one of the Sea Knights parked up somewhere in the desert.

  I did what I could to comfort the wounded boy, but it wasn’t easy. We didn’t share a language and I wouldn’t exactly get a job as Ronald McDonald. Besides, I wasn’t even sure he could hear me. The field dressings on his leg and head were so bulky he looked like a mummy.

  Sam – just below us – was more withdrawn than I’d ever seen him. His conscience was giving him hell, and I didn’t feel too good about what we’d done either. We hadn’t had much option, but that didn’t help.

  I’d killed people before, but this was different. Kids like this one should have been too young to be anybody’s enemy. The guys who’d forced these poor fuckers to carry weapons should be the ones lying out there in the sand.

  Standish finished with the fleet. ‘OK, they’ll be here just after first light. We move out the moment we hear them. We’ll have two minutes to get everything aboard.’

  Sam looked up. ‘Well, we’d better get your blood money on a wagon then, hadn’t we?’

  15

  05:47 hours

  The crates were loaded. Davy and the guys were up top on stag. There was nothing to do but wait. Even the general was quiet.

  I studied my burned hand in the moonlight, and watched Sam try his best for the kid. There wasn’t a lot more he could do: the wounds were plugged up and probably infected, but at least he was alive.

  Sam was deep in thought. There was a lot more going on in there right now than commanding this job. I felt bad enough, and that was without worrying about an afterlife and a Big Guy with a white beard I had to answer to.

  Standish broke the silence: ‘They’re over the coast and inbound. Let’s get on the wagons.’ He punched numbers into the pad; Sam called the guys and we started to board.

  ‘Commissioner, I’m preparing the team now. I’ll contact you as soon as I’ve made visual contact with the aircraft.’ He passed the handset to Annabel and went to look through the hole in the wall.

  The rebels were still out and about, even this close to first light. Fires burned, vehicle lights bounced around in the distance. The boys were still partying hard. But come first light, I wasn’t sure which was going to be more dangerous – that lot out there, or the Cobra two-ship escort piloted by trigger-happy Americans.

  We’d soon know. Light was brushing the far horizon and the sun would follow shortly. The Renaults coughed themselves to life and the compound filled with fumes.

  At least it kept the flies off.

  16

  06:04 hours

  All of us bar Davy were aboard just three wagons. He lay prone at the open gates, bipod dug into the sand, covering the ground the other side of the wall. We could see now that most of the bodies ripped open out there were kids’, but we ignored it. Or tried to . . .

  Sam’s wagon was going to be first out, with me on the gun. Standish, Annabel and the kid were on the floor behind us. The next wagon had the general sitting in Frankenstein’s old seat, with the wooden boxes and remaining four blokes on the floor. The third wagon had just a driver, and Davy with the RPG. If he had to fire, he didn’t want to worry about live bodies getting in his way or taking the backblast. His only cargo was the Yammy 175, the three remaining RPG rounds, Gary and the royal sisters. The fourth wagon’s fuel had been siphoned and shared.

  The mush of the sat comms cut out as Standish put the handset to his ear. The plan was that the Cobras would swoop in and protect us as we headed back the way we’d come and down into the dead ground where the Seahawks would pick us up. No one was sure how it was going to work, because there weren’t any comms between us and the helis.

  ‘They’re five minutes from target.’

  Davy gave an urgent shout: ‘I’ve got vehicles at about seven or eight hundred. They’re kicking up a shitload of dust.’

  Sam jumped out of the wagon and crawled alongside Davy in the gateway.

  Almost immediately, he was up and running again. He jumped behind the wheel and reached for the ignition. ‘We got too much coming. We can’t wait for the helis. They’ll have to find us.’

  17

  06:23 hours

  Our truck was first out of the gates. Sam’s foot was hard to the floor, and it wasn’t just so he could make it over the bodies we hadn’t been able to move. The front three enemy vehicles were no more than four hundred metres away. At least another dozen were lined up in the dust trail behind them.

  ‘I can’t cover that arc!’ I was out of my seat. ‘Gonna have to shift.’

  Sam braced himself. ‘Go for it.’ He knew what I had to do.

  I jumped on to the sandbags, manoeuvring myself until I was lying at a diagonal through the dashboard and across the bonnet. My arse was just about in Sam’s face, but at least I had a solid platform, bipod wedged into the sandbags, from which the gun could point east as we raced south.

  The wagon lurched and I almost careered off it. Sam grabbed my leg and steadied me as I got back into a fire position. I wasn’t going to put down rounds yet, though: I’d be aiming at moving vehicles, from a moving vehicle. Every round had to count. It was whites-of-their-eyes time. Where the fuck were those gunships?

  Sam had to steer one-handed as he gripped me with the other. The rebels’ vehicles careered towards us like a stampeding herd. The sun was less than a third above the horizon, but it was getting hard to look east, even so.

  Davy’s wagon broke ranks behind us and aimed right, then braked so sharply that for a moment I thought it’d broken down.

  A couple of seconds later, the backblast from an RPG kicked up a storm of sand and grey smoke.

  I followed the grenade’s flight path all the way in. The leading pickup jumped a good three feet in the air. There wasn’t a fireball, just an instant sand halo around it as the shockwave expanded and blew bits of wagon in all directions.

  By the time the carcass had thumped back into the ground, the three remaining pickups at the front were less than a hundred away. I could hear the scream of their overworked engines.

  The guys in the back of them fired wildly and indiscriminately, no idea where their rounds were going.

  I wondered if Sam was praying to his God. If so, he was wasting his breath. Right now, God wasn’t creator of the universe: God was a Cobra two-ship.

  I waited until they’d closed to within fifty of us before I fired my first double-tap. I aimed for a windscreen. You try to get the driver every time.

  Davy kicked off another RPG. He had only two left.

  This time, I didn’t see where it hit. I was too busy in my own little world, checking the link, firing as best I could as the vehicles circled us like Indians round a wagon train.

  I fired again. Glass shattered. The vehicle swerved. I sent another double-tap into the front passenger door at chest height.

  The pickup slewed right round and I went to fire again, but the Renault rocked violently and I lost my aim.

  Sam had to fight the wheel, and sand blew up around us as we were buffeted by downwash.

  18

  There was an instant sandstorm and the stench of aviation fuel as the Cobra two-ship swooped overhead. The gunships swivelled to face the wave of pickups and a set of 20mm cannons got on with their job.

  The rapid thud of rounds was joined a second later by an endless metallic rattle as big, empty cases rained on to our wagon.

  They moved forward and the sandstorm moved with them. I could see the Seahawks coming in low ahead of us, a gunner hanging out at either side.

  RPGs piled in from our right and exploded in mid-air. The gunships turned and responded with short sharp bursts.

  We had just a couple of hundred metres to go. The first Seahawk disappeared into its own sand-cloud as it settled on the ground. The second was hovering, looking for a landing site between the outcrops of brush.

  Two more RPGs came in from our right, but this time well forward of us, and lower. The sustainer motors on both fizzled out.

  When I realized what they were aimed at, the next couple of seconds passed in slow motion.

  There was a dull thud as the hovering Seahawk took a hit. There were no flames, no explosions, but it tipped drunkenly, nose almost vertical, and dropped the last fifteen or twenty feet to the ground. The fuselage crumpled.

  Sam rocked backwards and forwards in the driver’s seat, as if that was going to find us some more speed. He wouldn’t have been thinking about helping survivors. He was trying to get to the remaining Seahawk before an RPG did.

  One of the Cobras roared overhead. Empty cases kept raining down. Whoever had fired that RPG was probably already shaking hands with the guy with the white beard.

  There were still no flames from the wreckage: these things are designed to take hits. The two gunners from the other Seahawk came running out of their sandstorm as survivors tumbled from the stricken aircraft.

  We halted short of the downwash. Sand and aviation fuel filled my nostrils as I followed Sam and the other wagons caught up.

  The gunners’ only thoughts were to sort out their four mates, who were in a bad way. Their faces were bloody and shocked, but they were alive.

  My only thought was that there was just one aircraft now, and four places already taken.

  Sam yelled to get the gunner’s attention, then Standish was at his shoulder. ‘Boxes! Boxes! Boxes!’

  The gunner turned, dark helmet visor covering his face. Standish mimed a rectangle with his hands. The gunner gave a curt nod. They knew what they were here for.

  We shouldered the boxes from the wagon to the Seahawk, running, bent double under the weight, our sweat-soaked bodies caked with sand.

  That was it then, fuck it, we were going to be leaving here cross-country. At least we wouldn’t be chased. The Cobras hit them with a few more long bursts, and flatbeds were scattered and burning like targets in a computer game. The 20mms even took on the bodies spilling out of the wrecked vehicles. They had an aircraft down: they wanted to kill each and every one of them now, kids or not.

  Sam and I lugged the last two boxes, and as I reached the aircraft I could see Standish and the general already on board. As soon as our load had been transferred he thumbed the pilot to get airborne.

  Sam grabbed Standish’s leg. Over the roar of the quickening rotors he yelled, ‘Annabel and the boy! Annabel and the boy!’ He spun round to me. ‘I’ll go get ’em!’

  He disappeared into the dustcloud as I attacked the legs of one of the gunners, trying to signal to him that there were two more coming. In the end, I had to climb on board to make my point. Standish glared at me, trying to work out what was happening. Why weren’t they just lifting off?

  I showed the gunner and Standish two fingers. They got the message.

  There was a yell from below. Sam was at the door. He held up the boy like a begging bowl. Behind them, Annabel materialized out of the choking dust.

  Standish looked around him at the payload and fucked the pair of them off with the back of his hand. He yelled at the gunner and jerked his thumb skywards.

  The gunner’s helmet and visor swivelled, and there was another jerk of the thumb.

  The aircraft shuddered and started to lift.

  Dropping on to the London Delivery boxes, I held out my hands.

  Sam lifted the boy towards me as he kicked Annabel up on to the skid. She gripped the sill, ready to climb.

  Standish went ballistic. He yelled, then stamped on Annabel’s fingers.