Andy Mcdermott - Temple of the Gods

‘ Da , a little,’ said Maximov, tugging out a pair of silicone earplugs; without protection, the gunfire inside the metal-walled cabin would have been deafening. He smiled. ‘It felt good.’

‘You’re weird, Max.’ Years earlier, the muscular giant had survived a bullet to the head, with the side effect that his pain response had become scrambled. Getting hurt now actually gave him pleasure, making the ex-Spetsnaz mercenary an extremely dangerous opponent, as Eddie had discovered.

But they were on the same side for this job. ‘Nice work,’ he told Maximov, before turning his attention back to the escapees. Almost a hundred prisoners had been freed, he estimated; so many that it might be touch and go whether they could all fit in the waiting trucks. ‘Come on, move it!’ he shouted, waving for the stragglers to hurry.

‘And where do you think they will all go?’ Boodu demanded with condescending sarcasm. He glanced to the west; Botswana was only ten miles away. ‘The border is too well guarded — they will never get across it. And if they stay in Zimbabwe, we will find them. There is nowhere they can hide.’

‘That’s not gonna be your problem,’ said Eddie. The last of the men squeezed aboard the trucks, some dangling from the sides, held by their former cellmates. The first vehicle started to lumber away. ‘Right, Banga, we’d better shift. I don’t want to miss my flight.’

Banga helped his weary brother into the pickup’s cab, then climbed into the driver’s seat. Eddie hopped into the rear bed, keeping his gun on Boodu as the Zimbabwean, Strutter and Maximov followed suit. The pickup set off, but instead of following the other trucks back along the dirt road, it angled away into open scrubland. Shots from the fort followed them, but they were quickly beyond the range of the guards’ weapons.

Banga kept driving across the windy plain. After a few minutes, structures appeared ahead. Skeletal frames rose from the ground like hands clawing from a grave, the part-built beginnings of what had been planned as a cement works before Zimbabwe’s ruined economy forced construction to be suspended. The killdozer, in its original peaceful guise, had been one of the pieces of equipment abandoned in situ .

A long road ran from the site to a highway a few miles to the south, widened and flattened to allow the passage of heavy machinery. Eddie hoped it would also be wide enough for another form of transport…

‘There she is!’ shouted Maximov, pointing into the sky. Eddie looked up to see a bright yellow aircraft approaching at low altitude.

It wasn’t the one he had expected, however. ‘What the bloody hell’s that?’ he demanded as the large, ponderous biplane made a lazy descent towards the road. The closer it came to the ground the slower it moved, to the point where it seemed to be hanging impossibly in the air. Then, with an upward twitch of its nose, it dropped the last few feet and bounced along the dirt track before trundling to a stop near the unfinished buildings.

Banga drove the pickup to meet it. Strutter prodded Boodu out of the back with the machete as Eddie jumped out and ran to the aircraft. A hatch opened in the biplane’s rear flank. ‘TD!’ he yelled over the engine’s sputtering growl. ‘What the fuck’s this piece of old crap?’

Tamara Defendé looked offended. ‘And it’s nice to see you too, Eddie,’ she said in her melodious Namibian accent.

‘What happened to the Piper?’ He had expected her to be flying her Twin Comanche air-taxi.

‘Didn’t I tell you? I’ve got two planes now — my business is expanding. I thought you might need something bigger for this.’ She nodded at Maximov as he accompanied Strutter and Boodu to the aircraft. ‘I don’t think he would even fit in the Piper.’

Eddie was still far from impressed. ‘But… but it’s fucking prehistoric ! It’s a biplane, for Christ’s sake. Who built it, the Wright brothers?’

‘It’s Russian,’ said TD, pouting in defence of her plane’s honour. ‘It’s an Antonov—’

‘Antonov An-2, yeah, I know.’ Eddie’s military training had included aircraft recognition. He clambered into the surprisingly capacious hold, moving aside to let the three other men in. ‘I meant, why the hell would you buy this thing? It must be sixty years old!’

‘Hah! It’s only thirty-nine years old, so it’s younger than you—’

‘It’s the same age, actually,’ he protested. ‘I’m not forty yet.’

‘—and it’s cheap and simple and I can repair it with a wrench and a hammer out in the bush if I need to. And it can carry a lot of cargo and land just about anywhere, so it’s perfect for my work.’

‘Main thing I want to know is: is it fast?’ Eddie asked as he waved goodbye to Banga and shut the hatch.

‘Not really, but this is Africa. Things don’t happen in a rush here.’

‘They will once the government finds out what just happened at the prison.’

The attractive young pilot took the hint and hurried up the cabin to clamber through an arched opening into the cockpit. Eddie checked on the other passengers. Strutter, evidently as unconvinced by the Antonov’s supposed airworthiness as Eddie, had already strapped himself firmly in. The only thing keeping Boodu down, however, was Maximov’s scowl from the neighbouring seat.

‘You’ll never get away,’ the Zimbabwean snarled as Eddie took the seat next to Strutter, facing him across the cabin. ‘Not in this antique.’

‘Ten miles and we’re across the border,’ Eddie reminded him. ‘Even this thing can make it before any of your fighters reach us.’ TD revved the engine, applying full rudder to turn the elderly aircraft back down the road. The Antonov lurched over the bumps. Strutter nervously pulled his straps even tighter. ‘ If it can make it,’ said Boodu.

‘I heard that,’ TD snapped from the cockpit. She straightened out, braking and checking the instruments before pushing the throttle to full power. The engine roared, the entire fuselage vibrating and rattling.

‘I should have kept earplugs in,’ Maximov complained. Eddie had to agree; the Antonov betrayed its Soviet military heritage by its utter lack of creature comforts like soundproofing.

‘Hang on,’ TD warned. The jolting increased as the biplane picked up speed. Eddie looked out through the row of circular portholes, gripping the arm of his seat with one hand as he kept the gun aimed at Boodu with the other. They were doing forty miles per hour, fifty — then abruptly the juddering eased and the plane tipped back sharply as it took to the air. Antiquated though it might be, the Antonov still had low-speed performance that almost no modern planes could match.

‘How long to the border?’ Eddie shouted to TD as she banked to head west towards her current home country.

‘Less than ten minutes.’

‘Okay.’ Once the An-2 reached Botswanan airspace — passage had already been secured — another fifteen minutes of flight would bring them to a bush airstrip.

Where the relatives of some of Boodu’s victims awaited his arrival.

Boodu had realised this, his attempt at a neutral expression not hiding the concern on his scarred face. His gaze flicked to the machete, which Strutter had shoved point-down into the frame between his and Eddie’s seats. ‘Don’t even think about it,’ Eddie warned, with a jab of the gun for emphasis. The militia leader leaned back in his seat, eyes narrowed.

Now that they were in the air, Strutter started to relax. He wiped sweat from his forehead, then turned to the Englishman. ‘You say you are not my friend, Eddie, but for getting me out of that place, you have a friend for life. Whether you like it or not!’ He beamed, but the smile faded at Eddie’s unimpressed look. ‘Whatever you need, whatever you want, you’ll have it.’