Andy McNab - Recoil

Sam glared at him. Standish sat back, arms hooked over the chair. He looked pretty pleased with himself.

The sat phone rang, its display glowing.

Standish got to his feet but didn't answer it immediately. 'Both of you, wait here. I haven't finished yet.' He gave us a nod and walked away to take the call. I had seen a +41 prefix. It was probably his bank manager in Zurich.

I rounded on Sam. 'What the fuck's going on? Why didn't you warn me about him? And what's all this LRA-swarming-in-from-the-north shit? You're supposed to be a mate, for fuck's sake.'

'I'll explain later,' Sam said. 'When there are no ears. She'll be OK. We'll get to her in time, don't worry.'

I took a couple of deep breaths. There was no point getting sparked up: it wouldn't achieve anything. If their int was on the nail, it would be three or four days before the shit really hit the fan, and it shouldn't take more than a few hours to cover thirty-five Ks.

To my right, near the soldiers' tents, the jungle began to spit out one guy after another, each bent almost double under the weight of a bulked-out rice sack. Two whites in shorts used their AKs to direct the human mule train along the strip. A handful of other guys providing the escort peeled off from the snake and disappeared into their tents to dump their gear.

'The other patrol?'

Sam nodded slowly and mistook my pissed-off expression for concern. 'Don't worry, the route's easy. And, anyway, you'll have my sat nav. The way points are here and the mine.'

'What's your man-hour-per-kill, mate?'

He shook his head. One of the best measures of success at managing risk is how few men you lose per number of hours achieved, so the shake wasn't good news. 'Not good, since the LRA have been active. Less than a hundred. But that's with large numbers. With just four of you, you'll get through easy enough.'

Close to a couple of hundred porters must have struggled out of the jungle by now. They worked their way across the strip in single file and up the ramp into the belly of the An12.

'It's not the job I'm worried about.' I watched the men make their way back down the ramp empty-handed, head for the pile of empty food-aid sacks at the edge of the strip, then slope off in the direction of the shanty town. 'If anything happens to me on the way there, I want to know Silky's being taken care of. You'll do that for me?'

'Only if I can wear my kilt when we bury you.'

'Thanks, mate.' I tried hard to give him a grin. 'And it's probably best not to let Standish know what she means to me. Keep pretending it's a job, yeah?'

Standish would probably get me fighting his war single-handed if he knew I'd do anything to keep her safe.

Body after body, shiny with sweat and bent double under the sacks, continued to emerge from the jungle and shuffle along the airstrip. When they hit the back of the queue for the ramp their hands went straight on to their thighs to try and ease the weight, too fucked even to wipe away the sweat dripping from their faces.

The ones who'd already shed their load were now flopped out on the sacks in the shade of the treeline. A gaggle of brightly coloured women fussed round them with refilled plastic bottles of water.

I'd been wrong about the numbers. The snake looked as though it would never end. There must have been many more than two hundred of them – moving, queuing, or lying prone under the trees.

Sam nodded towards a group of half a dozen escorts high-fiving each other by the entrance to one of the tents. 'They won't be doing that when they hear they're going straight back in a couple of hours.'

Soldiers shouted at porters; women and children shrieked with excitement. The guys in the snake, however, didn't utter a sound. They were too fucked to do more than stagger to the treeline.

'So what's being mined, Sam. Diamonds?'

Sam's gaze was fixed on the other side of the strip, where the two white guys were now prodding the porters on the ground with their AKs. They seemed to be trying to organize the exhausted men into straight lines.

'Tin ore. It's the most hotly traded metal on the London Exchange these days – worth four hundred US per fifty-kilo sack. Here and South America are the only really big sources left. Did you see the old open-cast pits as we flew in?'

'Like nuclear Ground Zeros?'

He nodded. 'Those were the diamond mines. That war still goes on, but this is the one that's giving a few guys happy faces.'

'What's the big deal about tin all of a sudden? We overdoing it with the baked beans?'

Sam kept watching the other side of the strip. 'Supply and demand.' He pointed at the column working its way into the back of the aircraft. The poor bastards looked like beetles as they leaned forward with the sacks on their backs. 'The ore is casseritite. Every circuitboard on the planet uses the tin it produces. People are being killed and treated like animals here so that soccer mums can video their kids, and the kids can download Britney Spears on their PCs. Every time somebody uses a mobile, Nick, every time they use the Internet…'

'How much are you shifting?'

'About twenty tons at a time. And the plane's flying in and out 24/7.'

'That's a fuck of a lot of four-hundred-dollar bags.'

'Just over two million US a week at the moment. And the owners have plans to expand the misery once the LRA are sorted. Dodgy peerages might grab the headlines, but the real money's in those lumps of rock.'

'So who owns it?'

'The Chinese, would you believe? Africa's changing, Nick. This continent is no longer just an empty paradeground for us to come and play soldiers on. The rebel groups are slashing and burning for the multinationals now. And you know what? That makes them even more scary.'

'The Chinese are fucking everywhere.'

'Aye, big-time. Standish is fixed up with a guy who's the middle man for one of their operations here.'

'Anyone we know?'

Sam started to laugh. 'Sure he's going to tell us that. You know what he's like, knowledge is power. Anyway, who cares? We can all get what we need out of this deal.'

Lex's engines kicked into life and the props began to turn. The Antonov taxied through the heat haze before the ramp had finished closing. I knew just how he felt. I didn't want to stick around any longer than necessary either. The wash from the huge propellers blasted any sweat-covered bodies still on the strip, whipping at tattered T-shirts and shorts and caking them in dust.

Sam had to shout: 'Lex flies it to Kenya. From there, it's a slow boat to China.'

Sounded good to me. Once back here, Silky and I would be on the next available flight. A couple of days' R amp;R on the beach in Mombasa and then, all being well, a flight home.

Sam's eyes hadn't left the two white guys for one second. I could see from his face that they took their organizational skills a little too seriously for his liking.

'How long's the walk-in?'

'With the kit, it's fourteen hours in daylight or eighteen in the dark. It's safer to move at night. These guys won't like having to go back without a decent rest, but they'll still want to be there before first light. If they're not carrying weight and we don't have a contact, we can do it in about nine hours.'

Lex's Antonov had reached the bottom of the airstrip and turned. The props screamed and it lurched forward. Its take-off run brought it straight towards us, but even fully laden, the aircraft lifted halfway down the strip. The kids jumping and waving below it were soon engulfed in huge clouds of red dust.

The Antonov roared over our heads and banked away into the dazzling blue sky.

The women along the treeline were doling out small bowls along with the water bottles. Tired fingers scooped up the food and shoved it into hungry mouths.