Читать книгу Legacy - James Steel, James Steel - Страница 18

At first light the next day Alex twisted the focus on his binoculars and stared at the perimeter fence of the mine.

It was eight foot of razor wire with a coil of the stuff on top. Watchtowers with an armed guard in each were spaced along it, and a twenty-foot-wide swathe in front had been cleared of vegetation and covered with brown gravel.

Nice touch, he thought. We can’t sneak across that without making a noise. But it’s still not going to stop us if we drop in behind by helicopter.

Beyond the gravel strip, the trees had been cut down for a hundred yards into the jungle to clear the field of fire; clumps of tall grasses and bushes had grown up in their place and Alex was lying in a bush thirty yards from the gravel. The smell of damp earth and rotting vegetation was in his nostrils and he was soaked in cold dew from lying motionless on the ground for two hours waiting for dawn to come up. His body kept shivering and he fought to keep still.

The three of them had crawled into their observation post under cover of darkness in full combats, heavily camouflaged with cam cream on their faces and vegetation stuffed into their webbing and cam-netting head covers. Throat mikes on their radios meant they could communicate but radio silence was to be observed for all but emergency situations this close to the enemy.

They had wriggled forwards on elbows and knees with their weapons held in front of them; they had fitted their rifles with silencers, and had radio beacons to call on Arkady for emergency uplift, but Alex hoped to God that they did not have to make contact.

They were lying on the ground in a triangle shape, facing outwards. Yamba and Alex watched different sectors of the complex, whilst Col maintained a guard behind them. One foot lay over each other’s ankles so that a silent tap could alert them to any danger.

They were on the first leg of what Alex hoped would be three approaches to the perimeter; going in and out in a classic flower-petal pattern around the site to see it from all angles. He wanted to check the enemy’s defensive positions and weapons, their routines, and also to get some idea of what calibre of troops he was up against. Alex knew that a long day of discomfort lay ahead — it was going to be twelve hours before he could move enough to have a piss.

They were at the east end of the complex, where the road and the power line came in from the volcano. He had been able to see the outline of some of the buildings through the blurry green vision of his nightsight: the ends of a row of bar-rack huts and behind them the huge grey corrugated-metal shed they had to capture. However, he really needed daylight to get a detailed look at things.

As daylight seeped quickly into the air he pushed the night-vision goggles up onto his forehead so that he could use the binoculars. He twisted the focus again to zero in on the perimeter defences.

Shit, he muttered in his head. He was looking at one of the covered structures that had shown up on the satellite photo in Kalil’s presentation. From the air it looked like a simple square banana-leaf-roofed hut but underneath it was a concrete bunker.

Who the hell builds that kind of thing out here? he wondered as he looked at the squat hexagonal concrete structure. He could see that the walls were a good two foot thick from where the firing slits went through them. The long barrel of a heavy machine gun pointed out uncompromisingly from each of the three concrete pillboxes that he could see along the perimeter.

After that it just got worse. At seven o’clock an empty oil barrel was bashed with something metal as the camp wake-up call. Alex scanned the barracks as soldiers emerged from the long huts; they were mainly the same sort of teenagers that they had encountered at the roadblock, armed with a mixture of automatic weapons and grenade launchers.

So the boys at the roadblock were from the mine.

At first sight they looked dishevelled and scruffy, wearing a mixture of combats and ghetto-style Western fashion, but someone obviously had a grip on them. He noticed that they had jumped pretty quickly at the sound of the reveille and were hurrying across to a parade ground that he could just see between two huts. It was probably the tall, muscular guy stripped to the waist, who walked into his field of vision; he was shouting at the boys, urging them on.

What now?

Alex scanned on to two uniformed, middle-aged officers, who were now going from hut to hut checking that everyone was up. He didn’t recognise the camouflage pattern of their uniforms and caps, which was strange, as he had come across most nationalities.

White mercenaries?

He focused in on them. Swarthy and dark-haired, they didn’t look European.

Middle Eastern?

He couldn’t tell from this distance.

Yamba’s foot tapped his left ankle.

He looked round.

The black sergeant pointed to another wide hut structure halfway between two of the pillboxes, set back from the perimeter. Alex had skipped it in his initial scan. As he looked closer he could see more of the troops in proper uniforms get hold of the posts, lift up the ends in the ground and walk back with them so that the roof split neatly in two. As the camouflage netting pulled back he tensed.

The twin barrels of a Russian ZSU 23mm antiaircraft gun rose up smoothly from the horizontal position to the vertical and swept the sky in an early morning anti-aircraft drill. Any Mi-17 helicopter that got within a thousand yards of that would simply become a twenty-two-man coffin.

There goes the plan.

He put the binoculars down and rubbed his tired eyes; this was not going to be easy. He stared down at the ground in front of him for a while, deep in thought.

Eventually he looked up again at the complex but this time something outside the perimeter caught his eye. He hadn’t seen it before because he was either using the nightsight or the binoculars; he squinted and craned forward, peering at it for a minute.

Across the stretch of gravel he thought he had seen a slight shimmer just off the ground in the low dawn sun. He picked up the binoculars and twisted the focus all the way back to the nearest possible range. He peered at it again and then put the binoculars down and rubbed his forehead; the swathe of gravel was not just there for making a noise.

Yamba heard his sigh and twisted round to look at him. Alex rolled on his side so he had both hands free and put his fingers and thumbs together to make a large ‘O’ shape — the hand signal they used for mines.

The shimmer that he had seen was the early morning sun catching on droplets of dew that hung on tiny transparent rods and trip wires sticking up out of the gravel: spring mines. Once tripped, they shot up out of the ground to stomach height and then exploded in a shrapnel burst that left any man within fifty yards dead or writhing in agony. He could also see the tiny, pronged spigots of anti-tank mines mixed in with them.

The thick layer of gravel stopped the usual tropical plant growth from setting off the trip wires and disrupting the mines — weeding in a minefield was not something that you wanted to be doing every few weeks. Whoever was running this place was very organised.

How the hell were they going to do this?

That evening the flickering fire lit the exhausted faces huddled around it.

Eberhardt, Thomas and Albrecht were sitting on the earth floor of a tiny wooden hut on the edge of the forest with its owner, Joachim the Weaver, a follower of Thomas. The tiny fire did not succeed in heating the hut — their breath froze in the room — but it was better than being out in the snow.

Joachim was forty but looked seventy. His face in the firelight had deep creases cut into it by the strain of his life. Stoop-backed from his weaving, he was gap-toothed and bald, with shaggy grey locks hanging down the side of his head. Weighed down by suffering, he rarely spoke.

His wife and three remaining children were cramped in around the hut. Four others had died that winter already: tuberculosis and measles. The children were tucked in the bed head to tail, and a heavy racking cough came occasionally from it. They wouldn’t last long either.

These then were the poor.

Eberhardt had seen a lot of them since his fall, but such poverty still shocked him. Their faces were twisted by hardship, they stank of sweat, their hands were grubby and stained; their fingernails like claws with black grime under them.

Thomas seemed in his element. They had just shared a meal of thin gruel; he smiled and said graciously, ‘Joachim, you are too kind, too kind,’ gripping the man’s forearm.

With some dinner inside them now they perked up. Eberhardt looked at Thomas questioningly. ‘So you have prophesied that the end of the world is nigh?’