The voice whispered again.
‘Sighting report as at two-zero-four. At junction of Gully Red and Gully Yellow now. Infantry. Estimate platoon strength. Moving south.’
He checked the map. This was what it was all about, everything he did: contact with the enemy. They had waited for the moon to go down and hoped to hit the diamond mine just before dawn.
He turned round from his command post, a groundsheet hung up under an acacia tree with the radio on a stack of empty ammunition crates. Its dim glow was the only light. Behind him was the mortar platoon, black shapes in the darkness.
‘Fire Plan India,’ he called in an urgent whisper to the nearest crew, who repeated it down the line. The men twisted the elevation screws and the tubes rose slightly to lengthen the range. The 81mm mortars stared blank-eyed up into the night, blind to the destruction they would cause.
Yamba, the platoon sergeant, scuttled down the line to check the four crews were ready. Then he came close so that his dark face could be seen in the glow from the radio set. He nodded.
‘Zero, this is Lima Three. Fire mission.’
‘Lima Three, this is Zero. Fire mission. Out.’
He waited for the details; pencil stub paused over a dog-eared pad.
‘Fire mission. Grid: three-zero-eight-four-eight-one. Bearing three-two hundred mills. Infantry in gully. Destroy now. One minute. Over.’
He repeated the fire-control orders back to the observer. Then he stood up and turned to the mortar line. The time for action had come.
‘Open fire!’
He barked the order out in a harsh voice that tore away the veil of silence that had cloaked them.
The mortars made their distinctive thunk sound and spat their metal loads up into the night. White flames shot up out of the tubes. Base plates slammed and rang with the recoil.
The crews turned away from them when they dropped each round down. They jammed their fingers in their ears, but still it did not stop the feeling of being kicked in the head by the propellant burst.
After the first rounds dropped down the tube he grabbed the mike and called urgently: ‘Lima Three. Shot five!’ to indicate the number of seconds before impact.
The response came equally abruptly as the observer took cover.
‘Shot five. Out!’
They pumped round after round out at the stars. The forward observer, dug into a foxhole a mile away, could see the vivid flashes of orange in the night where the shells landed but he could not see the murderous swarms of metal splinters that they unleashed through the air when they burst.
The observer called in a correction.
‘Drop fifty! Over!’ he shouted loudly now over the din.
Range screws were twisted on the mortars.
‘On target! Over!’
Figures ran, stumbled and fell. They blundered around, shocked by the blasts. An officer’s whistle blew desperate signals but then stopped abruptly as a bomb hit. Eventually no more movement could be seen.
‘Cease loading!’ The shout went down the line and the last rounds fired off.
The crews froze and stared at their officer. The silence that followed was as stunning as the terrible noise that they had just been making.
He shouted brisk commands at them as he swept on his webbing and grabbed his assault rifle.
‘Col! You take Charlie fire team and a tracker, and sweep east of Gully Yellow. Yamba! Bring Delta fire team with me! We’ll sweep west!’
Alex Devereux looked down at the bodies laid in a row on the ground.
There were thirteen of them, teenagers mainly, but a couple of men in their twenties and one who must have been forty, a UNITA guerrilla veteran from the Angolan civil war, and presumably their commander. They were either barefoot or wore an assortment of wellies and trainers, with ragged T-shirts and patched trousers.
In the follow-up sweep to the mortar ambush their torches had revealed the carnage in the gully. In the confined space the blast of the bombs had blown the insurgents against the walls and ripped them apart.
The trackers had followed the blood trails from the scene. Dark splashes on the ground and smears on elephant grass stems led them to their quarry. Two had been injured and had crawled a few hundred yards before collapsing.
The trackers, Yamba and Sunday, knew their stuff. As the blood got fresher they signalled the squad to fan out in a line and switch off their torches. Eventually Alex’s squad heard the laboured breathing and mumbling of the wounded man as he dragged himself along.
Quick stabs of gunfire in the dark and he went down. No rules of engagement and warnings given here. He wasn’t in the regular army any more.
They went back and cast around for more tracks, but by the time they followed them up the survivors were long gone; the tracks showed them running wildly and crashing through bushes, terrified, desperate to escape.
The men dragged the bodies back to the gully and laid them out neatly. In the morning, the local Angolan army commander posed in front of them with a grinning thumbs up for the camera. He had the shots framed for the wall of his office back at the mine.
The captured weapons were laid out on the ground: nine AK-47s, four RPG launchers, three PKM light machine guns and some Claymores to cover their retreat. They were well armed.
All in all, a good night’s work.
Alex stood with his hands on his hips and frowned. Six foot four, broad shoulders, a strong masculine face — he looked very threatening like that. He ran his hand through his short black hair, rubbed the back of his neck and stared down at one of the boys; a mess of flies was fidgeting in a wound on his cheek.
Fourteen years old?
Major Alexander Devereux. Wellington College. Blues and Royals. Forty. Single. Child-killer.
A cold darkness of self-loathing settled over his heart.
The dancers in the graveyard waited silently for the signal.
Their faces, lit by flames, stared at the huge man standing in the centre of their circle.
Abba Athanasius was a Nubian, dressed now as an Ishfaqi mystic. His body was a slab of black muscle, more like a force of nature than flesh and blood. He was naked but for a black loincloth and kudu-skin bands that decorated his arms and legs.
Sensing the hour, he held up his right arm and bellowed, ‘Dance for the darkness in your heart!’
‘Amen!’ they roared, and the music began.
In the centre of the circle, black men drummed on hollow logs; staring unseeing at the flames. Light gleamed off the sweat on their muscles.
Other musicians played flutes and horns. The cult was of every creed and colour: Muslims, Christians, Druze, Alawites, Copts, Maronites and Bogomils.
The crowd danced as if they were one. Concentric rings of people moved in and out like a giant organism breathing. Their stamping feet stirred up the dust in the moonlight.
The dancers ululated. They made sharp cracks with little brass hand-cymbals. The sound was deafening, a heavy cloth of noise draped over them, suffocating their senses.
Abba Athanasius ran to and fro in the middle of the rings. He held a small drum in one hand and struck it repeatedly