With the crash of gunfire reverberating in our ears, we retraced our steps through the forest.
Before I drove away, I ripped my shirtsleeve off, then unscrewed the cap from the fuel tank and dowsed the cloth in petrol. I left half of it protruding from the neck of the tank, then drove slowly, without lights, down the track to the base.
The thunder of gunfire grew louder and, as we rounded a bend, I saw the glare of burning buildings and the muzzle flashes of scores of weapons. I stopped the pickup in the darkness beneath a clump of trees overhanging the track.
The rebel commander’s position was directly ahead of me down the track, just beyond a parked truck. I turned my head and let my gaze travel slowly along the perimeter of the base, picking out the other groups of rebels.
I touched Layla’s arm and pointed to a section of the fence almost midway between two groups of rebels. A tree grew close to the wire and the ground dipped down towards the fence, giving a little cover. ‘That’s the best place,’ I said. I stripped off my flying jacket. ‘Take that and sprint down to the fence. Wait under cover of the tree until the balloon goes up, then throw the jacket on to the barbed wire and climb over it.’
‘And where will you be?’
‘Right on your heels all the way.’
‘It’s too dangerous, Jack. Even if the rebels don’t shoot us, when Grizz’s men see us climbing over the wire, they’re not going to wait for us to identify ourselves, they’re just going to shoot us.’
‘That’s the chance we have to take. If we don’t get into the base and get that heli airborne, they’ll all be killed.’
I leaned across the seat and kissed her. She stared at me, then took my flying jacket and slipped out of the pickup.
I watched her run down the slope to the tree, then I reversed along the track a hundred yards. I got out of the pickup, found a good-sized rock and slipped it into the vehicle’s footwell, then walked back to the tailgate. I struck a light, ignited the cloth trailing from the neck of the petrol tank and sprinted for the cab. I accelerated through first and second gears, then lined up the pickup on its target, rolled the rock onto the accelerator, jamming it to the boards, and dived out of the side. The impact as I hit the ground drove the air from my lungs.
Still accelerating, the pickup bucketed along the track and hit the rear corner of the truck. There was a beat of silence then a blast as the petrol tank exploded and fire erupted into the air. Before the glare had faded, I was running bent double down the slope.
I saw Layla throw the jacket on to the barbed wire and begin to climb. I reached the bottom as she struggled over, and heard her stifle a cry of pain as a barb spiked her hand. Then she was dropping to the ground on the other side.
I was almost at the top when I heard a shout from inside the base and a burst of gunfire was directed at me. A moment later I was also spotted by the rebels. Caught in the lethal crossfire from both sides, I threw myself forward. I felt the barbs ripping and tearing at me, then I was falling to the ground.
I landed heavily on my side, but staggered to my feet and was off, stumbling after Layla, running for cover as bullets cracked and whined around me. We flung ourselves into a hollow and lay still as bullets chewed at the earth above our heads.
I waited for a lull in the firing then, still in cover, I shouted, ‘Grizz!’ I raised my arms. There was an isolated shot, then silence. I straightened a little, and advanced a couple of feet out of cover. Four black soldiers had their guns levelled at my guts. I could see their puzzlement at my white skin.
Beyond them I saw Grizz with his back to me, crouching behind an earth mound and directing fire towards the far side of the compound. I heard Layla start to follow me. ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘Wait there.’
She ignored me and came alongside me, her arms also raised. I shouted again at the top of my voice. ‘Grizz!’
I saw him turn, stare at us, then shout at the soldiers. They kept us covered as we moved slowly forward. A moment later Grizz came sprinting towards us. He pushed past the soldiers, dragged us down behind the earth mound and grabbed us both in a bear hug. ‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘I’d written you off. Can you get airborne and give us some help here?’
‘Just watch me. Get your boys to give us some cover while we get the heli out. It will fly, won’t it?’
‘Let’s hope so. We fixed it, but we’ve had no time to test it.’
‘Guns?’
‘Fully loaded. No time for the rocket pod, though.’
‘Right.’ I turned and ran at a crouch towards the hangar. Grizz followed. ‘Where’s Tom?’ I called over my shoulder.
‘You’ll have to manage without him. He’s been hit in the leg.’
We dragged the hangar doors open. I put on the night-vision goggles and then fired up the engines while the heli was still inside the building. The defenders laid down a barrage of fire until Grizz gave them the signal, then a dozen of them dropped their weapons and ran to push the Huey out of the hangar into the open.
When the nose of the heli appeared the rebels redoubled their fire, raining down everything they had to try to stop the Huey getting airborne. Even though an embankment partly shielded it from the rebel fire, rounds were cracking and rattling on the heli’s metal skin. I tried to force myself to concentrate on the controls in my hands.
As soon as the tips of the rotor arms cleared the hangar door, I gunned the engines. The rotors turned, blurred and accelerated into an unbroken disc overhead.
Grizz threw himself into the cab as the Huey lifted on its springs and then we were airborne. I banked hard away from the main concentration of rebels, climbing rapidly to two hundred feet, then I swung round and came in low and fast at my first target, the rebel command position.
I heard the chatter of the mini-gun as Grizz opened up from the door of the cab, laying down a barrage of fire, but I held off with the nose gun until the cross hairs intersected on the left-hand man in the rebel group. Then I squeezed the trigger, easing the right rudder down to walk the line of fire right across the cluster of rebel troops. The nose guns thundered and I heard the heavy rattle of ejected cartridges and smelt smoke and the tang of cordite.
I was already banking to bring the next group of rebels into my sights: the men manning the heavy machine gun. I squeezed the trigger again, swinging the heli around to move the line of fire through the target. The ground below me shook and erupted. Clods of earth were flung high into the air and dust mingled with smoke.
A few rebels returned fire, but it was ragged stuff. They began running in all directions. I saw the commander jump into the truck and begin urging the driver back, but its way was blocked by the burnt-out pickup. I lined up the guns and riddled the truck from bumper to bumper. It disappeared in a cloud of smoke and flame.
I pursued a group of fleeing rebels until I had emptied the guns, then banked around, back to the base.
We landed and I climbed down from the cockpit. Slowly the defenders began to emerge from behind the barricades.
Grizz slapped me on the back, ‘Great shooting, ace.’ His men fanned out across the base, pausing to examine each fallen rebel. There was a drum roll of single shots as the injured were finished off with a bullet in the head. I turned away.
Grizz caught my eye. ‘That’s the nature of war for all sides here,’ he said. ‘The Geneva Convention didn’t make it this far. There’s not enough medicine, food or anything else to supply your own side, let alone prisoners of war. So.’ He put his forefinger against his temple and mimed pulling a trigger.
Layla emerged from a bunker looking drawn and deathly pale. We looked at each other. Grizz’s face was a mass of cuts and bruises. I didn’t paint too pretty a picture either.
‘Where’s Tom?’ I said, suppressing a guilty twinge that I had only just thought about him.
Grizz gestured towards a low building alongside the hangar. ‘He’s in the hut there. Like I said, he’s wounded, but he’s OK, I think. He caught a bullet in the thigh, a flesh wound, but he made a lot of fuss about it – you know what pilots are like – so we dosed him up with morphine.’ He switched his gaze to Layla. ‘Now the heat’s off, you can look him and the rest of the casualties over.’
He led us over to the hut. Inside, the casualties lay on the floor or were propped against the wall. Tom was slumped just by the door. He stared up at us and smiled and waved in recognition, but his speech was a blurred, morphine-fuelled stream of incoherence.
The water canteen he had been carrying on his hip had been shattered but it had saved his leg and maybe his life. There were messy wounds where shards of metal had been forced into his thigh, but the bones were not broken.
Some of the other casualties had horrific wounds, but Layla moved among them, fast but purposeful, showing no trace of panic as she assessed them. ‘This one will wait. This one now.’
‘What’s our next move?’ I said to Grizz, who had been talking on the satcoms while Layla was working.
‘We must get the heli to the airport, load up as much ammo as we can carry and get back out to Bohara fast. It’s still under attack.’
We loaded Tom and the worst of the wounded into the back of the Huey. Grizz once more manned the door gun.
‘You can sit in the front,’ I said to Layla. ‘The co-pilot won’t be needing the seat and you’re as safe there as anywhere.’
I called the tower at the airport, making sure they were aware that the incoming helicopter was friendly. ‘This is Decisive Measures helicopter Grizzly One, flying from Sierra Leone Defence Forces Camp Seventeen, seeking clearance to land.’
‘Come on in, Grizzly One,’ a laconic voice replied. ‘You’ve got the place to yourself.’
We lifted off. I kept the Huey climbing to five thousand feet, then banked towards Freetown. As we approached the airport I could see a transport aircraft with Nigerian markings unloading near the runway.
We landed and I helped Grizz and Layla unload the casualties. The most seriously injured were taken away in a rattletrap ambulance emblazoned with the Medicaid International logo; the less seriously wounded, Tom included, were seated on the ground.
Tom still looked spaced out. ‘Will he be fit to fly?’ I said.
Layla frowned. ‘His leg is no problem; it’s only a flesh wound. But he needs a few hours to get the morphine out of his system. Four hours absolute minimum, OK?’
I nodded then turned away to help Grizz.
We unlocked one of the bunkers and began loading boxes of ammunition, grenades and RPG rounds into the cab of the heli, stacking them roof high and lashing them to the sides with webbing.
‘What about Layla?’ I said, as we worked.
‘What about her? She comes with us.’
‘It’s too dangerous,’ I said.
‘It’s too bloody dangerous everywhere these days. Besides, she’s needed; they’ve taken casualties.’
We waited for dusk and the cover of darkness before taking off. Soon, it was a moonless night. The mountains rising to the north of us were blacker even than the night sky and the distant river winding beneath the canopy of the forest gleamed like dull pewter.
The airfield was blacked out and the only light was the faint glow of the instruments, but the darkness would give us some protection from rebel ground fire, and with night-vision goggles I could have flown the Huey down a coal mine at midnight.
Tom limped over to the Huey and climbed into the cockpit. I glanced behind into the cab. Grizz was stationed by the open door, squatting behind the mini-gun. Layla was precariously perched among the ammunition boxes. If we encountered ground fire and rounds went through the cab… I shook that thought off.
Just before I started the engines I shot a sideways glance at Tom. ‘Are you really all right to take over control if you have to?’ I said.
‘No problem. Get on with it.’ The waspish note in his voice gave me more reassurance than his words.
I fired the engines, grabbed the rotor brake and pushed the lever forward into flight idle. The drooping rotors creaked into life. The whock-whock-whock as they began to turn accelerated into a blur of noise and motion.
I pulled the night-vision goggles down over my eyes and switched them on. There was a faint electronic whine and the dark landscape turned green before my eyes, sparkling into life. The course of the river shone like a ribbon of light and the starlight flickered from the rotors like sparks of green fire.
I pressed the intercom. ‘Here we go. Hold on, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.’
I raised the collective and the Huey rose into the air. I held it at one hundred feet as I got clearance from the tower and radioed ahead to Bohara. ‘We’re on our way. ETA twenty fifteen hours. Over.’
The reply was masked by static. ‘The sooner the better.’ I could hear the sounds of gunfire punctuating his words.
I put the Huey into a gradual descent. The changing air pressure in my ears told me we were descending without even having to look at the gauges or out through the canopy.
I waited until the altimeter hit fifty feet, then levelled. Still accelerating, we thundered eastwards into the night, rising and falling in response to my green-tinged vision of the unfolding terrain. I pushed us up to clear a ridge, then down again in a gut-loosening plummet to a valley floor, and rising once more to the next ridge. As I moved the controls, I gave a running commentary to Grizz and Layla in the back to help them brace themselves for the next lurch as the Huey swooped and soared, twisted and turned.
There had been no ground fire so far. I tried to imagine the unseen groups of rebel soldiers in the darkness ahead. They would have little warning of our approach, only a distant rumble of engines, swelling rapidly to a deafening clamour. There would be a storm of wind from the rotors and an unlit shape, black as a bat, flashing overhead. By the time they brought their weapons to bear, it would be too late.
We had been climbing steadily for some time to clear the last major ridge separating us from Bohara. As we neared the summit, the first starfires of shots pierced the darkness below us. I felt sweat start to my brow and gripped the controls even tighter. We cleared the ridge and lurched downwards in a sickening fall. I thumbed the radio. ‘Bohara, this is Grizzly One. We are on approach now, taking incoming fire.’
I switched my gaze forward, looking for the signal from the unlit base. Then in the distance I saw a single square of beads of light begin to glow in the enveloping velvet blackness.
The ground fire was increasing in intensity now and I pushed down towards the rocky moonscape created by the mines.
As we approached Bohara, a blizzard of rounds filled the air and arcs of tracer seared upwards. Heavy-calibre tracer could cut through the heli’s armoured skin like paper. I tried to ignore the stabbing streaks of red and orange light reaching up towards us. It seemed impossible that anything could fly through that inferno and not be carved into pieces. I jerked the heli left and right and sent it rising and falling, trying to unsettle the rebels’ aim.
I looked ahead. A line of fierce red tracer slashed through the sky ahead of us. If we held our course, flying straight into a curtain of fire, we would be shot down.
I pulled an abrupt turn, swinging through three hundred and sixty degrees in barely more than the Huey’s own length. I heard a cry of surprise from Grizz in the back and a rattle as an ammunition box broke loose from its ties.
I held my breath, then saw the tracer exploding harmlessly behind us. It snapped off for a few moments, then reappeared, again slicing though the sky to overtake us. I pulled the same manoeuvre. Once more the tracer whipped past us and disappeared in our wake.
The compound lights had been extinguished after that one brief showing but one of the mercenaries was guiding me in using a torch with tape across the glass to leave only a thin, faint lozenge of light glowing in the darkness. I pulled back the cyclic, banking to land.
‘Ground speed fifty, altitude one hundred feet,’ Tom said.
I stamped alternately on the rudder pedals, twitching the tail from side to side in the hope of throwing off the aim of the rebel gunners, but, as I prepared to land, the torrents of ground fire increased still further. A moment later a string of flares ignited. As they drifted slowly down, they lit up the compound and the heli.
‘We can’t land,’ Tom said. ‘Just ditch the ammo and let’s get out of here.’
I began to argue but I knew he was right. I pushed the intercom. ‘We’re going for a rolling drop. Get ready and I’ll count you in.’ The seconds crawled by as we cleared the fence line and reached the drop zone. ‘Three… two… one… Drop!’
Grizz and Layla started pushing and kicking out the cases of ammunition as I kept the Huey creeping forward over the floor of the compound. We were dropping the cases from thirty feet and I saw one split open as it hit the ground, spilling rounds on to the dirt, but Grizz was already shouting, ‘Load clear. Go! Go! Go!’
I rammed up the collective and, free of the heavy load, we bucked into the air. I nosed the Huey over hard as soon as we were clear of radio antennae and satellite dishes on the accommodation block. I kept us climbing fast, moving out of range, disappearing back into the blackness of the night.
I grabbed the intercom. ‘Everyone OK back there?’
‘A few more holes in the cab,’ Grizz said, ‘but none in us.’
We flew back to the airport, but returned to Bohara twice more during the night, each time dumping more ammunition into the compound and then disappearing as rounds buzzed around the cockpit like angry hornets. On the second trip we managed to get Layla safely to the ground so that she could treat the wounded.
Dawn was breaking as we flew back to Freetown Airport again. We reached the airfield and I saw a giant Hercules transport drawn up near the Decisive Measures compound.
As soon as we’d landed, we began checking over the Huey. There were a few more perforations in its metal skin and some nicks in the edges of the rotors, but no significant damage. We turned away from the Huey in time to see a field gun being unloaded from the Herc.
‘That’s ours,’ Grizz said. ‘Let’s grab some breakfast and then get that gun up to Bohara.’
‘We’re a sitting target already without a two-ton pendulum hanging underneath us,’ Tom said. ‘Do they really need it?’
‘Those weren’t fireworks the rebels were throwing, Tom,’ I said. ‘Of course they need it.’
I studied him for a moment. I’d been trained by him at Finnington when I was beginning my air force career in helis, but that was all I knew of him. When I discovered we’d be flying together again, I had asked the air-force rumour mill for information about him.
It appeared that Tom was a moderate pilot with an unexceptional career. There were no black marks on his record, but there was a whisper about him. The guy had served for twenty years in the air force – a period including the Falklands War, the Gulf War and Kosovo – and yet somehow he had never been in combat. My informants tapped their noses and hinted at a lack of bottle.
On the back of thirty hours with virtually no sleep, we had now been flying for over twelve hours non-stop. Close to exhaustion, I was flying as if on automatic pilot, but there was no question of refusing to fly the mission, least of all when the guys at Bohara were taking incoming fire. I sensed a difference in Tom’s attitude, however, and his state of mind was already beginning to worry me.
‘That’s the job, Tom,’ I went on. ‘They need it, we deliver it.’
‘Even if it gets us killed?’
‘That’s why they pay us the money.’
Grizz looked up. ‘Listen, Tom, you’ve got a hard job, but it’s nowhere near as tough as the one the guys at Bohara are doing.’ He gave Tom a look that contained little sympathy, and walked away.
Tom watched him go, then turned to face me. He held my gaze, his voice quavering with barely suppressed emotion. ‘I didn’t come here to die, Jack. I came to get my life back on track and give myself a breathing space, not get shot to pieces over some stinking jungle.’ He paused and softened his tone. ‘You’re younger than me. Things look more clear-cut to you: there’s right and wrong and not much else in between. And you fly – like all the young guys – as if the shoot-downs only happen to other people.’ He gripped my arm tightly. ‘Well, they don’t, Jack. They happen to people just like you and me. My luck’s run out. I’ve been hit already. The next one’ll kill me.’
As gently as I could, I disengaged his hand from my arm. ‘You copped a flesh wound in your leg, Tom, that’s all. If your luck had run out it would have killed you.’ I paused, trying to find words to rally him. ‘We’re both knackered and by the book we’ve flown too many hours already, but we’re going to get the job done. In a few hours’ time we’ll be sitting with our feet up and a cold beer in our hands, laughing about this conversation. Now let’s get some food and water and then get airborne.’
He turned away. I watched him limp towards a street vendor who had set up shop on the edge of the airfield selling bean soup, smoked fish and rice. The price had gone up fivefold since the news of the rebel attacks had broken and he would take payment only in dollars, but there was little choice: it was that or K-rations.
While we ate, Grizz shouted and cajoled his private army into preparing the field gun. It was an ancient 25-pounder.
‘I didn’t know you were an antiques collector, Grizz,’ I said.
He grinned. ‘We use what we can get, smart arse. It’s British Army surplus, but it still works all right and it’ll land a round on a target just as well as a modern artillery piece – maybe even better.’
As we talked, the others sweated to loop two thick wire cables beneath the gun and stack the boxes of shells into the heli. When all was ready, we refuelled the Huey and I fired up the engines to pick up the 25-pounder. I flew forward and a guy crouching near the gun reached up and swung four cables over the hook as I held the heli in the hover. Then I heard Grizz shout, ‘Got it. Let’s go.’ The rotors struggled to haul the load off the ground. But finally, engines groaning, we began to climb. The controls felt sluggish under the added load and the drag of the gun. I adjusted the controls with small, almost imperceptible movements, knowing the danger of beginning a pendulum swing in the load that would increase until it threw the heli out of flying trim.
The flight to Bohara seemed to take forever. The weight of the 25-pounder dangling below the Huey made every manoeuvre ponderous, and I knew that when we came under heavy fire it would be impossible to fly the normal patterns of evasion. Any attempt to climb or descend too steeply would simply send us crashing to earth.
The one trick I could employ was to approach from an unexpected direction. It was one of the first things we were taught in combat training: never use the same approach path twice or the enemy will set up guns under it and cut you to pieces the next time you fly in.
Instead of the direct approach to Bohara from the west, I therefore circled south and east of the compound, coming in from the opposite direction to the one the rebels would be expecting.
The drop-off was still fraught with danger, however. With the field gun trailing below us we could not even approach at low-level. Instead, I came in high and then dropped towards the compound in a dive that, because of the destabilising weight of the 25-pounder, was neither as tight nor as rapid as I would have wished.
The rebel gunners opened up with everything they had. I could see scores of muzzle flashes and moments later rounds began to clip the fuselage. More bullets struck sparks from the field gun below us and then ricocheted away.
Grizz and Tom talked me down as a hail of rounds rattled from the armoured underside of the Huey. One whined away from the metal frame of the Perspex canopy. The next one pierced it, punching twin holes in either side of the cockpit a few inches from our heads and showering us with fragments of Perspex that rattled against my visor. Tom’s voice cracked as he tried to give me instructions, but Grizz remained imperturbable, his words interspersed with bursts from the mini-gun. The rebels’ brightly coloured T-shirts made them highly visible targets.
‘Left thirty feet,’ Grizz said. ‘Hold it there and descend.’ At last, he gave the command. ‘That’s it. Hold it there. Release!’
‘Release,’ Tom said, the relief evident in his voice. The heli lurched upwards as he hit the button and the dead weight dropped away.
We had hovered for no more than a minute, but in that time we were riddled with fire. More rounds struck the rotors and ripped through the cab walls. As we returned fire, spent casings from the mini-guns cascaded down on to the tin roofs in the compound.
Grizz already had the cases of shells for the field gun poised at the edge of the deck. I nosed the heli forward another twenty yards, clear of the 25-pounder, and he began kicking them out. More and more rounds struck the fuselage of the Huey. It seemed impossible that none had yet pierced a vital area. At last I heard Grizz’s voice on the intercom. ‘Last one clear. Go! Go! Go!’
I piled on the power. Free at last of the massive load, the Huey shot upwards into the sanctuary of the skies.