McGrath went and opened one of the doors. He put his arm through the narrow opening, holding the shotgun at the ready. Dr Kat stood immediately behind him out of sight, so that the voice should seem to come from the bogus colonel. McGrath’s head was averted as though he were keeping an eye on his prisoners, but light fell on his shoulder tabs and brassarded arm. When Dr Kat spoke it didn’t sound much like Maksa but we could only hope that the soldiers would accept it. McGrath closed the door and breathed a sigh of relief.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Two officers are coming in. You ready, you three?’
The attack team nodded silently, and at the rear of the warehouse Zimmerman waved his machine-gun and dropped out of sight behind the topmost stack of cotton. McGrath strode across to Burns’ body and stood beside it with his back to the doors. His legs were apart and he held the shotgun so that it pointed down towards the shattered skull. It was a nice piece of stage setting; anyone entering would see his back and then their eyes would be drawn to Burns, a particularly nasty sight.
McGrath judged it was too quiet.
‘Say something, Mister Mannix,’ he said. ‘Carry on your conversation with the Colonel.’
‘I don’t want your bloody oil,’ I improvised. ‘I’m not in the oil business. I work for a firm of electrical engineers.’ Behind McGrath Proctor had his ear to the door and the cosh raised. I carried on, ‘We’re certainly not responsible for how you run your country…’
The door opened and two officers walked in, Mosira still wearing his dark glasses and a much younger officer following him. I went on speaking. ‘Colonel Maksa, I demand that you allow our medical people to see their…’
Proctor hit the lieutenant hard with the cosh and he went straight down. Captain Mosira was putting up a struggle, groping for his pistol. Lang had an arm round the Captain’s neck but his knife waved wildly in the air. Mosira couldn’t shout because of the stranglehold but it was not until McGrath turned and drove the butt of the shotgun against his head that he collapsed.
Outside all was quiet, and in the warehouse nobody spoke either. McGrath turned to Barry Lang and held out his hand for the knife. ‘I said, don’t be squeamish,’ he said coldly.
Lang gave him the knife. ‘I’m sorry, Mick, I just—’
‘Who can use this?’
‘I can,’ said Hammond.
McGrath instantly tossed him the knife. ‘Right, lads, let’s pick up our loot and get this lot out of the way.’
Both officers had worn pistols and the lieutenant had a grenade at his belt. In the distribution I got one of the pistols. We looked to McGrath for guidance.
‘Let’s get those guards, lads. There are only six or seven of them. It’ll be easy.’
It was entirely McGrath who made it work, his drive and coolness that kept the exercise moving. But paradoxically Maksa’s own personality also helped us. He was clearly a martinet and no enlisted man was going to question his orders. The guards entered on demand and were easy to deal with.
We looked round the warehouse. The soldiers were laid in a row behind the cotton bales, together with the body of Russ Burns. The door in the rear was opened with ease and we were ready to leave.
McGrath said, ‘As soon as possible we get that signal off. You know the drill, Mister Mannix?’
I nodded. The back of the warehouse faced away from our camp so we’d have to go around it and might run into enemy soldiers at any moment. One group was to get the medical team and Dan Atheridge to the rig and then rejoin the rest of us, who’d be in cover as close to the bridge as we could get. We’d leapfrog one another to get in place, ready to protect McGrath and his tractor team-mate. There had been some doubt as to who that would be.
McGrath looked at Barry Lang speculatively. He had jibbed at knifing Mosira and this made McGrath uncertain of his mettle. But they usually teamed up, and it was safer to work with a man one knew, so McGrath said to him, ‘Right then, Barry, you’re with me in the cab. Just stick close, you hear me?’
‘What’s the signal for Sadiq to attack? The Very pistol?’ I asked.
‘Yes, a red flare the way you planned.’
‘The Very pistol’s still in a suitcase by the rig, unless they found it.’
He grinned, swarmed up on top of the cotton and came down again with the Very pistol in his hand. ‘Full of surprises, aren’t I?’ he said.
I didn’t ask him how he knew where it was. He’d obviously been hiding nearby when I hid the thing. He might have seen me go off with the shotgun too, and I wondered again how Maksa had come by it.
‘You take it,’ McGrath said, handing me the signal pistol. ‘You’ll be in charge of this exercise, Mister Mannix.’
I said, ‘Just what are you going to do?’
He grinned. ‘I’m going to march Barry out of here at gunpoint. I still look like the Colonel, and I’ve got Sam as my sergeant. We’re going to take Lang down to the bridge and when we’re near enough we’ll make a break for the tractor. Sam will get into cover and wait for you to come up, if you’re not there already.’
It was audacious but it could work. Wingstead said, ‘You’ll have every eye on you.’
‘Well, it’s a chance, I’ll grant you. But it should get us to the cab. You get off the signal the instant we make our break, so that Sadiq can keep those laddies too busy to think for a bit.’
As quietly as possible we barricaded the front doors with cotton bales, and were ready to go. I opened the rear door a crack and looked out. There was some moonlight, which would help McGrath in the tractor later on, and the night was fairly quiet. We left cautiously.
As we rounded the warehouse we could see the fires from the rebels’ camp, and brighter lights around our rig. I could see soldiers in the light near the rig but there weren’t many of them. There was plenty of cover all the way to the bridge, just as we had visualized.
‘OK, Mick, start walking,’ I whispered.
We moved away from the warehouse according to plan. McGrath and his party stepped out, Lang first with a submachine-gun jammed into his spine. Next was Wilson, his sergeant’s cap pulled well down over his face. McGrath followed with the shotgun. It looked pretty good to me. I paced myself so that I was not too far ahead of McGrath, and the rest passed me to fan out ahead.
The marchers were almost opposite the rig when a soldier called out. I heard an indistinguishable answer from McGrath and a sharp retort, and then the soldier raised his gun. He didn’t fire but was clearly puzzled.
Then there came the rip fire of an Uzi from beyond the rig. Someone had been spotted. The soldier turned uncertainly
and McGrath cut him down with the shotgun. Then he and Lang bolted for their tractor. Wilson disappeared into the roadside cover. The shotgun blasted again and then gunfire crackled all around us, lighting up the night with flashes. I pointed the Very pistol skywards and the cartridge blossomed as I ran for cover, Bert Proctor at my side.
Soldiers tumbled out everywhere and guns were popping off all over the place. Then there was an ear-splitting roar as engines churned and a confusion of lights as headlamps came on. The night was split by the explosions of mortar bombs landing in the rebels’ camp.
We left the cover of the bushes and charged towards our convoy. The nearest vehicle was Kemp’s Land Rover and we flung ourselves down beside it. An engine rumbled as a vehicle came towards us and when I saw what it was I groaned aloud. It was a Saracen. Maksa’s men must have already got it off the bridge. It moved slowly and the gun turret swung uncertainly from side to side, seeking a target.
‘It’s coming this way!’ Proctor gasped.
Behind us the deeper voice of our tractor roared as McGrath fired its engine. The Saracen was bearing down on it. We had to do something to stop its progress. The Uzi wouldn’t be much good against armour but perhaps a Very cartridge slamming against the turret would at least startle and confuse the driver. As the Saracen passed us, already opening fire on the tractor, I took aim and let fly. The missile grazed the spinning turret and hit the armoured casing behind it, igniting as it landed. I must have done something right; there was a flash and a vast explosion which threw us sideways and rocked the Land Rover. When we staggered up the Saracen was on fire and inside someone was screaming.
I groped for my pistol but couldn’t find it, and watched the burning Saracen run off the road into the bushes as our tractor passed it. McGrath leaned out and yelled at me.
‘Lang’s bought it. Get him out of here!’
I ran to the passenger side of the cab. The Saracen had set bushes burning and in the flaring light I saw blood on Lang’s chest as I hauled him out of his seat. Proctor took him from me as we ran alongside the tractor.
McGrath yelled at me, ‘Stay with me. Get in!’ I clung onto the swinging cab door, hooked a foot over the seat and threw myself inside.
‘Welcome aboard,’ McGrath grunted. ‘Watch our rear. Say if anything gets in our way.’ He looked rearwards out of his own window. I followed suit.
Driving backwards can be tricky on a quiet Sunday morning in the suburbs, In these conditions it was terrifying. The tractor swayed from side to side, weaving down the road and onto the bridge. In the rear mirror I could see the second Saracen at the far end. There were heavy thumps on the tractor casing; we were being fired on by the Saracen as it retreated ahead of us. The driver had decided that he’d have more room to manoeuvre and fight off the bridge. We wanted to ram him before he could leave. We made it by a hair.
The Saracen’s driver misjudged and reversed into the parapet; his correction cost him the race. The tractor bucked and slammed with an almighty wrench into the front of the Saracen, and there was a shower of sparks in the air. Our engine nearly stalled but McGrath poured on power and ground the tractor into the Saracen.
‘Go, you bastard, go!’ McGrath’s face was savage with joy as he wrestled with wheel and accelerator.
There wasn’t much doubt that we’d won. The armoured car was a solid lump of metal but it didn’t weigh much over ten tons to the tractor’s forty. The impact must have knocked the Saracen’s crew out because the shooting stopped at once. The turret was buckled and useless.
McGrath kept up a steady pressure and the tractor moved remorselessly backwards, pushing the armoured car.
He judged his angle carefully and there was a grinding crunch as the Saracen was forced against the coping wall of the bridge. But we didn’t want the bridge itself damaged and McGrath stopped short of sending it into the river, which would have shattered the wall.
The Saracen’s engine was ground into scrap and wasn’t going anywhere under its own power. The bridge was effectively blocked to the enemy, and Sadiq was free to get on with the job.
McGrath put the tractor gently into forward gear. There was no opposition as we travelled back across the bridge and stopped to form a secondary blockade. We tumbled out of the cab to an enthusiastic welcome.
‘Where’s Barry?’ I asked.
‘We’ve got him back to the rig. He’s with the medics,’ Proctor said.
McGrath stirred and stretched hugely. I said, ‘That was damn good driving, Mick.’
‘You didn’t do too badly yourself. What the hell did you use on that first Saracen—a flame-thrower?’
‘I fired the Very gun at it. It shouldn’t have worked but it did.’
Looking around, we could see figures heading off towards the river downstream from the bridge. There was some scattered shooting. The remains of Maksa’s force were intent only on escaping back to their own side. More mortars fired and the shooting stopped.
We tensed up at this renewal of hostilities but it was happening a long way off from us, to our relief.
Geoff Wingstead was beside me. ‘I’ve had it. This is Sadiq’s war. Let him fight it from now on. I’m all for going back to being a truck driver.’
‘Me too—only I’ll be happy just to ride that desk of mine.’
McGrath said, ‘I’ll be happier when we’ve got a detachment down here; they still might try to rush that bridge and Sadiq isn’t nearby. We might still be wanted.’
‘I hope to God not. We’ve had one casualty and we don’t want any more.’
Wingstead said, ‘I’m afraid we’ve had more than one.’
I said, ‘Who else, then?’
He pointed to a group of men at the foot of the water tanker, consisting of Harry Zimmerman, a Russian, and Brad Bishop.
‘One of the Russians bought it,’ Wingstead told me. Together we walked over to Zimmerman, who was looking sadly at the huddled body. ‘I’m sorry about this, my friend,’ I said to his fellow countryman, standing impassively by, then to Zimmerman, ‘Who was he—Brezhnev or Kosygin?’ I never could tell them apart.
Zimmerman sighed. ‘His name was Andrei Djavakhishkili and he came from Tbilisi in Georgia. He was a nice guy when you got to know him.’
The remaining two hours to dawn were quiet. Sadiq had joined us, and we sat in the cover of our vehicles, waiting for the morning light. We didn’t expect the enemy to try anything; their only passage was blocked off and the decisiveness of Sadiq’s action, and our own, must have rocked their morale.
With the rising of the sun we could see no sign of movement from across the river. The scene was one of destruction; burnt out vegetation still smouldered, the camp site littered with debris, and the wreckage of the first Saracen huddled in a ditch. We found the bodies of three men near it, one shot and two who had died of burns. There were more bodies up the hill at the soldiers’ camp but Sadiq’s men were taking care of them and we didn’t want to see the site of that battle.
Our tractor blocked the nearside of the bridge and at the far end the second Saracen lay canted over diagonally across the road and forced up hard against the coping. There was no sign of men or vehicles beyond.
I said to Sadiq, ‘What now, Captain?’
He studied the opposite bank carefully through binoculars, holding them one-handed as his left arm was in a sling. He was no longer the immaculate officer whose pants were creased to a knife edge and whose shoes gleamed. He’d lost his boot polish to McGrath. His uniform was scorched and rumpled.
There were lines of strain about his eyes and mouth. Presently he said, ‘We watch and wait for one, two hours maybe. If everything is still quiet I will send scouts across the river.’