Fire Force(28)
‘So you boys are interested in a trip to Batota?’
Steve nodded. He and Ollie were gazing around the walls, on which dozens of newspaper clippings were pinned, all of them about Wallace. The Madman of Chad, ran a headline from the Daily Mail. Etonian Mercenary Held in Mozambique Jail, said a piece from The Times. There were countless others in a similar vein, many of them starting to yellow with age.
‘Then I’m your man,’ Wallace said, sitting down and pouring out the coffee. His voice was loud and smug: the man was already grating on Steve’s nerves.
‘Benjamin Kapembwa and I go back a fair few years, and I daresay he trusts me more than he would his own brother. He listens to me, and there aren’t many men in the world who can say that. Probably none, and certainly none with a white skin. People reckon the country is broke, and of course they’ve got their problems, but Batota is still rich in minerals, and the mines are still working, so there’s plenty of money sloshing around the place. You just have to get your hands on it, that’s all.’
‘We heard you were looking for some men.’ Ollie spoke for the first time.
Wallace rapped his knuckles on the wooden kitchen table. ‘There’s a nasty fight going on around the Talabeleland border,’ he said. ‘A man called August Tshaka is leading an insurgency. He’s a brutal thug even by African standards and he’s a right pain in the President’s backside.’
‘Can’t the Army deal with him?’
Wallace shook his head. ‘It’s a rabble,’ he said. ‘Only the Sixth Brigade is worth anything, but we need to keep those boys in Ibera in case the locals start getting restive. The rest of the Army couldn’t shoot itself in the foot without help. The President has promised he’ll capture Tshaka and blow the bastard’s brains out. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do.’
He looked straight at Steve and Ollie. From a box on the table, he took out a thick cigar, caressed it for a second, then lit it from the flame of a greasy, oil-fired lighter. ‘We need a small unit of men to get up to Talabeleland for us and capture the sod.’
‘We’ve got ten guys,’ said Ollie. ‘And we know what we’re doing.’
‘Backgrounds?’
‘SAS, Blues, SASR, Spetsnaz, Recces, Gurkhas, Provos . . .’
Wallace grinned.
It was hard not to be impressed by the collective fighting experience of the team. So long as you didn’t mention the Welsh teenager, Steve reminded himself.
‘So how come you want this job?’
‘We need the money, simple as that,’ said Ollie. ‘We’re not fighting for anything other than the pay cheque.’
‘There’s Iraq, Afghanistan . . .’
‘All the good work is gone. It’s just convoys and bodyguarding. We need some proper fighting and some proper pay.’
Wallace rapped the table-top again, blowing a thick cloud of smoke upwards.
‘We’ll pay each man three thousand dollars a week,’ he said. ‘And for each man, there will be a fifty-thousand-dollar bonus - once the bullet goes into Tshaka’s head.’
‘Two conditions,’ said Ollie. ‘We choose our own guys and our own kit. And we don’t take any orders from anyone apart from ourselves.’
‘Done.’
‘When shall we start?’ asked Ollie.
‘How about yesterday?’ said Wallace. ‘There’s a nasty old scrap going on up there, and we need to get it sorted as fast as possible.’
‘We’ll be there in three days,’ said Ollie.
Wallace stood up and shook both men by their hands. ‘I guess they don’t call your mob Death Inc. for nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s been a bloody hard vacancy to fill and we’re glad to have you on board.’
Thirteen
THE HOUSE WAS SET ONE road back from the seafront, along one of the trim suburban streets on the outskirts of Eastbourne. Last time Steve and Ollie had been here, Ganju Rai had been living with his grandfather, another ex-Gurkha who’d fought with the British in the Second World War. Now, he was by himself. The old man had died two months ago.
‘Sorry to hear about the old guy,’ said Steve as Ganju let them in.
There was a hint of sadness around Ganju’s tough, dark eyes, but he hid it well. He’d lost his brother fighting with the British Army in Bosnia and was left with the responsibility of supporting his sister-in-law and her children. If the Army paid decent pensions to the widows of its men, the little family would have been all right: life was cheap back in Nepal. But it didn’t - a point that rankled with Ganju, as it did with all the men the Gurkhas fought alongside - so he’d been forced to quit the Army and make a living as a mercenary to keep the family afloat.