‘He knows we want to kill him, and he’s not stupid,’ said Park. ‘There are three jeeps he uses to go out in, and two choppers. On any day, he might be in any of them.’
‘How about meetings?’ said Ian. ‘In the Provos, we’d get a politician’s schedule, then plan a hit . . .’
‘This is Batota, not Westminster,’ said Wallace. His tone was acidic. ‘Tshaka is a guerrilla leader. He doesn’t go to committee meetings.’
‘The fort it is then,’ said Ollie. He glanced towards Ian, noted that he’d fallen silent, and added: ‘We know where he is, we just have to figure out a way of getting him.’
Wallace was grinding his fists together, and chewing on the unlit cigar. ‘You men are all professionals, and it’s your lives on the line,’ he said. ‘So I’ll let you choose your own way in.’
‘Maybe some kind of nerve gas,’ said Maksim. ‘In the Spetsnaz, we’d get chemicals into a building, put everyone to sleep.’
‘And most of them died, the way I heard it,’ said Steve.
Maksim shrugged. ‘In the Spetsnaz, we don’t worry about casualties.’
‘Tshaka must be taken alive,’ said Park.
‘Then no chemicals, it’s too dangerous,’ said Dan. ‘There isn’t anything that’s reliable enough to disable the men inside the camp without killing someone.’
There was a brief silence among the men as they calculated the odds. Ten against fifty? Maybe that’s why they had to bring in outsiders, reckoned Steve. It wasn’t just that the Sixth Brigade couldn’t spare the men. They didn’t fancy the odds.
‘There’s a reason why the first thing any military commander has done for about five thousand years is build himself a fort,’ said Ollie. ‘Because they are bloody difficult to capture.’
‘That’s why I’m saying we grab him on the outside,’ said Ian.
‘We already told you, we don’t have the intelligence,’ snapped Wallace.
‘We could lie up in wait,’ said Ollie. ‘Find a spot on the road, then stage an ambush as soon as he drives past.’
‘He’s got three cars,’ said Dan. ‘If we get the wrong one, he knows where we are and he comes to get us.’
‘We could tunnel in,’ suggested Nick.
‘Thanks,’ said Steve, turning around to grin at the young Welshman. ‘I think you suggested that last time. Keep watching the Second World War DVDs.’
Nick went red in the face.
‘How about we just blast the bastards,’ said Dan. ‘Go straight in the front door, RPGs and cannon turned on full whack.’
‘The famous stealth tactics of the SASR,’ said Ian sourly. ‘And we have to get this guy out alive, remember?’
‘You got a better idea?’ Dan said nastily.
Steve took a swig from a bottle of water. It wasn’t even nine o’clock on the first morning of the mission and already tempers were starting to fray. This was going to be harder than it looked. And it looked sodding hard.
‘Maybe Newton could smuggle his way in?’ said Ganju. ‘If we had a man on the inside, that might help.’
Wallace shook his head. He was looking closely at Newton, assessing the man. ‘It won’t work, not in the time available,’ he stated. ‘Tshaka only has his handpicked troops inside the fort. They are his version of the Sixth Brigade. He won’t let anyone inside until he’s known them for years.’
‘A siege,’ said Ollie. ‘Like I said, commanders have been building forts for five thousand years. So we’ll do what their enemies have been doing for centuries to defeat them. Surround the fort, and put barrage after barrage of munitions into the bastards. If nothing else, we can starve them out.’
‘Thanks for the Sandhurst tutorial,’ Steve sighed. ‘He’s got a whole army less than a hundred miles away. A siege only works when you’ve got total control of the territory, and overwhelming numbers.’
‘So what’s the bloody SAS suggesting then?’ growled Ollie. ‘The usual? Run in with guns blazing and hope it’s the other bloke who gets his balls shot off?’
Another silence.
It didn’t matter how you looked at it. A fort was bloody hard to capture.
‘There is a way,’ said Chris slowly.
Steve looked towards him. The South African didn’t speak very often. His opinions were rarely ventured, but when they were, there was a determination to his voice that commanded respect. Chris had spent more time on battlefields than any of them: he knew what made the difference between victory and defeat. ‘I know some guys who fought in the Batotean bush wars,’ he said. ‘They had something called a Fireforce unit, based on that Rhodesian units of the same name . . .’