Fire Force(67)

Ollie grabbed Maksim’s shoulder. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Leave it. If the kid makes a run for it, you can shoot him, but until then we leave him right here.’

‘I’m not risking it,’ stated Maksim angrily.

‘You shoot him, we shoot you,’ said David.

Reluctantly, Maksim lowered the gun. Steve was already looking towards the officer’s mess. They’d taken the fort, but they hadn’t taken the man they’d come to look for yet. It was a simple bungalow, fifty feet by twenty, with maybe three rooms inside, constructed from concrete breeze blocks with some white paint on them that had long since faded. The roof was made of corrugated iron, the rainwater splashing off its surface and onto the ground.

‘I saw four men rush in there when the smoke cleared from the stun grenades,’ he said. ‘I reckon Tshaka’s in there, and those blokes are protecting him.’

Ollie nodded. The building was thirty yards across the parade ground, with no windows. Nobody could shoot into or out of it. ‘Then let’s get the bastard out.’

There was one wounded man on the ground, moaning in pain, but Maksim finished him off with a quick pair of bullets to the head. The victim was too badly wounded to be treated, and anyway, they couldn’t waste time on casualties. Ollie and Steve marched down towards the officer’s block, their guns kept cocked all the time. There might be more men hidden somewhere, they knew, and a bullet could come flying at them any time.

‘We know you’re in there,’ shouted Steve towards the doorway. ‘We have control of the fort. If you come out now, you’ll be taken prisoner but you won’t be harmed. If you don’t . . .’

He paused for dramatic impact.

‘We blow the place to pieces.’

There was a silence. Steve could hear nothing except for the beating of the rain against the ground, and the rumble of distant thunder.

‘We’re giving you five seconds!’ he roared.

Again, nothing.

Then: ‘Get the hell off my territory, Englishman,’ shouted a voice from inside the building.

‘Three seconds . . .’

‘Your bombs don’t frighten me.’

‘One more second . . .’

‘I’m already a dead man - so kill me now.’

Steve counted down the last second.

‘Christ,’ he muttered out loud.

‘He’s not falling for it,’ said Chris.

‘Then we blow the fucker,’ said Maksim. He looked towards Ian. ‘The Bomber here will have the explosives.’

Steve shook his head. ‘We’re being paid to bring him out alive. Put a bomb into the place and he’ll be killed.’

‘Then we storm it,’ said Dan.

Steve had already inspected the block. There was only one door and, close to the roof, some air vents that were no more than slits in the wall. It had been built as a bunker as much as a place for the officers to kip down. That wasn’t uncommon for guerrilla forts: they’d build in a safe room, the same way you might in a private house, so you could hunker down if you came under attack, and wait for reinforcements to arrive. It looked like Tshaka had been expecting an assault on his fort, and had made his plans already. He could hole up in there, make contact with his army via radio, then wait for the soldiers to arrive.

Smart, he decided. The man had planned for every possibility, and had already mapped out his response.

‘We could smoke the bastard out,’ said Ian. ‘Put some incendiary devices through those slits, then wait for him to run out.’

‘Too much rain,’ said Steve. ‘The bastard won’t burn.’

‘Or put an RPG round into the wall,’ said Nick.

‘Same problem,’ Steve barked. ‘If we bring down a wall, we risk killing him.’

‘So we use the see-through-wall kit,’ said Dan.

He pulled out the STW they’d bought back in Johannesburg. The imaging device could be slotted onto a standard AK-47, then the mag loaded with armour-piercing bullets. Dan had bought a dozen back in South Africa, and clipped them to his ammo belt. The bullets had a core of tungsten carbide, one of the hardest substances known to man, encased in a softer shell, usually made of copper. The soft skin would peel away on impact, allowing the core of the bullet to push through to the target. Armour-piercing bullets could smash through steel plates: relatively old concrete shouldn’t be any problem at all. The bullet was ‘hollow-point’ as well: that meant the energy wrapped up in the ammunition diffused rapidly on impact, creating a far worse, messier wound on its victim than normal ammunition. But it also meant the bullet wouldn’t pass right through the target and hit someone else. It was standard Special Forces training to use ‘hollowpoint’ ammo on hostage rescues. The last thing you wanted was for the bullet to take out the person you were rescuing as well as the guards. In this case, they didn’t want to accidentally shoot Tshaka. Just the men around him.