Legacy. James Steel
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too close now just to turn back — he couldn’t return to London and face Kalil without at least trying to go on.
An idea occurred to him and he barked out orders. They dragged the bodies back around the basha and scattered them as if there had been an argument and a shoot-out in the group. They placed bottles of liquor around the corpses and emptied some more so that the place stank of alcohol. They then wrapped two bodies in blankets and put them and their weapons in the back of the car as the ‘ones that got away’. They would dump them in the bush further on.
Alex wrapped a shirt round his face, took a forked stick and unhooked the intestines from the bush; they exploded with flies and he nearly threw up but he forced himself through it. At the same time, Yamba heaved the log aside so that Col could drive through. The two of them then replaced their respective barriers.
Col cut some branches and swept the vehicle tracks off the road whilst the others picked up their 9mm shell casings from the firefight, leaving only the boys’ 7.62mm ones. It was by no means perfect but Alex was banking on the fact that whoever commanded these guys probably did not have advanced ballistic forensic skills.
They drove on in tense silence.
Eberhardt reeled from the words — Thomas Müntzer! A man whose prophecy of the end of the world had recently set Germany on fire.
Associations flashed past him: a brilliant theologian, a firebrand preacher, an early associate of Luther’s who had split from him and was now leading the radicals against both him and the Catholic Church.
Zwickau.
Back in 1521, after Luther was condemned as a heretic and had had to go into hiding, the extremists took over the Protestant movement. They made the town of Zwickau the centre of the radical Reformation. The Zwickau Brethren were led by Müntzer and had been forced to leave with him by the town council, who had become fearful of their growing fanaticism.
Eberhardt had seen them: mad saints wandering the highways dressed in rags. They mumbled to themselves and jerked their arms wildly; staring and shouting as they imagined the millennium: the end of time that Müntzer said was coming soon.
Eberhardt looked at him now. The sallow face prematurely aged by the intensity of the prophecy he had made to bring about the Kingdom of God on Earth.
‘How …? But … I thought …’ Eberhardt mouthed frantically, trying to think how he came to be there.
Thomas nodded and explained calmly, ‘You probably last heard of me back in the summer, when I had my pulpit in Altstedt. I preached to the Princes and called on them to prepare the way for Christ’s coming. But the Devil stopped their ears and they would not hear me, the Dear Lord forgive them for they will burn in the hottest Hell. They chose to join with Satan because of their love of wealth.’ He shook his head at their folly. ‘So they drove me out and I had to flee into hiding. But through this trial the Lord showed me that the true Elect, His most faithful angels, will be the common man. They will be the new saviours of Germany.
‘I was organising secret meetings of the Elect in the Schwarzwald last year.’ He looked at Albrecht. ‘Those were the first stirrings you were referring to,’ he said, pitying him for his lack of understanding of the working of God in this world.
Albrecht nodded awkwardly.
‘I am now on my way north to Mühlhausen. You should join me,’ he said, looking intensely at Eberhardt. It was an instruction not a question. ‘We did not meet by chance. The Lord wanted you to hear His message; to be part of His movement — it is your destiny to be part of it!’ He held up a warning finger and hissed, ‘The end of this world is nigh!’
Eberhardt stared back at him, gripped by the certainty in the man’s eyes. He was presently a wanderer searching for a saviour for his nation and now he had found one.
He nodded slowly. ‘Yes … destiny, it is my destiny to join you, Thomas. We will save Germany!’
PRESENT DAY, TUESDAY 25 NOVEMBER, MBOMOU PROVINCE, CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC
At first light the next day Alex twisted the focus on his binoculars and stared at the perimeter fence of the mine.
It was eight foot of razor wire with a coil of the stuff on top. Watchtowers with an armed guard in each were spaced along it, and a twenty-foot-wide swathe in front had been cleared of vegetation and covered with brown gravel.
Nice touch, he thought. We can’t sneak across that without making a noise. But it’s still not going to stop us if we drop in behind by helicopter.
Beyond the gravel strip, the trees had been cut down for a hundred yards into the jungle to clear the field of fire; clumps of tall grasses and bushes had grown up in their place and Alex was lying in a bush thirty yards from the gravel. The smell of damp earth and rotting vegetation was in his nostrils and he was soaked in cold dew from lying motionless on the ground for two hours waiting for dawn to come up. His body kept shivering and he fought to keep still.
The three of them had crawled into their observation post under cover of darkness in full combats, heavily camouflaged with cam cream on their faces and vegetation stuffed into their webbing and cam-netting head covers. Throat mikes on their radios meant they could communicate but radio silence was to be observed for all but emergency situations this close to the enemy.
They had wriggled forwards on elbows and knees with their weapons held in front of them; they had fitted their rifles with silencers, and had radio beacons to call on Arkady for emergency uplift, but Alex hoped to God that they did not have to make contact.
They were lying on the ground in a triangle shape, facing outwards. Yamba and Alex watched different sectors of the complex, whilst Col maintained a guard behind them. One foot lay over each other’s ankles so that a silent tap could alert them to any danger.
They were on the first leg of what Alex hoped would be three approaches to the perimeter; going in and out in a classic flower-petal pattern around the site to see it from all angles. He wanted to check the enemy’s defensive positions and weapons, their routines, and also to get some idea of what calibre of troops he was up against. Alex knew that a long day of discomfort lay ahead — it was going to be twelve hours before he could move enough to have a piss.
They were at the east end of the complex, where the road and the power line came in from the volcano. He had been able to see the outline of some of the buildings through the blurry green vision of his nightsight: the ends of a row of bar-rack huts and behind them the huge grey corrugated-metal shed they had to capture. However, he really needed daylight to get a detailed look at things.
As daylight seeped quickly into the air he pushed the night-vision goggles up onto his forehead so that he could use the binoculars. He twisted the focus again to zero in on the perimeter defences.
Shit, he muttered in his head. He was looking at one of the covered structures that had shown up on the satellite photo in Kalil’s presentation. From the air it looked like a simple square banana-leaf-roofed hut but underneath it was a concrete bunker.
Who the hell builds that kind of thing out here? he wondered as he looked at the squat hexagonal concrete structure. He could see that the walls were a good two foot thick from where the firing slits went through them. The long barrel of a heavy machine gun pointed out uncompromisingly from each of the three concrete pillboxes that he could see along the perimeter.
After that it just got worse. At seven o’clock an empty oil barrel was bashed with something metal as the camp wake-up call. Alex scanned the barracks as soldiers emerged from the long huts; they were mainly the same sort of teenagers that they had encountered at the roadblock, armed with a mixture of automatic weapons and grenade launchers.
So the boys at the roadblock were from the mine.
At first sight they looked dishevelled and scruffy, wearing a mixture of combats and ghetto-style Western fashion, but someone