Legacy. James Steel
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them on.
What now?
Alex scanned on to two uniformed, middle-aged officers, who were now going from hut to hut checking that everyone was up. He didn’t recognise the camouflage pattern of their uniforms and caps, which was strange, as he had come across most nationalities.
White mercenaries?
He focused in on them. Swarthy and dark-haired, they didn’t look European.
Middle Eastern?
He couldn’t tell from this distance.
Yamba’s foot tapped his left ankle.
He looked round.
The black sergeant pointed to another wide hut structure halfway between two of the pillboxes, set back from the perimeter. Alex had skipped it in his initial scan. As he looked closer he could see more of the troops in proper uniforms get hold of the posts, lift up the ends in the ground and walk back with them so that the roof split neatly in two. As the camouflage netting pulled back he tensed.
The twin barrels of a Russian ZSU 23mm antiaircraft gun rose up smoothly from the horizontal position to the vertical and swept the sky in an early morning anti-aircraft drill. Any Mi-17 helicopter that got within a thousand yards of that would simply become a twenty-two-man coffin.
There goes the plan.
He put the binoculars down and rubbed his tired eyes; this was not going to be easy. He stared down at the ground in front of him for a while, deep in thought.
Eventually he looked up again at the complex but this time something outside the perimeter caught his eye. He hadn’t seen it before because he was either using the nightsight or the binoculars; he squinted and craned forward, peering at it for a minute.
Across the stretch of gravel he thought he had seen a slight shimmer just off the ground in the low dawn sun. He picked up the binoculars and twisted the focus all the way back to the nearest possible range. He peered at it again and then put the binoculars down and rubbed his forehead; the swathe of gravel was not just there for making a noise.
Yamba heard his sigh and twisted round to look at him. Alex rolled on his side so he had both hands free and put his fingers and thumbs together to make a large ‘O’ shape — the hand signal they used for mines.
The shimmer that he had seen was the early morning sun catching on droplets of dew that hung on tiny transparent rods and trip wires sticking up out of the gravel: spring mines. Once tripped, they shot up out of the ground to stomach height and then exploded in a shrapnel burst that left any man within fifty yards dead or writhing in agony. He could also see the tiny, pronged spigots of anti-tank mines mixed in with them.
The thick layer of gravel stopped the usual tropical plant growth from setting off the trip wires and disrupting the mines — weeding in a minefield was not something that you wanted to be doing every few weeks. Whoever was running this place was very organised.
How the hell were they going to do this?
That evening the flickering fire lit the exhausted faces huddled around it.
Eberhardt, Thomas and Albrecht were sitting on the earth floor of a tiny wooden hut on the edge of the forest with its owner, Joachim the Weaver, a follower of Thomas. The tiny fire did not succeed in heating the hut — their breath froze in the room — but it was better than being out in the snow.
Joachim was forty but looked seventy. His face in the firelight had deep creases cut into it by the strain of his life. Stoop-backed from his weaving, he was gap-toothed and bald, with shaggy grey locks hanging down the side of his head. Weighed down by suffering, he rarely spoke.
His wife and three remaining children were cramped in around the hut. Four others had died that winter already: tuberculosis and measles. The children were tucked in the bed head to tail, and a heavy racking cough came occasionally from it. They wouldn’t last long either.
These then were the poor.
Eberhardt had seen a lot of them since his fall, but such poverty still shocked him. Their faces were twisted by hardship, they stank of sweat, their hands were grubby and stained; their fingernails like claws with black grime under them.
Thomas seemed in his element. They had just shared a meal of thin gruel; he smiled and said graciously, ‘Joachim, you are too kind, too kind,’ gripping the man’s forearm.
With some dinner inside them now they perked up. Eberhardt looked at Thomas questioningly. ‘So you have prophesied that the end of the world is nigh?’
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