Recoil

by Andy McNab

Genres: Spy Thrillers; Historical Thrillers

Synopsis

Brought to you by Penguin.


Ex-special forces soldier Nick Stone is recuperating in Switzerland. His latest mission cost the life of one of his closest friends. And the woman he went to bed with last night has left without saying goodbye.

When she fails to reappear, Stone begins his quest to find her. Once in Africa and in the heart of a very dirty Congo war, it isn't long before the past comes knocking on the door. One bloody twist leads to another and Stone finds himself catapulted into the dark, brutal world he thought he's managed to leave behind.


© Andy McNab 2006 (P) Penguin Audio 2006

Release date: January 26, 2021

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 544

Sample

9



He’d been gone no more than five minutes when I heard the rattle of small-arms fire and the distant sound of two RPGs cracking off. Seconds later they smashed into the side of the house.

The pressure waves hurled me to the ground. My ears were still ringing as I staggered to my feet in a cloud of sand and mortar dust.

It was impossible to tell where they’d hit.

There was silence for the next two or three seconds while everyone came to their senses, then Davy screamed, ‘Man down! Man down!’ from above us.

I grabbed a torch and a bag of field dressings from the footwell of the wagon and ran back into the house. The dust was just settling. I flicked the beam round the room. The royal sisters, and what looked like four of the soldiers, lay motionless on the floor, their shattered limbs at crazy angles. The walls were splattered with blood. Margaret had a neat hole in her chest where the shaped charge from one of the grenades had punched its way through her, on its way to fucking up everyone else.

I barged through the confusion and screams. I was sweating big-time as I climbed the spiral staircase on to the roof.

Gary was lying on his back, his blood-drenched face pale and shiny in the moonlight. He wasn’t moving and his eyes were wide open. I leaned over him, knowing immediately that there was nothing I could do. He was totalled. A round had hit him in the throat and smashed its way out through his neck, taking the vertebrae and his spinal column with it. He must have dropped like liquid.

I caught a glimpse of Standish: he wasn’t trying too hard to conceal his delight at being the only one left alive.

‘What the fuck?’ Davy shoved him backwards. ‘You think that’s funny, yeah?’

Standish lost his smirk and his eyes blazed. ‘What do you think you’re doing? I’m in command here.’

Davy was about to give him the good news with his fist and size nines when Sam jumped between them. ‘Stop! Save it for that lot out there.’

A loud metallic scrape announced the opening of the main gates. The general screamed at the backs of his remaining soldiers as they legged it into the darkness.

I grabbed my AK and got into a fire position, aiming at the shadows as they melted into the darkness. If these guys were changing sides, they needed to be stopped now. I readied myself to shoot, but my blood-soaked hands slipped on the stock. ‘We dropping them?’

Standish sparked up from behind. His time had come. ‘Yes, do it. Take them.’

I might have been the new boy, but I knew who was now the real boss around here. ‘Sam?’

By now everybody had their weapon ready to go, and everybody waited.

Standish wasn’t impressed. I’d just been crossed off his Christmas-card list. ‘I’m giving an order. I want bodies out there. Get some rounds down!’

‘No – leave ’em.’ Sam took control. ‘We won’t get them all now, anyway. Hold fire.’

The last of the bodies disappeared into the darkness, heading towards the wagon lights that were scattered around the building, just out of our range, and the fires that flickered near them.

As Standish stomped off towards the stairs, a couple of shots cracked off here and there but they weren’t aimed at us or the mutineers. The rebels out there had probably chewed so much ghat, they were shooting each other to see if it hurt or not.



1



Standish was leaning against the far wall of the fire trench, arms resting on the mud at either side of it like he was floating in a jacuzzi. Sam and Crucial hunched down into the backblast channel. I sank on to my knees.

He glowered at me. ‘What went wrong with the claymores?’

‘Not sure.’ I shrugged. ‘Second reel of firing cable might have been contaminated, or the plunger didn’t kick out enough amps. Maybe even a knackered det.’

Jacuzzi over. It was like I’d thrown a switch. He pushed himself off the trench wall. ‘We nearly lost the firefight. We have lost Sam’s patrol. This nightmare is all down to you!’ He jabbed a finger at me to underline every word. ‘If you’d done your fucking job correctly, we wouldn’t have had half the fucking LRA in the valley, and Sam’s patrol unable to support us.’ He turned to face the scene of my crime. ‘We wouldn’t be in this fucking situation.’

I was tempted to suggest that next time he could rig the fucking thing up, but knew it was pointless to rise to the bait.

He switched to Sam. ‘And now we have the other half of your church here, what’s the plan? Deafen these drug-crazed heathens with semiautomatic gospel songs? Or maybe beat them off with copies of the Good News Bible?’

Sam didn’t rise to it either. ‘I’m going down there with these two. We need the guns. Bateman will cover us on the one Nick brought up. You can have the RPG.’

Standish had other ideas. ‘No, you’re not. We’re leaving. They’re going to take the mine – there aren’t enough of us. We need to use whatever darkness is left to cover us out of here right now, get back to the strip and evacuate to Cape Town.’

I heard the clanking of link as Bateman returned. He jumped into the trench and moved the weapon forward on to the parapet.

Sam kept his cool, but wasn’t giving up without a fight. ‘What about the Mercy Flight people? Both are injured – one’s a stretcher case. How can we move them in the dark? We’d land up with even more casualties. And how are we going to cross the river at night with them strapped into cots?

‘Then there’s the kids. They’re scared – they’ll get lost. We need to control the situation, not flap and run. Our best chance is to stay here and fight. At first light, we make a break for it. If it works, all well and good. If it doesn’t, well, tough. None of us is going to care, because we’ll be history. But it’s better than turning our backs on these people.’

Standish flicked his hand disdainfully. ‘Get real. Think about yourself, think about the future. We need to get back to Cape Town and reorganize, and we need to do it right now.

‘You two –’ he pointed at Sam and Crucial ‘– you can go and play golf while I go to Switzerland and devise a plan to retake the mines. I’ll get the backing. We’ll recruit, we’ll train, and then we’ll move back in-country and carry on as planned. But that’s not going to happen unless we leave now. And there’s too much at stake to mess around.’

Crucial clenched his jaw. ‘Too much cash, you mean?’

Standish thrust himself the half-metre or so to front him. ‘I’ve never seen you handing it back.’

I adjusted the AK across my thigh as I knelt in the mud. I’d had enough of this. ‘Listen, the longer you lot debate this shit, the longer we don’t have those guns up here. Moving or not, we need them. Let’s get out there while there’s still time.’

Bateman lifted up the top cover of his gun and cleared the feed-tray.

Standish turned. His face was level with Sam’s knees. ‘This is not for discussion. I’m ordering you to start moving towards the airstrip immediately. Leave everyone behind. We don’t need them. If we stay here we’ll die, and not achieve a thing by doing so.’

Sam stood up. ‘No. We’re leaving no one.’ There was quiet menace in his voice. ‘We stand our ground until first light, and then we try to break out with the wounded and the walking. You can do whatever you want.’

Bateman slammed down the top cover and gave it another smack with his clenched fist. ‘No, he isn’t going to do what the fuck he wants, man. We are all staying.’ He squared his shoulders. ‘I don’t give two shits about all these charity people.’ He encompassed the whole valley with a majestic wave of his hand. ‘All these miners, these kids – if I’m honest, I don’t give a shit. But I won’t leave other soldiers to die. That’s not the way it’s done, man.’

He was the bigger, stronger man – and this was the Congo, not the paradeground at Sandhurst or a guest slot on Newsnight – and Standish knew it.

‘My first operation was Uric. We went to destroy a training camp in Mozambique. Op Uric, you heard of it?’

Standish shook his head.

‘Well, you’d better listen good, man.’

He was going to have to do that whether he liked it or not.

‘Tooley was there with me when we flew into Mozambique – three hundred and sixty of us, man. We were going to kill everyone. Rebels, Mozambique Army, Russian advisers, everyone. We weren’t sure how many there were, maybe thousands.

‘We bombed them from the air, we gunned them from the Pumas. But it fucked up. They were dug in, just like us here. They held us down for days, man.’ Bateman was reliving it in his head. ‘We lost fifteen of our own guys but killed three hundred of those fuckers.’

Standish stifled a yawn. He didn’t want to be mistaken for a man who gave a shit.

Bateman shoved him in the chest. ‘You not finding this interesting, man? You think I’m telling you this for fun?’

Standish just stood there, no more than inches between them. He’d got the message now. It was time to listen, and listen good.

‘All but two of our guys were killed by these things.’ He kicked the launcher. ‘They work, man. But let me tell you about the other two. You need to hear this.’

Bateman leaned into him, closing the gap between their faces, eyes fixed on Standish’s.

‘They were young, just like me and Tooley, man. We were in Mozambique, detached, on our own, fighting – simply trying to stay alive.’

Their noses almost touched.

‘One guy refused to fight and decided we should surrender. He was shot by his own platoon commander before he could finish putting his hands up. The next ran, on the second day. He left other men to do the fighting. I shot him in the back of the head before he’d got ten yards.’

Bateman kept his face where it was as he pointed down into the valley. ‘Out there isn’t a place to reason why. You fight, or you don’t. It’s that simple. No questions, no excuses, no courts martial.’ He turned away. ‘You will fight.’ He rammed the butt in his shoulder and checked his arcs of fire. ‘We all stay, or we all go. And we’re staying. It’s that simple.’

Sam and Crucial lifted Tim and his cot into the tent.

I shoved two magazines into my OG map pockets and checked the safety lever was down two clicks. Then I grabbed the jerry-can and gulped as much water down my neck as I could without throwing up.



2



Weapons in the shoulder, we skidded down to the scrapyard where the ANFO had been mixed. The view down here in the stalls was scarier and more claustrophobic than the one we’d had up in the dress circle. It looked like a First World War battlefield, the sort the Germans used to call ‘the place where the Iron Crosses grow’.

Sam hunkered down among the oil drums and we closed in.

‘OK, listen – me and Crucial are going to get the two guns from those sangars. Nick, you get hold of as much link as you can from the stores dugout. We’ve cleaned it out of RPG rounds, but whatever you can find, we need it up top.’

He dug into his chest harness and handed me a cheap plastic version of a mini Maglite. I tried to shove it into my pocket next to the sat nav, but my OGs were so sodden it clung to my hand.

‘Get any link straight up to the trenches. Then come back here and wait. I want some cover down here as well, in case we have a drama on the other side.’

I nodded. ‘Got it. Listen, mate, I want to check the firing cables. That OK?’

Sam thought about it for a second, then nodded. It was going to take precious time, but he knew it would eat away at me if I didn’t find out, one way or another. Who’d fucked up, me or the kit? In my boots, he’d have wanted to do the same.

Sam led off, with Crucial behind him and to the left. I took the right. We moved as fast as we could, safety off, weapon back in the shoulder.

Sam found the cable. I picked it up and started to follow it towards the river. The other two fell in each side of me and covered.

Ahead of me I could see a haphazard arrangement of stepping-stones in the mud. As I got closer, I could see what they were: some adult, some kids, some still with weapons beside them or lying across their bodies. One had fallen face down and was almost fully submerged. His disembodied hands and feet seemed to grow out of the mud.

I got to where I’d anchored the cable, just short of the Nuka hidey-hole. Sam and Crucial knelt, covering the arcs, while I unwound the cable from the rock. I tried to pull the join apart, but the pigtails didn’t give an inch – they hadn’t let me down.

Sam wanted to move on, and I nodded. Job done. I was happy; well, sort of. I untwisted the two strands and let them fall into the mud. I still wanted to test the cable later.

Sam and Crucial aimed for the right side of the valley and I headed back the way we’d come.

When I reached the cover of the drums once more, I undid the torch and turned the bottom battery the right way round again. Old habits died hard for Sam. It saved power, and could also save your life: a torch suddenly coming on if the switch got knocked was an open invitation to any sniper within reach.

I shielded the lens in the palm of my hand. There was a dull red glow through the skin. I turned it off again and kept it in my left hand so that when I gripped the weapon it lay along the stock. When the time came, it would be my searchlight.

I moved off towards the stores dugout, trying to keep low, trying to offer as small a target as I could.

A pace or two from the mouth, it was time to hit the switch. Gripping it against the stock, I shone the beam down the barrel and into the cave.

The marzipan smell embraced me like an old friend, and as I swept the beam I could see the ground was strewn with many more empty wooden crates than last time. Bits of ordnance, the internal box packing for RPG rounds and sweaty slabs of HE covered with grit had been discarded all over the floor. Ahead of me was a stack of boxes.

As I panned the cave, there was a scuffle behind them.

I threw myself against the wall and tensed into a fire position, barrel up, both eyes open, first pressure taken. I didn’t want to give whoever was in here the chance to open up first, especially since they might not realize that if they fucked up and hit a slab we’d all be history.

‘Come out! Allez, allez!’ I didn’t expect it to happen; I just wanted whoever it was to know they’d been heard. ‘Identify yourself!’

I kept up first pressure on the trigger.

Still both eyes open, I aimed the weapon and torch towards the noise, ready for the slightest movement.

I heard it again; something between a gasp and a cough.

Torch beam and muzzle frozen on the stack, I eased myself upright and leaned into the weapon. ‘Show yourself! Allez, allez, allez!’

I shuffled forward a foot or two. The shadows moved with me.

I kept left. My back scraped against the side of the dugout, but the adrenalin killed any pain. I kept each pace firm and deliberate, my feet never crossing. I needed a stable firing platform.

I didn’t call out again. I didn’t want to miss the slightest sound, or provide cover for whatever was in front of me to move.

More noise: a stifled, frightened whimper this time.

I came level with the boxes. The torch beam moved further into the dead ground behind them.

The barrel of an AK toppled to the ground in front of me, rusty, the parkerization long gone.

I reached out for it and the beam fell on a kid. He was lying against the back of the dugout, his swollen stomach torn open by a gunshot wound.

He was panting hard, fighting for air.

I knelt down next to him. ‘Hello, mate. Mr Nick, that’s me.’

His huge eyes gazed up at me but there was little reaction in them as I ran the light across his face.

‘Let’s have a look at you, yeah?’

I eased up the chest harness that covered almost all of the little boy’s torso and lifted his blood-soaked shirt. I saw his intestines ripple with each tortured breath. He was in shit state.

‘That’s too bad, mate.’ I kept up my Mr Nice Guy act as I rolled him on to his side. ‘Let’s have a look round the back, see what you got for us there.’

The exit wound was three times as big, a mess of torn flesh and exposed rib. There was nothing I could do for him here. I doubted there was much that could be done for him up top, beyond strapping him up and trying to keep what was left of him in the right place.

‘Let’s get this harness off you, then Mr Nick will take you to see Mr Tim and Miss Silky.’

His face screwed up with pain and his heels dug into the ground as he tried to fight it. His head, too large for his underfed body, lifted towards me. ‘Mr Nick, Mr Nick . . .’

‘That’s right, mate, Mr Nick. I’m here, you’ll be OK, come on, up you get.’

As gently as I could, I unstrapped the harness and pulled the little fucker up a couple of inches, then slipped off his shirt. It must have hurt like shit, but he didn’t scream; not a good sign. I folded the shirt lengthways, then wrapped it as firmly as I could around his back and stomach. It wouldn’t stop the bleeding, but it might stop him falling apart in my arms.

‘There you go – not long now, mate, before you’ll be playing football on this airstrip I know. Lots of kids there to play with. It’ll be a good laugh, yeah?’

I slipped my left hand under his legs, and my right behind his back, picked up my weapon and lifted. I’d be fucked if we got within range of Kony’s lot, but I wasn’t going to leave him to die here, all on his own. I could feel warm blood oozing down my arms. I clicked off the torch and headed outside.

He cried weakly each time I took a step, and never once took his impossibly wide, pleading eyes off my face. As the moon broke through the scudding clouds again, I knew we presented the world’s easiest target, but I didn’t want to spill any more of this kid’s guts than I had to on the way up. I moved as fast as I could to the ANFO site, then on to the tents.

I pushed through the flaps and into the dull glow of a Tilley lamp. It had been turned right down so the light wouldn’t show through the soaking canvas. Either Tim or Silky knew a lot more than just doctoring, or Bateman had given them a bollocking about staying tactical.

Silky had her back to me as she leaned over Tim. His legs, still bound together, had been elevated on a roll of wet blankets.

Sam’s kids were huddled in a group on the ground, exactly the same as they’d been in the MF tent in Nuka.

‘We’ve got a gunshot wound here.’

Silky spun around. ‘Oh, my God!’ She grabbed the Tilley lamp.

Tim gripped the situation. ‘Get a cot. Put him next to me.’

Silky dragged one over and I laid him down as gently as I could.

‘There you go, mate. Mr Tim and Miss Silky.’

Tears spilled down his cheeks, washing tracks in the grime from the dugout. His eyes burned into me. ‘Mr Nick . . .’ He struggled to hold up a hand.

‘Yeah, Mr Nick.’ I took his bony little fist. The skin was too rough for a child. ‘We’ll have that game of football, eh? As soon as you’re up and about . . .’

Tim took one look at what was underneath the shirt and told Silky what he needed out of the bag.

He was completely calm, and completely in command. He reminded me of Sam.

I left them to it and went back into the darkness.

I still had a job to do.



3



I found eight metal boxes labelled 200 rounds – 7.62 MDX – Link 1.4 among the empty wooden RPG crates and drums of firing cable. There was a belt of 200 link in each, and every fourth round was a tracer.

A pool of blood glistened in the torch beam as it sank slowly into the grit. There was another big splash of it against the back wall. I felt a jolt of guilt. Was I responsible? Had I zapped him? All of a sudden, Crucial’s words weren’t as reassuring as he’d meant them to be.

I started throwing the boxes of link towards the dugout entrance. I knew that two fold-down handles in each hand and two boxes under each arm was the most I could physically carry. But that was without a weapon. I dropped them into one of the RPG crates and heaved it on to my shoulder. Weapon in my left hand, I started to hump the gear up to the trenches.

I didn’t try to run: I’d have spent more time flat on my face than moving uphill.

Bateman was on the gun, doing his job. Standish was to his left, doing nothing except getting even more pissed off. Tough shit, we were staying. But it worried me that he was so quiet. I dumped my load beside them and went back down to the dugout. Humping boxes of link took me back to my days as the infantry crow. The job of lugging the twelve-pound boxes of link always fell to the new boy – that was just the way it was.

I waited by the drums. Crucial appeared, a body over his shoulder, butcher style, legs held, arms dangling. He must have been knackered. He was also carrying a GPMG by the handle, and an AK in his left hand.

Sam had another gun, and stooped like an old man under the weight of link round his neck.

I joined them at the track and nodded at the body. ‘He from Nuka?’

‘No, he had a weapon.’ He accelerated away from me in his haste to get the boy to treatment.

‘I’ve just taken another one up there.’ I grunted with the effort of talking and climbing. ‘Little fucker’s got a round through the stomach.’

Crucial crested the top of the knoll and disappeared. Sam stopped, and gripped my arm. ‘This can’t go on, Nick. You know that, don’t you?’



4



The first thing I did was check on the kid. Silky was holding the Tilley lamp over his cot while Tim packed the hole where his stomach used to be with dressings. His surgical gloves were smeared with bile and blood.

The kid was still panting, eyes half closed and fluttering, and his little swollen, undernourished belly moved up and down with each short, sharp breath. He must have been in terrible pain, but he still wasn’t screaming, and I could see from Tim’s face that he was as worried about that as I was.

The boy opened his eyes and struggled to move his lips. ‘Mr Nick . . .’

Crucial’s casualty was lying on the floor alongside. He’d been peppered from head to toe by the fragmentation of an RPG round. There were so many open wounds I wouldn’t have known where to begin patching him up, but at least he was still gulping in oxygen so he could cry.

Crucial did his best to comfort him in his favourite-uncle French while Sam’s kids looked on. There was no fear in their eyes, no hate, no passion. They had the blank, empty stares of shell-shocked Tommies on the Somme.

I took the lamp from Silky so she could help Tim. I tried hard not to look down. I just wanted this out of the way, and to get on with what I had to do. ‘We can’t leave before first light. But they’ll hit us again – all depends how long it’ll take them to regroup.’

Tim glanced up and nodded.

‘So you’ve got a choice.’ I adjusted the lamp to keep the glow on Tim’s hands as he tried to repair the damage I had probably caused. ‘Back to the trench, or stay here and look after this lot.’

Silky smiled. ‘What do you think, Nick?’

Tim nodded again. ‘This is what I do.’ He and Silky exchanged a glance. ‘This is what we do. Besides, we need light. The moon doesn’t quite cut it.’

I couldn’t help smiling too. Fuck knows why, because there wasn’t anything to smile about.

Back outside, I ran to Sam’s trench. All three guns were facing forwards now. The top covers were up on the two they’d just brought, and Bateman’s was made ready, link in the feed tray.

I peered into the trench. ‘Where’s Sunday?’

Bateman didn’t bother looking up. He was cleaning the other two guns, and that took priority. ‘We put him in one of the tents, man. Fucking kid was in the way.’

Crucial joined us with his RPG, shoved it into the corner and disappeared again without a word.

I lifted the feed tray of the second gun and cleaned out the gunk underneath it. I checked there was no mud on my sleeve, then gave the inside a good wipe.

Crucial came back with an armful of RPG rounds, dumped them and pissed off again.

Standish and Sam jumped into the backblast channel. You could smell the friction between them.

Standish jabbed the air. ‘If we don’t use those kids, we’re all going to fucking die here. We need fire power, and that’s the solution, Sam. Why can’t you get that into your godly fucking head? Look, we have three guns, four RPGs. We take the guns, and Crucial trains up the kids on the RPGs.’ The words were tumbling out like spent cases from a feed tray. ‘If we’re all going to stay here and play Mother Teresa, we need to win the firefight, and that’s how we do it.’

‘Listen.’ Sam’s voice was dangerously calm. ‘You’ll only get this from me this one last time. I – will – not – arm – the – kids. We’ll stand our ground until we can move. With the extra casualties, first light is still the only option.’

Crucial reappeared with another load of RPG rounds. ‘No way the kids, man. I’m not here to sink to the level of those animals.’ He thumbed out towards the valley.

Bateman had had enough too. He jumped out of the fire trench, shaking his head like a wet dog. ‘For fuck’s sake, just get on and make a decision about the little shits, man, before sun-up. We’ve got a job to do here.’ He picked up his GPMG with about twenty link on it, grabbed two of the ammo boxes, and stormed off to his own trench.

Sam could see the cogs turning in my head. ‘No, Nick. It’s not going to happen. There’s enough of us – if we keep together, fight together, we’ll hold out. We know what to do with this stuff.’ He jerked his head down at the RPGs and the other two guns on the parapet. ‘We have three gunners, two RPG men – that’s me,’ he slapped himself on the chest and nodded at Standish, ‘and him.’ He turned to Crucial. ‘RPG rounds?’

‘Twenty-four.’

‘There you go – masses.’

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Fuck it. Let’s get this over and done with, shall we?’



5



Standish grabbed the RPG like a spoilt kid snatching back his football after the other side’s scored.

Crucial came and stood alongside me. Sam turned to us. ‘Right, take a gun each. We’ll handle the RPGs. Get everyone out of the tents and squeeze them into the trenches.’

I shook my head. ‘Silky and Tim, they’re staying. They need light to work on the casualties.’

He hesitated a beat. ‘OK, they’re big boys and girls.’ He glanced at Crucial. ‘Get the kids in now. Two in each trench.’

Crucial looked over at Bateman. ‘You sure, man?’

‘Why not? Let him see what we see every day.’

Standish began to shout at no one in particular, like an old meths drinker on a park bench. ‘We should leave now! Now!’

It was so loud even Bateman could hear him. He hollered back, incandescent: ‘Shut the fuck up, man! We stay and fight. When we get back, that’s me finished. I’m not working for you any more. I’ve had enough of this shit. You Brits bitch like fucking women!’

That got a laugh out of Crucial.

I kept my AK, picked up the gun and two boxes of ammo and staggered across to my position. The trench was now empty of RPG rounds; the launcher was where I’d left it. So was the . . .