Pretorius snapped. Lost it. He snatched up the President’s nameplate and went to town on the Colonel, smashing one end against his face in a mad flurry of blows. The Colonel groaned as the bronze slab cracked his nose. He raised a limp hand in a futile attempt to shield his face but Pretorius brushed his arm aside and lamped him on the jaw, and there was a sharp crack like a piece of wood snapping in half as his jaw shattered. The Colonel gasped in agony. He tried to roll out of the way but Pretorius smashed the makeshift weapon against his face like he was hammering nails into a piece of timber. The Colonel stopped grunting. Pretorius stood upright, ditched the nameplate and admired his handiwork.

  ‘Who’s laughing now, eh?’ he said, panting with effort, his eyes blazing with cruel intent. Then, much louder: ‘I said, who’s fucking laughing now?’

  The Colonel couldn’t reply. Mostly because he didn’t have a mouth. His face resembled a Florida sinkhole. Through this mess of gristle and bone, he was making a grating, hissing noise as if he was sucking soup through a straw. Blood formed a lake under his corpulent torso. He wasn’t fully dead – not yet anyway. Bald gave it four or five minutes – if the guy was lucky. Longer if he wasn’t. Beside him the President rolled around on the floor, desperately patting himself down to make sure he hadn’t taken a bullet. Pretorius clasped a hand around his arm and hauled him up. The President stood limp and distant, his eyes fixed on the dead Colonel, the colour draining from his face like dirty water from a sink.

  Then one of the support soldiers called out to Pretorius, ‘Sir, we have a problem.’

  ‘What is it?’ Pretorius snapped.

  The soldier pointed at the window.

  Pretorius spun around and gazed outside. Bald joined him and they watched as a convoy of military trucks parked up outside the gates. Fifteen soldiers piled out from the back of the nearest truck, each man clutching his FN FAL rifle and looking like he meant business. Bald counted another fifteen emerging from the second truck. Thought, if there were an equal number of soldiers in the back of each truck, then that meant . . .

  An icy dread percolated down his spine.

  Hundreds of soldiers, he realized.

  Hurrying straight for the palace.

  Thirty-seven

  0936 hours.

  Stegman shook his head and stared out of the window. ‘But the Colonel’s dead. They’ve nothing to fight for.’

  ‘They don’t know that,’ Pretorius replied. ‘All they know is there’s been a bunch of shots fired in the compound, and their new President is sat right here.’

  ‘What if they find out the Colonel’s dead?’ Bald asked.

  Pretorius shook his head. ‘Won’t work. It’ll piss off the foot soldiers and convince the 2iC, whoever the fuck that is, that the path is open to the Presidency. All he’s got to do is takes us out of the picture and the top job is his for the taking.’

  ‘What are we gonna do?’ Stegman asked.

  ‘This,’ Pretorius replied.

  Without a moment’s hesitation he smashed the glass with the grip of his pistol as the first wave of soldiers rushed through the gates. He traced the nearest soldier’s path across the compound with the Beretta and fired once.

  Bald put the distance from the window to the gates at twenty-five metres. The shot nicked the ground in front of the soldier farthest from the gates. Bald raised his rifle; so did Stegman. They squeezed off a couple of three-round bursts. Their aim was rushed and the bullets zipped high and wide of their targets, but the soldiers ducked anyway, fearing for their lives, their poor training evident in the way they beat a hasty retreat, backtracking towards the compound walls either side of the gates in order to remove themselves from the line of fire.

  Now Bald unleashed another burst at the truck. The rounds hammered into the grille. The driver panicked and scurried from the cab, joining his muckers behind the wall. The suppressive fire had bought them an extra second or two; no more than that. The second wave of fifteen soldiers had by now flooded out from the back of the truck immediately behind the lead vehicle and were sweeping towards the compound. Nine or ten seconds, thought Bald. That’s how long he figured they had until the soldiers regrouped and attacked in strength.

  ‘Spread out,’ Pretorius said, turning away from the window. ‘Harvey, you set up shop here. Deet, head to the other side of the building, find a good vantage point. John, you’re with me. We establish a baseline at the main door. The door is our red line. Whatever happens, we don’t let anyone reach the palace itself.’

  Stegman shook his head. ‘Mr Pretorius, there’s too many of them. They’ll keep coming at us until they get through. We can’t hold out for ever.’

  Pretorius clicked his tongue. But he said nothing. He stared at a spot on the wall, wilfully ignoring Stegman and the rest of the team. As if he refused to consider the bleak truth staring him in the face. That there was no hope, no glimmer of survival. The odds didn’t allow for the possibility of victory. They would die here, all of them, and Pretorius refused to accept it.

  ‘Loot those soldiers,’ he said brutally at last. ‘Rifles, secondary weapons, grenades. Whatever you can get your hands on.’

  The President looked on as the men hurriedly snatched weapons and kit from the six guards they had killed in his office. He shivered, then glanced up at Pretorius.

  ‘What about me?’

  Grinning, Pretorius replied, ‘You stay no more than a metre from me at all times. I catch you trying to run, I put a bullet in that slimy skull of yours.’

  Four of the team flooded out of the office, leaving Stegman and one of the other backup soldiers manning the window in the President’s office, putting down rounds on the gates. Deet and the second support soldier shuttled off down the opposite corridor to find a similar vantage point, while Bald and Pretorius sprinted down the lobby with the President in tow. They rushed outside through the main door and quickly established a baseline on the steps to confront the enemy. Right on cue two soldiers bolted around the compound wall and scurried through the gates. Bullets skipped up around their feet as Stegman put down rounds on them. Bald coolly switched to single shot and showed the South African how it was done, discharging a pair of rounds. He hit the jackpot with both. Bullet number one thumped into the head of the soldier on the left. Bullet number two pencilled his mucker through the throat. He made a gargling sound in his throat as he tried to staunch the wound with his bare hands. A third guy ran to his mates’ aid, firing wildly from the hip as he moved. His firing stance was tragically bad. His aim was all over the place. The rounds struck somewhere east of the palace door. Pretorius punished him with a single shot to the guts. The guy didn’t die like they did in the movies. He writhed in agony on the ground, legs kicking out as he screamed for help. Pretorius chief gave him another ball of lead to the chest. The guy stilled. Bald figured that the Comorians would have seen their mates taking hits as soon as they moved through the gates and had second thoughts about wading into the compound. But more and more soldiers were grouping outside the compound walls now – he could see them assembling by the trucks lining Rue de la Corniche. Bald counted sixty, seventy of them. Hundreds more were lying in wait, itching to give the guys dug in at the compound the good news.

  An advance unit of thirty Comorian soldiers hooked around the military truck and advanced towards the gates thirty metres from Bald. Fifteen soldiers dropped to kneeling firing positions and targeted their FN FALs at the palace door while their mates advanced. Basic fire-and-movement tactics. But efficient.

  ‘GET DOWN!’ Pretorius roared, hurling the President face-down as the soldiers opened fire.

  Hot smoke seethed out of their rifle barrels. A dozen cracks thundered across the rain-soaked garden. Bullets sprayed the steps and chewed up the door. A round flew over Bald and missed him by no more than an inch, the heat grazing his scalp. There was a sound at his six like a bag of coins being dropped from a great height as the bullet struck a window, and then he heard Deet call out, ‘Man down! Man down!’ They were five now. The chances of escaping from the palace with their lives dwindled further.

  The Comorian soldiers fire-and-moved forward again. In seconds they’d reach the gates. Bald grimly assessed the situation. Then he sprang to his feet, gesturing to Pretorius as he tipped his head in the direction of the Triton.

  ‘Cover me,’ he bellowed above the incessant hammer of gunfire. ‘I’ll get on the HMG. Brass these wankers up.’

  Pretorius grinned. ‘We make it out of here alive, I’m buying the first round.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that.’

  Pretorius put the brakes on the advancing soldiers with a steady stream of bullets. Bald raced towards the Triton. Nine metres. Piece of piss. His stomach muscles contracted and a chill ran down his back despite the clammy heat, bristling the hairs on the nape of his neck as he sprinted done the steps and towards the pickup. As an SAS operator he’d fought plenty of engagements against enemies with superior numbers and firepower, but nothing like this. He remembered the stories of an old trooper pissing away his retirement fund in his local boozer in Hereford – Bald in twenty years, if he lived that long – a guy with a haggard face and shoulders like a couple of breeze blocks who’d been at the Battle of Mirbat, in Oman, back in 1972. A handful of Regiment operators had repelled wave after wave of attacks from three hundred militiamen. Only, this was worse, thought Bald. Like Mirbat times ten. He knew he was going to have to call on all his training and expertise if he was going to stand a chance of coming out the other end in one piece.

  He blocked out the anxiety gnawing at his guts and looked up at the gates sixteen metres away. Six more soldiers darted inside. Four of them were swiftly cut down in the vicious criss-cross of arced gunfire coming from the firing positions at the opposite corners of the palace. That still left two guys dispersing either side of the gates. They spotted Bald racing to the NSV, dropped to a prone firing stance, sighted their weapons on him and unleashed a quick one-two. The distance was minimal but Bald was moving fast, his chin tucked in tight, and the bullets slapped into the grass at his six o’clock. More rounds slapped into the front wall of the palace, throwing up great fists of concrete. Four metres to the Triton now. The remaining two soldiers aimed at Bald and it looked like he wasn’t going to make it. Then Pretorius unloaded from the steps and cut down the pair of them down.

  ‘Nail the fuckers!’ he shouted. ‘NOW!’

  Bald leapt onto the back of the Triton. A soldier beyond the gates, fifty metres back, shot up the cab as Bald got to grips with the NSV. It was a Soviet-era gun, one that he’d operated once or twice during foreign weapons drills. He knew it took the 12.7x108mm cartridge, a slightly larger bullet than the standard .50-cal used by Western HMGs. The NSV had the stopping power of a cruise missile. The mechanisms were almost identical to the .50-cal he was used to. A long line of link coiled up from the ammo box to the feed unit via the right-hand side. He located the firing controls on the mount. These took the form of a pistol grip fixed to the cradle of the tripod, which had already been adjusted so that the barrel was high enough to fire over the side of the Triton. Bald flipped the safety and thumbed the fire selector to single shot.

  Good to go.

  At his three o’clock Pretorius was coming under sustained heavy fire from the two prone soldiers. Bald pivoted the NSV towards the soldiers as they opened fire again, peppering the door and keeping Pretorius pinned down. Then Bald rested the sights on the soldiers. Filled his muscles with air, and fired.

  The first rounds thundered out of the NSV’s muzzle and cut the soldier in half. His torso went one way, his legs the other. His entrails spooled out on the ground in a long, greasy trail. Bald actually heard the man scream above the discharge roaring in his ears – a guttural wail, like foxes mating, which filled the ex-SAS man with a perverse joy. He angled the HMG slightly to the right, gave another short pump of the trigger. The second soldier exploded. Turned to relish. Nothing left of him but fractured bones and shredded skin. Spent jackets the size of Red Bull cans burped out of the ejector tube on the right side of the receiver, showering the flatbed.

  A group of five soldiers swept through the gates, caught sight of their vaporized mates and displaced. Bald lined up a third soldier and gave him the gift of hot lead. His head toppled off his shoulders like a skittle knocked over by a bowling ball. His headless torso slumped to the ground as his mates fled for cover. Bald unloaded a round at a fourth man. The round struck low, blasted his leg below the ankle to dust. He crumpled. Bald corrected his aim. Pulled the trigger. Felt the killing power of the NSV in the heavy recoil, in the way the round scudded through the air and thumped into the soldier.

  ‘Fucking take it!’ he muttered.

  Bodies littered the area around the gates. But dozens more soldiers were disgorging from the trucks. They were moving forward and working in distinct two-man teams: one man putting down rounds while the other displaced and established a baseline closer to the target. Then the second guy went into covering fire mode to allow his mucker to catch up with him. The nearest soldiers were just eighteen metres short of the gates, so forty-three metres from the door of the palace. Almost on top of them. Half a dozen of them were now putting rounds down. Bald pivoted the NSV towards the gates and let them have it, but the soldiers were already sliding back behind the wall of the compound and the rounds thumped uselessly into the tarmac as the soldiers joined their comrades grouped behind the perimeter wall. More soldiers were gathering outside the gates now, and the awful realization struck Bald that very soon they would have the palace surrounded. There would be no way out then. He cursed his luck.

  Soldiers began darting out of cover, loosing off ragged shots and scurrying back behind the wall, all in the blink of an eye. Pretorius shouted to Bald above the incessant din, ‘Stop them, John, for fuck’s sake!’

  Switching the NSV from single shot to semi-automatic, Bald swung the weapon a few degrees to the right of the gates, so that the iron sights were lined up with a section of the wall to the immediate west of the sentry post – roughly at the point where the Comorian soldiers had found cover. Three-quarters of a metre of concrete stood between them and Bald. He pressed the trigger on the pistol grip. Kept it pressed for a few seconds as five rounds torpedoed out of the muzzle in a searing burst of smoke and thunder and slammed into the wall of the compound. The 12.7x108mm cartridge could punch a hole in an armoured tank and made short work of the wall, each round smashing home like a fist into a bowl of flour, clawing away at the concrete.

  The sixth round broke through the twisted metal rods and exited the other side of the wall. A hideous scream carried across the compound as the round slashed through the chest of a soldier hunkered down on the other side. Bald unleashed three more shots at the wall, increasing the size of the hole until it was roughly a metre wide and forcing the soldiers to displace. Meanwhile Stegman and the backup soldier in their firing position at the window to the President’s office, and Deet at the other end of the palace, were nailing anyone who tried slipping through the gates. Bodies were piling up in the compound now. At least twenty of them, sprawled, limbs spread, mouths slack, eyes heavy-lidded with that look of mute horror Bald had seen on a hundred dead men in a dozen different war zones.

  The rain continued to fall.

  The soldiers kept coming.

  Bald kept firing. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that Stegman, Pretorius and Deet were making short work of it, bullets tracing white-hot streaks across the garden, ripping into palm trees and throwing up great clumps of dirt into the air, slicing and dicing the soldiers like vegetables in a blender, and for a moment the Scot dared to think that they might hold out.

  But an instant later the bleak truth twisted viciously through his guts. They were running out of time. The plan had hinged on taking control of the Comoros with lightning precision and speed: there was a French Foreign Legion garrison based on the neighbouring island of Mayotte, some five hundred men, and once the first shot had been fired the alarm would have been raised. Securing the Comoros before the Foreign Legion could deploy and augment the Defence Force troops was vital to the success of the op. Bald guessed they had an hour max.

  And then?

  Then didn’t bear thinking about.

  At that moment one of the military trucks sputtered into life and sledded towards the gates.

  The truck abruptly picked up speed. Dozens of soldiers gathered behind the vehicle and Bald understood immediately what was happening. They were going to use it as a battering ram. The dread realization clawed at him as the truck trundled towards the gates. Forty metres away. Now thirty. Bald flicked the selector on the NSV back to single shot as he lined up the sights with the windscreen. Squeezed the trigger. The truck was close enough for Bald to see the brains squirt out of the back of the driver’s head, spattering the cab as the round hit the bullseye. He discharged two more rounds at the truck’s bonnet. The bullets worked their magic, piercing the hood and crippling the engine. The crippled truck skidded to a halt just inside the gates, smoke spitting out of the grille, the engine sounding a death note.

  No sooner had the truck stopped than soldiers began swarming behind it. Now they had a beachhead established inside the compound. Bald unleashed six rounds at the truck, hoping they would pinball through the chassis and strike down one or two of the soldiers hunched behind it. But it was desperation stuff. The floodgates had opened. Soldiers swarmed into the compound, fanning out to the flanks and establishing a baseline across the length of the garden. Bald realized they were being overrun. Nothing he could fucking do about it. Bullets spattered the Triton in a ferocious cacophony. Above it the Scot heard a throaty cry at his five o’clock. He glanced back at the door. Saw Pretorius drop to one knee, clutching his left shoulder, blood seeping between the fingers on his right hand.

 

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