Marine J SBS Read online

  ‘Is he really going to invade?’

  ‘Oh yes. Tanzania, too. He and Nyerere hate each other personally, and Amin’s regime will topple if he doesn’t slip the army’s leash. They stripped Uganda to the bone. Now they need somewhere else to play with.’

  ‘What about this camp we were told about at Mwanza?’

  ‘It’s half-built. I’m told you’ll have some two thousand men there by the end of the month, Ugandan exiles most of them, from about four or five different movements. There’s the Uganda Action Group, the Uganda Group for Human Rights, the Front for the Liberation of Uganda, and the Front for National Salvation. Most of them hate each other only a little less than they hate Amin. And then there’s Obote, of course, the ex-President. None of these movements want anything to do with him, but he’ll not see himself left out of any wheeling and dealing.’

  ‘Thank Christ I’m just a soldier,’ Willan said with feeling.

  Prentiss smiled. ‘You and your men are supposed to be training these people – it’ll be like juggling eggs.’

  ‘I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it,’ Willan said, irritated. ‘I was supposed to receive extra information from you concerning possible operations.’

  ‘Indeed you were. And I have it – your first op.’ He tossed a photograph on to the table. The SBS man squinted at it in the poor light.

  ‘Looks like an old passenger steamer.’

  ‘It’s the Victoria, as you say, an old passenger steamer. But these days it’s the mother ship for most of the Ugandan raiders who strike across Lake Victoria. They use the ship as a base and operate out of her in local canoes. The steamer is captained by a white man, Loos Van Dorn. He’s an Afrikaner, a mercenary. Basically he and his little band of merry men have been playing merry hell with the Tanzanian shores of the lake.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘He’s supposed to have over a hundred gunmen in his pay, armed with light weapons – AKs and the like. Pirates, basically.’

  ‘And we’re supposed to take him and his steamer out?’

  ‘Yes. Operation number one. Think about it while we’re travelling to Mwanza. My superiors want him taken out as soon as possible.’

  ‘And the training camp?’

  ‘Oh, get it up and running by all means. But take out Van Dorn as soon as you can.’

  Willan pocketed the photograph. ‘Where does he operate out of?’

  ‘Entebbe. The steamer lies up in the north-western islands of the lake while on . . . operations. We would prefer it if you did the business on her there as opposed to in Uganda itself. You don’t want to give yourself too high a profile.’

  ‘I see. And how are we supposed to locate her?’

  ‘I fly Cessnas for a firm in Mwanza. We’ll do an aerial reconnaissance as soon as my people in Entebbe send me word that she’s put to sea.’

  Willan considered it for a moment. He slapped a biting insect from his cheek.

  ‘Seems straightforward. A little cowboyish maybe.’

  ‘Get used to it – that’s the way things are done down here. Sometimes it seems as though half of Africa is run by seat-of-the-pants decisions. That, or the whims of madmen.’

  ‘Charming. And what about Nyerere, the man who asked us here?’

  ‘No one asked you here. You are not really here, and neither am I. That’s rule number one. The President did not ask for Britain’s help and does not know you exist – rule number two. He’s not a bad sort, Nyerere, but he’s full of ideals. The knowledge that he’s had to ask for a helping hand from the old colonial master sticks in his craw – he’d rather that nothing happened to remind him of it.’

  ‘So in other words my men and I are out on a limb in a big way.’

  ‘Hell – it’s what they pay you for, isn’t it?’

  Willan stood up. He was tired and irritable and suddenly aware that he disliked this man Prentiss and the entire set-up around him. But what he had said was true – it was what he was paid for.

  ‘I have to check up on the men,’ he said, and left the stifling room with the Ingrams dangling from one hand. There was a faint glow in the sky outside – dawn on his first morning in Africa.

  4

  Kigoma’s estimate of six days had been decidedly optimistic. It took ten days to travel the nine hundred miles to Mwanza, and before the end of it Willan began to feel that he was not so much on a military operation as a nightmarish safari. The old trucks broke down continually on the non-existent roads and in places had to be unloaded and manhandled with brute force and the assistance of scores of enthralled villagers through quagmires, thick vegetation, rockfalls and rivers. When they finally boarded the train at Dodoma things improved a little, but the train had a habit of breaking down as well. Built by the Chinese only a few years before, the railway had quickly fallen into the disrepair and chaos that characterized the country as a whole. The natives took all the breakdowns and delays in their stride, sometimes making a party out of it at the side of the track, but for Willan and his men, chafing to arrive at their destination and get on with the job in hand, the delays were infuriating.

  Finally they pulled into the station of Mwanza, almost on the shores of Lake Tanzania. There, more of the inevitable Studebakers were waiting and they unloaded and reloaded the equipment in what had become an almost automatic operation. Crowds of yelling children ran along the roadsides as the heavily laden trucks bumped slowly along and the Tanzanian soldiers travelling with the SBS men fired bursts of automatic fire into the air to add to the carnival mood.

  ‘I don’t fucking believe it,’ Morgan told Willan. ‘It’s as if we’re travelling to join a party.’

  ‘Or a circus,’ Willan added testily.

  The camp, when they finally reached it, was situated just on the shore of Lake Victoria. The ‘Great Lake’ extended off limitlessly to the horizon, shining in the bright sunlight. There were fishing canoes out on the water, tiny as insects.

  The camp itself consisted of a dozen buildings, constructed of brush and plastered with red mud. The roofs were of thatched reeds. They were built in a rough square, with a flat parade ground in their midst. From a warped flagpole the diagonal bar of Tanzania’s national flag flapped idly. A goat was cropping the yellowed grass. The place seemed deserted.

  ‘Home sweet fucking home,’ Geary muttered, jumping down from his truck. Willan studied the place with a practised eye. It was a lot smaller than he had thought it would be – it would be hard to barrack two hundred men here, let alone two thousand. And the place was wholly without defences of any sort. Van Dorn’s raiders might leap up out of the lake and burn it to the ground with hardly a struggle. Well, that would change.

  Willan ordered Geary to unload the trucks and find a suitable hut for some of the gear. Then he asked Kigoma to show him around.

  ‘Where are all the men?’ he asked his erstwhile liaison officer. ‘I thought they’d be here waiting for us.’

  Kigoma grinned. ‘No food here, no women – nothing to do. The men are in their villages. When you want them, they will come.’

  ‘I’ll bet,’ Willan growled.

  By that night he had the place organized after a fashion. He had established a headquarters office that doubled as a guardroom, an armoury, a stores building and sleeping quarters. He might be able to barrack a reinforced company here permanently, but the rest of his invisible army would have to sleep with the surrounding villagers.

  He drew up a stag roster whereby one SBS man and a squad of six of Kigoma’s men were patrolling the camp continually. There were rolls of rusted chicken wire in one of the huts, and with these he established a rough perimeter. Morgan and a couple of the other men rigged up a permanent vehicle checkpoint at the main ‘gate’ of the camp, and the locals built a little hut there for the sentries. Other villagers brought food for the new arrivals. The whole business was a logistical and administrative nightmare, but Willan threw himself into the work with relish. He told Kigoma to send out runners to the surroun
ding villages with orders for the would-be soldiers to parade at first light the next morning, bringing their weapons with them. Morgan was appointed quartermaster, much to the amusement of the rest of the team. Geary became adjutant. Breckenridge, a fitness nut even by SBS standards, was appointed PT instructor. Parker became the post’s medical officer. The rest of the team would be training officers except for Jock Fraser, who was appointed chief scavenger. In Aberdeen Jock had had a tendency to appropriate items that were not necessarily his, before the Marines had sorted him out. Now that adolescent talent would be put to good use again.

  Most of the team gathered round one of the cooking fires that night. Kigoma’s men were roasting a haunch of something unmentionable and singing and laughing as they turned it over the flames on its spit. Willan stared into the fire, exhausted and deep in thought.

  ‘Adjutant Geary – fuck me if this isn’t Alice in Wonderland,’ Geary said disbelievingly.

  ‘I’ll tell you what it is, Willy,’ Morgan said authoritatively. ‘It’s an example of a civil servant tail wagging the military dog. What do you think then? Are we just the government’s way of making a gesture? We haven’t even got a proper officer with us, unless you count that Prentiss bloke. Now there’s a spook if ever I saw one.’

  Prentiss had left at Mwanza, promising to have supplies and extra equipment forwarded out to them. There was a rough airstrip to the south of the camp that had been hacked out of the bush, but Willan did not know if the promised supplies would arrive by road or air. He knew bugger-all about anything, he told himself, and it annoyed him intensely. So far it had all been a bit of a lark, but at some point people were going to start getting killed and he was the one responsible for making sure that they were the right ones.

  ‘Sending an officer with us would have given us too high a profile,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we’ll be getting any medals for this little op.’

  ‘Well, we’ll get a tan at least,’ Keith Hill volunteered.

  ‘What’s the plan, Sarge?’ Morgan asked. The SBS men went silent, listening.

  ‘Well,’ Willan said reluctantly, ‘first things first. We get the camp up and running, see how many bodies we have to work with and what they’re like. Then we start whipping them into shape. The Ugandan exiles are the most keen, apparently . . .’ He looked sidelong at Kigoma, but the Tanzanian officer was nodding wisely.

  ‘. . . and we’ll see if we can’t train up a few decent NCOs out of them. After that, we have a little job of our own to do.’

  ‘Ah,’ Geary said, satisfied.

  ‘Then we await further orders from our long-haired friend in Mwanza. He’s our only contact in this country.’

  ‘Will we be operating across the lake then?’ John Gordon asked. ‘I hope we haven’t lugged those fucking boats halfway across the world for nothing.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Willan said cautiously. There were too many people around for him to say more.

  The rough cots in the huts of the camp seemed like feather beds after days of sleeping in the backs of the trucks or in spine-jarring trains. Kigoma shook Willan awake at dawn and the sergeant dressed quickly, scratching the mosquito bites that covered his body and cursing his tiredness. The camp was already awake, and he could hear people talking outside, the shuffle of feet, someone shouting in Swahili. He buckled on his webbing and pulled his bush hat down over his head, then stepped out into the rising sunlight, checking the Ingrams as he did so.

  Perhaps four hundred men stood there on the parade ground in uneven rows. They were mostly barefoot, dusty, carrying Kalashnikovs, old hunting rifles or shotguns. Many were armed only with pangas. They stood eyeing the SBS men as Willan’s team assembled before them. Kigoma and another man came up to Willan and saluted smartly.

  ‘May I present Colonel Tito Okello, commander-in-chief of the Ugandan National Movement.’

  ‘John Willan, Royal Marines,’ Willan said, holding out a hand. He thought it better not to mention his rank, considering there were so many officers around.

  ‘I take it these are the beginning of our little army,’ he said, gesturing to the crowd of men shuffling on the dusty parade ground.

  ‘They are my countrymen,’ Okello said. He was a tall man, younger than Kigoma, and his 1960s-issue US combat fatigues were clean and well kept. A .45 automatic was holstered at his waist and he had an AK slung from one shoulder. He seemed fit, alert and intelligent.

  ‘All the men you see before you were forced to flee their homes because of the excesses of Amin. Most have lost members of their families to his death squads. They will fight well, if they are properly trained.’

  ‘That’s why I’m here,’ Willan said.

  ‘But they need equipment, weapons, boots. Can you get them?’

  ‘Yes,’ Willan said, more confidently than he felt.

  ‘Good! Then, Colonel Willan, they are entirely at your disposal, as am I.’

  Willan turned to Kigoma, ignoring the other man’s unwitting inflation of his rank.

  ‘What about your people? What about the Tanzanian Army? I thought I was to have two thousand men to train.’

  Kigoma shrugged, smiling ruefully. ‘They are late, but they will come. They will be here soon.’

  ‘Right,’ Willan said. He wanted breakfast and a shower, but knew he was going to have to do without both.

  ‘Let’s get started then. Corp . . . Adjutant Geary . . . take the men’s names and assign them barracks. Hill, Gordon, divide them up into training platoons. Morgan, I want you to get me a list of their weapons. Let’s see what we’ve got to work with. And Parker, give them the once-over, medically speaking. Put down as fatigue men any who aren’t up to scratch. Let’s get to it, people.’

  The SBS team immediately split up and strode off to their duties.

  ‘Now, if you two gentlemen would join me in headquarters, I think we might benefit from a little chat,’ Willan said. ‘And, Kigoma, if you could get someone to rustle up some breakfast for the men I’d be much obliged.’

  Willan turned to watch just before ducking into the HQ hut. The parade ground was a hive of activity. Four hundred men – it was a better start than he had hoped for. All he needed now were decent weapons, uniforms, boots, supplies, ammunition . . . He shook his head. They’d muddle through somehow.

  5

  They came three nights later. It was a bright, starlit evening, and Willan’s sentries saw the dark shapes of the canoes hissing towards them over the surface of the lake. Some idiot fired a volley of shots when they were still hundreds of yards away. A fusillade of automatic fire answered him, churning up the sand at his feet.

  Willan ran out of his hut with the Ingrams levelled to find the camp alive with running figures. He bumped into Geary.

  ‘What the fuck’s going on?’

  ‘Firing down on the lake shore. Looks like our friends may have decided to pay us a midnight visit.’

  ‘Get the lads together. And for fuck’s sake get hold of Okello. We’ve got to get the men organized or they’ll end up shooting the shit out of each other.’

  ‘Righto, Sarge,’ Geary said, then dashed off.

  Willan kept running down to the lakeside, cocking the Ingrams as he went. There were knots of the trainees down there, milling about. More shots. He saw the muzzle flashes out on the lake, answering fire from the shore.

  ‘Hold your fire!’ he shouted, hoping they would remember their brief training.

  ‘Hold your fire!’

  The firing sputtered out. Kigoma grabbed him out of the darkness.

  ‘Captain, it is the Ugandan raiders. They have come!’

  ‘I know. Get the men back off the beach, Kigoma. Get them into cover. Do you hear me? And no one fires until I say so.’

  ‘Yes, Captain.’

  The trainees were told to take up firing positions off the beach. Half of Willan’s team stayed with them to make sure they stayed in position. The fire from the canoes continued. The Ugandans had hesitated on receiving gunfire from
the shore and now were sitting in their boats and firing desultorily towards the muzzle flashes they had seen, as if they could not decide whether to abandon their mission and flee or press home the raid.

  A moment later, however, they made up their minds. The firing stopped. They took up their paddles and began to head back the way they had come.

  But by that time the roar of powerful outboards was filling up the night. Two Rigid Raiders manned by four of the SBS were powering out to sea in explosions of foam, their bows lifted out of the water by their speed. In one were Willan and Breckenridge, in the other, Fraser and Morgan. They closed in on the swarm of canoes like sharks moving in for the kill.

  Wild automatic fire greeted them as the canoeists realized they were being pursued. The Raiders zigzagged in the water, their backwash making a confusing maelstrom of waves and surf which broke the rhythm of the paddlers. The Ingrams of the SBS crews spat out, almost noiseless compared to the noisy barking of the Kalashnikovs.

  The Rigid Raiders carved great circles around the huddled mass of canoes, the SBS firing into the midst of the Ugandans, lobbing grenades into the crowd. Explosions sent fragments of wood and bodies flying into the air.

  The return fire grew heavy. Several of the raiders were shot by their own comrades as the occupants of the canoes fired wildly at the speeding boats. Willan could sense the heavy fire hissing over his head. His boat thumped as rounds struck it, ripping the surface skin. In the canoes, some bright spark fired an RPG, the back-blast roasting three men behind him, the missile creating a great fountain of foam as it exploded.

  More bullets hit Willan’s boat; in a few minutes he found he was low on ammo, having fired four full magazines into the paddling Ugandans. He thumbed the pressel switch on the PRC349 radio.

  ‘Zero to One-Zero, break off contact. I repeat, break off contact.’

  A moment later, Fraser’s Scots burr replied reluctantly: ‘Roger, Zero, breaking off now.’