The Fighting Man (1993) by Gerald Seymour Page B

and starboard, he gestured – where was Whisky Alpha? Just the shrug of the pilot. They were in radio silence, how the hell would the pilot know, dumb query. A shimmer of sunlight ahead of them. He stared down at the ground, flat and endless to a misted horizon. The first sunlight caught the rich green of the jungle ceiling. They were across the road. The jungle was virgin. An empty quarter of desolation, no mark of man’s hand. No cut trails, no smoke spirals, no habitation clearances. An army could have been hidden here, below Echo Foxtrot, lost and never found.
    And the landing strip was ahead of them.
    He heard the pilot swear.
    So damned short . . . A runway for a light aircraft . . . There was a ribbon cut of lighter green in the darker spread of jungle . . .
    An alarm ringing in the cockpit.
    The needle was stationary at the bottom of the red section of the fuel gauge.
    They came in a half-circle to the north end of the runway. Gord thought it brilliant flying, brilliant navigating. He wondered how it was that a cockpit crew who could fly so well should have ended up on a crap mission with a drying fuel tank, and he remembered the Fidel story – the shit jobs for the livewires, just as he had always known it, the shit jobs for the men who would go home in ‘ignominy’ – and there was a slow smile on his face, and the bloody alarm was clamouring.
    A half-turn and they were going in.
    No recce, no gentle circling to spy the strip. Been past it once and seen nothing of obstacles, craters. No fuel to mess with.
    Coming down onto the uncut grass, might have been a foot high, might have been a yard high. Coming down.
    They hit.
    The shudder of touch-down tore at his arm tendons. Gord was braced. The bounce. Down. The change of the engine pitch, reverse thrust. Swerving, charging, slowing, rushing to the tree line ahead. Slewing, stopping. The tree line edging closer. Stopped. Gord felt the numbness, and his hand rested on the pilot’s shoulder and squeezed his admiration. He heard the applause from behind. All of them clapping their hands. God, and they’d the bloody right to clap. The pilot had his helmet off, and he was tearing away the silk face scarf that he wore like an old Grand Prix driver, and he had the hip flask to his mouth and the rum dribbling from his lips before the navigator snatched it from him.
    Gord dropped down from the side door of the Antonov.
    The warm dawn air was around him, and the butterflies scattered from the grass that reached to his knees.
    There was a small wood-built hut at the end of the runway, in the trees, a dozen yards from where Echo Foxtrot had stopped.
    The scramble started. Lifting out the ammunition crates. Passing down the canvas sacks that held the assault rifles. There was a low droning sound from the distance, below the tree level, beyond their vision. Forming a chain to get the petrol cans out of the fuselage. Throwing down the medical box, and the cardboard cartons that held the food, Meals Ready to Eat. Manoeuvring out of the doorway the flame thrower’s cart and the tubes. The droning of Whisky Alpha’s engine closing. The scramble to get the small pile of ammunition and weapons and medicines and food clear of the runway and into the hut, and to push the cart to the door of the hut, and to get the petrol cans to the edge of the runway. They had started to push Echo Foxtrot to the runway’s side, all of them straining together, when the engine sound of Whisky Alpha, the growing roar, was stifled. Just a cough, and gone.
    Gord saw the aircraft. She was low above the trees, rolling as if the pilot was losing his power.
    All of them quiet, all of them watching the silent struggle of Whisky Alpha to reach the landing strip.
    The main impact point, after the tops of trees had sheared away the wings, was fifty yards short of the safety of the runway.
    There was an explosion. Of course there was a fucking explosion. There was fire. Of course there was fucking