he’d put her at risk and made another mistake – this one so serious that if things were to go badly wrong she could be faced with more casualties than she could handle, or worse still, in the event of the village being overrun, even be confronted with the unthinkable possibility of being shot or raped at gunpoint.
CHAPTER 7
J UST AS IT had been Hari who’d decreed that the village should have no name, so had it been Hari who’d designed the village’s defences. Consequently, as Coburn had learned over the last half-hour, the little settlement was far from being without teeth.
Foremost amongst its defences were the minefields, a feature he’d least expected to hear about. Having always been told, and having always believed that the surrounding marshland was too waterlogged to walk on, he’d been surprised when Hari had told him that, under drought conditions in mid-summer, the tracks and trails could become sufficiently useable to pose a threat.
To counter it, the minefields had been laid – although not with conventional mines. Instead, they’d been seeded with Austrian-made mines of a kind that could be armed or disarmed remotely by shortwave radio signals – according to Hari a precaution to protect children who might venture off the plateau, and as a means of preventing accidents caused by porcupines, mouse-deer and the long-tailed macaques that sometimes descended from the trees to forage on the ground.
Since the state of emergency had been declared the village had been busy. With the exception of a still-damaged launch that remained tied up at the river-bank, the other boats had been moved downstream. The last to leave had been the Selina , delayed by the need to have its heavy machine-gun put in place, and because of the time it had taken to turn the vessel round in the narrow confines of the estuary.
As far as Coburn could make out, the Selina was a backup, stayingout of sight unless the ground defences were in danger of being over-whelmed and more serious measures were to be called for.
He couldn’t foresee the circumstances in which they would be. Although the majority of the men had been deployed along the inland perimeter of the plateau, those who’d been left to protect the river boundary had Hari’s secret weapons to rely on – the drainage ditches and the jetty.
The ditches served two purposes. Besides being the equivalent of trenches from which gunfire could be directed out into the estuary, in the ditch running closest to the water, drums of gasoline and diesel now stood ready to be spilled and ignited by explosive charges that in the case of an extreme emergency would throw up a hundred-yard-long wall of flame.
The protection offered by the jetty was similarly difficult to discern – a central section from which the supporting pins had already been removed so that under the weight of the first man to put foot on it the whole structure would collapse to render the jetty useless as a landing stage.
Despite the defences being an odd mixture of the very old and the very new, the set-up was pretty damn good, Coburn had decided, a stronghold guarded on one side by fire and a medieval trick draw-bridge, and on the other sides by men armed with modern weapons equipped with the best high-tech night sights that Hari had been able to buy.
For his own protection Coburn was carrying a 5.45mm Steyr assault rifle, a gun he’d chosen partly because he was familiar with it, but mainly because in the trench where he’d taken up position, a short-barrelled gun was easier to handle and would be easier to reload.
He wasn’t expecting to have to reload. As though Hari had wanted to avoid exposing his guest to unnecessary risk, the position he’d recommended was unlikely to see much action, located some way from the jetty at the end of a ditch that drained water directly into the estuary itself.
Tonight, only the very bottom of the ditch was damp, just moist enough to attract frogs of the kind that
CHAPTER 7
J UST AS IT had been Hari who’d decreed that the village should have no name, so had it been Hari who’d designed the village’s defences. Consequently, as Coburn had learned over the last half-hour, the little settlement was far from being without teeth.
Foremost amongst its defences were the minefields, a feature he’d least expected to hear about. Having always been told, and having always believed that the surrounding marshland was too waterlogged to walk on, he’d been surprised when Hari had told him that, under drought conditions in mid-summer, the tracks and trails could become sufficiently useable to pose a threat.
To counter it, the minefields had been laid – although not with conventional mines. Instead, they’d been seeded with Austrian-made mines of a kind that could be armed or disarmed remotely by shortwave radio signals – according to Hari a precaution to protect children who might venture off the plateau, and as a means of preventing accidents caused by porcupines, mouse-deer and the long-tailed macaques that sometimes descended from the trees to forage on the ground.
Since the state of emergency had been declared the village had been busy. With the exception of a still-damaged launch that remained tied up at the river-bank, the other boats had been moved downstream. The last to leave had been the Selina , delayed by the need to have its heavy machine-gun put in place, and because of the time it had taken to turn the vessel round in the narrow confines of the estuary.
As far as Coburn could make out, the Selina was a backup, stayingout of sight unless the ground defences were in danger of being over-whelmed and more serious measures were to be called for.
He couldn’t foresee the circumstances in which they would be. Although the majority of the men had been deployed along the inland perimeter of the plateau, those who’d been left to protect the river boundary had Hari’s secret weapons to rely on – the drainage ditches and the jetty.
The ditches served two purposes. Besides being the equivalent of trenches from which gunfire could be directed out into the estuary, in the ditch running closest to the water, drums of gasoline and diesel now stood ready to be spilled and ignited by explosive charges that in the case of an extreme emergency would throw up a hundred-yard-long wall of flame.
The protection offered by the jetty was similarly difficult to discern – a central section from which the supporting pins had already been removed so that under the weight of the first man to put foot on it the whole structure would collapse to render the jetty useless as a landing stage.
Despite the defences being an odd mixture of the very old and the very new, the set-up was pretty damn good, Coburn had decided, a stronghold guarded on one side by fire and a medieval trick draw-bridge, and on the other sides by men armed with modern weapons equipped with the best high-tech night sights that Hari had been able to buy.
For his own protection Coburn was carrying a 5.45mm Steyr assault rifle, a gun he’d chosen partly because he was familiar with it, but mainly because in the trench where he’d taken up position, a short-barrelled gun was easier to handle and would be easier to reload.
He wasn’t expecting to have to reload. As though Hari had wanted to avoid exposing his guest to unnecessary risk, the position he’d recommended was unlikely to see much action, located some way from the jetty at the end of a ditch that drained water directly into the estuary itself.
Tonight, only the very bottom of the ditch was damp, just moist enough to attract frogs of the kind that
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