Tenth Man Down Read Online Free

hundreds of elephants had been poached for their ivory. Already we’d found gaunt hulks of elephant carcasses, eaten to the skeleton by vultures, hyenas, jackals and insects. Joss told us that normally the hyenas would have eaten the bones as well, or carried them away, but the war had produced such carnage that the scavengers couldn’t keep pace with the supply of rotting bodies. Everywhere we found heaps of hyena droppings – so white, from all the calcium the animals ate, that they were known as ‘missionaries’ chalk’ – and at night eerie howling sounded off from all points of the compass.
    For the ambush exercise Whinger and I had recced a perfect site, where a dirt road crossed one of the sand rivers. On the home side of the crossing the terrain was open, with scattered trees and shrubs growing from stony ground, but the far bank of the river – enemy territory – was cloaked with thick bush, and it was from there – according to the scenario we’d devised – that the terrorists would appear.
    ‘The second lot of pop-up targets,’ said Whinger. ‘It might pay us to move them another hundred metres along the bank. That’d give the killer group a better arc.’
    ‘Okay,’ I agreed. ‘We’ll have time to take another look at it in the morning. What’s that?’
    I broke off as a hefty, low-pitched hoo-hoo sounded somewhere close above us, and I looked up to see a huge bird pass silently overhead, a fast-moving silhouette, black against the stars.
    ‘Jesus!’ exclaimed Chalky White. ‘A bloody great owl.’
    ‘Where?’ Everyone started craning their necks around.
    ‘It went thataway.’ Chalky pointed towards the village.
    Seconds later, from among the grass huts, there burst an eruption of noise: people yelling, pots and pans being hammered. We stood up to get a better view, and Pavarotti nipped across to the nearest pinkie, where he grabbed a spot-lamp, switched it on and swept the beam over the shiny, dark-green canopy of the mango trees which rose above the settlement.
    ‘It must be a great eagle owl,’ said Mart Stanning, our medic, who’d got talking about birds to one of the Alpha guys. ‘The locals don’t like them. They reckon the devil uses owls for transport, so it’s bad news if one comes into the village. If it sits on the roof of a house, it means someone in that family’s going to die before morning.’
    ‘Cheerful lot, these buggers,’ said Pavarotti. ‘With that racket under it, I don’t reckon the bird’ll so much as touch down, let alone stay long enough to organise a funeral—’
    The rest of his sentence was cut off by a hollow report, and we saw a spurt of flame shoot into the air.
    ‘Christ!’ exclaimed Danny Stewart. ‘The headman’s let drive with that bloody old muzzle-loader he showed us. I hope it hasn’t killed him.’
    We’d seen the weapon a couple of days earlier – a fearsome, home-made contraption about six feet long, held together with rusty wire and leather thongs, which the owner displayed proudly, showing us how much powder he would load: two fingers’ width for an antelope, three for a buffalo, four for an elephant. We reckoned any discharge would be a greater threat to him than to whatever he fired at, but clearly the gun was his pride and joy. At the same time, we couldn’t help noticing that he’d lost his left thumb.
    Danny – a compact little Yorkshireman with fine, sandy hair – had a funny habit of dropping his chin and rotating his head through half a circle, as if he were trying to peel his neck away from his collar, whenever he came up with a commentary on anything interesting that happened. Now he did just that as he said, ‘It’s quietened the buggers, anyway, the old gun.’
    ‘Aye,’ Pavarotti agreed. ‘From the way the commotion’s died down, I reckon the bird’s got away. If they’d dropped it, they’d be screeching something horrible.’
    We settled back round the fire and started talking about our tour.