The Perfect Soldier by Graham Hurley

Author:Graham Hurley [Hurley, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 1996-12-02T13:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

McFaul left Muengo at dusk the following day. When Bennie asked him where he was going he said it didn’t much matter, and when Bennie looked pointedly at the Armalite carbine cradled in his left arm, McFaul simply shrugged and stepped out of the schoolhouse, carefully closing the door behind him. Deep down, he knew that Bennie was relieved not to be part of whatever his boss was planning. Domingos’s death had robbed him of the last of his courage. All that mattered now was safe passage back to the UK

Outside the schoolhouse, McFaul checked the lashings on the rubber dinghy and then stooped in the gathering darkness, hitching the trailer to the back of the Land Rover. With the Armalite beside him, he drove slowly out of the city, watching the trailer in the rear-view mirror, trying to minimise the bounces. Beside the river, a dirt track ran south towards the encircling UNITA lines. He’d swept the track himself, one of his first assignments, and it had been used every day since by people from Muengo. A kilometre short of UNITA territory, a low bluff beside the river offered cover and he pulled the Land Rover into a tight turn, using the last of the daylight to back into a narrow re-entrant, hidden from view.

McFaul stood for a moment beside the Land Rover, flexing his injured arm, running through the calculations in his head. Katilo’s camp was about five kilometres downstream. Getting there on foot was out of the question. There were mines everywhere. But drifting downriver on the current, he should make it comfortably before daybreak. He’d lie up somewhere close, waiting for dawn. And when Katilo appeared, taking the bait he’d so carefully prepared, he’d spring the trap and kill him.

McFaul limped towards the river bank. The simplicity of the plan warmed him. Unlike so much of the life that he’d led, it was untainted by compromise or ambiguity. Killing Katilo might well lead to his own death but that was no longer of any consequence. Until yesterday, he’d thought that his years in the minefields had blunted his feelings. He’d thought he’d become immune to feelings of any kind. But he’d been wrong. Domingos’s death was one too many. The little man deserved revenge.

Beside the river, below the Land Rover, was an abandoned plastic jerrycan, riddled with bullet holes. McFaul up-ended it, sitting in the semi-darkness, cupping his hands to hide the flare of the match. He hadn’t smoked regularly since Afghanistan but somehow it felt suddenly right, a comfort, an adieu. Christianne had given him the cigarettes. They must have belonged to the boy Jordan, a South African brand, untipped.

McFaul drew the smoke deep into his lungs, removing a shred of tobacco from his tongue. His hands still carried the sweet, marzipan smell of C4, the explosive he’d been using to blow up the cache of defused mines. He’d spent most of the afternoon preparing the charges, checking off each mine from the master log he kept at the schoolhouse.

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