A prolonged, shuddering scream cut through the still of the night. It was immediately followed by the shattering fire of an AK47 assault rifle on full automatic, spitting rounds into the darkness, the muzzle flash lighting up the forest in an astonishing strobe effect.

Jones’ head snapped round in the direction of the gunfire. The light and sound was coming from out on the left flank of the patrol’s overnight camp. Tracers – bullets with a luminescent coating that soldiers used to guide their fire at night – shot up into the sky, seeming to float slowly up towards the stars. He rather unnecessarily ordered the patrol to stand to (or prepare for action) since the mercenaries had already scrambled from under their ponchos, which were strung out above their hammocks, and had dashed to their fire positions on the perimeter.

“Target left, moving left, twenty metres! It’s in the trees!” came a cry, stuttering with uncertainty.

Who was that shouting, calling the hostile’s movements? Was it Smudger? Jones dashed over to the left flank, warning the patrol, as he ran, to keep facing forward and to watch their fire lanes – the areas of ground that they were expected to cover, trusting in their buddies to watch their lanes just as carefully. This arrangement enabled the patrol to cover all the jungle on their perimeter with each man responsible for his own narrow arc of land. They could concentrate their fire better, with their immediate neighbours on the perimeter providing an element of support with overlapping territory to cover. It required discipline to work like this, as well as experience, but this is exactly what each person in the patrol brought with them.

More shooting from Smudger’s position announced that whatever had triggered the patrol’s defences was still out there, testing them.

Jones yelled out, “Hold your fire, hold your fire!” as he kept low in case of any return fire, scrambling into the shallow pit that marked Smudger’s position. Each member of the patrol had laboriously scraped one of these pits out on the perimeter before bedding down so that they each had a prepared fire position, and cover, in case they were attacked in the night. Jones inwardly blessed the fact that the men hired for this job were consummate professionals and had barely grumbled when he ordered the fire pits dug. Soldiers always grumble – it was the soldier’s lot in life. Henry V’s archers at Agincourt had probably grumbled when he ordered them to hammer in the sharpened stakes that protected their position from cavalry. Now they were actually being attacked, each man had somewhere under cover that they could shoot from.

“What have you got, Smudger?” Jones asked, sliding next to his comrade in the mud.

“I dunno, Jonesey. There’s movement over there in the trees, about twenty metres in,” Smudger pointed, his hand a pale smear against the dark of the forest, illuminated only by the moonlight that filtered down through the forest canopy. “Every now and again you can see a light bob up. I think that was what Red was shooting at.”

Red? Where was Red? “Sound off!” he ordered the patrol, his voice carrying across their positions, and counted on his fingers as each member of the patrol reported in. Everyone except Red.

“Where’d he go, Smudger?”

“Into the trees. I was on stag and he said he just wanted to go for a pee. He just went out there!” Smudger said somewhat wildly. “I heard him shout a challenge then he screamed and started shooting.”

“Red!” Jones called. “Red! What’s your position?”

There was no answer. Only the angry chittering of animal life in the trees, alarmed by the shooting, gave any response to the patrol’s presence.

“Everyone, hold your fire!” he called out to the patrol. “We have a man down outside the perimeter! Report any movement and check in with your buddies!”

“There!” Smudger hissed. “There! The light!”

Away in the forest, like a moon that had fallen from the sky, a faint blue light hung, its glow revealing the skein of tangled plant life between it and Jones. It was if it had suddenly grown from a tiny dot to the size of a football in an instant. Was it torchlight? It seemed too dim for torchlight.

“Halt!” Jones hailed. He shuffled his rifle butt into his shoulder and glared down the gun sight at the light, “Who is there?”

There was no answer. The light hung there in the undergrowth, seemingly disembodied but Jones thought that it was at about chest height, about where a military torch would be attached to a man’s harness. One thing puzzled him: why give away your position by leaving your torch on?

“Who is there?” Jones repeated. “Identify yourself or you will be fired on!” he added, shifting his sweaty fingers over the pistol grip of his AK47.

The light winked out. What was happening? Would they be rushed in a sudden onslaught? Jones had experienced something like that in the jungle before. He’d taken on a job in a Central African insurgency. The group he had been with was attacked in the dark by rebels. He still had nightmares about the silent assault – dark figures sweeping across the perimeter in a vengeance-seeking flood of fury – which was suddenly punctuated by the hacking coughs of his heavy machine guns cutting down those figures like a scythe would to corn. And they still had come on. Jones shook the horror out of his head, he hadn’t thought of that in years. Why now? He had to stay focussed; he had a man down somewhere with potential hostiles on his doorstep. This was no time to revisit bad dreams.

“We’ve got to find Red, Jonesey,” Smudger offered, similarly tense, crouching behind his rifle.

“I know, but now doesn’t seem a good time!” Jones snarled back.

“We can’t just leave him out there! He might be hurt,” argued Smudger with a rare show of assertiveness.

“All right, all right!” Jones growled. “I’ll get someone and we’ll go out and see if we can track Red down.” If there was one thing he couldn’t stand, it was sentimental clowns like Smudger, who always wanted to do something for their mates. That might be what the Army wanted but it wasn’t wanted in a mercenary outfit. Money was their prime motivation, not looking after the man next to you. You needed to be able to cut and run - leaving others behind if necessary - to survive as a mercenary. There was no place for sentiment and friends tended to get you killed. “Just watch your post and do what you’re told, all right?”

Smudger nodded, his head barely visibly in the darkness. Jonesey really was a sour so-and-so, Smudger thought. Still, he seemed to know what he was about.

Darting through his positions in a half crouch, he checked on the other members of the patrol. He was reassured by their steadiness. It was really only Smudger who seemed to be on edge. Grabbing one of the men from his fire pit, Timber Wood, he made his way back to Smudger. “Right we’re going out to find Red. He’s out there in the trees, probably no more than a few metres out. Keep your safety catches on and go slow. There’s something pretty weird going on,” he briefed the other two men.

Jones and Smudger dashed from Smudger’s pit and had Timber cover their movements. Tactical lights attached to their rifles lit their way imperfectly, the narrow blue beams bouncing around as the men bolted from position to position. Winthrop-Smythe had been too cheap to provide night-vision goggles as part of their kit and Jones lamented their absence now. They struggled in the dark, through foliage that snagged their clothing and dragged at their legs, but being strong men they quickly covered the ground to two nearby trees. From there they could cover Timber’s movements. He puffed past them to another tree, further out. They progressed this way, leapfrogging each other’s positions, tearing their clothes on hidden thorns, cutting their hands, arms and legs in the black of the night. More than once, Jones thanked his foresight for wearing his safety glasses as a low twig whipped across his eyes.

“Here!” whispered Timber, “Over here!”

Smudger and Jones stumbled into Timber’s position. He was kneeling in some ferns holding up another rifle.

“Red’s AK,” Jones muttered. He grabbed it off Timber and checked the magazine. It was empty. Every single round had been fired. “OK,” he said, “Red was here, so he can’t be far away now. Spread out!”

They parted company, slowly feeling their way in the dark, each sense hypersensitive to the smallest indication of trouble. Jones could feel every breath of air on his face, every pit and lump on the surface of his assault rifle’s grips. His ears were attuned to the natural rhythms of the forest, which were returning to a more normal volume after Red’s shooting, and he could almost see in his head a three dimensional map of his surroundings based on the clicks, buzzes, chirrups and whistles of the insect life around him. Heart thumping in his chest, he moved stealthily, picking his way in the dark, careful not to let his feet become entwined in ground covering creepers or lose a foot down a burrow.

The men quartered the area around where they had found Red’s rifle, attempting to conduct a search in the darkness with only the narrow focus of the beams of their tactical lights to help. It was frustrating, slow work. As they looked for Red, they still had to maintain their situational awareness, alert to the possibility of attack. As much as they looked on the ground for Red, the beams of their gun lights would dart around each man covering a 360 degree arc, lingering here and there on potential targets, wet leaves gleaming greenly in small blue circles of light.

Jones was aware that things were not going well. The men were isolated from the patrol and their search and rescue operation was hardly yielding results. He paused to think. Red had no gun. For Red to have no gun he either had to be incapacitated or dead. If he was incapacitated, then there were only three choices to consider: he could be lying low, injured, or captured. In the case of the first two options there was not a lot that Jones could do. If Red hadn’t seen the search party, or was unable to alert them to his position, then the search party were hardly going to find him at night. If Red had been captured by the hostiles then Jones was not going to achieve a huge amount tramping around in the flowers. If he was dead he was no longer a problem, not for Jones at any rate. Making a decision, Jones gave a low whistle and recalled the other two.

“We’re not going to find him out here. We’ll have another go in the morning when we can see,” Jones remarked. “We’ll head back to camp and have the patrol stand to until first light.”

He tried to raise the camp on his radio but the channel seemed flooded with white noise. Try as he might, he simply could not get any reception. Switching channel, Jones tried Winthrop-Smythe but was similarly confounded. Swearing to himself, he warned Timber and Smudger that they would be going back to camp unannounced. The rescue party would need to be careful that they weren’t accidentally shot by a nervous sentry.

They made their way cautiously back and halted at outside the perimeter. They needed to announce themselves so they didn’t accidentally get shot by someone with an itchy trigger finger. That was when they heard the challenge.

“Halt! Who is there?” It sounded like Buck, which Jones thought was a bit odd because his position was off on the right flank and as far as he was aware the rescue party should be coming back to the exact point they had embarked on the rescue mission – the left flank. It should be Nobby challenging them, not Buck. Unless Buck’s voice was carrying in the still air and he was challenging someone else…

“Take cover!” he bellowed at Timber and Smudger just as Buck shouted, “Fire!”

The whole of the patrol’s perimeter exploded in searing gouts of metre long flames. Jones hit the ground, squirming his way into the mud, trying to make as low a profile as possible. Gunfire hammered at his ears with appalling rapidity and repetition. The patrol barely let up. There was a pulse to the gunfire, dead spots in the clattering crash as magazines were swapped round after being emptied in less than three seconds. Jones could hear yelling but being on the wrong side of the cacophony of muzzle blasts, he could not make out what was being said.

The flames from the patrol’s rifles lit up the forest like a firework display. Jones spotted a fallen log to take cover behind. He wriggled carefully through a mat of thorns, ferns, thick grass and creeper until he felt more secure with the thick wood between him and the patrol. Lying on his back he watched as red tracer rounds streaked overhead, standing out like laser beams against the undersides of leaves, flickering green in the canopy with the backdrop of the night sky beyond. It was quite beautiful really. Jones grinned to himself. He carried on smiling until he heard the metallic clunk and subsequent whistle as a grenade was fired. Panicking slightly, desperate to present as small a target as possible, he curled into a foetal position, covering his head with his arms.

A flat, sharp concussion thumped through the trees as the grenade exploded, showering Jones with debris. More grenades followed, the explosions thudding out across the forest. Thankfully, they all appeared to be directed far beyond his current position. The worst injury he received was a scratch along his left arm from some flying splinter and sore ears, repeatedly subjected to the stabbing pain of explosives detonating.

The shooting became more ragged, less consistent in the volume and quantity. Jones could hear his men shouting more clearly now.

“What is it?”

“I can’t stop it! It just keeps coming!”

“There’s another in your sector, Chalky!”

“Chalky!”

“Movement on the right flank!”

Whatever was going on in there was not going well. Just as he decided to make a run for the perimeter so that he could regain some form of command and control, he heard Timber shout, “Hold your fire, friendly coming in! Hold your fire!”

He watched as a stuttering fan of tracer spread overhead and distantly noted the short, sharp grunt as they hit their unintended target. Timber indeed! The tree had definitely fallen now. Stupid army nickname given to a stupid man, he thought. Jones had forgotten that he had intended to do the same thing and the fact that he did not share Timber’s fate was down to pure luck alone.

“Smudger!” he shouted, “What can you see?”

There was no reply. Was Smudger down too? Almost absent mindedly he noted that the gunfire was being replaced with screaming. Of course, he thought, of course, the fools couldn’t even be relied on to hold an easily defensible position. What a bunch of jokers Winthrop-Smythe hired. This job just goes from bad to worse!

The screaming continued. Each shriek shredded Jones’ conviction in himself, tearing at his certainty that the world was what he thought it was. Each howl of fear and pain seemed as if it was wrenched from more than just still living flesh. It seemed to come from a place that only the primordial subconscious remembered, a place shared with fear of the dark, fear of rending claws, a fear of what lay beyond the circle of firelight. A feeling of dread welled up in him like a black tide; his mind became blank to all considerations except self-preservation. An overwhelming urge to hide manifested itself in him. He did not want to see what was happening in the camp, he did not want to meet what was inflicting such pain.

Shaking with terror, whimpering and crying, his hands grasped at the earth beneath the log, dragging through plants and grasses, bloodying his fingers and tearing out his nails, as he tried to burrow under the worm-eaten wood. Fear gave him strength and he wedged himself tightly in a hollow space beneath the log, in the company of the bugs and grubs that feasted on the dead weight above him.

A last quavering cry tailed off, leaving a hollow silence in its wake. Even the forest was quiet, a horrified spectator to what had happened in the patrol’s camp.

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