The Dogs of War [antikvár]

There were no stars that night on the bush airstrip, nor any moon;just the West African darkness wrapping round the scatteredgroups like warm, wet velvet. The cloud cover was lying hardly offthe tops of the iroko trees, and the waiting men prayed it wouldstay a while longer to shield them from the bombers.At the end of the runway the battered old DC-4, which had justslipped in for a landing by runway lights that stayed alight for justthe last fifteen seconds of final approach, turned and coughed itsway blindly toward the palm-thatch huts.Between two of them, five white men sat crouched in a LandRover and stared toward the incoming aircraft. They said nothing,but the same thought was in each man's mind. If they did not getout of the battered and crumbling enclave before the forces of thecentral government overran the last few square miles, they wouldnot get out alive. Each man had a price on his head and intendedto see that no man collected it. They were the last of the merce-naries who had fought on contract for the side that had lost. Now itwas time to go. So they watched the incoming and unexpectedcargo plane with silent attention.A Federal MIG-17 night fighter, probably flown by one of the