“Don’t antagonise him,” I said. “He is more dangerous than you realise. Let me handle this.”
I opened my door and climbed out.
“Where’s the gun?” Alassane asked.
“I left it there,” I said.
“Hold your arms up.”
Alassane patted me with shaking hands. He found no gun on me.
“Let’s go,” he said, and opened his jacket so that we could see the holster with another Makarov tucked into it. His hand rested on the butt. I guessed he didn’t want to pull it out, lest any of the loitering passengers happened to see. But he would need to draw the gun before firing it. That would be my single, brief opportunity.
Nine
Bibata went ahead of me, her bag clutched before her. The interior of the hangar was a wall of darkness, heavy with the smell of oil and jet fuel. It took my eyes a moment to adjust as we walked in from the bright sunshine. I almost walked into Bibata, who had turned to face me, and was holding out the Makarov in its leather pouch. I took it from her, making it look as if I had bumped into her, and the two of us stumbled slightly.
Then it happened very fast, as I knew it would. Alassane was momentarily blinded. But he noticed me crouching as I pulled the Makarov from its pouch, flipped the safety.
Alassane raised his gun and squeezed the trigger without taking the time to aim. The barrel was not pointing at me. I squeezed the trigger of my Makarov. Then realised that his bullet had struck Bibata. She spun about from the force of it, uttered a cry, and fell to the ground beside me.
My bullet struck Alassane in the hand, shattering a bone and spraying blood into his face. He howled with pain and surprise, and the pistol dropped from his hand.
I rushed up to him.
“Who else?” I asked in a voice that was almost a shout to grab his attention. The pain and the panic were consuming him, and I needed an answer before it was too late.
Alassane’s response was another howl. He dropped to his knees, holding his shattered hand before him, his attention consumed by the sight of his own blood.
I pointed the Makarov at his forehead.
“Whose idea,” I shouted. “Whose idea was this?”
“Don’t kill me,” he wailed.
“Who?”
“It was me,” he said. And in saying it, despite the pain and terror, a glimmer of self-satisfied pride came to his eyes. “It was me,” he said again. “All my idea. I fooled all you foreigners. The general is dead. And the world will know it was you. It is done.”
I noticed his left hand drop to find his fallen Makarov. He raised it, not to point at me, but at Bibata, who had struggled up to her knees and was swaying unsteadily on all fours.
“Yes,” I said. “It is done.”
His eyes twitched. He was pulling the trigger with his left hand.
I squeezed the trigger of the Makarov.
Alassane’s dead body fell back and flopped onto the concrete floor. His left index finger released the trigger and the gun dropped from his lifeless hand.
Bibata had taken Alassane’s bullet just above the hip on her left side. She was in a great deal of pain, and suffering from shock, but I inspected the wound and decided it was not serious. There was muscle and tissue damage, but no bones or organs had been affected.
“That’s why God gives us Burkinabé women the extra curves,” she said, and smiled through the pain.
She helped me unlock her phone with shaking hands, gave me the emergency number, and I called for an ambulance. I tore strips from the bandage on my arm, found a faucet in a corner of the hangar, and cleaned her wound.
“My grandmother said they sent you to kill him,” she said. “To kill Alassane, not the general. Is that true?”
“Your grandmother is crazier than I thought,” I said.
“She got one thing right though.”
“What was that?”
“She said that you would save me.”
“She said that?”
“If it hadn’t been for you, he would have killed me. I am sure of that. When we were driving around, waiting for you to come out, I realised it.”
Bibata flinched with pain.
“You should stop talking,” I said.
“My grandmother told me that I was not to stop you from doing what you needed to do. She said some things need doing.”
An ambulance siren sounded in the distance. Bibata closed her eyes and winced from the pain. I made sure that she was comfortable, then found a side door to slip out of. I joined the small crowd of travellers who had heard the gunshots and had gathered anxiously outside the entrance to the hangar. We watched with ghoulish fascination as the paramedics helped Bibata into the back of the vehicle, then carried the covered body of Alassane out on a stretcher and loaded that too.
I had a couple of hours until my flight to Paris. I stood with the others outside the terminal building, smoked a few cigarettes, and watched the storm approach.
Bibata’s grandmother had been right about something else. Without realising it, I had made a decision.
I was done with killing; it was time for me to stop. I had decided I would change the course of my life. It was time to lay down my gun and find a new way.
Ten
“When do you make the decision to kill?” I asked the captain in the middle of the night.
Hours after we dropped into the forest to find the survivors of the plane wreck. And we found survivors, but only five of them. They emerged from the forest like pale, terrified ghosts. Captain Chandler administered tranquillisers to the survivors. No tranquillisers for us.
Only five survivors. Twenty passengers and the crew were killed on impact and a further fifteen passengers were taken to a clearing by ADF terrorists. They did not leave that clearing.
We removed the bodies from the fuselage. It took us several hours to dig shallow graves and to bury them together with what we could retrieve of the bodies in the clearing. There was not much of them left to bury because the terrorists had planted IEDs around the bodies. IEDs that included several old-fashioned Claymore mines.
Now, in the night, we have been taking it in turns to sleep and to keep watch. Exhaustion is tearing at our minds, stealing away great chunks of reality, and replacing it with a nightmarish horror in which my friend is dead. Because it was Brian who triggered the IEDs. I am convinced he did it to save our lives.
We did not bury Brian. Although I searched, I found nothing of him to place in a grave.
By the time we finished with the burials and tending to the survivors, evening was upon us. It was too late for the helicopter. First light tomorrow, the pilot promised. This meant we had to spend the longest night of our lives surrounded by the dead and the bereaved.
Now the survivors are mostly sleeping in the fuselage, although occasional cries of terror and sobs of grief reach us outside. It has stopped raining, but everything is wet. Our clothes are soaked all the way to the skin.
“He asked me the same question, Corporal Gabriel,” says the captain. “Asked me often. It was a trick question, you realise that?”
“I do, because he spoilt it by giving me the punchline,” I say. “He always did that. He told me we don’t make the decision at all.”
Chandler nods. I notice a streak of blood beneath his ear. It is a horizontal streak. We had collected rainwater and done our best to wash the blood and fragments of bone from our faces. But neither of us had done a very good job. It is Brian’s blood; I am sure of it.
“He was wrong about that,” says Chandler. “We do make the decision. Or we made it. Many years ago. Because the decision to kill is a single decision for people like us. It starts as a realisation. Perhaps you were little more than a child when you realised you had it in you. The army sees it in us. They take advantage of it. Because the journey from that realisation to the decision to kill is a short one.”
“If I didn’t know you better, Captain, I would think you are criticising our masters.”
“It’s an observation, Corporal, not a criticism.”
“And a single decision means we cannot change our minds?”
“It does.”
“Did you explain that to Brian? To Corporal Starck? That he had made the decision only once?”
Captain Chandler smiles. A tightening of the lips into a straight line. No teeth, but a glint in the eyes.
“He called it bullshit,” says Chandler. “He lived in the hope, I believe, that he would change the course of his life. Refused to accept that people like us cannot change. We lost a good man today. A good soldier, and a good man.”
“And a good friend,” I say.
Chandler nods. He turns to me, and his grey eyes glint in the darkness.
“You know his fiancée, don’t you?”
“Robyn,” I say, and nod.
“She will need your support. He was a good man, and she could see the goodness in him. Do you think it was her who inspired all those foolish ideas in him? Made him think he could change?”
“I think so,” I say. “She has a lot of spirit and told us both that we are little more than weapons in the hands of our masters. That’s why he kept going on about it.”
We sit in silence for several minutes. One of the survivors in the fuselage is moaning, a low keening sound, like the underscore to all the pain in the world.
“And what did you say to that, Corporal Gabriel?” says Chandler.
“I told her I choose not to believe that, Captain. I am more than a killer for hire or a weapon in the hands of my masters. I can make the decision to change my life.”
“Good for you, Corporal,” says the captain. “A good soldier is indeed so much more than that.”
There had been only one occasion I saw Robyn after Brian’s death. She was wearing black, her tear-stained eyes hidden behind dark glasses. She turned to me, after the prayers had been said, the hymns had been sung, and I saw myself reflected in her glasses, above her damp cheeks.
“Nothing will be the same,” she said. A beautiful voice, low-toned and calm.
“Nothing,” I agreed.
Robyn watched Brian’s parents walk down the hill, supported by friends, on the way to the wake. A gust of wind tossed a handful of leaves over the gravestone they had placed in their village graveyard. I knew there was nothing beneath the gravestone. We had brought nothing of Brian back with us, except our memories. Robyn turned back to me.
“What will you do?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I am at the mercy of my masters,” I said.
Robyn raised her glasses from her eyes, so that I could see the scorn in them. She had very dark eyes, almost black, and the edges were red from crying. She said nothing, but looked at me as if she expected me to say something.
I said nothing.
Robyn nodded, lowered her glasses, and turned to follow Brian’s parents down the hill to their small house in the village.
I lingered beside the grave. I wanted a moment alone with my friend, even though his body was not there. I felt I needed to make a decision. The same decision made by my friend. The decision to stop doing what I was doing and to change my life.
But he was not here to help me make it. All I had to help me was a gravestone, a blustery wind, and my memories.
Keep Reading
The story has only just started …
Ben Gabriel’s life has reached a turning point. Can he put the killing behind him? Can he create a new life for himself?
The Gabriel Series tells the story of Gabriel’s determination to put his damaged past behind him, and to build a new life for himself despite his uncanny ability to see the corruption that surrounds him.
Treasonous is the first full-length book in the series and tells the story of Gabriel’s struggle to discover the truth behind allegations that the new president of South Africa might be a killer.
He turns to his erstwhile captain Chandler for help, discovers that he and Robyn have joined forces on a new venture, and Gabriel soon finds himself spiralling into a life of crime.
Sometimes the path to the truth is more than a little crooked!
Get your copy of Treasonous here
Author’s Note
Burkina Faso is a country that holds a special place in my heart. I travelled there for the FESPACO film festival in the early 2000s with a film I had directed called Beat the Drum. The city of Ouagadougou was as hot as an oven, dry and smothered with dust from the Sahara. I had a wonderful time at the film festival, inspired by the extraordinary enthusiasm that the people of Burkina Faso have for film and for stories in all forms.
The people that I met in Ouagadougou were so welcoming and friendly. They were proud of their city and their beleaguered, landlocked country. I thought to myself at the time that Ouagadougou was a place deserving of an entertaining and probably slightly crazy story. Something that captured the madness of post-colonial Africa.
The opening ceremony of the film festival was held at a huge football stadium and attended by tens of thousands of people. The incident mentioned by the character of Bibata in this short novella, in which several people were killed in the crush of the crowd, happened when I attended that opening ceremony. I will never forget that evening; the mingled emotions of enthusiastic passion for film, and the horror of the deaths. I had left the hotel in the company of several other filmmakers from around the world, and we were driven through the chaotic streets of Ouagadougou. No one seemed to have a clear understanding of which side of the road they should drive on. We arrived at the stadium to see the biggest crowd I have ever witnessed, all waiting to gain entrance to the stadium, which was being searched for bombs before the arrival of the country’s president. This was before the terrorist attacks that have occurred recently, but even then the country was no stranger to violence. I joined the outskirts of the crowd with my fellow filmmakers and observed from there the increasing impatience of the crowd to gain entrance to the stadium.
A dignitary arrived in a stretch Mercedes, and some kind of disturbance started at the front of the crowd. There was the sound of gunfire, and police in full riot gear fired teargas canisters and rubber bullets. The vast crowd scattered. It was an extraordinary experience; standing in that open space, the sound of gunfire, and the billowing smoke of the teargas. The only people not fleeing for their lives were foreigners. And the only reason for that was because we had little understanding of what was actually happening. I probably had a little more, having had teargas thrown in my direction several times when I was a student in South Africa. But I was standing beside a French filmmaker, and I did not want to abandon him. And so we stood and waited for the panic to settle.
The character of Bibata’s grandmother in this novella is inspired by a woman I met on my last day in Ouagadougou. My film had won several awards at the festival, and one of them was an honour from the government, a kind of ‘key to the city’, which was presented to me by a government dignitary in his office (which inspired the general’s office in this story). The dignitary presented the award and then held onto my hand in the African way, as he asked whether anyone had a camera. It turned out nobody did, and so he released my hand and we waited twenty minutes while someone went to find a camera. While waiting, the grandmother of one of the festival liaisons – mostly students and film enthusiasts who worked as tour guides and translators for the foreign filmmakers – came up to me. She said that my film would win many further awards. Over thirty awards, she said, which seemed fairly specific. I thanked her, and her granddaughter said I should celebrate: her grandmother was known to be able to see into the future. I didn’t take her comment seriously, but years later, after I had flown around the world to many further festivals with Beat the Drum, and the film had won over thirty international awards, I remembered that comment and wondered whether indeed the grandmother had seen into the future.
A little of the wonder that I discovered in the place and people of Ouagadougou inspired this story.
Also by David Hickson
Have you read them all?
Treasonous – The Gabriel Series – Book One
A journalist’s dead body is pulled from the waters of Cape Town harbour, and disillusioned ex-assassin Ben Gabriel wonders whether he died because of questions he was asking about the new president. Gabriel knows that sometimes it takes one killer to stop another, and will do anything to discover the truth, even if that means stepping outside the law.
Get Treasonous now
Murderous – The Gabriel Series – Book Two
When a massacre in a small country church shatters an Afrikaans farming community, the message that this is “only the beginning” sparks the fear of genocide. The Department asks Ben Gabriel to apply his unconventional approach to discover the truth behind the massacre – a task made more difficult by the intensive search to find a large number of gold bars stolen from one of the country’s most powerful men.
Get Murderous now
Vengeful – The Gabriel Series – Book Three
A series of prominent members of South African society are being brutally murdered. When the police discover that a certain Ben Gabriel recently visited each of them, he becomes a hunted man. And when Gabriel is linked to a multi-million dollar gold heist, his life becomes even more complicated.
Get Vengeful now
About the Author
David Hickson is an award-winning filmmaker and writer from South Africa. His work has included internationally released feature films, television series and live entertainment television shows.
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