by Wilbur Smith
None of us had admitted it out loud though. That was the deal: we were stronger together if none of us cracked. But I’d spotted Amelia wincing as she worked and Xander’s grunts of effort now had a pained edge to them. Only Mo appeared genuinely unconcerned.
Between us we’d cleared a patch of earth roughly half the size of a tennis court. General Sir took it in with a glance. I was annoyed to find that I genuinely cared whether we’d met his expectations, and not just because I feared what Mo’s ‘or else’ might entail. Somehow the man’s approval mattered to me.
‘Good work,’ he said, and the sense of relief I felt disgusted me. ‘But hard, yes. You look tired. Come!’
And with that he led us back to the camp. This time he took us straight to his shack, however. I heard engine noise as we approached but there was no vehicle in sight. It took me a moment to realise the sound was coming from a generator. That’s what was powering the little fridge in the corner of the single room into which General Sir had ushered us.
The room was as neat as its occupant. No flea-ridden dogs were allowed in here. There was a cot bed with a blanket, the corners of which were tucked in, next to a little table and a single wooden chair. On the table stood a laptop computer, plugged into an extension cord and connected to a mobile phone. The laptop’s screen was up.
With the air of a host at Christmas, General Sir took four cans of what turned out to be orangeade from his fridge and handed them round. In my entire life I have never appreciated a cold drink more, and the gratitude I felt towards the General sickened me further.
I edged closer to the little table as I drank, just a step, but enough to glance at what was on the laptop screen. What I glimpsed made no sense at all. Had the orangeade gone to my head?
Half a step closer I dared to take a longer look. I knew that face because I’d seen it on a screen before. Then, it had been on Mum’s laptop, in the swanky resort, a world away from here. But this was the same photograph, I was sure, of a man with a fighter’s square chin and wide-spaced, watchful eyes set beneath a determined brow.
The face was as familiar to me as it was foreign. I had no idea who he was, but he was the same guy Mum had been in touch with, definitely. It was him.
33.
General Sir gave us the rest of the day off. He acted as if he was being kind to us because we were ‘new’, but immediately undercut that by saying, ‘You’ll soon get used to things,’ making it clear he intended to put us to work again before long. As soon as we were alone again outside, I brought up the photograph with Amelia and Xander.
‘Whose face was it?’ Amelia asked.
‘That’s the thing. I don’t know.’
‘Well, if it was on General Sir’s screen as well as your mum’s, whoever it is must be famous,’ said Xander. ‘They were probably on news sites. Whoever it is must be an actor or a politician.’
‘Or a sportsman,’ added Amelia helpfully. ‘Was he swinging a golf club or anything?’
‘No!’ I said. ‘And it wasn’t a newspaper site. The guy is in Mum’s contacts. She was messaging him.’
‘Yeah, but your mum knows some pretty influential people,’ reasoned Xander.
‘So does General Sir,’ added Mo quietly.
‘Really,’ I snapped. ‘Mum and General Sir. A humanitarian from Surrey and a child-slave-trafficking warlord from Southern Somalia. I bet they have loads of friends in common.’
‘Either way the coincidence isn’t Mo’s fault,’ said Amelia. ‘And unless you have a better hypothesis it seems the most likely solution to the mystery.’
Xander could see I was rattled by this suggestion. ‘Yeah, but perhaps the most likely explanation,’ he suggested, ‘is that you’ve made a mistake. You could have seen two similar faces and jumped to the wrong conclusion. My head’s definitely been fried today by the heat and the flies and the back-breaking –’
‘No!’ I cut him off more loudly than I’d intended. Lowering my voice, I went on. ‘It’s the same guy, I’m sure of it.’
‘If you say so,’ said Amelia, making no attempt to sound convinced.
Whatever the truth, I could do little about it for now. If – no, when – I made it back to Mum, well, I could ask her then. I was mulling over this unsatisfactory conclusion when General Sir reappeared from the shack. ‘Another treat for you all!’ he said, and slung a tattered kit bag into the centre of our dusty circle.
‘What’s in it?’ Amelia asked.
‘Home!’ he said, and waved at the bag with his baton, as if about to do a magic trick.
By ‘home’ he meant a moth-eaten tent. I could have punched him for the insult in this, but again the meagre good news that we wouldn’t have to spend another night out in the open did in fact come as a relief. Having revealed his generous gift General Sir sauntered off, leaving us to erect it.
This was easier said than done, mostly because the tent was incomplete. Specifically, part of one of the A-frame legs was missing, though it took me a while to work that out. I figured it out eventually, just as Mo, who’d wandered off when we unpacked the tent, came back. He was carrying a stick. I knew instantly why: he’d taken one look at the contents of the kit bag, identified the problem, and set off to solve it.
As we watched, he ripped strips from the end of that stick with his teeth until it was thin enough to ram into the open end of the A-frame joint. He’d even estimated the correct length of the missing pole. I stood back, noticing that he let Amelia and Xander do the easy bit: pull the canvas into place, peg it down over the groundsheet, hammer in the pegs with a rock, and tighten up the guy ropes.
When up, the tent was only slightly bent. Mo had repaired it with a stick. Yet he made nothing of it, just went off to gather up the blankets, trudged back with them, and dropped them onto the groundsheet. We stood quietly for a moment.
Then a bird sheared down. We all ducked. Eagle, kite, hawk: whatever kind of bird it was, it scythed through the air like an axe-head, only veering away at the last moment.
‘Why did it do that?’ asked Amelia.
‘Probably checking out the new real estate,’ said Xander.
‘Yeah, good job mending it,’ I said to Mo eventually.
‘No problem.’
‘Does General Sir always give out incomplete shelters?’ asked Amelia.
‘Often, yes. It’s another of his stupid tests.’
I couldn’t help admiring Mo in that moment, yet something about his easy mastery of just about everything sent a chill through me even as I tapped his closed fist with my own.
34.
We spent the next few days locked in an awful cycle: gut-busting work punctuated by bowlfuls of that terrible sludgy food – there was nothing else, so even Amelia soon caved in and ate it – and nights of poor sleep. We were filthy and exhausted and everything ached. General Sir gave us some woven mats, but they were wafer thin and spread on packed dirt so they offered no comfort. By about day six I felt like a zombie. I was so weak and tired that I could barely think straight.
‘It’s deliberate,’ I said to Xander as we trudged back from the field after another gruelling spell of stump-hacking.
He waved at the ever-present cloud of flies and said, ‘What is?’
‘This routine. It’s designed to wear us down.’
‘Break us, more like,’ said Amelia.
‘You’re right, Jack,’ Mo explained. ‘It’s what he does with all new recruits – makes everyone so tired they become, what’s the word …’
‘Compliant?’ Amelia suggested.
‘Unable to think for themselves, more likely to give in and do what they’re told.’
‘That’s what it means, more or less,’ Amelia agreed.
‘Compliant then. And less likely to run away,’ said Mo.
‘I’d have trouble running a bath,’ said Xander. ‘I’m not sure I’ve got the strength to turn on the taps.’
‘It’s the food’s fault,’ said Mo. ‘There isn’t much goodness in it.’
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This made sense. The best that could be said for the sludge was that it filled a hole, but it didn’t exactly fill me with energy. With all the physical work, I’d lost weight. We all had. The dents above Amelia’s collarbones had deepened and Xander was definitely thinner in the face. General Sir was literally working us to the bone. I’d thought it best to take stock of our situation before mounting an escape, but maybe I’d made a mistake.
‘If we don’t make a run for it soon, we’ll be too weak to try,’ I said in the dark of the tent that night.
‘I wouldn’t risk it,’ Mo replied.
‘Why not?’
‘You wouldn’t be the first to attempt to get away. I’ve seen what happens when people try.’
‘What?’ Amelia asked, genuine fear in her voice.
‘General Sir makes an example,’ said Mo. ‘Anyway, if you wait it out, sooner or later he’ll get his ransom, and then he’ll free you himself. He’s making your parents sweat with this waiting, driving up his price. But he’ll want the money eventually. Just do as he says and be patient.’
‘That’s probably good advice,’ said Xander.
Deep down, I knew he was right. But still: I’d told Mum not to pay the ransom for a reason. I’d got myself into this mess. It was up to me to get myself out of it. I couldn’t just sit there waiting for help.
‘We should try at night,’ I said, as much to myself as the others. ‘Turn in as usual, then sneak off in the dark. Head south. We may not know exactly where we are but the Kenyan border can’t be that far away.’
Mo gave a little snort. ‘If it was that easy,’ he said.
‘We won’t know unless we try,’ I said. ‘If we can get far enough away before anyone notices, they’ll not be able to track us down.’
‘I wouldn’t bet on it. You’ve noticed the dogs in camp?’
‘Yes. They seem harmless enough.’
‘They’re tracking dogs. They like nothing more than to chase a scent.’
Amelia piped up then with, ‘Ah, the tent.’
‘What about it?’ said Xander.
‘It smells of us.’
The penny dropped. Far from doing us a favour, by giving us a tent and blankets General Sir had impregnated them with our scent.
‘That’s right,’ said Mo. ‘We may not be caged here but the dogs are a sort of fence. You could have a whole day’s head start and it would make no difference. They’d still catch up.’
‘There’s a chance we could make it,’ I muttered. ‘And anyway, think about it, what’s the worst that could happen? You said it yourself, we’re valuable to him. If he hunts us down with the dogs, he’ll hardly let them rip us apart. He’ll just haul us back here to work and wait again.’
‘You, maybe,’ said Mo quietly. ‘It’s a chance you could take. But not me. Nobody is about to pay a ransom for me.’
Xander tried to reassure him otherwise, saying, ‘You’re valuable in a different way,’ but it didn’t stop me regretting what I’d said. What a selfish idiot. We lay there in silence for a bit. I was wishing I’d said nothing at all about trying to escape. I should have waited until I had a proper plan. Talking about something you want before you’ve got a sensible way of achieving it only makes whatever it is less likely to happen, in my experience.
‘When you say he makes an example of people, what do you mean?’ Amelia asked, her voice small.
Mo didn’t answer her directly. Instead he said, ‘I’m tired. We should try to get some sleep.’
35.
The following afternoon, walking back from the stump-field, we came upon a bunch of new recruits doing a form of military training. It seemed mostly to involve poking wooden guns into sandbags, crawling around in the dirt on all fours, and running on the spot holding something heavy: a lump of wood, an old tyre, a breeze block.
There was a bored air to all of these activities. The teenager supervising looked half asleep and none of the other kids were putting in much effort.
But further on from this weary circus we passed another little gathering learning how to use real guns. A boy about my age was showing a semi-automatic rifle – Mo said later that it was an AK-47, one of the few working guns General Sir kept under lock and key – to three boys who looked about ten.
I slowed my pace to watch. The older kid was acting very cool, the big man at ease with a deadly weapon. He took the magazine off the gun, jabbed his finger into the hole, waggled it about, then flipped the cartridge over and slotted it back into place. With no warning at all he lifted the gun to his hip and pulled the trigger, firing it at nothing in particular.
I had an immediate flashback and saw chips of fibreglass ripping from Pete’s beautiful boat. The harsh metallic sound of the gun, and the casualness of the kid unleashing it, took me straight back to Flip-flops and Barrel-man.
We were in the middle of nowhere here but bullets fly miles. The four or five this boy had shot off could have ended up anywhere. As I watched, he removed the magazine again and held it and the gun up for the ten-year-olds to inspect. For some reason all of the boys burst out laughing. Swap the AK-47 out of the picture and they could have been showing each other a stupid meme on a phone.
The big kid with the gun now handed both bits over to one of the ten-year-olds. Still in the grip of the joke, the little boy nevertheless managed to refit the magazine. It didn’t matter that he was laughing; the gun gave him a sort of swagger. He was a skinny kid, couldn’t have weighed more than forty kilos, and he was already wobbling about with the giggles, so when he copied his instructor and nonchalantly fired the semi-automatic from the hip the force of the recoil spun him backwards. He had no weight behind the gun and was completely off balance. Its muzzle swung our way.
Instinctively I ducked, yanking Amelia down with me. Both Mo and Xander dropped to the ground as well. It was a good job, because the little idiot still had his finger on the trigger and, whether he meant to or not, he pulled it again. With the rifle pointed at us! I swear the shot was louder with the gun aimed our way. A flash of orange flame burst from the barrel.
Mercifully, this second shot only knocked one person over: the kid who fired it. The recoil made him sit down on his bum in the dirt. He threw the assault rifle aside as if it was a live thing he couldn’t trust. But he was still laughing. They all were. They thought it was hilarious. Even when Mo shouted at them, they kept at it with the giggles. Only as we stood up and dusted ourselves off did the little twit who’d nearly killed us glance down the track towards camp and abruptly shut up. Panic flared in his eyes.
General Sir was striding towards us. He’d clearly seen what had happened, and he looked furious. He said nothing until he was standing right over the boys. All four of them shrank before him. With one hand he grabbed the kid who’d nearly shot us, and he took hold of the teenage instructor with the other.
He had them by the hair. The teenager was nearly as big as General Sir, but neither he nor the little one resisted as the General banged their heads together, hard enough for the thwack to be audible.
It was almost funny: less than a minute beforehand they’d been tough guys with a gun, and now they looked like little kids in trouble. Both of them kept their eyes down for the short walk back to camp. We followed. The General led them purposefully. Clearly the punishment wasn’t over.
‘What’s going to happen to them?’ I asked.
‘The pits, probably,’ said Mo.
‘What’s that?’
‘Come and see for yourselves.’
As the General peeled off behind his own quarters Mo led us along with him. General Sir took the two boys further into the bush. Quite a way, in fact. When he finally stopped, Mo raised a hand and we all stopped too.
General Sir had his baton out again. He pointed it at the teenage instructor and then at the ground. From where we were, it wasn’t clear what he was jabbing at down there. But the boy knew what to do. He bent over and levered up a metal door set flush with the ground. Then he climbed in
to the hole beneath it and let the door clang shut.
The General knelt to work a long bolt into place across the top of the door, with a metal-on-metal shriek.
‘What’s down there?’ asked Amelia, as the General made the smaller boy climb into his own hole in the ground.
‘Nothing. That’s the point.’
‘Nothing?’
‘They’re just empty cages buried in the ground. Smallish cages. I think they were meant for animals. You can’t stand up in them, or lie straight. You just have to sit there on your own until General Sir lets you out. It’s dark in the pits and they get hot. He had them dug all the way out here so that anybody yelling doesn’t disturb him back in camp.’
The little kid had shot at us accidentally and hurt nobody. To be buried in an underground cage for doing something stupid hardly seemed fair, particularly when the guy doing the burying was responsible for giving the boy in question an assault rifle in the first place.
‘How long does he put people in there for?’ asked Amelia. She gets claustrophobia. A punishment like that would be bad for anyone, but from the look on her face it was obviously her idea of hell.
‘It depends on what you’ve done,’ Mo replied. ‘A day or two, normally.’
Xander shuddered. ‘Is it his way of making an example of people who, say, get caught running away?’ he asked.
‘Yeah,’ said Mo, looking at me. ‘One of them.’
36.
Later that afternoon there was a commotion in camp. Two white Land Rovers rolled up in a dust cloud and crunched to a stop next to General Sir’s shack. He materialised at once to greet whoever had come to pay us a visit, and in response to his barked order a group of kids immediately assembled beyond the vehicles. When I say assembled, I mean it; the boys, twelve of them in total, stood four abreast in three loose ranks.
Most of the boys, I noticed, were smiling. They were stealing glances at each other, exchanging smirks and even giggling. General Sir, with his oiled head and amazingly dirt-free boots glistening in the evening sun, was smiling too. Three adults who’d jumped down from the 4x4s stood next to the General to inspect this impromptu parade.