by Wilbur Smith
‘What took you to England?’
‘I went as a refugee. When my father was killed my mother fled with me and my brothers and sisters. To Ethiopia first. And from there a long and dangerous journey to England. My youngest sister died on the way. She was only a baby.’
‘Also sad,’ said Amelia.
In the pause that followed, something shrieked in the dark. It sounded panic-stricken and human. I thought of the boys held in the pits. They were still out there. General Sir took this opportunity to say, ‘Noises always seem more sinister at night.’ Whatever he intended by this comment, it wasn’t reassuring.
‘What was that?’ said Xander.
‘A wild dog, I think. They make a lot of noise but they’re no real threat to us here.’ He went on. ‘I made it to England with my mother and two elder brothers, in the end.’
‘My cousin lives near Camden,’ said Amelia. ‘I’ve been there loads. Why did you come back here? Didn’t you like it?’
‘My family liked Camden very much. We went to school and lived in a good house. My elder brothers still live in London. So does my mother. My brothers worked hard and they have done well. One has his own computer business now, and the other is a hospital physio. He helps … rehabituate people who’ve had accidents.’
‘Rehabilitate,’ said Amelia, unable to let the slip pass.
General Sir ignored her. ‘I liked being in London, but other people,’ he said vaguely, ‘didn’t like me being there so much. There was a misunderstanding.’ He smiled at us in turn. ‘About a burglary, I think. Yes, a burglary. Teenage foolishness on my part.’ He held up his hands and smiled harder.
I used to have nightmares about strangers coming into my room while I was asleep. Even locking the window didn’t stop the bad dreams. I knew my fear was irrational: Mum told me all about the statistical improbability of a burglar targeting our house. But when I was about eight the nightmares got so bad, I refused to go to bed. Mum couldn’t persuade me to and I even refused to go when ordered by Dad. I only went when my brother, Mark, offered to sleep on the floor in my bedroom, as a first line of defence. He kept it up for a week. Now, listening to General Sir casually admit to burglary, the thought crossed my mind that he’d been among the people I’d been so terrified of back home as a little kid.
‘You left London because of a burglary?’ I said.
He nodded and smiled. ‘It was most regrettable.’
I looked at Mo. He stared back at me; it felt like he was willing me not to ask for more details. Since General Sir seemed to want the chance to elaborate, I held my tongue. I didn’t want to give the maniac the satisfaction.
He sat back in his chair. ‘So, yes, with my mother’s blessing, I returned to our wonderful capital, Mogadishu. And from there –’ he waved in the general direction of the darkness – ‘my adventures brought me to this lovely part of the world!’
As if on cue, the wild dog noise started up again then, closer than before, a series of overlapping yelps, each more shriek-like than the last. The sound wasn’t so much menacing as deranged: the dogs seemed to be whipping each other up into a frenzy. Had they caught something? Were they killing it, or arguing over the spoils? I didn’t know. As abruptly as the cacophony started, it stopped. In the silence that followed a shiver ran through me, all the way from my head to my toes.
General Sir knew we were terrified – of him, the camp, and the wild world beyond it. His work done, he simply rose from his chair, said, ‘Sleep well!’ and drifted off into the darkness.
‘You too!’ Xander called after him.
As ever he knew exactly how to defuse the moment. Though trembling, I couldn’t help laughing. ‘Great guy,’ I said.
‘Real charmer.’
Ignoring us, Amelia asked Mo outright, ‘What really happened?’
‘What he said, more or less.’
‘It’s the “more” bit I’m interested in.’
‘The General broke many laws in London. For gangs and drugs mostly. He was young and often in trouble, doing bad things. Motorcycle robberies, even burglaries as he said. Being small and a good climber meant he could get in through upstairs windows. And for him there was never a minimum age for violence.’
‘But why, specifically, did he flee London?’ Amelia asked.
‘There was a murder. General Sir was fifteen. A dispute over drugs and territories. He killed another boy with a knife. But the police arrested someone else. They thought they had the perpetrator. Later they realised they were wrong. In the time gap General Sir’s mother, thinking that the situation in Somalia was improving, put him on a plane to her sister in Mogadishu.’
‘So he returned to the capital. How did he end up here, in the middle of nowhere?’
‘He was recruited to fight in the conflict himself, and he immediately saw that children were valuable in war because so many children fought on both sides. They do what adults tell them; it doesn’t matter if it’s evil or good. But there are never enough children to fight the adults’ wars! General Sir saw this. He spotted a business opportunity. He would find children by whatever means, teach them to be useful, and sell them to the highest bidder. According to camp rumour, he’s been doing it ever since.’
40.
The wild dog noise made it hard to sleep that night. The following morning, bleary and exhausted and because there were no real toilets to use in camp, I took myself off to do my business a little way into the bush. As I was walking back, I heard another animal whimpering. The pitiful noise was intercut with a whacking sound.
Instinctively I went towards the noise and came upon Kayd. His back was to me and he had a stick in his raised hand. As I watched he brought it down on a small boy curled tight on the ground. Realising Kayd was laying into a child, I ran straight in yelling at him to stop.
Kayd ignored me. He didn’t even look my way. He just brought the stick down hard again on the curled-up boy’s back. Weirdly, the little boy didn’t yelp at the blow. He just kept on with his whimpering. As Kayd lifted the stick again I closed in on him and grabbed it.
Kayd spun around. His eyes were blank, his lips expressionless. With his free hand he punched me hard in the chest. It would have been enough to knock me over if I hadn’t been hanging on to the stick. As it was, I staggered backwards with all my weight, yanking at the stick as viciously as I could – hard enough, at any rate to rip it from him.
Kayd just stared at, or rather through, me. He didn’t try to grab the stick back, or run at me, or yell. He looked almost bored. To have punched me one minute and be content simply to stare at me the next made little sense. Neither did the fact the small kid was still curled on the ground rather than running for cover.
I have to admit, I was fired up. I was so frustrated and frightened, and his face was so impassive it looked like a sculpture. I wanted to smash it to pieces.
I swung the stick at his face with all my might. I wanted to burst it open like a piñata. Every birthday party I ever went to in junior school had one of those stupid things. And I was always pretty good at destroying them. You just have to swivel from the hips, put your weight behind the blow, lean in.
The stick stopped in mid-air. I was swinging so hard the dead halt jerked me backwards. I turned in shock to see Mo. I had no idea where he’d come from but he’d arrived in time to catch the stick and he wasn’t about to let it go. Everything about him said: ‘No!’
In stopping me from hitting Kayd he was clearly trying to save me from myself. Still, I didn’t like it. For a nanosecond I thought of ripping the stick free again, but instead I let it go.
Instantly Mo’s expression changed. He laughed, slapped me on the shoulder, and tossed the stick back to Kayd, who caught it. Mo then said something, and although I had no idea what it was, I could tell from the tone of his voice he was making light of what had just happened. I’ve seen the same sort of thing often enough at school. An argument flares up and is about to go off properly, then somebody backs down pretending the who
le thing is a joke. It’s a way of saving face. Cowards use it. I didn’t like that Mo had chosen this tactic for me, not one bit.
But we weren’t in school. We were in a camp that turned slave children into child soldiers. The tactic may have been the same, but the consequences of not deploying it here were unknowable.
Kayd was staring right through me again, ignoring Mo’s nothing-to-see-here joking entirely. I couldn’t help but stare back. His eyes were a very dark brown but facing the morning sun they swam with tiny flecks of amber. Very slowly, he turned from me to the kid on the ground.
The little boy was still curled tight, shielding his head and neck with his hands. They were thin, with slight fingers. Why, oh why, hadn’t he crawled off when he had the chance? Kayd was toying with the stick, daring me to challenge him for it again. It took every ounce of my willpower to stop myself. But Mo’s forced jocularity was if anything more effective than his panic had been.
I had no choice but to trust him. I’m ashamed of it, but I stayed rooted to the spot as Kayd brought the stick down on the little kid’s back one last lazy time. The boy’s whimpering started up again. Kayd tossed the stick down next to him and walked off slowly towards General Sir’s shack without looking back at us.
41.
As soon as Kayd had gone, Mo switched his attention to the little boy on the ground. During the beating his shorts had twisted round his waist so that the fastener was on his hip. He wriggled them back into place. He wasn’t crying. Kayd must have hit him a dozen times with that stick, but the boy put up with the hurt as if it had been nothing more than a slap. Mo said something to him that actually made him smile, nod, and jog off towards the main camp. I couldn’t believe a boy that young could shrug off such brutality.
‘Compared to what’s coming for him, that was nothing. It’s almost helpful, in a way. Means he’ll be less scared when he sees war.’
Mo wasn’t defending Kayd so much as stating a fact. I thought of the kids I’d seen working the tantalum mine in the Congo, and the two General Sir had imprisoned in holes in the ground, and the dozens of little ones here being groomed to fight, and I thought of Mum and what she would want to do about it.
‘When we escape, we’re taking him with us,’ I told Mo.
‘Sure. Why not,’ he said.
‘I’m serious. In fact, any kid who wants out of here should be free to come too. A rebellion is what’s needed. The more the better. With enough of us working together, the General will be powerless.’
Mo sighed. ‘You’ve just seen Kayd at work. There are others loyal to General Sir who will stop us.’
‘They’ll try,’ I said. ‘But –’
‘And even if we get past them, which we won’t, there’s the dogs. I’ve already told you about them.’
An idea came to me, obvious and yet surprising: ‘Then we’ll take the dogs with us as well.’
‘What?’ Mo looked at me like I was an idiot.
‘They can’t track us for the General if they’re already with us, can they?’
‘They’re hunting dogs! They belong to him. What makes you think they’ll come with us?’
‘I’ve seen the way he treats them.’ I shrugged. ‘They’re frightened of him, sure. That can make a dog obedient, but it doesn’t make it loyal. There’s a big difference.’
Mo sighed. ‘Either the dog wants to do something or thinks it has to: the pain you’ll feel when its teeth sink into your leg will be much the same.’
We’d been walking back to the others as we talked and now arrived at the tent. Xander and Amelia were sitting in front of it on plastic chairs. Mo and I sat down too, just as one of the little boys arrived with our breakfast. We each took a bowl from him. The sun was still low, bathing everything in a welcoming early morning light. Zoom in on the tent and chairs, cutting out the context, and we could have been on a camping holiday, about to tuck into some cornflakes. But we weren’t in a campsite, with cereal, bowls and spoons. Breakfast here was more slop, eaten with our fingers. I ate it anyway and, between mouthfuls, told Xander and Amelia what I’d witnessed.
‘Poor kid,’ said Amelia. ‘At least he wasn’t badly hurt.’
‘That’s not the point,’ I said.
‘I reckon it was for him,’ she countered.
‘There are divisions here to exploit.’
‘There are big kids terrorising little ones,’ said Amelia. ‘We can’t do a lot to help them.’
Xander said, ‘I think I see what Jack is getting at. The younger boys and girls could be helpful to us. At the moment they do what they’re told because General Sir has a bunch of thugs working for him. It’s too much to expect the little ones to rebel on their own. But with a leader to follow they might turn against General Sir. And with the dogs out of the equation he couldn’t do much against a mass breakout.’
Mo had his head in his hands. Now he leaned back in his chair and spoke to the sky. ‘You think they’ll listen to you, get behind you, support you when you go up against Kayd and the enforcers, who have weapons to make their point with? You’ve got, what? Fists against their guns? Sticks at best. And you think you’re their great hope?’
‘No,’ I said quietly. ‘I’m not the great hope here. You are.’
Mo didn’t reply to that. He set down his breakfast bowl, stood up and said, ‘We need to start work,’ instead.
42.
Over the next few days Amelia, Xander and I made plans. Despite himself, Mo was a part of them. He was working, eating and sleeping alongside us, so he didn’t really have a choice but to overhear us, and I deliberately made sure he was in earshot.
To begin with he just listened, occasionally shaking his head in weary disbelief, even puffing out his cheeks from time to time, as if to say ‘impossible’ without words. But as the shape of what we were plotting became clear, with the difficulties we’d face along the way becoming more obvious at each step, he started making suggestions. I’d gambled on this, his hardwired resourcefulness. It was in his DNA: faced with a problem, Mo couldn’t help trying to come up with a solution.
‘How are we going to handle the dogs then?’ Xander asked as we worked together to prise up a particularly reluctant stump.
‘I’ve already started,’ I replied, ‘by trying to gain their trust. I read a lot about dog training when we got Chester. Dogs read how you are around them. They’re all about body language. Project calm and confidence and a dog will pick up on it.’
Amelia, who was levering a crowbar under the stump’s tap root, now pulled it out, leaned on it, and said, ‘Sure, body language is a big thing for canines, as it is for all animals in fact, but in my experience, dogs are more about treats.’
‘We could save some of our food to feed to them,’ Xander suggested.
‘It would be a start,’ Amelia replied. ‘But I doubt they’d be much more impressed by that slop than we are. What we need and don’t have is meat.’
‘We could do with some of that ourselves,’ said Xander. ‘To help get our strength up.’ He jabbed at the stump listlessly with his shovel. ‘I’ve never felt so weak.’ He looked it. Despite us having been outside more or less constantly, working in the sun, his dark skin was tinged a sallow grey. ‘We’re not exactly going to stumble over a pack of sausages out here though, are we?’
Mo had been hacking back some scrub a little way off. He stopped now and said, ‘Not sausages, no.’
‘Sounds like there’s a but,’ said Amelia.
‘There are animals in the bush. You’ve heard the noises at night.’
‘We’re hardly equipped to bag an antelope though,’ I said.
‘There are ways of hunting for smaller prey. Fringe-tailed gerbils, acacia rats, Greenwood’s shrews, and so on. Boys in the camp have done it before. I’ve seen them. Using snares.’
I thought of the snares I’d seen in the rainforest in the Congo, set by poachers. They were horrible things, as likely to harm an endangered species as anything else. Was it wrong of me to al
low Mo to teach us how to set them here? No, I decided. First, we weren’t in a national park or conservation area. And second, we were desperate. When I brought that up Amelia immediately suggested that the poachers had probably been desperate too, but I shut that thought out and set to learning from Mo.
He was a methodical teacher. We’d all learn how to build the snares, he said. That way we could make many between us. To start with he told us each to fetch the component parts: a stout forked stick (the sort that might make a good catapult, but bigger); three similarly strong straight sticks; and two lengths of string or twine, one thick, the other thin. That was it. Xander came up trumps on the string front with a discarded guy rope that we cut up using a sharp stone. For the thin string we butchered some shoelaces.
Once we had all the bits, we began by hammering the catapult stick, arms up, firmly into the ground. Then Mo showed us how to make a spring using one of the bits of string, wound round the ‘Y’ of the catapult and twisted tight with one of the long straight shafts.
It was ingenious: by delicately wedging the long arm against another of the straight sticks, which we’d also hammered into the ground, we created a spring-loaded arm on a hair trigger.
With the final component – the length of thinner shoelace – we made a noose which we attached to the sprung arm of the trap. The open ‘O’ of the noose went on the ground over the hair trigger, on top of which, Mo explained, we’d put the bait. Simple, but effective.
Once we’d got the materials together, making those first snares took less than half an hour. And over the next couple of days we scavenged more materials with which to make a few more.
Bait was the last ingredient. Mo suggested we use dollops of the very mush General Sir fed the rest of us for this purpose. Hearing that’s what we’d be tempting our prey with, I rolled my eyes.
‘You’re sure they’ll fall for that stuff?’
‘It may not be your favourite but for a rat or gerbil it’s rich … what do you call it?’ Mo said.