by Jeremy Duns
‘Do any of you speak English?’ I said to the guards, in the clearest, calmest voice I could muster.
All three coiled in response, and I could feel Isabelle doing the same beside me. Coiled, but there was no harm done, yet. Fingers gripping triggers, but no shots fired, yet.
‘Do not speak,’ said the man with the scars. ‘The colonel told us if you speak, we shoot you.’
‘That’s just it,’ I said quickly, before he could think about it. ‘I’m worried you might shoot us by accident. My colleague here is very nervous, and if we hit a big bump, I’m worried someone might…’
‘Do not speak,’ said the man. ‘If I were you.’ But he gave a tiny nod and kept his eyes locked on mine, as if to say he understood the problem. A few minutes later, he leaned over and whispered in the ear of the guard next to him, who in turn whispered something to the third man. And a few minutes after that, Scarface quietly put his gun onto safety, and the other two followed suit.
It was an opening. There was nothing now between me and the road – well, nothing but chains and a dozen armed soldiers. But supposing I could bound forward with enough force to break the chains? My hands were attached to the underside of the bench, meaning that if pressure were exerted at the right angle, I could use it as leverage. The bench was quite wide – I could press my feet back at least fifteen inches. It was perhaps even a little too much, but if I sat bolt upright, the distance shortened until it felt almost like a natural starting block.
And the soldiers? Most of them were not on their guard. This was just another journey back to headquarters. They would be looking forward to putting some food in their bellies, perhaps a beer or two, and sleep. They knew there were a couple of prisoners in their midst, of course, but they also knew that three of their colleagues had their weapons trained on us. We were not their responsibility. And unless they had been paying close attention, they wouldn’t have known that those weapons were now on safety. I would have the benefit of surprise.
But, of course, the danger would not be over once I had left the jeep. It would take the fastest of the men only a few seconds to recover, if that, and I would be picked out even through the rain and the mud and the darkness in only a few seconds more. And nobody would face a firing squad for shooting a prisoner who had tried to escape.
My other potential lever was sitting beside me: Isabelle. If I managed to bring her with me, the soldiers would have two targets, rather than one, and added to the rain and the mud and the darkness that might just be enough to save me…
I stopped the line of thought. It was an exercise, that was all, an exercise I had hoped might reveal a way of prising open the chink. But I knew even as I went through the options that none of them was viable. Even if I managed to pull Isabelle and myself into the road, the chances of survival were too small to take the risk. The fact that escape was possible was no comfort – it had to be likely. In short, it was the kind of plan that looked good on a blackboard in the Home Counties, but when it was your life on the line in the middle of the night in the African bush, it was only good for keeping your mind distracted.
And right now I had more important things to think about. Chiefly: Alebayo. The good news was that I hadn’t done anything I wouldn’t have done had I, in fact, been a photojournalist. If he interviewed Gunner or any of the other men who had been on the plane, they wouldn’t be able to report anything incriminating. And there was nothing in my bag that shouldn’t have been there.
The bad news, of course, was that I had already crossed paths with him. He had been suspicious of my cover then, and it had changed since. Not substantially, but perhaps enough to be a problem. I’d told him I was working for The Times, assigned to follow the PM’s trip in Lagos. If he remembered that (and I had a feeling he might), he would naturally want to know what I was doing several hundred miles away, and under the aegis of Agence France-Presse.
I decided the best thing was to bluff it out, and insist that I was still working for The Times, but simply teaming up with Isabelle. As long as she didn’t crack and I stuck to my guns, there would be no easy way for him to prove otherwise. My trump card was that I was British. That meant he couldn’t do too much without provoking an international incident – if I made enough of a noise, perhaps nothing at all. Hopefully I’d be away from here within a couple of hours, leaving me plenty of time to find my way to Udi.
More light was entering the jeep now, and the road had suddenly become much smoother. Peering through the rain, I saw rows of small houses, a few of them with lit windows, and then what looked like a grass tennis court. That must have been a mistake, though, because I couldn’t imagine many towns in the area had a tennis club.
The truck started to slow, and our guards took their guns off safety with an audible click. It was our stop. Without a word, the soldier with the scars on his face released our chains, and we were pushed out onto a smooth asphalt surface. The truck sped away.
Where the hell were we? It didn’t look like it could be a Nigerian town, or even an officers’ mess – it looked like one of the new towns outside London. Neat, white Snowcem bungalows lined both sides of the road, and each had a small garden in the front fenced off by low hedges. There were even a few sun loungers, and I wondered for a moment if we had fetched up in some sort of luxury holiday resort; perhaps I had fallen asleep and we’d driven into some tropical paradise. But that wasn’t right – it was quarter to ten, so we couldn’t have been more than fifty miles from Aba, and probably less as the roads would have slowed us down. The smell of the swamp was still here, too, and every bit as fetid.
Before I could contemplate my surroundings any more, I was prodded in the back again, and Isabelle and I were marched towards one of the bungalows. We reached a small wooden gate and one of the men struggled with the latch for a few seconds before getting it open. We walked up the narrow path to the door.
A small plate was fixed next to the doorbell: ‘561. Sebastian Tilby-Wells and Family’. A former British army base, then? But why would the British have a camp out here? And looking down the street, it looked very grand for the military – even Fort Gosport didn’t have this level of build. I tried to imagine Sebastian Tilby-Wells, and saw a very tall man with a neat ginger moustache and a burnt pate, bossing around his fat little wife and their fat little children.
Scarface fiddled in his shirt pocket and brought out a key with ‘561’ stamped on it. He unlocked the door and we were pushed into darkness.
‘Stay here,’ he said. ‘Do not try to leave, or you will be shot.’ He cocked his trigger to make sure we’d got the message, then closed the door and locked it.
XVI
I ran my hand along the wall until I found the light switch. We were in a large living room: two armchairs, a divan, a coffee table, a couple of dead house plants. At the far end, an integrated kitchen, long metal windows – and an air conditioner. I walked over and switched it on, but nothing happened.
Isabelle slumped into one of the armchairs and asked me if I had any cigarettes left. I tossed her the pack and lighter, and walked over to take a look at the windows. They were unlocked.
That was interesting. I rolled them back to find a veranda, complete with deckchairs and flowers sticking out of what looked like old petrol drums.
‘They had it good, didn’t they?’ said Isabelle.
I turned. ‘Who? Where are we?’
She laughed, her face momentarily obscured by a cloud of smoke. ‘You are very serious. “Who? Where are we?”’
‘Fill me in,’ I said, ‘and I’ll tell you all my knock-knock jokes.’
She sat up and ground out my sixth-to-last cigarette in an ashtray on the coffee table. ‘We’re in the Shell–BP camp at Port Harcourt. I thought you knew – Alebayo is using it as his headquarters.’
Of course. While I’d been feverishly fantasizing about throwing myself into the road, we must have been waved through some gates. The windows were unlocked because it didn’t matter if we left the hou
se: we wouldn’t be able to get past the perimeter. I turned back to the window: the moon was dim in the rain, but I could make out a few more bungalows and, beyond them, the outline of a high concrete wall. I couldn’t see any machine guns in turrets, but it amounted to the same thing.
I had another look at the room. The Tilby-Wellses appeared to have left the place rather quickly. Magazines and paperbacks were still scattered across the coffee table: a two-year-old issue of Life featuring the lost notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci shared space with The Collected Short Stories of Somerset Maugham, My Family and Other Animals and a booklet about West African birds. Apart from the standard pieces of furniture, the only unusual items were a drinks cabinet and an antique radio set. The kitchen was home to a disconnected fridge and a rusty stove. The cupboards were empty, except for a couple of cockroaches and several tins of Bartlett pears. No tin-openers, though.
It was like a safe house, I decided. The thought comforted me somewhat, and I made my way back to the drinks cabinet, where I found the dregs of a bottle of Drambuie, a sliver of Tio Pepe, and about a quarter of a litre of lime cordial. A not-too-dirty shot glass was resting on the board, and I poured the lot into it and downed the result. It tasted vile: my teeth felt as though they were rotting away as they came into contact with the liquid. But for one exquisite moment it relieved the dryness in my throat. I also hoped it might contain enough sugar to send some much-needed aid to the pain surging through my lower back and thigh muscles.
Behind me, Isabelle announced she was going to find the bathroom to powder her nose. I investigated the radio set. It was in working order, so I tuned it to the BBC’s African Service. They were reaching the end of a bulletin – I wanted the headlines, to see if Pritchard had cancelled the PM’s trip. I turned the volume up as loud as it would go, and the weather report blared across the room. Cairo was hot. Oslo was cold.
‘What are you doing?’ Isabelle called from offstage.
I walked towards her voice. ‘The room may be bugged,’ I said, taking a left at the kitchen. ‘You might want to watch what you say.’
‘You should check the plants. Isn’t that where they usually hide them?’
If there were microphones, they could be anywhere – in the ceiling, the walls, the furniture. It would take at least an hour to turn over the place, and I didn’t know how long we had.
‘The radio is fine,’ I said. ‘Where are you?’
‘Here!’ she said, leaping out from behind the wall. ‘So what do you think?’ Instead of her usual Zazou black, she was now in a turquoise ankle-length dress.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
‘You don’t like?’ she said angelically. ‘I could no longer wear those wet clothes.’ She scrunched up her nose in disgust, then raised a finger. ‘I find something for you also.’ She vanished behind the wall again for a few seconds, then reappeared clutching a pair of silk turquoise trousers and a white tennis shirt. ‘Voilà! You will match me perfectly.’
I took her by the wrist and exerted some pressure. ‘We’re not going to a bloody fashion show,’ I said.
She pulled away. ‘What happened to those jokes you promised me?’ she said. She walked back into the living room, seated herself in one of the armchairs and pouted.
I didn’t have time to waste on games – somewhere in this compound, Gunner and his men were being interrogated. And any minute now, it could be our turn.
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Do you have your press accreditation from Lagos?’
She looked up. ‘No – it was in my bag. Why?’
That was what I’d been afraid of. ‘Here’s what we’re going to do,’ I said. ‘I’m working with The Times, but at the last moment I got ordered to the front, and we decided to work together. All right?’
She took it in, then nodded. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘But I think you should relax. We’re not in danger now. It’s a story for your friends back in London, I think. A story for myself also – my office will be very pleased to hear it. Some of the photographs I took in the hut may change the course of the war. This level of suffering – it will shock people into action.’
She looked so smug, I could have smacked her. I pointed out that Alebayo might not be too keen to let her call her office, or hand back her camera. She didn’t hear me, so I moved closer and said it again.
She laughed, smoothing the pleats of her new dress with one hand. ‘I think he will give it back. He can be tough when he’s ordering his men to kill innocent Biafrans – I would like to see how tough he is in front of a member of the world’s press.’
‘These ones aren’t all innocent, though,’ I said. ‘The men are deserters.’
She looked at me, aghast.
‘Did you see the condition they were in?’
The silly bitch seemed to have forgotten we were in the middle of a war. It was bad news – if she tried to take Alebayo on, she’d really put the cat among the pigeons.
‘Alebayo hates the world’s press,’ I told her. ‘In fact, he hates anything that smacks of interference by the West. If you want to help the Biafrans, and yourself, you would do well to remember that.’
We listened to the football results in sullen silence for a few minutes. Finally, the familiar notes of ‘Lilliburlero’ whistled merrily into the room, and I turned it down slightly so we could listen to the bulletin more comfortably. Pakistan had a new president, there was fierce fighting in southern Vietnam, and John Lennon and his new wife were staging a protest in bed in Amsterdam. No mention of Nigeria or the British prime minister. I wondered where Pritchard was – probably a deal closer to Anna than I was.
‘That was about your operation, wasn’t it?’ said Isabelle when the report had finished and I’d turned the volume back up. ‘There was a coded message in one of the items!’
I shook my head. ‘We don’t do that any more.’
‘What, then?’ she said. ‘You might as well tell me now.’
‘The less you know, the better.’
It was a shame to have to treat her like a child, but she had a glint in her eye and it was worrying me. She was notching it all up for her exclusive report from the Biafran front, where she had been imprisoned in a bugged room with a British secret agent on a mysterious mission. It would make thrilling reading at breakfast tables across France – if we got out of here in one piece.
We listened to the radio for a while longer, and she cadged another of my cigarettes. I went over the story with her one more time, and then the door opened and Scarface marched in.
‘Move,’ he said, gesturing with his sub-machine gun.
*
The streets of the compound were quiet and deserted, but I caught a few glimpses of the site’s new purpose: a couple of camouflaged armoured cars and a Land Rover parked outside one of the bungalows, and a small obstacle course that had been set up on the other side of what had once been tennis courts. It was still raining, and Isabelle was having trouble with her new outfit, which was sticking to her in all the wrong places. God knows what Scarface made of her get-up; he didn’t say a word, just gestured which turnings we were to take and kept a close eye on our movements in case we decided to make a run for it. There was little chance of that, unfortunately – the only thing to do now was to talk Alebayo into letting us go as soon as possible. At one point, we passed a street that led to the entrance into the compound. It was a massive iron gate, and I managed to count eight guards before we had to make a turn.
After about a ten-minute walk, we arrived at our destination: a grand villa standing on the crest of a small hill. We walked up a path through the large and well-kept garden, passing jacarandas and palm trees. As we got nearer to the house, the sound of music spilled out onto the lawn, an American soul number with swishing drums and a plangent male voice singing about the end of the world. The doors to the place were open, and a handful of soldiers were pulling crates off a jeep in the forecourt. It looked a little like preparations were being made for a party –
I half-expected to see a marquee being erected.
Scarface took us into the house, which still had the appearance of a private home – presumably this was where the managing director had lived. The paintings and mirrors still hung on the walls and there were vases filled with flowers. We walked down a short corridor, passing several soldiers on the way, their boots pinging off the tiled floor as they went about their business. Nobody gave us a second glance.
The music became louder with every step, and the instruments and voice started to mesh together. Scarface pushed open some double doors and we entered a large hangar-like room. It was dark, but I could make out desks, chairs, filing cabinets, telephones, several standard radio sets and a few SSBs. I could make out a faint glow from the rear of the room, and Scarface indicated we should head for it. As we got nearer, I saw that the light was emanating from a small area sunk a couple of feet into the floor. There was a campbed, a wardrobe and a mahogany table. On top of the latter was an antique gramophone player, from which the closing notes of the song blared, and a lamp, which cast a small pool of light on the tatty leather armchair in the centre of the ‘room’. Seated in this was Colonel Alebayo, his head tilted back, apparently asleep. He was wearing a black and gold kimono-type number and matching slippers. His uniform lay folded neatly on the bed, his cap resting on top of it.
We stood at the edge of the pit for a few seconds, watching him. Then Scarface coughed. Alebayo’s eyes snapped open, his head jerked upright and he jumped to his feet. Without looking at us, he strode the two feet to the table, stopped the needle and replaced the record in its sleeve.