by Jeremy Duns
XXI
It took me less than a second to realize my mistake. Our little chat had sharpened my mind but not my body, and I hadn’t made enough allowances. I had deliberately stepped onto the floor with my back facing him, calculating that my apparent helplessness would delay him for a fraction of a moment in reaching for the gun he would inevitably be carrying. As I landed, I raised my right foot so it was in front of my left kneecap, then fired the right edge of the foot out towards Akuji, aiming at his thigh.
I’d executed this manoeuvre hundreds of times, and Akuji was no match for it: he crashed into a table on wheels behind him before I’d even brought my foot to a stop. I immediately followed up with a two-finger hand to his left carotid, after which he fell to the floor with a permanent-sounding thud. But by then I was also falling, because my stomach had suddenly been engulfed by a wave of nausea so intense I thought I was going to pass out. I managed to turn back to the bed and caught hold of the iron bars that ran around it for a second or two, but the nausea was overwhelming and I started slipping to the floor, automatically hunching myself into the fetal position as I came into contact with the concrete. My ears started ringing, and grey blotches were floating in front of my eyes, so I took to slapping myself in the face to stave off unconsciousness.
‘Four hours,’ I said aloud, partly to remind myself of the deadline, partly just to get my body and brain back on speaking terms. It was down to the wire now, and I couldn’t afford to lose another minute. I couldn’t wake up with the Prime Minister dead and Anna having fled the country, never to be seen again. Which would be worse, I wondered: Nigeria becoming a Soviet state, or the Biafrans continuing to be slaughtered in a war they could never win? Wilson dead or alive?
‘Four hours.’
Akuji. You need to find him, make sure he’s out, get his gun. You need Akuji’s gun to get through this, so turn now, turn to your right…
If I’d had any voice then, I’d have screamed. I was practically on top of him: his eyes lolled obscenely, and blood was leaking from his mouth. He was out, all right, and would be for a while.
On his wrist was a slim gold watch: some fancy Swiss make. I managed to reach out and unclasp it and held it in my palm, staring at the second hand as it slowly made its way around a smaller circle set within the dial. When it gets to the top, I told myself, you must straighten your legs. I breathed in as deeply as I could, and the ringing slowly began to subside. The room was completely silent and I couldn’t remember hearing anything since the thud of Akuji’s landing, so I lifted the watch to my ear and was rewarded with a faint tick-tick tick-tick tick-tick… Another wave of nausea swept over me, and I longed to find a bathroom and shit all the bad stuff out of my system. In the shapes behind my eyelids, I suddenly saw the rat from the bathroom sink of the Palace Hotel tunnelling towards me, its claws outstretched, and the landscape it was tunnelling through was my bowels. I looked back down at the circle in the dial and saw that there were five seconds, four, three, two, move now, move your legs, and there we were, rest. Rest. Breathe. Now look at the dial again. Through the rat. Ignore the rat, look past him, there, at the hand inside the circle, concentrate on the shape of it, yet another circle at the bottom, so many circles, but this one is like a pivot, and then the arrow of the hand through it, sweeping slowly around the soft gold field. Now follow that, yes, there we are, no, ignore that, ignore that feeling, just keep watching, coming down, coming down, there, now it’s going up, focus, focus, not long to go, fifteen, smooth sweep, thirteen, twelve, coming up, are you ready, get ready to move your knees, now, now, shift your knees up and move your feet, both of them, a bit more, there you are, there! You’re sitting. Now you are sitting. Breathe slowly, not too much at a time, and take in your surroundings.
My heart jolted as I saw the rat scuttling across the floor. So I hadn’t imagined it? It was a large, dirty-looking brute with yellowish eyes and a bright red tail breaking through the coarse brown hair. It scampered over the mountain of Akuji’s body, past me and over to the other side of the room.
I watched the rat, following its movements obsessively, like a seasick passenger watching the waves. It placed me in the room and it made it easier to regulate my breathing and to hold the nausea at bay.
I gave myself a threshold of ten minutes’ rat-watching time – any less and I’d be out cold again, any more and I’d be whistling down the seconds until her finger squeezed the trigger and it was all over. After seven and a half minutes the rat scuttled under a bed in the corner and started biting at a dirty piece of gauze, and I felt ready.
I leaned over and gently prised the gun from Akuji’s hands. It was a version of the Tokarev: unmarked, but possibly Chinese, by the look of the barrel lug. China was supporting the Biafrans, so that made some sense. I checked the pistol – fully loaded – and placed it in my waistband. Finally, my lesson from Pritchard from all those years ago in a clearing outside Frankfurt: pockets. They had nothing in them but the packet of Three Fives in his jacket, which I decided to take. I slid a cigarette out and lit it. The nicotine burned my lungs and brought some fire back into my head.
After I’d taken a few drags, I grabbed hold of the table Akuji had crashed into for leverage and pulled myself to my feet. Several bottles had been smashed and thick, sharp-smelling liquids were flowing into each other across the metal tray. Taking care not to touch any of the broken glass or liquid, I examined the small bottles, turning the tops of them with my fingers so I could read the labels. Most had trade names I didn’t recognize, but one I did. In bold black letters was a word that might save me: Benzedrine.
The small type on the bottle said it was ‘fast-acting’: I timed it as seven minutes before the tablet started to take effect. In that time, I found a white coat on one of the beds and put it on, and I was in the middle of ripping a sheet into strips so I could tie Akuji’s hands together when the fatigue lifted and my senses came alive and I heard the footstep at the top of the stairs.
*
‘Is he dead?’ said the man in the mask as he surveyed the scene: Akuji on the ground and a half-crazed British spy shaking a pistol at him.
I took the cigarette from my mouth to answer, and promptly threw up all over my trouser-leg. There was blood in the vomit, and the man responded to his professional instincts and stepped forward. I waved the pistol at him and grunted threateningly, and he got the message and stopped, and I sorted out my throat and used some of Akuji’s uniform to wipe off the stuff and then looked back at him again through stinging eyes, took another drag and tried again: ‘He’s just out of action for a while,’ I said.
The doctor nodded. ‘Please get back into bed now,’ he said. I had to admire his sangfroid.
‘How far is it to Udi?’
‘We have all the facilities you need here…’
‘I need to get to Udi now!’ I said, banging my hand against the bed and making the bottles rattle on the shelves.
It must have come out stronger than it had in my head, because his eyes were wide now, through the slits.
‘Please calm yourself,’ he said. Then, slowly, reaching for the right words to pacify me: ‘What medication have you taken?’
‘A tablet of Benzedrine you had lying about.’
The white mask stared back at me.
‘You are joking, I hope?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not joking. Because in’ – I checked Akuji’s Longines – ‘around three hours and forty-five minutes’ time, something very bad is going to happen in Udi, and I need to be there to stop it. I need to be alert until then. After that—’
‘After that you may die,’ he said. ‘There’s no telling what Benzedrine could do to your system right now. And please put the gun away – soldiers threaten us all the time, and we’re accustomed to standing our ground. You can threaten me all you want, but I can’t let you leave here. It’s just not safe.’
I started laughing then. ‘Safe?’ I spat at him. ‘Half an hour ago you told me I might have ca
ught this disease from rat shit, and there are rats in here, for Christ’s sake!’
‘I know. Unfortunately, they were here when we arrived. They were attracted by the smell of amputated limbs. But I didn’t mean safe for you – I meant for everyone else. Your condition is probably highly contagious.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I didn’t think you just liked masks.’
I walked towards him and pulled it down. A neat beard failed to hide that he was barely out of his teens.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
‘David.’
‘David what?’
‘David Kanu.’
‘Born here and educated in the States, I presume? Wanted to come back to help out?’
He nodded. A trickle of sweat travelled down his left cheek.
‘Can you drive, David? Do you have access to a car?’
‘Why?’
I gestured to the body lying on the bed. ‘Do you know this man?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘He turned up in his car and asked if I had a British patient here. I said I had and he—’
‘I mean do you know who he is?’
‘Yes, of course.’
I waited for him.
‘Colonel Ojukwu. The head of the Biafran army.’
‘Wrong,’ I said. ‘He’s an impersonator, name of Akuji. And, like me, he’s a British agent. How far are we from Udi?’
‘Sixty or seventy miles.’
‘Right. Well, sixty or seventy miles from here, in a very short time, someone is going to try to kill the British prime minister. Do you understand?’
‘We have a telephone,’ he said. ‘You could call your embassy.’
‘They already know about it. But they might not get there in time.’
‘You can’t leave,’ he said firmly. ‘You might cause an epidemic. I can phone someone at the clinic in Udi. I have some connections with the American government.’
‘Do you, now?’ I said. ‘That’s interesting. But no, thank you. As for an epidemic, I may not be fit to pass a company medical but I’m not about to die either, and if I understood our conversation earlier the other people who caught the disease you think I have did die, and very quickly.’
‘You’ve taken medication—’
‘I’ve taken a tablet of amphetamine, which you’ve just told me should make me even more ill. So how is it that I am standing here talking to you about all the rats there are going to be scuttling around here if you don’t help me?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘If the Prime Minister is killed,’ I said, ‘his replacement may decide to start providing arms to the Biafrans instead of the Nigerians.’
‘Good for them,’ he said, folding his arms.
‘I thought the Red Cross were meant to be neutral.’
‘We are,’ he said, clenching his jaw. ‘As much as it’s possible to be.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘But it’s not as simple as that. Strengthening the Biafrans may simply mean that neither side will be able to deliver the knockout blow. The war could last months, perhaps even years longer. In which case, you’ll be treating a lot more amputees, and the rats will be the only ones happy about it.’
He considered this, and I tried to ignore the ticking of Akuji’s watch.
‘From what I hear,’ he said, ‘this war is very unpopular in Britain. If there is a new government, it might decide not to supply either side with arms, and that could lead to a ceasefire coming sooner rather than later.’
It was the same argument I had used on both Pritchard and Akuji, and the one I personally thought was the most likely to happen. I made a note that David Kanu was not as green as he appeared, and tried again.
‘That may be the case,’ I said. ‘But I wouldn’t like to have it on my conscience if it weren’t.’
‘You don’t strike me as a man whose conscience often troubles him.’
‘Perhaps not,’ I said. ‘But I think yours does. So, David, do you want to be kept awake at night because you have helped prolong the bloodshed among your fellow men or do you want to give me a lift and save a respected world leader from being murdered in cold blood by the Russians?’
He stared at me with hatred in his eyes, and I knew I had him.
XXII
Friday, 28 March 1969, Biafra, 11.30 a.m.
Emerging aboveground, my eyeballs throbbed as they adjusted to the glare of the sun. We were in a small clearing surrounded by dense forest, deserted except for two vehicles: a dirt-spattered Land Rover with a large red cross on its side and a white Mercedes estate in which were seated several heavily armed soldiers, all of whom were watching us keenly.
‘Akuji’s men?’
David nodded.
I got him to hand over the keys to the Land Rover and told him to wait for me.
There were six of them, all seated in varying postures designed to intimidate, all in crisp uniforms with the Biafran sun on their shirtsleeves and berets sitting on their heads at the correct angle.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I’m Doctor Foster.’
‘Where is the Colonel?’ said one of the men, his thumb toying with the trigger of his machine gun.
‘He’s still downstairs,’ I said. ‘He wants to talk to the patient some more. Doctor Kanu and I are needed elsewhere, so he asked me to tell you to wait here for him.’
A few of the men sighed or rolled their eyes.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘He should be up in about half an hour.’
David had told me that all the patients belowground had been moved to another clinic on my arrival. But they didn’t know that, and I reckoned it would be at least another hour before they ventured downstairs to check up on Akuji. I turned to walk away.
‘Doctor Foster!’ one of them called out. I turned to face him and smiled through clenched teeth. ‘Are you from Gloucester?’ he asked.
A couple of the others broke into laughter, no doubt remembering the rhyme from childhood. Careless, Dark: you may be in the middle of the bush, but it’s also a former British colony. If you’re going to make this cover work, you’re going to have to use your head a bit more.
I smiled wearily. ‘Very funny,’ I said. ‘I’ve never heard that one before.’
Their cackles followed me back to the Land Rover. David was already behind the wheel, so I climbed in and handed him the key. As he started the ignition, he gestured at a small plastic container on the dashboard, which looked to be filled with yellow mush.
‘Garri,’ he said. ‘Crushed cassava.’
I told him I wasn’t hungry.
‘That’s because Benzedrine suppresses the appetite. But your body needs this. Eat.’
I did as I was told. The taste was coarse and bitter, but I was soon using my fingers to scoop out the last of it. When there was none left, I laid my head against the window and watched the landscape judder by.
I still had no idea why Akuji had been impersonating Ojukwu, but with an armed guard and a swish car, it seemed he had some pretty powerful backing. I had told both him and David that the PM’s death would lead to Britain switching allegiance in this war, but that was because I thought it would persuade them to help me. I wasn’t sure what the game was. Pritchard was still nagging at me: what was the message he had wanted to pass to Akuji?
I turned my head and was startled to see a man staring back at me from the road: sunken eyes, a few days’ beard and a bloodstained white coat. It took me a fraction of a moment to recognize myself in the wing mirror, which was hanging at an odd angle. I felt light-headed and exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep, not now. I caught David glancing at me, and I lifted my gun fractionally and met his gaze. He looked away and pushed his foot down.
*
Within twenty minutes of leaving the clinic we reached our first checkpoint. It was a distinctly unofficial-looking one, consisting of a gang of youths in unidentifiable uniforms and a few cleverly positioned oil drums. I had hoped that the large red cross painted across the side of our vehicle migh
t speed us through such situations, but they signalled us to stop nevertheless, and I quickly slipped the gun into my waistband and covered it with my shirt. David pretended to brush some mosquitoes from the windscreen and in the same gesture brushed the garri container to the floor. ‘They’re looking for food,’ he said. Sure enough, as we came to a standstill the group immediately headed towards the back of the Land Rover to investigate our cargo. Without turning my head, I tried to calculate the odds of survival if I had to make a run for it, but presumably there were no edible supplies under the tarpaulin because they quickly sauntered back and waved us through with their sticks and machetes. We passed two more similar checkpoints before reaching our first back in Federal-occupied territory, but apart from flicking through David’s identity papers, which the boy held upside down, they were no more interested in us.
I was nevertheless getting anxious. I had to be there by half past two at the latest; it was now twenty to, so I asked David for an estimate of how far away we were. He pointed ahead, and as the haze lifted, I saw the concrete barriers, machine guns and ring of barbed wire reinforcing a solid perimeter fence.
‘We’re there,’ he said.
Udi.
*
‘Can I help you?’ said the man in the uniform of the British military police, but his tone of voice suggested he couldn’t.
‘We’re from the clinic over in Awo Omamma,’ I said cheerfully. ‘We were asked to bring over some supplies.’
The Benzedrine was really kicking in now: every pore on the Redcap’s face was in focus and my fatigue had miraculously vanished.
He stepped back from the window and took a small notepad from his belt.
‘Name?’
My stomach tightened, and a fresh supply of sweat broke across my neck and back.
‘We probably won’t be on there,’ I said, lowering my voice. ‘Has Pritchard arrived yet? I’m with his group.’
He looked at me.
‘And you are… ?’
‘Paul Dark. Government liaison.’
He frowned, and I knew why. Never change your story. I had started by saying I was with the Red Cross, before suddenly claiming to be a British government agent. I’d had to, because he had a list of authorized personnel and I wasn’t on it and I didn’t have time for the inevitable runaround that path would have led to: Snowdrop disappearing to fetch someone higher up the chain, bluster about phone calls received from people whose names I couldn’t quite remember, and so on. No choice but to switch horses quickly and hope that the hint of top-secret hooha carried enough authority to sway him – and that Pritchard was curious enough to come out and get me, despite apparently warning every soldier in the country to lock me up on sight. I cursed myself for letting the local roadblocks lull me into complacency. The British prime minister was visiting – of course they would have something professional in place.