Black Pearl

by Peter Tonkin

  But this afternoon’s session began, as many of these did, with a simple history lesson. ‘Such armies as The Lord’s Resistance Army, M23 and the Army of Christ the Infant will take the boys and keep them alive,’ said Anastasia, not for the first time – driving home a message the girls dared never forget. ‘Their life in the army will be hard. But it will be life.’ She looked around the room, meeting each pair of wide brown eyes there. ‘But they rape and kill the girls. I have seen it and I know. Like Ado. Like Esan. Should any girl along the river meet such men, they will be dead or a sex slave used by all, all the time … Until they are no more use. And then they will be dead.’ She looked around the rows of wide-eyed girls – aged from ten to fifteen – sitting silently in front of her. ‘But not you!’ she shouted. ‘You are not slaves and fodder for animals like the Army of Christ the Infant! Here is who you are,’ said Anastasia.

  And Esan pulled a slide up on to the laptop which shone up on to the whiteboard. It showed an old photograph of a line of soldiers. All armed. All black. All women. Beneath the photograph there was writing in English, which Anastasia translated into Matadi for them: ‘“There they are, 4,000 warriors, the 4,000 black virgins of Dahomey, the monarch’s bodyguard, motionless in their war garments, with gun and knife in hand, ready to leap forward at the master’s signal. Old or young, ugly or beautiful, they are wonderful to look at. They are as well built as the male warriors and their attitude is just as disciplined and correct, lined up as though against a rope.” That was written by a man called Chauduin, who was held captive by them and lived to tell the tale in a book about his life.’

  She gestured. Esan pulled up another picture. A detailed, water-coloured drawing. This time of a single woman. Tall. In full uniform. Well armed, with a matchet at her waist, a musket in her right hand and the severed head of an enemy still dripping in her left. ‘Her name was Seh-Dong. She was a leader of the Dahomey Amazons,’ Anastasia explained. ‘The writing beneath comes from another book, this time by a man called Djivo. It says the Dahomey Amazons believed that, “We are men, not women. Those coming back from war without having conquered must die. If we beat a retreat our life is at the king’s mercy. Whatever town is to be attacked we must overcome it or we bury ourselves in its ruins. Our chief is the king of kings. As long as he lives we have nothing to fear. Our chief has given birth to us again. We are his wives, his daughters, his soldiers. War is our sport and pastime, it clothes and feeds us”.’

  She looked down at the girls sitting, enraptured, in front of her. ‘Remember,’ she said gently. ‘You are not victims. You are not slaves. You are not food for any men in any army.’ She gestured at the picture of Seh-Dong on the whiteboard, with her musket, her matchet and the severed head in her hand. ‘This is who you are.’

  ‘This is who we are,’ chanted the girls in unison. ‘This is who we are.’

  Spetsnaz

  It took the rest of the week and several more trips to Granville Harbour International airport before Max and Felix’s contingent were ready for the off. Even though all of the experts in mining, engineering, chemicals and civilian transport were already there, together with the Kamov chopper and everything else that had gone into the first, abortive expedition to Lac Dudo. A lot more large Russians arrived, but none was quite as huge as Ivan. And none proved as difficult to get through customs. After a while, they blurred into one big, bald, muscular mass for Richard. But, like Ivan, they were all impressively special ops. Like Ivan, in fact, all were Spetsnaz.

  Ivan took Richard and Robin under his wing when they were in the Zubr Volgograd, which so swiftly became his territory even though Caleb Maina was its captain. He did this for reasons that were not immediately obvious to either of them – though they, too, adopted the overpoweringly cheery young man. For Ivan knew his special forces. And he knew the men who were slowly filling up the soldier spaces on Caleb’s Zubr Volgograd, by reputation if not in person. But they all, oddly enough, seemed to know him and he became their natural leader long before Richard worked out that this had little to do with his rank as senior lieutenant – Stárshiy Leytenánt, as Kebila had called him – and more to do with his right to wear a Krapoviy or red beret.

  So that, one morning late in the second week, Ivan took Richard and Robin down to Volgograd’s main area, which was every bit as large as Stalingrad’s. While the morning was still cool, all the men who had come through the airport during the last ten days were engaged in fearsome exercises. Silent, apart from the odd grunt of effort. Focused. Honing themselves to a level Richard – who understood only too well that he was not special in quite their way – had never dreamed of attaining. Preparing themselves for eventualities he hoped with all his heart to avoid. He exchanged glances with Robin who shrugged, mouthed, ‘Boys!’ and rolled her eyes.

  But Ivan clearly had a purpose in mind. A point to prove. And the little talk he gave his two guests as the three of them walked through the echoing enormity of the place was his way of proving it. ‘You see those six there,’ Ivan began. ‘Army types. Military intelligence GRU regulars. Steady as rocks. Like those ones over there, the VDV airborne. They’re elite soldiers, like the Paras and the Green Berets. There’s a good solid squad of a dozen army men in all. They’ve been to Chechnya – right across the Caucasus, North and South Ossetia, and lived to tell the tale. That’s taken some doing, I can tell you. If the going gets tough and you can’t find me, you stick by them. They’ll never let you down.’ No sooner had he finished speaking than the men he was talking about stopped their individual routines, split into pairs and started practising dazzlingly quick fight moves.

  Ivan seemed hardly to notice. ‘But that little squad over there,’ he continued, directing Robin’s attention with a huge hand on her shoulder as light as a feather, as irresistible as gravity. ‘Different kettle of fish. FSB. Anti-terrorists – Alpha group and Vympel. They’ve been to Chechnya too, but more likely with intelligence rather than on the front line – though they work both sides, like your SAS. They’re here because they’re expert on how units like the Army of Christ are structured. How they arm and feed themselves. Where they get their financing, drugs, bullets. And how to go about stopping them. In the field. In their supply lines. In their heartlands. Eradicating them. Dead. Buried. It was Vympel and Alpha group, you may remember, who closed down the siege in the Beslan School back in 2004, though none of these guys were directly involved in that. Some of their fathers may have been involved in the storming of the Supreme Soviet building back in 1993, though. This is the new breed, however. And don’t believe all you read about how the special forces started falling to pieces after perestroika.’

  Robin could believe him. While the regular army men were still working one-on-one, these guys had started three-on-one and nobody appeared to be pulling any punches.

  ‘Will you be joining any of this, Ivan?’ she asked as a man the size of a single-decker bus went sailing through the air to crash on to the deck like a falling tree – only to bounce erect, laughing.

  ‘I’ve done my stint,’ he chuckled. ‘And I’m down for weapons later.’

  ‘Weapons?’ she teased. ‘That doesn’t sound too tough.’

  ‘We do it stark naked and blindfold, under water. And we don’t get to breathe till we’ve field-stripped and reassembled our weapon. Even if we get our what-nots tangled in our cocking mechanisms.’

  ‘And if you don’t do it in time?’ she asked, fascinated. Not least, thought Richard, by the mental picture.

  ‘You don’t breathe and you get sent home. Sometimes in a box. But I wanted to show you that last group over there, you see them? Police, or rather Politzia: Vityaz and RUS. The Vityaz have the same areas of expertise as the Vympel but their intelligence work is more internal. If the Beslan siege had been organized by the late Vyacheslav Ivankov’s Moskva brigada Mafiya kidnappers, say, instead of Shamil Basayev’s separatist Riyadus-Salikhin Battalion, then it would have been Vityaz and not the Vympel who went in.

 
; ‘Those guys doing the knife fighting – the ones with the real knives beside them, they’re the RUS. They’re Politzia too, but they’re here because they travel. I’ve talked to a couple of them in depth and they’ve been all over the world. Negotiating, being trained; training. They’re the real Africa hands. They’ve actually been on the ground out here. Libya, DRC, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique. They know the place. They know the jungle. They’ll be training the others up as they go. And the OMON police special units guys there, they’re the transport section. Military transport.’

  ‘Spetsnaz. What does that actually mean, nowadays?’ asked Richard, finding even his usually encyclopaedic knowledge taxed beyond its limit.

  ‘In many ways it means that they’ve all had similar training, and that’s about it. The edges are beginning to blur these days, I must admit. And that’s before you start to address the fact that many of these chaps are like me – they’ve come out of service and gone into the private sector as guns for hire anyway. The army men, the GRU chaps over there, will have been trained to a high degree of expertise in weapons handling, rappelling, explosives, marksmanship, counter-terrorism, how to survive the most brutal beatings, hand-to-hand combat, climbing, diving and underwater combat, long-range marksmanship, emergency medical procedures and demolition. The VDV get all that plus extra parachute work. Some of them, the regiment forty-five men, get boat training too. Most of the rest will have had some, if not all, of it. And they will all have received training in how to fight with everything from knives to shovels – as well as with their bare fists, of course.’

  ‘They all look pretty experienced,’ persisted Robin. ‘What sort of combat experience will they have had?’

  ‘They’ll have been involved in situations like the Chechen problems, the 2008 South Ossetia war which kind of rolled over into East Prigorodny, the civil war in Tajikistan, the war in Abkhazia. Dagestan. Georgia. The insurgency in the North Caucasus. Fighting Al-Qaeda in Syria back in 2012. The FSB and Politzia men will have been involved in situations like the Beslan School siege that I mentioned: Alpha group and Vympel. More recently, there have been a string of internal terrorist outrages for them to deal with – or to clear up after. The Moscow market bombing, the Nazran bombing and the Nevsky Express bombing, the Moscow Metro bombings, the Stavropol concert bombing, and of course the Domodedovo International Airport bombing. More recently still, there was the Dnipropetrovsk bombing in Ukraine, and the Makhachkala incident in Dagestan. Anyone dealing with anything more recent than that’s probably still in uniform.’

  As he finished speaking, he glanced at his watch. ‘Tishina!’ he ordered.

  There was instant silence. Stasis. Robin got the strange notion that even if the man the size of a bus had still been flying through the air he would simply have stopped there and hovered until Ivan’s next order. It was unnerving.

  ‘Obed!’ he said. ‘Poshli!’

  ‘Time for lunch,’ Richard translated cheerfully, as the small army of large Russians trooped off, in step, as though marching to war rather than to the showers and the mess.

  ‘Time for us to be off, then, said Robin. ‘I know all about Russian lunches. Even the salads are enormous.’

  ‘And considering what’s going on afterwards,’ added Richard, ‘there’s just too much temptation all round.’

  Ivan laughed. ‘It is probably best,’ he said. ‘It will be a working lunch in any case. Felix and Uncle Max are keen to get under way. If you want an interesting afternoon, I suggest you go across to Stalingrad and watch Captain Zhukov taking Colonel Kebila and his special forces aboard.’

  He leaned down between Richard and Robin with a huge grin and a boyish wink. ‘But I think you will find that Kebila’s special forces are nothing compared to my special forces.’

  Tension

  There was tension between the Zubrs right from the start. It was inevitable. When Richard remarked upon it to Robin, asking if she noticed it, she looked at him as though he was slow-witted. ‘Of course there’ll be tension; competition!’ she said. ‘They may be Russian and African, but they’re still men!’

  And Richard had to admit that she had a point. He had seen it often enough before. And in teams of women as much as in crews of men, to be fair. On one hand, it could hone everyone to performance standards that were almost Olympic. Or on the other it could lead to the kind of aggressive rivalry that led to punch-ups in pubs near football stadiums.

  Certainly, Ivan had made it clear that the Spetsnaz men looked down on the local soldiers. And a brief talk that afternoon as Colonel Kebila saw his special forces team aboard Stalingrad made it plain that the punctilious officer was equally unimpressed with the Russians. ‘Thugs and bully boys,’ he dismissively referred to Ivan’s men. ‘Body-builders. We need ballet dancers.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Richard.

  ‘I mean they are preparing for the wrong sort of war,’ shrugged Kebila.

  ‘They seem to be preparing for every sort of war they can,’ countered Richard warily.

  ‘Except for the correct one. They are going into a situation they have never experienced. Even their so-called Rus contingent, the ones who are supposed to have advised various armies in Africa. They have never been in anything like they will find upriver. And as for the rest of them, this is not like Chechnya – it is like Mount Karisoke. It is not Beslan. It is Benin La Bas!’

  Richard and Robin looked at each other, wondering where the colonel got his information. ‘So your men have an edge of local knowledge?’ asked Robin. Richard returned to the here and now, hoping that Kebila did not hear the undertone of is that all? that he himself seemed to discern within the question.

  But perhaps he did. ‘It is more than you think,’ answered the soilder stiffly. ‘Although they live and train in the city now, these are men of the jungle. Like their fathers, grandfathers and ancestors through the generations, though the focus is not from father to son, as some of your Western traditions are. As the Russian traditions are. You will find none of my people called the equivalent of Ivan Lavrentovich Yagula – because his father is Lavrenty Mikhailovich Yagula and his father was Mikhail Ivanovich Yagula! Such traditions tend to exist so that possessions can be passed from one generation to the next, and my people, the Matadi, do not operate like that. The jungle is what we know. Although we make little of the fact. Especially in the face of ignorance and lack of understanding among our Western associates. These men are all Poro. Now, that has its negative aspects, I realize. But they were all initiated at some stage into – what shall we call them? The mysteries of the jungle. Those – and there are many – who were raised in the shanty town under the old regime, will have been taken away from their families at a relatively early age and brought up by Poro masters in the forests of the delta. If you remember, when you first came to our country, it was only a step or two from the shanties to the jungles.’

  ‘So most of your men were raised wild? A bit like Mowgli in the Jungle Book?’ asked Robin ironically.

  She had seen the only negative side of these tribal traditions. The deadly use that ruthless men like General Nlong and Colonel Odem made of the Poro gods like Ngoboi. She had talked to both Anastasia and Celine, who had seen women’s hearts ripped still beating from their chests and fed to men with sharpened teeth. Seen the bodies of nuns literally butchered – to be cooked and served to the starving army.

  But Richard had also talked to Anastasia and Celine about Esan and Ado – the boy member of a Poro society and the girl member of Sande society. He knew that Ado and Esan had stayed with Celine and Anastasia, guiding them, helping them, tending them – so he knew how the youngsters’ knowledge of the wild places had actually kept the two older women alive. Without the kind of jungle lore Kebila was talking about, no one would have survived to tell the tale of Moses Nlong’s atrocities. No one would have been able to organize resistance, and – eventually – rescue.

  So, next morning, when Ivan asked him in turn about Kebila’s com
ments, Richard didn’t waste time asking where the Russian got his information, he simply tried to give a balanced account of what he believed the situation to be. ‘Kebila’s point is simple. Your men know a hell of a lot about fighting, but they haven’t been briefed on fighting in the sort of terrain you’ll face.’

  ‘And his men have, of course.’ Ivan’s sandy eyebrow rose quizzically.

  ‘Since childhood. In the tribal traditions of this place, young boys are taken from their families at a young age and put into groups with older boys and men. They are then taught everything that their teachers know about the jungle – practical, pharmacological and spiritual. Where the trails are. If there are no trails, how to make them. What the calls and cries of all the jungle creatures are and which animal, bird or whatever made them. How to track them, trap them, cook and eat them.’

  ‘I thought there were almost no animals there. I thought they’d all been slaughtered for bush meat.’

  ‘Most of them have – but these guys are still trained in what they used to sound like. How they used to behave. How to prepare them. It’s an enormous body of lore and knowledge. And they’re taught about the plants – which ones kill and which ones heal. God knows, there are one hell of a lot of plants up there, ranging in size from a couple of millimetres to a hundred metres high. It’s the kingdom of the plants.’ He stopped, drew breath, and met Ivan’s highly amused gaze. ‘And, less positively from our Western perspective, perhaps, they’re taught about a range of jungle gods and spirits which govern the laws that bind families, tribes and societies together. In the final analysis, that’s why General Nlong and Colonel Odem and their kind make the kids who join their armies do such barbaric things – they want to make sure the kids have broken such fundamental Poro laws that their families and tribes are forever closed to them. Otherwise, of course, they’d just vanish into the jungle first chance they get. So they have no alternative but to stay with the Army of Christ the Infant or whoever. They simply have nowhere else to go.’