Besides the civilians in the terminal, there were a conspicuous number of soldiers with lethal-looking automatic weapons. The soldiers stood around in groups of two and three, laughing, talking, smoking, a tough-looking lot, not the retired, rent-a-cop types you would find doing security in the States. The impression in the terminal was of a war zone.
It was a first impression that became a lasting one as I saw the same wartime atmosphere everywhere I went in the country.
A large black man with a big chest, thick arms, and a black cigar that smelled like roasted dog shit was waiting for me as I came into the general reception area.
“Liberte?” he asked.
It wasn’t hard to recognize me—I was the only guy who got off the plane wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap.
“I’m Cross, security manager at the mine. Eduardo couldn’t make it.”
His English was perfect. He was dressed in tan khakis and the type of leather-canvas jungle boots the army used in Vietnam. Put an Uzi in his hand and he’d look tougher than the soldiers decorating the place.
The missing Eduardo Marques was the mine manager.
“Is he dead?” I asked, inferring that would be the only reason the mine manager shouldn’t be at the airport to meet the new owner.
Cross shrugged. “In this country, being dead is sometimes an improvement over the living conditions.”
His body language neoned bad temper. Like the country, Cross stuck me as something of a war zone. Some guys wonder how much money you make when you meet them—others wonder how tough you are. His body language communicated his feelings as I came into the reception area—he’d just as soon stomp me as shake hands.
Things are pretty smelly in Denmark when your employees don’t give a shit about you. Three minutes in Angola and I was ready to jump on the next plane out. Only my newfound poverty, innate greed, and the terrifying prospects of having to work for a living kept me from heading for the ticket counter. There was nothing waiting for me back in the States except a job slapping hamburger patties at McDonald’s—and I wasn’t qualified for that.
Controlling my own sour mood, I ignored the asshole and went for my bags. I didn’t know if he was pissed because the mine manager copped out and made him come out to pick me up, or if he just had a foul disposition. I grabbed my bags and followed him. He didn’t offer to help. I followed him across the terminal with a bag in each hand and my carry-on strapped over my shoulder. I guess I was lucky he didn’t have a bag or I’d be carrying that, too.
A battered old Mercedes that looked like it had lost a few Third World Wars was waiting outside. The dents and bullet holes were rusted. Hell, in this hot, wet climate, people probably rusted.
On the driver’s door was a faded sign indicating that it had once been a Lisbon taxi. The driver was smoking and talking to a uniformed guard who was dressed differently than the army personnel inside the terminal and patrolling outside. The guard wore camouflage fatigues without military insignia, had an AK-47 hung over his shoulder, and a cigarette dangling from his mouth. I took him to be a private gun.
The driver opened the trunk for me and stood aside so I could put my bags in. That’s okay, I thought, when we got to the hotel, I’d tip myself.
The driver and guard got in the front and I climbed in back with Cross.
“We’re going straight to the hotel,” Cross said, as we pulled away from the curb. “In case you didn’t notice the government troops with the machine guns back at the airport or the private one we have riding shotgun, Luanda is not user-friendly.”
The people on the streets didn’t seem to have any better dispositions than my companions. The streets were crowded with people, fat cats rubbing shoulders with people who looked defeated. Emaciated people and well-fed specimens carrying umbrellas and briefcases. Squalid mud-walled shacks with tin roofs lined the roadway. Emaciated kids with skinny frames and big eyes squatted in the dirt in front of shanties and stared at us as we drove by.
“A musseque,” Cross said. “Shantytown. There’re about ten million people in the country and three or four million of them are displaced by the civil war. They crowd into miserable slums because they have nowhere else to go. A lot of them end up in Luanda. There’re a couple million people living in a city that was built to hold forty or fifty thousand. That’s a lot of shit and piss in the gutter and water supply. While you’re here, drink nothing and eat nothing that isn’t completely sanitized. Licking the water off your lips in the shower or washing your toothbrush can give you a dose of something that will give you the shits for a week—if it doesn’t kill you. It’s supposed to be a modern city but don’t let the high-rises fool you. A little glass and chrome doesn’t make this place civilized or healthy.
“When you need the velvet rubbed off your cock, you call a number in Amsterdam and they send down a whore for a couple days. It costs a couple grand, but in a country where the four-letter word is AIDS, any other sex except a hand job is suicide.”
He grinned. He seemed to enjoy letting me know what a hell I had stepped into. “But even healthy people often die from lead poisoning from a twelve-year-old kid with a nervous trigger finger.”
I wondered if he was deliberately painting a bleak picture of the place so I’d tell the taxi to turn around and take me back to the airport. Not that he had to try hard. Luanda was a harrowing experience. If the bugs and filth didn’t get you, a bullet might—Marni had told me that a sizable chunk of the rebel army were twelve-year-olds who the commanders deliberately addicted to drugs so they could control them and make them good killers. At the moment, I felt more depressed from the pathos I saw than threatened.
I didn’t see much of a Portuguese heritage to the place. Maybe it got blown away and burned up in the colony-era war before independence and the civil war that began in 1975. The only Portuguese flavor I saw were the names of the streets and storefronts. RUA AMILCAR CABRAL, a sign said. The sign had rusty bullet holes.
The streets were paved with ruts, the busses were battered and abused smoking sardine cans with people packed inside, hanging onto the back, and sitting on the roof. Some of the bikes I saw were running on rims.
White paint on a wall proclaimed, SOCIALISMO O MUERTE! Socialism or death. A heritage from the heady days of communism, before the fall of the Evil Empire. But someone had crossed out part of it, leaving it to read, SO MUERTE!
Only Death.
There was nothing subtle about the Third World. It stepped right up and smacked you, getting in your face and under your skin. The jokes I made to Marni on the plane didn’t seem so funny now. Her lecture on the horrors of war that oil and diamonds brought to Angola came home.
“What do you think of our little capital, bubba?”
“It’s crowded,” I said. “And it stinks.”
Cross gave me a look that didn’t conceal his contempt for the rich American he picked up at the airport. “You’re going to find Angola an education, pal. It’s a pit stop on the road to hell. Maybe it’s even the finishing line.”
“Your English is good. Did you go to school in the States?”
Cross exploded with laughter. “Yeah, if you consider Michigan City, Indiana, part of the country. I went to Indiana State and played football. Would have went pro but I fucked up my knee.”
“You’re an American.”
“No shit, José.” He tossed his cigar out the window and spat after it.
It was pretty stupid of me. “Cross” was a long way from being a Portuguese or African name. It must have been the heat that kept me from thinking straight. Or maybe I just hadn’t gotten past his attitude.
I leaned closer to him and locked eyes.
“My name is Win Liberte, not José, not Bubba, and I ain’t your fuckin’ pal. Now, the fact that you’re such a prick to me—your employer—means you don’t give a shit about your job. Which is okay, because I don’t give a shit about you, either. But as long as we’re hanging out together, let’s have some mutual respect. Or
you can go fuck yourself and get out at the next corner.”
Cross slowly lit another cigar, appraising me out of the corner of his eye as he flooded the car with foul smoke. “Well, you have teeth, I’ll say that. You’re going to need them. If you want my advice, tell the driver to turn around and take you back to the airport. You may be hell on wheels at the cotillion ball and the country-club dances, but you’re into something that would put the fear of the Lord into a Delta Force unit.
“Angola’s the kind of war zone those TV talking-heads news people cover sitting in New York or Atlanta while couch-potato Americans switch channels, trying to find news about the latest celebrity divorce because the horrors coming out of this part of Africa are too unreal for them to goggle over. Shit, most news people are too damn scared to come here and cover it. It’s not just a war, but a way of life, supervised by all the demons in hell.
“If you’re gonna hang around Angola, you better get used to seeing children starving to death in their mother’s arms, prostitutes with AIDS doing tricks on street corners, men who can’t pick their nose because both their arms were cut off or they’re crawling in the dirt because their legs have been blown off by land mines. One of the many records this shithole country holds is more lives and limbs lost to land mines than anywhere else in the world.”
Cross gave me another appraising look. “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Maybe you thought it would be an adventure to come to Africa and see your own diamond mine. Maybe you thought you’d safari dress like Stewart Granger and shoot an elephant or two, and have the natives call you bwana. Okay, now that you’ve had your reality check, get yourself a ticket back to where people don’t shit—and die—in the gutters, and kids don’t teethe on AK-47s.”
I stared out the window. “I don’t like Angola. And I think you’re an asshole with a chip on your shoulder. Not to mention your fucking cigars stink.” I grinned at him. “But I’m here for the duration, pal. What do you have to say about that?”
He snicked cigar ash on the floor and gave me a calculating look.
“My name ain’t Pal.”
I checked into the Hotel Presidente Meridien on Avenida 4 de Fevereiro. I didn’t know why the street was named the Fourth of February or why other streets I saw had date names, but it wasn’t hard to guess. The dates were victories in war or revolution. And the victors got to name the streets and put up statues.
I took a shower and stood on the balcony, sucking down a cold beer, checking out the busy, noisy, dirty street below. People, cars, bikes, and carts jostled each other like carnival bumper cars. The reflection of the setting sun turned the bay into the black gold of an oil slick.
I never realized until now what a comfortable life I had led. Never worried about money—hell, never even thinking about money because it was always there. So was food, fresh sheets, clean water. I could travel coast to coast in the States and never worry about where I took a drink of water. I’m sure the humidity in Angola probably carried something that wasn’t good for you.
When the sun was down, I left the room to meet Cross in the hotel lounge. I was surprised he didn’t just drop me off in front of the hotel and continue on to wherever he was headed.
I hadn’t made up my mind yet about Cross. I didn’t care about his attitude. Probably the only way to survive in this hellhole was to get thick-skinned and mean-tempered. But I needed allies and Cross had one trait that I liked—he was blunt. What you saw is what you got. You’d think nothing short of a mine cave-in would have kept Eduardo, the manager, from meeting the owner at the airport. Which told me I wasn’t high on his list, either. Was it that hard to get good help? It was a dumb question. Hell, it was probably impossible.
Which gave rise to the question of what Cross was doing in Angola. And why Eduardo was sticking around, running a loser mine in a war zone. There had to be easier and safer ways to make money. They sure as hell weren’t on a humanitarian mission for the mine owner or the warring factions that kept tearing the country apart. That whittled it down to one thing—they were making money. And it had to be plenty of money to make it worthwhile to hang around a war zone and risk murder, kidnapping, and disease.
And that raised another question. If they were making money from my mine, why wasn’t I?
In the lounge, I sat down at the table Cross had staked out and ordered a beer, no glass. I had traveled in the Yucatan and Central America and knew better than to order anything that didn’t come out of a sealed bottle. If it had to be put into a glass or needed ice, even in a decent hotel, the risk of an attack of Montezuma’s revenge went up.
“What’s there to do in this town?” I asked.
“Nothing’s safe, outside of a few hotels and restaurants. But if you want to tempt fate, for excitement, there are boites, discos with American and Brazilian music, and kizombas, African-style nightclubs. They have local music and food like goat meat and a sticky ball of smashed yams called stodge. You don’t want to go near any of them. Even if you’re safe inside, you can be murdered three feet from the front door. And you can figure any cunt you stick your dick into is infected with AIDS. People talk about AIDS like it was the common cold, that’s how common it is. If you have a serious death wish that needs satisfying, you can trot through the musseque, shantytown, anytime day or night.”
“If this place is such a hellhole, then why are you here?”
“Not for the scenery, that’s for damn sure. I came for the same reason other Americans and Europeans are here—money. I got an undergraduate degree in engineering and hired on with an oil company working the Cabinda, an enclave north, up the coast. The area ended up belonging to Angola despite the fact it’s surrounded on three sides by the Congo. Working an oil field turned out to be a little too regimented for me. I got diamond fever and left oil to prospect for them.”
“How did you get into mine security?”
“Being broke. Small-time diamond mining is as risky as buying lottery tickets. But it has that same lure, that a little money and sweat will get you the big one. I’m still running some diamond claims on the side, but I needed a job to keep me in beer and beans.”
“You must have hit it big to quit your job as my security manager.” We both knew he hadn’t quit. Yet. So far it was still talk.
“I haven’t hit shit. I’m quitting so I don’t get killed babysitting the absentee owner who decided to drag his pretty ass out of Manhattan to visit one of his feudal domains.”
I looked behind me and around the room. “Where’s this asshole owner you keep bad-mouthing? Let’s get him and kill him.”
“I apologize. Your ass isn’t pretty. But you don’t understand diamond mining in Angola. If you did, you wouldn’t be here. Let’s start at the top. This country’s been at war for over thirty years, first against the Portuguese colonial rule, then rebels supported by the U.S. against the communist regime supported by Moscow and Havana. The C.I.A. and thousands of Cuban troops have gone home and there’s a peace treaty, but that’s all on the surface. The political pact is nothing but a piece of paper no one cares about and that the leaders on both sides give nothing but lip service to. That’s because the fight is not over political freedom, but control of the oil fields and diamond industry.
“When you were a kid, I’m sure you learned in school about the Gold Rushes to California and Alaska, miners packing a six-gun while they stood knee-deep in creeks panning for gold with one hand and fighting off claim jumpers and Indians with the other. Well, bubb—Win, it’s the same thing here, only the guys jumping claims in Africa have helicopter gunships, machine guns, tanks, and air-to-ground missiles.”
“The rebels took over the mines?”
“Not the actual operation, but only because they don’t know how to run a diamond mine. Let’s say they own the mines and lease them back to people like you. And they come by each month to collect a percentage of the take as the rent. If they think you’re holding out on them, they kill you.
“Kind of li
ke the Mafia, but those dudes only kill when it’s necessary for business. Here, if the rebels or government troops don’t like the color of your shirt, they kill you. But only if you’re not a big payer. A while back they kidnapped a bunch of Europeans from mines and marched them hundreds of miles into the bush. It wasn’t for a picnic. The Euros had been a little slow in their payments.
“But the rebels aren’t stupid, they don’t kill the golden gooses, except when they feel they need to make an example now and then. Like whacking off the arms of their own people. Do that to the men of one village and a thousand other villages suddenly fall into line.”
“It sounds like organized, legalized murder. And chaos.”
“Murder, massacre, genocide, they cover all the bases. And it is organized. The guy who comes around to collect your rent reports to someone else, right up to Jonas Savimbi himself, the man who heads the rebel organization called UNITA. You heard of him?”
“No,” I lied. He was the guy Marni said was a homicidal maniac, but she threw in a bunch of initials like the UNITA and I couldn’t remember who was on first.
Cross threw up his hands in frustration and looked around the lounge as if he was trying to spot an exit. “You sure as hell did your homework, didn’t you, bubba? Well, let me tell you about the guy who may be responsible for your death. President Reagan called him a freedom fighter, characterizing him as a regular Abe Lincoln for Angola.”
“That’s encouraging.”
“Only if you didn’t know Reagan was senile and that his wife’s astrologer was running the country. But the American political attitude about Savimbi is a classic example of American politicians being as dumb as they can. If the devil said he was anticommunist, our political leaders would make a pact with him—which they’ve done at one time or another in most of the Third World.
Heat of Passion Page 13