‘We need water,’ I said. ‘And food. And then a shower and a bed.’
He continued to stare at me, uncertainty written on his face.
I tried again. ‘We were staying here a few days ago. I’m Jack Griffiths. I’m with Decisive Measures.’
His face now wreathed in smiles, he clapped his hands to summon his staff. ‘Mr Griffiths, of course. I will have your room prepared at once. Perhaps you would prefer to shower before you eat.’
I shook my head. ‘Water and bread now.’
He barked an order at a slouching waiter, then ushered us to the dining room. I felt my knees buckle and had to slump in a chair before I fell. The waiter brought a jug of water and I gulped some down, then fell on the basket of naan bread he proffered.
Layla laid a warning hand on my arm. ‘Take it easy,’ she said. ‘Eat and drink a little, then wait before you swallow some more. Give your body time.’ She sipped at her water as she spoke, then took a small mouthful of bread.
We sat there for half an hour, hardly speaking a word, just eating, drinking and smiling at each other. At length, I pushed back my chair and got unsteadily to my feet. ‘I’ve got to have a shower but I think I’m too hyper to sleep.’
She nodded. ‘Me too. Let’s get away from these people, though.’
As we walked through the lobby, I stopped at the desk and picked up the phone, planning to call the Decisive Measures HQ in the hope of getting word on the situation at Bohara. The line was dead. The owner spread his hands. ‘Out of order, I’m afraid. The phones seem to be out all over the capital.’
I tried to read his expression. ‘Is everything quiet here?’
He gave a flustered smile. ‘It’s very quiet. Not many guests.’
‘That’s not what I meant. I was talking about the rebels.’
‘There is fighting in the mountains, but they will not dare attack Freetown.’ He glanced around the lobby, measuring the effect of his words on the hotel guests, then leaned over the counter and lowered his voice. ‘There are rumours, though. People are leaving the city.’
‘What rumours? Which people?’
‘The president is unpopular. The army has not been paid. The president’s son flew to Guinea yesterday.’ He tapped his nose. ‘They say the aircraft that took him has returned to await its next passenger.’
‘We’ll get a better idea later,’ I said to Layla as we walked to the stairs. ‘If the phones are still knackered I’ll go to the High Commission and contact Decisive Measures from there.’
‘And I’ll go to Medicaid International,’ she said. ‘I should have reported in already; they’ll be worried about me.’
‘To hell with it,’ I said. ‘Let’s catch up on the world later on. We’ve earned a bit of rest after what we’ve been through.’
When we reached the first floor, we stood in silence on the landing, looking at each other. I ached to take her to my room, crush her to me and bury myself in her body, then sleep with our arms wrapped around each other, cut off from whatever awaited us. But still I hesitated, unsure of her response. ‘Would? Do you?’ I began at last.
She stood on tiptoe, took my face in her cool hands and kissed me, but when she felt me responding, she stepped back. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I can’t, not yet. It’s too soon. But I don’t want to be on my own. Can we just?’
For answer, I put my arm round her waist, supporting her as we shambled away down the corridor to my room.
The rifle I had left behind a week before was still propped in a corner down the side of a wardrobe. I sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘You shower first.’
She emerged twenty minutes later, her hair damp and her body wrapped in a threadbare towel, barely long enough to cover her. I saw the marks of lacerations and dark, purpling bruises on her thighs and felt anger burning in me. As she looked towards me I averted my gaze, as if I’d been caught spying on her.
I stood under the trickling shower, soaping my hair and body until the dirt had been washed away. I checked myself in the bathroom mirror and was shocked at my condition. There were black, sunken hollows under my eyes, I had lost several pounds in weight and my skin was a mass of abrasions, bruises and insect bites.
I pulled on some clean clothes and walked through to the bedroom. Layla was lying on the bed covered by the sheet. She held out her arms to me. ‘Come and hold me while we talk.’
I lay next to her, feeling the unaccustomed softness of the bed beneath me, and very aware of the warmth of her body against mine.
‘There’s something I have to ask you,’ Layla began. ‘The last time we were in this hotel, you spent most of the evening avoiding telling me why you were in Sierra Leone. After all we’ve been through, do you feel ready to tell me yet why an otherwise apparently sane and decent human being would want to become a mercenary here?’
‘All right.’ I hesitated. I didn’t want to lie to her but I was afraid of what she might think if I told her the truth. ‘There was an operation in Kosovo,’ I said at last. ‘It went badly wrong.’
‘Tell me about it. Only if you want to, of course, it’s none of my business, but…’ Her voice trailed away.
I held her gaze. ‘No, I want to tell you. It was when the Serbs were really tearing the country apart. We were flying non-stop missions looking for targets – tanks, artillery, anything that presented itself. Then base picked up intelligence on some suspected hostiles. My wingman and I were sent to investigate. We made a few passes over the area and I glimpsed some vehicles hidden in the woods. I made another pass, then another, trying to decide. I was also hoping to draw some fire that would have confirmed them as hostile.
‘My wingman said they were definitely hostile, but I still wasn’t sure. I went round again, put the heli into the hover near the wood and then I saw people sprinting for the vehicles. I hesitated a little longer, then I made up my mind. We attacked. We flew in at low-level and I fired my rocket pods at the vehicles. I was circling for another attack when I saw a figure running out of the trees. It was a woman wearing a long black skirt. She was on fire. She raised her arms above her head as if she were pleading with me. Then she fell to the ground.’ Tears were now streaming down my face. ‘She’d managed to escape from the Serbs. A group of her people were hiding in the woods with their farm trucks and tractors and carts. If the Serbs had found them, the men would have been killed and the women raped. But they’d survived. The Serbs had gone. Then I killed them.’
Layla didn’t reply, but she reached up and stroked my face as I got myself under some sort of control.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ve never told anyone about that before.’
We lay in silence for some time. ‘I used to dream that one day I would be famous,’ Layla said. She smiled. ‘But the older I get, the more I realise that life is about really small things. If we can do a little bit more good than harm while we’re passing through, that’s probably about as good as it gets for most people.’
‘In that case, my personal ledger is way out of balance,’ I said.
She gripped my arm, her fingers digging into my flesh, trying to impress upon me the importance of what she was saying. ‘Then that’s all the more reason to start balancing the books now. You can’t change the past, but you can change the future. You don’t want to be looking back in old age and still seeing that woman in Kosovo.’
She fell silent, studying my face, and when she spoke again her voice was little more than a whisper. ‘I killed a child once. It was when I was training as a doctor. I was a houseman, a junior doctor. I was dog-tired at the end of a very long shift, but of course that’s no excuse. Somehow – I don’t know how, I knew what the right dose should be – I gave the baby three times the normal dose of a drug. Her heart stopped. I killed her.’
‘But you’ve saved hundreds of others since.’
‘I killed that one. When I close my eyes I can still see her little crumpled figure in the cot and her parents turning to look at me and asking, “Why? Wh
at happened?” And do you know what? I didn’t even have the guts to admit what I had done.’ She fell silent again, staring past me. ‘So, we’ve both had to learn to live with mistakes,’ she said eventually. ‘I can understand why you left the air force, but that still doesn’t explain why you came to Sierra Leone.’
‘I didn’t ever want to be in a position where I could get it so terribly, horribly wrong again. But flying helicopters is what I do. There’s no civilian work; there are thirty pilots for every job that’s going. I thought this would be a safe option; not many people want this kind of posting, but it suited me.’
She gave me a gentle smile. ‘If the reasons you joined the air force were good ones, what happened in Kosovo shouldn’t negate them. It was a tragic accident, but you can’t just run away from it.’ She paused. ‘I ducked my responsibilities to the family of that dead girl and I’ll never forgive myself for that, but I didn’t give up medicine because of it. I know that nothing I can ever do will end the heartbreak her parents must feel. All I can do is try to help other sick children and make sure I never make such a terrible mistake again.’ She held my gaze as she spoke. ‘You’ve got to do the same kind of thing, Jack. You can’t just sit on the sidelines, least of all in Sierra Leone. If you’re here at all, you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution.’ She fell silent. ‘I’m sorry. I’m a fine one to lecture you, aren’t I? I spend my life butting my head against every obstacle that presents itself.’
‘We make a good team then,’ I said. ‘We cancel out some of each other’s weaknesses.’
She gave me a long, thoughtful look. ‘That’s one way of looking at it. But what if we cancel out each other’s strengths instead?’
‘If we did, we wouldn’t be having this conversation now. We’d be lying dead back there in that jungle somewhere.’
The light was fading now. She kissed me, then sat up. ‘I’m going back to my room,’ she said. ‘I need to sleep now.’
‘Sleep here,’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘I need to be alone for a while to think things through.’ She held on to my hand for a moment, then stood up.
I watched her all the way to her door and as it closed behind her, I whispered, ‘I love you,’ to the empty corridor.
Despite my exhaustion, it was a long time before I fell asleep. When I did, I was soon in the grip of the familiar nightmare: the thunder of guns, the burning figure and the crushing feelings of helplessness and guilt. Then, finally, I was awake, with the sound of explosions and gunfire in my ears. This was no dream.
I rolled off the bed on to the floor, then crawled to the window and peered out. Dawn had not yet broken, but I could see the flash of explosions and the lurid glare of flames.
I picked up the rifle. As I felt my way along the darkened corridor towards Layla’s room, I heard a door open and saw her silhouetted in the flash of another explosion in the heart of the city. I called her name and we clung to each other.
‘I was just coming to find you,’ she said, her voice shaking with fear. ‘What do we do?’
‘Try to find out what’s going on.’
‘Are we safe in the hotel?’
‘I guess so, as safe as anywhere. If we go charging out into the night, we’re just putting ourselves in greater danger. We’ll stay here until we know what’s happening.’
We groped our way to the stairs and went down to the lobby. There was no one to be seen. The hotel staff and, more worryingly, the security guards paid to protect the building had obviously reached their own conclusions about the shooting. All had fled. The owner was not in evidence, but his office was unlocked. I tried to dial the British High Commission, but the lines were still dead. There was a transistor radio on the desk, but when I turned it on I heard only the hiss of static from the local channels. It was another ominous sign.
I tuned the radio to the BBC World Service instead. We had to endure forty minutes of magazine programmes before the next news bulletin. We were the lead item: ‘Reports are coming in of an attempted coup in Sierra Leone. Sections of the armed forces have mutinied and made simultaneous attacks on the airport, the radio station and Government House in the capital, Freetown. There are unconfirmed reports of killing and looting in the capital.’
I returned to the local channel. A scratched recording of martial music was playing, but a few minutes later it was replaced by a rebel spokesman. He announced that the government and ‘key installations’ were already in rebel hands and proclaimed an immediate curfew, breaches of which would be punished by death. He warned ‘foreign troops not to get involved with the internal affairs of the new republic of Sierra Leone’.
I forced a smile. ‘I guess that means me and the rest of the boys.’
‘What do we do now?’
‘We need to know a bit more about what’s going on. Meanwhile we stay put. We’d be safest from the firing somewhere near the heart of the building, but I guess we’ll be better off up where we can see what’s happening. If the rebels decide to storm the hotel, we need enough warning to be able to make a break for it. I don’t fancy our chances’ – I held her gaze – ‘especially yours – if they find us here.’
We went back to the lobby. The handful of other residents had congregated there. They had dressed in haste and now stood debating what to do. Some were for making a dash for the airport at once; others preferred to wait for daylight.
The hotel owner had appeared and was fussing around the group, imploring them not to panic, to wait to see what daylight brought. It was hard to tell if his concern for them was personal or financial.
We left them and went down to the kitchens for some food and water, then up to the first floor. The door to the corner suite was locked, but I kicked it open. The suite had windows looking south along the beach road where some of the expatriate houses were, and east, down the hill to the city centre. We drew the curtains, leaving only a chink through which we could see out, then we sat back to watch and wait, huddled together, her head resting on my arm.
Explosions continued to light up the night and there were regular, sustained bursts of small-arms fire.
Just before dawn, two vehicles crammed with people stormed out of the hotel car park and away down the hill. The group advocating a break for the airport had obviously won the day.
We tracked the tail lights of the cars until they disappeared from sight. Shortly afterwards there was a prolonged burst of gunfire from the direction they had taken. Our eyes met, but neither of us spoke, though I felt Layla shaking as she cried soundlessly.
The first light of dawn revealed a pall of grey smoke hanging over the city. Peering out through binoculars from our hiding place, I saw rebel soldiers advancing along the road. Most wore sunglasses, T-shirts and stolen clothes piled layer upon layer over their threadbare fatigues. Like the rebels we’d encountered before, they had mirror fragments and bits of multicoloured plastic woven into their hair.
As they moved through the streets, they searched each building by shooting wildly into it. Then the looting began. The streets lower down the hill were soon strewn with debris and smashed glass.
‘Where are the government troops?’ I asked.
‘Don’t hold your breath. They defected to the rebels en masse in the last uprising. They’re on whichever side they think will win.’
From the windows facing the beach road, I could see the homes of expatriates being stripped. The Lebanese traders were the most vulnerable targets. Those who had not taken the precaution of buying the protection of the rebel leaders – and perhaps even some who had – were robbed of everything. Most people had already fled or gone into hiding. The terrible screams we could hear echoing through the deserted streets told of the fate many others were suffering.
At noon, the rebels began to advance towards the hotel.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘If we stay, we’re finished. Let’s get out of here.’
‘To where?’
I shrugged. ‘The High Commission.
’
She gave me a doubtful look. ‘I think our best destination is the Medicaid International compound. I’ll be needed there anyway. There’ll be a lot of wounded. And whatever else the rebels are destroying, I’m sure they won’t attack there.’
‘I wish I shared your confidence,’ I said. ‘The High Commission has well-armed guards to protect it. The rebels are likely to leave it alone because they won’t want to provoke a direct intervention by British troops. It’s a much safer bet.’
‘For you maybe, but I have to reach Medicaid International. I’m a medic, Jack, I’m needed there.’
We ran down to the lobby. Only the owner remained, sobbing and wringing his hands. He ran to us and seized my arm. ‘What will I do?’ he said. ‘Please bring help, bring soldiers before it is too late.’
I gently disengaged his hand. ‘You should get out now,’ I said. ‘If you stay, you’ll be in great danger.’
‘If I leave my hotel, it will be destroyed.’
‘Perhaps, but if you stay, they will loot it anyway. Don’t let them kill you too. You must leave now.’
He turned away and disappeared into his office. A moment later, I heard the sound of the key being turned.
We went downstairs to the deserted kitchens, took some more water and a little food, and then slipped out of the back door of the hotel and ran off down the access road to the beach.
We sprinted along the sands, using the dunes flanking the beach to screen us from any pursuers. We ran for half a mile, then threw ourselves down, gasping for breath.
‘We can’t stop yet,’ I said, as soon as I could speak. I grabbed a handful of dead palm fronds. ‘Come on. Down to the sea.’
When we reached the water’s edge, I led Layla through the shallows for another few hundred yards. Then, lungs bursting, I stopped again. I turned to make sure the beach was still empty behind us, then gave Layla the rifle and sent her on ahead into the dunes. I followed, walking backwards, erasing our tracks with the palm fronds.
Layla found a hiding place among the dunes from where we could keep watch. I swept away the last marks we had made and then lay down beside her. I could feel her heart pounding, but when she turned to speak to me her voice was level. ‘What now?’
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