Soldier N: Gambian Bluff

by David Monnery

  And then there was the gunfire. Nothing steady, no long bursts, just single shots every minute or so, from wildly different directions, as if an endless series of individual murders was being committed all over the town.

  It was eerie, and frightening. At Jobo’s house his mother pulled him inside and shut the door almost in the same motion, as if afraid to let the contagion in. McGrath climbed back into the jeep and laid the Browning on the seat beside him, feeling the hairs rising on the nape of his neck. He engaged the gears and took off, hurtling back up the street faster than was prudent, but barely fast enough for his peace of mind.

  It was only half a mile to the dim lights of McCarthy Square, only forty seconds or so, but it felt longer. At the square he slowed, wondering where to go. The Atlantic Hotel offered a whites-only haven, but there would be guards there, maybe guards who were looking for him, and he knew he would feel more restricted, more vulnerable, surrounded by fellow Europeans. Particularly if the rebels suddenly got trigger-happy with their tourist guests. No, he decided, the Carlton offered more freedom of movement, more ways out. And he could sleep on the roof.

  The Party envoys, along with an armed guard of a dozen or so Field Force men, arrived at the prison soon after dark, and after a heated discussion with the warden, which ended with his being temporarily consigned to one of his own cells, they addressed the assembled prisoners in the dimly lit exercise yard. Moussa Diba and Lamin Konko listened as attentively as everyone else.

  There had been a change of government, the speaker told them, and all prisoners, with the exception of the two convicted murderers, were being offered amnesty in return for a month’s enlistment in the service of the new government. They would not be asked to fight against fellow Gambians or workers, only against foreigners seeking to invade the country. If they chose not to enlist, that was up to them. They would simply be returned to their cells to serve out their sentences.

  ‘What do you think?’ Konko asked Diba.

  ‘Sounds like a way out,’ Diba said with a grin. He was still inwardly laughing at the exemption of the two murderers, whom everybody in the prison knew to be among the gentlest of those incarcerated there. Both had killed their wives in a fit of jealous rage, and now spent all their time asking God for forgiveness. Some of the thieves, on the other hand, would cut a throat for five dalasi. He would himself for ten.

  ‘I’ve only got two years more in here,’ Konko said. ‘I’d rather do them than get killed defending a bunch of politicians.’

  ‘We won’t,’ Diba insisted. ‘Look, if they’re coming here to get us out, they must be desperate. It must be all craziness out there in Banjul. We’ll have no trouble slipping away from whatever they’ve got planned for us, and then we hide out for a while, see how the situation is, get hold of some money and get across into Senegal when it looks good. No problem. Right, brother?’

  Konko sighed. ‘OK,’ he said with less than total conviction. ‘I guess out there must be better than being in here.’

  There’s women out there,’ Diba said. Anja was out there. And with any luck he would have her tonight.

  The two of them joined the queue of those waiting to accept the offer of amnesty. Since only three of the prison’s two hundred and seventeen eligible inmates turned down the offer it was a long queue, and almost an hour had passed before the new recruits were drawn up in marching order on the road outside. They were kept standing there for several minutes, swatting at the mosquitoes drawn from the swamp by such a wealth of accessible blood in one spot, until one of the Party envoys addressed them again. They were being escorted to temporary barracks for the night, he told them. On the following morning they would be issued with their weapons.

  The barracks in question turned out to be a large empty house in Marina Parade. There was no furniture, just floor space, and not enough of that. The overcrowding was worse than it had been in the prison, and, despite the protests of the guards, the sleeping quarters soon spilled out into the garden. There was no food, no entertainment, and after about an hour the sense of too much energy with nowhere to go was becoming overpowering. The guards, sensing the growing threat, started finding reasons to melt away, and with their disappearance an increasing number of the prisoners decided to go out for an evening stroll, some in search of their families, some in search of women, some simply in search of motion for its own sake.

  Diba went looking for Anja.

  Finding Independence Drive partially lit by a widely spaced string of log brazier fires, he slipped across the wide road and down the darker Mosque Road. It could not be much later than ten, he reckoned, but Banjul was obviously going to bed early these days. There were no shops open, no sounds of music, and few lights glowing through the compound doorways. Occasionally the sounds of conversation would drift out across a wall, and often as not lapse abruptly into silence at his footfall.

  Conscious that he had no weapon, Diba kept a lookout for anything which would serve for protection, and in one small patch of reflected light noticed a two-foot length of heavy cable which someone had found surplus to requirements and discarded. It felt satisfyingly heavy in his hands.

  Some fifteen minutes after leaving Marina Parade he found himself at the gate to the compound where she had her room. Her husband’s family had once occupied the whole compound, but both his parents had died young, he had been killed in a road accident in Senegal, and his brothers had gone back to their Wollof village. She had fought a losing battle against other adult orphans, and the compound had become a home to assorted con men and thieves.

  To Diba’s surprise the gate was padlocked on the inside. He climbed over without difficulty, proud of how fit he had managed to keep himself in prison, and stood for a moment, listening for any sounds of occupation. He heard none, but as his eyes became accustomed to the gloom they picked out a pile of identical cardboard boxes stacked against a wall. They were new stereo radio-cassette players. No wonder the gate had been locked. He walked gingerly down one arm of the L-shaped courtyard, and turned the corner. The first thing he noticed was the yellow glow seeping out under Anja’s door, the second was the sound of her voice, moaning softly, rhythmically, with pleasure.

  Maybe it’s not her, he told himself, a knot of anger forming in his stomach. He silently advanced to the door, and placed an eye up against the gap between the window shutters.

  A single candle burnt on the wooden table, illuminating the two naked people on the bed. She was underneath, her back slightly arched, eyes closed, hands behind her head, gripping the cast-iron rail of the bedstead. He was above her, supporting his upper body on two rigid arms as he thrust himself slowly this way and that. The two bodies glistened in the candlelight.

  Anger surged through Diba’s guts, but he fought it back. He took two deep breaths before walking through the curtained doorway into the room, the length of cable loose in his hand.

  Though her eyes were closed she became aware of him first. Perhaps it was a draught from the door, or perhaps they really did have a telepathic connection, as she had always claimed. Her eyes opened, widened, and snapped shut again as he swung the cable in a vicious arc at the man’s head.

  Blood splattered, and the man seemed to sway, as if he was held upright only by his position inside her. She cried out and twisted, and he collapsed off the bed with a crash, falling onto the already crushed back of his head. Two thin streams of blood emerged from his nose and mouth, merged on his cheek, and abruptly ceased flowing.

  Diba used a foot to roll the body into the shadows. Anja was just lying there, one hand still gripping the iron rail, the other covering her mouth, palm outwards. Her eyes were wide again, wide with shock. He reached down a hand and brushed a still-erect nipple with his palm.

  She reached for the sheet to cover herself, but he ripped it away from her, and threw it on the floor.

  He pulled his shirt over his head, tore off his trousers and stood over her, his dick swelling towards her face. For a moment he thought of thrus
ting it into her mouth, but the expression on her face was still unreadable, and he did not want it bitten off.

  ‘Moussa,’ she said.

  He clambered astride her, and thrust himself into the warm wetness which the dead man had so recently vacated. She moaned and closed her eyes, but Diba was not fooled. He came in a sudden rush, spilling three months of prison frustration into her, and then abruptly pulled out, and rolled over onto his back.

  For several moments the two of them lay there in silence.

  ‘How did you get out?’ she asked after a while, her voice sounding strange, as if she was trying too hard to sound normal.

  ‘They let us all out to fight for the new Government,’ he told her.

  She risked moving, raising herself onto one elbow. ‘Is he dead?’ she asked.

  ‘Looks like it,’ Diba said coldly. It was funny – he would have expected to feel something after killing a man, but he felt nothing at all. Unless he counted being aware of the need to make sure he was not caught.

  But he did remember how angry he had felt. ‘Who was this man you were fucking?’ he asked in a threatening voice.

  ‘Just a customer,’ she lied. It was her experience that men who got it for free did not usually feel jealous of those who had paid.

  She was right. ‘You been prostituting yourself?’ he asked, with an anger that was less than convincing.

  ‘While you’re in the prison I have to eat,’ she said, risking some self-assertion for the first time.

  He reached out a hand and grabbed her by the plaited hair. ‘You sounded like you were enjoying it,’ he said.

  ‘Men like that need to think they’re making you feel good,’ she said.

  He grunted and let her go. He wanted to believe her – he always had. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘But you’re all mine again now – got it? And we’re getting out of this shit-hole.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘I haven’t decided yet. You got anything to drink?’

  ‘No, but I can get some beer from Winnie’s. It’ll take five minutes.’

  He grabbed one of her cheeks in his hand and held her eyes. She was so fucking beautiful. ‘You wouldn’t disappear on me, would you?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll be five minutes.’

  ‘I’d kill you, you know that.’

  ‘Yes, I know that.’

  ‘Right.’ He let her go, watched her slip the dress over herself and head for the door, careful not to look at the prone body under the window.

  He supposed he ought to do something about that.

  He put his trousers back on, grabbed the corpse by the feet and dragged it out into the courtyard. Anja had left the gate open, so he carried on into the darkened street, his ears straining for other sounds above the scrape of the man’s head in the dust. After fifty yards he decided he had gone far enough, and simply left the body in the middle of the road. With any luck they would think he had been hit by a taxi in the dark.

  Back in her room Anja was engaged in opening one of three bottles of beer on the edge of the table. He took it from her and sprang the cap off, remembering doing the same thing at other times in the past, in that same candlelit room.

  ‘Do you mean you’re in the army now?’ she asked.

  He shrugged. ‘They want us to defend their revolution,’ he said. ‘They’re going to give us guns in the morning. And then … I don’t know. But I’m not going to get killed for a bunch of fucking politicians. I’ll take their gun all right, but who I use it on is my business.’ He smiled. ‘And I’ve got a few ideas on that myself.’

  ‘The Englishman who caught you,’ she said, before stopping to think.

  ‘How do you know about that?’ he asked angrily.

  ‘It was in the newspaper’, she said. ‘Someone showed it to me.’

  ‘What was? What did it say?’

  ‘That you were caught at the hospital by an Englishman, that’s all,’ she said. There had been more, but she reckoned he would not want to hear the details of his humiliation.

  ‘It was bad luck,’ he said. ‘But yes, I owe him.’ And the doctor too, he thought. He had had her naked once, and he would have her naked again, only next time she would not have the white bastard there to protect her. He would make her kneel for him.

  He looked across at Anja, who was just as beautiful as the doctor, but had grown up as poor as he had. He felt the old desire mounting in his body. ‘Take the dress off,’ he said.

  Chapter 5

  The column of five open lorries, each carrying twenty ex-prisoners, rumbled through Serekunda and south towards Yundum Airport. It had been light for only an hour or so, and the heat was not yet oppressive. Diba sat alongside Konko, the Kalashnikov leaning against his thigh, watching the countryside go by. He was not very happy with the situation. A town man, he felt much more confident of melting away into the scenery when it was composed of shanty compounds. Outside the town he felt too conspicuous.

  Still, he had had no chance to get away again since returning to the temporary barracks an hour before dawn. Most of the other nocturnal absentees had also come back: like Diba they saw little hope of escaping the country under the present circumstances, and no hope of anything but longer prison terms from a returning Jawara. For the moment the new regime was their only friend – not to mention their only source of weaponry and ammunition.

  The lorries with the Kalashnikovs had drawn up outside the barracks just as dawn was breaking, and the men had been told to claim their guns as they boarded. The new regime was obviously not composed entirely of fools.

  Diba wondered if he really would find himself in a battle before the day was over. Not if he could help it, he told himself.

  ‘Where do you think we’re going?’ Konko asked him.

  ‘The airport,’ Diba replied. It was a guess. There was nothing else of any importance in this direction, only three hundred miles of villages. Unless of course the new government had decided to invade the rest of Africa.

  He was right the first time, for the lorries swung off the road to Brikama, taking the airport turn-off. The land was flat savannah, dotted with the occasional tree, but otherwise offering no more cover than that provided by the long wet-season grass. For the first time the possibility of being attacked from the air occurred to Diba. He remembered the opening shot of the film he had seen just before his arrest – a wall of palm trees exploding into flames. It had been about Vietnam, but he could not remember the title.

  Also for the first time, he wondered whether leaving the prison had been such a good idea. His mind went back over the previous night, and told him it had been. And there had to be some way to make use of this situation for his and Anja’s benefit. He just had to be patient, and recognize the opening when it came.

  The lorries were drawing up in front of the airport terminal. The tailgates were lowered, the men ordered down and divided into groups of ten by two uniformed Field Force men. From the looks on their faces the latter hardly seemed enamoured of their new reinforcements. And Diba had to admit that his fellow prisoners hardly looked like soldiers. All were still wearing the clothes they had been wearing in jail, which ranged in condition from rags to almost reasonable, from utterly filthy to merely soiled.

  The groups of ten were led off at intervals through the airport’s main doors. When Diba and Konko’s turn came they found that the building was only a temporary port of call: after each man had been issued with a hunk of bread and a couple of bananas they were led out through other doors at the back and onto a wide expanse of tarmac, where several large planes were parked. None looked like it was expecting to fly.

  Diba’s group, accompanied by a roughly equal number of Field Force men and other rebels, headed north up the main runway to its end, and then pressed on another two hundred yards until they reached a row of landing lights, protruding from the grass like fetish poles. Spades were produced and the ex-prisoners took turns excavating trenches while the others scanned the sky, talking nervously among themselv
es and occasionally throwing a contemptuous glance at the diggers.

  Within an hour the group of twenty was arranged in a semicircle of trenches, the airport behind them, empty savannah and sky in front of them. The sweating Diba and Konko shared the latter’s last cigarette and hoped that the rest of the day would be as peaceful.

  McGrath was woken by a loudly honking formation of geese flying low over the hotel roof. He had been having one of those lovely English dreams, sitting in the conservatory his wife had spent so much effort on, watching the sparrows eating from the bird table on the lawn outside. It had all been so peaceful.

  He looked at the sun, then at his watch. It was gone eight already, and his back ached from the hardness of the roof, but he felt reluctant to get up. Dreams like that – and he seemed to have more of them with each trip abroad – always produced a vague aching in his heart, and made him wonder why, if he really missed her and the children so much, he spent so much of his time so far away from them.

  I mean, he said to himself, what the fuck am I doing at my age sleeping out on an African hotel roof because it’s not safe to sleep in my fucking room?

  He reached for the transistor radio that he had recovered from his room the night before and tuned in to Radio Gambia. And like the night before, the programming consisted of replays of the new leader’s message to the world, sandwiched between bouts of Bob Marley. The rebels were still in control.

  McGrath manoeuvred himself into a sitting position, his back against an air vent, and thought about what he should do. For all he knew, the entire rebel army was out looking for him, although it seemed unlikely. He had heard no commotion in the hotel below him, and he tended to trust Jobo’s judgement in the matter of the boy who had thrown himself into the creek. Of course it would be prudent to assume the new authorities were looking for him, and to stay where he was until he knew otherwise, but the thought of sitting on the Carlton roof for the rest of the day did not seem very appealing.