Soldier N: Gambian Bluff

by David Monnery

  ‘She changed her mind,’ Diba said, digging in his pocket and coming up with a five-dalasi note. ‘Take this,’ he said, and began to close the door.

  The other hand was still out of view, and Franklin could not risk setting off the gun by launching himself forward. The door clicked shut, but no footsteps sounded inside. The man was waiting for him to leave before he moved back upstairs.

  Franklin walked back down the steps, and turned left up the street, continuing on until he knew he was out of sight of the house. What should he do? The idea of going for the police was quickly abandoned: it would take hours and Sibou might only have minutes. She might already be dead. The thought cut through his mind like a knife.

  There was only one thing for it – he had to get into the house, and now. It would have to be the back. He found a way between the next two houses down and stumbled his way through the dark backyard of the one which stood next to Sibou’s building. The ground behind the latter was overgrown, the only back door seemed both locked and rusted shut, and the windows were barred as well as shuttered. The verandah on the first floor looked more promising, but it was fifteen feet up, and the wall seemed to offer no help to a would-be climber.

  Inside the house Sibou was holding on to the hope that the man at the door had been Franklin. The voice had not sounded like his, but she could not think who else it could have been. She wondered for a moment if McGrath might have phoned for a taxi while she was in the shower, but there would have been no reason – they had his jeep. And anyway, she suddenly remembered, the man had said it was a woman who called.

  It had to be Franklin. He would get help or something. She just had to stay alive long enough for it to arrive.

  All these thoughts ran through her head as Diba dragged her back up the stairs. At the top he pushed her into the flat and again locked the door behind him.

  Franklin, or whoever he went for, would have to come through that door, she thought. There was no other entrance. She would have to distract Diba somehow, make noises to cover any that her rescuers might make. One thought came into her mind and caused her to shudder. She would sooner die, she thought, and then realized she would rather not.

  ‘Wake him up,’ Diba said, waving the gun in the direction of McGrath. She dutifully leant over the Englishman and took his pulse, which was surprisingly strong. ‘He’ll come round in a little while,’ she said, and at that moment an almost inaudible groan escaped from his lips.

  Franklin had already wasted several minutes looking for something to help him onto the verandah when he discovered the line of iron rungs just round the corner of the building. Silently cursing himself, he started to clamber up as fast as the need for silence would allow, until one rung came half out of the wall and nearly sent him tumbling thirty feet down to the ground.

  Moving more cautiously, he reached the level of the top-floor windows. Craning his neck round the corner of the house, he could see dim light coming from both, which suggested that light was filtering through from the room at the front. But he could see no way of reaching the windows from the ladder of iron rungs, and for a few moments he could see no reason whatsoever why the rungs had been placed where they had. Then he realized: the newer bricks to his right were blocking up what had once been a doorway.

  He carried on up to the flat roof, pulled himself over the edge and lay still for a second, listening for any sounds that might be coming through from below. There were none. He got carefully to his feet and tiptoed over to the front edge, almost strangling himself on a half-invisible washing line. Here he could hear a voice – the man’s – but not what he was saying. And then Sibou, who replied more clearly: ‘You’ll kill him!’

  Putting his head over the edge, Franklin could see the lighted windows below. The shutters were open, and he guessed that the glass windows were too, but there was probably a mosquito screen. The top of the window was about five feet below the level of the roof. He had no harness, but there was little choice.

  He went back for the washing line, decided it was strong enough, and spent a few minutes knotting foot and hand holds at one end. Then he tied the other through one of the holes in the parapet where the water drained off the roof.

  He stood there for a moment, thinking that he should have called the police, or someone, before coming up to the roof. If he fucked this up then there would be no help for her or McGrath.

  But it was too late to think about that. Just don’t fuck up, he told himself, and everything will be fine.

  He lowered himself over the edge, walking his feet down the wall inch by inch as he let the rope out through his hands. When he was level with the window he paused, and wondered how many years’ wages he would give for one stun grenade. Then he took a deep breath, bent at the knees, and pushed himself off the wall and out into space.

  Sibou had told Diba that McGrath needed water, and he had accompanied her into the kitchen while she filled a cup from the tap. She noticed he had an erection, and wondered how long his desire for an audience would dampen his desire for her. Back in the living room she applied water to McGrath’s lips and forehead, and was just opening the top button on his shirt when her ears, already straining for any sound from beyond the locked door, picked up the slightest of scraping noises from outside the open window.

  She managed not to look at Diba, instead rising to her feet as noisily as she could manage. ‘He can see now,’ she said aggressively, walking away from McGrath. ‘Let’s get it over with,’ she went on, moving towards the couch, pulling Diba’s eyes away from the direction of the window. To hold them on her she reached back to unhook her bra, flicking it off her shoulders and letting her breasts fall free, just as Franklin came hurtling feet first through the open window.

  Diba whirled around, tried to raise the arm that held the gun, but found both her hands wrapped around it. He slashed out with his other hand, sending her flying, and turned in time for a final glimpse of the taxi driver from downstairs, perched on his knees, both hands around the butt of an automatic that was aimed between his eyes.

  Darkness fell swift as a camera shutter, eclipsing his world.

  Epilogue

  Caskey and Wynwood set foot again on British soil the following Sunday afternoon, having flown from the reopened Yundum Airport to Luton with a plane full of complaining package tourists. Despite assurances to the contrary from the High Commission in Bakau, their passage through customs and immigration was neither smooth nor speedy. No one at Luton had been given any advance warning of two returning SAS men bearing semi-automatic handguns, and the ensuing phone calls took much longer than the process under way in the main hall, that of relieving the tourists of their duty-free excesses.

  Caskey had been half-expecting a posse of journalists, but not even a single newshound was waiting to dog their steps, and the two men ended up boarding the bus for the railway station like any pair of returning holiday-makers. A newspaper left lying on one of the seats gave no clue that The Gambia existed, let alone that anything newsworthy had happened there.

  They sat on Luton Station, waiting for the delayed train to London, eyeing their fellow travellers as if they were from another planet. ‘We’ve been gone almost exactly eight days,’ Wynwood murmured, ‘and it seems like a couple of months.’

  ‘It always feels like that,’ Caskey said. ‘This time next week it’ll feel like three months since we came back.’

  The train finally arrived, and while Caskey read the paper Wynwood stared out of the window at the darkening countryside and suburbs, mentally comparing the silhouettes of oaks and poplars with palms and mango trees. Caskey was right, he thought, already Africa was turning into a dream.

  In London the MOD had arranged for a taxi to whisk them across town in time to catch the last connecting train from Paddington to Hereford. Wynwood had time to call Susan before it left, and found himself, wholly unexpectedly, almost in tears simply from hearing the sound of her voice.

  She brought the car to Hereford Station,
and they gave Caskey a lift back to his flat in the centre of town. ‘It was a pleasure working with you,’ the Major told Wynwood as he climbed out of the back seat.

  ‘It was mutual, boss,’ Wynwood said.

  Caskey walked slowly upstairs, feeling faintly envious of Wynwood’s youth, not to mention the Welshman’s obvious joy in being in love. He let himself into the flat, poured himself a generous drink, and sat down on the sofa. The previous Saturday’s paper was still sitting on the coffee table, its back page headlining the news of England’s inevitable defeat.

  He leaned back in the chair and smiled. What a summer it had been!

  Late that night Mamadou Jabang and three of his young acolytes arrived in the small town of Cacheu on the river of the same name. After a day holed up in a terrified supporter’s house in Bakau they had travelled south in the President’s speedboat, which Junaidi Taal had used for his escape from the Denton Bridge a week before, and which the Senegalese had not thought to either guard or remove from the beach beneath the African Village Hotel. The fuel had soon run out, but two days of drifting on the prevailing southerly current, the second without water, had brought them, bedraggled but hopefully safe, to this estuary town in the small republic of Guinea-Bissau.

  What the next twenty-fours hours held in store none of them could know. They had no money, and no way of sending for any. The local authorities might simply return them to The Gambia, or they might agree to give them political asylum. Most likely of all, if Jabang knew anything about his fellow African politicians, they would choose to do neither. Letting revolutionaries stay in one’s country invited trouble, and sending them back reminded your own people how oppressive your regime had become. No, the local authorities would simply find some way to pass on the problem to someone else.

  Through such means, sooner or later, Jabang hoped to find himself back among friends willing and able to support him in a second attempt at rescuing The Gambia from international capitalism.

  Next time, though, he would steel himself to be harder.

  Arriving at his office that Monday morning, Cecil Matheson found a full report waiting for him on the events of the past two weeks in The Gambia. The status quo ante had been satisfactorily restored, thanks in large part to the efforts of the three SAS military advisers.

  By this account – and by most others that Matheson had picked up on the Whitehall grapevine – they had somewhat exceeded their authority. Questions were also being asked about the activities of a fourth man, apparently an ex-SAS officer, who had not even had any authority to exceed.

  Still … Matheson smiled to himself and closed the folder. Perhaps he should send his American counterpart a copy, he thought. After the farcical mess they had made of trying to rescue their hostages from Iran the previous year, Lubanski and the Pentagon could do with some professional advice.

  That same morning McGrath dropped in on Mansa Camara at his home in Serekunda. McGrath still had headaches, but the Medical Research Centre had given him a clean bill of health, provided he agreed to avoid excitement for a fortnight. Chance would be a fine thing, he thought, as he parked the jeep. His SAS friends were gone, and Sibou would not be back for a few days yet.

  He found Mansa in cheerful mood, despite the announcement that The Gambia was now to have an official army of its own. ‘It’s either that or risk the Senegalese Army marching across the border every time there’s any trouble,’ the ex-Field Force officer said. ‘Sooner or later they might just decide it would be easier to keep their troops here on a permanent basis. And if we have to have an army I’d rather it was made up of Gambians. No country deserves an army that speaks another language.’

  ‘So the Field Force is being abolished?’

  ‘Yes.’ Mansa grunted. ‘Too many officers ended up on the wrong side. Some of them good men,’ he added, as if surprised by his own readiness to admit such a thing. ‘And there is one good thing about an army. It means the police force can be just that, and not get itself mixed up in politics.’

  ‘Maybe,’ McGrath agreed. ‘I’ve been an Army man since I left school, but I was kind of getting used to being in a country where there wasn’t one.’

  ‘I noticed,’ Mansa said wryly. ‘Yes, well … Jabang and the comrades wanted to bring about change, and in that at least they were successful – The Gambia will never be the same again.’ He shrugged. ‘But in the long run I expect all the tourism will change us even more, and not for the better.’

  McGrath thought about that as he drove back to Banjul. Mansa was probably right, but there seemed to be very few other ways that the country could earn the money to pay for all those consumer goods which most of its people seemed to want. It was sad, he thought. From what he had seen, the African people deserved better.

  It had taken Franklin two days to sum up the courage to talk to Sibou about their relationship, and when he finally did so it came out much more negatively than he intended. ‘I know you can’t give up what you do,’ he said, ‘and I can’t give up what I do. How can we keep anything alive when we live and work three thousand miles apart?’

  She had looked at him for a moment. ‘Do you want to keep it alive?’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘There are things called planes,’ she said. ‘If you’re coming from England, The Gambia is the cheapest place to get to in Africa. And that works both ways.’ She had taken him by the shoulders. ‘It won’t be easy, and it may be impossible, but we can try. What have we got to lose?’

  He had her to lose, he thought that afternoon, as they sat together on a stone wall overlooking the ocean. They had come to the Île de Gorée, the island off Dakar which the man in the French café had recommended to him and Wynwood, and which she had visited and loved several years before. Most tourists came over on the ferry, visited the famous Slave House, shopped for souvenirs, walked along the bougainvillaea-covered lanes, and returned to Dakar a few hours later, but there was one hotel on the island, with three high-ceilinged rooms and shuttered windows that opened onto a view across the beach and jetty.

  Now they were sitting at the rear of the red-stoned Slave House, above the cells where hundreds of thousands had waited in suffocating squalor for a voyage to the New World. Here was where their two lives divided. His ancestors had been taken, and hers had not.

  ‘Did you read that report,’ she asked, ‘the Senegalese General saying that he only let your friends lead the assault because the rebels would not shoot at white faces?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Franklin said. ‘And all the reports I’ve seen only mention two SAS men, or two British soldiers.’ He laughed. ‘I might as well have been invisible.’

  ‘Doesn’t that make you angry?’ she asked.

  ‘Two weeks ago it would have,’ he said. ‘And I guess if I think about it then it still does …’ He looked at her. ‘But if I hadn’t had a black face when I came to your door that night, Diba would have killed me, and probably you and McGrath as well …’ He opened his palms in a gesture of resignation, and smiled at her.

  ‘I like your face,’ she said.

  Discover other books in the SAS Series published by Bloomsbury at

  www.bloomsbury.com/SAS

  Soldier A: Behind Iraqi Lines

  Soldier B: Heroes of the South Atlantic

  Soldier C: Secret War in Arabia

  Soldier D: The Colombian Cocaine War

  Soldier E: Sniper Fire in Belfast

  Soldier F: Guerillas in the Jungle

  Soldier G: The Desert Raiders

  Soldier H: The Headhunters of Borneo

  Soldier J: Counter Insurgency in Aden

  Soldier K: Mission to Argentina

  Soldier L: The Embassy Siege

  Soldier M: Invisible Enemy in Kazakhstan

  Soldier N: Gambian Bluff

  Soldier O: The Bosnian Inferno

  Soldier P: Night Fighters in France

  Soldier Q: Kidnap the Emperor!

  Soldier R: Death on Gibraltar

  Soldier
S: The Samarkand Hijack

  Soldier T: War on the Streets

  Soldier U: Bandit Country

  Soldier V: Into Vietnam

  Soldier W: Guatemala – Journey Into Evil

  Soldier X: Operation Takeaway

  Soldier Y: Days of the Dead

  Soldier Z : For King and Country

  This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

  First published in Great Britain 1993 by Bloomsbury Publishing

  Copyright © 1993 Bloomsbury Publishing

  All rights reserved

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  eISBN: 9781408841563

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