The Break Line

by James Brabazon

  If it was true that you were only ever as good as your last job, I was screwed.

  I thought about going down to the bar for a drink but let the curtain fall again. Instead I went into the bathroom and glued the tile I’d lifted earlier back in place. Then I put the glue back in my duffel bag and took out a blister pack of Valium, popped out a ten-milligram pill and washed it down with duty-free Johnnie Walker Black, straight from the bottle. I wanted to go to the bar, to see other people. Maybe talk to someone interesting. Maybe there would be a woman. But who would really be there? Aid workers, assholes and hookers—that’s who. And Ana María? She definitely wouldn’t be there. So I persuaded myself I didn’t want to speak to anyone after all and lay on the massive king-sized bed, which was actually just two single beds pushed together, and went to sleep, puzzling about the Juliets.

  9

  “There’s a hundred and six miles to Makeni, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a packet of cigarettes, it’s dark out and we’re wearing sunglasses.” Roberts turned to me and grinned.

  “Hit it!” I humored him. A happy driver is a safe driver.

  After a quick stop for fuel at a one-man pump run by one of Roberts’s many cousins—“the only roadside seller in the city who doesn’t water down the petrol”—we’d got on the road again, urging the old Nissan on through Freetown in the predawn dim. We’d clocked up ten miles in good time, Roberts in an old Barcelona top and a battered pair of Ray-Bans, me every inch the respectable Canadian medic—real ID and a real medical kit close to hand. Real dollars, too, which nine times out of ten is more likely to get you out of trouble than a real pistol, which was also to hand.

  I’d slept deeply but dreamed relentlessly, waking to fragments of images that told a story I couldn’t quite hang on to: my father, leaving the house for the last time; Juliet’s face in profile; Sonny Boy giving me the thumbs-up as we dropped into the Maghreb, our parachutes opening high and wild above us. The more I chased whatever meaning there was in these dream slivers, the faster they dissolved. Then Freetown melted away, too, as the sun broke free of the hills. Long skeins of shanties thinned out along the road like corrugated spiderwebs. Suddenly the city was gone, and there were only individual houses and the occasional village—strung always with the seemingly endless gaggles of children that populated the unfolding conveyor belt of tarmacadam that pulled us east.

  I had no plan. My nighttime ruminations had left me with no idea if Roberts and Juliet were anything to do with “Juliet” or what it meant if they were. And I had no way of making a plan other than looking at the lay of the land myself. Someone had identified the target in the rebel camp: I could learn from him, or her, how to get into the camp. The least I needed to know was where I needed to position myself for the shot I was there to make. It would need to be close enough to have no margin of error, distant enough that I could get away afterward.

  In my mind’s eye I imagined a sweet spot in the jungle with a clear view of the camp. The nearest designated airport was at Kabala, but it was the airstrip eight klicks by road northwest from Soron that interested me. The Chinese had cut it in the mid-2000s. It was just long enough to land an AN-12. Though the basic satellite imagery provided by Captain Rhodes hadn’t indicated any activity, the Russians must have been using the Soron strip themselves. It was in the epicenter of their area of operations, and there was nowhere else up-country they could land cargo planes or troop carriers. Even if they were just dropping supplies, they’d need somewhere at least to land choppers and small fixed-wings like Cessnas, and Kabala was too exposed. There was no way an officer like Colonel Proshunin—an airborne officer no less—was going to drive up to the rebel camp in Karabunda every time he wanted a briefing. He may have chauffeured my target up there once, but my guess was that he’d been a more regular visitor, and he’d be coming in by air.

  Getting to Makeni was straightforward, at least.

  As we drove, Roberts told stories about the war—some of which he’d lived through personally, some of which were part of the collective folklore of the civil war. The spaces between the villages grew larger and then contracted again as we entered and then cleared the town of Waterloo. In the late nineties, rebels from the Revolutionary United Front had swept through it during their first incursion into Freetown. Safely in the city, his family survived that initial onslaught. No one thought they’d come back.

  “But they did,” said Roberts. “The sixth of January ’ninety-nine.” He pushed his sunglasses up onto his forehead and kept his eyes on the road. I’d been operational in Central America. But although I’d missed the war, Nazzar hadn’t. I remembered his debriefing. “War does not get worse than January 6, 1999,” he said. And that was from a man who knew all there was to know about fighting, and then some.

  Rebels had streamed out of the forest and into the city, burning and looting in an orgy of violence unparalleled even in that conflict. Dressed in Tupac T-shirts, women’s wigs and even wedding dresses, child soldiers—many high on drugs—systematically rounded up entire suburbs and machine-gunned them en masse. No one was spared: doctors, foreigners, journalists—almost everyone who crossed their path was killed. Just looking at a rebel soldier the wrong way was enough to get a bullet in the head, or worse. Women were gang-raped by the hundred, nuns executed. The names of individual units described the rebels’ specialties: as well as the Burn House Unit, Cut Hands Commando and Blood Shed Squad, the Kill Man No Blood unit also ran riot—their method was to beat people to death without shedding blood. Equally macabre was the Born Naked Squad, who stripped their victims before killing them. Hands and limbs hacked off children and babies were hung from trees, or eaten. More than seven thousand people died.

  “They killed everyone, everything in their way. Even the dogs, man. They even killed the fucking dogs.”

  As well as your mother and father, I thought. I took my sunglasses off and folded them in my hand. As soon as Roberts was on the evacuation chopper, his parents headed back into Freetown to get his grandmother.

  “Do you know how it happened?” I asked him. “Your parents, I mean.” He looked sideways at me and then back at the road, unspeaking. For a minute there was only the sound of tires on tarmac and the judder of air pulsing through the car windows.

  “I lost my parents, too,” I said. “I was a couple of years younger than you were when it happened.”

  Another pause.

  I hadn’t had this conversation for a long time. “Plane crash. My dad. Then my mum—you know, I guess she just couldn’t take it. . . .” I trailed off.

  “Sorry, bruv. Sorry.”

  “Yeah, me too. But it was a long time ago. I don’t even think about my dad that often.” It was true—I didn’t. The dreams and memories of my father that had been surfacing of late were unusual, unwelcome, like an unexpected squall that leaves you soaked and shivering. I had no defense against my own mind other than to subdue it with alcohol and benzos. But some fragment, some shard of him would always cut through. My mother, though—she was always there, peering in from the perimeter of my memory.

  Roberts dipped the brakes as an aging articulated lorry creaked out in front of us.

  “Was that in, uh, Canada that you lost your mum?”

  “No, it was in Ireland,” I admitted. For a professional liar, even little truths are hard-won. I’d never told anyone exactly what had happened.

  “I see. Mine . . . God, this is like some fucked-up show-and-tell shit. I raise your mum’s suicide with ‘butchered by kids.’” His eyes filled with tears. “Fucking kids, man.”

  Yeah, kids with AKs and machetes, I thought. I pictured the scene. It made me sad in that detached way that other people’s disasters do.

  “They shot my dad,” he went on, “and then, when my mum and gran wouldn’t come out of the house because they didn’t want to be raped or chopped up or whatever fucked-up shit those cunts got off on, they tried to
burn them out. Except they wouldn’t come out. Our neighbor was the only one who survived on our street. She said she could hear them praying together in Krio over the sound of the flames. ‘Papa God, we de na evin, na yu wan gren na God.’” He wiped his cheek with the back of his hand. He was angry, and lost. And I expected he always would be. God knew I was.

  “But he’s never there when you need him, is he, the Old Bloke upstairs?” he continued. “Still, here we are, the orphaned black-and-white-survivors road show. Fuck me. Beats working for a living, I s’pose.” There were no comfortable words to speak. He smiled and wiped his cheek again, and we drove on in silence.

  Dropping down from the high green hills around Freetown, we turned northwest and into Northern Province. Rice paddies flourished in the swamps sandwiched between the sea and the highlands that rose farther inland. The towns and villages and hours rolled past against a backdrop of rich agricultural land. Robat, Masiaka, Mafila—the names were indecipherable, and at once both familiar and meaningless. The vowels sounded European; the consonants seemed always in the wrong place, confusing pronunciation.

  There was no breeze here except the cross draft created by winding the windows down in the old Nissan. Thick gray clouds boiled on the horizon. We stopped to piss, to stretch our legs, to smoke. The air grew heavier. Hotter. We began to sweat and lapsed into long silences, each digesting the other’s tragedies. Then we thundered over the mighty Rokel, which downstream becomes the Sierra Leone River and empties into the Atlantic, cutting Freetown off from Lungi Airport. We bought smoke-blackened river fish and spat the bones out the wound-down windows and sucked condensed milk from miniature-sized tins bought at a roadside shop in Lunsar. The road snagged northeast, then due east. It was a good road and before we knew it, we were pulling into Makeni itself. But the excitement of arrival dissolved in Roberts’s recollections.

  “Dirty old town.” He steadied the steering wheel with his elbows and lit a cigarette. “Just darkness and potholes, my dad used to say.”

  “Looks OK to me. Busy. Bit dusty. Roads are all right, though.” And they were. New tarmacadam, new streetlights and scooter taxis everywhere.

  “Bloody okadas. They’re like flies. Put hardworking taxi drivers out of work, they do.” We were crawling down the main drag, past the university, looking for our hotel.

  “What’s up with you? It’s not that bad. It looks like a decent place to me.”

  “Rebel town,” Roberts replied. “Makeni was their HQ.” People crossed the road in front of and behind us: men with boxes of supplies of who knew what on their heads; women leading, cajoling, lifting children; students carrying bundles of books. “And don’t tell me this shower didn’t roll over at the first opportunity. ‘Please save us from the wicked president.’” Roberts affected a pathetic, whiny voice, before adding: “Rebel fuckers.”

  We pulled up in front of the DJ Motel.

  “O-K, mister. Easy does it.” We sat in the Nissan, both staring at the motel’s tatty Union Jack awning. A couple of teenagers stood in the doorway, smoking. Half of these “fuckers” weren’t even born when the rebels rocked up.

  “The war is over,” I reminded him. “Long time. And you know what that means?” Roberts said nothing. “That means there is an uninterrupted supply of beer to the north. So shake a leg. I’m buying you a Star.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THE DJ MOTEL was in fact just a regular hotel with a large car park at the back. It looked decent and clean. There was a dining room, a bar and a business center—which comprised one ancient PC, a desk, a printer and an office swivel chair. It played host to a man in impossibly pointed leather shoes and a pin-striped suit who was bellowing erratically into his mobile phone in French.

  I checked us in.

  We’d been prebooked into rooms on different floors by Captain Rhodes. Roberts poured the beers and calmed down. We both knew the war would never be over for him. Being orphaned is a permanent condition. So, too, it seemed, was war, or the promise of war, looming above this violent coast. Ninety miles up the road, yet another army threatened to invade Roberts’s hard-won peace. I resisted the temptation to reassure him about a reality he didn’t yet know endangered him.

  “Your grandfather,” I said, after he’d relaxed into his drink, “you said he was still alive. I presume you’re not numbering him among the evil northern collaborators still roaming the streets of Makeni. Where is he now?”

  He took a long swallow of beer and let out a sigh of relief.

  “Musala. The old man never left.”

  10

  The motel rose to three floors behind reception, with external staircases zigzagging up above chipped alabaster columns. There was a lift, too. I took the stairs. I let myself into the cool, dark cave of my room. An aircon unit hummed in the wall alongside the bed. White tiled floor. Mosquito net. Ceiling fan. Sink, shower, loo. Third-world three-star. It would do.

  All squaddies loved to repeat the bastardization of that old recruitment catchphrase: Join the army! Travel the world! Meet interesting people . . . and kill them! In UKN, at least . . . and stay in shit hotels would have been just as accurate.

  I’d told Roberts to get some rest and that I’d see him downstairs at eight o’clock for dinner. I had to pop out and pick up some medical kit from the university, I explained. I hadn’t blinked when Roberts told me his grandfather still lived in Musala. He hadn’t seen him for a year. I hoped he was still alive.

  Collecting the rifle was straightforward. The dead drop was the boot of a white mid-eighties C-Class tucked away in the corner of the DJ Motel car park. I took the silver key that Captain Rhodes had given to me at the briefing in London. The lid opened with a little leap like heavy German car metal on well-oiled springs does. Lying flat under a tarp inside the Mercedes was an oblong canvas bag with two shoulder straps. A Velcro patch with a red cross in a white circle was stitched on one side, the Canadian flag on the other. The boot clicked shut again. There was no dust on the tires. The windscreen was clean. I guessed it had been parked that morning.

  I walked the bag upstairs and unzipped it on the bed. The canvas peeled away to reveal a soft, custom-made rifle case, which in turn opened to reveal a scoped Accuracy International sniper rifle with a folding stock. Pockets in the case’s padded lining held three magazines, a detachable bipod, a sound moderator and a Leica laser range finder. I lifted one of the magazines out. It was already charged. I flicked the rounds out, and gave them a once-over. Ten Federal Gold Medal 168-grain 7.62mm full metal jacket boattail cartridges: commercially manufactured, match grade, consistent. I snapped them back into the magazine. Their report, deadened by the moderator and the forest, would barely be louder than an unsilenced 9mm. That would help conceal my position, but the enemy would still hear their supersonic crack all right.

  I’d need to get close before I could pull the trigger. Tree density, even in the northern savannah, meant there’d be no chance of a long shot: the maximum distance I was likely to get from the target would be three to four hundred meters—and that was pushing it. Taped to the outside of the folding stock was my elevation table for the Federal Golds and that rifle, out to a thousand meters, calibrated to Sierra Leone’s atmospheric conditions for early spring. Captain Rhodes had done her homework.

  I had all the tools required to do the job. I just needed to find my target, and fast. As soon as news of Musala falling reached the public, the road north would quickly become monitored, treacherous and then impassable. I put the zipped-up rifle bag in the wardrobe, took a step back and caught myself.

  “This is ridiculous,” I said out loud. “It’s like trying to conceal a bloody elephant.” I took the bag back out and slid it under the bed. I considered this, and then returned the bag to the wardrobe. Of course, I wasn’t supposed to leave the hotel once I’d made the collection—but I had another, unscheduled, visit to make in Makeni before we
set off in the morning. I left the room light on, hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the doorknob and hoped for the best.

  * * *

  • • •

  IT WAS THE end of the day now. The sun drops fast in the tropics. No lengthy sunsets: just light, and then dark, with a flash of fire above the waves or trees if there are no clouds to mask it. In Ireland the long evening skies in County Wicklow were choked with wild geese harrying the sun westward. I preferred this sharp transition. The air was beginning to hum with night insects, but it was still just light.

  The Global Assistance Committee office was tucked down a side street behind the hotel—sandwiched between the Catholic Church of St. Francis Xavier and the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Kingdom Hall. I guessed they were hedging their bets—and that they’d saved more souls than both of their neighbors combined.

  “Aw di bodi?” I greeted the receptionist in the first words of Krio I’d learned from Roberts. She looked at me with a mixture of pity and amusement.

  “Di bodi fayn,” she replied. And then, in cut-glass English, “And how is your body, Mr. . . . ?”

  “Dr. McLean.” I smiled. “Call me Max, though.”

  “I see,” she said, grinning in that way that some women do when they’ve decided you’re not worth flirting with, but are keen to see just how much of a fool you can make of yourself before you realize it, too. “And how can I help you, Dr. Max McLean?”

  I lied and said I was heading up to Musala to conduct a feasibility study on a clinic. She introduced herself as Florence, “from the Nairobi office.”

  “Hard though this might be to believe,” I told her, “I’m new to Sierra Leone. And it’s just that I’m heading up to Kabala tomorrow, and my colleague in Vancouver said one of your people had been up there about a month back for an event—couldn’t remember their name. I wondered if I could have a chat with them, you know, to . . .” I stopped talking. Florence had stopped smiling.