Yes. Willan had forgotten that. He scanned the lake with his binos continually, watching for the flash of white that would be the Victoria’s hull.
Thirty minutes after take-off, Prentiss nudged him and pointed down to the coast below.
‘Bukoba!’
It was one of many such small, straggling lakeside towns, the lake front crowded with canoes and, behind it, what looked like a hiving market-place. Old pick-up trucks clogged the streets, along with cattle and crowds of brightly clad people. They circled the place once at five hundred feet, and Willan could make out the upturned faces, the pointing fingers.
‘Look north,’ Prentiss told him. He did so, training the binoculars to regard a massive expanse of bush and secondary forest, cleared fields, the red-brown of naked earth crossed by a single road. There was another town out on the undulating spread of the plain, smaller than Bukoba. Willan looked at his map. Kyaka. Just to the north of the settlement he could see the meandering curve of the Kagera, sluggish and brown. It looked more like a wide, shallow ditch than a river.
‘That’s Uganda,’ Prentiss said, pointing at the land beyond.
‘Christ, it’s close, isn’t it?’
‘Less than thirty miles. You’re looking at the Ugandan invasion route, Willan. Amin’s tanks, if they come, will come down that road.’
They banked right and the aircraft curved in a graceful arc into the eye of the sun. She shuddered a little as she passed through some light turbulence, and then they were speeding out across the vast, glittering face of Lake Victoria. Willan kept the binos to his eyes as though they were some kind of extension of his face. He ignored Prentiss’s tapping of the fuel gauge.
The little plane climbed to a thousand feet. The air was as clear as glass and Willan could see for miles. Prentiss, he noticed, was quartering the lake systematically with wide, right-angled turns.
They flew on in silence for twenty minutes until Prentiss tapped the SBS sergeant on the shoulder.
‘We’ve just crossed into Uganda,’ he told him.
Willan looked down again. There was no difference to the lake below; the boundaries so important on maps did not exist out here. But he remembered his briefing back in England, and frowned.
‘Will they mind us entering their airspace?’
Prentiss grinned. ‘They probably don’t even know where their airspace is. Don’t worry, Willan. They have no land-based radar capability down here, only around Kampala. And their MiGs don’t make a habit of buzzing the lake. Not yet, anyway.’
They flew on. Time was running out, along with their fuel, and Willan’s eyes were watering with the constant strain. He cursed under his breath.
There. A flash of white, like the back of a seagull, but farther away.
‘Turn right,’ he barked, and the little plane banked obediently.
Down there, somewhere. His eye had just registered it. He swept the area with the binoculars.
‘Gotcha.’
The steamer seemed to be at anchor. There was a long, dark tail of towed canoes behind it, a wisp of smoke from the funnel. Probably they were keeping the fires banked.
‘What’s our position?’
Prentiss busied himself with compass and map.
‘Got it. We’re eight miles nor-nor-west of Bukoba. Bearing zero-six-three. Got the bastard.’
‘Take us back. We don’t want to arouse their suspicions.’
The aircraft turned sharply to the left and began a long curve that would put them back on the course to home.
‘But how long will he stay there?’ Willan asked.
‘His SOP is to raid a shoreline for two or three nights running, with the mother ship standing off more or less in the same position. You can bet the bastards will still be there tonight.’
‘And the raiders will be off in their canoes?’
‘Almost certainly. Any ideas?’
Willan didn’t answer. The beginning of a plan was forming in his head.
‘We’ll hit him tonight,’ he said at last.
6
‘Slow engines to one-third,’ said Loos Van Dorn, peering out through the cracked glass of the wheelhouse with his binoculars.
‘Engines one-third,’ repeated Lomu, the first officer.
‘Starboard two points.’
‘Starboard two points, skipper,’ the helmsman said, and spun the ship’s wheel through a minor revolution. Van Dorn, an Afrikaner, was a self-taught sailor who still navigated by the old compass-point system rather than degrees. Each point on the compass was equivalent to about seven degrees. The helmsman had his eyes fixed on the binnacle as his hands shifted on the wheel.
‘All stop,’ Van Dorn said finally.
‘All stop.’
‘Drop anchor. Lomu, inform the boys that we’re in position.’
‘Aye, cap’n.’
The Victoria gradually lost way and came to a halt on the surface of the Great Lake. It was getting on for evening and the setting sun had filled the western sky with flame. Already, the stars were shining. On the shores of the lake the first fires had been lit and were lining the shore like beacons. The decks of the old steamer were in darkness, however, and crowds of men were milling about her decks while others hauled the towed canoes about her sides and dropped scramble nets down from the ship’s rails.
Van Dorn walked out of the wheelhouse on to the wing-bridge to one side. He looked up at the grimy funnel to see the sparks and smoke that were still curling out of it.
‘Bank her down,’ he called back to the wheelhouse, and Lomu bent to blow breath into the old-fashioned speaking tube that connected the wheelhouse with the engine-room.
The Victoria had once been the Tanganyika. Built before the end of the First World War, she was a passenger steamer of close to five hundred tons and had served as a troop transport of sorts during that conflict. With the fall of the German colony, as Tanzania had been then, to the British at the close of the war, she had continued to serve her original mission of plying the waters of the lake, but under a more suitable name. Van Dorn had found her a rusting hulk, abandoned in a swamp west of Entebbe. Amazingly, her hull and boilers had still been sound, and all the rest was mere cosmetics. He had got her afloat within three months and placed her and her new captain at the disposal of the Ugandan Army. The Ugandans had seen his offer as an ideal opportunity to vent some of their spleen on their unfortunate neighbours without being seen to do so too blatantly, and so Van Dorn had acquired his crew of pirates, his ‘boys’, as he called them. Originally Bagandan privates in the national army, they had in time come to see themselves as his personal retinue, to be rewarded for their efforts with the loot of their nightly expeditions.
As for Van Dorn, not only did he receive all his expenses, plus a modest bonus from the Ugandan government – a government which was basically the military in another guise – he also had the pick of whatever loot his raiders managed to bring back from their nocturnal forays. And the girls who were part of that loot, they were sold up north through a series of Sudanese agents. Potentially, Van Dorn thought, that was the most lucrative part of the whole operation. Whoever had thought slavery was dead in Africa was a fool, he concluded. It was still there, perhaps on a smaller scale than in the past; but as long as the demand existed, it would have to be satisfied. That was a fact of life.
Of course, if the Ugandan government knew that he was profiting in slavery, then his operation could well be shut down; even the genocidal senior officers of Idi Amin’s army might draw the line at that. But when the projected invasion of Tanzania at last occurred – and from what Van Dorn could pick up in Kampala, it was not far away – then the potential for his lucrative little sideline would increase tenfold, such was the effect of war. He stood to make a tidy packet for himself if he could just keep the operation on course until the invasion was well underway.
But that led to the disquieting part, the one fly in his ointment – the reception that his boys had received on a raid less than two we
eks ago.
Van Dorn had lost twenty-three men in that abortive raid, a fifth of his strength. And the boys had needed some very heavy persuasion to raid again. Of course, since then they had stayed away from the Mwanza area and had encountered no further problems, but still it made him uneasy. From the garbled reports his men had made that night, it seemed that the enemy, whoever they were, had been well armed, disciplined and mounted in fast-moving attack boats of some kind. Certainly not the profile of a Tanzanian force. Could there be foreign mercenaries working for Nyerere? If so, it was a worrying development, and one that the Ugandan authorities should really hear about. But if Van Dorn informed them of it they might either curb his raids, or worse, send army officers out as observers to keep an eye on things. He could not tolerate that, not at this stage. He’d just stick to the western shores of Victoria for a while.
The boys were struggling down the scramble nets now by the score, their weapons slung at their backs. There were splashes and curses as they fought to find their footing in the canoes below. Tonight they would be hitting a string of small villages south of Bukoba. Not so rich as the area around Mwanza, or as heavily populated, but a lot safer. It would be near here that the invasion would begin. Van Dorn guessed that the first Ugandan objective would be the salient created by the meander of the Kagera, which lay between Lake Victoria and the rising highlands of Rwanda to the west. No harm, then, to soften up the area a little first in preparation for the T-55s of Idi Amin.
He peered over the side of the ship to where the canoes were now a mass of limbs and gun barrels. He looked at his watch, nodded to himself, then briefly flicked on the beam of a little torch at the assembled men below. A moment later came the soft splash of paddles, and the mass began breaking up as the canoeists started off on their way to the shore.
It was completely dark now – sunsets were brief in this part of the world, twilights non-existent – and Van Dorn could see the lights of the villages strung out like a series of glittering jewels on the horizon. Three miles away, far enough. He would wait a couple of hours, then light the masthead lamps to guide the canoeists back to the mother ship. For now it was just a question of waiting.
He yawned suddenly. This was the worst part. He had actually accompanied the boys on the first few raids, to get them into the swing of things, so to speak, but he was too old for that now. These pirates of his were for the most part in their late teens, impoverished members of the Baganda tribe who had joined the army as a way to get on the winning side and have some food to fill their bellies. Van Dorn sometimes felt a kind of paternal affection for them, but he knew that their lives would most likely be brief and violent. That was the way of things in this country, and had always been the way of things in Africa. Nothing had changed, except the methods of killing, and there was nothing anyone could ever do about it.
He yawned again, told Lomu to take over the watch, then went below to his cabin. Nothing interesting would happen now for hours. Best to get some sleep.
The plan, Willan thought, was a good one. The only problem was that it proceeded on a series of assumptions – or guesses, to put it crudely. If even one of those guesses proved to be wrong, then the whole thing would go for a ball of chalk, and his men might very well pay for it with their lives.
Twenty-four men in three Rigid Raiders, one of the Raiders trailing a pair of Kleppers. It had taken a lot of patching to get all three craft seaworthy for that night but so far they seemed to be holding up just fine.
Raider One carried the Command and Assault Group, consisting of Willan, Morgan, Prentiss and five trainee NCOs from the camp. Raider Two carried the Reconnaissance Group – Geary and Hill. Their canoes were towed behind them, bumping and jumping in the wake of the powerful outboards. Also on board were the rest of the Assault Group – Okello and five more of his Ugandans.
Raider Three carried the Interdiction Group. In it were Fraser, Gordon, Kigoma, and five more men – Tanzanians, these, as Kigoma had insisted.
Thanks to Prentiss, the mission was more heavily armed than it might have been. The bags he had brought with him on his flight turned out to contain two 7.62mm General Purpose Machine Guns, or ‘Gimpies’, and several hundred rounds of linked ammo. Raiders One and Three now had these weapons mounted in the prow of the boats.
Prentiss had not asked to come along – he had just presented the weapons nonchalantly and seemingly assumed that he was included in the night’s mission. There was also the fact that he had been a train fanatic in his youth, and knew all about handling a steam-driven engine. The knowledge had proved decisive, as he had probably known it would, Willan thought sourly. The MI6 agent was therefore included in the night’s line-up, a line-up which had left two very bad-tempered SBS men, Breckenridge and Parker, cooling their heels back at camp. They had protested, but Willan had been adamant. He needed to leave somebody behind to keep an eye on things, and to continue the training if anything should go disastrously wrong.
It had taken them over six hours to cover the distance from Mwanza to their current location, for they had not wanted to use up too much fuel on the approach and had kept the speed down to less than twenty knots. Now they were cruising along at less than five knots, so that the usual roar of the outboards was down to a low purr. The three boats were at five-hundred-yard intervals, communicating by radio – which worked with eerie perfection over the flat surface of the lake – and keeping their eyes peeled for any sign of their objective.
This was the worst part, Willan thought to himself. They knew the approximate location of the target, but they could not be precise about it. She might be anywhere within twenty miles of them. They would simply quarter the lake, much as he and Prentiss had done in the aircraft that morning, until they found her. And hope that they were not spotted first. Like everything else in this country, the plan was to a certain extent dependent on a favourable set of tactical circumstances, otherwise known as luck.
‘Romeo One, this is Romeo Three. Over.’ It was Fraser’s gruff voice coming over the headphones on ‘whisper’ mode. Willan thumbed the pressel switch and held the throat mikes of the 349 tighter to his Adam’s apple.
‘Three, this is One. Send. Over.’
‘One, we see a light, I repeat, a light, at three o’clock off our axis, estimate within a thousand yards. Over.’
‘All Romeo call-signs, this is Romeo One. Kill engines. I say again, kill engines.’
Within a few moments the engines of all three boats had died, and all they could hear was the splash and plop of waves and the cries of nocturnal birds out in the darkness.
‘Got it,’ Willan said, peering through the Individual Weapons Sight. The IWS was a long, heavy, metal sausage which looked like a swollen telescopic sight and was meant to sit on the breech of a rifle, but he was using it like a telescope now. It whined like a mosquito in his hands and turned the dark night into a landscape of bright flickering green. He could see Fraser’s light now, a pinprick of white amid the green clutter in the sight, and a silhouette brighter than the cool night air about it – the warmth of a man-made object of some size floating on the surface of the lake.
‘All call-signs, this is Romeo One. Objective in sight. Acknowledge. Over.’
‘Romeo Three. Seen. Over.’
‘Romeo Two. Seen. Over.’
So they had all now identified the target. What was in some respects the trickiest part of the mission was now over. They could go ahead with the plan.
‘Romeo Two, this is One, launch Ducklings. Over.’
‘Roger, out.’
Geary and Hill would be clambering into the Kleppers now, preparing to head out on a close-up ‘eyeball’ mission.
The two canoes moved along almost silently across the calm waters of the lake, the SBS men dipping their paddles carefully and economically. Sound travels far over water at night, like radio waves. They had no way of knowing how alert the crew of the steamer might be and so could take no chances.
It loomed above t
hem now, a dark giant that blotted out the stars. They could see the dim glow of the binnacle in the wheelhouse, the crack of light from a badly drawn curtain over one of the portholes. The ship creaked and groaned slightly as she rode the slight swell, her anchor chain dipping and coming up out of the water again as her bow rose and fell.
The SBS men piloted their canoes to the very side of the ship, and there Geary found the scramble net. They paused a while, listening, then Geary tapped his comrade on the shoulder and pointed a finger skywards. A moment later he had hauled himself noiselessly out of the Klepper and was going up the side of the ship as smoothly as an ape.
Nothing.
He had the Ingrams cocked and ready. He padded across the deck, his rubber shoes making no sound, peering down hatches and into portholes.
Two men in the wheelhouse, one smoking, his cigarette a tiny red gleam. They seemed bored, listless. No problem.
He made his way aft. An open companionway, the smell of old cooking and sweat. No lights down there. He started down the stairs into the pitch-blackness below.
No sounds . . . no . . . someone snoring. He continued aft below-decks like a dark ghost, and found himself in a larger hold-like space. Iron bunk-beds, all empty, a foul smell, a scatter of belongings. The place seemed utterly deserted. He left the way he had come, easing himself back into the canoe that Hill had held for him. And then the two men paddled back quietly to the waiting boats beyond.
‘Romeo One, this is Duckling. Over.’
‘Send. Over.’
‘Operation complete. Two in wheelhouse, at least one below. No more that I could see. Over.’
‘Roger. Wait, out.’
Excellent. So the pirates were still out on their little foray, and the ship had been left with a caretaker crew, no more. Willan took some moments to hone his plans, then said a few brief sentences over the radio. The plan was as simple and as clear-cut as he could have wished for. And now they were ready to put it into practice.
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