by Simon Mann
Waiting for us at that airport are weapons and ammo, sold to us by a key middleman in the Op, one Captain Brodie. Lately of the Zimbabwe Air Force, Brodie is a veteran of their rape and pillage of the DRC for diamonds – and anything else that’s worth taking. But Brodie is also a senior – but covert – officer in Mugabe’s notorious Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO). Bob’s Gestapo.
These men are good friends of Mark Thatcher – himself one of the high-profile secret backers of this Op. ZDI are supplying me with 100 AK-47s, 20 PKMs, 20 RPG-7s, nine 60mm mortars, six Dragunov sniper rifles, ten 9mm Star handguns and box upon box of mortar bombs, grenades and ammo. Two and a half tons and 250, 000 US dollars worth in all. Charles and Lyle are here with me to make sure we get what we’ve paid for.
Tomorrow will be the first time that the key components of the party attacking EG – men, weapons, the 727 – will be all in the same place.
I had two golden rules for this operation. Golden rule number one is that favourite of the Provisional IRA: men and weapons come together for the least possible time. They meet for the Op – that’s all. Tomorrow golden rule number one is going to be broken, but it’s that or jack this in.
Anyway, my 727 is stuck in Miami. The ferry crew flying the thing to South Africa phoned in. They are Aircraft On the Ground – AO fucking G – with a ‘no fly’ equipment failure. Just to make sure that I go pear-shaped, the ferry captain is also grousing about paperwork. I know that the paperwork can be torn up, then sorted out later. If there is a later.
I’ve dealt with ferry crews before. They’re always a waste of rations. They land somewhere sun ’n’ fun – like Miami – then bingo: the airframe goes unserviceable (U/S). What I need to do is get hold of someone in the States who’ll ride shotgun, to get crew and aircraft into the sky. Flying south. Fast.
I know just the man. But Bill comes at a cost, and at a risk. Anthony – my Jo’burg-based PA – is trying to get hold of him, but we’re running out of time.
The whole picture is looking shonky. The plane picture worse. My 727 has to be flown out of Florida for South Africa in the next few hours. Finding a plane is only one of my ‘No Go’ headaches.
Already in EG is my number two – Niek du Toit – and an advance party of ten men. Tomorrow night – before me and my 69 men land at Malabo International – his ten must secure the airport’s control tower. This must be done silently. Maybe by force.
With the control tower in his hands, Niek can radio us the all-clear: that our runway is not an ambush. He can also operate the runway lights. Switch on the instrument landing system – if serviceable.
Niek’s team has to get six vehicles onto the airstrip. Those wagons are to carry me and my 69 to our targets. Each vehicle will have a driver and a co-driver from Niek’s team. They will have recced the route to our targets. Palace, police station and barracks, media and communications. The Central Bank. Key Points (KPs). All of these have to be locked down.
Niek is taking the biggest gamble right now. As I keep telling him, by his being in EG so much, he has been putting his head inside the mouth of a hungry lion. A man-eater. Tomorrow night he’ll be taking over an international airport for a plane that may or may not fly in.
If he and his team are captured while we’re in flight, then – maybe – the first we’ll know of that is when we land. By then it will be too late to avoid the water barrels, chains or rocks laid across an ambushed runway. Caltraps.
Another of my old gang is Crause Steyl. He is in the Canary Isles with President designate Severo Moto, plus a chartered King Air 200 turbo prop. His job is to fly our new El Presidente into Malabo, landing a half-hour after us: the cavalry. That just gives us time to form up. Moto’s brass band. His guard of honour.
Since day one of this Op – plotting with the Boss in London – golden rule number two has been that we must not move around Africa without our ‘Pres des’ in tow. If we are caught without Moto on board, then we are the big bad mercenaries. They’ll throw away the key. With Moto, then, what we are about is clear and in the flesh. Black flesh. Then we are the bodyguard – the close protection – such that Severo Moto can take his place as an interim President, pending free and fair elections. We are PC.
Tomorrow, golden rule number two, like number one, is going to be broken. But it’s either that or jack in the Op. Fucking hell.
What my men don’t know – what only the Boss and I know – is that, inside Obiang’s fortified palace, courtiers and security disloyal to him are primed and ready. As soon as they get the Boss’s phone call, the plotters will arrest Obiang, his closest supporters and any security people still loyal. That call will only be made once he knows that I’m gear-up out of Harare, en route to Malabo. With airport and palace held, the EG army – mutinous, disloyal, and now caught off-guard – will either surrender or run into the jungle.
Mark Thatcher – who is a helicopter pilot and a yachtsman – has our Escape & Evasion (E&E) plan. I’ve been through it with him more than once and he is gung-ho. It’s Mickey Mouse but it’s better than nothing.
In case it all goes wrong on the night, our opening night in EG, we’ve agreed frequencies, timings and days, locations, signals – either for a helicopter or for a boat. For Mark to come in and pick us up.
This whole Op may sound kamikaze to you… Maybe it is, but you don’t know what we did in Angola in ’93. Or Sierra Leone (SL) after that. Both those times, all the odds were stacked against us – plus superpower players – but we won through. Big time.
Anyway, ask around! You don’t become a crack mountaineer by turning back when the weather changes, or because someone’s hurt their toe. You get there by not jacking it in. You get there by wanting the top badly enough. It’s ‘Who Dares Wins’. Isn’t it?
So, as Pien’s Hawker rocks and rolls Harare-ward, that’s how it is. I pray to the war god. My prayer to Ares. Let us be lucky one more time, please. Just one more.
Between prayers, my mind drifts to Amanda and the baby inside her – our fourth – that she only just told me about. I think of our son – Freddy – and our two lovely little girls, Lilly and Bess, so different from each other. I drove them all to school just last week.
When I said goodbye to them, I felt a heart stab: I might never see them again. But I have to block them out of my mind. I cannot allow myself to think of the pain I will cause them if this goes wrong. I’ve been here before: in the British Army, and all the other ones I’ve been in. If you’re going to do this shit, you have to build a barbed-wire fence around your heart.
I feel the engine thrust come off. The pitch change, top of the drop. I take a deep breath, tune into what’s happening in the cockpit. At least the toddlers are calm now. We’re on long finals – follow the glide path and the localiser beam – down onto Harare’s great 4,725-metre runway.
Right, lads, who wants to jack it in? Last chance. Now. Truck’s over there…
Charles, Lyle and I walk the walk. Harare International Customs and Immigration. The night-time airport is deserted. We’re the only show in town. They’re bound to give us a load of shit.
We breeze through. Zero hassle. A sure sign – I cheer myself – that all’s well. For an old ‘Africa Hand’ like me, such a walk-through can mean only one thing: that we have powerful friends. These must be friends who – thanks to Mark Thatcher – love us. The air crew – following shortly – will waltz through too. Harare? Piece of piss.
Charles, Lyle and I are driven along bare, scarcely lit streets. Not so long ago Salisbury. Metalled potholed roads are wet with rainy-season rain. Dim yellow streetlights glisten off the surface, as few and far between as other traffic.
I can feel the poverty that grinds these people as fiercely as the blast-furnace heat of an African midday.
A mobile phone rings.
Back at the airport, the three pilots are in shit. They are held. The plane’s owner, Pien, is scared. Another old Africa Hand, Pien knows Africa better than anyone. He has done shi
t in Africa that makes my hair stand on end, and that’s not because of the flying. Now he tells me that this is not the usual ‘your money or your life’ banditry.
They want money, of course, Pien tells me. US dollars, naturally, but there’s something nastier at work. Another cold chill blows between my shoulder blades. My Africa Hand antennae, comfy after our stroll-through, are back on alert. Is this whole thing a set-up? An ambush? Have we just ‘walked the walk’ … into a gin trap?
I ring our fixer, Brodie, and tell him what’s happened. He’ll sort it out, he says. Relax. I wince once more at this month’s ever-ready thought: the pond life with which I have to deal – so as to make this Op work – would fill a swamp. What is it they say? ‘Lie with dogs – get up with fleas.’
Déjà vu. I check in to the Cresta Motel; just as I had two weeks earlier, for the previous, aborted, shot at this.
I set up my mini COMCEN once more: it’s a comedy Communications Centre, made up of a battery of four mobile phones and their chargers, and two stacks of Pay As You Go cards. This is not some cunning, low-tech COMSEC (Communications Security) ploy: it’s our African way of keeping in touch. Drums.
One phone has a UK SIM card on ‘roaming’; another is a South African one – same detail. The other two are on different, heavily juiced-up local Pay As You Go networks. Most times one or other of the four will work, even if only for text. I also have a handheld Iridium satellite phone, never before used and therefore, I hope, ‘clean’.
This motel room puts me into a cold sweat. All by itself. I had sat in an identical room two weeks earlier, as the ill-fated Plan Daisy – even more far-fetched and far-flung than this one – ran awry. Plan D. Yes, far-fetched and far-flung. But better – safer – than this one, Plan E. It didn’t break golden rule number one – men and weapons come together for the least possible time. That’s why it was safer. For Plan D, I sat through the long night: frantic to talk to the airport control tower, or the Operations Centre, or the loo cleaner, or any so-and-so, at half a dozen African airports, each unwittingly involved in that cunning plan.
All I wanted to know: where’s my bloody airplane? That night the aircraft was an old Russian Antonov An-12 cargo plane. As I sat there – shouting at the darkness, the distance, the poor phone lines and the far-away second languages – my fever to GO GO GO had driven me crazy.
I had screwed myself up to fight – to kill or be killed if it came to it – only to find myself trying to sweet-talk some Air Traffic Controller, half asleep, in a far-off place, with no Air, no Traffic and fuck-all Control. Throughout that night a chunk of me had been fearful. Cold, wet, ball-of-sick-in-my-gut fear. That fear had been piano wire tied taut to the door. Waiting for that moment when Mugabe’s famously nasty CIO came busting through to capture me. Or to shoot me.
Now, two weeks later, that cold, wet ball is back. Will the air crew get out OK? If not, we’ll have to break them out – by force maybe or bribe more likely – then flee Zimbabwe. Bring Plan E to its own sorry end.
But fear not! Captain Brodie – of Zimbabwe Defence Industries (ZDI) – is secretly Central Intelligence Organisation, CIO, Gestapo, and therein lies our safety. Thatcher is sure of it. So is Niek. We’re in with the Baddest of Bad Arses. He will look after us.
I start to wonder why Niek – up there at the coalface in EG – hasn’t been in touch. Shit. Has he been captured? Even if we do speak, how can I tell that he isn’t being forced at gunpoint to string me along? So that we fly into their trap? A runway ambush. Their touchdown Killing Zone (KZ).
Still no word about my 727, the one last heard of stranded in Miami. And still the Greek hasn’t got back to me about our alternative option – his 727, idle in Kinshasa. If neither 727 comes good, then this is over. For ever.
I’m running myself ragged. Why not be a train driver, after all? Why not be safe at home? Why not be with Amanda?
Thank God there is a point to this Op. A point beyond mere money, I mean. EG is a rank tyranny and ongoing. Sure, we’ll make money – loads – but EG is a mountain that needs climbing. The people of EG are under the cosh. EG has too much oil. It’s like the fatal gift of beauty. An ancient Greek curse.
One-time Spanish colony EG is the third-biggest sub-Saharan oil producer. Yet the poor bastards come near bottom of the UN Human Development Index. Less than half the population drinks clean water. One in five children dies from malaria before they make it to five years old.
Since independence in 1968, the nation’s two leaders – without an election between them – have been pilloried as being among the worst abusers of human rights in Africa. And the richest. Before Obiang’s terror came that of his uncle, Francisco Macías Nguema. He ordered the mass murder of thousands of the Bubi tribe and political enemies. One third of the population fled. Francisco was a member of the Fang tribe, one of Africa’s largest. The Fang extend from Cameroon, through Equatorial Guinea, all the way south to Gabon.
Obiang, of course also a Fang, took over by force – killing his uncle – then, some say, eating him. That was in 1979. Since then, Obiang and his gang have trousered the petrodollars, letting his own people starve. With no help from outside, those people will never win their freedom. Getting out from under tyranny without help has a snowball-in-hell’s chance.
This civilian population will never know the most basic public health care. This state won’t even fork out the $5 needed per new-born child for a mosquito net. A simple step that would more than halve the infant mortality rate, which stands at almost one in ten.*
I cannot think of a single reason not to putsch this bastard.
My SA mobile rings. It’s the Greek calling from a far-distant very bad line in Kinshasa. His boss says no. Fuck. The notice is too short. If we have another go, then his boss will back us all the way, he says: 727, money, weapons.
I have no idea if any of that is true. It’s too late now anyway. It’s tomorrow or it’s never. If Anthony, my PA, can’t get this American crew to fly my 727 from Miami to South Africa, the Op is gashed.
The same phone rings again. It’s Anthony. Hallelujah! My 727 is back on plan. Good ol’ Bill: he has the ship ready for take-off from Miami. Paperwork done. Snags sorted.
0400 HRS ZULU,* ETA LANSERIA RSA
I know that Pien has paid off the officials at the airport in Pietersburg (now called Polokwane) in the northern state of Limpopo, South Africa. The plane will land there, refuel, then clear immigration. It’ll take off OK for Harare, with 69 known mercenaries on board. Bet your arse, it won’t be just Pien’s bribe that will make sure that happens smoothly. I know. I suspect that powerful agencies, too, have smoothed our path out of South Africa.
Hallelujah! At last. I get a call through to Niek up in EG. He is ready for us, he says, and all is well. Meaning that there isn’t a wall of water-filled oil drums across the main runway at Malabo International. That tanks aren’t out on the streets. Not yet.
Cryptically, Niek lets me know that the EG Army are going to help us, and that the South Africans are going to support Severo Moto. Both of these things I know, but how the hell does Niek? It’s an open line, sure to be intercepted, so I can’t ask: our stilted, veiled speech, our ad hoc codes, won’t allow it.
I put the phone down. I run it through in my mind: was there any hint – any use of one of our trigger code words – to say that Niek was under duress? But I couldn’t spot one. All clear. Or I’d missed it.
Suddenly my Op is happening.
I don’t know whether to feel happy or just more frightened. I don’t tell anyone that the Hawker crew is being held at the airport. Does Brodie have the political clout to spring my crew? He’d better have.
As on our first shot, two weeks ago, I stay in frequent comms with the Boss and Mark Thatcher. The Boss is having fun with our code. His code says that the Op’s a party, the mercenaries the band, weapons the musical instruments. I wish I hadn’t started that one. Thatcher is full of it: good luck, right behind you. His code is that we’re oil
-prospecting in Uganda. He’s 100 per cent on board with our E&E plan. The plan I noted in my Smythson notebook.
‘I’ll be there for you, no matter what, Simon.’
All this time I’m thinking, what the fuck’s happening to Pien and the other two?
Just then a mobile rings.
Pien. I can’t make out what he’s saying. I shout at him to slow down. He’s gabbling. He’s joyful. They’ve been let go. Pien knows the score. Brodie has sorted out the airport uglies in nothing flat: he has flexed supercharge muscle. Brodie has clout. We – therefore – are VVIP. In favour. I thank my stars that Mark Thatcher is on the boat. The Zimbabwe sector of this Op is going to be a walk in the park. Plan E for Easy is GO GO GO.
The evening wears on.
I want to get pissed, with Charles and Lyle, in the Cresta Motel bar, but I can’t. To take my mind off the mission, I try to watch TV in bed, but it’s garbage. I ring round my stations: Niek, Anthony, the Boss, Thatcher. I dare not call Amanda any more: I’m beyond love.
I think of Willard in Apocalypse Now, in his hotel room in Saigon during the Vietnam war. What did he say? ‘When I’m here I wanna be home. When I’m home I wanna be here…’ Boy, he got that right.
Then the thought strikes me: I’ve gone beyond doing this shit for a reason. All I’m doing is seeing this Op through for the Op’s sake. I’m trail-stamping deep snow to the top of a meaningless mountain.
The task – the climb – the Op – has a life of its own. Groups carry out tasks. The group – the team – is a runaway juggernaut truck. Big wheels are turning now. Task and group. I’m the flea on one axle. I’m clinging on. In my heart of hearts I know it: this is how big fuck-ups happen. But each time I think that, I think back to our other times: the Ops before, when I felt the same. Because then – each time – by sticking it out – by keeping the top of my bottle screwed down…
Just keep going. We always win through…
0600 HRS ZULU (Z), SUNDAY 7 MARCH 2004: D DAY MINUS ONE FOR THE ATTACK: CRESTA MOTEL, HARARE, ZIMBABWE