Cry Havoc

by Simon Mann

  In the meantime, I had been stretching my brain about our mining strategy. The DMW money was sure to run out, so we would have to go back to the market to beg for more. That begging would be met with scorn. Unless we had defied all the doubters and nay sayers by bringing the mines into production. The Koidu, in Sierra Leone. The famous Luo Mine, in Lunda Norte, Angola. On the Chicapa river. Tributary of the Kasai. The tail of Conrad’s Congo River dragon.

  Tall order. Here were two mines in what were very recent war zones. Zero infrastructure. Luo is over 1,000 miles from Jo’burg; Koidu, in Sierra Leone, four times that.

  We attacked it with all we had: me and my crew of about 100 full-time employees, and some 200 local part-time workers. Sure enough, we ran out of money. But thanks to this amazing bunch of people, we were able to go back to investors and raise more.

  That was because the Koidu Kimberlite in Sierra Leone, and the Luo mine in Angola, had been successfully brought into production – on time and on budget.

  One of Andy Smith’s wilder applications had been for gold-exploration licences deep in the Cabinda rainforest. There had been an old Portuguese hard rock mine up there. This, Smith said, was a sure sign. (Something that I now know to be bullshit. More likely a sure sign that the old mine failed.)

  EO veteran Calvin had been our man in Angola. After all the usual labyrinthine negotiations, arrangements and bribery, Calvin sent in a three-man team to make an exploration for alluvial gold. Not the old mine.

  The three men – two ex-EO plus one crazy Yugoslav mining engineer – oversaw the work. They were sub-contractors to Branch Minerals, not employees. Local hired labour (not slaves) did the digging.

  They delved out 1 x 1 x 1 metre pits, according to a sampling plan. The miners then processed the gravel over a portable sluice box, tilted, watered and covered in artificial turf to catch the gold. According to the Cape Town Assay Laboratory which was testing the samples, it had been going extraordinarily well.

  Then the three men vanished.

  Calvin had known he must pay a security fee – or tax – or deposit – or squeeze – to keep the guerrillas at bay. The guerrillas in Cabinda were FLEC. FLEC had been quiet since the November 2004 ODAB ceasefire. FLEC were still there, nevertheless.

  What had gone wrong was typical. So typical that Calvin blamed himself. Under the agreement to mine in Cabinda, Branch Minerals had been obliged to joint venture with a local company. This outfit had mysteriously popped up on the Ministry of Mines concession map, from nowhere, after the Branch Minerals applications had been made. Calvin had been paying protection money to the boss of that company. He was the brother of the Governor of Cabinda. The far-off cousin, more likely. Nonetheless, he was well known. It turned out that this man had been trousering the protection money. Keeping it for himself. So no protection. Nada.

  Calvin called me in London. ‘If they’ve been kidnapped by guerrillas or bandits … then we’ve got big shit…’

  Days later, Calvin and I met in Luanda. The Tivoli.

  Calvin was beside himself with worry. Also anger. I bought the beer, then dinner, as he told me about the three kidnapped men. The man in charge was an old Yugoslav miner, Tadek. With him, one of the original Soyo crew, Jannie de Beer. The third miner was a black EO trooper, Rusty. Calvin had to do everything and anything, for Jannie. Yet again I was taken aback by the iron loyalty of these Afrikaners.

  The other two? ‘Well, Simon, maybe … when we get Jannie out, eh?’

  On hearing about their disappearance, Calvin had immediately travelled to Cabinda. What a nightmare. Officialdom were in denial: it was as if the three hostages had never existed. Our partners in Luanda could do nothing. The official line was: the Angolan government do not approve of the paying of ransoms for kidnapped mining personnel.

  With the Angolan security forces toothless – especially in the outpost enclave of Cabinda – we must somehow sort this out ourselves.

  But how?

  Calvin and I made a decision. I should cover Luanda and Cabinda itself, meaning official Cabinda. I had connections there, influence, since the battle for Soyo. Surely I could make something happen. In the meantime, Calvin would try to worm his way into the FLEC hierarchy. If FLEC is behind this, then we need to start making connections to senior members.

  That we had heard nothing from FLEC was not a good sign.

  Not long after that, Calvin and I met again, this time in Jo’burg. I confirmed what Calvin had suspected. Despite my connections in Cabinda and Luanda, I could make nothing happen. All I’d encountered was arse covering. Shoulder shrugging.

  We were left with one option – to open a dialogue with FLEC. If they weren’t the kidnappers, they’d know who were. So: I had to track down someone – anyone – connected to FLEC.

  FLEC had reps in Brazzaville and in Kinshasa, and something in Paris. I got Paris. Days after Calvin’s arrival in Brazzaville, he was arrested. Acting suspiciously. Hanging about with undesirables. In fact, the security services of Brazzaville were aware of Calvin’s mission. He had briefed them. He had paid them off. So why had they arrested him?

  To get Calvin released, Tony sent a new DOG recruit to Brazzaville. Mark Cullen (MC) was the former British Ambassador to Mozambique, and ex-MI6. He arrived a few days later on our HS 748 turbo prop private jet (ex-RAF Queen’s Flight – going cheap) with three crew members.

  The arrival of MC fuelled the Brazzaville Police. Within a day, MC and his entourage were also arrested and the aircraft impounded. Full marks, Chief Inspector. Police took their passports, placed them under arrest, but let them remain in their hotel, under armed guard. ‘Tennis arrest’, the models called it. As days drifted by, their incarceration in a five-star hotel gave me a fresh headache. A load of money.

  Then, after two weeks of this, Calvin, MC and the crew were released. The UK Foreign Office had stepped in: arresting ambassadors, even ex-spook ambassadors, simply isn’t on.

  Again I met Calvin – again in Jo’burg.

  Calvin told me why they’d been arrested. He had paid the bent police too much. The Brazzaville security services decided, if Calvin’s visit to Brazzaville was this important, then they could extract more money. When MC turned up with aircraft and crew, then it must be Christmas.

  Meantime, Calvin and I had come to the same conclusion: FLEC existed, but FLEC did not exist. Our sources weren’t wrong about FLEC having people in Paris, Brazzaville and Kinshasa. And probably in other places too. They were taxi drivers and such like who, along with scratching out a living by any means that came to hand, claimed, if it looked like a good move, to be FLEC officials.

  They were FLEC. They weren’t FLEC. Money in it. No money in it.

  However Calvin’s Brazzaville odyssey hadn’t been a complete waste of time and money.

  Before his ‘tennis arrest’, Calvin had met some tough operators in Brazzaville. Gangsters. These men claimed that they could find out – for sure – which village head was holding our three hostages. They asked to be go-betweens.

  I sent Calvin back to Brazzaville to explore this new route. Of course, the go-betweens would need to be paid. Of course the whole thing had Fucking Dangerous written all over it.

  Days later, the men told Calvin they’d made contact with the village head. He was, and was not, a FLEC field commander. He had demanded $10 million per hostage. I burst out laughing. I told Calvin to go back and talk some sense into them.

  After days of haggling, the village head and the go-betweens settled for a payment of $600,000: two hundred grand a scalp.

  That pushed the cost of our ten-week hostage nightmare to over $1 million. There was only one place this money could come from. Mine and Tony’s pockets. I had spoken to Amanda because it was her money too. She instantly said we must pay. Tony asked me if we really had to pay but he knew as I did: there was no other option. For us to mount a hostage rescue into Cabinda was too much. What else could we do? We paid.

  We scrambled the money together, then talked
it out of my bank in Monaco. We had to get a letter out of the Foreign Office, one which underwrote our account of the story, and said that the purpose of so much loose change was to save these three lives. We flew the money under guard to Calvin. Bravely, Calvin then made a truly desperate, worse-than-Hollywood 4x4 journey through torrential rain, in tracks swollen to rivers, expecting at any moment to be robbed and killed. Sitting on top of $600,000 in cash.

  Calvin returned with the three hostages. Just. They were in bad shape. We arranged a get-together in Jo’burg. They had been tied to a tree the whole time. They were fed scraps and drinks that villagers dropped off for them when they felt like it. The village that had captured and held them didn’t care, said the hostages. A ransom or three corpses. So what?

  On the evening of our reception party, Rusty, the black trooper, broke down in tears to me, saying thank you. He told how his village captors had said that, while his bosses might pay a ransom for the two whites, they’d never pay for a black. After a while he had believed them.

  Shortly after the drama of the three hostages, Calvin and I spent an evening together in Luanda, swapping yarns. It turned out that Calvin and his wife, Mary, had both been operators in London for the notorious CCB.

  The CCB had been a government-sponsored hit squad during the Apartheid era. They had carried out illegal operations – including murders – under the authority of Defence Minister Magnus Malan. In London, the CCB had tasked Calvin and Mary to sabotage the ANC.

  Then Calvin and Mary were only pretending to be man and wife, as part of their cover. They had lived in London. I told him how I too used to live in the same area of London. With a lovely Scots girl called Susan.

  How times change, I laughed: I could remember Susan and I going to the enormous Free Nelson Mandela pop concert at Wembley stadium, just down the road. We had laughed when a West Indian next to us in the crowd had turned round and asked, ‘So when’s this Nelson bloke coming on, then?’

  Calvin looked sadly at his beer, then took a swig.

  ‘Jeez, Simon, we were fucked over by that concert, eh?’

  I was puzzled. Calvin thought. Then he spun the yarn.

  ‘We thought we could make money, something we were always being told we should do, as well as disrupt that concert, which was obviously a big money raiser for the ANC. We thought we could achieve both missions by flooding the market with forged tickets.’

  ‘How did you go about doing that?’

  ‘We made the right connections, with the East End gangsters. The tickets, you may remember, Simon, were very high quality: hard to forge. Jeez! We paid out £30,000 – that’s a farm, eh? – to have the printing plates made. The forgeries would have been perfect replicas. Perfect.’

  Calvin went quiet again.

  ‘What happened?’ I prompted.

  ‘We never saw them again. Those bastards. We never saw them, the money, the plates, the tickets: ZERO. They took us for such a ride.’

  I didn’t try to disguise my delight at this outcome. I loved the story – just as I hated the idea of their Afrikaner thuggery going on back there in Blighty.

  We drank a couple more beers and told a few more stories that night. But there was one thing Calvin said that shook me. In a pause, Calvin frowned, then spoke.

  ‘We weren’t meant to free those three, the three hostages.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well – think about it. If you take hostages for money you set the thing up to get the money. You keep your assets healthy. You keep them alive.’

  ‘So what, Calvin? I mean – so what are you saying?’

  ‘I dunno. It bugs me. I can’t put my finger on it exactly, Simon.’ Calvin looked up at me. His frown sterner, worried.

  ‘Naah – look, Simon. I dunno. I’ve thought about this. You know – CCB, and all that shit – you start thinking that everything’s a conspiracy, because you yourself do nothing but conspire! Know what I mean?’

  ‘I can see that – sure. Maybe you become paranoid. But maybe you need to be paranoid.’

  ‘’xactly, Simon. Now: these hostages. I can’t put my finger on any one thing – but I tell you this: I have a feeling that the real plan was that those guys should die, should never have been rescued: that somebody paid that village head to take them, and make it look like a kidnap. If those hostages meant a big fat pay day, then the villagers would have been looking after them really well. The men would be no value to them dead.’

  ‘Who would want to do that, Calvin? What would be the point?’

  ‘Come on, Simon. Who wants us to fuck up, here, in Angola? Fuck up things with our operations, our employees, with the locals, our partners, the ministries, the government? Who?’

  ‘You mean a big bad mining company who wished the names of EO and Branch had never been? Never been near Angola, at least?’

  ‘’xactly, Simon. ’xactly.’

  Calvin was far too tough, too highly trained, too experienced to say what he had said accidentally, unguardedly, without meaning to say what he had said. Calvin’s bothersome worry, upon which he had been unable to put his finger, was more than that.

  Or he wouldn’t have mentioned it.

  I didn’t want to inherit Stav’s mantle as the Grim Prophet in Chief. But I decided I must at least tell Tony and Michael of Calvin’s observations.

  Tony was bullish: ‘But what difference does it really make? If we found out that Andy Smith was murdered, and this kidnapping an organised attack on us, then … so what? What are we going to do? Stop? Go home? Nope… Damn the torpedoes.’

  SEPTEMBER 1997

  I knew my life was at one of those major crossroads. Take this turn. Or that. You don’t know where either will lead. All you know is that they are going to be very different.

  Meanwhile, Tony and I had entered the Peking to Paris motor car rally. We would be one of 94 classic and vintage cars. 33 days’ driving, 14,000 kilometres: China – Inner Mongolia – Tibet – Nepal – India – Pakistan – Iran – Turkey – Greece – Italy – Austria – Germany – Paris. Then home. In time, I hoped, for the birth of our new baby. Our number two.

  Of course, Tony and I had been better friends eight months earlier when we’d submitted our entry. That was before we were really pissing one another off. Since then, things had become more tense. This would be a test. This was our 40 days and 40 nights in the desert. This could break us up. Forever.

  Instead, when we crawled into Paris, the only breakdowns had been mechanical. Our Aston Martin DB 5 (Bond’s car, in fact) had survived: four deserts, the highest rally checkpoint ever (the Tango La, Tibet, 17,000 feet) in the Himalayas, river fordings, mobs of thousands, Pakistani truck drivers, oily Customs and Immigration.

  Lahsa. Kathmandu. Delhi. Lahore. Quetta. Esfahan. Tehran. Istanbul. Thessalonika. Patras. Ancona. Rimini.

  Searing heat, freezing bloody cold, passes closed by rockfall, a crash, several engine failures. Perversely, our friendship had thrived – the endless shift driving brought us together. Short of sleep, revolting hotel rooms, food so bad we would sit out in the car park while I brewed up our compo rations.

  One day – back in China – I carelessly spun the car on a greasy bend. Tony wasn’t kind. I got out: ‘You fucking drive.’ He showed me his technique. We drove another ten minutes. He spun the car. I said nothing. He said nothing. The car shook with gagged laughter. The car – like us – grew ragged, smelly, knackered. Like us, our Aston was quickly stripped of status. Stripped of ego. Stripped of its brash, shiny exterior.

  When Amanda saw it creep into the Place de la Concorde on 18 October, 1997, she cried. ‘Oh my God, what have you done to that beautiful car?’ She remembered the car from three months previously: immaculate, gorgeous, ready to be shipped to Beijing.

  The rally helped us to find our friendship again. We stopped acting like arseholes. We got on. I started to remember what great company Tony could be and why I loved him like a father.

  Better still, I got home in t
ime for Lilly’s birth.

  Next, as COOA DMW, I bade farewell to Angola. Then Sierra Leone. I decided to say goodbye personally to the DMW crew at the Koidu mine, and to the Koidu Mayor, his clients and the admen. Tomorrow: England.

  The day before, I said my goodbye to President Kabbah. It had been tense, my meetings with Kabbah always were. But this one more so. I had been briefed that Kabbah had decided to scrap the last EO remnant in SL: the 30-man Presidential bodyguard team.

  Kabbah had been persuaded to save the money and expunge the memory of EO – perhaps so that the little children of Sierra Leone could be fed a more palatable, patriotic, version of their recent history.

  As I flew in Bokkie from Freetown to Koidu, I asked myself if I would tell the Mayor and the people the news that the last of EO were leaving for good. Months earlier, when the news had spread that Kabbah was to pull out the bulk of the EO force, this Mayor and his townspeople had tried to put together money in order that they could pay for the whole of EO to stay on.

  The people had been frantic. Their fear was a return to lawlessness and of the barbaric RUF. For them, EO was Hobbes’ Leviathan – security.

  As Bokkie settled into a cloud of dust blown up by her rotors, I decided to duck telling the Mayor that Kabbah was sending the last of EO home. Incredibly, I knew that those 30 men, seen as an icon of EO, had been enough to deter the RUF.

  A day earlier, as politely as possible, I had told Kabbah of the folly of his decision. I warned him that, if the RUF were sure that EO had really gone, then they would be back in Freetown in a hundred days.

  Back home, in Cape Town – Kaapstad, the boys would say – I watched with horror as the RUF rolled towards the sea. Freetown. I had been wrong about 100 days. They were there, but in 98.

  Kabbah had flown. The shit.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN