Cry Havoc

by Simon Mann

  MARCH 2004: ZIMBABWE

  My knees are wet in the sand.

  My hands are steel-cuffed behind me. The cuffs wrench my shoulders back, my neck and head forward.

  I smell the river water. I can smell my death, even though I don’t believe in it.

  They say they’re going to shoot me…

  ‘Are you afraid?’ ‘Are you brave?’ ‘How tough are you?’ ‘Do you think you are tougher than a black man?’ ‘Do you think you are better because you are white?’ ‘Who knows where you are?’ ‘How long will it be before anyone misses you?’ ‘What can they do to help you – here in Zimbabwe?’ ‘Are you ready to die?’ ‘Would you like us to kill you – or shall we wound you … leave you for the crocodiles to finish you off?’

  I guess that even if they do shoot me I still won’t believe it.

  ‘Please kill me first – don’t leave me to the crocodiles…’ I say it, but to myself. Not to them.

  Am I scared?

  Yes.

  Click. Click.

  They laugh.

  They order me to stand up, then kick me and pull me up. They chuck me back into the car. I’m slow and awkward so they laugh, then curse. I’m not as tough as a black man. My hands behind my back make any movement hard. They need another drink. They’re bored now – and tired. Danger.

  The car is turned around. Cack-handed. A small victory.

  I remember how I was once trained that – with Africans – if you are their prisoner, then the big thing is to be strong for 24 hours. After that they’ll start to like you. But maybe I read that.

  My mind clutches at another straw: the Boss. If anyone has the experience, the knowledge, the African clout, the money, to help us – it is him. This is his show anyway, even if he isn’t here.

  He’ll help me. Mark Thatcher…? The same.

  We bump back up the sandy track, climbing slightly, the river behind us.

  The rain is lighter now. Our car finds a shabeen. By the light of one oil lamp I can just make out the shapes of wrecked humans sprawling around the stoop. They couldn’t care about anything – just shuffling out of the way of the bullies.

  After my guards and driver all have a swig from their new-bought bottle in a brown-paper bag, we set off. The car smells vile. Stale sweat and rank liquor.

  My arms and shoulders cramp. When I shift to ease them, I get a dig in the ribs with a 9mm.

  An argument breaks out. They are speaking Shona. Are they arguing about killing me? The driver rules. It’s his car. He wins. Our course becomes less erratic. There is somewhere we are headed towards … then we come to it. Halt.

  A poorly lit house… No, it’s a police station.

  Sunday night, but it’s business as usual. We’re in the Sunningdale Police Post, a notice tells me. A crowd of arrests are being written up. A cartoon notice on the wall hooks my eye: it’s a poster from the United Nations Refugee Agency, the UNHCR.

  Beatings Are NOT to be a Part of Police Work.

  In the corner nearest the cartoon, a boy is being kicked and beaten by two khaki-uniformed officers.

  I’m roughly forced to sit on the floor. My handcuffs are unclasped. I’m told to hand over my boots, socks and belt, and watch. All my other stuff has already been taken. Stupidly I think about Brodie’s $20,000.

  My cuffs back on, I watch from the wooden-board floor. My drunken captors and the proud khaki-clad owners of this wooden Good Old Days cop shop painstakingly write my goods down in their property book. Then they fill out the sergeant’s desk book.

  Dixon of Dock Green. Gone wrong.

  Two men in civvies haul in a third. In tatters. They come through a back door. Throw their quarry into a small cell to one side. The two men won’t look at me – which is odd because all the others – officers and civilians – look at nothing else. They pull open a steel locker. From there they take out two strips of what look like the off-cuts of lorry fan belt, each about two feet long.

  The strips are just right for beating some poor bastard to death. The young man they just hauled in lies on his back, holding up his legs and bare feet. The two plainclothes men take turns to lash into his soles with their fan belts.

  Screams. The door is left open. For me.

  Other prisoners come to carry the crying man out through the same back door. The plainclothes men follow, at last giving me a telling look as they go. Their clothes – jeans and leather jackets – are new but of poor quality. Like their government.

  After half an hour of the man’s screams and cries ringing in my memory, the pair come back for me. The soles of my feet tingle. They drag me up – one aside – their hands under each armpit – then run me out of the back door.

  Are all policemen drunk on a Sunday night? I can smell hooch again.

  Outside is dark. Even the dim light inside the police station blinds me to the night. There are a few weak yellow streetlights dotted around here or there, but I can’t see.

  My feet are bare but they run me – shouting – across rough ground until I smash into a rock, then fall. They kick. One holds my shoulder down while the other strikes me in the face.

  ‘You’re not tough, Mann… Tomorrow you’ll see. We are tough. Tomorrow you must tell us the truth.’

  A uniformed police officer opens the steel door of a low, square blockhouse, 20 yards behind the police station. The goons take off my handcuffs and shove me inside. The door slams behind me. Outside they laugh as they shut the padlock.

  There is no light in the blockhouse. Faint yellow light from a streetlamp slips in through a small, rectangular opening, high on the wall opposite the door.

  I stand still by the door. My eyes and ears strain. There are people in the blockhouse. Quite a few. It’s a ‘tank’: a police holding cell. A voice comes from my right.

  ‘Here – there’s a place here.’

  I look – see nothing – but take a small step, kicking someone on the leg. Slowly I feel my way to where I think the voice has come from. Slowly my eyes are seeing.

  I lie down between two men. One is unconscious, the other the voice. Something sticky wet runs over the filthy concrete floor. With some wriggling, space is made for me. So I lie in it.

  In my shock and shame I think I won’t sleep. I can’t. Then, when I’m fast asleep, come shouts: ‘Mann, Mann, wake up! Handei! Come here!’

  In a daze I go to the door, frantic not to kick my fellows. A torch scores my sight.

  ‘You better tell the truth. We’re gonna see how tough you are.’

  Every 30 or 40 minutes they come for me. I’ve no watch, but I’m sure. It goes on through the night. On one of these calls, two of them take me out. They beat me up, punching and pushing me to the ground, then kicking me.

  Again they threaten me with beatings, again telling me to tell the truth later that day.

  The light of first morning as a prisoner creeps into the tank. I now see what I should have guessed – that the wet on the floor is blood, now dried and sticky. The man on one side of my space has grubby bandages around his head that have failed to do their job.

  There’s no need for me to ask him how he has been beaten. I feel humiliated, but in a good way – humble: I am one of these men now. My instinct tells me that last night was how it is: I’m one of them. We’ll look after one another as best we can.

  The thought is a lifeline, because I have to fight against the need to bash my head against the wall. The thought of the pain that I am about to bring upon Amanda and the children is too much to shoulder. Then there is the pain of what my life will now be like, maybe for the rest of it.

  Suddenly comes the sound of singing. It is not an African sound, but men in strict unison. A European sound. The man next to me answers my surprise: it is the police shift change. The officers coming on duty sing the Zimbabwe National Anthem. Of course they do.

  Next there is a kind of tarts’ beauty parade. We go outside into a pig-fence dog run. CID officers look us over – to see if anyone they fancy has been
pulled during the night.

  We stand or sit outside in the dirt while this unpleasant-looking bunch of about half a dozen men ogle us from the other side of the fence. They all look thuggish: more leather jackets. They look as if they have money.

  They have money because they take bribes, same as everyone else in Zimbabwe. What is the point of any post in Zimbabwe, if not for bribes? The salary is going to feed nobody.

  There is nothing to drink or eat for me. Others have had food brought by their family. One man tries to give me food. The officers scream at him not to.

  Back inside our shit tank.

  The latrine is a hole in concrete, in the corner. It doesn’t flush. There’s no paper. Piss and shit cover the concrete. The stench is terrible. My stomach has turned to a runny porridge. I badly add to the stench.

  Slowly – one by one – most of my overnight companions go. Where or exactly how, I don’t know.

  I must try to escape. I know from my training that a principle of escape is that it will only get harder.

  Escape. The one door is padlocked on the outside. The hinges are on the outside. The small opening in the wall, the one that lets in all the light, is small, heavily barred. High up.

  Outside there is the wire-mesh dog run, except that the mesh also covers the sky. There is no way out of the run other than the gate. Whenever we are in the run we are heavily guarded.

  All the time a thought careers around my head: the rest of my life will be spent as a prisoner of Mugabe. Hard labour. I try not to think of the pain that I’m going to cause Amanda and Freddy, but can’t. There are the two lovely little girls, Lilly and Bess, and the child unborn, that Amanda had told me of days before. Made in Cape Town that Christmas. Made with love.

  Within the maelstrom of sorrow and anger that swirl around my thoughts and feelings – Amanda, home, the children – I have two clear priorities. First, I must give Niek du Toit and the others with him in EG a chance to escape. That means time: 24 hours. Then, second, I must do the best I can to protect the other 69 men. They must also have been arrested last night.

  Niek has an aircraft with him, the An-12 that let us down so badly on Plan D, a fishing boat, the FV Rosalyn, and a couple of rubber boats. He must have word of what has happened to us.

  The team back in South Africa must have realised we’d been arrested when we lost comms with them. Niek and crew should have had time to get away. Niek has friends in São Tomé. They could escape to there.

  At mid-morning a strange-looking white man with crutches and one leg comes in. He’s a crook, for sure. Likely a stool pigeon.

  Ten minutes after he comes in, an officer comes to take his crutches. The man shouts and screams but the crutches go. Now he has to crawl and hop around in the filth.

  I learn that my space in the tank is all-important. How thankful I must be to the kind man of last night. The two corners on the same wall as the door are the best spaces. The corner diametrically opposite the door has the latrine built into it, while the one on the far side, opposite the door, is too close to the latrine’s mess.

  The corner closest to the door has the door right on it, so is liable to see aggro in the night. That is where I will end up in all the tanks. I am the aggro.

  I see that everyone wears their clothes inside out. Later I find out that this is their way of trying to keep their clothes clean, the outers at least. They don’t have others.

  When they are taken from the tank, they frantically strip, pull their shirts and trousers back the right way, then slip into them once more.

  My lack of food and water, the sleep deprivation, never knowing the time, the beatings – the beating demos upon others – are all part of the pre-interrogation softening-up process. I don’t need SAS Combat Survival training to tell me that.

  It is torture, by any modern definition. I know that from my time as a soldier in Northern Ireland. Tactical questioning, sensory deprivation – African style.

  The man with crutches tells me that, if I agree to pay to get him out – that is, pay US$3,000 back to the company that has accused him of theft – he will pay off the station sergeant. I will walk.

  I never find out if such an escape could work.

  A uniform comes to the tank, takes me out and handcuffs me. He leads me to a small and bare wooden shed, smelling of creosote, in which I have to kneel.

  Without ado, two CIO beat me up with punches and kicks. I try to cover the bits that would hurt the most. It comes as a shock, but I know that they’re pulling their punches. If they want to really hurt me, then they could. Their questions are as poor as their kicking, so I stick to our cover story. We were on our way to provide security at a gold mine in Kilo Moto in the northern DRC.

  I ask over and over to see a lawyer. They laugh at me: ‘This is Zimbabwe! If we get you a lawyer, then he’s our lawyer. You can’t escape us with lawyers.’

  They don’t believe the DRC story – not one word. Strangely, though, their questioning stays around the DRC. How often have I been there? When was I there last? Who were my contacts there?

  ‘Tomorrow you will tell us the truth, Mann. Think about what will happen if you don’t.’

  ‘Tomorrow I want a lawyer.’

  ‘Forget it, Mann. Think about what we’ve said.’

  I think about it, sitting on the filthy concrete. Why were they so limp-wristed? My one small hope is that there has been a muddle between ZDI and their chiefs. That this would be sorted out. We would be set free. That hope had started small, then shrank. By the second night it is gone.

  I watch as the tank fills up with that night’s shift of grubby wrongdoers. I’m an old sweat now, with my own corner space by the door. My fellow prisoners are cheerful and friendly.

  That night my diarrhoea, my shock of capture, lack of food and water, and sleep deprivation all make me dizzy. I cannot not sleep but, whenever I do, there they are:

  ‘Mann! Mann! Get up! Come here! Quickly. Quickly. Come to the door. Handei! Handei!’

  This happens every half-hour or so. Sometimes they make me go right out and into the dog run. Other times I go to the door and that is all. When they take me into the run, they kick and punch me.

  One time I go out and they order me to do press-ups. When I ask the time they laugh. They keep harping on skin colour. Are you as tough as a black? Are whites better than blacks? How do you like being a prisoner with Africans? Do black people bother you? Do you think blacks smell? Do you think you smell better than blacks?

  Sometime morning comes. The Anthem is sung with gusto, then we parade in the dog run, to see if CID want any of us strays. There is no food or water for me. Most of my fellows have visitors who give them food. Everyone seems very poor, and so is their food. When any of them try to give me food they are shouted at.

  The next shout for me will signal the next beating – the next load of questions. Niek has had his chance by now. If he has not escaped already, then he too is a prisoner. Now I must try to help the 69 with me. They, I believe, are already undergoing questioning with violence. Torture.

  Finally, they come to take me to questioning, and not just to wake me. On the way, two goons take over from the two uniforms that took me out of the tank and handcuffed me.

  ‘Tell the truth today, Mann – or we’ll kill you…’ And so on. They’re tedious. Unoriginal.

  In the smelly little garden shed a new shift is on, and the stakes are higher. In fact, three new shifts are on, so the shed is crammed full. They push me in. A small space is clear for me on the floor, in the middle. I sit: hands cuffed, barefoot, unshaven, stinking, beaten up and scared. My stomach is water, and has been for two days now.

  There must have been 12 men around me. There’s something comic: so many squashed into this shed, all so purposeful, each with his notebook and pencil. I sense that there are different agencies here, not all with the same agenda: probably army, police CID and CIO.

  What’s wanted, and why, is put to me loud and clear. My crew in South Af
rica have all been arrested. They’ve been given the chance to turn state’s evidence. They’ve all taken it. They are talking as hard and as fast as they can.

  My 69 men, being held in Zimbabwe, are being questioned vigorously. Some are talking, others not. It’s up to me: I can tell them the truth, or they can beat it out of me. And they can beat it out of the men with me.

  For form’s sake we go around the houses yet again – about my need for a lawyer. I ask. They refuse. Despite everything, I know enough to know that without a lawyer, this is duress. Worthless as evidence in a fair trial.

  I also know enough that, around here, fair trials are UN Red List endangered. Like the wide-mouthed toad.

  That’s for another day. I have a higher priority: my 69 men held here in Zimbabwe. If I tell these goons the story, there will be no need to torture them.

  I tell them about Plan E: our mission to oust Obiang and replace him with Severo Moto.

  Then we go round and round. They try to catch me out. They become angry, and then, when they think they have caught me out, violent. We go round and round small details. Each of the dozen or so men squashed into that little hut needs his shout. Most of those men don’t speak English well. The services present – CIO, police, army – show off to one another.

  Suddenly the questioning stops. Thinking that I’m going back to the holding tank, I’m surprised to be put into a car. Once again I squash into the back seat between gun-toting heavies.

  I miss my friends from the tank. I need not have. We soon arrive at another tank, just as bad. With the exact same characters.

  My routine doesn’t change: the denial of food, water, sleep. The swap, from one police holding tank to another – I realise – is because they are hiding me from the outside world. Thus far I am deniable. They can do what they like with me.

  Kill me.

  The next day is like the one before: I think that I am to be questioned. The Anthem and dog-run beauty parade are no different. All morning I wait – to be beaten up, then questioned again, while instead they just keep coming every 30 minutes to wake me. Some of them look as tired as I feel.