by Simon Mann
He knows what I mean. He knows the jar is out of its hiding place. He would have heard me moving it. He can hear me pick my nose in that cell.
As I’m bundled out, I think only of Magneto and Uncle Bertie. I hope to God I haven’t cost them their lives.
At the Maxi Gate, I am the only white man among an even bigger crowd of goons. Maybe 20 in all. They look calm. Amused. By contrast, the ZPS men – another ten or so – are horrified. This – a kidnapping – is the one thing they always promised me would not happen.
I have always feared a kidnap most.
For form’s sake, I have a go at Mashone, the OIC. I plead with him to telephone the Croc.
‘Our exchange is closed, Shumba.’ A lie.
‘Then call him on your mobile.’
‘No signal here, Shumba.’ A lie.
He tells me he is sorry. He is clearly terrified. He knows that I am being kidnapped. This is the end for me.
They make me change into clothes from my suitcase. Jeans and the light-blue Ralph Lauren button-down shirt that I haven’t seen for four years. Although I have worn nothing but prison white or prison khaki during that period, their familiarity gives me no pleasure. I call over the head man, a plainclothes police inspector but probably CIO as well.
‘I demand to know what is happening to me. You know I have been told not to leave Chikurubi without my lawyer present.’
He measures his words. ‘Mann, you have lost your appeal against extradition. Last night High Court Judge Patel found against you. We are taking you to Harare Central. Your lawyer will be there, and he will explain everything. You must come with us now. Quickly. No arguments.’
‘And if I don’t?’
‘We will force you.’
‘Then I want to make a complaint. You are using force to move me. I’m not going to start a fight…’ – we both smile, while running our eyes over the massed heavies – ‘…but you are using force to move me. Were it not for your threat of force, I wouldn’t move. Do you understand?’
‘I understand, and your protest is noted: you are being moved by force.’
It is pantomime. I have to go through with it. I can’t believe that ‘London’, the British government, the Croc and the rest will allow me to be kidnapped. Across half of Africa. To a messy death.
I have to register that fact. Make them understand. I am indeed being moved by force.
Only when I am dressed do they start to get rough. Handcuffs. Leg-irons. Another set of handcuffs fix me to an officer. I am an insect: wrapped up in a spider’s web, ready for the larder. They manoeuvre me off the Maxi Gate loading ramp. They run me, pushing, pulling, punching, into the back of a waiting Grey Maria, its engine running.
The leg-irons burn me every step. That is not half of the pain. I am back where I was four years ago. Humiliated. Ashamed. Powerless. Disgusted with myself. I feel hostility, bullying, the misery of my first week in their hands.
Once inside the vehicle, I am fastened even more securely – the chain of my leg-irons passed behind the seat brace. My back is against the forward bulkhead, so I face aft. Troops, four of them, in full fighting order, AK-47s with bayonets fixed, climb into the back.
A CIO officer parks himself on either side of me. They mean business. I guess it is about 5.30 am when the wagon finally moves out. My predicament is as dark as the night. I am escaping from Chik, but not in the way I had wanted.
As the bus rolls out of the long driveway that serves the Chikurubi Prison Farm complex, I can see nothing about me. Nor do I want to be seen to be observant. I need to know where I am being taken, but if I’m too alert they will hood me and make me lie on the floor.
I have never before driven this route to Harare Central, but the place is as named – central. I know that downtown Harare is about 12 miles from here. But I wonder. No streetlamps, to cast their sickly yellow on to the gloom; no house lights; no traffic, even at that hour, if we really are heading towards Harare. Unless they are lying and we are not going there at all. The fear inside me begins to uncoil, its scales scraping cold in my gut.
The Grey Maria trundles along the dark road while the soldiers smoke and talk among themselves. The corporal, to whom I have often spoken before, chats in Shona on his mobile. Who to? The Croc?
I know these squaddies – visiting me twice a day all these years, checking that I haven’t bribed the ZPS to let me escape. Zim squaddies! Always asking how to join the British Army – as many of them do – or asking me for a mercenary job in Iraq or Afghan… Afghan, where my two boys are now – Peter and Jack – both captains in Guards regiments. Thank God they can’t see this.
The two goons are silent. I recite my Chik mantra silently: ‘Hope for the best, expect the worst.’ Ninety per cent expectation. Ten per cent hope. I have been kidnapped. I am going to be smuggled to Equatorial Guinea. Murdered. Unless – my 10 per cent glimmer – the British government, the Croc or my family in London can somehow block that.
I am in this bus, heading for God knows where. How do I begin to set myself in order? Hope, fear, shame, self-disgust, rage – where do I start? And blame, too. How could ‘London’ have let this happen? How could my Brothers-In-Arms have let this happen?
Uncle Bertie was dead right all along. For God’s sake.
I am aware of a faint glow pushing up on the horizon. I steal a look, trying not to make it obvious. Distant streetlights? A bush fire? It could be, but in my heart I know that it is dawn breaking and, with that, the dread in the pit of my stomach uncoils another inch or so.
If that is daybreak, then we are heading south-west. We have been since we left Chikurubi 40 minutes ago. We are not heading for Harare. Harare Central. Or Harare anywhere else. That makes it all the more likely that I am being taken to Equatorial Guinea.
I address my guards. ‘I hope you two are being paid plenty of money for this.’
‘What do you mean, Mann?’
‘Your bosses are certainly being paid a lot of money for this. What you are doing is a crime. You’ll pay for it in the end, you can bet on that. So, I hope you’re being paid well – now.’
‘You heard, Mann. Judge Patel, in the High Court, found against your extradition appeal last night. We are taking you to Harare Central. Your lawyer will be there. He will explain everything. We’re just doing our jobs.’
‘Just doing your jobs?’ I laugh. How often have victims heard that mantra of tyranny?
‘You have no right to extradite me until all my appeals are exhausted. The British Embassy has written to that effect. They’ve written to your Ministry of Justice and to the Ministries of Home and Foreign Affairs. You’re a bunch of lying thugs and you’re not taking me to Harare Central at all.’
Ministry of Justice? For God’s sake. You don’t need to have read 1984 to laugh at that one.
Why am I bothering? I don’t care any more. I feel bleak. I think of Amanda. I long for the love we once had. Maybe this change is better than nothing. Even the thought of being shot doesn’t seem so bad. Better for Amanda and the children that I be dead. Not rotting away in prison.
‘What do you mean, Mann? Why do you say we are not going to Central?’
I tell them I can see. The position of the rising sun. Our speed since leaving Chik. We must be by now about 30 miles due south of Harare. They look at each other.
‘Ah, Mann, we were warned about you… Shumba – you are very dangerous.’
At this moment, Shumba feels as dangerous as Hello Kitty.
When we eventually pull up outside the guardroom of the Zimbabwe Army Military Police Depot, the bastards are still trying to tell me it is Harare Central.
‘Put a hood on him!’
They have no hood, of course. They pull my threadbare old towel out of the pathetic cardboard box. Abducted with me from my cell, this they wrap around my head. They rough me up coming out of the bus.
With my hands behind my back, the hernia is forced further. They push me around. The leg-irons bite. I lose it. I pum
p up and down, shoulders working, ducking out of their grip, shaking the stupid towel off my face.
‘You fucking arseholes…’
I should see it coming. I don’t. The fist strikes. What am I doing?
They punch me. Shove me. Pull me. Handcuffs and leg-irons cut in with every move. The hernia is killing me. I beg them to at least cuff my hands in front of me, to ease the force.
‘Here’s your kit, Mann. Change.’
‘What do you mean, “Change?” I am changed. You saw me getting dressed.’
They’re at my old cardboard box again. Rifling through my suitcase.
‘You look too well dressed, Mann,’ smiles the goon-in-chief. ‘You cannot look like this. I want you to put on something different.’
‘Do you want me in something more … prisoner-like?’
His smile grows into a grin. ‘Yes – more prisoner-like … exactly … but shorts…’
He holds up a pair of khaki drill shorts, tailor-made by Richard James of Savile Row, London W1. A long way from home.
‘I’ll wear them, then.’
‘No. These look too good…’
‘These?’ I brandish a pair of crumpled lightweight khaki trousers. He eyes them.
‘Better. But I want shorts.’
‘Take these… Cut off the legs. These soldiers have their bayonets – use them.’
Changed now, I am put back into handcuffs, again fastened behind, and leg-irons. Unbelievable. They take me to a ghastly dungeon: small, dark, filthy. One small, high window, unglazed but heavily barred, lets in some light. I can feel the hernia push out again.
I don’t understand. Why am I being treated like this? A prisoner for four years, I have never caused trouble, I tell them.
Push. Shove. Jab. Kick. Then the door slams shut. I’m on my own. I listen to the stupid fuckers, fiddling around with the cell’s lock for what seems like hours. I want to see them all fried alive in rat’s piss.
Then I remember. President Obiang has said he will eat me. But I love them all, really, the President included. My copy of Introducing Psychology – which followed my Iliad into the cardboard box earlier – explains that love of one’s fellow men is one of the key characteristics to being a happy person.
This hernia is my constant companion. It was diagnosed as needing an immediate operation 18 months ago. I have had no treatment. The hernia pushes out of the intestinal sack more and more. You can reduce the pain and the protrusion yourself by kneading it back where it came from – lying on your back is best – as I have to do every ten minutes these days. But you need surgery eventually.
Now, with my hands pinned behind my back, I cannot stand up straight. The upper part of my body is forced into bad posture. It hurts. The fear of the hernia becoming trapped is ever present. That is an emergency. Unless an operation is carried out within a day, it will kill.
When the pain is too much, I start shouting. I keep shouting. My cries go unanswered. I lie there, on that filthy floor, on my side, wrists and ankles in irons, my hands and arms somehow stuck back and below my arse. Simon Mann, contortionist. For a time I despair. Then, as usual, despair gives way to something else. An awareness that nobody cares if I despair or not, so why bother? Now I feel more alone than ever before.
Not only have ‘London’ and the rest been wrong, now they don’t even know where I am.
At some point, my captors come into the cell to rearrange me. Then they leave me, to play with myself again.
Out of nowhere: ‘Shumba! Shumba! It’s me!’
A voice coming at me from above, urgent, hurried, slightly fearful. I look up at the foot-square barred opening. My cell is in darkness but at the opening, silhouetted against the bright light, I can make out an African head.
I can’t see who it is. My mind starts to race. A trap? It wouldn’t be the first time someone has tried to frame me. Set me up. It could be one of the soldiers that I know. Maybe one of the Commandos of the regiment that had last been guarding me in Chikurubi? I was friendly with some of them.
‘It’s me, Shumba. Thomas. You know me.’
‘I can’t see you in this light, Thomas.’ And I really can’t see his face. I can’t place him. He must be balancing on something outside the window. The sill is about eight feet above the ground.
‘It’s OK, Shumba. I cannot help you in there… It’s me. Thomas. You know me. I am a friend of Zeb…’
‘Listen, Thomas – get hold of my lawyer. You know him. He will pay you. But you must get word to him of where I am. That’s what you must do: tell the Croc where I am!’
He tells me it is OK.
Word of my whereabouts has reached the Croc. Zeb has already spoken to him. He knows how to talk to the Croc. So if the Croc knows where I am, so must ‘London’. The British government – if they know where I am, surely they can put a stop to this? I line up my thoughts. The Croc must know. The thuggery can stop. The cavalry may be coming … but so may Christmas. I’m wrong. It’s the old Chik maxim. When things are as bad as they can be, then you know: they are about to get worse.
That night is not a good one. But which has been? As the pounding hoofbeats of the cavalry grow faint, I can only see ahead my EG torture, and death.
I lie in the cell, in my own piss and shit, while squadrons of mosquitoes feast upon exotic blood.
Then – hard to face – another day. No better than the last. I am more in control of my body. With pain and effort I can just lie down or stand up, as long as I don’t try too often. No mystery visitors at the window today.
In the afternoon I have a visit by a chief inspector, a torturing bastard if ever there was one. He has been responsible for my hardships from the first minute of my arrest.
‘Ah, Mann. Now you are not so tough, are you?’
He has come to gloat.
‘That’s a fine new suit, Chief Inspector. And look at those new shoes … your shirt … your fancy tie. Don’t tell me! Don’t tell me that EG have paid … before you deliver me!’
During the second night of my stay in the Military Police Depot, soldiers come for me. Young, in a great hurry – they seem so frightened, so panicky, so jumpy – my apprehension dissolves behind hidden laughter.
There is the usual shoving and prodding as I am thrown up into an army truck. I help – anything to make it less painful – as I’m dragged along the filthy, torn rear deck. This is unlike anything that has happened.
A glim of hope.
More shouting. An oil lamp is lit. They place it in front of me, while six of the soldiers jostle. This gang scream and point their AKs at me. They’re ready to use them.
I want to laugh. A mad laugh. To match this chaotic, wild scene. The truck, engine gunning, jolts off into the night. Our getaway truck. What is this glimmer of hope? This scene makes no sense at all – unless these soldiers are acting under the orders of General Solomon Mujuru. Am I being rescued, or aided in an escape?
General Mujuru is Mugabe’s number two. Once Commander of the Zimbabwe National Army, he just about still is; his wife Joyce is Vice-President. He is the man who promised my sister that, whatever happens, I will never be taken to Equatorial Guinea.
Is it possible that…?
The truck lurches round a corner and knocks the lamp over, killing the flame. Puff. My tiny light of hope goes out. Ahead I see, lit by our headlights, an aircraft.
‘Handei! Handei! Let’s go! Let’s go! Come on, Mann. Into the plane.’
My leg-irons make it hard to jump off the high tailgate. My hands are cuffed. I can’t save myself. They shove me off.
I pick myself up off the deck. The hernia hurts. I try to push it back in. It won’t go back. I need to lie down flat. Coax it in. I can’t do that. The familiar charade follows.
I make the goon-in-chief own up. ‘I am being moved by force. Under protest.’ We both know our lines.
They shove me into the waiting aircraft, a twin-engined high-wing Casa C-212 200 Aviocar turbo prop. The Zim Defence Force use it
for parachuting.
I’ve made plenty of military parachute jumps, but with a Zim chute? What if the rubber breaks? They’re not planning to throw me out, are they?
They remove my handcuffs. Then, having run them through the crisscross web tapes of the jump seat behind me, they put them back on.
If we are going from Zim to EG, it will take days in this thing. An aviation adventure. Maybe a chance for me, Biggles, to escape.
As a trained pilot, I always enjoy the start-up/take-off sequence. But now, as we take to the air, I regret all the time and money spent struggling through my flying courses and exams. Amanda said I should do it; fulfil a lifelong dream.
Now, as I squint at the flight deck instruments, too far away to see the numbers, I regret the waste. How could I, stupidity and arrogance, be in love with a woman as wonderful as Amanda, then waste time not being with her?
It cannot be that we will make the journey to EG in this Casa. We’ve been flying 40 minutes. My time and distance computer has been spinning. Too many difficulties with fuel stops. Some of the countries en route are not on good terms with either Zim or EG. As if reading my mind, the Casa’s engines change note and it begins its descent.
I pick up words from the goon chat: we are flying into Bulawayo. I’d always loved the name Bulawayo. I remember that it comes from the Sindebele word ‘KoBulawayo’: ‘The place where they are all killed’.
Our last chance to refuel in Zimbabwe perhaps?
Now is my last chance for a goodbye para jump – without a parachute. ‘Glory, glory…’ I eye the door and handle. Measure the paces I need to make. Weigh up the goons. But ambition is greater than ability yet again, Mann, even if I am handcuffed to the jump seat.
Hallelujah!
I think yet again about Richard Westmacott, my great friend and SAS Brother-In-Arms, shot dead in Belfast. The battle he had with his parachuting. I must have thought of Richard every single day that I have been in Chikurubi.