Cry Havoc

by Simon Mann

  Walk along the west side – I think it’s west – and into – can it be? – Cell 6. My crowd of goons pile in. I sit on the bed. A bed with springs. A mattress. These are objects that for me have become myths from a fabled but Golden Age. Quickly I lie down on my back, then shove my hernia back in. General Manuel frowns.

  He talks to the young officer, the one that drove me from the airport. He is the OIC, I will find out. The man goes over to the corner of the cell, turns on the shower, then the tap on the sink, then he flushes the loo.

  I gasp.

  I haven’t seen water run out of a tap for months. I stare. The lights are on. If they go out, there is a foot-square steel-barred opening in the wall. I will never be without daytime light. I try to adjust to these wonders. The cell is the same length as in Zim (seven paces) but twice the width: ten feet instead of five.

  For four years, I haven’t seen my face. No mirrors. No photos. Nothing. I see a mirror over the sink. I stand, look at myself.

  I grin. It’s my own ugly mug. I laugh.

  Four new plastic bags are pushed at me. I open them. Inside are brand-new uniforms, grey with white and grey stripes. New. It’s Christmas. In Chikurubi, some prisoners have no uniforms at all. There are fights for uniforms. Here, I have already spotted, people wear civvies if they like, but they still get new uniforms.

  I turn to the Zimbabwe goons. They are watching. They don’t like this.

  ‘You see! Here the water flows, electricity works, new uniforms … at least this is a country that works.’

  ‘Shut up, Mann,’ they say. Dopey.

  Then I see what they are worrying about: the handcuffs and leg-irons are theirs. They are on their signature. They take them off. Heaven.

  I change into one of the crisp new uniforms.

  Then EG handcuffs and leg-irons are put on. Not a good moment. These are more modern than Zim’s, and they are put on properly, so they are loose, but they are a bucket of cold water over my happiness. My executive suite has lost some charm.

  But a bucket of ice water would not go amiss. The heat and wetness of the air are a too-hot sauna. There’s no air moving.

  A Chinese doctor checks me out. Nobody can tell him anything. Nobody speaks Chinese.

  With the General is a young plainclothes cop: his interpreter. He wears with pride a badged jacket: INTERPOL.

  ‘You must put me on malarial prophylactics… Please.’ My request.

  They don’t.

  Outside there is mayhem: everyone on the first floor, many of them, maybe four to each of twenty cells, are packing up and herding downstairs. If I hadn’t worked out that this exodus was because of me, their looks would have told me.

  Over the next few days, I keep going with the malaria thing. I know that this part of the world is rightly called the White Man’s Grave. The Niger River, not far to the north, was only opened up to successful exploration after the discovery of quinine, and its anti-malaria capabilities.

  In EG, there are strains of malaria that are cerebral and resistant to standard treatments. One of these strains can kill a healthy, fit man in 24 hours. As an Englishman born and bred, I have no resistance to malaria. Zero.

  My executive suite is dirty. Cobwebs festoon the ceiling. They cover the high corners. From one of those, a fish-like CCTV eyeballs me. Smile – you’re on telly.

  My uniform is sweat-sodden. I drink from the bottled water. The General forbade me to drink from the tap. Teeth brushing OK. Drink not OK. The heat grabs at me, clutches me, hugs me close. I lie on the bed very still. It helps my hernia, and the stillness of it makes me less hot.

  But I can’t lie down. I must walk. I’m a walker. All I do is walk. I start walking, but the irons eat into my ankles. Sweat foams up. I’m alone. The door is locked. There is nobody to talk to. Even if there was, we would have no language. For the thousandth time I pray: if they’re going to kill me, then let them do it by a bullet, not a rope.

  Since my arrest in 2004 – four years ago – the thought that this story was going to end with my execution has always been there. Rarely at the front of my mind, but ever there, somewhere. Flitting about.

  I think about being hanged. The minutes and seconds just before. I’m haunted by Orwell’s description of an execution, in his essay A Hanging. I try to think of it in a way that I can cope with. Being hanged can’t be worse than a really frightening downhill race, in which you are sure to fall over and break something badly.

  Then, lights out.

  It works. I’ve done that downhill. I can cope. Then … the big snake slithers inside my sick gut once more. I have to think it all through one more time.

  Screwing back on tight the top of my bottle. Again.

  I try to tell the panic to go away. Panic fingers are scrabbling at me, tugging, clawing. The heat and humidity and stuffiness are more than I can take. I fight for air. Night comes. I drift in and out of sleep. My poor body is being eaten by mosquitoes. If I don’t know that by their many bites, then I would by the screaming air-attack whine of the deadly critters.

  After four days and four long nights, my interrogation begins. They escort me to a courtroom, new built within the prison wire. The equatorial sun is frighteningly strong outside. The brightness blinds me. The courtroom was built for me to be tried in, they say. But I won’t be tried there. It isn’t big enough, they boast.

  ‘Those were the days, my friends…’

  I have company: Israeli Special Forces. They each carry a handgun, with spare mags around the waist, as well as a main weapon, each with his favourite: HK G3, M16, AK 74, MP5. All the main weapons are on a chest harness. Their clothes are a stunning mix of uniform and expensive sports civvies.

  ‘Shalom.’

  ‘Shalom,’ one says, chewing back the first letters of the word into his mouth while the latter ones are still coming out.

  My courtroom is bliss: six air conditioners blow an arctic wind across. The relief is great. I’m going to hate power cuts here. I’m given a Coke by one of the many goons, after General Manuel insists.

  Along with the General, who met me at the airport, the EG Attorney General, José Olo Obono, is here. Business-like. I’ve met them both before: when they came to offer me the deal back in Chikurubi.

  ‘Why am I in handcuffs and leg-irons 24 hours a day, every day? Please. They are making me sick.’

  The interpreter, Miguel, looks pained.

  ‘You must stay like this for the moment, señor,’ says Obono.

  I sense that he is boss here. I smile. I remember my Chikurubi rule: make a request, never a complaint.

  I long for Chikurubi.

  To go through the whole pantomime of interrogation, then trial – all over again – sickens me as badly as this heat. As badly as my hernia. As badly as the prickly heat rash, spreading from my handcuffs and now in my armpits and down my sides.

  ‘The General told me that you will try and help me, if I help you. Well, I will do everything I can to help you, but we need an agreement, a legally binding agreement, that if I do help you then I will be released.’

  ‘Mann. There will be no negotiation with you. We do not negotiate with terrorists. You are a terrorist.’

  So why did you come and offer me a deal while I was in Chik? I said. To myself. Lips not moving. Obono is the Attorney General, and the man who hunted me down, took me to Chik and then brought me here. The Attorney General runs this prison. I am his prisoner.

  General Manuel is the Minister of Security and the Head of Police. Miguel, my interpreter, is a petroleum expert, and a professor at the university. Few people speak English in EG. He has been roped in.

  I’ve tried to get a negotiation going, and, as I have been trying to do each time, the General has come to my cell these last gasping-hot four days. I’ll keep trying, but I can’t push too hard.

  All I can do is try to get it over to these men that the big-shot bosses in the plot are my out-and-out enemies. I will do anything to fuck them over because they are my Bro
thers-In-Arms who betrayed me. Four long years, still no postcard. They are my enemy.

  Once they have that message – not too hard for me to project – then next I have to get over to them that I can do much more against those enemies as a free man than as their prisoner… Sure… Pigs might fly.

  Our interrogation starts. It’s old hat. The detail is tight. Question after question, then back over earlier answers. My interrogation will last three weeks, then there will be a trial.

  Day 1, Day 2, Day 3… Each day the relief of the air conditioning in my courtroom is vast. In a break I turn to Miguel: ‘What do you guys do for winter?’

  ‘We fly to Spain.’

  He isn’t meant to be chatting with me. He answers quickly out of the side of his mouth.

  I point out to the General that he is using mercenaries that look like Israeli Special Forces. Ironic, when they take so badly to my being one. ‘Mann, why do you say these are Israeli, not Moroccan, Special Forces? They are Moroccans.’

  ‘Sir, I can see an Israeli at 300 metres… It is the way they sling their rifles … and carrying a side arm as well as a main weapon says Special Forces… Anti-terrorist team. The SAS started it. I was in the SAS…’

  Then the General notices how the Israelis creep forward during the interrogation. Courtroom bench by courtroom bench. He shoos them away.

  Of course they want to hear this shit. Angola? Sierra Leone? They dream of doing what I’ve done. With me.

  Then they are gone. I never see any of them again. It’s a pity because I enjoyed watching them play the fool, with their clothing and weaponry: mix ’n’ match, then accessorise. I know how bored they are. That kind of job is the pits.

  Lunch the first day is one sandwich and a Coke, the second day two sandwiches, then the third a sandwich and a salad on a plastic plate. The General, I learn, owns Hotel El Paraiso.

  The days roll on, while the lunches – slowly but surely – get bigger and better. My inquisitors are beginning to relax with me. The General has naps after lunch. I don’t think Obono ever sleeps.

  I sense tension between the two men. Obono and the General. Each morning when we start, Obono has a list of questions typed up on a sheet. We make sure that we have each of those well answered. I notice how these questions sometimes go down alleyways that seem out of keeping with Obono.

  By this time Miguel is allowed to chat with me, so long as either Obono or the General can hear. Both have a decent grasp of English. One day, Obono goes to the loo. I ask the interpreter, ‘Where does Señor Obono’s list come from each day?’

  Miguel smiles and turns to the General, who nods for him to go ahead with an answer.

  ‘Simon, each evening – when Señor Obono and the General leave here – however late it is – they go to the President. They have to tell the President the answers to his questions of the night before, then he gives them new ones for the next day…’

  By now we’re working off my notebook, found by me in my suitcase, here in EG. Missed by the Zim clowns. That helps win their confidence. It also hugely helps me answer their questions about the nitty-gritty of four years ago.

  Then – in the course of a careful search of my cell – by now I am an old hand – I find a cutting knife and a pair of heavy pliers. Good escape kit. Or planted? Or to be found in a search?

  My best escape route, I believe, is more subtle.

  I piss off the owners of the tools. I piss off the officers. I take my prizes to Obono and the General. Of course the General gives the officers a bollocking, but I get a wink from Miguel.

  One night, when I get back to my cell, we find my bulb blown. The OIC – my escort that evening – puts me into another cell, over on the east side. A little later there is a power cut. I can see that it is a general outage by looking at the lights across the way. I know that the CCTV cameras work in the dark, and during power cuts, because before they caught me using a contraband razor blade to sharpen a pencil.

  I’d spotted the razor blade on the stairs, on my way out to interrogation. I’m slow on the stairs because of my leg-irons. I marked the step. On the way back that evening, I saw the blade still there. I slipped on the stairs, went down onto my cuffed hands and palmed it.

  Now it is a part of Miguel’s job to make sure I have a supply of sharp pencils. They want me to make notes because that helps to jog my memory in our exhaustive search for clues.

  That night – carefully – because of my hernia, the handcuffs, the leg-irons and the darkness – I climb onto the low tiled wall that divides the washing area from the rest of the cell. Slowly, I stand, craning to see, my eyes struggling to make out what is in front of me.

  I can see the sea! I can see the sea!

  My heart leaps with joy.

  Seeing the sea is nothing next to the other good points about my new cell. The openings in the wall and the cell door have no old bits of mozzy net to block the air. Air moves. I am facing the sea and the breeze, when there is one. I feel it.

  Below me is the yard. I can hear people having fun: playing football, talking. I can also hear their bloody chickens, this being an ex-Spanish colony.

  Hard, in solitary confinement.

  Next morning, I see the dawn. The sun puts on a great show for me. I feel so lucky. Whipping out my pencil, I mark the shadow of sunrise on the wall. I can pursue my amateur astronomy, my barefoot navigation, just as in Chikurubi.

  I have malaria. I feel like shit, and the blood tests say the same. They treat me by locking me in the cell with a drip in my arm. If I scream nobody will come. The drip goes funny, so my arm swells up. I shout, but nothing happens.

  For days I am all over the place. I wonder how Gerhard Merz really died. They told me it was his heart. In Zim, everyone had agreed that it was his heart because he had been denied his heart medicine while being questioned.

  The prickly heat still spreads, grows worse.

  The doctor is called in to see the General and Obono. He gets a massive rocket, but tells them he needs money. After that I get the Rolls-Royce treatment. I see that I am being treated with Artemesin, an anti-malarial wonder drug – a silver bullet that I had read about in Scientific American three years before, while in Chik.

  I look at the Artemesin pack. There’s no CE, ‘Complies Europe’, badge. The whole thing, except for the sticker saying ‘Artemesin’, is in Chinese. After that I get better quickly. One hundred per cent.

  Slowly, and while the lunches become bigger and better, my ad hoc friendship with my captors grows. I have won trust. One of my requests is to take proper exercise. I tell them how I always exercised in Chikurubi, rain or shine.

  They know that I exercise every morning as best I can, despite my handcuffs and leg-irons, and despite the malaria, prickly heat and bloody hernia. Press-ups, sit-ups, heaves, dumb-bells (in my case, a six-pack of 1.5-litre Ceiba water bottles). To my amazement, Obono comes back from a Madrid trip a few days later and gives me a French-made step exerciser that works on hydraulics.

  This – of course – comes from the President, or with his blessing. By a miracle, my sister Sarah also gets me, at my request, a heart-rate monitor. This arrives with the UK Consul, who has braved local airlines from Lagos, Nigeria. Now I start to really exercise, even though the guards tell me I am loco. They are missing the point: part of the exercise routine is to tell them to fuck off. Look! I’m fitter and tougher than you, despite all this shit. It may be stupid, but something works. They do respect me. More importantly, I respect myself.

  How I would so easily not do those exercises.

  Two months pass. Tragedy strikes. The machine breaks and hydraulic fluid flies all over the now very clean cell floor. I cry. It’s my lifeline.

  I pull myself together. Even with my Chikurubi training, I can’t make the step exerciser work… I think what I really want is a rowing machine.

  Then I get it. The bottom of the barred opening in my cell door is tit height. If I hold on to that with my hands, I can bounce my body up and down
. A rowing action. The Concept Zero rowing machine. I laugh at myself. It works, but it’s hard to get my pulse up into Zone 3 and hold it there. Really hard. You see, I have a four-point-plan for keeping myself sane – my four-legged table, for living through every shitty day:

  ONE – a strict daily routine

  TWO – physical exercise every day

  THREE – something creative every day

  FOUR – logging of the first three

  My routine means one day a week of real scrubbing. My cell is shiny clean. It also means a change-round, from day to night and back. This is all about shifting things around. I did it in Zim, where I made my blankets into British Army-style bed blocks. I became a fanatic: hoarding water and drinking an exactly prescribed amount, so my hoard would keep growing while I would keep my urine clear.

  ‘Something creative every day’ means writing – unless I am flying my airplane around. I should say my flight simulator. I made one by drawing an instrument panel, then writing out checklists and making up navigation charts, standard approaches, instrument approach plates and airfield diagrams. The charts are all unnamed, so can be anywhere in the world. I fly around in my aircraft – N90676 – and work the radio. To make it more fun, I do both sides of the radio, using – of course – the local accent of the peoples below.

  That is fine, until one day the officers are all standing outside my cell laughing: the white man in Cell 11 has at last lost it.

  Then they are sure. They catch me doing all the voices for the cast of strange people that I press-gang into a mad screenplay. It is fun for me. Double Dutch to them.

  Meanwhile, there are serious matters afoot: escape!

  My master plan – making the EG President let me go because I am trying so hard to help him – is failing. That’s not because I’m not trying hard enough. That’s because I don’t know the intelligence that the Pres needs.

  It goes like this. President Obiang and his men have worked out the truth. They deduced that there had to be a Plan X – a palace coup, or something like it.