Shepherd’s finger tightened on his trigger but he couldn’t bring himself to fire. They were murderous killers high on drugs and they would kill him without hesitation, but they were still children. He lay down and pushed himself down against the ground, burying himself in the vegetation. He held his breath and tried to stay calm but his heart was pounding fit to bust. He heard them crashing through the undergrowth and then they were gone.
He got to his feet and moved to the left, his mind racing. He had intended to make for the RV but that now wasn’t an option, not with the rebels ahead of him. His only sensible option was to try to make his own way back to Freetown, but that was a lot easier said than done.
He heard more searches behind him and upped his pace. The faster he moved the more trace he left of his passing, and the rebel group stayed on his trail. An hour before dawn he looped his track, lay up in the cover of a thorn bush, and waited. There were six of them, five boy soldiers and an adult, a stick-thin figure with dreadlocks tied back into a ponytail. He was obviously their commander but he took care not to lead from the front, urging them on from behind while using the partial cover they provided. Shepherd squinted through the site of his rifle drawing a bead on the man’s left eye as he moved slowly forward in three-quarter profile to him. He took a deep breath and as he exhaled, he squeezed home the trigger. He allowed himself a brief smile of satisfaction as the man’s head exploded. The boys looked around trying to work out where the shot had come from but Shepherd had already moved on. Shepherd discarded everything but his weapon and ammunition and belt kit to increase his speed over the ground. He had no food and could move safely only at night, for once he had left the forest and begun to cross the savannah, he was dangerously exposed by day, visible for miles under the pitiless sun.
For two days and nights he moved on and then, exhausted, semi-delirious and now completely without water or food, he was stumbling through a patch of scrub when his eye caught a slight movement from the base of a thorn bush. As he looked at it, he saw an eye staring back at him. He swung his weapon up but in that instant, he heard a voice crying ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!’ and an African man crawled out from under the tree and stood up, raising his hands over his head.
‘It’s all right, you can put your hands down,’ said Shepherd. ‘Why were you hiding?’
The man grinned. ‘English?’ he said. ‘You’re English, aren’t you? Look at this!’
He fumbled in his pocket and produced a small, cracked and crumpled book with a sun-faded red cover. Shepherd took it from him and read the title: “Soldier’s Service And Pay Book.”
The man’s smile had become even broader. ‘It belonged to my father, Thomas Tucker,’ he said. ‘He fought with the British West African Field Force in the Second World War. He told me many stories of fighting with the Chindits in Burma. I am named after him: Thomas Tucker, Junior.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ Shepherd said. ‘I’m Dan, but why were you hiding?’
‘Because the rebels are here. The RUF. If they find me they will kill me.’
‘I hear you,’ said Shepherd. ‘Looks like we have something in common.’
‘But you have a rifle. You can fight them off.’ He paused, eyeing Shepherd narrowly. ‘You are making for Freetown? We can travel together.’
‘I’m sorry Thomas, I can’t take a passenger.’
Thomas shook his head. ‘I won’t be a passenger. You protect me - be my bodyguard - and I will show you a safe route into Freetown. Very few people know it. And,’ he said as his gaze took in Shepherd’s cracked lips and the empty bottle dangling from his belt. ‘I know where there is water too.’ He held out his own bottle. ‘Go on, drink. There is water nearby.’
Shepherd took the bottle gratefully and took a long pull on it. Almost at once he felt some of his strength and sharpness returning. He looked at Thomas for a moment and then nodded. ‘All right, you’ve got yourself a deal.’
Thomas led Shepherd away, at a tangent to the bearing he’d been following. A couple of miles away, half-hidden in a hollow, was a large baobab tree. ‘Give me your water bottle,’ Thomas said. He climbed its bulbous trunk, hauled himself up and then leaned forward into the crook of two branches. A few moments later, he dropped the bottle down to Shepherd; it was now full of water. Thomas beamed at the look of surprise on his face. We call these trees “the tree of life”. They store water from the wet season.’ He moved out along the branch and leaned down to pull a fruit that looked like a gourd from the underside. He grinned down at Shepherd. ‘They feed us, too.’
He climbed back down and used a bush knife to cut through the hard skin, exposing its white, powdery pulp. He dug some out and handed it to Shepherd. Shepherd ate it greedily; it was the first food of any kind he’d seen in two days. It tasted like a cross between a pineapple and a melon with a tart, citrus tang.
They moved off again and Thomas led Shepherd even further from the route he had been following, crossing a dry river valley and climbing onto a low ridge. He pushed his way through some scrub bush then turned to Shepherd and smiled. They were standing on what appeared to be a narrow pathway running straight as a die into the distance. Although it was flanked on either side by dense scrub, the ground underfoot felt stony and the way itself was mainly grass-covered, burned brown by the sun with a few stunted bushes. ‘It’s an old railway line,’ Thomas explained. ‘It’s been closed for many years, but it’s so dry and stony that almost nothing can grow on it. We can make fast time now.’
To Shepherd’s surprise they arrived at the fringes of Freetown within 24 hours, where the railway track ended, petering out among a sprawling shantytown of crude buildings and lean-to shacks. The stench was overpowering and the watercourse that ran through the area was as foul as any Shepherd had ever seen, yet he saw women scooping drinking water from it. The stink of sewage, refuse and decay mingled with the smoke from cooking fires, and there were clouds of flies everywhere.
As they peered out from cover, they saw a barrier across the road, guarded by rebel soldiers, and patrols moving through the shacks and houses. They waited until after midnight before they moved on. Shepherd still had the scarf around his neck that he’d used to keep the dust from the Harmattan wind out of his nose and mouth. ‘Wind your scarf around your head,’ Thomas said. ‘You’ll need it. There is disease in the air.’ Thomas had a black and white checked scarf around his neck and he pulled it over his mouth and nose.
He led Shepherd into the shantytown, past shacks built from scrap wood and packing cases, their roofs made from rusting corrugated iron or palm fronds. They moved through a maze of alleys and passageways, the stench growing ever stronger. A few mangy dogs growled or barked at them, and one or two figures appeared briefly but the sight of Shepherd’s powerful figure and the rifle he carried was enough to send them melting back into the shadows. Lower on the hillside, where the ferocious heat of the night was unbroken by even a trace of breeze, they reached a dumpsite, where even during the hours of darkness, a mountain of reeking refuse was being picked over by ragpickers moving like ants across its surface. Everything, even the people, was so smothered in grey dust that when they stopped moving, the rag pickers seemed to disappear from sight, merging into the heap on which they stood.
Shepherd’s white skin was blanketed in dust in an instant and he was gagging on the stench, but Thomas urged him on. ‘There are no rebels here,’ he said. ‘There is nothing for them. No food to eat, nothing worth stealing, no women worth raping and no boys to conscript to do their killing. But the dump reaches almost into the heart of the city. It is a highway for us to follow.’
They reached the far end of the dump two hours before the dawn. They slipped across the road, passed through another warren of side streets and passageways and emerged almost in the heart of the city, near the Cotton Tree roundabout. ‘You can find your way from here, I think,’ Thomas said.
Shepherd nodded. ‘What about you?’
‘My brother’s house is no
t far away. I’ll be safe there.’
Shepherd took out all the money he had and tried to give it to Thomas, but the man shook his head. ‘I did not do this for money. We were comrades in arms. I was the guide, you the bodyguard.’
‘You saved my life,’ Shepherd said. ‘Is there nothing I can do for you?’
‘Say a prayer for my father when you get home. In an English church. That will be more than enough for me.’
Shepherd gripped his hand. ‘Your father would have been very proud of you, Thomas. Thank you.’
‘I hope we will meet again some day, when my country is at peace once more, but now we must hurry, the sun is almost up.’ Thomas turned and disappeared almost at once back into the maze of streets, while Shepherd walked up the slope to the US embassy. The guards looked him over with ill-concealed disgust, but after giving a code word and unloading his weapon, they let him sit outside the guardhouse while a message was sent via the British Embassy. Ninety minutes later, Jock, Jimbo and Geordie roared up in their commandeered Landcruiser to collect him.
‘Thought you’d got rid of me, did you?’ Shepherd said.
‘No such luck,’ Jock growled. ‘We never doubted you’d survive, did we lads? Though the jury’s out on whether you got here on your E&E skills or just on sheer bloody luck.’
Shepherd slept most of the day. He woke in the early evening and after a shower and some food he met the others in the bar. He told them about Thomas, and about the boy soldiers he’d hadn’t been able to fire on.
‘I’d have pulled the trigger,’ said Jimbo.
‘If it was me or them, so would I,’ said Geordie. ‘But I know what you mean. Killing kids is wrong.’
‘Not if they’re trying to kill you,’ said Jock.
‘They don’t know what they’re doing,’ said Shepherd. ‘The adults play mind games with them and keep them high on drugs. It’s the adults that are to blame. I want to find the bastards who brutalised them and sent them into battle, and make them pay for what they did. I don’t care if I have to kill every rebel from here to the Liberian border; they don’t deserve to live.’
‘I’m up for that,’ said Geordie.
‘And you can count me in,’ said Jimbo.
‘Sounds like we’re going to be busy then,’ Jock said. ‘In the mean time, see if you can find another bottle of Jamesons behind the bar, Spider. It’s your round.’
ROUGH DIAMONDS
SIERRA LEONE.
October1997.
‘Penny for them?’ growled Jock McIntyre. Jock was a hard-bitten Glaswegian whose rough, no-nonsense ways concealed a keen intelligence. Had ‘intellectual’ not been something of an insult where Jock came from, he might even have admitted to the title, for the SAS rumour mill claimed that he could read the Iliad in the original Greek.
Shepherd realised that the question was directed at him. ‘Penny for what?’ he said. He took a long pull on his glass of Jamesons whiskey. It was Jock who had introduced him to the brand and he had developed a taste for it, albeit mixed with soda water and a few ice cubes thrown in for good measure. They were billeted at the Tradewinds Hotel, overlooking Lumley Beach, west of the Sierra Leonean capital. In different circumstances it would have been an idyllic location with palm-fringed, white sand beaches fringing the turquoise sea, but decades of rampant corruption, military coups, insurrection and civil war had left the country destitute, and as violent and lawless as anywhere on earth.
‘You know what,’ said James “Jimbo” Shortt. ‘You keep drifting off in your own little world.’
‘Probably because you keep boring the pants off him,’ said Jock. ‘He’s missing his wife and kid, that’s what it is.’
Jimbo raised his beer to Shepherd. ‘I know the feeling. I miss my missus and would much rather be back at home than stuck in this mosquito-ridden hell-hole.’
‘At least Sierra Leone is sunny,’ said Geordie Mitchell, the fourth man at the table.
‘Sunny? You call this sunny?’ said Jimbo. ‘It’s hell on earth, that’s what it is.’
‘I’m just saying, give me a hot country over a cold one, every time,’ said Geordie. ‘At least when it’s hot you can drink a cold beverage.’ He nodded at the ice cubes in Shepherd’s glass. ‘Not that I’d be tempted to touch the ice here.’
‘He deserves whatever he gets for adulterating a perfectly good whiskey,’ said Jock.
Shepherd grinned. ‘There’s a machine in the kitchen,’ he said. ‘I checked. There’s a filter on it so it’s all good.’
‘You hope,’ said Geordie. ‘I’ll stick with the beer. No one ever got the runs from beer.’
‘You still haven’t answered the question,’ said Jock. ‘What’s on your mind?’
Shepherd grinned. ‘I was just thinking of all the shit I’ve been through over the last few days,’ he said. He took another long pull on his whiskey. ‘I’ve helped to usher a rapacious bunch of South African mercenaries into Sierra Leone, been forced to trek seventy miles through the bush with no food and no water, witnessed some of the worst atrocities I’ve ever seen, been pursued through the jungle by a group of drug-crazed boy soldiers who were not even in their teens. And I’ve had to put up with Jimbo’s boring stories. I’m not sure how much I can take.’
‘At least we’re never short of excitement in the SAS,’ said Geordie. ‘Unless Jimbo’s telling us a tale, of course.’
‘Fuck you very much,’ said Jimbo.
‘Seriously though, this God-forsaken country is getting me down,’ said Shepherd. ‘I mean, how the hell are we supposed to deal with what goes on here?’ He took a long pull on his drink. ‘I’ve seen Sierra Leonean girls as young as eight who’ve been raped, and boys not even in their teens who’ve been forced to murder their own parents. Kids kept high on a lethal cocktail of amphetamines, cocaine and gunpowder, so that they can be used as killing machines and cannon fodder.’
‘That’s Africa for you,’ said Jock.
‘It doesn’t matter where it’s happening,’ said Shepherd. ‘It’s wrong. It’s just plain wrong. I keep wondering how I’d feel if it was my boy being treated like that.’
‘Liam’s still in nappies,’ said Jimbo. ‘And England’ll never go that way.’
‘You say that, but look at Yugoslavia,’ said Shepherd. ‘That was only a few years ago and they were carrying out ethnic cleansing like there was no tomorrow. Snipers were shooting pregnant women and kids in Sarajevo. And Sarajevo is just a hop, skip and a jump from London.’
‘Yugoslavia’s different,’ said Jock. ‘It was never a real country anyway. Like Jimbo said, it’ll never happen in England.’ He grinned. ‘And once we’ve rebuilt Hadrian’s Wall and thrown out the English, we’ll be as happy as Larry north of the border.’
‘You know that the English built Hadrian’s Wall to keep the Scots out?’ said Jimbo.
Jock shook his head. ‘Nah, you Sassenachs rewrote the history on that. We built it because we couldn’t stand the sight of you.’
Geordie raised his glass. ‘At least we’re here,’ he said.
‘The cavalry has arrived?’ said Shepherd sourly. ‘I don’t think so, Geordie. Looks to me like we’re doing more harm than good. What’s the first thing we did on arriving here? They get us to organise a beach landing for an unnamed invasion force that turned out to be a bunch of South African mercenaries that the spooks had armed and recruited. What was the first thing the Mercs do when they landed? They ignored the job they’d been hired for – ie to engage the rebels – and instead the went rogue and made straight for the diamond fields. There they drove the rebels out of the diamond fields and grabbed the stocks of diamonds for themselves.’
‘Aye, you can’t get decent help these days,’ growled Jock.
‘It’s not funny,’ said Shepherd.
‘It’s the way of the world, Spider,’ said Jock. ‘Mercenaries fight for money, that’s the nature of the beast. If they can see a way of getting more cash from a situation, they’ll take it.’
‘So that’s why you were so deep in thought?’ said Geordie.
‘I want to do something to help, I just don’t know what,’ said Shepherd.
‘That’s because we’re soldiers, we follow orders,’ said Jock. ‘Someone else does the thinking, we do the fighting.’
‘I’ll drink to that,’ said Jimbo, and he banged his glass against Geordie’s.
‘There must be something we can do to help the poor sods who live in this godforsaken country,’ said Shepherd.
‘Better men than us haven’t managed to find a way to sort out the problems of this shithole,’ said Jimbo.
‘We’re the Pilgrims,’ said Geordie. ‘There are no better men than us.’ He was only a couple of years older than Shepherd and Jimbo, but the stress lines around his eyes and across his forehead made him seem much more than that. He paused, giving Shepherd a calculating look. ‘So spit it out then, Spider. Where has all your deep thought got you to so far?’
‘The reasons for some of the things that have happened here are now pretty obvious,’ he said. ‘Fact One: We’ve come across a lot of obnoxious shits in our line of work - it goes with the turf - but the rebels here are the worst I’ve ever encountered: torturers, child rapists, child murderers and thieves, stripping Sierra Leone of the resources needed to rebuild the country and give children like the ones we met some sort of hope for the future. Fact Two: The people we helped to bring ashore are now making the country’s problems even worse. They’ve gone straight from the landing beach to the diamond fields and are plundering the diamonds which could and should be used for the good of the Sierra Leonean people. This is one of the poorest nations on earth but once more the people are being robbed of their rightful inheritance and pushed ever deeper into poverty.’
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