The Perfect Soldier

by Hurley, Graham

  Now, she pulled up the blind on her window and stared out. The land below was veiled by a thin layer of cloud. She could see a coastline, a thin strip of beach, and what might have been a road. Everything was greyer and somehow flatter than she’d imagined. She felt Robbie beside her, leaning across for the view, and she tucked herself into the corner of her seat, making room for him. The plane began to bank to the left and it was a second or two before she recognised the beginnings of a city. She wiped her own breath from the cold Perspex, peering down at the jigsaw of roads, recognising the line of a railway snaking away inland. The city was built around a lagoon. On the seaward side, a long yellow strip of sand lay parallel to the foreshore, enclosing a natural harbour, and on the mainland there were docks, and tiny toy cranes, and a pair of bathtub freighters tied up alongside. The pilot eased to the left again and from under the wing slid office blocks, traffic jams, the perfect oval outline of a football stadium, all the images you’d associate with any busy city.

  She turned to Robbie, trying to put this surprise of hers into words. Somehow, she’d expected something more exotic, more African, not this. He grinned, his eyes never leaving the view below. He’d already told her how much he loved the place, how chaotic it was, how great the people were. There was a rumble as the undercarriage came down and then the pilot made a final adjustment, steadying the big jet for touchdown. Robbie glanced at his watch.

  ‘Quarter past seven,’ he said approvingly. ‘Early for once.’

  Llewelyn got off first, hurrying down the steps, cradling his camcorder. En route, he’d been acquiring a variety of shots and the Belgian stewardesses had warned him about getting more pictures on arrival at Luanda. The country was at war. The airport doubled as a military base. Just the sight of a raised camcorder would expose him to arrest. Llewelyn had listened to the warnings without comment and now Molly stood at the top of the aircraft steps, watching him turn on the apron, the camcorder wedged beneath his arm, the lens pointing back towards the 747. He waved, beckoning her on, and she felt Robbie nudging her down towards the oil-stained tarmac, but she resisted him, looking round, wanting to make the most of this moment. The cloud was beginning to burn off now and it was already hot. Beneath the sharp tang of aviation fuel, she could smell something else, something far earthier, a strange mix of spice, and seaweed, and raw sewage. James, she thought at once. His first scent of Africa.

  She began to move again, down towards the apron. There were aircraft everywhere, taxiing out towards the runway, big unmarked freighters, heavy-bellied planes with ‘UN’ on the tail, and smaller, two-engined aircraft, and she listened to Robbie as he explained what was going on, his mouth to her ear, fighting against the whine of the nearby aircraft. This was the airport’s busiest hour, the morning’s first aid flights leaving for destinations inland. Each plane would be carrying supplies. They’d be back within hours, he said, reloading, readying for another supply run.

  ‘Why?’ she mouthed, watching the queue of aircraft juddering to a temporary halt. ‘Why doesn’t the stuff go by road?’

  Robbie was looking for Llewelyn. He seemed to have disappeared.

  ‘Mines,’ he yelled, ‘you can’t move anywhere without—’

  He broke off, realising what he’d said, apologising at once, and Molly turned away, angry with herself for embarrassing him. She squeezed his arm, telling him it didn’t matter, then there was an ear-splitting roar of jet engines and Molly followed Robbie’s pointing finger, watching a pair of sleek jet fighters thunder down the runway. As they climbed steeply upwards, balls of fire fell from both of them, leaving delicate black smoke trails against what was left of the cloud. Molly glanced at Robbie.

  ‘Decoy flares,’ he said briefly.

  ‘Decoy what?’

  ‘Flares. In case anyone tries shooting them down. The missiles are heat-seeking. They think the flares are the aircraft.’ He paused, watching the fighters bank steeply to the south and disappear. Then he indicated a line of low concrete shelters on the other side of the airfield. ‘That’s where the rest live. They normally work in pairs. They’re Russian planes, MiGs. Mornings are favourite for ground-attack missions. Set your watch by them.’

  Molly nodded, looking again at the queue of departing aircraft, newly thoughtful. Robbie had already briefed her about Muengo. The place was under some kind of siege. The Terra Sancta man who’d gone in for James was living underground. Getting there might be a problem.

  Slowly, the Sabena passengers resumed their progress towards the terminal building. Molly and Robbie joined them, Molly looking around for Llewelyn, wondering where next he might appear. They walked beneath the wing of a big freight plane. The ramp at the back was lowered and a truck was waiting on the tarmac. There were injured soldiers inside the plane and in twos and threes they were helping each other off. Those who could walk had injuries to their heads and upper bodies. Some of the stretcher cases were barely conscious. Molly looked up at the waiting soldiers, already sitting in the back of the truck. One had pads over both eyes. Another wore a bloodstained bandage, wound tightly round his head. There were crutches propped against the trailer board.

  Molly shook her head, sobered again. Lorries were backing towards the ramp beneath the tail of the big freighter and men in dirty brown overalls began to manhandle bulky packages into the belly of the plane. The packages were tightly bound with cord, and the men piled them onto wooden pallets, securing each pallet with cargo netting.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Molly asked. ‘What are they up to?’

  Robbie shrugged, watching them.

  ‘Resupply, I imagine. Stuff goes in by parachute.’

  Inside the terminal building, the place was in chaos: outbound Portuguese nursing their passports, languid Angolan officials taking their time over customs checks, and an endless queue of recently arrived passengers that seemed to curl round and round itself to no apparent purpose. Robbie had already arranged for them to be met by the Country Representative of a sister charity and the woman was waiting for them beside the single immigration desk. She was small and intense, wearing her Oxfam T-shirt like a badge. She carried diplomatic status, signified by a plastic ID card hung around her neck, and she waved it with great vigour, carving a path through the customs formalities.

  Outside, the terminal building was under seige from hundreds of kids. Every time the door opened, they fought to carry a bag to the line of waiting vehicles. Even Llewelyn stood helpless, swamped by small black hands while Robbie peeled off a couple of the orange 100,000 kwanza notes and selected the boys he wanted. Molly watched him, impressed by the way he handled this wild scene. From the moment they’d landed, he’d seemed completely at home.

  The drive in from the airport seemed interminable, the traffic crawling from intersection to intersection, the Oxfam VW Combi wedged in on every side. Nothing seemed intact. There were cars without windscreens, tyres without tread, even headlights with neither glass nor bulbs. There were trucks everywhere, towering over them, rumbling along in clouds of thick, black exhaust. From the wing mirror of one hung a bundle of dried fish. The door of another sported a ragged line of bullet holes. Yet despite the noise, and the fumes, and the constant jockeying for space, no one seemed the least bit harassed and Molly stared out, astonished at how different this city was at ground level, not at all the place she’d imagined from the air.

  Everything seemed to be on the point of collapse: the grey, dowdy apartment blocks with their crumbling concrete and rust-stained air-conditioning units, the traffic lights that didn’t work, the cripples begging from car to car, the street kids sifting through the mountains of garbage at the roadside. Once, during a longer hold-up than usual, Robbie pointed out an impromptu restaurant, three men in business suits perched on 40-gallon oil drums, eating skewers of meat from a roaring barbecue. It was an extraordinary sight, framed as it was by three Angolan women walking barefoot into town. One had a baby strapped to her back and the others carried blackened bananas in red plast
ic bowls on their heads. For some reason, the attention of the nearest woman was drawn to the car and she looked down at Robbie, answering his wave with the widest smile Molly could remember. She had a length of vividly patterned cloth wound around her body and her smile somehow transformed this ravaged city, giving Molly the first clue to what brought Robbie back here. These people were bigger than their surroundings. They seemed impervious to circumstances or misfortune. And they knew, above all, how to laugh.

  Robbie’s Oxfam colleague dropped them outside the rented house that was Terra Sancta’s Luanda headquarters, a modest two-storey villa with a dusty square of front garden and a limp palm tree that had seen better days. On the drive in from the airport, the woman had been briefing Robbie on the overnight situation in Muengo. Evidently there was again a possibility of some kind of ceasefire though no one was holding their breath. The aid community had gone to ground in a variety of bunkers and to her knowledge, no one had yet been injured. Evacuation would go ahead as soon as both sides stopped fighting but so far the situation was still, in her phrase, ‘fluid’.

  Robbie paused at the kerbside, stooping to the open window to give her a farewell peck on the cheek.

  ‘Thanks for the lift,’ he said. ‘Made all the difference.’

  The woman looked at him, then at Llewelyn and Molly. Llewelyn was already at work with his camera, filming the exterior of the house. Molly had no idea how much the woman knew about the purpose of their trip but her parting shot seemed clue enough.

  ‘No problem,’ she said grimly. ‘I wish you luck.’

  McFaul was bumping along the road beside the river when he first heard the drone of the big freighter. He’d decided to blow the last of the diesel in the Land Rover’s tanks on a circuit of the city. Above all, he wanted to make sure that Domingos and his family had survived the shelling intact.

  The freighter was flying in from the north, the pilot keeping the aircraft as low as he dared. It thundered across the city at no more than two hundred feet then climbed a little, dipping a wing and banking sharply at the point where the river dog-legged towards the distant hills of the Plan Alto. As the pilot tightened the turn, McFaul saw the lowered ramp at the back and the line of helmeted dispatchers clinging onto the webbing straps that criss-crossed the interior of the fuselage. The plane was dropping again now, making directly for McFaul, and he brought the Land Rover to a halt, ducking involuntarily as the huge aircraft swept over him, the downwash from the big turbo-props raising the dust on the road.

  The dispatchers were on the move now, pushing heavily laden wooden pallets towards the lip of the ramp. The pallets tumbled out, each one piled with bulky-looking packages, and as the nearest hit the ground the wooden pallets splintered apart, sending the packages in every direction. McFaul lost count after a dozen pallets, wondering how much of the stuff would survive. The freighter was climbing now, already a mile away, the whine of the turbo-props receding, and as silence returned to the city McFaul heard the rattle of automatic fire from the direction of the cathedral.

  He hesitated a moment, identifying the sharp bark of an AK-47. Kalashnikovs, he thought. Government troops. Definitely. He pulled the Land Rover into a tight circle and headed back the way he’d come. From the river, the road curved gently in towards the city’s centre. McFaul was driving fast now, swerving left and right to avoid the worst of the pot-holes. If the fighting spilled into the area around the Red Cross bunker, he wanted to be there. What little security remained in Muengo lay in sticking together.

  Seconds later, he was braking hard. Ahead, slewed across the rubble-strewn carriageway, was an old burned-out bus. Beyond it was the last of the packages from the freighter. Crouched behind the bus, government troops were taking it in turns to empty a magazine or two in the direction of the cathedral. Answering fire swept down the road towards them. McFaul found reverse gear and sought the protection of a nearby garage, pulling the Land Rover into the shadowed breeze-block recess that had once served as a repair shop. He got out, hugging the inside wall, peering through a slit between the blocks. The makeshift repair bay still smelled of diesel oil and the concrete floor was slippery underfoot.

  Out in the sunshine, the firing had become spasmodic, occasional shots, sometimes returned, sometimes not. McFaul began to think about getting out but before he could make a move two of the soldiers behind the bus broke from cover and darted across the road. Almost immediately one of them was hit, sprawling headlong in the dirt, his body jerking with the impact of more bullets. The other soldier faltered a moment, looking round, then he ran on, seizing one of the packages from the air-drop and dragging it backwards with both hands. By some miracle, he survived the forty yards intact, making it back to the shelter of the bus. The other soldiers fell on him, tearing at the cords that bound the package like kids at a Christmas party. Suddenly there was paper everywhere and the sound of laughter and the firing died away and then began again, more distant this time, as government troops and Muengo’s police force fought amongst themselves for the lion’s share of the goodies from the Antonov.

  McFaul waited a couple of minutes longer, making certain that the immediate danger was over. The resupply flights had been coming in for three days now, a lifeline tossed to the Muengo garrison from military headquarters in Luanda. From the Red Cross bunker, with the help of François, McFaul had listened in to the complex radio negotiations between the rebel troops, out in the bush, and Muengo’s force of MPLA soldiers. Without an agreement that guaranteed the Antonov safe passage, the resupply drops would never take place, and in the end the commander of the Muengo garrison had been forced to share the incoming supplies with the rebels. This had meant alternate drops – day one over the bush, day two over Muengo – and in broad terms the agreement had worked. Except that the Muengo drops had been further contested by the soldiery and the city’s sizeable police force. The latter were heavily armed and saw no reason why they, too, shouldn’t have a slice of Luanda’s pie. Quite where that left the rest of Muengo’s population was anybody’s guess, though McFaul had lived here long enough now to suspect that they’d be mere spectators at the feast. Unless you had something to barter – a wife, say, or a daughter – then the incoming food was strictly for uniformed bellies.

  McFaul peered through the slit in the breeze-block wall again. The soldier who’d retrieved the package was standing behind the bus with a can to his lips. From a distance it looked like Sagres beer, though McFaul couldn’t be sure. The body of the other soldier was still out in the road. Blood had pooled darkly round his head and a couple of dogs had turned up, circling his body, their noses poking at the folds of his combat smock.

  Abruptly, the Motorola clipped to McFaul’s belt came to life and he heard his call sign, Golf Charlie One. He reached down for the handset, recognising François’s voice. He’d asked the Swiss to keep trying Domingos while he drove across. The Angolan had a two-way radio of his own, though for some reason he’d stopped answering calls. Once again, François reported no response.

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘Rien.’

  McFaul grunted an acknowledgement and returned to the Land Rover. The soldiers behind the bus, squatting amongst the contents of the looted package, barely looked up as he pulled out of the garage and headed back towards the river, joining the dusty unsurfaced road that led out of town. There were people around now, tiny knots of them, women and children mostly, squatting by the water’s edge, filling whatever containers they owned. For these people, water would come before everything, though the river itself was heavily polluted.

  After a mile or so, beside a gnarled old baobab tree, McFaul took a left turn, leaving the river and picking his way through a sprawl of tiny shacks, home to thousands of Muengo’s poor. The shacks were made from broken branches and small lengths of sawn wood covered in bits of blue plastic sheeting, cardboard, and ancient pieces of corrugated iron. Shell damage here was light, the odd crater, the odd direct hit, a dozen or so shacks flattened by blas
t. Beside one such pile of wreckage, a woman was digging what looked like a grave while her children played nearby with a makeshift toy cart. The wheels of the cart were made of plastic, a light tan in colour, and McFaul smiled grimly, recognising the distinctive shape of the tiny Italian VS-50 anti-personnel mines. One of the problems he’d been trying to tackle was the sheer ingenuity of Muengo’s street kids. They seemed to have no fear of high explosives. On the contrary, some of them had been making a living from lifting the mines themselves. They’d learned how they worked – how to defuse them, how to empty the casing of the little tablet of explosive inside – and they subsequently sold them, either intact or in pieces. Intact, you could use them in the river, killing the fish by blast, whilst shaved into tiny slivers, the explosive was good for priming cooking fires.

  McFaul drove on. The shacks seemed to extend for miles, an instant slum, but at least here there was still a little room for the notion of ownership. These people still had a stake, however small, in what was left of Muengo, unlike the thousands of others who’d flooded in from the countryside, a tidal wave of displaced people washed up by the war. For these people, even a one-room lean-to beside a shit-filled river was the wildest dream, way beyond their means, and many of them were now camping in what had once been Muengo’s cinema, a long, barn-like building with thick breeze-block walls, long since sooted with the smoke of hundreds of cooking fires. The roof of the cinema, huge sheets of rusting red corrugated iron, had fallen victim to an earlier bombardment and so the families inside were now exposed to the elements. Somehow, in spite of everything, they managed to survive and feed their kids and even raise a smile or two at a life that had ceased to offer them anything but abject poverty. They got by on maize porridge and aid hand-outs and an unswerving faith that one day Angola would come to its senses. Quite where they found the evidence for this, McFaul didn’t know, but living alongside these people had given him a profound respect for their courage, and their fortitude, and like them he’d come to the conclusion that things couldn’t get much worse.