The Perfect Soldier

by Hurley, Graham

  Now, the Global Land Rover came to a halt on the embankment overlooking the path to the river. In all likelihood they’d be back here in the morning, protected by Katilo’s blessing. According to Domingos’s records, there were just seven metres left to clear. Between the road and the live remnant of the minefield there were nearly eighty metres of secured terrain, ample scope for the TV man and his menu of shots.

  Bennie got out and went to the back of the Land Rover. At Llewelyn’s suggestion, he’d brought a boxful of demo mines, plastic casings emptied of explosives and used in the schoolhouse for training. Reburied, these would serve as real mines, targets for Global’s repertoire of tricks.

  First, Llewelyn wanted an electronic search, the team working together, one forward, one back, both men fully kitted up in the protective gear, using the new Ebingers to sweep the ground before them. The soundtrack, put together back in the UK, would signal the likelihood of a mine, the distinctive yowl as the electronic sensors picked up the tiny particles of metal in the firing mechanism without which the mine wouldn’t explode. Once located, Llewelyn wanted Domingos and Bennie to go through the whole procedure, laying down the Ebinger, getting to work with the bayonet and the camel-hair brush, establishing the exact position of the mine, scraping away the soil around it, exposing the thing to the naked eye. There was real drama here, big fat close-ups, sweaty faces, steady hands, flesh and blood pitted against the terrible chemistry of high explosive.

  Bennie hauled the box of demo mines from the back of the Land Rover, wondering what the film would look like once everything had been cut together. He didn’t much like Llewelyn – too pushy, too pleased with himself – but he’d recognised the face the moment he’d met him, and just listening to the man you knew he’d do the biz. Where the film might lead was anyone’s guess but just now Bennie would do anything to get himself out of the front line. In this trade you were wise to follow your instincts. A thousand quid a week was good corn but Bennie’s instincts were beginning to tell him it was time to look for something a little safer.

  He scrambled down the embankment and left the box of dud mines at the start of the path. Domingos was standing beside the Land Rover, his binoculars trained on the rebel positions he’d spotted the previous day. When Bennie rejoined him, he was frowning.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  Domingos didn’t lower the glasses.

  ‘They’re all looking at us,’ he said quietly, ‘and I don’t know why.’

  Katilo had started on the whiskey. They’d been in the cave nearly an hour. Behind him, deep in the shadows, two soldiers were glued to an episode of Baywatch. Evidently, on Katilo’s insistence, cassettes were shipped in weekly from South Africa. It was, he said, invaluable for morale.

  McFaul stirred. A third can of lager had given his anger a hard, brittle edge. If Katilo had invited them here for some kind of game, so be it. The man had touched a nerve. What he sanctioned, the means he used to wage his war, deserved a little attention.

  ‘What was the matter with the fella Zezito?’ he said. ‘The one you dumped at the road-block? No use any more? Damaged goods?’

  Katilo had moved his chair. Side-on now, he could keep an eye on Baywatch while looking round from time to time to raise an eyebrow in Christianne’s direction. At the mention of Zezito’s name, he shrugged.

  ‘There was an argument,’ he said. ‘Some of the men wanted to kill him.’

  ‘Maybe they should have done. Might have been kinder.’

  ‘You think so?’ His eyes were back on the TV screen. A lifeguard called Stephanie was splashing through the shallows on some Californian beach. The film dissolved into slow motion, her breasts rising up and down inside the tight orange one-piece bathing suit. Katilo muttered something to one of the watching Angolans. The soldier reached forward, respooling the video, then playing it again. McFaul glanced across at Christianne. Her face was a mask, her gaze fixed on the empty cans by her feet. McFaul took another pull at the bottle of Black Label.

  ‘Zezito piss you off?’ he enquired. ‘Laying mines where they wouldn’t do any good?’

  Katilo ignored the question. The soldier with the remote control was laughing now, putting the video into fast-forward then stopping it again. Stephanie emerged from the lifeguard’s look-out, stooping to pick up a towel. The camera angle left little to the imagination. The sequence juddered to a halt, Katilo admiring the still frame. He peered round at McFaul.

  ‘You know something, Mr McFaul? My men prefer this to pornography. We have lots of pornography. We get it from our friends in South Africa. White women. Yellow women. Black women. Animals. Anything you want. But this …’ he waved his glass towards the screen, ‘is really hot. My men love it. Ask them. Please. Be my guest.’

  McFaul declined the invitation, wondering again where Katilo had learned his English. He spoke with an American accent and the drunker he got, the more authentic he sounded. He wore a gemstone, too, through the lobe of his right ear. It looked like a diamond, catching the light when he turned his head.

  ‘You took a knife to Zezito,’ McFaul said. ‘Just tell me why.’

  ‘Is he a friend of yours?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve met him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why do you care what happens to this man?’

  Katilo had abandoned Baywatch now, swinging his body round in the canvas chair, and McFaul recognised the quickening note in his voice. The questions were getting under his skin. The man was angry.

  He leaned forward, the huge head lowered, thick slabs of muscle visible beneath the tight T-shirt.

  ‘What’s the matter, Mr McFaul,’ he was saying, ‘don’t you like the way we make war?’

  ‘No,’ McFaul shook his head, ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Because of Zezito?’

  ‘Because of lots of things.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like mines.’

  ‘Is that any of your business? These mines?’

  ‘Yeah,’ McFaul smiled, ‘as it happens, they are. And you want to know why? Because you think it’s all so fucking simple. You ship them in by the thousand. You chuck them around. And hey, they do your bidding. Man steps on one, it goes off. Kid goes for a walk, he’s hamburger. Woman looks for firewood, she loses both legs and her face maybe too. Nice war, Colonel. Must take a lot of courage, laying those mines.’

  McFaul paused, aware of the soldiers staring at him. Katilo’s head was up now, the eyes bloodshot. He held the whiskey bottle loosely by the neck, his arm dangling beside the chair.

  ‘It’s our war, Mr McFaul. You know what that means? It means our people, our land. Ours. Not yours. Ours.’

  ‘Your blood?’

  ‘Yes, Mr McFaul, our blood. Exactly. Ours to spill, ours to waste. If you were part of this country, if you were born here, you’d understand that. War is war. The only important thing is winning. The people suffer, sure. But the people win, too. In the end.’

  McFaul looked away, not bothering to hide his contempt. He’d heard this shit before. War was a noble calling. The people, the povo, could take it.

  ‘Tell me something,’ he mused. ‘How many mines does a hundred dollars buy you? How many arms and legs? How many months of lying around in hospital? How many years of learning to walk again? Ever do the sums? Add it all up?’

  ‘Mines work,’ Katilo murmured, ‘and they cost us nothing.’

  ‘You’re right.’ McFaul nodded. ‘Especially if you’re buying knock-offs.’

  Katilo lifted the bottle to his lips, his eyes never leaving McFaul’s face. ‘Knock-offs’ were cut-price copies of the classic mine designs. More and more were pouring out of factories in Pakistan and China, fuelling the Third World’s hunger for war on the cheap. For the price of a Western saloon car, a man like Katilo could drive thousands of people off the land. The armchair warriors called it ‘area denial’. Another word was starvation.

  Katilo extended a leg towards Christianne. He
was wearing rubber flip-flops, and he began to rub one toe up and down her ankle.

  ‘You think we buy knock-offs?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m asking.’

  ‘You can’t tell? When you find them?’

  ‘Sometimes.’ McFaul nodded. ‘Sometimes not.’

  Katilo brooded, withdrawing his foot. Then he half-turned and said something to one of the watching soldiers. The man got up at once and blundered past McFaul. Light spilled into the cave as he pushed through the blanket. Then he was gone.

  Katilo was offering the bottle to Christianne. He looked thoughtful. His interest in Baywatch seemed to have disappeared.

  ‘Every man needs to work, Mr McFaul. To live. To eat. You agree with that?’ McFaul nodded, his hand on Christianne’s arm, reassuring her. ‘So maybe you should consider yourself lucky, no?’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because you’ll never be out of a job. Wherever you go, here, Asia, Afghanistan, everywhere there are mines. And you know why? Because mines make the best soldiers.’ He smacked a fist into an open palm. ‘Bang. Always there. Always watching. Never tired. Never lazy. Never drunk.’

  ‘Never disloyal? Never one of your guys on the receiving end?’

  ‘Yes, often. Of course my men are injured. It happens all the time. But that’s because we’re poor, Mr McFaul. We can’t afford your kind of war. Expensive missiles. Radar. Stealth fighters. In Africa, everything is cheap.’

  ‘Including blood?’

  ‘Yes,’ he nodded, ‘including blood. You understand that?’

  McFaul leaned forward, engaged now.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘but what I don’t understand is this. You’re fighting a civil war. You’re using mines to try and win it. But by the time that happens, there’ll be no country left to win. The whole lot will be off-limits, a desert. Mines work. Of course they work. But you know how long it’s going to take to clean up Afghanistan? Assuming it can be done at all? Maybe a century. A hundred years. Think about it. A whole fucking country laid waste. Taken out. As good as nuked. That’s what it means. Your kind of war.’

  Katilo was watching the blanket now, waiting for the soldier to return.

  ‘You remember our elections?’ he said at length. ‘In ninety-two?’

  ‘I read about them.’

  ‘OK. I was in Luanda. You know what happened in Luanda? We were massacred. The government wanted to kill us all. Thousands died. But you know what happened to me? I got away. With my men. Everywhere there were government troops, MPLA soldiers. We were running, running. Sometimes we had to stop, to sleep. So each night we put out mines, a little present for anyone who might try to kill us.’ He paused. ‘The mines looked after us, Mr McFaul. I owe those mines my life. When things were really bad, when the mines had nearly gone, we used to wear them round our necks. Not active. Not live. But ready.’ He nodded. ‘Sure, round our necks, believe me …’

  McFaul stared at him and then began to laugh. The metaphor was perfect. A whole country, an entire nation, putting its trust in six ounces of high explosive strung around its neck. The latest mines were 98 per cent plastic. That made them virtually indestructible, sensitive to the merest footfall for decades, maybe centuries to come. Just like Afghanistan.

  McFaul felt a sudden draught round his shoulders. Two soldiers came in. Between them they were carrying a heavy wooden box. Katilo told them to put it down. He leaned forward, unsheathing a long bowie knife. He slipped it beneath a length of wood and levered upwards. The wood splintered and then lifted. Inside the box, neatly cocooned in straw, McFaul could see dozens of small, palm-sized antipersonnel mines. Their surface was subtly textured. They looked like stones from the riverbed.

  ‘You know what these are?’

  Katilo took one out and tossed it across to McFaul. The soldiers exchanged looks. McFaul turned the mine over.

  ‘Difesa,’ he heard himself saying, ‘SB-33.’

  He checked the firing mechanism and then fingered the rubber diaphragm on top. The diaphragm was mottled and it had a gentle resistance to the touch, like a computer keyboard. His hand closed around the mine and he shut his eyes a moment feeling the blood pumping in his head. He was word-perfect on exactly what this mine could do. He knew it could be air-dropped. He knew it could function upside down. He knew you could coat it with a special finish, making it resistant to infrared detection. Jesus, you could even stipulate a choice of colour, depending on where you wanted to use the thing. The one McFaul had triggered in Kuwait had been ‘desert sand’. He knew that because he still had the fragments the surgeons had dug out of his thighs and buttocks, once they’d amputated his lower left leg, and he’d compared them to the colour chart in the sales brochure nearly a year later. Desert sand, he’d thought at the time. Nice enough phrase until you knew different.

  McFaul slumped in the chair, the mine in his lap now. A box of SB-33s was the last thing he’d expected Katilo to produce.

  ‘They call it the Gucci,’ he said drily. ‘You ever hear that?’

  Katilo nodded, grinning, pleased with the word.

  ‘And you think that’s a copy? A knock-off? You really think we can’t afford the real thing?’

  ‘You said you were poor. That was your word, not mine.’

  ‘Of course. But poverty is relative, Mr McFaul. Even these are cheap. Compared to your kind of weapons.’

  McFaul nodded, weighing the little mine in his hand. Katilo was right. The SB-33 was made by an Italian company, a subsidiary of Fiat, and they continuously battled to guard their design against Third World rip-offs. McFaul looked at the open box at his feet, wondering what else Katilo had outside. The stuff they’d been lifting around Muengo had been mainly Chinese, Romanian and Russian, lethal enough but not as sophisticated as the latest offerings from Western designers.

  ‘You’ve got US mines? M-14s?’

  ‘Yes, and M-16s as well. You want to see them?’

  McFaul shook his head, thinking suddenly of the boy, James Jordan. Until now, he’d assumed that he’d trodden on one of the Soviet OZM-3s. His injuries had clearly been caused by a bounding mine, and Angola was littered with thousands of the Russian version. Now, though, it occurred to him that Jordan might have fallen to a piece of Western technology. Not that it mattered.

  Katilo signalled to the soldiers and they bent to the rope handles on the box. McFaul leaned forward, about to replace the SB-33, but a hand closed over his. Looking up again, McFaul found Katilo’s face inches from his own. For the first time, he realised that the man was offended as well as drunk.

  ‘You really know about these? How much they cost?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘So you know what a fool like Zezito can expect? Wasting stuff like this? SB-33s?’ Katilo paused. ‘UNITA buy the best. Everyone knows that. The best for the best.’ He nodded, bunching his huge fist, driving it once again into the palm of his left hand. ‘You know Kinshasa, Mr McFaul? You know the friends we have there? How well they look after us?’

  McFaul said nothing, easing back in his chair, aware what a dangerous turn this conversation had suddenly taken. Katilo was tired of offering rationales, of defending himself against McFaul’s flabby Western disapproval. In his war, there was no room for qualms about civilians, worries about starvation, second thoughts about kids blown apart. None of that was remotely relevant. He’d said it himself. What mattered was winning. And winning came down to a very simple calculation. How much violence your money could buy. And where you went shopping to get it.

  Katilo was talking about Kinshasa again. Kinshasa was the capital of Zaire, the neighbouring state to Angola’s north where UNITA had always been able to count on support. McFaul had spent a little time there once, a troubled week and a half waiting to bribe the right customs official for access to a Global shipment of spare parts. He’d hated the place, its viciousness, its corruption, and he’d sworn never to return. Luanda, by contrast, was Disneyland.

  ‘You bought this stuff in Kinshas
a?’

  ‘Buy, Mr McFaul. We buy this stuff in Kinshasa.’

  ‘You get a good deal?’

  ‘You mean money?’ Katilo roared with laughter. ‘You think we pay money? In Kinshasa?’ He began to rock in the chair, backwards and forwards, hugging his knees like some enormous child. Then, abruptly, he barked an order. Before McFaul could react, he felt his arms pinioned to his sides. Then everything went black and he smelled the sour, sweaty taint of the blindfold. The knot tightened at the base of his skull and he heard a tiny gasp beside him from Christianne. McFaul tore his arms free, reaching for her, trying to get up. There was a scream, Christianne again, and hands around his throat. McFaul could smell the whiskey on Katilo’s breath, feel the press of his body. Then the pressure on his windpipe eased and someone was slipping a length of cord around his wrists, lashing them together behind his back.

  Katilo’s voice, very quiet.

  ‘Sure you can clear your paths, Mr McFaul. I’m grateful. We’ll need the water, too.’

  McFaul stumbled backwards, nearly falling. Then there were hands pulling him round and the rough kiss of the blanket on his face as he left the cave. He tried to stop, calling for Christianne, thinking the worst, imagining her back with Katilo, unprotected, but she cannoned into him, cursing in French as she did so. McFaul heard laughter, Katilo again, very close. The ground was rising beneath his feet and he recognised the sound of water from somewhere below.

  He came to a halt, disorientated. There was wind here. He could feel it on his face. It carried the hot, dry smells of the bush. He moved his head, left and right, up and down, trying to find a chink of daylight, his arms still pinioned. Then, abruptly, he was free. For a second or two he did nothing, just stood there. No one stirred. No one said anything. His wrists were still bound but he could move in any direction.