Katilo was looking at his watch. He nodded towards McFaul and said something brisk in Ovimbundu. Then he turned to ford the river, a tuneless whistle on his lips. The soldiers closed around McFaul, roping his elbows behind his back again, and began to push him after Katilo. They were nearly halfway across before McFaul recognised the tune. Dvořák, he thought. The New World symphony.
Christianne opened McFaul’s Jiffybag as soon as Molly arrived back at the MSF house. The French girl had been up all night nursing Llewelyn. His temperature had climbed again at dusk and now he lay in Christianne’s bed, semiconscious, his eyes still bright with fever. Molly looked down at him while Christianne scissored the sticky tape that secured the Jiffybag. In three days, Llewelyn had aged ten years. Thin, gaunt, helpless, he’d become an old man.
Christianne was emptying the Jiffybag. Twenty-dollar bills cascaded onto the bed. She began to count them, bewildered. There were seventy.
‘Fourteen hundred dollars,’ Molly murmured, ‘and this.’
She handed Christianne a single sheet of graph paper, a grid of tiny blue squares. There was writing on one side. Christianne read it quickly.
‘The money’s for Celestina,’ she said. ‘He says it belonged to Domingos. Here.’
She passed the note to Molly. Llewelyn was peering at the pile of dollar bills, uncomprehending. Molly folded the note and returned it. McFaul had careful, backward-sloping writing, like a child.
‘He wants you to get her on the plane,’ Molly pointed out. ‘Her and the kids. Maybe he thinks the money might help.’
‘It won’t. They’ll never allow it. I know the way these things go. You take one African, you take them all. That’s what they’ll say.’
‘But why don’t you try?’
Christianne looked at the note again. She was frowning.
‘How much did you say?’
‘Fourteen hundred dollars. About a thousand pounds in sterling.’
‘And this is supposed to be Domingos’s money?’
‘His wages, I imagine.’
‘Impossible.’ Christianne shook her head. ‘I know how much they paid him. Fifteen dollars a day, maybe. Good money in Angola but not this.’ She picked up the wad of dollar bills, weighing it in her hand.
Molly was watching her carefully. So far, Christianne had packed no bags and time was running out. On the doorstep, just now, Molly had found a handwritten note from Peterson establishing a schedule for the evacuation. The plane was due mid-morning, a big Hercules from Luanda. Everyone was to report to the UN bunker at 09.30. Vehicles would leave for the airstrip fifteen minutes later in convoy, personal belongings only, no additional equipment. The list of instructions had gone on and on, detailed, precise, businesslike, an elaborate master plan covering every eventuality. Luanda were sending a second aircraft, one of the little Twin Otters. The Otter would remain airborne, circling the grass strip. If the rebels seized the Hercules, cutting off communications, the Otter would provide radio back-up, sending word to the coast. What might happen after that was unspecified but a final line from Peterson left Muengo’s aid community in no doubt about their individual responsibilities. ‘My job is to get you all out intact,’ he’d written. ‘One mistake, one miscalculation, could hazard the entire operation.’
Molly nodded at the money.
‘Aren’t you even going to try? With Peterson?’
Christianne shook her head.
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
Christianne stooped to retrieve Llewelyn’s bowl. He’d been throwing up most of the night and the smell still hung in the airless room.
‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘There’s no time. I have to find a stretcher for this man. Pack his bags. Get him ready.’
‘There are stretchers at the schoolhouse,’ Molly said quickly. ‘I’ve seen them.’
‘Of course. But they have no vehicles, no transport.’
‘Why not?’
‘McFaul took it.’
Molly stared at her.
‘How do you know?’
Christianne turned away, refusing to answer. Molly caught her up in the garden. She was standing beside a dying rosebush, emptying Llewelyn’s bowl.
‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘Why did he go?’
Christianne shook the last drips from the bowl, then began to scour it with a handful of grass. In the sun, it was already hot.
‘You must know,’ Molly repeated. ‘You must know why he went.’
Christianne said nothing. When the bowl was clean she threw the grass away and wiped her hands on her jeans.
‘I think it was Domingos,’ she said at last. ‘He loved that man, the family, everything. He told me so.’
‘But Domingos is dead.’
‘Exactly.’
‘So why should he go away? Why should he—’ Molly broke off, remembering something that Bennie had said the previous evening. It seemed that McFaul had got hold of a weapon, a rifle of some kind.
‘Did he have a gun? Yesterday?’
Christianne seemed not to be listening. She began to walk back towards the house, stepping into the cool of the kitchen. Molly looked at her watch. It was nearly eight. The time for arguments had gone.
‘We’ve got an hour and a half,’ she said briskly. ‘I’ll get the stretcher. Bennie can help me. You get packed and ready.’
Christianne was standing beside the sink now. The taps were beginning to rust.
‘I’m not going,’ she said quietly. ‘I’m staying here.’
Molly smiled, sympathetic, understanding. She admired courage. She applauded independence. But seven days in Muengo had taught her a great deal about Africa. Staying behind, the one white woman left in town, was madness.
‘Where?’ she said. ‘Where will you go? Who’ll look after you? How will you cope when the rebels come?’
Christianne was halfway up the hall. Back in the bedroom, Molly watched her easing the dollar bills from Llewelyn’s grasp. She put the question again, already looking for Christianne’s cases. She remembered seeing them before. She thought they might be beside the wardrobe in the corner.
Christianne was shaking a thermometer. When the mercury had returned to normal, she slid it into Llewelyn’s mouth.
‘He’ll need a hospital bed,’ she said. ‘You should get someone to talk to Luanda before you arrive.’
*
After the soldiers had searched McFaul, finding the little video-cassette he’d buttoned into the pocket of his shirt, they pushed him back across the river. A line of waiting troops on the river bank watched curiously as McFaul splashed through the shallows towards them. The men behind him included the soldier with the broken teeth and McFaul had spent long enough in uniform to know what would happen next. With luck, they’d simply shoot him. The alternative could take far longer.
Out of the water, down by the camp, they marched him along the bank. Someone had thrown blankets over the bodies beside the torn remains of the dinghy. McFaul tried not to look at the carnage but when he paused for breath, trying to ease a searing pain in his leg, the soldiers kicked him onwards. Finally, beside an anthill, they pulled him to a halt. The men circled round, eyeing him the way you’d look at a good meal. The soldier with the broken teeth had taken his shirt off. Round his neck he wore a gold crucifix and McFaul fixed his eyes on it, knowing that was one of the ways you were supposed to cope. Shut your mind off, they always said. Concentrate on something real, something you can see. Prise away your mind from your body. Tell yourself it isn’t hurting.
The first blows took him by surprise. They came from nowhere, a savage explosion of pain in his kidneys. McFaul gasped, his elbows still tied behind his back, and he began to fall forward, his legs giving way. The soldier with the broken teeth took a tiny step backwards, measuring his distance, and a second before the darkness came McFaul saw the boot rising to meet him, still dimpled with water from the river.
*
The unmarked Hercules made two low passes o
ver Muengo before banking steeply beyond the river and side-slipping into the tiny strip. Molly watched it from the front of the Terra Sancta Land Rover, Bennie wedged in beside her. The pilot touched down, throwing the props into reverse, and the big plane shuddered to a halt in a cloud of dust.
Before it began to move again, taxiing back towards them, Peterson was out of the Land Rover, striding towards the semi-circle of army trucks. There were knots of UNITA troops waiting beside the trucks, and as the plane approached they turned their backs, covering their ears against the high-pitched whine of the turbo-props. The plane came to a stop for a second time, the pilot cutting the engines, and the UNITA soldiers signalled impatiently at the cockpit, wanting the landing ramp at the rear to be lowered. Katilo’s price for the evacuation was a full consignment of supplies – food, fuel, alcohol, drugs – and Molly watched as the ramp finally came down and the soldiers clambered eagerly into the belly of the plane.
The men reappeared in seconds, bent double under huge sacks of rice. The army trucks bumped towards them across the grass, ribboned in black exhaust smoke. Bennie watched the men on the backs of the trucks sweating under the first sacks.
‘Thieving bastards,’ he muttered cheerfully.
Molly said nothing. She’d spent the last half-hour telling Peterson about Christianne. They had to go back and find her. There was no alternative. Alone in Muengo, she simply wouldn’t survive. Peterson had agreed, cursing the girl’s selfishness, and Molly had sensed that he somehow took her decision personally. He’d pledged to get Muengo’s aid community safely back to Luanda. His commitment to the evacuation was total. Christianne’s determination to stay was the purest folly. By choosing to remain behind, she’d wrecked his plans.
Robbie Cunningham had joined Peterson now. Together, they were talking to one of the aircrew. The man was looking at his watch and Molly saw Robbie shrugging. Work at the back of the plane had slowed. A couple of the soldiers were levering the tops from a line of wooden boxes, and others were on their hands and knees beside the truck, investigating the contents of the boxes. Robbie went over to them, trying to start a conversation, but the soldiers ignored him and after a while he gave up. These were the guys in charge. Arguments could end with a bullet.
Bennie was rolling a cigarette. Before he’d left he’d given Christianne the key to the schoolhouse. She was to help herself to anything she wanted. The stuff was hers for the asking. Molly had thought of asking him what a twenty-nine-year-old French nurse would do with several tons of de-mining equipment but in the end she hadn’t bothered. Bennie’s world had narrowed to the prospect of a pint or two in his Aldershot local. What happened to anyone else no longer mattered.
Molly shuddered, thinking of McFaul again, where he might have got to, what could possibly have happened. He was a strange man, stranger than anyone else she’d ever met. There was a silence about him, a deadness, that unnerved her. Yet listening to Bennie’s stories, trying to imagine the life he’d led, she could understand only too well the scars he must be carrying. Not simply flesh and blood – his face, his legs – but inside, too.
Bennie began to laugh. A woman from the city was running across the airstrip. She had a child under each arm. They were stick-thin, their spindly legs trailing behind them. The aircrew were still deep in conversation with Peterson. The men turned to stare at her.
‘What’s she doing?’
‘She wants them to take the kids to Luanda. Fuck knows how she got past the road-block.’
Molly nodded. A line of rebel soldiers guarded the road to the airstrip. When the convoy had passed through, there were already dozens of women at the roadside, squatting in the dirt, surrounded by children. At the time Molly had wondered what they were after. Now she knew. Any escape route. Anything to spare the kids the days and nights to come.
‘What happens to them in Luanda?’
‘They beg. Like every other fucker.’
‘No parents? No relations?’
‘Bugger all. Literally. Poor little sods.’
Molly nodded again, pursuing the conversation no further. Talking to Bennie was one of the most depressing experiences she’d ever had, a glimpse of what happened if you always assumed the worst. Inside, where it mattered, the man had caved in. She thought of McFaul again, and Christianne, and she smiled. Strength, she thought. And guts. And a refusal to go along with the rest of the world. Maybe the girl had been right to stay. Maybe Muengo was where anyone half-decent belonged. No matter what the cost. No matter what the consequences.
Peterson was signalling to one of the rebel soldiers. The woman and her kids were disappearing into the belly of the plane. The soldier nodded and sauntered after them. Seconds later, he was driving them back down the ramp, the woman flailing at him with her fists. Molly could hear her screaming, rage not pain, and she got out of the Land Rover, determined to do something about it.
Peterson met her halfway.
‘They’ve been talking to the MSF people,’ he said at once. ‘On the radio.’
‘Who have?’
‘The aircrew. It seems Christianne has resigned.’
Molly stared at him. The woman with the two children was being marched back to the road-block at gunpoint. The soldiers involved were laughing.
‘Resigned? When?’
‘Yesterday. Through the Red Cross circuit.’ He paused, frowning. ‘Extraordinary no one mentioned it. I might have been able to change her mind.’
Molly was still watching the woman with the two kids. One of the soldiers was prodding her with his rifle, making her run. The kids were crying.
‘I doubt it,’ she said quietly.
McFaul was barely conscious when he heard the Hercules. Sprawled in the dirt, he tried to look up, shielding his eyes from the sun, waiting for the pain to resolve itself. For the moment, everything hurt. His hands began to explore his face, his fingers swollen and bruised where he’d tried to protect himself. The blood on his face had scabbed in the hot sun and when he tried to swallow, his tongue snagged jagged fragments of teeth, debris from the beating. The plane was louder now, almost overhead, and he lifted a limp arm, not knowing quite why. For a split-second, he felt a shadow pass then the whine of the turbo-props began to recede, and he lay still again, resigned to the heat and the pain. Ants, he thought vaguely. Everywhere.
BOOK THREE
Durability
Durability in a mine, comprising longevity and toughness, is a vital design objective. The mine must, above all, be waterproof to repel ground moisture, rain, dew, and snow. In alternative, extreme climes it may have to withstand great heat, or icy cold too. Whatever may be envisaged, the mine must not disintegrate or collapse and has to remain intact to function at the right moment.
LT.-COL. C. E. E. SLOAN
Mine Warfare on Land
CHAPTER TEN
Molly Jordan sat at a table outside the Café Arcadia, waiting for Robbie Cunningham. It was dark now, nearly eight o’clock, and across the water she could see the lights of the Ilha, the spit of land that enfolded Luanda’s lagoon. The Ilha was the playground for the city’s rich and poor, good pickings for the legions of homeless kids, smart beachside cafés for the journalists, and mercenaries, and empresarios who fed off Angola’s war. Molly had spent most of the afternoon there, listening to Larry Giddings’s dry analysis of exactly where the country had gone wrong. The foreigners are the real problem, he’d told her. Charter a couple of 747s, ship them all out, and the povo, the people, could start to organise themselves a few surprises. Like peace. And clean water. And an inflation rate a little lower than 2,500 per cent a year.
Molly reached for her coffee. She’d been back in Luanda for a couple of days now, fending off enquiries from the embassy. She’d been met at the airport as the ambassador had promised, a friendly young second secretary in a rumpled white suit, and when she’d politely turned down the offer of a lift back to town he’d taken her to one side and given her the TAP ticket and explained that the flight wou
ld be leaving at noon next day. TAP, he said, had a reputation for punctuality. It would be as well to check in early.
Molly had slipped the ticket into her bag, thanking him for the trouble he’d taken, telling him that she’d decided to stay a little longer. There were matters she’d yet to attend to, loose ends she needed to tie up. When he pressed her for details, she’d declined to elaborate. She was, she pointed out, an independent woman. She had no deadlines to meet, no responsibilities to consider. Terra Sancta had guaranteed her board and lodging and what little money she had would doubtless see her through. The way she’d put it – firm, courteous, self-confident – had surprised her and when the young diplomat finally beat a retreat to the embassy Frontera parked in the sunshine outside, she’d felt an extraordinary sense of release. My life. My decisions. My future.
A waiter appeared and chased away the kids beside the pavement table. Robbie had warned her about the kids. Eating in the open air was a great idea but they’d be pestering you all night, offering to wash your car, or guard your moped, or help you finish the finger-shaped bread rolls that came with the steaming bowls of garlic-scented fish soup. Molly had been amused by the warning. Seven days in Muengo had revised her ideas about more or less everything, charity included, and she’d already distributed the scoops of rice abandoned on an adjoining table. Now, the waiter back inside the café, the kids were circling again. None of them looked older than nine. One had a paper plate balanced on his head. Another wore a long, heavy overcoat, several sizes too big. The rest were barefoot in ragged shorts and dirty T-shirts. One of the T-shirts sported a line of penguins, a motif Molly recognised from an old Mothercare catalogue, and through the tear beneath one armpit, Molly could count the child’s ribs.
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