‘Not the way Jones told it.’
‘And you’re not sure about Ron Jones’ death.’
‘No, that’s only a gut feeling. But four men saw McGrath gun Sisley down. Burke ran off and is very likely dead by now. Jones is dead. Lang is gravely wounded, though thank God I know that one isn’t at McGrath’s door. That leaves Bob Pitman and if I were he I’d be walking carefully right now. Whatever we know or suspect about McGrath I suggest we keep it buttoned up, or we could find ourselves in deep trouble.’
We turned our attention to the future.
‘There’s a biggish town, Batanda, not far across the Manzu border,’ Wingstead said. ‘I haven’t found anyone who’s been there, but the country itself is known to be relatively stable. There must be a road from Batanda to the ferry on Lake Pirie, because a lot of trade goes on between the two countries at that point. If we can take the ferry to Manzu and drive to Batanda we should be safe.’
‘What’s Fort Pirie like?’ Kemp asked.
‘Another Makara, not much there at all. And there may have been military activity there, so God knows what we’ll find.’
Kemp asked, ‘What are Sadiq’s plans?’
‘He’ll stay with us as far as Fort Pirie, and help us cross the ferry if the road to Lasulu isn’t clear. He won’t cross himself, of course. He’ll keep his men inside his own border. But I think he’ll welcome our departure.’
‘Not half as much as I will,’ Kemp said fervently.
The bush country was left behind and the rainforest began to close in, green and oppressive. The exuberant plant life had eroded the road surface, roots bursting through the tarmac. The trees that bordered the road were very tall, their boughs arched so that it was like driving through a tunnel. There was more bird life but the game, which had been sparse before, was now nonexistent.
In the days before Maro Ofanwe improved matters this road had been not much more than a track, only one car wide for miles at a stretch. Traffic was one way on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and the other way on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Sundays you stayed home or took your chances and prayed to God. A lot of other roads in Nyala were still like that.
Occasionally there was a hard won clearing, usually with a scattering of grass huts clustered about a warehouse. These were the collection points for the cotton, coffee and cacao beans from the plantations hewed out of the forest. There were people in all these villages but little in the way of food or goods, and hardly anyone spoke English. We asked for news but it was scanty and the people ill-informed.
One or two villages were larger and we were able to drain storage tanks and pumps of available petrol. It was a good sign that there was some, as it meant that there’d been little traffic that way. Somehow enough food was found to keep us going, though it was pretty unpalatable. Behind and around us, our escort of Nyalans swelled and diminished as people joined in for a few miles, dropped out and were replaced by others. The train was growing, though; Sadiq told us there were several hundred people now, coming as remorselessly as a horde of locusts, and with consequences for the countryside nearly as disastrous. There was nothing we could do about it.
Two days passed without incident. On the rig, Lang’s condition worsened and one of the soldiers died of his wounds. Sister Ursula nursed with devotion, coming among us to do spot checks on our continuing health and bully us into keeping clean, inside as well as out. If she could she’d have dispensed compulsory laxatives all round.
Margretta Marriot did the rounds too, changing bandages and keeping a watch for infection. There was little for her to do on the rig now except basic nursing, and sometimes she rode with one or other of us. A dour woman at best, I thought, and now she had retreated into a pit of misery that only work could alleviate. Sister Ursula, for all her hectoring, was more of a tonic.
On the morning of the third day Sadiq’s scouts returned with news that they’d reached the Katali river and seen Lake Pirie shining in the sun. From where we were camped it was only a couple of hours’ drive in a car, and spirits lifted; whatever was going to happen there, we’d reached another of our goals with the convoy still intact.
I’d travelled for most of the previous day in the cab of the water tanker with Sam Wilson (we each gave one another a turn in the comparative comfort of the Land Rover) and now I was with Thorpe in the travelling workshop when a messenger came asking me to join Captain Sadiq.
‘I am going ahead, Mister Mannix,’ he told me. ‘I wish to see for myself what the situation is. There is a village ahead with petrol pumps. Would you and Mister Kemp drive there with us to look at it, please?’
I said, ‘Harry Zimmerman told me there was a fuel depot hereabouts, one of his own company’s places. We’ll take him with us.’
Zimmerman, Kemp and I pushed on behind the soldiers, glad of the release. Soon enough we saw a welcome bottlegreen expanse spreading out between the trees, and the road ran down through them to emerge on the shore of a large body of water, a sight quite astonishing after the endless days of bush and forest, and incredibly refreshing to the eye. It stretched away, placid in the blazing sun.
For a while we just sat and stared at it. Then we drove along the lakeside road for another mile or two.
Eventually we arrived at what might have passed for civilization. The place consisted of a roadside filling station with a big, faded Lat-Am fascia board; it was obviously a gas and oil distribution centre. Behind it was an extensive compound fenced in by cyclone netting, which contained stacks of drums. I supposed the gas and oil would be hauled along the road by tankers, transferred to ground tanks here and then rebottled in the drums for distribution to planters and farmers.
If anyone spoke English we were likely to find him here, though I did curse my lack of foresight in not bringing an interpreter with us. It proved not to be necessary.
At first there was nobody to be seen and few sounds; a water pump chugging somewhere, scrawny chickens pecking about, the monotonous tink of some wild bird. I eyed the chickens speculatively, then blew a blast on the horn which scattered them, though not very far. They were used to traffic. A hornbill rose lazily from a tree and settled in another, cocked its head and looked down with beady eyes, as unconcerned as the chickens. At the sixth blast the door of the cabin behind the pumps opened, and a brown face peered warily at us through the crack.
We’d had this sort of nervous reaction before and could hardly blame the locals for being cautious, but at least our non-military car and clothing should prove reassuring. I called out cheerfully, ‘Good morning. Are you open for business?’
The door opened wider and a Nyalan stepped out into the sun. He wore a tired overall on which the logo of Lat-Am was printed, a travesty of the livery which they inflicted on their gas station attendants in more affluent places.
‘I am not open,’ he said. ‘I got no custom.’
I got out of the car into the scorching morning air. ‘You have now,’ I told him. Through the open door I saw a familiar red pattern painted on an ice box. ‘You got cold Coca-Cola in there?’
‘How many?’ he asked cautiously.
‘I could drink two. Two each—six of them. I’ll pay.’ I pulled out a handful of coins, wondering as I did so how he managed to keep them cold. He thought about it, then went in and returned with the Cokes, blissfully chilling to the touch in the narrow-waisted bottles that were still used in this part of the world. I sank half of my first in one swallow. ‘Quiet around here, is it?’
He shrugged. ‘There is trouble. Trouble come and the people they stop coming.’
‘Trouble meaning the war?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know about no war. But there are many soldiers.’
Kemp asked, ‘Soldiers where—here?’ It certainly didn’t look like it. Our untapped mine of information doled out another nugget. ‘Not here. In Fort Pirie they are come.’
I swallowed air this time. Soldiers in Fort Pirie could be bad news if they were rebels, and I wondered how Sadiq wa
s getting on.
‘Has there been any fighting here at all?’ Kemp asked.
A headshake. ‘Not here.’
‘Where then?’
This time we got the shrug again. ‘Somewhere else. I do not know.’
This was like drawing teeth the hard way. I downed some more Coke in silence and tried to keep my impatience under control. Then, surprisingly, the attendant carried on unasked. ‘Two tanks come two days ago from Fort Pirie. Then they go back again. They not buy nothing.’
‘Did they threaten you? I mean, were they bad people?’
‘I think not so bad. Gov’ment people.’
They might or might not be, but it sounded a little better. At least they weren’t hellbent on destruction like the last lot we’d met up with.
The attendant suddenly went into his cabin and returned with another opened Coke, which he began to drink himself. I recognized a social gesture; he must have decided that we were acceptable, and was letting his guard down a little by drinking with us. I wondered with amusement how much of his stock vanished in this way, and how he fiddled his books to account for it. I didn’t yet know him very well.
‘Soldiers come by now, one half-hour ago. Not many. They go that way. Also they go that way this morning, then come back. They not stop here.’
He indicated the direction of the river and I realized that he was talking about Sadiq, but we weren’t in a hurry to enlighten him about our association with any military force. We exchanged a few more generalities and then, noticing the wires leading down to the cabin from a pole across the road, I said, ‘Do you mind if we use your telephone?’
‘No use. It dead.’
That would have been too easy. ‘It’s the trouble that caused it, I suppose. What about your radio?’
‘It play dance music, long time only music. Sometimes nothing at all.’ He decided that it was his turn to ask questions. ‘You people. Where you from?’
‘We’ve come from Kodowa.’
‘A man said that Kodowa is not there no more. Is bombed, burnt. Is that true?’
‘Yes, it’s true. But Makara is all right. Was Fort Pirie bombed?’
Now we were trading information. ‘No bombs there. No fighting, just many soldiers, the man he say. Where you go?’
‘We are going to Fort Pirie, if it’s safe there. We have more people waiting back there for us, men and women. We are not soldiers.’
‘White women? Very bad for them here. They should stay in city, here is dangerous.’ He seemed genuinely anxious.
‘Believe me, my friend, they’d like nothing better. We are going to go back and get them, tell them it’s safe here. When we come back we would like to buy gas, OK?’
‘I not sell gas.’
‘Sorry, I mean petrol. Petrol and other things if you have them to sell. Meantime, how many Cokes have you got in that ice box in there?’
‘Many. Maybe twenty, twenty-four.’
‘I’ll buy the lot. Find a box and if you’ve got any more, put them in the cold right away. We’ll buy them when we come back.’
He seemed bemused by this but was quite ready to deal with me, especially as I produced the cash at once. Kemp said, ‘Do you have many people living here? Could we get food for our people, perhaps?’
The attendant thought about this. He was careful with his answers. ‘Not so many people. Many of them go away when trouble comes, but I think maybe you can get food.’
Kemp had noticed the chickens, and caught a glimpse of a small field of corn out behind the cabin. Even his mind, running mainly to thoughts of fuel, road conditions and other such technicalities, could spare a moment to dwell on the emptiness of our stomachs. The station hand was back with us now with some twenty icy bottles in a cardboard box, for which he gravely accepted and counted my money and rung it into his little till. Zimmerman, who’d said nothing, watched with interest as he filled our tank with gas and rung up that sale as well. After we drove off he said, ‘He runs a pretty tight ship. That’s good to see. We’re both on the same payroll, him and me. We’ve got to give him a square deal when we bring the convoy in.’
Zimmerman was a Lat-Am man and he regarded the station in a rather proprietorial manner.
‘Don’t worry, Harry,’ I said to him, feeling unwarranted optimism rising inside me. ‘We won’t rip him off, I promise you.’ I patted the box of Cokes. ‘This is going to make them sit up, isn’t it? Something tells me that it’s going to be easy all the way from now on.’
It wasn’t quite like that.
TWENTY-THREE
There was some restrained rejoicing when we got back to camp with the news and the Cokes, which hadn’t yet lost all their chill. Geoff Wingstead decided that unless we heard anything to the contrary from Sadiq within an hour, he’d move the rig on as far as the filling station, thus saving some valuable time. I suggested that he leave Kemp in charge of this phase of the operation and come on ahead again with me. I’d had a couple of ideas that I wanted to check out.
He agreed and we left taking Zimmerman with us and adding Ben Hammond to the Land Rover complement. Proctor was quite able to take Hammond’s place for this easy run. This time I bypassed the gas station and we carried on for a little way, with the forest, which was still quite dense at the station, now thinning away until there was only a narrow screen between the road and the gleam of sunlight on water. When we had a clear view I pulled off and stopped. At this point Lake .Pirie was about five miles wide, broadening out to our right. We were told that where the ferry crossed it was a couple of miles across, with the far bank visible, but I wasn’t sure how far downwater that would be from where the road came out; local maps were not entirely accurate, as we had often discovered.
Wingstead said, ‘It doesn’t look like a river.’
It wouldn’t, to an Englishman to whom the Thames was the Father of Waters, but I recalled the Mississippi and smiled. ‘It’s all part of the Katali,’ I said. ‘It would have been better if they hadn’t put the word Lake into it at all. Think of it as the Pirie Stretch and you’ll have a better mental picture.’ It was a long stretch, being in fact about thirty miles from where it broadened out to where it abruptly narrowed again, a pond by African standards but still a sizeable body of water.
‘It’s a pity it isn’t navigable, like most of the European rivers,’ Kemp said, his mind as ever on transport of one sort or another.
‘It’s the same with most African rivers,’ I said. ‘What with waterfalls, rapids, shoals, rocks and crocodiles they just aren’t very cooperative.’ Zimmerman laughed aloud. We sat for a while and then heard the rumble of traffic and a moment later a Saracen came into view, moving towards us from the river. There wasn’t much we could do except hope that it was ours, and it was; a couple of Sadiq’s men waved and the armoured car stopped alongside us.
‘We came back to look for you, sir. To stop you going any further,’ one of them said.
‘What’s wrong?’
It was bad news. The ferry crossing was about six miles downstream, and the Nyalan ferrypoint and the road to it were occupied by a rebel force, not a large one but probably a guard detachment. There was no ferry movement at all. All this Sadiq had seen from far off, which was bad enough, but what was worse was that he had picked up radio conversations, thanks to Bing’s expertise; and it was apparent that Kigonde had not told him the whole truth. The opposition was stronger than we’d been led to believe. A large part of the army had defected and the countryside through to Fort Pirie and perhaps as far down as Lasulu was in rebel hands.
From what the soldiers told us, there was even some doubt as to whether they should be called rebels or military representatives of a new ruling Government; all news from Port Luard had ceased. There was no indication as to which way the Air Force had gone, but no doubt that whichever side they started on they’d find a way of ending up on the side of the victors.
‘Thank you for the news,’ I said, though I didn’t feel at all thankful. ‘Tell Capta
in Sadiq that we will bring the convoy no further than the filling station along the road there. We’ll wait there until we hear from him.’
Sadiq would probably regard even this as dangerously close to the enemy. The Saracen turned back and so did we, bearing a cargo of gloom to the gas station. Wingstead said, ‘Christ, can’t anything go right?’ It wasn’t like him to be dejected and I hoped it was caused by nothing more than exhaustion.
‘Why couldn’t they have been government troops?’ Zimmerman asked plaintively.
‘You think that would make much difference? In a civil war the best bet for a foreigner is to stay clear of all troops whichever side they’re on. There’ll be bastards like Maksa on both sides.’
We arrived at the station and I took the Land Rover round the back of the cabin out of sight of the road. The Nyalan attendant popped out with a disapproving face, then relaxed when he saw who we were, ‘I got more Cokes getting cold, like you said,’ he announced proudly.
‘You know the trouble we talked about? Well, it’s not far away, my friend. There are soldiers down at the ferry and they are not friends of your Government.’
The others got out of the car and joined me. I said, ‘We would like to look around here. I think there is going to be more trouble, and it may come this way. If I were you I’d go tell your people in the village to go away until it’s over, and that means you too.’
He said, ‘Other people, they already go. But not me.’
‘Why not?’
‘I leave and Mister Obukwe, he kill me,’ he said very positively.
‘Who’s he?’
‘My boss in Fort Pirie.’
I thought that Mr Obukwe must be quite a terrifying guy to instil such company loyalty, and exchanged a grin with Harry Zimmerman. He came forward and said, ‘What’s your name?’
The attendant thought about answering him. ‘Sam Kironji,’ he said at last. Zimmerman stuck out his hand.
‘Pleased to meet you, Sam. My name is Harry Zimmerman. Call me Harry. And I work for Lat-Am same as you. Look here.’ He opened a wallet and produced a plastic identification badge, to which Kironji reacted with delight.
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