by Tony Park
She hovered on eighty, pausing only to gear down expertly a couple of times when the Volkswagen’s path was momentarily slewed by some deep sand. The car skipped along the ridges of the corrugations on the harder surfaced tracks and the suspension absorbed the worst of the ride when they bounced along a section which was cobbled with round rocks each the size of a softball. Once or twice Tom winced as the underneath of the Chico scraped over an earthen mound or rock, but Sannie maintained the relentless pace, taking each curve like a seasoned rally driver.
The vegetation was different on the Mozambican side and Sannie confirmed Tom’s suspicion that the trees were more mature and bush thicker because of the lack of browsing and grazing animals. In the first hour of driving he saw only two impalas and a single steenbok, a delicate little brick-coloured antelope which took off at the sound of their approach. Animals of the four-footed variety were the least of his concerns now.
Sannie slowed as they entered the village of Macavene, a widely dispersed string of mud huts with thatched-reed roofs. There was the ruin of an old farmhouse, Portuguese they presumed, but no one was living in the gutted building now. A cluster of children gathered around them, staring in silence. Sannie asked for directions and a young man pointed to the left fork of a road as the route to Massingir Dam, their next waypoint.
The road deteriorated rapidly after they left the village and Sannie was forced to drive most of the badly rutted and eroded track in second and third gear. She muttered curses in Afrikaans as she scraped her way along and took the little car up the side of a washed-out section of road so that they were riding at an alarming angle for a hundred metres. At one point Tom instinctively reached out to brace himself against the dashboard when it felt as though they might roll. She laughed at his face and it relieved the tension of the pursuit for a precious minute.
When they arrived at the manned gate marking the border of the Limpopo Park, there was a car ahead of them, a shiny new Corolla, which turned out to be a rental car driven by two middle-aged brothers from Tasmania in Australia. Tom shook his head after chatting briefly to them. It seemed he and Sannie weren’t the only crazy people braving the unknown in Mozambique.
Massingir was an impressive man-made addition to the African landscape, an earthen dam five kilometres long and topped with new concrete, a roadway and modern spillways. It blocked the Olifants River, and the land immediately downstream of the wall was green and fertile, a stark contrast with the uniform khaki of the bush on either side of the watercourse. Tom saw fishermen in canoes hugging the lake shore as they set out for the evening’s work. The trees on the banks were taking on the soft golden hues he had come to associate with the onset of Africa’s brief twilight.
He suddenly felt guilty, for taking Sannie away from her children and having her share the risks in a bid to make up for his mistakes. ‘You know, I couldn’t do this without you,’ he said.
‘I know. It’s why I’m here.’
She let Tom take the wheel after they crossed the dam and encouraged him to push the car up to a hundred and twenty. The road was narrow – just enough room for two cars to pass – and while the tar was studded with gravel it was smooth enough to allow him to reach the maximum speed limit. The bush encroached to the very verge of the surface and he realised that if a goat or a cow – or even a person – emerged from the trees on either side he would have virtually no chance of stopping in time. He gripped the wheel harder and pushed the accelerator until the engine was screaming, before changing up a gear.
Just when he was beginning to think all of Africa was covered with thorny bushes and stunted acacias, the road they were on ended in a T-junction and the countryside changed. Turning right on to a wider, smooth-tarred road they passed into wide open flat land of treeless flood plains. Here the road was raised, on a kind of levee bank. A long, straight irrigation or drainage canal ran parallel, on the left, complete with locks similar to those found on English canals. To the right of the road was a railway line.
‘Good farming country,’ Sannie said. ‘I remember the fruit and vegetables here were some of the best I’ve ever had. The greenest lettuces, the reddest tomatoes you’ll ever see.’
Here and there the seemingly endless verdant farmlands were dotted with white houses with red roofs that looked like terracotta tiles. It was only later when they passed closer to one such farmhouse that Tom saw the roof was actually corrugated asbestos painted to look like tiling. It was a little piece of imitation Portugal, erected by long-gone colonists who must have pined for the far-off homeland they were feeding with the rich soil of Africa and the sweat of her people.
In the small towns they whizzed through were more signs of the old rulers’ influence: signs in Portuguese, Catholic cathedrals, stout concrete buildings of the colonial administration, and clusters of merchants’ villas with a distinct Mediterranean flavour. Some of the houses were freshly painted in pale pastels – more faux Europe – while others bore the bullet holes and black scorch marks of the post-colonial orgy of violence.
They passed a small mosque with a stunted, pointed minaret which was more a gesture to Islam than a tower from which to call the faithful to prayer. It made Tom think about the men they were pursuing. He was assuming they were Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, though he had no proof of their motive, cause or identity at this stage, beyond one man’s facial features. As he reminded himself to keep an open mind, the enormity of the task – the probable futility of their race across a foreign country with no support, no back-up – hit him like a bullet in the chest.
On the edge of the canal beside the road, life went on. Women in bright wraps washed themselves and their babies in soapy plastic washing bowls; small boys dived off bridges; men fished with long reed poles with fishing line tied to the ends. They passed a man in a suit and a cowboy hat riding a bicycle, and a new Land Cruiser driven by a fat, waving Portuguese farmer.
‘Some of the old farmers from the colonial days are returning, and there are white Zimbabwean farmers here too. They were kicked off their own land by their government, which was once allied to the ruling party here in Mozambique. That’s Africa for you,’ Sannie said.
Tom shook his head.
‘What is it?’ Sannie asked. ‘You’re looking grim.’
‘You don’t need to be here, Sannie.’
‘Yes I do.’
They were silent for a few seconds as they both considered the implications of that, but Tom finally broke their reverie.
‘We don’t have a chance in hell, do we?’
‘Probably not.’ She took a sip from a can of Coke and handed it to him. ‘But there’s nothing else we can do.’
14
Bernard Joyce had spent the better part of eight years at sea. He had lived for the wide expanses of empty ocean, even though he was under it for most of the time. Now he prayed that he would see the water again.
He knew they were by the coast. He could smell it. The dank odour of salt water damp was as much a part of a multimillion-pound nuclear submarine as it would have been on one of Nelson’s ships of the line or an Arab trading dhow. And though he knew nothing at all about African birds, seagulls made the same irritating squawk the world over.
His world was one of darkness and pain. He lay on a cold concrete floor, his face covered with a rough hessian sack tied about his throat with string. His hands were cuffed behind his back with plastic cable ties and his fingers were numb. His shoulders ached from the position he had been kept in since the abduction in the cool dark pre-dawn at Tinga.
Time was a hard thing to measure when kept in darkness, but the coarse weave of his hood had let in daylight when he and Greeves had been bundled into the back of the truck, and for parts of their nightmarish journey. He had been elated to hear gunfire, then terrified as the hot bullet casings rained down on him, burning his bare arms, as their captor fired on whomever was pursuing them. Would they be killed before their rescuers got to them? He imagined their abductors – who had
so far said virtually nothing – were terrorists rather than petty criminals, and that they would ensure their hostages died if it looked as though they might be caught. But there had been no evidence of a pursuing force since the gun battle in the bush, which had ended with explosions and fire.
Bernard’s feet throbbed with unceasing pain. He had been barefoot, undressed for bed except for a pair of boxer shorts, when they had come for him. They had let themselves into the room – an inside job, for sure – and the needle’s jab had silenced him before he could fight back, though he had managed to call out first. He’d awoken in the bush and panicked at the feel of the tape over his mouth. He’d always suffered sinus problems and needed consciously to force himself to breathe as deeply and slowly as possible through his nose.
His feet had been punctured and torn bloody in the first few steps through the bush, and made worse, later, when he had been dragged from the back of the vehicle and made to run as the bullets flew around him. They had marched him and Greeves hard and fast through the bush, each step compounding Bernard’s agony. Several times he’d tripped and fallen and had either been dragged upright by his cuffed hands – an excruciatingly painful experience – or kicked in the ribs until he forced himself to his feet. ‘If you keep trying to delay us,’ a man had whispered in English to him, though with an oddly Latino accent, ‘we will simply kill you. It’s not you we need, and you know it.’ They had seen through his ploy immediately. He’d thought that by causing himself to fall more times than he did by accident, he might slow their progress and thus allow their pursuers to gain ground. ‘No one is coming now,’ the man had said with an air of certainty.
An hour later, perhaps two, Bernard had arrived, bleeding, panting, dehydrated, bruised from the captors’ boots, at another dusty roadside. There he and Greeves had been pushed and dragged into the rear of a pick-up. The road they travelled, at high speed, was badly corrugated. Dust entered the cab and found its way through the hessian weave to clog his nostrils and throat, and he was slammed into the unforgiving metal floor of the cargo compartment with every tortuous bump and pothole. Twice they had slowed to a stop and heard voices. Each time, Bernard had felt a blanket drawn over his body, the heat adding to his fears of suffocation, and felt the hard cylindrical metal imprint of a rifle barrel pressed against his temple under the covering. Police checkpoints? he wondered. It was difficult to hear what language was spoken, enclosed as he was in the back of the truck and smothered, but it wasn’t English and he didn’t sound like an African dialect. Portuguese? That was the language of Mozambique.
When they arrived at their destination he had smelled the sea. The air was cool on his bare arms and legs and it was a relief just to stop moving, and to stand there for a second or two and stretch his aching, battered limbs. The relief was short-lived. They had come for him once and said nothing. Two of them had dragged him across the slippery, polished concrete floor to another room, lain him on the bare squeaking wire frame of a bed, cable tied his ankles to the tubular metal foot of the bed, and laid into the soles of his already tortured feet with a cane. The tears had flooded the inside of his hood, though the tape had muffled his screams. They didn’t ask him a single question – didn’t speak a syllable.
He’d had the lecture on resistance to interrogation as part of his training as a naval officer deployed overseas on sensitive operations. He knew the techniques the men were employing, but that didn’t make them any easier to bear. He was being disorientated, kept in the dark in a state of sensory deprivation. He was being kept off balance – he knew nothing of what they wanted from him, so he couldn’t develop a means of misleading them. He had already learned to associate the sounds of footsteps with pain. He had been humiliated already – he had pissed himself out of sheer necessity. When the footsteps came again he’d try hard not to void his bowels in fear, but he couldn’t trust himself not to.
He heard the scream, and it made his whole body start.
Again. An animal noise, but coming from a man. From Robert Greeves.
‘Never!’ Greeves yelled.
Bernard had heard dull thuds and another scream – even more high-pitched than the last. There had been muffled voices, sometimes raised, followed by defiant profanity, yelled by his urbane, educated political master. The bastards. More wailing.
The noise of water being poured, an open palm slapping flesh. Had Robert passed out? Were they trying to revive him? Then silence.
Bernard’s heart pounded as he heard the footsteps. Doors opening and slamming shut. Footsteps getting louder. God help me, he prayed silently.
Two of them entered and grabbed him under the armpits. They dragged him – he couldn’t have walked if they’d let him – the tops of his toes burning from the friction on the polished floor, and lifted him onto a wooden chair.
Bernard blinked as the hood came off, his eyes seared by the unaccustomed light. The tape stung as it was quickly ripped off his mouth, but that was the least of his pains. He was at a desk, a man sitting opposite him, smiling. The face was dark – handsome, even – with a thick black moustache, Saddam style. A cigarette was smouldering in a tin ashtray, next to a small electronic device which looked like a portable DVD player. The room was otherwise unfurnished, the walls whitewashed but grubby. The windows were set in metal frames, but the light came from a bare overhead bulb; paper or plastic had been taped over the glass panes.
‘Leave us,’ the man said in English to the other two. Bernard blinked and looked over his shoulder at his captors. One wore jeans, the other three-quarter length cargo pants. Their shirts were plain cotton, one blue, one white. Both had ski masks on, but from their hands, and the ankles of the one in the shorter trousers, he could see they were black Africans. The men, who each had a mini version of an AK 47 slung over his shoulder, departed without a word.
‘Hello, Bernard.’
Joyce said nothing. From his brief training he recalled that he should give only what was known as the ‘big four’, and nothing more. The big four were name, rank, date of birth and service number. As he was no longer a serving naval officer, he decided to limit it to two – name and date of birth. For now, though, he said nothing.
‘Cigarette?’
He was about to say he didn’t smoke, then realised that would be breaking the first rule. ‘My name is Bernard Joyce and I was born on the sixteenth of November, nineteen seventy-four.’
The man laughed, and the noise echoed off the bare walls. ‘I don’t care, Bernard. And that’s the truth.’ He picked up the cigarette and drew deeply on it, blowing the smoke towards the ceiling. ‘Filthy habit, I know.’
‘My name is Bernard Joyce and I was born on the sixteenth of November, nineteen seventy –’
The man held up a hand. ‘I need nothing from you, Bernard. I don’t need to know about your job as policy advisor to Robert Greeves. I don’t need to know about the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarines, and I don’t need to know about your future plans for troop deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, or anywhere else for that matter. I don’t even need to know that you are homosexual, save for the fact that it is a useful detail – a good way of breaking a man down is to anally rape him, but perhaps that wouldn’t work on you. In fact, Bernard Joyce, born nineteen seventy-four, I don’t really need you at all.’
Bernard shifted in the chair. He felt sick to his stomach. The man wouldn’t have revealed his face if he had any intention at all of letting him live.
‘So here is my dilemma. What do I do with you, and can you be of any further use to me? You see, Bernard, you were insurance. In the unlikely event that Robert Greeves was killed in the abduction phase, you were to be my back-up hostage. But Robert, for the time being, is very much alive, if not too well at the moment.’ He smiled at his own cruel joke. ‘So you, my friend, are redundant.’
Bernard felt like he was going to shit himself. He wondered if this talk would end with a bullet in his head, or a slower, more barbarous fate. He needed to stay alive if he was
to fulfil his duty as a former officer – to try to escape. He was as good as dead already, so he would not go peacefully.
‘What thoughts, I wonder, are going through your head now?’ The man waved the lighted cigarette in the air, as though punctuating his words with a question mark. ‘Will you become my Scheherazade, talking and talking now to keep yourself alive, trying to think of something to say that will keep me from killing you? Or will you try to escape, risk your life on a futile gesture, but go out fighting, as the Americans would say?’
Bernard said nothing. The man leaned across the table and flipped open the screen of the portable disc player. ‘There are many ways to fight a war, Bernard, as I’m sure you know. My people, the people oppressed by the Israelis, the British, the Americans and their puppets in Pakistan and the House of Saud, do not have nuclear submarines or jet fighters or B-52 bombers. My people are good at making the most of what they have. This little device – and the video camera in the next room – are what military people call force multipliers. Do you know what that means?’
Bernard did, but he was sticking, for the time being, with his say-nothing strategy.
The man sighed. ‘It means that I can inflict disproportionate damage on my opponent by using a tool which will enhance my meagre military resources. The media, Bernard, is a force multiplier, and one that my people are very good at using. As good as your submarines and jets and bombs are, your people are hopelessly inept at using the world’s press, radio and television to your advantage.’
If the conversation were being held over drinks in the Naval and Military Club, Bernard would probably agree with the man.
‘Now, Bernard, allow me to multiply the power of my words with some home videos.’
Bernard took a deep breath, then closed his eyes.
‘Open them, Bernard, or I’ll get one of my men to slice your eyelids off.’
Bernard blinked, looked at him again and swallowed. There was no smile on his face, just a deadpan look that said he had every intention of carrying out his last threat and would think no more of it than if he had just stepped on an ant. He leaned over and turned the player so than Bernard could see the small screen.