by Chris Ryan
‘These guys we’re training,’ I said, gesturing round about. ‘I gather they’re Kaswiris. Different from the Afundis, obviously.’
‘Different! By George! Different language, different customs, different everything. We hate the Afundis’ guts.’
‘We — you — you’re a Kaswiri?’
‘Of course. What else?’ He drew himself upright on his ammunition box and thrust out his chest. ‘We Kaswiris know how to behave.’
‘Don’t get me wrong, Mr President, but discipline isn’t the force’s strongest point yet.’
‘Are you criticising Alpha Commando?’
‘Not at all.’ I held up a hand in token appeasement. ‘Just pointing out the need for good control. You saw how high some of them were firing — all that tracer into the stratosphere.’
‘Okay, okay,’ he went. Then he leaned his grizzled head closer to me, and said confidentially, ‘As you know, some of these chaps are not long down from the trees. So of course they need training. That’s why you’re here!’
‘What about Bididis?’ I asked. ‘Where do they come in?’
‘Bididis?’ He seemed surprised. ‘They’re okay. They don’t cause trouble. Why?’
‘There’s one at least in the commando, and he seems a useful fellow.’
‘Well, that’s a turn-up.’
‘Why?’
‘Because we have jokes about the Bididis. Like you and the Irish. They’re the thick men of Africa — not a brain in their heads.’
‘How about this Muende?’
‘Muende!’ The President gave a snort. ‘He’s the Afundi of Afundis, the worst. The fundamental orifice of the Afundis. Ha ha!’
‘What age is he?’
‘Thirty? Thirty-two? I don’t know. What does it matter?’ He turned and scowled at me, his jokiness veering towards irritation. ‘Why don’t you do me a favour: get down there and put some bullets through him?’
It wasn’t the moment for a serious argument about the extent of our commitment. Bakunda was too far gone for that. So I just said casually, ‘Well, of course we’ll do anything we can to help.’
‘Good man!’ Bakunda leant over to slap me on the shoulder, missed because his arm was so short, and nearly swung himself off his perch. ‘In the morning, we’ll settle details. But in any case you’ll go as far as Gutu.’
It was more a statement than a question.
‘The mine there,’ I said, stalling. ‘Is it that important to you?’
‘Of course! Gutu means diamonds. Muende’s smuggling the diamonds out over the border, into South Africa, Namibia, everywhere. He’s getting so much revenue that his strength is increasing all the time. He’s buying all the weapons he wants. Look here! Only yesterday we heard that he’s brought in foreign mercenaries to fight for him.’
‘Mercenaries?’ said Whinger, sharply. ‘Where from?’
‘How do I know?’ Bakunda waved his cup about, slopping rum. ‘Somebody said America.’
‘Americans!’ I went. ‘Jesus. If we don’t watch out, we’ll find ourselves fighting former SEALs.’
‘Seals?’ barked Bakunda. ‘What are they? Fish, are they not? How can you be fighting fish?’
‘US special forces — sea, army and land. Like the SAS. When American guys finish their service, they often take mercenary jobs.’
‘Okay, okay,’ said Bakunda. ‘I was only trying to be funny.’
The conversation was interrupted by the sound of an engine: the truck coming back in.
‘Excuse me a minute,’ I said. ‘I’ll just check everyone’s okay.’
I got up and moved off quickly, afraid that Bakunda would try to come with me. Luckily the troops were debussing some distance off, out of earshot, and I picked out the tall, bulky figure of Pavarotti. As soon as he’d squared things away with Joss, I drew him aside.
‘Everything all right?’
‘One silvery down.’
‘I thought so. What happened?’
‘This guy opened up on the search party as it went forward. Apparently he’d been feuding with one of the lads in it — tried to take him out as he ran towards the targets.’
‘But he missed.’
‘Yeah. His mates didn’t miss him, though. One of them snatched his AK47 off him, and another whacked him with a panga. One swing, head off, clunk.’
‘Christ! What did the rest of them do?’
‘Nothing. They left him where he dropped. I told them to bring the body in, but Manny, the group commander, just said, “Food for hyenas. Let’s go.”’
‘These people!’ I said. ‘Like I was saying the other night: Kaswiris, Afundis — one lot are as bad as the other.’
‘Yeah,’ went Pav. ‘They need watching. It wouldn’t take much to make some of them turn on us. They got really pissed off with us for forcing them to lie out all day.’
‘Nobody threatened you?’ I said.
‘No, but they came pretty close. I just think everyone ought to be aware they’re pretty volatile. Maybe we’d better slack off a bit.’
‘Screw that, Pav. We’re here to train the bastards, not entertain them.’
I looked back to the fire and went on. ‘Listen. We’ve been chatting up Bakunda. We’ve got him well pissed already. He’s spouted quite a bit. Get some food down your neck and join us. But for fuck’s sake don’t mention this business. I don’t think he realised what happened — or at least, if he did, he doesn’t want to know.’
Whatever the President suspected, no further mention was made of the incident that evening. We continued to hammer the rum, and after a while Joss joined the party, along with Pavarotti, Andy and Genesis. I hadn’t seen Joss drinking before, and now he began to worry me a bit. It may have been that alcohol started to bring out his true character, or it may have been that he was trying to impress the President, or both. In any case, he started saying that the time when Kamanga needed the services of the West was coming to an end.
‘The whole of Africa’s independent now,’ he shouted. ‘We’re in charge of our own destiny.’
‘But you still need blokes like us to help with your military training,’ Phil told him.
‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that,’ said Joss, louder than he need have. ‘This could be the last assignment the SAS gets in Kamanga.’
‘Now then,’ said Bakunda, and he quickly followed up with some remark in his own language. Joss looked abashed and took a big gulp from his mug.
I shot a glance at Whinger and saw he was thinking what I was thinking. Time to change the subject.
I turned to Bakunda, and asked, ‘Ever bought a ticket in our national lottery?’
‘No!’ he shouted merrily. ‘How much can I win?’
‘Millions,’ I told him. ‘Up to ten million, anyway.’
‘Pounds or kwatchas?’
‘Pounds, of course.’
Luckily, the conversation became totally frivolous. We began talking about what we’d do, back home, if we won the main prize. Whinger said he’d buy a pub, Pavarotti that he’d hire Concorde for a private trip round the world and have it stop off in Polynesia while he put in a couple of weeks’ shagging. Genesis that he’d buy an island off the Welsh coast and set up a foundation for religious instruction. Chalky fancied buying a luxury yacht and cruising in the West Indies, and Danny reckoned he’d set himself up in business as an international arms dealer.
‘And what about you, Geordie?’ burped Bakunda. ‘What would you do?’
‘I’d hire one really good guy to go and take out Saddam, and another to sort Gadaffi.’
‘Good!’ Bakunda roared. ‘I like it!’
‘General,’ said Phil, always a bit of a joker, ‘what does choka mean?’
‘Choka!’ Bakunda raised his eyebrows. ‘That’s quite a rude word. Who said that?’
‘I dunno,’ said Phil innocently. ‘I heard it somewhere.’
‘Well, it means “piss off’, to put it politely.’
‘Thanks,’ went Phil, who’d
known that all along. ‘It might be useful, sometimes. And General, can I ask why you’re called Rhino?’
‘Hey!’ Bakunda stuck out a mock-accusing finger. ‘Who told you that?’
‘Can’t remember.’
‘Since we’re all friends, I’ll tell you. Partly it’s this.’ He held out his hands to indicate the width of his torso. ‘Partly it’s because when I was at Sandhurst, I took up rugby. I can see you smiling, but I did. I thought it was wonderful, how all these white wogs were murdering one another on the field. I reckoned that if I joined in I could maybe smash one or two of them. Nothing personal, you understand. Anyway, once I ran into someone — poom!’ He smacked one fist into his other open palm to illustrate the impact. ‘The opposing centre three-quarter. He went straight up in the air, and was laid out cold. When he came round, he said, “Christ! That was like being charged by a bloody rhino!”’
At around 2300 I decided I’d had enough. It was clear no serious discussion would take place until we held a wash-up on our own in the morning. I knew the President’s aides had sorted out somewhere for him to sleep, so I had no compunction about making my excuses. Then, just as I was leaving the fire, a thought struck me.
‘If you come from this village, General,’ I said, ‘you must know the witch doctor.’
‘The sin’ganga? Old Chilukole? Of course. What about him?’
It seemed too late to start on the saga of the dead boy, so I just asked, ‘What d’you think of his spells?’
‘Why, has he witched somebody?’
‘Not that I know of, but I wondered if he can foretell the future. Doesn’t he do something with bones?’
The President’s manner changed. It was as if my question had let the wind out of him. His boisterous good humour vanished, and all at once he looked serious, even alarmed. ‘Did he make a prophecy, some forecast?’
‘No, no.’ Suddenly feeling bad vibrations, I decided to turn the enquiry into a joke. ‘I just thought he might tell us how to win the lottery.’
‘Steer clear of him,’ said Bakunda heavily. ‘You never know what trouble that old devil might stir up.’
I said nothing else, but secretly felt glad that I’d binned the dose formulated to ward off evil. I’d sent the witch doctor five dollars, as agreed, but next morning, instead of taking the medicine, I threw it into the fire, where it went off with a miniature explosion and a spurt of bright green flame.
FIVE
As our little convoy rolled south, Whinger and I had plenty of time to discuss the situation. The morning after the ambush, Bakunda had been up at dawn, none the worse for having put away half a bottle of rum on top of ten or fifteen beers. Far from sporting a hangover, he’d come out, cocked a leg, executed a couple of rhino-power farts, and gone off chatting and laughing with his officers, handing out zikomos and compliments all round.
The fact that one of the Kamangans had lost his head didn’t seem to worry him in the least. He knew what had happened, all right; I had overheard him talking to Joss about the incident. But when I cornered Joss about it after breakfast, and suggested we should recover the body, the answer was, ‘Forget it, Geordie. All our guys knew Chidombo had been witched by a fiti. Sooner or later he was going to die. Now he’s dead, no one would touch his body even if we went looking for it. They think the spell might jump into them. Anyway, it’s probably gone already.’
‘Eaten by animals, you mean?’
Instead of answering straight, Joss gave me a peculiar look, half evasive, half angry. Then, after a pause, he said, ‘Maybe the devil’s got it.’
I wasn’t sure what he meant. There was something odd about his manner. He didn’t sound quite himself. But I sensed there was no point in arguing. The strange thing was that when Pavarotti had gone out with a recovery party to bring back the targets, he’d found no trace of a body. He, if anyone, knew exactly where the scuffle had taken place, and while the Kamangans had collected the figure-eights, he’d gone straight to the spot. As he said, if hyenas had eaten Chidombo, he’d have found traces of blood and chips of crunched-up bone — probably the head, too, or at least the remains of it. In the event, there was nothing — not even any flies around the place. It was as if something had lifted the body whole and whisked it clean away.
As Pav had reported this back, I felt the hair on my neck creep. We’d been getting too many stories about the devil using owls and hyenas for transport, too much stuff about witching.
‘Don’t mention it at the wash-up,’ I had warned Pav. ‘If one of the Africans starts in about it, okay, but otherwise, let it go. I reckon they’ll bin the whole episode and pretend it never happened.’
My hunch had soon proved right. At the debrief, which Bakunda attended, the incident was simply passed over. Joss bollocked men for other mistakes — firing at the hyena, the ND while I was away, somebody walking off his position to have a dump — but never mentioned what had been by far the worst incident of all. It, and poor old Chidombo, were wiped from the record.
‘I don’t like it,’ I said to Whinger as we jolted along the sandy track. ‘If they act like that during an exercise, what are they going to be like when they get into a real, live battle?’
‘Fucking awful,’ he replied, and he pin-pointed my own worry by adding, ‘They’re all right for a bit, but then the buggers go bananas. They seem to lose their reason.’
When I had spoken to Hereford over the satcom the previous evening, I’d been deliberately vague about our plans for the next few days. I certainly didn’t tell them that I’d more or less promised the President we’d go as far as Gutu. But that, for better or worse, was what I’d done. I’d developed quite a liking for Rhino. His visit had ended happily and he’d gone off in his Puma highly chuffed, fancying Alpha Commando to win the civil war in a couple of weeks. In his estimation, the sun shone out of the backside of any member of the SAS.
‘Zikomo! Zikomo!’ he had called, waving graciously as he boarded his chopper. Chalky had given him a few zikomos in return, claiming that the word meant ‘goodbye’ as well as ‘thanks’.
So here we were, driving towards the edge of the disputed zone, with the mine at Gutu our next major objective. All we knew about it was that its buildings stood on a bluff on the south bank of the Kameni river, and that diamonds were being dredged by suction from alluvial deposits in the bed of the stream. We had no information about the strength of the garrison, or about the area immediately surrounding the mine, but from the map the Kameni looked a major waterway.
Our own guys were riding in the two pinkies we’d flown out with us — long wheel-base Land Rovers, with windscreens folded down, all mirrors and lights hessianed-up, cam nets bunched and tied along the overhead roll-bars, and poles for the nets strapped along the sides. Everything had been stripped down in case we had to bomb-burst out of the vehicles. One pinkie had a .50 heavy machine gun mounted on the back, and one a Milan rocket-launcher post.
Our bulky kit was loaded into a seven-ton, four-wheel-drive Zyl lorry, sometimes driven by a local, sometimes by one of us. It was an ugly great lump of a truck, with a square-fronted radiator, a fore-mounted winch and an extra heavy angle-girder welded across the front, low down, to act as a bullbar. In spite of power steering, it was a brute to drive, but it was tough and reliable and had plenty of space. The cab was hot as hell, because it was all metal, with a turret opening in the roof on the passenger side. The back had steel sides about three feet high, and a canvas roof, rolled up on its frame to make a sun-shade. Most of Alpha Commando was travelling in similar vehicles, although they also had four Gaz jeeps of Russian origin.
One obvious problem was the inaccuracy of our maps. We already knew they were dodgy before we started south, but it wasn’t until we started covering bigger distances that we realised just how much imagination they included. That first morning we wasted a couple of hours searching in vain for a dirt road clearly marked in yellow, heading south-east in the direction we wanted; either it had never existed, or it h
ad been over-grown by bush, and we finished up making a three-hour detour along tracks to the west. That was the morning gone, and us scarcely any closer to our objective.
Another problem, we could see, was going to be water. We were carrying our own supplies in jerricans stowed under the false floors of the pinkies, along with our rations, and we had reserves in forty-five-gallon containers aboard the big truck. But the locals went through water like they were going to land up beside a nice big clean river every night, and I kept hearing their ruperts reading the riot act about it.
Even before the civil war the country south of us had been sparsely inhabited. According to Joss, only one village in fifty had a borehole. Now most of the villages had been burned down. Some of the few wells that existed had been deliberately wrecked, and others had been polluted with the dead bodies of animals or humans thrown down them, so that once again everybody depended on rivers or springs, and people thought nothing of walking three or four kilometres in each direction to fetch water every morning.
As we went further south, the air grew steadily hotter. With only short breaks we drove right through the first afternoon after Bakunda’s departure, and on through the night. A couple of hours before dawn we came out on to a ridge commanding a big sweep of country, across which — according to our maps — ran a main road leading from the border in the direction of Gutu. So we stopped under a grove of sausage trees to get a good look at what lay ahead of us. Our vehicles deployed and cammed-up, with the heavy weapons sited in all-round defensive positions, and everybody got their heads down in turn.
When the light came up, we were disappointed to find that the ground in front consisted of a featureless sea of bush, dipping gently until it rose again to another low ridge in the distance. There were open patches of grassland between the trees and shrubs, but if the road was there, we couldn’t see it and continuous observation revealed no movement of any kind. The only development before midday came at about 1130, when a column of smoke went up from beyond the far ridge, to our left.