by Julian Beale
Then there was Conrad Aveling, born to be the successful soldier which he duly became. Conrad was the youngest child of the four sons and two daughters produced by General Sir Anstruther and his Lady Vivien Aveling. The family lived in baronial style in a vast and ugly mansion located in a village only just outside Oxford. On first acquaintance, Conrad seemed a bit quiet for David’s taste, but it became quickly apparent that he was simply withdrawn from his overwhelming family. His mother was of towering personality, a physically dominant woman who was said to have given birth to one of her brood only hours before returning to the hunting field. All the Avelings, boys and girls alike, were large and brave. Conrad was the exception in that he had a brain as well and with it came a waspish sense of humour.
During their first year at Oxford, David was invited to spend a good deal of time, weekends and summer evenings, at the Aveling pile of Barrington Park and he grew increasingly to value Conrad’s companionship. The rambunctious family atmosphere was so completely different from his own experience. There was always activity, sometimes close to chaos, but set against a prevailing background of relaxation tinged with a faded elegance. Conrad’s siblings seemed to drift comfortably in and out of his life. Their father, the jovial General, had achieved war time distinction and retired to manage his land from the draughty old house, but it was generally accepted that he was forcefully guided by his imposing wife. Lady Vivien could be a battle axe, but wise and thoughtful too, as David learnt from his very first visit to the Park. Once she had recovered from mild astonishment that he had never sat on a horse or held a gun, Lady Vivien had managed to draw from him more about his early life and distant family than he had ever previously confessed.
‘She’s a shrewd old bat, my Mum’, Conrad had spoken of her lovingly, ‘and we all owe her more than we can say or she would accept. She holds our team together, no question’. David had found himself quite moved: this sort of family experience was completely new to him. It made a deep and lasting impression.
As the Oxford years progressed, David became close to Connie Aveling. They had shared interests in sporting, carousing and the politics of the day. But while David was undecided on a future career path, Conrad was entirely committed to the army, although unusual at the time in having opted for university rather than going straight from school into the army. Connie had a relaxed good humour and a wry turn of phrase, but he kept a close counsel and it was hard to read where his thoughts were turning. This led David to an increasing concern that Conrad’s similarly lustful pursuit of Alexa Labarre was more successful than his own, but Connie would give nothing away. And then again, it often seemed that her favourite was Pente, but at least he came to put himself out of the chase. Whatever else, it was all a lot of fun.
When they came down from university, Conrad went to Sandhurst and then to take up his commission in the Rifle Brigade where his military career was soon to prosper. He and David kept in close touch to further a friendship which built on the diversities of their interests and lifestyles. Conrad was a man of perception which he inherited from his mother and nurtured in the shabby grandeur and windy corridors of Barrington Park.
The third man was an exception in every respect. Kingston Horace Offenbach was different in age, nationality, religion, politics and colour. An unusual man to be found at Oxford University in the mid 1960’s, King Offenbach was born in South Carolina in September 1938. He had one brother less than a year older and their father abandoned his small family when Kingston was three months old. His mother was left high and dry with two tiny children, no money and precious little support from her family. But she was an intelligent girl with guts, looks and the determination that she would do right by her children. She managed to succeed, but not without further heartbreak. Her elder son had been a sickly little boy from birth, and she lost him to pneumonia just before his third birthday at a point when she had no reserves of energy or money to buy him the drugs which might have saved him. She had retreated from his pathetic little grave, vowing that that she would channel her every effort into raising his brother. King rewarded her by exceeding her wildest expectations, becoming in due time an outstanding student who worked his way through secondary education and exhibited such promise that he was taken into US Government Service under which sponsorship he won an excellent degree and then was sent to the UK to do a postgraduate thesis at Oxford. Now, at the age of twenty-six, this was the first time that he could not make his monthly visit back home to his mother’s small house in a small town.
King Offenbach was older than the undergraduates with whom he shared life at Oxford and he had little in common with any of them. In addition, he was a self-effacing man, much more inclined to listen than to offer opinions. Despite his colour, King had a talent for melding into the background, present but not accounted for.
King’s course at Oxford was for one year, and David first met him one gloomy evening in November 1964. He was running late for an appointment with his tutor as he rounded a corner in his college and collided with the unbending Offenbach frame. To make matters worse, David assumed him to be a tourist visitor or a new member of staff and had been less than polite.
From such an unpromising start can sometimes grow the strongest relationships. People would say of Offenbach that he stood a little apart from the rest of them by reason of his age and others would cite his colour, his Deep South accent or his religious fervour. Or could it have been the ‘transatlantic flavour’ as one Don famously labelled a prejudice for which he could find no other name.
It was Pente Broke Smith who became closest to Kingston Offenbach, and even he talked of deep and still waters. Pente remarked one day to David, ‘I know this is being pretty pompous, but I reckon that on a spiritual level, King will always keep a bit back. He has this compulsion to hold onto his reserve. But of course that personality trait is cranked up further by his profession.’
David looked at him with surprise.
‘What profession? He’s a student like the rest of us. Just a little more mature, that’s all. Oh, and a bit darker too!’
‘Dimwit’, rejoined Pente as they walked together, ‘no David, you’re missing it. Our Kingston is on the CIA payroll and has been since he was at school, I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘Balls,’ said David, but he had his doubts even then.
David, Alexa, Pente, Conrad and King: a group of friends drawn into a coterie which was recognised by their many colleagues and contacts throughout the university — so much so that someone dubbed them the ‘Oxford Five’, a collective which they were all happy to embrace and to retain down the years to come.
There was another man too, in his own way just as vital an ingredient, but he was not at Oxford and was about as different to David Heaven as could be imagined. Perhaps that’s why it worked as well as it did. In the long vacation of David’s second year, he joined a party of bright young characters to spend a month on the Riviera near Menton. The arrangement was as might be expected. One fellow undergraduate blessed with plenty of money and some good connections is keen to acquire a wider circle of friends and thus a house party is assembled.
They swam, sailed, caroused and gambled. Towards the end of the holiday, they were returning from a casino outing when one of the party’s cars, with David at the wheel, was in a minor traffic jam collision with a sprightly sports car driven by a young man of about his age. Damage was minimal, there was no police involvement and hardly any delay. But the following day brought a telephone call for David from the other party, politely asking him over for a quick drink to deal with some insurance questions. What the hell, David said to himself, and went. That was the introduction to his first employer who was to become also his business partner, mentor and a much valued friend.
Unlike some of his companions in Menton, it troubled David not at all to sit down in the company of a Jew. Martin Kirchoff was also on holiday, and during the couple of hours they spent together in the lobby of his smart hotel, they found an instinctive
enjoyment in each other’s company. Martin had a sense of fun which he tried to keep under tight control but which David was able to tease out of him. He was transparently entranced by the vision of an undergraduate lifestyle and presented himself as a sort of social thoroughbred yearning to escape from a commercial carthorse existence — but only occasionally since he was so deeply committed to his business aspirations. For his part, David was stimulated by Martin’s status as an emerging entrepreneur. It seemed to David that this guy was already embarked on life with a capital L, whilst his own existence was dilettante in comparison. It further appealed to David that Martin was in partnership with his father. The image of a dynasty fired his imagination.
They concluded their form filling and exchanged contact details but parted without a plan to meet again. Yet each took away the firm expectation that there was more to come from this chance encounter. They were right.
JOSH TROLLOPE — 1965
David Heaven’s graduation day on 13th July 1965 was significant also for Rory Trollope as it was the date of his birth. Rory was pugnacious from conception, a kicker and a puncher in the womb. He gave his mother a hard time of it in the Pretoria hospital where Rory came into the world. She lay in the hot and foetid cot staring at the fan above her head beating vainly at the successive waves of pain which broke about her.
This was not Moira Trollope’s first experience of labour, but it was infinitely the worst of her three pregnancies and was bearable only because she could feel the living child within her whereas the previous two births had resulted in stillborn girls. But the monster about to emerge felt all too like a man with a demanding nature. She bit her tongue and ground her teeth against the astonishing pain, determined that she could and would get through this to triumph in her healthy son but she did so wish that his father Josh could have been there with her, or at least within call. Instead of which, he was lost to her, hundreds of miles to the north somewhere, a soldier of fortune fighting in some squalid little war in which he had only two interests — to stay alive and to pick up his mercenary’s pay with which to establish a home and hearth for his wife and child.
Josh Trollope had come late to marriage and to any thought of settling down. A career soldier, he had joined the British Army straight from school and the elite Grenadier Guards had enveloped him as a member of their lifelong family. Josh had seen action in Normandy after D-Day and had remained in the thick of it until the end of the War. He had gone on with his Regiment, serving as much overseas as at home, steadily increasing his status with the passage of time and the building of experience.
He had been a senior NCO serving in Germany when he met Moira five years previously. She was a South African over on a working holiday and they had fallen for each other in a style which had amazed Josh’s mates. Moira’s father had land in South Africa, but he was widowed with no son to take it on and he himself was running short of strength and morale. Josh and Moira paid one visit to the farm, in the process using up much of their savings and his accumulated leave, but it was worth it. For Josh, seeing was believing and understanding, so he returned to hand in his papers, taking an immediate chance to leave the Guards after twenty years of loyal and productive service.
He was now just forty years old and on the day of his son’s birth he was lying prone, silent and sweating behind inadequate cover in a small village many miles northeast of Libreville, capital city of the republic of Gabon. In 1965, all this region of West Africa remained under the colonial influence of France, but it had become destabilised by the bloody war which had been raging in the Belgian Congo since the early sixties. Josh knew a fair bit of the history. He was too good a soldier not to take an interest, but he cared very little as to who would win. He had been able to see at the outset that this conflict was all about possession, not politics and certainly not principles despite all the high flown language and the international debate.
When Josh and Moira had disembarked in Durban after their emigration voyage, he had seen newspaper advertisements which sought trained and battle experienced soldiers to sign on as mercenaries. The logic of a short term engagement was compelling. They did really need some capital to take over the farm and to plan for the future.
So within weeks of arriving to settle in South Africa, Josh was on the move again and back into soldiering, but now as a mercenary in the Belgian Congo, a member of the force working to re-establish the charismatic Moishe Tshombe. Trollope signed on with the English speaking 5th Commando led by the legendary Mike Hoare and stayed with him through most of the Simba war until Hoare’s retirement in December 1964. By then, Josh reckoned that he had put by enough in savings and was more than ready to move on to his new life on the farm with Moira and her father in the background to help.
But then came the baby. A few days of unexpected leave started the bulge which was just showing on Moira by the time of his contract termination. When he returned home to the farm, there was news that the baby was fit and strong in the womb, but the final stages were expected to be testing. Moira was going to need expert and expensive help to deliver the infant so they must invest much of their nest egg in the best medical care they could find and worry about replacing the money later.
And worry he did. Josh was preoccupied when he went into a bar in Pretoria during the Christmas period and bumped into a friend from way back in his British Army days. Barry Bingham was established as a soldier of fortune, and as it happened, looking for help. He had little difficulty in talking Josh into one last tour which was to be with the private army of a character who called himself General Moses Samson. This self appointed general, whose birth name was never discovered, was recruiting a dozen white officers to manage the efforts of a rabble which he referred to as a battalion, and his objective was brigandry, pure and simple. Josh was to come to tax himself for being so quick to commit, but he was seduced by the lure of enormous money for a short and dirty contract. There was neither time nor opportunity for Josh to meet Moses Samson in advance. He simply relied on the version of events as set out by his old mate Barry Bingham and although Josh was mindful of Barry and had taken several pinches of salt with his story, it still remained a long way wide of the mark of reality.
Samson claimed to be the leader of a recessionary tribal group occupying a small wedge of territory in the extreme south of the Central African Republic, seeking independence from the colonial government installed in the capital city of Bangui. In truth, Samson was after much more than this. He aimed to annex a small corner in the north west of the vast country which was then the Belgian Congo. Samson was not the only privateer to see the opportunities to be afforded under the convenient cloak of civil war and he was at least as cunning as any who tried. His target patch of ground was something of the size of Switzerland and it was not so much the land which took his fancy as the valuable minerals beneath it, especially the iron ore which the French had been extracting from two mines in this region for the past decade.
Profiting from the unsettled politics of the day, Samson had approached the East Germans who, fronting for Moscow, had been prepared to advance him some funding. With this help, and his own powers of persuasion, he had contrived to recruit his modest team, no more than 500 strong and some materiel. Most of his fighters were hired guns who brought with them their own motley armaments. In a gesture towards some military professionalism, he was recruiting a few white mercenaries, but this was also to make his insurrection the more newsworthy in Europe and the United States.
Samson raised his force in Cabinda in northern Angola, right by the Congolese border. He then took his men further north by a cheaply chartered tramp steamer and disembarked in Equatorial Guinea, a tiny country with a lawless reputation in which he could buy an unopposed reception for modest price. From there, the column had marched and driven in a ragbag of vehicles almost due east with an outline plan to pass swiftly through the extreme north of Gabonese territory en route to their end objective, a few hundred kilometres distant.
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sp; Barry Bingham and Josh Trollope were late to join the force, and Barry had insisted on first passing through Libreville to collect fifty per cent of the contract price up front which was the deal he had struck with Moses Samson. It was enough for signing on and starting up. There were all sorts of reasons why the balance might never get paid.
When Barry went sick, he and Josh had been in Libreville for twenty-four hours, just long enough for them to pick up their money from Samson’s bag man and get it safely into the French banking system. It was over an evening meal before their onward journey that Bingham collapsed without warning, literally into the soup. Josh knew enough about Africa’s sicknesses and malaria in particular to speculate that Barry would be lucky to survive this attack, never mind catching up with ‘the army of Moses’.
This left Josh in a difficult situation but not with a decision over which he hesitated for long. He knew that he couldn’t return the money to a nameless man who had long since vanished and he couldn’t hope to hang on to it and bail out without the risk of Samson’s retribution overtaking him. He would never be free of that worry and besides, he would be condemning Barry to an unpleasant end if the malaria didn’t get him first. And then there was another aspect. If Josh went ahead and did some of Bingham’s job for him, he could count on picking up a fair proportion of Barry’s pay as well as his own.
So Josh stuck to the plan even though he was sorely hampered by being alone and unable to communicate easily. He rendezvoused at dawn the next day with a one legged guide and they travelled north together by native bus, an interminable journey which gave Josh the chance to practice extravagant explanation in sign language and pidgin of what had befallen Barry Bingham. He was not confident that his companion either understood or believed him, still less General Moses Samson whom they met more or less on schedule two days later in camp outside the little bush town of Mbornou.