Dictator

by Tom Cain

  They walked out to Morrison’s car, a battered old Nissan Sunny, its once red paint faded to a washed-out pink, streaked with rust and punctuated with dents and holes.

  ‘Sorry if the wheels are a bit rough for your taste,’ said Morrison, getting in the driver’s side then leaning across to shove open the passenger door. ‘No point having a fancy new car here, boet. The munts strip it like fucking vultures on a corpse, and if it breaks down out there in the bush, there’s no bugger qualified to fix it. But this old heap? A baboon could learn to service it.’

  After a couple of failed attempts, the engine coughed into life like an elderly man waking from an afternoon nap, and they headed out of the airport towards the city.

  ‘So,’ said Morrison once they were on the open road, ‘you are here to get the girl, hey?’

  Carver nodded. ‘That’s the plan.’

  ‘By whatever means necessary.’

  ‘Something like that. So, you got the gear I asked for?’

  Morrison grinned. ‘Mr Heckler and Mr Koch are in the building, and so are all their friends, stripped, checked, reassembled and in perfect working order.’

  ‘I’ll be the judge of that.’

  ‘Quite right. Never trust another bugger to check your weapon. So, they told me you were a Royal Marine, hey?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Regular bootie or SBS?’

  ‘That’s not something I talk about.’

  Morrison gave a slightly narrower, slyer smile. ‘Ja, you were SBS, I can tell. Did you see action, may I ask? Contacts with the enemy?’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve had contacts.’

  ‘Good. Because let me tell you, I don’t want to fuck about with any more plum-in-mouth so-called experts in fancy suits who don’t know how to fight. “Conflict resolution” they call it, “a negotiated settlement”. Bullshit, man! They’re just sitting on their fat backsides in the bar of the Zambezi Hotel making bloody telephone calls to Mabeki, the treacherous, ungrateful black bastard, while that poor little chibba Zalika Stratten is all alone, scared out of her fucking mind, wondering why no one’s come to get her.’

  ‘She hasn’t been moved in the past twenty-four hours?’

  ‘Nah, still in Chitongo. It’s a village up by the Cahora Bassa dam, just another back-country shithole. Now me, I’d go and get her myself. Fuck, I’ve killed enough of them in my time. Wasted more than a hundred gooks, way more. Rebels, their women, children … hell, you see something moving in the elephant grass, you don’t stop to ask questions, you just empty your magazine before the other fucker bends you over and gives you one right up the nought. But sometimes, hey, sometimes you should not have fired …’

  Morrison’s voice trailed away. For a moment Carver could have sworn he was welling up. But then Morrison coughed, wiped a hand across his flushed, scarlet face, whispered, ‘Christ,’ to himself and went on, ‘So, anyway, I offered to do it, but the boss said, “No, Flattie. We must have a man who is more clinical than you. In, out, no mess, that is the plan.”’

  Carver wondered what kind of kid Morrison had been before someone stuck some pips on his shoulder, put a gun in his hand and sent him off into the bush to destroy anything he found, himself included. The man was barely keeping it together. But Carver wasn’t about to judge. The ghosts of his own dead haunted him too, visiting him in nightmares that left him sweat-soaked, wide-eyed and fighting to hold back the screams. Anyone who’d truly been to war was scarred by the experience. If they told you any different they were lying.

  ‘How come you work for Klerk?’ he asked. ‘You don’t seem the corporate type.’

  Morrison broke into a chuckle that ended in a wheezing cough. ‘You mean, why does a man like him put up with a crazy old bastard like me, hey? Well, I will tell you. I used to be his company commander. Klerk was just a corporal back then. After the war, well, let’s just say that our lives took very different courses. But we were comrades. We fought side by side. You don’t forget a thing like that.’

  They drove down a broad avenue, the tarmac hardly visible beneath a thick coat of dust whose red-ochre colour seemed tinted by all the bloodshed it had absorbed. Tall palms poked up between the trees on either side.

  ‘We could not put you up at the Zambezi because we don’t want those other useless buggers knowing what’s really going on,’ said Morrison, pulling up in front of a dilapidated attempt at an American-style motel. ‘This place will have to do. Don’t worry, though, you won’t be stopping here long.’

  Morrison walked into a lobby whose mint-green paint was mottled with black stains of mould. He had a brisk, argumentative shout at the man behind the reception desk then led Carver to his room.

  ‘Sling your gear in there, then we will cut into town,’ he said, standing by the open door as Carver went into the room and slung his bag on an ancient, sagging bed beneath a grimy grey mosquito net. ‘You need a good meal inside you. I must have more smokes. We will go through tonight’s entertainment. Then I suggest you get a couple of hours’ rest. We take off at fifteen hundred hours, on the bloody dot.’

  As Carver was on his way back out, Morrison stepped into his path and stuck a hand into his chest to stop him.

  ‘I want you to make me a promise, hey,’ Morrison said, and there was no trace of humour now. ‘Promise me, swear on your mother’s life—’

  ‘I don’t have a mother.’

  ‘On her fucking grave then, I don’t care. Just swear that you will get that girl out alive. This is Africa and there is no negotiation here, just taking and killing, the way it has always been. These kidnappers will never give that girl back, never. They intend to take the money and then kill her anyway. So you get her out, Mr Carver. You get her out, or believe me, she will die.’

  11

  The chopper was flying northeast out of Tete, following the Zambezi upstream towards the Cahora Bassa dam. At first the river flowed calm and wide, a mile from bank to bank at some points. But then the gradient steepened, the river narrowed, and the force of water within it increased. The valley became deeper and the hills on either side of the river closed in, becoming first bluffs then cliffs that plunged hundreds of feet down to boiling, frothing rapids whose surface disappeared from time to time beneath a fine mist of spray. The helicopter had been flying high above the river, but now it swooped down, plunging between the precipitous rockfaces of the gorge: a metallic dragonfly skimming the surface of the river, swooping right and left as it followed the twists and turns of its course.

  Carver wanted his approach to be as fast and discreet as possible and the unpopulated, inaccessible ravine provided a route that led directly to his target out of sight of prying eyes. It also threatened a far greater danger of death en route. One flick of a rotor-blade against the valley walls, one touch of the landing gear against an outcrop of rock and he, Morrison and the pilot would all be sent spinning to their graves. But he had ridden plenty of helicopters at absurdly low levels en route to missions whose odds were near suicidal. It was not so much that he felt no fear, simply that he had learned to park it in a distant, sealed-off area of his mind, while his conscious thought was directed to the job in hand.

  Beside him, Flattie Morrison’s cigarette was clamped at one end of a crocodile smile that was even wider and toothier than usual.

  ‘This is the life, hey?’ Morrison shouted over the clatter of the rotors, made even louder by the echoes resounding off the rock walls on either side. ‘Feels like old times! Fuck, man, the closer I get to the Reaper, the more I feel alive. You know what I’m talking about?’

  Carver said nothing, but he couldn’t argue. There was nothing on earth so charged with pure adrenalin as the excitement that came with the risk of oblivion. But that too had to be kept in check, every ounce of nervous energy reserved for the moment when it was most needed.

  ‘Yeah, you know all right,’ said Morrison. He looked at his watch. ‘Not long now till we get there. You want to check anything, go through the plan again, this is the t
ime to do it.’

  They went over the timeline of the next nine hours one more time. The success of the mission depended on perfect coordination: the simultaneous arrival of two elements at a given point, timed to the last second.

  ‘OK,’ said Morrison, once the details had been confirmed. ‘One last thing: if anything goes wrong and you need an emergency evac, just get on the comms and say “Flattie”. Whisper it, shout it, fucking yodel it, doesn’t matter, we’ll be on our way. But one thing you should consider. We will be parked at an LZ just across the river. It will take us eight minutes to reach the extraction point, and I don’t have to tell you, eight minutes is a fuck of a long time if you’re getting your arse shot off in a firefight. So think about that before you call, hey? Right, now we must get out of here before we hit the dam like a bug on a windscreen.’

  No sooner had Morrison spoken than the helicopter lurched upwards and hurtled up the cliff-face, past the bare rock towards the luscious carpet of greenery at its summit. Then they were escaping the grasp of the gorge, and for a second Carver caught a glimpse up ahead of the mighty Cahora Bassa dam, whose five-hundred-and-sixty-feet-high concrete walls held back the Zambezi, confining the river within a man-made lake more than a hundred and eighty miles long. Then the pilot swung left over a range of hills, skimming the trees as closely as he had the water, before dropping again and bringing the chopper in to land at the centre of a minuscule clearing with the precision of an experienced big-city driver squeezing into a tiny parking space.

  ‘Out you get!’ shouted Morrison as the helicopter’s skids kissed the ground.

  Carver jumped down, holding the Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine gun he had specified, and a kitbag was thrown after him.

  Morrison gave him a thumbs-up and then the helicopter rose and sped away over the trees.

  ‘Mr Carver!’

  Carver turned at the sound of the voice and saw a tall African man in faded blue trousers and a loose, short-sleeved white shirt gesturing at him to follow.

  ‘My name is Justus Iluko, but everyone just calls me Justus,’ said the man when Carver had caught up. ‘Come with me, please. I work for Captain Morrison. I fought with him in the war of liberation,’ he added, by way of explanation.

  ‘On the same side?’ Carver asked.

  Justus laughed. ‘Oh yes! All the soldiers were black in our company. Just the officers and NCOs were white. Some of them … pah!’ He shook his head dismissively. ‘But Captain Morrison, he was square with us. He never made any man do anything he would not do himself. We trusted him and we followed him, you know?’

  Carver nodded.

  ‘Mr Klerk, too,’ said Justus. ‘He was a mighty warrior. When he fought, no one could defeat him!’

  Carver followed Justus through the trees to a dirt track on which an ancient VW van was parked. He climbed up into the passenger seat. Justus got in the driver’s side and set off.

  ‘I knew Miss Zalika too, when she was just a little baby girl. When the war ended, before he started his own businesses, Mr Klerk got me a job as a game warden on the Stratten Reserve. I was only there for three years, but I remember Miss Zalika being born. We were all given the day off and plenty of beer to drink!’ Justus laughed at the memory. ‘Sometimes Mrs Stratten took her children for picnics and one of us drove them out on to the reserve and watched over them in case any lions or other dangerous animals came, but they never did. Those were good days. No more war, everyone with so much hope for the future …’

  His voice trailed away, and for a while the only noise came from the VW as it lurched and rattled along the potholed track. Justus looked around, then nodded as he spotted a familiar landmark. ‘Just thirty minutes and we will be in Chitongo.’

  ‘Has Morrison briefed you on the plan of action for tonight?’ Carver asked.

  ‘Of course. The captain is a very thorough man. He always told us about the importance of proper preparations. He does not like to leave anything to chance.’

  Five minutes’ worth of intensive questioning proved that Justus was right. Morrison might have his problems, to put it mildly, but he still retained the organizational skills that had made him a company commander whose men trusted him to lead them into action and out the other side. Meanwhile, Justus was evidently the kind of reliable, level-headed fighting man who made any officer’s life a lot simpler. That didn’t make tonight’s mission any less difficult, but at least it tilted the chances of success marginally in their favour.

  Once he had satisfied himself that he was in good hands, Carver leaned back in his chair and looked around. Hanging from the rearview mirror were a string of beads, a St Christopher medal and a photograph of a laughing woman with her arms round two small children, a boy and a girl, both in their neat white school shirts.

  ‘Your family?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Justus, the warmth of his smile conveying the love, pride and happiness he felt. ‘That is my wife Nyasha, who has blessed me with her affection for twelve years now, and my son Canaan – he is eight – and my daughter Farayi, who is six.’

  ‘They look like great kids. You’re a lucky man.’

  ‘Yes, I am very, very lucky. Do you have a family, Mr Carver?’

  ‘No, not yet.’

  ‘So you have never found the right woman to take as your wife?’

  Carver grimaced. ‘A couple of times I thought I had. Never quite worked out.’

  ‘That is sad,’ said Justus, shaking his head. ‘To have a good woman who gives him strong, healthy children is the greatest satisfaction a man can have. You know, sometimes when I am tired from working too long, or the jobs I must undertake do not please me, I ask myself, “Why do I do this?” Then I look at that picture and I know. I do it for them.’

  ‘So where do you live?’

  ‘I have a small farm, about twenty miles from Buweku. The country there is very beautiful: rolling hills, so green that my cattle grow as fat as hippos, and with earth so rich that all you have to do is throw seed upon the ground and any crop will grow. I am building a house there. Soon it will be finished. Then I will go to my wife and say, “I have given you many rooms. Now you give me more children to fill them all!” ’

  Carver laughed along with Justus, admiring but also envying the straightforward convictions by which he seemed to lead his life. Carver would probably earn more from this one night’s work than Justus could hope to make in his entire life. But that didn’t make him richer in the things that really mattered.

  He brushed the thought from his mind as if swatting an irritating fly. He had more immediate problems to worry about than his lack of women or kids.

  Justus, too, was getting back to business. He pulled the car up by the side of the road and said, ‘We are getting close to Chitongo and it is most important that no one sees you arrive.’ He turned in his seat and looked towards the rear of the vehicle. ‘Please lie on the floor at the back, Mr Carver. I have provided a blanket to cover you.’

  ‘OK.’

  A minute later they were on the move again, Samuel Carver huddling under an ancient tartan picnic blanket as he was driven into battle.

  12

  Zalika Stratten had long since lost track of where she was. She thought she’d heard voices a couple of days ago talking in Portuguese. That suggested she might be somewhere in Mozambique. Beyond that, though, this was just another bare mattress shoved into the corner of another room, with another uncovered bucket to squat over. The windows were boarded over and the door in the centre of the wall opposite her mattress was locked, with a guard permanently stationed outside. There was no bulb at the end of the wire that hung from the ceiling. The only light came from the cracks between the planks nailed to the window frame.

  Zalika’s feet were chained together, just far enough apart that she could shuffle across her room, but too close to allow her to walk properly, let alone run. Her jeans and shoes had been taken away and all she had to wear now were the T-shirt and underwear she’d been wearing when s
he was captured.

  They gave her two meals a day, feeding her on a basic diet of maize-meal porridge, with an occasional treat of salty, bony fried fish, or a meat stew that consisted of a couple of lumps of indeterminate gristle adrift in a plateful of grease. From time to time she’d be handed a small plastic basin filled with cold water and a bar of gritty pale-grey soap with which to wash herself. She did her best but her hair was matted and greasy, there were black rings of dirt beneath her fingernails and she was permanently damp and prickly with sweat.

  Just as airline passengers getting off a long-distance flight have no idea how disgusting the air onboard smells to ground-crew getting on, so Zalika’s senses had long since become accustomed to the rank odours of sweat, urine, excrement and stale food that hung in the airless atmosphere of her solitary cell.

  Yet Mabeki himself seemed not to care about her plight. She barely recognized her brother’s smiling, impeccably mannered friend in the fierce, embittered ideologue who from time to time came into her room. He paced up and down, his voice ranging from a sinister, low-pitched calm to rabid fury while she huddled on her mattress, as defensive as a curled hedgehog, her knees pulled up to her chest and her arms wrapped round them.

  This was virtually the only human contact left in Zalika Stratten’s life: her meals and bucket were delivered and removed in total silence by guards who ignored any attempt of hers to make conversation.

  In the near-darkness, Mabeki was as insubstantial as a wraith. Only his words seemed real. Again and again he repeated the arguments that justified his actions, building up a portrait of her father and family, layer by layer, that flatly contradicted everything she had ever believed.

  ‘Richard Stratten was an oppressor, an imperialist. How can it be right for one man to have so much land, so much money, so much power when countless millions have so little? How can it be right for the white man to give the orders, while the black man can only say, “Yes, boss! No, boss!” and do his bidding?’