For Jacob
In loving memory of Tim Hetherington: 1970–2011
Name me someone that’s not a parasite, and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him.
Bob Dylan
A Note on Pronunciation
In Afrikaans, the ‘v’ in vok is soft, and pronounced like an English ‘f’; the ‘g’ in ag is guttural, and to the English ear sounds like the German ‘ach’ in ‘achtung’; the ‘j’ in ja is pronounced like the ‘y’ in ‘yes’.
CONTENTS
Map of Africa
Map of West Africa
Prologue: Black Beach
Part One
1. Shake Hands with the Devil
2. Dead Presidents
3. A Journey Without Maps
4. Spider House Rules
5. University of Bullet
6. Whisky Papa
7. Charnel House
8. The Great Escape
Part Two
9. A Stranger’s Hand
10. Blood Brothers
11. Wanderlust
12. The Revolution Will Be Televised
13. Too Tough to Die
14. Arms and The Mann
Part Three
15. Simon Says
16. Lawyers, Guns and Money
17. Congo Mercenary
18. The End
Epilogue: Illumination Rounds
PROLOGUE
BLACK BEACH
A man is hanging naked from the ceiling by a meat hook. His feet are bound, but his mouth is open – screaming a confession. He is surrounded by half a dozen soldiers in ragged uniforms whose fists are caked in his blood. Unsatisfied with his answers, they taunt him in a language he doesn’t understand and slam a rifle butt into his testicles. Nine days after the arrests, the most extreme bouts of punishment have begun. The air fills with the bitter-sweet tang of roasting meat. The flames spouting from the soldiers’ cigarette lighters burn the fat on the soles of his feet until it spits and crackles like a Sunday joint. It is the last thing he will feel. Opened wide by pain, his eyes take in the horror of the blood-spattered chamber he’s strung up in and then his heart gives out. His yellow corpse is cut down and stretched out in front of the other prisoners.
Further down the corridor, the interrogations continue. A dim light burns, illuminating a prisoner, half a dozen soldiers and a seated government minister sweating in a smart suit, nodding approval. Next to the minister, behind the soldiers, a man holds a video camera, capturing the scene in minute, digital detail. The pictures reveal the prisoner, silent, hog-tied to a pole, suspended face down. Electrodes are clamped to his genitals, wet rags stuffed into his mouth.
Next door, his comrades lie crying, broken and bleeding, crammed tight into a separate sixty-foot cell with two hundred other prisoners. Baked under a corrugated roof by the relentless sun, they are picked out one by one for interrogation, random beatings or public humiliation. One begs to be shot. Another has his fingers broken.
In the last cell a man is screaming on the floor. His hands have been cuffed tightly behind his back. His legs have been pinned at the ankles with shackles, which have been hammered shut by the soldiers. Skin and muscle split as metal bites down to bone. Boots stamp on his feet, ripping out toenails. The prisoner’s name is Nick du Toit. He is South Africa’s most notorious mercenary, and one of my best friends.
Nick confessed before this torture began – in public, at gunpoint, in accurate, extensive detail, a day after he was seized. Now he no longer knows, nor cares, what he confesses to. His story shifts to fit the fantasies of his jailers, but it is a desperate, pointless game. In this ramshackle collection of wooden huts and concrete cells fenced off from the sea and the world beyond by rolls of barbed wire, Nick’s tormentors are not seeking the truth: they want revenge.
Nick is dragged up from the stone floor and forced to kneel. The commander enters the cell and puts a pistol to his head. He has come to execute him, but the gun is empty. Laughing, the guards knock him unconscious with their rifle butts. The same ritual is repeated over and over again.
Nick is left to the mercy of the rats in his tiny, five-by-seven cell. His hands and feet remain chained. Like an animal, he eats scraps of food from the floor, where he must also sleep and defecate. There is no daylight: he is kept in pitch darkness, and beaten daily. And then the septicaemia sets in. Pus oozes from his open wounds – sustaining the cockroaches that feast on his sores. By the time he is dragged outside his eyes have sealed shut. The soldiers immerse his head in freezing water and then rip the scabs from his eyes.
This is how Nick begins his 34-year sentence in Black Beach prison, Africa’s most notorious jail. He was arrested on 8 March 2004 along with fifteen other men as he tried to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea, a tiny West African country fabulously rich in oil. But there is just one person missing from the scene. What Nick doesn’t see when he opens his eyes that day is me. Had all gone according to plan, I could have been lying next to him: I was supposed to film the coup.
PART ONE
1
SHAKE HANDS WITH THE DEVIL
Treading quickly on the halo of my noon shadow, I skirted the edge of the pool. I glanced at my watch. It was midday on 11 April 2002. I was exactly on time. At a table in the luxury hotel in Johannesburg two white men sat waiting. One, muscular with a ponytail, hid behind a pair of black sunglasses; the other, older and with a neat side-parting, stroked the end of his moustache, scrutinising the terrace and my arrival. I threw out my palm in a premature greeting, and they rose in unison to return it with a gruff ‘Howzit?’
I’d met the ponytail in Sierra Leone the year before. A 37-year-old South African former paratrooper and one-time mercenary, Cobus Claassens had fought in the troubled West African state during the mid-nineties with a military company called Executive Outcomes, a private South African-run army which had been hired by the Sierra Leonean president to defeat rebels who threatened to overrun the capital, Freetown.
With the highly trained soldiers of EO on the ground, the rebels were quickly and comprehensively destroyed. Cobus stayed on after his contract wound up, carving out a living from the freelance security contracts that hovered like flies around the carcass of the country’s diamond industry.
He was back in South Africa for a short holiday – a chance to see family and chase some business contacts. I’d met up with him a few days earlier when a chance conversation had planted an idea for a filming trip in West Africa. It was as preposterous as it was compelling: I would get access to a war in Liberia that no other journalist had filmed, and few even knew was happening. To do so I would need his help, and his man.
I stepped under the shade of the umbrella and saw them clearly.
Cobus spoke first.
‘This is Nick du Toit. Nick – this is James.’
His Afrikaner accent bent itself uncomfortably around English vowels. Nick, a plain, forgettable-looking man in his forties, reached over the table, and shook my hand. There was something awkward about him, as if his hands and ears were too big for his body, like a teenager waiting to grow into his skin. I wondered if this was really the soldier that Cobus had in mind. Nick’s gaze was alarmingly direct, but not aggressive. He released my hand, sinking his six-foot frame back into the chair. Drinks arrived.
‘Great to meet you,’ I said to Nick. ‘Thanks for coming along.’
I was struggling to disguise my unease. I was here to recruit a war hero to protect me while I filmed in Liberia. I thought I knew what I needed – what I had already been told I would require: a bodyguard; an experienced soldier; someone capable of defending me under fire – someone, frankly, extraordinary. Nick looked like none of these things: if anything, his w
hite-and-blue checked shirt, freshly pressed chinos and neat row of pens in his breast pocket made him look profoundly ordinary, like an accountant or mild-mannered manager. Disappointment sagged into my shoulders.
Tilting our beer bottles inward, the three of us touched the necks lightly. The gentle double-click of glass on glass was swallowed by the rhythmic pumping of the hotel’s infinity pool cascading gallons of crystal water beside us. There was no one in it. It was too hot to swim.
‘Nick was a Recce, a Special Forces operator down here, in 5 Reconnaissance. He was about to be made a full colonel when he quit. He knows the type of area you’re going to very well.’ Here Cobus paused for effect. ‘Nick was with me in Sierra Leone, actually.’
I liked Cobus, but he was a consummate hustler. I was beginning to wonder if he’d sold me a pup. Cobus was sure to take a generous commission from whatever I paid Nick to hold my hand in the jungle. Like a car salesman throwing in a full tank of petrol to sweeten the deal, he added: ‘He’s an experienced combat medic. Aren’t you?’
‘Ja,’ Nick agreed, ‘we were all trained to a certain standard, but the medical side became a bit of a speciality of mine. We did a lot of long-range stuff in Angola. I had to patch myself up once. We trained in civilian hospitals, too. They had all sorts of injuries, a bit more interesting than just the ones you got in the army.’
Nick looked down at the table, almost self-conscious. His voice was quiet, matter-of-fact. There was no hyperbole, apparently no bullshit.
I knew almost nothing about the ‘Recces’, other than what I’d learned hanging out with Cobus. South Africa’s equivalent of the British SAS, they were highly trained killers and survivors who fought both conventionally and controversially in the service of the apartheid state during the bush wars and insurgencies that had torn Southern Africa apart for a quarter of a century. They were dedicated, arguably fanatical professionals – but unlike the SAS, they had not, ultimately, been under the control of a democratic government. In fact, the South African Army closely resembled everything I had been taught to despise when I was growing up: it was hard to shake the feeling that the Recces must have been more Waffen-SS than Special Air Service.
‘A colonel? Have you worked with journalists before?’
I just couldn’t see how Nick was going to rub along with the media, however well he might know the jungle.
Nick’s gaze, set by a pair of profoundly blue eyes which reflected the turquoise pool beside us, fixed on me again. His expression was open, but unreadable. Somewhere below us, the bizarre but unmistakable toot of an elephant filtered through the hum of the city. Nick was studying me intently, like a farmer weighing up the price of a steer at auction.
‘No, but from what Cobus tells me it sounds like it could be a lot of fun.’
Fun? I thought. Is that really what people who kill other people for money think is fun?
‘A colonel?’ I repeated to him.
Disbelief crept into my voice. He looked away for a moment, as if embarrassed at the mention of his former rank, and then nodded.
‘It was a desk job at the end. I went private – Sierra Leone with EO and then mining in Angola. EO was quite an adventure. We ran a mobile Fire Force team; Cobus was my second-in-command.’
He must have seen my head jerk in surprise. I knew very well what Cobus’s unit had got up to in Sierra Leone – and Nick had just outed himself as his commanding officer. That meant that men under Nick’s command had killed a great number of rebels at close quarters, and then routed them. It was disturbing to think how much blood they’d seen shed between them. I changed the subject.
‘I don’t know how much you know, but Cobus thinks I need someone to hold my hand in Liberia. I’m planning a three-week trip into rebel-held territory.’
I paused and looked at him, trying to judge his reaction. His face was still impassive. I realised that I was trying to sound convincing and knowledgeable about Africa in front of two Africans who had been fighting here while I’d still been in school. Suddenly I felt lost. I bluffed my way onwards.
‘No one has any real idea what’s going on there. The main thing I want to do is meet the leadership and hopefully film some fighting – to prove a war is really happening. You’re very highly recommended.’
This last line was addressed to Cobus, who now seemed equally impassive. My confidence was ebbing fast. I had never attempted anything remotely like the trip I was suggesting – I didn’t even know if it was feasible.
I turned back to Nick. His demeanour might have been underwhelming, but his experience was – apparently – compelling.
‘Are you interested?’
A thick, conspiratorial smile spread across his face and we all shifted our chairs closer. Cobus reached and took Nick’s notepad, turning over a fresh page. My gut tightened a little more. Cobus folded away his shades.
‘Here’s the plan.’
Wrapped up in a comfortable bubble blown out of my own hubris, by the time I met Nick I thought I knew who I was: someone who had already plumbed the depths of human suffering. In the eight years since I had left university – an ivory tower that encouraged boyhood curiosities for the scandals and scrambles of African history – I had worked mainly as a stills photographer in some of the world’s worst trouble spots, or so I’d thought. I’d taken pictures in Kosovo, Afghanistan and the occupied Palestinian territories, and spent long periods of time working in Zimbabwe. I’d photographed artillery barrages at 12,000 feet in Kashmir, and taken photographs in Eritrea where corpses littered the battlefield, but I’d never seen close-quarter combat.
When I’d started taking pictures at school I’d been mesmerised by the work of Robert Capa and Don McCullin. I thought that a camera and the right attitude were all I’d need to follow in their footsteps. I was wrong. I hadn’t been prepared for the competition. In London it seemed that every other person I met was a photographer and all of them were scrambling for a piece of the action. I was barely scraping a living and couldn’t see how to break through to the life of a professional photographer I’d imagined for myself.
I met Cobus in Sierra Leone during my first trip to West Africa in 2001. I arrived as the violent, decade-old civil war in Sierra Leone was finally drawing to a close. With a box of film and a couple of battered cameras I found myself en route to the capital, Freetown – a 29-year-old photographer on assignment, shooting a magazine feature about the deployment of British troops. I was accompanied by Robert, an American writer who promised an interesting footnote to my story: we would be staying with a former mercenary.
After clearing customs we were bundled into a helicopter transfer to the city, and then whisked away by Land Rover at the other end. Eventually, we ended up at a pleasant bungalow on the outskirts of the capital. It was stiflingly hot. A smiling, muscle-bound South African opened the door. I stepped over the threshold into Cobus’s home. I may as well have stepped through the Looking Glass.
Robert had arranged to stay with him for a fortnight. He assured me I’d be welcomed, too, but, in fact, he’d never met Cobus, either. He’d only hooked up with him through the notice-board of a private military website. In a fit of largesse, Cobus had invited ‘us’ to stay. He handed us a set of keys, and told us that there would be a Mercedes and driver sent along for our use in due course. If we had any problems, we just had to call.
I had no idea who Cobus was, nor, indeed, what ‘problems’ I might need to call him about. No one mentioned the word ‘mercenary’, but with his military bearing and house full of khaki equipment, he clearly had a story to tell.
I came and went from the house, finishing the magazine assignment – grateful for the car, and the meals cooked up by his housekeeper, which stretched my meagre budget. The magazine piece practically wrote itself: everyone had something to say about the war they’d narrowly survived. A double amputee described how he’d had his hands severed by rebels from the Revolutionary United Front; others spoke of soldiers in their early teens holdi
ng them down while their eyes were gouged out, and the sockets filled with molten plastic from burning carrier bags.
The RUF was infamous for its extreme atrocities. The mutilation of civilians was a favourite tactic. Their fighting units went by the names of Blood Shed Squad, Burn House Unit and Kill Man No Blood Unit – this latter group prided itself on beating people to death without a drop of blood being spilled. The Born Naked Squad stripped their victims naked before killing them. So it went on. Their military campaigns were known by a series of cruelly honest code names, too, including Operation Burn House, Operation Pay Yourself and the brutally self-explanatory Operation No Living Thing.
In my second week in the country I flew with the United Nations to the Parrot’s Beak – dangerously insecure bandit territory to the east of the country. While Freetown had been effectively disarmed a few weeks earlier, and now lay under the control of the British and UN, not a single round of ammunition had been surrendered in the Parrot’s Beak. As we landed, sixty or so children limped their way out of the thick undergrowth and made their way to the edge of the clearing. Held as slaves by the RUF, they had been forced into combat as child-soldiers, raped or confiscated as ‘wives’.
I felt lucky to witness the moment of their freedom, but also felt a sense of shock at my own ignorance. I had no experience of the actual events that shaped these people’s lives, and yet here I was, taking photos and gathering stories like a tourist collects souvenirs.
Back in Freetown, Robert left in a hurry to get to his daughter’s graduation in the US, and I found myself alone with Cobus on his couch, staring at storm clouds piling up beyond the window.
‘So who are you?’ he asked, pouring another glass of Red Heart rum. He sounded genuinely interested, his Afrikaner accent only mildly inflected with irony. I was perplexed. After two weeks of sleeping on his couch – an occupational speciality of mine – he knew exactly who I was.
My Friend The Mercenary Page 1