My Friend The Mercenary

by James Brabazon

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, who are you?’ he repeated, stretching and swallowing his vowels in turn.

  It suddenly struck me that my arrival may have been more of a shock than he had let on.

  ‘Hang on, you did know I was coming to stay, didn’t you?’

  He smiled and shook his head, and handed me the glass of rum.

  ‘Oh God, I am so sorry.’ Humiliated, I put the glass down. ‘I thought you’d invited us both. I’m sorry, I should have asked. I’ll find a hotel, it’s …’

  As I stood up and moved towards my bags, pulling my camera over my shoulder, a motorbike pulled up outside. A few seconds later the screen door slammed and a stout, slightly comic-looking man with a Mediterranean tan bustled into the room.

  ‘Yossi, this is James. He’s a journalist, a friend of mine. He’s been staying with me.’

  I put my hand out and said hello. Yossi looked me level in the eye, and spoke in a thick Israeli accent.

  ‘If you take my photograph, I will kill you.’

  Suddenly, Yossi didn’t look so comic. I looked at Cobus, whose eyes were flashing me a smile.

  ‘I’ve got a brilliant idea,’ I said.

  Yossi hadn’t taken his eyes off me, or my camera.

  ‘How about I don’t take your photo?’

  Yossi and Cobus laughed.

  ‘Yossi and I have some business to sort out,’ Cobus explained. ‘James, why don’t you, er, make yourself even more at home? I’ll be back later.’

  The screen door banged to and the motorbike coughed. I was alone. I could either take the Israeli’s threat at face value, and leave – or accept Cobus’s generosity and make the most of my final few days before my flight home. I fidgeted, and finished the rum.

  Over the next six days, Cobus showed me his Freetown. It was a city haunted by the recently departed war, but a city, nonetheless, where you could still enjoy yourself. We went to a casino, and gambled away the last of my field budget; we drove out to an ape sanctuary, where I took the most profitable single picture of my career – a portrait of a unique albino chimpanzee called Pinky. Along the way I was introduced to the rogues’ gallery of mercenaries, soldiers and businessmen that Cobus called friends.

  Yossi turned out to be a sniper, who had commanded an elite undercover squad in the Israeli Defence Force. During the Lebanon war in the ’80s, his unit had fired fifteen shots, and killed fourteen enemy commanders. Settling in Freetown as a businessman in 1990, Yossi started his own security company. Shortly before I left, he came and asked me a favour. Almost shy, he wondered if, possibly, I might take some photos of his children. As I snapped away, I saw him at the edge of the frame, scrutinising my lens.

  Other characters popped up at house parties and in beachside bars. I met Neall Ellis, Nellis as everyone called him, on the beach with Cobus. A helicopter gunship pilot, Nellis had flown for the South African Air Force before joining EO. Already a legend in the air force, he had quickly become a local hero in Freetown after almost single-handedly holding off a fresh rebel advance on the capital in 2000 when Sierra Leone had been abandoned to its fate, and most of the professional soldiers were long gone. He had flown dozens of sorties in his Russian HIND gunship until, finally, the British managed to secure the city.

  Cobus and Nellis were fascinating to me. I had been brought up to revere the black liberation movements that South Africa tried to eliminate in the ’70s and ’80s; but they told the other side of their war, the politically incorrect accounts that were never taught in school. I felt like a priest in the company of whores. Their banter was infectious, their honesty disarming and the beer flowed into the night. Their stories of courage and friendship were all too easy to get carried away with.

  At night, feeling less priestly, Cobus and I stuffed his Mercedes full of pretty girls, taking them from one bar to another as curfew approached. Then, back at his house, ensconced on his sofa with an apparently endless supply of rum and Coke, we talked about his twin obsessions of diamonds and history. I put my earlier nervousness to one side and asked him about his time with Executive Outcomes.

  Cobus handed me a photograph from across the table. He stood, centre-frame, unrecognisable in combat fatigues, his face blacked with camouflage paint. A dozen or so other mercenaries clustered around him. It was impossible to tell if most of them were even white or black – so completely had their identities been obscured by the trappings of war.

  ‘I was hired from friends amongst the senior Executive Outcomes people. I signed up in May ’95. I was offered three times what I was making in the army, so I quit and became a mercenary.’ Several of his friends joined up as well. ‘We didn’t even know which country we were being sent to fight in. They told us on the plane flying up there from South Africa that we were going to Sierra Leone, the worst place in the world.’

  He smiled at the irony of having made it his home, and re-filled his glass.

  For Cobus, the fight became personal. Wiping out the rebels was more than simply a job to be done for money – in the face of their legendary cruelty he felt increasingly obliged to ‘cleanse’ the rebels from the forest. He styled himself an Angel of Death, with justice, he believed, firmly on his side. His mobile force, commanded by Nick du Toit, went and smoked them out. On one occasion they received a report of an attack on a village, and arrived to find women with sticks thrust into their vaginas, and old men with their throats slit. Eventually the rebels were found twelve miles away, terrorising another village.

  Cobus and his men fanned out through every hut and hunted them down. There were no surviving rebels; no prisoners; no mercy. Cobus’s face hardened.

  ‘At a certain point a human being becomes less of a human being, and more of an animal, and then he should just be culled and got rid of as quickly as possible so the rest of humanity can go on with their lives.’

  I had no such stories to share. Cobus’s uncompromising attitude to summary justice was hard to digest, too far outside my own experience to judge properly. Cobus bade me goodnight. I cleared away the cigarette ends and empty Coke bottles, and pulled a mosquito net over the couch where I’d slept for the last three weeks.

  My time in Sierra Leone was up. Cobus took me to the airport by speedboat, and urged me to stay in touch. As the boat sliced through the clear blue water, I asked him if he had any regrets.

  ‘We did something that gave some hope to these people,’ he answered. ‘But yes,’ he said, ‘yes.’ The beach loomed up, and the engines idled. ‘I regret not having killed more of the rebels.’

  Like his stories from the nights before, his comments did not invite discussion. He set his stall out: whether you bought into it or not was irrelevant to him.

  I did as Cobus asked, and stayed in touch. Eight months later, in February 2002, I’d hung up my stills cameras and taken my first steps towards a career as a television producer. I went to Zimbabwe with a Kenyan production company on behalf of the BBC – who were banned from entering the country. I knew the country well from working there as a photographer, and the job was a surprise success. Using a mixed British, South African and Zimbabwean crew, we managed to keep images and analysis flowing to the BBC producers cutting the nightly news reports that documented Robert Mugabe’s descent into criminality. When the job was done, we decamped to South Africa and the company set up an office in a trendy area of Johannesburg to try and capitalise on the reputation we thought we’d earned. I flew down to George, on the Garden Route, to see Cobus, home on leave from the claustrophobia of Freetown.

  Slipping a .45 into the back of his trousers (‘You never know in this fokken country’), we drove out to an oyster bar in Knysna to shuck the day’s catch with his wife and children. He was as candid as ever. After EO’s contract had been wound up, Cobus, it transpired, had been sought after by other masters – including the United States Government.

  Not long after my visit to Sierra Leone in June 2001, he’d gone to neighbouring Guinea to visit a friend wh
o worked for US Intelligence in the region. On Kassa Island, off the coast, American Special Forces were training Guinean soldiers. Cobus had gone along for the hell of it to test-fire the US military’s M4 carbine. In gun-heaven, he’d noticed that several of the ‘Guinean’ soldiers spoke English with thick Liberian accents – and not French, the local language.

  I didn’t understand why the American Army would be training Liberians.

  ‘A new war has broken out in Liberia,’ Cobus told me. ‘Details are very hard to verify, but it looks like a rebel army has sprung up on the border between Guinea and Liberia. There are a lot of guys in the east, the area around Macenta, from the different factions that fought against Taylor in the old war.’

  The old war, he explained, was another West African tragedy that unfolded alongside – and helped precipitate – the war he’d fought in Sierra Leone. Between 1989 and 1997 Charles Taylor and other warlords waged a vicious civil war against the Liberian Government – and between themselves. It was a war that Taylor finally won when he was elected president in 1997.

  ‘Taylor took his revenge on the other warlords after his election, and most of their fighters fled to Guinea. In ’98 the shit really hit the fan. They started fighting it out in Monrovia again and the fighters loyal to the warlord the Yanks had been supporting just fokken ran to the US embassy. Then the Americans put together a rescue mission before Taylor could massacre them.’

  Cobus had been part of the rescue mission and wore a stars and stripes patch on his uniform. In the four years that had followed, Taylor’s enemies had slowly re-grouped, and the president himself had become an international pariah. Accused by the United Nations of funding, arming and training the limb-hacking RUF rebels in neighbouring Sierra Leone, his regime had military and commercial sanctions slapped on it.

  9/11 changed the picture. Fed up with Taylor’s government, and incensed at reports that he may have allowed al-Qaeda operatives safe passage through his country, the Americans were now keen to help their old friends again. Taylor, it was decided, had to go.

  ‘There’s a long history to this,’ Cobus informed me. ‘In ’96, the US Government had given weapons to ULIMO-J fighters – those are the same guys that they later helped in ’98 – through a private contractor when it looked like Taylor was going to fuck them up. Now proper battles are being fought a hundred miles away from the largest UN deployment in history, and no one knows a fokken thing about it.’

  He spat the initials of the UN, who, despite maintaining a massive peacekeeping operation in Sierra Leone, had done nothing to intervene in Liberia.

  ‘They are incredibly fokken useless.’

  His rolled ‘r’s hammered the point home. No one, apparently, outside Guinea and Liberia (and US Intelligence) really knew what was happening.

  Our oyster shells had piled up into a grey, crenulated mountain. We climbed into his car and headed back to his house. I thought about what Cobus had told me. If I could get access to a rebel army in this unknown, unreported war it would be a genuine scoop – in fact, it could make my name as a journalist.

  ‘This American friend of yours,’ I asked, trying to sound off-hand, ‘can he get me in? I mean, would it be possible to film?’

  The sun was dropping towards the sea. Cobus adjusted his sunglasses as he drove.

  ‘I’ll have to ask him. I’m not exactly sure what the situation is at the moment, how much territory they control. The Americans are, you know, trying to help them with some small arms and logistics – nothing heavy, just enough to keep them going, to see if they can hit Taylor, to see if they’re any good.’

  We rounded the hill, and swung back on ourselves for a sweeping view of the ocean. Cobus killed the engine, and we dropped the windows. The truck filled with the scent and sound of the sea.

  ‘I’ll let you know.’

  Two days later my phone rang. I stepped away from the bar I was propping up in Johannesburg, extricating myself from the din of lunchtime banter. I’d half-forgotten that I was waiting for Cobus to call me. In the cold light of day, it seemed unlikely that US Intelligence (who-or whatever that might be) were going to broker introductions between a rebel group (that may or may not exist) and a journalist. It seemed even more unlikely that the rebels would want any part of it.

  ‘James, it looks like those jokers are going to play ball. You’re in.’

  ‘I’m what?’

  ‘You’re in. I spoke to the Yanks and told them they can trust you, that you’re not interested in fucking them or anything, that you just want to get the story of the rebels out. As long as you agree not to broadcast anything about the Americans, I don’t think it will be a problem.’

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. For a moment my mind went blank. What was I supposed to say? I imagined myself surrounded by gun-toting rebels in an anonymous jungle clearing and felt a rush of nervous excitement.

  ‘You need someone who can look after you, run an evacuation. Someone to watch your back.’

  I glanced into the restaurant, and then at my feet.

  ‘Cobus, I don’t even have a budget for this. It’s going to be very tight.’

  Getting the Americans on board was just the beginning of the process, not the end. In order to film anything, I would need equipment, personnel – and money.

  ‘I hear you, I hear you. Look, don’t worry, we’ll sort something out. All the payments will be run through me. I’ll help manage it from Freetown. I’ll be in Jo’burg at the end of the week. There’s a guy I have in mind. Let’s meet at the Westcliff Hotel on the eleventh …’

  Nick ordered another round, and we started jotting down notes by the poolside. The plan was simple enough, or so it seemed. Cobus would man a UHF military radio in Freetown – one they had used in the army and on a different frequency range from the local sets – which had enough power to reach Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, and much further than we planned on going. Nick and Cobus would be in regular contact, with Nick relaying our daily GPS co-ordinates, so that Cobus could liaise with the Americans in case of an emergency. We would take with us a satellite phone as a back-up, bullet-proof vests, water purification equipment and essential food and supplies so that we would not be a burden on the local population.

  It occurred to me that perhaps the rebels would not be keen on my bringing in a mercenary as my bodyguard. I picked my words carefully. Cobus was sanguine.

  ‘If the Americans tell them it’s okay, they’ll accept it. Besides, it’s in their interest to have Nick along. The last thing they want is to have to look after you if there’s a problem.’

  His reasoning had merit, but his almost complete reliance on the Americans concerned me.

  ‘Nick,’ I asked, ‘will you be armed?’

  ‘Yes, but not immediately. We can’t take weapons in from here. Well, we could – but people might get the wrong idea, hey? I expect I’ll get an AK from the rebels when we get in. I don’t think it will be a problem.’

  Nick looked over my shoulder as the beers arrived at the table and we lapsed into silence. A chalk-white tourist edged away from the safety of his lounger and dropped into the pool. I fanned myself with a lunch menu, and accepted what he said. I wanted him to be armed, and I wanted to know what he thought he would be armed for. As the ripples dissipated, he explained how the AK might be used.

  ‘If there is a problem,’ he continued, ‘I’ll make enough space for us to get clear – just that. If necessary, we can walk out.’

  My mind drew a blank: walk out of where? To where? I imagined the forest I’d seen in Sierra Leone, Nick emptying his rifle into the faceless enemy, while I ran, scared, into the trees.

  ‘I like the “we” bit,’ I said. ‘I haven’t done anything like this before.’

  The words hung between us. Cobus cut across the silence. ‘Don’t worry. You’re going to have to take in a big crew. You can be sure that they don’t know jack-shit about filming, but the more people you’re in charge of, the more they’re goi
ng to be impressed by you.’

  Nick was smiling in agreement. I was writing furiously.

  ‘Take big cameras, too, so you look like a proper news crew. They’ll love that.’

  I noted the implication that we wouldn’t really be a proper news crew at all: I couldn’t fault him on that. We agreed that Nick would acquire a comprehensive medical kit and procure our supplies. The production company would put together the crew, and I would draw up the necessary paperwork.

  ‘How are we going to get there, exactly? If we go into Conakry directly … that’s going to be bloody tricky.’

  Conakry, the capital of neighbouring Guinea, where the rebels’ political office was located, was one of the hardest places on earth to enter as a journalist. The airport had a special place in the International Journalists’ Travel Bestiary: rapacious customs officials, unpredictable soldiers and sinister government agents made clearing immigration like running the gauntlet. Nick leaned in to hear the answer. He was as concerned as I was.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Cobus reassured us, ‘I’ll be there before you. I’ll meet you at the airport with one of their guys.’

  Apart from the reputation, or lack thereof, of its international airport, I knew next to nothing about either Guinea, or Liberia. In the days since my phone call with Cobus confirming the meeting, I’d dredged the Internet for any clues as to what might be going on. I’d turned up almost nothing.

  The few reports that suggested there was renewed fighting were often sceptical. One BBC dispatch thought it possible that Liberian president Charles Taylor was fabricating attacks against his army in order to justify relaxing the international community’s arms embargo against him. Indeed, in February 2001, Charles Taylor had written personally to Kofi Annan, the then United Nations Secretary General, asking for the weapons ban on his regime to be lifted owing to the threat he faced from Guinea – a request that was flatly denied.