I watched Nick coat the man in iodine, and helped out with the other, lighter injuries. When he was done, Nick straightened up and washed the blood off his hands.
‘Vok, he’s lucky. Most likely he’ll be okay. One of the kids was playing with a grenade.’ He shook his head and looked at me, his disbelief turning to a smile. ‘You’re fokken lucky, too. You would have been sitting next to him.’
Joe took himself back to Conakry as we continued that night to Zorzor. The war was not ‘out there’, as I had been fooling myself: it was everywhere, all the time. I stared out into the black river of the road ahead. Nick’s background remained an enigma, but his medical skills as sold by Cobus were not. The driver probably owed him his life.
Dawn in Zorzor broke with the scraping of rice pots and the excited banter of the newly arrived rebels. The rebel commander in charge was Prince Seo, the LURD’s chief of staff. A former ULIMO-J fighter, he had been given the second-to-top job in order to promote unity among the former factions that made up the LURD. Most of the fighters and commanders were ULIMO-K Muslims from the Mandingo tribe. Seo was a Christian, from the Krahn tribe. His appointment was a sop to the Krahns, whose troops were desperately needed on the front.
Seo presided over a wasteland. A group of children kicked a jagged fragment of skull along the main street. The buildings were in a state of collapse. The few remaining civilians scavenged in the ruins of their houses for food, cutting wild plants. Even to my untrained eye, their babies displayed clear signs of severe malnutrition.
Seo also presided over an enormous arms cache. While the chief of staff was occupied in the radio room, Deku showed me the weapons, and allowed Dudley to film as they were distributed to his men for our journey to the front line. One locker was piled high with new AKM assault rifles, still packed in their factory grease and sealed in plastic bags. Tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition were stacked up in green plastic packets; rocket-propelled grenades, fuses and bombs, also fresh from the factory, lined the walls. All of it came from Guinea.
Nick was offered his choice of weapons. Turning them over in his hands, working the bolt in the breech and inspecting the working parts, he settled on an AK that was an older Russian model – more robust and with a better trigger, he said, than the newer Chinese-made ones. A folding stock meant it would be lighter to walk with. He removed and pocketed the cleaning kit from the stock of another rifle. He snapped a brown magazine into place, picked up another four loaded magazines for backup and slipped a cut green plastic bag with a couple of hundred rounds in it into his haversack: that made about 350 bullets in all. He saw me eying the shiny brass cartridges tipped with small copper points.
‘I’ll get some more in the next town,’ he said.
Deku prised open the lid of one large green box, to reveal an unexpected cargo.
‘Missah,’ he grinned, ‘fo’ Taylah helico’ter.’
Inside the box, two Strela SAM-7s – guided surface-to-air missiles – nestled with the battery packs and instructions required for use. They were serious hardware. In the right hands they were capable of bringing down a commercial airliner. The LURD had captured them from Taylor’s forces when they had fought alongside Guinean troops in 2000, he explained. Even Nick was impressed. Although he hadn’t mentioned anything more to do with shooting down the helicopter, he now had the tools to do it should we come back this way.
Nick dropped the safety catch on his AK by two notches, and snapped back the bolt with a click-clack familiar from just about every war movie I’d ever seen. Very slowly he put the rifle to his shoulder, and squeezed the trigger twice. With flat, ear-splitting blasts he sent the copper-tipped bullets into the soft earth ten feet in front of him.
He re-loaded the clip twice, so that a live round was chambered in the breech, on top of a full magazine – a maximum thirty-one rounds – and then we walked back to Seo’s house, where we’d spent the last two nights. I was relieved that Nick was armed, even if the sight of him, unshaven, tearing up the dust in his long black shorts and T-shirt had looked more Mid-West Gun Club than elite Special Forces – but this was just part one.
The next morning Nick emerged from our room transformed. Gone were the shorts and polo shirt. In their place he wore full battle dress: British Army camouflage trousers, a light khaki South African Defence Force short-sleeved shirt and his old Reconnaissance Regiment webbing – stuffed with AK magazines, water, a small medical kit and his GPS. Wrapped in a plastic bag, poking out of his breast pocket, his notepad and pens were about all that I recognised of his former sartorial self. His AK hung down in his hand, like an extension of his arm. I was in awe: a little boy surprised to find his Action Man had come to life.
We jumped into the vehicles and drove south. As we arrived in the village of Zolowo, an edgy LURD rebel fired an RPG into the forest. The deafening bang … whoosh … crunch of the launch and explosion caught me off-guard. I was trying to take this in my stride, to hide my nerves, though I didn’t understand why they were firing at trees.
‘Because the Government soldiers are scared of the bang,’ Nick told me, ‘and no one knows where they are.’
It was a bloody big bang. It scared me. So did the idea that the enemy was out there, somewhere.
Dudley and Mandla, meanwhile, seemed unfazed, their constant banter insulating them from the uncertainty that gripped us from one hour to the next. Dudley was especially pleased at having a captive audience to film. While Nick paced out the perimeter, we got to work filming a rag tag bunch of civilians: women who tended to listless babies and men who told stories of the jobs they once had, aspirations that got lost in the war. These people were scared as much by the nagging hunger pains in their stomachs as by the boom of the grenade launcher. Their situation was not unique.
There was no running water, no electricity, no healthcare, no separation of powers and no accountability by anyone to anyone. I could not see one house that did not bear the scars of war, and spoke to no one who was not desperate for something. The civilians gave graphic accounts of the brutality and rapine of Government soldiers; at the same time the rebels were requisitioning food from a population that had not planted a rice crop in three years. Others murmured that they were forced to haul ammunition hundreds of miles against their will. ‘A kin’ o’ slavery’, one rebel commander admitted.
The hamlet of Zolowo clung to the edge of the Liberian forest like a child tugging at the skirts of a distracted mother. We were about to step into a belt of equatorial jungle that had once stretched all the way from the Rift Valley to the shores of the Atlantic. Steam rose in dense clouds from the forest floor in the half-light of the pre-dawn chill. The civilians I had interviewed and who I’d assumed were refugees were, in fact, our porters, the ‘slaves’ forced to carry the LURD’s ammunition to the front line. They lined up to be handed small, 100g bags of salt – a valuable and scarce commodity during the war. It was their payment for the long walk ahead. Dressed in ragged shirts and torn trousers, and shod in flip-flops, they loaded AK bullets, a mortar, rice, a goat and a small generator – amongst a hoard of other essentials – onto their heads and backs. They also carried my bags. I accepted it, and was cautioned to offer no payment except in cigarettes. I was learning to be a spectator, to mix what I knew was right with what I knew had to be done.
One group of rebels went up ahead, followed by porters, then us, followed by a group of women carrying children and bundles of cooking pots, and then a rear-guard of more fighters. Nick walked behind me, our footsteps crunching into the forest floor just out of step, so that his footfall came to me like an echo. He cradled his rifle across his chest, and as I looked over my shoulder he smiled and said simply, ‘It’s a nice morning for a walk, Mr Brabazon.’
The porters disappeared silently into the trees ahead of us. Like a grand expedition in the vein of Greene or Stanley, the scene had a timeless quality, as if the last hundred years had never happened. Only the occasional glint of gun-metal gave away the fact
that we were on the threshold of a very modern war.
The forest took me in with no resistance. Wet leaves stroked me into an exotic land of deep shadows and animal calls; everywhere was impenetrable green; everywhere life stirred, just out of reach. Rank and earthy, the ground breathed a perfume of mulch and decay that grew stronger as the canopy leaned in over our heads. Gradually I forgot that Zolowo had been attacked two days before, and stopped looking for enemy soldiers. I put one foot down, and then the other.
After an hour, I became light-headed, drenched with free-flowing sweat. There was precious little sugar or salt in our diet. My muscles began to cramp. My knees were jolted painfully by the endless tree roots – some waist-high – that snaked into the woods like gnarled arteries feeding the dark tree trunks all around us. After only two hours, I was disturbed by hunger; tiredness had become exaggerated to something like collapse. It was impossible to march to any sort of rhythm. I waded through streams, my boots soaked and heavy, and climbed gullies slippery as glass. The rebels offered constant encouragement. ‘Take time,’ they would caution, if they saw me stumble, and then ‘Sorry’ (pronounced sarry) if I fell or cursed. If anything, they seemed embarrassed that it was such a long way to walk: this was not how guests were supposed to be treated.
Then it rained, and the rebels stopped while thick chutes of water cascaded down through the dense, oily green canopy. I sat down heavily on a swollen tree root, and peered cautiously into the dark undergrowth. I remembered we were near the war and shuffled closer to Nick. I handed him my water bottle, which he filled under a water spout falling from the trees and then handed back to me. I took a long drink. After half an hour the rain eased almost imperceptibly, and we walked again, as if marching in a boiling shower. The path had become a running stream, and my toes sprouted blisters.
Nick cleared his throat as we splashed along.
‘You don’t have children, do you?’
‘No, man. I’ve got a girlfriend, Rachel. She’s eight years younger than me.’
I wondered when I was going to see her again. You really need to call her, I told myself. She was on vacation from university, where she was studying English.
‘I’m a very lucky boy,’ I said, remembering how pretty she was.
‘Are you going to get married?’ Nick laughed.
I thought there was no reason not to one day.
‘But, to be honest, I’m not exactly the best proposition right now. Look at me – I’m a disgrace!’
I was caked in mud, peppered by mosquito bites, and I itched furiously from the sweat running down my thighs. Swinging my legs over yet more deadfall, I asked after his family. He began to talk.
‘I’ve got three kids, two boys, Nico and Jacques, from my first marriage. Nico’s the eldest, just getting ready for technical college. Marzaan is my youngest – the one who calls me ‘Tiger’. She’s nine. When I got re-married I got a whole new family – a whole new life. I never thought I’d get married again, and then there I was, saying “I do” and getting two new daughters, my wife’s children, into the deal. They’re a bit older.’
Nick wanted to chat. So did I. His son, Nico, was a source of concern. First of all he’d wanted to join the army, but was now threatening to give up his college course for a dead-end job and a little cash so he could do as he pleased. Nick wanted stability for him, prospects. The new army was no good, all the fighting was done, a long time in the past.
‘It’s tough for young white guys in South Africa now. They’ve got this black empowerment to struggle with. No one wants to give them jobs, so they go abroad. We’re dying out, man. It’s finished for us, Africa is finished for us. When I joined up, I just went and did it.’ He confessed, ‘My old man was not very happy – he wanted me to go to work on our grape farm, but I wanted some excitement like all young guys. Of course, I thought I knew best.’
‘Did he forgive you?’
‘Ja, I think he was secretly quite proud. We had a general that lived on the neighbouring farm, and I think he told my dad about the Recces, what we were doing. It was a secret outfit then. Our bases were sealed, completely closed to civilians. Not even other soldiers were allowed onto them. When I came home on leave he’d bought me half a bottle of Red Heart rum, because he knew we drank that in the Recces. It was a huge deal for him to spend money on alcohol; he was very strict like that. So, ja, it turned out okay, but there’s no real future for white people in the army now. It takes years to get promoted. It’s all reserved for the new black guys, so most of the white people have left.’
Nico didn’t want to go abroad. He was lost, and so was Nick as he tried to reason out how best to be a good father in a different world from the one he’d grown up in. When he joined the South African Defence Force in 1975, Southern Africa was about to go up in flames. Vast swathes of the continent, as well as his native South Africa, laboured under white-minority governments: South West Africa, Angola, Mozambique, Rhodesia, Western Sahara and Djibouti all denied black Africans equal political or human rights. Within months of joining up, Nick was at the spearhead of the South African Army’s invasion of Angola, and his country’s vigorous intervention in the political life of the continent. By the time he resigned his commission nineteen years later, then aged thirty-eight, the political domination of Africa he had been raised to accept as his white birth right had all but vanished. With it had gone his marriage and any certainty for the future.
He’d left his first wife and his sons as his career in Special Forces became ever more demanding. He was deployed to Rhodesia and then later fought in Angola, Mozambique and South West Africa. I wondered what her side of the story would be like: Nick, the absent father? Nick, the secretive Special Forces operator, never saying where he’d been, or knowing how long he’d be home for?
Nick had little to say about her, and nothing but praise for the dedication and fortitude of his new wife. He re-married while he was still in the Recces. Eleven years on, he still spoke like a man who couldn’t believe his luck.
‘She is a real woman, you know, very strong-willed. She doesn’t take any kak, man. It’s like having a beautiful sergeant-major at home.’
His voice changed when he mentioned his daughter, at whose gentleness and unconditional love he was amazed. From behind me his tender monologue – soliloquy, perhaps – drifted over my shoulders and into the trees until finally the pair of us lapsed back into silence.
I heard the River Via before I saw it – a deep, bass rumble that lifted at times to sound like the rushing of wind through trees. Its expanse was breathtaking – all the more so because we had to wade or climb across on improvised deadfall bridges. Too fast for boats, the swirling eddies of the current snatched anything that dipped into them. Suddenly, the enormity of the task facing the rebels revealed itself. Every soldier from the northern bases; every round of ammunition fired at the front; every pot used to cook on had to cross this river.
I took my boots and socks off, and somewhat hopefully rolled up my trouser legs. My bare feet slipped on the glass-like trunks of submerged branches, and were quickly cut on the blanket of sharp stones that littered the river bed. Almost immediately I was up to my waist in fast, angry water. Everyone linked arms where they could, but within minutes we were in disarray. One man lost his footing halfway across, and two cases of mortar bombs slipped to the bottom, leaving the rebels with only five shells. A pallet of ammunition followed, as more men stumbled and cursed, and then one of our bags with medicine in it vanished as a porter went up to his neck in a deep trench. I suddenly felt weak in the face of the river, the jungle. I looked down into the ripples and held my hand out to Nick.
‘Can you help me, please?’ I asked. ‘I can’t do this by myself.’
Nick threw his arm out immediately. I fixed on the far bank, and picked my way along, his hand locked around mine. We waded to the bank and climbed out as Dudley, dripping, filmed us.
On the far bank we bumped into a group of LURD rebels returning from t
he front line. Lawrence Geedra, a lieutenant with shrapnel wounds in his legs, sat up on his stretcher and took a cigarette from me. His unit of thirty-seven men had been ambushed at Lofa Bridge, near to where we were heading. Seven had been killed, and four wounded. In the preceding week there had been another two ambushes, and six injured. The war was hotting up. A plume of blue-grey smoke twisted up from Geedra’s lips. The stretcher-bearers shouldered their loads and then staggered into the river, back the way we’d just come.
As we marched on, hacking our way through the bush towards the village of Kpawolozo, I felt an overwhelming urge to turn back and follow the injured men. I was walking the wrong way. I should have been following the wounded out, not re-tracing footsteps that had led to their demise.
I tried to distract myself with happier thoughts – nights out with Rachel and delicious meals in clean, cool restaurants. Eventually, I daydreamed of childhood. The soft Irish lilt of my paternal grandfather, Martin, comforted me in whispers and half-remembered phrases. He was an inspiration to me. He’d passed away two years ago. Sixty years before I set foot in the forest, he hacked his way out of the Burmese jungle, retreating in the wake of the Imperial Japanese Army’s victorious push through South East Asia. With few war stories of my own to recount, I told Nick instead how my grandfather took his men across the great Irrawaddy River, with terrible losses. Comrades died as they marched, friends stepping over friends’ bodies. Consumed with thirst, they drank fetid ditch water and sucked rusty liquid from the radiators of abandoned vehicles, knowing it would poison them. Military discipline dissolved. Their commanding officer was shot by his own men. Disease, exhaustion and injury crippled them all – many for life. Nick grunted politely to let me know he was listening.
My Friend The Mercenary Page 6