He shifted his weight and crossed his ankles in front of him, draining the water.
‘There was a lot of young guys killed in Angola in ’87 and ’88 for nothing. We felt betrayed, but it was always like that, it’s always been like that everywhere. You get the guys who is fighting, and the big men who make deals and sell them out.’
He thought for a moment, wiping the sweat out of his eyes.
‘Ag, this had to happen. It was the only thing we could do. You just can’t fight all the people. There was just too many of them. That’s no way to live. So far this new government isn’t doing too bad. The economy is okay. Part of the settlement was that they had to ditch all the Communist economic stuff. In that way, we had a victory. I think most of the people sees now that Communism would have been the fokken end.’
I’d forgotten, perhaps never really known, that the ANC were card-carrying Marxists. Once Nick warmed to the theme, it was hard to stop him. Fighting had been his life: he lived and breathed it still.
‘In ’87 and ’88 we were fighting massive battles in Angola. We were fighting the Angolan Government, who were Marxists, and Cubans and Russians who were Communists. We’d been at war with them since independence in ’75. Most of the guys who joined up or were conscripted were there to protect South Africa from that. It wasn’t just a racial thing. There was no proper apartheid in Three-Two, or the Recces, and most of the guys weren’t thinking about that. You know, then the Government did a deal with them, the Communists. That pissed a lot of people off. Some people say that the Russians threatened to escalate the whole thing. The Chinese, too.’
For Nick, the Cold War had been a hot one. While the West talked about fighting the Evil Empire, and finessed diplomatic moves against Moscow, Nick and his Recces were getting down and dirty actually killing Reds, whatever their colour. The South African Government supported almost anyone with an anti-Communist agenda. Psychopathic Renamo guerrilas in Mozambique – created there by Rhodesia to fight the newly independent Marxist government – were, Nick explained, covertly armed and trained in the 1980s by 5 Recce. Nearly a million people died from war or starvation; many times that were displaced from their homes. The apartheid regime also helped create, and then fought alongside, tyrants like Jonas Savimbi and his rebel UNITA army in Angola. I asked what the war in Angola had been like at the end. Had he seen any of the Cuban troops he’d said were sent by Castro to fight alongside the Angolan army? It turned out he’d fought in the battles that were a prelude to a series of massive pitched confrontations between the South Africans, Cubans, Russians and opposing Angolan armies. His Recce missions helped lay the foundations for what, at that time, was the largest battle ever fought in sub-Saharan Africa.
‘You didn’t see them too much unless they were dead, but ja, there was this one Cuban soldier. I found him between two tanks we’d knocked out. I turned around and saw him aiming at me from a few yards away – very close. His magazine was empty. He threw down his rifle and smiled at me.’
‘What did you do?’
I tried to imagine the panic of hand-to-hand combat fought on that scale. What I had seen in Liberia so far provided a clue, but not an answer. Nick looked perplexed.
‘I shot him.’
In 1987 I was fifteen years old. I doodled pro-ANC slogans on my satchel. I knew nothing. My only way forward with Nick was to judge him on what he did now and not what he said about the past: he was honest, he had stood by me and he did what soldiers do: kill. While I had been defacing my school bag, Nick had been fighting a war: not, as I’d assumed, a war unquestioningly and only in the defence of apartheid, but one, he believed, of national survival.
And that was precisely the point: I had never physically fought for anything – right or wrong. Nick had, and his past followed him like a shadow. More than anything, Nick was, just like my grandfathers, a man defined by his choices, dignified by the courage of his convictions irrespective of their correctness. For that, he was someone to follow, to trust instinctively, and to look up to. In this University of Bullets, he was my tutor.
7
CHARNEL HOUSE
Tubmanburg was burning. We’d edged our way towards the front line on our bellies. Fat machine-gun rounds droned overhead, gouging lumps of masonry from what remained of the buildings at the south end of town. Chattering incessantly, the rebels’ Kalashnikovs continued the conversation, tearing up the sticky black tar of the road ahead. Nick spotted a wide alley to our right where the forest spilled onto the streets and we ran dodging between the houses to a wall on the left, where a group of commanders were assessing the battle. Just ahead of them, a line of rebel soldiers kneeled in the grass.
And then, without warning, as I was trying to catch my breath, Government troops stood up thirty yards away and engaged us openly. We flattened against the wall – me trying to film, Nick squinting into the bush, his AK swinging level.
‘We have to go – now,’ he said.
I shrugged his advice away. Crawling across town had taken nearly two hours. I couldn’t face turning back without pictures.
‘Two minutes!’ I pleaded.
‘No, man, now. These guys can’t hold them. Now!’
I carried on filming. A rebel soldier crumpled in the bushes. We were completely exposed.
‘Two minutes, okay?’ I demanded.
Deku joined us, dressed in shorts and a forage cap, and echoed Nick’s request, urging me back. Where had he come from? I was almost delirious with adrenaline.
‘Our bom’ fini’, we nee’ mo’.’
He looked adamant. I could barely hear him. Nick was next to me, shouting.
‘They’ve run out of RPGs. They won’t fight without them. We have to go back now.’
Nick was insistent. I kneeled down. All I wanted was to film the machine gun opening up. I zoomed down onto the ejection port to capture the spent brass oozing out. But then Nick’s hand was on my wrist, pulling me across the street. He dragged me sideways, down, across to the house on our right, hauling me clear as our previous position exploded in a dirty fountain of broken earth. Our party had taken a direct hit; all of them had been injured. I steadied myself and stared across the road at the bloody remains of a soldier we’d been standing with.
Deafened by the blast, and transfixed by the thought of what might have been, I stood rooted to the spot as Nick mouthed commands at me. We were still in the firing line. A rifle bullet flew between our faces, punching a hole in the wall beside us. I stumbled, and Nick grabbed me.
‘That was close!’
Nick was actually smiling. It was incredible. Nothing seemed to piss him off.
He pulled me to safety again. More machine-gun fire, the searing lead licking up the dust about our heels, harried us down the street. Then we were on the tarmac, and the battle was behind us.
I had become so absorbed with filming, and was so frustrated with myself for not capturing the contact on tape, that it wasn’t until we were back at the house that it dawned on me how narrowly we had both survived. Nick had saved my life, twice.
On the balcony, I filled my notebook with times and details, facts and figures. With painstaking accuracy I recorded the start and finish times of contacts, as if by creating order on the page I could somehow order or influence or make sense of the chaos around me. My knees were too painful for me to concentrate properly, so I stopped to re-bandage them, strapping them tight. My body was not holding up well. My teeth now hurt too much to brush, and the skin on my thighs itched almost constantly – from what (a parasite?), I had no idea. We had run out of soap; I was filthy and my left ear had started to throb. I raised my hand unconsciously to the side of my face every few minutes.
‘Is it the gunfire, James?’ Nick enquired.
‘I don’t think so. It’s actually in my ear, not my head. Why?’
‘Ag, it’s just I have this ringing in my ears, from the artillery.’
‘Artillery?’
‘Yes, from the army. We had these big
G5 cannon in Angola, really good. They saved us a few times – but they weren’t so hot on hearing-protection and stuff in those days. I have this, er, tinnitus. It can get really irritating.’
It was untreatable. In extreme cases, it could cause madness. I wondered if protecting journalists for no pay was an early symptom.
‘How is it now?’
‘It’s there. It’s better in the fighting; all the noise buries it. When the shooting stops, it gets quite loud, especially at night.’
We lapsed into silence.
The rebels were very low on RPGs, and Nick was right – they would not fight without them. Supply from Guinea did not seem to be a problem; getting anything over the River Via from Voinjama or Zorzor was. For us, it was doubly problematic: with the river now swollen with the rains, the route out, as well as the route in, was likely impassable.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ Nick piped up, as if waking from a daydream. ‘What these guys need is self-sufficiency. They rely on Guinea for everything, and then in the rainy season they’re screwed because Taylor’s supply lines are so much shorter. The civilians in their areas can’t plant crops, and the rebels don’t have any food or work to give them. They need to generate their own money.’
He was right, but how on earth could they generate income in this wasteland?
‘You’re right. This place is fucked. There isn’t even any fruit left in the forest, people are so hungry,’ I said.
‘Ja,’ Nick grinned, ‘but it’s what’s in the ground that’s interesting. The next position to us, at Lofa Bridge, has got quite a lot of diamonds.’ The word flashed between us. ‘They need to hold Lofa because otherwise Tubmanburg will fall, but they are so busy with fighting that there’s no chance to make it pay.’
No one had mentioned diamonds before, but it was true, they were here. Although reserves were minuscule in comparison with Sierra Leone, Liberia nonetheless had enough deposits to be of interest to big mining corporations, and, it seemed, mercenaries.
As we talked, it became apparent that Nick’s knowledge was extensive. He had been a senior commander in a private army charged with re-capturing the vast diamond fields only a short hop over the border with Sierra Leone from where we sat now.
‘Deku says Sekou has been very much against it, the diamonds. There was some trouble a year ago when one commander was killed over some stones. He was ambushed by his own men. Now they have the death penalty if anyone mines the stones for themselves.’
It was becoming clearer that Nick and Deku, and probably the other commanders, had not just been talking about the war.
‘Okay, but it still doesn’t solve the supply issue. If there are diamonds, Taylor will want the area back as soon as possible – and even if the LURD can mine the stones and sell them, it’s still going to be practically impossible to hold their ground there.’
That argument was good for the war per se, not just the diamonds. While the rebels were only supplied overland from the north, the war was all but unwinnable.
‘Ja, that’s why I’m going to try and get them a helicopter.’
I hadn’t seen that coming.
‘Is that possible?’ I asked sceptically.
‘I think so. If the stones are good enough, then they could either buy one outright or rent flight time from an operator based in Freetown or Guinea. They could use it to get the stones out – which is safer and solves the ambush problem – and drop troops and logistics right on the front.’
I sat in amazement.
‘And’, he continued, ‘if you came back to do more filming, you wouldn’t have to fokken walk in!’
Nick expanded the plan. He would speak to Sekou Conneh when we got back to Voinjama and ‘make him a proposal’. He would need shovels, sieves, small water pumps, rice and basic foodstuffs to get the operation going: hardly any capital outlay for an extraordinary potential return. He told stories with childlike enthusiasm about lucky strikes in Angola; about men made millionaires by a single stone; about the freedom and adventure that came from mining. It was hard work, it was dangerous work, and it was absolutely, unquestionably illegal. In terms of international law, the words ‘diamond’ and ‘opium’ were almost interchangeable.
His motivation was simple. No one was paying him for this gruelling slog in Liberia. He needed to make it work, somehow. But if mining here was going to work, what Nick needed, to make his plan come good, was a partner: someone he could trust, someone who knew the terrain, someone who was respected by the rebels. Nick, it turned out, needed me.
‘Have a think about it. We could get very rich, and it’s a chance to do something for the ordinary people here. I mean, they have nothing.’
I said nothing. There was nothing to say. What he was proposing was wild, adventurous and unthinkable.
Our silence was broken by shouting from below the balcony. A couple of rebels had come to tell us the good news: they had taken a prisoner that morning and they wanted us to witness the interrogation.
Thick-set and listless, the prisoner lay on the poured-concrete floor outside the town jail – a robust two-cell lock-up a hundred yards up the lane from our billet. He was already naked. Torn and bloodstained white underpants were all that remained of his clothing.
I looked at Nick, and said, ‘He’s fucked.’
On the walk down, he’d told me straight: if the prisoner is naked, he’s a dead man. Nick nodded and went in ahead of me. A dreadful feeling of suspense settled as I started filming.
‘We capture ’im livin’,’ one of the rebels explained. Most of their banter was in dialect; at times it was hard to be sure if they were speaking in English or Mandingo.
Their prisoner was an older man, well into his thirties, his light skin reddened from rolling in dust. I could see a gash by the side of the man’s right knee; and, as his torso twisted around, unable to support its own weight, I saw a larger hole in the base of his back. I guessed that he’d been shot in the leg, and that the round had exited from behind.
He was encircled by the pink, red and green flip-flops of his captors, their AK barrels pointing down. Most were young, in their teens or early twenties, decked out with magazine bandoliers, bush hats and black vests. One younger kid wore a garish turquoise-and-pink striped shell-suit top with yellow shorts; another sported a blue football shirt.
‘He wa’ capture’ on the main roa’, on de fron’ lahn,’ a fighter in a mauve beanie hat shouted at me. Tempers were becoming excited; the younger guys crowded round, ordering other rebels to get out.
‘How did you capture him?’ I asked the beanie hat, from behind the camera.
‘Becau’ de fi’powah wa’ too heavy fo’ ’im!’
No sooner had he spoken than his friends ripped his hat off, laughing, exposing short braids that glistened with sweat. They were making him look good for the camera.
I wanted to know what regiment the prisoner was from. Some thought the Navy Division.
‘No, he i’ RUF fro’ Sierra L’one,’ one of the younger guys explained.
The prisoner was possibly one of the mercenaries that the radio intercepts indicated Taylor had flown in from the Sierra Leone border to help the Navy Division attack Tubmanburg.
The rebel unsheathed his bayonet as he spoke and cut open the charm that had been tied around the prisoner’s neck. It was filled with dry grass and herbs.
‘Dis i’ traditiona’ me’icine, African me’icine, to protec’ fro’ bulleh’.’
Two other rebels held him up and poured water into the RUF man’s mouth. Their prisoner was conscious, talking, at the end of what I imagined had been a lengthy interrogation. He held his arms up, waving them, as if he were dancing.
‘A-wooh! A-wooh!’ chanted the rebels.
I stepped back, holding the camera steady. The rebels took it in turns to shout at the prisoner, mocking him for being captured. A woman came and looked on as a burning cigarette end was forced into his mouth, between his lips, and extinguished on his tongue.
&nb
sp; ‘Cot i’ ou’,’ said the woman.
One of the teenagers pointed at the moaning prisoner and started saying something to me about his ‘power’. Wrapped in thick patois, the words were lost on me. Next to him, an older fighter who spoke clearer English translated.
‘He say he wan’ take de heart ou’ an’ ea’ i’.’
‘Yeah,’ concurred the teenager, ‘i’ wi’ hep me to kill.’
An AK bayonet was passed from hand to hand and sharpened on the stone steps of the jail house. Then it was passed back again, and they sliced off the prisoner’s ear with three swift strokes, and stuffed it into his mouth. His head rolled, his eyes flickered. He was still alive. They dragged him to the road by his feet. His skull thumped heavily up the steps. Singing and chanting, they carried him through town. Everyone came out to look: women wrapped in colourful, striped batiks; children holding ragged soft toys; old men in ruined suits. After a couple of hundred yards, they cut the other ear off. Now they dragged, and no longer carried, him.
‘Jay!’ called the teenager. ‘Jay, I wan’ to ea’ heart, I wan’ ea’ de man heart. I’m a wickeh boy, I’m a rebel.’
‘I’ ca’ hep to make yor protec’shan stron’ when y’ ea’ yor enemy, when y’ ea’ deh heart, as a warriah,’ clarified another rebel in a black T-shirt.
‘I origina’ Sonny Boy,’ a voice chirped up to my left. It belonged to a rebel no more than fifteen years old, likely much younger. ‘I eatin’ de heart in peppah sou’. Yes! I’ wi’ mak’ my protec’shan hu’!’
Finally, they stopped and mocked their captive one last time before driving a bayonet into his chest just below his sternum. In all likelihood, that was what killed him, there in front of me, on film. I hoped so, because what came next was so inhumane, so abhorrent, that it was hard to trust my eyes. If I had not filmed it, I would have come to doubt this happened, could have happened, at all.
As red and yellow intestines bubbled out of the slit in his stomach, the rebels severed his penis and testicles.
My Friend The Mercenary Page 14