My Friend The Mercenary

by James Brabazon

  Emerging at Zolowo, the track joined the wider road we’d walked down fifty days before. Salayie was in chaos. We were greeted by a horde of teenagers with Kalashnikovs and green bottles of homemade hooch in their hands. The local population was nowhere to be seen. Drunk, stoned, the fighters were running riot. All their commanders were either dead or had deserted. Heads wrapped in bright bandanas, spliffs hanging from their mouths, they made the once-picturesque village look like the set of some Mad Max-type movie.

  ‘This is fokken bad. It’s completely broken down here. Keep moving and try not to look anyone in the eye,’ Nick cautioned.

  We walked right through them. Very young fighters were openly disrespectful to Dragon Master and Deku, dancing in front of them, waving their guns around. The flimsy veneer of tribal unity that held the LURD together was cracking under the stress of the retreat. I saw Nick re-adjust his own rifle, cradling it against his chest. Any last vestiges of hope or respect I had for the LURD departed. Not only were the lunatics running the asylum, they were armed to the teeth and all under the age of fifteen.

  As we marched onwards, my energy came in waves. When I thought I couldn’t go on, a surge of power would grip my legs and I’d pace ahead, convinced again that I could make it after all. Nick was in the same boat. Marvellously, our energy ebbed and flowed at odds with each other, so when I was flagging, he spurred me on; when Nick slowed up, I teased him about being an old man, and he quickened his pace to keep up.

  ‘Just think,’ I said to him, as we puffed our way to the hump of a hill whose sides were moulded from red clay slippery as glass, ‘every step we take is a step closer to fried chicken at the Petit Bateau. We are walking towards chicken.’

  ‘And beer,’ he added.

  Despite our banter, Nick constantly had his eye on what might be on the horizon.

  ‘Stay back,’ he warned, ‘let them get ahead.’

  I was walking at the point of the front group. We waited together as the front unit pressed on and opened up a hundred yards between us.

  ‘Ja, okay. Let’s go.’

  Nick was tired now, too. We were nearing our limit: it was well past midday and we’d been on the move without a real break since dawn. As we rounded the crest of the hill, we found a village spread out either side of the road. Running like a muddy red ribbon through a strip of open, green ground, the road ran past a dozen wooden huts built on the edge of the forest – and was flanked by two deep drainage ditches. A lone bench sat in the middle of what I took to be a sort of village green. I fixed my eye on it, and marched to it for a rest. Nick was in step behind me.

  I saw the smoke before I heard the noise. From the window of one of the huts a thin blue-grey cloud struggled into the thick, humid air. Then our ears were filled for a brief moment with the sickening crackle of incoming rounds and then, a split second later, a cacophony of machine-gun rounds zooming past. I flung myself headlong into the ditch. Nick dived the other way. We’d been separated. A curtain of lead flew over my back. Up ahead, the LURD advance party had begun to reply. A volley of RPGs went off, followed by another, and another. Instead of diminishing, the shooting intensified. Joining the machine gun were bursts of AK fire and the blasts of hand grenades. Behind me a young woman and skinny older man were cowering in my ditch. Incredibly, the man was my porter; he had my bag. Smiling weakly as I wriggled up to him, he unstrapped my rucksack and then stared at me uncomprehending as I began to assemble my camera.

  ‘I have to get this,’ I heard myself repeating, ‘I have to get this.’

  The rebels had other ideas.

  ‘Mah man, stop da’ ting you doin’. Le’ go! Le’ go! Le’ go!’

  A commander whom I didn’t recognise was crouched in the ditch with us. The very idea that I was trying to film was absurd to him. This was about survival, nothing else. He was right. I suddenly felt foolish, as if I’d learned nothing. I closed my bag, and he took it from me. I looked at the woman, and we held hands and stood up together to face the storm.

  I braced myself for impact, and leaned forward, my left arm up over my head as if trying to keep dry in a squall. I could feel the bullets, see them: dirt flying up, the shot-riddled clay road; the air now thick with smoke. Seven or eight rebels lined the road ahead, launching grenade after grenade into the tree line. The noise filled my head entirely, blotting out all thought and feeling. Then Nick was there, and he grabbed me, and the three of us ran, holding hands; the commander charged ahead, my bag over his shoulder, his AK leaping and spewing spent cartridges across us. And we tumbled into the shade and cover of the trees, and lay on our backs, amazed and alive. All I could see were clouds and leaves.

  ‘Sorry, man.’

  I sat up and addressed the unknown commander, but he just shrugged and ran deeper into the forest. I turned to Nick.

  ‘He was pissed off that I was trying to film. Fair enough, really.’

  Nick didn’t say anything. We picked ourselves up and began to run at a trot into the forest, following the civilians. The sound of gunfire and the screams of the injured harried us towards Zorzor until eventually the firing stopped, and the Government troops melted back into trees. Several people had been hit in the crossfire, but no one had died.

  Zorzor had been only an hour’s walk away. Taylor’s men were close to a major LURD headquarters – which was practically undefended. If the Government took Zorzor, it would make it almost impossible for the rebels to re-supply their troops in the east. We sat on the stoop of an abandoned house and drank the rainwater cascading from the zinc roof.

  ‘I can’t go on.’ Nick’s voice was quiet, but even. ‘I can’t go any further.’

  He was matter-of-fact. He took his boots off and sat back in an old wooden chair, drained. I was so exhausted that I wasn’t sure I could carry on either. I suspected he was just trying to make me feel better. It seemed very unlikely that we were going anywhere anyway. Then, after an hour, Dragon Master stood up and shouldered his AK.

  ‘Le’ go! No car.’

  We stared at him in disbelief, and then Nick silently re-laced his boots and I strapped up my knees.

  ‘Ja, that is not really a surprise. It looks like we are walking the entire way.’ Nick managed to smile at me. ‘Not bad for an old guy.’

  His beard was full now, and very white, making him look like a Father Christmas in camouflage. We put our feet to the road, and pressed on, turning off down a bush path and back into the unforgiving undergrowth of equatorial jungle. We walked more slowly now. Nick handed his AK to a small boy, employing his own pekin.

  ‘This chicken’, Nick mumbled, ‘is going to be the best fokken chicken I have ever eaten.’

  Then we stopped talking, and squelched northwest, daydreaming our separate fantasies of home.

  Hours later – I no longer knew how many – we fell out of the fetid soup of the jungle and emerged at a clearing flanked by a brick bunker and a handful of young men in tatty green uniforms. The rebels greeted them enthusiastically: their faded yellow-and-green insignia heralded our escape. They were Guinean soldiers. After nine days of marching two hundred miles through the rain-soaked guts of the Liberian forest, we had crossed the border.

  PART TWO

  9

  A STRANGER’S HAND

  I woke up in my old bedroom in my mother’s house to the sound of wood pigeons cooing in the boughs of the oak tree outside. I reached up and pulled the curtains apart, squinting as the warm light of an August morning filled the tiny room. All I could see were clouds and leaves. Downstairs Champion Jack Dupree growled on the record player. Bacon and toast were working their magic together in the kitchen – the scent of home creeping under the door to greet me. Mum tapped out a familiar Morse code with her teaspoon on her coffee mug, and cleared her throat – her way of calling to me without shouting through the house.

  What was she going to make of me, her emaciated son with a shaggy beard, who crept home in the early morning the day before and slept for nearly twenty-four h
ours?

  I wandered downstairs, into the familiar sanctuary of the dining room, kissed her on the cheek, and sat down at the dining table, which looked out over the garden. She went to speak, and then checked herself and disappeared back to the kitchen. A minute later she was plying me with an enormous bacon sandwich and a mug of steaming tea.

  ‘You were ready for that,’ she noted, taking away the empty plate. ‘It hardly touched the sides.’

  ‘Was I? Ready for it, I mean?’ I said awkwardly.

  I didn’t feel ready for anything. She smiled and looked at me in a way that only mothers look at their own children: an inquisitor, assessing me like I’d had a bad day at school. I sat there barefoot in my favourite old green towelling dressing gown. It felt like I had surfaced from weeks under pressure into her small, quiet detached house in Canterbury. There was a lot to say – too much, perhaps – and neither of us knew where to start.

  ‘I might have another round, if that’s okay?’

  She got up and smiled again, and went to cut more bread. Our cat sauntered in, sniffing the air like a sommelier nosing ripe claret. Beyond the double glazing, the heat of a perfect summer’s day percolated through the leaves of the trees overhanging the lawn. The cat climbed up onto the windowsill next to me and we stared out at the garden together. She’d always been terrified of the world outside the back door. I knew how she felt.

  After marching past the bedraggled border post, Nick and I had kept walking into Guinea with the rebels until we came to a small town where we found a LURD contingent waiting for us. Before we were bundled into a beaten-up white pick-up truck, Nick and I improvised a meal from the roadside market: we split open a fresh baguette (the first bread we’d eaten in two months), soaked it with condensed milk and layered it with sardines. Grinning at each other as we wolfed it down, we were too hungry to notice whether it tasted good, bad, or of anything at all. We toasted each other with bottles of orange Fanta – and set off for Macenta on a sugar high.

  We rolled into the LURD compound that evening, through the high metal gates that had last opened to see us off into the war. Back then Macenta had seemed strange and foreign – a tiny town lost in the eastern forest region, cut off from normal life and filled with rebels, refugees, and all manner of people bustling through streets lined with traders and soldiers. Now it seemed normal: this was what West African towns were supposed to look like when they weren’t blasted to bits by high explosive and raked by gunfire.

  National Chairman Sekou Conneh was waiting for us in the forecourt where I’d watched Nick patch up the driver wounded by the freak grenade blast two months earlier. He had the kit bags that we’d left behind in Voinjama. Nothing had been stolen. Voinjama was in safe hands, he assured us, but it was unclear just how much territory the rebels expected to lose, or when they hoped to regain it.

  ‘Taylah can’ mak’ i’,’ was Conneh’s only line, an emphatic statement that he clung to despite the fact that we had been chased all the way to the border. Zorzor must have been overrun behind us, or at least surrounded.

  We ate a hasty and heavily salted rice meal that made our mouths burn, and then joined Conneh and Bengura, the Guinean president’s almost-sober driver, for the overnight ride back to Conakry. As Bengura loaded the Jeep in the dimly lit compound, Nick and I faced Deku and Dragon Master. Somehow, it wasn’t enough just to say goodbye. I wanted to leave something behind, something physical that would stay with them, with the war. The impartial journalist had got left behind somewhere on the march north.

  To Dragon Master I gave my rucksack, the contents now emptied into our other bags; that much was straightforward – he’d been making admiring remarks about it for weeks. Deku was trickier. I had no idea what he wanted, only that he would definitely want something. He stood awkwardly, like a child waiting for a gift from a department store Santa. In the end I handed over my folding knife, which I had left behind in our bags in Voinjama. The absurdity of giving a war criminal a small weapon like this was inescapable; he opened and closed the blade and beamed at me in the dirty puddle of lamplight that illuminated our farewell. Whoever they were, whatever they had done – or allowed to happen – they had also helped keep me alive and filming, and I felt sad to be saying goodbye.

  In Conakry, Nick and I headed straight for the terrace restaurant where we had first met Frank and Joe. The staff meandered with their usual determined sloth, their bored faces broken only by their shock at our eccentric demands. At ten o’clock in the morning we ordered four roast chickens and four large beers.

  ‘Les autres, ils viennent tout de suite?’ our perplexed waitress wanted to know.

  I explained that no one else would be joining us, and then, after a tantalising half-hour wait spent staring at the kitchen door, Nick and I gorged ourselves on the soft flesh and crispy skin of the best meal of our lives. We ate every morsel, stripped every bone, drank every drop. Surrounded by our mountain of bags – we hadn’t even checked in – I lit a Marlboro Red and collapsed back into my chair, blowing a plume of blue smoke up to the heavens. A cool breeze fanned us from the Atlantic. You’ve done it, I thought, you’ve fucking done it.

  ‘I’ll tell you what, Mr Brabazon,’ Nick said, finishing his last mouthful of beer. ‘That was great. I just hope we don’t have to walk that far again to make the next meal taste as good.’

  ‘Just you wait,’ I said, ‘you’ll be back here before you know it. This one is going to run and run.’

  We dragged our bags to our rooms. It was going to be the first day of privacy, the first night I’d slept apart from Nick in more than two months. As Nick disappeared down the corridor, I stepped into the room, peeled off the second skin of my filthy shirt and socks, and pushed open the ill-fitting bathroom door. Under the weak glow of a single bare bulb, I saw, for the first time since leaving the hotel in June, my own reflection. I was emaciated. My skin sagged and clung to my chest – pallid, and pitted with sores and insect bites. My ribs and collar bones were sharply defined; my muscles had atrophied. My face, covered with a wild, dirty black beard, was nearly hidden: all I could see of it were my confused, sunken eyes staring back from behind the glass.

  I fished the small stills camera out of my trouser pocket, and pointed it at my reflection. I shrugged, and took a picture, and then another. I put the camera down, and thought Remember this. You’ll never look like this again. I ran a tepid bath and washed the mud and blood from between my toes, and prepared myself to see Cobus’s US Intelligence contact, Colonel Frank. Any earlier misgivings I’d had about debriefing him dissolved. If he wanted details, he could have them. The war wasn’t over; and neither, I suspected, was my relationship with US Intelligence. While I had the chance, I wanted to make sure they were firmly behind the film project.

  Once I was cleaned up, Nick and I took a taxi into town and found Frank, who was having a beer after lunch with half a dozen balls of uniformed muscle from the Green Berets. Clean-shaven, and in their early twenties, they’d recently arrived from Fort Bragg in North Carolina and were desperate to see the footage I had shot. I hooked up my mini-VCR to the TV in their billet, and rolled on a Tubmanburg fire-fight. After thirty minutes, everyone got the point.

  ‘Man,’ said one of the younger guys in a pressed shirt and aftershave, ‘I sure hope we get some of that. We’re all just ready to go.’

  In Conakry to train the Guinean Special Forces, they were in fact, also on standby to help abduct two al-Qaeda operatives suspected of helping President Taylor launder illegally mined blood diamonds. I saw Nick’s eyes flicker at the D-word. Since outlining his initial plan, the sparkling syllables had never been far from his lips. Now, though, he was silent.

  I ran Frank through the basics of the rebels’ situation, struggling to articulate what I had seen. It was hard to begin to explain a war whose outcome was dependent upon a carelessly discarded cigarette butt, though Frank seemed to understand what I was getting at. I dumped some clips onto VHS for him, and Nick handed over the captur
ed AK. It was nothing if not an anti-climax: I’d been expecting a James Bond-esque debrief; what I got was a beer and a quick chat.

  Frank concluded, ‘If these guys are seriously going to take on Taylor, they’re going to need to sort their supply lines out. The Guineans will keep them going with just enough ammunition, but it’s not really in their interest for the rebels to win too quickly, or even at all. I don’t think anyone sees these guys actually in power.’

  We all laughed – after the mayhem of the Tubmanburg firefight on TV, the idea of a LURD government suddenly seemed absurd.

  ‘But the president here is going to do whatever it takes to protect this eastern region from another invasion.’

  It was certainly straightforward, working with Frank. He was almost certainly right, too. Nick and I stood up to leave.

  ‘Don’t forget to send me a copy of the finished film,’ was Frank’s parting shot, ‘and stay in touch.’

  His tone was quiet, and it felt as if he meant it, as if he was accepting me into his club. He shook hands vigorously with Nick, who was clearly a life-member.

  Back in the taxi that returned us to the hotel, Nick turned to me after taking in the view of the city’s ramshackle streets that sped past the open window.

  ‘They spend too long in the gym, and not enough time in the field. All that muscle, it doesn’t mean anything.’

  I folded my arms around my wasted biceps, and agreed.

  Two months and two days after we’d arrived in Conakry, it was time to go. A Guinean Army four-by-four took us to the airport. We bypassed all checks and controls and were delivered straight to the VIP lounge. In a successful bid to protect us from any last-minute assault by rapacious customs officers, I slipped $100 bills into the hands of the men who ushered us through to the air-conditioned lounge. Within half an hour I’d bought off the entirety of Conakry airport’s security staff.