My Friend The Mercenary

by James Brabazon

‘I see. It was quite valuable information, I suppose. I expect some people are quite interested in that information.’

  ‘Yes,’ he concluded. ‘That is, after all, the nature of the beast.’

  It was impossible to like or dislike Mick – his personality was impalpable and his riddles impenetrable. He seemed to be suggesting that whatever problems there had been were now in the past – which was a relief, as I knew that back in Liberia I might very well need the help of the Foreign Office if I got into trouble.

  We finished our drinks, and shook hands.

  ‘I’ll be in touch,’ I said. ‘I might have something interesting for you soon.’

  In fact, by now I was quite enjoying myself, revelling in the deception. It was like playing an exciting game to which no one knew the rules.

  As I considered my next move in Africa, American troops and their Allies invaded Iraq. War reporting – once a rare treat on nightly bulletins – became the mainstay of television news as the press corps scrambled to get embedded with combat troops and film the bloody progress of the occupation. Meanwhile, all I could concentrate on was a small, fetid corner of West African jungle. Planning the next trip to Liberia became all-consuming. I packed and re-packed cameras, and spent hours poring over maps and what few reports were available from other journalists. The more remarkable the onslaught in Iraq became, the more completely I immersed myself in the quest to get back into Liberia. If the rebels did attack Monrovia, the film would have to be powerful and original to break through the saturated coverage that accompanied the ‘Shock and Awe’ of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

  Back at home, Sekou Conneh had taken to calling me frequently and randomly from his satellite phone. He liked to brief me about the progress of the war, or the status of the rebels’ latest weapons deliveries. On one occasion, straining to be heard over the crackling line, I excused myself from the table at a friend’s house and headed into the hallway.

  ‘How much ammunition do you need?’ I bellowed into the receiver, straightening the frame of a painting in the white, up-lit corridor.

  Sekou was having difficulty in getting hold of Nick again, and was explaining what he required to begin the assault.

  ‘Jay, we nee’ too much. Fi’ hundre’ plastic, an’ mo’ bom’. We don’ have sufficien’ ammunishan to attack a’ dis time,’ he cautioned.

  ‘AK or PKM?’ I clarified.

  We continued shouting at each other over the unstable line. His bizarre inflection rose and fell.

  ‘And how many heavy machine guns do you need?’ I roared as a young woman in a ridiculously short skirt appeared and handed me my glass of wine.

  Our conversation continued for several minutes. I returned to the meal to the dumbfounded silence of my fellow guests. One of them laughed as I sat down, and asked me:

  ‘Are you filming this war, or fighting it?’

  12

  THE REVOLUTION WILL BE TELEVISED

  A year ago to the day that I’d first arrived in Conakry, I strode into the arrivals hall of the notorious airport, armed with my commission from the Discovery Times Channel to make a feature-length documentary about the forthcoming battle for Monrovia. This time I arrived with a photo-journalist called Tim Hetherington.

  Two years older than me, Tim was represented by Network – a leading photographic agency in London. When he first contacted me and asked if we could work together, I’d turned him down; but as the scope of this new film became clear, it was evident I would need all the help I could get. Although he’d never been in combat, a chance assignment had taken him to Liberia in 1999; he’d then worked extensively in Sierra Leone and across West Africa. His photographs were disarmingly intimate, different from anything I’d seen shot in the region before. Tim’s route into photography had been as odd as mine into television. After graduating from Oxford, he’d got enough money together to travel to India. Two years later, he returned to London, picked up a camera and had an epiphany. After working through night school, learning his craft, he went on to work at first for the Big Issue and then the Independent. Now carrying a video camera, he was going to help me shoot from behind rebel lines – while Jonathan Stack shot simultaneously in Monrovia with President Taylor. It was his first television production.

  Nick was waiting for us with a smile and a welcoming committee of red-bereted presidential guards.

  ‘Nick, this is Tim, who I told you about. Tim, Nick.’

  The two men locked palms, and sized each other up.

  ‘Great to meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you. You seem to have this place pretty much under control.’

  Tim spoke confidently, but I could see his eyes darting around, taking in the details of the scene: the harassed passengers, the arrogant smirks of the soldiers. No stranger to African airports, he was looking for whatever trouble might arise before it was too late.

  ‘Ja, well, it’s getting easier. Let’s head straight to the hotel and we can have a briefing. How was the flight?’

  ‘Brutal,’ Tim replied. ‘We flew via Nouakchott, where I think one of my bags is having an unscheduled holiday.’

  ‘That’s a great start. I think they’re about to have a coup. The army isn’t very happy,’ Nick mused, as the president’s soldiers took our passports away for stamping. How does he know this stuff? I wondered. ‘So, ja,’ he continued, ‘it could be worse: you could be in Mauritania with your bag.’

  After the short, and by now familiar, drive to the outskirts of town, Tim and I checked into the dilapidated safe-haven of the Petit Bateau hotel. Nick had made his own arrangements, and was staying with the rebels’ national chairman in town. The three of us sat down to a late breakfast on the terrace while Nick filled us in.

  Freshly re-supplied with ammunition from Guinea, and assisted by the emergence of the new MODEL rebel group also battling Taylor in the southeast, the LURD rebels were poised – we hoped – to strike a hammer blow against his regime.

  ‘They have Robertsport – it’s under their control – and the chairman says they’ve finished with Foya. Ag, you know they might still be cleaning up there, but it’s not a threat.’

  From almost being defeated in Lofa County, their home region, the previous October, the LURD were back in control of more territory than ever before. ‘They took a delivery of around three hundred thousand AK rounds just now, and there should be another one coming with more RPG bombs and fuses.’ He looked at Tim. ‘They won’t fight without RPGs – it’s fokken irritating.’

  It seemed as if the Guinean president – Lansana Conté – was finally prepared to give the rebels what they needed to finish the job. An illicit airdrop of ammunition was not going to be needed, after all.

  ‘Mr B, what’s the situation with our American friends? Are they still helping, or what are they doing?’

  Nick looked at me cautiously, probably wondering what I’d told Tim.

  ‘Tim knows about this,’ I said. ‘I’m meeting with one of their guys here tomorrow morning. I don’t think the film did Frank any favours. Apparently, it was quite widely watched in Washington. The idea of supporting cannibals is a bit of a no-no. Basically, it put the kybosh on Frank’s little mission. I got the impression that they’ve been told to back off.’

  ‘And what about Conté?’ Tim asked. ‘Are the Yanks still supporting him?’

  The position of the Guinean president was as mysterious as ever, though there were political moves in Washington to try and contain his regional aspirations as well.

  ‘Kathi says that the US ambassador to Guinea issued Conté with a strongly worded diplomatic démarche and demanded he stop supporting the rebels. Apparently, she saw it, or a copy of it. I can’t imagine it’s going to make a blind bit of difference, though.’

  Nick agreed it wouldn’t.

  ‘Conté hates Taylor,’ he said, matter-of-factly. ‘He’ll do whatever he can to fuck him up.’

  Tim was nodding as he pieced together the fragments of the story. Nick was scribbling into his noteb
ook, as usual. Coffee and croissants arrived. Tim ordered fried eggs. Nick doubled, and then I trebled the order. We were all ravenous. The sun climbed higher above us, the edge taken off the heat only by a strong breeze rolling in off the Atlantic.

  ‘When are we going to move?’ Tim asked.

  ‘It should be quite soon, I hope – within a week, I expect. Sekou is going to give you an update in the next couple of days. He says he has some internal squabbles to deal with.’

  Nick was also anxious to get in and see what the situation was really like. As soon as the area around Lofa Bridge was secured, his diamond operation would become theoretically feasible.

  ‘Okay, that’s great, a week’s great.’ Tim looked relieved. ‘I need a bit of R-and-R. My sinuses are fucked. I think it’s the flight and the dust, but I’ll be okay in a few days.’

  That night – for the first time in a long time – I slept soundly.

  With Tim on board, the filming seemed less daunting; and with Nick there as a volunteer and not my employee, I felt liberated from the anxiety that I was somehow aiding his business plans with the rebels. My only real concern was how the rebels would react to me, personally, now that A Journey Without Maps had been broadcast. It was not a flattering portrait of their movement. One former commander, who had moved to Washington to lobby the United States Government on behalf of the LURD, had sent a thinly veiled threat for the lies he claimed the film had propagated. At the time I’d dismissed it as the ranting of a madman – but I had no idea who, or what, was waiting for me over the border

  Tim failed to materialise the next day. His sinusitis had knocked him out. In his absence, Nick and I sat and drank grandes pression beers until dusk at our favourite table on the terrace. It was a close day – the relief the breeze had brought the day before was gone, so we sat wrapped in a cloak of sweaty conspiracy, dissecting the war as the tide washed in beside us. Small, grey-headed sea gulls picked their way across the receding, rancid belt of mud that ringed the hotel. It was turning into another unremarkable, interminable day of waiting and plotting, like so many we’d passed together over the previous twelve months. And then Nick raised his glass and led our conversation down an altogether darker and more unpredictable path.

  ‘So, you won’t believe what I’ve been getting up to now, Mr Brabazon.’

  ‘Oh, no, what is it?’ His face looked suddenly mischievous. ‘This doesn’t involve jumping out of a cargo plane over the Congo, does it?’

  ‘No, man. This is altogether a different mission. It looks like I’m getting involved in regime change now.’

  Regime change? I thought. That’s weird. I can’t really see Nick enjoying Iraq much.

  But it wasn’t Iraq. Grinning from ear to ear, Nick explained that a ‘business associate’ had contacted him with the offer of a job the likes of which had not been seen for a generation.

  ‘I’ve been asked to help overthrow a government.’

  ‘Seriously?’ I wasn’t sure I’d heard the words correctly.

  ‘Ja, it seems so.’

  ‘Where?’ Here? I thought. In Conakry?

  ‘Just along the coast,’ he said, nodding to the rising tide.

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ I muttered.

  He looked serious. The grin was fading. There was, he explained, a small country rich in oil, happily guarded by a tiny, hopeless army ‘not far from here’. He’d been asked to assess the feasibility of overthrowing the Government in a mercenary-led seizure of power.

  ‘Guinea-Bissau?’ I interjected.

  ‘No,’ he replied, ‘wrong direction.’

  It was like playing a bizarre game of Twenty Questions. That left São Tomé and Equatorial Guinea as the most likely candidates. Nick was suddenly coy.

  ‘I can’t tell you now. A few things have to be put in place first.’

  He took a swig of beer, looked at me from across our table. A ripple of nervousness washed through me.

  ‘Sekou is going to help. He’s promised weapons and agreed that we can pick some of their fighters for the main attack force.’

  Sekou, in turn, was to be paid in cash and equipment – particularly the provision of a helicopter.

  Despite guarding the secret of the target country, Nick began to delve into the specifics of his fledgling plan. The operation would be seaborne. A boatload of rebels, specially trained and led by Nick, would be joined by a small contingent of South African mercenaries who would then set out from either Guinea, or Liberia itself – if the rebels could hold on to Robertsport. The mercenaries would then disembark at sea into several smaller boats and storm the ‘island’ at night in a classic beach-head operation.

  ‘They aren’t going to know what’s hit them. We’ll just equip our guys with small arms and a few PKM machine guns. The South Africans will put down a barrage with 60mm mortars once we’re close enough. Sekou is taking delivery of some in the next run. Then we lead them in. Ag, it’s pretty simple. Very much like the ops we did in the army.’

  I didn’t know what to say. It sounded like a recipe for a bloodbath.

  ‘What kind of resistance are you going to meet? Do they have helicopters, or artillery?’

  ‘No, man, it’s just like all these places,’ he said, casting his eyes along the darkening shoreline, ‘they don’t have the military capability to mount a proper defence. The standard of their army is most likely very poor – which is lekker, otherwise it would be a moer of a fight.’

  He explained that the current president, alleged to be a psychotic cannibal whose secret police were renowned for abhorrent human rights abuses, was not co-operating with the oil industry. Once toppled, his exiled political arch-rival would be installed in his place. The pay-off would be lucrative oil contracts for the plotters, and security contracts for Nick. Not only would he train the new president’s army, he’d supply their weapons, too. From what little I could recall, São Tomé didn’t fit the bill; but Bioko, the tiny island province of Equatorial Guinea that sat on top of Africa’s third-largest oil reserves, did. I kept quiet.

  ‘Vok, James, this place is rich. It could be incredible – it’s so small, they could transform it. They have big plans. The guy I’m doing this with says he wants to turn it into the Switzerland of Africa.’

  I sat and digested the information – or at least tried to. Overthrow a country? It was hard to think straight. Is there, I wondered, a moral, or even a legal duty to tell anyone? What Nick was suggesting would break laws in at least four countries. It might even be considered an international war crime. I lit a cigarette. Then another thought crept up on me. You aren’t going to be able to tell anyone – ever. As soon as I opened my mouth to talk about it publicly, Nick would be arrested. I blew a plume of blue-grey smoke into the thick evening air. As well as the moral and legal dimension, there was a professional angle, too. Exposing the operation would be a major scoop: but there was nothing I could do, other than betray my friend, to capitalise on it.

  I didn’t see Nick’s next suggestion coming at all.

  ‘You can film it.’

  ‘I can film it?’

  ‘Ja.’ I must have looked incredulous. ‘This will be a real bloody film for you. You can ride in the boat, up front. It will be a real scoop. It’ll be great for you – an exclusive.’

  I still didn’t follow. Why would Nick want anyone to film this coup? Nick explained: if the exiled president’s new government was to gain international recognition, the operation would have to look like a heroic local uprising.

  ‘And that’s where you come in,’ he smiled, and then laid out the plan.

  As well as the LURD rebel fighters led by a small vanguard of notorious white mercenaries, Nick was going to recruit Portuguese-and Spanish-speaking black African troops. Some of these had been with Nick in the Recces, but most of the men he planned on enlisting had previously served in 32 ‘Buffalo’ Battalion. Nicknamed ‘The Terrible Ones’ by their enemies, they had also provided the bulk of the fighting troops for Executive Outcomes.
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br />   My job, Nick informed me, would be to film the arrival of the new ‘president’ and make him look like the head of a rebellious local army – rather than the protégé of an apartheid-era Special Forces unit. There would be a set-piece handshake at the airport and a victory parade once the fighting had died down – and no white faces on camera. This footage – the only television pictures that would exist – would then be released to the world’s media, buying the new regime crucial time and credibility while it took over the institutions of state, hopefully helping to avoid interference from neighbouring countries. In return, I would have exclusive access to film ‘every aspect’ of the coup from the inside for my own documentary – which I could release (only) once Nick and his pals had been paid by the new president and given diplomatic passports. More than just offering me an opportunity as a journalist, he wanted to co-opt me as a conspirator, making me the propagandist, the Leni Riefenstahl, of his coup d’état.

  ‘It has to look like it’s one hundred per cent a local thing. What do you think? I’m calling it my African Adventure,’ he said flippantly.

  I took another drag on my cigarette and we looked at each other across the table. He was asking me a huge favour – and offering me a huge opportunity. After the months we had spent together, he had learned as much about me and my profession as I had about him and his. He understood that a war reporter is as opportunistic as a mercenary. I needed a war; Nick needed a war. I protected us with the quest for truth my cameras represented; Nick protected us with an assault rifle.

  He was offering me the chance to direct the movie of his own private war – an opportunity that, on the face of it, no sane journalist could agree to.

  I held my tongue. Despite the heat and the sweat and the excitement of going to war, I knew that what I said in the next few seconds could have serious consequences – for my future and our friendship.

  On the one hand, I couldn’t possibly accept. It was illegal; blood would be shed; innocent people would be killed. To partake in the coup, even just with a camera, would mean I’d have blood on my hands, too.