The truck behind us had taken a direct hit from an RPG. Under the rattle of machine-gun fire, I could hear Tim swearing.
‘Fuck. I can see them. They look so calm. It’s incredible.’
Tim could see Government soldiers eighty yards away, firing at us. He was still clicking away with his Rolleiflex – an old-fashioned stills camera that needed a fiddly new roll of paperbacked film loaded into it every twelve frames.
‘Here,’ he said, handing me another shot roll.
I licked and glued the paper leader closed, and put the shot roll between my teeth like a yellow cigar as I changed videotape myself. We lost some window glass as the Range Rover was strafed by rifle fire. With the near-side doors wedged shut with sacks of looted rice, there was no option other than to exit the vehicle by opening the off-side doors onto the incoming rounds. There, off the road and up a slight incline, sat a line of Government soldiers plugging away at us. We danced around the vehicle, and then flattened ourselves behind a wall.
‘Shit, the tapes,’ Tim said, getting up again.
We’d forgotten the grab-bag.
‘No, man,’ I cried after him, but it was too late.
Sprinting round the car, he opened the door again and reached in for the precious black rucksack. Bullets snapped overhead as he vaulted the wall, bag flying in front of him.
‘Please don’t do that again,’ I begged, ‘that was ridiculous.’
By this point, even experienced rebels were at the point of despair. The retreat had become a turkey shoot. They were taking casualties right down the line, not just up front. Engulfed by clouds of acrid blue cordite smoke, almost every rebel was now firing a Kalashnikov assault rifle on fully automatic into the bush by the side of the road. Over the deafening roar of their last remaining rounds of ammunition, Tim and I ran for cover behind a row of houses. I braced for impact. None came. We made it to the houses. A young man, a refugee, ran up to me and clung on, desperate.
‘Save me,’ he begged, ‘save me. I nah wan’ die. I nah sol’iah man.’
He was crying; his arms were closing around my waist. He was hysterical. I could smell the sweat and fear on him.
All I could think was Execution Squad. Any one of these civilians could be contracted to kill us. A surge of anxiety gripped me. I slapped him hard across the face with the palm of my hand.
‘Pull yourself together,’ I shouted. ‘Get a fucking grip.’ A rebel saw what was happening. ‘Get this guy off me, will you?’
The armed teenager pulled him clear and stuck the barrel of his Kalashnikov into the crying man’s guts.
‘You wan’ me shoo’ ’im?’
In my panic, for a split second, I wanted him to pull the trigger.
‘No, no, no,’ I said, coming rapidly to my senses, ‘just get him out of here.’
I looked at my potential assassin and saw a frightened, shellshocked man. I put my hand on his shoulder.
‘It’s okay. You’re going to be okay.’
Finally, we rejoined the vehicles as Bushmaster sprinted to his .50-calibre machine gun and went to work. The convoy punched its way out of the ambush, and over the bridge. We sped clear of the city as the rains came with a vengeance. A looted World Food Program truck, loaded with civilian refugees, overturned on the slippery highway, crushing to death dozens of women and children hitching a ride in the back. The city that had seemed to teeter on the edge of defeat, before half-swallowing us, had spat us back into the bush.
Within another hour we were back in Tubmanburg, exhausted, confused, embarrassed that our own relief to be alive contradicted so sharply the rebels’ sense of defeat. Dragon Master walked past us, and we gave each other mock, unsmiling salutes.
My nerves were drawn tight by those last hours of filming. Tim was pale. He sat in the rain by the side of the road, silently smoking a cigarette. I knew then that we had to leave, death warrant notwithstanding. I couldn’t go back in; even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t send Tim back in. I’d kept the war as my own private affair for so long. Perhaps it was finally time to give it up.
Back at the house we found Rocket. Miraculously he was feeding himself, spooning rice into his mouth, dribbling a bit. His eyes were focused, and the screaming, we were told, lasted only for an hour or so a day.
‘How’s it going, Rocket?’ I asked.
He looked at me and smiled. I wanted to cry: for him, for me, for the dozens and dozens of people whose lives we’d just seen ended – but no tears would come.
Forty-eight hours later Tim and I left Liberia, and the war. I called Jonathan Stack in Monrovia. He had access to Taylor, and was filming his part of the documentary as per plan. I told him that Tim and I had enough on tape to make the film work; everyone agreed it was time to go. I called Kathi, too. We hadn’t really spoken since I arrived in Liberia; she was beside herself with worry.
‘Come home, sweetie,’ she said, ‘and tell me all about it.’
But home was, in truth, not where I wanted to go. I was high on the rush of our escape, and preoccupied with the thought of joining Nick’s coup – and investigating the plot behind it. Even the thought of the stuffy flat in London made me feel claustrophobic.
‘I was about to call the Americans, I’ve been so worried,’ she continued. ‘I think they would have sent a helicopter for you, you know, if it had come to it.’
There was no need. Negotiating with the British embassy, Frank had fulfilled his promise – and the Mano River Bridge was opened specially for us. We bade our farewells; Cobra remained defiant.
‘Lor’ Forces wi’ bring Taylah dahn,’ he assured me. ‘I wi’ brin’ Taylah dahn.’
I had lost count of the number of times I had heard the rebels promise to bring Taylor down. LURD’s prospects were better than they had ever been, but with the American Government now directly engaged in efforts to secure a ceasefire, it looked increasingly likely that Cobra and Conneh would be allowed to seize an outright military victory. What was more, ammunition re-supplies from Guinea were still erratic – especially RPGs and large-calibre bullets. While the rebels looked firmly entrenched in Tubmanburg, it wasn’t clear that they would ever be able to break through Taylor’s defences.
As we were unloaded into the hands of the suspicious Sierra Leone authorities, one rebel commander waved a long goodbye from behind the barbed wire on the bridge, wishing us a safe return.
‘Nex’ time Monrovia!’ he cried.
His black T-shirt blared in clean, white letters: This is Not the Life I Ordered.
14
ARMS AND THE MANN
I found Nick in the tiny bar of the Comfort Hotel, hunkered down five kilometres from Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport’s busy runways. He was back in his chinos-and-checked-shirt look – notepad and pen poking out of his breast pocket. I’d last seen Nick only four weeks earlier, as he climbed into a battered four-by-four with General Cobra in Tubmanburg. It felt like a lot longer. My anger at being abandoned by him had been assuaged by the simple relief of survival. It was good to see him.
‘Mr Brabazon, I presume?’
Nick stood up, and we shook hands.
‘Nick, you really do take me to some wonderful places.’
The best that could be said of the hotel bar was that it was functional. Its wipe-clean atmosphere was designed to be passed through, not relished. Nick rolled his eyes and ordered me a beer.
Nick had called me less than forty-eight hours after I’d got back from Liberia. He was travelling to Paris and wanted me to meet him there, immediately.
‘There’s a friend of mine I’d like you to talk to,’ he’d informed me. ‘It should be very interesting. Can you make it?’
I was exhausted. The day before, Mick at the Foreign Office had called to arrange lunch. Then I’d cut and voiced a special report on the battle for Monrovia on the BBC Six O’Clock News. Liberia was no longer a hard sell: it was lead news. Tim’s agent had also managed to wrangle us a major front-page article in the Guardian magazine, whi
ch they wanted immediately. By the time Nick called, I was already looking forward to escaping London.
Irrespective of the meeting he had planned, I was glad I’d flown out to meet him. It was unlikely I’d be making another trip to Liberia, and it was good to chew over the fat of the last month with him. I filled him in on the two-day fire-fight in the capital.
‘Jonathan’s still there,’ I told him, ‘you know, filming on the other side. Taylor doesn’t know we’re working together. His updates make for grim listening: the city’s under siege – it seems Taylor controls almost no territory outside the capital except for isolated pockets here and there, like Ganta, up in the northeast. Despite all the press coverage, the Brits are still after me. I had lunch with that guy from MI6, or wherever, yesterday. They’re mad keen to work out what Sekou’s plans are.’
Mick had also quoted to me the name of the ship that the rebels were using to ferry ammunition to the front line. I’d pleaded ignorance. Nick took the information in and smiled.
‘Ja, it’s a big fuck-up in Monrovia. Everyone is being watched. I’ve just got back from there myself.’
I smiled, too, and nodded, and then realised what he’d said.
‘What, Monrovia? Are you insane? What on earth were you doing there?’
Nick and I both risked arrest and execution if we were caught there – a privilege I’d extended to Tim as well. In fact, Tim and I had enjoyed a narrower escape than we’d appreciated at the time. Back in Freetown, Colonel Frank met us and went into more detail about the contract on our lives. Taylor had offered $10,000 each for us. The call ordering our assassination had been picked up by British Intelligence at GCHQ in Gloucestershire and relayed to the people most likely to get us the message. Frank had been wrong in one respect – the British had done as much as they could to help, after all. Mick had possibly been more helpful than he was admitting, having claimed himself over lunch not to be aware of the origin of the tip-off. Looking for me during the LURD rebel retreat, Government soldiers had found a badly wounded Lebanese man hiding in the ruins of his shop and hauled him back to their HQ believing they’d bagged me, instead. He didn’t survive.
‘Ja, well, it was quite uncomfortable to say the least. Piet brought me in and I hid in a hotel for two days.’ He took another sip of beer. ‘And then he introduced me to Taylor’s son, Chucky.’
Chucky, a renowned sociopath, was the commander-in-chief of the Government army’s infamous Anti-Terrorist Unit, whose initiation rituals, the rebels assured me, boasted – among other delights – the drinking of human blood.
‘Bloody hell! Did he know who you were?’
‘Ja. He knew, and I told him about you – that I’d brought you in – and that I’m working with Sekou. Taylor wants me to spy for them. Sekou already knows. He’s going to give me some info to pass over, to make it look real. It looks like I’m becoming a double agent,’ Nick explained, coolly. ‘Sekou’s been flown to Nigeria, by the way, on Obasanjo’s private plane, to discuss peace terms. After that he’s asked me to go with him to the next round of talks in Italy and then Ghana.’
‘Right. I see. They’re really relying on you. Did Chucky have anything to say about me?’
‘I wouldn’t recommend a trip there yourself. I don’t think they found our film very amusing. It was not a good feeling. I was quite paranoid, even. You never know what these guys are going to do, or when.’
I was as perplexed as I was amazed.
‘But why were you there? Man, they could’ve had your nuts clean off.’
‘Taylor wants to buy a helicopter gunship. Piet brought me in to discuss a deal with one of Taylor’s women called Fina – I’m not sure if it’s his wife or what – but we can use her for our own purposes. The Russian Government has ten HIND helicopter gunships – six of which are fully operational – sitting in a factory in the Ukraine. They’ve been re-fitted like new, but the end-user purchase fell through, so they’re stuck in the factory.’
I wasn’t sure where this was going.
‘If Taylor gets a gunship up and running, the LURD is fucked,’ I thought out loud.
‘Ja, they’d take a moering for sure. But now I know he wants one, I can stop him from getting one. We can slow down the whole deal. It’s a great opportunity.’
Nick was smiling now.
‘These are full-spec, combat-ready Mi-24s. They’re being sold off very cheaply by an arms dealer I know who is friends with the Bulgarian president. They’re around four hundred thousand dollars each, with all the paperwork included. The idea is to get two of them for ourselves, to support the other job we discussed, and base them at that big airfield in Conakry. Sekou’s cleared it with the president.’ Nick drank a mouthful of beer, and added as an afterthought, ‘I’m also looking for an Mi-8 or Mi-17 for the rebels so they can clean up the Government lines and re-supply their troops easily. We’ve made arrangements to move aviation fuel to Voinjama. We would re-fuel there, and then fly straight to Monrovia or wherever.’
My crash course in arms dealing was going up a gear. I glanced around the room. Except for a middle-aged couple chattering in French at each other over tiny cups of coffee a few tables away, we were alone.
‘So, basically, Taylor’s never going to see any hardware – and the troop-carrying chopper for the rebels would be a kind of part payment for using their support in the other operation?’ Nick nodded. ‘And then you would use the HINDs on the other attack. Isn’t range a problem?’
I never mentioned the name of the ‘other place’. I wanted neither the embarrassment of putting him on the spot by asking directly, nor the possible legal responsibility of formally being told where the operation would take place.
‘The gunships – one or two of them – would be put on the ship from Conakry. The other possibility is that we put one inside an Ilyushin cargo plane and fly it in.’
We both thought about that for a moment.
‘We used the HIND very effectively in EO in Sierra Leone. It would be lekker to have them, but it’s not completely necessary. It’s just extra insurance.’
He confided that he now had a serious financial backer for the purchase. Nick seemed both delighted and slightly bemused by the implications of what he was proposing.
‘Vok, I can hardly believe all this is going along so well. Every week brings a new mission now,’ he laughed.
‘So this operation is definitely going ahead – the African Adventure?’
‘One hundred per cent.’
The order had been placed, and the helicopters would be available in six weeks. Regime change was what the meeting with his friend tonight was all about. The Americans and Nigerians were onside, he thought.
‘I’m not sure of the exact details. They’ll use “oil unrest” as an excuse for intervention in the place we’re going.’
Nick was letting me know only as much as he wanted, while reinforcing the idea that the operation was not only viable, but bankrolled. I was trying to work out if all his planned operations were linked – and if so, how.
‘And the Congo job, is that still on?’
Nick’s original plan of arming rebels in the Congo had seemed a lot more plausible after Kathi had confirmed that the capital, Kinshasa, was a hub of illegal weapons transfers – often facilitated by Russian dealers, sometimes en route to Liberia.
‘Ja. I’m calling that my “American Coup” now.’
‘Oh lord, really? Do I want to know this?’
‘Ja,’ Nick laughed again, ‘you do. We’ve had some interesting conversations with them about it. It seems the North Koreans are busy trying to smuggle uranium out of a mine near Lubumbashi in Katanga. The people I’m dealing with want to run the place as an independent country, and the Americans are very interested in the North Koreans.’
‘And they’ll support the Katangese if the Koreans get the boot?’ I cut across him.
Southern DRC was a war zone – with different neighbouring countries, particularly Zimbabwe, plundering its
resources for all they were worth.
‘I hope so,’ Nick chuckled.
My head was starting to spin with the geo-political ramifications of Nick’s plans. Even if the operations went wrong, the consequences could be huge. We finished the drinks and went back to our rooms to rest before our evening meeting. Everything Nick was suggesting was unquestionably illegal, supported by the Americans or not. As I put my card-key to the lock I imagined a masked assassin inside, waiting for me with a silenced pistol. There was already one definite contract on my life, albeit one unlikely to extend outside of Monrovia. If word of my connection to Nick’s plans spread, who else would want to have a go? I was already known to the Americans – who could easily get Frank to tell me to piss off, or shut up. But the Congolese? The Equatoguineans? The Nigerians? My only solace, as I turned the handle and entered the tiny – and, mercifully, empty – room, was that the governments of the countries in question couldn’t run a bath, never mind an intelligence service.
At around eight o’clock that evening, Nick and I wandered over to the only restaurant in the village to find his friend already waiting for us at the table.
‘Hello, I’m Simon Mann.’ The bespectacled, slightly built man in his late forties shook my hand and smiled in welcome. ‘How d’ you do?’
‘Pleased to meet you.’
‘Yes, you too. Nick’s told me a lot about you.’
His accent was clean and crisp, infused with the camp lilt of the British upper class.
‘Yeah, we’ve had some interesting adventures over the last year. Pretty intense, actually.’
I pulled up a chair, and made to sit.
‘Excuse me,’ Simon said quickly, ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
He turned his back on the table and threaded his way to the lavatory.
‘Nick,’ I hissed, ‘is that the guy from EO?’
Nick nodded. One of the brains behind the Executive Outcomes mercenary army, Simon Mann was a legendary professional soldier – and political deal-maker. Ex-G Squadron SAS, he’d also co-founded Sandline International, a private military company that had famously been implicated with the British Foreign Office in supplying weapons to Sierra Leone. He was, by reputation, very experienced in African warfare. I was astonished. I’d had no real idea whom I’d be meeting, or why – another soldier, perhaps, or a contact like Piet in Monrovia. Simon was in another league. Nick, it seemed, was serious.
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