Warlord

by James Steel

  Joseph is numb.

  ‘Hey, come on!’ Karuta shakes him and starts singing a war song to get him over it. He jabs his rifle in the air and shouts at the men to get on their feet. They all jump up, grab their rifles and start jogging on the spot, shaking their rifles in time. Their black faces gleam silver with sweat in the firelight as they sing the words over and over again.

  Hutu boy, why are you sitting down?

  Kill your enemy!

  Kwa! Kwa! Kwa!

  They make machete gestures with their free hands.

  Hutu boy, why are you sitting down?

  Kill your enemy!

  Kwa! Kwa! Kwa!

  Chapter Six

  Sophie’s car pulls up to the barrier and the soldier steps towards her window. He is heavy-set with a fuzz of stubble and a sergeant’s stripes on his uniform.

  She winds down her window and he leans his rifle on the ledge.

  ‘Your papers! Where is your accreditation?’ he says in the aggressive, officious tones of Congolese officials. She smells beer on his breath. As he leans in to take the documents his wrist stretches from his sleeve and she sees he is wearing three gold watches.

  Six other soldiers stand around the car. Their faces are impassive but their eyes flick back and forth watching everything, rifles held across their chests, fingers on their triggers.

  Usually white NGO workers are regarded as neutral in the multi-sided conflict in the province and only get minor hassle for bribes rather than serious assaults. They float around in white Land Cruisers like some magic tribe with ‘No weapons’ stickers on the windshield (an AK-47 with a red cross over it) proclaiming their neutrality, but Sophie still feels nervous. The edge of the manila folder in her grasp is damp with sweat.

  She opens it to show the sergeant. ‘All our papers are in order and we have our permit à voyager here.’ She shows him the document on the top of the stack in the folder.

  He grunts in reply and takes it from her.

  ‘You are in a security zone, this is a military installation here!’ He points at the cement block building with a rusting corrugated iron roof and ochre paint that is flaking off like a skin disease. Bullet holes are dotted across the front of it and there is a larger one where an RPG exploded. Piles of rubbish and plastic bags are caught in the grass and bushes around it. The ground on either side has been used as a latrine by the soldiers and drivers. ‘You must park over there, switch off the engine and deposit the key with the security manager for safekeeping.’ He points to a teenager with a rifle. ‘I will confirm your accreditation with the captain.’

  He snatches the folder away from her and marches into the building.

  She glances nervously across at Nicolas who calmly reverses the vehicle and parks off the road where the teenager is pointing. He then reluctantly hands over the keys and they sit and wait in tense silence. Sophie gets out and paces up and down, glancing at her watch and the building. Nicolas leans against the jeep and lights a cigarette.

  Five minutes later the sergeant comes marching back out with the folder and strides up to her.

  ‘There is a problem with your documents. You must come and see the captain.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your permit à voyager is not present, you must see the captain to explain yourself!’

  Sophie is incredulous and stares at him. ‘My permit à voyager?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It was on the top of the folder.’

  ‘There is no permit.’

  ‘It was on the top of the folder.’ She raises her voice and gestures at him in exasperation, trying to think how he could have missed it. She is tired, hungry, frazzled and desperate to get to the clinic. Her frustration boils over. ‘It was right there! I showed it to you!’ She snatches the folder from his hand, opens it and shows him the place where the blue document had been.

  The sergeant stiffens and glares at her angrily.

  Nicolas is suddenly at her side. ‘Ah, Monsieur le Directeur, can I offer you a cigarette?’

  The sergeant brushes him aside and grabs the folder back from Sophie, jabbing his finger at her and shouting, ‘You are in contravention of regulations on a military installation! You must see the captain immediately!’

  Four other soldiers run over and stand around him.

  Sophie glares back at him, refusing to be intimidated. ‘We have vaccines – humanitarian aid – in the Land Cruiser that will go off in an hour’s time if we don’t get it to the clinic! This is for the children of the Congo! Your children! OK, fine, let’s go and see the captain!’

  She marches off towards the building and the sergeant and the four soldiers hurry after her. He pushes in front of her as she gets to the door and then halts outside a chipped and scratched inner door. He knocks and then opens it and walks in, Sophie follows; she is so angry she is not afraid.

  The room is bare with grey breeze block walls and a hurricane lamp hanging from the ceiling. The captain sits behind an old plywood desk which is empty except for an old IBM PC and keyboard with a power lead but no plug. He stares up angrily at the commotion of their entry; both the sergeant and Sophie’s faces are flushed with anger.

  They both start talking at the same time.

  ‘Here is the illegal traveller!’

  ‘The permit à voyager was on the top of the folder! I showed it to him when he took it off me, you know you have it! I have vaccines to deliver in an hour or they will be ruined!’

  The captain sits and looks at her insolently from his chair, head on one side.

  ‘We can issue you with an emergency permit à voyager for a thousand dollars.’

  ‘A thousand dollars! Jesus Christ!’ She looks at him as if he is an idiot. ‘We don’t pay bribes. Where do you think I am going to get that kind of money!’ She turns and points angrily at the sergeant next to her. ‘You had it! This is ridiculous! Can we stop playing …’

  The captain bangs the table and is on his feet in one fluid move. He switches from angry insolence to rage in the blink of an eye. He moves round the desk to stand in front of her and pulls his pistol out of his holster at the same time. The gun suddenly looks very large and solid as he points it at her.

  ‘You are an alien travelling without the correct documentation! You are coming in here and making accusations against my men! You come in to my office and you do not salute me! Why do you not salute me?’

  He slaps her across the face with his left hand.

  Sophie is stunned. No one has ever hit her before or threatened her with a gun.

  Her indignation suddenly turns to helpless terror and a feeling of total powerlessness. She has overstepped the magic line that surrounds white NGO workers, pushed her luck too far and broken the spell. She is in a small room with five large men. She now knows what it is like to be a local Congolese, totally at the mercy of the men with guns.

  There is nothing she can do, no clever argument, no grand family connections, no degree from Oxford, no right or law that she can wave at them to stop them doing whatever they want to her.

  Chapter Seven

  The megaphone crackles and squawks, ‘Move up!’ and Eve dutifully shuffles forward in the line of refugees.

  The local Red Cross worker at the head of the line wears a fluorescent yellow waistcoat over his white Red Cross tee shirt. He wears the megaphone on a strap over his shoulder, holding a clipboard in one hand and the microphone and a pen in the other. He looks harassed as he tries to tick people off his list and keep the food distribution session under control. It’s only a small refugee camp, at Ikozi in south Kivu, just off the road from Bukavu out to Shabunda, but it still has five thousand people and is chaotic.

  A former headmaster who lives in the camp helps him by measuring out the rice from sacks piled on the ground into the battered bowls and tatty sacks that people have brought with them.

  Eve never wanted this passive life and it still feels alien to her. She was used to the hard work of village life: cooking, washin
g, tending the family vegetable patch. She is just an average girl with average dreams: she hopes one day to get the money to buy a hand-cranked sewing machine so she can set up as a seamstress and repair and make clothes.

  Life has been pretty hard to her so far though. Her first husband, Bertrand, left her when she gave birth to an albino baby, regarding it as unclean. Eve’s own mother had shrieked with fear when the baby had emerged and run out of the hut. Bertrand left to return to his home village and she hasn’t heard from him since.

  Some people do want albinos though. Hundreds are kidnapped and murdered in East Africa every year, their body parts dried and used as charms: tied to fishermen’s nets in Lake Kivu to attract a good catch, ground into powder and sprinkled by miners on the sides of their pits to draw precious metals to the surface, strapped to the front of traders’ trucks to bring them good fortune on journeys.

  Where is my baby?

  The thought of little Marie cut up and used in one of those scenarios is too much to bear.

  Gabriel is the only piece of good news in her life. He met her when he was travelling through her village and was fascinated by her calm manner. The other girls teased Eve about him because he was so ugly. He wouldn’t have been Eve’s first pick but, as one of her friends said, love is a choice as well and in her circumstances she had to be realistic.

  Gabriel is certainly ugly and he scares her sometimes with his intensity but he does also make her laugh. He is always so intent on impressing her, going on about his grand plans, angry in his desire to make money. He talks about his schemes for hours, using terms he has learned and that she doesn’t understand: brand value, profit margins, return on investment. She just sits and looks blank as he rants at her.

  After a while though, he eases up and starts talking about people he has met on his travels. She has never travelled outside her village, but he has been all over the province, to the main towns of Goma, Bukavu and Uvira in the south and even as far as Beni in the goldfields in the far north. When he relaxes he can make her laugh with his stories about scrapes he has got into and deals he has done. That’s when she likes him, when his big jaw opens in a wide white grin and his prominent stomach shakes with laughter. They used to sit on the bench outside her hut and laugh and chat.

  She hasn’t heard from him in a while though; he is overdue from his latest journey. She wonders what has happened to him – will he reject her because of the rape?

  ‘Move up!’

  She shuffles forward and the headmaster bustles around, directing people to fill up their sacks and watching carefully that they don’t take too much. She hands over the chit for her family and then heaves the sack onto her back and walks away slowly and painfully.

  Alex is showing Fang back out to his chauffeur-driven car parked on the gravel drive in front of the house. The April shower has passed and they make small talk about the weather and the best route back to London.

  Alex is relieved that the meeting is over; he isn’t going to take the mission but he feels strangely disconcerted and cannot work out why.

  As he gets to the car Fang turns and shakes his hand. The two tall men stand facing each other.

  ‘I realise that Operation Tiananmen is very large scale and takes a while to get used to but I am confident that once you have had time to think about it you will want to be involved. It would be the largest operation you could ever command.’

  Alex smiles politely. ‘Well, thank you very much for your time in coming here today to explain it to me.’ He shakes the man’s hand.

  He waves the car off as it moves away into the distance down the mile-long drive through the parkland until it passes the beech copse and is lost. He turns and looks at the dogs sitting at the top of the stone steps – his father’s two black labs, Bert and Audrey, that he inherited along with the title and estate when Sir Nicholas died a little while back.

  The dogs miss the old man but Alex doesn’t. His father had been another Blues and Royals officer, a cantankerous alcoholic who had beaten his wife and whose influence had blighted Alex’s career in the regiment. He refused to let Alex go to university, which in the army, effectively barred him from promotion to colonel. Apart from which, in the small and snobbish world of the Household Cavalry, the reputation of drunkenness attached to the Devereux name had always made it hard for Alex to prove himself in the regiment.

  His father’s final summation of his career had come in an argument over the phone during which he had shouted, ‘If you hadn’t been such a fucking failure, the family wouldn’t be in the mess it is!’ Alex had been struggling to disprove this assessment ever since.

  Although Alex bears a grudge against his father and the British upper class, he isn’t going to bear one against the dogs. They need a walk, having been locked up in the kitchen during the meeting.

  ‘Come on!’ he says and walks off briskly round the corner of the house to the rose gardens in front of the Regency façade. The shower has blown over a trellis and he fossicks about, tutting and putting it back up. After that he spends a while throwing an old tennis ball for the dogs and they tangle with each other on the lawn.

  He looks out over the parkland and then walks back round, entering the house from the other end through the door on the terrace into the library that he uses as his study in the red-brick Tudor section of the house. His desk is surrounded with piles of old copies of the Economist and periodicals from Chatham House, Royal United Services Institute, International Crisis Group and other defence think-tanks. The dogs jostle after him, puffing and grinning and wagging their tails. Now he has got his meeting out of the way he wonders what he will do today.

  Life proceeds at a pretty slow pace. The repairs on the house are nearing completion, paid for with the money from his last big operation in Russia. It had fallen into disrepair as a result of his father’s drinking but has now been restored to something like its former glory: the roof has been redone, the dry rot sorted out and the gardens replanted. He’s got a final meeting in Hereford with the English Heritage surveyor but that’s not until next week.

  Alex stops and realises he really is feeling unsettled by the meeting with Fang. He was supposed to be the Englishman at home in his castle, lord of all he surveys, and yet on a personal level he feels unnerved.

  It was like sitting in a room with a global business droid looking at him through the narrow metal vision slits of his titanium glasses. He was a commercial chameleon, with a different name for every market he operated in, a multi-tasking, open-sourcing, integrated business platform capable of working simultaneously in multiple time zones. The guy was ten years younger than him but he was the one driving the meeting, the man in a hurry who wasn’t taking any prisoners. If Alex didn’t accept the project he would just find another way – like his steel delivery in Port Sudan.

  Alex wondered where did the business stop and the person start? The answer was nowhere. Fang was a money-making organism, unimpeded by morality or etiquette. He ate, slept and breathed money.

  It wasn’t just the personality though. It’s the scale and audacity of the vision he presented that makes Alex feel old and out of date. He was talking about infrastructure projects to open up an entire continent. There was a tone of disdain in the way Fang talked about the Western view of Africa and how his was the new vision for the future.

  And maybe he was right? Alex had done his best to trip him up but he hadn’t managed to even make him stumble; the businessman had it all covered.

  But the idea was bonkers.

  It was all very well being young and enthusiastic and having visions about new world orders, but Iraq and Afghanistan had shown very well how the law of unintended consequences came into play when you started naively messing around with other people’s countries.

  Where was the exit strategy?

  What the hell would the US and the UN say to it all?

  The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

  Alex pauses in thought and then turns and makes
his way through the oak-panelled library, the dogs following him. He goes into the medieval hall and then walks across its huge stone flags and into the large archway that leads up into the fortified tower. This is the original part of the house from the time when the area was the lawless Welsh Marches, prone to invasions and cattle rustling from Welsh bandits across the border.

  The eighty-foot-high tower has thick stone walls and he walks up the spiral staircase, stepping in the groove worn into the stone by generations of his ancestors’ feet. He is feeling disconcerted and defensive and somehow the tower feels the right place to be.

  He walks up to the top, opens the narrow wooden door and stands at the battlements. The dogs accompany him and sit smiling up at him uncertainly. The various roofs of the house are below him with their pointed gables and gargoyles, the gardens, parklands and outhouses all clearly visible.

  But Alex stares out over them at the magnificent green hills beyond.

  The captain glares at Sophie, his eyes wide and angry; white spittle flecks his upper lip. She stares at the black hole of his pistol muzzle. It’s 9mm across but looks much larger.

  The soldier behind her pushes her in the back with his rifle and she stumbles forward onto her knees in front of him.

  Sophie is terrified and starts babbling, ‘I’m sorry, terribly sorry, Captain. It’s all a mistake, a terrible mistake. Forgive me please!’

  The door behind her opens and Nicolas slips into the room, speaking quietly and with a large fan of twenty-dollar bills in his outstretched hand. He has hurriedly fished them out of the emergency stock that he carries wrapped in a plastic bag in the petrol tank of the Land Cruiser.

  ‘Ah, Monsieur le Directeur, here is the payment for the permit à voyager, our sincere apologies for forgetting to buy one before we set out.’