by James Steel
For secrecy reasons candidates are not being told where the operation will take place or its precise nature, only that it will involve proper war fighting, not just security work.
The hope is that by the time they get the guys out to Rwanda and working together they will be less likely to leave when they hear the actual details of what they are going to do. Alex knows that most mercenaries are men of action, not that bothered about the finer points of international law, and thinks he can persuade any doubters to stay on by saying that the mission will create a much better world. It’s not perfect but what else can he do?
Col’s interest is waning. ‘So who’s this bloke?’
‘Will you please read the paperwork when I give it to you?’ Yamba looks at him in despair.
‘I hate paperwork.’
Yamba rolls his eyes.
Alex reads out the details. ‘He’s Jean-Baptiste Delacroix, been a captain in the French Foreign Legion …’
‘Oh, what! He’s a Frog! Bludy ’ell!’ Col chucks the papers on the table.
Yamba looked at him incredulously. ‘What’s wrong with the Frogs?’
‘Don’t get me started, don’t get me started. I hate the French.’
‘But you speak French.’
‘That’s different.’
‘But Alex has a French name.’
‘It’s Norman, actually,’ says Alex rather too quickly. ‘Big difference. Anyway, look, this chap’s good, the Foreign Legion doesn’t muck about, Col.’ He reads from Yamba’s notes, ‘Experience in Chad, CAR and West Africa, tours in Afghanistan. Definitely knows what he’s on about.’
Col suddenly becomes positive. ‘OK, that’s great; I am really pleased to have this opportunity to work with our valued European partners. Let’s give him a fair chance and then tell him to fook off.’
He grins at the others.
Alex ignores him. ‘Right, let’s get him in, shall we?’ He heads down to fetch him from reception.
Jean-Baptiste Delacroix is a short, muscular Frenchman full of intense energy. He is in his mid-thirties with a neat beard, light brown curly hair, a pugnacious stance and a ferociously hard handshake. His bright hazel eyes dart around as he meets the team, assessing everything about them.
They settle into their seats and Alex is his usual urbane self. Although his French is good enough to conduct the interview, the main language of command for the unit will be English, so he needs to test the man’s ability.
‘Well, Captain Delacroix, thank you very much for coming here today to see us. Can I start by asking you about your time in the Legion? It has a very good military reputation. What do think you would bring from it to another unit?’
Jean-Baptiste looks at him for a moment. In that instant his mind rushes through his fifteen years of memories and he wonders how he could explain the Legion to an outsider.
‘Well, the Legion is a very different unit,’ he says quietly. ‘It is a state within a state, more like a monastic order. Once you join you are not allowed any personal possessions, no bank account, no civilian clothes. No contact with the outside world for the first stages of training and you cannot marry until you have served five years. So it is very intense but this produces a ferocious professionalism that I believe I would carry over into any other unit.’
Should he talk about his selection course as a private on the ‘Farm’, their isolated training camp in the high snows of the Pyrenees? Two hours of sleep in three days of constant hard physical activity, culminating in an all-night march. They only got through it by working in pairs, one man walking and holding the hand of the other man who slept as he stumbled along behind. Giving up was not an option in a unit whose unofficial motto was ‘March or Die’.
Or should he mention the hand-to-hand combat training that followed for days and nights afterwards? Attacked repeatedly as they slept, bombarded with shouts of ‘Alert! Alert! Alert!’ and then the rain of blows from their instructors. He got used to sleeping with his fists clenched.
Alex nods. He is intrigued: he knows about the Legion’s ferocious training and cannot work out why such an intelligent, sensitive man would have gone through such a process.
‘And can I ask why you decided to join the Legion?’
‘In the Legion you do not ask.’
Jean-Baptiste says it in a completely neutral tone of voice, just a statement of fact.
Alex meets his eye for a moment. They both know that recruits effectively disappear inside the French state when they join, protected from the police and their home countries. After five years’ service they can opt to be allocated a new name and identity. After World War Two the Legion sheltered many Waffen SS soldiers fleeing justice in their homelands.
This is the problem with mercenary recruitment. How can he tell why the men have left their units and what they have been doing? They are asked to bring a full service record but sometimes you have to read between the lines. When he gets round to recruiting nearly a thousand squaddies from all over the world he just won’t have the time to do full background checks.
Will the men be competent at their jobs, will they be inept? Will they have criminal records? Assault on an officer, drug taking, rape, theft – squaddies are not saints, especially those who have left the army.
Alex decides not to push it in this case. Jean-Baptiste’s gaze is straight and unflinching.
‘OK, well, can you tell me what you have been doing since you left?’
The Frenchman is happy to move on. ‘For eighteen months I have been in Paris doing what I originally meant to be. I am a sculptor.’
Alex nods in surprise and Jean-Baptiste smiles. ‘Yes, the Legion was not the natural place for an artist but …’ He gives a genuine Gallic shrug.
Somehow he managed to preserve his humanity in the midst of the fascism. Any disobedience was met with savage beatings – he looked at his corporal wrong on the parade ground once and that night three large NCOs got him in the washrooms and punched his head so hard it banged back against the wall, then shoved it down the toilet, pissed on him and flushed it.
‘…But I am not that commercially successful, so I have come back to my other metier.’
Alex moves the interview on to his time in Afghanistan and the intense combat that he encountered there. Then they give him maps and instructions in English for a difficult company-level operational scenario and five minutes to understand it and come up with a solution.
Jean-Baptiste comes alive, leaning forward over the table, his head flicking back and forth rapidly between the maps as he assesses the situation. His answers are quick, decisive and correct.
When he has left Alex looks at the others. ‘What did you think?’
Yamba nods, impressed. ‘He’s good, he has an excellent service record and he handled the scenario well. He’s definitely someone we could work with.’
Col has spent most of the interview with his arms folded and his eyes narrowed.
Alex looks at him.
‘Well, he’s still a Frog but I suppose he’ll do.’
Chapter Seventeen
Matt Hooper is a newly commissioned sergeant in the Kivu Defence Force but is currently wearing civilian clothing and standing in the arrivals hall of Kigali airport in Rwanda. He is awaiting the arrival of his platoon of men on the flight from Brussels. It’s March, eleven months after Alex’s first meeting with Fang in April, and the plans for the assault and invasion are coming together.
He’s holding a tour rep’s clipboard with a fictitious company logo, Adventure Training and Development Partnership, on the back. All his men are flying in on tourist visas and are down to do adventure training and volunteer development work in rural Rwanda.
Matt taps the barrier in front of him nervously with his biro and his head flicks round as the first passenger comes out of the door from customs. It’s a middle-aged woman and he looks away again.
Matt is twenty-eight and from Norfolk, a real Fenlander, born and brought up amidst mile upon mil
e of flat industrial farmland. A bit of a lad, he joined the Royal Anglians aged seventeen as a squaddie to get out, did two heavy tours in Afghanistan and got promoted to sergeant. His Norfolk accent makes his speech slow but his eyes have that calm look that shows he’s no fool.
He left the army two years ago, got a girlfriend, Danielle, a job selling high-end German kitchens, and then got bored. Now he wants to make a decent whack of money to start his own business.
He spots two likely lads coming through the doors pushing their luggage trolleys. Both have buzzcut hair, tattooed forearms and wear shellsuits.
‘Over ’ere, lads!’ He holds up the clipboard and waves them over to him.
Sean Potts and Jason Hall are both ex-squaddies bored with their lives as South London painters and decorators. Sean is Irish Catholic, has ginger hair and is built like a brick shithouse. Jason is from Deptford and, following in the Marlowe tradition, got involved in a stabbing before deciding to join the army to avoid further trouble. He is now looking to earn three years’ money in six months in order to buy himself a Subaru Impreza, at which point he knows his life will be complete.
Matt gives them his big smile. ‘Come round ’ere.’
He directs them round the barrier to where he wants to corral his platoon of new recruits in a corner of the arrivals hall.
When the last of his twenty-five blokes come through, he ticks them off on his list and checks them over. Big men in their twenties and thirties with thick necks, shaved heads and biceps bulging out of tight tee shirts.
He’s been impressed how the recruitment process has weeded out the unfit and undesirable. He attended a selection day at a paintballing site in the countryside near Heathrow. There were a hundred guys on the day who seemed to have come from all over the world, both NCOs and soldiers. Some looked past it, with potbellies and creaking backs; they hadn’t lasted long on the fitness test and the assault course. The platoon-level exercises with paintball guns had also showed up who could and couldn’t command a platoon in the field. Others on the course were obviously bullshitters and fantasists, walking around in combat jackets with badges sown on that proclaimed they had been in the 82nd Airborne and the Royal Marines.
He hadn’t seen any of that type since he had got to Rwanda two weeks ago. He had been swiftly inducted into the training base in the Virunga Mountains on the border with Congo and had been impressed by how everything had been run like clockwork. Mission security was tight but Regimental Sergeant Major Thwaites had had a quiet word with him and let it be known that the objective was as part of a mission in Southern Sudan to support the newly installed government there.
Matt isn’t that bothered really. The money was great, tax-free as well, and he is doing the job he loved. He is engaged to Danielle now, she wanted a commitment from him before he went off for six months and he was glad to give it. He misses her – there’s no contact until after the op has started in a month’s time, phones and laptops have been confiscated – but all the lads understand that OpSec is important. It is their lives on the line if word gets out.
He looks at his new recruits. He’s got English, Dutch, Romanian, American, Canadian, Danish and Polish soldiers so language is going to be tricky to start with but they have a month of hard training in the mountains before they go on the op so he reckons he can get it worked out.
‘Right, lads, we’re in the two minibuses out the front. So stick your bags in the trailers and let’s get going.’
Jason and Sean look at Matt, sizing him up. His Norfolk accent sounds a bit ‘oo arr’ to their South London ears but he’s on the ball and seems a good bloke, got a big smile.
They drive three hours west to Ruhengiri near the border with Congo. The roads are good but the country is obviously dirt-poor, hardly any traffic around but loads of families trudging along the roadside or up and down the many hills with huge loads of firewood, water and vegetables bundled on top of their heads.
Jason and Sean have both been in Afghanistan and they are experiencing the same feeling of being strangers in a strange land again. Jason is squeezed into a seat next to a large soldier from Romania with very limited English. Normally Jason would take the piss out of him for this but he knows that if they go into combat then this bloke could be the man next to him in the firing line who keeps him alive. The fear of approaching combat focuses his mind and he instead spends the time teaching him words like ‘rifle’, ‘casualty’ and ‘cease fire’. Sean leans over between the seats and they also teach him ‘fuck’, ‘cock’, ‘birds’ and ‘shag’.
Matt is sitting at the front of the bus with a guy that no one else wanted to sit next to. He is a brute of a man, six foot two of muscle, bone and stubble with a spider’s web tattoo on each side of his massive neck. The dome of his shaved head forms a single unit with his shoulders and his arms stick out from his body because of the size of his chest.
‘Stein,’ he says in a humourless German accent and shakes Matt’s hand; it feels like a lump of concrete.
‘So what unit were you in then?’
‘Kar Ess Kar.’
Matt looks at him blankly. Stein spells the letters out with a finger.
‘Oh right, KSK.’
‘Shit,’ he thinks, ‘I’ve got a psychopath here.’ The Kommando Spezialkräfte is the German equivalent of the SAS. He’s met other Special Forces guys like him – totally brutalised by the harshness of their training.
‘Ya, I am in Afghan but then I want a break. I leave, I go to America for six months, I go to California, I drink, I fuck girls. I come back and now I want to fight again.’
He looks at Matt fiercely. His eyes are deep-set under heavy brows and there’s a dangerous gleam in them.
Matt nods and thinks, ‘I’ll need to watch this one.’
They skirt round the edge of Ruhengiri town and bump down off the tarmac onto a dirt road. It starts heading up into the Virunga Mountains, a chain of eight volcanoes along the border with peaks just under fifteen thousand feet that are home to mountain gorillas. The sky clouds over and the bush presses in around them. Sean does a bad American accent for his new mate, Specialist Daz Vitriano from San Diego: ‘In the jungle, man!’
Daz grins and shakes his head.
They climb the eastern slopes of the extinct volcano Mount Karisimbi and drive past a small rusty sign saying ‘Interdit’ marked with a Rwandan army logo. The border is a closed area with a lot of army bases against possible incursion from the FDLR. Jason is now too involved in a conversation with Daz to notice. They are talking about why a Subaru Impreza is a better pulling car than the Mustang that Daz is going to buy when he gets back home with his money.
The conversation cuts off when the bus stops at a small dirt road turning off yet higher into the jungle-covered mountains. A convoy of ten dark green Rwandan army trucks is turning in there, slowly grinding up the gradient and they have to wait. All chat stops and the lads peer anxiously out of the windows. They can see that the trucks are laden with artillery ammunition boxes.
They follow in the dust haze from the trucks and soon stop again at a barrier next to a guardhouse manned by Rwandan soldiers. They get on the bus and carefully check Matt’s roster against the men’s passports. Jason thinks their sergeant looks switched on and dangerous as he glares at each soldier checking his face against his passport photo.
They drive past a sign saying ‘Camp Purgatory’. The road flattens out into a valley floor and passes an area with helicopters, gunships and troop carriers being worked on by mechanics. Jason glances nervously round at Sean. They are back on planet military.
As they drive on, all around are wooden barracks huts up the sides of the valley and a parade square in the bottom of it. Men in camouflage uniforms are moving around quickly and with a sense of purpose, unloading the ammunition trucks. They can hear the sound of a helicopter swirling around in the hills and nearby is the regular crack of small arms fire from a firing range.
The buses pull up in a line on the parade
square in front of an HQ building. There’s a flagstaff with a unit insignia flying next to it, a large red ‘1’ on a green shield.
Matt Hooper pulls open the door of their bus and yells, ‘Right, get out! Get your kit, fall in here! Let’s go!’ He’s not smiling now.
Jason and Sean can see why. Standing on the veranda of the HQ building with his hands on his hips, watching everything very closely, is a classic British army hardman type. He is small with shaved hair, moustache, neat uniform and an RSM’s badge of office on a broad leather strap on his left wrist.
Behind him is a tall, stern-looking white officer and a scary-looking black bloke. They were introduced on their selection course as Mr Hughes and Mr Jones and are watching them closely now.
Matt gets them sorted into rough ranks and the small figure struts over to address them. His voice booms out in a harsh Lancashire accent and the men flinch at the volume.
‘Right, my name is Regimental Sergeant Major Thwaites, and you are now in my regiment! S’arnt Hooper will get you sorted out with your mess and your scoff tonight and you will commence training tomorrow morning.’
Col watches their eyes switch their gaze internally as the message sinks in. This is not going to be a fun adventure holiday; they are back in the bullshit.
‘The commanding officer of the regiment, Colonel Devereux, will now address you. Two Platoon! Atten-tion!’
The response to the drill command would not be acceptable in the Guards but even with the language difficulties the men can work out what is going on and they stand rigidly to attention and eye their new boss carefully for clues to what their new life will be like. Is he taking things seriously? Will this be some sort of slack-arsed, wild and crazy mercenary unit?
Alex steps up, his hands on his hips, leaning forward to address them. His combats are smartly pressed and his maroon beret is worn at the right angle. His voice is loud and deep.
‘Gentlemen, you have made it through the selection process and now have the honour of serving in the First Regiment, Kivu Defence Force.’
