Warlord

by James Steel

  The trucks drive on and slow again to climb over a high ridge, the gears grind and they swing back and forth up the switchbacks before finally swooping down the other side in a series of sickening turns. Joseph begins to feel very ill – at times the back of the truck is hanging over a steep drop. He throws up over it and huddles down with his head inside his tee shirt.

  Finally the turns stop and he sticks his head out, they are driving over a fast-flowing river on a bridge of metal girders. He looks up ahead and sees that they are entering a steep-sided valley – Lubonga, the main FDLR base.

  The aircraft has no pilot but it manoeuvres adroitly on the dirt airstrip, lining up to take off.

  The Israeli-made Heron unmanned aerial vehicle is the size of a sleek, dark grey Cessna but with only a bulge where the cockpit should be. The rudders on its twin tail boom waggle and the wing flaps adjust. The rear-facing propeller between the two tailfins revs and it speeds down the runway.

  Alex watches it anxiously; they only have one Heron and the runway is short and surrounded by hills. They do have one other drone, called a Ranger, that can be catapulted off a ramp on the back of a lorry, but they will use it more when they are over the border and don’t have a runway for takeoffs.

  Like its namesake, the Heron is an ungainly flyer; it lumbers off the ground and then jerks up into a steep climb to clear the ridge in front of it. It is sunset and he watches it disappear over the hills into the rapidly rising gloom.

  He turns and looks at Major Mordechai Eisenberg. ‘Looks OK?’

  Mordechai nods. ‘Yes, it always takes off like a brick.’

  He is the head of the Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance unit, or ISTAR for short. He and his team are part of an Israeli company called Angel Systems who are now working for the Kivu Defence Force. Mordechai is forty, tall, lean and tanned, with a large hawkish nose and a permanently grim expression. After years of experience with the Israeli Defence Force and Mossad, fighting the PLO, Hamas and Hezbollah, he tends to assume the worst in life.

  More recently he helped the Sri Lankan government win its campaign against the Tamil Tigers. Alex hired him because he has battle-tested intelligence gathering systems and an experienced team of analysts used to operating in a tropical environment. They not only gather the intelligence but also process it to track insurgents and produce a real-time target set for counterinsurgency strikes.

  The Heron is off on its first mission over the border into Kivu to recce their main target. It’s April, a month after the regiment came together and started training at their base in Rwanda. The invasion will start in a few weeks time in May at the beginning of the dry season.

  ‘OK, let’s get back to base and see what it comes up with.’

  They walk over to a jeep, climb in alongside a few technicians and drive off up the valley back to headquarters.

  At the drone control desk, on one side of the operations room, two technicians are sitting side by side at a computer console. The first is flying the plane with a joystick; in front of both of them are two screens, one on top of the other. The top one shows a map of where the plane is, with a vertical readout of its altitude and flight data. The lower screen shows what the various sensors in the large pod underneath the drone can see.

  The second man has a larger-scale map up on his screen and taps it with a pen. ‘The Lubonga base is here, it’s about fifty miles, so at …’ he checks the speed readout ‘…about ninety miles an hour we will be over the target in half an hour.’

  The Lubonga valley is the place where their political contacts in Kinshasa and Unit 17 have indicated that the FDLR is concentrating its forces.

  The Congolese government has always maintained covert links with the FDLR; they fought together for six years against the Rwandans during the main Congo war. They have now duped the FDLR into concentrating their troops by telling them that the Congolese President will demand that UN troops leave Kivu shortly as part of a drive to take more control of the country for himself. This has encouraged the FDLR commanders to bring their troops in out of the bush and into the Lubonga valley.

  Alex knows that if he is to hit the FDLR hard in a surprise attack he will have to strike them here, so the drone is going to recce the layout of the base and its defences.

  He nods, leaves the Israelis to get on with flying the machine and turns to the operations room. Yamba, Col, Arkady, his six rifle company commanders and other senior officers are all sitting on chairs in a semicircle in front of two large plasma screens on a wall.

  They alone in the regiment know that the mission objective is Kivu and not southern Sudan. Alex didn’t want some scrounging squaddie with a hidden mobile phone to try to leak the story to the press for a few quid. Uppermost in his mind has been the fake pictures given to the Mirror for a few grand by some soldiers purporting to show the beating of Iraqi prisoners. Piers Morgan might have lost his job over it for being sloppy but he isn’t going to take the risk with his men’s lives, or his own. He is planning to be in the helicopters going in to attack Lubonga.

  All that is showing on one screen at the moment is a ghostly black and white silent image from the drone’s infrared camera as it looks down over the mountains. The image drifts gently across the terrain of valleys and forest. It’s not a Hollywood blockbuster but everyone is watching it carefully, getting a feel for the difficult terrain that they will be operating in. All the officers have pens and pads on their knees poised for when they get over the target.

  It’s going to be a long session, though; the drone can stay airborne for fifty hours. It lumbers on through the night, its specially silenced engine producing only a low whirring noise. Eventually the second technician looks at his on-screen map and taps it with a special pen to set up a box search pattern and locks the drone into it. The small satellite dish inside the dome on the top of the drone tilts to stay locked onto its satellite uplink. It receives the information; the onboard computers process it and the plane banks into the surveillance pattern.

  A sensor pod, the size and shape of a football, is suspended from metal brackets under it in a gimbals mount. It twists as the drone moves and its all-seeing infrared eye sends back its images.

  Alex looks at the grey pictures with crosshairs in the centre of the screen and data readouts ranged around the edge. He can see the sides of the valley and a road along the bottom of it, then the image drifts over huts and he can see people moving about. To them it’s pitch dark and they have no idea that an angel of death is drifting overhead. Alex has a weird cold-blooded feeling; watching people go about their normal life and planning how to kill them.

  The surveillance continues over the course of the next day and they get a detailed picture of the layout of the valley and the camp: barracks, dining halls, ammunition dumps, trench systems and gun emplacements.

  They also observe the routines of the men there and find what they think is the main command area. The unblinking eye locks onto it and they watch a column of four trucks come across the bridge over a river at the bottom of the valley and drive up into the main base. The men jump down and can be seen being greeted and then taken off to their barracks.

  All this is taped and noted by the commanders planning how they will take these men on in battle and defeat them.

  The Promised Land

  Chapter Nineteen

  The two undercover Unit 17 men have been hanging around the mobile phone relay station for several days now, selling beers, Coke and Fanta from a portable kiosk with a tatty parasol over it. They haven’t had much business; the relay station is on the edge of town, but no one pays them any attention.

  It’s early May and the initial operations to support the invasion have begun.

  The men have been watching the station very carefully, making a note of when the staff arrive and leave and getting to know the security guard who comes on in the evening to guard the gate in the barbed wire fence around the big telephone mast. They split some beers with hi
m each night before they wheel their kiosk back into town.

  Mobile phones are big in Kivu. They are an easy source of revenue for the many new providers: all pay-as-you-go, cash up front, with no landline infrastructure. They have a high penetration in the province and every village clubs together to get one. This mast is the main relay station for signals from masts on the hills west from there out towards Mount Bitoy and Walikale.

  The two men watch the staff leave at the end of the day and the local boss of the station locks up and hands the keys over to the security guard with his tatty uniform, shotgun and machete.

  It gets dark quickly and a pickup truck with four Unit 17 men in it stops down the street. The men get out; one is carrying a holdall. They circle around to an alley at the back of the station and slip black balaclavas over their heads.

  The two vendors pack up their stall and wheel it over to the guard. ‘Ah, brother!’ they call out cheerfully holding up a cool Primus.

  ‘Ah, brother!’ he laughs as he takes the beer and the two men move in close to him.

  Major Zacheus Bizimani sits on top of the old lorry as it grinds forward in the queue at the border crossing into Goma.

  Around him are twenty men, women and children all clinging on to the top of a load of sacks full of charcoal. They are all Rwandans going to visit relatives across the border in Kivu and have brought chicken coops, goats, mattresses and huge bundles of belongings tied up in brightly patterned cloths.

  Zacheus is wearing a grubby tracksuit top and some old shorts with large rips in them. He looks down past his flip-flops and watches the border police as they haggle with the driver. The lorry looks decrepit, a large crack running across its windscreen and rusty body panels.

  The old gap-toothed driver grumbles but pays the bribes and they let him pass. The truck pulls slowly away and drives on through Goma and then out and up the road into the hills to Masisi.

  ‘Hey, this is my stop,’ a woman shouts to Zacheus and he bangs on the roof of the cab to tell the driver to let her and her children off. Eventually all the passengers depart and Zacheus gets into the cab with the driver.

  By late afternoon they are in the hills and forests and drive through the area of high ground that peaks in the cloud-wrapped mass of Mount Bitoy. They skirt the mountain to the north and begin to come south again into the Lowa river valley. The old man chews nuts and chuckles to himself as he steers the truck around the hairpins.

  ‘Slow down, it’s coming up.’

  ‘Right,’ the man says through a mouthful of nuts.

  They stop at a steep track and the truck heaves itself up the slope into the woods. Zacheus takes out a GPS device from a compartment hidden under the floor by his feet and switches it on.

  They bump along the track for a mile and then come into a small clearing. The GPS device chirrups as they emerge from under the thick cover of trees and it acquires a signal.

  Zacheus checks a compass and gets the man to line the truck up on a bearing facing northwest. After manoeuvring to and fro the truck stops and the engine shuts off.

  There is absolute silence.

  Zacheus looks around the clearing and sees figures walking towards them through the trees. He jumps down from the cab and goes over and talks to the Unit 17 men dressed in civilian clothing.

  The soldiers wheel five 125hp dirt bikes out of the bush into the clearing, strap sacks of goods to the front handlebars and stuff wicker panniers full of baggage before mounting up, two to a bike, and driving off down the trail. Five men remain behind with the old man and the lorry.

  It gets dark but the motorbike drivers pull night vision goggles from their bags, fit them on their heads and then continue on up the mountain trail. Eventually it becomes too steep and they wheel the bikes off the track and conceal them in a large clump of smilax bushes.

  The men move about quickly and purposefully, pulling packs and webbing from their luggage panniers. They each quickly assemble and load a silenced MP5 submachine gun with a folding stock and pack grenades and knives into their webbing.

  Zacheus checks the GPS again against his compass and looks up the slope. The men form up behind him and he leads off.

  Sophie Cecil-Black holds up her hands. ‘OK, everyone, can you just settle down and let’s get started.’

  The fifteen NGO workers and six local staff in her team are crammed into the living room of the charity’s villa on the outskirts of Goma. It’s hired from a local businessman and has been well used by generations of aid workers on their tours. The cane sofas are stained and sagging and the coffee table is marked with beer bottle rings and cigarette burns from late night boozing sessions.

  It is 1st May, midmorning, and the aid workers sit on the floor, cram on the sofa and chairs or stand behind them, cradling mugs of coffee. Standing at the front, Sophie has great presence; she’s tall and carries her head high. She looks over them – bright, young, committed men and women from all over the world dressed like her in jeans and tee shirts.

  ‘OK, so I have got us all together to discuss the security situation. As you know the UN have raised the alert level to Condition Charlie earlier this week because of an unspecified threat. We are supposed to stay at our duty stations and all nonessential travel is banned.’

  Along with the other charities in Goma she has pulled her field workers in from outlying areas in the hills, hence the overcrowded villa. There is a lot of fear in local communities and the aid workers are all on edge. Sophie cares about her team and takes their security very seriously.

  ‘A lot of the current tension started with the death of General Sabiti last summer. Has anyone picked up any word of what might actually be happening?’

  ‘Well, no one believes the petrol tanker crash story, that’s a given.’ As usual Natalie is the first to open her mouth. She’s sitting on the floor with her iPad on her knees, taking the chance to use the house’s connection to the internet landline.

  ‘Yeah, that’s just bullshit, man,’ says Dirk from Holland. ‘I don’t know if Kinshasa was thinking people would actually believe that it was an accident. I mean, him and his entire group of ten bodyguards all killed, with no witnesses – come on.’

  He looks round the room and there are nods from everyone.

  Sophie agrees. ‘OK, so there’s all sorts of rumours going around: Sabiti fell out with Kinshasa, he fell out with Oloba, the Rwandans are behind it and are going to invade again.’

  Mariana, a Spanish worker, chips in. ‘I’ve heard a lot of stories about FDLR troops on the move from our people up country,’ she says. ‘I don’t know where they are going but they have been attacking villages in Walikale district and then moving on.’ She shrugs and looks around; again there are nods of agreement and other people tell stories they have heard of FDLR troop movements.

  Charlie, an English public school type who has recently been making moves on Sophie that she has haughtily ignored, adds, ‘Well, I’ve been trying to get through to my team in Walikale but all the mobile phone networks went dead last night, haven’t heard a peep from them since then.’

  Concerned conversations start up around the room.

  Sophie calls them back together. ‘OK, OK. So no one seems to know what …’

  ‘Hey!’ Natalie looks up from her iPad and interrupts her in a shrill tone. ‘My internet connection cut off just like that. What the hell is going on?’

  Chapter Twenty

  Alex is standing in front of another group of people. He also looks tall and commanding.

  ‘Right, gentlemen, this is the battleplan for Operation Wrath, which is an assault on the Lubonga valley, the break-in battle for our campaign in Kivu in two days’ time on 4th May.’

  He pauses and grins wryly. ‘Not Sudan, as I am afraid some of you might have thought.’

  He looks round the thirty officers and senior NCOs present. These are the captains, lieutenants and sergeants who will be in charge of the platoons going into the assault.

  Sergeant Matt Hooper
looks back at him with fierce concentration. This man holds his life in his hands and if the plan is bad then he and a lot of the men in this room will die. Matt absorbs the deception and thinks, ‘Fair enough.’ Colonel Devereux has already shown in the recruitment and training of the regiment that he is a switched-on commander and it’s reassuring to know he takes operational security seriously.

  Alex looks back at the large-scale model of the Lubonga valley made out of sand on the floor of the briefing room. The men are hunched in around three sides of it and Alex stands at the top of the valley with a PowerPoint screen behind him.

  ‘The FDLR have chosen this valley as their main base for good reason. It is a very strong defensive position.’

  He starts pointing out features with a long cane.

  ‘The valley runs northwest off the slopes of Mount Bitoy. That’s off the model here, so have a look at the first aerial shot.’ They glance at the colour printouts in their hands and can see a high-altitude picture of a ragged peak rising up over eight thousand feet.

  ‘The mountain is covered in dense forest and we cannot find any landing zones on it anywhere.

  ‘Now, carved into the side of it are a series of steep river valleys. This one has the river Lubonga running down it for just over three miles.’ He indicates the blue piece of string down the middle of the model. ‘At the foot of the valley it flows out into the larger river Oso. This is the only road into the valley via a bridge over the Oso.

  ‘We’ve had a drone up over the valley and have a good idea of where the main concentration of enemy barracks, headquarters and ammunition dumps are. We estimate that they have about two thousand men and a similar number of family members.’ He points to little flags with symbols on them dotted along the floor of the valley. ‘They have also cleared some areas for fields and we will use these for landing zones later on in the assault.