Warlord

by James Steel

  Ciacola sees this and knows he has scored a direct hit. Alex looks at him questioningly. ‘So what do you want me to do?’

  ‘We want you to continue to resolve the security situation but we also want you to ensure that democratic elections do actually take place and that a Western, democratic model of government is established here. We do not want Kivu becoming a high-profile poster boy for the new Chinese way of running the world with some sort of managed capitalist dictatorship.’

  Alex looks back at him steadily, thinking hard. He doesn’t want to seem to give in to Ciacola’s threats but he can’t afford to be arrogant about them either.

  ‘Well, as I said, the reality is that those decisions are not within my remit. I am a paid employee of the coalition of interests and I do what I am told.’

  He knows it sounds weak even as the words leave his mouth.

  ‘Oh, come on, Colonel Devereux. We both know that you are the military power behind this project and that if you don’t support what is happening then it won’t happen.’

  Alex doesn’t answer for a moment and just looks at him. Finally, he says, ‘Mr Ciacola, I respect the wishes of your government. I am a supporter of the democratic model of government and I will do what I can to see that it is implemented, but in the final analysis this may well be beyond my powers. I should also point out that there is a timing issue on all this.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Which is that most of my force are on a standard six-month tour contract. Most of them began training for the op in March, so that means that by the end of August the bulk of the regiment will have rotated home and the leasing agreement on the helicopters will also expire.

  ‘Now, renewal of both those factors is under review by President Rukuba and our Chinese partners in the Kivu Investment Corporation, depending on how events on the ground go but I can’t say what they will decide. The Chinese want us stood down as soon as possible because we are expensive. It’s the 10th May now so if they do decide to keep us then I need to get on with the renewal process fast.’

  Ciacola rubs his chin and looks at Alex. ‘Hmmm. Well, I think we have both stated our cases, Colonel Devereux. We will see how events unfold but you need to be mindful of American concerns or we will not hesitate to take robust action.’

  The meeting ends and the two men shake hands warily. Alex reunites the diplomat with his anxious bodyguards and they leave.

  Yamba comes up to Alex as he watches the UN helicopter lift away. ‘How was that?’

  Alex rubs his eyes wearily and looks back at the ops tent where another long day’s work beckons; he’s been hard at it for months now.

  He shakes his head. ‘I tell you; I could really do without this clash of superpowers crap right now.’

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Gabriel heaves himself off the back of the old blue Peugeot Mobylette as Marcel cuts the engine. His groin and legs are painfully stiff from hanging on for hours as they bumped up the tracks to Rukuba’s farm at Mukungu.

  Gabriel grimaces as he bends his legs and straightens out the second-hand suit that he bought in Bukavu. His legs are splashed with mud and he tries brushing it off with a handful of lush grass from the verge.

  Marcel also has on an old suit. He takes his teacher’s briefcase from the basket on the handlebars and gives it to Gabriel. It’s empty but Gabriel insists on looking the part.

  ‘Do I look OK?’ he asks.

  ‘Hang on.’ Marcel straightens his clip-on tie and stands back. ‘OK.’

  The two of them walk up the dirt road towards Rukuba’s farmstead. It’s heavily rutted with vehicle tracks and they walk past a small shantytown of tents and shacks put up by KPP supporters and other people who have flocked to their guru’s rural retreat. It’s 10th May, only a week after the invasion started, and Chinese work gangs are erecting temporary houses and installing a sewage system. People peer at them as they walk by.

  Gabriel talks quietly to Marcel with his head lowered as they walk past. ‘I listened to the President’s broadcast last week and he said that he would continue to live the life of a simple farmer, close to the soil of Kivu and its people and away from the corruption of the old political classes in Bukavu and Goma. The man is truly a saint.’

  The lush grass of the meadow in front of the farmstead is now muddy and beaten down by vehicle tracks and feet. They step across it towards the small stream at the foot of the hill, which is now encircled by a barbed wire fence.

  The old man with the machete has been replaced by three Unit 17 soldiers with flak jackets and rifles standing at a gate through the fence. They peer suspiciously at Gabriel through their wraparound shades. ‘Where is your pass?’

  ‘Er, good afternoon. My name is Mr Gabriel Mwamba, I am a businessman from Bukavu and this is my business partner Marcel.’ He proffers a business card; he printed it off on ordinary paper in an internet café in Bukavu and cut it out with scissors.

  The guard looks at it suspiciously. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘We would like to see President Rukuba in order to discuss new business opportunities with him.’

  ‘Do you have an appointment?’

  ‘No.’

  The man grunts and goes back into a new wooden guard-room to make a call up the hill.

  ‘You can go up but you will have to wait to see the President.’

  They frisk both the men carefully and peer inside the empty briefcase before handing it back.

  Marcel shoots a nervous look at Gabriel as they walk on up the hill.

  ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be fine,’ Gabriel reassures him. ‘Remember adversity is spelt opportunity.’

  The track twists round and they come up into the farmyard. The cows have been moved out and the barns converted into offices now, half of them full of Chinese engineers and logistics staff and half with KPP officials. A large array of satellite dishes and telecoms equipment is set up in the orchard and a big generator is beating somewhere behind the cowsheds. There are no children around.

  Zacheus emerges from the farm building as they approach. ‘Mr Mwamba, you do not have an appointment with His Excellency? He is very busy.’

  ‘No, I’m afraid I don’t, but I have many business propositions to put to him.’

  ‘Hmm, OK … Well, wait here.’

  They sit on the veranda outside the house and watch the busy scene in the old farmyard. People come and go and a helicopter clatters in and lands in the meadow. A delegation of Chinese businessmen is driven up the track in a new Land Cruiser and enter the farmhouse.

  The two men sit and wait all afternoon. Eventually Zacheus comes out and says, ‘The President has five minutes, he can see you now.’

  They walk through the front room and see that it is a busy office with computers and printers manned by KPP staff.

  They go through to the back of the house and out onto a lawn overlooking the view back down the valley. The President is stretched out in his hammock strung between two trees. Zacheus introduces them and they sit on white plastic chairs.

  Rukuba is tired and distant. ‘What do you want?’ he asks quietly.

  Gabriel begins hesitantly, ‘Mr President, I am overwhelmed to be here, I want to thank you so much for paying for my fiancée Eve’s operation. I have come to offer my services to your new government in whatever capacity I can help.’

  Rukuba frowns and then sits up. He strokes his fine face with his long fingers and looks thoughtful. ‘Well, Mr Mwamba, there is a lot of work to be done.’

  Major Mordechai Eisenberg walks slowly across the operations room towards Alex holding a sheaf of computer printouts in his hand.

  ‘Colonel, can I show you something?’ With his craggy face and aquiline nose he looks perpetually gloomy, so initially Alex doesn’t realise there is anything amiss.

  It’s lunchtime on 11th May, two days after Alex talked with Sophie at the football event and they are gearing up for the briefing for the night’s helicopter raids. Alex is standing next to the b
irdtable; it is the focal point of the large operations tent, a big table covered with a map of the province under a clear plastic cover with different coloured marker pens showing areas controlled by the FDLR and other militias. Alex is staring at the targets for tonight and mulling over his decisions, making sure he has got them right.

  All around him the large tent is crammed with thirty staff officers hunched over desks and laptops or talking quietly as they process intelligence from the drone control station at one side of the tent, check details for the raids and keep the Battlegroup running. The atmosphere is tense and stuffy; several radios crackle and squawk intermittently and a generator drones outside.

  Alex turns from the table, still thinking about the raids and looks at the Israeli, ‘Hi.’

  ‘Something has come up on the nodal analysis computer.’ Mordechai looks uncomfortable.

  ‘OK?’

  ‘We are processing the data that we requisitioned from the mobile phone companies and there is a lot of traffic from two phone numbers into the bush around Lubero on the afternoon before the mayor was killed there.’

  ‘Do we know who the numbers belong to?’

  ‘Well, that’s the thing; the computer tracks all numbers on our database to see when they intersect with another target number. The phones that were calling Lubero were actually on our friendlies list.’

  Alex looks at him warily, sensing a problem. ‘Whose numbers?’

  ‘They were listed as staff in the office of President Rukuba.’

  Alex’s eyes flick away from Mordechai as he thinks hard about what to do. An explanation occurs to him. ‘Well, I’m not surprised they were calling contacts in the area after what he said on the radio, but that doesn’t mean they were trying to kill him. I mean, we still don’t know what the Kudu Noir are or whose side they are on. No, I think we’ll leave that one; we’ve got enough on our plate with the FDLR. Let’s just crack on with that.’

  He’s made his decision. He pushes the matter out of his mind and turns back to the birdtable.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  ‘Well, welcome to Heaven,’ Alex says, spreading his hands and smiling in a weak attempt at humour.

  The setting is idyllic. Lake Kivu sparkles in the sun, dramatic green hills rise up from the lakeshore in front of him. But Sophie and Natalie both look back at him awkwardly; they don’t particularly want to be here and are playing it very straight. They wish he’d just get on with the tour, allow them to make their assessment and leave.

  Rukuba has persuaded the management board of Hope Street to accept a large funding injection in return for their cooperation with the process of reintegrating former militia soldiers into society. Sophie’s job is to assess the new base for a permanent Hope Street presence and detail what facilities they want built. If this site works out then a network of reintegration centres will be established across the province. They are moving fast and it’s now 12th May, three days after Alex inspected the training centre near Goma.

  Alex gets the point and drops the bonhomie. ‘OK, right, well. Can I introduce my second-in-command, Major Douala?’ Sophie eyes the tall Angolan and shakes his hand warily, as does her colleague.

  Yamba is more formal than Alex. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he says to both of them.

  Alex continues, ‘And you’ve met Regimental Sergeant Major Thwaites.’

  Col nods at Sophie awkwardly and mutters a gruff, ‘Ma’am.’ She smiles but without any warmth.

  Although she doesn’t like being associated with a mercenary operation, Sophie is a pragmatist and can see that the KDF looks like being the future of Kivu so she might as well cooperate with it.

  As usual her mind is hunting for inconsistencies in what she sees, and as she looks along the coils of razor-wire fence either side of the gate to the base, she asks, ‘Why did you decide to build the base on a peninsula?’

  Alex is glad to get on to talking practicalities. ‘Well, the site is strategically perfect – the peninsula is uninhabited and three miles long so we can put all our men in one base and we just have this one fence to guard.’

  ‘Why’s that such a good thing? I thought your men ought to be out there in Kivu like the UN are in lots of bases where they are close to the people?’

  ‘Yes, that is one way of doing it but the problem of dissipating your forces across the region is that you end up using most of your blokes on force protection, i.e. guarding fences like this, so you can’t use them for deliberate operations. The whole idea behind First Regiment is that we are an airmobile strike force, we can cover the whole province from this base because it’s in the middle of Kivu and we can get out and attack the enemy when and where we want to, so we dictate the time and pace of the battle not the enemy.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Sophie doesn’t seem satisfied.

  What Alex doesn’t mention, because he is keen to play down the Rwandan connection to the operation, is that the peninsula also sticks out into Lake Kivu so that he can be supplied from Rwanda directly across the lake by boat. This is ideal because he doesn’t want to have long overland lines of communication that could be attacked by militias.

  ‘Well, why don’t you put your men in Goma or Bukavu? They’re the political centres.’

  ‘Well, the theory behind our operation seems to be working so far – it’s called partnership intervention.’

  Sophie frowns.

  ‘The idea is that we are the stick to back up the central authorities by giving it the threat of credible force, we’re not here to replace the government. Also I don’t want my blokes mixed up with civvies, it always causes problems.’

  Sophie relents and nods.

  Alex continues. ‘Obviously as we move from military operations through the demilitarisation stage to policing work then we will have to get more involved but really we want to be handing over as much of that work as possible to civilian organisations like yours.’

  Sophie appears less than comfortable acknowledging the continuity between their two areas of work.

  ‘OK, let’s have a look around anyway.’

  Col leads the way through the razor-wire gate, nodding to the sentries in the sandbagged machine-gun posts on either side of it. The base is buzzing with activity; it’s still in the construction phase. They stand to one side as three large civilian container lorries lumber past on the muddy main road.

  ‘Where are those from? I’ve seen that logo before.’ Sophie points to the Arabic insignia on their sides.

  ‘They’re from Fadoul Holdings. We’ve just signed a contract with Mr Fadoul to be our main supplier for food, he’s Mr Supermarket in Kivu.’ Again Alex doesn’t mention the reduced Rwandan involvement that this allows.

  Natalie chips in, ‘Oh right, they have great falafel in their store in Goma,’ and Alex smiles politely, glad that she is along and he won’t just be getting the third degree from Sophie the whole time.

  They carry on through the base and Alex shows them the lines of large green tents for the different companies of troops. As they walk through Echo Company’s lines, Jean-Baptiste salutes, and his eyes then flash over the women with more than professional interest as he walks past. In the tents the men are either crashed out asleep on their camp beds or sitting around with their shirts off, stripping and cleaning weapons, waiting for their raid that night. Sophie eyes the shaven-headed, tattooed, muscular men warily.

  Activity continues all around them with the noise of building work, quartermasters in-loading stores and the whirr of helicopters. This noise becomes gradually louder as they approach the flight line and Alex has to raise his voice. ‘What we’re doing here is building concrete landing pads so that the whole thing doesn’t turn into a mud bath when the rains come.’

  He points out three gangs of Chinese workers who are working frantically with bulldozers and cement mixer lorries to clear and concrete large circular helicopter pads. ‘They’re also digging a big fuel depot area over there behind those big earth berms. Fang will tell you more about it.’r />
  He waves as the familiar gangly figure walks across from one of the groups of workers with an overseer.

  ‘Good to see you, Mr Wu.’ They shake hands and Alex introduces Sophie and Natalie, before continuing, ‘We were just admiring your work.’

  Fang smiles with delight. ‘Yes, we work fast. We trucked the heavy equipment straight in from Kenya through Rwanda.’

  Alex nods. The builders have an almost desperate air as they shout to a crane driver to position a tub of concrete correctly over a pad. He turns to the group. ‘These guys work twelve-hour shifts seven days a week, I’m not kidding you. They are unbelievable, and they just love it, can’t seem to get enough.’

  They look at the workers; all are small, furiously active men in their early twenties, wearing jeans and cheap nylon tracksuits stained with red dust. They each have a canteen of water on each hip so that they need to take fewer breaks to refill.

  Fang nods to the man next to him. ‘This is the site foreman.’ The man bows and Alex sees that the short hair on his head is slicked with sweat into little spikes that show white scalp between the strands.

  Fang is full of pride and cannot resist a dig. ‘This is Chinese industry, you will see, we will rebuild Africa. The West’s time is over.’

  Alex drops his expression of polite interest, his eyes zero in on Fang, and Sophie glares at him as well.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Joseph sits on the ground in the new detention facility in Camp Heaven and plucks idly at the chain manacling his feet together. It’s the same day that Sophie is being shown round the base.

  ‘What are they doing?’ he mutters to Simon, the other young FDLR soldier captured with him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Simon shrugs. They were taken out of their newly built wooden cells and have been sitting on the ground in a wired-off section of the detention facility for half an hour now. The older génocidaires were kept in Camp Purgatory where the Rwandans are investigating their involvement in the 1994 massacres.