by James Steel
Yamba yells, ‘Come on!’ and fires a long burst of suppressive fire at some movement across the farmyard.
Alex half drags Col with him to the door. ‘OK, cover us!’
‘Go!’
They run forward, Alex holding his weapon at his hip and firing on auto as they run. They reach the cover of the farmhouse and he reloads and fires off another full mag as Yamba’s cloaked figure lopes across towards them. The two of them drag Col back into the house, desperately hoping the second part of their plan will work.
Overhead the three missiles targeted on Mukungu swirl into their preset bombing patterns with perfect choreography like angels of death. Half a mile away their companions begin bombing the area around the American compound and the flashes of the explosions sparkle rapidly in the night and then a second later the heavy repeated thudding of the blast waves arrive.
Inside the house Yamba stumbles along a dark corridor trying to find the door to the cellar that Rukuba showed them when they first visited the house. His hands search frantically along the walls for the handle.
Alex supports Col with one arm behind him but keeps his weapon free to guard against anyone following them. ‘Come on!’ he yells to Yamba. He can hear the bombs going off around the American encampment and hear the missiles overhead. In his mind’s eye he sees the bombs tumbling down.
‘OK!’ Yamba finds a handle and twists it. It opens onto inky blackness and he tests with his foot. There are steps down. ‘This is it!’
‘Take Col!’ Alex passes him over and the two of them stumble down into the cellar as Alex turns and fires at a soldier running into the far end of the corridor.
Over their heads the three cruise missiles circle the farm area and in seconds the bomb racks whirr and spew out their deadly cargo from both sides as they move over the target. Four hundred and ninety-eight bomblets shower down, blanketing the area and exploding in a rain of death that wipes every living thing off the face of the earth.
Alex throws himself down the stairs as the first bombs explode. He tumbles to the bottom and lies still as the repeated blast waves suck the air out of his lungs and pound on his head like a hammer.
Above him the wooden farmhouse is blasted apart, planks and chunks of timber flying through the air and cutting down the pursuing troops as they close in. The barns and cowsheds, the new prefab offices, the trees supporting Rukuba’s hammock on the lawn, the flagpole – all are angrily smashed down by the exploding American ordnance. The heat of the blasts sets fire to the flimsy wooden structures.
In the cellar, Yamba drags Alex away from the bottom of the stairs as the door is blown in on top of him and balks of timber crash down above them.
The cellar is filled with tall computer server units and the three of them crawl between two stacks and shelter as beams smash onto the top of them and dust showers down. Still the pounding of the bombs continues as the missiles fly their patterns overhead.
The air becomes stifling as the oxygen is sucked out by the blasts and the dust builds up.
Finally the torrent of explosives stops and Alex lies on the floor and tries to heave air into his lungs whilst covering his mouth with his hand. He is battered from his fall down the stairs and concussed by the blasts.
Drunkenly he heaves himself up to his knees. He can smell smoke from above and hear the crackling of flames in the dried pile of wood over his head.
‘Come on!’ he croaks and breaks into a fit of coughing. ‘Get out!’ he mumbles. He can see Yamba lit up in the dark by a streak of light from the flames above them.
He hauls himself onto his feet, sways and steadies himself against the server stack. His rifle hangs on its harness off his chest and he and Yamba drag Col upright and up the stairs. Alex insists on going first and painfully heaves a heavy beam out of the way. The farmhouse has been completely flattened above them and he can feel the heat of the flames on his face as he pushes the beam to one side.
A bloodied and soot-stained face emerges from the burning wreckage of the house. The bodies of the soldiers they fought a few minutes ago are scattered around, blown to pieces by the bombing. Alex turns and drags Col after him and then he and Yamba support him between them as they stumble across the shattered remains of Rukuba’s base and their brave new world. They stagger away from the flames and into the darkness.
Once again the bright landing light of the Mi-17 switches on above them and its pure beam cuts through the rain and flickering orange shadows around them. Arkady looks down at the devastation in horror and sees the three figures swaying in his downdraught.
Alex waves desperately to him and he brings the big machine down in a hover over the wreckage-strewn lawn where he dropped them off a few short minutes before. They clamber up onto the rear ramp and Alex lurches forward to the cockpit as they take off again, supporting himself by holding onto the struts on the wall.
He slumps into the copilot seat and puts on the headset.
Arkady looks with horror at his bloodstained, battered commander. He is soaking wet, he has wounds on his face and his clothes are burnt in places. The Russian barks over the noise of the rotors, ‘What are we going to do?’
The World to Come
Epilogue
President Asani Jaafar looks ashen-faced as he walks slowly up to the podium in the White House garden. He’s a well-intentioned, liberal politician who has just lived through his first firefight, a bruising encounter with the very worst of human nature. Admiral Harry Kruger and the Defense Secretary walk behind and then move to stand stony-faced on either side of him.
It’s early afternoon on a warm day and the garden is in bloom, creating an atmosphere completely at odds with the appalling scenes of violence that he and the press pack in front of him have just lived through. All the sounds of the grenades and gunfire in the compound were broadcast live. Everyone is morbidly silent as they wait.
The President is a slow speaker at the best of times but now he seems to take an age as he shuffles his notes and finally looks up at the cameras. He opens his mouth and eventually says, ‘My fellow Americans,’ and then looks down again trying to think how to articulate the horror that the nation has just witnessed. It feels as bad as 9/11.
‘What we have just seen and heard are terrible events that we will never forget. We as a country are all in a state of shock.
‘What I will do in the press conference is update you on the latest information that we have on the situation in the newly declared Republic of Kivu. Following the intervention of United States Navy cruise missiles on the area around the besieged compound, and on the nearby headquarters of President Rukuba, the siege of the compound was lifted.
‘One hour and forty minutes later, at 8.11 p.m. local time, a USAF C-130 cargo aircraft dropped a company of one hundred twenty soldiers from 3rd Battalion Rangers Regiment into the area of the siege.
‘With the aid of an accompanying Spectre gunship, they have now secured the area and searched it for survivors. Some have been found and are receiving immediate medical attention from army medics, including Under Secretary of State John Ciacola. But they have also reported finding numerous casualties.’
Here he pauses again and steadies himself.
‘It is with extreme personal regret that I must announce to you now the murder of the following American citizens.’ His voice begins to crack and he pauses to clear his throat. ‘My close friend and trusted personal political comrade, United States Secretary of State, Patricia Johnson. Nine other State Department diplomats, fifteen United States military personnel and eleven press journalists accompanying the mission. A total of thirty-six people.
‘The Rangers have also searched the nearby headquarters of President Rukuba. This was destroyed by the deployment of cluster munitions and burnt to the ground. However, they have recovered and positively identified the body of President Rukuba and a number of his senior security personnel.
‘In the light of this disaster, I have spoken to the Secretary-General of the Unit
ed Nations and agreed to the immediate deployment of a large United States military force to Kivu under a UN mandate to secure the province and take control of it from the mercenary army led by the war criminal, Colonel Alex Devereux, whose whereabouts are currently unknown.’
His voice suddenly takes on an angry tone and he glares at the cameras.
‘The murder of these innocents is a crime against humanity and I pledge to you now that I will not rest until we have brought to justice all those responsible for their deaths! Not only those who pulled the triggers but also those who were negligent in their duty of protecting this peaceful diplomatic mission!’
Two miles away from Rukuba’s headquarters at Mukungu, Gabriel and some friends listen to a simultaneous French translation of the press conference on Radio Okapi.
The five men huddle around the crackling radio trying to make sense of the madness that has broken out around them. Gabriel was so full of hope for the future and now it all seems to have gone wrong. Maybe even the FDLR will come back?
After his desperate pleading with Rukuba had failed, he fled down the hill to the temporary encampment with the rest of the KPP supporters who did not want to run out to attack the Americans. They were appalled by the violence whipped up in an instant by Rukuba’s demagoguery.
When the missiles struck, he and a small group of friends looked in horror at the flames pouring up from the hilltop headquarters into the night sky.
The press conference ends and Gabriel slowly switches off the radio. There is too much to take in. After a minute of stunned silence, someone says, ‘Well, at least the Americans are coming in, maybe they will be better than the UN?’
Gabriel is about to round on him for being insensitive when an idea strikes him and he stops and looks thoughtfully at the ground for a moment.
Adversity is spelt opportunity.
He reaches into the pocket of his jacket, pulls out his new mobile phone and calls his wife in their house in Goma.
‘Eve, get me the number for the UN commander’s headquarters in Goma, I think I can help him.’
Alex stares out of the cockpit canopy of the helicopter as they fly into the rainy night.
Arkady’s voice sounds in his headset again, harsh and mechanical against the background roar of the engines. ‘What are we going to do?’
Yamba leans his head in through the door between the two pilots and looks at him as well; he heard Arkady’s question on his headset. Col is huddled on the floor in the cargo bay behind him.
Alex forces himself to think. His murderous attack on Rukuba cleared some of the pent-up rage from his mind and helped him reassert some feeling of control over his shattered world.
His voice regains its hard edge of command. ‘We’ll make it back to Heaven and check what state the regiment is in. I’ll need to see what the American reaction has been and then we may have to withdraw everyone back across Lake Kivu to Rwanda.’
‘What about us?’ Yamba asks. ‘The Americans will come after us, they’re not going to let this go.’
Alex twists his head round and looks up at his old friend; the Angolan’s expression is severe but full of concern. He is worried about Alex’s state of mind after all the horrors of that one day.
Alex turns away and looks out of the canopy window on his left at the darkness outside. After a moment he narrows his eyes and frowns. The dim cockpit lights create a reflection of his face in the glass. It is the face of a man with strong feelings but he can see that they are still deeply controlled. Dark tides run just under the surface and he now understands more about what drives them.
His fame has become his doom but he has survived them both.
He stares at his war-weary but hardened expression and remembers another Devereux with a look of similarly grim determination – Black Hal.
He turns back to the other two with a straight gaze and says in a voice filled with a sudden certainty, ‘We’ve come through worse than this, we always win in the end.’
He turns back and faces the darkness ahead.
Author’s Notes
Warlord is a complicated story that took two years to research, plan and write. In terms of style, it is what I call ‘mindful violence’. The whole book was designed as a way for me to explore some big international relations issues whilst at the same time being a page-turning read. These are issues on both an international level and also a regional level in Kivu Province and reflect its complicated relations with its neighbours in the Great Lakes region.
On the international front, one of the key questions I wanted to discuss is: how do you fix failed states? This is increasingly the problem of our age. As an historian I find it interesting to note that the twentieth century was characterised by the problems of too much state power in the hands of communist and fascist dictatorships, whereas now we seem be battling to boost state power in failed states: Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan and Yemen are all areas of concern. However, now these countries must choose not between capitalism or communism but between anarchy and authority.
So, why do states fail in the first place? This is a complex area but in many cases it is not because the insurgencies are strong but because the central authority is weak. What the West is currently doing in Afghanistan amounts to trying to prop up a drunk. Unless the Kharzai government rids itself of corruption it will continue to play a parasitic role on the population, meaning that they will support any insurgency as an alternative to it.
A similar state of affairs exists in Kivu Province in DRC where around thirty armed groups continue to terrorise the region because there is no effective central authority to stop them, despite the presence of a large UN force since 2003. In a number of instances, small professional military forces have had a great impact on ending wars in such chaotic circumstances, two good examples being the South African mercenary company, Executive Outcomes, that ended the long running Angolan civil war and the British Parachute Regiment in ending the reign of terror of the RUF in Sierra Leone. Both of them acted to give the weakened central authority the threat of credible force that enabled them to bring the rebels to the negotiating table to negotiate a peace deal in good faith rather than just using the talks as a respite from the fighting.
Kivu also provided an interesting way of discussing the other big issue I was interested in; the battle of social models currently going on in the world between China and the West: managed capitalism versus democracy and human rights. In many ways the biggest clash of civilisations at the moment is not between the West and radical Islam but between these two very different social systems.
Again this is a complicated issue, but in the developing world a number of countries are looking to the success that China has had in lifting three hundred million people sustainably out of poverty and comparing it favourably to the Western model. A lot of this interest by developing world governments is also for cynical reasons in that the government can do what it likes and is not bothered by the constraints of an opposition or human rights, e.g. in Sri Lanka and Rwanda.
However, at the same time it can also be argued that ethnically fractured, post-colonial states need managed capitalism to organise and direct the resources of the country in order to build the infrastructure that they need to develop. Only in this way can Africa achieve the capitalist revolution that it needs to move it sustainably out of poverty. Removal of the Common Agricultural Policy and the Farm Subsidies Bill would also be key structural developments that would be of more use than all the aid that the West gives.
In terms of my own views on the matter, I can see arguments on both sides. I didn’t want the novel to be a polemic and so had to end it in an ambiguous manner. Africa has already had more than its fair share of dictators that have brought only ruin and destruction to the continent. But at the same time I wanted to ask some of the searching questions that Professor Paul Collier asks about the practical impact of democracy in fractured, post-colonial states.
Aside from this clash of social systems ther
e is the general issue of the rise of China and the question of: can a great power rise without there being a major war? On the plus side, one can look at the rise of the US in the nineteenth and early twentieth century but on the downside we can see the emergence of Germany and Japan and two world wars before they were able to find a way of fitting into the world order.
The overall issue here is complicated; America and China are rivals who need each other. The main question is: can China balance its growing economic strength against its growing nationalism? In the absence of communism the state now relies on Chinese nationalism as its unifying ideology and this can be a very aggressive force. However, as the world’s largest exporter it is not in China’s interests to start a shooting war with anyone. Economic success is the main method of legitimisation of its government and it needs to maintain 8% pa growth rates just to employ the new workers coming onto its labour market every year. A war would not help this.
Therefore, for the moment, China pursues policies of peaceful rise and harmonious living that mean it tries to stay out of big international issues, rarely taking a lead. However, it currently piggy backs on American-provided security and it cannot continue indefinitely pretending that it is Switzerland. It will eventually have to take a more assertive role in the world and in Warlord I was sketching out one way of this happening through buying up large areas of land. The land deals mentioned in Warlord all happened recently: South African farmers bought two hundred thousand hectares of Republic of Congo, just north of DRC. UAE leased six thousand square miles of Southern Sudan and Daiwoo Logistics tried to buy half the agricultural land in Madagascar, which provoked a coup.
Whether China uses the land purchase route to assert its power or not it is nonetheless the case that it is having a huge influence in promoting a capitalist revolution in Africa and connecting it to world markets. This is both at a state level with massive infrastructure projects, but also through private sector purchases of raw materials and at a bottom-up level with a million entrepreneurs on the ground developing African business. Crucially here, the Chinese see Africa as a business opportunity not a charity case, in contrast to the West.
