The Red Die

by Alex MacBeth

  Samora arrived with a handful more candles.

  “What about the email to the embassy?” asked Samora, instinctively heading for the socket to charge his phone. Felisberto grabbed his jacket, blew out the candle and stood in the door.

  “Let’s sleep on that until tomorrow.” João was guarding the comando and had fallen asleep at his post. “We’re leaving,” said the Comandante to the cadet, pointing to the open door at the comando. João stifled his yawns as he waved and looked around to see where his gun was. It was dead quiet and the lamppost outside the comando was flickering on and off. In the distance, Felisberto could see a car approaching the hill to Mossuril.

  “That’ll be the prosecutor,” joked Samora, alluding to the local judge’s inclination towards drinking houses in Monapo and holding late hours. The two men laughed heartily and talked over a few mundane details about fixing the electricity. The car that Felisberto had seen in the distance began to accelerate – dimming its lights as it approached.

  Before they knew it, the Comandante and Samora were forced to jump out of the road as the large 4×4 practically bulldozed through them. A figure in a balaclava holding an automatic rifle fired shots in the air. When the car was out of sight Felisberto grabbed Samora and ran back into the station. The car came by again, this time with two snipers. Another avalanche of bullets came raining down on the officers as they scrambled into the comando. Felisberto launched himself into his office and slammed the door shut as soon as Samora was inside. The Comandante grabbed two Kalashnikovs from the arms trunk, threw one at Mossuril’s shaking deputy and signalled with his finger to his lips not to talk. They heard the car outside turn off the ignition and they waited with heavy breaths. Moments stretched into centuries. Then they heard the gunfire. “João!” whispered Samora. Another gunshot. Silence.

  Felisberto knew the men had come for him. He pushed Samora into a corner and told him to cover the front door. The Comandante slipped out of the back with two loaded guns, one in each hand and crept up the sidewall of the comando. He had estimated there were three, maybe four men including the driver. There could also be back up but the Comandante had only heard one car. He would have to take out at least two of the men with his first shots when he blew his cover if he was to have a chance of killing the other men before they got him.

  What these hitmen didn’t know is that Comandante João Felisberto had spent more than fourteen years fighting guerrilla warfare in forests and mountains against an enemy better armed, lavishly-funded and equipped with a seemingly infinite ability to sustain its operations.

  The Comandante’s side had won.

  If he had to give his life tonight to show these men that they had landed in the wrong district to kill a 22-year-old innocent trainee policeman, a hero of the nation, then so be it. They had just killed his best cadet, they had decimated his force and they would pay for it in blood and wounds.

  Felisberto crept up to the edge of the wall and looked out. He could see a tall man dressed in black with a balaclava behind a tree in the distance signalling to someone. The Comandante honed his radar. Two men simultaneously ran forward and took up positions about fifty metres from the comando, sheltered behind trees. Felisberto could hear them whispering in a foreign language, most likely the same mercenaries he had faced years before in the battlefield.

  Felisberto knew that both would make their next move together, covered by at least one other marksman. The Comandante also knew he would have to take the first two out at the same time and return to his cover behind the wall before the third sniper hit him. It was an extremely risky plan and Felisberto knew the dangers, but he was clear that it was the only available window. If the foreign killers made it to the comando, the Comandante would no longer have the angle to take them out. They would break down the door and kill Samora. Then the town of Mossuril would not only be without a Comandante, it would have no police officials either. Felisberto knew he would have to be precise yet somehow he felt readier than ever for the enemy. Defeat was not an option, if only for the honour of Stokes, Bia, Tomlinson and now João, all innocent casualties of putrid interests and foreign mercenaries.

  The first sniper ran out, and Felisberto hesitated. The second emerged running from the fog of darkness. The moving targets sheltered in the shadows. As they neared the comando, the light slowly began to outline their frames in flickers. Felisberto focused, stood up, aimed, and fired. He heard a scream and knew he had hit one but retrained his eye to the second target without a pause. He found him kicking the door of the comando and fired. Felisberto retreated behind the wall amidst a hailstorm of bullets. He ran towards the back of the comando as the third sniper moved in from an angle, firing round after round. What guns did these men have? Felisberto wondered as he ran for his life. The Comandante ran to the other side of the comando, behind the kitchens. The sniper hadn’t followed him, probably expecting an ambush.

  A rat scuffled away as Felisberto passed the wood stove, momentarily diverting the Comandante’s concentration. Through a hole in a window he caught a glimpse of the third sniper moving in on the comando with a hand grenade in one hand. If he could get to him before the sniper could get to Samora, he’d have a clear shot. He tiptoed to the edge of the building until he could see his target. From thirty-five or so metres he took aim and fired. The man fell on the hard stone steps of the comando and the Comandante retreated again.

  Silence.

  The grenade hadn’t exploded. It wouldn’t be long before the sound of gunshots would attract worried neighbours, and Felisberto knew he had to eliminate any surviving aggressors quickly and clean up the bodies before the crowds started gathering.

  The Comandante peeped around the wall and saw blood trickling from the head of a dead sniper. Three bodies lay like soldiers on a battlefield. One crawled towards his weapon. The Comandante took aim and hit him with a second bullet to the leg. The man wriggled in agony. What about the fourth man, the driver? The Comandante approached João and checked his pulse. He was dead. For the first time since his wife Adija had died, he cried. This was all his fault. If he had just closed the file on Stokes, a young Mozambican, an honest officer – the rarest of kinds – wouldn’t have lost his life in the line of duty.

  Felisberto slid back inside the comando from behind and crouched below the window. The assassin Felisberto had shot in the leg was still trying to crawl towards the car as the driver sped away. Had the driver been there all along? Samora made to chase but the Comandante held him back. “See if Monapo can set up a roadblock.” There was only one way out of Mossuril by land and if Raquel and her team cooperated, they could still catch the fourth sniper alive, although he was armed and clearly dangerous. He didn’t want to involve Raquel but he had to. Last-minute logistics were not the force’s greatest strength but with a little luck they’d catch the runaway driver.

  Felisberto heard a cough and grabbed his gun. He was angry. What had become of the country he had fought to keep free? The Comandante opened the front door to his comando and approached the only breathing sniper. The wounded mercenary was contorting like a spider with five legs. As the sniper slithered to his gun, Felisberto put his boot on his neck and shoved the barrel of his AK47 in the man’s face.

  “Who sent you?” screamed the Comandante, pushing the gun into the sniper’s mouth before he could reply. He kept it there for ten seconds.

  “I won’t tell you anything,” replied the man. The Comandante could tell from the gun-for-hire’s appearance that he was either South African or European: white, blond and speaking in broken Portuguese. He had faced hundreds of similar mercenaries during Mozambique’s war of liberation against apartheid South Africa-backed forces, which didn’t bode well for the current prisoner. Felisberto dragged the man inside with Samora, who had appeared armed but still shaking a few moments before. They put the sniper in the cell and tied his hands to a high pole.

  “Boil up some oil,” said Felisberto to Samora. “And bring me my tweezers.” Samora ha
d never been asked to take part in any kind of torture. The Comandante looked his deputy deep in the eyes and stripped the prisoner.

  “I won’t do it,” said Samora, crossing his arms. Felisberto turned his head toward his deputy and Samora could see a coldness in his eyes that he had never seen before.

  “Do it.”

  Samora hesitated before reluctantly leaving the room to ask Raquel to set up the roadblock. He would not cook the oil.

  “Who do you work for?” Felisberto repeated, holding the knife near the sniper’s testicles.

  “Listen,” said the man, in a noticeably higher octave, “we can sort this out.”

  “How so?”

  “I have money, lots,” said the sniper. “You can have it all.”

  The Comandante pressed the blade to the man’s testicle. The sniper peed onto the cold stone floor and dribbled.

  “I work for a man called Palma,” he stuttered finally.

  Palma.

  “Where is Palma?” pressed Felisberto in shock, pushing his blade near the sniper’s eyeball. The sniper urinated again and cried.

  “In Pemba, in a house on Wimbi beach,” the mercenary wailed. Felisberto cut the strings that held the man’s arms. The prisoner crawled into a corner, shivering and afraid. Felisberto took a handgun and shot him in the heart as Samora walked in.

  “Comandante… why?”

  “Because he would have come back to kill us. We need to stop the fourth sniper too before he gets away. Then we need to get to Palma,” said Felisberto.

  “Palma?” exclaimed Samora. “I thought he was dead.”

  “So did I but these were Palma’s men,” said Felisberto.

  “But I thought he died in a plane crash?”

  “Unless he has a double who wants to kill me, he can’t have died in the crash.”

  Felisberto closed the heavy grey metal gates of the comando and bolted them from the inside. Then, shielded from the village by the comando’s high wall, he took off his jacket and covered João where he lay sprawled in a pool of blood near the flagpole. He noticed that João had fallen onto Albertina’s African marigolds, crushing them – the dead flowers would merely amplify the young girl’s loss. Samora had joined him and he signalled to his deputy to help lift their fallen colleague. Together they lugged him into the guest room where Tomlinson had slept the night before and covered him with the crumpled bed sheet. Neither officer spoke.

  Felisberto marched back out to the forecourt and began dragging one of the mercenaries’ bodies to a small shed behind the comando. The Comandante had lapsed back into his soldier mind-set and was busy clearing the field of the dead. Empathy was a foreigner to the moment. He was cold, calculated and direct as he lugged the corpses out of sight of the main street as if they were bags of coal.

  “We should have saved him, Comandante,” whispered Samora gravely.

  “We didn’t stand a chance. Like João didn’t. They are too big.”

  “Who? What?” Samora stuttered, still shaken.

  “It doesn’t matter how many you kill, more will always come,” uttered the Comandante, wrestling the 220 pound body into a small bamboo tool shed behind the comando. Together they dragged the other two dead snipers into the shed and wrapped them in old cloths.

  Felisberto opened the gate. As soon as the forecourt became visible a village elder craned his neck to see what was going on inside. He seemed disappointed to see that there was nothing there but a deathly silence. Two children arrived shortly after with another old man wearing an immaculate white all-in-one and a kufi worn by Muslims.

  “Salaam Aleikum,” said the old man, pummelling lightly on the iron gate.

  “Aleikum Salaam, mashikamolo,” replied the Comandante, greeting his elder with the specific terms of respect preordained by local culture.

  “We heard gunshots,” continued the old man.

  “Some drive-by freaks going a bit too far, sir. Monapo will arrest them and we’ll apply the heaviest charges, don’t you worry about that. They’ll still be cleaning stains off toilets at Nampula Prison by the time these young boys and girls have graduated,” said the Comandante, trying to laugh.

  “Were people shooting?” asked a young girl.

  “I’m sorry if it disturbed you, mea filha, dear.” Felisberto leaned down towards the child. “But it really is nothing to worry about. We have it under control. It was probably just some of those rich boys from the city, trying out their handguns as they drive home from the beach. This generation, hey, baba?” said the Comandante, rolling his eyes to the concerned elder. The old man nodded and took the children away from the comando, occasionally looking back suspiciously at Felisberto as he closed the gate.

  Cristina appeared at the gate chewing gum. “Is everything okay, Comandante?” said the young girl out on an evening stroll.

  “Comandante, I heard gunshots,” said Amisse, who had been running. The situation was getting out of hand, thought the Comandante. “Everything is fine,” he lied. “Take Cristina home and we’ll talk tomorrow.” The Comandante stepped away from the gate, signifying it was the end of the conversation.

  “What did he say?” asked Samora.

  “We need to bury the snipers,” said Felisberto ignoring him and grabbing two spades.

  “Here?”

  Samora could no longer believe what he was hearing.

  “They’ll rot in the heat by morning,” commented the Comandante to no one in particular. He grabbed the car and parked it behind the comando in front of the shed. They loaded the three mercenaries into the boot and drove in silence deep into the bush. A large cobra snake slithered across their path as they navigated the dusty road in the moonless night. Not a speck of light, not an electric pole in sight. A solar bulb illuminating a tiny green mosque looked like an alien to Samora amidst the depth of darkness. Twenty minutes later they pulled up beside a coconut tree. The Comandante began to dig, at first alone, until Samora reluctantly followed suit.

  “Were you going to torture him if he didn’t speak?” asked Samora.

  The Comandante kept digging in silence.

  They dug for over an hour, non-stop. The constant rhythm of earth being thrown to the side was interrupted by the men’s occasional groans. Animal sounds circled around them and echoed through the trees creating an eerie amphitheatre for the officers’ crime. Sounds of cicadas, grasshoppers, bats, snakes and baboons. When the grave was dug, they put the men in the hole and said a few words for their spirits. Felisberto poured some liquid on their bodies and struck a quiet note on Samora’s drum in the car to keep away any evil spirits present. Without further ceremony or adieu, they drove home. They had killed three men and buried them. Both officers knew they wouldn’t file a report or mention it to anyone. Felisberto had killed before. This was Samora’s first time.

  Samora was first out of the car and his body language showed his dissension. “Samora,” the Comandante called out. Samora turned back. “I wouldn’t have done it if there had been any other way.” They walked to behind the comando where his fallen cadet lay wrapped in a sheet.

  “Now, if you value your life and that of the other officers here, get onto Monapo and Namula and Ilha and tell them we have an officer down. Tell them that a drive-by joyrider shot him. Then pick up every bullet and shell case you can find except for two and then turn on those new sprinklers and swill down the bloodstains. I’ll inform João’s family,” said Felisberto. As he walked away, he said, more to himself than to his deputy: “I thought such waste of human life had ended with the war.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Podolski picked up the phone and dialled Clemence’s Mozambican number scribbled on a post-it note on his desk. It rang but no one answered. The Source had sent the broker an email that morning telling him that something had gone wrong in the recovery of the zoologist’s potentially inflammatory diary. As far as Mason & Stock’s initial risk assessment was concerned, there was nothing in the diary that could incriminate the company. The proje
ct had been carefully set up to avoid any criminal traces. But if the diary fell into the wrong hands it could be misunderstood and bring unwanted attention to Mason & Stock’s lucrative activities. The real problem would be if somebody found Stokes’ material. ‘Bizu the Fixer’ had personally assured him however that “nobody ever would”.

  Podolski was surfing the Bloomberg website when his phone rang. It was The Source. Why was The Source ringing? Podolski got the SMS soon after. Meet me in 15.

  “So what is it now?” said Podolski, finding The Source seated in his usual antique leather chair in a corner of the grandiose private member’s club in Central London.

  “Last night, four men went to recover the diary,” began The Source. “None returned.” Podolski leaned in closer.

  “The driver was last heard from at 11.57pm last night. His car broke down as he was fleeing a gunshot battle. The men are out of contact,” continued The Source, visibly shaken.

  “Are you telling me three men just disappeared in the bush? Three trained mercenaries couldn’t recover a pile of scrap paper from an illiterate village in the middle of no-man’s-fucking-land?” roared Podolski.

  “The driver said two of the men had been killed when he fled under fire. We lost contact with him after midnight,” said The Source.

  “What about the zoologist?”

  “We can’t keep him for much longer, he’s beginning to get suspicious,” muttered The Source, resigned to the inevitable.

  “Neutralise him.”

  “No,” insisted The Source. “He is the only person who can help us get the diary. We need him for now.”

  “I don’t care when you neutralise him, just neutralise him.”

  “What about this cop?”

  “What cop?”

  “It’s unlikely the men got eaten by sharks or torn apart by spirits,” observed The Source. “Clemence says Tomlinson keeps mentioning two local cops.”