Soldier N: Gambian Bluff

by David Monnery

  For a few moments he sat there with the last quarter of an inch of claret, watching the BBC2 logo, knowing he was not ready for sleep. It was good to be going somewhere, he thought once more. It would change nothing, and the same mess would be waiting for him when he got back, but it was good to be going somewhere. Anywhere.

  Chapter 8

  After several days of unseasonable dryness, the heavens opened in the early hours of Saturday 1 August. Moussa Diba’s trench soon turned into a warm bath, and he was forced to sleep out on the open ground. An abandoned piece of corrugated-iron fence provided him with a hard, uncomfortable blanket. Still, at least it kept most of the water off him.

  The rain stopped before dawn, and he had an hour or so of real sleep before Jahumpa did the rounds with his toecap, waking everyone up. The sun was already above the horizon, a large white disc behind a line of silhouetted palms, and the pools of rain on the road were beginning to evaporate, each forming its own private cloud of mist in the clear morning air.

  There was no breakfast.

  Diba washed his mouth out with some rainwater that had gathered in a fold of his iron blanket, and began baling out his trench, wondering what he should do. Or at least plan to do.

  He supposed the Senegalese would be along in the not too distant future, though there was always the chance that they would head straight for Banjul. His company had been taken out of that line of march, and pulled back to form part of a defensive arc around the beach resort areas of Bakau and Fajara. Their current location lay astride the Serekunda-Fajara road, close to the village of Kololi, a mile or so from the coast. In front of them the road stretched arrow-straight for about a mile towards the outskirts of Serekunda. They would have no trouble seeing the bastards coming.

  Diba wondered what was going on in the heads of the revolutionary leaders. Had they abandoned Banjul, or were they going to make a last stand somewhere? The Denton Bridge was the obvious place. If they could stop the Senegalese there, or blow it up, then Banjul could be held for a bit longer.

  But what for? The rebels must know that they had lost. So what were they still fighting for? Because they could think of no alternative? Because they needed time to make a getaway? Who fucking cared anyway? He should be thinking about his own getaway.

  Which was getting more and more complicated. If the Senegalese took Banjul – or even if they just got as far as the bridge – then they were between him and Anja, him and the Englishman, him and the doctor. That had occurred to him the previous night, but for one thing there had been no chance to slink away, and for another he was not at all sure Banjul would be a healthy place to be over the next couple of days. With the Senegalese in control, Jawara and his cronies would all be coming back, and they would be turning the town upside down, looking for the rebels, who they probably had no photographs of, and the released prisoners, whose mugshots they most certainly did have.

  No, he would have to revisit Banjul before he headed for the border, but not just yet. For the moment Bakau seemed a safer bet. When the time came – and recognizing the right moment would be the difficult part – then he would do what he had to do. Steal enough money to buy a new life, kill the fucking Englishman, have a time to remember with the doctor, collect Anja and go. Guinea, the Ivory Coast, anywhere.

  Four miles to the east, Colonel Taal’s thoughts were running in similar channels whenever the exigencies of the situation allowed him the luxury of such reflection. It could all be summed up in one phrase, he thought: when do we cut our losses and run? And he suspected they would all have different answers. The Sallahs of this world would leave too early, the Jabangs would probably leave it too late. So they were both lucky to have him around, he thought with a sour smile.

  He looked back along the bridge towards the Banjul end, but there was no sign of any vehicle approaching from that direction. It was hard to believe that there were no explosives in the entire western half of the country, but he was reluctantly coming to that conclusion. He supposed that when it came down to it, explosives were mostly used by armies and miners, and The Gambia had neither. But still …

  It hardly seemed worth blowing up the bridge anyway. It might slow down the Senegalese, keep them out of Banjul for another day perhaps, but the Revolutionary Council had essentially abandoned the capital in any case, and there was always the argument that if they could not march into Banjul the Senegalese might just march all their forces straight into Bakau.

  Taal could not help feeling he was wasting his time. There were nearly a hundred men dug in on either side of the bridge, and it would take the Senegalese a while to shift them, but he knew his side had lost both the battle and the war, and that now it was just a matter of how much they could salvage through the hostage negotiations. In which case, these hundred-odd men would be better served defending the Field Force depot in Bakau.

  Jabang, however, had insisted on at least a token resistance to the enemy occupation of the capital. The longer they held Banjul, he said, the longer the radio station could continue broadcasting. How his leader had reached the conclusion that another two hours of broadcasting threats and demands were worth a hundred men, Taal could not say. But he did know he had come too far with Mamadou Jabang to start arguing with him at such a moment. It was, as the American military liked to say, a ‘no-win situation’.

  At the radio station Mustapha Diop was trying, without much success, to quell a slowly growing sense of panic. After his broadcast the previous afternoon, and the threats to kill him and his family at five p.m. if the rebels’ demands were not met, he had been taken back to the house in Marina Parade. There he had agonized about whether or not to tell his wife, torn between a need to share his fear and an unwillingness to see her suffer. Instead, he had paced up and down for three hours, one eye on the window for the arrival of nemesis at his gates.

  But five o’clock had passed without any visitors, and after another hour had passed Diop was beginning to let himself believe that the worst was over. When Sallah, accompanied by the same two ‘comrades’, did appear a few minutes later, Diop felt as if his stomach had dropped through the floor. The next thirty seconds were the worst of his life, and when Sallah coldly told him they only wished him to make another broadcast, he could have kissed the ugly bastard.

  He had accompanied them to the radio station in the same taxi, by the same route. It would all have smacked of déjà vu, but this time there was to be no talk of prisoners or deadlines; they simply wanted him to politely ask his compatriots for two things: a ceasefire between the warring armies and negotiations between the rebels and the Senegalese Government.

  Once he had done so Diop had expected to be driven back to Marina Parade, but no such journey was forthcoming. They might need him again, Sallah had told him, and there seemed no point in making continual trips to and fro. And in any case his family were at this moment being moved to the Field Force depot in Bakau – for their own safety, of course. He would be joining them as soon as circumstances allowed.

  A long evening had followed, during which Diop reached the unhappy conclusion that even a terrified man can experience numbing boredom. Sallah had left soon after dusk, and his other minders seemed disinclined to talk. The radio played either mindless Afro pop or repeats of his own broadcast, which sounded stranger and stranger as the evening wore on. Sleep, even the fitful kind in an upright chair, had proved a merciful release.

  He woke with all the old fears and a few new ones, but soon found reasons for hope. To judge by the faces of his companions, he was no longer alone in feeling afraid. It seemed that at some point in the night they had belatedly come to the realization that theirs was likely to be the losing side. And one of the consequences of this realization was a desire to ingratiate themselves with him. He was allowed some privacy in the toilet, and even asked what he would like for breakfast.

  It never arrived, of course, but it was nice to be asked. The rebel in charge, a Mandinka named Jimmy Gorang, spent most of his time on the tel
ephone, presumably talking to his superiors. The look on his face just before eleven, when the connection was suddenly severed, would have been comic in any other situation. His mouth gaped open, he shook the receiver, then pressed a few times on the cut-off button. He then tried redialling, once, twice. Eventually it seemed to sink in that the line was dead.

  His countrymen had taken the Denton Bridge, Diop guessed, and put a temporary block on all communications between Banjul and Bakau. The question was: how would his captors cope with their new isolation?

  Caskey had told him to pack for the tropics, so Franklin just gathered together the most lightweight clothing he could and stuffed it into the somewhat battered suitcase his father had originally brought from Jamaica. His mum was already at work, his sister at school and his brother still in bed, so he ate breakfast alone and walked down to the tube. He changed onto the Piccadilly at Green Park and got off at Holborn, with almost an hour in hand for the ten-minute walk to the MOD building in Theobald’s Road.

  It being Saturday, the area seemed almost empty, and most of the cafés were closed. He eventually found an Italian sandwich bar open, bought coffee and a doughnut, and sat in the window watching the buses go by. Major Caskey had not told him much on the phone the night before – in fact all he knew was that three of them were going to Africa. Which was a big place. His first reaction had been to be thrilled by the news, and the fact that he had been selected. His second had been to wonder whether even his soldiering was now a hostage to his race. Had he been chosen for this mission simply because he was black? Franklin intended to ask Caskey precisely that question the first chance he got.

  At least the third member of the party was not the Regiment’s other West Indian.

  ‘Joss Wynwood, B Squadron,’ the man in the MOD hospitality room introduced himself, the chirpiness of the Welsh accent somehow made more apparent by the unruly shock of dark hair and wide grin which accompanied it. Franklin found himself taking an instant liking to the man.

  ‘Worrell Franklin,’ he replied, smiling back. ‘G Squadron.’

  ‘Any idea where we’re going?’ Wynwood asked.

  ‘Africa was all the boss told me. What did he tell you?’

  ‘Nothing. Which boss? All I know is that I was given a flight ticket to London and ordered to report here at eleven.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Armagh. But if it’s Africa I can see a connection,’ he added. ‘I had my honeymoon in The Gambia last year, and I was just reading in the paper that there’s been a coup there.’

  ‘Dead right,’ a voice said behind them. Caskey dropped the blue holdall, introduced himself and shook each man by the hand. They looked young, he thought. Both of them. Which was hardly surprising – when he was their age they would have just been starting primary school. ‘We’re on the second floor,’ he said, picking up the holdall again.

  They took the lift up, and the two troopers followed Caskey down a long corridor and into a large room. It made them think of school – rows of tables and chairs facing a blackboard and map easel. A thin man in a dark-blue suit was busy draping several maps over the latter. He looked about thirty, had black, sleeked-back hair, a cheery smile and a public-school accent.

  ‘Be with you in a mo’,’ he said.

  ‘From the Foreign Office,’ Caskey explained. ‘This is just the background briefing. We’ll get a more detailed briefing on the current military situation from the French in Paris.’

  Wynwood and Franklin exchanged impressed glances.

  ‘Any chance of a night at the Folies Bergère?’ Wynwood asked.

  ‘A night in the Charles de Gaulle departure lounge if you’re lucky,’ Caskey said. ‘Two if you’re not.’

  ‘And they said the SAS was the glamorous Regiment,’ Wynwood lamented.

  The FO man was clearing his throat. ‘I’m not sure how much you need to know,’ he began, ‘so if it’s too much or too little, just tell me.’ He turned to the map. ‘This is West Africa,’ he said, and this uneven sausage shape is The Gambia. It’s about two hundred miles long and between twenty and forty miles wide. The River Gambia runs down the middle of it and is the reason why it looks that way – the British just wanted control of the river for strategic reasons, and enough land on either side of it to make the territory viable. As you can also see, it is completely surrounded by Senegal, which was a French colony.

  ‘In fact the two countries would make a lot more sense together than they do separately – the River Gambia would provide exactly the transport artery for a united country which Senegal lacks, and Senegal would provide the hinterland which the river lacks. And that’s the main reason why the two countries have been moving towards a confederation – or at least they had been until the current crisis.

  ‘But I’m getting ahead of the story. The population of The Gambia is about 600,000, of which about a quarter live in the towns at its western end. Here’ – he pointed at the map with a ringed finger – ‘is the capital, Banjul, which used to be called Bathurst. Business and government are still centred there, but it tends to be like the City of London: most of the people who work there don’t actually live there. So by day you have business as usual in peeling colonial mansions, and by night it reverts to being a large shanty town.

  ‘Here is where most of the middle class tends to live’ – the finger pointed again – ‘about eight miles away along the Atlantic coast. Bakau and Fajara are basically outer suburbs, much plusher, much less fraught. Most of the embassies are there, and that’s where the big hotels are being put in for the European package tour trade.’

  ‘Finally, here, forming the third corner of a triangle with them and Banjul, almost like a gateway to the rest of the country, is Serekunda, which is probably more populous than Banjul by now, but is basically just an African township. It’s the place which looks most authentic to the tourists when they drive from the airport to their hotels. They can say they noticed Africa somewhere between the duty free and the beach.’

  Wynwood smiled to himself at this. He remembered driving through Serekunda in the coach quite well, but had only a dim recollection of the beach – somehow the chalet had seemed a more appropriate setting for what Susan and he had in mind. It occurred to him that if he had been picked for this mission on account of his knowing The Gambia, then he was travelling on mostly false pretenses.

  ‘The people,’ the FO man was saying, ‘are mostly Muslim – about ninety per cent. The largest tribal grouping are the Mandinka, who make up just under half the total, followed by the Wollof – about sixteen per cent – and then several other small minority groups. The tribal boundaries don’t follow the national boundaries. For example, there’s a lot more Wollofs over the border in Senegal. Generally though, tribalism has never been a serious problem in The Gambia. All the chiefs got their own patch to lord it over, and none of the minorities seems to feel any real grievance. All of them are represented – were represented, I should say – in the Government.’

  ‘Is it a democracy?’ Caskey asked.

  The FO man smiled. ‘Formally, yes. But Jawara has been in charge now for almost twenty years, since before independence, and – how should I put it? – well, he’s always the one in the best position to win the elections. He’s not a bad ruler, and not a very good one either. The Gambia is poor, make no mistake about that – the annual per capita income is about £100. It doesn’t have anything much in the way of natural resources – peanuts and sunny beaches are the only things they have which anyone else wants, and Jawara’s made a fair fist of encouraging tourism. But there are other things he could have done, which other small countries have done to earn revenue, like printing lots of stamps, or running lotteries, or setting up a free port … There hasn’t been much imagination devoted to the country’s problems, and the few major schemes which have been launched since independence have nearly all been ill conceived and incompetently handled. And in the last few years the economic chickens have started coming home to roost: the
re was widespread famine in 1978, and more shortages last year. Like I said, Jawara’s not a bad ruler, and he’s certainly not a half-baked psycho like Amin or Bokassa. He’s more like an African Mr Average.’

  ‘And what about the guys who mounted the coup?’ Caskey asked.

  ‘We don’t know much about them. The Socialist and Revolutionary Labour Party seems in charge, and that goes back a few years. It was banned last year after a policeman was shot, although it was never clear whether that was the reason or the excuse. Ideologically, they spout the usual Marxist rubbish, which sounds even more comic coming out of a continent without any industry or workers than it does anywhere else. But that may just be window-dressing. A lot of their inspiration – and probably their weapons – comes from Gaddafi, who also likes the phraseology, but takes its meaning about as seriously as I do. And since it seems that over half the military – the Field Force as it’s called – has supported the coup, it’s obviously not just a matter of a small bunch of loonies seizing power. I’d guess that Jawara must be pretty unpopular outside the tourist areas.’

  ‘Has it been a bloody coup?’ Franklin asked.

  ‘Hard to say. The reports we’ve had have only put deaths in the low hundreds, but the coup leaders have appealed for blood donors, so it may be more.’

  ‘What’s the latest news you have?’ Caskey asked.

  The FO man went back to his map. ‘The Senegalese took the airport yesterday, and since then they’ve been advancing on Banjul up this road. I’d guess they’ll take it sometime this morning.’

  ‘That won’t leave us much to do,’ Wynwood complained.

  ‘The rebels still seem to be in control of this area,’ the FO man said, indicating the Bakau-Fajara coastal strip. ‘That’s where their main depot is, and that, I should imagine, is where they’ve taken their hostages.’ He smiled. ‘I’m sure they’ll find something for you to do. Any questions?’ There were none. ‘Then good luck,’ he said, removing the portfolio of maps from the easel and heading for the door.