‘Bit more. But yes, we’re behind enemy lines all right. There’s usually a group of them outside the gate, and we often see lorry-loads going past. But they haven’t knocked on the door yet. Or rather they haven’t knocked again, since the first morning, when they warned us to keep inside the compound.’
‘Have you? What about food?’
‘We’re OK. But no, we haven’t stayed indoors. Several of us have tested the water, literally in fact. We’ve taken to using the beach instead of the road – they run more or less parallel, and only about fifty yards apart. That way we’ve been able to keep tabs on the situation in the hotels.’
‘Which is?’
‘Hunky-dory. Well, almost. The Sunwing seems to have run out of tinned sauerkraut, so the Germans are desperate, but generally speaking everyone has just been sitting round the pool and reading pulp fiction, like they always do. The only difference is that they don’t know when they’ll be allowed home.’
‘And what do you make of the rebels?’
‘Mmm. Hard to say. I mean, you’d think any intelligent group of revolutionaries would make sure they were in control of all the relevant communications, right? But the telephone has been operating more or less normally – erratically, in other words – throughout. You could probably phone up the Field Force depot now and talk to Jabang.’ He paused. ‘But having said that, there’s clearly some intelligence at work. They slowed the Senegalese down long enough to secure their hostages, and now they’ve managed to force a temporary stalemate. There’s even a mobile radio transmitter somewhere in Banjul which is irritating the hell out of the Senegalese. They were in the middle of patting themselves on the back for capturing the radio station – which in any case was down to McGrath and some loyal Gambians – when Jabang’s voice comes jumping out of the ether at them. Bit of a slap in the face for your friend the General.’
‘So we’re not dealing with fools here?’
‘Not in the usual sense of the word. Irresponsible, yes. Emptying the prison was a stupid thing to do. From what I’ve heard most of the killing in Banjul was done by ex-prisoners settling scores.’
‘Any idea of casualties?’
‘Not really. Ask N’Dor. Less than a thousand, I’d say, but it’s only a rough guess.’
‘OK. I’ll keep you up to date with what we’re doing …’
‘Uh-huh. I know what that means – we’ll be the first to know what you’re planning, some time after the event. I’ve had dealings with the SAS before.’
Caskey smiled to himself. ‘We understand each other then. Ah, one other thing,’ he said hurriedly before Myers could hang up, ‘you wouldn’t know the test score by any chance?’
‘Of course we know it,’ Myers said. ‘What’s the diplomatic service for if not to keep Brits up to date with the cricket?’
‘Well?’
‘Well what?’
‘What’s the score?!?’
‘Oh that. We won of course.’
‘Won? They only had about a hundred to make on a pitch like a pudding!’
‘You’re forgetting Botham.’
‘Again?’
‘Again. He took five for one in twenty-six balls. They were all out for a hundred and twenty-one.
Caskey could hardly believe it. Lightning obviously did strike twice in the same place. ‘Amazing,’ he murmured, as much to himself as Myers.
‘You said it.’
‘We’ll be in touch,’ Caskey said, still shaking his head in disbelief.
‘Good luck,’ Myers said, and hung up.
Caskey went back upstairs to where Franklin and Wynwood had established camp, in a suite usually reserved for visiting royalty. Prince Charles had apparently used it once, a piece of information which had caused Wynwood to wonder out loud whether the royal honeymoon was proving a success. ‘I mean, tell me, boyo,’ he had asked Franklin, ‘can you actually imagine the two of them at it? Can you?’
Franklin had tried and failed and gone to have a bath. He was just emerging as Caskey arrived back upstairs. ‘Would you believe we won the test match?’ he asked the two of them.
‘Just about,’ Franklin said.
‘You know,’ Wynwood confided in the West Indian, ‘I had this dream that the three of us had been flown out to Africa on some mission or other …’
‘All right, all right,’ Caskey said with a grin. ‘Business.’ He told the other two the gist of his conversation with Myers.
‘So what now, boss?’ Wynwood asked.
Caskey looked across at the window, which showed a rapidly darkening sky. ‘I think we should talk to McGrath before we decide anything,’ he said, ‘and I wouldn’t object to some food. Or a drink.’
‘Good thinking, boss,’ Wynwood said encouragingly.
‘I take it we’re going armed,’ Franklin said, replacing the Browning in the holster on his belt.
‘You bet,’ Caskey said.
Downstairs the aide who had been detailed to look after them had bad news. There was no food in the palace, for the rebels had stripped the storeroom before departing on the previous day. He recommended the Atlantic Hotel, which was just up the road. They could use the jeep which had been sent by the Senegalese for their use.
Caskey offered a mental apology to General N’Dor and asked the aide for directions to Independence Drive and the hotel. This was also apparently a short drive away, and, as it happened, an unnecessary one. Caskey had no sooner turned the jeep out of the gate than two figures were caught in the arc of its headlights. One was a black woman, the other the white man he had last seen in an SAS photograph.
Caskey pulled the jeep to a halt. ‘Simon McGrath, I presume,’ he said with a smile.
‘And you must be the Three Musketeers,’ McGrath replied.
They shook hands, and Caskey introduced the other two. McGrath ushered Sibou forward. ‘This is Dr Cham,’ he said. ‘She would be The Gambia’s Florence Nightingale, but Florence was only a nurse.’
She ignored him. ‘My name is Sibou,’ she said, offering her hand. Franklin could not remember ever meeting such a lovely woman.
‘Where are you headed?’ McGrath asked.
‘To look for you, and then the Atlantic Hotel for dinner.’
‘Which is where we’re going,’ McGrath said, offering a hand to help Sibou up into the back of the jeep.
Five minutes later they were entering a sparsely populated dining room, and being ushered to a large table by an army of waiters.
‘The tourists from here went home today,’ McGrath explained, ‘and the next batch have been cancelled because of the situation. Which is why our friends here’ – he indicated the hovering waiters – ‘all look like they’re suffering from withdrawal symptoms.’
Once they had ordered two bottles of wine and several beers Caskey invited McGrath to tell the story of the last couple of days. ‘And don’t make too much up,’ he added with a grin, ‘I’ve already talked to Bill Myers.’
McGrath went through what had happened, leaving nothing out, not even the shooting on the Denton Bridge. He caught Sibou’s eye as he recounted those moments, and found he could not read what she was thinking from her expression. Maybe she was not sure herself, he decided.
Franklin, who was sitting between Sibou and McGrath, thought he could feel the tension in her as McGrath told of shooting the rebel, but maybe he was imagining it. He found himself admiring this cynical white Englishman, but not sure whether he liked him very much. He wondered what the relationship between him and the doctor was.
As they ate he managed to share a few words with her, asking whether she was a Gambian and how long she had worked at the hospital. She seemed not to mind being asked, but offered only monosyllabic answers to his questions, and looked genuinely interested only once, when he told her that his mother was a ward sister in a London hospital. It gradually dawned on Franklin that she was tired. Really tired. Tired beyond tired.
Immediately they had finished eating Sibou announced that she
had to get back to the hospital.
‘You need to go home,’ McGrath told her.
‘I need … you’re right, I need to go home,’ she agreed.
‘I’ll take you,’ McGrath said, getting up.
‘Go and see if there’s a taxi,’ she said. ‘If there is I’ll take it. And you can stay and talk to your friends.’
‘I …’
‘I’m not arguing with you,’ she said.
McGrath was back a couple of minutes later. ‘It’s waiting for you,’ he said.
‘It was good to meet you all,’ Sibou said. ‘And don’t let this idiot talk you into anything. I don’t want our next meeting to be at the hospital. Unless you’d like to see what one looks like around here,’ she added, looking at Franklin.
He watched her thread her away out through the tables, balanced like a dancer.
‘Now,’ McGrath said, ‘how do you lads feel like a little exercise?’
In the Field Force depot’s main office the Revolutionary Council was once again in session. One of the twelve members was sick and confined to his bunk, but the other eleven were all there, and, Taal noted, all looking reasonably smart. It was impressive, he thought. Ludicrous perhaps, but still impressive.
Outside the crickets were making their infernal noise, and tonight there was no sign of a downpour to shut them up. Taal wiped his brow with a saturated handkerchief and wondered how many of those present were going to end up hanging from the gibbet in Banjul Prison.
Snap out of it, he told himself. That was what the English said. ‘Snap out of it.’ What a strange expression.
He tried to keep his attention on what Mamadou Jabang was telling the Council, but it was hard to concentrate on something you already knew off by heart. He and Jabang had spent most of the afternoon and evening thinking through the new policy, and he did not really care what the rest of the Council thought of it. There was, after all, no alternative.
‘We will keep what we have,’ Jabang was saying, ‘and negotiate from that position. We have the hostages as one bargaining card, and we have the prisoners as another.’
A murmur of surprise greeted this statement.
‘I am prepared to admit that releasing them was an error,’ Jabang said. ‘An offer on our part to deliver them back into custody will show that we are negotiating in good faith.’
‘Are we in any position to do that?’ one man asked. ‘They are all armed now …’
‘There are only about eighty of them here,’ Taal said. ‘And more than four hundred of us. It will simply take some organization, that’s all. And with any luck it will not be necessary. All that we must do is keep them here, which means trebling the security around the depot. No one should be going in or out without written authorization from this Council.’
There were a few moments of silence while everyone digested this. ‘OK,’ one man said eventually, ‘but what do we want? What are we negotiating for’
‘Our freedom,’ Jabang replied. ‘Free passage out of the country.’
‘To where?’
‘That will depend on which countries are prepared to accept us,’ Taal interjected. ‘But in any case, first we have to establish the principle.’
‘That is true,’ Jabang conceded. ‘And to establish that principle we must make Jawara fear the consequences of refusal.’
Diba stood in the shadows under the depot’s water tower and watched the two men stop for a few words with the sentries on the gate, before starting another lap along the inside of the wall. A few moments earlier another patrol had passed by on the outside of the gate. They were presumably circling the outer wall.
And then there was the searchlight which had been installed in the fire-station tower that evening. Its operator was either minus a brain or very well instructed, because the search pattern was decidedly random, the wide beam slipping this way and that across the depot compound, spilling out onto the road in front and into the trees behind. A man could get across the wall and away, but he would need to be lucky. There was no way to be certain, and Diba was not yet desperate enough to chance his life on such a throw of the dice.
Besides, he thought, as he walked back towards his barracks, the leaders had promised women the following evening. There was no hurry. If the Senegalese attacked the depot there was no way they could capture all three hundred men – some were bound to escape. He just had to be sure that when the time came he was one of them. And that should not be a problem, because most of the rebels would be too busy playing the hero, and most of the ex-prisoners were too slow on the uptake to think of running.
McGrath brought the jeep to a halt on the side of the open road. ‘We’d better walk from here,’ he said. ‘No point in giving the enemy the idea that anything’s happening.’
The other three got out. A cool breeze seemed to be blowing in from the ocean, which by Caskey’s reckoning was a mile or so ahead of them. The sky was clear, the stars of the summer triangle bright in the northern sky. To the west, the reddish Arcturus hung balefully above the horizon.
They were on the Serekunda-Fajara road, about a quarter of a mile inland from the Senegalese front line. All four men had spent several minutes in front of the mirror with the make-up kit, and their faces and hands were artistically streaked with camouflage cream.
The soldiers at both the Senegalese checkpoints they had passed through – one at the Denton Bridge, the other at the crossroads in Serekunda – had eyed them with a mixture of suspicion, awe and, it had to be admitted, amusement. Still, the authorizations signed by Jawara and N’Dor had granted them free passage, and after a certain amount of head-scratching they had been allowed just that. The Gambia was their oyster, as McGrath announced. ‘Pity there’s no pearl,’ he had murmured to himself.
‘Ready?’ Caskey asked. He had made it clear to McGrath, in as friendly a manner as he could manage, that the SAS group in The Gambia had only one boss – himself. He was the one who was responsible to Bryan Weighell, and ultimately to the British Government. As long as McGrath understood and accepted that he was more than welcome to join the party.
‘You’re the boss,’ McGrath had agreed, and only time would tell if he meant it.
‘You take lead scout, Simon,’ Caskey said, organizing the four men along standard SAS lines. ‘Joss, Tail-end Charlie.’ As leader he would take up the second position, with responsibility for the left flank. Franklin would come third, and cover the right. For the moment, while they were still supposedly in friendly territory, there was unlikely to be any danger, but it paid to be careful. He could tell from the dark silhouettes of the palms that this was hardly the Brecon Beacons.
They started off, walking at a reasonable pace, but not so fast that they lost their sensitivity to the rest of the world. On either side of the road open countryside dotted with trees and the occasional low building stretched away into the distance. Behind them a dim glow in the sky over Serekunda announced the imminent moonrise.
After about ten minutes McGrath slowly moved his right arm up and down to signal a slow-down. Caskey caught him up, and took a look through his binoculars. Two hundred yards ahead of them, where several buildings were clustered under a group of palms close to the road, a number of vehicles were parked. Between them Caskey could make out a neatly sandbagged emplacement, which probably contained a machine-gun. Some way off the road, and shielded by a house from the enemy’s view, four men were sitting round a fire. As Caskey looked one of them dragged on his cigarette, turning it into a miniature flare.
He passed the binoculars to McGrath, who took a look. ‘They’re Senegalese, all right,’ he whispered. ‘Not much of a war zone, is it?’
‘No point in spoiling their rest,’ Caskey observed. ‘Right or left, do you reckon?’ he asked, looking first to one side, then the other.
McGrath tried to remember what the area looked like in daylight. ‘Left,’ he said finally. ‘I don’t know this area well, but I think they’ve put in a golf course just up ahead, and on
the other side of that we should find the approach road to the Bakotu Hotel. From the back of the hotel there’s a path leading down to the beach. If we go to the right it’ll cut down the distance, but we’ll probably end up scrambling over garden walls in Fajara.’
‘Left it is. Lead on, MacDuff.’
They crossed an expanse of difficult broken ground. The huge orange moon now looming behind them offered little help, but did manage to throw an almost malevolent sheen over the landscape. In some areas the surface was decidedly swamp-like, and Wynwood found himself imagining strange creatures lurking in the ominous ooze.
It was with some relief that they emerged onto a beautifully cut green, complete with a flag announcing that it was the third hole.
‘Fancy a quick round?’ McGrath asked Caskey.
‘On the way back, maybe.’
Wynwood and Franklin rolled their eyes up at each other. There was only one thing crazier than an SAS trooper, and that was an SAS officer. Or, as in McGrath’s case, an ex-SAS officer.
They traversed the third fairway, crossed the low fence which separated the tee from a narrow road, and waited for a moment, ears straining to pick up any sounds not made by nature. There were none. In the distance they could now hear the murmur of the ocean.
A quarter of a mile or so away several pinpoints of light suggested habitation. ‘The Bakotu,’ McGrath said. ‘It has its own generator.’
They followed the road in that direction, still strung out in a line some fifty yards from head to tail, and then closed up on McGrath’s hand signal. The hotel was now about a hundred yards distant, and with the aid of the binoculars Caskey picked out two men with rifles on sentry duty. They were standing facing the main entrance, obviously considering it their job to keep the tourists in rather than anyone else out. Caskey forced himself to wait five minutes in case there were others patrolling the grounds, but none appeared. He nodded to McGrath to continue.
They skirted the outer edge of the hotel car park, all the time keeping an eye on the backs of the sentries. Even if they had turned round it was doubtful whether they could have seen the SAS patrol, but they did not. McGrath led the way through a gap between two outbuildings, cautiously opened a squeaky gate, and found himself skirting a swimming pool. A discarded bikini top was floating on the water – clearly someone was still enjoying their holiday.
Soldier N: Gambian Bluff Page 16
