Soldier N: Gambian Bluff

by David Monnery

  An arched doorway at the rear led out onto the footpath he remembered, which wound steeply down through trees to the beach. Checking to see that the others were still with him, he started off down the slope.

  The tide was out, which was fortunate. If it had been in, the beach would have been impassable in several places between there and their destination. McGrath felt momentarily disappointed in himself for not remembering such an important element at the planning stage, then brought his mind back to the job in hand.

  The beach seemed empty in both directions. The half beneath the low cliffs was still in shadow, but the flat sands stretching down to the sea were bathed in moonlight. Walking would be easier down there, McGrath thought, but they would also be plainly visible to anyone watching from above. They would have to trudge through the shadows.

  All four men hunkered down in a circle.

  ‘We’re about a mile and a half from the nearest point on the beach to the rebel HQ,’ McGrath said.

  ‘And how far from the beach is that?’ Wynwood asked.

  ‘Only a hundred yards or so. There’s a line of buildings – hotels, restaurants, embassies – between the beach and the road, and then the Field Force depot is on the other side. It looks like an American children’s camp – all cabins and trees – except that it’s also surrounded by a high wall. There’s a fire station next door with a high tower.’

  ‘Any questions?’ Caskey asked.

  ‘Yes, boss,’ Wynwood said. ‘If we run into someone what’s the policy?’

  ‘Avoidance if possible,’ Caskey said. ‘We don’t want anyone knowing that we’ve recced this route if we can help it.’ He looked round at the others. ‘Anything else?’

  There were no questions. McGrath led off along the sand, using any firm ground at the foot of the cliffs he could find, and the rest of the patrol followed, making sure that the spaces between them were both wide enough and irregular.

  As Tail-end Charlie, Wynwood would occasionally spin round on his heel to check the area behind them, but no one came into view. This beach was as empty as his own favourite stretch of sand would be in the depths of winter. Nearly every summer of his childhood Wynwood’s family had taken their annual holiday in one of the caravan parks around Tremadoc Bay, and at least once each trip they had all walked the six miles across the sands from Criccieth to Portmadoc, getting up such an appetite that the fish-and-chip supper which invariably followed tasted as good as anything on earth.

  He sighed at the memory. Somehow he was finding this trip hard to take seriously. They had been whisked away from Britain to live in a palace, had been served a sumptuous dinner by more attendants than Lady Di had had at the Wedding, and had then been treated to an exposition of McGrath’s Boy’s Own exploits. Now here they were walking down a moonlit beach with palms waving overhead. Wynwood half expected to see Biggles roar by in a bi-plane. It felt as if he had come a hell of a long way from Armagh in not much more than forty-eight hours.

  Up ahead of him Franklin was keeping his eyes peeled on the clifftops to his right, thinking about Sibou Cham, and asking himself the same questions most people must have asked after meeting her. Like – what was a beautiful, talented girl like her doing in a place like this? He smiled to himself. He already knew the answer – she was making the best use of her talent. Not in terms of her own material gain, and probably not when it came to her own development as a doctor, but undeniably the best in terms of other people’s needs. She had simply put herself where she could make a real difference to the largest number of lives.

  He wondered whether she had a political axe to grind and decided probably not. She just wanted to do her job and do it well. Like he did. Race never got in the way of doing your best. He realized he wanted to talk to her about these things, that she might … not have an answer for him, exactly, but maybe some clues. Just a little wisdom, as his grandmother used to say whenever she was asked what she wanted for Christmas. Just a little wisdom.

  Some twenty yards further forward the moonlit sands were also bringing out the philosopher in Caskey. Nights like this were the reason he had loved his military career – the sense of freedom, the sense of being on the edge, the overwhelming sense of being utterly alive. Nothing compared with it, nothing at all, not even the day’s news that Botham had done it again. Certainly not sex, which always came with such distressing side-effects – like having to deal with someone else’s emotions. The only downside of nights like this was that they cast everything else into their shadow. He would go back to England, continue his military career for a few more years, hang around in pubs reminiscing about old times, watch the cricket. There were many enjoyable ways to pass the time. The trouble was, that was all they did, just pass it. On a night like this, with life and death at stake, every moment had to matter. And did.

  As lead scout, McGrath’s responsibilities included picking out their route and keeping an alert eye for any rebel presence up ahead. He was enjoying himself every bit as much as Caskey, and sharing in the same realization that for him this much-loved way of life would soon be over. He would be forty in a couple of months, and though he was as fit as he had ever been, he knew that time was running out for his legs and his reflexes alike. In this job anything less than the best was not good enough.

  He was also feeling the pull of home, and knew that the arrival of the three men behind him had done something to make that pull real again. He missed his wife and children, but then he always had – this was something else, a feeling of being tired of places where he felt alone. Sure, he had made friends in The Gambia – he had made friends wherever he had been in the world – but no matter how much he liked people like Sibou Cham or the Camaras he knew a gulf lay between them, a gulf that prevented him or them from ever growing close enough to …

  The fire leapt into view as he rounded the small headland, causing him to stop in his tracks and inch his way back over those few feet of sand which inertia had carried him across. No shout came after him, no bullets. He signalled Caskey to stop, and walked back to meet him, his mind recreating a picture of the scene around the corner.

  The four men gathered in a circle once more, this time deep in the writhing shadows of trees which swayed on the cliff edge above them. ‘There are two men – I think they’re both in uniform – sitting by a fire in the middle of the beach. Sitting on upright chairs, I think.’ McGrath held his arms out, palms upwards, in a gesture of apology. ‘I only had a split-second glimpse.’

  ‘Weapons?’ Caskey asked.

  ‘One was holding something. Something shiny. I’d guess a rifle, but only because that’s all I’ve seen up to now. It could be an SMG.’

  ‘Suggestions?’ Caskey asked them all.

  ‘Is there no way past them?’ Franklin asked, looking up. The cliff, though only about fifteen feet high, was virtually sheer.

  McGrath shook his head. ‘Not that I know of. Not unless we go back a ways and risk the road. And they’re bound to be patrolling that.’

  ‘Frankie, how do you feel about impersonating a local?’ Caskey asked. ‘You could probably get close enough to get the drop on them.’

  ‘He doesn’t look like a local,’ Wynwood said. ‘He’s too damn tall, for one thing. And the clothes are all wrong.’

  ‘And if they ask me anything in Mandinka I’m finished,’ Franklin said, trying to keep his voice level. He did not want to turn down Caskey’s request, but there was something about it that he really resented.

  ‘How about two of us impersonating a couple of tourists?’ McGrath suggested. ‘Drunken English tourists.’

  ‘I do a convincing drunken Welsh tourist,’ Wynwood said.

  ‘No kidding,’ McGrath said wryly.

  ‘Why not three?’ Caskey wanted to know.

  ‘Two’s better,’ McGrath insisted. ‘Three will look too threatening. We want to look friendly. Very friendly.’

  ‘OK,’ Caskey said, looking at him and Wynwood. ‘The parts are yours.’

  �
��Who dares wins,’ McGrath murmured.

  They made sure to start singing some way before they turned the corner. Wynwood opened with a heartfelt chorus of ‘Land of My Fathers’, but soon decided to join in McGrath’s spirited rendition of Abba’s ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’. They rounded the end of the headland, two arms about each other’s shoulders, two waving wildly at the sky. One of the latter contained a bottle which McGrath had found under the cliff.

  ‘Knowing me, knowing you, AHAAAA, there is nothing we can DO! … We just have to face it this time – WE’RE THROUGH!’ they bellowed in different keys.

  The two uniformed Field Force men were on their feet, and yes, McGrath noticed, they had been sitting in the middle of a beach on two upright wooden chairs. One of them started shouting at the two drunken tourists; something about going back to their hotel.

  Wynwood and McGrath staggered on, vocally reaching for the sky.

  ‘In these old familiar rooms, children will play … Now there’s only emptiness, nothing to say … KNOWING ME, KNOWING YOU!’

  One of the Field Force men was now laughing at them, his Kalashnikov pointing at the ground, while the other continued to shout at them, brandishing his in their general direction.

  ‘Constable!’ McGrath boomed, waving the bottle. ‘Have a drink!’

  They were only a few feet away now. Wynwood disentangled his arm from around McGrath and put it over his face, as if suddenly stricken by a dizzy spell. Then he opened his mouth as if to yawn, all the time watching McGrath, who had the man with the upraised gun to deal with.

  The Englishman did not bother with subtlety. One minute he seemed to be offering the bottle, the next it was crashing down on the African’s head. The other Field Force man’s eyes were still bulging with surprise when the edge of Wynwood’s hand came down on the side of his neck. The eyes could apparently bulge no wider, and he slid to the ground.

  ‘May the Field Force be with you,’ Wynwood murmured.

  ‘Nice work,’ McGrath said, examining the two men. ‘They’ll both be out for a while,’ he added. ‘But let’s ice the cake a little …’ He took a hip-flask from his pocket and began easing small amounts of whisky down the unconscious men’s throats. ‘No one’ll believe their story if they smell of booze,’ he explained to the other three.

  ‘Good one,’ Caskey said. ‘And then …’

  A shout from behind turned all their heads round, and there, coming down a flight of steps that had been cut in the cliffs was a third Field Force man. He seemed to realize his mistake at almost the same instant, and for what felt like several seconds appeared to hang motionless, like a cartoon character who had just run off the edge of a cliff.

  Then he managed to put himself in reverse, and started scooting back up the steps.

  ‘Frankie,’ Caskey said, turning to where the black trooper had been standing, but Franklin was already off, racing across the sand and leaping the bottom three steps in one bound before the Field Force man had regained the top. And as he hurled himself up the steps Franklin’s mind seemed to be on automatic, asking and answering questions like a computer talking to itself. Did the man he was chasing have a gun? Yes, he did. What had the man seen on the beach? Three white men and himself standing over his two comrades. Looking sober. Looking like they knew what they were doing. Conclusion: this man should not be allowed to report what he had seen.

  Franklin reached the top of the steps, from where a pathway led up through a grove of trees towards the road. The man was fifteen yards ahead, and not a good runner. Franklin knew he would catch him within fifty yards.

  The African must have known it too from the swelling sound of Franklin’s boots behind him. He stopped suddenly and turned, raising the Kalashnikov to his eye and firing wildly. Bullets seemed to zip past Franklin’s face, and as one part of his mind was registering disbelief at the fact that he had not been hit, the other was pulling the Browning from his holster, making sure his legs were slightly bent, locking his arms, and pulling the trigger.

  The man’s knees buckled, and he sank to the ground without making a sound.

  Franklin walked forward to where he was lying, suddenly hyper-aware of the sounds around him: the waves rippling on the beach below, the breeze in the palm fronds above, the footsteps behind him.

  It was Wynwood, who looked down at the corpse thinking, this is real all right. This man is as dead as the men in that lane in Armagh.

  ‘We’d better get him back down to the beach,’ Franklin said. ‘I can manage,’ he added, and used a fireman’s lift to get the body across his shoulder.

  ‘I’ll keep watch up here for five minutes,’ Wynwood suggested, ‘just in case somebody comes to investigate.’ It was hard to believe that the burst of automatic fire had not alerted someone, but he had no clear idea how far they were from the rebel HQ. And the breeze now seemed to be blowing offshore, which could only help.

  Down on the beach Caskey and McGrath were waiting. ‘Nice work,’ Caskey told Franklin grimly. ‘I wonder …’

  ‘The tide’s out almost as far as it goes,’ McGrath said. ‘If we take him out another twenty feet, and weigh him down with a rock or two … He only needs to stay hidden for a couple of days.’

  They did as he suggested, completing the task just as Wynwood came back down from the clifftop. ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  Caskey breathed out noisily. ‘Then let’s get moving again,’ he said.

  They left the two unconscious Field Force men by their glowing fire. Caskey had wondered whether they should be killed as well, but decided against. It might not be the right decision in military terms, but killing men who were already unconscious did not seem like cricket. Even the way the Australians played it.

  Ten minutes later they reached a point which McGrath judged was level with the rebel HQ, and he scrambled up the sloping cliff to check his bearings. Away above the trees in the distance a bright light could be seen shining. There was only one place it could be – in the fire-station tower. They were in the right place. He signalled the others to join him.

  They found a narrow passage between walls which led in the direction of the road, and cautiously advanced along it. A pile of crates containing empty Coca-Cola bottles suggested they were outside a restaurant or a hotel, and when they were no more than twenty yards from the road an archway led off the passage into a thatch-covered area full of seats and tables. The wall between this and the road was composed of blocks arranged in a geometric pattern, through which the moonlight cast a chequer-board of shadows.

  Through the spaces they could see the front gates of the Field Force depot, across the road and some twenty yards to their left. As far as outside movements were concerned it was an ideal observation spot, and for the next hour they used it to log the frequency of both the perimeter patrol and the jeep which seemed to be tracking backwards and forwards between the Sunwing and Bakotu ends of the road.

  There was no need to spy out the layout inside the depot – there were loyal Field Force officers to provide such details, and probably architectural plans somewhere or other – but it would be more than useful to know in which particular building or buildings the hostages were located. Such information could only be obtained by either surreptitiously seizing control of the fire-station tower – which would probably prove impossible – or sending someone over the wall. Without any clear idea of the layout within, and with the two men on the beach liable to wake up within a few hours, Caskey reluctantly ruled out the latter option as far as this particular night was concerned.

  They went back the way they had come, down to the beach and back along it, passing the unconscious men beside the dying fire. The tide had turned and the moon was now high in the sky, dimming the stars.

  They met no one on the path up from the beach, heard nothing as they went past the sleeping Bakotu Hotel, and decided sleep was a more pressing priority than a round of nocturnal golf. The jeep was waiting where they had left it, the Senegalese checkpoints manned by the same
soldiers, who seemed to have no curiosity as to where they had been.

  Shortly before two in the morning they dropped McGrath off outside the Carlton Hotel and roared back down Independence Drive to their palace.

  Chapter 11

  It was scarcely seven o’clock when Franklin woke up, and far from fully light outside. Wynwood was snoring contentedly in the other bed. Franklin turned over and tried to get back to sleep, but the dawn chorus of birds in the Palace grounds was even louder than Wynwood.

  Make the most of it, a voice inside his head told him. He would probably only be in Africa for a few days.

  By the time he had bathed, dressed and got himself downstairs, the new day had established itself. There was only a single uniformed guard beside the doors in the wide entrance hall. One of the benefits of a coup like this one, Franklin guessed, was that you knew where your enemies were. For a while, anyway.

  The guard smiled at him but said nothing. Franklin walked out into the morning, and shielded his eyes against the sun piercing through the trees almost directly ahead of him. Where should he walk to? Did it really matter?

  He strolled down the drive to the gates, where two Field Force men did bother to examine his authorization before offering friendly smiles. He asked them which way to the centre of town, was pointed in a vaguely southerly direction, and set off.

  The hospital where Sibou worked already seemed open for business, and he thought of dropping in to see her as she had suggested, but on reflection decided that this probably was not the ideal time. He kept going, turning left onto Independence Drive and walking past a small building which claimed to house the National Museum and a medium-sized Christian church proclaiming itself a cathedral. Several people were on the street already, either just walking to work or busying themselves outside their premises on the other side of the street. It felt more normal than the day before, less like a ghost town.