The jeep dropped Jimfish at the door of a large hotel which had been badly damaged by rocket fire, like so many of the buildings in Freetown. He was led into what was once the manager’s office and there sat a man in military khaki, wearing a cap laced with gold braid and large sunglasses, who sported a bushy beard as broad as a shovel. The armed escort saluted their chief, who returned the salute, and this went on for some time before the escort was dismissed.
Jimfish felt more wretched than ever, faced by the man in the gold braid. What was he to say to this imposing personage? As John Doe had warned, he did look all neck; it was as broad as a baobab trunk, climbing from his tunic collar up into his heavily gold-encrusted cap. But when the Commandant pulled a bottle out of the desk drawer and asked him if he’d like a brandy and Coke, Jimfish’s heart leaped. It was such a stroke of luck he hardly dared to believe what he had heard, but the man’s accent was unmistakeable.
‘Are you perhaps South African?’
The other nodded so hard his beard gave off a breeze. ‘Born and bred and proud of it.’
‘My countryman!’ Jimfish embraced him. ‘One of us!’
The other extricated himself and gave Jimfish a careful look. ‘Up to a point, maybe.’
‘Where exactly are you from?’ Jimfish asked eagerly.
‘From little Port Pallid, on the Indian Ocean,’ said the soldier.
Jimfish knew suddenly who he was and his heart blazed with happiness.
‘What blessed luck! You’re Deon Arlow, brother of Lunamiel.’
The other nodded. ‘Commandant Arlow, if you don’t mind. And now that I cast my mind back, aren’t you the fellow who was sitting, or even lying, on a red picnic rug in my father’s orchard, entangled with my sister?’
‘That’s right!’ Jimfish was overjoyed, after being so long so lost in the world, to meet a fellow countryman.
‘My dad got so damn furious he tried to shoot you.’ Deon Arlow laughed at the memory. ‘It’s only natural. But you got away scot-free. Isn’t that so, hey?’
So overwhelmed with delight at meeting another of his own kind was Jimfish that he found himself nodding. After all, shooting people was what Sergeant Arlow did for a living. It was nothing personal. In fact, Jimfish felt a tiny twinge of remorse at having deprived Sergeant Arlow of doing what came so naturally. As he sat and sipped his brandy and Coke he felt a surge of South African camaraderie so strong he almost apologized to Deon Arlow for having got away scot-free.
CHAPTER 22
Deon Arlow poured Jimfish another brandy and Coke.
‘I’m the first to say those were mad times. Race, colour, blood and tribe drove us crazy. But that’s all behind us now. I’m so proud that my sister Lunamiel was at the forefront of this push into Africa.’
‘As I remember,’ said Jimfish, ‘you traded her for mineral rights in Zaire.’
‘Exactly. A brave move at the time, I can tell you. Who says white guys can’t adapt and reach out to our African brothers? Commerce not conflict is the way to go. Since we embedded my sister in Zairean high society I’ve opened branches in Angola, Liberia and Sierra Leone, with more deals to come.’
‘And what’s the name of this excellent example of commercial outreach?’ Jimfish asked.
‘Superior Solutions,’ came the reply.
Jimfish remembered Brigadier Bare-Butt’s warm greeting when they met behind the line of burnt-out army trucks during the battle for Monrovia.
‘You mean you fight other people’s wars – for money?’
Deon Arlow shook his head so violently his beard swung to and fro beneath his chin like a bushy pendulum.
‘Not just money. We take gold, oil, dollars, platinum, rare earths, uranium yellow cake – in this case’ – he pulled out a linen bag very like the one John Doe had been carrying – ‘it’s diamonds.’
‘But then, surely, you must be mercenaries?’ Jimfish was appalled.
The Commandant smiled at his naiveté. ‘Mercenaries are medieval. Then came conscripts, when the worst of the fighting fell to lowly private soldiers. But the willingness to die in numbers is not what it was. The old cannon-fodder model is kaput. Replaced by the contractor paradigm. Think of us as management consultants sans frontières. Businessmen, not brigands. We consult, confer, clobber, console. In return, we are paid in whatever currency the dominant warlord prefers.’
Jimfish was confused by this talk of models and paradigms. ‘Then who does the killing?’
The Commandant shook his head. ‘Not a word we use. We contain, counter, stabilize, neutralize, pulverize. We contract to downsize the bad guys or maximize the weak. Sometimes we save innocents from being hacked to pieces by lawless soldiery. We can peacekeep or we can plaster enemy guts all over the bloody place. Outsourcing assets. More and more countries are seeing the light. The Great Leopard in Zaire, he headhunts Croat and Serb snipers to put down local uprisings at home. Makes an internal market, because Serbs and Croats hate each other and so they compete on kill-rates.’
The Commandant walked over to the map of Africa on the wall and tapped Pretoria. ‘Here’s the question I asked myself when I started out: why look abroad for talents we’ve got at home? For decades our own government spent buckets of blood and bags of treasure fighting black terrorists – and most whites were pretty damn happy with that. Then, just last year, without a word of warning, our new President caves in, signs a peace treaty and tells us to jump into bed with the enemy. Where does that leave lots of young guys – white and black – who’ve never known anything but war and more war? If they can’t kick it, eat it, shoot it or screw it they haven’t a clue what to do. That’s when I saw a gap in the market. Our rulers may have thrown in the towel and settled for peace, but plenty of other rogue regimes – all over Africa – are in the market, looking to do what we did so well. Only they don’t have our skills or our arms industry.’
The Commandant marched Jimfish to the window and pointed to the white soldiers who had escorted him from the chopper, now grabbing a bit of shut-eye in the shade.
‘I said to myself: “Deon, my boy, there must be a rich niche for a mobile fighting force with terrific weapons and a civilizing mission.” I started in a small way over in Angola, cleaning out rebel strongholds. And now I have more work than I can handle. You want a coup backed – or bust? You want your current dictator safe – or dead? You need the folks over the hill to be conclusively terminated? Look no further. Superior Solutions has the plan to suit your treasury. Right now, I’m fixing a deal with interested parties, right here in Freetown.’ He poured Jimfish another large brandy and Coke and raised his glass. ‘Here’s to Superior Solutions: a proudly South African company.’
Jimfish felt it was only polite to join in the toast, before asking Deon Arlow a question of vital importance.
‘And what can you tell me of your sister Lunamiel?’
The Commandant shrugged: ‘I hear she’s been grabbed by that demented Liberian mystic Brigadier Bare-Butt. I’m no racist. All’s fair in love and war, etcetera. But between you and me I’d love to whizz across the border into Liberia and nail the brigadier’s ugly backside to a baobab.’
‘I’ll come with you!’ cried Jimfish. ‘We can take the helicopter and rescue my Lunamiel and then we’ll get married.’
‘Hold it right there!’ Deon Arlow was furious. ‘What did you just say? My sister is a white girl, one hundred and fifty per cent pure-as-snow European and proud of it. Back home in Port Pallid my late father made me swear I would never ever let his daughter – an Aryan to the nth degree – marry a black man.’
‘You hold it right there!’ Jimfish was himself suddenly so angry he quite surprised himself. ‘Didn’t you lease-lend Lunamiel on a timeshare contract to the Zairean Minister of Education?’
‘That was business,’ said Deon Arlow. ‘Constructive engagement. It is not the same as letting my sister marry a black man.’
‘Who says I’m black?’ demanded Jimfish.
Deon Ar
low looked him over and what he saw puzzled him, because Jimfish really didn’t look quite human. He was pale and pink in some lights or eerily ice-white or tan, but then again, at times, his skin showed a light blue tint.
‘Whatever you are, you’re not the right white,’ he said. ‘And nowadays, since we don’t do the old apartheid talk any more, back in Port Pallid anyone not strictly white – and that goes for Asians, Chinese, Thais, Libyans and mixed-race guys – are formally black.’
Jimfish stood up. ‘The days of dividing people by colour are over. You said so yourself. If my old teacher Soviet Malala is right about anything, he’s right when he says that those who keep up the struggle will land on the right side of history. I love Lunamiel, she loves me and we want to get married.’
‘Over my dead body!’ Deon Arlow went for his revolver, but, like his father, he was a slow, clumsy man and Jimfish beat him to the draw, pulled his pistol from its python-skin holster and calmly shot the Commandant of Superior Solutions through the heart.
It was only when the Commandant slumped to the floor that Jimfish – faced by the ghastly truth that not only was he as violent as any other man but he had really rather enjoyed it – broke into wails of despair.
‘What have I done? I hate brutality and murder! But I’ve already killed a government minister and an American secret agent! Now I’ve shot my future brother-in-law!’
Luckily, his sobs alerted John Doe, who had returned from a useful meeting with local warlords. He took one look at the scene and, being trained for this sort of thing, he knew what to do: he began stripping the dead man.
‘Take off your clothes,’ he instructed Jimfish, handing him the Commandant’s uniform, finishing with his cap and dark glasses. Then very neatly he scissored off Deon Arlow’s great beard and fixed it to Jimfish’s chin with duct tape.
‘This is what we do next.’ He handed Jimfish the dead man’s bag of diamonds, assuring him they would come in useful. ‘I’ll fetch the Commandant’s jeep and you jump in the back. Soon as they see you, the Commandant’s men will snap to attention and salute. You salute in return and while all this saluting is going on, we drive away. We’ll be airborne in the Blackhawk and heading for Somalia before they know what’s happened.’
And so it was that Jimfish escaped from Sierra Leone, laden with diamonds, but with a heavy heart, knowing that he had once again failed to land on the right side of history.
CHAPTER 23
Mogadishu, Somalia, 1992–93
The Blackhawk floated above Mogadishu, giving Jimfish his first glimpse of Somalia, and touched down in a field outside town. John Doe seemed anxious to get away the moment he had deposited his passenger, and just before closing the hatch he shouted a rapid briefing on his role as a harbinger.
‘Restore hope – that’s us. Harbinger – that’s you. Surgical strikes. Food aid. Votes for all. Mission accomplished. Got that? God bless!’
With that the chopper lifted into the sky and Jimfish set off to walk into the capital under the fierce January summer sun.
He had not gone far when a pickup drew level with him and for a moment he thought he was being offered a lift. Then he noticed the machine gun mounted on the truck and glowering soldiers, strung with ammunition, who demanded to know if he was an American.
Jimfish was happy he could put the record straight: ‘I am a harbinger of hope.’
‘Without doubt, an American,’ they said, pointing their guns at him. ‘Tie him up.’
Jimfish pulled out his bag of rough diamonds and offered to trade, but his captors laughed. What would they do with dirty pebbles? Jimfish explained the stones could be swapped for a fortune. They laughed again. Who would trade stones for Kalashnikovs? It was dollars they wanted, but Jimfish had none. The soldiers explained that kidnapping had become the best new Somali thing. Leveraging high-end hostages into cash. Americans were blue-chip stocks. With that they tied him up, tossed him into the back of their truck and drove into Mogadishu, firing happily at anything that moved.
The truck moved through empty, silent, potholed streets lined with billboards and plastered with pictures of a stern, uniformed soldier, whose formal title was ‘Victorious Leader’ and whom he took to be Siad Barre, one-time and most recent dictator of Somalia. On the left-hand side of the road the former dictator was pictured in fading posters, hanging alongside Karl Marx, Lenin and the dear leader of North Korea Kim Il-sung; he was also shown locked in a bear hug with none other than Jimfish’s late acquaintance Nicolae Ceauşescu, the Genius of the Carpathians.
On the right-hand side of the road were more recent posters, showing Presidents Jimmy Carter and George Bush Senior, and Jimfish remembered John Doe telling him that the Americans had replaced the Russians in supplying the dictator’s need for cash and arms.
As the pickup bounced over Mogadishu’s dusty, pot-holed roads Jimfish was once again filled with wonder at how effortlessly people reversed positions.
Seeing Nicolae Ceauşescu’s face brought back to him the show trial of the dictator and his wife in Târgovişte; and how long-serving lieutenants of Ceauşescu’s iron rule, abruptly and unhesitatingly switched from being life-long patriarchs of the Communist Party into proud fighters for freedom by firing squad.
Clearly, this was what sensible, pragmatic people did. Hadn’t the redoubtable Robert Mugabe once gone to war to liberate his people from colonial bondage only to cheer the shooting of those who mistakenly took their freedom at face value? The liberator turned liquidator showed adaptability of a high degree.
And what of those armed guards he had seen at the Berlin Wall as it was falling down? So ready to shoot on sight anyone crossing the wall on, say, Tuesday, yet on Wednesday, calmly helping people through the breaches made by the woodpeckers with their chisels. Was this not the acme of pragmatism?
In Liberia, when Master Sergeant Samuel Doe murdered President William Tolbert, together with all his ministers to become the new President, he was demonstrating his talent, not for criminal cruelty, but for robust common sense. Samuel K. Doe, in turn, had been murdered by Prince Johnson, in about the time it takes to sink a Budweiser, setting off a race to rule Liberia amongst those warlords still standing. Which of their election promises would speak most winningly to Liberians as they were frogmarched into the voting booths? Would it be Prince Johnson, who had carved up the late President on camera and marketed the home movie? Or Charles Taylor, running on his record of killing the mothers and fathers of his compatriots and ready to do the same to any of their children who made the wrong choice. Or would the winner be the dark horse, Brigadier Bare-Butt and his horde of hopped-up, bewigged boys, one of whom turned into the team breakfast before each battle? Hard to say.
Oh, where was Soviet Malala now? Jimfish wanted to tell him he was wrong. If this is how things were, then he no longer believed in rage and he did not care whether or not he arrived on the right side of history. If this was what adaptability meant, then he would rather die, and he said so to the soldiers as they were hauling him out of the back of the truck.
That was something they could very well offer him, they assured him, but first they would use him to set the floor price in living hostages. It was all a question of testing and trusting the market. If it turned out, when they had collected more prisoners, that they got almost as much for a dead American, then they might execute their captives and settle for a lower margin on larger volumes. With that they flung Jimfish into a cell and left him to his misery.
But he was not alone. Sitting on a bunk watching him closely was a tall fellow with a good head of hair.
‘The men who have locked us up – what do they want?’ Jimfish wondered. ‘I offered them diamonds, but they weren’t interested.’
‘In a civil war there is always only one good convertible currency. In my war, dollars didn’t work, nor did British pounds. For bribes or ransoms or customs fees it had to be German Deutschmarks.’
‘Where was your war?’ Jimfish asked him.
&
nbsp; ‘Hard to say,’ said his fellow prisoner with a sad smile.
‘You can’t have a war without a country to have it in,’ said Jimfish. ‘That stands to reason.’
‘We don’t bother much with reason where I come from,’ said the other. ‘Let’s just say I had a country once, but it went away.’
Jimfish had to laugh. ‘Where on earth did it go?’
The melancholy man shrugged. ‘Who knows? One day it was there. On all the maps, in the travel brochures, available on package tours. But the next time I looked, it was gone.’
CHAPTER 24
Jimfish was baffled. Maybe the man was mad. Though, looking at him, what his fellow prisoner showed was a great and sombre calmness, as if he had faced some terrible fate and accepted it, but what he had faced was so depressing he simply could not talk about it. So he spoke in riddles.
Jimfish pressed him. ‘But surely, strictly speaking, you must be someone from somewhere?’
‘Strictly speaking, I’m Zoran the Serb, from Belgrade,’ said the sad man with the good head of hair. ‘I was a serving soldier in what was once the Yugoslav National Army. Created by a man called Tito, who made a country called Yugoslavia. I’m still a Tito man. To hear what they say about him these days, you’d think Tito wasn’t a Croatian genius who kept Yugoslavia in one piece. No, he was another Hitler. And this from idiots who want only certified Serbs in Serbia and kosher Croats in Croatia and model Muslims in Sarajevo. Right down to the tribal wire, in every pathetic little Balkanette born from ex-Yugoslavia. Each run by ex-Communists turned chauvinists, like Tuđjman in Croatia and Milošević in Serbia – savage sectarians who worship village gods.
‘Once upon a time I lived in a big, joined-up country where you never had to be, strictly speaking, anyone at all. Borders didn’t count. We all spoke Serbo-Croat. My sister married a Slovene, my aunt was Macedonian, my grandfather came from Montenegro and married his Bosnian wife in Kosovo. Wherever in the Federation you were born, from Dubrovnik to Nis, Pristina to Skopje, you were a Yugoslav. Until it blew up.’
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