“You’re going, aren’t you?”
“Going where, Sonny?”
“There.”
“What, Sierra Leone?” As soon as I spoke, I realized my mistake. He gripped my hand hard and looked me in the eye as if suddenly seeing something for the first time.
“That’s why they sent you to see me, isn’t it? They’re still sending you. That’s why they sent me.” His voice was quiet, steady. “Ah, not you, Max. Please, not you.”
I went to reassure him, but it was too late. He lurched into me, twisting and crashing me onto the floor. My hand in his; his face against mine; his teeth at my ear; he deafened me with a cry fit to rend my soul.
I went limp, and rolled with him. My right hand was still free. I pushed his head back hard. My thumb gouged his face. There was a wet pop as I put his eye out. I rotated my left wrist and pulled it back to my chest. Both hands free. He lifted a massive balled fist, but I hit him first with a left brachial punch. Sonny roared in pain—half-blind, arm paralyzed—and collapsed on me, his forearm across my throat. The room blackened. I braced and struck his carotid artery. No effect. My windpipe was collapsing. Blackness. I punched again. He rolled off, found his feet and faced me like an obscene Cyclops. I landed a short jab to his brachial plexus. He swung and missed. I lunged inside his reach, the base of my right palm to the tip of his nose. Blood gushed from his face. My left wrist to his right ear, then my right palm to the bridge of his nose, crushing the cartilage completely. I kept at him. My left elbow to his left ear, hard. He went down. But I was too close and went down with him, pinned under his massive weight again.
Two men in black appeared beside me, electric pistols drawn. Neither fired. My palms found Sonny’s temples. His eye hung from its socket onto my cheek. He was bleeding heavily from his mouth, nose and ears; hemorrhaging into his throat and onto my face. The room filled with a woman’s voice, and the smell of peppermint and blood iron. I forced his head up, and he looked down through his one dying eye. As my hands began to twist his neck, he smiled and relaxed.
“They’re coming, Max. They’re coming.”
7
I woke up over the Sahara. At first I thought I could see camel trains winding their way through the dunes. But it was just wishful thinking. We were too high, and all I could see were the narrow outlines of rocky outcrops threading their way across the scorched earth. The slipstream from the engines created the impossible illusion of a heat haze rising off the horizon, and only then did I realize I was cold.
I looked at my phone and reread the last messages I’d received from Frank before takeoff:
Sonny didn’t make it. Proceed as planned. Don’t kill any Russians.
And then in Irish:
Ádh mór ort.
Good luck? I took the battery out of my phone, and the screen went black.
So Sonny Boy was dead.
It had taken me an hour at Brinton to scrub his blood out of my hair, from under my fingernails. I sniffed my fingertips. Bleach and cigarettes. No Sonny Boy. No Ana María. I didn’t even smell like me anymore.
I’ve killed my own kind before: one who went rogue, one who went bad and one who went mad in a petrol station—two weeks back from Afghanistan and he barricaded himself in a service station outside Hereford and poured petrol over himself and everyone else inside. It had been too risky to fire a shot. In the end I’d dropped down from the ceiling with a ceramic cook’s knife. No one else would do it.
But Sonny Boy? That was different. And there would be consequences. Sonny Boy was a straight-up hero, and killing a hero, even in self-defense, doesn’t go unpunished—one way or another. I’d stopped short of breaking his neck and had been lucky not to have mine snapped by him. When I left the room, a crash team was intubating him. His vital signs were wildly erratic, but he was still breathing. The private security men had been scooped up by plainclothes military police within seconds. Crossman the counselor hardly said a word. She watched while blood samples were drawn from my forearms, and a dozen shots of who knew what were plunged into my deltoids. I asked what they were for. “For your own good,” she’d replied.
Frank had told me to go see Sonny Boy. But all Sonny Boy told me through his rantings was that he believed he’d been on some sort of recce for my trip—and the thought of that had flipped a switch. But Sonny Boy also believed he could hear things through a soundproof cell wall and had tried his level best to kill me. Quite who he thought was coming after him was beyond me. Perhaps his brain had been fried in the jungle. But we’d both spent a lot of time in jungles, and neither of us had ever come back that far gone. It was one thing for the local pastor to think the world was ending when the enemy closed in; but Sonny Boy was cut from different cloth.
Mason and King wanted the operation wrapped up inside of a week. If the rebels were as mobile as was believed, then Makeni was already threatened, and so was the capital, Freetown. Mason and King wanted me to get up there and get on with it. I wanted to know what had happened to Sonny Boy. I also wanted to speak to “Juliet”—the only source who’d placed the mystery white man in the camp. One thing was certain: taking the shot would be only the beginning. Afterward I had to get out, and get out clean. A week was already looking optimistic.
As we sped our way toward the jungle and eventually the coast, yellow gave way to brown and then green—and then eventually a flash of blue as the 737 flitted over Tagrin Bay before arcing out wide over the Atlantic.
I disembarked onto the apron at Lungi International Airport and wasn’t cold anymore. It was like stepping under a hair dryer—the sea wind took the edge off the humidity, but the scouring equatorial heat was inescapable. Although the rains were at least a month off, the climate, as well as the terrain up-country, would be brutal.
My father had spent years of his life in Africa—both in the army and on long school holidays with me in tow—but I’d never been operational in West Africa. Once I was through the huge plate-glass doors that helped bake everyone who worked in the arrivals hall into a state of exhausted inertia, there was a momentary rush of enthusiasm from the other passengers to secure pole position at the immigration desk. Soon, they, too, settled into an extended heat-addled group fidget. But no one hassled me. A man in a limp blue uniform took my Canadian passport, studied my visa.
“Mr. Maxwell. Do you have anything to declare?” His accent was soft, as if littered with half-spoken aitches. I told him I didn’t.
“Ah, you have not brought your hammer then, Mr. Maxwell? So you will not be killing anyone, I hope.” He grinned at me, and chuckled. I froze. The immigration desk is a point of maximum vulnerability. You can’t run and you can’t fight. If your papers aren’t in order or the Man (who is often a woman) doesn’t want them to be in order, you are powerless. This was an entirely deniable black operation. Get busted, and there’s no calling the embassy.
The immigration officer held my look, and his smile deepened. I smiled back. Just because I was paranoid didn’t mean that London hadn’t fucked it up. Again. Then the penny dropped.
“Abbey Road!” I almost shouted. “You’re a Beatles fan, Officer”—I peered at his name tag—“Johnson.”
“Bang! Bang!” he said in triumph as he thumped the entry stamps down into my passport. “Yes! And you are welcome to Salone, Mr. Maxwell. Most welcome!”
I tucked the little gold-crested Canadian booklet back into its ziplock bag, and then into the thigh pocket of my cargo trousers, and said thank you to Johnson. In my mind’s eye I saw the picture of the mystery white man upriver striding across an Abbey Road–style zebra crossing in the jungle. Bang bang, indeed. This Max would make well sure that he was dead.
Defunct air-conditioning pipes overhead snaked silently toward customs. Only a whisper of warm air emerged from them. The terminal was new, but it was already collapsing into decrepitude. Sweat soaked into the back of my shirt, clung to my lips, trickled into
my mouth. The taste of salt made me thirsty. Anxiety dried out my throat. I pulled the red North Face bag off the stationary baggage carousel and braced myself, hyperaware of the five thousand US dollars in my other trouser pocket.
But no one in customs stirred, and I strode past their unmanned desks unmolested. It was nearly two o’clock now, and the heat was oppressive. I shouldered my kit and stepped into the light. The sky was razor-sharp. The breeze coming off the Atlantic had stiffened and stirred the fronds of a dozen palm trees standing sentinel outside. The sweat on my back chilled. I pulled a blue Vancouver Canucks cap down over my eyes, scanned and dodged the throng of porters hustling for a tip and struck out for the chopper transfer terminal.
Lungi Airport is separated from Freetown by the Sierra Leone River. Getting into town after touchdown was an unwelcome hurdle to clear. Water taxis, private charter speedboats and an old ferry plied the route in what looked like varying degrees of nausea-inducing seaworthiness. Fastest—but not for the fainthearted—was the helicopter transfer. Aged Russian military helicopters piloted by what looked like equally aged Ukrainian crews hurtled passengers to and from the Aberdeen district of Freetown with occasionally fatal consequences: a few years back, one of the old troop carriers burst into flames on landing, killing all the passengers on board.
I found the worn-out Russian Mi-8 humming behind a chain-link fence a short walk from the exit at arrivals. The service had only just got going again. Given that my father had gone to an early grave in an aircraft flying over Africa, buying a ticket to climb aboard that rusty Cold War memento didn’t sit well with me. I’d have preferred to fly it myself. I stood in line with a dozen equally wary passengers, each of us with our seventy bucks in hand for the one-way, seven-minute Iron Curtain roller-coaster ride. Businessmen, tourists, mining contractors, aid workers, embassy staff and a few wealthy locals—most likely each of us hoping this wasn’t the day for an emergency autorotation over the Atlantic. Then the roar of the turbines and the reek of Jet A-1 evaporating in the afternoon sun triggered that familiar adrenaline rush. Fragments of countless chopper flights glinted in my memory as my seat belt buckle clicked home and the ground fell away beneath us, revealing first the sea again, and then, as we swooped forward, the patchwork ocean of gray and blue and the rust-colored corrugated roofs of Freetown itself.
Roberts was waiting at the Aberdeen terminal. Five-ten, skinny as a beanpole, with braided hair unraveling at the ends. He looked like he was in his twenties, but I knew he was thirty-six. He was smoking, propped up against an old Nissan with “God’s Gift” scrawled across the hood.
“All right, mate. Good flight?” No trace of a Krio accent. Roberts was one hundred percent south London. I put the red duffel bag on the backseat and folded myself into his ride.
“Yeah, it was all right.” I lit a cigarette.
“Hotel?”
The Mammy Yoko was almost within walking distance of the terminal. We’d flown around it as we made our descent: an expensive white island in a murky wash of green and brown. There were tennis courts and the turquoise rectangle of a swimming pool at the back of the complex, fringed by half a dozen women in bikinis.
“No. Let’s get a beer. I’ll check in later.”
“Cool. I know just the place.”
God’s Gift hiccuped into half-life.
“Where did you get that accent from?”
“Peckham.” He smiled. “Sarf Landan boy, ain’t I? Yours?”
“Canada.” I smiled back.
“Yeah?”
“There are lots of Irish in Canada. Trust me.”
“Course there are. What do I call you? Max?” I nodded, and he stuck the cigarette butt between his teeth as he slapped the Nissan’s dash in encouragement. “Come on, old girl. Let’s be ’avin’ ya.”
“Roberts . . .” I looked around me. Outside, the car was a patchwork of replaced panels, each sprayed with its own shade of gray primer. Inside, the integrity of the Nissan’s chassis seemed to rely heavily on strips of gaffer tape and zip ties. “Is this piece of, uh, premium Japanese engineering going to get us in or out of trouble? I have money. We can get another car.”
“Hey! She’s very sensitive! But she goes. And you know her real beauty? No one’ll fuck with her. So no one’ll fuck with you. You’re just one more white man getting ripped off across the town.”
“You got that right.”
Five minutes later we’d crossed the mouth of a long creek that nearly cut Aberdeen off from the rest of Freetown, and were heading into town—driving south and then east. Roberts reached behind him, under my seat, and produced the strap of the Billingham satchel Captain Rhodes said he’d have for me.
“S’all yours. No idea what’s in it. And I don’t want to.” Which in his accent came out as Annahdoanwannoo.
As he drove, he talked. And he was good at both. Roberts, it turned out, had led a life charmed and desperate by turn. He recounted his story in fits and starts as we bounced along by the coast. Barely eighteen years old when rebels of the Revolutionary United Front poured into Freetown, he’d run away from home and headed straight to the offices of Southern Star, a private military company run by one of his dad’s friends: an Israeli mercenary who called himself Ezra Black. Roberts wanted to kill rebels. Ezra wanted an untrained kid yapping at his heels as much as he wanted a hole in the head.
“What did he do?” Roberts the skinny, chain-smoking mercenary. It was almost funny.
“He shot me.”
“What?”
“He shot me. Right ’ere.” And with that, he pulled up his top with his right hand, exposing a knotty lump of scar tissue above his hip bone. “It bloody hurt. But it saved my life. He saved my life.”
Ezra had slapped on a wound dressing, driven him back to his parents’ house and then taken them all to the United Nations chopper pad at their HQ: the Mammy Yoko Hotel. The UN was evacuating its staff; Ezra knew the pilots and their military escorts. Roberts—now officially a wounded child in “critical condition”—was given a UN ID pass and flown to Senegal. From there Ezra managed to get him to an elderly aunt in England. He never saw his parents again. When the war finally ended three years later, he was an orphan with a degree in business studies, an English wife and an overdraft the size of a small mortgage.
“Y’know what happened then?”
I didn’t.
“Mate, it was fucking mad. No word of a lie. My auntie, yeah? The day they signed the peace accords, she drops dead. Dodgy ticker.”
I looked suitably surprised.
“But that’s not the mad bit. The next day—after my auntie died—my missus bought a scratch card.” He paused for effect and looked at me, his eyes wild with the memory of what he was about to recount. “One hundred large. One hundred!”
She’d paid for a decent burial for Auntie and settled their debts; he came home, and she came with him. Now he drove a taxi, and she, a former barmaid, ran her own bar—which was where he said we were headed.
“Who’ve you got left? Here, I mean.”
“Just my grandad. You’d like him. Old soldier, and a proper ladies’ man. Always banging on about how great the Irish are, too.”
“Clever man, your grandad. Any kids yourself?”
“None that I know of.” He laughed, and then pulled himself up short. “Nah, no kids,” he continued more quietly. “We can’t. My wife, she, uh . . . she can’t have any. You know?” He swerved hard around a peanut seller who’d overbalanced off the curb and into the road. Roberts changed the subject and pointed toward the sea. A black, red, gold and green bead bracelet with a Rastafarian Lion of Judah dangling from it looped around his bony wrist. The lion’s foot was missing.
“That’s White Man’s Bay over there.” He looked at me and grinned. “And up ahead, if you keep going, that’s Congo Town, where my folks were from. It’s come back to life, but during Eb
ola . . . that was something else. If you weren’t scared of dying, it’s cos you were either crazy or already dead.”
We took a hard right down Wilkinson Road, and the old Nissan thundered south. Women with babies tied to their backs with yards of brightly colored printed cloth picked their way through roadside markets. Salt, smoke and shit flavored the moist, hot air that ripped through our open windows.
“I won’t lie,” Roberts went on. “It’s been hard, you know? But it’s OK now. Better, anyway.”
The Ebola outbreak had swept through their lives like a second civil war. Fourteen thousand people had been infected, Roberts reminded me. And nearly four thousand of those had died. The highly contagious hemorrhagic fever liquefied vital organs and caused its victims to bleed uncontrollably from their eyes, ears, mouth, genitals. . . .
Roberts had, by his own admission, nearly gone bust. Again. Sitting in a bar is not high up on the list of things people want to do in the midst of one of the most lethal epidemics the world has ever known. But together, he said, he and his wife were just about breaking even again.
“How did you get mixed up with the Brits, at the embassy?”
He gave me a sidelong glance.
“Why? For the money—what else? Let’s save ‘how’ for the beer.” And then, leaning across me, he pointed out my window. “That’s Cockerill, the air base. The South Africans are still there. Anything military that comes in from offshore lands there. Yanks, Brits, Russians. Ethiopians.”
“Ethiopians?”
“Yeah, they send tech crews in to fix the choppers. Cheaper than Russians. And the South Africans insist on it. No one else gets to touch their birds.” He grinned rakishly. “Not that you’d want to touch any bird they’d been near.”
Two large Russian Hind helicopter gunships sat on the apron, blades tied down. They were the same mid-1970s model that I’d trained on in Poland with A-Squadron. At who knew what cost, the British government was financing the Sierra Leone Air Force to buy gunships from the old Soviet bloc, serviced by Ethiopian crews, piloted by South African mercenaries. With the combined firepower of these choppers alone, they probably had enough hardware in place to end the insurgency in the north. Instead, I was supposed to end it single-handed with a single shot. Frank had been right: One job. One kill. Not question. Not think. Plausible deniability commanded a high price and a lot of hassle. A cold beer was looking more appealing by the minute.
The Break Line Page 6
