The Perfect Soldier

by Hurley, Graham

  Beyond the shacks, McFaul was back on a paved road, heading once again for the centre of the city, and the Romanesque bulk of the cathedral. On this side of town were the Portuguese-built houses where Muengo’s tiny middle class lived: native-born Angolans who’d been to college in Huambo or Benguela, picked up a language or two, learned about computers, or refrigeration, or how to run a maize cooperative, and then returned to Muengo to put their newfound skills to work.

  Domingos had been one of them, a cheerful thirty-three-year-old with an engineering degree from Huambo University who’d caught McFaul’s eye at once. Part of Global’s brief was to teach the local people how to deal with mines. Only by doing this, insisted Ken Middleton, could the country ever hope to free itself of mines. And so McFaul had recruited Domingos the first week he’d arrived, impressed by the man’s intelligence, and by the speed with which he’d picked up the practical skills. Domingos also spoke good English, rare in rural Angola, and the two men had quickly become friends. Two or three times a week, McFaul would eat with Domingos’s family, bringing little presents for Celestina, his wife. After supper, unless McFaul managed to talk his way out of it, he’d be press-ganged into wild games of football in the tiny square of garden, trying to keep the kids from tackling his plastic leg. They viewed this handicap with total indifference, telling him in sign language that friends of theirs played better with no legs at all.

  McFaul rounded the corner of the street where Domingos lived. The houses here were all of Portuguese design, with red terracotta roof tiles, pastel stucco walls, and big shuttered windows that opened in the evening to catch the cooling breeze. In the two decades since independence, the area had decayed a little around the edges but McFaul had always liked it. It had space and a certain serenity. Half-close your eyes, he told himself, and you could be in some small Portuguese town, somewhere south of Lisbon.

  For the first time since leaving the city centre, McFaul saw serious shell damage. First one house. Then another. 105 mm, he thought, at least. Half a roof gone. A front wall missing. Someone’s living room neatly scissored in two. He slowed, easing the Land Rover around a crater in the broken tarmac, thinking again about Domingos’s lack of response on the radio. The rebels had been recruiting locally. They’d seized men from Muengo, forced them into uniform. They’d have plans of the city. They’d know best where to target their big guns. Destroy the city’s middle class – wreck their homes, kill their children, break their spirit – and you tear out Muengo’s heart. McFaul drove on, his right hand already reaching for the Motorola, certain now that something terrible must have happened.

  Domingos’s house was at the end of the street. At first, fooled by a curtain of drifting smoke from a nearby fire, McFaul thought it had gone completely. Then, dimly, he picked out what remained of the exterior walls. Two shells at least, he thought, and probably some kind of secondary explosion. He braked sharply, leaving the Land Rover in the middle of the street, limping the last fifty yards. The interior of the place was rubble, everything crushed beneath the weight of fallen masonry. McFaul stood in the street, calling Domingos’s name, uncertain exactly when the damage had been done. Next door, when he knocked, there was no response. The bungalow opposite, gutted by fire, had been abandoned.

  McFaul crossed the road again, clambering over Domingos’s shattered front wall, trying not to lose his balance on the loose rubble inside. He began to tear at the wreckage, tossing aside lengths of splintered trusses from the fallen roof, telling himself he had to dig, had to find out, had to know the worst. Then he stopped, sucking at a deep cut in his hand, distracted by something else, something hideously familiar, a garment, yellow and green, crushed beneath a huge chunk of masonry. He stepped across to it, levering the masonry aside, stooping to pick up Domingos’s treasured football shirt. Green and yellow were the colours of Brazil’s national team. Angolans worshipped Brazilian football, convinced already that their heroes would lift next year’s world cup. Across the chest it read: ‘BRAZIL – COPA MUNDIAL, ’94’.

  McFaul shook it out, looking at it. Then he eyed the wreckage for a second or two longer before turning away and limping slowly back towards the Land Rover, the shirt still in his hand.

  Molly sat in the gloom of the Café Palmeira, waiting for the rain to stop. She’d never seen rain like it. It seemed to form a solid wall of water, curtaining the café from the street outside. Already the road beyond the pavement had become a foaming brown torrent, carrying rubbish from the pile at the top of the hill, and as she watched she saw the body of a dog wash past, turning over and over, surrounded by a flotilla of rusty tins, discarded bottles and sodden cardboard boxes. In the gutter, the iron grilles on the storm drains had begun to lift, forced upwards by the pressure of water beneath. Seconds later, the water was fountaining onto the pavement, forming a long, brown, foam-flecked tongue that began to reach into the café itself.

  Molly sipped her coffee, wondering what to do with her feet. The café had a concrete floor, metal chairs and tables. No one seemed to care about the rain. A bulky shape appeared in the street outside. He had a jacket over his head and he was trying to protect a roll of telex paper from the rain. He plunged into the café, splashing through the water inside thedoor. Molly stood up and pulled out a chair, glad to see him.

  ‘Shit.’ Robbie Cunningham beamed at her. ‘Can you believe this?’

  The rain got heavier. A minute or so later the awning outside began to tear, the cloth bellying downwards under the weight of water. A waiter appeared at Molly’s elbow. His sandals were submerged. Robbie looked at the menu and ordered something in Portuguese. Molly said she wasn’t hungry but when he insisted she settled for a hot dog.

  ‘Um cachorro quente,’ he said. ‘E dois cervejas.’

  The waiter made his way back to the bar and returned with the beers. Molly watched him pouring hers. She’d had two coffees already and she was dreading having to find a loo. Robbie raised his glass and proposed a toast.

  ‘To drying out,’ he said. ‘Me, at least.’

  He flattened the radio telex against the table-top. The message had come from Muengo within the last hour. It said that there was the possibility of some kind of surrender negotiations and an end to the siege. Molly peered at the name at the end.

  ‘Who’s T.P.?’

  ‘Tom Peterson. The bloke I mentioned on the plane. Our man in Luanda. He’s new here but he’s sound. Good guy.’

  ‘And he’s trapped in Muengo?’

  ‘Yeah. Like the rest of them. He went in when we got the word about James. We needed someone on the spot to sort things out and he was our best bet. We weren’t expecting a siege then, of course. That wasn’t on the menu at all.’

  ‘So what do we do?’ Molly gestured helplessly round. ‘Just wait?’

  Robbie shook his head.

  ‘Llewelyn’s working on it,’ he said. ‘Whatever I tell him about Muengo he just ignores. One way or another, he’s determined to get us in. I’ve told him it’s a crazy thing to even try but the guy’s on a different planet. I don’t think he knows this country’s at war yet. I don’t think anyone’s told him.’

  ‘So will he …’ Molly shrugged, ‘succeed?’

  ‘He might.’

  ‘What would that take?’

  Robbie studied her a moment. The run up the hill from the office had pinked his face and he looked even more cherubic than usual.

  ‘Money,’ he said uneasily. ‘And he seems to have lots.’

  They stayed at the café for an hour, sharing two more beers while they waited for the food. After ten minutes or so, the electricity went off and the waiter came round with candles stuck in empty gazola bottles. It was barely midday but outside it looked like dusk. The rain had stopped now but for some reason there was even more water pouring down the hill, soaking the gaggle of street kids on the pavement.

  ‘So do you trust him?’

  Robbie was talking about Llewelyn again. Molly looked glum.

  ‘I have
to,’ she said, ‘I’ve no choice. I couldn’t do it otherwise. Not properly.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Find out about James. Find out what really happened.’ She paused. ‘And do whatever else he wants.’

  ‘But that’s the problem, isn’t it?’ Robbie gestured helplessly at the telex. ‘What’s he really after in Muengo?’

  Molly thought about the question. It had troubled her since that first interview, the five of them packed into the airless bedroom at the Blue Boar Hotel. She’d tried to raise it a couple of times since, phoning Llewelyn on the London number he’d given her, but whenever she thought she’d pinned him down he managed to avoid giving her a direct answer, sheltering instead behind phrases like ‘candid account’ and ‘ultimate sacrifice’. She’d not seen him face to face again until the evening they’d left for the airport, and by that time he’d become curiously remote, treating her with the kind of lofty concern she’d once encountered in a Harley Street consultant. Thinking about it, the parallels were uncomfortably close. In Llewelyn’s eyes, she was plainly one of life’s walking wounded. She was suffering. She was under immense stress. And he was there to make her better.

  ‘But that’s exactly what he wants,’ Robbie said when she tried to explain it. ‘That’s the way he works. You’re the puppet. He pulls the strings.’

  ‘But why?’ She frowned. ‘Why should he want to pull my strings? What’s in all this for him?’

  ‘Fame,’ he said at once. ‘Glory. Profile. His star’s on the wane. His batteries are flat. He needs to recharge. Before he gets too old.’

  ‘You’re serious?’

  ‘Completely. These guys run on ego, pure and simple. Without a presence on the screen, they’re nothing. It’s a kind of sickness, an addiction. Television’s full of it. In the UK, it’s not such a problem. Out here, it could be difficult.’

  ‘Oh? Why’s that?’

  Robbie hesitated a moment and Molly realised just how long he’d been working up to this conversation. Relations between the two men, never good, had developed a perceptible chill. The last day and a half, Llewelyn had been treating Robbie like an assistant, someone who’d do his bidding, and the younger man was finding it more and more difficult to hide his irritation.

  ‘These guys are all the same,’ Robbie was saying. ‘I’ve met them before. They make up their mind about a story and there’s bugger all you can do to open their eyes to anything else. It’s a kind of tunnel vision, The facts don’t matter. Just me, me, me.’

  Molly gazed at him, hearing the contempt in his voice, half-understanding why he should feel so strongly, yet helpless to offer anything constructive of her own. The beer and the candle-light and the puddle of tepid water at her feet had lent her exhaustion a strangely surreal edge. All she wanted to do was get to Muengo. And find her son.

  ‘You’re telling me we shouldn’t go,’ she said wearily. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘I’m telling you it could be extremely dangerous.’

  ‘Why?’

  Robbie gestured at the telex again.

  ‘I managed to raise Peterson on the HF. The place is wrecked. Four days’ shelling. Dodgy water. Not much food. No power. Shooting in the streets.’ He paused. ‘This is a civil war. I’m not sure Llewelyn understands what that means. This isn’t something Angola’s staged for his benefit, something he can pop onto video and cart back to London. It’s real … real blood, real bullets. We could end up dead. All of us. No problem.’

  ‘Then it’s simple, surely. If it’s that bad then no one will take us, no one will fly, and without a plane it’s …’ she shrugged hopelessly, ‘no go.’

  There was a long silence. A bus roared by outside, sending a tidal wave of water into the café, producing shrieks of excitement from the street kids. The waiter splashed towards the open door, shaking his fist, cuffing the nearest child. At length, Robbie sat back in his chair. For the first time, Molly realised he was no less exhausted than she was.

  ‘How badly do you want to get there?’ he said slowly.

  ‘Badly. That’s why I’m here.’

  He nodded, toying with his beer.

  ‘And if Llewelyn comes up with some kind of deal? A plane? A pilot? You’ll risk it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘After everything I’ve just said?’

  ‘Yes.’ She offered him a wan smile. ‘I suppose you might call it tunnel vision. Me, me, me.’

  The waiter was singing now, banging a tin tray in time to some Portuguese pop song. Robbie watched him a moment then shrugged, reaching for the telex and rolling it up.

  ‘OK,’ he said at length, ‘then I guess we’d better get ourselves organised. Fuel. Provisions. Drugs. Stuff they’ll be needing. We might as well make it an aid flight. That way they might leave us alone.’

  The food arrived. It started to rain again. Molly ate a mouthful or two of her hot dog then knew she had to go to the lavatory. Robbie spoke to the waiter and he produced a key and several sheets of newspaper and a red and white golf umbrella.

  The closet was at the back of the restaurant. It didn’t have a roof and the tiled floor was under water. Molly found the ceramic footholds on either side of the central hole and squatted as best she could, one hand keeping her skirt up, the other holding the umbrella. By the time she came to use it, the newspaper had turned to pulp, and she squatted there for a minute or two longer, the warm rain pouring off the umbrella, her mind quite blank.

  The last few days – Giles’s disappearance, the rush for the visa, the vaccinations, the night flight south – had emptied her of everything. Whatever happened next was out of her hands. The only part of her life that remained in focus was James. Finding him. Tending his body. Saying goodbye. She thought about it a moment longer, what Muengo would really be like, whether or not she’d be able to cope, what she could possibly find there that might soften the loss of her son. Then, without warning, the power came back on. The signals bulb began to fizz in its rusty socket over the door and she heard a discreet cough in the yard outside.

  ‘Molly,’ Robbie was whispering, ‘you OK in there?’

  The needle on the fuel gauge had been on ‘Empty’ for at least three miles when McFaul drove into the ambush. He was returning to the schoolhouse after a fruitless search for Domingos. He’d been to address after address, hunting for friends and relatives, but no one had any news of the little Angolan. The shelling, everyone said, had been terrible. In the chaos of those four days, anything might have happened.

  Now, McFaul began to slow the Land Rover, easing down through the gear box, still preoccupied by Domingos’s disappearance. Bodies had begun to appear at the roadside, roped in cloth or wrapped in straw mats, waiting for someone to come along and bury them. Ahead was a line of oil drums across the road. Abandoned beneath the stump of a palm tree was a burned-out army truck. Of troops, or police, there was no sign.

  McFaul brought the Land Rover to a halt, opening the door to move one of the oil drums aside. He was about to get out when he heard the crack of a semi-automatic rifle. At first he didn’t associate it with anything personal. Then there came another shot, and another, followed by a burst of sustained fire. At the same time, the windscreen of the Land Rover shattered, covering him with glass, and he heard the angry whine of bullets ricocheting off a nearby wall. He hesitated a moment, one leg still dangling from the open door, then he saw the line of army troops, six or seven of them, emerging from cover about a hundred yards away. Some of them were laughing. Others were having difficulty standing up. One was raising his carbine again, taking careful aim.

  McFaul threw the Land Rover into reverse, pulling into a tight U-turn, cursing himself for offering such an easy target. These guys were drunk. They’d obviously been looting some of the aid houses, stripping them of everything useful, anything they might eat or drink. That’s what had happened at the schoolhouse. That’s where the fuel and the contents of the freezer had gone.

  McFaul was accelerating away now, praying
that the diesel held out. He could hear the crackle of small-arms fire behind him and the zip of the bullets past the cab. The guys were having fun, he thought, real turkey shoot. Then there was a sharp metallic clang beside his right ear and he threw himself against the door as the glass in the speedo disintegrated. He looked in the mirror, feeling the engine beginning to falter, seeing nothing but the line of oil drums across the road. He began to weave the Land Rover left and right, trying to throw the soldiers off their aim, gathering speed as he did so. Up ahead was an intersection, the right-hand turn blocked by another army truck. There were more soldiers behind it. He could see black faces peering round the driving cab. A hand appeared, then withdrew, and for a split second, seeing the grenade rolling towards him, McFaul knew he was going to die. It was too close. It couldn’t fail to kill him.

  He stamped on the accelerator, pulling the Land Rover to the left, away from the grenade, pure instinct. The offside of the Land Rover caught the blast. The front tyre shredded and the glass in the door blew inwards and McFaul felt the vehicle lurch on its chassis. For a moment he thought it was going to turn over and he hauled on the wheel, trying to keep it upright, still travelling at speed, knowing now that he had to try and make the last half-mile to the hospital. He could feel something hot and sticky oozing down his right cheek and there was a sharp, burning sensation in his shoulder. Every time he turned the wheel he gasped with pain.