McFaul felt a pressure on his arm. Christianne was standing beside him, watching Bennie at work. Bennie was getting the feel of the controls, moving the arm of the digger up and down, scoring a deep line in the earth with the scoop. The soil here was a dark, rich brown, tinged with ochre, the colour of drying blood.
‘Has he done this before?’ Christianne said.
‘Years ago. On a building site.’
‘Alors. It’s good you use the machine. I thought … you know …’ she made a digging motion, ‘it would take all day.’
‘Nothing like.’ McFaul shook his head. ‘Bennie says an hour or so.’
‘Good.’ Christianne was still watching Bennie. ‘James used this too. You know that? This same machine? Those pipes he laid from the river?’
McFaul nodded, not taking the conversation any further. Finally, Bennie began to dig, the scoop taking huge bites from the newly softened earth, piling it up beside the deepening trench. After a while, McFaul heard the whine of the returning truck. He glanced round. The soldiers were standing up in the back. Some of them had wrung out their shirts and tied them around their faces, covering their noses and mouths. Another man had appeared. He was young. He wore slacks and a pale blue shirt. Christianne said he was a priest.
‘I never asked you …’ McFaul began.
‘Pardon?’
‘… whether you wanted a separate grave.’ He nodded back towards the Landcruiser.
Christianne shook her head, watching the soldiers jumping off the truck. Bodies were stacked on the floor like cords of timber.
‘No,’ she said at last. ‘In Africa, he would have wanted this. To be buried together. One grave.’
‘You’re sure? Only—’
‘No.’ She shook her head emphatically. ‘One grave.’
The soldiers began to file past, staggering under the weight of the shrouded bodies. Christianne watched them approaching the yawning trench trying not to lose their footing in the mud.
‘Children died too,’ she said. ‘Several at the hospital. One of them was Maria.’
‘Maria?’
‘The little girl James tried to save.’ She made a vague, hopeless gesture before her hand again found the crucifix around her neck.
Molly Jordan was due at the British embassy at three o’clock. She’d phoned earlier for an appointment, surprised that the ambassador’s secretary was already aware of her presence in Luanda. The ambassador himself had been trying to make contact. There were certain issues on which he’d welcome a discussion. Perhaps she’d be kind enough to pop over.
Larry Giddings, her new American friend, insisted on giving her a lift, reappearing outside the Terra Sancta office in his battered estate car while Robbie scoured Luanda for a ton of assorted supplies. Todd Llewelyn had by now confirmed a flight for tomorrow morning. They were to meet Piet Rademeyer at the international airport at 8 a.m. At the very least, the South African would be able to gauge whether a landing at Muengo was possible.
Now, Larry Giddings sat behind the wheel of the Buick, inching across the city. The traffic stretched ahead down the Avenida Comandante Valodia towards the distant bulk of the São Miguel fortress, a soft brown shimmer in the heat. The air-conditioning in the Buick had broken and Giddings had the window down, one arm draped over the rusty sill, the other nursing a can of something warm and fizzy he’d just bought from a kerbside trader. Molly sat beside him, one eye on the dashboard clock. Conversation with the big American was easy. You just listened.
Giddings had been explaining about slavery. Angola had evidently been a prime source of slaves for the sugar plantations in Brazil. The English and the Portuguese had shipped them across the Atlantic in their hundreds of thousands, hauling them to the coast from the interior, shackling them to trees at night. In Giddings’s view, this had set a pattern from which the locals had never fully escaped. Once a slave, he seemed to be saying, always a slave.
Molly frowned, half-following the logic. They had barely twenty minutes to make it to the embassy and the traffic showed no signs of moving.
‘You mean they’re still slaves? Even now?’
‘Technically, ma’am, no. Ain’t nobody are slaves now. But think about it. Nineteen seventy-five. You know what happened then?’ Molly shook her head. ‘The Portuguese left. Little trouble back home. Army coup. And you know what? They took every last damn thing with them. They’d had the country trussed up like a chicken, real tight. The white guys ran the mines, the fishing, the railways, you name it. Out in the bush, same story. Anything that moved, anything that needed growing, or harvesting, or repairing, or selling, there you’d find some fat Portuguese bossman. The blacks, the mestiços, knew squat about squat. Famous for it. So no prizes for what happened when the white guys left. Independence? Nationhood? Are you serious? Come ’75, we’re talking the biggest orphanage in Africa, millions and millions just waiting to be told what to do, what to think, and believe me …’ he waved a languid hand towards the sea, ‘the bad guys couldn’t wait.’
Molly nodded. The traffic, at last, was beginning to move.
‘Bad guys?’
‘Soviets, ma’am. Operation Carlotta. Ever hear about that?’
‘No.’
‘Well, now …’ he pulled into the next lane of traffic, brooding, ‘the Soviets were clever. They used the Cubans. Nice play. Same colour. Same, I guess, temperament. Believe me, you couldn’t move round here for guys from Havana. They just rolled in, thousands of them. Course, to begin with, we were there too, us and the South Africans. That was cool. Line in the sand. Hey, guys, so far and no further. Know what I mean? Sure you do, but then the college kids in Washington all woke up from that horrible Vietnam nightmare and started hollerin’ about covert activities, and secret stuff, and spooky-spooky, and violations of sovereignty, and all that bullshit, and you know what? We left them to it.’
‘Left who to it?’
‘The Soviets, ma’am. I been telling you. Operation Carlotta. Milk and rusks and a damn fine happy Christmas from Ol’ Mother Russia. What’s good for us is good for them. Know what we call that? Down where I come from?’
‘No.’
‘Communism.’
Giddings shook his head, more sorrow than anger, and Molly found herself wondering exactly how old he was, and what he’d been up to in the mid-seventies. Her knowledge of the Cold War was minimal and certainly didn’t extend to whatever had happened in this tormented city.
Giddings had turned left now, the old Buick wallowing through a series of side-streets. Soon, they were bumping over cobblestones. The houses here looked centuries old, the narrow windows shuttered against the harsh afternoon sun. Giddings coasted past a mountain of rubbish, tossing the empty can out of the car window. Then he licked his fingertips, one after the other, grimacing at the taste.
‘You think I talk too much? Just say—’
‘No,’ Molly shook her head, ‘not at all. It’s fascinating.’
‘—only I know some folks don’t like it. Me? I’m fascinated by the place. Was then. Am now. And, hey …’ he touched her lightly on the arm, ‘good luck with your Mr Ambassador.’
They swung left again and came to a halt. A uniformed Gurkha stood beside a security gate. A tall white wall stretched away down the street. Behind it was a pale blue building wreathed in pink and purple flowers. Giddings was already out of the car, opening Molly’s door. He was beaming again, exactly the expression Molly had first seen beside the meat counter in the supermarket. Molly began to thank him for the lift but he waved her courtesies away.
‘You want me to wait? Sure. I’ll be here. Take care now. And say hi for me.’
Todd Llewelyn sat in the downstairs office at the Terra Sancta house, waiting for the phone to ring. He’d been here for nearly an hour now, sprawled in the broken armchair, trying to resist the temptation to fall asleep. He’d tried for most of the morning to get a message through to London, and at lunch-time he’d finally succeeded in making contact. It was vital
, he’d told the girl on the People’s Channel switchboard, that he talk to Martin Pegley. He needed to organise the banker’s draft for the Muengo flight. And he needed People’s to know about Alma Bradley. Someone should have a word with ABTV and tell them not to waste their time.
Pegley, though, was out of the office and not expected back until two. Irritated, Llewelyn had left the Terra Sancta’s Luanda phone number, plus the six-digit country code for Angola. He repeated it twice, making sure that the girl had got it right. Pegley was to phone back the moment he returned. Llewelyn would be waiting for the call.
Now, past three o’clock, he was still waiting. The house was empty, Cunningham out somewhere, and every now and then Llewelyn got to his feet and prowled from room to room, trying to rid himself of an overpowering sense of fatigue. Since his meeting with the young South African pilot, he’d felt physically exhausted. At first he’d blamed it on jet lag and the novel pressures of having to shoot his own pictures. The hour he’d spent on the streets with the little Sony camcorder had given him some marvellous shots – crippled kids, one-legged veterans, pitiful human debris washed up by the war that had taken James Jordan – but the sheer business of pointing a camera, of being white and rich in one of the world’s poorest cities, had taken its toll. But even this kind of pressure – the kids in his face all the time, the demands for money – couldn’t explain the sheer depth of his exhaustion. Llewelyn normally thrived in situations like these. Indeed, within the industry he’d become a byword for stamina and a certain dogged persistence. Maybe he’d picked up some infection or other. Maybe a siesta might not be such a bad idea.
Llewelyn circled the office. The room was cool and spacious. There were straw mats on the polished wooden floor and a view of the garden through the tall, half-curtained windows. Both desks were piled high with paperwork and on one of them, beside the computer, stood a plastic canister about the size of a biscuit tin. Inset into the top was a dome-shaped object with a series of metal probes sticking out. The probes were a couple of inches in length and Llewelyn picked the canister up, weighing it in his hand, knowing it must have been disarmed.
He sank into the chair again, holding the canister at arm’s length against the glare of the sunshine through the window. The shape was unmistakable, a Valmara 69, one of the family of Italian anti-personnel mines he’d read about only a couple of days ago. The simplest mines you simply stood on. The weight of your body triggered the explosion and you lost a foot or a leg. This, though, was a bit more sophisticated. Llewelyn ran his finger along one of the prongs, finding the little eyelet with its length of attached wire. According to the sales literature he’d acquired from a contact at the Ministry of Defence, you tied the other end of the wire to something nearby, preferably at ankle height. Anyone snagging the wire would fire a charge in the canister. This, in turn, would blow the centre of the mine upwards. At the base of the mine was another wire, tethered to the canister. Stretched tight, this wire would trigger a bigger charge, blasting hundreds of razor-sharp fragments into anything within fifty metres. The secondary charge was the one that killed you and the length of the wire determined exactly the height it went off.
Llewelyn unscrewed the dome at the top, putting the diagrams he’d seen in London to the test. The centre of the mine came free in his hand and he stationed the canister between his feet, tugging the centre of the mine upwards until the wire was taut. The sales literature had been right. Not until the mine reached belly height would the thing go off.
Llewelyn went through the movements again, wondering about a piece to camera. He’d read the manual for the little camcorder twice and he’d already practised what they called ‘self-video’ in the privacy of his bedroom. The best way to do it was in front of a mirror. First you lined up the shot, marking the place you had to stand to frame your head properly, making sure you weren’t shooting into the light. Then you steadied the camera on something solid and hit the button marked ‘X’. That gave you ten seconds to get yourself organised, plenty of time if you’d been in the game a while and you knew exactly what you wanted to say.
Llewelyn picked the mine up again, reseating the dome in the canister. Terra Sancta obviously used this for demo purposes. That in itself was worth a line or two, graphic evidence that these things were threatening Western lives. Llewelyn sat back, closing his eyes, putting together a paragraph or two, say thirty seconds, nice and punchy, good strong visual background, the bush probably, outside Muengo, some location they could dress with a couple of those death’s-head warning signs, DANGER – MINES. He’d talk about the hours before James had died, what he’d been up to, why he’d strayed into a live minefield, and he’d make room at the end for the phrase he’d circled in the sales literature. They called it ‘The Killing Zone’. Anywhere closer than fifty metres, and you were hamburger. Llewelyn tried a version or two, imagining the impact on a mid-evening audience. The thought brought a grim smile to his lips, and he was reaching for a pen and a sheet of paper from the nearby desk when he heard a buzzing sound and then the chatter of the Terra Sancta telex machine.
The telex was in the corner beside the big HF radio. Llewelyn got up, pleased and impressed that Pegley had managed to find the Terra Sancta number. He must have contacted the people in Winchester, he thought. He must have been trying the international phone lines since two, and given up. Llewelyn bent to the machine, reading the message as it came through, aware at once that it wasn’t for him.
‘ATTENTION: ROB CUNNINGHAM,’ it read, ‘MOST URGENT, TANKER EX-ROTTERDAM REPORTS FINDING SURVIVAL DINGHY SOUTHERN NORTH SEA. ITEMS RECOVERED FROM DINGHY INDICATE MISSING YACHT MOLLY JAY REGISTERED GILES JORDAN. BELGIAN/UK AIR/SEA RESCUE SEARCH LAUNCHED SURROUNDING AREA. NO INDICATION OF SURVIVORS OR YACHT TO DATE. SUGGEST YOU RETURN WITH MRS JORDAN AT ONCE. PLEASE ADVISE SOONEST. OPERATIONAL DIRECTORATE, WINCHESTER.’
Llewelyn read the telex for a second time, then looked at the machine. If Molly read this, there’d be no flight to Muengo, no trips to the minefields, no moody pieces to camera. On the contrary, she and Cunningham would be on the next plane home, leaving the People’s Channel with ten minutes of street scenes and absolutely no prospect of progressing the story a single inch further. And that, as Llewelyn knew only too well, would be curtains. Even Pegley wouldn’t risk it a second time round.
In the kitchen next door there was a glass cafetière beside the sink. The coffee grounds had settled at the bottom and there was an inch or so of thick, viscous liquid on top. Llewelyn fetched the cafetière and returned to the office. A fold-over sheet of clear plastic protected the machine from dust and debris. He hinged it back then poured the coffee into the machine. There was a sizzling noise, and the softest pop, and the acrid smell of something burning. The green light on the control panel flickered and went out.
Llewelyn bent down and pulled out the wall plug then reconnected the current a couple of times, making sure. When nothing happened – no green light, no ‘stand-by’ signal – he left the plug on and stood up again. The roll of telex paper included two carbon sheets. He tore off all three, readjusting the paper roll as if the message had never arrived. Then he folded the news about Molly Jordan’s husband into his jacket pocket, wiped the telex keyboard with a handful of tissues, and returned the cafetière to the kitchen. Minutes later, in his assigned bedroom upstairs, he was sound asleep.
For the second time Molly Jordan asked to see the field report. The ambassador sat behind his desk, visibly embarrassed. She’d liked him at once, a small, sandy-haired man with a youthful grin and a warm handshake. He’d come through personally to the reception area where she’d given her name and by the time they got to his office there was a tray of tea and biscuits waiting on the table beside her chair.
‘Please …’ she said again, extending a hand.
The ambassador sighed, still reluctant to pass over the single sheet of paper.
‘This is tricky,’ he began, ‘strictly speaking …’
‘It’s my son we’
re talking about. The least—’
‘I know, I know. It’s just …’ He sighed again, then leaned forward, still uncomfortable, sliding the report across the desk. Molly picked it up and read it quickly. In three terse paragraphs it spelled out exactly what had happened to James. He’d been out of the city in the Terra Sancta Land Rover. He’d returned at dusk. He’d stopped by the roadside to investigate an abandoned piece of clothing. This had led him into the bush. His companion, a French nurse called Christianne Beaucarne, had stayed in the Land Rover. The child he’d gone after had turned up. Shortly afterwards, James had stepped on a mine. The girlfriend had come through on the radio. On recovery, the boy had been dead.
Molly looked up. The ambassador was studying her over the rim of his teacup.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Jordan,’ he said quietly. ‘It doesn’t make for pleasant reading.’
Molly nodded, saying nothing, her eyes returning to the report. Somehow she’d never expected it to be like this. This mundane. This ordinary. Six days living with the fact of James’s death had invested it with something altogether more significant. He’d been in the Third World. He’d been helping the poor and the disadvantaged and in the end it had cost him his life. That she could cope with. Just. But this was like the traffic accident she’d first imagined, simple cause and effect, one wrong decision, a moment’s recklessness, savagely punished. Could even James have been this foolish? This headstrong? Could he?
She read the final paragraph again, hearing the sound of someone’s voice behind the brutal prose. There was incomprehension here, and anger too. Her son had been briefed. He’d been made aware of the dangers. He’d been shown slides, told about previous incidents, warned off in the only language that mattered, the language of torn flesh and spilled blood. Yet there he was, blundering through the bush, risking other people’s lives, ending his own. Crime and punishment, Molly thought. Break the rules. Take the consequences. Ugh.
The Perfect Soldier Page 15
