by Jeremy Duns
I felt dizzy with the effort so I closed my eyes again and tried to imagine the breeze washing over my face. It didn’t come, but instead a cool wetness spilled over my lips, and I opened my eyes to see the man with the mask standing over me, his arm outstretched, a white cup pressed against my mouth. As with the sitting up, the fresh experience made me aware of the old one, and I could taste vomit, and it all came back. The hall. The voice. The bodies made of light.
‘Good morning,’ said the man. His voice was a little muffled by the mask. I couldn’t place his accent – possibly American – but he was black; I had seen a strip of arm between a sleeve and glove.
He stood and raised his arms above me. I tilted my head and saw that he was adjusting some kind of a tube – I followed it and saw that it entered my arm.
‘Where am I?’ I said, and was surprised at the effort it took.
‘You are in a clinic run by the Red Cross,’ he said. ‘You are very ill.’
A clinic. Of course it was a clinic – the tubes. That smell. Those objects on the shelves were bottles, I now saw. ‘The Red Cross’. That phrase was also familiar. It meant something. More than what it normally meant. It was connected with something. Like a player of patience, I racked my brains to match the pair.
‘“Finlandia”,’ I said, remembering another piece of the puzzle. ‘I heard a choir singing “Finlandia”.’
He nodded. ‘The Biafrans have taken it as their national anthem. They often play it on the radio.’
A string of pairs suddenly matched up.
‘Udi,’ I said. ‘Are we in Udi?’
The glove stopped the calibration of the tube, and the mask looked down at me. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But we aren’t too far away.’
‘I need to get there.’
The mask nodded in understanding, while the gloves went back to their task. ‘You need to recover first,’ he said. ‘You’re very ill.’
‘Malaria?’
The doctor finished his work and then sat down in the chair he had been fanning me from earlier.
‘That’s what we thought at first,’ he said. ‘But now we’re not so sure. Do you feel you can talk?’
I nodded, and he took out a pad of paper and a pen from his coat.
‘When did you arrive in Nigeria?’ he asked.
It took me a few moments. ‘Monday,’ I said. ‘Monday evening.’
‘March 24th?’
‘Yes.’
He wrote it down, adjusting his peepholes a little to make it easier. ‘Have you taken any anti-malarial medication since arriving?’
I started to shake my head, but suddenly remembered the pills Manning had given me on the way back from the airport. ‘Yes!’ I said. ‘Yes, I have!’
The eyes in the mask stared back at me. ‘How did you take it?’
‘What do you mean? Swallowed it, of course. A glass of water in my hotel…’
‘From the faucet – the tap?’
‘Yes,’ I said, hollowly. ‘From the tap.’
Silence, as his pen scratched the paper. My muscles ached; my innards gurgled; my head throbbed. Was it neon they were using for the light in here?
‘Have you had any other contact with unfiltered water since you arrived? Have you been in any areas containing swamps, for example?’
Only waded through one. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him, so I just nodded. He scribbled it down.
‘Have you been in contact with any rodents since you arrived in Nigeria?’ he asked, not looking up.
I stared at him and nodded. Of course. The rat in the sink. The same sink from which I had poured the water to wash down Manning’s useless bloody malaria tablet.
‘What do you think it is?’
‘We’re not sure,’ he said. ‘We’ve tested you for everything we could think of: malaria, typhoid fever, trichinosis… None of them fitted. Another candidate is yellow fever, but you don’t look jaundiced and if you arrived Monday the incubation is still a little too fast. It could be a new disease: there was one discovered a couple of hundred miles north of here in January, in a village called Lassa. An American nurse in a missionary hospital fell sick very quickly. Then one of the nurses treating her caught it. Nobody’s sure how it’s transmitted yet, but one possibility is via rodent faeces. From monitoring you and talking to others, you seem to have had some of the same symptoms as the nurses: muscle and back pain, fever, nausea… Have you had any retro-orbital pain?’
‘Meaning?’
‘Behind the eyes.’
I nodded.
‘That’s another.’ He looked down at his pad. ‘Also intermittent loss of hearing, respiratory problems, hallucinations…’
His outfit was starting to take on a significance I didn’t like. ‘What happened to the nurses?’ I asked.
‘They died,’ he said evenly. ‘But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. That disease has only just been discovered, and we’re by no means certain you’ve contracted it. It’s just an idea. We’ve been giving you hydroxychloroquine and tetracycline, and now I am starting you on chloramphenicol. We’re doing everything we can. In the meantime, I’d be very grateful if you could make a list of all the people you have come into contact with since arriving in Nigeria. We may need to start tracing them.’
I asked him how I had arrived at the clinic, and there was a conspicuous pause before he answered. ‘Some Biafran soldiers brought you in. They said they had been at a meeting with Doctor Wise when you had collapsed.’
‘Doctor who?’
‘Wise. He’s a well-known spiritualist in these parts. Many of the Biafrans are devotees of his – some of the soldiers insist that he has the final say on whether to go ahead with military manoeuvres.’ The white cotton shoulders shrugged. ‘It’s crazy, of course. They think he can invoke spirits from the sky.’
It didn’t sound so crazy to me. As he had been talking, I had managed to raise my head enough to have another look at the room. There was something I didn’t like about it – there were no doors, just a flight of steps.
‘Where are the doors?’ I said. ‘And why are there no windows?’
The doctor shifted a little in his chair. ‘Because we are underground. This is usually a theatre for emergency operations, but we’ve converted it into an isolation ward to treat you.’
I looked around at the dank walls and low ceiling. The prognosis didn’t look too good – I had already been buried.
The doctor closed his pad, placed the top back on his pen and placed them both back in his coat. ‘Even though your fever has subsided somewhat, you are still in a critical condition,’ he said, pushing his chair back and standing. ‘I’ll be back to check on you later. In the meantime, you have a visitor.’
As if on cue, there was a clanging sound and I looked towards the end of the room, at the staircase. Black boots tucked into khaki trousers appeared, followed by stocky legs, a stockier torso and, finally, the head of an African man with a bushy beard.
He walked over and nodded to the doctor, who turned to a trestle and picked up a white coat lying there. The newcomer carefully placed this over his uniform – it was a little tight on his shoulders. The doctor offered him a mask, but he shook his head and said something I couldn’t catch. The doctor nodded and walked away, disappearing up the staircase.
The African approached my bed and leaned over me. I had never met him before, but I knew who he was.
‘Hello, Mister Kane,’ he said in a deep, velvety voice. ‘Welcome to Biafra.’
XX
‘A bearded Othello.’ The phrase came into my mind, but I couldn’t place where I’d heard it. Then I realized I hadn’t – I had read it. I had been in an airport. That was it. The interview in the Newsweek I had bought at Heathrow.
As I watched him moving around my bed, I concurred with the journalist who had come up with the phrase. There was something of Othello about Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu: a measure of dignified hurt, and an aura of self-importance. He was taller and broad
er than I would have expected; the photographs didn’t get across how much space he took up. But he had a kind of lumbering elegance, a studied stillness, that seemed familiar from what I had read of him. Pritchard’s briefing notes had referred to him as a ‘power-hungry menace’. That, too, seemed a well-chosen phrase.
But this was all by the by. What the hell was the leader of the Biafran army doing here? And why did he want to talk to me?
After he had fidgeted with his coat a little, he sat himself on the chair vacated by the doctor, squeezing his frame into it as though it were a makeshift throne. Apart from a gloss of sweat on his forehead, he looked calm, well rested, relaxed. With one hand he stroked his massive beard. I’d read about that, too: he had grown it as a symbolic gesture after the pogroms against his tribe three years earlier, and many Biafran men had since grown their own in deference to him.
‘I am sorry about your mishap,’ he said. He made it sound as though I’d stubbed my toe in his swimming pool. ‘My men are superstitious, you know. They had strict orders to bring you straight to me, but they didn’t want to miss their rendezvous with their witch-doctor.’ He smiled tolerantly at his charges’ roguish ways. He struggled with his coat some more, eventually bringing out a pack of cigarettes: Three Fives. He slid one out and lit it with a worn gold lighter. ‘The men responsible have been reprimanded.’
He took a puff of the cigarette. It looked like heaven from where I was sitting. He exhaled, and looked up at the low ceiling. I could sense him thinking, preparing his words.
‘Do you have the message?’
I waited for him to continue, then realized that he had finished.
‘What message?’ I asked.
He laughed, a deep, hearty and utterly insincere bellow. It faded, and he closed his eyes and rubbed them with the palms of his hands.
‘Please do not play games with me,’ he said, letting out a sigh. ‘Let’s not go through the rigmarole of passwords. We are not children.’
‘I don’t have any message for you,’ I said. ‘I’m a journalist with The Times.’
His eyes snapped open and he looked at me as if for the first time. ‘Is there a reason you cannot convey your message?’
‘You’ve made a mistake,’ I said. ‘I have no message to give you or anyone else. Colonel Alebayo…’
‘Alebayo?’ He stood up suddenly. ‘What does he have to do with this?’ He leaned over the bed and stared into my face. He had very sad eyes, like a type of dog you want to adopt.
‘Alebayo captured me,’ I said. ‘A French journalist died…’
‘Oh,’ he said, sitting down again. ‘That. I know about that already. Let’s not waste each other’s time. Where does the Prime Minister want to meet?’
The Prime Minister? What was he talking about? Was this one of my hallucinations? I tried to block everything out and examine his words. Who did he think I was, and what did he want me to tell him? What was it he had said when he had come in? ‘Hello, Mister Kane. Welcome to Biafra.’ So he knew my cover name. That meant he had talked to Gunner – presumably that was how he had heard about Isabelle’s death, too. But there was something else there, some clue. What was it? Why was the leader of the Biafran army in an underground hospital in the middle of the bush? He was apparently waiting for a message from the British prime minister to set up a meeting between them – presumably to talk peace.
Ojukwu was smoking, studying me.
‘There is a plot to kill the Prime Minister,’ I said. ‘In Udi.’
He didn’t react, just carried on smoking his Three Fives cigarette. Where did he get them from, I wondered, in the middle of a war?
‘This is not the message I was expecting,’ he said softly.
‘It’s the one you’re getting,’ I replied. ‘The Russians are planning to assassinate him at the Red Cross camp on Friday afternoon. Help me get there.’
He examined me for a moment, then slumped back as far as he could in his chair, as mystified by me as I was by him. ‘But why should I do that? Your prime minister is my enemy, and so are the Russians.’
I shook my head. ‘You’re not thinking it through,’ I said. ‘Think of the effect of killing him. Think of what it will do to public opinion in Britain. They are already opposed to this war. There are marches, petitions, debates…’
He nodded slowly.
‘So how do you think they will react if their prime minister is killed out here?’
He opened his hands, waiting for the answer.
‘They’ll be furious!’ I said. ‘Not only are their taxes buying arms for this horrific war that is starving innocent children – now their prime minister has been murdered here. They will demand the immediate withdrawal of any assistance to Nigeria, and they will get it. The next prime minister would immediately withdraw from this war.’
‘Good,’ said Ojukwu, scratching his beard. ‘But this is not…’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not good. Not good for you. As soon as the British have left, the Russians will step up their support. They will be the Nigerians’ only hope, and make no mistake, they’ll capitalize on it, and fast. They will flood the Federal side with weapons, and the war will be over before you know what’s hit you. Then they will have their stepping stone in Africa…’
‘This is all very interesting, Mister Kane,’ said Ojukwu curtly, mashing out his cigarette on the floor with the heel of his boot. ‘But I feel that we are drifting away from the main issue.’
He was looking up at the ceiling, and without his gaze to distract me, I was free to focus on his voice. And that was when it hit me.
‘Take me to Colonel Ojukwu,’ I said.
His head snapped back down and his eyes opened wide.
‘What did you say?’
‘You heard,’ I said. ‘I want to see Ojukwu. You’re an impostor.’
*
My reading jag in Heathrow on Monday evening had been well worthwhile. Pritchard’s dossier on the war had contained extensive briefing notes on the major figures of each side, and one of the Biafrans in particular had attracted my attention. Simeon Akuji, the Commissioner for Internal Affairs, was Ojuwku’s second cousin and a possible means of communication with him via a personal cipher. Although it hadn’t been spelled out, I had taken it that the link was overseen by Pritchard – especially as Akuji had been educated at Fettes, Pritchard’s alma mater in Edinburgh.
As I had listened to ‘Ojukwu’ pontificating, something had bothered me about him. That he seemed to be performing an act was in character, but then I had realized why his little welcoming speech had jarred: there had been the faintest touch of a Scottish accent to it. My guess had been that Ojukwu had pulled a Monty and had Akuji impersonate him. Judging by the reaction, I had been right. But what was the reason for the subterfuge?
The answer, surely, lay with Henry Pritchard. Akuji seemed to be expecting a message from the PM, but according to the official programme no visit to Biafra was planned. Unless his entire trip to Nigeria had secretly been about meeting Ojukwu? Pritchard had denied that there had been a negotiating element to it back in London, but why else would the Prime Minister fly out here? So he could report to Parliament that he’d seen the war with his own eyes? To deflect attention from a Nigerian attack, as Radio Biafra had alleged? A peace mission made much more sense. He had even come with HMS Fearless, which he had recently used, albeit without much success, to hold talks with Ian Smith over the Rhodesian problem. A peace mission, then, with Pritchard the go-between setting up the meeting with the Biafran leader? Perhaps Akuji was the deal-broker; or perhaps Ojukwu was scared of being assassinated himself.
‘You British have a most amusing attachment to conspiracies,’ Akuji was saying, but I didn’t have time for that.
‘You read history at Lincoln, Colonel. I was there a few years before you, but I imagine they still had that marvellous portrait in Hall of – ah, who was it of again?’
He opened his mouth, and for a moment I thought he was going to try to blu
ff me, but then he dipped his head and sighed deeply. It hadn’t been the most sophisticated ruse, and I’d been at Wadham anyway, but it had been enough.
‘Is that why you’re not wearing a mask?’ I asked. ‘So I could see how similar you are to Ojukwu?’
He nodded slowly.
‘Quite a risk,’ I said. ‘If you lose your hearing, you know where to come.’
‘The doctor warned me of the dangers,’ he said, somewhat sniffily. Then, his pride hurt: ‘How did you realize?’
‘I’ll come to that,’ I said, though I had no intention of doing so. ‘What made you so sure I was the messenger?’
‘Who else would you be? The message told me to expect someone to turn up here on Wednesday, and here you are. Granted, you were waylaid for a couple of days, but I knew the reason for that – the men told me.’
‘Waylaid?’ I said. ‘What do you mean?’
He gestured at the walls. ‘You’re ill, unless you hadn’t noticed!’
‘Not that,’ I said. ‘Not that. You said I was waylaid by a couple of days. But I’m not. It’s still only Wednesday morning.’
He looked at me quizzically. ‘Does British intelligence now train its agents to bamboozle its allies? Today is Friday.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Just after ten a.m.’
The walls suddenly seemed to be melting towards me, and all I could think of was Anna, on a roof, looking down at a black car with the Prime Minister in the back seat.
It wasn’t Wednesday. It was Friday, at just after ten in the morning. I ripped the sheet off the bed and sat up. Then I set about trying to find how to disconnect myself from the feed.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Akuji, alarmed.
‘Leaving,’ I said. I had just over four hours to get to Udi.
XXI
It took me less than a second to realize my mistake. Our little chat had sharpened my mind but not my body, and I hadn’t made enough allowances. I had deliberately stepped onto the floor with my back facing him, calculating that my apparent helplessness would delay him for a fraction of a moment in reaching for the gun he would inevitably be carrying. As I landed, I raised my right foot so it was in front of my left kneecap, then fired the right edge of the foot out towards Akuji, aiming at his thigh.
