by Chris Ryan
Ellie was too nervous to smile. She bit her lip instead. ‘Is this …’ She didn’t quite know how to ask the question. ‘Is this something to do with Zak? The man with the patch – he showed me a photograph and …’
‘You’re going to be late for school, Ellie.’
Ellie looked down. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘I’d better go. I suppose I’ll see you later.’ She headed towards the school gate again.
‘Oh, and Ellie, by the way …’
Ellie looked over her shoulder. ‘Yeah?’
‘You can call me Gabs,’ said the newcomer. ‘And try not to worry too much, sweetie. I’m pretty good at this sort of thing.’
And with another wink, Gabs walked away, leaving Ellie – confused and more than a little bit scared – to make up a convincing lie to explain to her teachers why she was so late for school.
Zak woke after only a couple of hours: 05.45 hrs. His night might have been disturbed, but he had no intention of staying in bed. This wasn’t a holiday, after all.
The sun was only just rising when he stepped out of his tent. There was still a little warmth around the ashes of last night’s camp fire but nobody else was up yet. He had a day until the Mercantile arrived. A day until he had to pit his wits against the grisly-sounding members of Black Wolf. He knew he should keep a low profile. Avoid drawing attention to himself.
He also knew he’d be doing nothing of the sort.
The road from the beach to the centre of Lobambo was deserted. Zak walked for 500 metres before seeing anyone. He walked another 100 metres before he realized that the boy coming towards him was Malek.
‘You’re up early, Jay,’ the Angolan said.
‘So are you.’
‘I prefer it when Lobambo is quiet.’ He looked over his shoulder back towards the town. ‘Would you like me to show you around?’
‘You bet.’
Malek led Zak into the village. Now that he was off the main road, he saw that it was a widespread collection of compounds. These compounds consisted of huts and shacks, grouped around central courtyards and surrounded by wooden fences about a metre high. Some buildings were sturdier than others, and some didn’t form part of a compound but stood alone. Malek pointed out the bottle shop where people with money – there weren’t many of them, he explained – could buy beer or Coca-Cola. They passed a small breeze-block building no bigger than the tiny corner shop where Zak went to buy sweets when he was much younger. It had no front – just a trestle table running the length of its open side. An incredibly ancient Angolan man was laying hunks of meat out on the table. Hundreds of flies had settled on the meat, but that didn’t seem to worry the butcher. He glanced up at Zak and Malek. His eyes lingered on the stump of Malek’s arm and he gave an unfriendly glare before continuing his work.
‘You get a lot of that if you’re seen with us?’ Zak asked.
Malek nodded.
Apart from the butcher, they saw very few people as they wandered the dusty roads of the town. A handful of women, colourfully dressed and preparing food outside their houses; a few kids, up early and playing quietly. One of these children – he couldn’t have been more than eight years old – was sitting alone, cross-legged, his back up against the low fence of a compound. He wore no shoes and although he was young, Zak saw that the soles of his feet were rough and calloused like an old man’s. He was desperately thin and with his forefinger he traced patterns in the dust.
Malek approached him. It was clear the little boy knew him and they spoke together in Portuguese. Malek gestured for Zak to join them. ‘This is Bernardo,’ he said. ‘He says he wants to play a game with you.’
With his forefinger, Bernardo drew a grid on the floor – three squares by three – and drew a cross in the middle. Zak immediately saw that he had been challenged to a game of noughts and crosses. He smiled at Bernardo, bent down and drew a circle in the middle square of the bottom row. Bernardo’s second cross went in the bottom right, forcing Zak to put his circle at the top left. And as soon as the Angolan boy made his next move – the middle right-hand side – Zak saw that he couldn’t win. Bernardo grinned.
‘Bernardo is very clever. But without a school’ – Malek looked around – ‘he will never leave this place.’
After two more games – one of which Bernardo won, and the other Zak – they continued their tour. Zak saw compounds with thin cattle and scrawny hens wandering in the dust. More people had emerged from their shacks now and everywhere he went his white skin drew silent stares. He was glad he had Malek with him.
Fifteen minutes later they reached the eastern edge of Lobambo. It was here that they came across the building site Zak had seen on his way in. There were four men guarding it, just as there had been last night. There were sitting cross-legged on the ground, like Bernardo. Unlike Bernardo, they didn’t look like the types to pass the time playing puzzles. Each of them had a weapon by his side.
‘The school?’ Zak breathed.
‘The school.’
Zak examined the site. It wasn’t big for a school – perhaps twenty metres by twenty. A trench had been dug for the foundations, but that was all it was – a hole in the ground. He checked out the faces of the men on site and compared them with his mental snapshot of the guys he’d seen when he arrived the previous evening. They were lean and young – all in their twenties, Zak reckoned. They wore grubby jeans and T-shirts. Two of them had shaved heads. One had a nasty scar down the right of his face – it looked pale against his black skin – and a fourth had very bloodshot eyes.
Same people. He was sure of it.
That meant, he reckoned, that these four men were the only troublemakers. If there had been more, they’d be working shifts – the guys on duty last night wouldn’t be the guys on duty again this morning.
And then Zak checked out their weapons. He knew he shouldn’t be surprised that they were armed with AK-47s. He remembered Raf telling him that they were the commonest rifles in the world. Chances were that they were older than the men themselves, their parts cobbled together from other AKs manufactured in Russia, China or Eastern Europe. Learning about them, though, was one thing; seeing them in the hands of aggressive-looking young men was quite another. Zak suddenly felt very vulnerable.
They didn’t notice Zak and Malek immediately. But as soon as they saw the two boys lingering twenty metres from the building site, their hands felt for their weapons. The man with bloodshot eyes stood up and took a few paces towards them, clutching his AK-47. He shouted something at Malek in Portuguese. Zak didn’t understand the words. He did understand, though, the man’s tone of voice. It wasn’t welcoming.
‘We should go,’ Malek said. He tugged on Zak’s sleeve. ‘Come on.’
‘Which one’s your cousin?’ Zak breathed.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ replied Malek. ‘Come on!’
The leader of the little group raised his weapon and with a lazy sneer aimed it in Zak’s direction. Zak backed nervously away, holding up his hands in an attempt to show that he was harmless.
‘Do you know where these guys live?’ he asked, keeping his voice low so that only Malek could hear.
‘Of course. Jay, we must go.’
Zak nodded. The two boys turned and walked quickly away from the building site. But Zak felt an anxious prickling sensation at the back of his neck. He didn’t have to look over his shoulder to know that the man with bloodshot eyes still had him in his sights.
The rest of the day passed slowly. Zak chatted to some of the volunteers, who seemed content to sit around the camp doing not much. Around midday there was a storm. Zak watched the rolling clouds heading towards him from out at sea. He wondered what it must be like on board ship in the middle of such a tempest. When it hit land, he took shelter in his tent and listened as the rain fell like a shower of bullets for at least an hour, all the while going over the details of his mission in his head. When he emerged again, the ground was sodden and full of puddles, the air thick with evaporated rainwater.
But the sky was blue again and it only took an hour for the earth to dry.
He saw Tillie, one of the volunteers he’d met when he arrived, emerge from her tent at the same time. She was a petite, pretty girl, with a turquoise Alice band and four small earrings in her right ear. She smiled at Zak and walked over to him.
‘We get storms like that quite often,’ she said. ‘You get used to them.’
‘Bit different to London,’ Zak agreed, remembering that Jason Cole lived in Notting Hill. But not so different from St Peter’s Crag, he thought quietly to himself.
‘I saw you walking up to the village this morning,’ said Tillie.
‘Malek was showing me the sights.’
‘Poor Malek.’ Tillie sighed.
‘What do you mean?’
‘That arm of his. Kids his own age won’t play with him. The adults in the village treat him like an outcast because he’s involved with us. He says he likes to help us so he can improve his English, but I think he just likes that we treat him like a normal person.’ She gave Zak a piercing look. ‘He’s taken a shine to you,’ she said.
‘We’ve got a few things in common,’ Zak replied. He knew he had to be careful here. Careful to talk about Jason and not himself. ‘He lost his mum. So did I.’
Tillie’s eyes filled with pity. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said simply.
Zak shrugged it off with a nonchalance he didn’t really feel. ‘We went to see the building site,’ he said.
Tillie frowned. ‘I wish we could do something,’ she said. ‘I really do.’
‘Maybe you can.’
For a moment, she looked like she was going to agree; but then she shook her head. ‘It’s too dangerous,’ she said.
Just then, Marcus, Ade and Alexandra came out of their tents and wandered over to them. The conversation moved on, but Tillie was quiet and looked thoughtful. Her eyes kept flicking in Zak’s direction.
By sundown, you’d never have known there had been a storm. Zak ate with the other volunteers – grilled meat cooked on a barbecue. He tried to forget about the flies he’d seen crawling over the butcher’s wares. It tasted good, whatever had been on it. Even Bea managed to tuck in – in between henpecking the other volunteers, who looked at her with amused, patient expressions that she didn’t seem to notice. After supper, everyone else sat round the camp fire again. Marcus strummed lightly on his guitar and Zak took a seat next to Malek, only half listening to the music and the gentle murmur of chat.
‘Tell me about our friends at the building site,’ he asked Malek.
Malek thought for a moment. ‘The one who spoke to me …’
‘Bloodshot eyes?’
The Angolan boy nodded his head. ‘He is Ntole. The son of my mother’s brother. He does not like people to know he is my cousin.’
‘Why?’
Malek held up the stump of his amputated arm. ‘Because of this,’ he said simply. ‘Some people in the village are like that. When I was small, he used to tell me that he remembered my mother. He called her …’ His face darkened. ‘I do not want to say what he called her.’ Zak could feel himself frowning. ‘He was born in Lobambo,’ Malek continued, ‘but when he came of age he left for five years. They say he went away to fight. That he killed many men.’ Malek shrugged. ‘I don’t know if it’s true. But now he thinks he owns the village. He certainly owns the others who guard the site with him. He tells them what to do.’
Zak stared into the fire. ‘What if you could get him to stand down from the building site?’
‘I have one arm, they have guns. There is nothing I can do.’
‘But what if there was?’
‘You must be careful of Ntole, Jay. He drinks palm wine every night and sometimes during the day. They all do, but Ntole most of all. You can’t tell what mood he will be in from one day to the next. He never goes anywhere without his weapon; it’s always loaded and he knows how to use it.’
But Ntole and his men weren’t the only people who knew how to fire an AK-47. Zak had received more firearms training in the last eighteen months than that lot put together.
‘Listen,’ Zak whispered. ‘I’ve got an idea, but I need your help.’ He held up one hand to stop Malek objecting. ‘All you have to do is show me where they live. Can you do that?’
Malek nodded, but his eyes were still full of doubt.
When ten o’clock arrived and it looked like everybody was going to bed, Zak edged closer to his Angolan friend. ‘Meet me at the building site at midnight,’ he whispered.
‘You’re not going to do anything stupid, Jay?’
‘Trust me.’
The Angolan boy gave a sigh, as if to say he didn’t think this was a good idea, and walked away from the camp fire, disappearing into the darkness as he made his way back up towards the village. Zak said his good-nights and returned to his tent, where he lay on his bed and waited for everything to become silent outside.
Eleven o’clock came and went. Eleven-thirty. There was no noise. No light. Zak crept over to the doorway of his tent where he had left his tackle bag. He removed the reel and silently left the tent. No sign of anyone, just like the previous night. He crept away from the encampment, stopping every twenty metres to look over his shoulder. But he didn’t see anyone as he made his way, not to the pier this time, but back up into Lobambo.
It was very quiet in the village. Zak passed the occasional villager – none of whom seemed to be doing anything but sitting outside their shacks enjoying the clear night – but most people were inside.
It was 11.55 precisely when he reached the building site. Malek was already there. ‘Jay,’ he whispered, looking around, ‘what are we doing?’ He looked at the reel in Zak’s hand. ‘Fishing?’
‘Yeah,’ Zak said. ‘Sort of. Just not for fish.’
Malek grabbed his arm. ‘You have to be careful with those men, Jay. They are very violent. When they say they will shoot people, they mean it.’
‘I know,’ Zak breathed. He sounded a lot less nervous than he felt. ‘And when I say they can’t stop people building that school, I mean it too.’ He paused. ‘Nobody should call your mother names, Malek. I don’t care who they are, or how many guns they’ve got.’
‘I do not want other people to get hurt for my sake, or my mother’s.’
‘Nobody’s going to get hurt, Malek. I promise you. So are you going to show me where they live? Let’s start with Ntole.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Just pay him a little visit. You’ll see.’
Malek was obviously wrestling with himself. He sighed and nodded, but as he took the lead he was muttering to himself in an African dialect Zak couldn’t understand.
The first compound he led Zak to was very close – just fifty metres north of the building site. It consisted of eight shacks around a central courtyard about fifteen metres wide. The moon was so bright that the shacks cast shadows on the ground. Zak could see an old football in the middle of the courtyard, and a motorbike against one of the shacks.
‘Which one?’
Malek pointed in the direction of the shack with the motorbike.
‘Wait here,’ Zak told him. ‘Whistle if you see anybody coming.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘You’ll find out,’ Zak told him. Better that he kept his plan to himself, otherwise Malek would try to talk him out of it.
‘Jay, I think we should go back …’
But Zak was already heading stealthily towards the shack.
When he reached the motorbike, he stopped. He was in shadow now, and it was difficult to see. He flicked the switch on the bottom of his fishing reel and raised it to his eye. The night sight lit the courtyard up brightly. He could see Malek at the entrance to the compound, chewing on the thumbnail of his good hand and looking left and right. Zak turned his attention to the door of the shack. There was no lock on the outside – just a block of wood that acted as a handle. He listened carefully at the door. There was a sound. Regu
lar. Quite loud. Snoring.
The occupant of the shack was asleep.
Slowly, Zak opened the door.
He stepped inside.
The first thing he saw in the hazy green glow of the night sight was Ntole. The young Angolan man was sprawled in a chair. He wore nothing but a pair of jeans. There were empty bottles littered around his chair, and a further bottle still in his right hand, hanging at an angle. The whole place stank of sweat and alcohol. It made Zak want to retch but Ntole, he could see, wasn’t waking up any time soon.
The rest of the shack was a total dump. Clothes, empty food tins – all sorts of junk was littered around. Zak wasn’t interested in any of that. He was just interested in the object that was propped up against Ntole’s seat: his AK-47.
He lowered the night sight, but didn’t switch it off in case the noise woke the slumbering thug. Instead, he stood there, waiting for his own vision to become accustomed to the darkness, listening to the sound of Ntole’s snoring. Within two minutes he could see the outline of the sleeping man.
He took a step forward.
And another.
Ntole stirred. He shouted out in his sleep. He’s waking up, Zak thought. What should he do? Stay still or run? But then the outline of the slumbering man fell still.
Zak could feel his blood pumping. He stepped forward again and five seconds later he had his fingers round the cold metal of Ntole’s AK-47.
It felt comfortable in his grip. Zak was well trained and he knew how to handle these weapons, better even than Ntole himself.
He took a deep breath and started his evening’s work.
9
A SHOT IN THE DARK
Thursday, 03.00 hrs GMT
THOUSANDS OF MILES away, in the darkness of 63 Acacia Drive, a mechanical cuckoo burst from the clock in the dining room. It cheeped twice.
