Right of Reply

by John Harris

  He stared at her for a moment. ‘Suppose you tell me,’ he suggested.

  She nodded. ‘OK. It’s none of my business, but if I can help to stop it, then here we go. I was in King Boffa Port before I came here, as you know. Stuart, they’re ready for you.’

  ‘Who said we’re going to King Boffa Port?’

  ‘Nobody, damn you, but I know you are and you know you are!’ She brought out a map from her handbag and pushed it across to him. ‘They’re waiting, Stuart. I don’t know what you’re expecting, but I can tell you that the Russian experts they’ve had there for the last eighteen months have done wonders. They can muster eighteen brigades now, ten infantry, three armoured, one coastal defence and one ack-ack, together with three in reserve. The coastal and ack-ack are hot-shot outfits and the Border Defence Corps is good, too. The police are a paramilitary organisation trained by Nasser’s men, and they’re loyal. And, just to clinch things, the Russians have just flown in a new consul, Dhevyadov, who’s hot stuff at subversion and propaganda.’

  Leggo said nothing. Most of what she had told him was news to him and he tried not to show it. ‘Go on,’ he said numbly after a while and she glanced quickly at him and continued.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Hold your hat on. They’ve got rocket batteries round the harbour.’ She jabbed her finger at the map. ‘There’s one there. I saw it – they’re not as good at security as you are. There’s another here. And they’re both placed to cover the beaches and the entrance to the port. Did you know about them?’

  His control slipped a little. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We didn’t.’

  She studied his face for a second then she went on quickly. ‘There are reserve brigades in the jungle around Chinsa,’ she said. ‘That’s only three hours by train from King Boffa Port. They’ve got Congolese officers and good weapons. You know as well as I do that the Russians have been working arms into the area for years.’

  Leggo was itching to ask questions but, knowing how freely the information was being given and with what heart-burning, he refrained.

  ‘There are airfields,’ she went on mercilessly. ‘At Lo and Kij-Moro, I think. And there are Migs. I don’t know how many but they’re modern Migs, Stuart. I know they’re modern because I’ve seen plenty of Migs in my working life. The stuff on the airfield at King Boffa’s old hat to let you believe they haven’t got anything else.’

  Leggo was silent now and she went on urgently, not meeting his eyes. ‘I can give you a breakdown on all they’ve got,’ she went on. ‘Never mind where I got it. You won’t like it.’

  She seemed to hesitate at the look of agony on his face, then she hurried on, almost as if what she were saying hurt her, too.

  ‘They have around fifty tanks,’ she said. ‘Centurions and Soviet T34s and JS3s. And mechanised infantry in Ford wagons, armoured personnel carriers and Soviet BTZ scout cars. Their ack-ack brigades have 3o-millimetre Hispanos and 40-millimetre Swedish Bofors. Their field artillery has around a hundred-fifty guns – British 25-pounders and Soviet 22-millimetres – and they have at least seventy-five Shees and more than a few 17-pounders and 57-millimetre anti-tank guns – even a few Russian SU 100 self-propelled guns. The infantry has the Russian 7.62-millimetre rifles and they’re better than you think, Stuart. They’ve also got a few Ilyushins, two KZ-class destroyers and two Governor-class frigates – from my own beautiful country which hasn’t been behind the door when it came to handing out weapons. And they have around five hundred four-wheel-drive military vehicles. Did you know they’d got all this?’

  ‘Not all that.’ Leggo could hardly keep the shock from his voice.

  ‘Well, here’s more: Tasia next door has thirty modern Migs, Akondja has thirty-five Centurions, thirty older Migs and a lot of smaller equipment. Hajaia has an unspecified number of the new Viking tank destroyers, and ten old Migs. Akondja’s also got thirty MII Whippets from the States. Hajaia, which my own sweet Congress has been lavishly equipping for years, has six Galleon transport aircraft, eighteen M52 medium tanks and eighteen M43 Howard-Terrier light tanks. And they’ve all been offered in case of emergency. Your own country’s sold to Malala in the life of the present government military and paramilitary equipment amounting to twenty-seven million pounds, most of which has found its way to Khanzi. I got the figure from an unimpeachable source.’

  Leggo sat silent for a moment then he spoke slowly. ‘Good God,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t quote me, for God’s sake,’ she begged. ‘But I’ll tell you something else, too – free, gratis and for nothing. You’ll not get into King Boffa Port, Stuart. They’ve got blockships in position across the entrance. I saw them loading them with cement, scrap-iron and explosive. They made no bones about it. And I’ll tell you why, Stuart. The Khanzians are right behind Scepwe. He’s no Braka, Stuart. I’ve met him and he’s a right guy. He’s the sort of guy they want in Africa, and you could never say that of Braka. They don’t want your goddam army.’

  She drew her breath sharply. ‘And I don’t blame ’em,’ she ended abruptly. ‘And I wish to God I’d never come here and that I’d never seen you again because I’m not sure I can handle it.’

  The sky had a strange glow in it through the darkness as Leggo headed for Pepul Camp, and the lightning, which seemed to be increasing, lit up the tin roofs of the town with a violet glow. As he moved along the waterfront, the sea was poppling and bubbling among the rocks and the air was like the inside of a laundry. On the outskirts of the town the streets were full of figures shooing goats and pigs and chickens before them into the wooden houses.

  A scattering of rain fell, nothing much, but with heavy drops that burst like bombs on the broad leaves of the banana plants; and Leggo increased speed, using his horn to part the crowds. The black-faced white-shirted figures that crowded the streets, the shrieking mammies, the ancient, lop-sided buses thronged with people that laboured up the hill from the harbour to Hastings Hill, seemed to be all stubbornly headed in the wrong direction.

  The centre of the town was a sea of bicycles and the smell of frying coconut oil was strong around a market in the main square. The jam of humanity slowed Leggo almost to a stop and he had time to see little wooden stalls selling second-hand clothing and cigarettes which were said to be made up locally from fag-ends, among the sunglasses and cycle accessories and the rolls of purple and yellow cloth.

  Here and there he saw British soldiers, some of them none too sober, and young airmen in a riotous mood. Near a beggar’s tame baboon crouching beside a wall, clumsily attempting to peel a banana, one or two Malalan soldiers in ill-fitting uniforms grinned at a couple of spindle-shanked girls whose feet were encased in split-sided high-heeled shoes. The night was noisy with the sound of voices and the bleating of goats penned near the harbour, for driving aboard a ship to Machingo the following morning; and the local inhabitants, sensing the storm, pushed through the white men urgently, anxious to be home before the rain came.

  What he had learned had worried Leggo. It had worried him so much, in fact, he had stopped the Landrover at the bottom of the drive from the Pepul City Hotel and jotted down for Hodges a list of figures in his notebook before he forgot them.

  As he struggled out at the other side of the market he saw more groups of British soldiers, sailors and airmen, and he was surprised to see them so much intermingled, not only with one another but with the steel-helmeted Malalans. The Services had never regarded each other with brotherly affection as comrades-in-arms – let alone allied troops of other nations – but he thought nothing of it until, by the light of naphtha flares from the market behind him, he noticed something odd about the towering statue of Queen Victoria and he remembered what Stella had said.

  The sandstone plinth separated the crowd like the bow of a ship driving through a tide race, and across it in large white letters he saw the words, PAY NOT OKAY. WE WANT TO GO HOME. He frowned, then with a shock he realised that what worried him about Queen Victoria was not so much the slogan as the fact that she
was painted bright red.

  The statue had been erected as a cheapjack job during the Diamond Jubilee by a sculptor who had specialised in making royal likenesses for places around the Empire with more loyalty than money to spare, and the features had been those of a rather superior monkey. The cheap soft stone had been worn down by the weather until they had become blurred, and managed after eighty years to convey an impression of amiable drunkenness; and now it seemed as though someone had upended a large pot of red paint over the crown, and the scarlet streaks had rolled over the face and ample bosom and run down the voluminous robes like so much blood.

  Leggo was so startled he stopped instinctively to see better, not noticing that it had started to rain again and that the drops were tapping heavily on the hood of the Landrover.

  A lot of people, many of them sailors, were staring up at the statue and laughing at it, and he noticed that a large number of British and Malalan flags which had hung outside the bars had been replaced by red banners carrying hammer-and-sickle devices, and that a group of men in uniform were singing The Red Flag.

  ‘Good God,’ he said aloud. ‘It’s like a damned revolution!’ Then, as he stared, the rain began. It came abruptly, the drops changing to a deluge in a second, as though something had burst in the heavens above them. It came in torrents that roared majestically on the tin roofs, against the foliage of the trees, each leaf tilting its cascade to the ground, and on the awnings of the bars and the hood of Leggo’s Landrover, filling the monsoon ditches in seconds and scattering petals in blood-red swathes from the bushes across the road. At once the figures round the statue scattered, white- and khaki-clad figures bolting for the bars and houses, black and white men alike huddling in the doorways and staring out at the downpour and the dripping hibiscus and banana plants.

  Leggo still sat staring at the statue as though transfixed, then he became aware that the fine mist the downpour had raised was drifting through the open sides of the Landrover, chilling his bare skin, and he jerked to life abruptly and, pulling his cap lower over his eyes, took off the brake and jammed his foot hard on the accelerator.

  Nine

  The following day there was a lunch-time cocktail party aboard Banff. Not only was she to carry troops but she was there as an escort to Hodgeforce, though no one had any illusions that she was not as much in need of assistance as anyone else. It was quite a gay affair, however, and Captain White enjoyed it, though a damper was placed on the affair by the fact that the ship’s captain was missing.

  He and White were old friends and White had been looking forward to seeing him again, but the ship’s Executive Officer sought him out over the pink gins with a rueful smile on his face.

  ‘Captain’s compliments,’ he said. ‘Had to leave. Conference somewhere. Couldn’t even stay long enough to leave a message, except that he was sorry he couldn’t make it.’

  White thought very little more of it until he returned to camp. He was feeling vaguely disappointed, however, and doubly conscious of the abrupt change in the weather that made him realise how long he had now been in Pepul.

  Although the storm which had cleared Victoria Square the night before had passed beyond the town by this time, the clouds hung on the hills grey against the wet green, and the sunshine was pale and watery. The roadways were scattered with twigs and small branches and there was a mist hanging like damp gauze curtains among the trees.

  At the guardroom, Sergeant O’Mara came out to meet him. ‘Colonel Drucquer wants to see you, sir,’ he pointed out. ‘I think there’s something on. Something about an exercise.’

  White stared at him, frowning. Drucquer wasn’t the sort of man to get worked up about an exercise for which everybody had been ready for days.

  Then he remembered that the day before the officers of the 17th/105th had themselves thrown a party to repay a little of the hospitality they’d received from other messes. General Hodges had been invited but had gracefully declined, but they had firmly expected Colonel Leggo, his Chief-of-Staff, and the commanding officers of the other regiments, to say nothing of at least one of the two infantry brigadiers.

  They had all arrived late in a body, with the excuse that Hodges was engaged in planning a big four-day exercise and had called them for an unexpected briefing, and now, with the call from Drucquer and the absence of the Banff’s captain, it wasn’t hard for White to put two and two together. Following a policy that had obviously been decided on in London, no one was telling anyone anything, but no naval captain would be absent from his own party unless there was good reason. It was no four-day exercise they were starting. It was the real thing. After so many weeks of waiting, it came as a bit of a shock.

  Using the guardroom telephone, White rang the ACT5 office and asked for Sergeant Frensham.

  ‘I’m coming round to pick you up, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘There are a few things I’d like to talk to you about. Drop what you’re doing. It’s urgent.’

  There was a momentary silence at the other end of the line, and he knew that Sergeant Frensham was also sufficiently experienced to guess what his words meant.

  ‘I’ll be ready at once, sir,’ he said.

  At the base, everybody was busy preparing kit, loading vehicles and waterproofing trailers. Sergeant Frensham had just finished fixing a free-running reel of cable to the back of a one-tonner so that, instead of having to have it manhandled, it would be paid out quite simply as the vehicle moved forward.

  ‘Seemed a good idea, sir,’ he said, as White appeared.

  There was none of the usual backchat going on, and White noticed immediately that the men of Lieutenant Jinkinson’s section weren’t at ease with him. Their looks were veiled and their replies to his questions were brisk but entirely uncommunicative.

  ‘What the hell’s the matter with them, Sergeant?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘I dunno, sir’ Frensham said. ‘There’s a bit of monkey business going on somewhere, I suspect. Normally at a time like this you can’t hold ’em down.’

  ‘What we were discussing the other day, perhaps, do you think?’

  ‘Should think so, sir,’ Frensham agreed. ‘But, on the other hand, perhaps not. This is different. They’re all in it. O’Mara had a word with me about it the other day, and I’m told the CO of the 4th/74th has threatened his lot with bloody murder. They ain’t pulling their weight, and I don’t like it, sir.’

  When they’d finished talking in White’s office, Frensham ran White over to headquarters in the Landrover, neither of them saying much. There seemed to be a lot of Malalan troops on the move past the camp, tramping stolidly towards the north where their harbour was situated at Korno. They waved and shouted as the Landrover roared past, and pointed to the brightly-coloured banners they carried, an odd mediaeval habit that seemed strange in the twentieth century.

  ‘Wogs are restless,’ Frensham commented succinctly.

  ‘Africans,’ White corrected him, but without much enthusiasm.

  Frensham nodded but made no attempt to put the matter right.

  At the battalion office, clerks were typing loading lists and complaining about the amount of work involved, and one of them, standing by the freshwater jar, was just wiping his brow as they arrived.

  ‘Pity they can’t arrange a bloody exercise without all this bumph,’ he was saying.

  Asking for the CO at the Chief Clerk’s office, White noticed the quick movement as the warrant officer pushed a map across the top of his desk.

  ‘The Colonel’s in his office,’ he was told. ‘He’s expecting you.’

  White nodded, not saying anything. Underneath the corner of the map, he’d seen a pile of pay books. The Chief Clerk was extracting the names of next-of-kin, and it didn’t require much intelligence to guess from it that in a very short time they would very probably be going into battle.

  The two men’s eyes met as White turned away and it was quite clear that they had both understood the message in the other’s gaze.

  Colonel Drucquer
was sitting at his desk, surrounded by all his officers of the rank of captain and above. They looked round as White entered.

  ‘Sorry I’m late, Colonel.’

  ‘That’s all right. Well in time, but as you’re the last we can make a start.’

  Colonel Drucquer was a Guernseyman and a deceptively mild character. Slightly built and colourless, he had a narrow head and pale hair and eyes, and in the African sun suffered agonies from a peeling nose. He had a languid and old-fashioned manner that somehow reminded White of something out of P G Wodehouse, but it required only a glance at the ribbons he wore to realise there was more to him than met the eye.

  His news wasn’t good. What he still insisted on calling an exercise was, he said, liable to be chaotic. The Navy, in their trial runs, had found it difficult to co-ordinate the speeds of the old ships in such a manner as to keep steerage way, and as the ‘exercise’ had been moved forward unexpectedly there was likely to be a certain amount of confusion. Old and faulty equipment wouldn’t help to make it easier.

  ‘We just have to face it, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘You will have to be prepared for every emergency. This exercise isn’t going to be an easy affair – I’m as well aware of that as you are but – we’ve got our orders and it’s up to us to do the best we can. There’s been a riot and we’re being sent in to rescue British Nationals. That’s the idea behind the – er – exercise.’

  A few of the officers glanced at each other but no one spoke. Drucquer had paused, glancing at a sheet of notes in his hand, almost as though he were allowing them time to absorb what he was saying and to relate it to international events and form their own opinions.

  ‘Troops will embark in khaki drill,’ he went on finally, ‘but they will carry long trousers, mosquito boots and ground-sheets with them. Battle dress and heavier clothing will be packed in kitbags and delivered to the Quartermaster for carriage to the exercise area.’