My Friend The Mercenary

by James Brabazon

  As I panned the lens across the gathered crowd, Nick slipped the safety catch off his AK, and Jonathan stood blanched white, uncomprehending. As the rebels held up the severed head for its close-up, Robert appeared and did a piece to camera next to the murdered man, describing the rebels’ ‘trophy’. After the final take, the oppressive humidity of the day exploded into a torrential tropical downpour. We sprinted across a small field and sheltered from it in the doorway of a burned-out school house, tightly huddled together with a group of boy-soldiers, who shied away from the fat raindrops as if they were bullets. I looked down to see that the decapitated head was squashed against my thigh. A piece of bright red electrical wire had been threaded through the ears, transforming it into an obscene handbag. Out in the field, which I supposed was a football pitch, another severed head – hacked off another prisoner further up the road – sat upright on an old school chair, lashed by the summer rain.

  In the hours that followed we sat together on the oblong of veranda outside our billet, reading, chatting and smoking. The rebels had put the severed heads on spikes by the main road as a warning to the Government army. I thought about what we were doing, the film we were making. In many respects the trip had been a failure: as we were unable to move outside of Voinjama, it was impossible to capture the scale of the conflict and the wider impact it had on Liberia. Until that morning, we didn’t have a film, and there had been no realistic prospect of getting the material we needed to make one. But I knew now that the pictures of the beheading would insulate me from criticism: we had the war on film. That made me happy. Working in Liberia was like being in an abusive relationship: when she hit me, it felt like a kiss.

  Nick had remained tight-lipped about his past in front of the Americans. And then, out of the blue – almost, it seemed, out of boredom – he announced to all of us that he’d been working on plans for a mercenary contract in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. I lit a cigarette, and listened carefully.

  ‘It’s quite a simple plan,’ Nick enthused, almost chuckling with relish. ‘I’m looking at getting some weapons and a few advisers to a rebel group in eastern Congo. The idea is to start a fight with the Rwandans who have occupied that part of the country – which has got a lot of diamond fields in it. The United Nations has also got that area under control.’

  I drew hard on the cigarette and tried to get Nick’s attention – this was not a conversation to have with people we hardly knew. He carried on, regardless.

  ‘We’re hoping that the Congolese Army will use it as an excuse to re-occupy the area, and get the diamond fields back.’

  The operation would create a diversion for Nick to bring out a stash of already mined diamonds – the proceeds of which would be shared between himself, Joseph Kabila, the US-backed president of the Congo, and an ‘agent’ who had contacted Nick about the plan in the first place. Then Nick dropped the punch.

  ‘Ja, if it goes ahead, all of you can come along and film it.’

  Nick, it seemed, was in the grip of diamond fever. Not only was I annoyed that he’d discussed it in front of the Americans, but I was also alarmed at how seriously Nick was taking a plan which was, on the face of it, highly likely to fail. I got up and paced around in disbelief, as the rain tumbled down beyond our veranda. Perhaps he saw the shock in my face, perhaps recounting the plan had simply been Nick’s solution to another interminable evening in Liberia – but, whatever the reason, he never mentioned it again while we were in Voinjama.

  I slept fitfully that night, disturbed more by our surprise conversation than by the earlier execution. I also slept dressed for combat – the rebels were clinging on by the narrowest of margins, and we were defended mainly by children.

  Two days later the rebels finally agreed to let us film some shooting – on the understanding that if they did, we’d pack up shortly afterwards and move back to Conakry. The rebels were beginning to tire of the Americans’ presence, and wanted to concentrate on putting a new offensive together. That morning, 17 October, the rebel battalion headquarters at Kolahun fell to the Government army – a calamity described by Jackity as ‘not a major setback’. Taylor’s men were now based a mere twelve miles from Voinjama. It was time to go.

  A precious case of ammunition was prised open and given to a hand-picked group of men, who obligingly put on a display they called a ‘fire and manoeuvre’ exercise – which, to the untrained eye, looked like a bunch of men running around in circles with automatic weapons, firing them wildly into the undergrowth. However strange the spectacle, the pictures made good entertainment.

  I set up a final shot of Robert watching the live rounds going off, which could be used as a dramatic backdrop for placing him in the context of the war. And then, true to our word, the next day, ten days after we arrived in Liberia, we left Voinjama and settled in for a gruelling twenty-two-hour drive back to Conakry. A day later, after checking into the Petit Bateau hotel, the Americans left us.

  ‘Well, that was real. Thanks for a great trip.’

  Tired, deeply affected and personally inspired by his experience with the rebels, Jonathan shook hands with us and set off for the plane, with Robert loping in front of him. They couldn’t wait to get back to their families.

  Back on the terrace at the Petit Bateau, Nick and I picked up where we left off in Tubmanburg. I was curious to know how he had ended up in the arms business – a story he hadn’t finished.

  ‘When I came out of EO in ’96, I went to Angola as a concession manager for Namco on one of the diamond fields. I began to learn about diamonds there. It was supposed to be a short contract, but I stayed for a few months. I got to know the business quite well. After that I went to Mozambique with Coin Security for a year at one of their mines.’

  Nick waved his hand at the waitresses skulking by the kitchen door, and held up two fingers, hopefully, for beers.

  ‘So, basically, you’d moved from being a professional soldier into the mining industry?’

  ‘Not really. That was just the work that was around if you had my background. It’s the same today. Then, when I was back in SA, I met up with an old friend of mine, Paul Haynes. That changed my direction a bit.’

  Haynes, it transpired, was an army pilot who flew clandestine missions for both the Recces and the CCB, the civilian dirty-tricks department that specialised in assassinations and black operations. Retaining close links to the South African Intelligence service (despite the new era and new government voted into power in 1994) he’d set up a company called Military Technical Services – MTS – and asked Nick to join him as a business partner.

  ‘That must have been at the end of ’98, beginning of ’99. Paul was already busy with aviation and small-arms contracts. I concentrated mainly on the weapons side. It worked out very well for me. It’s his company, really, but I can come and do jobs like this as well. He’s a good friend. Not everyone is so lucky to have a partner like him.’

  The beers clunked down onto the table. I lit a cigarette.

  ‘So what about this bloody Congo job, then? What is all that about?’

  ‘Ja, well, actually it’s quite possible. The guy that contacted me represents a group of fighters more from the central part of the country, but he’s also involved in the Katanga region and knows the rebels in the east.’

  Katanga, Nick explained, is the Congo’s massive southern province, fabulously rich in minerals and diamonds, and the source of the uranium that powered the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of the Second World War. It had been a magnet for mercenaries since the 1960s. From the outset of the Congo’s independence from Belgium, Katanga had striven, with hired guns for an army, to become a very rich, independent nation.

  ‘The rebel stronghold in eastern Congo is a mountain – almost impenetrable. The only real way in would be to jump in, a low-release drop like we used to do in Mozambique.’ He looked at my face, which had frozen mid-mouthful. ‘I could teach you. It’s not hard to do. It’s just trying to find somewhe
re to land with no trees to break your fall that’s tricky.’

  ‘Right,’ I replied, unsure if I was being set up for a punchline in an elaborate joke. ‘How exactly would we do it?’

  I could see myself plummeting through the darkness, camera in hand, jittery rebels lit by landing flares in the jungle clearing below.

  ‘The ammunition would most probably be supplied by the Russians—’

  ‘The Russian Government?’ I interrupted.

  ‘No, a private dealer with links to the old former Soviet republics. The weapons would be dropped in on pallets and we’d go in with them, at night. We’d jump at about five hundred feet.’

  ‘Five hundred?’

  I’d never done a parachute jump before. Even so, five hundred feet seemed very, very low.

  ‘Ja, sometimes we used to jump at three hundred – static line – but that’s really the limit. In Rhodesia I used to stand with the dispatcher at the door of the Dakota. You could just about see the DZ below. Sometimes there would be incoming tracer fire from the terrorists on the ground – but when he said jump, vok, you had to jump, right into the bullets. Makes you think what it must have been like for those guys at Arnhem. Looking back, it’s amazing more people weren’t killed. The Rhodesians had a few serious injuries – in the end they said vok that, we’re not jumping like that any more, but we never really had a problem with it.’

  I wasn’t sure if this was supposed to make me feel better about throwing myself out of a cargo plane cruising at just five hundred feet or reinforce the dangers – either way, I felt apprehensive at the prospect.

  ‘And if we jump in, how are we going to get out?’

  I couldn’t believe I was asking genuine logistical questions about an operation that involved throwing myself out of an aeroplane.

  ‘Probably we’d have to walk. And we are quite good at that.’

  The ‘plan’ was as sketchy as it was improbable, but it was intriguing, too, despite (or possibly owing to) the lack of any coherent detail. What did emerge clearly, and for the first time, was that Nick was not just the pragmatist I knew him to be. Alongside his practical expertise in the field ran another, perhaps even deeper vein of adventurous wishful thinking. As well as the financial reward, he seemed to want to do the Congo job for the sheer hell of it.

  I wasn’t ready to commit to his scheme, not least because the logistics of it terrified me. Apart from the extreme undesirability of a parachute jump followed by intense combat and a long hike through the jungle, I struggled with another problem, too: how to go about filming an illegal operation with integrity and professional probity that would not also provide the evidence to land Nick in jail?

  ‘We’d just have to do it in such a way as you can film it without revealing some things, like the source of the weapons,’ he said.

  It was a fair point. He’d seen me agree to this with US Intelligence, and there was no reason for me to treat him any differently. If nothing else, working in the Congo would, he assured me, be an extraordinary adventure.

  ‘You know,’ I said, ‘an adventurer was exactly what I’d wanted to be – from as early as I can remember. When I was growing up, all my role models were the soldiers in my family. My mum was broke, but I didn’t mind because I had hours to myself to make up war games, like I was the last man surviving from my grandfather’s unit in Burma, that kind of thing. Kids’ stuff.’

  ‘Ja,’ said Nick, ‘and then one day it fokken happens for real.’

  I wasn’t answering his question about joining him in the Congo, but I wanted to keep the door open while I figured it out for myself. I told him that, as I grew up, I wondered what life might be like away from the familiar and predictable routines of Britain. When I was nine years old, my father got a loan from the bank and took me hitchhiking in Ireland. We slept on the floors of youth hostels, and were fed by strangers.

  ‘I was given my first bottle of Guinness by my Irish grandfather’s ancient first cousin,’ I told Nick. ‘He wouldn’t hear of me not drinking with him and Dad, so I sipped it by this open peat fire, feeling like a real man – and then fell fast asleep.’

  In the days that followed, my father and I scrambled up mountains in Connemara that felt like they were on top of the world. Our holiday opened a window onto a real world that trumped all the games I could play at home by myself.

  I had no idea what I wanted ‘to do’, I explained, but as I grew up, a thirst for travel gripped me completely. By the age of sixteen, I was hitchhiking by myself. Aged eighteen, in the year before I went up to Cambridge, I was inspired by the books written by the war hero and travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, and set off in his footsteps to Istanbul.

  ‘When I was travelling, I started taking pictures. I had no idea what I was doing – but when I look back at that time, you know, that was really the beginning of my career. I wasn’t exactly planning on the dizzy heights of the Petit Bateau, mind you.’

  Nick laughed. I told him that Fermor – with whom I stayed in Greece en route to Turkey – had urged me to visit Fitzroy Maclean, the author of Eastern Approaches. Thought to be Ian Fleming’s inspiration for James Bond, Maclean had been in the Western Desert at the same time as my grandfather. Fermor told me he thought I had a promising future in international relations.

  ‘You know you said that your dad wanted you to work on the grape farm? My family were pretty much the same – they wanted me to do something respectable, or at least secure, like become a teacher or a civil servant.’

  Nick nodded, and washed down a mouthful of roasted peanuts.

  ‘They want the best for you,’ he said, ‘and you can never see their point of view – until you have your own children. Then it all makes sense, and you get even more cautious than your parents were.’

  But Fermor’s tales of undercover derring-do with partisans fighting the Germans watered a seed that had already been planted by my family’s own history of wartime adventures. I had wanted to go to war; and now, with Nick, I was being offered any number of options. The question, I realised, was how far I dared pursue them.

  11

  WANDERLUST

  My ears filled with gunfire. Deku strode past me, determined, shaking the sweat from his braids. My camera found the dying man and pulled his bullet-riddled torso into centre-frame. I zoomed in to his face, his eyes.

  ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’

  I pressed pause on the tape deck. Hannes, my video editor at the SABC’s Special Assignment programme, was standing at the door of the edit suite, peering over my shoulder. It was midnight, and we were almost alone in the huge SABC building in Johannesburg. We’d been cutting the film of the first Liberia trip for a week. The process was exhausting.

  ‘This doesn’t get any nicer, does it?’ he said, nodding at the screen.

  ‘No, it doesn’t.’ I looked back at the man’s death mask. ‘I need a smoke. A coffee would be great, thanks, man. That’s really kind.’

  Hannes reappeared a few minutes later with a thin white plastic cup of boiling-hot instant coffee. We taped an empty over the smoke alarm, and lit cigarettes. Happy but tired, his kind, open face blinked at me through the miasma of hazy blue smoke.

  ‘We’ll finish it tonight,’ he said. ‘Once we’ve got this pre-title sequence tidied up, we’re there. You can do the graphics and sub-titles tomorrow. I’ve typed up all the time codes – I’ll just need to drop them in. It’s a bit fiddly, but then we’re really done.’

  By the time midnight had arrived on that November evening, I’d learned there was a lot more to making films than getting combat on tape. Originally I believed I was making the film in Liberia – but in truth it was constructed in the edit suite. It was a painstaking process, with quite a lot of swearing in Afrikaans from Hannes and much head-shaking and muttered ‘if only I’d known’s’ from me. Eventually, we’d ended up with a thirty-minute film that I decided somewhat pretentiously to call Liberia: A Jour ney Without Maps – in homage to the writer Graham Greene’s
travel book about Liberia written in 1936.

  A couple of days later, on 12 November 2002, the film was broadcast. A group of us – producers, and journalists from the SABC – sat around in a friend’s house with cold beers and watched it go out. I could hardly breathe. When it ended there was a small round of applause, and everyone looked at me, but I was lost for words. Ten weeks of filming and twenty-two hours of tape had been crunched into a thirty-minute-and-sixteen-second film. That was the reality that everyone saw, would now always see. Any mistakes, misrepresentations, miscalculations, were now permanent ‘facts’. My memories had become public property.

  The only person missing from this extended party was Nick. He was already back in Liberia, negotiating a helicopter-and-diamond deal with Sekou Conneh, the LURD’s national chairman. I had no way of reaching him. In the seventeen days since we’d returned from the trip with the Americans, we hadn’t seen each other at all.

  In the week that followed the broadcast, I was curious to hear other reactions. So with Nick himself out of range, I called his friend Piet in Monrovia, who told me that Taylor had seen the film. At first Taylor had gone apoplectic, railing against me and the fact that the film had caused upwards of a dozen international trading and investment companies to cancel their plans in Liberia with immediate effect. Then he had his own edited version of the film made (removing any mention of the president being a war criminal, and of his troops raping young girls) and made sure as many people as possible in Monrovia saw it. Look, it screamed, the rebels are psychopathic killers! Only I, Charles Taylor, can protect you! That it would be used as propaganda by Taylor, I hadn’t foreseen. Once the film was out there, it really was uncontrollable.