‘But the Adventure’, I asked, trying not to sound too insistent, ‘is going ahead?’
‘Ja,’ he replied, ‘I’ll keep you informed.’
We chatted about the situation in Liberia, and I filled him in on the BBC series and my schedule. No explanation was given for his long absences: I assumed they were taken up with gathering intelligence on the targets to be attacked. I also asked him for Simon’s number. My phone had been stolen a couple of weeks before, so I plucked up the courage to ask for it again.
‘I’m sorry, I don’t have it.’
His reply caught me off-balance.
‘What, you don’t have Simon’s number?’
I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. He became uncharacteristically evasive, and the conversation was punctuated by an awkward pause while he seemed to collect his thoughts.
‘No, I don’t have it,’ was his final, emphatic answer.
We finished the call. I stood in the study of my new flat in London and looked out over the rows of gardens spreading across my quiet corner of North Kensington. Nick was lying to me – the first time I’d known that he’d done so. Perhaps they’ve fallen out? Or maybe he’s trying to protect me from something? In comparison to navigating my way through the twists and turns of Nick’s planned coup, Liberia had been remarkably straightforward.
As I travelled back and forth to Africa, I became further accepted as part of the respectable face of television journalism. At an awards ceremony in London, I won two Rory Peck awards – the industry’s highly prized gongs uniquely for freelance cameramen. Other nominations and awards followed. It was hard to justify the price. A lot of blood had been spilled for the professional recognition they brought, not to mention untold turbulence in my personal life.
After returning from the latest BBC trip, I’d gone down to Kent to see my grandfather, Don. As soon as he walked into the room, I knew he was dying. My mum and grandmother were positive, supportive, and apparently blind to what was happening in front of them. Perhaps it was because I’d spent so long among the dead and dying in Liberia that it was so obvious. No one spoke the word ‘cancer’, least of all Don, who didn’t like to talk about it in case it upset my grandmother.
‘How is everything with Kathi?’ he asked instead.
I told him everything was fine. I thought it was.
‘I mean, obviously, you know, she’s much older and everything … but she’s very grounded. We’re dealing with the same people, doing the same things, but from different ends of the spectrum. She knows everyone. It’s pretty amazing.’
My grandfather raised his eyebrows almost imperceptibly.
‘There’s more to her than meets the eye,’ he’d replied. ‘Still, I’m glad it’s working out.’
As the winter wore on, my grandfather’s health deteriorated. On Christmas Day he sat with us for dinner, eating a tiny portion of the feast that Mum and Nan and Kathi had prepared. The tumour in his lungs had spread to his thigh bone, devouring him by degrees. By January it was clear, to Kathi and me at least, that he didn’t have much time left. Increasingly reliant on morphine and the constant care of his family and specialist nurses, he began to slip into long narcotic daydreams that insulated him from the agony of his body’s collapse.
For as long as I could remember, Grandad had been exactly that – a Grand Dad. When I had nightmares as a small child, he would sit with me and make me laugh, or tell me stories until I fell asleep. He spent hours on a windswept pier jutting into the Channel as I tried, and occasionally succeeded, to catch something for supper. He let me blast holes in almost anything in the garden with my air rifle, and showed me, very patiently, how to grow potatoes.
He taught me to recite my times-tables and then he taught me how to drive. And when I left university he took me on one side, to make sure I understood what my responsibilities were as a man towards my family.
When I started to work, he helped. When I was travelling alone in Palestine, and taken seriously ill, it was Don’s telephone number that I repeated over and over again to the medics who rushed to treat me; when my car broke down in a refugee camp at night on the Afghan border, I called Don; when I blew a tyre in the Kalahari Desert, I called Don, because he knew what to do.
He watched me make mistakes, and helped me learn from them. And when suddenly I got my break, he enjoyed every minute of it with me.
I took rough edits of the BBC films I was working on to show Don, and he watched them when the opiates wore off, propped up in bed. I told him about my nomination for the Royal Television Society’s best cameraman of the year award. He held my hand and nodded.
‘And they can’t take that away from you, can they’ he assured me.
My grandmother brought in a small blue album of black-and-white photographs from the Second World War, and we sat together while he guided me through his days in Palestine, El Alamein, Tobruk and Italy. His handsome face peered out from the burning desert across sixty years of hard work and achievement: an example I had tried – and mostly failed – to emulate.
I took notes with a pencil while, completely lucid, he pronounced the almost-forgotten names of his comrades deliberately and with a warmth that blew a breath of life into them for a few hours more. One photograph, blurred and lopsided, showed rows and rows of Italian prisoners of war lined up by the side of the road.
‘That was taken from the back of our truck. We were going up the line, in Libya.’
He put the photographs down and held my hand again. His eyes were glassy with unshed tears.
‘You know,’ he said, his voice still strong but starting to crack, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to make it.’
It was a question, as much as a statement. I could neither lie to him, nor tell him the truth.
‘No, I don’t know either. It’s hard. It’s such a hard fight, this one.’
And then I saw what it was in his eyes, that same look that I had seen in countless other faces in Africa. He was going up the line again, not knowing if he was coming back.
Back in London, the New Year had hardly begun when Kathi and I split up. Our relationship crumbled in a night fuelled with accusations, recriminations – and a lot of alcohol. By the time we sat down to dinner in a local journalists’ club, I was drunk enough to have difficulty walking straight; thinking straight was out of the question. Fundamentally, I wanted to be alone – and her company, with all the intrigues of her work, had by degrees made our life together one of the loneliest places to be. My relationship with Kathi felt like a game, and I was too tired to play any more.
It was an ugly scene. I struggled out into the night air, enraged by her politely evasive responses. I stumbled across an always-busy main road outside the club before collapsing. Slumped on the pavement, I called Tim. He thought I sounded a bit rough. I told him I’d left Kathi. And then suddenly I changed the subject. A memory of our trip into Monrovia, of a particular episode whose true meaning I had suppressed for so long, hit me hard.
‘Tim, man, I need you to forgive me, I need you to forgive me,’ I repeated over and over. I didn’t know where the words came from. ‘In Monrovia, I left you. I thought you’d been hit, man – and I just left you. I was so scared, I was so fucking scared, man. I didn’t want to die. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’
He cut across my ranting, gently, feeling his way cautiously into my hysteria.
‘We were both scared. It’s okay, it’s really okay. I’d forgotten about it, it didn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean anything. You’re my brother, we’re brothers. No one understands. No one will ever understand what it was like. It’s okay.’
‘It’s not okay. It’s really not okay. My grandfather is dying. You know? He’s going to die very soon, and no one will admit it or say anything. No one understands that, either, no one understands why it hurts so much. He’s just an old man, right? He’s lived a good life.’
I was crying uncontrollably, shaking on the freezing January ground.
‘He wasn’
t a coward. He was always there, he never left me. No one else gets it, man. I’m just a coward.’
I don’t know how long he talked me down for, but at some point I stopped crying and stopped talking. I curled up on the pavement and slept. When I woke up, it was still dark. I went home to find Kathi waiting for me, shaken, but apparently ready to forgive – but something had snapped. The next morning she left. I never saw her again.
At last I felt as if I was in control of my personal life. The BBC job had wound up, and I looked forward with anticipation to my African Adventure. I called Nick – who was in South Africa for once. He had surprising news.
‘Ag, well, it’s quite an interesting story,’ he began. ‘The businesses have gone very well. I’ve got a joint venture now with the president’s family under way, and there are a lot more plans in development. We might not need to do our operation after all. We’re looking at making so much money here, it might not be necessary to remove him.’
After waiting to go for eight months, his news was a terrible anticlimax. I was out-of-contract at the BBC, and his coup was the only meal ticket I had. I was counting on him.
‘Okay. Well, if it does go ahead …’
I paused while I chose my words carefully. We always spoke in a loose code that seemed to evolve from month to month.
‘If you do decide to go ahead, how much notice will I get? My bags are packed. I think it would be a very exciting holiday, and I’ve got someone lined up to buy the souvenirs afterwards.’
In fact, no one had commissioned the film of the coup. I planned to shoot it on spec and sell it afterwards.
‘Forty-eight hours,’ Nick replied.
‘And what about the big country, in the middle? Any news there?’
We had not talked about the Congo job since Paris.
‘Ja,’ he confirmed, ‘that is still on.’
My spirits lifted. Somehow, somewhere, we were going to go into action together again.
He signed off, as usual: ‘I’ll let you know.’
I waited in nervous ignorance, texting and emailing in the hope of some movement. And then my grandfather died.
On his last morning, as I prepared to go to London for a meeting, my mother suggested I say goodbye to him. It was the day before his eighty-third birthday. I understood what she meant; there was no way to know the day, nor the hour. Leaning over his emaciated body, I wrapped my arms around him. Six-foot-one and light as a child. Conscious, lucid, he looked at me through his watery blue eyes that now sank back into his skull.
‘Most people think they’re lucky if they ever meet their heroes,’ I said. ‘I’ve lived with mine all my life.’
Deep breaths rattled in his ravaged lungs. I kissed his cheek, and told him that I loved him. He held my hand as tight as he could.
‘We’re the same, you and me.’
It was the highest compliment I could ever be paid. He looked at me and I kissed him again and said goodbye.
On 4 March 2004, my grandfather Don Sim was cremated at a small family service near to his home in Kent. For four days my mother, grandmother and I sat and nursed our grief, recounting memories, sharing the burden of remembrance. On 9 March I returned to London. I hadn’t looked at a newspaper, heard the news or checked my email for eleven days. Not even my mobile phone worked at the house in Kent. Back in my London flat, I drew the curtains, switched on the heating and made a cup of tea in the chilly, empty space. Then I turned on the radio, and got the shock of my life.
On 7 March, a Boeing 727 had been seized at Harare airport in Zimbabwe, carrying sixty-four suspected mercenaries and military equipment. Eighteen hours later, fifteen other suspected mercenaries, including several South Africans, had been rounded up in Equatorial Guinea on suspicion of being an advance guard for the Zimbabwe force. Together, they were believed to be plotting an imminent coup d’état in the Equatoguinean capital, Malabo.
I picked up my phone and called Nick.
PART THREE
15
SIMON SAYS
‘Hello?’ It was Nick. My shoulders dropped in relief. Thank God.
‘I’ve just heard the news. Are you okay, man?’
The line fizzed and then echoed with a sharp tap. It sounded like a scuffle or Nick dropping the phone.
The line went dead. I tried again, standing nervously in the box-room office at the back of my flat, surrounded by piles of prints from my old photographic career. The call connected.
‘Who’s this?’
It was another man speaking now, with a strong accent and African intonation. He sounded almost Spanish.
‘It’s James,’ I said. ‘James from London.’
‘James who?’
My gut tightened. Something was wrong.
‘I’m a friend of Nick’s. May I talk to him, please?’
A long pause elapsed, filled with crackles and hisses.
‘Nick cannot come to the phone right now. He’s in the shower. Can you call back in an hour?’
I agreed reluctantly and hung up. Sixty minutes later my call was answered again, but when I asked for Nick the line went dead. My third attempt went to voicemail. Thereafter, Nick’s number was unobtainable. He was gone.
I paced around the tiny room, trying to collect my thoughts. I knew a great deal about the coup, but not quite enough to help him now. In fact, the best I could hope to do for Nick was to shut my mouth, and keep it shut – destroying in the process any chance I had of reporting on the story myself. I switched on the radio, opened my email, and prepared to become part of the audience for the story I’d hoped to be directing.
Within an hour my phone rang. It was a man from the US military’s Joint Analysis Center at Molesworth in Huntingdon – a top-secret facility in eastern England from where the CIA, DIA and a host of other military intelligence entities (including MI6 and other foreign agencies) co-ordinate jointly on intelligence from Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He had one urgent question:
‘James, what the hell is going on?’
I had to confess that I didn’t really know. I pressed him to see if he knew anything – but he claimed that the entire event had caught ‘everyone’ unawares. Very politely he asked me to check in when I did know, and rang off. I called Frank, my US Intelligence contact, but to no avail.
There was no breaking news that mentioned Nick or Simon by name. I started to search the Internet for clues. Journalists were filling up pages of speculative copy online. Alibis started to appear. A man calling himself ‘Charles Burrows’ telephoned the Reuters news agency. He was, he claimed, a representative of Logo Logistics Limited, the company that owned the impounded jet plane. It was all, apparently, a ‘dreadful misunderstanding’: the men were not mercenaries at all; they were security guards who were on their way to guard a mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo. As if to corroborate this, state television pictures from Zimbabwe showed army personnel sifting through the equipment confiscated on the plane, including sleeping bags, army boots, satellite phones and radios – though no weapons.
As the day wore on, it dawned on me that there was only one person I could really call. I scrolled through the numbers on my phone, and dialled Nick’s home number. His wife answered. It was the first time I had spoken to her, the first time I’d had any contact with anyone Nick knew other than Cobus, Piet the spy in Monrovia and Simon Mann. She was distraught, but claimed to know little. Nick had been in Equatorial Guinea and now he had vanished.
‘James,’ she fretted, ‘what is going to happen to him? You’ve been to these places, you know what these people are like. They aren’t like us. They aren’t going to give a damn about anything.’ She was crying, her voice cracked and distorted as the shock took hold. ‘They can just kill him,’ she declared. ‘They can just kill him. James, do you think they will? Will they kill him?’
‘Well,’ I said, thinking on my feet, ‘the best way to make sure Nick is not harmed is to make this as public as possible. You need to make as much noise as
possible. You don’t know he’s been tortured or mistreated – so right now the best thing to do is hope for the best and plan for the worst.’
I chose my words carefully. It occurred to me that I had no idea what she knew about Nick’s African Adventure. I also had no idea whether her phone was tapped.
‘Whatever Nick may or may not have done – or been planning to do – he has rights. It doesn’t look like he’s actually done anything, which is handy, but even if he was planning to do something illegal – which we know he wasn’t – he would still have rights. You know, a right to be treated properly, to have a lawyer, a right to have a fair hearing – all that kind of thing.’
She didn’t sound convinced, but I carried on regardless.
‘Now, it may well be the case that he’ll be released very soon – but on the off-chance that he’s held for a few days, you should get onto Amnesty International now, and every other human rights organisation you can think of, and help them to publicise his detention. I’ll email you a list, too. It’s very important that this happens quickly.’
It was only later that evening, after I’d hung up, that the implications of Nick and Simon’s arrests finally sank in. The news reports online and on the radio made it seem so remote that I had forgotten for an instant how close I’d been to being with them when they were seized. It could just as easily have been my mother, or Tim, making desperate calls to Amnesty International. I had escaped. My grandfather had saved me.
My Friend The Mercenary Page 31
