Dictator

88

The pilots in the F-7s were like predatory raptors eyeing a dove with a broken wing. They wheeled and swooped in ruthlessly perfect formation, screaming down towards the Twin Otter as it limped past the first trucks on the Malemban side of the border. Down the fighters roared, and beneath them cab-doors and tarpaulins were flung open as drivers and passengers desperately sought to get away from the angels of death plunging from the sky.

Again the guns spat out a continuous hail of deadly shells, strafing the Twin Otter and the trucks and customs huts below it with indiscriminate malice. A petrol tanker bound for the thirsty pumps of Malemba’s empty filling stations erupted in a ball of fire that seemed to swallow the fragile little plane before it emerged on the far side. Its wings and tail had been pierced so often they looked more like torn lace than solid metal. Its left engine had gone, too. All that its wounded, bleeding pilot could hope to do was bring a little control to the final glide as the Otter hit the top of a brilliantly painted bus, smashing several boxes filled with chickens that had been strapped there, bounced forward and crashed down on to the road surface as the F-7s roared by, less than a hundred feet above the ground.

The undercarriage collapsed, sending the aircraft skidding over the road surface, slewing round as it went. The right wing hit a fully loaded lumber truck and sheared off, but the Otter kept going, spinning like a Frisbee as it left the road, ploughed through a stretch of bare ground and then came to a halt in a cloud of thick black smoke and choking dust.

For a while, nothing moved. The crowd of people gathered on the roadside stood there motionless, too afraid to approach the crashed plane for fear of an explosion. But as the seconds passed and no eruption came, the first few figures made their tentative, nervous way towards it.

One clambered up on to the nose and peered through the cracked windscreen into the cockpit. Others tugged at the main passenger door, just to the rear of the battered remnants of the left wing and engine. Then they sprang back as the handle was operated from within the aircraft cabin.

The door swung open.

A white man was revealed in the open doorway, dressed in black combat fatigues. His face was covered in blood from an open wound across his forehead. He was only held upright by his right hand gripping the door frame. He tried to move his left hand, waving towards himself.

‘Come here,’ he croaked. ‘Please help.’

A trucker dressed in a replica Manchester United football shirt helped the white man down on to the ground. Then he started shouting exuberantly, yelling at his travelling companions to come and assist him. Very soon the crowd could see what the excitement was all about as two slender black figures were carried from the plane. One was a young man in his late teens. The other was his older sister.

And they were both alive.