Star of Africa

Chapter 39

The crews from the two Bell Iroquois and the men by the fuel truck all turned as Khosa made his appearance. He strode across the avenue between the rows of buildings, kicking up clouds of dust with his boots. As he neared the gathered crowd of his men, he reached into his pocket and brought out the diamond in its leather pouch for all to see. He held it high in the air like a trophy and yelled ‘I have it! You see? I have it!’

His men greeted him like a conquering hero returning from a victorious military campaign. Laughter and yells and whoops of triumph echoed around the compound, and a few did the tin-pot army thing of stabbing their rifles straight up like spears and loosing off a string of shots in celebration. The crackle of the gunfire sounded hollow and flat in the oven-dry air.

‘Are you all right?’ Ben asked Jude, squeezing his shoulder.

Jude gave a nod and managed a smile. ‘I’m fine,’ he replied. ‘I never really thought they were going to shoot me. Just playing around, acting tough. I wasn’t worried.’

‘Nor was I,’ Ben lied. ‘It’ll all be fine. Just you wait and see.’

‘Move! Move!’ barked a voice behind them. It was the fat soldier again, joined now by the skinny one and the nose picker, jabbing gun muzzles at them and motioning urgently towards the buildings.

Jeff pointed a warning finger at the fat one. ‘Hey. You. Back off. I’m telling you. Before I ram that shotgun down your throat so hard it’ll come out of your arse, butt end first.’

‘I wouldn’t provoke them, Jeff,’ Tuesday advised him with a frown. ‘Especially chubby cheeks there. He’s just itching to blow us away, first chance he gets.’

Gerber and Hercules each had one of Condor’s arms, without which the sick man couldn’t have remained upright for long. ‘What the hell is this place anyway?’ Gerber said. ‘Why’d they bring us here?’

Hercules nodded grimly towards the largest of the buildings, the one with the heavily bullet-cratered wall. ‘You blind, homes? Don’t you see that wall right there? It’s a motherfuckin’ execution yard, is what it is. They ain’t takin’ us inside. They’s gonna line our asses up along that there wall and put us down like a buncha dogs.’

‘We’re not dead yet,’ Jeff said.

‘Move! Move! You walk!’ the fat soldier barked, urging them on. Then, scowling at Condor, ‘What wrong with him?’

‘He needs a doctor,’ Ben told him in Swahili. ‘Either leave him alone or go and fetch one, right now.’

‘No doctor! No doctor!’

‘Then get us some water,’ Ben told him. ‘For God’s sake, these men are thirsty.’

‘No water! No water!’

‘Yeah, right.’ Hercules shook his head. ‘No doctor, no water, ’cause why waste it on a dead man? This is it, my friends. End of the line, I’m tellin’ you. But not for all of us.’

Releasing Condor’s arm for a moment, Hercules opened up the flap of his baggy jacket pocket and let Murphy clamber out onto his hand. Hercules raised his arm up high.

‘Go, Murph. Get out of here. Go!’

The parrot blinked at Hercules, then flapped its wings and took off. Hercules watched it go, nodding wistfully to himself.

Then the boom of the fat soldier’s shotgun cut through the desiccated air like a grenade blast. The flying bird exploded in a cloud of feathers. Murphy’s mangled carcass dropped to the earth floor of the compound. Laughing, the fat soldier walked over to it and crushed what was left of it into the dirt with the heel of his boot.

That was the last thing the fat soldier would be doing for a while. Because when he turned back round to grin at the prisoners, he was met by Hercules’s ham-sized fist coming at him like a wrecking ball with two hundred and fifty pounds of muscle behind it. The punch spread his nose into a bloody pulp across his face and slammed him hard to the earth. With a roar of pure rage, Hercules was about to finish the guy off with a stamp to the head when Jeff and Tuesday rushed forwards and grabbed Hercules by the arms to restrain him.

‘You want to die, big man?’ Jeff said in his ear. ‘Keep it up.’

‘Gonna die anyway. Fuck’m! Fuck’m all!’

The fat soldier was stone unconscious. His comrades were all yelling and screaming and jabbering and waving their guns. Khosa turned to see what was happening. More of his men came running. In two seconds, Hercules was surrounded by rifle muzzles. Ben, Jude, Jeff and Tuesday stood shoulder to shoulder with him. Ben eyed the nearest yelling African and got ready to make a grab for his rifle. If this was how it was going to end, then so be it. You could have death, or you could have glory, but sometimes you had to settle for both at once.

Then Khosa shouted, ‘Stop! Hold your fire!’

The circle of guns backed off and opened up to lead the way.

The seven prisoners were marched towards the large building. Hercules shooting glares of grief-stricken hatred at every man who dared come within punching distance. Jude helping Gerber to steady Condor on his feet. Ben and Jeff glancing at each other and both wondering the same thing. Why had Khosa stayed his men?

Ben was worried. Because he had a feeling he knew the answer.

Hercules had been wrong. The soldiers didn’t line them up along the wall to be shot, but instead prodded and shoved them inside the building. It was a bare one-room shell inside, long and low, cool and dark and dank. The compacted earth floor was littered with broken glass and garbage, but most of all it was littered with empty cartridge casings. Piles of them, two or three deep in places, trodden into the dirt. Ben felt them underfoot as he stepped inside and instantly knew what they were, even without looking. Just as he knew that the fired shells would be mostly concentrated at one end of the room. Just as he knew why, without needing to peer into the shadows to examine the far wall and make out the craters that scarred the inside of the blockwork as well as the outside.

Bad things had happened here. Maybe even worse things than could be done out in the open of the compound. The earth floor had soaked up the stench of it. The indelible scent of death from the terrible, inhuman atrocities that he could imagine taking place on this spot. And perhaps some that he didn’t want to imagine.

Ben wasn’t surprised. It was all pretty much what he expected, and the reason could be summed up in the same three neat little letters he’d been running through his mind while observing Khosa’s soldiers. T.I.A.

The acronym was a wry old saying often repeated all over this continent, by people who knew the score. To remind others that things here didn’t work the way they did elsewhere. To encourage them never to forget that when you set foot in this land you were suddenly in a very different place, where you had to forget everything you thought you knew about the world and the people in it.

T.I.A. This Is Africa.

All that really needed to be said. If you knew, you’d get it. If you didn’t, you soon would.

The tall, broad figure of the commander filled the doorway, silhouetted against the dust-hazed light from outside. His booted feet braced a little apart, hands clasped against the small of his back, chest thrust proudly outwards. He nodded to his men, and they drew back from the prisoners. He walked into the building. More of his soldiers crowded through the doorway in his wake and spread out behind him with drawn weapons and scowling faces. Khosa himself was wearing a contented smile. As well a man should be, with an incalculable fortune in precious stones bulging his pocket and his enemies subdued and powerless before him.

‘I am General Jean-Pierre Khosa,’ he said to them. ‘Welcome to my army.’