Star of Africa

Chapter 47

As Ben stood watching and the dust settled around the now-stationary DC-3 Dakota, the main hatch on the left side of its green fuselage, halfway between the rear edge of the wing and its tailplane, swung open and a ladder was lowered out. Moments later, he watched as more of General Jean-Pierre Khosa’s soldiers spilled out of the hatch and came stampeding down the ladder to meet their commander.

By the time the last man had climbed out, his Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder, Ben had counted thirteen of them. An unlucky number, especially as it now brought the strength of Khosa’s ground force up to over thirty, and brought Ben’s chances of making the slightest move against them to less than zero. The odds just kept getting steeper. The disused airfield was now beginning to look like a real military base again, full of bodies and activity and a lot more guns. It wasn’t a welcome development.

The nose picker and a few other soldiers emerged from the mess hut, grinning and waving at the new arrivals. The nose picker ducked back inside, then reappeared at the head of a larger group of his comrades herding the remaining five prisoners outside at gunpoint. Jude, Jeff, Tuesday, Hercules and Gerber all gaped at the plane, slackening their step only to be prodded on from behind with jabbing rifle barrels. Ben felt a similar jab in the back and a voice behind him said, ‘Move! Move!’ He let himself be marched across the compound to rejoin the others.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ Gerber said.

‘Our transport just arrived,’ Ben said. ‘At least now we know where we’re going.’

‘Where?’ Gerber said.

‘What did he want with you?’ Jude asked.

‘I’ll tell you inside,’ Ben replied. The soldiers were ushering them back towards the hut where Condor had been killed.

‘I ain’t goin’ in there,’ Hercules said. But he wasn’t going to argue with three rifles at his back. The six of them were walked across the dusty ground and through the doorway into the bullet-cratered building. The stink of death hit them as they stepped inside. It was bad enough to make them gag and cover their faces with their hands, but not as bad as it would be by tomorrow, when the morning sun began to blaze afresh and the flies arrived in their millions to feast.

‘You clean up,’ the nose picker ordered them.

‘No chance,’ Hercules told him resolutely. ‘We ain’t touchin’ it.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Ben said. ‘I get the feeling we’re going to be spending the night here.’

‘Not like we haven’t done it before,’ Jeff said.

‘Bring a shovel,’ Ben told the nose picker.

‘No shovel. Use hands.’

‘Then bring me a sack,’ Ben said.

They brought a wooden crate. An old but sturdy oblong box nailed together out of pine slats and fitted with rope handles at either end, painted olive green and stencilled with faded white Cyrillic lettering. All the way from the Lugansk Cartridge Works in the Ukraine. If it could fulfil its original purpose of holding two thousand rounds of Soviet 7.62x39mm assault rifle ammunition, it could hold the weight of a hundred-and-sixty-pound corpse, albeit in pieces.

Gerber couldn’t face it. Nor could Hercules. It was left to the other four to place the empty box in the middle of the floor and kneel in the drying blood and scoop up what remained of poor Condor. The guns were pointing at them the whole time. The gruesome work took ten long minutes, by which time the pine slats were slippery with blood and Ben, Jeff, Jude and Tuesday were stained up to the elbows with it. ‘You got water?’ Ben asked the nose picker.

‘You already drink.’

‘Not to drink. To wash with.’ Ben held up his bloody hands. ‘See?’

The nose picker pulled a face and turned to grunt an order at another soldier. Khosa’s army must have had some notion of rank hierarchy, because the other soldier ran off and returned a moment later with a begrudging half-cup of water and a filthy rag for the four of them to clean up with. Once they’d done the best they could, Ben pointed at the box and said to the nose picker, ‘We can’t leave him here.’

‘Okay, okay, bring out, bring out,’ the nose picker said, waving impatiently towards the doorway.

‘This isn’t exactly the kind of funeral I’d have in mind for myself,’ Jeff said, trying to joke. Gallows humour was how he’d always coped with the worst situations, but for once it failed him and he couldn’t raise a smile as he went to grab one of the rope handles.

‘Let me do it,’ Jude said. ‘I knew him.’ Ben grabbed the other handle, and he and Jude carried the sloshing, dripping box outside into the falling evening. The sun was dropping fast. The temperature would quickly follow.

Ben said to the nose picker, ‘Now tell your man to fetch us that shovel.’

The nose picker frowned as if he’d been asked a long division question. ‘Why do you need it?’

‘To bury him, idiot.’

‘No shovel!’

‘Why, did you think I was going to use it to smack the side of your thick skull in?’

‘Now, where did he go getting an idea like that?’ Jeff growled from the doorway.

‘Quiet!’ The nose picker pointed across to a far corner of the compound near the perimeter fence. ‘Leave it there.’

‘We’re not just going to dump him,’ Jude said, outraged.

‘Rats also must eat,’ the nose picker said with a guffaw that was picked up by a few of the other soldiers.

And so, veteran merchant mariner Steve Maisky, a.k.a. Condor, found his final resting place. Unburied, unmarked, left to rot in a crate behind a clump of weeds next to a chain-link fence in a forgotten no-man’s land many thousands of miles from any home he’d ever known.

Ben turned his back on the rifles and muttered a quick prayer, and then all that could be done for the dead man had been done, and nothing remained but to walk away and prepare for whatever lay in store next.

It wasn’t long coming.

As Ben and Jude were being escorted back towards the bullet-cratered building that was to be their dormitory for the night, a pair of soldiers moved in on Jude and grabbed his arms, one on each side. They started hauling him away in the other direction, towards another of the buildings opposite.

‘Hey, hey, what do you think you’re doing?’ Ben said. He took an angry stride towards them and was instantly halted by three rifles in his face.

‘General’s orders,’ the nose picker said with a sneer. ‘He will not stay with you tonight. We will look after him.’ He laughed.

‘It’s okay,’ Jude said. ‘I’ll be fine.’

Ben’s hands balled into fists. ‘No, it’s not okay.’ He glared so hard at the three men holding the rifles in his face that they backed off a step. But the rifles kept pointing right at him as the soldiers led Jude away.

‘Move, move!’

Night fell. The building cooled. Its dark, empty shell felt like a grave. Just a milky shaft of moonlight shone in through the doorway, broken by the shadows of the two sentries standing on watch outside. Down to five, Ben and the others huddled in a circle on the cold, hard compacted earth. In a low voice, Ben related to the others what Khosa had said to him earlier.

‘The Congo,’ Tuesday muttered, shaking his head. ‘That’s bone.’

‘Bone?’ Gerber said.

‘Technical term,’ Tuesday explained. ‘British army expression meaning “totally fucked up”.’

‘I’m with you there, brother,’ Gerber said sullenly. ‘It’s bone, all right. Christ. I could use a drink around now.’

‘I could use a whole damn bottle,’ Hercules added. His big form was a slumped shadow in the darkness, exuding defeat.

A long hush fell over them as each man sank into his own thoughts. It was Gerber’s voice that finally broke the silence.

‘Jesus, guys. What are we going to do?’

‘Two sentries on the door,’ Jeff said in a lowered voice. ‘Am I the only one thinking “easy meat”?’

Ben shook his head. ‘One gunshot. That’s all it’ll take to raise the alarm. Then it’s over before it even started.’

Jeff shot a furtive glance at the doorway. One of the guards had just lit a cigarette. They could see the glow of its tip burning in the night, like the red dot of a laser sight marking its target. ‘Who’s talking about shooting them? We can take them down in a second, quiet as a mouse. Won’t be like we haven’t done it before. Then we grab their guns and go and find Jude, and get the fuck out of this place.’

‘I’m not taking that chance,’ Ben said softly. ‘Not when there’s thirty more of those bastards out there in the darkness, and a gun to Jude’s head with someone’s finger on the trigger. That’s just the way it is.’

‘Then what are we gonna do?’ Gerber repeated.

‘Stay alive,’ Ben said. ‘All of us. This is about survival now. We play it cool, we don’t do anything stupid, and we wait.’

‘Wait for what?’ Gerber said in a strained whisper. ‘Wait for this lunatic to decide to let us go?’

‘For the right moment,’ Ben replied.

Hercules gave a bitter chuckle. ‘Sure. They got us sewn up tighter than a fish’s ass, man. You just said it yourself. What right moment?’

‘It’ll come,’ Ben said. ‘We’ll know it when it does.’

‘And when it does,’ Hercules said. ‘What then?’

Ben said nothing.

It was a long, cold night. Ben moved to a corner of the building and curled up on the floor. More than he wished he had his cigarettes, and a tot of his favourite scotch to console him, he wished he had a blanket to wrap himself up in. What sounded like a pair of hunting jackals were roving somewhere outside the perimeter, deep in the darkness. He lay huddled up, trying to relax his tense, aching muscles, and listened to the haunting cries of the nocturnal predators. Doing what they were evolved to do, flitting through the night in search of their quarry. The same thing Ben was evolved to do. The night was his element, always had been.

But now he was no longer the predator.

He had never felt so powerless in all his life.