Tenth Man Down

TEN

We were away just after 2200, hoping we had nearly two hours’ start, driving our two pinkies and the mother wagon we’d been using for our kit. This, of course, belonged to the Kamangans, but I told myself we’d hand it back to them at some later stage.

What would the Alpha guys do when they found our campsite deserted? Joss had overheard part of my conversation with the Belgian, so he knew we might have our sights on the convent and be heading that way. Almost certainly he’d order a squad to follow us up, and inevitably the tracks of our vehicles would show where we’d gone. But would the blacks have the guts to come after us in the dark? Would they wait around until daylight? Or would they let us go, pull back to the mine and sit there until the relief aircraft arrived?

‘Hundred to one against them doing a follow-up at night,’ I said to Pavarotti as we set out. ‘All the same, we’ll go off at a bit of a tangent. Head due west instead of south-west. As soon as it’s light, we’ll tack back down.’

The track we’d followed from the Kamangans’ camp out to our temporary staging post was so overgrown that even in daylight it had been hard to pick out. Lack of use had allowed saplings and shrubs to spring up all over it, blending it back into the bush. Now in the dark it was untraceable — and in any case, it was no longer heading in the direction we wanted.

We piled up the fire, to make a good marker for the assassins, and slipped away into the night. Driving across country without lights was tricky until the moon climbed higher. Later its bright glare, coming at first from behind us, threw inky shadows across the ground ahead and made it difficult to spot holes. For the first hour the land kept falling away, and apart from a few short climbs out of gullies, we were mostly going downhill. Then the terrain flattened out, and I guessed we were back on a level with the river, which lay somewhere off to our left.

On difficult stretches, where we had to cross numerous small ravines, we had guys ranging ahead on foot, but whenever the going was better we kept the vehicles rolling at seven or eight kilometres an hour. It was a miracle that we had Jason with us: an extra driver, and the best spotter of obstacles anyone could hope for. All the same, with three men driving, three spotting and three tabbing ahead, we were stretched to the limit. Every hour we swapped around, but there was never a chance for anyone to get his head down properly.

One factor in our favour was the heavy dew, which had damped down the dust; without it, the trip would have been a nightmare for the guys at number two and three in the column. As it was, even for those in the rear, the night air felt cool and clean. The people I felt sorry for were the two invalids, who were being continually bounced around in the backs of the vehicles. Afterwards I suspected that the rough passage did a lot to accelerate Whinger’s deterioration.

Our slow progress gave me all too much time to worry. Not only had our training task gone to ratshit, we were in deep trouble. With comms still down, we couldn’t tell Hereford what had happened; there was no chance of the Kremlin getting a Here on its way to exfil us. We weren’t carrying enough diesel to drive all three vehicles back to our original start-point out-side Mulongwe, and anyway, we’d now get a hostile reception wherever we pitched up inside Kamanga. If Joss’s radio was working, and he’d already sent back messages heaping shit on us, it would be highly dangerous for us to approach any military camp or centre of population. We’d suddenly become pariahs, to be shot, or eaten, or at best locked up, by the first native force that could catch us. We badly needed to get a true version of events back to Hereford.

I knew several of the guys were wondering about Jason. Had he made up part or all of his story? We knew he had that habit of not coming out with important facts. Chalky, in particular, had been sceptical, and Danny also voiced his suspicions. I wasn’t sure, but my instinct was to trust him. For the time being there was nothing for it but to put distance between ourselves and the assassination squad. At our first halt, soon after 2300, we switched off our engines and sat listening. After an hour of grinding movement, the silence was beautiful. Then, from somewhere not far ahead, came an extraordinary sound, a volley of harsh grunts, in and out, like somebody sawing wood.

‘What’s that, Jason?’

‘Kaingo. Leopard. It is male, making territorial call.’

Moments later weird squeals and shrieks erupted out to our right.

‘Hyenas,’ said Jason. ‘They dispute kill, maybe with lions.’

In the tension of getting away I’d forgotten that animals were going about their business all round us. The calls of the predators brought home to me even more clearly the fact that we, the foreign humans, were being hunted. Many times in my career I’d been on the run, and the sensation had never been a comfortable one. Now I got the feeling that takes over during escape and evasion exercises, when you have to keep going against the clock, driven by the knowledge that enemy forces are out looking for you, and that the consequences of getting caught will be extremely unpleasant. From being aggressive marauders, we’d abruptly turned into fugitives, committed to escape and evasion on a continental scale, with no safe house to aim for.

‘Try the satcom again,’ I told Stringer. ‘I’d be a lot happier if the Kremlin knew what we’re doing.’

‘Come on, then,’ he said. ‘You try. Check everything with me to make sure I’m not cocking up.’

We knelt on a patch of flat, sandy ground and set up the little dish aerial.

‘What bearing do we need?’ I asked.

‘One sixty mills.’

‘Okay. Elevation?’

‘Forty-five degrees.’

I set the dish on those parameters, and went, ‘Frequency?’

‘Five point six eight nine.’

I punched in the figures, waited a few seconds, then squeezed the button on the hand-set, and said, ‘Hullo, Zero. This is Sierra Five Four. Sierra Five Four.’

Holding my breath, I released the button. Nothing but a rush of static. I waited a minute, then tried again, with the same result.

‘You little fucker,’ said Stringer quietly, gazing at the brilliant stars as he addressed the satellite. ‘You’re up there somewhere. I can almost see you with the naked eye.’ Then he turned to me, and said, ‘With the sky this clear, you’d think we’d have continuous comms — nothing to block them.’

‘I know. Maybe it’s to do with the ionosphere.’

‘Check all the connections, anyway.’

We did that next, undoing every one and tightening it again before we tried once more. I imagined the signallers sitting in the bomb-proof Comms Centre in the Kremlin, monitoring calls from all over the world. Why in hell weren’t they responding to ours? There was no question of them having gone for a piss, or being asleep. The centre was run to the highest professional standards and continuously manned. The fault must lie in the atmospherics, or in our set.

‘Try again in an hour,’ I said, and on we went.

For the next stage it was my turn to drive the lead pinkie, and I needed all my concentration to avoid rocks, skirt depressions and weave between trees whenever the bush grew thicker. Towards the end I had a headache, and I felt so shattered I told Pav to keep talking to me so that I didn’t fall asleep at the wheel.

Midnight brought a badly needed respite. We reckoned we’d put fifteen kilometres between us and our last campsite. Because there’d been no sign of any pursuit, it seemed safe to stop and get a brew on, so we lit up our solid fuel stoves and set about making hot drinks. The person who needed liquid most was Whinger. By then he’d more or less stopped talking; he’d only respond to a remark if really pressed, and we had to haul him into a sitting position to get some warm, sweet tea down his neck.

‘Hang in there, mate,’ I told him. ‘We’ll get you to the Krankenhaus first thing in the morning.’ I made my voice sound cheerful, but it choked me to see my old mate sunk so low.

I’d just taken my first sip of cocoa when, very faintly, a dull splutter of small-arms fire popped off in the distance far behind us, then another. The sounds seemed to come from somewhere to the right of the line we’d been driving on.

‘It is a battle? Yes?’ Inge loomed out of the dark. She’d gone walkabout to have a pee, and I noticed she was moving more freely.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, genially. ‘It was a long way off, any road. I see your foot’s on the mend.’

‘It is stronger, yes. I think there is nothing broken. Only bruises.’

The distant noises spurred us on. Whether or not Jason’s version of events had been correct, we knew now that some action was in progress behind us, so we reckoned we’d done the right thing, and I had no regrets as we motored on through the rest of the night, with the moon gradually moving across the sky until it was low over the horizon to our left front.

At the four o’clock halt Stringer came up to me, and said, ‘Still no comms, but I think I’ve hacked Boisset’s message.’

His normal handwriting was small and neat, but on the sheet of paper he handed me the letters were all over the place, thrown by the jolting of the vehicle. Even so, I had no trouble reading them by torchlight. What he’d done was to decipher the condensed French text by opening it out into separate words; then he’d added a translation.

‘Good on yer, Stringer,’ I went. ‘Hey, Phil, look at this.’

‘What does he mean,’ growled Phil, ‘“an exceptionally large stone”?’

‘Don’t you remember? The old Belgian told us that sometimes rocks the size of pigeons’ eggs come up out of the river. I reckon they found one of those. If it doesn’t have too many faults, it’ll be worth a fucking fortune. This explains Joss’s crazy behaviour. It’s got to be this that flipped him.’

‘No wonder the bastard wanted us out, then,’ went Phil. ‘He’s after the stone himself.’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘He couldn’t afford to have us know anything about it. That’s why he had those two guys shot by the kangaroo court. Must be. He reckoned they’d got the big one, or knew something about it. You know how he kept shouting the same question at the second guy? I bet he was asking, “Where is it? Where is it?” He’ll be doing his nut by now.’

‘Fuck him,’ said Phil, savagely. ‘It’s too much to hope that noise just then was him running into the rebels.’

‘Not him,’ I said. ‘Not Joss. He’ll be down there digging holes all over the compound, trying to find his magic rock.’

When we drove on again, I kept thinking about the diamond. If Boisset had been working in the heart of the mine, why hadn’t he seen it when it came up out of the river? Maybe he’d been locked away in his cell at the time. And then, how had Joss found out about it? From one of the technicians we’d released, I supposed. They were the guys who would have seen it. And what had happened to them? If they’d refused to say where it had been hidden, they’d probably been fed to the crocs by now. The one fact of which I felt certain was that Joss himself wouldn’t leave the mine until he’d found the big one.

Our plan was to keep moving until first light, and then take stock of our position. But things didn’t quite work out that way. By 0430 we’d reached a dead flat area. The ground was smooth and level, and sandy to the touch, with patches of tall, dense grass scattered about. I realised we might be near the edge of what the map called the Zebra Pans, and that therefore the ground might be soft, so for a while we had a couple of guys walking ahead to test the going. Then, because it seemed firm enough, they climbed back aboard.

Trouble came without warning. Pavarotti, at the wheel of the lead pinkie, suddenly began cursing.

‘Fucking hell!’ he went. ‘Puncture… no it isn’t. We’re going down!’

He slammed the gear lever down into second and gunned the engine, but the vehicle wallowed as if it was afloat and settled on to its belly. Pav revved some more, went into reverse, gunned again, and gave up with a yell of ‘Shit!’

Twisting round, I saw the blunt bonnet of the mother wagon just behind us, also stationary. The roar of its engine instantly told me that it, too, was stuck.

‘Switch off a minute,’ I shouted. I jumped out, expecting my boots to sink in. To my surprise, the ground felt firm. But when I shone a torch at the pinkie’s wheels, I immediately saw what had happened. We’d driven on to a crust of dried-out earth, and the weight of the vehicles had taken them through it. Round the tyres liquid mud was oozing up, glistening in the torch beam.

‘Jesus!’ I said. ‘This is all we need.’

Genesis was still gunning the engine of the mother truck, which heaved and shuddered like a stranded elephant as all four wheels churned in the morass. Already our predicament was bad enough, and the mechanical scream made it intolerable. I waved my torch violently at him, shouting, ‘Switch off, for fuck’s sake!’ Thank God, Stringer, driving the second pinkie, had been far enough behind to stop and back off before he too sank into the quagmire.

Behind us the sky was already starting to lighten. Looking all round, I couldn’t make out a tree anywhere, only grass, grass, grass. Nothing to winch on to. Nothing to hide under. In every possible sense of the phrase, we’d landed in the shit. The only factor in our favour was that the ground round the vehicles was solid enough to bear human beings: we could walk about without our boots going through the crust. But the bedded vehicles were over their axles, down on their bellies.

‘Pav,’ I called. ‘I vote we wait for daylight before we start any winching. What do you reckon?’

‘Good decision,’ he answered. ‘Otherwise we could end up worse than we are.’

‘Let’s get some breakfast, then.’

Before I looked out some food, I went to check on Whinger. I found Mart with him in the back of the mother wagon, propping him half upright to make him drink some water. The right side of his head was still covered with gauze, but the other half of his face looked puffed-out and swollen. When I went, ‘How’re you doing, Whinge?’ he didn’t answer, and Mart had to fill in for him.

‘He’s going down,’ he said. ‘Unless we get him into a better environment, he’s not going to last the day.’

For a few moments I couldn’t speak. Then I took refuge in practicalities, and said loudly, ‘We’ve got to get out of this mess, first. Then we’ll see what we can do.’

I drew Pav aside, and said, ‘I know we’re wanting north. But I reckon the priority now is definitely to get old Whinge into dock.’

‘Agreed.’

‘Best if we can all go on to Msisi together then. But if we can’t, it may come down to a couple of us taking the good pinkie and leaving the rest of you here. I don’t like the idea of those turds following our trail and finding you stuck — but there it is.’

‘No sweat,’ said Pav. ‘I don’t think they’ll come anyway. But somebody can nip back a couple of kilometress and mine the track. At least that’d give us early warning. Christ, look at that.’

Straight behind us, in precisely the direction from which we’d come, the rim of the sun was coming over the horizon, a blood-red crescent sitting on the rim of a black world. As we stared, it grew rapidly into a crimson hemisphere, then into a complete ball, and our surroundings took on a ruddy glow.

A GPS check gave coordinates that tallied closely with the location shown on our good map as the eastern end of the first Zebra Pan. We reckoned the river couldn’t be more than a couple of kilometres due south, and the convent no more than fifteen downstream to the south-west.

With daylight strengthening, we recced outwards on foot and confirmed that we’d driven into the edge of the easternmost pan. The land round the stranded vehicles had obviously been flooded during the rains: although the surface was dry now, we could see it had been levelled and puddled by sheets of water. Genesis, returning from a quick sortie, reported that reeds eight or ten feet tall were growing in water a few hundred metres ahead. Behind us, in contrast, the terrain was quite different. Only fifty metres from the big wagon we found a definite demarcation line, where the bare mud ended and thick grass was established. Easy enough to see it now, but if we’d stopped half an hour earlier, and waited for dawn to break, we’d have been okay. As it was, exhaustion had blunted my judgement and let me blunder on.

All three vehicles were equipped with front-end winches. In theory the way to recover the stranded pair was to winch out the pinkie first, and then use both jeeps to pull the mother wagon out backwards. The trouble was, truck and jeep were one behind the other, in line ahead, both facing away from the pinkie on dry land. There was no way we could drive round in front, to give a pull from that direction, because the treacherous ground extended for hundreds of metres, becoming softer and softer as it approached the reeds. The only solution seemed to be to attach both pinkies’ winch cables to each other and try, by pulling at an angle, to drag the bogged one round in its own length.

So began a dire struggle. While Pav went back along our tracks to cover our backsides, the rest of us dug, heaved and sweated until we were on our knees with filth and exhaustion. The mud beneath the crust was grey-brown and glutinous. The moment we began to dig, we were covered in it from top to toe, and as the temperature mounted, we got into a hell of a state, so plastered in slime that we looked like aboriginals going through some initiation ceremony.

Progress was alarmingly slow. Once the mud was disturbed, it exercised terrific suction: when our boots went down into it, we had the devil’s own job to pull them out, and the vehicles were held as if by glue. When we linked the two winch cables together with shackles and pulled in opposite directions, trying to heave the front of the stranded pinkie round, all that happened was that the free vehicle got dragged bodily forward, with the clutches of both winches squealing and overheating. Next we tried digging so that we could get our perforated steel strips of sand-track under the wheels, but as soon as we opened a trench, water seeped into it and dissolved the mud into thick soup, leaving the tyres nothing to grip on, with the belly of the vehicle held as fast as ever.

As the sun rose, tsetse flies swarmed out of the grass and increased our desperation. Their easiest target was Whinger, who was too comatose to notice when they landed on him, so we carried his cot out of the back of the stranded pinkie and set it in the shadow of a clump of grass, with mozzie nets rigged up over him. He never made a sound while we were moving him, but every now and then, as we worked, he’d start shouting gibberish.

The nightmare would have been bad enough without the German woman, but she nearly sent us ballistic, hopping about, making idiotic remarks, apparently panicking about the time, as if she was going to miss a plane.

‘I think we are late,’ she kept saying. ‘We should go now. Push harder, please.’

‘Late for what?’ I replied, only just managing to keep expletives out of it. ‘And can’t you see we’re doing our best?’

At around 0830 Pavarotti reappeared, chuffed to bollocks at having laid what he called ‘a couple of nice ones’. He’d buried the mines at places where we’d driven through dry river beds, and he’d raked out the sand above them so that our wheel-tracks appeared to run straight through the hollows. When he saw the state we were in, he was amazed. ‘Christ!’ he exclaimed. ‘You lot remind me of that cabaret we went to in Berlin: hermaphrodites wrestling in mud.’

‘You come and try it, mate,’ Chalky snapped. ‘You won’t think it so fucking funny.’

Pav got stuck in. By 0900, after repeatedly digging away the mud beside the wheels, rather than in front of them, and then winching, we’d dragged the stranded pinkie about halfway round. But the guys looked totally knackered, covered in mud and sweat and visibly drooping, so I called a break and lay down flat on my back, looking up at the sky. High above us two large birds of prey were effortlessly circling, gliding round and round in huge sweeps with no perceptible movement of their wings. There was something faintly ridiculous about their shape: their tails were so short that it looked as though they were flying backwards.

‘What are those, Jason?’

‘Bateleur eagles,’ he answered. ‘Snake eaters.’

‘Some flyers. If we could fly like that, we’d be at Msisi in a couple of minutes.’

When I closed my eyes, I got a sudden, clear vision of the convent hospital. I saw a compound shaded by trees, an airy ward open to the breeze, nuns in white habits ministering to the sick, a sister in an office working the radio. I knew it was wishful thinking, but the pictures were startlingly real, and as I lay there some sort of compulsion took hold of me. We couldn’t wait any longer. We had to get Whinger to this place. We had to get the woman out, for her own safety. We had to send a radio message to the outside world.

I opened my eyes. The eagles were still circling, as if keeping an eye on our puny struggles, or maybe hoping we would flush out some prey.

‘Pav,’ I croaked.

‘Hullo.’

I turned my head and realised he was lying on the ground a few feet away.

‘We can’t fuck about any more. We’ve got to get Whinger into dock. As soon as we get the pinkie out, I’m going to drive on with him and Genesis, and leave you to carry on extracting the mother wagon. D’you have any problem with that?’

‘Fine by me,’ he went, ‘but take the woman with you too, eh? She’s driving the guys round the bend, and if the Alpha guys follow up, the last thing we need in the middle of a fire-fight is a hysterical Kraut.’

‘Will do, mate.’

‘How long will you be?’

‘Can’t say. We’ve got to find the place first. But I’ll be surprised if it’s much more than an hour ahead of us. Maybe three hours for the round trip.’ I looked at my watch. ‘If we leave at midday, we should be back by 1600 at the latest. Well before dark, anyway.’

‘Okay.’ Pav sat up and slapped at a tsetse fly that had landed on his shin. ‘Supposing we get out, what d’you want us to do?’

‘Stick around,’ I said. ‘If there’s anything wrong with the hospital’s radio — if we can’t get Whinger casevacked, for any reason — we can’t just leave him there. We’ll get what drugs we can for him, but we may have to bring him back for the time being.’

‘We’d better RV on higher ground,’ said Pav. ‘Up there, for instance.’ He pointed to the north, where a tree-covered ridge formed the skyline. ‘See that single tree standing out on the little shelf? If we get clear, we’ll make for that and get cammed up in the best location near it.’

‘Fine,’ I agreed. ‘Provided we get back in daylight, no problem.’

Pav asked, ‘What’s your route going to be?’

‘Good question.’

I dug out our reliable map. Its scale was too small for it to be much use, but it gave the general lie of the land.

‘All we can do is head straight south, for the river, which I reckon should be just out of our sight.’ I indicated the spot where I thought we were. ‘Then we turn right and follow the north bank, as closely as we can.’

Looking back on that terrible day, I realise how vague and speculative our plans were. We didn’t have any precise idea of where we were; we didn’t know where the convent was; we weren’t confident that the mother wagon could be rescued; and we knew that a strong Alpha force might well come on the scene. Our little party was in an extremely dangerous situation. Yet necessity drove us on. Necessity and exhaustion: we were all too worn out to see the risks or take rational decisions.

At last we managed to turn the bogged pinkie round. Once we’d got it lined up in the right direction, we started to make slow progress by digging in front of its wheels, slipping sand-tracks under the tyres at a slight upward angle, and winching the vehicle forward two or three feet at a time. The process was desperately laborious, but it worked. Gradually, as we drew near the edge of the pan, the mud became shallower and the rate of advance speeded up. At last Phil gunned the pinkie the final few yards under its own power, and a cheer went up, half ironic, half relieved, as it went up on to dry land under its own power. The time was 1145. Every part of the under-carriage was packed with mud — axles, steering arms, track rods, hubs, brake-tubes — but nothing seemed to be damaged, and as we had no spare water, any attempt to wash parts clean was out of the question.

It took Genesis and me only a few minutes to get organised. Because we wanted to travel light, we left most of our kit behind, taking only our weapons, ammunition, basic rations and a jerrican of water. Rather than take off the Milan post, we left it in place, even though the chances of our firing it seemed negligible.

Gen had already recced a route to the river bank, and away we went, with him in the back to keep an eye on Whinger, and Inge sitting up front beside me. Tired though I was, I sensed she was in a peculiar mood, almost on a high, twisting around on her arse and making bright remarks. I put it down to the fact that she thought she was about to get away from us.

Anyone who’d seen us would have thought us quite crazy. I was still caked in dried grey mud from head to foot (my plan was to have a quick plunge in the river, provided we could find a croc-free pool). Gen was also caked. Whinger was fairly clean, but wearing nothing except a pair of shorts. We were carrying more clothes for him, and sweaters for ourselves, in case it got cold at sun-down.

Our first sight of the river sent Genesis into ecstasies. ‘Look at it!’ he cried. ‘It could be the Garden of Eden.’

Impala grazed on the far bank. Troops of baboons were scattered along the shore, with babies sitting on their mothers’ backs or hanging round their necks. Crowned cranes paced the sand, and a flight of duck went away low upstream.

‘Okay,’ I agreed. ‘But where’s the serpent?’

‘He’s about,’ Gen admitted. ‘And so are the crocs.’

Every sandbar was carrying what looked like a dead log, which sprang to life and slithered into the water at speed the moment we came into view. I wondered about the bodies thrown in upstream the day before. Had they already been eaten? Or would they have passed this point and gone on downstream by now?

Crocs or no crocs, I had to agree with Gen: the scene was idyllic. At the point where we hit the river the stream was sweeping in wide coils between banks about ten feet high, and the ground on top was almost bare of vegetation. Turning right, I drove for a few hundred metres downstream, sending the baboons racing for cover. The current looked quite fast, especially in shallow stretches, and the water was opaque with grey silt. Gen stood up in the back, spotting for a good place to fill the jerricans, and presently he said, ‘There, that’ll do.’

We pulled up above a little bay, where the stream had carved a sweep out of the bank. The pool was manifestly too small and shallow to harbour a croc, and it was cut off from the main river by a sandbar.

‘My life’s in your hands, Gen,’ I said as I slithered down the bank.

‘Fear not,’ he replied. ‘If it moves, I shoot.’

With him poised above me, 203 at the ready, I walked through the pool, just to make sure it was uninhabited, then lay down full length and scrubbed myself furiously. Never mind that the water was full of decomposing bodies, crocodile shit, bilharzia and other delicacies, its coolness was sheer delight. When the relatively stagnant pool turned the colour of milky coffee, I rolled sideways into the faster-flowing shallow race and let the current sweep away all the grit, dirt and sweat. With all the grunge went a lot of my anxiety and exhaustion, and I came up feeling renewed.

Genesis followed me in, fully dressed, and washed his clothes on him, knowing they’d dry in minutes under the burning sun, while I stood over him with a weapon loaded and cocked. The German watched all this with a condescending air, as if we were lunatics; we ignored her and climbed back into our seats, dripping but refreshed. Whinger hadn’t stirred. His eyes were open, and he turned his head slightly when I told him we were moving on, but otherwise he was frighteningly inert.

The drive took far longer than we’d anticipated. We were never lost, as we always had the river to follow, but it swung back and forth in huge loops, and we were constantly forced away from the bank by tributaries coming down to it from the north. Most of them were dry — just beds of sand — but many were deep, with vertical sides, and some still had water in them, so we had to search for places where we could cross. Each time, before we committed ourselves, we took it in turns to walk ahead and check the ground, because we couldn’t afford to get bogged again. As the flies were still a pain, I put some clothes back on, and by then Gen had fully dried out.

At last, about 1630, with the sun going down straight ahead of us, we hit on our first trace of civilisation: a dirt road running along the bank. By the look of the dust, no vehicle had been up it for months, but at least it was a man-made track. Gratefully we rolled on to it and increased our speed. Then, in the hazy distance ahead, we made out higher ground above the river, a little plateau, with tall trees growing on it, silhouetted black against the sun.

‘The bluff!’ we both said simultaneously.

‘This is Msisi?’ went Inge.

‘Looks like it.’

‘Wunderbar!’

‘We’d better get some covering over Whinger,’ I said, pulling up. ‘Don’t want to give the nuns a fright.’

He gave a couple of delirious curses as we pulled a blanket over him. His body was hot to the touch, his breathing short and laboured. When I accidentally brushed my hand against his burnt arm, he gave a groan of pain.

The closer we came, the higher the plateau seemed to loom over the river. Probably the cliff was only a hundred feet tall, but in that flat environment it looked enormous. Perhaps that’s why they put the hospital up there, I thought: healthier, away from swamps and mozzies, catching the breeze. I felt adrenalin driving off some of my exhaustion; the sheer relief of having found the place was exciting.

As we approached, the dying sun was straight in our faces, so that we couldn’t make out details. But we caught a glimpse of white walls, and a flag flying from a pole among the trees. Also, joy of joys, we spotted a latticed radio mast. Then we were in under the shadow of the cliff, and following the track up a natural ledge which rose across it, until at the top we came out on the level.

Looking back, it’s easy to see what we should have done. We should have stopped well short of the bluff and concealed the vehicle under a tree. While one of us stayed to guard Whinger and the woman, the other should have recced forward and taken a good look at the convent. The fact was, we were in desperate straits, and too far gone to carry out SOPs. We’d set our hearts on reaching what we thought was a haven, and now we’d found it, relief swept caution away.

Low, whitewashed buildings with corrugated-iron roofs were ranged round a compound. The place looked fairly run-down, with big blotches of mould on the walls and fallen branches lying about. We seemed to have arrived at the back door. Between two of the buildings, set at right angles to each other on a corner of the compound, was a gate of rusty wire mesh.

‘Can’t see any lock,’ I said. ‘We might as well drive through. Try undoing that loop of wire.’

Genesis jumped out, wrestled with the primitive fastening, eventually got it free, and pushed the gate open. I drove forward a few yards and stopped, waiting for him. By evil chance Whinger chose that very moment to surface and say something. I couldn’t make sense of it, but the sound of his voice made me turn to look at him, and when I faced forward again, I got a dreadful shock.

Black soldiers were running at us from both sides. With a glance to my right I took in a line of military vehicles parked down the inner side of the compound.

‘Gen!’ I yelled. ‘Get back in! We’re compromised!’

I slammed into reverse and let out the clutch with a bang. But Gen had just got the gate secured, and it caught the pinkie like a fishing net.

Seconds later the blacks were all over us like baboons, yelling, screaming, brandishing pistols and machetes. I tried to drive forward, but three or four sets of hands seized me by my shirt and dragged me out sideways. As my foot came off the clutch, the vehicle gave a bound and the engine stalled. Everything happened so fast that I didn’t even have time to grab my 203 from its place down beside my right hip. Gen never made it back to the vehicle; other guys were dragging Whinger out of the back.

For a few seconds I was convinced we were going to get lynched. Then the strangest thing happened. Inge pulled herself to her feet, holding the top of the windscreen, and began bellowing in some African language. Quickly the hubbub died down. Into the moment’s silence she shouted something else. The next I knew, we were all face-down in the dust and getting our wrists and arms bound behind our backs. I felt hands going all over me, nicking my watch, pistol, knife, GPS set. Afterwards, I couldn’t think why we hadn’t offered more resistance, but the truth was we were numbed by the suddenness of the attack, too shocked and tired to react quickly.

Once our captors had got us trussed, they heaved us back to our feet. At least, they tried to. Whinger, wearing only his shreddies, just fell down again. Once more the German woman called out some order. I was amazed and horrified to see a couple of the Africans salaaming at her, as if she were some sort of goddess or white witch.

My mind reeled. What the fuck was going on? These soldiers must be rebels. They were rebels: on the epaulettes of their DPMs they were wearing green-and-white stars — Muende’s emblem. And yet they seemed to know her. From the way they were greeting her, it was almost as if they’d been expecting her. How in hell did she know them? How had she got such a hold over them?

I shot a glance at Genesis and saw him looking equally bewildered. Then anger surged up inside me. Somehow the woman had betrayed us. I couldn’t see how she’d done it, but by God, she had. It was she who’d brought up the idea of Msisi in the first place, she who’d gone on about the place being a hospital, she who’d urged us to come here. Dimly I realised she must have known all along the place had been captured by the rebels. She’d shopped us, delivered us into the hands of the enemy.

‘You fucking bitch!’ I roared.

She was still standing in the front of the pinkie, high above everyone else, with a gloating smirk on her face.

‘English soldiers,’ she said, in a mocking voice. ‘You should be pleased. You will now have the privilege of meeting the leader of the Afundi rebels, General Gus Muende.’

With that she turned and gave another order. Our escorts frog-marched us forward, past our abandoned vehicle, into the compound itself. Too late I saw that the flag, which to us had been just a black rag against the sunset, bore the same green-and-white design. Too late I saw that the whitewashed walls were pockmarked with bullet holes, and that the sign proclaiming MSISI HOSPITAL–CONVENT OF POOR CLARES had been riddled with small-arms fire. A couple of soldiers began dragging Whinger like a sack of coal, but when Inge spoke sharply to them, they picked him up and carried him. That puzzled me, as well. Why should she care what happened to Whinger?

The sun was setting, and the light was already dim, but not so dim that I couldn’t see, lying along one wall, a line of bodies. Somebody had thrown a sheet over them, but it didn’t cover the legs, and the legs were those of elderly white women. White undergarments had been ripped off and thrown aside. The nuns. I felt sick. The nuns, butchered. No doubt they’d been raped as well, probably with bayonets. What the hell were these people going to do to us?

There was a brief delay as we were herded into a small room close to the main gate, Whinger on the deck, Gen and myself hemmed into a corner by a crowd of stinking soldiers, all jabbering with excitement. From the notices pinned on a wall-board, still listing patients and treatments, I saw the room must have been the hospital office. Where had the patients gone, for God’s sake? Probably they’d been murdered, too.

Next door somebody was trying to get a voice transmission through on the radio, yelling the same message over and over again. Then I heard Inge take over, talking in a native language, until suddenly she said in English, ‘Yes, they are coming now… No, but we make them talk.’

I was thinking furiously, how wrong can you be? Somehow it had never occurred to us that the convent could be in enemy hands. We’d believed all along that the rebel forces were away to the south, that the mine at Gutu was the most northerly point they’d reached. In our eyes, the fact that the convent was on the north bank of the river had given it extra security. In any case, we’d assumed that a religious hospital wouldn’t come under attack. All of us had been totally blind.

Minutes later, all three of us were face-down on the steel floor of an open-backed truck, Whinger in the middle, and we were driven out of the compound with four or five armed soldiers ranged along the seats on either side, stamping their boots on us whenever they felt a need to relieve their feelings.