Tenth Man Down

TWO

Every day for the past couple of weeks the sun had grown slightly hotter, until at noon the temperature had started to hit the low nineties. But the nights were still quite chilly, and now once again, as full darkness closed in, the air was cooling quickly.

As if reacting to a command, several of the lads moved closer to the fire, all at the same moment, dragging their seats forward so that the steel ammunition boxes grated over the beaten earth. We’d made the fire in typical Kamangan fashion, with branches of dead mopane wood pointing inwards like the spokes of a cartwheel, so that all you had to do to stoke the blaze from time to time was to push a piece inwards towards the hub. Mopane, we’d soon discovered, was an ideal fuel. The sticks burned so steadily that they’d smoulder all night, but you could make them flare up again into a hot fire when you revived them in the morning.

Above us, the leaves of two big mahogany trees shivered as a breeze ran through them, and all around in the bush crickets were sounding off a continuous, zinging buzz. From the edge of the village, a hundred metres away, came bursts of laughter and chat as the locals brewed up supper, separated from us only by a grass stockade they’d built in a pathetic attempt to deter elephants from raiding their little stores of maize.

I looked round the circle of familiar faces. Including myself, there were eight of us, all with low-mow haircuts. One of the traditions in the Regiment is that nobody need have a squaddie’s traditional short back-and-sides. Recently, it was true, one or two officious individuals had crept up through ranks and gone about fining people anything from £50 to £100 for looking unkempt. But that was exceptional. It was also ridiculous, because one of the SAS’s skills has always been to blend in with the local population. Here in Africa there was no chance of that, and for this trip to a hot and bug-ridden country everyone had opted for crew-cuts, so the guys had a vaguely American appearance.

The glow of the flames was softening their complexions, even Whinger Watson’s. The ruddy light seemed to iron some of the wrinkles out of his face; certainly it disguised the grey bristles in his Mexican-type moustache. Like me, he was heading for forty, and had that strained, heavily lined appearance which SAS guys tend to get from repeatedly pushing themselves to their physical limits, and also from the mental stress of working and playing hard; but now he looked ten years younger. He and I were so much the senior members of the party that we spent a lot of time together, and tended to compare notes about the younger guys, almost as if they were apprentices in our trade.

After a fortnight of African winter sun, everyone had started to acquire a serious tan. Everyone, that is, except Pete Jones, known to all as Genesis from his tireless reading of the Bible. He, poor bugger, with his gingery hair and freckled skin, had immediately started to burn: he’d had to wear a wide-brimmed hat and keep his sleeves rolled down to stop himself being sizzled. Also, he’d reacted violently to the bites of mozzies and tsetse flies. All of us had got bitten, but whereas the rest had developed nothing worse than itchy bumps, Genesis had come up in horrific-looking blisters full of yellow fluid, all along the insides of his forearms.

‘How are the bites, Gen?’ I asked.

‘So-so,’ he replied — from which I knew they must be itching horrendously, because he always played down any problem he had. Lately he’d started carrying on about how the Lord had inflicted Job with boils, and my enquiry set him off again.

‘“Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth,”’ he went in his singsong Welsh lilt, shining a pencil torch into the pages of his little bible, with its battered cover of white leather, which he kept about his person twenty-four hours a day. ‘“Therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty. For he maketh sore, and bindeth up; he woundeth and his hands make whole.”’

‘But what have you done to annoy the Big Boss?’ I asked.

‘Our sins are not to be accounted for,’ he replied. But Pavarotti Price, our other Welshman, who was twice Genesis’s size and famous for the fact that he had a Chinese-looking eye tattooed on either cheek of his arse, groaned, ‘Ah, for fuck’s sake! Give over.’

Genesis looked at him coolly over the top of his bible, then closed the book without remonstrating. That was typical of him: he had such a forgiving nature that he could rise above any number of obscenities, and never resorted to any himself. Sometimes one of the lads got seriously pissed off with his pious attitude, but everyone had to respect the guy for his integrity and professional skills. Now Pav, having bollocked him, gave him a friendly grin to show he meant no harm. He was amused by the fact that Genesis obviously felt at home in Kamanga, where the colonial missionary influence had left many of the men with biblical Christian names: David, James, Joseph, Philemon, Isaac.

Tilting the face of his watch towards the fire, Pav said, ‘They’re late.’

‘Yep,’ I went. ‘Another air-lock in the fuel, I expect.’

At lunchtime the seven-ton Zyl truck had gone off on its weekly supply run to Chiwembe, the nearest town. Most of us had never been there, but Pav, who’d master-minded the first trip, described the place as ‘the arsehole of Africa’. When somebody remarked that we were already in that location, Pav came back with, ‘In that case, Chiwembe’s a hundred and something ks up it.’ Although it was only 120 km to the east, the dirt roads were so diabolical that the journey took over four hours each way. That day’s drivers, Joseph and Sanford, were African, but two of our guys had gone with them to ride shotgun and make sure that no sell-offs took place on the way home. Even allowing an hour for loading, they should have been back by now: they’d left at midday, and already it was past eight.

Meals had been kept back for them, but the rest of us had already eaten: impala curry with rice — and very good, too. Like everyone else, the Kamangan soldiers preferred fresh meat to their rations, which were mostly canned, and they shot whatever they could. One of them had gunned down two antelopes with his AK47, and Stringer Simpson, our comms specialist, had helped him skin and butcher the animals, because before he joined the army he’d worked in a slaughterhouse and was an ace at handling meat. The local cooks also knew what they were at, especially when it came to spices. Pondani, the kitchen boss, had done two versions of the curry, billed as ‘hot’ and ‘nuclear’, and the nuclear version had been enough to blow your head off.

Round the fire, uncomfortably full, we chitchatted about our task in Kamanga. At the briefing in Hereford everything had sounded simple and straightforward. Our role was to bolster the government army by training their select Alpha Commando, and we’d come out under the impression that they just wanted general instruction. But as soon as we reached camp, out in the bush, it became clear that Alpha was preparing for a particular operation: an attack on Gutu, a diamond mine in the south of the country captured by rebel forces the year before, and it was in planning this that they needed our help.

Equally clear was the fact that the officers expected us to accompany them into battle when the time came. This we’d been specifically forbidden to do: our orders were to act as advisers only, and not to get involved in any fighting. On paper, that was fine, but from previous operations Whinger and I knew all too well how the best of intentions go to ratshit in the field. It had happened in a big way during our time in Russia, a year before. There, too, we’d been told not to tangle with local villains, specifically the mafia, but circumstances had got the better of us, and we’d ended up fully engaged. Back in Hereford, we’d taken a token bollocking, but we got away with bending the rules because we were judged to have done far more good than harm.

This time, we hadn’t made any firm decision. Whinger and I both liked the Alpha CO, Major Joss Mvula, and wanted to keep our options open. Joss was a lively, likeable guy, a bit younger than me, with crinkly black hair already receding from his forehead. He’d never been out of Kamanga, but he’d studied at the military academy in the capital, Mulongwe, and seemed well educated. He had quite a clear idea of world politics: he knew about the special relationship between Britain and America, and the tension between East and West during the Cold War. He’d seen for himself the mess the Russians had made of things when they were empire-building in Africa, and the speed with which they abandoned ship, leaving most of their equipment behind. He’d had enough communist ideology to last him a lifetime, so he was predisposed in our favour. Just as important, from our point of view, he had plenty of common sense and a reasonable grip over his men. Also, he saw the funny side of things, so he was good gas to work with.

As we waited for the truck, our talk turned to the training ambush due to go down next day. We’d already hammered out most details, both on our own and with Joss, but, as always, doubts niggled. We’d seen what happened when the Kamangans started firing live rounds: they got so over-excited they were liable to lose control. On a simple fire-and-movement exercise one guy had already gone completely hyper, screaming and shouting as he squirted off a whole twenty-round magazine, waving the weapon around in one hand like a pistol and spraying rounds through 360 degrees. Tomorrow night they were going to be firing live rounds in the dark.

During our first week we’d done what we could to steady the guys down, taking them through the various stages of range work. Then we’d started teaching them to move through the bush — individually, in pairs, finally in patrol groups. They’d learnt quite fast, and improved to the point where we’d made them do a dry attack on a dummy camp we’d built for the purpose — an exercise which went off better than we’d expected. But still I felt sure that in a real battle a lot of them would go ballistic.

The country was ideal for training. The land consisted of low hills covered in bush and forest, with rivers of pale sand winding through. We’d heard that in the rains, from November to March, these shallow channels filled up and became tributaries of the Nasangua, a big river to the south. But now, in July — the middle of the African winter — they were bone dry and easy to cross on foot, although dodgy for vehicles, which easily became bedded in the fine sand.

Before the civil war the area had been a game-park. The villages had been cleared out of it thirty years earlier, and there were no humans living in a block of at least five million acres. The Kamangans told us that, once we got outside the park, we’d find burnt-out villlages by the score, fields uncultivated, everything gone to waste; but in the country we’d seen so far, there had been no inhabitants anyway. This meant we could fire live ammunition in any direction we fancied without endangering anybody — a fantastic freedom from restrictions. In that environment it was hardly surprising that the Kamangans were trigger-happy. Whenever they had weapons loaded, they’d loose off at anything that moved, whether they themselves were on foot or riding in the backs of vehicles.

After two years of war, the park had gone to ruin. The village where we were camped had been just outside the boundary, beside the main gate. Somehow the grass huts had escaped destruction, but inside the park the tourist lodges had been burnt, and the tracks used for game drives had either grown over or been washed away by flash floods during the rains. Most of the animals had been shot out. The rhinos had gone first, killed for their horns, and hundreds of elephants had been poached for their ivory. Already we’d found gaunt hulks of elephant carcasses, eaten to the skeleton by vultures, hyenas, jackals and insects. Joss told us that normally the hyenas would have eaten the bones as well, or carried them away, but the war had produced such carnage that the scavengers couldn’t keep pace with the supply of rotting bodies. Everywhere we found heaps of hyena droppings — so white, from all the calcium the animals ate, that they were known as ‘missionaries’ chalk’ — and at night eerie howling sounded off from all points of the compass.

For the ambush exercise Whinger and I had recced a perfect site, where a dirt road crossed one of the sand rivers. On the home side of the crossing the terrain was open, with scattered trees and shrubs growing from stony ground, but the far bank of the river — enemy territory — was cloaked with thick bush, and it was from there — according to the scenario we’d devised — that the terrorists would appear.

‘The second lot of pop-up targets,’ said Whinger. ‘It might pay us to move them another hundred metres along the bank. That’d give the killer group a better arc.’

‘Okay,’ I agreed. ‘We’ll have time to take another look at it in the morning. What’s that?’

I broke off as a hefty, low-pitched hoo-hoo sounded somewhere close above us, and I looked up to see a huge bird pass silently overhead, a fast-moving silhouette, black against the stars.

‘Jesus!’ exclaimed Chalky White. ‘A bloody great owl.’

‘Where?’ Everyone started craning their necks around.

‘It went thataway.’ Chalky pointed towards the village.

Seconds later, from among the grass huts, there burst an eruption of noise: people yelling, pots and pans being hammered. We stood up to get a better view, and Pavarotti nipped across to the nearest pinkie, where he grabbed a spot-lamp, switched it on and swept the beam over the shiny, dark-green canopy of the mango trees which rose above the settlement.

‘It must be a great eagle owl,’ said Mart Stanning, our medic, who’d got talking about birds to one of the Alpha guys. ‘The locals don’t like them. They reckon the devil uses owls for transport, so it’s bad news if one comes into the village. If it sits on the roof of a house, it means someone in that family’s going to die before morning.’

‘Cheerful lot, these buggers,’ said Pavarotti. ‘With that racket under it, I don’t reckon the bird’ll so much as touch down, let alone stay long enough to organise a funeral—’

The rest of his sentence was cut off by a hollow report, and we saw a spurt of flame shoot into the air.

‘Christ!’ exclaimed Danny Stewart. ‘The headman’s let drive with that bloody old muzzle-loader he showed us. I hope it hasn’t killed him.’

We’d seen the weapon a couple of days earlier — a fearsome, home-made contraption about six feet long, held together with rusty wire and leather thongs, which the owner displayed proudly, showing us how much powder he would load: two fingers’ width for an antelope, three for a buffalo, four for an elephant. We reckoned any discharge would be a greater threat to him than to whatever he fired at, but clearly the gun was his pride and joy. At the same time, we couldn’t help noticing that he’d lost his left thumb.

Danny — a compact little Yorkshireman with fine, sandy hair — had a funny habit of dropping his chin and rotating his head through half a circle, as if he were trying to peel his neck away from his collar, whenever he came up with a commentary on anything interesting that happened. Now he did just that as he said, ‘It’s quietened the buggers, anyway, the old gun.’

‘Aye,’ Pavarotti agreed. ‘From the way the commotion’s died down, I reckon the bird’s got away. If they’d dropped it, they’d be screeching something horrible.’

We settled back round the fire and started talking about our tour. Looking at the faces again, I realised that Chalky had gone almost as dark as some of the Africans. It’s standard practice for anyone with the surname White to be called Chalky, but with this one there was some point, because he had jet black hair and a swarthy complexion. What with his tan, and the fact he hadn’t shaved for a couple of days, you could hardly see him in the firelight.

Stringer looked like the butcher’s boy he’d been: rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed, big, powerful, a fitness freak. In the UK he spent hours in the gym, and here in the bush he was constantly skipping or doing press-ups or dips between two boxes set out a couple of feet apart. Also, he couldn’t resist the long tendrils of creeper trailing from big trees in the forest; whenever he found some good ones, he was up them in a flash, earning derisive shouts of ‘Fucking Tarzan!’ He was also our best linguist, with reasonably fluent Arabic and Russian. Neither of those was any cop here, but he’d already picked up a useful amount of Nyanja, the language common to the various native tribes in the area.

Pavarotti, the biggest guy in the team, always fighting his weight, was pretty dark as well. His rubbery face — typically Welsh — seemed to have grown larger, its tan emphasising his heavy features and thick eyebrows. Apart from Whinger and myself, Pav was the oldest of the lads, at around thirty-one or thirty-two. Among many other hairy tasks, he’d taken part in our Kremlin job a year earlier, and his strength had saved the day when we were struggling to hoist a suitcase bomb into position in the tunnel under the Moscow river. That episode had finally cured his phobia about being caught in confined spaces.

As for Whinger, he and I had survived numerous dodgy situations together, in Belfast, Libya, Colombia and Grozny, not to mention England itself, and I’d come to rely on his coolness and efficiency, whatever the threat. We’d worked together for so long that I took his presence, and his bastard rhyming slang, for granted. The guys who knew him less well had been puzzled at first when he started talking about ‘silveries’, and I had to explain the derivation of the term: silver spoon — coon. The moment they got it, everyone took it up.

Aside from Whinger and Pav, the lads were all around the twenty-seven, twenty-eight mark, and although I’d never worked with any of them, I felt solidly confident about their capabilities. They were well tried and tested, and so far on this trip they’d been a hundred per cent. Mart Stanning, for instance, was an excellent operator. Slim and wiry, and so fair that people often mistook him for a Dane or a Dutchman, he stood out even among our own lads. Unlike Genesis, he tanned easily, and while the sun was bleaching his hair, it was darkening his skin, so that he looked as though he was wearing a straw-coloured cap. To the Africans he was a phenomenon, and they referred to him by a native name that meant ‘Yellow Doctor’. They quickly saw that he was a good practitioner, and every morning he had to conduct a regular surgery, treating sores and septic wounds by the dozen, and doling out harmless aspirin for things like cancerous growths which he couldn’t deal with.

The one guy I had reservations about was Andy Dean, who was away on the supply run. That May he’d got married to Penny, a farmer’s daughter from Shropshire, and most of the team had been to his wedding near Ludlow. I’m afraid we behaved in typical SAS fashion, collaring a table in a corner of the big tent and getting stuck into the champagne without bothering to make polite conversation to the other guests. Then, before we left the UK, Andy had bought a cottage in Kilpeck, a village near Hereford. The house was more than a hundred years old, and tiny. It needed a hell of a lot doing to it to make it habitable, and I knew the mortgage payments were going to stretch him to the limit. Once or twice in Kamanga I’d found him looking preoccupied. His heart didn’t seem to be in the job, and it was obvious financial worries were preying on his mind.

Except for myself, married and widowed, and Whinger, who’d been married for a couple of years, but then divorced, without any kids, Andy was the only one who’d got spliced, and with the dire record of the Regiment in this area, everyone was waiting to see how long it would last. Several of the others had woman problems, but nothing that wouldn’t wait the six weeks until we were home again. Looking round the circle again, I reckoned we were a pretty typical SAS team: all fit, all well built, all fairly undemonstrative, all quick on our feet, both physically and mentally, all able to do each other’s jobs, should the need arise.

Before we’d come out, Stringer had got quite excited about the trip, his first to Africa. He thought it was going to be a great adventure: the Dark Continent and all that. Now, by the fire, Whinger said cynically, ‘Didn’t I tell you? It’s like I said. Where’s the action? Here we are, miles from anywhere. No bar for a thousand miles. Bugger all entertainment. HIV wherever you look.’

‘Come on!’ said Pav. ‘We’re gonna have a ball!’

‘Have your motor flown out, Pav,’ Danny told him. ‘Take it for a drive on the Chiwembe highway.’

‘Thanks, mate. As long as you stump up for the repair bills.’

Just before we went to Russia, Pav had bought a second-hand XJ 120 Jaguar, flame red, and the wretched thing had become the love of his life. No matter that it had already put six points on his licence, at the slightest opportunity he was away down to Ross and the M50 for what he called a pipe-opener. The idea of driving it out here, on the dirt roads, made him groan.

‘Whinger’s right, up to a point,’ said Mart, scratching at his blond scrub. ‘That briefing I got at the med centre about not touching anybody wounded unless I’m wearing rubber gloves — they reckon one in three of the population are carrying the HIV virus.’

‘Don’t touch ’em, then,’ said Pav. ‘Just let ’em carry on.’

There was a pause, and then Stringer said, ‘I reckon they’re all right.’

‘Who?’ Pav demanded.

‘The Alpha guys.’

‘Listen,’ I told him. ‘They’ve been all right so far, but these people are volatile as hell. They can turn in a flash. When I was in Zaire in ninety-one, the whole population went fucking berserk. In Kinshasa, the capital, they started looting shops and houses like savages, trashing everything. They were even nicking amputated limbs from the skips at the back of the hospital.’

‘What for?’ Stringer looked a bit sick.

‘To eat, of course.’

‘Christ!’

There was another silence while everyone took that in. Then Chalky said, ‘At least we can’t spend any money. There’s that.’

‘You wait,’ said Whinger. ‘If we get that week of R and R they promised us at the end, and end up in Sun City, you’ll spend everything you’ve got.’

Presently, through the bush in the opposite direction, we spotted headlights flaring and swinging in the distance as our supply truck came lurching back towards base. We got up, walking towards it, and within a minute it was pulling up on the open ground in front of our tents. The whole area was pretty dark, with no illumination except the flicker of cooking fires in the distance, but from the speed at which the lorry slid to a halt, I got the impression that something was wrong.

A cloud of dust rolled forward from behind it, boiling up into the headlights, and a figure I recognised as Andy jumped down off the tailboard.

‘Eh, Andy,’ I called. ‘What’s up?’

‘Geordie!’ he went, in a strange, tight voice. ‘There’s been an accident.’

‘You all right?’

‘Fine.’

‘What about Phil?’

‘He’s okay. It wasn’t us. We ran into a group of kids.’

‘Oh, Jesus! Anyone killed?’

‘I don’t think so. But two of them are quite bad. We brought them with us — in the back.’

Immediately I yelled for Mart.

‘Right here, Geordie.’ His voice came from close behind me.

‘Hear what Andy said?’

‘Sure.’

‘Get your kit, then.’

An African came running with a hurricane lamp. Moths swirled round the light as he held it aloft. I saw Phil Foster in the back of the truck, holding something in his arms. A moment later he handed the bundle down to me — a child wrapped in a dark-coloured blanket. Instinctively, I started out towards our own tents, which were nearest to the spot. The child was warm, but limp and not moving. It felt pathetically light.

Mart had moved with commendable speed. Under the fly-leaf of his tent a hurricane lamp was burning, and he’d got some of the contents of his medical pack spread out. I laid my burden gently on the ground and opened up the blanket. Inside was a boy of maybe eight or nine, barefoot, clad in a dirty brown T-shirt and dark-blue shorts, powdered all over with pale dust. His eyes were shut, but his little chest was lifting and falling in very short, quick breaths. The sight of him immediately made me think of Tim.

‘Gloves, Mart,’ I said.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘There’s no blood. His skin’s not broken.’

He started to check the boy over, feeling carefully for broken bones. Then another blanket came to rest beside me. This one held a girl, also barefoot, wearing a simple dark-blue shift. She looked younger than the boy, perhaps only six. Blood was shining on her right temple, and down her right arm. Her eyes were open, but they were wide with fear.

‘You’re okay,’ I said gently. ‘Take it easy.’ I couldn’t tell if she understood English, but I hoped soft words would soothe her.

Looking round, I found Phil crouching beside me. In the harsh lamplight the hollows in his long, lean face were full of shadows. ‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘Joseph was driving. We were way out in the bush, well clear of the village. Already dark. Suddenly a load of kids jumped out of the grass into the road. I reckon they were after a lift.’

‘These clothes.’ I pointed to the dark blue and brown. ‘They can’t have shown up in the headlights. Arms and legs the same.’

Phil shook his head. ‘I was standing with my head out the top of the wagon. I never saw a fucking thing. It wasn’t Joseph’s fault. He stamped hell out of the brakes. Nobody could have stopped any quicker.’

‘Nothing broken,’ Mart reported of the boy. ‘But I don’t like the look of him. His breathing’s very shallow. He’s had a bad bang on the head. There — feel that.’

Gingerly I ran my fingers through the soft, furry stubble on the boy’s scalp. The skin seemed to be intact, but I could feel a large swelling high up over the left ear.

‘Is there anything you can do?’

‘Not much. Keep him wrapped up, that’s all. He needs to go to hospital soonest.’

‘Hospital!’ I exclaimed. ‘Some hope. What about the girl?’

Mart pulled on a pair of surgical gloves, took a swab and carefully wiped the blood off her forehead and arm. ‘Only scratches,’ he said. ‘Limbs seem okay. Looks like she was knocked into some thorns. It’s him we’ve got to worry about.’

Hearing voices behind us, I turned, to find we were surrounded by a crowd of maybe fifty Africans. Some of the men I recognised — members of Alpha, wrapped up in khaki cotton sweaters and tracksuit trousers — but the rest were strangers, people from the village. The lamplight glinted off white teeth and flashed on shiny black skin. As they pressed forward to see what was happening, their voices rose rapidly into an aggressive chorus. In the distance drums had started beating out some message.

I stood up, towering over most of the people, and made placatory gestures, moving my open hands gently up and down. ‘Take it easy,’ I said. ‘We’re only trying to help.’

Most of them already knew that Mart was our medic, and respected him, but now they sounded angry, as if the accident had been our fault, and they were accusing us of trying to kidnap the children.

‘What are they saying?’ I asked Godfrey, one of the Kamangan soldiers.

‘You give boy bad spirits.’

‘Bollocks. He was hit by the truck — got a blow on the head.’ I was going to remonstrate more, but I knew the guy’s English was poor. ‘Where’s Major Mvula? Get the major.’

‘Major coming.’

He was, too. I looked through the crowd and saw Joss hurrying towards us, dressed in the sky-blue tracksuit which he wore in the evenings. As usual he was grinning, eager to help.

‘Hey, Geordie,’ he went. ‘Mind if I join the party? What’s all this?’

His face fell as I explained. ‘The girl’s okay, but the boy’s pretty bad. We need a chopper, to get him to hospital.’

‘Not a chance.’ Joss used a phrase he’d picked up off me. ‘Not tonight, anyway. We can get on the radio, but they won’t fly at night. Can we send him by road?’

‘How far is it?’

‘Seven hours.’

‘The journey’d kill him.’

Joss nodded. Behind him the hubbub was getting louder. He turned and shouted something to quieten it. As the clamour dropped, he began to explain about the accident in a loud voice, and for a few moments his words seemed to be swaying opinion. Then a new wave of yelling started up, and the crowd opened to let a small woman through. With a screech she rushed past me and dropped beside the boy, lifting him up. His stick-like arms and legs hung down as she cradled him in her arms.

‘The mother,’ said Joss.

Mart knelt beside her and tried the boy’s pulse again. In his big, square hand the little black arm looked skinny as a bone.

‘He’s fading,’ he announced. ‘Not going to last long.’

The woman began screaming and shouting, repeating the word sin’ganga, sin’ganga again and again.

‘What’s she saying?’

‘Take him to the doctor,’ Joss translated.

‘I didn’t think there was a doctor.’

‘It’s the witch doctor she means.’

‘Jesus, that will kill him. Tell her he’s got a better chance if we just keep him quiet.’

Joss spoke forcefully to the woman, but she kept on with her shouts. The crowd backed her. Out in the darkness the drums were getting louder. I began feeling the sheer level of noise would finish the child off.

‘Where is he, this doctor?’ I yelled.

‘Here, in the village.’

‘How far?’

‘Two minutes’ walk. Three minutes.’

‘What’ll he do?’

Joss shrugged. ‘How do I know? Consult the spirits for a remedy.’

I shot Mart a glance. ‘What d’you reckon?’

‘Better go. There’s nothing I can do for the kid. As long as we handle him gently, a short carry won’t hurt. This crowd could turn nasty any moment.’

‘Right, then. You carry him. Phil and me’ll come with you as escort.’

Joss put a hand on the mother’s shoulder, restraining her, and said something to her while Mart took the boy from her. So we set off in an amazing procession, Mart leading, the mother wailing at his elbow, myself and Phil immediately behind with Joss, then half the village. Some of the people had oil lamps, and several were carrying torches of burning reed bundles. Any moment, I thought, these grass huts are going on fire, and the whole village will be up in smoke.

Above the hubbub, I shouted, ‘Hadn’t somebody better warn the guy we’re coming?’

‘He knows,’ Joss called back. ‘The drums have told him.’

As we advanced between huts huddled under mango trees, I liked the feel of things less and less. The crowd was so hostile that I was glad we had pistols on our belts. I was happy to have Phil with me, too. In the flickering light, with his close-cropped dark head and hollow cheeks, he looked quite dangerous. The impression wasn’t misleading, either: he was the most hawkish member of the team, always keen to get out there and top somebody.

‘Whatever happens,’ I shouted to Mart, ‘we’re going in with the boy. I’m not leaving him alone with the witch doctor. I want to see what gives.’

In less than three minutes we were outside a big, circular hut with a thatched verandah running round it. The crowd dropped back and fell silent as we approached over beaten earth, leaving us alone outside the open doorway. The hut was pitch dark, but I was aware of movement and rustling noises inside, as if someone was making rapid preparations. Then a lamp flared, a curtain was drawn aside, and a voice said something in Nyanja.

‘Go inside,’ said Joss quietly. ‘The mother must hold the child.’

Mart handed over his burden. I think he felt the same as I did: that we’d better do what we were told. Phil was more sceptical. Even though he said nothing, I could sense him seething with indignation just behind me. But when the woman stepped forward, we all followed.

The air inside was full of a powerful smell, half animal, half acrid human sweat. A single, primitive oil lamp flickered on the ground to our right. Towards the back of the hut there was a kind of cubicle, walled in with hanging black material, wide enough to accommodate two standing figures. The left-hand one was ordinary: a man dressed in normal, scruffy clothes, bare-headed, bare-footed, using both hands to hold a book open in front of his chest. It was the right-hand figure that made me catch my breath: a tall man, six foot at least, dressed in a blood-red robe that reached almost to the ground, with a zebra skin slung over his left shoulder and diagonally across his chest. On his head was a hat like a big muffin, also of zebra skin. His face was dead white, covered in paint or ash, so that his mouth and eye sockets showed up black on a pale background. In his left hand he was flicking what looked like an animal tail vertically up and down, and in his right he held a curved black horn.

‘The tail is from giraffe, horn from buffalo,’ Joss whispered in my ear.

I could see how scared the mother was from the way she cringed in front of the doctor, especially when he began to grunt and moan and whisk his giraffe tail with a faster, jerking motion. But the helper spoke sharply, obviously ordering her to come closer, and she moved forward a step, so that the boy in her arms was only a couple of feet from the hissing hair.

As the witch doctor’s hand flew up and down, and shadows leapt about the grass roof like huge bats, the mask of a face began to twitch and gibber in a high-pitched, squeaky voice, letting out staccato bursts of sound that reminded me of machine-gun fire. I shot a sideways glance at Mart and saw his eyes switch from the doctor to his helper and back. Phil was still behind me.

Suddenly, the helper spoke, in a normal voice, and Joss translated for us: ‘The spirits are talking.’

‘What are they saying?’

Joss relayed the question, but all he got for a reply was an irritable shake of the head.

‘Eh,’ I muttered to Mart. ‘The helper guy’s a fraud. He’s pretending to read from that book, but it’s that dark he can’t see a bloody word.’

‘Fucking ridiculous!’ muttered Phil, but Mart, who was closer to the acolyte, said, ‘Fuck me, it’s a bible.’

I stared at the tattered edges. Sure enough, one title page was hanging open towards us, and the flickering light was strong enough for me to make out, in big type, THE BOOK OF DANIEL.

The gibbering outbursts rose even higher. The witch doctor’s eyes were tight shut. His head was rolling on his shoulders. Beads of sweat flew off his forehead. There was a touch of red about his lips. Blood? No, it was crimson froth. He was chewing something, leaves or roots or berries. Suddenly a shudder ran through his body and he stood stock still, holding the narrow end of the horn to his right temple. For a few seconds he remained motionless and silent. Then his lips moved and the twittering broke out again, this time in a steady stream.

The helper began to interpret.

‘He says evil spirits have come into the boy,’ Joss translated. ‘The trouble is in his head… His brain is damaged… He has bad pressure in his head… He is very sick.’

I bit back the impulse to say, ‘We know that,’ and asked, ‘What can he do about it? Can he give him anything?’

‘Wait, there is something else.’

The sin’ganga rolled his head and gibbered, the acolyte interpreted, Joss translated. ‘The boy will die. There is no medicine for this condition.’

There followed a pause of maybe half a minute, during which I found I was holding my breath. Then came the message. ‘His spirit is leaving him now.’

The mother, who’d been standing still and quiet, gave a sudden hoarse cry and sank to the ground, decanting the child out of its blanket on to the earth at the witch doctor’s feet.

What happened next, I’ll never be sure. I saw Mart go down on his knees to recover the boy, but then something soft brushed across my shoulders and a sudden draught put out the lamp. In the darkness I felt an intense chill close in on me.

Behind me, Phil gave a sharp exclamation of ‘Fucking hell!’ I heard a movement, looked round, and found he’d disappeared.

‘Phil!’ I said sharply. ‘Are you feeling anything?’

He didn’t answer.

‘Phil!’ I went. ‘Where are you?’

It was Mart who answered: ‘He’s back in the crowd.’

‘Did you feel anything just then?’

‘Cold,’ said Mart. ‘Freezing cold, horrible.’

‘I got it too,’ I told him. ‘It was deadly. How about pulling out?’

‘I’m okay.’ Mart sounded solid. ‘D’you want to?’

‘No, I’m okay to stay.’

That was what I said. But in fact I was shuddering and felt sick, as if gripped by fever. What surprised me most was that Phil had quit. Phil, the least scared of all our people, the toughest, the most punchy.

Through those unnerving seconds the twittering had kept up unabated. Then I heard Mart exclaim, ‘Shit! He’s gone!’

‘Who?’

‘The kid. No pulse. Breathing’s stopped. I’ll try mouth-to-mouth.’

‘No, for Christ’s sake!’ I told him. ‘If the people see you doing that, they’ll think you’re killing him.’

‘They think that anyway.’

‘Try it,’ I said. Then instantly I changed my mind and ordered, ‘Cancel that. Leave him!’

The crowd outside seemed to sense what had happened. The tide of voices swelled again. I heard more drums going in the distance, and at our feet the woman began to wail. Joss called out something in Nyanja, and a man came through from the back of the hut carrying another lamp.

Light showed that neither the witch doctor nor his assistant had moved. Both held exactly the same posture: the giraffe tail was still thrashing the air; spirit messages were still arriving. The woman was on the deck, with Mart on his knees beside her. Apart from Phil having vanished into the crowd, nothing had changed. Certainly there was nobody close behind me who could have flicked a garment or shawl over my shoulders.

The back of my neck was crawling. What was it that put the lamp out? What had produced that icy chill?

‘He says, white men must leave Kamanga,’ Joss translated.

‘Tell him we had nothing to do with the accident,’ I said. ‘It was a Kamangan driving the truck.’

‘He knows that. But he says white men bring evil to our country.’

‘We’re trying to help. The only reason we’re here is that your government invited us.’

That information produced a long pause. The witch doctor transferred the buffalo horn to his left hand and clawed at the air with his right, fingers spread, drawing in handfuls of air towards his head, as if plucking at the spirits who were talking to him. Several times he turned his hand slowly and brought it back towards his face, palm-first. But in the end his message was the same: ‘All white men must leave Kamanga.’

‘What happens if they don’t?’ Mart demanded.

‘They will die.’

‘All of them?’

Another pause, then, ‘Some.’

‘How many?’

‘To find this out, the sin’ganga needs to consult his bones.’

‘Okay, then,’ I agreed. ‘Tell him to do it.’

Later, I wished to hell I’d never issued the challenge. But at the time, in the heightened atmosphere of that stinking hut, one question seemed to lead on from another so fast that there was no time to think of possible consequences. Before I could start worrying, the acolyte was ordering the woman out, shooing her backwards as if she were a sheep.

‘She will have to pay for the consultation,’ said Joss.

‘It’s all right,’ I told him. ‘I’ll pay. How much is it?’

The answer came back, ‘Four thousand kwatchas. One dollar US.’

‘Okay. We’ll see to that.’

The woman rolled her dead child in its blanket and disappeared into the crowd with her pathetic burden. Wailing broke out, but the anger seemed to have given way to grief. The people began to move off, back into the middle of the village, leaving us alone.

The witch doctor was coming out of his trance. Convulsive shudders ran through his body, and he gave a few loud gasps. Red froth still hung around his mouth, but at last he opened his eyes and looked about, as if trying to get his bearings.

The acolyte, who’d disappeared into the blackness behind him, came out again into the light without his bible, holding a small, pear-shaped bag made of leather, with a draw-string gathering the neck. The witch doctor handed over his horn and giraffe tail, took the bag, then abruptly sank down on his haunches, his knees cracking as they bent. Then he started sweeping the flat of his right hand across the earth floor in front of him. Once again the helper stood at his master’s right shoulder.

A high-pitched humming started up, like the drone of bees. At first I thought it was coming from the helper, then I saw that the witch doctor had his lips pressed tight together as he produced the sound, which had a slight beat in it, so that it seemed to come and go. Shaking the bag, he tweaked the cord at the neck and shook out the contents. With a light, dry pattering about a dozen bones landed on the beaten earth. They were brown with age and use, and must have come from a small animal about the size of a hare.

After a few seconds’ scrutiny, he said something, speaking now in a normal voice, surprisingly deep.

‘Death,’Joss translated. ‘He sees death.’

‘Fucking roll on!’ went Mart under his breath.

‘We’ve had a death already,’ I said.

‘More now.’

‘Who?’

‘Wait.’

After a pause and more humming, the wrinkled old hands gathered the bones, shook them like dice and threw them again, harder than before, so that they clicked on each other and spread out over a wider area of earth. I saw that the man’s right-hand index finger was missing.

This time the pattern seemed to give an immediate answer.

‘Ten will die,’ Joss translated.

‘Ten what?’

‘Ten white persons.’

‘Men?’

‘And women. Either.’

‘Why ten?’

As the questions were relayed through our interpreter, the witch doctor never glanced in our direction, but kept his eyes down, fixed on the bones, his right hand, with its missing finger, stretched out downwards over them. There was a long silence before he gave his next answer.

‘Because the boy was ten years old. One death for every year of his life.’

Mart, who’d been squatting still and silent beside me, suddenly asked, ‘Why’s he putting this spell on us?’

Joss answered that one off his own bat, without translating the question: ‘The spell is not from the sin’ganga. He’s only telling you about it. It is from a fiti, a sorcerer. Very bad man. The sin’ganga can feel the spell coming.’

‘Where’s this fiti then?’

Joss shrugged and gestured outwards into the darkness. ‘He lives in the village, but now I think he is hiding in the bush.’

‘How the hell can he put a spell on us if he hasn’t seen us?’

‘He has seen you. In the past few days he has watched you all. He is a powerful man, very dangerous.’

‘Can’t this guy make up a counter-spell?’ Mart gestured at the witch doctor. ‘Put something on the other bastard?’

I knew the question was meant to be sarcastic, but Joss took it seriously, translated it, and passed back the answer: ‘He will give you medicine, to stop you being witched.’

‘Medicine!’ snorted Mart. ‘Medicine against evil spells? For fuck’s sake!’

I felt just as cynical, but I reckoned this was a game we had to play.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll have some. How much will it cost?’

‘Twenty thousand kwatchas. Five dollars.’

‘All right, then.’

I reached into my shirt, going for my money belt, but Joss waved my hand down, and said, ‘No need to pay now. He has to prepare medicine first. He will give it in the morning. Pay then.’

‘Okay. But I’ll pay for the woman, anyway.’ I handed over a one-dollar bill, which the acolyte accepted.

I’d had enough of this mumbo-jumbo, so we pulled out. We left the witch doctor still squatting, still staring fixedly at his bones, and the acolyte sorting little heaps of wood and bark that lay about on the floor. As we pulled away, Phil materialised out of the darkness.

‘What the fuck happened to you?’ I asked.

‘I dunno. Something horrendous.’

‘Feeling of cold?’

‘Like a tomb. I had to get the hell out.’

Back in camp we found that the crowd had dispersed, and there was no immediate threat. The mother of the dead boy had taken his body away. It turned out that the girl with the scratches wasn’t related to him, and had been recovered by some of her own people.

Round the fire again, we broke out a bottle of rum and shot the shit while we had a good slug apiece — all, that is, except Genesis, who stuck to his normal Coke. I felt shaken.

‘What do we reckon to that, then?’ I asked the circle in general. I gave a quick run-down on what had happened, for the benefit of the guys who’d missed it.

‘It all started with that fucking owl,’ said Pavarotti.

‘Did they kill it?’ Chalky asked.

‘Did they hell!’ said Pav. ‘I bet it just cleared off. It probably does a fly-past every night, just to wind the bastards up.’

‘Surely,’ said Genesis, ‘the accident to the kids must have happened before the owl appeared?’

‘I dunno,’ I told him. ‘I reckon the two were much the same time.’

‘Maybe the old owl came to tell us about it,’ Chalky suggested.

‘Bollocks to the owl,’ went Stringer. ‘It’s only a bloody bird, after all.’

‘Those guys were both phoneys,’ Mart declared.

‘Who?’ Genesis asked.

‘The old witch doctor and his mate. The whole thing was just a performance. No disrespect, Gen, but that business with the bible really gave them away. The helper guy never turned a page or anything. Besides, it was far too fucking dark for him to read a word. The book was nothing but a prop. What could the Book of Daniel have to do with the injured kid? If you ask me, the entire show was a load of shite.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It was and it wasn’t. How did the guy know the kid was dying? He couldn’t see him. He never even touched him. He never asked the mother any question. He just knew — at the exact moment, as well.’

‘Lucky guess,’ said Mart.

‘Could have been,’ I agreed. ‘But his timing was spot on.’

‘True.’

‘Another thing,’ I went on. ‘Something touched me on the shoulders when the lamp went out. Something like a big bird, with soft wings.’

‘The owl!’ cried Stringer. ‘To-whit to-bloody-whoo!’

‘Piss off, Stringer,’ I told him. ‘You didn’t feel it. You didn’t get the cold, either. Phil got it, though, didn’t you?’

‘Yeah. And I don’t fucking want it again.’

‘Cold?’ went Pav. ‘What are you on about?’

‘It was like I’d stepped into a freezer,’ I said. ‘I was shaking like I had malaria or something. It made Phil do a runner.’

‘Philip Foster!’ went Whinger in mock horror. ‘Don’t tell me you left your colleagues in the shit.’

‘You’d have shat yourself,’ Phil told him, ‘if you’d felt what I was getting.’

‘Geordie!’ said Whinger, relentlessly. ‘I can’t believe you were bricking it as well.’

‘I was,’ I assured him. ‘I was scared shitless, because I didn’t know what was happening. Brrrrrh!’ I shuddered again. ‘Get that rum moving, for Christ’s sake.’

We passed the bottle round again and sat gazing into the fire.

‘I dunno,’ said Mart. ‘Joss was telling me yesterday that witch doctors’ medicines really work. These guys are herbalists. They get their stuff out of the bush: leaves and roots and bark and things. The point is, for the locals, these are the only drugs that exist. There’s no hospital this side of Chiwembe — not even a clinic. The clinics that do exist don’t have any drugs or trained staff. Joss reckons that without traditional medicine, very few of his mates would have made it to twenty-five.’

‘Come on, Mart,’ went Whinger. ‘You can’t swallow all that crap.’

‘It works,’ Mart insisted, stubbornly. ‘That’s all I’m saying. Maybe a lot of it’s psychological. If you believe in it, you get better.’

‘Yeah,’ went Danny, ‘or you can get witched.’

‘Better not to believe in it,’ said Genesis. ‘If you don’t let it get to you, it can’t do you any harm.’

‘That’s right,’ said Whinger. ‘And for fuck’s sake don’t take any medicine the quack throws you. Don’t give me any, either. Imagine calling up the CO in Hereford and saying, “Boss, I’m dying. I’ve been poisoned by a fucking witch doctor.”’

Everyone laughed. I took a deep breath and got up to kick some pieces of wood towards the centre of the fire.

‘One thing about it,’ I said. ‘There’s only ten of us, and no white women in sight. If ten freak out, there won’t be many left.’

‘Nobody’s going to freak out,’ said Phil, confident and aggressive again, in spite of the fright he’d had. ‘It’s all in the mind.’

If we’d taken a vote on the genuineness of the witch doctor, I reckon it would have gone seven to three against, or possibly six to four. Phil and Mart and myself had all felt that peculiar cold, and Genesis, who was wavering, couldn’t help being fascinated by the fact that the acolyte had wielded a bible.

When I told the guys to watch themselves particularly over the next few days, they gave me some peculiar looks, as if I was going soft in the head. But my own mind was far from easy. I lay looking up at the brilliant stars, thinking of the white powder, done up in a twist of dirty paper, a messenger had brought me. It was a long time before I could go to sleep.