Cry Havoc Page 3

  Dawn comes. I’ve never been more than half asleep.

  Anthony calls to say my Boeing 727 landed at Lanseria International, South Africa. Since then it’s flown from there to Wonderboom in Pretoria. Some avionics have gone U/S – but none of the items is a ‘no fly’. Our crew are right now taking over from the bronzed, fun-loving ferry crew. The 727 will be taking off on time, for the rendezvous (RV) at Harare. But this early morning – now – I don’t know what to do.

  Charles and Lyle were pissed last night, for sure. They’re with me at this motel because this evening – out at the airport – they will check that ZDI actually deliver to us the weapons and ammo that we paid for. It has cost US$250,000. Cash. Charles and Lyle won’t want to run this morning. I slip into my running kit, then set off for a fast 45 minutes.

  As ever, to run is a blessing. Mindless joy and rhythm make me calm and focused. I feel good. The coup is going to be doing something right – and this time the Op is for all the right reasons.

  Then, minute by minute, the day becomes more and more of a nerve-stretcher. As I lounge about, with nothing else to do, each hour becomes my rack. The time my inquisitor. All I can do is quiz myself. Over and over I run through my coordinating instructions.

  Niek wants us into the Landing Zone (LZ) – Malabo International’s main runway – between 0200 Z and 0600 Z the next day – ideally between 0300 Z and 0500 Z. Our Estimated Time En Route (ETE) is four and a half hours.

  So we must take off from Harare between 2130 Z and 0130 Z – ideally between 2230 Z and 0030 Z. I must allow an hour to refuel, and an hour and a half to load the weapons and ammo. Therefore, the 727 and the men must land at Harare between 1900 Z and 2300 Z tonight.

  Our Harare gear-up time will trigger Crause’s take-off from his refuelling point in Bamako, Mali. He is flying the King Air with the new President, Severo Moto, direct to Malabo International. They will have flown out of Gran Canaria, the Spanish island off Africa’s west coast.

  The two trigger messages – for Crause and Moto to take off – and for the palace coup to green-light – will be sent by me, from the cockpit of the 727, via my Iridium satellite phone, to the Boss. Then I will make two more calls: to Thatcher and to Anthony, both in South Africa.

  While I’m still trying to lounge in the Cresta, Brodie calls me. He’s in the lobby. Is something wrong? When he arrives it’s 12.30. He insists I buy him a beer. He sips his Lion lager carefully. What’s going on? I wait for his news. There is none.

  Then the penny drops: he is babysitting his US dollars. This evening Captain Brodie (laugh! Captain of what?) will be given $20,000 by me – just for his own pocket – if it goes OK. He’s already had $10,000.

  A warmer into the bank.

  Brodie is large. Between 50 and 60, I guess. Black and sweaty. A lugubrious face that belies real intelligence. Well dressed for a Zimbabwean. Always formal. Not afraid of eye contact. Hard and direct for what he wants. For what he doesn’t want, ruthless. Not kind.

  We talk of more business in the future. All the time my radar is probing. Is he a traitor? An entrapper? But the radar can’t see through his thick black hide. Reading him is too hard, our differences too great.

  My loyal soldier Charles West has had a panic attack. He triggers one off in me. Would the AKs come as standard? Four magazines, a bayonet and a cleaning kit? We didn’t order them separately.

  Maybe we – Niek and I – should have been specific when we placed the order. To this question Charles had added a few choice Boerer slurs, against black Africans in general, Brodie in particular. I ask Brodie, and he tells me, ‘Four magazines with each weapon is standard. Standard is what you’ll get.’ Unshakeable.

  Brodie says he’ll be back at 1800 hrs to take us to see the weapons. Back in my room, I force myself to read a Jane Austen novel – Mansfield Park. Same one I start again later in prison. Plenty of time to finish it then. I snooze. You can blame Jane or the beer. It’s the least painful way to pass this time.

  I look at my Breitling Emergency. It’s after six. Suddenly the minutes that crawled by are racing. Too quick. Now I have to pack up, get the other two together and check us out of this dump. If we don’t work fast, we’ll get late.

  A part of me refuses to believe that we are going to go ahead with this. I’m scared. I screw the top of my bottle down – yet again – only harder. I wish that I was armed already, but not to shoot anyone else.

  From the start of our EO adventures – the business identity of our old mercenary outfit – rule number one had been ‘Don’t get captured’. To that end, there had always been a last few rounds. A last grenade.

  We rush to be ready. I row with the hotel – over their not taking local currency, over their ripping us off. Then we wait. We’re twisted up like corkscrews with the stress of this. Where the fuck is Brodie? We rush to wait. A thunderstorm bangs off all around us, then delivers its downpour.

  Rainforest rain. Tropical greed. Exotic excess.

  I phone Brodie. No answer. I phone the other ZDI man, a frightened little apparatchik named Daniel. No answer. The rain drives down harder. This rain means business.

  Anthony had already called to say that the Boeing 727 took off – bang on time – from Wonderboom, in South Africa, for Pietersburg. Then he had called again. Our aircraft had taken off for Harare. Shit! The thing will be landing in ten minutes, for God’s sake!

  Where the fuck’s Brodie? Where’s our wagon? Where’s Daniel?

  The rain’s a burst main.

  A pair of yellow headlights leak through the downpour, followed by another. The splashy outline of a car pulls up. It’s Brodie. Daniel is driving the second. We scowl. They smile. Relax. I smell that Daniel has been drinking. Brodie takes me aside.

  ‘Do you have my twenty thousand ready – to give to me? I want my twenty thousand now.’

  I love his spirit, and his openness. I laugh and smile at him. He and I are best friends.

  ‘Shamwari! My friend! You don’t think I’m going to leave Zimbabwe without giving you your money, do you?’ Africans hate that kind of joshing. Brodie hates it. Clever me. Or should I read Brodie’s plea for cash up front as a warning?

  ‘Your money’s on the plane,’ I lie, voice dropped, serious now. ‘It’s in the cockpit – with the captain…’

  Brodie’s phone rings. He talks briefly, in Shona, the Bantu tongue of Zimbabwe, then he says, ‘Your plane has landed…’

  ‘…and my money better be on board,’ he doesn’t say.

  ‘…it’s taxied to the civilian side – for the fuel,’ he tells me.

  We pile into two cars, with our kit. I’m with Brodie. Charles and Lyle are with drink-driver Daniel. We drive through the thrashing rain. Roads are rivers. I think about Neil, the captain, and the co-pilot of my Boeing, flying the men into Harare.

  Neil is the brother of Crause, the pilot charged with flying Severo Moto into Malabo, from the Canaries, via Bamako. Neil and Crause are both EO originals, with us from our first war, Angola 1992–5. I think of Neil, and how he would be loving it. Poking the new Boeing down the Instrument Landing System glide path. Down through this onslaught waterfall. Vic Falls, from above.

  Reaching the civilian side of Harare International – all along on running-wet tarmac – we drive on, dodging potholes, skirting the perimeter fence, right round, until we reach Manyame Air Base.

  The military side of the airfield. The guard room and gate look British. Strangely anachronistically British is what they are, still fresh from 1950. The old Rhodesia. Our convoy of two drives in. Damp soldiers eye us, then stand to attention. String puppets. No nit-picking checks. All salute.

  Brodie’s $20,000 rides on this. We’re expected. I’ve bought the bloody place.

  At the military camp, inside the old Rhodie Fire Force huts (the huts from which the Fire Force fought their nasty useless stupid war so well), I’m introduced to the Base Commanding Officer. Fine in his Sunday afternoon Hawaiian shirt, but looking worried.


  He’s been dragged off the golf course – unaware and unhappy – to sign off on something beyond his power. That’s how he seems. Not happy. My alarm bell clatters. There are four or five people with him, also soldiers, also in their Sunday civvies. They alarm me more. I look around. What danger? Nothing stands out.

  He nods us through. Airside. I push a squeaking metal door … through to a hairdryer of wet warm air and a welcome sight.

  The downpour has halted.

  I see the aircraft – there she is! My very own Boeing 727. Here. Twenty-four hours ago she was stuck in Florida. I’m hit by a freight train of feelings: pride, excitement … then memories of the great days of Angola and SL.

  Fear uncoils its cold scales against the sides of my belly: what is going to happen to us in the next 24 hours? Not everyone is working to my Coordinating Instruction. Not the target, President Obiang.

  But, as ever, it is doing which elbows dread behind.

  Quickly, I walk across the ramp, then towards the rear air-stair (for our kinds of shit, the rear air-stair is one of the Boeing 727-100’s plus points. Useful. We are not a customary airline!).

  As I reach the bottom of the stair the howl of the aircraft’s auxiliary power unit beats down on me from just above my head. The smell is hot-wired: the reek of Jet A-1 kerosene makes my heart pump. I leap up a gear.

  ‘Napalm in the morning’ if you like. But for me kerosene and hot jet exhaust are the smell of ‘Action Stations’ … of ‘Airborne!’ … of air power… ‘Danger’s no stranger – to an Airborne Ranger!’

  On board the smell of Nando’s greets me. I had forgotten how Anthony and I had planned our in-flight catering for the troops. Men call out to me. A few faces I remember from the old days, most I don’t. I greet them all as old friends. I make it to the cockpit.

  ‘Hi, Neil – you fuelled up OK?’

  ‘Hi.’ Neil looks at me to check that we are really here. Doing this. ‘We’re full of fuel. Topped off. Ready to go – and all paid for. Where’s Charles?’

  The refuel has been a scam, of course, our cash US dollars going nowhere near the fuel’s true owners. This is Zim.

  ‘Charles and Lyle are checking the weapons. I’m going to them now,’ I say. ‘Get our loading party ready, will you, please – down at the bottom of the air-stair?’

  This loading party is to shift the gear into the hold. Neil is ready for that because he has read the handwritten orders I gave to Anthony back in Jo’burg. I know that Neil has read those orders because I can see my note in his hand. I say nothing, but I curse Anthony: I told him that note must not come onto the aircraft. It’s one more breach of security. One more of many. Too late to matter, I hope.

  On my way back down the stair, I find our old flight engineer. Like many of the others – like Neil and the co-pilot – he is a veteran of our adventures. Gnome-like. Always sunburned. Wiry. White-grey hair, balding. Always nervy. Excited. A born pessimist. This night, and true to his trade, he looks like he’s lost something precious. A ten-rand note maybe.

  ‘Cheer up. It may never happen! C’mon, man – only two and a half tons of weapons and ammo… That’s no sweat…’

  ‘It isn’t your two and a half tons … it’s where you’re gonna put them…’

  He glances at his clipboard, scribbled with the hieroglyphics of weight and balance, of centre of gravity.

  We both know how tight we’re going to be for fuel: we’ll be shutting down the centre one of the 727’s three engines as soon as we’re into our cruise climb. Even then we’re too tight on range – and on take-off weight. Harare is 5,000 feet above sea level for a kick-off – and we’re going to be heavier than maximum for this runway. This outside air temperature … in this wind … this tide.

  The flight would be without a kosher ATC flight clearance. But over black Africa, pilot-to-pilot self-ATC is the norm. Worse than incorrect Flight Plans, and the wrong Over-Flight Clearances, we have no Alternate … no other airport to divert to.

  If Malabo proves impossible, our best option is to fly south-west for just under 300 miles to São Tomé. We may have enough fuel. But then we will be flying into another war.

  We’ve spoken with some of the rebels down there, three nutters from the Committee for the Liberation of São Tomé and Principe (CLSTP). They are our friends, and have promised us their help if we need it. If we land there, without doubt they’ll use us to kick off their own coup.

  ‘Whoops! Sorry! Wrong island. Wrong fucking President!’

  There are other horrors. This is March. We are close to the Equinox. Flying into the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). That equals shit weather. This time of year the ITCZ is bang on top of our target: Malabo, on Bioko Island (formerly Fernando Po), Equatorial Guinea. The armpit of Africa.

  That’s the weather. But what if Niek is nabbed?

  What if our main runway – our Landing Zone – turns out to be our Killing Zone? What happens if we get ambushed on landing? We are on one wing and a prayer.

  In Jo’burg we decided – Charles, Neil and me – that, if Niek is compromised, then we’ll just fly in anyway. We’ll crash-land if we have to – then take our chances. Leaving Niek behind is not an option.

  Fucking hell. Why am I doing this? For the money? Sure. Right now, all the money in the world isn’t enough. I’ve got loads of bloody money anyway. I’m a multi-millionaire in sterling, for fuck’s sake.

  Brodie, my Zimbabwe spook, waits for me at the bottom of the airstair. He craves his 20 grand. All 20 shine back out at me from his greedy dark-brown eyes. In his car we drive 100 yards – round the corner to a run-down old Rhodie hangar.

  Charles and Lyle wait outside, standing by the other car.

  Charles gives me a hidden look: ‘All clear.’

  Inside the hangar – ill-lit and dirty – stands a flatbed trailer, sides up, without a pulling truck. No horse.

  Brodie waves us to inspect the piled boxes.

  ‘There are your weapons on the trailer. Check them, please.’

  So we climb up the high sides. A sickening sinking weight thumps downward to my lower gut. I climb … peer over the sides… There isn’t enough kit on here. Something’s wrong.

  I look across at Charles. He and Lyle have their knives out, opening a box. Some of the boxes look like the real thing but others don’t. My mind reels. Stupidly I think what a long walk it is to Jo’burg. My skin soaks me in a chilled sweat.

  I open what looks like a shoebox. Plain brown cardboard. Inside are one old 36 grenade, a few loose rounds of 9mm. They laugh at me. What the fuck is this?

  I look back to Charles. He’s holding an RPG-7 round: rocket and warhead. Lyle’s looking at the rocket while Charles looks at me, his face a mirror of mine.

  ‘What the fuck is this?’

  ‘Get down off the truck!’

  It’s an order. I glance around the meanly lit hangar. A circle of ten men stand silent in a ring around the trailer. Black overalls, HK MP5s slung across their chests. Relaxed, alert, poised.

  I know the look of these men. I’ve been one. They are pros, even if we are in the heart of black Africa. God knows … but where had they come from?

  Three or four others huddle around Brodie. Their bulky awkwardness and cheap leather jackets give their game away: ‘secret police’.

  My strong heart slips, then I fall. A dark abyss without bottom sucks me down and down … down…

  My hands are steel-cuffed behind my back. The cuffs pull my shoulders back. My neck and head forward. It hurts. They stuff me onto the back seat of some crap car.

  Two goons wave the barrels of their 9mm Star handguns in my face. I’m sat between them. Their breath smells of cheap liquor, kaffir beer, moonshine, hooch.

  God knows what they’ll do to me.

  We drive.

  No formal arrest. No hope. I’m going to die, so I think of home. They tell me how I’m going to die. Nobody knows where I am, they tell me. They’re going to shoot me. The crocs will hide me. Ther
e are plenty of crocodiles in Zimbabwe.

  We drive some more, then turn off the bombed tarmac. The car lurches down a sandy dirt track, weak yellow headlights barely showing the way. I can sense a river ahead.

  Crocodiles eat evidence.

  What ways out of this? Who are these people? What’s gone wrong?

  God knows what’s gone wrong. This is Africa.

  Stay loose. We can get out of this, I tell myself. Thatcher can get me out. Thatcher and the Boss can get us all out.

  If we live.

  The dirt track grows bumpier, narrower.

  ‘Are white men tougher than black men, Mann?’

  I smell the hooch from inside him.

  ‘We are going to kill you, Mann. Nobody will ever know where you died. Nobody will ever know what happened…’

  ‘Are you afraid, Mann?’

  They’re bullshitting me. I hope.

  I don’t know. If they are, then I can’t see why. What’s their game? The crocs are not thinkable. I try not to think. I feel relief, strange flakes in the Force Ten blizzard of thoughts and sadness charging by. Relief muddles me. We’ve fucked up. All is lost. There’s no suspense now. That’s a cop-out … but it’s some kind of relief.

  Sixty-nine men have been nicked with me. Fucking hell. I don’t know that they have been nicked. I assume it. I know Charles and Lyle are in irons. I saw them collared along with me. I saw them taken to another car.

  Brodie was nicked. He was taken to a third car. Maybe ZDI will sort this out for him and then, because we’re his clients, for us? Maybe even without Thatcher’s help… But I didn’t believe in Brodie’s arrest. There had been a touch of con about it.

  The car stops. I feel sick.

  ‘Get out! Kneel down!’

  Their feet kick me, hands strike my head. Ten paces from the car. Downhill. They wrestle me into a kneel. River water. I can smell my death even though I don’t believe in it.

  They say they’re going to shoot me … again. They shoot, now…

  Click. Click.

  They laugh.

  My knees are wet in the sand.