Hostile Territory (A Spider Shepherd short story) (2 page)

Shepherd knew when he was being given the bum’s rush, but it was pointless arguing about it, so he just nodded. ‘No problem, Boss. And do you mind if I raise the plight of those children with some of the aid agencies here?’

The officer frowned as he scratched his chin. ‘Children?’

‘The only survivors of the massacre of an entire village. I told you about it and gave you the map coordinates.’

The officer looked pained. ‘Ah yes, yes, a tragic business, but all too common here, I’m afraid.’

Shepherd waited for the officer to say something else, but when he didn’t Shepherd didn’t pursue the matter.  Since he hadn’t been ordered not to contact the aid agencies, he kept his mouth shut and chose to take the Boss’s silence as acquiescence.

‘And is there transport to get us to this hotel?’ Jock asked. ‘Or are vehicles like choppers around here - as rare as rocking horse shit?’

The officer flashed the Scotsman a tight smile.  ‘There are a few Landcruisers that the mechanics have been working on. They’re beaten-up but driveable, you can take one of those.’

 They left the officer and went outside into the blistering sunshine. They chose the least battered and bullet-holed Toyota from a row parked at the side of the compound, helped themselves to some ammunition from the armoury and replenished their rations, then drove out of the base. The road on either side of the gates was lined by the ragged stalls of traders and craftsmen who had set up a sort of informal market there in the hope of attracting trade. The poverty of the country was shown in the limited range of goods on offer, with men and women sitting cross-legged in the dirt selling a handful of plantain bananas, sandals made from recycled car tyres, a couple of battered paperbacks or a few empty tins and bottles or scraps of fabric that must have been reclaimed from the city dump. There was also a metal worker there, his hammers beating out a tinny rhythm as he pounded pieces of scrap metal and flattened tin to make cooking pots and water carriers, while a sweating boy, perhaps his son, pumped the bellows of his primitive forge. Shepherd had never seen such abject poverty and understood why the West had been forced to intervene.

The road was a wasteland of potholes and crisscrossed by tank tracks that had torn up the surface. The Landcruiser bounced and jolted over the ruts as they drove on. Every mile or so they passed the rusting wrecks of vehicles, crashed or ambushed, that had been bulldozed off the road.

As they rounded the head of Aberdeen Creek and turned onto Lumley Beach Road, the views improved dramatically. The palm-fringed, pristine white sands stretched away from them for miles, towards the lighthouse at Cape Sierra Leone and Man of War Bay. The beaches looked as beautiful as any in the world but in this war-torn country there were no tourists to enjoy them and they saw not a soul as they drove along.

‘Looking on the bright side, no one’s going to be hogging the sunbeds around the pool,’ said Geordie. 

They passed a few mud-and-thatch huts and an occasional concrete building on the beach side of the road, many of them with sun-faded signs advertising beer and Coke, though they looked more like jails than bars, with steel shutters covering the doors and iron bars across the windows. Almost all were closed and shuttered, vandalised or derelict, many pitted with the marks of gunfire, and with smoke-blackened windows. Several were completely burnt out.

The Tradewinds Hotel proved to be an ugly two-storey concrete block with a flat roof and the familiar bullet-marks on its stained facade. ‘Bloody hell,’ Jock said as he caught sight of it. ‘I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a building anywhere in Sierra Leone that hasn’t been shot up.’

‘At least this one’s open for business,’ said Shepherd. ‘Though I’m guessing there won’t be much in the way of room service.’

‘Mate, I’ll be happy if the bed’s got sheets and a pillow,’ said Jimbo.

The owner of the hotel, a paunchy Lebanese with a thick black moustache and slicked-back hair, eased himself out of a cane chair in the lobby, beneath a ceiling fan that turned with a slow, rusty squeak. As they watched him fumble behind the counter for the room keys, they could hear a steady dripping sound from down the corridor. ‘At least we know the water supply’s working,’ Jimbo said with a wink.

‘Even better than that,’ Jock said. ‘There’s a bar as well, and I can definitely see a bottle of whisky on the shelf.’

 Geordie grinned. ‘That’s you sorted then, but what are the rest of us going to drink?’

‘Ask someone who cares,’ Jock said. ‘Right, shit, shower and shave and back in the bar in twenty minutes.’

‘Sounds like a plan,’ said Shepherd.

Shepherd let himself into his second-floor room, trying hard not to speculate on how many people might already have slept in the bed since the sheets were last changed. There was a small balcony, but there were bullet holes in the shutters, which did not seem a particularly good omen. He dragged his bed as far from the windows as it would go, exposing a thick carpet of dust where it had been standing. The tiles in the bathroom were cracked and the walls mildewed, and when he turned on the light, there was a rustling sound like dry leaves stirring in a breeze, as streams of brown cockroaches scuttled across the floor and disappeared beneath the bath and into cracks in the walls.

He turned on the shower, more in hope than expectation. To his surprise a stream of brackish water flowed, albeit erratically, and he took his first shower in more than a fortnight. He trampled his filthy clothes underfoot as he showered, killing two birds with one stone. He dried himself on a threadbare towel, hung his wet clothes over the balcony railing and put on some clean ones. Feeling human again, he went downstairs.

The other three had got there well ahead of him, and were sitting at a table in the baffa - the outdoor, tin-roofed drinking area overlooking the beach. Geordie and Jimbo were drinking bottles of beer while Jock had sequestered the bottle of whiskey. It was Jamesons.

‘Thought you only liked Scotch?’ said Shepherd, sitting down at the table.

‘Whiskey’s whiskey,’ said Jock. ‘And the Paddys make a decent enough drop of the hard stuff.’ He poured a large measure into a glass and pushed it across the table towards Shepherd.

‘Got any ice?’ asked Shepherd.

‘The ice out here’ll give you the runs for a week,’ said Jock. ‘But neat whiskey will do wonders for your digestion.’

Shepherd picked up the glass. He sniffed the whiskey and then took a cautious sip. He felt a warm glow spread out from his stomach and he grinned. ‘Nice,’ he said, then emptied the glass with one swallow.

Jock laughed. ‘A convert,’ he said, and refilled Shepherd’s glass.

Shepherd looked around the room. Despite the mosquitoes fogging the air, the relative coolness of the evening breeze was welcome. There were another dozen or so people in the outdoor bar, the usual Third World mixture of local fixers in shiny suits, Western carpetbaggers, wheeler dealers, arms traders and other dubious types who were always drawn to troubled countries like flies to shit. As the four SAS men drank and joked, Shepherd saw two men paying them particular attention. One was Arab-looking, balding and overweight with a gold Rolex on his wrist, and the other a younger man in a linen tropical suit wearing what appeared to be an orange and yellow striped MCC tie.

When Shepherd had walked in they had been sitting on stools at the end of the bar but after a while they moved to the next table and struck up a conversation with the troopers. The Arab-looking man introduced himself as Farid and described himself as a Lebanese trader.

‘And I’m Jonathan Parker,’ the other said, ‘I’m a Brit, out here looking at a couple of business opportunities.’

‘And what line of business would that be?’ Shepherd said.

‘Oh, import-export, that sort of thing,’ said Parker. ‘It’s not every day I get a chance to buy fellow-Brits a drink in this tropical hellhole, so what’ll it be? Same again?’  Shepherd couldn’t help but notice that Parker had cleverly managed to stop any further questioning of what he was doing in the country.

As he went to the bar, Jock and Shepherd exchanged a look. ‘We should have asked for Six drinks,’ Shepherd said.

Farid looked blank, but none of the SAS men needed the cryptic comment explained. They’d all reached the same conclusion: Parker was a member of MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service.

The sky was darkening into dusk and Shepherd could see lightning already flashing over the mountains to the east. A few moments later, the bats flitting among the palms disappeared and a curtain of rain began to fall. Within seconds it was drumming on the corrugated iron roof and sending torrents of water sweeping through the street in a foaming brown tide.

Thirty minutes later the storm ended as suddenly as it had begun, the floodwaters ebbed away and the evening chorus of frogs resumed. Clouds of mosquitoes again filled the air and the bats resumed hunting for moths drawn by the flickering glow of the lights. Street traders emerged from the doorways and shacks where they’d been sheltering and set up again around the hotel, lighting candles to illuminate their threadbare selection of goods.

 The lights in the hotel and in the buildings across the city flickered and died in one of the frequent power cuts, but after a few seconds of silence there was a rapidly growing noise of generators being fired up all over the city, a metallic chorus counterpointing the incessant croaking of the frogs.

Parker returned from the bar with a second tray full of beers and, Shepherd noted with a smile that he had brought another soft drink for himself. Parker settled himself in his chair, raised his glass to them. ‘Cheers, lads,’ he said.

‘How long have you been in Sierra Leone?’ asked Shepherd. Parker had put a beer down in front of him but he was sticking to the Jamesons. He was rapidly acquiring a taste for the Irish whiskey.

‘Too bloody long,’ said Parker, neatly avoiding the question.

‘What can you tell us about the place?’ asked Jock, ‘other than the fact that it’s a shit-hole.’

Parker smiled. ‘The infrastructure is rudimentary.  Sierra Leone doesn’t even have a railway system. There was a single line with a couple of side-branches but it was only narrow gauge and in any event it closed twenty years ago. However, it does does have the third largest natural harbour in the world, and is one of the world’s biggest producers of bauxite and rutile…’

‘Rutile?’ Jimbo interrupted. ‘What the hell is that?’

‘Titanium ore,’ said Parker. ‘The country is also a major producer of platinum, gold, chromide, iron ore, coffee and cocoa, but its greatest sources of wealth are the diamond fields. That’s why this little piece of Africa has been hit by a succession of coups, counter-coups and civil wars. The diamond fields are what they call alluvial, which means they’re accessible to anyone with a shovel and a sieve and so there’s large scale illegal mining.’

Jimbo grinned. ‘I can lay my hands on a shovel or too, lads? What do you say?’ 

‘Sierra Leone should be one of the richest countries in the world and yet by whatever yardstick you choose, it’s pretty much the poorest ,’ continued Parker. ‘Sierra Leone’s assets and the national wealth are all owned by foreign corporations or lodged in the Swiss bank accounts of politicians and generals. Bribery and corruption runs right through the government here, no matter what their politics. Civil servants and teachers go unpaid, so everyone has to steal in one way or another, just to survive. And since the government has no foreign currency reserves it’s still handing over what’s left of its dwindling stock of assets at knockdown prices. Even the mercenaries fighting here are paid in mineral rights, so all they’re interested in doing is protecting their diamond concessions, not fighting the rebels.’

‘And what about the diamonds?’ Shepherd said. ‘Who makes money out of them? The government?’

‘The trade in them is controlled largely by Lebanese traders like Farid here, and Israelis with connections to the international diamond markets in Antwerp,’ said Parker.

Farid nodded eagerly. ‘I’ve been buying diamonds in Sierra Leone for more than twenty-five years,’ he said. ‘And even while the Civil War has been raging, I’ve still been able to buy a few carats here and there. But every year, even though the mines’ production remains much the same, there are less and less for sale.’

‘Because they’re being smuggled out of the country?’

‘Exactly,’ said Parker.  ‘Liberia, just to the east of Sierra Leone, is one of the biggest diamond exporters in the world. There are even more diamond merchants in the capital, Monrovia, than there are in Antwerp.’

‘So what?’ Jimbo said. He was frowning and clearly having trouble following the conversation.

‘Just this: there are no diamond mines in Liberia,’ said Parker. ‘Every single one of the gemstones that are traded there every year has been plundered from Sierra Leone. The official figures say that two million carats of diamonds are produced for export from Sierra Leone every year, but unofficial figures suggest that at least twice that number are smuggled over the border. They’re known as “blood diamonds” for the obvious reason that an awful lot of blood is spilt in obtaining them.’

‘However,’ Farid said, ‘for the last twelve months, the flow of diamonds through Liberia and Sierra Leone has dropped dramatically. Yet production from the mines has actually risen slightly.’ He spread his hands, palms upwards. ‘What conclusions can we draw from that other than that somewhere in Sierra Leone there is now a large cache of illicit diamonds which everyone - governments, rebels, mercenaries and yes,’ he said with a smile, ‘traders like me, are trying to get their hands on.’

There was a silence while the SAS men digested this. ‘Farid,’ Parker said eventually. ‘I wonder if I could have a private word with these gentlemen?’

Farid pursed his lips in annoyance. ‘Do you not trust me, my friend?’

‘Of course I do. It’s just that this is…’ He paused as if groping for just the right word. ‘It’s... well it’s a delicate, personal matter.’

‘Very well, then. I have some calls to make in any case,’ Farid said, though his expression showed his annoyance. He prised himself out of his chair and lumbered off towards the lobby.