Tenth Man Down (23 page)

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Authors: Chris Ryan

BOOK: Tenth Man Down
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‘Training for what? For the war, I suppose. My God, I would rather train dogs. At least they do not eat each other.’
‘Well, it’s our job.’
‘All these shootings this morning, these explosions.’
‘That was an exercise, a practice battle.’
‘It is finished?’
‘For the time being, yes.’
‘Then you can take me back, perhaps.’
‘Back? Where to?’
‘To Gorongosa.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘The Gorongosa national park. Where we came from. It is in Mozambique.’
‘Mozambique! Jesus! You flew from there?’
‘Quite sure.’
‘But it’s bloody miles away. The border’s far enough. How far’s Gorongosa inside Mozambique?’
‘The park headquarters? Perhaps two hundred, three hundred kilometres.’
‘How long did it take?’
She waved both hands in a gesture that said, ‘How do
I
know?’ Then, ‘Maybe two hours, three hours.’
‘What time did you take off?’
‘In the morning . . . what time was the accident?’
‘Lunchtime.’
‘So, we take off at nine, nine-thirty, maybe. Not sure.’
‘Heading for where?’
‘Yes,’ she said, as if still calculating. ‘Now I remember. It was after breakfast. Nine exactly.’
‘And where were you going?’
‘
Endlich
, to Windhoek, but first to Gaborone, in Botswana. You have a map? I show you.’
‘Okay. Just a minute.’
I walked back through the grove of trees and found Whinger in precisely the same position, still shaking.
‘Had her yet?’ he asked casually.
‘Twice,’ I told him. ‘Listen. She doesn’t realise I talked to you before I saw her. She never mentioned coming over here. She’s lying all the time. Where’s our map of the area, the one without Gutu marked on it?’
‘On the pinkie.’ He pointed at a millboard slung round the windscreen pillar. ‘Why?’
‘I need to check her story. There’s something about her that doesn’t hang together. She says the plane came from Mozambique, and I don’t reckon it can have. She’s fucking curious about where we are, and I don’t want her to know. I want her kept well in the dark about what we’re doing.’
‘What did she think all those bangs were, then?’
‘I told her it was an exercise. Pass the word to anyone you see.’
‘Roger.’
Back under the sausage tree, I asked, ‘How long have you lived in Africa?’
‘All my life. My grandfather came from Germany, 1946.’
Nazis, I thought immediately. Nazis on the run after the war.
‘What did he do?’
‘Skins.
Was heisst
“
Gerberei
”?’
‘Tannery?’
‘
Ja, ja
. He made animal skins. Zebra, cheetah, ostrich.’
I nodded. ‘And what’s Windhoek like now?’
‘Quite small. There is the Kaiserstrasse, with hotels and shops. Otherwise, not much.’
‘People speak German?’
‘All. German and Afrikaans.’
‘English?’
‘
Wenig.
’
I opened the map and handed it to her, standing beside her to point things out.
‘We’re somewhere round here.’ I indicated a large area.
First she spread the map over her knees, but then she held it out at arm’s length, as far from her as she could reach.
‘
Meine Brille
,’ she said. ‘My spectacles. To read, I need spectacles.’ She reached to where the left front pocket of a safari shirt would have been.
‘Short-sighted, are you?’
‘Short, no. Long. I can read a newspaper one kilometre distance, but from close, no. You have such spectacles?’
I shook my head. ‘None of our guys uses them.’
‘And the blex?’
‘Don’t need ’em.’
She gave a snort of exasperation, and said, ‘So where is the border of Mozambique?’
‘Away over there.’ I waved extravagantly to the right of the sheet. ‘Well off the map. This is quite large scale.’
‘And we cannot drive there?’
‘Not a chance. We’re too far from the border. And anyway, we haven’t any permission to cross. The frontier guards would go bananas if us lot turned up.’
She glowered at me, as if her predicament was my fault. To lower the temperature, I asked, ‘What were you doing in Gorongosa, anyway?’
‘Wildbemerkung.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Game assessment. Many animals are killed in the civil war. We try to estimate how much game survives, for the possibility of hunting again.’
‘But you say you don’t run safaris?’
‘No. We make totals – counts – from the air, to provide information.’
‘And what did you see? Elephants?’
‘Very few. Most have been shot.
Nashorn – total kaputt
.’
‘Nashorn?’
‘It is rhino. All gone. But impala okay, kudu okay, giraffe quite good. Zebra,
natürlich
. Warthog okay.’
‘Well.’ I folded the map. ‘The only thing I suggest is that you go out on the plane tomorrow.’
‘Plane? What is this?’
‘A Kamangan military aircraft is coming down tomorrow on a resupply run. Maybe it could lift you out.’
‘Where does it go?’
‘To Mulongwe, or somewhere just outside.’
‘Mulongwe!
Das ist ein Dreckhaufen
, a shit-heap. I don’t go there.’
‘You’d be better off there than here.’
‘By no means. The Kamangans cancel all international flights because of the war. There is no way I can get out of Mulongwe. Probably they put me in gaol because I am Namibian. If I go to hospital for my leg, I catch Aids. Quite sure. Mulongwe – no.’
I was thinking, you’ll go where you’re fucking well told. In any case, how did she know what was going on in the Kamangan capital?
Luckily, someone forestalled further argument by shouting for me from our living area. I just said, ‘Sorry, I’ll see you in a minute,’ and walked away.
I couldn’t quite make out what it was that was making me feel so pissed off. The woman’s arrogance didn’t help, but if we were going to get rid of her within twenty-four hours, what did it matter? I also realised I was tired. We’d been up most of the night, and once the adrenalin of the assault had drained away, there was bound to be a sense of let-down. Yet none of this quite accounted for the black feeling that seemed to have settled on me.
I kept trying to analyse the reason. It wasn’t the state of affairs at the mine; for the time being I didn’t much care what was going on there. We’d helped Alpha Commando recapture it, and there our responsibility ended. It didn’t take us to get the machinery going again or to keep an eye on the diamonds – that was down to the Kamangans. I wanted to help old Boisset, but if he preferred to stay put, that was up to him. We needed to get his message through, and maybe we could do that in the evening. The trouble was that for the moment our comms were down. You get these periods when satcom phones don’t work, and there’s nothing you can do but wait for the system to sort itself out.
Whinger was on my mind, as well. But suddenly I realised, or thought I realised, what the real trouble was. The day before, I’d taken my weekly anti-malaria tablet, Lariam. Back in Hereford the MO had issued each of us with two little foil packs of the big white bombers, one to be taken every week for eight weeks on end, without fail. Everyone said that Lariam was dodgy stuff, but that it was the only drug still proving effective in the part of Africa where we’d be working. The mozzies, apparently, had wised up to all the older drugs like Paludrine and Mepacrine. Several of the lads, particularly Chalky, had been quite nervous of the possible side-effects of Lariam, printed on the leaflet that came with each packet. They’d tried to take the piss out of the warnings, but they hadn’t convinced themselves.
Now I remembered Pavarotti putting on a phoney doctor’s voice as he read out, ‘Most common unwanted effects: dizziness, vertigo, loss of balance, headache, sleep problems. Less common unwanted effects: psychiatric reactions which may be disabling and last for several weeks, unusual changes in mood or behaviour, feelings of worry or depression, persecution, crying, aggression—’ At that point there’d been loud cries of ‘For fuck’s sake!’, and he’d laid off. But I know that Andy, for one, had binned his tablets rather than swallow them, and I suspect a couple more of the guys had done the same, just as they’d rejected the anti-nerve gas stuff handed out before the Gulf War in 1991. I’d taken my Lariam regularly, and so far had had no problems.
But now I felt so peculiar that I began to wonder: was the stuff getting to me at last? If it was, there was nothing I could do about it, and maybe it was this thought that relaxed me. In any case, I drifted off to sleep.
I was woken by Phil shaking my shoulder.
‘Rise and shine, mate,’ he went.
I sat up, sweating all over. ‘Christ! What’s the time?’
‘Midday.’
I’d been out for nearly three hours. I should have felt refreshed, but even when I’d scrubbed my face with a wet rag I still had the same thick sensation in my head, and Phil did nothing to clear it by starting in again about the woman.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said as I sat there trying to get myself together. ‘You had a run-in with her as well?’
‘She fucking started it. She shouted at me as I was going past.’
‘What did she want?’
‘She’s found out where we are, more or less.’
‘How?’
‘One of the silveries told her we were close to the river Kameni.’
‘Fuck it!’
‘Yeah, and now she’s screaming about a place called Msisi.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Christ knows.’ Phil scratched his head. ‘She claims it’s on the river. Therefore she reckons we can’t be far from it. She says it’s a hospital, run by Roman Catholic nuns.’
‘A hospital? I thought such things didn’t exist around here.’
‘This is the only one, apparently. Part convent, part
Krankenhaus
.’
‘So what?’
‘She wants us to take her there,’ said Phil. ‘She reckons the nuns’ll sort out her ankle.’
‘I don’t believe it. What does she think they’ve got? Fucking X-ray machines that work without electricity? Wait till they
hear
her. That’ll finish her chances. What’s wrong with Mulongwe, for Christ’s sake?’
‘Dunno,’ said Phil. ‘She just won’t hear of it.’
‘This place, Msisi. Is it on the map?’
‘Not this one.’ Phil picked up the bum map and scanned it. ‘Not if it’s on the river.’
‘How does she know about this convent, anyway?’
‘Her party was going to land there on their way across, just to make sure the nuns were okay.’
‘In that case it must be to the west, somewhere downstream. Try the good map.’
While Phil dug it out, I was turning the idea over in my mind: a quick run down to Msisi would be one way to get Braun off our hands. If the nuns had an airstrip, they could get her flown out from there. Also, maybe they could give Whinger better treatment than we could. Certainly the environment of even a primitive hospital would be less dangerous to someone with major skin loss than the shitty conditions in which we were living. The nuns might have better drugs, too.
But then Phil came back, saying, ‘Nothing. I’ve followed the river all the way down.’
‘Is it supposed to be a village, or what?’
‘No, just a group of buildings on some sort of bluff.’
‘No wonder it isn’t marked, then. Wait a minute, though. I tell you who’ll know: the old Belgian. We’ll go back down and ask him.’
‘Fair enough.’ Phil folded the map away. ‘She’s obsessed about the plane, too. Keeps asking questions.’
‘Like?’
‘It ken fly again, yes?’ He imitated the German intonation perfectly. ‘I told her, “Can it hell?”’
‘She already knew it got burnt out. I told her that myself.’
‘She can’t seem to accept that. She was on about her passport and stuff. “Vot heff zey finded?” I told her you’d found bugger all. She started asking me about Whinger. Did he get into the plane? How did he get burnt? Then it was, “Ve can go back zere, yes?” “No way,” I said. “We’d never find the spot.”’
‘It’s as if she wanted to recover something,’ I said.
‘I suggested that. But she said no, she just wanted to see the place where her companions died.’

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