Thunder in the Blood
Read Thunder in the Blood Online
Authors: Graham Hurley
Thunder in the Blood
Graham Hurley
© Graham Hurley 2012
To Bill Flynn with love
Dimmi se mai fu fatto qualche cosa?
Leonardo da Vinci
Yesterday, according to my father, was the first day of spring. He hauled out the old push-mower and tramped up and down the lawn beneath my window, and when the grass was cut he took the mower to pieces, wiping off the winter grease, freshly oiling the moving parts.
I took a break from the book, watching him through the open window. When he’d finished, he looked up at me, wiping his hands on a length of rag. I leaned out of the window, amazed, as ever, by his logic.
‘Why do that first?’ I said. ‘Why make life so hard for yourself?’
He didn’t answer for a moment, just stood there smiling, gently amused. ‘Good question,’ he said, ‘coming from you.’
He’s got a point. I’ve been here now for nearly four months, back in the bedroom I grew up in, six hours a day at the tiny fold-down table by the bed. On the floor, all around me, are the sources I’ve drawn on for what follows in this book, the raw material which has made the account possible. There are diaries, cuttings, books, magazine articles, letters, transcripts of various interviews and three boxes of video and audio cassettes. The material is carefully organized and I’ve lived with the stuff for so long that I can access anything in a matter of seconds, but to anyone else I know it looks a mess: an ocean of paper, spilling across the carpet. It’s a scene which has greeted my parents every time they’ve come up with a cup of tea, or a sandwich, or a message from a caller, and I know they’re as puzzled now as when I began, three cold days into the New Year.
Last time I occupied this room for any length of time, I was seventeen years old and on the verge of university: cheerful, trusting, headstrong, exuberant and quite fearless. Now, more than a
decade later, I’m none of those things. The Sarah of my father’s dreams has become a solitary obsessive: sober, thoughtful, not given over-much to conversation, unprepared for now to share the secrets of the growing pile of typescript at my elbow. This new me, the lodger upstairs in Sarah’s bedroom, isn’t someone they recognize or perhaps even like, but that, I suspect, is the way it has to be. Telling a story like this exacts a certain price.
These are the facts, the way I first heard them. In September 1991, a journalist on a specialist UK defence magazine was attending a three-day conference in Geneva. On the first evening, late, he found himself talking to an American. The American was a senior design engineer with a major defence contractor. He was very drunk.
The journalist bought more drinks. They talked about the Gulf War. They moved on to a night club. Past three in the morning, in the cab back to the hotel, the American told him that his own company had done exceptionally well out of the war. Their equipment had showcased on the Basra Road and he had the videos to prove it. Better still, post-war, they’d won a multi-million dollar re-equipment order from the Kuwaitis. For this, the American had been duly grateful. In the post-Cold War sales vacuum, Saddam Hussein was effectively keeping his company afloat.
Back at the hotel, the journalist sensed there was more to come. Over brandies, in the privacy of his hotel room, the American got into the small print of the re-equipment deal. His company, he said, had been contacted at the highest level by the US State Department and given specific instructions on when to pitch to the Kuwaitis and what bid would be acceptable. The instructions were very precise: a specific day and a specific price. His company was left in no doubt that the business was there for the taking. All they had to do was follow the chalk marks on the trees. And so it had proved.
The journalist said that sounded very interesting. He’d heard similar stories from other sources. The American nodded and fell silent for a while. Then, according to the journalist, he looked up. The point about the State Department, he said, was the date of their covert approach. They’d been in touch on 7 January 1991… nine days
before
Desert Storm had even begun.
The journalist thought about the conversation overnight. To him, the Gulf War had never made any kind of military sense. The Allied casualties had been impossibly low, lower even than the budgeted deaths for a peacetime exercise of equivalent scale. Not because of luck or some special genius in the Americans’ conduct of the war but because Saddam had consistently pulled his punches, making a long tally of elementary mistakes.
Why no overseas terrorist strikes? Why only one serious attack on Allied shipping? Why withdraw the best Iraqi warplanes, Saddam’s precious MiG–29s, so quickly? Why such poor targeting of the Scud missiles? Error margins so gross that they began to look deliberate? Why deploy the best Iraqi army units to totally ineffective positions? How come the Allies got through the minefields so quickly? With such little loss of life? Why no use of chemical weapons?
In review, the cumulative scale of military blunders had occasionally made the journalist wonder whether Saddam had
ever
been serious about ‘the mother of battles’.
Now, the conversation with the American businessman fresh in his mind, the journalist began to think the thing through all over again. The Gulf War had, after all, conferred blessings on both leaders. Internationally, George Bush had emerged with enormous political and military prestige, architect and master of a ‘new world order’. Domestically, likewise, he’d become the hero-president: guardian of American lives, saviour of the American arms industry, moral leader of the Free World. God knows, thanks to lavish dollar contributions from non-participating nations (like the Japanese), he’d even managed to run the war at a
profit.
For the expense of little blood, he’d acquired huge amounts of treasure.
And Saddam? Remarkably, despite the attentions of the best-equipped coalition army in the history of warfare, he and his regime had survived intact. Bridges were down, sewage flooded the streets, food was scarce and the chemical and nuclear programmes had been set back a decade, but Saddam’s grip on Iraq was, if anything, even tighter. The Republican Guards were as loyal as ever and huge portions of the troublesome conscript army had been incinerated on the Basra Road. In the immediate aftermath of the war – thanks to the passive connivance of the
Americans – Saddam had even managed to deploy his gunships and armour and smash a dissident Shiite rebellion in the south.
So why the symmetry? How come so much violence had finally resolved so little?
The journalist brooded. On the face of it, a behind-the-scenes, covert understanding between Washington and Baghdad on precisely how the war should be fought seemed inconceivable. Yet the more he thought about it the more this explanation seemed to fit all the facts. What if the two leaderships had conferred through third parties after the invasion of Kuwait? What if an agreement had been hammered out? A shooting script for the conduct of the war? A painstaking, highly publicized build-up of arms in the Gulf followed by the swift expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait? Baghdad spared? Saddam spared? American lives spared? George Bush (and the American arms industry) walking tall?
Next morning, the journalist went looking for the American. He had more questions to ask. He needed detail: names, dates, phone numbers. He knocked on the American’s hotel door. There was no reply. Downstairs, he enquired at the desk. The clerk checked his bookings and then looked up. Unaccountably, at six in the morning, the American had checked out and returned to the States. The remaining two days of the conference were, it seemed, no longer of any interest.
That was the way I first heard it. Later, I got to know the journalist. His name was Wesley Keogh. I knew the American, too, a man called Grant Wallace. I visited his grave last month, a corner plot in a small, shadowed half-acre within sight of the Shenandoah River. I went there for two reasons: partly to pay my respects and partly to make sure the man was really dead. Three months with Wesley had that kind of effect on me. Believe nothing until you’ve seen it for yourself.
Wesley’s dead, too. I was very close to him in the months before he died, and everything that follows is based on what he told me, what I found out for myself and on the tapes, notes and diaries that he left behind, the material that surrounds me now.
Towards the end, when it was obvious that he wasn’t going to make it, Wesley brooded on whether or not to ask me to take over, to risk unleashing me on the foothills of the mountain he’d
tried so hard to climb. He was far too proud to put the thought into words and when I did it for him he pretended that the idea had come as a great surprise. He thought about it for a day or two. Then he said yes, on two conditions. It had to do justice to the story. And it had to be worth my while, something I truly believed in.
He need never have worried. Wesley Keogh was an exceptional man, the bravest person I ever met, and I loved him for it. Hence, if he’s still listening, this book.
The story begins, bear with me, in Africa.
I arrived in Kinshasa on 2.8 July 1984, three days short of my twenty-second birthday. I had a second-class university degree in English and a large canvas holdall stuffed with the clothes I thought I’d need for the next nine months. The holdall had been a going-away present from my father, a relic from his more active years in the Royal Marines, and I hauled it around like a talisman. It had seen him through some tricky postings in Northern Ireland and I saw no reason why the eleven-hour flight from Gatwick should have affected its karma.
At Kinshasa, I joined a river boat called the
Colonel Ebeya.
There are quicker and more comfortable ways of making the thousand-mile journey to Kisangani, but three years at Cambridge had given me a hearty appetite for real life. The
Colonel Ebeya
was an old boat. It plied up and down the Zaire River pushing six double-decker barges before it. The barges were jammed solid with people. I never counted, but there were evidently more than five thousand. They packed the gangways and rooftops. They spread sleeping mats where there was space. They napped, played cards, plucked chickens, butchered monkeys, chewed manioc, pounded plantains, washed clothes and doused their kids in river water from powdered milk cans lowered carefully over the side.
The first evening, I abandoned my shared first-class cabin aboard the
Colonel Ebeya
and clambered on to one of the barges. The companionways were virtually impassable.
Commerçants
at makeshift tables sold soap, salt, sugar, fishhooks, medicines and bread. The decks underfoot were slippery with enormous catfish, giant eels and glistening piles of grotesque bottom-fish netted from the river. When I finally located a seat, I found the space
below the table occupied by a ten-foot crocodile, still alive, trussed to a pole. The crocodile had green eyes and smelled, unaccountably, of diesel oil. Its jaws were bound shut with lianas and every minute or so it farted. If equatorial Africa was a culture shock, the
Colonel Ebeya
was instant trauma.
It took twenty-nine days to get to Kisangani. In some ways the journey changed my life and I arrived with none of my comfortable European assumptions intact. Every morning I awoke, sweating, to the same smells: smoked fish, roasting palm grubs and the overwhelming stench of the latrine. The noise of the
commerçants
and the kids and the tribes of orphaned young monkeys on the deck overhead was deafening, and when I rolled over in the narrow bunk and peered through a crack in the welded metal shutters, the view always seemed the same: the unending tropical rain forest, huge and clammy and green, a soupy broth of life-forms crowding down to the sluggish brown water at the river’s edge. I’d never been anywhere so fertile and so forbidding. By the time the
Colonel Ebeya
docked at the journey’s end and I managed to find an old Peugeot taxi to take me to the Mission Hospital, I felt comprehensively outnumbered. The Europeans had got it all wrong. In terms of the life-force, what the planet could
really
do, we were doomed.
I’d come to Zaire to spread the good word about AIDS. I’d applied for the job through a Christian newsletter my mother takes but seldom reads. I travelled up from Devon for the interview and spent a pleasant enough afternoon with two elderly presbyters and a retired district nurse. My qualifications, aside from a working knowledge of French, were non-existent. I never went to church. I knew nothing about epidemiology. I knew precious little about AIDS. But I had a good degree and a nice smile and I was candid to the point of bluntness about the speed with which I could pick things up. By teatime, after a lengthy discussion of a transatlantic crossing I’d done aboard a forty-foot yacht, I knew I’d got the job. The younger of the two men leafed again through my hastily typed CV.
‘You’ve certainly been around,’ he said. ‘Was there ever a favourite place?’
‘America,’ I said without hesitation, ‘last year.’
‘Whereabouts?’
‘New York, Chicago, West Coast…’ I shrugged. ‘I loved them all.’
‘And you were there
alone
?’
‘Yes.’
‘No companion? No boyfriend?’
‘No.’
‘Was that wise?’
‘Probably not.’ I smiled again. ‘But it never got dull.’
I spent six months in Kisangani, working from a tiny office in a near-empty wing of the old Mission Hospital. A lot of the time I was out in the bush, accompanying a young French nurse called Monique who was as close to a saint as anyone I’ve ever met. We travelled together from village to village by jeep and motor-driven wooden canoe. We had a blackboard and a box of chalks and an ancient generator-driven projector for after-dark slide shows, and we offered a cartoon account of the interplay between the body’s immune system and the tiny packet of protein and nucleic acid they call the HIV virus. Interestingly, in our presentation the T-cells and the B-cells, the body’s trusty warriors, were always black, while the HIV virus, the unwanted interloper, was always white. In the end we made a joke of this, we white girls from Kisangani, and it never failed to raise a quiet laugh.
The Africans called the disease ‘Slim’ and many of the people we met, either in the bush or the Mission Hospital, were already victims. After a month or so I could spot the symptoms at first glance: weight loss, lassitude, fatigue, yeast growths in the mouth, visible swellings in the neck and groin. The disease had been rife for years, part of the landscape, and for the most part the sick were remarkably sanguine about what awaited them. Monique, a practising Christian, put this down to faith but I wasn’t so sure. These people lived here. They knew the jungle. They knew the biological odds. They knew where the food chain began and ended, and if it wasn’t a leopard or a crocodile or a snake that got them then it might as well be a virus. This sense of resignation, of mute acceptance, was pervasive. In Lingala, the local language, there were no separate words for yesterday or tomorrow. Time-wise, there was now, and not now. Somehow, the HIV virus fitted nicely into this stoic view of human life. The virus was the untamed beast, the hand that reached out from the rain forest,
immune to white man’s medicines, eager for fresh kills.
Towards the end of my six months, on our blackboard, we gave the virus a name. The taker of lives and layer-waste of whole communities we called George. In the light of later events, it was a curiously prophetic choice of name, though it was to be another five years before I realized why.
At about this time, in New York City, Wesley contracted HIV. I’ve got a photo of him from that trip, part of my precious archive, and it shows a tall, gangly twenty-eight-year-old standing on a street corner on one side of Times Square, the eager young reporter recently taken on by a big national tabloid, the provincial boy made good. Whoever took the picture knew nothing about photography because the background, sunlit, is in perfect focus, while Wesley is in shadow, dramatically blurred. The smile’s still there, though, his head cocked slightly to one side, the hair savagely barbered, the eyes slightly bulbous, the ears too big. He looks immensely pleased with himself, that very special combination of mischief and genius, and the forefinger of one hand is looped into the belt of his jeans, his own awkward parody of high camp.
Wesley had flown to New York on assignment. I found what passed for the brief amongst a pile of other souvenirs he’d kept from the trip. According to the features editor Wesley was to unearth background on a drugs feature but, ever curious, he’d decided to broaden the brief with a visit to a selection of the city’s bathhouses. Gay himself, with a limitless appetite for what he called ‘really horrible sex’, he’d become rather less than objective and at some point between the second and the fifth of April, he’d taken one risk too many. Later, it became a source of some regret that he could never put a name or a face to the person who’d effectively ended his life. It could, he said with a frown, have been any of three dozen men.
Either way, back in England, he fell ill almost immediately with a flu-like fever – muscle aches and sweating – which lasted rather longer than usual but nevertheless cleared up. Impatient to return to work, he ignored a friend’s advice to get himself tested. Only seven months later, as part of the research on another story, did he allow a doctor to draw 10 mls of his blood and send it away
for analysis. The results came back five days later and Wesley kept the letter they sent him through the post. ‘Dear Mr Keogh,’ it goes, ‘Further to your recent test, we would ask you to return for additional discussions with Dr Webber. You may wish to bring a relative or a friend …’ Wesley, typically, did neither. Bad news, he always said, was like life. Better confronted alone.
I returned from Zaire in the late spring of 1985, staying with my parents in their house in Budleigh Salterton. Budleigh is a small, genteel seaside town in east Devon. The locals call it ‘God’s waiting room’, and it’s much favoured by retired folk of the moneyed kind. There are avenues on the southern edge of the town, up towards the golf course, where it’s difficult to find anyone below the rank of Rear-Admiral, but my father had long since settled for something a little more modest, a neat thirties house near the town’s centre, with a decently kept garden and a couple of fruit trees and distant glimpses of the sea from the upstairs bedrooms. I’d grown up there, an only child, and I’d loved it.
The summer came and went. I’d managed to save a little money from Africa, and when that had gone I began to commute daily to Exmouth, a bigger town along the coast. A young couple my mother knew had opened a nursing home and they were always short-handed. They’d bought a property called Beacon Hill House, a handsome Georgian mansion with wonderful views down the coast. Inside, the place was shabby and chaotic, but the couple who ran it – Eileen and Pete – became good friends, and I spent three months emptying bedpans and spoonfeeding elderly women until the novelty began to fade. By September, both my parents and I agreed that my life, post-university, was going nowhere.
Part of the problem was my spell abroad. People say you don’t leave Africa by getting on a plane. On the contrary, you take the place with you, its smells, its madness, its frequent and at times brutal reminders that life isn’t all fast food and bus stops.
One particular episode had made a deep impression. A couple of weeks before I was due to leave, there’d been an incident down by the docks, a brief flurry of violence between a group of fishermen from upriver and a couple of local merchants. The
cause of the quarrel was obscure, but the fishermen returned upriver with one of their number savagely beaten. Later that night, they came back. Unable to find the merchants, they kidnapped a relative of one of them. They woke him up, bound his wrists behind his back and walked him on to the street. There they beat him unconscious with lengths of rubber hosepipe and cut his throat with a gutting knife. Then they hacked off his genitals and stuffed them in his mouth. Next day, he was still lying dead in the street, his body in full view. I saw him on the way to the Mission Hospital. I recognized what was left of his face because he’d recently helped us fix a puncture on the jeep. His name was Malu and he was barely eleven years old.
There was an investigation of sorts, but no arrests. Everyone knew who’d done it, but no one seemed to care. Monique and I attended his funeral and laid flowers on his grave. His family hardly dared look at us. The message was plain: we were white; we didn’t understand; Malu had been taken; there was no point making a fuss. For months, back in England, I brooded on this incident. Economically, Zaire had long been a basket case even in Africa, and I’d seen plenty of suffering. The place was a real mess and I’d gone way beyond the point of being surprised or angered by it, but the sight of Malu’s broken body, already swelling in the heat, had tripped a switch deep in my head.
I’d never been remotely political, but that single image forced me to think for the first time about the glue that sticks society together. Old-fashioned things. Like justice. And law. And order. Sometimes, on the occasional evenings I spent at home, I tried to discuss it with my father. We’d never been especially close – he’d spent most of my childhood away on various postings – but my descriptions of daily life in Kisangani struck a chord with him, too.
The British, it seemed, were also locked in conflict. The miners’ strike had dragged on through the winter I’d been away, no quarter offered or given, and the prime minister seemed to have turned confrontation into a way of life. Everything, quite suddenly, had become black and white. There was good and there was evil. There was right and there was wrong. The middle ground had gone. Either you were a believer or you weren’t, and if you weren’t then you were simply ignored. The moderates,
according to my father, had been neutered, and the only language that now mattered was the language of violence. Anarchists on the rampage. Riot police on horseback. Thirty pounds of Semtex in a Brighton hotel, the prime minister escaping death by the width of an en suite bathroom.
Recently attached to some kind of forward planning unit in the Ministry of Defence, my father was now close enough to the heart of it all to understand what a delicate structure our society really was. Concepts like law and order, he said, rested on an elaborate conjuring trick, an illusion. There were more, lots more, of them than us. Exactly who ‘they’ were and what my father meant by ‘us’ I never quite fathomed, but the moment ‘they’ realized the true odds, the sleight of hand at the heart of democracy, then the trick was revealed and the game was over. What remained was chaos and violence and the slow surrender to corruption and anarchy. Poor Malu.
In retrospect, I shouldn’t make too much of these conversations. They happened twice, perhaps three times, and what mattered most about them to me was the interest my father took in what had happened in Zaire. I warmed to his questions. They seemed to me to be the beginnings of a real relationship and accordingly I told him everything. But my father, I suspect, took a great deal more from our heart to hearts. Behind the slow smile and the occasional asides, he was thinking, as ever, on practical lines. I was twenty-three years old. I was highly educated. I could handle myself in most situations. I was wasted at the Beacon Hill House Nursing Home. I, and perhaps my country, deserved rather better than that.