Читать книгу Gambian Bluff - David Monnery, David Monnery - Страница 9

The column of five open lorries, each carrying twenty ex-prisoners, rumbled through Serekunda and south towards Yundum Airport. It had been light for only an hour or so, and the heat was not yet oppressive. Diba sat alongside Konko, the Kalashnikov leaning against his thigh, watching the countryside go by. He was not very happy with the situation. A town man, he felt much more confident of melting away into the scenery when it was composed of shanty compounds. Outside the town he felt too conspicuous.

Still, he had had no chance to get away again since returning to the temporary barracks an hour before dawn. Most of the other nocturnal absentees had also come back: like Diba they saw little hope of escaping the country under the present circumstances, and no hope of anything but longer prison terms from a returning Jawara. For the moment the new regime was their only friend – not to mention their only source of weaponry and ammunition.

The lorries with the Kalashnikovs had drawn up outside the barracks just as dawn was breaking, and the men had been told to claim their guns as they boarded. The new regime was obviously not composed entirely of fools.

Diba wondered if he really would find himself in a battle before the day was over. Not if he could help it, he told himself.

‘Where do you think we’re going?’ Konko asked him.

‘The airport,’ Diba replied. It was a guess. There was nothing else of any importance in this direction, only three hundred miles of villages. Unless of course the new government had decided to invade the rest of Africa.