Читать книгу Warlord - James Steel, James Steel - Страница 14

The megaphone crackles and squawks, ‘Move up!’ and Eve dutifully shuffles forward in the line of refugees.

The local Red Cross worker at the head of the line wears a fluorescent yellow waistcoat over his white Red Cross tee shirt. He wears the megaphone on a strap over his shoulder, holding a clipboard in one hand and the microphone and a pen in the other. He looks harassed as he tries to tick people off his list and keep the food distribution session under control. It’s only a small refugee camp, at Ikozi in south Kivu, just off the road from Bukavu out to Shabunda, but it still has five thousand people and is chaotic.

A former headmaster who lives in the camp helps him by measuring out the rice from sacks piled on the ground into the battered bowls and tatty sacks that people have brought with them.

Eve never wanted this passive life and it still feels alien to her. She was used to the hard work of village life: cooking, washing, tending the family vegetable patch. She is just an average girl with average dreams: she hopes one day to get the money to buy a hand-cranked sewing machine so she can set up as a seamstress and repair and make clothes.

Life has been pretty hard to her so far though. Her first husband, Bertrand, left her when she gave birth to an albino baby, regarding it as unclean. Eve’s own mother had shrieked with fear when the baby had emerged and run out of the hut. Bertrand left to return to his home village and she hasn’t heard from him since.

Some people do want albinos though. Hundreds are kidnapped and murdered in East Africa every year, their body parts dried and used as charms: tied to fishermen’s nets in Lake Kivu to attract a good catch, ground into powder and sprinkled by miners on the sides of their pits to draw precious metals to the surface, strapped to the front of traders’ trucks to bring them good fortune on journeys.

Where is my baby?

The thought of little Marie cut up and used in one of those scenarios is too much to bear.

Gabriel is the only piece of good news in her life. He met her when he was travelling through her village and was fascinated by her calm manner. The other girls teased Eve about him because he was so ugly. He wouldn’t have been Eve’s first pick but, as one of her friends said, love is a choice as well and in her circumstances she had to be realistic.

Gabriel is certainly ugly and he scares her sometimes with his intensity but he does also make her laugh. He is always so intent on impressing her, going on about his grand plans, angry in his desire to make money. He talks about his schemes for hours, using terms he has learned and that she doesn’t understand: brand value, profit margins, return on investment. She just sits and looks blank as he rants at her.

After a while though, he eases up and starts talking about people he has met on his travels. She has never travelled outside her village, but he has been all over the province, to the main towns of Goma, Bukavu and Uvira in the south and even as far as Beni in the goldfields in the far north. When he relaxes he can make her laugh with his stories about scrapes he has got into and deals he has done. That’s when she likes him, when his big jaw opens in a wide white grin and his prominent stomach shakes with laughter. They used to sit on the bench outside her hut and laugh and chat.

She hasn’t heard from him in a while though; he is overdue from his latest journey. She wonders what has happened to him – will he reject her because of the rape?

‘Move up!’

She shuffles forward and the headmaster bustles around, directing people to fill up their sacks and watching carefully that they don’t take too much. She hands over the chit for her family and then heaves the sack onto her back and walks away slowly and painfully.

Alex is showing Fang back out to his chauffeur-driven car parked on the gravel drive in front of the house. The April shower has passed and they make small talk about the weather and the best route back to London.

Alex is relieved that the meeting is over; he isn’t going to take the mission but he feels strangely disconcerted and cannot work out why.

As he gets to the car Fang turns and shakes his hand. The two tall men stand facing each other.

‘I realise that Operation Tiananmen is very large scale and takes a while to get used to but I am confident that once you have had time to think about it you will want to be involved. It would be the largest operation you could ever command.’

Alex smiles politely. ‘Well, thank you very much for your time in coming here today to explain it to me.’ He shakes the man’s hand.

He waves the car off as it moves away into the distance down the mile-long drive through the parkland until it passes the beech copse and is lost. He turns and looks at the dogs sitting at the top of the stone steps – his father’s two black labs, Bert and Audrey, that he inherited along with the title and estate when Sir Nicholas died a little while back.

The dogs miss the old man but Alex doesn’t. His father had been another Blues and Royals officer, a cantankerous alcoholic who had beaten his wife and whose influence had blighted Alex’s career in the regiment. He refused to let Alex go to university, which in the army, effectively barred him from promotion to colonel. Apart from which, in the small and snobbish world of the Household Cavalry, the reputation of drunkenness attached to the Devereux name had always made it hard for Alex to prove himself in the regiment.

His father’s final summation of his career had come in an argument over the phone during which he had shouted, ‘If you hadn’t been such a fucking failure, the family wouldn’t be in the mess it is!’ Alex had been struggling to disprove this assessment ever since.

Although Alex bears a grudge against his father and the British upper class, he isn’t going to bear one against the dogs. They need a walk, having been locked up in the kitchen during the meeting.

‘Come on!’ he says and walks off briskly round the corner of the house to the rose gardens in front of the Regency façade. The shower has blown over a trellis and he fossicks about, tutting and putting it back up. After that he spends a while throwing an old tennis ball for the dogs and they tangle with each other on the lawn.

He looks out over the parkland and then walks back round, entering the house from the other end through the door on the terrace into the library that he uses as his study in the red-brick Tudor section of the house. His desk is surrounded with piles of old copies of the Economist and periodicals from Chatham House, Royal United Services Institute, International Crisis Group and other defence think-tanks. The dogs jostle after him, puffing and grinning and wagging their tails. Now he has got his meeting out of the way he wonders what he will do today.

Life proceeds at a pretty slow pace. The repairs on the house are nearing completion, paid for with the money from his last big operation in Russia. It had fallen into disrepair as a result of his father’s drinking but has now been restored to something like its former glory: the roof has been redone, the dry rot sorted out and the gardens replanted. He’s got a final meeting in Hereford with the English Heritage surveyor but that’s not until next week.

Alex stops and realises he really is feeling unsettled by the meeting with Fang. He was supposed to be the Englishman at home in his castle, lord of all he surveys, and yet on a personal level he feels unnerved.

It was like sitting in a room with a global business droid looking at him through the narrow metal vision slits of his titanium glasses. He was a commercial chameleon, with a different name for every market he operated in, a multi-tasking, open-sourcing, integrated business platform capable of working simultaneously in multiple time zones. The guy was ten years younger than him but he was the one driving the meeting, the man in a hurry who wasn’t taking any prisoners. If Alex didn’t accept the project he would just find another way – like his steel delivery in Port Sudan.

Alex wondered where did the business stop and the person start? The answer was nowhere. Fang was a money-making organism, unimpeded by morality or etiquette. He ate, slept and breathed money.

It wasn’t just the personality though. It’s the scale and audacity of the vision he presented that makes Alex feel old and out of date. He was talking about infrastructure projects to open up an entire continent. There was a tone of disdain in the way Fang talked about the Western view of Africa and how his was the new vision for the future.

And maybe he was right? Alex had done his best to trip him up but he hadn’t managed to even make him stumble; the businessman had it all covered.

But the idea was bonkers.

It was all very well being young and enthusiastic and having visions about new world orders, but Iraq and Afghanistan had shown very well how the law of unintended consequences came into play when you started naively messing around with other people’s countries.

Where was the exit strategy?

What the hell would the US and the UN say to it all?

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Alex pauses in thought and then turns and makes his way through the oak-panelled library, the dogs following him. He goes into the medieval hall and then walks across its huge stone flags and into the large archway that leads up into the fortified tower. This is the original part of the house from the time when the area was the lawless Welsh Marches, prone to invasions and cattle rustling from Welsh bandits across the border.

The eighty-foot-high tower has thick stone walls and he walks up the spiral staircase, stepping in the groove worn into the stone by generations of his ancestors’ feet. He is feeling disconcerted and defensive and somehow the tower feels the right place to be.

He walks up to the top, opens the narrow wooden door and stands at the battlements. The dogs accompany him and sit smiling up at him uncertainly. The various roofs of the house are below him with their pointed gables and gargoyles, the gardens, parklands and outhouses all clearly visible.

But Alex stares out over them at the magnificent green hills beyond.

The captain glares at Sophie, his eyes wide and angry; white spittle flecks his upper lip. She stares at the black hole of his pistol muzzle. It’s 9mm across but looks much larger.

The soldier behind her pushes her in the back with his rifle and she stumbles forward onto her knees in front of him.

Sophie is terrified and starts babbling, ‘I’m sorry, terribly sorry, Captain. It’s all a mistake, a terrible mistake. Forgive me please!’

The door behind her opens and Nicolas slips into the room, speaking quietly and with a large fan of twenty-dollar bills in his outstretched hand. He has hurriedly fished them out of the emergency stock that he carries wrapped in a plastic bag in the petrol tank of the Land Cruiser.

‘Ah, Monsieur le Directeur, here is the payment for the permit à voyager, our sincere apologies for forgetting to buy one before we set out.’

He proffers them towards the captain, keeping his eyes and head down. The captain looks down at him. The intrusion has broken the violent tension in the room and the money is what he really wants. Somewhere in the back of his head he also knows that killing or injuring a white NGO worker would cause a fuss and could get him into trouble.

His ego has been assuaged by the grovelling of the woman on her knees in front of him; she looks pathetic. Nicolas is also in a suitably fawning posture and he takes the offer of a ladder to climb down. He grabs the money from his hand. ‘Get out of my office! Your paperwork will be issued in due course, when we are ready. Wait in your vehicle.’

Nicolas hustles Sophie out of the office and hurries her over to the Land Cruiser with his arm around her. Natalie is sitting on the backseat looking anxious.

‘What happened?’

Sophie gets into the backseat next to her, white as a sheet and shaking. The American goes to put her arm around her.

‘I’m fine!’ Sophie pushes her away, forcing herself to get a grip. ‘I’m fine! We just had some issues, that’s all, they’re sorting it out. We just have to wait a while.’

With that she shifts away from Natalie and stares out of the window. Natalie looks stunned and gazes out of the opposite window. Nicolas sits in the driver’s seat and waits patiently. The soldiers have their keys so they can’t go anywhere. Time is running out for the vaccines but there is nothing they can do. No one can even bring themselves to look at the building, they are too scared of it.

After ten minutes of strained silence Sophie says, ‘I’m just getting some air,’ slips out, walks away from the car and stands looking at the view, feeling the gentle breeze blow over her.

She stays like that for an age, in a numb trance of her own thoughts. Time ticks on and the sun suddenly drops out of the sky; they’re on the equator and there is only a short sunset. It gets chilly straightaway at six thousand feet and she goes back to the car to get her brightly coloured Kenyan shawl.

Eventually at seven o’clock the captain has judged that he has inconvenienced them enough and the sergeant walks back over to the car with their permit tucked back in its original place on the top of the folder. He hands the keys wordlessly back to Nicolas who accepts them with profuse gratitude.

They drive away from the shabby little station and some of the tension drains from them. Natalie mutters, ‘Thank the Lord,’ but otherwise they don’t talk – Nicolas because he is comfortable driving in silence, Natalie because she is afraid of Sophie and is now crying quietly on the backseat, and Sophie because she is shocked but also because she is furious.

She is furious at the soldiers for their pigheaded, money-grubbing wickedness and contempt for the people of their own country. The journey has been a complete waste, the vaccines are lukewarm and she will have to explain to the local field workers that she has wasted their time and effort and made them look stupid in front of the desperate people who are crying out for their help.

However, she is most furious with herself. She can hear a recording of her voice playing in her head pleading with the captain: ‘I’m sorry, terribly sorry, Captain. It’s all a mistake, a terrible mistake. Forgive me please!’

Pathetic! Utterly pathetic!

She rages at herself, staring into the night as the car headlights swing back and forth following the road down to the clinic at Tshabura. The indignity of it; Cecil-Blacks were not born to grovel. It goes against every fibre of her being. Her family would be ashamed of her if they knew. She is ashamed of herself.

Yet she did it. The memory of what happened in the grubby little office will stay locked up with her never to be revealed to anyone.

They finally arrive at the clinic at eight o’clock. The local workers run out anxiously holding up lanterns to greet them. Sophie immediately switches back into professional mode, addressing the circle. ‘I’m sorry we are late; we were stopped at a checkpoint. I’m sorry, the vaccines are …’ She shakes her head and looks round at the deflated faces in the lamplight.

She tries to be upbeat. ‘Look, we can try again next month, I’ll get onto the UN and we’ll do it by helicopter next time.’

But they remain downcast; to her their expressions seem to say, ‘Hoping for anything in Kivu always brings disappointment. This place will never improve.’ She feels awful.

They drive the car through the high metal gates of the compound. Like any NGO facility it has items of value that could be stolen so it’s surrounded by rolls of barbed wire and there are two watchmen with old shotguns and machetes.

They have a brief meal of foufou, tomato paste and beer and then they are shown to their rooms. As project manager, Sophie gets the luxury of a room to herself across the other side of the compound, a bare, cement-floored place with a camp bed and a candle on a chipped plate.

She sits on the bed in the dim candlelight. Now that she is finally alone her deepest reaction to the turmoil finally comes storming out of her. It’s not that her pride and dignity have been offended – though they have – it’s the memory of her utter helplessness and loss of control that makes her shake with rage. She bends forwards and clenches her fists in front of her face until the knuckles go white. In her mind’s eye she can see the faces of the captain and the sergeant.

‘Bastards!’ she mutters through clenched teeth.

She is a humanitarian charity worker who has made sacrifices and striven hard to get where she is and is passionately committed to her work. She knows that if she had a gun and those men were in front of her now she would calmly shoot each one of them in the head and enjoy doing it.