Solo (12 page)

Then in a doorway he saw a small boy sitting, leaning weakly against the door jamb. A small boy as skeletal as an ancient wizened man. Naked, his ribs stretching his slack dusty skin, running sores on his stick legs, his head huge, almost teetering on his thin neck. Flies explored his eyelids and the corners of his mouth. He stared at Bond listlessly, barely interested, it seemed, in this apparition of a white man standing in front of him.

Bond crouched down, disturbed and unsettled.

‘Hello,’ he said, with a token smile, before realising how stupid he sounded.

Something moved behind the boy and another skull-faced child appeared, staring at him, dully. Bond stood and went to peer into the mud hut but an awful smell made him recoil, rake his throat and spit. It seemed full of the corpses of children. Nothing was moving inside. Starved into this kind of fatal inertia, Bond supposed: crawl away to some shade and wait to die. This was the fate of the weak and forgotten in the shrinking heartland of Dahum.

Bond left the village feeling helpless and depressed. It had been like witnessing some surreal version of hell. What could he do for those two kids? They’d be dead before nightfall, like all the others lying in that infernal room. His powerlessness made him want to weep. Perhaps there was another village further down the road; perhaps help could be sent from—

Then, miraculously, he saw a figure up ahead – a very skinny young man in a tattered pair of shorts. The young man shouted at him and then threw a stone. It kicked up a puff of dust by Bond’s feet. The young man shouted at him and threw two more stones.

‘Hey!’ Bond shouted. ‘Come here! Help!’

But the figure turned and sprinted away, disappearing from view behind a copse of thorn trees. Bond gave chase but stopped as he rounded the copse. Here was the water source for the village – a small creek dammed to form a shallow pool. The skinny young man seemed to have vanished into thin air, like some kind of sprite or vision. Bond wondered if he had been hallucinating, but he didn’t care any more – he waded out into the centre of the pool and sat down, soaking himself, scooping up mouthfuls of warm cloudy water with his cupped hands. He could press on now, and perhaps see if there was any way of getting some help for those children. He lay back and submerged his head, closing his eyes, feeling weak with relief. When he surfaced a moment later he could hear the distant sound of a car changing gear. His long walk was nearly over.

Bond stood by the side of the dammed creek, his sodden clothes dripping, in a sudden stasis of indecision. No, he couldn’t just walk on. He made his way back to the village and found an empty calabash and a large tin that had once contained powdered milk. Returning to the creek he filled them both with water and carried them to the mud hut with the dead children. The little boy had disappeared – crawled back inside, Bond hoped, and he set the two containers down carefully at the threshold. Then he heard a cracked shout from behind him.

A stooped old man stood there at the entry to the meeting square, leaning on a staff. He was incredibly thin, his arms and legs like vanilla pods, wearing a tatter of rags. Bond approached slowly as the old man berated him with hoarse incomprehensible curses. He had a small head with a powdering of grey hair, a collapsed face with white corpse-stubble. He was like something from a myth – or a symbol of death, Bond thought – and his red eyes blazed at Bond with a weary venom.

Bond pointed at the hut with his two water containers placed in front of the door.

‘Children – pickin – inside. Help them.’

The old man shook his fist at Bond and continued with his spitting maledictions.

Bond pointed at the doorway again and as he did so saw two tiny claw-hands reach out and drag the powdered-milk tin inside. Now the old man grasped his stave and giddily, powerlessly tried to hit Bond with it. It thwacked painlessly against his leg.

‘Help those children!’ Bond admonished the old man for a final time and turned and strode out of the village, his head in a swoon of pressure, feeling as if he’d taken part in some atavistic dumb-show – a stranger’s encounter with death on the road – all the ingredients of some dreadful folktale or legend. He concentrated. He had heard a car, he would be saved – unless the malign spirits of this place were still tormenting him.

Bond’s ears had not been deceiving him. There was indeed a road at the end of the dirt track leading from the village, the usual potholed frayed tarmac ribbon, along which the odd car raced at full speed as if fleeing from some natural disaster or catastrophe. Two flew past him without stopping. Then there was nothing for half an hour and Bond felt his clothes drying in the hot sun. Finally a third car came into view – a Volkswagen Beetle which slowed as Bond flagged it down and the door opened. Like the other cars that had passed, Bond noticed this one had a large red cross painted on the bonnet.

A sweaty grey-haired man was at the wheel. He watched in candid astonishment as Bond slid in beside him.

‘Where you go?’ he said.

‘Port Dunbar,’ Bond replied.

‘I go drop you at Madougo. I fear too much for the MiGs.’

‘Is that why you have red crosses on your car?’

‘Yes. Maybe they think we are ambulance.’ The man glanced skywards, as if expecting a MiG to appear at any moment. ‘If they see one car they come and shoot you. Bam-bam-bam. They don’ care.’

Bond told him about the village and the dying children.

‘They all die,’ the man said.

‘No. There are two alive. Maybe more, I couldn’t tell.’

‘All village are dead,’ the man insisted. ‘Everybody go to Port Dunbar.’

Bond kept on and extracted a promise from the man that he would report the presence of starving children in the village of Lokani, or whatever name it had. Perhaps something would be done.

Madougo turned out to be another semi-destroyed hamlet of mud huts on the roadside but this time there were signs of life. There was, amazingly, a stall set up on the laterite verge, tended by a toothless old mammy. Bond was dropped here and the VW turned off down a track and sped away. The mammy had a small bunch of unripe bananas, a shrivelled pawpaw and a bottle of Green Star beer. Some stubborn undying commercial instinct made her come to her stall in Madougo and pretend life was going on as normal. And maybe she was right, Bond thought, as, using sign language, he bartered his safari jacket for the bottle of beer. He sat on a wooden stool in the shade cast by her stall and drank it slowly. It was sour, warm and gassy, an ambrosial liquor of the gods.

A few people emerged from the shattered huts, stared at him and went away. The beer had gone to Bond’s head and he felt woozy and sleepy, exhausted from his two-day hike through the forest. The occasional car stopped and he was scrutinised but never spoken to. This dirty, unshaven white man lounging in the shade of a roadside stall in Madougo would be the subject of much speculation, Bond reasoned. The bush telegraph would do its business – all he had to do was wait; he would be sought out, he was absolutely sure.

It took longer than he thought but in the heat of mid-afternoon he heard the tooting of a car on the road, heading north. Bond shook himself out of his torpor and stood up to see a dusty black Mercedes-Benz station wagon drive through the village and pull on to the verge by the stall.

The door opened and Kobus stepped out. He was wearing jeans and a blue checked shirt. He took off his sunglasses.

‘Mr Bond,’ he said, with a brief dead smile. ‘Welcome to Dahum.’

As they drove south, Bond decided to remain cautiously taciturn, despite Kobus’s crude attempts at amiability, as if there were no history between them. After all, this was a man who had thrust a gun in his throat, struck him twice in the face, who had threatened him with death and had stolen all his possessions. Kobus’s endeavours at small talk were forced and unnatural, as if he were being paid to be agreeable while everything in his nature rebelled against it. Bond said nothing: he knew Kobus’s pleasant formalities and empty smiles counted for nothing.

So they drove on, for the most part in this mutual silence, Kobus interrupting from time to time to ask him to check the sky from Bond’s side of the car for sign of any MiGs.

Kobus was obviously aware of the chill between them and, half an hour later, made another semi-reluctant effort to try and break it down. He turned and conjured up another of his awkward smiles. When he smiled he showed both top and bottom rows of teeth – small teeth with gaps that resembled the radiator grille of a cheap car.

‘I forgot to say – the name’s Jakobus Breed. Call me Kobus, man – everyone does.’

‘I’m James Bond. As you know. Call me Mr Bond.’

Kobus took this as a signal that all was now well and began to chatter.

‘You walked out of the Lokani forest after two days, Bond. I’m damn impressed, I got to tell you. You’re good – for a journalist.’ He failed to keep the tone of scepticism out of his compliment. ‘Smoke?’

Now this did moderate the chill in their relations, somewhat. Bond gladly accepted one of Kobus’s proffered cigarettes. He lit it and inhaled.

‘Is this a Tusker?’

‘Nah. It’s a Boomslang – they make them in Dahum. A boomslang’s a snake. It bites but it doesn’t kill.’ He chuckled and wiped a dripping tear away from his bad eye. ‘You get a taste for them – you’ll never smoke a Tusker again.’

Bond drew on his Boomslang, feeling the powerful nicotine hit. He remembered Kobus slapping his face.

‘No hard feelings,’ Kobus said, as if reading his thoughts. ‘I had a job to do: snatch the SAS guy, they told me. How was I to know any different?’

‘Try using your intelligence,’ Bond said.

‘Hell, do they love you in Port Dunbar,’ Kobus pressed on, ignoring him. ‘The government boys jumping up and down: Agence Presse Libre. We haven’t had a Frenchie in town for months. When I showed them your ID they crapped all over me. How could you lose him, you stupid douche-bag?’ Kobus gave an odd barking laugh, like a seal. ‘Then word comes down this lunchtime. An Englishman has just walked out of Lokani forest. I said – that’s Bond, that is. Jumped in the car and here we are.’ He glanced over again and a tear tracked disconcertingly down from his bad eye. ‘Glad you made it. That crazy fucking firefight on the road. Somebody set us up.’

‘What happened to the girl?’ Bond asked.

‘Never saw her, man. I swear. I thought she was with you.’

‘She panicked and ran. I heard her scream. Twice. I lost her.’

Kobus grimaced. ‘Let’s hope she died in the bush. If those Federal boys got her, then . . .’ He sniffed. ‘She’d be better off dead, believe me. I’ve seen what they do to women.’

Bond felt that weary heart-sink, that heaviness of loss.

‘I looked for her in the morning,’ he said. ‘But there were no bodies left behind.’

‘Pretty girl,’ Kobus leered. ‘How was she in the sack? A real goer, I’d bet.’

Bond registered this glimpse of the old Kobus, the brutal gun-for-hire, not this purported pseudo-comrade he was being offered, and stubbed his cigarette out in the dashboard ashtray. He didn’t want to be friends with Kobus Breed.

They drove on in silence, as if Breed sensed Bond’s new sombre mood. There was very little traffic on the road to Port Dunbar. At one stage Breed pulled over to the side in the shelter of a tree convinced he’d heard a MiG. They both sat and listened for a couple of minutes but there was no sound of jet engines, so they motored on.

Eventually, they came to the outskirts of Port Dunbar. They passed through two roadblocks – Breed was waved on – and drove down the main boulevard into the city. Bond looked around him – it appeared to be a typical, bustling provincial capital, even though there were many soldiers on the streets. Otherwise it seemed bizarrely normal; police directed traffic at crossroads, the roadside food stalls were busy with customers, street-hawkers harassed them when they stopped and, as they passed a church, Bond saw that there was a wedding party emerging. Port Dunbar gave no sign of being a beleaguered, besieged city. Bond noticed that on the roofs of the higher buildings – office blocks and department stores – there were batteries of ground-to-air missiles.

‘What’re they? SAMs?’

‘Dead right,’ Breed said. ‘But they’re all dummies. Knocked up by the local carpenters in a couple of hours. No, we got one real S-75 SAM site in the central square and one at Janjaville. Two months ago they shot down a MiG. Now the MiGs don’t come near Port Dunbar. Those boys don’t want to lose their wages.’

Bond thought of the pilots he’d seen drinking in the bar of the Excelsior.

‘So they just shoot up cars on the road,’ Breed went on. ‘Chalk it up as a kill – military vehicle. Money for old rope, man.’

‘How did you get your hands on S-75 missiles?’

‘Present from our pet millionaire. He pays for the Janjaville flights as well.’

Pet millionaire, Bond thought, filing away the information for later. Breed was turning off into a compound. He showed his pass to a guard at the gateway and they drove into a courtyard surrounded by neat white two-storey buildings.

‘Welcome to the DRD Press Centre, Mr Bond,’ Breed said.

It turned out that the Press Centre was a former Methodist primary school converted by the Dahum government after the secession as a comfortable base for foreign journalists and a location where the daily SitRep briefing took place. Forward planning, Bond thought – they knew they needed friendly propaganda. Once again he was impressed by the organisation and efficiency. He signed in at reception where his new accreditation was waiting for him, and Breed showed him upstairs to his room. There was even a private bar that was open from 6 p.m. to midnight. The only problem was, Breed said, that it wasn’t like the early days of the war when the place was heaving; now there were hardly any journalists – just three, apart from Bond: an American, a German and another Brit. ‘A freelance,’ he said, with a sneer.

Breed opened the door to Bond’s room. There was a bed, a table fan, a chest of drawers and a desk and a chair. Sitting on the bed was Bond’s Zanzarim bag. Breed gave him back his passport, his APL identification and his Ronson lighter and Rolex watch.