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Sunday introduced Bond, respectfully. ‘Mr Bond from Agence Presse Libre.’

‘Hulbert Linck,’ the tall man said, in good English with the faintest accent that Bond found impossible to place: Swedish? German? Dutch? He shook Bond’s hand vigorously. ‘At last, the French are here.’

Bond saw, in the glow from the engineers’ lights, the shine of a zealot’s near-madness in Linck’s eyes. He immediately began talking rapidly.

‘When will the French recognise Dahum? Perhaps you can inform me. We’ve all been awaiting the news from the outside world.’ He put his thin hand on Bond’s shoulder. ‘Everything you write will be vitally important, Mr Bond. Vitally.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ Bond said, changing the subject. ‘These are Malmös, aren’t they?’

‘Bought cheap off the Swedish air force,’ Linck said. ‘We’re converting them for ground attack. When we can strike back from the air the whole context of this war will change. You wait and see.’ Linck talked on excitedly, outlining his plans. It was as if the Zanzarim civil war and the survival of Dahum were a personal problem of his own. Dupree and Haas had told Bond of Linck’s unswerving support – he had spent millions of dollars of his fortune (his was a pan-European dairy empire, originally: butter, milk and cheese) recruiting and paying white mercenaries, chartering planes, buying illicit military materiel in the shadier locales of the world arms’ market, all to keep this fledgling African state alive. There was no rationale, Bond supposed, looking at the man as he spoke and gesticulated, it was a ‘cause’ pure and simple. It gave him something to live for – it was Hulbert Linck’s personal crusade. Bond had asked Haas where Linck was from and had received no precise answer. Nobody seemed to know his early history in any detail. Rumours abounded: that he had made his first fortune smuggling foodstuffs in the black market during the chaos of post-war Europe; that he was the bastard son of an English aristocrat and an Italian courtesan. He had a Swiss passport but was resident in Monte Carlo, Haas had told him; he spoke excellent German and French but no one really knew for sure where he was from – Georgia, someone had said, or one of the Baltic states, perhaps; Haas had even heard rumours about Corsica and Albania. His companies were all based in Liechtenstein, apparently.

Bond looked at him, closely – was the white-blond hair dyed? he wondered suddenly. Another ruse. Were the slightly deranged mannerisms – the wide-eyed enthusiasms, the carelessness about what he wore – more examples of a very clever and duplicitous mask? Everything about him, to Bond’s eyes, seemed slightly bogus and worked-up. He realised that for someone like Hulbert Linck the more speculation about his origins, the more wild guesses thrown about, the better the disguise.

Suddenly a bell rang briefly from the blockhouse and Bond sensed a quiver of readiness from those waiting around the Janjaville strip.

‘Excuse me, Mr Bond,’ Linck said and loped off.

The runway lights were switched on, delineating the grass strip with dotted lines of blue and, seconds later, Bond heard the growing roar of aero engines.

Then out of the darkness he saw landing lights appear and into the blue glow cast from the runway a Lockheed Super Constellation swooped, touching down heavily, bouncing, then great clouds of dust were thrown up as the four propellers went into reverse, slowing its progress so it could turn off and wheel round on to the piste in front of the hangar.

Bond had flown in Super Constellations in the 1950s, when they, along with the Boeing Stratocruiser, were the apogee of airline glamour. They still had a remarkable look about them, Bond thought, watching this one come to rest and the cargo doors in its side open. The three tail fins, the four radial engines, the unusually high undercarriage and the curved slim aerodynamics of the fuselage all gave it a particular degree of beauty for an aeroplane. This one was elderly, its paint finish patched and blistered and there was no airline logo in evidence, no trace of where, or from whom, Linck might have chartered it. Arc lights were switched on and the soldiers and the lorries rushed forward to unload its cargo.

Bond watched, his mind busy, as the plane was unloaded in minutes, the four propellers still turning. He saw boxes of ammunition, mortars, bazookas, heavy machine guns, food, powdered milk, crates of Scotch whisky and gin, drugs, spare tyres and what looked like household goods – air conditioners, stainless-steel sinks, a couple of coffee tables – all passed down the chain of soldiers’ hands from the cargo doors to the waiting lorries and trucks that, once loaded, sped off into the night. Bond looked on, amazed. Then, just as the doors seemed about to close, he saw Kobus Breed run from a building and climb the steps to the plane, handing over a small package to someone inside. The doors were shut, Breed descended and the steps were wheeled away. It wasn’t entirely one-way traffic, then, Bond thought to himself. Breed was now talking to Linck – like two familiars, Bond noticed. Linck clapped him on the shoulder and Breed headed off into the darkness.

‘The planes come two, three, four times a night,’ Sunday said.

‘Where from?’ Bond asked, turning back to Sunday.

‘Dahomey, Ivory Coast, Mali – we don’t know for sure.’

Bond looked at the tall figure of Linck, as the Super Constellation revved its engines and turned to taxi back to the runway. It hadn’t been on the ground for more than fifteen minutes, Bond thought, watching Linck waving enthusiastically at the taxiing plane as if he were bidding farewell to parting relatives.

‘Mr Linck, he control everything,’ Sunday said.

With an accelerating roar of its Wright radial engines the now empty Super Constellation barrelled down the Janjaville runway in a blue-tinged cloud of dust and took off into the night sky. The landing lights were extinguished and all that could be heard was the diminishing drone of the engines as the plane climbed to cruising height. Bond walked back to Sunday’s Peugeot, impressed: this rearguard action had real potential, he could see.

Bond spent many hours the next day sitting in an anteroom outside Abigail Kross’s office hoping for an appointment. When she eventually saw him she seemed distant and preoccupied and her apology was perfunctory. Bond asked if she could use her authority to arrange an interview with Brigadier Adeka. She said that would be impossible. The brigadier had a lifelong distrust of the press and never spoke to journalists. Bond played the French card – ‘Agence Presse Libre would see it as an honour to be able to speak to the brigadier exclusively’ – but in vain.

‘Perhaps you could talk to Jakobus Breed,’ Madame Kross then suggested. ‘He supervises the foreign military advisers.’

‘I’m already familiar with Mr Breed,’ Bond said, savouring the euphemism. Then he added, ‘I met the brigadier’s brother in London,’ hoping that this claim would give him a little more credence. ‘He wanted to pass on a message to his brother.’

‘Gabriel Adeka is no friend of Dahum,’ Abigail Kross said, her smile fading permanently. ‘His name will open no doors here, Mr Bond. Especially not with his brother.’

Bond left her, thinking hard. Madame Kross was a woman of intelligence and integrity, Bond recognised, but her absolute intransigence seemed almost perverse to him. Why wouldn’t the brigadier speak to the foreign press? Propaganda was a highly effective weapon when it was well deployed. Something strange was going on here. Perhaps Hulbert Linck was the man to approach next – maybe he could apply some pressure.

Back at the Press Centre, Bond sent a telex to the fake APL address he had been given and that went straight to Transworld Consortium in Regent’s Park. He wrote bland stuff about plucky little Dahum defying the odds, soldiering on gallantly, but Bond knew that the subtext would let M know he was ‘in country’. He added a postscript that he was making every effort to interview Brigadier Adeka but ‘operational difficulties’ made it seem unlikely that it would be granted. He also mentioned that the chief executive of OG Palm Oil Export and Agricultural Services was currently indisposed. Blessing’s fate would at least be investigated now.

He spent another bibulous evening with Dupree, Haas and Breadalbane and learned from Haas that anyone could book a seat on an empty outbound flight on the Super Constellation for $100. The actual port of Port Dunbar was completely blockaded and the only way out of the country was by air – or overland, if you were prepared to risk your neck beneath the watchful eye of the MiGs.

Bond climbed upstairs to bed in a bad mood, wondering if he should just pay his $100, quit Dahum and admit failure. It went against his nature, but he couldn’t see how there was any way he could get close to Adeka, short of storming his headquarters. And he had a horrible feeling that this military stalemate might leave him stranded in Dahum for weeks or months, like Digby Breadalbane.

He was woken before dawn by an urgent knocking on his door. It was Sunday, in a state of real excitement.

‘We have a scoop, Mr Bond. There has been a small battle and we have defeated the enemy. I thought you might like to see it.’

Bond dressed as quickly as possible and Sunday drove him north out of Port Dunbar on increasingly minor roads. As they bumped along through the pearly, misty light Bond wondered if this was a simple propaganda exercise – something staged for him, the gullible newly arrived journalist, who would duly report it as a Dahumian feat of arms. His mood was still sour – he wasn’t expecting much.

After an hour’s drive, they turned off the metalled road and entered an area of mangrove swamp and winding creeks. The road they drove along was built up above the watercourses on a kind of revetted embankment. Then they began to pass jubilant Dahumian troops returning from the front and in the morning sky they saw smoke curling up above the treeline.

The village they arrived at had been burnt out and destroyed weeks previously: shattered mud huts, charred roof timbers and leafless trees signalled a napalm strike. Bond and Sunday left the Peugeot and walked through exuberant milling Dahumian soldiers towards the giant shade tree at the village’s centre. Here they found Breed and half a dozen other white mercenaries standing round eight Zanzari soldiers’ corpses laid out in a row. A little way off at another entrance to the village was a still smoking, upended armoured personnel carrier, a hole punched through its side – perhaps, Bond wondered, from a bazooka or an anti-tank gun unloaded from the Super Constellation the night before.

Breed turned to meet him, wiping away a tear. He was wearing a grey T-shirt with ‘HALO’ printed on the front and his bashed kepi was pushed back on his head at a rakish angle. He was exhibiting his usual shifting cocktail of moods – at once jovial, wired and sinister.

‘Yah, we know they were coming so we just waited up here in the village,’ Breed said. ‘Bang-bang – got these fellas and the others just ran away. We’re gonna chase them back to Sinsikrou.’

He shouted orders and some soldiers shinned up into the shade tree with lengths of rope that they secured to the branches and let fall. Then Breed had a man bring him a clinking, heavy sack and from it drew out what looked like giant fish hooks, six inches long, with a large eye. Breed attached the dangling ropes to the hooks and then, to Bond’s shock and surprise, he thwacked the sharp end in and under the jaws of the dead soldiers, like a stevedore walloping a bale hook into a sack. He tugged sharply at the hook to make sure its grip was secure under the jawbone.

‘Pull away, boys,’ he shouted.

The men in the tree hauled on the ropes and the dead bodies were lifted aloft by their jaws. Like so many fishing trophies – like marlin or bluefin, Bond thought – on a dock after a successful fishing expedition.

‘Stop!’ Breed shouted when the dead men were three feet off the ground. ‘Secure them there!’

The ropes were lashed to the branches and the dead men hung there, twirling gently. Bond had seen lynched men before but these bodies looked different, unusually dehumanised by the hooks and the forced jut of their lower jaws and the tearing stretching strain on their necks that were taking the full weight of their bodies. He thought as they hung there that they looked like ghoulish sides of beef in a butcher’s chill room, the dangling arms and legs all the more obscene because of the unnatural angle of the head with the giant hook through the jaw.

Breed looked on with an eerie, satisfied smile on his face.

‘That’s a good haul,’ he said. ‘The more the merrier. One isn’t enough, you need a cluster, like. Once I strung up more than thirty. I tell you it—’

‘Why do you do it?’ Bond interrupted.

‘Because it freaks them out when they see this,’ Breed said, cheerfully, lowering his voice as he spoke to Bond. ‘I leave them all over the forest, hanging from trees. Scares the shit out of the Zanzaris – bad juju.’

‘Where did you learn that little trick?’ Bond asked, concealing his disgust.

‘Down in Matabeleland in ’66,’ Breed said. ‘I used to string up the ZIPRA terrs we caught like this.’ He smiled. ‘What do you say in French?
Pour encourager les autres
.’

Bond turned away from the dangling bodies, feeling nauseous, and went to join Sunday, who looked equally distressed.

‘Does he do this all the time?’ Bond asked Sunday.

‘Yes. He like it too too much.’

‘I don’t like it,’ Bond said. ‘It’s revolting.’

‘I go ’gree for you, sar,’ Sunday said. ‘They are just soldiers, like our own men.’

Bond looked over to see Breed striding around and shouting at the Dahumian troops, forming them into a rough column of about 200 men. They were charged and energised by their victory, armed with an odd variety of weapons – AK-47s, SLRs and ancient World War Two Lee–Enfield rifles. They all had machetes at their waist in leather scabbards or thrust through their belts. Every one of them, Bond noticed, despite their patchwork uniforms, had the red, white and black flag of Dahum sewn on to their right shoulder.

‘Bring him on,’ Breed shouted and from behind a ruined hut a witch doctor appeared. Bond couldn’t think of any other word to describe him. His face was painted white with lurid green circles around his eyes. A great mass of shells and beads was wrapped around his neck and wrists setting up a coarse rattle as he shuffled forward in a half-dance. He was bare-chested and wore a thick dry grass skirt that fell to his ankles and he carried a gourd and a long horsehair fly whisk. He shuffled up and down the column of men – who stood there rapt and rigid – and as he went he drank from the gourd and spat out the liquid through his clenched teeth in a fine spray into their faces and flicked their chests and groins with the fly whisk, chanting all the while in a low monotone. When he had sprayed and touched them all he screamed shrilly, three times, stepped back, made a weird sign of benediction over them and shuffled off behind the house again.