Solo (9 page)

He took over the driving and they headed on through constant scrubby forest, then, at one stage, they passed through a vast plantation of cocoa trees that took them half an hour to traverse. It was hot and the sky hazed over to a milky white. They saw no military vehicles and encountered no roadblocks. Bond remarked on this: you’d hardly believe this was a country in the grip of a two-year civil war, he said, that just a couple of hundred miles to the south half a million people were starving to death.

‘It’s Africa,’ Blessing said with a shrug. She gestured at the village they were passing through. ‘These people may have a transistor radio or a bicycle but their lives haven’t really changed in a thousand years. They probably don’t even know their capital is called Sinsikrou.’

Bond swerved on to the laterite verge to avoid a six-foot pothole. The road ahead was completely straight and the view so unendingly monotonous he wondered if he was in danger of falling asleep. He pulled on to the verge again and said he needed to relieve himself. As he stepped, carefully, a few yards into the forest he soon lost sight of the car. The air was filled with noises – frogs, bird, insects – and he suddenly felt a sense of immense solitariness overwhelm him, yet everywhere he looked there were signs of non-human life: columns of ants at his feet, a trio of magenta butterflies exploring a sunbeam, some angry screeching bird on a high branch, a lizard doing press-ups on a boulder. This specimen of
Homo sapiens
emptying its bladder was just another organism in the teeming primeval forest. He was glad to walk back to the road and the car – feeble symbols of his species’ purported domination of the planet – and to smoke one of Blessing’s potent Tuskers before she offered to take over the driving for the final stage of the day’s journey to their first destination, the Good Companion rest-house on the outskirts of a small town called Kolo-Ade.

These rest-houses were another just-surviving relic of Zanzarim’s colonial past. The Good Companion had been built in the 1930s – a solid large airy brick house with a wide veranda and sitting room, dining room and kitchen on the ground floor and eight bedrooms on the floor above – created for the travelling administrators and functionaries who ran the colony in days gone by. The place was showing clear signs of its age – the paint was flaking and the concrete floors needed rewaxing – but it was clean and simple in its efficiency. Bond’s room had a bed with a mosquito net suspended above it and a wooden stand with an enamel jug and ewer. There was a WC at the end of the corridor.

He and Blessing sat on the veranda – they were the only guests – watching the bats swoop and swerve in the brief African gloaming as the sun set in its sudden blood-orange termination. They drank whisky and water and smoked steadily to keep the mosquitoes at bay. Blessing showed him on the map how far they had travelled – they had covered some 200 miles on these back roads, she reckoned. The next day’s drive would see them enter the fringes of the Zanza River Delta, where they could expect roadblocks and inevitable delays. The soldiers often kept cars waiting for hours in order to up the fee for being allowed to motor on.

Bond savoured this moment on the veranda as they sat and chatted. He had a powerful sundowner in his hand and the heat was leaving the atmosphere as the cool of the tropical night advanced. He felt at ease – and he was also enjoying the company of a beautiful young woman, he realised. Blessing had changed into an embroidered, tie-dyed dress of many hues of vermilion and rose that had the effect of making her look more exotic and African – or was that just the result of their journey into the interior of Zanzarim, Bond wondered, recalling her cool sci-fi beauty of the previous evening. He could tell, moreover, that she wore no brassiere under the dress – he could see her pert breasts shiver as she flicked her hand to shoo away a fluttering moth. He found himself imagining her naked, wondering what her youthful firm body might be like beneath the— Stop right there, Bond! – he issued the stern instruction to himself. Don’t go down that road.

A white-haired toothless old man, the manager of the Good Companion, called them in for their evening meal: fruit salad, followed by a tough steak with fried cassava. Bond decided to forego the sago pudding with raspberry jam offered as dessert and called for another whisky. They had been driving for a good eight hours today, Bond realised, and he was feeling tired.

So was Blessing, Bond saw, as she yawned widely, and they both agreed it was time to turn in. They climbed the stairs to their bedrooms and parted on the landing.

‘I think we should start at dawn tomorrow,’ Blessing said. ‘I’ll knock on your door.’

‘Fine,’ Bond said and resisted the urge to kiss her goodnight. ‘See you in the morning.’

He lay in his bed under the gauze tent of his mosquito net listening to the night noises beyond the shuttered windows – the tireless crickets, the whooping owls, burping toads and pie-dogs yapping in Kolo-Ade’s outskirts. One more day’s driving, Bond thought, another night in a rest-house and the infiltration into the shrinking heartland of Dahum. He felt the prickle of the adrenalin rush but also a rare sense of foreboding. The drive through the lonely interior of Zanzarim had reminded him of the problems, not to say the enormity, of the task that faced him. As his surroundings had grown more primitive and elemental so, it seemed, whatever strength, capability and powers he possessed appeared more insubstantial and weak. What was it about Africa that unmanned you so? he wondered, turning over and punching the hard kapok pillow into a more amenable shape for his head – why did the continent so effortlessly remind you of your human frailties?

When Blessing knocked on his door it was still dark. Breakfast was a mug of Camp coffee and some toast and marmalade and when they set off the light was growing pearly and the air was wonderfully cool. They made good progress in the morning but, just as they were contemplating their lunch break, they met their first roadblock. There was a queue of around two dozen cars on either side of an armoured personnel carrier that had parked itself across the road. Half a dozen soldiers, in the now familiar patchwork uniforms, lazily scrutinised identity cards and searched the belongings of resigned and unprotesting motorists.

A young officer ambled down the line of cars towards them, attracted by the 1100’s self-described press status. He looked smarter than the other soldiers and was wearing a lozenge-camouflaged blouson and trousers and had a moss-green beret on his head.

‘Stay there,’ Blessing said, and stepped out of the car. Bond watched her talking to the officer in Lowele. From time to time she pointed back at Bond, clearly the topic of their conversation. Then they both returned to the car. The officer looked in the window at Bond, smiling. Bond smiled back.

‘Morning, Captain,’ Bond said, elevating his rank by two pips.

‘Pleased to assist you, sir,’ he said and snapped a salute.

Blessing climbed into the car, started the engine, did a three-point turn, then drove back the way they had just come.

‘We’d have been there all day,’ she said. ‘I told him you were late for an interview with Major General Basanjo – he’s the commander-in-chief of Zanza Force. The officer said we were heading in the wrong direction.’ She glanced over at him and grinned. ‘Plan B?’

‘Over to you,’ Bond said, quietly impressed with Blessing’s powers of improvisation. He tried to ignore the little spasms of sexual interest he was suddenly feeling for her, watching her muscles tauten and flex in her slim brown arms as she turned the wheel of the car, seeing the glow of perspiration on her throat, noting the contour-hugging tightness of the T-shirt she was wearing. Keep your mind on the job, he told himself.

They turned off the road at the next junction and headed east for the transnational highway. They made slow progress for an hour or so once they reached the highway as they were constantly waved off the road to give military vehicles right of way. During one of their enforced pauses Bond counted a convoy of over forty army lorries, packed with troops. At another stage, further down the road, they passed five tank-transporters with what looked like brand-new Centurion tanks sitting on them. A low-level flight of MiGs, heavy with napalm canisters, screeched past, ripping through the air with a sound like tearing linen. Everything Bond saw said ‘major offensive looming’: it was as if Zanza Force was preparing for the final thrust into the rebel heartland. He said as much to Blessing but she was more sceptical.

‘They’ve got all the arms and men, sure,’ she said. ‘But these new troops are conscripts – badly trained and nervy. They only advance if given free beer and cigarettes. And those tanks are useless in the delta. They don’t like the terrain and all the key bridges are blown.’

Then, as if someone had been overhearing them, they passed a line of parked flatbed trucks loaded with the cantilevered sections of Bailey bridges. As they drove by Bond saw white soldiers in what he thought were British Army fatigues.

‘Slow down,’ Bond said, craning his head round to catch a final glimpse. ‘Could they be British? Royal Engineers?’

‘There are some “military advisers” out here,’ Blessing said. ‘I met three of them at the airport the week before you arrived.’

Bond sat back, thinking. If he was right about those soldiers being British then this urgency, this hands-on military aid, also had an oblique bearing on his mission. The British government was clearly keen for this war to end as soon as possible. Why? Bond wondered. Conceivably, he thought, British ‘military advisers’ could also be manning those tanks . . .

Bond took over at the wheel after a snatched lunch at a roadside food-shack – more beer and dago-dago. He became aware of the landscape changing as they drove south into the river delta – small lakes and stagnant pools of water began to appear on either side of the highway, great expanses of reed beds and more palm trees and mangroves.

Blessing told him to turn off the highway and follow the signs for a small town called Lokomeji on whose outskirts their next rest-house, Cinnamon Lodge, was situated. It was late afternoon by the time they arrived. Blessing dropped him at the portico-ed entrance and drove on into Lokomeji to rendezvous with the local fisherman who would guide Bond into Dahum.

Cinnamon Lodge was virtually identical in structure and layout to Good Companion and belonged to the same colonial era. Standing on his bedroom balcony Bond could look across the dense low-lying forest that made up the Zanza River Delta. From his vantage point he could see the late afternoon sun glinting silver on the creeks and channels that wove their way sinuously through the vegetation. They were perched right on the edge of the huge delta, Bond could see from the map. Port Dunbar was only forty miles away – as the crow flies – but it might as well have been 400 such was the impenetrability of the marshy forest with its maze of watercourses lying in between. The air felt heavy and moist and, in the far distance, he could see a thin column of smoke rising, hanging in the air, dense as a rag, as if reluctant to disperse into the atmosphere. Another flight of MiGs ripped by, heading north this time, wing racks empty. Mission completed, and no doubt their pilots were looking forward to another evening in the bar of the Excelsior Gateway, Bond thought. It seemed like another world.

He was sitting on a cane chair on the veranda with his second whisky on the go when he saw the headlights of the 1100 sweep into the gated compound. Blessing seemed pleased. The fisherman – named Kojo – would meet Bond tomorrow evening at 6 p.m. by the wharves at Lokomeji and take him out, ostensibly for a spot of night fishing – looking for Zanza carp. Lokomeji sat on the edge of a small inland lagoon that merged into the tracery of creeks and inlets that wormed their way through the forest. Kojo was familiar with every twisting inch of the waterways, Blessing said; he’d been fishing at Lokomeji, man and boy, and knew exactly where to put Bond safely ashore in Dahum.

‘Good,’ Bond said. ‘So what’ll we do tomorrow? Maybe we could go back to the highway – I wouldn’t mind checking out those British soldiers.’ He smiled. ‘I am a journalist, after all – might make a good story.’

Blessing advised caution. ‘We should stay put,’ she said. ‘The whole of Lokomeji knows there’s an Englishman staying at Cinnamon Lodge. You’re a rare bird here. Talk of the steamie.’

Bond was amused by the Scottish expression, no doubt picked up from her father, but she was right of course. He thought of the whole empty day ahead of them tomorrow, confined to Cinnamon Lodge, and rather wished he’d brought his unfinished Graham Greene with him. Still, he considered, another twenty-four hours in Blessing’s company was hardly purgatorial.

They were alone in the dining room once again, Cinnamon Lodge’s only guests, and were served a surprisingly tasty, peppery fish stew with dago-dago dumplings. Bond even ate the pudding – baked bananas with a rum and butter sauce. After supper they drank more whisky on the veranda from Bond’s bottle of Johnnie Walker.

‘You’ll make me tipsy,’ Blessing said. ‘I’m not used to whisky.’

‘Best drink for the tropics,’ Bond said. ‘It doesn’t need to be chilled. You’re meant to drink it without ice, anyway. Tastes the same in Africa as it would in Scotland.’

They went upstairs together. Something had changed in the mood between them, Bond sensed – perhaps the evening wasn’t quite over yet. He decided to kiss her on the cheek as they said goodnight.

‘I know you’re the head of station,’ he said, ‘and I probably shouldn’t have done that, but you did well at that roadblock today. Quick thinking.’

‘Thank you, kind sir,’ she said, a little sardonically. ‘I have my uses.’

Bond lay in bed thinking about the plans for the following night – the crossing of the lagoon and trusting this man, Kojo, to deliver him safely. And what then? He supposed he would make his way to Port Dunbar and introduce himself as a friendly journalist, provide himself with new accreditation, and say he was keen to report the war from the Dahumian side – show the world the rebels’ perspective on events. Again, it all seemed very improvised and ad hoc. He wasn’t used to such—