The Perfect Soldier (17 page)

The soldiers were waiting outside the construction yard. They were sitting in the back of an ancient Russian truck, immobile, their rifles upright between their knees, water sheeting off the peaks of their forage caps. The rain had soaked through their camouflage fatigues and the thin cotton clung to their bodies, giving them a strangely alien look, mottled and blotched like visitors from another planet. Some
of them watched as Bennie pulled the Land Rover to a halt, incurious, listless, beaten. Domingos spotted the officer and got out to talk to him. Inside the compound, he could see the digger Bennie had found earlier. It was yellow, a Japanese model. Apparently one of the aid people had hired it some weeks earlier.

Domingos returned. Already the rain had penetrated his bandage, softening the blackened crust of dried blood.

‘The men will help,’ he said briskly. ‘The officer wants to know where you’re going to dig.’

McFaul had already chosen a spot. Bennie had the keys to the digger and Domingos took the wheel of the Land Rover, leading the little convoy back through the city to a hillock beside a grove of mango trees. The run-off from the hillock had turned the surrounding ground into a quagmire and for a moment or two McFaul thought they were going to bog down. The rain had begun to ease now, watery patches of blue appearing between towering stacks of cumulus, the horizon already veiled with rising steam as the sun reached through.

Beneath the trees, already parked, was the Toyota Landcruiser which belonged to MSF. McFaul limped across, his boots squelching in the mud. Christianne was sitting behind the wheel. She looked pale and drawn, and her fingers kept returning to the thin gold crucifix she wore around her neck. When McFaul’s shadow fell across the cab, she wound the window down, her eyes drawn at once to his sling.

‘How is it?’

McFaul said it was fine. He was embarrassed by what had happened at the hospital when he’d first arrived. He’d never lost control like that in his life. It was worse, in a way, than the ambush.

‘You get him out OK.’ he asked, peering into the back of the Landcruiser.

Christianne nodded. She’d just brought James’s body from the schoolhouse. She’d disinfected the freezer and done what she could about the smell with a can of borrowed aftershave. With luck, hostilities permitting, the building would be ready for reoccupation by nightfall. She went through it all without a trace of emotion – just another chore, another hour or so of tidying up – but McFaul knew the price she’d really paid. Until the rebels had taken the airstrip, she’d been planning to fly James out. Now, she’d have to bury him.

McFaul reached into the cab, a reassuring hand on her shoulder, and she clung to it a moment before turning her head away. McFaul stepped back from the Landcruiser, hearing the driver of the soldiers’ truck gunning the engine as the back wheels slipped on the sodden grass. They were off now to collect bodies from the roadside, four days’ worth of Muengo’s dead. No one knew for sure how many had been killed in the shelling but Bennie had done a quick recce in the Land Rover after the morning’s repairs and he was planning to bury at least sixty. He was still at the controls of the digger, eyeing the ground where it began to rise beneath the mango trees. The sun was hot now, crusting the mud on the thickly welted tyres.

McFaul felt a pressure on his arm. Christianne was standing beside him, watching Bennie at work. Bennie was getting the feel of the controls, moving the arm of the digger up and down, scoring a deep line in the earth with the scoop. The soil here was a dark, rich brown, tinged with ochre, the colour of drying blood.

‘Has he done this before?’ Christianne said.

‘Years ago. On a building site.’

‘
Alors
. It’s good you use the machine. I thought … you know …’ she made a digging motion, ‘it would take all day.’

‘Nothing like.’ McFaul shook his head. ‘Bennie says an hour or so.’

‘Good.’ Christianne was still watching Bennie. ‘James used this too. You know that? This same machine? Those pipes he laid from the river?’

McFaul nodded, not taking the conversation any further. Finally, Bennie began to dig, the scoop taking huge bites from the newly softened earth, piling it up beside the deepening trench. After a while, McFaul heard the whine of the returning truck. He glanced round. The soldiers were standing up in the back. Some of them had wrung out their shirts and tied them around their faces, covering their noses and mouths. Another man had appeared. He was young. He wore slacks and a pale blue shirt. Christianne said he was a priest.

‘I never asked you …’ McFaul began.

‘Pardon?’

‘… whether you wanted a separate grave.’ He nodded back towards the Landcruiser.

Christianne shook her head, watching the soldiers jumping off the truck. Bodies were stacked on the floor like cords of timber.

‘No,’ she said at last. ‘In Africa, he would have wanted this. To be buried together. One grave.’

‘You’re sure? Only—’

‘No.’ She shook her head emphatically. ‘One grave.’

The soldiers began to file past, staggering under the weight of the shrouded bodies. Christianne watched them approaching the yawning trench trying not to lose their footing in the mud.

‘Children died too,’ she said. ‘Several at the hospital. One of them was Maria.’

‘Maria?’

‘The little girl James tried to save.’ She made a vague, hopeless gesture before her hand again found the crucifix around her neck.

Molly Jordan was due at the British embassy at three o’clock. She’d phoned earlier for an appointment, surprised that the ambassador’s secretary was already aware of her presence in Luanda. The ambassador himself had been trying to make contact. There were certain issues on which he’d welcome a discussion. Perhaps she’d be kind enough to pop over.

Larry Giddings, her new American friend, insisted on giving her a lift, reappearing outside the Terra Sancta office in his battered estate car while Robbie scoured Luanda for a ton of assorted supplies. Todd Llewelyn had by now confirmed a flight for tomorrow morning. They were to meet Piet Rademeyer at the international airport at 8 a.m. At the very least, the South African would be able to gauge whether a landing at Muengo was possible.

Now, Larry Giddings sat behind the wheel of the Buick, inching across the city. The traffic stretched ahead down the Avenida Comandante Valodia towards the distant bulk of the São Miguel fortress, a soft brown shimmer in the heat. The air-conditioning in the Buick had broken and Giddings had the window down, one arm draped over the rusty sill, the other nursing a can of something warm and fizzy he’d just bought from a kerbside trader. Molly sat beside him, one eye on the dashboard clock. Conversation with the big American was easy. You just listened.

Giddings had been explaining about slavery. Angola had evidently been a prime source of slaves for the sugar plantations in Brazil. The English and the Portuguese had shipped them across the Atlantic in their hundreds of thousands,
hauling them to the coast from the interior, shackling them to trees at night. In Giddings’s view, this had set a pattern from which the locals had never fully escaped. Once a slave, he seemed to be saying, always a slave.

Molly frowned, half-following the logic. They had barely twenty minutes to make it to the embassy and the traffic showed no signs of moving.

‘You mean they’re still slaves? Even now?’

‘Technically, ma’am, no. Ain’t nobody are slaves now. But think about it. Nineteen seventy-five. You know what happened then?’ Molly shook her head. ‘The Portuguese left. Little trouble back home. Army coup. And you know what? They took every last damn thing with them. They’d had the country trussed up like a chicken, real tight. The white guys ran the mines, the fishing, the railways, you name it. Out in the bush, same story. Anything that moved, anything that needed growing, or harvesting, or repairing, or selling, there you’d find some fat Portuguese bossman. The blacks, the
mestiços
, knew squat about squat. Famous for it. So no prizes for what happened when the white guys left. Independence? Nationhood? Are you serious? Come ’75, we’re talking the biggest orphanage in Africa, millions and millions just waiting to be told what to do, what to think, and believe me …’ he waved a languid hand towards the sea, ‘the bad guys couldn’t wait.’

Molly nodded. The traffic, at last, was beginning to move.

‘Bad guys?’

‘Soviets, ma’am. Operation Carlotta. Ever hear about that?’

‘No.’

‘Well, now …’ he pulled into the next lane of traffic, brooding, ‘the Soviets were clever. They used the Cubans. Nice play. Same colour. Same, I guess, temperament. Believe
me, you couldn’t move round here for guys from Havana. They just rolled in, thousands of them. Course, to begin with, we were there too, us and the South Africans. That was cool. Line in the sand. Hey, guys, so far and no further. Know what I mean? Sure you do, but then the college kids in Washington all woke up from that horrible Vietnam nightmare and started hollerin’ about covert activities, and secret stuff, and spooky-spooky, and violations of sovereignty, and all that bullshit, and you know what? We left them to it.’

‘Left who to it?’

‘The Soviets, ma’am. I been telling you. Operation Carlotta. Milk and rusks and a damn fine happy Christmas from Ol’ Mother Russia. What’s good for us is good for them. Know what we call that? Down where I come from?’

‘No.’

‘Communism.’

Giddings shook his head, more sorrow than anger, and Molly found herself wondering exactly how old he was, and what he’d been up to in the mid-seventies. Her knowledge of the Cold War was minimal and certainly didn’t extend to whatever had happened in this tormented city.

Giddings had turned left now, the old Buick wallowing through a series of side-streets. Soon, they were bumping over cobblestones. The houses here looked centuries old, the narrow windows shuttered against the harsh afternoon sun. Giddings coasted past a mountain of rubbish, tossing the empty can out of the car window. Then he licked his fingertips, one after the other, grimacing at the taste.

‘You think I talk too much? Just say—’

‘No,’ Molly shook her head, ‘not at all. It’s fascinating.’

‘—only I know some folks don’t like it. Me? I’m fascinated by the place. Was then. Am now. And, hey …’ he touched her lightly on the arm, ‘good luck with your Mr Ambassador.’

They swung left again and came to a halt. A uniformed Gurkha stood beside a security gate. A tall white wall stretched away down the street. Behind it was a pale blue building wreathed in pink and purple flowers. Giddings was already out of the car, opening Molly’s door. He was beaming again, exactly the expression Molly had first seen beside the meat counter in the supermarket. Molly began to thank him for the lift but he waved her courtesies away.

‘You want me to wait? Sure. I’ll be here. Take care now. And say hi for me.’

Todd Llewelyn sat in the downstairs office at the Terra Sancta house, waiting for the phone to ring. He’d been here for nearly an hour now, sprawled in the broken armchair, trying to resist the temptation to fall asleep. He’d tried for most of the morning to get a message through to London, and at lunch-time he’d finally succeeded in making contact. It was vital, he’d told the girl on the People’s Channel switchboard, that he talk to Martin Pegley. He needed to organise the banker’s draft for the Muengo flight. And he needed People’s to know about Alma Bradley. Someone should have a word with ABTV and tell them not to waste their time.

Pegley, though, was out of the office and not expected back until two. Irritated, Llewelyn had left the Terra Sancta’s Luanda phone number, plus the six-digit country code for Angola. He repeated it twice, making sure that the girl had got it right. Pegley was to phone back the moment he returned. Llewelyn would be waiting for the call.

Now, past three o’clock, he was still waiting. The house was empty, Cunningham out somewhere, and every now and then Llewelyn got to his feet and prowled from room to room, trying to rid himself of an overpowering sense of
fatigue. Since his meeting with the young South African pilot, he’d felt physically exhausted. At first he’d blamed it on jet lag and the novel pressures of having to shoot his own pictures. The hour he’d spent on the streets with the little Sony camcorder had given him some marvellous shots – crippled kids, one-legged veterans, pitiful human debris washed up by the war that had taken James Jordan – but the sheer business of pointing a camera, of being white and rich in one of the world’s poorest cities, had taken its toll. But even this kind of pressure – the kids in his face all the time, the demands for money – couldn’t explain the sheer depth of his exhaustion. Llewelyn normally thrived in situations like these. Indeed, within the industry he’d become a byword for stamina and a certain dogged persistence. Maybe he’d picked up some infection or other. Maybe a siesta might not be such a bad idea.

Llewelyn circled the office. The room was cool and spacious. There were straw mats on the polished wooden floor and a view of the garden through the tall, half-curtained windows. Both desks were piled high with paperwork and on one of them, beside the computer, stood a plastic canister about the size of a biscuit tin. Inset into the top was a dome-shaped object with a series of metal probes sticking out. The probes were a couple of inches in length and Llewelyn picked the canister up, weighing it in his hand, knowing it must have been disarmed.

He sank into the chair again, holding the canister at arm’s length against the glare of the sunshine through the window. The shape was unmistakable, a Valmara 69, one of the family of Italian anti-personnel mines he’d read about only a couple of days ago. The simplest mines you simply stood on. The weight of your body triggered the explosion and you lost a foot or a leg. This, though, was a bit more sophisticated.
Llewelyn ran his finger along one of the prongs, finding the little eyelet with its length of attached wire. According to the sales literature he’d acquired from a contact at the Ministry of Defence, you tied the other end of the wire to something nearby, preferably at ankle height. Anyone snagging the wire would fire a charge in the canister. This, in turn, would blow the centre of the mine upwards. At the base of the mine was another wire, tethered to the canister. Stretched tight, this wire would trigger a bigger charge, blasting hundreds of razor-sharp fragments into anything within fifty metres. The secondary charge was the one that killed you and the length of the wire determined exactly the height it went off.