The Perfect Soldier (31 page)

The rain had stopped now and he tipped his head back,
looking up, wondering what difference the clouds would make to the coming of daylight. It was already gone four-thirty. This time last week, he’d been watching the sun rise at five. He frowned, peering across the river again, trying to guess the distance to Katilo’s camp. After he’d first heard the music, he must have retreated a couple of hundred metres. At least. Double that, and you were probably looking at the kind of range he’d have to work with tomorrow morning. In combat terms, he knew it was nothing. Aimed fire at 400 metres was supposed to be 90 per cent accurate. He reached down, touching the Armalite, wondering whether a bullet or two might be simpler. Then he put the idea out of his mind, knowing that his first plan, the one that had come to him so instinctively, was favourite. Katilo deserved a taste of the real thing. With luck, he might even survive long enough to feel what Domingos had felt. A bullet would be too clean, too swift, too kind.

McFaul swallowed a yawn. Tomorrow, after Katilo, he’d have to make his way back upriver, back towards Muengo. Whether he’d make it or not was anyone’s guess but travelling overland was out of the question. Too many soldiers. Too many mines. He tried to imagine the journey. If everything went according to plan, there’d be no search. The soldiers would put Katilo’s death down to an accident, fate, black magic. There’d be no evidence of an enemy at work. There’d be no gunshot. No footprints. Nothing human. Just a shredded dinghy and the smoking remains of their beloved commander. Using the transmitter, triggering the bomb by radio, was the nearest McFaul could get to the kind of death Katilo had inflicted on so many of his countrymen. It also, in theory, gave McFaul a chance of getting away.

He looked across the water again, sensing the darkness beginning to thin. There was the pipe of birdsong now,
rising above the steady chatter of the surrounding bush, and downriver, towards Katilo’s camp, the Dvořák had come to an abrupt end. For a moment, nothing happened. Then came the bellow of an animal, something big, something goaded beyond endurance. It sounded, McFaul thought, like a cow. The bellowing went on for a full minute. Then it stopped and McFaul heard the soldiers again, laughing and clapping, and the swirl of a different kind of music, something infinitely more modern than Dvořák, drums and maracas and guitars, hot Brazilian rhythms rolling across the inky water.

McFaul listened, slapping at the first of the day’s mosquitoes, thinking again about Domingos. Alive, he’d disapprove of this. Violence, he’d argue, was never justified. McFaul smiled, hearing his voice, picturing the way he’d put it, remembering the expression on his face when he fought to make a point. Then he reached for the holdall, unzipping it, wondering whether there was enough light to check the bomb.

When Molly awoke, it was daylight. She blinked, getting up on one elbow, looking across the shadowed room. Bennie was sprawled on the other bed, his mouth wide open, still fully dressed. He was snoring noisily, his chest rising and falling, one hand dangling limply over the side of the bed. Molly watched him for a moment or two, wondering how she’d come to spend the night at the schoolhouse. She remembered the drone of Bennie’s voice, more stories about the minefields, and she remembered abandoning the floor for the comfort of McFaul’s bed. After that though, there was nothing. Just an air of faint surprise that she should have shared this room with a stranger and woken up feeling totally shameless.

She slipped off the bed as quietly as she could and went to the window. Something had disturbed her and she didn’t know quite what. Outside, the road was empty. Molly crossed the room, glancing at her watch. 05.47. Still early. She opened the door to the schoolroom, remembering the water Bennie kept in the row of chipped old fire-buckets. He’d shown them to her the previous evening as she’d helped him back from the Red Cross bunker. She’d suggested then that he drank a glass or two but he’d shaken his head, preferring to finish the bottle of Smirnoff he carried in the pocket of his threadbare combat jacket.

Now, Molly bent to the nearest of the buckets, cupping the tepid water in her hands and sluicing her face. Only when she stood up again did she see the youths sitting behind the schoolroom’s wooden desks. There were three of them. The one with the Santos football shirt stood up and offered her a shy smile. In broken English, he explained that he was a friend of Domingos’s family. Domingos was dead. The Englishmen would need another Domingos. He and the others had come to volunteer.

Molly stared at him, listening to the little speech, water still dripping from her face. When the youth began to ask her what they could do, when they could start, she held up her hands, stepping back into the dormitory and shutting the door behind her. It took a full minute to shake Bennie awake. She tried to explain about the boys next door. Bennie frowned, not understanding. Then he swung his legs off the bed and blundered through to the schoolroom. Molly could hear him snarling at the youths. There was the scraping of desks on the wooden floor, and then footsteps as they left. Bennie was back in the open doorway. Molly was at the window. The youths had disappeared.

‘Were they serious?’ she asked. ‘Did they really want Domingos’s job?’

Bennie looked nonplussed. He was staring at a Jiffybag on the table at the foot of his bed.

‘Yeah,’ he said at last, ‘anything to get them on that fucking plane.’

He picked up the envelope, feeling it. Then he handed it to Molly without a word. Molly took it. It was thicker than it looked. It had Christianne’s name scribbled on the front. Molly weighed it in her hand.

‘Whose writing is that?’

Bennie was back in the schoolroom. Molly could hear him scooping handfuls of water into his mouth.

‘Andy,’ he muttered through the open door, ‘must have left it last night.’

Gunfire awoke McFaul. For a second or two, his head pillowed on his folded arms, he remained completely motionless. The gunfire was coming in sporadic bursts. It sounded like small-arms. McFaul opened one eye. The sun was still low, gilding the mist that hung above the river. He eased his head up, his body still sprawled across the dinghy. The Armalite lay across his lap. His hand crabbed along the stock, releasing the safety catch. The gunfire had stopped now and he could hear men’s voices, the bark of orders, then the cough of an engine stirring into life. McFaul looked across the river. The further bank was eighty metres away, the bush dotted with trees. Of soldiers, there was no sign.

Downriver, his view was blocked by a dense screen of thorn bush and elephant grass. McFaul reached for the holdall and pulled out a pair of binoculars. Then he slipped into the water, staying close to the sand-bar. Underfoot, the bottom of the pool was matted with rotting vegetation. McFaul could feel twigs breaking beneath his boots. There was a bad smell here, too, the smell of human shit, and the
closer he got to the sand-bar, the worse the stench became. He frowned. Normally, you’d shit downstream. Not here.

McFaul paused in the water. Through the thinning stands of grass, he could now see down the river. Katilo’s camp was further than he’d expected, more than five hundred metres away. He put the binoculars to his eyes, adjusting the focus ring. A line of trucks was drawn up beside the water, their outlines blurred by camouflage netting. There were soldiers everywhere, some standing in groups, others squatting round a handful of cooking fires. Curls of thin blue smoke hung in the windless air and as McFaul watched, one of the soldiers got to his feet and disappeared behind a truck. Seconds later he was back again, driving a cow before him, pushing and kicking at it. The other soldiers were laughing. Through the binoculars, McFaul watched one of them fashioning a lasso from a length of rope.

McFaul got a little closer to the sand-bar, widening his view. Inland from the river, on a bald patch of scrub, he found a battery of big field guns. There were more soldiers here, stripped to the waist, piling shells in five-layer pyramids. The barrels of the field guns were elevated towards Muengo and beneath the camouflage netting McFaul thought he recognised the brutal outlines of the South African G5. A G5 could hurl a shell fifteen miles. Muengo’s agony was clearly far from over.

McFaul traversed the binoculars back to the river bank, trying to match the shape of the landscape to the images stencilled on his memory from his last visit. The blindfold walk from the cave to the river had been no more than thirty metres. The four-wheel had been parked nearby. He looked at the line of trucks. Beyond them stood a spindly acacia tree and to the left of it there was a tumulus of some kind where the land shouldered upwards before flattening again. At the
foot of the tumulus, clearly visible, were two soldiers standing several metres apart. Unlike the men around the fire, they were obviously on duty, their bodies criss-crossed with heavy bandoliers of ammunition, their carbines cradled in their arms. McFaul was about to put the glasses down when a third figure appeared, emerging between them. The build and the body language were unmistakable. The way he paused to flick an insect from his face. The passing word he shared with one of the sentries. The slow, languid, early morning stretch, hands behind his neck, hands raised in the air, hands finally propped on his hips as he looked across at the men around the camp-fires. Katilo. Very definitely.

McFaul felt the first stirrings of fear. If he got this wrong, if the plan misfired, Katilo would tear him apart. Literally. In front of an audience. Was this what he really wanted? Would Domingos have thought any the less of him if he jacked it in and called it a day? McFaul hesitated a moment, then dismissed the thought. Domingos wouldn’t be asking any questions. Ever. Domingos was dead. And this man had killed him.

McFaul returned to the dinghy. He went through the holdall, item by item, making sure he kept everything he needed. The water containers he clipped to his belt. A third spare magazine for the Armalite went into the waistband of his jeans. The last of his precious Kendal mint cake, he ate. Finally he unwrapped the taped slab of C4 and inserted the tiny, pencil-thin detonator in the gap he’d left at one end. The detonator was wired to the Motorola, and he bound the whole parcel together with more tape, making sure that the power switch on the radio was off. Beneath his fingers he could feel the shapes of the nails and the broken glass he’d lashed around the explosive. In the bow of the dinghy was a triangle of sturdy rubberised material that acted as a
spray cover. Using more tape, he fixed the bomb beneath the cover. To anyone looking in, the bomb would be invisible.

McFaul slung the Armalite over his shoulder. Then he untied the dinghy and began to tow it out towards the river. Still hidden behind the sand-bar he paused, eyeing the eddies that curled in from the main current. He reached into the dinghy, pulling out the holdall. Inside the holdall was the other Motorola. He pushed it inside the waistband of his jeans, then filled the holdall with water and let it sink. Finally he reached under the spray cover, his fingers finding the power switch on the Motorola. The receiving radio was now on. A call on his own Motorola would trigger the bomb.

McFaul lifted the binoculars, gazing downriver. The water was deeper here, nearly up to his waist. Through the binoculars, he could see the soldiers loading the trucks. The camouflage netting had gone. Of Katilo, there was no sign. McFaul glanced back at the dinghy, measuring the distance between himself and the tell-tale ripple that indicated the middle of the current out in the river. Then he turned the dinghy round until the bow was pointing downstream and gave it a hefty push. The dinghy nosed out across the river, slowing and slowing until it snagged on the current and half-turned and then began to drift sideways downstream.

McFaul was already back behind the thickest vegetation, metres from the river bank, the binoculars to his eyes, tracking the dinghy through the blur of grass and thorn bush. The dinghy was still revolving, turning and turning, already fifty metres downstream. McFaul followed the river down towards the camp. Some of the soldiers were still working amongst the trucks. Others were stamping out the fires. No one seemed to have noticed the dinghy. Minutes went by. To the naked eye, the dinghy was slowly becoming a dot. Then there was a shout. McFaul raised the binoculars again.
One of the soldiers had seen the dinghy. He was standing on the river bank. He was pointing. He was very close to Katilo’s cave.

McFaul traversed the binos. One of the sentries outside the cave had disappeared. The other one was shading his eyes with his hand, staring upriver. McFaul found the dinghy. It was still two hundred metres from the camp. Back outside the cave, Katilo had appeared. He was pulling on a white T-shirt, tucking the bottom into his fatigues. He was following the sentries towards the river bank. McFaul lowered the binoculars a moment, one hand finding the Motorola tucked into the waistband of his jeans. He pulled the radio out and switched it on. All he had to do now was transmit. The transmission button was yellow. Yellow, for Katilo, was the colour of death.

McFaul took another look through the binoculars. There were soldiers in the water now, a little semi-circle, ready for the dinghy. McFaul counted four of them. They were chatting amongst themselves. Katilo was on the river bank, watching them. The soldiers would capture the dinghy. They would bring it to Katilo. They’d manhandle it out of the water and present it to him, their tribute, their offering, and he’d bend to inspect it. The colour yellow. Channel Six. A tiny blossom of flame. A puff or two of smoke. And a mist of bone and blood where Katilo had just been standing.

For the first time, McFaul heard the voices. They were men’s voices. It sounded like they were walking towards him, on his side of the river, up from the direction of the camp. Instinctively, McFaul edged forward, ducking low, seeking the cover of the sand-bar. The soldiers were clearly visible. There were three of them. They were looking back towards the camp, watching the capture of the dinghy. They were laughing. Only one of them was armed. They paused for a
moment, barely fifty metres away, one of them undoing the buttons on his fatigues, and McFaul suddenly realised why they’d come. Shit, he thought. The stench of human shit. These men, for some reason, had chosen this place to defecate.