I said to the pilot, a cheerful young man called Max Otterman, ‘Can you fly to the other side of Lasulu, please? Not far, say twenty miles. I want to look at the road over there.’
‘It peters out a mile or so beyond the town. But I’ll go on a way,’ he said.
Sure enough the road vanished into the miniature buildup around Lasulu, reemerging inland from the coast. On the continuation of the coastal stretch another road carried on northwards, less impressive than the earlier section but apparently perfectly usable. The small harbour did not look busy, but there were two or three fair-sized craft riding at anchor. Not easy to tell from the air, but it didn’t seem as though there was a building in Lasulu higher than three storeys. The endless frail smoke of shantytown cooking fires wreathed all about it.
Refuelling was done quickly at the airstrip, and then we turned inland. From Lasulu to Bir Oassa was about 800 miles and we flew over the broad strip of concrete thrusting incongruously through mangrove swamp, rain forest, savannah and the scrubby fringes of desert country. It had been built by Italian engineers, Japanese surveyors and a mixture of road crews with Russian money and had cost twice as much as it should, the surplus being siphoned off into a hundred unauthorized pockets and numbered accounts in Swiss banks—a truly international venture.
The Russians were not perturbed by the way their money was used. They were not penny-pinchers and, in fact, had worked hard to see that some of the surplus money went into the right pockets. It was a cheap way of buying friends in a country that was poised uncertainly and ready to topple East or West in any breeze. It was another piece laid on the chessboard of international diplomacy to fend off an identical move by another power.
The road drove through thick forest and then heaved itself up towards the sky, climbing the hills which edged the central plateau. Then it crossed the sea of grass and bush to the dry region of the desert and came to Bir Oassa where the towers of oil rigs made a newer, metal forest.
I spent two days in Bir Oassa talking to the men and the bosses, scouting about the workings, and cocking an ear for any sort of unrest or uneasiness. I found very little worthy of note and nothing untoward. I did have a complaint from Dick Slater, the chief steam engineer, who had been sent word of the change of schedule and didn’t like it.
‘I’ll have thirty steam fitters playing pontoon when they should be working,’ he said abrasively to me. ‘Why the bloody hell do they have to send the transformers first?’
It had all been explained to him but he was being wilful. I said, ‘Take it easy. It’s all been authorized by Geddes from London.’
‘London! What do they know about it? This Geddes doesn’t understand the first damn thing about it,’ he said. Slater wasn’t the man to be mealy-mouthed. I calmed him down—well, maybe halfway down—and went in search of other problems. It worried me when I couldn’t find any.
On the second day I had a phone call from Sutherland. On a crackling line full of static and clashing crossed wires his voice said faintly, ‘…Having a meeting with Ousemane and Daondo. Do you want…?’
‘Yes, I do want to sit in on it. You and who else?’ I was shouting.
‘…Kemp from Wyvern. Tomorrow morning…’
‘Has the rig come?’
‘…Unloading…came yesterday…’
‘I’ll be there.’
The meeting was held in a cool room in the Palace of Justice. The most important government man there was the Minister of the Interior, Hamah Ousemane, who presided over the meeting with a bland smile. He did not say much but left the talking to a short, slim man who was introduced as Zinsou Daondo. I couldn’t figure whether Ousemane didn’t understand what was going on, or understood and didn’t care: he displayed a splendid indifference.
Very surprising for a meeting of this kind was the presence of Major General Abram Kigonde, the army boss. Although he was not a member of the government he was a living reminder of Mao’s dictum that power grows out of the muzzle of a gun. No Nyalan government could survive without his nod of approval. At first I couldn’t see where he fitted in to this discussion on the moving of a big piece of power plant.
On our side there were myself, Sutherland, and Basil Kemp, who was a lean Englishman with a thin brown face stamped with tiredness and worry marks. He greeted me pleasantly enough, remembering our last encounter some few years before and appearing unperturbed by my presence. He probably had too much else on his plate already. I let Sutherland make the running and he addressed his remarks to the Minister while Daondo did the answering. It looked remarkably like a ventriloquist’s act but I found it hard to figure out who was the dummy. Kigonde kept a stiff silence.
After some amiable chitchat (not the weather, thank God) we got down to business and Sutherland outlined
some routine matters before drawing Kemp into the discussion. ‘Could we have a map, please, Mister Kemp?’
Kemp placed a map on the big table and pointed out his bottlenecks.
‘We have to get out of Port Luard and through Lasulu. Both are big towns and to take a load like this through presents difficulties. It has been my experience in Europe that operations like this draw the crowds and I can’t see that it will be different here. We should appreciate a police escort.’
Daondo nodded. ‘It will certainly draw the crowds.’ He seemed pleased.
Kemp said, ‘In Europe we usually arrange to take these things through at extreme off-peak times. The small hours of the night are often best.’
This remark drew a frown from Daondo and I thought I detected the slightest of headshakes from the Minister. I became more alert.
Kigonde stirred and spoke for the first time, in a deep and beautifully modulated voice. ‘You will certainly have an escort, Mister Kemp—but not the police. I am putting an army detachment at your service.’ He leaned forward and pressed a button, the door of the room opened, and a smartly dressed officer strode towards the table. ‘This is Captain Ismail Sadiq who will command the escort.’
Captain Sadiq clicked to attention, bowing curtly, and then at a nod from Kigonde stood at ease at the foot of the table.
Daondo said, The army will accompany you all the way.’
‘The whole journey?’ Sutherland asked.
‘On all journeys.’
I sensed that Sutherland was about to say something wrong, and forestalled him. ‘We are more than honoured, Major General. This is extremely thoughtful of you and we appreciate it. It is more of an honour than such work as this usually entails.’
‘Our police force is not large, and already has too much work. We regard the safekeeping of such expeditions as these of the greatest importance, Mister Mannix. The army stands ready to be of any service.’ He was very smooth, and I reckoned that we’d come out of that little encounter about equal. I prepared to enjoy myself.
‘Please explain the size of your command, Captain,’ Daondo said.
Sadiq had a soft voice at odds with his appearance. ‘For work on the road I have four infantry troop carriers with six men to each carrier, two trucks for logistics purposes, and my own command car, plus outriders. Eight vehicles, six motorcycles and thirty-six men including myself. In the towns I am empowered to call on local army units for crowd control.’
This was bringing up the big guns with a vengeance. I had never heard of a rig which needed that kind of escort, whether for crowd control or for any other form of safety regulations, except in conditions of war. My curiosity was aroused by now, but I said nothing and let Sutherland carry on. Taking his cue from me he expressed only his gratitude and none of his perturbation. He’d expected a grudging handful of ill-trained local coppers at best.
Kigonde was saying, ‘In the Nyalan army the rank of captain is relatively high, gentlemen. You need not fear being held up in any way.’
‘I am sure not,’ said Kemp politely. ‘It will be a pleasure having your help, Captain. But now there are other matters as well. I am sorry to tell you that the road has deteriorated slightly in some places, and my loads may be too heavy for them.’
That was an understatement, but Kemp was working hard at diplomacy. Obviously he was wondering if Sadiq had any idea of the demands made by heavy transport, and if army escort duty also meant army assistance. Daondo picked him
up and said easily, ‘Captain Sadiq will be authorized to negotiate with the civil bodies in each area in which you may find difficulty. I am certain that an adequate labour force will be found for you. And, of course, the necessary materials.’
It all seemed too good to be true. Kemp went on to the next problem.
‘Crowd control in towns is only one aspect, of course, gentlemen. There is the sheer difficulty of pushing a big vehicle through a town. Here on the map I have outlined a proposed route through Port Luard, from the docks to the outskirts. I estimate that it will take eight or nine hours to get through. The red line marks the easiest, in fact the only route, and the figures in circles are the estimated times at each stage. That should help your traffic control, although we shouldn’t have too much trouble there, moving through the central city area mostly during the night.’
The Minister made a sudden movement, wagging one finger sideways. Daondo glanced at him before saying, ‘It will not be necessary to move through Port Luard at night, Mister Kemp. We prefer you to make the move in daylight.’
‘It will disrupt your traffic flow considerably,’ said Kemp in some surprise.
‘That is of little consequence. We can handle it.’ Daondo bent over the map. ‘I see your route lies through Independence Square.’
‘It’s really the only way,’ said Kemp defensively. ‘It would be quite impossible to move through this tangle of narrow streets on either side without a great deal of damage to buildings.’
‘I quite agree,’ said Daondo. ‘In fact, had you not suggested it we would have asked you to go through the Square ourselves.’
This appeared to come as a wholly novel idea to Kemp. I could see he was thinking of the squalls of alarm from the London Metropolitan Police had he suggested pushing a
300-ton load through Trafalgar Square in the middle of the rush hour. Wherever he’d worked in Europe, he had been bullied, harassed and crowded into corners and sent on his way with the stealth of a burglar.
He paused to take this in with one finger still on the map. ‘There’s another very real difficulty here, though. This big plinth in the middle of the avenue leading into the Square. It’s sited at a very bad angle from our point of view—we’re going to have a great deal of difficulty getting around it. I would like to suggest—’
The Minister interrupted him with an unexpected deepbellied, rumbling chuckle but his face remained bland. Daondo was also smiling and in his case too the smile never reached his eyes. ‘Yes, Mister Kemp, we see what you mean. I don’t think you need trouble about the plinth. We will have it removed. It will improve the traffic flow into Victory Avenue considerably in any case.’
Kemp and Sutherland exchanged quick glances. ‘I…I think it may take time,’ said Sutherland. ‘It’s a big piece of masonry.’
‘It is a task for the army,’ said Kigonde and turned to Sadiq. ‘See to it, Captain.’
Sadiq nodded and made quick notes. The discussion continued, the exit from Port Luard was detailed and the progress through Lasulu dismissed, for all its obvious difficulties to us, as a mere nothing by the Nyalans. About an hour later, after some genteel refreshment, we were finally free to go our way. We all went up to my hotel room and could hardly wait to get there before indulging in a thorough postmortem of that extraordinary meeting. It was generally agreed that no job had ever been received by the local officials with greater cooperation, any problem melting like snowflakes in the steamy Port Luard sunshine. Paradoxically it was this very ease of arrangement that made us all most uneasy, especially Basil Kemp.
‘I can’t believe it,’ he said, not for the first time. ‘They just love us, don’t they?’
‘I think you’ve put your finger on it, Basil,’ I said. ‘They really need us and they are going all out to show it. And they’re pretty used to riding roughshod over the needs and wishes of their populace, assuming it has any. They’re going to shove us right down the middle in broad daylight, and the hell with any little obstacles.’
‘Such as the plinth,’ said Sutherland and we both laughed.
Kemp said, ‘I think I missed something there. A definite undercurrent. I must say I haven’t looked at this thing too closely myself—what is it anyway—some local bigwig?’
Sutherland chuckled. ‘I thought old Ousemane would split his breeches. There’s a statue of Maro Ofanwe still on that plinth: thirty feet high in bronze, very heroic. Up to now they’ve been busy ignoring it, as it was a little too hefty to blow up or knock down, but now they’ve got just the excuse they want. It’ll help to serve notice that they don’t want any more strong men about, in a none too subtle sort of way. Ofanwe was an unmitigated disaster and not to be repeated.’
During the next few days I got on with my job, which mainly consisted of trying to find out what my job was. I talked with various members of the Government and had a special meeting with the Minister of Finance which left us both happy. I also talked to journalists in the bars, one or two businessmen and several other expatriates from Britain who were still clinging on to their old positions, most of them only too ready to bewail the lost days of glory. I gleaned a lot, mostly of misinformation, but slowly I was able to put together a picture which didn’t precisely coincide with that painted by Shelford back in London.
I was also made an honorary member of the Luard Club which, in colonial days, had strictly white membership but in these times had become multi-racial. There were still a number of old Africa hands there as well, and from a couple of them I got another whiff of what might be going bad in Nyala.
In the meantime Kemp and Sutherland were getting on with their business, to more immediate ends. On the morning the first big load was to roll I was up bright and early, if not bushy tailed. The sun had just risen and the temperature already in the eighties when I drove to the docks to see the loaded rig. I hadn’t had much chance to talk to Kemp and while I doubted that this was the moment, I had to pin him down to some time and place.
I found him and Sutherland in the middle of a small slice of chaos, both looking harassed as dozens of men milled around shouting questions and orders. They’d been at it for a long time already and things were almost ready to go into action. I stared in fascination at what I saw.
The huge rig wasn’t unfamiliar to me but it was still a breathtaking sight. The massive towing trucks, really tractors with full cab bodies, stood at each end of the flat-bed trailer onto which the transformer had been lowered, inch by painful inch, over the previous few hours. Around it scurried small dockside vehicles, fork-lift trucks and scooters, like worker ants scrambling about their huge motionless queen. But what fascinated and amused me was the sight of a small platoon of Nyalan dock hands clambering about the actual rig itself, as agile and noisy as a troop of monkeys, busy stringing yards of festive bunting between any two protruding places to which they could be tied. The green and yellow colours of the Nyalan flag predominated, and one of them was being hauled up a jackstaff which was bound to the front tractor bumpers. No wonder that Kemp looked thunderstruck and more than a little grim.
I hurried over to him, and my arrival coincided with that of Mr Daondo, who was just getting out of a black limousine. Daondo stood with hands on hips and gazed the length of the enormous rig with great satisfaction, then turned to us and said in a hearty voice, ‘Well, good morning, gentlemen. I see everything is going very well indeed.’
Kemp said, ‘Good morning, Mister Daondo—Neil. May I ask what—’
‘Hello, Basil. Great day for it, haven’t we? Mister Daondo, would you excuse us for just one moment? I’ve got your figures here, Basil…’
Talking fast, waving a notebook, and giving him no time to speak, I managed to draw Kemp away from Daondo’s
side, leaving the politician to be entertained for a moment by John Sutherland.
‘Just what the hell do they think they’re doing?’ Kemp was outraged.
‘Ease off. Calm down. Can’t you see? They’re going to put on a show for the people—that’s what this daylight procession has been about all along. The power plant is one of the biggest things that’s ever happened to Nyala and the Government wants to do a bit of bragging. And I don’t see why not.’
‘But how?’ Kemp, normally a man of broad enough intelligence, was on a very narrow wave length where his precious rig was concerned.
‘Hasn’t the penny dropped yet? You’re to be the centrepiece of a triumphal parade through the town, right through Independence Square. The way the Ruskies trundle their rockets through Red Square on May Day. You’ll be on show, the band will play, the lot.’
‘Are you serious?’ said Kemp in disgust.
‘Quite. The Government must not only govern but be seen to govern. They’re entitled to bang their drum.’
Kemp subsided, muttering.
‘Don’t worry. As soon as you’re clear of the town you can take the ribbons out of her hair and get down to work properly. Have a word with your drivers. I’d like to meet them, but not right away. And tell them to enjoy themselves. It’s a gala occasion.’
‘All right, I suppose we must. But it’s damn inconvenient. It’s hard enough work moving these things without having to cope with cheering mobs and flag-waving.’
‘You don’t have to cope, that’s his job.’ I indicated Daondo with a jerk of my thumb. ‘Your guys just drive it away as usual. I think we’d better go join him.’
We walked back to where Daondo, leaning negligently against the hood of his Mercedes, was holding forth to a
small circle of underlings. Sutherland was in the thick of it, together with a short, stocky man with a weathered face. Sutherland introduced him to me.
‘Neil, this is Ben Hammond, my head driver. Ben, Mister Mannix of British Electric. I think Ben’s what you’d call my ranch foreman.’
I grinned. ‘Nice herd of cattle you’ve got there, Ben. I’d like to meet the crew later. What’s the schedule?’
‘I’ve just told Mister Daondo that I think they’re ready to roll any time now. But of course it’s Mister Kemp’s show really.’
‘Thank you, Mister Sutherland. I’ll have a word with Daondo and then we can get going,’ Kemp said.
I marvelled at the way my British companions still managed to cling to surnames and honorifics. I wondered if they’d all be dressing for dinner, out there in the bush wherever the rig stopped for the night. I gave my attention to Daondo to find that he was being converged upon by a band of journalists, video and still cameras busy, notebooks poised, but with none of the free-for-all shoving that might have taken place anywhere in Europe. The presence of several armed soldiers nearby may have had a bearing on that.
‘Ah, Mister Mannix,’ Daondo said, ‘I am about to hold a short press conference. Would you join me, please?’
‘An honour, Minister. But it’s not really my story—it’s Mister Kemp’s.’
Kemp gave me a brief dirty look as I passed the buck neatly to him. ‘May I bring Mister Hammond in on this?’ he asked, drawing Ben Hammond along by the arm. ‘He designed this rig; it’s very much his baby.’
I looked at the stocky man in some surprise. This was something I hadn’t known and it set me thinking. Wyvern Haulage might be new as an outfit, but they seemed to have gathered a great deal of talent around them, and my respect for Geoff Wingstead grew fractionally greater.
The press conference was under way, to a soft barrage of clicks as people were posed in front of the rig. Video cameramen did their trick of walking backwards with a buddy’s hand on their shoulder to guide them, and the writer boys ducked and dodged around the clutter of ropes, chain, pulleys and hawsers that littered the ground. Some of the inevitable questions were coming up and I listened carefully, as this was a chance for me to learn a few of the technicalities.
‘Just how big is this vehicle?’
Kemp indicated Ben Hammond forward. Ben, grinning like a toothpaste advertisement, was enjoying his moment in the limelight as microphones were thrust at him. ‘As the transporter is set up now it’s a bit over a hundred feet long. We can add sections up to another eighteen feet but we won’t need them on this trip.’
‘Does that include the engines?’
‘The tractors? No, those are counted separately. We’ll be adding on four tractors to get over hilly ground and then the total length will be a shade over two hundred and forty feet.’
Another voice said, ‘Our readers may not be able to visualize that. Can you give us anything to measure it by?’
Hammond groped for an analogy, and then said, ‘I notice that you people here play a lot of soccer—football.’
‘Indeed we do,’ Daondo interjected. ‘I myself am an enthusiast.’ He smiled modestly as he put in his personal plug. ‘I was present at the Cup Final at Wembley last year, when I was Ambassador to the United Kingdom.’
Hammond said, ‘Well, imagine this. If you drove this rig onto the field at Wembley, or any other standard soccer pitch, it would fill the full length of the pitch with a foot hanging over each side. Is that good enough?’
There was a chorus of appreciative remarks, and Kemp said in a low voice, ‘Well done, Ben. Carry on.’
‘How heavy is the vehicle?’ someone asked.
‘The transporter weighs ninety tons, and the load, that big transformer, is three hundred tons. Add forty tons for each tractor and it brings the whole lot to five hundred and fifty tons on the hoof.’
Everybody scribbled while the cameras ground on. Hammond added, airing some knowledge he had only picked up in the last few days, ‘Elephants weigh about six tons each; so this is worth nearly a hundred elephants.’
The analogy was received with much amusement.
‘Those tractors don’t look big enough to weigh forty tons,’ he was prompted.
‘They carry ballast. Steel plates embedded in concrete. We have to have some counterbalance for the weight of the load or the transporter will overrun the tractors—especially on the hills. Negotiating hill country is very tricky.’
‘How fast will you go?’
Kemp took over now. ‘On the flat with all tractors hooked up I dare say we could push along to almost twenty miles an hour, even more going downhill. But we won’t. Five hundred and fifty tons going at twenty miles an hour takes a lot of stopping, and we don’t take risks. I don’t think we’ll do much more than ten miles an hour during any part of the journey, and usually much less. Our aim is to average five miles an hour during a ten hour day; twenty days from Port Luard to Bir Oassa.’
This drew whistles of disbelief and astonishment. In this age of fast transport, it was interesting that extreme slowness could exert the same fascination as extreme speed. It also interested me to notice that Nyala had not yet converted its thinking to the metric unit as far as distances were concerned.
‘How many wheels does it have?’
Hammond said, ‘Ninety-six on the ground and eight spares.’
‘How many punctures do you expect?’
‘None—we hope.’ This drew a laugh.
‘What’s the other big truck?’
‘That’s the vehicle which carries the airlift equipment and the machinery for powering it,’ said Kemp. ‘We use it to spread the load when crossing bridges, and it works on the hovercraft principle. It’s powered by four two hundred and forty-hp Rolls Royce engines—and that vehicle itself weighs eight tons.’
‘And the others?’
‘Spares, a workshop for maintenance, food and personal supplies, fuel. We have to take everything with us, you see.’
There was a stir as an aide came forward to whisper something into Daondo’s ear. He raised his hand and his voice. ‘Gentlemen, that will be all for now, thank you. I invite you all to gather round this great and marvellous machine for its dedication by His Excellency, the Minister of the Interior, the Right Honourable Hamah Ousemane, OBE.’ He touched me on the arm. ‘This way, please.’
As we followed him I heard Hammond saying to Kemp, ‘What’s he going to do? Crack a bottle of champagne over it?’
I grinned back at him. ‘Did you really design this thing?’
‘I designed some modifications to a standard rig, yes.’
Kemp said, ‘Ben built a lot of it, too.’
I was impressed. ‘For a little guy you sure play with big toys.’
Hammond stiffened and looked at me with hot eyes. Clearly I had hit on a sore nerve. ‘I’m five feet two and a half inches tall,’ he said curtly. ‘And that’s the exact height of Napoleon.’
‘No offence meant,’ I said quickly, and then we all came to a sudden stop at the rig to listen to Ousemane’s speech. He spoke first in English and then in Nyalan for a long time in a rolling, sonorous voice while the sun became hotter and everybody wilted. Then came some ribbon cutting and handshakes all round, some repeated for the benefit of the
press, and finally he took himself off in his Mercedes. Kemp mopped his brow thankfully. ‘Do you think we can get on with it now?’ he asked nobody in particular.
Daondo was bustling back to us. In the background a surprising amount of military deployment was taking place, and there was an air of expectancy building up. ‘Excellent, Mister Kemp! We are all ready to go now,’ Daondo said. ‘You will couple up ail the tractors, won’t you?’
Kemp turned to me and said in a harassed undertone, ‘What for? We won’t be doing more than five miles an hour on the flat and even one tractor’s enough for that.’
I was getting a bit tired of Kemp and his invincible ignorance and I didn’t want Daondo to hear him and blow a gasket. I smiled past Kemp and said, ‘Of course. Everything will be done as you wish it, Minister.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘I must get to Independence Square before you arrive. I leave Captain Sadiq in command of the arrangements.’ He hurried away to his car.
I said to Kemp, putting an edge on my voice, ‘We’re expected to put on a display and we’ll do it. Use everything you’ve got. Line ‘em up, even the chow wagon. Until we leave town it’s a parade every step of the way.’
‘Who starts this parade?’
‘You do—just tell your drivers to pull off in line whenever they’re ready. The others will damn well have to fall in around you. I’ll ride with you in the Land Rover.’
Kemp shrugged. ‘Bunch of clowns,’ he said and went off to give his drivers their instructions. For the moment I actually had nothing to do and I wandered over to have another look at the rig. It’s a funny thing, but whenever a guy looks at a vehicle he automatically kicks a tyre. Ask any second-hand auto salesman. So that’s what I did. It had about as much effect as kicking a building and was fairly painful. The tyres were all new, with deep tread earthmovers on the tractors. The whole rig looked brand new, as if it had never been used before, and I couldn’t
decide if this was a good or a bad thing. I squinted up at it as it towered over me, remembering the one time I had towed a caravan and had it jackknife on me, and silently tipped my hat to the drivers of this outfit. They were going to need skill and luck in equal proportions on this trip.