Wings of the Morning (5 page)

JOSH TROLLOPE — 1965

David Heaven’s graduation day on 13th July 1965 was significant also for Rory Trollope as it was the date of his birth. Rory was pugnacious from conception, a kicker and
a puncher in the womb. He gave his mother a hard time of it in the Pretoria hospital where Rory came into the world. She lay in the hot and foetid cot staring at the fan above her head beating
vainly at the successive waves of pain which broke about her.

This was not Moira Trollope’s first experience of labour, but it was infinitely the worst of her three pregnancies and was bearable only because she could feel the living child within her
whereas the previous two births had resulted in stillborn girls. But the monster about to emerge felt all too like a man with a demanding nature. She bit her tongue and ground her teeth against the
astonishing pain, determined that she could and would get through this to triumph in her healthy son but she did so wish that his father Josh could have been there with her, or at least within
call. Instead of which, he was lost to her, hundreds of miles to the north somewhere, a soldier of fortune fighting in some squalid little war in which he had only two interests — to stay
alive and to pick up his mercenary’s pay with which to establish a home and hearth for his wife and child.

Josh Trollope had come late to marriage and to any thought of settling down. A career soldier, he had joined the British Army straight from school and the elite Grenadier Guards had enveloped
him as a member of their lifelong family. Josh had seen action in Normandy after D-Day and had remained in the thick of it until the end of the War. He had gone on with his Regiment, serving as
much overseas as at home, steadily increasing his status with the passage of time and the building of experience.

He had been a senior NCO serving in Germany when he met Moira five years previously. She was a South African over on a working holiday and they had fallen for each other in a style which had
amazed Josh’s mates. Moira’s father had land in South Africa, but he was widowed with no son to take it on and he himself was running short of strength and morale. Josh and Moira paid
one visit to the farm, in the process using up much of their savings and his accumulated leave, but it was worth it. For Josh, seeing was believing and understanding, so he returned to hand in his
papers, taking an immediate chance to leave the Guards after twenty years of loyal and productive service.

He was now just forty years old and on the day of his son’s birth he was lying prone, silent and sweating behind inadequate cover in a small village many miles northeast of Libreville,
capital city of the republic of Gabon. In 1965, all this region of West Africa remained under the colonial influence of France, but it had become destabilised by the bloody war which had been
raging in the Belgian Congo since the early sixties. Josh knew a fair bit of the history. He was too good a soldier not to take an interest, but he cared very little as to who would win. He had
been able to see at the outset that this conflict was all about possession, not politics and certainly not principles despite all the high flown language and the international debate.

When Josh and Moira had disembarked in Durban after their emigration voyage, he had seen newspaper advertisements which sought trained and battle experienced soldiers to sign on as mercenaries.
The logic of a short term engagement was compelling. They did really need some capital to take over the farm and to plan for the future.

So within weeks of arriving to settle in South Africa, Josh was on the move again and back into soldiering, but now as a mercenary in the Belgian Congo, a member of the force working to
re-establish the charismatic Moishe Tshombe. Trollope signed on with the English speaking 5th Commando led by the legendary Mike Hoare and stayed with him through most of the Simba war until
Hoare’s retirement in December 1964. By then, Josh reckoned that he had put by enough in savings and was more than ready to move on to his new life on the farm with Moira and her father in
the background to help.

But then came the baby. A few days of unexpected leave started the bulge which was just showing on Moira by the time of his contract termination. When he returned home to the farm, there was
news that the baby was fit and strong in the womb, but the final stages were expected to be testing. Moira was going to need expert and expensive help to deliver the infant so they must invest much
of their nest egg in the best medical care they could find and worry about replacing the money later.

And worry he did. Josh was preoccupied when he went into a bar in Pretoria during the Christmas period and bumped into a friend from way back in his British Army days. Barry Bingham was
established as a soldier of fortune, and as it happened, looking for help. He had little difficulty in talking Josh into one last tour which was to be with the private army of a character who
called himself General Moses Samson. This self appointed general, whose birth name was never discovered, was recruiting a dozen white officers to manage the efforts of a rabble which he referred to
as a battalion, and his objective was brigandry, pure and simple. Josh was to come to tax himself for being so quick to commit, but he was seduced by the lure of enormous money for a short and
dirty contract. There was neither time nor opportunity for Josh to meet Moses Samson in advance. He simply relied on the version of events as set out by his old mate Barry Bingham and although Josh
was mindful of Barry and had taken several pinches of salt with his story, it still remained a long way wide of the mark of reality.

Samson claimed to be the leader of a recessionary tribal group occupying a small wedge of territory in the extreme south of the Central African Republic, seeking independence from the colonial
government installed in the capital city of Bangui. In truth, Samson was after much more than this. He aimed to annex a small corner in the north west of the vast country which was then the Belgian
Congo. Samson was not the only privateer to see the opportunities to be afforded under the convenient cloak of civil war and he was at least as cunning as any who tried. His target patch of ground
was something of the size of Switzerland and it was not so much the land which took his fancy as the valuable minerals beneath it, especially the iron ore which the French had been extracting from
two mines in this region for the past decade.

Profiting from the unsettled politics of the day, Samson had approached the East Germans who, fronting for Moscow, had been prepared to advance him some funding. With this help, and his own
powers of persuasion, he had contrived to recruit his modest team, no more than 500 strong and some materiel. Most of his fighters were hired guns who brought with them their own motley armaments.
In a gesture towards some military professionalism, he was recruiting a few white mercenaries, but this was also to make his insurrection the more newsworthy in Europe and the United States.

Samson raised his force in Cabinda in northern Angola, right by the Congolese border. He then took his men further north by a cheaply chartered tramp steamer and disembarked in Equatorial
Guinea, a tiny country with a lawless reputation in which he could buy an unopposed reception for modest price. From there, the column had marched and driven in a ragbag of vehicles almost due east
with an outline plan to pass swiftly through the extreme north of Gabonese territory en route to their end objective, a few hundred kilometres distant.

Barry Bingham and Josh Trollope were late to join the force, and Barry had insisted on first passing through Libreville to collect fifty per cent of the contract price up front which was the
deal he had struck with Moses Samson. It was enough for signing on and starting up. There were all sorts of reasons why the balance might never get paid.

When Barry went sick, he and Josh had been in Libreville for twenty-four hours, just long enough for them to pick up their money from Samson’s bag man and get it safely into the French
banking system. It was over an evening meal before their onward journey that Bingham collapsed without warning, literally into the soup. Josh knew enough about Africa’s sicknesses and malaria
in particular to speculate that Barry would be lucky to survive this attack, never mind catching up with ‘the army of Moses’.

This left Josh in a difficult situation but not with a decision over which he hesitated for long. He knew that he couldn’t return the money to a nameless man who had long since vanished
and he couldn’t hope to hang on to it and bail out without the risk of Samson’s retribution overtaking him. He would never be free of that worry and besides, he would be condemning
Barry to an unpleasant end if the malaria didn’t get him first. And then there was another aspect. If Josh went ahead and did some of Bingham’s job for him, he could count on picking up
a fair proportion of Barry’s pay as well as his own.

So Josh stuck to the plan even though he was sorely hampered by being alone and unable to communicate easily. He rendezvoused at dawn the next day with a one legged guide and they travelled
north together by native bus, an interminable journey which gave Josh the chance to practice extravagant explanation in sign language and pidgin of what had befallen Barry Bingham. He was not
confident that his companion either understood or believed him, still less General Moses Samson whom they met more or less on schedule two days later in camp outside the little bush town of
Mbornou.

There had been an unending tirade from Samson, delivered in a mixture of language and dialect of which Josh could decipher hardly a word, for all that the message was clear enough. White
mercenaries were expensive and unreliable, especially if they came from South Africa. They were there only to exploit the poor and downtrodden blacks, but they should be careful now as the day was
dawning for the new Messiah, Moses Samson himself, and all this announced with much beating of breast, rolling of eyes and jiggling of his little goatee beard. Samson cut a physically small and
insignificant figure, but there was no denying his presence and the inspiration which he aroused in his fervent followers. A true rabble-rouser, Josh thought to himself as he suffered this
performance which was interrupted from time to time by an immense Belgian mercenary who was on hand to provide a limping translation. In some response, Josh made the most of his own attendance
despite the sickness of his partner before lapsing into a surly silence.

This interview with the great leader constituted the whole of his welcome and introduction into the army of Moses. It was made plain was that they were behind schedule and they broke camp before
dawn the following day, moving off to the East in a straggle of unlit vehicles down the rough track. It was three hours later when the crisis struck, but it didn’t take Josh unawares. His
every sense had been warning him from the moment when he had walked into this outfit that a moment of truth was approaching, the only questions being what and from which quarter.

First they stopped and then they sat. From his vantage point beside the driver in the elderly Mercedes truck which had wheezed its way up the track, Josh could see in the full daylight that his
vehicle was about two thirds down the line. The column ahead wound up a shallow incline and there was a gathering way ahead by the lead vehicle, a similar truck to his own with its squat, blunt
bonnet lifted. Presumably some sort of breakdown. After a twenty minute delay, brilliant for mobility tactics he thought ruefully and all the better for being in wide open country, Josh saw the big
Belgian start to descend the track on foot. As he approached, he acknowledged Josh with a jerk of his head and shortly afterwards, Josh heard him bellow to a Frenchman who was riding shotgun in a
Land Rover further to the rear. Josh waited for them to come up to him. There was some delay while they exchanged conversation. He could see them from his cab as they talked. They knew each other
well, he decided, well enough to work together, close enough to be discussing something from which he was to be excluded.

Finally, they walked up to his truck and Josh nodded to his driver before descending to join them. The three walked together to the head of the line and there made out a group of a dozen or so
gathered around the lead truck which by now had its bonnet mostly closed again and the engine on tick over. The assembled company included all the white mercenaries, an assortment of Africans who
served as Samson’s personal staff and of course the General himself, apparently spitting tintacks and fulminating enough to make his spray fly.

Plus one more: a powerfully built black man, completely naked, bloodied back and buttocks. His head, neck and arms were pinned beneath the bonnet of the Mercedes truck on which two soldiers were
seated, casually raining further blows on the unprotected torso beneath them. The prisoner was flinching, jumping and scratching his feet in the dirt as he fought for purchase from which to ease
his position. His discomfort would owe less to the beating than to the under bonnet heat on his face and hands. Josh Trollope had seen this form of bush stocks treatment before.

As Josh and the other two mercs arrived at the scene, Moses ceased his harangue to boot his captive between the legs and then turned to Josh, at the same time snarling at the Belgian to come
forward. Not that much interpretation was needed. Josh could pretty much write the script himself, but he settled himself in a casual pose, hands on hips, allowing the tirade to sweep over him and
ignoring the stumbling translation whilst he thought furiously.

The theme of the Moses speech was that the captive was a Nigerian, an Army deserter presenting himself as a mercenary. He had been assigned to travel at the front of the convoy to be on hand for
the General in case they met English speakers. He had been caught rifling through papers, no doubt looking for cash and saleable commodities. Just now under questioning, he claimed to know you, Mr
Trollope. Probably nonsense, but just to be sure, you grill him a bit more and then finish him off. Enough time wasted already.