The Perfect Soldier (19 page)

Peterson urged the officer to get out of the truck and take a look at the new well. According to the paperwork at the Terra Sancta bungalow, it had been dug by local labour under the supervision of the luckless James Jordan. He’d located
an aquifer, using data from an earlier Oxfam survey, and had sunk an exploratory borehole. The aquifer was relatively shallow, no more than fifteen feet below ground level, and a week’s digging had opened a well deep enough to produce fresh water. The well was lined with precast concrete rings to within a metre of the surface, and a couple more days’ labour would see it through to completion.

The officer finally agreed to inspect the well. He was a young man, no more than twenty-five, and he came from Sombe, a city on the coast. Peterson sensed that he had no enthusiasm for either the countryside or the war, and the events of the last four days had plainly shaken him. Now he stood beside the well, peering in. A rusty iron pulley hung from the wooden tripod erected over the mouth of the well and Peterson could smell the water below, a damp earthiness that reminded him of early summer mornings in his native Somerset.

The officer tossed a pebble into the well, listening for the plop. They were talking in Portuguese.

‘How many men do you need?’

‘Six. No more.’

‘For how long?’

‘Three days. Four days. Less if it doesn’t rain.’

The officer nodded. The ceasefire had held now for nearly sixty hours while arrangements were finalised for the evacuation of Muengo’s aid community. Colonel Katilo’s UNITA troops had thrown a noose around the city, and nowhere was the truce line further than six kilometres from the cathedral. Once the evacuation was over, the fighting – it seemed – would resume.

Peterson stepped back from the well. The road to the airport was only a couple of hundred metres away across the rough scrub and in the distance he could see the line of
oil drums the rebels were using as a barrier. There were rebel soldiers on the other side of the barrier, motionless figures in full combat dress, and one of them had a pair of binoculars trained on the well.

‘The water situation’s serious,’ Peterson pointed out. ‘We could have the well working by the weekend. If we’re still here.’

‘One well?’ The officer looked at him. ‘Sixty thousand people?’ He shrugged, turning away, no longer seeing any point in the conversation, but Peterson followed him, determined to press the point. He’d met this kind of attitude before, a listless surrender to overwhelming odds. This man spoke the language of the battlefield and he understood the implications of the nearby road-block only too well. In a couple of days he’d probably be dead. Why should he bother about someone else’s hole in the ground?

Peterson began to argue afresh, pointing out that the soldiers too would need clean water, but the officer had stopped again, his attention attracted by the blue UN Landcruiser bumping towards them. The vehicle came to a halt in a cloud of dust. Peterson hadn’t seen Fernando since late last night when the UN rep had returned, exhausted, from yet another session with the UNITA high command. Now, if anything, he looked even more harassed.

‘You know anything about this?’ he said at once.

‘What? About what?’

‘This aid flight? Coming in this morning?’ Peterson shook his head, opening the door of the Landcruiser, letting Fernando get out. The ashtray in the dashboard was brimming with cigarettes. Fernando produced a dirty handkerchief and mopped his face. ‘Luanda came through ten minutes ago. The people at the airport cleared a flight this morning. It left at eight-thirty. One of your guys on board.’

‘But the airstrip’s blocked.’

‘I know. I just checked.’

Fernando’s hand had gone to the breast pocket of his rumpled shirt. Peterson declined the offered Gitane, glancing at his watch, doing the calculations in his head. Flight time from Luanda, unless you were a MiG, was two hours or so. Already it was nearly 9.15.

‘So what happens now?’ he said.

‘You tell me. I raised Katilo on the way down here. Told him what had happened.’

‘And what did he say?’

Fernando grimaced at the question, turning his shoulder to the wind and lighting his cigarette. Peterson watched the smoke drifting away, waiting for an answer. Fernando picked a shred of tobacco from his lower lip.

‘Just laughed,’ he said at last. ‘The way he always does.’

The Dove droned on, the needle on the airspeed indicator nudging 130 knots, the landscape unrolling slowly below. They’d been airborne now for more than an hour and a half and Molly was beginning to feel drowsy, the sun hot through the unscreened Perspex above her head. From time to time, Rademeyer would lean over and attract her attention, indicating some feature beneath them, a range of hills, the loop of a river, and – only minutes ago – the thin black line of the Benguela railway. Once, Rademeyer mused, you could buy a ticket all the way through to Beira, riding the train from one side of Africa to the other. Now, though, the war had restricted services to thirty miles of track between Benguela and Lobito, a port city further up the coast. Inland, UNITA troops had blown up bridges and mined the track, determined to first isolate rural communities, then destroy them.
Molly, still gazing down, had picked up the thought. There were clouds beneath them now, big white puffballs against the greens and browns of the bush.

‘Doesn’t all this upset you?’ she asked.

‘All what?’

‘The killing? The war? The waste?’

She looked across at Rademeyer. Behind the aviation sunglasses she could see he was trying to mask a smile.

‘Why should it upset me? It’s the way the place is. They’ve been at war now for thirty years. The war’s older than me.’

Molly nodded, thinking of Larry Giddings.

‘Communism solves nothing,’ she said lightly. ‘It didn’t then and it doesn’t now.’

Rademeyer was looking across at her. The smile was wider.

‘Communism? Are you kidding?’

‘No.’ Molly frowned. ‘The government’s communist, isn’t it? That’s what the war’s about. That’s why people are in such a mess.’

‘Who told you that?’

Molly looked away, beginning to regret the conversation. Maybe Larry Giddings wasn’t such an authority after all. Maybe there were other points of view.

‘A friend,’ she heard herself saying, ‘in Luanda.’

‘And what did he say? This friend of yours?’

‘He said that nothing works. It’s true, too. You only have to look.’

‘And is that because of communism?’

‘Yes.’ Molly nodded. ‘Yes. It has to be.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the government should be in charge. They should be the ones sorting everything out.’

Rademeyer was laughing now, his head back against the seat.

‘Our MPLA friends? The government? You think they’re
communist?
Are you kidding?’

Molly felt herself blushing. She was sure she had it right. The MPLA were the government. The government were communist. The opposition was UNITA.

‘We back UNITA,’ she said uncertainly. ‘The West, your country, South Africa …’ she glanced across at the young pilot, ‘that makes the government communist, doesn’t it?’

Rademeyer’s smile had gone. He was peering at something ahead, leaning forward in the seat.

‘Used to be that way,’ he muttered at last, ‘back in the eighties. Now it’s about power, pure and simple. Two gangs, two lots of gangsters, one on either side, the big guys wanting it all. Most days you can’t tell the difference between them.’

Molly thought about the proposition for a moment or two, hearing Giddings’s voice again, the soft American drawl, the incessant talk of communism.

‘So why,’ Molly gestured down at the landscape below, ‘is the place such a mess?’

‘Because they’re off the planet, all of them, both sides. The place is rich, potentially. You’re talking a lot of oil here, up in Cabinda. That’s serious wealth. But all they ever do with it is buy weapons. Billions of dollars’ worth. And that’s just the government.’

‘What about UNITA?’ Molly frowned, remembering the name of the opposition leader. ‘Savimbi?’

‘He’s just as bad. Instead of oil, it’s diamonds. The diamonds pay for his end of the war.’ Rademeyer shook his head. ‘A thousand people a day dying of starvation and all these guys can buy are guns. You ever tried eating a gun? Pathetic … shit!’

Molly looked up in time to see a dark green blur streak past. Instinctively, she reached for the dashboard as the Dove
shuddered and bucked in the disturbed air but the safety straps held her back in the seat, her arms flailing around in front of her. In the far distance, miles ahead, she saw an outline she recognised, arrow-shaped, climbing almost vertically, rolling over, then growing rapidly bigger. Rademeyer saw it too and he pulled the Dove into a tight wingover, banking to the left, diving for cover in the clouds beneath. The fighter flashed past, another blur, and suddenly they were in cloud, the sun gone, beads of moisture streaking the Perspex.

Molly’s hand went to her mouth. She hadn’t had time to be frightened but now she was beginning to shake. Rademeyer pulled out of the dive and she felt her stomach yawn, a terrible emptiness inside her, then one wing was vertical again and they were making another turn, to the right this time, the aircraft plunging out of the cloud, the ground beneath suddenly much closer. Behind her, in the cabin, she heard a thump that shook the whole aircraft as something heavy landed in the aisle.

Molly was terrified now, knowing in her heart that she was going to die. Rademeyer had tightened the turn even more, pivoting the plane on one wingtip, and she felt her whole face being tugged sideways, as if a giant hand was pulling at her flesh. Through the side window, she could see a forest, individual trees, water tumbling into a gorge. Then, abruptly, the land folded up towards them, the mouth of a deeply shadowed valley, the long, bare, treeless flank of a big mountain. Molly braced herself for the impact, wondering whether there’d be any prospect of survival, then she felt the plane lift beneath her, the engines screaming as Rademeyer fought for height again, threading his way between the surrounding peaks, his eyes flicking left and right, still hunting for the fighters.

‘See?’ he muttered after a while.

‘See what?’

‘Bastards can’t even shoot straight.’

McFaul stood on the river bank, downstream from Muengo’s only bridge, watching the kids and the women knee-deep in the water. It had been raining all night and the river had risen at least a foot, giving McFaul the opportunity to use the dinghy to scout for stray mines. Garrison troops in Muengo had seeded the approaches to the bridge on both sides of the river. They’d used hundreds of Romanian antipersonnel mines, the thick Bakelite MAI-75s, and floodwater sometimes disinterred them, washing them onto the margins of the shallow pool where the women washed their clothes and the kids played submarines.

McFaul half-turned, signalling to Domingos to back the dinghy trailer down to the water line. Global’s first task in Muengo had been to sweep this area clear of mines and periodically – like now – McFaul made a point of returning. The people had learned to trust him. A single rogue mine, a single accident, could change all that.

Domingos inched the trailer slowly into the river and water began to lap around the bottom of the dinghy. The kids were already climbing aboard, yelping and laughing when McFaul tried to shoo them off. They called him ‘
O Mutilado Inglês’
, the English cripple, and McFaul had at first been stung by the phrase until he’d seen the grins on their faces. To be crippled in this country was far too commonplace to warrant even a moment’s pity.

McFaul signalled to Domingos to stop and bent to unhitch the trailer. When he stood up again he found himself looking at Peterson. The tall Terra Sancta man had followed
the safe lane down from the road. Now he was gazing across the river at the rapids where the older kids were testing each other against the current.

McFaul edged his body around, blocking the view. He’d heard the rumours about an aid flight only minutes ago. There were passengers, too, down from Luanda. Peterson evidently knew the details.

‘How many on board?’

‘Three. Robbie Cunningham I know. He’s our press officer back in the UK. Nice bloke.’

‘And the others?’

‘One’s some kind of journalist. The other’s apparently the boy’s mother.’

‘Boy?’

‘James Jordan.’

Domingos was gunning the Land Rover’s engine. McFaul waved away the exhaust smoke.

‘Jordan’s mother?’ he said blankly. ‘What’s she doing here?’

‘I don’t know. Not that it matters. They can’t land anyway. The strip’s closed. Our friend’s decision.’

McFaul grunted, watching the Land Rover’s wheels trenching in the wet sand. Like Fernando, the UN rep, he’d been trying to negotiate with Colonel Katilo. An evacuation was clearly imminent and before his team pulled out, McFaul wanted to clear a handful of vital paths around the city, making sure the local people at least had safe access to other parts of the river and to the handful of old wells still producing clean water. Most of the paths were now within small-arms range of Katilo’s men, and before he started work he wanted a cast-iron guarantee that no UNITA marksman would play the hero. So far, McFaul had conducted negotiations on the radio, speaking to Katilo in French through
Christianne. Katilo had been interested enough to arrange a face-to-face chat for tomorrow morning behind rebel lines but whether or not his interest extended beyond meeting Christianne, McFaul couldn’t be sure.

‘So what does Katilo do,’ he wondered aloud, ‘when this plane shows up?’

‘Nothing, I imagine. If the pilot’s got any sense he’ll be taking a look from way up. Ten, fifteen thousand feet. Apparently the strip’s got trucks all over it. There’s no way he can land. He’ll just have to go back to Luanda, or divert.’ He paused, glancing skywards. ‘Assuming he’s got the range.’

The Dove was still low, hugging the foothills of the Plan Alto, when Rademeyer spotted the distant smudge of Muengo. He banked away at once, heading back towards the high ground, handing Molly a map without once taking his eyes off the approaching crestline.