Dictator

Dictator - By Tom Cain





Part 1

Ten Years Ago





1



Carver sat astride the girl’s broad hips and ran his cool green eyes over her naked torso. Her belly was by no means fat, but it had a proper female curve to it. Her breasts were full and weighty. Her features were anything but delicate: the nose a little too big, the jaw perhaps too heavy. But her mouth was a vivid slash of blood-red lips that parted to reveal strong white teeth, and her eyes were bright with spirit and life.

He leaned forward, reached out his right arm and very gently, experimentally, allowing barely any contact between her skin and his, brushed his hand across her left nipple. She shivered and gave a little gasp as it hardened against his palm. She threw her arms back on the pillow, the wrists crossed above her head as if tied by invisible cords to his bedframe. Her fists had clenched at Carver’s first touch. He smiled and gave her other breast exactly the same treatment.

Then, he placed a hand on each breast, a little more firmly now. Taking all the strain in his back and stomach, so that his hands did not press down too hard, he lowered his head and let his lips and tongue play where his hands had just been. He felt her hips move beneath him and tightened the grip of his thighs, restricting her movements and increasing her frustration. She moaned as he took one of her nipples between his teeth and toyed with it, biting her with delicate precision, just enough to hurt a very little.

Now Carver ran his hands down both sides of her ribcage till they settled in the dip of her waist. His mouth delivered weightless kisses to the undersides of her breasts and the downy, peachy skin that surrounded her belly button. He explored that with his tongue for a second, tickling her, and then shifted position so that his arms moved off her body on to the mattress, taking his weight as his legs slipped between hers and slowly but inexorably forced her thighs apart. She put up a token, playful resistance. She was strong, but he was stronger. They both knew this was a contest he was always going to win.

His mouth brushed against the thin strip of pubic hair, just a few wisps to toy with as she tilted her pelvis to bring herself closer to him. There was another moan now, a little louder this time, in anticipation of the feel of his tongue inside her. She moved her own hands down to his head, almost cradling it as she ran her fingers through his hair, trying to guide him to her, but Carver wasn’t in any hurry. Instead of carrying on down, he teased her a little, kissing the insides of her thighs, right at the very top, so that he was breathing in the smell of her, feeling her heat.

His own hips were moving now and he could feel his hardness between his body and the sheets. He was frustrating himself as much as her, but that was just part of the fun, seeing who could hold out the longest. Her fingernails were digging into his scalp, scratching the skin, urging him on. The moment was getting closer. He placed his lips against her, tasted her for the first time, and then …

And then a thought suddenly dropped, unbidden and unwanted, into his brain: he had absolutely no idea at all what the woman beneath him was called.

The realization hit him like a bucket of ice-cold water, killing the moment stone dead. Had he really come to this? A drunken pick-up in a crowded club; going through the motions of a cynical, anonymous f*ck: was this his idea of a great night out? He’d always thought he was better than that.

He shrivelled with disgust and self-loathing and pushed himself away from her.

She must have thought this was just another one of his teases because for a couple of seconds she didn’t react. Then she raised herself on her elbows.

‘What’s the matter, baby?’ she said.

Her accent was Italian. It didn’t help him remember her name any better.

She giggled enticingly. ‘Come back here. What you do feels so good, so hot. Don’t be mean, boy. Don’t stop now.’

Carver ignored her. He sat on the edge of the mattress and rubbed a hand across his eyes. Now that the buzz of sexual excitement had gone, he was just another sleepless man at half-past four in the morning, on the cusp between intoxication and the inevitable hangover.

He got to his feet, taking a moment to get his balance before padding through to the kitchen.

‘Hey! Where you going, leave me here?’ she shouted after him, then muttered something in Italian. It didn’t sound like much of a compliment.

He stopped in the corridor and turned back towards the bedroom door. ‘You want some coffee?’

She gave him the finger.

Carver shrugged and continued on his way. As he poured water into the coffee-machine he could hear her stomping and cursing in the distance, letting him know how she felt as she searched for her discarded clothing and got dressed.

He looked out at the rooftops of the Old Town as they turned from black to battleship grey in the first watery light of the false dawn. It struck him that he was ravenously hungry. He hadn’t eaten anything last night, and he wasn’t about to eat now. There was nothing in the fridge apart from an old half-empty bottle of Sancerre and an ancient lump of Gruyère now roughly the consistency of heavy-duty plastic and thickly encrusted with green and white mould.

The coffee-machine was making gurgling noises that suggested the water had boiled. Carver slid a cup under the spout. The cup still had the dried brown remnants of yesterday morning’s multiple espressos in it. What the hell, boiling water would kill any germs, no need to bother washing it now.

By the time he’d poured his coffee and left the kitchen, she was making her way to the door.

‘What your problem?’ she sneered when she noticed him watching her. ‘Can’t do it? No woody? Puh!’

He downed his espresso and opened the door for her. ‘Here, allow me.’

‘Oh thank you, Mr English Gentleman.’ The sarcasm was laid on with a spade.

‘Just before you go,’ Carver said, putting an arm across the open door. ‘What’s my name?’

She gave him a withering look. ‘I don’ know. Don’ care. Never wanna see you again.’

‘So we’re even.’

He let his arm fall and she walked past, not even sparing him a backward glance. He closed the door behind her and wandered back to the coffee-maker, wondering when it was that he’d let it all slide. Not just the girl, everything.

Stupid question. He knew exactly when it had happened. He could date it to the second. Another woman walking through the same door, the finality as it closed behind her, ripping out his heart.

Even now, months later, there were moments when Carver thought he saw Alix Petrova again. All it took was a flash of gold hair in the sunlight that caught his eye, but was not hers; a waft of her scent on the air, but sprayed on another woman’s body; a voice that sounded like hers but came from another’s mouth.

No matter how often it happened, he was helpless to stop the surge of hope, or the crushing pain when those hopes were dashed.

Carver pulled on some clothes and went out in search of a bakery that would sell him a couple of slices of pizza or a croque-monsieur. Both maybe. He’d need the energy because as soon as he’d eaten and showered he planned on driving up into the mountains. He was going to run through woods and across meadows, run till he’d burned the alcohol from his body and the poison from his soul. And tomorrow he’d do it again.

It was time he got his edge back, time he regained focus. But all the physical fitness in the world would only get him so far.

What Samuel Carver really needed was a job, an assignment that would allow him to exercise his very particular, deadly skills. And several thousand miles away, in the landlocked African state of Malemba, that need was about to be met.





2



On the Stratten Reserve in southern Malemba, hard by the South African border, a black rhino cow was standing placidly in a grove of acacia trees, close to the pool on the banks of a slow-flowing river where she liked to drink. The game wardens who had followed her progress like doting godparents since her birth fifteen years ago called her Sinikwe, just as they named all the key animals – the rhinos, elephants and big cats – on the reserve.

She looked up as she heard a squeal from Fairchild, her calf, who was discovering to his cost that while acacia leaves were tender and delicious, they grew on branches protected by vicious thorns. The youngster had suffered no serious damage, however, and his hunger soon overcame his pain. He returned to the acacia, but a little more cautiously this time, a lesson learned. Two other calves were feeding nearby, Sinikwe’s two-year-old daughter Lisa-Marie, and her cousin, Kanja, whose mother Petal had wandered to the pool to slake her thirst.

A dirt road ran by the grove, near enough to enable tourists to sit in their open-sided trucks and photograph the rhino and other species that clustered there. The animals had become accustomed to humans and no longer fled at the first sound of an engine, unless they were actually on the road when a truck appeared. In that case the safari-goers got to enjoy the sight of a fully grown rhino’s massive backside heading away from them at thirty miles an hour in a rolling, waddling, fat-man gait – a sight as comic as that of a rhino charging towards them would be terrifying.

But the eight men crammed into the battered old Toyota Hilux pick-up – two in the cab, six packed tight in the back – were not tourists. Dressed in a motley jumble of jeans, army fatigues, football tops and sleeveless T-shirts, and aged from eighteen to forty, their only common denominator was the AK-47 assault rifle each of them carried.

Sinikwe looked up again as the truck drove by the grove. Her ears gave an edgy twitch. But the truck kept moving and its noise faded away, so she returned to browsing for food.

The truck came to a halt downwind from the grove, so she did not smell the men as they dismounted and walked back towards her. The feeble eyesight with which rhinos are cursed meant that she did not see them either as they crept up to the acacia grove and raised their weapons to fire.

A rhino has no natural predators. The biggest danger they face is each other: roughly one-third to a half of all rhinos die from injuries sustained as a result of fighting other rhinos. Thick hide and a sharp horn will deter any other natural threat. But they are powerless against a brutal volley of automatic weapons fire like the one that ripped through the acacia grove that day, tearing skin and flesh, cracking bones and shredding leaves and branches.

Sinikwe was the first target. She died with a high-pitched scream of terror that could be heard over the brutal chatter of the guns before she and they fell silent, leaving her punctured body, garlanded with the crimson rosettes of its wounds, lying on the blood-spattered earth.

All but one of the other rhinos fled, suffering no more than minor injuries. But Fairchild, frozen by terror, overwhelmed by the sound and smell of the guns and baffled by his mother’s sudden stillness, remained by the bush where he had been feeding. Then he slowly crept towards Sinikwe’s body, mewling and squeaking in a plaintive attempt to rouse his parent.

A single sharp order was barked by one of the men. Two of the others slammed fresh magazines into their AK-47s. There was another, much briefer burst of firing. Then Fairchild, too, lay dead.

The men got to work with machetes. One group hacked the full-grown horns off Sinikwe and the much shorter, immature growths off Fairchild. The others, some wielding axes, attacked the rhinos’ feet until their work was cut short by another order.

The men stepped away from the mutilated corpses, keeping Sinikwe’s longer front horn, their most valuable trophy, but leaving the rest for the carrion feeders who would soon be drawn to the slaughter. They made their way back to the Hilux. And silence fell again upon the grove.





3



Zalika Stratten kept hoping that her father would rescue her. Later, she knew, he would ruffle her hair with his strong brown fingers, their skin as rough as bark, and tell her, ‘Don’t you worry too much about what Mummy says. She means well. She just worries about you, that’s all.’ But Zalika didn’t want ‘later’. She wanted him to stand up now and say, ‘Stop it, Jacqui. That’s enough.’

Dick Stratten ruled his own vast personal kingdom – not just the reserve, but farms and ranches all over the country, filled with people who depended on him for their work, their homes, even the food in their bellies. Why couldn’t he rule his own wife? Why did he have to sit there, chewing on his lamb chop and very deliberately looking out at the view from the terrace while he ignored the argument going on right next to him at the table?

And why wouldn’t her mother leave her alone?

‘Honestly, darling,’ Jacqui Stratten was saying, ‘it really wouldn’t hurt, just once in a while, to put on a pretty dress. If you just took off those ghastly trainers and put on some heels, or paid a tiny little bit of attention to your make-up, it would make such a difference. You have such lovely blue eyes, they’re much your best feature, but no one will notice unless you make some effort to show them off. As for your hair, René keeps asking me when I’m going to bring you along to the salon. He’s longing to give you some proper highlights. He says it would absolutely transform you.’

‘I don’t want highlights,’ Zalika snapped back. ‘Sitting for hours with my hair wrapped up in tinfoil, getting bored out of my mind while that horrible old man fusses about with his fake French accent – that’s my idea of total hell.’

‘Well you’re never going to get a boyfriend if you carry on with those attitudes, that’s for sure,’ her mother replied.

‘I don’t want a boyfriend.’

‘Oh don’t be silly. You’re a seventeen-year-old girl, of course you want a boyfriend. When your brother was your age, he was absolutely surrounded by girls. But then, Andrew’s never had any trouble making the best of himself.’

Zalika rolled her eyes. ‘Here we go again with my oh-so-perfect brother …’

‘Well, have you seen how many letters he’s had since he got back from New York, all obviously written by girls? All my friends there could talk about was the impression he was making. Every pretty little thing in Manhattan wanted to know him.’

‘God, Mummy, don’t you have any idea what Andy’s like? He’ll be giving all these silly Americans his big stories about going on safari, pretending that he rides on elephants and fights lions single-handed, and they’ll all be dreaming that he’ll take them away to Africa and planning what they’re going to pack. Then as soon as he’s got inside their pants, he’s off telling the exact same stories to some other girl. That’s what he does. Don’t pretend you haven’t noticed.’

‘Honestly, Zalika, you really do talk utter nonsense sometimes. And you shouldn’t be so mean about your brother. After all, he’s the one who worked hard enough to get a place at Columbia Business School. To judge by last term’s reports, you’ll be lucky to pass a single A level. And I’m sure you’re not stupid, really. You’d have a good mind if only—’

‘The plane!’ shrieked Zalika, ignoring her mother and switching straight from furious indignation to utter delight with the speed only a teenager can muster. She leapt to her feet and ran away, dashing from the shade of the thatched veranda and down the steps, her long, slender, butterscotch legs racing out on to the rich-green lawn while Jacqui Stratten called after her, ‘Zalika, Zalika! Don’t leave the table!’

Frustrated by her daughter’s sudden departure, Jacqui turned her attention to her husband. ‘That girl will be the death of me. And you could have done something to help, my darling, instead of sitting there stuffing your face while your daughter was being so rude.’

Dick Stratten didn’t respond. He had long since learned that there were times when nothing a husband said could possibly be right. It was best just to let his wife have her say and get things out of her system.

Out on the lawn, Zalika stopped in mid-stride and spun to face her parents, still sitting at their lunch. ‘Look!’ she cried, flinging one hand back up at the sky. ‘Can’t you see? It’s Andy! He’s back from Buweku! He’s brought Moses home!’

Stratten frowned as he peered out towards the horizon, following the line of his daughter’s arm.

‘My God, the girl’s right,’ he said. ‘I must be going blind in my old age.’

Now he rose too, stepping up to the wooden rail that ran round the edge of the veranda, the evident strength and fitness of his body giving the lie to his claims of decrepitude.

‘Oh, you’re not so bad … not for such a very old man,’ said Jacqui, teasingly.

They’d met when Dick was thirty and she a girl of eighteen, just a year older than Zalika. His family and friends, all stalwarts of white Malemban society, had been appalled: she was too young and, even more importantly, too common for the heir to the Stratten estates. Dick didn’t care what anyone else thought. His view of the world was shaped far more by the law of the jungle than the niceties of social convention. As far as he was concerned, Jacqui Klerk was the most desirable female he had ever clapped eyes on and he was damn well going to have her as his mate. Twenty-six years later, they were still together and that youthful animal passion had deepened into a lifelong partnership.

‘Don’t be too hard on the girl,’ Stratten said.

‘Oh I know,’ his wife sighed. ‘It’s just, well, I worry that she’s going to turn into a wallflower if she doesn’t make a bit more of an effort. All one can see now, looking at her, is a mass of drab mousey hair and that great big Stratten nose.’

‘It’s a very splendid nose,’ said Stratten with exaggerated pride.

‘On a man like you, darling, yes it is. But not on a young girl. I know Zalika means “wondrously beautiful” in Arabic, but we have to accept our daughter will never be that. She could be a great deal less plain, though, if only she accepted even one of my suggestions.’

‘I don’t think she’s plain at all.’

‘Of course not, you’re her father.’

‘Anyway, I’m sure it’s just a phase. She’s trying to work out who she really is. It’s natural for her to rebel a little bit, all children do it.’

‘Andrew didn’t.’

Stratten gave her a quizzical, not to say sceptical look. ‘Maybe you just didn’t see it. In any case, you are famously the most beautiful and best-dressed woman in the whole of southern Africa’ – Jacqui Stratten glowed in the warm light of her husband’s compliment – ‘so she’s rebelling against you by pretending to take no interest at all in how she looks. The second she finds a boy she really likes that will all change, just you wait.’

Jacqui mused on the problem as she watched Zalika take a few more paces across the grass. As the plane drew closer she started waving her arms above her head. The girl’s frantic gestures were answered by a waggle of the plane’s wings. She squealed with delight then ran away again across the grass, calling out as she went, ‘I’ll go and meet them at the strip!’

Zalika disappeared out of sight of the veranda. Not long afterwards came the sound of an engine starting up and the arid scrunch of tyres on dusty gravel.

Jacqui’s thoughts turned to the boys her daughter was rushing to meet. Her son Andy – how handsome he was becoming, she mused proudly – and his lifelong friend Moses Mabeki, the son of the family’s estate manager. Moses was Andy’s equal in looks, with a finely sculpted bone structure made all the more apparent by a shaven head, and full lips framed by a close-cropped beard. But as the horn-rimmed spectacles round his liquid brown eyes suggested, he took a much more earnest approach to his studies. Moses had attended the University of Malemba before being offered a graduate place at the London School of Economics’ Department of Government. As the first member of his family ever to receive a college education, he had no intention whatever of wasting it on girls and parties.

Dick Stratten had insisted on paying the young man’s tuition fees and living expenses. ‘Moses is like a son to me too,’ Stratten had told the boy’s father, Isaac Mabeki, as they shared one of the bottles of thirty-year-old Glenfiddich they polished off from time to time, talking not as master and loyal servant but as one man to another. ‘I know he will do great things for this country one day. With your permission, it would be my pleasure and an honour to help him on his way.’

Moses had spent the past three years in London, returning to Malemba only for occasional visits. Now, with his masters degree completed, he was coming home for good.

The roar of the Cessna’s engines as it passed low over the house and made its final approach to the landing strip roused Jacqui Stratten from her reverie. She blinked, gave a little shake of the head and thought for a second. Yes, there would be time. Then she smiled at a servant who was hovering a few feet from the table. ‘Coffee, please, Mary,’ she said. ‘Mr Stratten and I will have a cup while we wait for the boys to arrive.’





4



The seventy-four-year-old man sitting behind his mahogany desk in a lavishly appointed office in Sindele had begun his career as a village schoolteacher, working in the same modest school where he had been given his own early education by Anglican missionaries. Had his life followed its expected course, Henderson Gushungo would now be retired, a respected member of his little community, spending his days sitting under a shade-tree, talking to the other old men, grousing about the way the world had changed and indulging his grandchildren.

Gushungo, however, had had other, more radical ideas. He’d joined the resistance movement against the white minority who ruled his country as though it were still a colony of the British Empire. Like Nelson Mandela in South Africa, he’d burnished his reputation among his people and radicals around the world by going to prison for his beliefs. Unlike Mandela, he’d emerged from jail filled with a lust for revenge, not reconciliation. For years he had fought a war on two fronts: publicly against the whites, and privately against his competitors within the liberation movement. Now he held the entire country’s destiny in his hands. Having been Prime Minister, he had promoted himself to President, never submitting himself to any election whose result was not certain before a single vote had been cast.

Gushungo liked to call himself the Father of the Nation. But he was a very stern and cruel parent.

His soldiers were fighting in the jungles of the Congo. His henchmen were forcing white farmers off their properties and forcibly cleansing hundreds of thousands of black Malembans from areas where, in his increasingly paranoid imagination, they might constitute a serious opposition to his continued rule. His demoralized opponents, unable to remove him themselves, prayed that God would do the job for them. But the old man had no intention of meeting his maker any time soon. His hair was still thick and black, his face remarkably unlined, his posture erect. His mother had lived past one hundred. He still had a long way to go.

One of the phones arranged to the right of his desk trilled.

‘It has begun,’ said the voice on the other end of the line.

‘Excellent,’ said Henderson Gushungo. ‘Let me know when the operation has been completed.’