85
Parkes, his men and the two Iluko kids crammed into a Toyota Previa people carrier with blacked-out passenger windows, slipped out of a side gate of the builder’s yard and joined the traffic heading out of town at the start of the afternoon rush-hour. It took a while to get on to the two-lane ribbon of cracked and potholed tarmac that constituted the main route to the South African border, and even then the going was slow. More than ninety minutes had passed before the driver took a right turn on to a much more basic dirt track that snaked away into the flat, featureless expanse of the bush.
A few minutes later, the De Havilland Twin Otter took off from Buweku airport without any passengers aboard. Barely ten minutes into its flight, less than fifty miles from Buweku, the pilot radioed the control tower, reporting multiple systems malfunctions. He said he would attempt to make an immediate forced landing and requested information about nearby landing strips.
The air-traffic controller hesitated. There was, indeed, a full-length runway right under the Twin Otter’s flight path. It was one of the many Forward Air Fields built thirty years earlier by the former white minority rulers of Malemba. Fighting a war in which the enemy could appear anywhere in the country, at any time, they’d wanted to be able to fly troops in and out of battle zones as fast as possible. Today, many of these airfields were derelict and overgrown, but the strips were still there, for all the plants that were pushing through them.
The controller wasn’t sure whether the positions of the forward fields were considered a state secret. Of course, everyone knew where they were, but could one say so in public? In a government based on unreason and downright madness, it was so hard to tell.
‘It is possible that there may be facilities close to your current position, but I am not at liberty to be specific,’ he said, with painstaking caution.
To his surprise, the controller heard laughter in his headphones.
‘Ja,’ the pilot agreed. ‘I have a feeling I may have heard of facilities like that, too.’
Seconds later, the Otter adjusted its course and began a rapid descent towards the crumbling remains of the airstrip.
‘Bang on time,’ said Sonny Parkes with a nod of satisfaction as he watched the Otter coming in to land.
Of the original two-thousand-yard runway less than half was still usable, but that was plenty for a plane with the Otter’s short takeoff and landing capability. It came bumping along the runway, swung through one hundred and eighty degrees and paused, engines still running, just long enough for its seven passengers to clamber aboard before the pilot raced back the way he had come and climbed into the dimming light of the late-afternoon sky. Then he banked to the south and headed for the South African border, some forty miles away.
Watching the Otter reappear on his radar, the air-traffic controller suddenly felt a lot less pleased with himself. He had been conned. The plane had never had anything wrong with it at all. It had landed in order to make a drop or a pick-up. And since it had left Buweku empty, a pick-up was the overwhelming likelihood. For the past two hours he had been hearing snatches of news and gossip about the attack on the prison van. Several prisoners were still missing. Had some of them been spirited away on that plane? Men willing to commit such a crime in broad daylight, in the middle of Buweku’s busiest street, would surely not baulk at such a dramatic escape. Well, they were not going to get away with it.
Feeling personally insulted, somewhat humiliated and very, very angry, the air-traffic controller got straight on the line to the air force.
In the aftermath of the coup, all of Malemba’s armed forces had been put on an ultra-heightened state of alert. Everyone from the lowliest cadet to the highest-ranking officer knew of the glory and preferment that would be heaped on anyone responsible for capturing Patrick Tshonga, or any of his associates. They also knew of the terrible price to be paid if, by chance, they missed the opportunity to apprehend him. So three Malemban Air Force interceptors were airborne less than five minutes after the call came through from Buweku control.
They were Chengdu F-7 interceptors, a Chinese fighter plane based on the Russian MiG-21. They were twenty-year-old models of a fifty-five-year-old design, and as modern combat aircraft they were a sorry joke. They would have been as helpless as Wendell Klerk’s clay pigeons against any twenty-first-century fighter. But the Malemban F-7s were not going up against an RAF Typhoon or an American F-22 Raptor. Their prey was an unarmed, propeller-driven passenger aircraft. And they could deal with that just fine.
Their turbojets blasted them through the sound barrier as they hurtled towards their target. There had not been time to arm the planes with air-to-air missiles, but each was equipped with a pair of thirty-millimetre cannons. The three pilots, all honed by years of combat missions during Malemba’s participation in the Congo’s endless civil wars, chattered happily on the radio. If modern rockets were not available, they were happy to do this the old-fashioned way.
86
In a cellar beneath a government building in the capital city of Sindele, Moses Mabeki watched the sight presented before him with eyes that glittered with greedy excitement.
The man whose arms and legs were currently being strapped to a long wooden board was a senior official in Patrick Tshonga’s political party, the Popular Freedom Movement. He and Tshonga were known to be close friends as well as allies. He had thus been one of the first enemies of the regime to be rounded up when Mabeki initiated the counterstrike against Tshonga’s attempted coup. For the past twenty-four hours he had been deprived of food, water and sleep. He had been stripped naked, repeatedly hosed in icy water and beaten savagely at random, unpredictable intervals, so that he remained in a state of constant fear of when the next agonizing assault might come. Now his interrogators, their skills honed by twenty years of experience working for a psychopathic dictatorship, were moving in for the coup de grâce.
This was a moment for connoisseurs, a display of artistry that was guaranteed to produce the desired results. Mabeki would not have missed it for the world.
The board upon which the man now lay was tilted at an angle of twenty degrees, so that his head was below the level of his feet and, more importantly, his heart. His mouth was covered in black masking tape so that he was unable to cry out. But his terror was evident in his bulging eyes, their lids stretched so wide apart that the whites were clearly visible right around the deep brown iris; the sweat that glittered on his forehead and ran between the veins that had distended beneath his skin; and the involuntary spurt of urine that was so cruelly and humiliatingly exposed for all to see.
Looking at the man, Mabeki thought that what was about to happen was probably superfluous. He was ready to talk, regardless. But it was always worth taking that extra little bit of trouble, just to be sure. Especially when the trouble was also such a pleasure.
Mabeki nodded to one of the men standing by the board. He, in turn, clicked his fingers at an underling, who handed him a white cotton towel. It had been soaked in water. With an almost tender solicitousness, the towel was draped across the face of the man on the board.
Another click of the fingers: a second towel, also wet, was handed over, and it was placed on top of the first.
The body on the board jerked from side to side, desperately struggling to break free from its restraints. The man’s back arched in a taut rictus of agony. He tried to thrash his head, to shake off the towels, but strong, gentle hands pressed down and kept them in place.
Mabeki was fascinated by the perfect simplicity of waterboarding. A couple of planks, some cheap towels and a bucket of water were all it took to reduce anyone to a helpless wreck. The stifling press of the towels and the water that passed into the victim’s nose with every inward breath created a perfect simulation of drowning. And if the towels were left in place long enough, the man would actually drown. Even if he tried to hold his breath – and only those with ice-cold nerves had the self-control to do that – he would have to breathe again eventually and the drip, drip, drip of water into his lungs would work its inexorable magic.
A minute went by. The thrashing body was reduced to feeble twitches.
Ninety seconds.
Mabeki gave another nod.
The towels were removed and the tape torn from the man’s mouth. With a rasp like tearing canvas, he breathed again, dragging air into his starving lungs with desperate intensity.
‘Again,’ said Mabeki.
More strips of tape were stuck across the man’s mouth. Two more wet towels were placed over his head. Another minute and a half went by before Mabeki signalled his satisfaction. This time the towels were removed but the tape stayed on, forcing the man to breathe through his nose.
Only then did Mabeki walk across to the board. He stood for a moment, contemplating his victim. Then, frowning thoughtfully, as though contemplating the possible outcomes of a scientific experiment, he placed his right thumb and forefinger over the man’s nose and squeezed them firmly, shutting the nostrils tight.
Keeping that hand in place, Mabeki squatted down on his haunches so that his mouth was level with the man’s ear.
‘So, you snivelling, treacherous jackal, do you know where Patrick Tshonga is hiding?’
The man gave a series of rapid, frantic nods.
‘And are you going to tell my colleagues here everything you know?’
More nods.
Mabeki let go of the man’s nose and gave him a gentle, almost affectionate pat on the cheek.
‘Excellent,’ he said, rising to his feet. ‘Console yourself with the thought that your last act before dying was to serve your country.’
Mabeki turned to the chief interrogator who had earlier applied the towels. ‘Find out everything he knows. Inform General Zawanda. Tell him that I wish a detailed plan for Tshonga’s capture to be drawn up as fast as possible. I want him taken before tonight is out. But no one is to make a move until I give the signal. Do you understand me? No one!’
87
‘How far to the border?’ asked Sonny Parkes. He was standing in the Twin Otter’s cockpit, resting his hands against the back of the co-pilot’s seat.
‘A little under two minutes,’ the pilot replied. ‘One and a half if I push it.’
‘So push it, then.’
‘Ja, well, easier said than done. Top speed in this crate is barely two hundred miles an hour. It’s a workhorse, not a racehorse.’
Parkes grunted dismissively and looked at his watch, following the second hand as it swept, or rather crawled, round the dial. Eighty seconds … seventy … a minute. They were almost safe, but still his back was crawling with prickly tension.
‘There you go,’ said the pilot. ‘Look out of the left-hand side window, about five clicks up ahead – see those long lines of trucks? They’re waiting to go through customs, either side of the border. We’re almost— Shit!’
The noises seemed to come at once: the chatter of thirty-millimetre cannons, the shattering clatter of rounds tearing through the Twin Otter’s wings and fuselage and the deafening roar of three fighter jets as they shot past their prey, throwing it around the sky as it was caught in the chaos of the displaced air they left in their wake.
‘Hang on!’ the pilot shouted as he flung his aircraft to the left, then plunged it into a precipitous dive.
Parkes was hurled against the side of the cockpit, then flung backwards, ending up on the floor, jammed up against a bulkhead and barely conscious, as the Twin Otter headed nose-first towards the ground.
Down they went, the windscreen filled with nothing but the onrushing earth. The pilot remained impassive as he maintained his suicide dive. But back in the passenger compartment, Farayi Iluko screamed with terror as the plane hurtled towards obliteration. For a few seconds her brother Canaan maintained the pretence that he was not equally terrified. But as the dive went on and on, and the brutal earth drew ever closer, he started screaming too.
Up above, the three Malemban fighters were coming to terms with an unwelcome consequence of the vast disparity between their power and that of their target. They were going so much faster than the Otter that they’d had very little time in which they could bring their guns to bear before they overshot it. Even so, their advantage was overwhelming.
The three planes looped up into the sky, twisting as they went until they were facing the way they’d come. Then they headed back towards the desperate evasions of the Twin Otter.
Now, at last, the pilot pulled back on the controls and shouted to the co-pilot sitting next to him to do the same, the two men leaning back, their arms, necks and faces flushed and contorted with effort as they desperately fought to bring the aircraft out of its dive.
It was too late. They were going to crash.
Sonny Parkes, for the first time in his life, understood the absolute certainty of death. His end was only a second away.
Canaan Iluko grabbed his sister’s hand in a grip so tight it seemed her fingers must surely snap from the pressure.
And then the Twin Otter managed to grab some purchase against the onrushing air and haul its nose up, oh so slowly, away from the ground, until there was once again clear blue sky in the pilot’s eye-line.
As the wheels of the fixed undercarriage brushed through the desiccated leaves of an ancient baobab tree, the pilot jinked right and sent the Twin Otter into a corkscrewing roll, its tumbling wingtips almost seeming to brush the ground before he spiralled back up into the sky.
And then the F-7s were on them again, coming in one after another and raking the Otter with armour-piercing rounds that ripped straight through the flimsy fuselage and out the other side, barely impeded by anything they encountered.
‘Right engine’s been hit!’ shouted the co-pilot. ‘It’s on fire!’
They’d lost half their power and now the pilot faced another problem: the same burst of fire that had knocked out his right engine had also torn through the control surfaces at the rear of the wing. He was in danger of stalling. The plane was lurching drunkenly from side to side, and he could see the fighter planes turning for one last, assuredly fatal attack run.
When he looked down, however, there was hope. The border crossing was clearly visible just a few hundred feet below, little more than a mile ahead. Beyond the customs post on the South African side stretched a narrow black ribbon of highway and the safety of home.
If he could only reach it.
88
The pilots in the F-7s were like predatory raptors eyeing a dove with a broken wing. They wheeled and swooped in ruthlessly perfect formation, screaming down towards the Twin Otter as it limped past the first trucks on the Malemban side of the border. Down the fighters roared, and beneath them cab-doors and tarpaulins were flung open as drivers and passengers desperately sought to get away from the angels of death plunging from the sky.
Again the guns spat out a continuous hail of deadly shells, strafing the Twin Otter and the trucks and customs huts below it with indiscriminate malice. A petrol tanker bound for the thirsty pumps of Malemba’s empty filling stations erupted in a ball of fire that seemed to swallow the fragile little plane before it emerged on the far side. Its wings and tail had been pierced so often they looked more like torn lace than solid metal. Its left engine had gone, too. All that its wounded, bleeding pilot could hope to do was bring a little control to the final glide as the Otter hit the top of a brilliantly painted bus, smashing several boxes filled with chickens that had been strapped there, bounced forward and crashed down on to the road surface as the F-7s roared by, less than a hundred feet above the ground.
The undercarriage collapsed, sending the aircraft skidding over the road surface, slewing round as it went. The right wing hit a fully loaded lumber truck and sheared off, but the Otter kept going, spinning like a Frisbee as it left the road, ploughed through a stretch of bare ground and then came to a halt in a cloud of thick black smoke and choking dust.
For a while, nothing moved. The crowd of people gathered on the roadside stood there motionless, too afraid to approach the crashed plane for fear of an explosion. But as the seconds passed and no eruption came, the first few figures made their tentative, nervous way towards it.
One clambered up on to the nose and peered through the cracked windscreen into the cockpit. Others tugged at the main passenger door, just to the rear of the battered remnants of the left wing and engine. Then they sprang back as the handle was operated from within the aircraft cabin.
The door swung open.
A white man was revealed in the open doorway, dressed in black combat fatigues. His face was covered in blood from an open wound across his forehead. He was only held upright by his right hand gripping the door frame. He tried to move his left hand, waving towards himself.
‘Come here,’ he croaked. ‘Please help.’
A trucker dressed in a replica Manchester United football shirt helped the white man down on to the ground. Then he started shouting exuberantly, yelling at his travelling companions to come and assist him. Very soon the crowd could see what the excitement was all about as two slender black figures were carried from the plane. One was a young man in his late teens. The other was his older sister.
And they were both alive.
89
Justus Iluko tried not to think back to the night he had first met Sam Carver. But sometimes he couldn’t avoid it, nights when his dreams were filled with images from a small town in Mozambique: the white-hot glow of a man leaning over a helpless girl; the shouts of drunken men and the giggles of prostitutes doing business in a squalid drinking den; firing guns and exploding grenades; the screams of wounded men; the clatter of an approaching helicopter; the dead weight of Captain Morrison’s body as they dragged him back aboard. But above all the sense of chaos and confusion, the pervasive grip of mortal dread, clawing at his guts. He’d wake up in a cold sweat and Nyasha would have to calm him till the night demons had vanished back into the darkness. Now Nyasha was gone, and so, he supposed, was his bed, even the very house in which he’d raised his family and dared to dream of a better future for his children.
Here he was, though, still alive when so many others had gone, and now the nightmare that had cursed him for so long was being replayed in a new form. The night was quiet this time with just the chatter of insects and the occasional rustle of animals in the long grass to disturb the moonlit stillness. From his position behind a fallen tree trunk, Justus could see what he still thought of as the Stratten house no more than a hundred paces away, a low-slung building that nestled beneath a grass-thatched roof. The terrace where the Strattens had eaten so many of their meals and held so many parties, the African guides like Justus transformed into white-jacketed waiters for the night, was exactly as he remembered it. Even the woven palm-leaf sofas and chairs were still there. Yet Zalika Stratten was a prisoner in what had once been her home and the rest of the family were rotting in unmarked graves.
Now those chairs were occupied by armed men, four of them, sitting hunched over a table while they played games of cards. Though there were a few beer bottles on the table, these men had not let themselves get drunk. Their manner was sober in the extreme, the cards merely a means to pass the time between watches in the house, or out in the grounds. A woman appeared from time to time, but she was no prostitute, instead a respectable housekeeper who upbraided any man who dared put his feet on the furniture, even as she brought them their meals of thick maize porridge and stew.
Carver and Justus had arrived two hours earlier, having left the Land Rover hidden in the bush more than a mile from the house. They had approached their destination with extreme stealth, and Justus had been surprised and not a little impressed by the skill with which Carver selected his path, always avoiding soft ground; taking extreme care to move silently, without leaving tell-tale broken twigs or disturbed leaves in his path; regularly pausing to listen out for anyone who might be following them. Together they had reconnoitred the property and assessed the number of guards and the routine with which they carried out their assignments. There were eight in total: two inside the building, presumably standing guard over Miss Stratten; two patrolling the perimeter, walking in opposite directions; four resting between watches. Yet even these, the card players and beer drinkers, maintained their readiness.
Far in the distance, Justus heard the roar of a lion, a noise that struck a primitive, animal terror into a man, no matter how far away it sounded. Instantly, all four of the men stopped their game and looked out into the night, towards the direction from which the roar had come. As the sound of the lion subsided in a series of short, coughing growls, one of the men got to his feet and walked to the edge of the terrace, sweeping his gaze from side to side and causing Justus to fear that he had been spotted, even though he knew that no man had night-vision sharp enough to penetrate as far as his position.
All Justus had to do was wait. His job was very simple. As and when Carver emerged from the building, with Zalika in tow, it was his duty to lay down covering fire to suppress anyone who might want to stop them getting away. The orders Carver had given him were very specific. He was to remain exactly where he was. If anything went wrong, then he should melt back into the bush, return to the Land Rover and drive like hell for the border, which was less than ten miles from where he now stood. Under no circumstances was he to risk his own life in an attempt to save Carver’s.
Justus wondered about that last point. He was by nature a man who obeyed his commanding officer. He also had a very good reason indeed to survive the night in one piece. Yet he had a feeling that if the moment came, he might for once be insubordinate.
But what about Carver? Justus could not see or hear him. He was out there somewhere, silently tracking the patrolling guards like a deadly spirit, his sharp, black-bladed knife in his hand.