10

The eastern border of Malemba resembles a crudely drawn semicircle, ringed by its neighbour Mozambique much as a spanner grips a nut. About fifty miles inside Mozambique, astride the river Zambezi, lies the town of Tete.

Carver arrived there at nine in the morning after a twenty-hour journey from Geneva, changing planes twice en route. He was expecting to be hit by a physical blast of heat and humidity as he stepped from the plane: Tete is only sixteen degrees south of the equator, well within the Tropic of Capricorn. He knew too that Mozambique was one of the poorest nations on earth, devastated by more than a decade of armed struggle against its former Portuguese masters, and a fifteen-year civil war that had killed almost a million people. Yet the air was pleasantly warm and dry, and the small terminal building, which rose from the runway tarmac in a series of whitewashed blocks topped by sharply angled roofs, was surprisingly clean and well maintained.

He’d cleared passport control and customs and walked out into the arrivals area when a short, wiry, moustachioed white man wearing a faded safari shirt over a pair of khaki shorts came up to him, pulled a cigarette from his mouth and asked ‘You Carver?’ in an abrasive colonial accent.

Carver said nothing.

‘Flattie Morrison,’ said the man, chucking the glowing butt on to the floor and grinding it under the heel of an ancient walking boot before sticking out his right hand. ‘Howzit? We’ve been expecting you.’

‘Samuel Carver.’

Morrison turned and led the way through a crowd of people, exchanging greetings in what Carver presumed was the local dialect; shooing away anyone who looked as if they were about to try to sell something; cursing and occasionally swatting the children who constantly darted around them.

‘The munts here are all right, but they are the worst fucking thieves in the whole of Africa,’ Morrison said, shoving a diminutive boy out of the way. ‘They will jack the clothes off your back and you will not even notice until you feel the wind on your arse. What the hell, hey? They have no economy, so if they want some kite, what else can they do?’

‘Kite?’

‘Money … greenbacks!’ Morrison rolled his tongue round the word with enormous relish then grinned, his upper lip spreading in a flat line across his face, exposing a line of gleaming white teeth below his grey-flecked ginger moustache. He tapped his right cheek. ‘See this smile, hey?’ he said, then clipped another child with the back of his hand without slowing his stride or pausing for breath. ‘That is why they call me Flattie. In Malemba, a flattie is a crocodile. And he gives you a great big smile just like this … right before he kills you. Hahaha!’

They walked out to Morrison’s car, a battered old Nissan Sunny, its once red paint faded to a washed-out pink, streaked with rust and punctuated with dents and holes.

‘Sorry if the wheels are a bit rough for your taste,’ said Morrison, getting in the driver’s side then leaning across to shove open the passenger door. ‘No point having a fancy new car here, boet. The munts strip it like fucking vultures on a corpse, and if it breaks down out there in the bush, there’s no bugger qualified to fix it. But this old heap? A baboon could learn to service it.’

After a couple of failed attempts, the engine coughed into life like an elderly man waking from an afternoon nap, and they headed out of the airport towards the city.

‘So,’ said Morrison once they were on the open road, ‘you are here to get the girl, hey?’

Carver nodded. ‘That’s the plan.’

‘By whatever means necessary.’

‘Something like that. So, you got the gear I asked for?’

Morrison grinned. ‘Mr Heckler and Mr Koch are in the building, and so are all their friends, stripped, checked, reassembled and in perfect working order.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that.’

‘Quite right. Never trust another bugger to check your weapon. So, they told me you were a Royal Marine, hey?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Regular bootie or SBS?’

‘That’s not something I talk about.’

Morrison gave a slightly narrower, slyer smile. ‘Ja, you were SBS, I can tell. Did you see action, may I ask? Contacts with the enemy?’

‘Yeah, I’ve had contacts.’

‘Good. Because let me tell you, I don’t want to fuck about with any more plum-in-mouth so-called experts in fancy suits who don’t know how to fight. “Conflict resolution” they call it, “a negotiated settlement”. Bullshit, man! They’re just sitting on their fat backsides in the bar of the Zambezi Hotel making bloody telephone calls to Mabeki, the treacherous, ungrateful black bastard, while that poor little chibba Zalika Stratten is all alone, scared out of her fucking mind, wondering why no one’s come to get her.’

‘She hasn’t been moved in the past twenty-four hours?’

‘Nah, still in Chitongo. It’s a village up by the Cahora Bassa dam, just another back-country shithole. Now me, I’d go and get her myself. Fuck, I’ve killed enough of them in my time. Wasted more than a hundred gooks, way more. Rebels, their women, children … hell, you see something moving in the elephant grass, you don’t stop to ask questions, you just empty your magazine before the other fucker bends you over and gives you one right up the nought. But sometimes, hey, sometimes you should not have fired …’

Morrison’s voice trailed away. For a moment Carver could have sworn he was welling up. But then Morrison coughed, wiped a hand across his flushed, scarlet face, whispered, ‘Christ,’ to himself and went on, ‘So, anyway, I offered to do it, but the boss said, “No, Flattie. We must have a man who is more clinical than you. In, out, no mess, that is the plan.”’

Carver wondered what kind of kid Morrison had been before someone stuck some pips on his shoulder, put a gun in his hand and sent him off into the bush to destroy anything he found, himself included. The man was barely keeping it together. But Carver wasn’t about to judge. The ghosts of his own dead haunted him too, visiting him in nightmares that left him sweat-soaked, wide-eyed and fighting to hold back the screams. Anyone who’d truly been to war was scarred by the experience. If they told you any different they were lying.

‘How come you work for Klerk?’ he asked. ‘You don’t seem the corporate type.’

Morrison broke into a chuckle that ended in a wheezing cough. ‘You mean, why does a man like him put up with a crazy old bastard like me, hey? Well, I will tell you. I used to be his company commander. Klerk was just a corporal back then. After the war, well, let’s just say that our lives took very different courses. But we were comrades. We fought side by side. You don’t forget a thing like that.’

They drove down a broad avenue, the tarmac hardly visible beneath a thick coat of dust whose red-ochre colour seemed tinted by all the bloodshed it had absorbed. Tall palms poked up between the trees on either side.

‘We could not put you up at the Zambezi because we don’t want those other useless buggers knowing what’s really going on,’ said Morrison, pulling up in front of a dilapidated attempt at an American-style motel. ‘This place will have to do. Don’t worry, though, you won’t be stopping here long.’

Morrison walked into a lobby whose mint-green paint was mottled with black stains of mould. He had a brisk, argumentative shout at the man behind the reception desk then led Carver to his room.

‘Sling your gear in there, then we will cut into town,’ he said, standing by the open door as Carver went into the room and slung his bag on an ancient, sagging bed beneath a grimy grey mosquito net. ‘You need a good meal inside you. I must have more smokes. We will go through tonight’s entertainment. Then I suggest you get a couple of hours’ rest. We take off at fifteen hundred hours, on the bloody dot.’

As Carver was on his way back out, Morrison stepped into his path and stuck a hand into his chest to stop him.

‘I want you to make me a promise, hey,’ Morrison said, and there was no trace of humour now. ‘Promise me, swear on your mother’s life—’

‘I don’t have a mother.’

‘On her fucking grave then, I don’t care. Just swear that you will get that girl out alive. This is Africa and there is no negotiation here, just taking and killing, the way it has always been. These kidnappers will never give that girl back, never. They intend to take the money and then kill her anyway. So you get her out, Mr Carver. You get her out, or believe me, she will die.’