Once our captors had got us trussed, they heaved us back to our feet. At least, they tried to. Whinger, wearing only his shreddies, just fell down again. Once more the German woman called out some order. I was amazed and horrified to see a couple of the Africans salaaming at her, as if she were some sort of goddess or white witch.
My mind reeled. What the fuck was going on? These soldiers must be rebels. They were rebels: on the epaulettes of their DPMs they were wearing green-and-white stars — Muende’s emblem. And yet they seemed to know her. From the way they were greeting her, it was almost as if they’d been expecting her. How in hell did she know them? How had she got such a hold over them?
I shot a glance at Genesis and saw him looking equally bewildered. Then anger surged up inside me. Somehow the woman had betrayed us. I couldn’t see how she’d done it, but by God, she had. It was she who’d brought up the idea of Msisi in the first place, she who’d gone on about the place being a hospital, she who’d urged us to come here. Dimly I realised she must have known all along the place had been captured by the rebels. She’d shopped us, delivered us into the hands of the enemy.
‘You fucking bitch!’ I roared.
She was still standing in the front of the pinkie, high above everyone else, with a gloating smirk on her face.
‘English soldiers,’ she said, in a mocking voice. ‘You should be pleased. You will now have the privilege of meeting the leader of the Afundi rebels, General Gus Muende.’
With that she turned and gave another order. Our escorts frog-marched us forward, past our abandoned vehicle, into the compound itself. Too late I saw that the flag, which to us had been just a black rag against the sunset, bore the same green-and-white design. Too late I saw that the whitewashed walls were pockmarked with bullet holes, and that the sign proclaiming MSISI HOSPITAL–CONVENT OF POOR CLARES had been riddled with small-arms fire. A couple of soldiers began dragging Whinger like a sack of coal, but when Inge spoke sharply to them, they picked him up and carried him. That puzzled me, as well. Why should she care what happened to Whinger?
The sun was setting, and the light was already dim, but not so dim that I couldn’t see, lying along one wall, a line of bodies. Somebody had thrown a sheet over them, but it didn’t cover the legs, and the legs were those of elderly white women. White undergarments had been ripped off and thrown aside. The nuns. I felt sick. The nuns, butchered. No doubt they’d been raped as well, probably with bayonets. What the hell were these people going to do to us?
There was a brief delay as we were herded into a small room close to the main gate, Whinger on the deck, Gen and myself hemmed into a corner by a crowd of stinking soldiers, all jabbering with excitement. From the notices pinned on a wall-board, still listing patients and treatments, I saw the room must have been the hospital office. Where had the patients gone, for God’s sake? Probably they’d been murdered, too.
Next door somebody was trying to get a voice transmission through on the radio, yelling the same message over and over again. Then I heard Inge take over, talking in a native language, until suddenly she said in English, ‘Yes, they are coming now… No, but we make them talk.’
I was thinking furiously, how wrong can you be? Somehow it had never occurred to us that the convent could be in enemy hands. We’d believed all along that the rebel forces were away to the south, that the mine at Gutu was the most northerly point they’d reached. In our eyes, the fact that the convent was on the north bank of the river had given it extra security. In any case, we’d assumed that a religious hospital wouldn’t come under attack. All of us had been totally blind.
Minutes later, all three of us were face-down on the steel floor of an open-backed truck, Whinger in the middle, and we were driven out of the compound with four or five armed soldiers ranged along the seats on either side, stamping their boots on us whenever they felt a need to relieve their feelings.
ELEVEN
Think positive. That’s what I’ve always been taught. When you’re in trouble, think as hard as you can about possible options. For one thing, the process takes your mind off present hardships, and for another, it may produce a good idea. The trouble is, when you’re face-down on the steel floor of a truck being driven at lunatic speed along African bush roads in the dark, it isn’t easy to think of anything except immediate survival.
The first few minutes of that marathon journey were relatively gentle. The truck ran downhill for a minute or two and then on to a pontoon. We never saw the ferry, but we could tell from the movement we were afloat. The driver switched off his engine, and after a quiet five-minute crossing we thudded ashore against the far bank. That’s one thing the Boisset slipped up on, I thought: he’d said there was no means of crossing the river at Msisi. That was one of the factors that had encouraged us to believe it was a safe place to visit.
On the far side, all three of us were soon getting severe stick from the bumps in the road: we were repeatedly thrown in the air and smashed down on the deck, without having our hands free to steady ourselves or lessen the impacts. If I lifted my head, or tried to turn on one side, or spoke, I got a boot between the shoulderblades or on the backs of my knees. Oddly enough, as I realised after a while, Whinger was probably suffering the least of the three. He was so far gone with his fever, and so full of painkillers, that he didn’t seem to care much what anyone did to him.
As we were getting thrown into the truck, I’d hissed at Genesis, ‘Estimate the time.’ I got a clout in the ear with a rifle butt for my pains, but he registered my message: that to find out where we were being taken, we needed to guess the time the journey took. Gauging our speed was difficult: from the violence of the ride, it felt like seventy or eighty kilometres an hour, but I reckoned that because of the roughness of the road, we weren’t doing more than forty, if that, and would probably average twenty-five. At one point we went up a long hill, or over a range; the driver kept changing down, grinding upwards in low gear, and negotiating sharp bends. Then came a protracted descent, with the brakes squealing as we approached corners. From the way we were continually enveloped in a dust-cloud, I assumed another vehicle was travelling ahead of us as escort or leader.
After one almighty bump, which threw all our guards into the air, as well as us, I managed to get my head up far enough to catch a glimpse of the stars. There, ahead of us and slightly to the right, was the Southern Cross. As I expected, we were heading south-south-east.
Obviously we were in for a bad time, and I tried to prepare for it mentally. It would have helped to talk to Gen, but that was out of the question, as any attempt at communication put our escort into a frenzy of stamping.
Everything seemed desperately uncertain. Did the rebels know who we were? Did they know what we’d been doing? Did they know that we’d set up the attack on the mine? I suspected the woman was telling someone all about us. Ever since she’d come on the scene our own guys had been very guarded with her, but I was pretty sure some of Joss’s men had blabbed. Even they hadn’t known, or shouldn’t have known, that we were SAS. Our cover story was that we belonged to an infantry training school based at Hythe in Kent, and we’d stick to that as long as we could.
Not that details of regiments would make much difference if Inge had found out about our involvement at Gutu. If she had, we’d be accused of butchering the defenders. Altogether, I didn’t give much for our chances of survival. It wasn’t as if we knew any vital secrets the rebels would want to pry out of us, and we’d seen what a low value Kamangans put on human life, so to knock off a trio of Brits would be just a nice little evening’s entertainment for them. People with a greater sense of responsibility might have been inhibited by fear of the international repercussions that such murders might create, but not the Afundis.