A Time to Die, page 27
This preoccupation with aerial attack puzzled Sean; all he had heard and read indicated that Frelimo’s air force was so weak and scattered as to be almost non-existent. The types of aircraft they possessed were obsolete and unsuited to ground attack, and a shortage of skilled technicians and spares only compounded their ineffectuality. These men, however, were taking the threat very seriously indeed.
At midday the sergeant ordered a halt. One of the troopers prepared food on a small fire, which he doused as soon as it was cooked. They moved on a few miles before stopping once more to eat the meal. Sean was given an equal share. The maize meal was cooked stiff and fluffy and was well salted, but the meat was rancid and on the point of putrefying. In the average white man it would have caused an immediate attack of enteritis, but Sean’s stomach was as conditioned as any African’s. He ate it without relish, but without trepidation either.
‘The food is good,’ the sergeant told Sean in Shangane as he sat beside him. ‘Do you want more?’ Sean made a pantomine of incomprehension and said in English, ‘I’m sorry I don’t know what you are saying.’ The sergeant shrugged and went on eating. A few minutes later he turned back to Sean and said sharply, ‘Look behind you, there’s a snake!’ Sean resisted the natural impulse to jump to his feet and instead grinned ingratiatingly and repeated, ‘I’m sorry I don’t understand.’
The sergeant relaxed and one of his men remarked, ‘He does not understand Shangane. It is all right to speak in front of him.’
They ignored him for the remainder of the meal and chatted amongst themselves, but as soon as they had finished, the sergeant produced a pair of light manacles from his pack and locked one side on to Sean’s wrist and the other onto his own. He delegated sentry duty to two of his men and the rest of them settled down to sleep.
Despite Sean’s exhaustion, he had been going for days now on only brief snatches of sleep, he lay awake and pondered all he had learned, and the missing pieces of the puzzle. He was still not certain that he was in Renamo hands, he had only Claudia’s brief note to suggest that. On the other hand, Comrade China had been a commissar in Robert Mugabe’s Marxist ZANLA army, but Renamo was a rabidly anti-communist organization committed to the overthrow of the Marxist Frelimo government. That didn’t add up correctly.
Furthermore, China had fought the Rhodesian army of Ian Smith. What was he doing here across the border, involved in another struggle in a foreign country? Was China a soldier of fortune, a turncoat, or an independent warlord taking advantage of the Mozambiquan chaos for his own private ends? It would be interesting to find out.
With all this to think about, still his last thought before sleep finally overcame him, was of Claudia Monterro. If China wanted him alive, then it was highly probable that he wanted the girl alive as well. With that thought, he fell into a deep, dark sleep with a faint smile on his lips.
He woke to the ache of abused muscles and the bruises left by gun butts, but the sergeant had him up and running immediately southwards again into the cool shades of evening. Within a mile, his muscles warmed and the stiffness evaporated. He settled into the run, matching his escorts easily. Always he looked ahead, hoping at any moment to see the tail of the main column emerge from the darkness, and to see Job and Dedan carrying Claudia’s litter.
They ran through the night and when they stopped again to eat, his captors began to discuss him through their mouthfuls of maize and high-smelling meat.
‘They say that in the other war, he was a lion, an eater of men,’ the sergeant told them. ‘It was he that led the attack at Inhlozane, the training camp at the Hills of the Maiden’s Breasts.’
The troopers looked at him with interest and dawning respect.
‘They say that it was veritably he, in person, who destroyed one ear of General China.’
They chuckled and shook their heads, that was a fine joke.
‘He has the body of a warrior,’ said one of them, and they considered him frankly, discussing his physique as though he were an inanimate object.
‘Why has General China ordered this?’ another asked, and the sergeant grinned and picked a shred of meat from his back teeth with a fingernail.
‘We must run the pride and the anger out of him,’ he grinned. ‘General China wants us to change him from a lion into a dog who will wag his tail and do his bidding.’
‘He has the body of a warrior,’ the first man repeated. ‘Now we must discover if he has the heart of a warrior.’ And they all laughed again.
‘So it’s a contest, then.’ Sean kept his face impassive. ‘All right, you bastards, let’s see which dog wags its tail first.’
In a perverse fashion, Sean began to enjoy himself. The challenge was much to his taste. There were ten of them, all in their twenties. He was just over forty years of age, but that handicap made it even sweeter and helped him to endure the monotony and hardship of the days that followed.
He was careful not to let them know that he understood that this was a contest. He knew it was dangerous to antagonize or humiliate them. Their goodwill and respect would be more valuable than their hatred and resentment.
Sean had spent his entire adult life in the close company of black men. He knew them as servants and as equals, as hunters and soldiers, as good and loyal friends and as bitter cruel enemies. He knew their strengths and weaknesses and how to exploit them. He understood their tribal customs, their social etiquette, he knew how to flatter and please and impress them, how to gain their respect and make himself agreeable to them.
He showed them just the right degree of respect, but not enough to make them contemptuous. He took especial care not to challenge the sergeant’s authority or force him to lose face in front of his men. He made the most of their sense of humour and of fun. With sign language and a little clowning he made them laugh, and once they had laughed with him their whole relationship altered subtly. He became more a companion than a captive and they no longer used the steel-edged gun butts as instruments of casual persuasion. Most importantly, he was every day picking up little snippets of information.
Twice they passed burned-out villages. The cultivated lands around them had gone back to weeds, the black ashes blowing in the wind.
Sean pointed at the ruins. ‘Renamo?’ he asked, and his captors were outraged.
‘No! No!’ the sergeant told him. ‘Frelimo! Frelimo!’ And then he tapped his own chest.
‘Me Renamo,’ he boasted, and pointed at his men. ‘Renamo! Renamo!’
‘Renamo!’ they agreed proudly.
‘Well, that settles that,’ Sean laughed.
‘Frelimo. Bang! Bang!’ He made the gesture of shooting a Frelimo and they were delighted, joining in the pantomime of slaughter enthusiastically. Their attitude towards him improved even further and at their next meal the sergeant handed him an extra-large cut of rotten meat. While he ate it, openly they discussed his performance to date, agreeing that he was acquitting himself admirably.
‘But,’ the sergeant asked, ‘he can run and we know he can kill men, but can he kill a henshaw?’
Henshaw was the Shangane word for a falcon, and Sean had heard them use it many times over the last five days of their trek, and each time as they said the word, they looked up at the sky with a troubled expression. Now, once again at the mention of that bird, they looked unhappy and as a reflex glanced upwards.
‘General China thinks so,’ the sergeant went on. ‘But who knows, who knows?’
By now, Sean was confident that his position was fairly secure, his relationship with the band would allow him to take the first liberty, and force a resolution of this trial by attrition.
On the next stage, he began to force the pace. Instead of keeping his station in the file of trotting men two paces behind the Shangane sergeant who led the column, he closed up until he was running on his heels, not quite touching him with each stride, and exaggerating his breathing so that the sergeant could feel it on the back of his thick sweaty back. Instinctively the sergeant lengthened his own stride and Sean matched him, keeping close, too close and pushing him.
The sergeant glanced over his shoulder irritably and Sean grinned at him, breathing into his face. The sergeant’s eyes narrowed slightly as he realized what was happening, then he grinned back at Sean and extended his stride into a full run.
‘That’s it, my friend,’ Sean said in English. ‘Now let’s see whose tail wags.’
The rest of the column had fallen behind. The sergeant called a sharp order to them to close up, and they went away at a killing pace. Within an hour, there were only three of them left, the others were straggled back over a mile of the forest floor and ahead of them the path climbed a steep incline to the crest of another tableland.
Sean moved up slightly until he was running shoulder to shoulder with the tall sergeant, but when he tried to pull ahead the man kept with him. The hillside was so steep that the path went up it in a series of hairpins, and the sergeant forged ahead of Sean at the first bend, but Sean caught him and passed him on the straight.
They ran at the top of their speed now, the lead changing back and forth between them and the third man dropped out before they were halfway up the hillside. They ran grimly, in a wash of sweat, their breathing harsh as the exhaust of a steam engine.
Suddenly Sean darted off the path, scrambling straight upwards, cutting across the bend and coming out fifty feet ahead of the Shangane. The sergeant shouted angrily at this ruse and cut the next bend himself. Now both of them abandoned the pathway and ran straight at the steep slope, jumping over boulders and roots, like a pair of blue kudu bulls in flight.
Sean came out on the crest three feet in front of the sergeant, and threw himself down on the hard earth and rolled onto his back moaning for breath. The sergeant dropped beside him with his breath sobbing in his chest. After a minute, Sean sat up uncertainly and they stared at each other in awe.
Then Sean began to laugh; it was a harsh painful cackle, but after a few seconds the Shangane laughed with him, though clearly each gust of laughter was an agony. Their laughter grew stronger as their lungs regained function, and when the rest of the party struggled to the crest of the hill, they found them still sitting in the grass beside the track, roaring at each other like a pair of lunatics.
When the march resumed an hour later, the sergeant left the endless footpath and struck off across country towards the west and there was at last direction and purpose in the way he led the column.
Sean realized that the trial was over.
Before dark they ran into a Renamo line of permanent defences.
They were entrenched along the bank of a wide but sluggish river that flowed green between sand bars and round water-polished boulders. The dugouts and trenches were revetted with logs and sandbags and meticulously camouflaged against aerial discovery. There were mortars and heavy machine-guns dug in, with commanding fields of fire across the river and sweeping the northern bank.
Sean had the impression that these fortifications were extensive and he guessed that this was the perimeter of a large military area, certainly battalion and possibly even division strength. Once they had crossed the river and been passed through the defences, Sean’s appearance in the ranks of his escort created a stir of interest. Off-duty troopers turned out of their dugouts and crowded around them and his captors were clearly enjoying the elevated status that a white prisoner bestowed upon them.
The crowd of interested and jocular onlookers abruptly thinned and parted as a tubby bespectacled officer strode through them. His escort saluted him with theatrical flourishes which he returned by touching the rim of his maroon beret with the tip of his swaggerstick.
‘Colonel Courtney,’ he greeted Sean in passable English. ‘We have been warned to expect you.’
For Sean, it was refreshing to notice that Renamo wore conventional badges of rank, based on the Portuguese army conventions. This man had red field officer flashes and the single crowns of a major on his epaulettes. During the bush war the terrs had eschewed the capitalist imperialist traditions, and dispensed with the symbols of an elitist officer class.
‘You will spend the night with us,’ the major told him. ‘And I look forward to having you as our guest in mess tonight.’
This was extraordinary treatment, and even Sean’s captors were impressed and in a strange way rather proud of him. The sergeant himself escorted Sean down to the river and even produced a fragment of green soap for him to wash out his bush jacket and shorts.
While they dried on a sun-heated rock, Sean wallowed naked in the pool and then used the last of the soap to wash his hair and rid his face of camouflage cream and ingrained dirt. He had not shaved since he had left Chiwewe camp almost two weeks previously and his beard felt thick and substantial.
He worked up a lather of suds in his armpits and crotch and looked down at his own body. There was not a vestige of fat on him, each individual muscle was outlined clearly beneath the sun-darkened skin. He had not been in this extreme condition since the closing days of the war. He was like a thoroughbred racehorse brought up to its peak by a skilful trainer on the eve of a major race.
The sergeant lent him a steel comb and he brushed his hair out. It fell almost to his shoulders, thick and wavy and sparkling from the wash. He put on his damp clothes and let them dry on his body. He felt good, that charged restless feeling of being at the very pinnacle of physical fitness.
The officers’ mess was an underground dugout devoid of ornament or decoration. The furniture was crude and hand-hewn. His hosts were the major, a captain and two young subalterns.
The food made up for its lack of artistic presentation by its abundance. A huge steaming bowl of stew made with sun-dried fish and chillis, the fiery peri-peri that was a relic of the Portuguese colonialists, and great mounds of the ubiquitous maize-meal porridge.’
It was the best meal Sean had eaten since leaving Chiwewe, but the highlight of the evening was the drink that the major provided, unlimited quantities of real civilized beer in metal cans. The labels read ‘Castle Lager’ and in small print at the bottom, ‘Verwaardig in Suid Afrika, Made in South Africa’. It was an indication as to which country was Renamo’s good friend.
As the guest in mess, Sean proposed the first toast. He stood and raised his beer can.
‘Renamo,’ he said. ‘And the people of Mozambique.’
The major replied, ‘President Botha, and the people of South Africa,’ which settled it conclusively. They knew Sean was from the south and was, therefore, an honoured guest.
He felt so secure in their company that he could relax and for the first time in months allow himself to get moderately drunk.
The major had fought for the Rhodesians during the bush war. He told Sean that like Job Bhekani he had been a subaltern in the Rhodesian African Rifles, the elite black regiment which had fought so effectively and inflicted such slaughter amongst the ZANLA guerrillas. They soon established the camaraderie of old brothers-in-arms. Without obviously pumping him, Sean was able to nudge the conversation along and pick up the crumbs of information that the major let fall more freely as the cans of beer were consumed.
Sean’s estimation had been correct. This was part of the northern perimeter of a Renamo army group. The fortifications were deep and dispersed as a precaution against aerial bombardment. From this base, they marauded southwards, hitting the Frelimo garrisons and strafing and raiding the railway line between Beira on the coast and Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe.
While they were still working on the first case of beer, Sean and the major discussed with seriousness the significance of that rail link. Zimbabwe was a completely land-locked nation. Its only arteries to the outside world were the two railway lines. The major one was southwards, into South Africa, via Johannesburg to the major ports of Durban and Cape Town.
Mugabe’s Marxist government bitterly resented being reliant on the nation which, for them, epitomized all that was evil in Africa, the bastion of capitalism and the free-market system, the nation which had for the eleven long years of the bush war propped up the white regime of Ian Smith. Mugabe’s hysterical rhetoric against his southern neighbour was incessant and yet the foul hand of apartheid was curled around his jugular vein. His instinct was to look eastward into Mozambique for salvation. During his struggle for independence Mugabe had been nobly assisted by the Frelimo President of Mozambique, Samora Machel, whose own struggle against the Portuguese had only just culminated in freedom from the colonial yoke.
Frelimo, his brother Marxists, had provided Mugabe with recruits and arms and full support for his guerrillas. Without reservation, they had offered him the use of bases within their territory from which to launch his attacks on Rhodesia. It was only natural now that he turned once more to Mozambique to provide an escape from this awful humiliation of being seen by the rest of Africa, by his brothers in the Organization of African Unity, to be dealing with the monster of the south, not only dealing with, but totally dependent upon it for every litre of gasoline, for every ounce of the daily stuff of survival.
The railway line to the port of Beira on the Mozambique channel was the natural solution to his predicament. Of course, the port facilities and the main-line system under the African socialist management had been allowed to fall into almost total disrepair. The solution to that was simple and well-tried: massive aid from the developed nations of the West. As every good African Marxist knew, they were fully entitled to this, and any attempt to withhold it could be countered by the equally simple and well-tried expedient of dubbing it blatant racism. That dread accusation would force immediate compliance. The estimate of the costs of work needed to restore the port and main line to full efficiency was four billion American dollars. However, as actual costs in Africa usually exceeded estimates by a hundred per cent, the sum of eight billion dollars was more realistic. A mere bagatelle, nothing more than their due, a fair price for the West to pay for the pleasure and prestige that Mugabe would derive from being able to thumb his nose at the monster of the south.
