It took every ounce of willpower for Steve not to kill the man on the spot.
He could feel the hatred of the man and everything he represented flooding into his veins. Brutality towards women and children was, the way Steve reckoned it, a step across the line. That wasn’t soldiering, it was just thuggery. They had enough munitions in the Nissan to take out the whole border post. The Colonel would be the first to die. But no, he told himself. There’s no point in taking out one soldier: there will be another thug, just as brutal, ready to step into his bloodstained boots. We’re here to mallet the man who created this hellish situation. Nothing should distract us from that.
‘Fine,’ he said, his voice tense. ‘Let’s crack on.’
Steve glanced back once towards the child. A boy of about three, dressed in ragged clothes, he was shaking with shock and fear. One of the soldiers was already jabbing him with the barrel of his gun.
‘Let’s move,’ he said, gesturing for everyone to get back into the stationary vehicles.
Ganju steered the Nissan back onto the road. Low, dark cloud hung over the flat, scrubby landscape, making the tin shacks of the border town look even more dismal. People were everywhere - refugees mostly, but also shopkeepers selling fruit and drinks, money-changers swapping bundles of local currency for South African rand, and people-smugglers offering to take refugees across the border. Girls were selling their bodies right along the main highway, some of them shouting that they were virgins so there was no chance of catching AIDS. ‘Even Nick might be able to score in this town,’ said Ollie in the back of the Toyota, but somehow the joke fell flat. No one was in the mood for ribbing one another. They were just looking out of the windows, slowly taking in the sheer scale of the devastation that had swept through the country.
To Ibera, it was a drive of more than three hundred miles, and the road wasn’t in great shape. For years now, it had been thronging with refugees. It might have been a decent enough highway once, decided Steve, but now it was covered with potholes. The refugees had left years of debris. There were broken-down vehicles everywhere, abandoned by their owners when they ran out of the petrol that was in short supply right across this area. Most had just been shunted off-road and left to rust. There were mounds of rotting food, with flies swarming around it. And, as you got further up the highway, you could see people dying by the side of the road: elderly men and women who had simply given up the struggle and laid down to die in the forest that was creeping closer and closer to the highway every year.
Nothing stopped the Sixth Brigade, however.
Yohane was leading the convoy in the first of the two jeeps. He was sitting right in front of the open-topped machine, his purple and gold beret glinting in the morning sun. A pair of aviator shades had been pulled down over his eyes. Although the highway was crowded with people, the driver didn’t even have to honk. The crowds just parted as they saw the vehicles approach, people scrambling to the sides of the road, and cars and trucks steering wildly into the muddy ditches that ran along the edge of the highway. It was a lesson in how much this organisation was feared, noted Steve. People would happily risk their lives rather than hold them up for a single second.
That’s because they knew what they’d get.
A bullet straight between the eyes.
Even so, the journey was a long and hard one. It had been eight in the morning when they crossed the bridge, and Steve reckoned it would be late in the evening before they made it to Ibera. Along the way, he was watching, observing, drawing in as much information about the country as he could. It was a lesson he’d learned when he was still training with the Regiment. The more you knew about the territory you were fighting in, the better your chances of survival. Sometimes it was just knowing the routes out, at other times the type of kit you could pick up along the way. Whatever it was, you never knew when it was going to give you that millimetre of an edge against your opponent.
But what can I learn about Batota? he wondered. Except that a cyclone of chaos has already swept through this country.
He thought briefly about Sam. As he saw the miserable poverty to which the country had been reduced - one dirt-poor village after another rolling past, abandoned farms and disused factories everywhere - he began to get a sense of the anger that burned within her. To see your parents murdered was bad enough. To see the country you were raised in sent back to the Stone Age was more than anyone could bear.
Without lusting after vengeance.
It was after ten at night by the time the convoy entered the dusty villages that surrounded Ibera. The road came in from the south of the city, running close to Lake Abayo, a manmade waterway created by the damming of the Nanyama River in the 1960s. After that, the roads twisted through the big leafy suburbs, built for the white elite during the 1970s. Looking out on the buildings was like being transported to an old American TV show, Steve thought. Big comfortable houses with space for a couple of cars on the driveway and a barbecue and a swing for the kids out the back. It looked a bit like the more prosperous parts of Bromley, the place where he’d grown up. Except here you didn’t get the sense of suffocating safety so familiar from a middle-class London suburb. Far from it. You could feel the tension bristling through the night air.