Many of the houses were abandoned now, with weeds crawling across their driveways and verandas, their gardens turned into jungle. Others had been taken over by Kapembwa’s war veterans, his state-licensed thugs who roamed the streets terrorising the local population. Groups of boys, some of them no more than twelve or thirteen, could be seen sitting around on the lawns toting their assault rifles and smoking dope. A few of the old white families had stayed on, and some of the houses had been bought by middle-class black families, but even driving past you could see that the city was fast turning back into a ghetto.
Give me Bromley any day, thought Steve. It never gets this dangerous - not even on a Saturday night outside Wetherspoon’s, when they’ve got a three-for-two offer on the alcopops.
The convoy drove steadily forwards. You could feel the lurking menace all around you, but nobody was going to attack the Sixth Brigade. Nobody was that crazy.
Yohane’s jeep steered through the outer parts of the city, then headed towards the centre. It skirted around Churchill Avenue, the site of the President’s Residence. Barriers came down at six o’clock every evening to seal off the road surrounding the building. The restriction was taken seriously: anyone straying into that part of town after the curfew was likely to be shot on sight. Even when the Presidential motorcade came out of the compound, drivers were required by law to pull over and stop. Maybe that was why Kapembwa had survived assassination so long, Steve thought.
The barracks were situated three miles to the north of the city centre. Steve had seen plenty of military camps over the years, both living within them, and attacking them. But he hadn’t yet seen anything with the same air of ugly violence as the headquarters of the Sixth Brigade. The building was on its own piece of derelict land, off a main highway, with only an abandoned factory close by. There was an eight-foot wall all around it, topped with barbed wire and broken glass. Searchlights from the two twenty-foot-high turrets next to the main gate swept the surrounding city in long, aggressive arcs. At the front were two big steel gates, with sentry posts on either side, both of them manned by four soldiers.
Yohane swept forwards, barking orders at the sentries, his jeeps only slowing fractionally as the soldiers scurried to get the gates open. As Ganju steered the Nissan inside and brought it gently to a stop on the tarmac, Steve glanced around. Another six sentries were standing right inside the gates. Straight ahead of him were six blocks where he guessed the ordinary soldiers slept, followed by an officer’s mess, a canteen, then an arsenal, and finally a parade ground and shooting range. Next to the latter one piece of equipment that Steve reckoned wasn’t part of the typical furniture of a military camp.
A gallows.
Steve stepped out of the jeep.
We’re here, he thought grimly. In the pay of the beast.
As the men piled out of the vehicles, Wallace was already walking stiffly towards them, the embers of a cigar still smouldering in his mouth. He shook Ollie by the hand - the only man present he rated as his equal, noted Steve - then took a step back.
‘I hope you had a good journey, boys,’ he said, taking the stub of the cigar from his mouth but leaving a trail of smoke around his face. ‘And you have my thanks for getting out here so quickly. There’s work to be done, plenty of it, but we’ll crack on with that in the morning. The Colonel here will show you to your barracks. Get a good night’s sleep and I’ll see you in the morning.’
The barracks contained thirty beds, in two rows of fifteen; it had a wooden floor and a coal-fired burner at one end. It was the kind of hut you’d see in Second World War movies: built purely for survival, with no regard for the comfort of the men. But they’d only be here for a couple of nights at most. Steve had slept in much worse places. It would do fine.
‘Make yourselves at home,’ said Yohane. ‘There’s food on the table. Help yourselves.’
As he left, Maksim and Nick had already checked out the grub. It was piled up on a wooden table. There were six loaves of bread, a big bowl of lukewarm beans, two different types of salad, and plates of cold chicken and ham slices. On the side was a bowl of tinned fruit. All the men started to heap their plates with food. None of them had had anything proper to eat since they left Johannesburg almost twenty-four hours ago and they were ravenous. Steve squeezed some chicken between two thick slices of bread, stuffed some tomato and lettuce on top and took a huge bite. He was feeling better already.
‘So far, so good,’ he mumbled.
‘We haven’t started yet,’ said Ollie, taking a spoonful of beans.
‘And we haven’t got anything to drink,’ growled Maksim.