Luckily for General Fart, at the time, Ashes had been busy putting the finishing moves on the deal which would have earned him millions. He had made a deal with Alan Witherthrush, known as the Big Bossman to everybody, who was the head of Copper Motors, to import spares for military helicopters, Stinger jeeps, Leyland buses and lorries. He was bound to cream off a clean ten million dollars through inflation of prices and commissions. Amin had approved the deal, and the spares were already on the way. According to plan, his millions should already have been paid into his account. When he confronted Bossman about it, he was told to wait. He waited because he wanted to handle the affair carefully, without the Marshal knowing about it. But when nothing changed, he realized that Big Bossman had cheated him.
The head of Copper Motors deeply resented Robert Ashes’ interference in the affairs of his company because Ashes did not have any sense of history, any respect for what Witherthrush had been through to keep it going. Copper Motors had begun as a branch of a multinational company that mined copper and cobalt in Kilembe, in the South-western Region, and was further involved in small-scale manufacturing. The copper plant and the manufacturing divisions had folded soon after Amin came to power. The foreign employees had cleared out. Big Bossman had found himself in a precarious situation: he could leave and work in Kenya or South Africa, or take a gamble and rebuild the flagging motor division. He decided to stay; he reorganized; he hired and fired; he blackmailed and curried favour. With great success. By 1973 he was the sole importer of spare parts for the whole country. Competitors came and went, leaving him stronger. Barclays Bank remained his faithful banker, switching money, transferring bribes, offering loans, maintaining the mechanism which kept the company solvent.
The first meeting between Bossman and Ashes had been acrimonious.
“I want a cut of the action,” Ashes dourly demanded. “It is protection money. I want shares, a partnership.”
“You are joking,” Big Bossman said, laughing.
“We will see,” Ashes said in parting.
Ashes swallowed the insult, went home and decided to contact the Bossman’s deputy. He threatened to link him with guerrillas if he did not comply. The man refused. Ashes hanged him, making it look like a suicide. The next time he held talks with the Bossman, the latter obliged. Ashes was made a partner. His contribution to the mega-deal had been to make Amin approve and finance the importation of the biggest haul of spares in years.
At that time, Bossman realized that Ashes wanted to take over everything. It was clear that his dream was ending. He and his wife decided to exit with a big bang. Friends at Barclays Uganda and Barclays Britain transferred Ashes’ cut not to his account, but to a secret numbered account in the Cayman Islands. At about the same time, the Bossmans sent their only son abroad and made him sole beneficiary of their fortune. Just in case. Mrs. Bossman was supposed to follow a fortnight later. Her husband would leave last. They had planned to travel separately so as not to arouse suspicion.
But Ashes knew very well that the only way to make Bossman tell him the truth was to go for the softest target: his wife. It was also insurance in case Bossman managed to get away or decided to tell Amin what was going on. Ashes sent his men to abduct the woman. They arrived in Euphoria 707s, surrounded the compound, cut the phone, stormed the house, gagged her, threw her in the boot and drove off. At their rendezvous they transferred her into a Shark helicopter which took her to Ashes’ island, the base of the Anti-Smuggling Unit.
The island was five kilometres long and three kilometres wide at its widest. It was full of chunky, imposing rocks, extremely tall grey-trunked trees filled with the song of yellow-legged parrots and other birds. From the distance, it looked like a green, grey-stemmed blur, dovetailed by rocks. There were houses, gun emplacements, speedboats, and a massive bunker Ashes used as his headquarters. The island sat by itself in the water, battered by moody waves, combed by sharp-toothed winds. It conjured up images of enchantment, freedom, glorious isolation, especially when viewed from a distance on a bright sun-drenched day.
Kate Witherthrush was a sun-burned, long-haired woman in her early forties. She had a seductive figure and a pleasant face which often belied her inner strength. She had spent the last ten years in Uganda, staying when others gave up and left, hell-bent on accumulating a big fortune. Her family had at one time had money, but had lost it in the Second World War. She had met her husband in London, where he was holidaying. She had been waiting all her life for such a man, an adventurer, a charmer, a man ready to risk all and gain all. The last decade had been the happiest period in the couple’s life.
She remembered the years as action-packed, often giddy, often calm, often unpredictable. There was always something happening, nights loaded with shooting, days calm as a sleeping baby, and vice versa. She had witnessed the fall of one government and the rise of another. She had witnessed lynchings, shoot-outs, beatings, burials, flamboyant weddings, wild Christmas celebrations lasting days, pleasure and pain see-sawing on an invisible, ever-changing pivot. She had been robbed five times, two at gunpoint. All by soldiers. Amidst all this they had their son, the icing on their cake of success which seemed to grow bigger and bigger. They had enjoyed so much success that at times they felt invincible, like gods walking among the uniformed scum and the people yearning for salvation from tyranny. They were in the unique position of trading with a tyrant, knowing that as they helped they did both good and bad. His capacity to oppress increased but at the same time the spares for the buses and lorries used by the populace were indispensable.
She was glad that her son was out of Ashes’ reach, safe in an exclusive boarding school. She still appreciated the wit, the danger, the revenge, the intoxication involved in the deal. They had decided to fuck Ashes back after he had fucked them, undercut their position, endangered their lives, and killed their colleague. The fake suicide note had been an insult both to his memory and to them. They would not be around when Ashes appointed stooges to run Copper Motors. They would take the spirit of the company with them to the Caribbean where they had just bought a mansion, a yacht, and a piece of paradise.
Mrs. Bossman sat opposite Robert Ashes, hardly able to hide her loathing for him. It seemed to seep through her pores and spread like a gas. After the way they had treated her, transporting her like a sack of onions, she knew that lines were already drawn. She had to stand firm. Any show of weakness would be the ruin of everything. She knew by now that her life, and that of her husband, and the career of Ashes, were all in the balance. She just prayed and hoped that her husband would also stand firm and not cave in to the violence of this gangster.
From the dignified way she conducted herself, Robert Ashes knew that he would get absolutely nothing from her. The fact that her son was already secured and out of his reach said it all. He regretted that he had let the boy escape the country. Why had he been fooled by Big Bossman and waited? He realized that his pride, his feeling of infallibility, had cost him a great fortune. If he had been more paranoid, the boy would be here, and Mrs. Bossman would be singing.
He stood up, a Havana in his hand, walked about and asked the woman where his money was. When he introduced the ways he intended to treat her son on capture, she did not flinch. She saw through his lies and that infuriated him. He looked at her coldly, and at that moment both of them knew that one would have to kill the other in order to walk away. Ashes could not risk releasing her for the fear that she might talk. He kept thinking about Mau Mau women caught with guns under their robes. Two decades later, he could still see them, their immobile faces giving away nothing even after rigorous torture, dying with their secrets and ruining a perfect day, a week or month’s campaign. His nightmare had caught up with him. He was after secrets, probably the most important in his whole life, which the witch didn’t want to divulge.