Escorted by two boats, Ashes made his way out of danger, sailed on and landed at the small port of Majanji. He hired a pick-up truck, which had come for fish, to take him to the border town of Busia. Two days later he crossed into Kenya on a false passport. At Mombasa he got medical attention and booked a place on a ship to Cape Town.
GENERAL BAZOOKA COULD NOT BELIEVE hisears. He had set the perfect trap, his men had overrun the island, and yet he had come away empty-handed. A day later his men arrested Ashes’ wife, bringing her in with a black eye. It turned out to be somebody else. He released her, changed his mind, wanting to ask her a few more questions, but the men sent to go after her five minutes later lost her. The real Mrs. Ashes had, in the meantime, disappeared into the maze of villages.
A WEEK LATER the South African government bragged about offering political asylum to Amin’s right-hand man.
AMIN UNLEASHED vintage invective against the racist regime for a whole week.
Ashes listened to his former employer’s rantings from the safety of his farm, bought two years before. In the distance he could see the Table Mountains wreathed in mist. In his backyard he could see vines, laden with the grape famous for producing white wine. He could hardly wait to launch the harvest and his future career as vintner.
TWO DAYS AFTER CUTTING off his toe, General Bazooka received a summons to report to the State House. The Defence Council gathered and put him in command of the main force charged with driving the dissidents from south-western Uganda. Doing his best to disguise his limp and pain as the boot bit into the wound, he tried to find credible reasons for not complying. He had lost touch with the region. He wanted to stay and guard the city. His wife was, after all, in Mulago Hospital. Marshal Amin, who had been drifting away under hallucinations induced by whisky (disguised with Coca-Cola to keep up appearances as a teetotaler), cocaine and fear, seemed to wake up for the first time. All thirty eyes in the room turned to him, to scrutinize him for signs as to the fate of the errant general. There was a holding of breath among the congregated generals. Amin fixed on Bazooka a very meaningful stare. Disobedience? Wife? When the fate of the nation was at stake? The General felt chilly despite the fact that it was a hot afternoon and the sun was blazing outside. Amin had said nothing to him about Ashes and his involvement in the affair.
Under the cold stares of his colleagues, all of whom were grateful that Ashes was gone, General Bazooka accepted the order, but he asked for permission to take his wife with him.
“You must be mad. Do you want to give that patriotic woman to the enemy? Mulago is the best hospital in the country. It is where she belongs till you return with victory.”
General Bazooka realized that mentioning his wife had been a big mistake, and the freezing looks from fellow generals and the hateful eye Amin fixed on him had unsettled him. Now he had to think very quickly of a plan to get her out. He had less than an hour to do it. He had last seen her the day before. He had once again asked if she wanted to go to Libya, and as a reply he had got the request to describe the smell of the air outside. Suddenly, he felt his dreams go sour, coagulating into heavy rotting lumps. He had got used to the visits, the sound of her croaking voice, the view outside the window. Without her and the children, he had little left. They underpinned everything, absolved every crime. Without them he felt hollow. He could see the winds from the south sweeping his achievements away, stripping him naked. Victory? Why should I be its guarantor? Maybe I should shoot the Marshal and die honourably, but there is no honour in suicide, except if committed to evade capture and betrayal of war secrets, he mused. He wondered what he should do next, but before he could reach any decision, the meeting was adjourned. He stood up, saluted and left with the rest.
Major Ozi, in his capacity as head of the Eunuchs, escorted him out and informed him that he, Ozi, was now in charge of the General’s family’s security and welfare. Ozi informed the bewildered general that he was not allowed to go to hospital to say goodbye or to collect his children from school. He was to get on the move to the south-west immediately.
Major Ozi enjoyed watching the signs of alarm on the General’s face. He smiled as he watched him write out messages to his mother, instructing her to take charge of everything till his return. He had waited for this moment for a very long time.
He held all these generals responsible for the instability in the country and in the government. He held them responsible for failing to repulse the dissidents or to infiltrate their camps in Tanzania and wipe them out. He held them responsible for the death of his men in coup attempts, the last of which had cost him twenty men and left ten wounded, and for the bombing of his shop and shops belonging to some of his men. He hated them for indulging themselves instead of running their ministries and fulfilling other responsibilities on their shoulders. He hated Bazooka for wasting the taxpayers’ money on capers, and especially for running Colonel Robert Ashes off, which had left Amin without a confidant, making him moodier, more paranoid, more dependent on drugs, and harder to protect. As a man whose job and life depended on Amin remaining alive and in power, Major Ozi hated these men for threatening his life, and the lifestyle of his men. What would happen to the wealth he and his men had collected? And on a more personal level, he hated the General for killing his friends while quelling revolts in the army.
In the past few years Major Ozi had done it all. The Eunuchs had risen to such power that everybody, including Amin’s wives, was afraid of them. They had in fact organized a car crash in which one of the Marshal’s wives died, and arrested another on suspicion of cheating on him. That had been the apogee; nothing could beat laying one’s hands on the wife of the most powerful man in the land. The Eunuchs had also broken the Vice President’s back. With these, and many more achievements bubbling in his head, he wondered what to do with this man. The Marshal had, literally, given his head to him on a plate. It was up to him to slice it off if he wanted. The Marshal had also given him this man’s entire family. He wondered how to tackle them, whether to make it easy for them or to make their life extremely hard. He hoped that the remaining generals would learn a lesson from Bazooka’s trials and tribulations. He dismissed the General with a friendly shake of the hands and wished him success in his coming campaign.
General Bazooka left the State House feeling sick. He was now head of troops he did not know and officers he did not trust. They carried out his orders woodenly, making no input whatsoever. On the way, he saw the nightmare of a disorganized army, with tanks in the wrong places, lorries full of scared soldiers labouring to the wrong destinations, orders lost on the way in a faulty chain of command, the wrong ammunition delivered to the wrong places. He could feel the glee with which the civilians watched, and he felt angry that there was little he could do about it. There were chaotic roadblocks which slowed the progress of both soldiers and supplies. The codes were messed up, and at times it seemed as if the dissidents were in charge. He suspected that some of these men were deliberately messing up things out of fear of engaging the enemy, praying that by the time their turn came the order would be given to withdraw. There were bodies along the road, civilians shot by soldiers, soldiers shot by soldiers mistaken for dissidents. And the fact that this was hardly two hundred kilometres from the capital dismayed him.