‘I can’t figure out the rebels’ strategy,’ I said as I sat beside Whinger in the front of one of the pinkies. ‘Bakunda reckoned they’ve got five hundred armed men, at most. With a force that size there’s no way they could control an area as vast as this.’
‘Not a chance,’ Whinger agreed. ‘All they can do is hold on to one or two key points. If they’re getting diamonds from the mine, they can buy in weapons from other countries. Meanwhile, they terrorise the population by burning villages while they build up their strength. The arms convoy was supposed to be part of that build-up. Even if we only delayed it, we may have done ourselves a favour.’
‘I wish to hell we’d hit it, though,’ I said. ‘It would have been nice to see a few tons of ammo go up in smoke.’
‘By the way,’ said Whinger, ‘what did you make of Joss last night?’
‘I don’t know. Until then I’d thought the guy was all for us. But I suddenly got the feeling he doesn’t like us that much.’
‘Not a lot we can do about it.’ Whinger beat a tattoo on the wheel with his fingers spread. ‘And anyway, in about three weeks we can say goodbye to him.’
By noon that day we were well into rebel territory, and everyone was getting hyped up with the feeling that we were driving into danger. Our relatively carefree time of training, pure and simple, was over. From now on we might come under attack at any moment. Already we were exceeding our brief from Hereford, but I told myself that if anything did develop, we’d pull back and let the Kamangans handle it.
The overgrown track had swung more to the east than we wanted, but for the time being it still seemed our best option, and we followed it, moving cautiously in short bounds, conscious of the fact that somebody might be coming out to meet the missing convoy. One of our pinkies ranged ahead, with Pavarotti driving, Joss beside him, Phil on the .50 in the back, and two silveries sitting on the bonnet to watch the surface of the road for any sign of disturbance. It seemed unlikely the Afundis would have mined a track their own vehicles were using — but we weren’t taking any chances.
The speed of our advance depended on the terrain. In places where the bush was thick, we moved slowly, but when vegetation was sparser and visibility better, we accelerated. The scout vehicle would press ahead until it came to a natural look-out point; there it would halt, and once Pav had satisfied himself the coast was clear, he’d call up the rest of the force by radio.
Stopping and starting, we progressed without incident until late in the afternoon. All the way Pav was following the single set of wheel marks left by the truck from which the wounded refugee had escaped. But then at about 1630, with the sun turning red as it sank towards the horizon behind us, he called a halt after only a short stretch on the move.
‘Wait out,’ he called. ‘We’ve got more tracks here.’ A couple of minutes later he came through with: ‘We’re on a Y junction. There’s one road coming from the east, and another heading south. Quite heavily used. Fresh tracks. Several different vehicle types. Looks like the remains of a village in the distance as well.’
‘Nothing on the map,’ I told him.
‘I know. But the place is real enough on the ground.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Stay where you are. We’ll close on you.’
By the time we reached the burnt-out village, dusk was already falling. All that remained of the grass huts were black circles of ash, with an occasional stick of charred wood — the relics of home-made furniture — poking out of the pile in the centre. The one brick building, a single room, had evidently been a shop of sorts, for although its roof had gone, the remnants of two pathetic metal signs still hung over the open doorway: HOT CENTRE GROCERY and TWO BARS HEAVEN. There was no smoke rising, but when one of the Kamangans pushed a stick into a heap of ash, he found the middle of it still warm.
‘We’re pulling back out of here until we get a better look at the area,’ I told Joss. ‘The rebels can’t have gone far.’
‘Agreed.’ He looked round and gave a shout of ‘Mabonzo!’, calling up the beanpole tracker.
‘How long have the people been gone?’
Mabonzo examined various footprints and tyre marks, then held up his right hand, tilting his open palm alternately right and left. ‘Maybe last night. Maybe this morning.’
‘That settles it,’ I said. ‘That, and the evidence of traffic on the road. We’ll take up a defensive position on the rise back there, and move on in the morning.’
The night passed uneventfully. We heard hyenas, but no engines, and in the morning, as soon as the light was strong, we checked out the village more thoroughly.
‘Look at this,’ I said to Genesis, as we found the blackened skeletons of maize stores — little round enclosures with grass walls, built up on stilts to keep their contents safe from rats. The remains of charred cobs showed that the contents had been incinerated along with the structures. ‘What sort of bastards deliberately burn people’s food supplies? If they’d wanted the maize for themselves, they could have taken it. But why destroy it?’
‘There’s no accounting for human wickedness,’ he said. ‘Innate evil is the greatest problem in the world.’
I looked at him. His pale, freckled skin was glistening with sweat, and an angry-looking red lump had come up from a fresh bite on his throat beside his Adam’s apple. From anyone else, remarks like that would have seemed platitudinous and balls-aching. But Gen radiated a kind of calm that usually had a soothing effect on everyone else. I never did understand how he reconciled his religious beliefs with his job, which was basically to be a killing machine, but somehow he managed it.
It was Genesis who made the worst discovery. In a hollow behind the remains of the village store he came on what looked like an innocent heap of brushwood, but, seeing that everything around it was black, and this pile of sticks was unburnt, he realised that something was odd and went over to it. The next thing I heard was the sound of him retching violently.
‘Eh, Gen,’ I called. ‘What’s up?’
I found him staring at a tangled pile of black bodies, half hidden beneath the wood. The flies were at them already, but they hadn’t been dead much longer than the elephants. I felt my own gorge rising. The corpse nearest to us was that of a young woman, naked. Whatever else she’d been raped with first, she’d been terminally violated with a knife or a bayonet, and her whole torso was split open from crutch to breastbone. The violence of the attack, which had carved her pelvis clean in half, was appalling. They hadn’t spared the babies, either: several tiny, mangled corpses lay among the big ones.
I thought Genesis was going to start pulling bodies out, to see how many there were, so I said sharply, ‘Don’t touch them! There’s nothing you can do for them now.’
‘But we can’t just leave them,’ Gen began.
‘We can, and we’re going to. The only useful thing we can do is take the coordinates and hand them over to the UN when we get back. How many are there?’
‘Looks like five or six women and three children — no, make it four.’
‘Okay, then.’ I scribbled the figures into my notebook, along with the GPS fix of the village. Was there any point in recording one small atrocity in the middle of a civil war? Not much, but you never know. Then I turned round and shouted, ‘Joss! Look at this!’
I thought he was shaken when he saw the bodies, but he kept a hold on himself and just said, ‘This is what they do, I’m afraid.’
‘D’you want to bury them, or anything?’
He shook his head. ‘We could spend the rest of the year burying bodies, and still there’d be thousands above ground.’
‘Right, then,’ I said. ‘We’re moving on.’
No doubt the village had had a name, but because the map was blank, we had only our GPS to give us our position. That put us almost due north of Gutu, which looked as though it was about fifty kilometres off. According to the map, a range of hills ran north-east to south-west across our front, with the river Kameni flowing parallel beyond them, and Gutu on its south bank — the far side from us.