‘What did she think all those bangs were, then?’
‘I told her it was an exercise. Pass the word to anyone you see.’
‘Roger.’
Back under the sausage tree, I asked, ‘How long have you lived in Africa?’
‘All my life. My grandfather came from Germany, 1946.’
Nazis, I thought immediately. Nazis on the run after the war.
‘What did he do?’
‘Skins. Was heisst “Gerberei”?’
‘Tannery?’
‘Ja, ja. He made animal skins. Zebra, cheetah, ostrich.’
I nodded. ‘And what’s Windhoek like now?’
‘Quite small. There is the Kaiserstrasse, with hotels and shops. Otherwise, not much.’
‘People speak German?’
‘All. German and Afrikaans.’
‘English?’
‘Wenig.’
I opened the map and handed it to her, standing beside her to point things out.
‘We’re somewhere round here.’ I indicated a large area.
First she spread the map over her knees, but then she held it out at arm’s length, as far from her as she could reach.
‘Meine Brille,’ she said. ‘My spectacles. To read, I need spectacles.’ She reached to where the left front pocket of a safari shirt would have been.
‘Short-sighted, are you?’
‘Short, no. Long. I can read a newspaper one kilometre distance, but from close, no. You have such spectacles?’
I shook my head. ‘None of our guys uses them.’
‘And the blex?’
‘Don’t need ’em.’
She gave a snort of exasperation, and said, ‘So where is the border of Mozambique?’
‘Away over there.’ I waved extravagantly to the right of the sheet. ‘Well off the map. This is quite large scale.’
‘And we cannot drive there?’
‘Not a chance. We’re too far from the border. And anyway, we haven’t any permission to cross. The frontier guards would go bananas if us lot turned up.’
She glowered at me, as if her predicament was my fault. To lower the temperature, I asked, ‘What were you doing in Gorongosa, anyway?’
‘Wildbemerkung.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Game assessment. Many animals are killed in the civil war. We try to estimate how much game survives, for the possibility of hunting again.’
‘But you say you don’t run safaris?’
‘No. We make totals — counts — from the air, to provide information.’
‘And what did you see? Elephants?’
‘Very few. Most have been shot. Nashorn — total kaputt.’
‘Nashorn?’
‘It is rhino. All gone. But impala okay, kudu okay, giraffe quite good. Zebra, natürlich. Warthog okay.’
‘Well.’ I folded the map. ‘The only thing I suggest is that you go out on the plane tomorrow.’
‘Plane? What is this?’
‘A Kamangan military aircraft is coming down tomorrow on a resupply run. Maybe it could lift you out.’
‘Where does it go?’
‘To Mulongwe, or somewhere just outside.’
‘Mulongwe! Das ist ein Dreckhaufen, a shit-heap. I don’t go there.’
‘You’d be better off there than here.’
‘By no means. The Kamangans cancel all international flights because of the war. There is no way I can get out of Mulongwe. Probably they put me in gaol because I am Namibian. If I go to hospital for my leg, I catch Aids. Quite sure. Mulongwe — no.’
I was thinking, you’ll go where you’re fucking well told. In any case, how did she know what was going on in the Kamangan capital?
Luckily, someone forestalled further argument by shouting for me from our living area. I just said, ‘Sorry, I’ll see you in a minute,’ and walked away.
I couldn’t quite make out what it was that was making me feel so pissed off. The woman’s arrogance didn’t help, but if we were going to get rid of her within twenty-four hours, what did it matter? I also realised I was tired. We’d been up most of the night, and once the adrenalin of the assault had drained away, there was bound to be a sense of let-down. Yet none of this quite accounted for the black feeling that seemed to have settled on me.
I kept trying to analyse the reason. It wasn’t the state of affairs at the mine; for the time being I didn’t much care what was going on there. We’d helped Alpha Commando recapture it, and there our responsibility ended. It didn’t take us to get the machinery going again or to keep an eye on the diamonds — that was down to the Kamangans. I wanted to help old Boisset, but if he preferred to stay put, that was up to him. We needed to get his message through, and maybe we could do that in the evening. The trouble was that for the moment our comms were down. You get these periods when satcom phones don’t work, and there’s nothing you can do but wait for the system to sort itself out.
Whinger was on my mind, as well. But suddenly I realised, or thought I realised, what the real trouble was. The day before, I’d taken my weekly anti-malaria tablet, Lariam. Back in Hereford the MO had issued each of us with two little foil packs of the big white bombers, one to be taken every week for eight weeks on end, without fail. Everyone said that Lariam was dodgy stuff, but that it was the only drug still proving effective in the part of Africa where we’d be working. The mozzies, apparently, had wised up to all the older drugs like Paludrine and Mepacrine. Several of the lads, particularly Chalky, had been quite nervous of the possible side-effects of Lariam, printed on the leaflet that came with each packet. They’d tried to take the piss out of the warnings, but they hadn’t convinced themselves.
Now I remembered Pavarotti putting on a phoney doctor’s voice as he read out, ‘Most common unwanted effects: dizziness, vertigo, loss of balance, headache, sleep problems. Less common unwanted effects: psychiatric reactions which may be disabling and last for several weeks, unusual changes in mood or behaviour, feelings of worry or depression, persecution, crying, aggression—’ At that point there’d been loud cries of ‘For fuck’s sake!’, and he’d laid off. But I know that Andy, for one, had binned his tablets rather than swallow them, and I suspect a couple more of the guys had done the same, just as they’d rejected the anti-nerve gas stuff handed out before the Gulf War in 1991. I’d taken my Lariam regularly, and so far had had no problems.
But now I felt so peculiar that I began to wonder: was the stuff getting to me at last? If it was, there was nothing I could do about it, and maybe it was this thought that relaxed me. In any case, I drifted off to sleep.
I was woken by Phil shaking my shoulder.
‘Rise and shine, mate,’ he went.
I sat up, sweating all over. ‘Christ! What’s the time?’
‘Midday.’
I’d been out for nearly three hours. I should have felt refreshed, but even when I’d scrubbed my face with a wet rag I still had the same thick sensation in my head, and Phil did nothing to clear it by starting in again about the woman.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said as I sat there trying to get myself together. ‘You had a run-in with her as well?’
‘She fucking started it. She shouted at me as I was going past.’
‘What did she want?’
‘She’s found out where we are, more or less.’
‘How?’
‘One of the silveries told her we were close to the river Kameni.’
‘Fuck it!’
‘Yeah, and now she’s screaming about a place called Msisi.’
‘Where’s that?’