‘All right, then.’
I reached into my shirt, going for my money belt, but Joss waved my hand down, and said, ‘No need to pay now. He has to prepare medicine first. He will give it in the morning. Pay then.’
‘Okay. But I’ll pay for the woman, anyway.’ I handed over a one-dollar bill, which the acolyte accepted.
I’d had enough of this mumbo-jumbo, so we pulled out. We left the witch doctor still squatting, still staring fixedly at his bones, and the acolyte sorting little heaps of wood and bark that lay about on the floor. As we pulled away, Phil materialised out of the darkness.
‘What the fuck happened to you?’ I asked.
‘I dunno. Something horrendous.’
‘Feeling of cold?’
‘Like a tomb. I had to get the hell out.’
Back in camp we found that the crowd had dispersed, and there was no immediate threat. The mother of the dead boy had taken his body away. It turned out that the girl with the scratches wasn’t related to him, and had been recovered by some of her own people.
Round the fire again, we broke out a bottle of rum and shot the shit while we had a good slug apiece — all, that is, except Genesis, who stuck to his normal Coke. I felt shaken.
‘What do we reckon to that, then?’ I asked the circle in general. I gave a quick run-down on what had happened, for the benefit of the guys who’d missed it.
‘It all started with that fucking owl,’ said Pavarotti.
‘Did they kill it?’ Chalky asked.
‘Did they hell!’ said Pav. ‘I bet it just cleared off. It probably does a fly-past every night, just to wind the bastards up.’
‘Surely,’ said Genesis, ‘the accident to the kids must have happened before the owl appeared?’
‘I dunno,’ I told him. ‘I reckon the two were much the same time.’
‘Maybe the old owl came to tell us about it,’ Chalky suggested.
‘Bollocks to the owl,’ went Stringer. ‘It’s only a bloody bird, after all.’
‘Those guys were both phoneys,’ Mart declared.
‘Who?’ Genesis asked.
‘The old witch doctor and his mate. The whole thing was just a performance. No disrespect, Gen, but that business with the bible really gave them away. The helper guy never turned a page or anything. Besides, it was far too fucking dark for him to read a word. The book was nothing but a prop. What could the Book of Daniel have to do with the injured kid? If you ask me, the entire show was a load of shite.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It was and it wasn’t. How did the guy know the kid was dying? He couldn’t see him. He never even touched him. He never asked the mother any question. He just knew — at the exact moment, as well.’
‘Lucky guess,’ said Mart.
‘Could have been,’ I agreed. ‘But his timing was spot on.’
‘True.’
‘Another thing,’ I went on. ‘Something touched me on the shoulders when the lamp went out. Something like a big bird, with soft wings.’
‘The owl!’ cried Stringer. ‘To-whit to-bloody-whoo!’
‘Piss off, Stringer,’ I told him. ‘You didn’t feel it. You didn’t get the cold, either. Phil got it, though, didn’t you?’
‘Yeah. And I don’t fucking want it again.’
‘Cold?’ went Pav. ‘What are you on about?’
‘It was like I’d stepped into a freezer,’ I said. ‘I was shaking like I had malaria or something. It made Phil do a runner.’
‘Philip Foster!’ went Whinger in mock horror. ‘Don’t tell me you left your colleagues in the shit.’
‘You’d have shat yourself,’ Phil told him, ‘if you’d felt what I was getting.’
‘Geordie!’ said Whinger, relentlessly. ‘I can’t believe you were bricking it as well.’
‘I was,’ I assured him. ‘I was scared shitless, because I didn’t know what was happening. Brrrrrh!’ I shuddered again. ‘Get that rum moving, for Christ’s sake.’
We passed the bottle round again and sat gazing into the fire.
‘I dunno,’ said Mart. ‘Joss was telling me yesterday that witch doctors’ medicines really work. These guys are herbalists. They get their stuff out of the bush: leaves and roots and bark and things. The point is, for the locals, these are the only drugs that exist. There’s no hospital this side of Chiwembe — not even a clinic. The clinics that do exist don’t have any drugs or trained staff. Joss reckons that without traditional medicine, very few of his mates would have made it to twenty-five.’
‘Come on, Mart,’ went Whinger. ‘You can’t swallow all that crap.’
‘It works,’ Mart insisted, stubbornly. ‘That’s all I’m saying. Maybe a lot of it’s psychological. If you believe in it, you get better.’
‘Yeah,’ went Danny, ‘or you can get witched.’
‘Better not to believe in it,’ said Genesis. ‘If you don’t let it get to you, it can’t do you any harm.’
‘That’s right,’ said Whinger. ‘And for fuck’s sake don’t take any medicine the quack throws you. Don’t give me any, either. Imagine calling up the CO in Hereford and saying, “Boss, I’m dying. I’ve been poisoned by a fucking witch doctor.”’
Everyone laughed. I took a deep breath and got up to kick some pieces of wood towards the centre of the fire.
‘One thing about it,’ I said. ‘There’s only ten of us, and no white women in sight. If ten freak out, there won’t be many left.’
‘Nobody’s going to freak out,’ said Phil, confident and aggressive again, in spite of the fright he’d had. ‘It’s all in the mind.’
If we’d taken a vote on the genuineness of the witch doctor, I reckon it would have gone seven to three against, or possibly six to four. Phil and Mart and myself had all felt that peculiar cold, and Genesis, who was wavering, couldn’t help being fascinated by the fact that the acolyte had wielded a bible.
When I told the guys to watch themselves particularly over the next few days, they gave me some peculiar looks, as if I was going soft in the head. But my own mind was far from easy. I lay looking up at the brilliant stars, thinking of the white powder, done up in a twist of dirty paper, a messenger had brought me. It was a long time before I could go to sleep.
THREE
The Kamangans had a form of reveille that I found spooky but attractive. At 0530 a single hand-drummer would start up, tapping out any rhythm he liked as he went on his round — and since a different man did it every morning, each day’s summons was unique, sometimes quite short, sometimes carrying on for a couple of minutes, until everyone was fully awake.
Next morning, as always, we were up in the dark, but by the time we’d had breakfast in the grey light of dawn, and everyone had got themselves sorted, it was already eight o’clock and the sun was hot. Whinger and I had recced the ambush site and laid out half the pop-up targets the day before; now our task was to show the location to Joss and his section commanders so that they could work out their own plan.
The dry watercourse we’d chosen for the ambush had no name — it didn’t feature on our maps — so for ease of reference we’d called it the Congo. The scenario of Exercise Mantrap was simple. Intelligence sources, it said, had revealed that terrorist forces were planning to come across the border with a shipment of arms: the party would use the earth road that ran roughly east to west along the far bank of our Congo. If the terrorists performed as predicted, they would cross in front of our guys from left to right. Alpha Force’s brief was to intercept and eliminate them in a linear ambush.
We were planning a conventional ambush, with a killer group and and two cut-off parties, right and left, and a Bergen cache which would act as rear protection. At the point we’d selected, the sandy bed of the river was forty metres wide, and the track that ran along the bank was three or four feet above the level of the watercourse. Beyond it lay thick bush. From the home forces’ lying-up position on the near side of the river, the range to the track would be barely a hundred metres — a perfect killing ground. On our side of the river the vegetation was relatively sparse, but the terrain was rough, broken up by banks and dry ditches, so there was plenty of cover for the Kamangans to conceal themselves.