Soldier N: Gambian Bluff Read online

  Taal did not stop to explain matters. As his men fanned out to occupy all the relevant aircraft, offices and communication points, he headed straight through the departure area and into the office of the airport controller.

  The last plane of the day – the 21.30 flight to Dakar – had long since departed, but the controller was still in his office, catching up on paperwork. As his door burst open he looked up in surprise. ‘What is this …’ he started to say in Mandinka, his voice trailing away at the sight of the guns in the hands of the civilians flanking the Field Force officer.

  ‘There has been a change of government,’ Taal said bluntly in English.

  The controller’s mouth opened and closed, like a fish’s.

  ‘The airport will remain closed until you hear to the contrary,’ Taal said. ‘No planes will take off, and no planes will land. The runway is being blocked. You will inform all the necessary authorities that this is the case. Understood?’

  The controller nodded vigorously. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said, wondering, but not daring to ask, how much more of the country these people – whoever they were – had under their control. ‘What reason should I give the international authorities for the closure of the airport?’

  ‘You don’t need to give a reason. They will know soon enough.’ He turned to one of the two men in civilian clothes. ‘Bunja, you are in command here. I’ll call you from the radio station.’

  Banjul lies on the south-western side of the River Gambia’s mouth and is separated from the rest of the southern half of the country – the major tourist beaches of Bakau and Fajara, the large township of Serekunda and the airport at Yundum – by a large area of mangrove swamp, which is itself intersected by numerous small watercourses and the much larger Oyster Creek. Anyone leaving or entering Banjul had to cross the creek by the Denton Bridge, a two-lane concrete structure two hundred yards long. At around two a.m. Taal and twenty rebels arrived to secure the bridge, left half a dozen of their number to set up checkpoints at either end, and roared on into Banjul.

  The lorry drew up outside the darkened building in Buckle Street which was home to Radio Gambia. No one answered the thunderous knock on the door, so two Field Force men broke it down, and the rebels surged into the building. They found only three people inside, one man in the small studio, sorting through records for the next day’s playlist, and one of the engineers undressed and halfway to paradise with his equally naked girlfriend on the roof. The engineer was bustled downstairs, while the two remaining rebels handed his girlfriend her clothing bit by bit, snickering with pleasure at her embarrassment, and fighting the urge to succumb to their own lust. It was fortunate for the girl that the coup leaders had stressed the need for self-discipline – and the punishments reserved for those who fell short of this – to all of their men. The girl, tears streaming down her face, was eventually escorted downstairs, and left sitting in a room full of records.

  The radio station now secure, Taal called Bunja at the airport and checked that nothing had gone amiss. Nothing had. Further calls confirmed that the Banjul ferry terminal and the main crossroads in Serekunda had been seized. Taal called the main Field Force depot in Bakau where the coup leader, Mamadou Jabang, was waiting for news.

  ‘Yes?’ Jabang asked, his voice almost humming with tension. ‘Everything has gone according to plan?’

  ‘So far,’ Taal said. ‘We’ll move on to the Presidential Palace now. Are our men in position around the hotels yet?’

  ‘They should be,’ Jabang replied. ‘The tourists never leave their hotels anyway,’ he added sourly, ‘so it hardly seems necessary to use our men to keep them in.’

  ‘We don’t want any of them wandering out and getting shot,’ Taal reminded him. Their chances of success were thin enough, he thought, without bringing the wrath of the white world down on their heads.

  ‘No, we don’t,’ Jabang agreed without much conviction. ‘We’re on our way, then. I’ll see you at the radio station.’

  Dr Sibou Cham yawned and rubbed her eyes, then sat for a moment with her hands held, as if in prayer, over her nose. You should pray for a decent hospital, she told herself, one with all the luxuries, like beds and medicines. She looked down at the pile of patients’ records on her desk, and wondered if it was all worth it.

  There was a muffled crack, like a gun being fired some way off. She got wearily to her feet and walked through the treatment room to the empty reception area, grateful for the excuse to leave her paperwork behind. The heavyweight concertina door, which would have seemed more at home in a loading dock than a hospital, was locked, as she had requested. Ever since the incident the previous May this had been done. Her attacker might be in prison, but there were others.

  She put the chain on the door before unlocking it, then pulled it open a foot, letting in the balmy night air. Almost immediately there was another sound like gunfire, but then silence. It was a shot, she was sure of it. Perhaps a gang battle. She might be bandaging the victims before the night was over.

  She closed the door again and sat down at the receptionist’s desk. All the drawer knobs were missing, which seemed to sum up the state of the place. It was all of a piece with the peeling cream paint on the walls, the concrete-block partition which had been half-finished for six months, the gaping holes in the mosquito screens, and the maddening flicker of the fluorescent light. It went with a pharmacy which had fewer drugs than the sellers in the marketplace.

  What was she doing here? Why did she stay? One person could not make all that much difference, and maybe the very fact that she was there, working herself into the ground day after day, took away any urgency the authorities might feel about improving the situation.

  But where else could she go? Into private practice, of course. It would be easier, more lucrative. She might even get some sleep once in a while. But she could not do it. In The Gambia it was the poor who needed more doctors, not the rich. If money and an easy life was what she wanted, she could have stayed in England, got a job in a hospital there, even become a GP.

  Most of the other Africans and Asians she had known at medical school had done just that. They had escaped from the Third World, so why on earth would they want to go back? They would bitch about the English weather, bitch about the racism, but they liked being able to shop at Sainsburys, watch the TV, give their children a good education. And she could hardly blame them. Their countries needed them back, but to go back would be a sacrifice for them, and why should they be the ones to pick up the tab for a world that was not fair?

  She could hardly pretend it had been a sacrifice for her, because she had never been able to separate her feelings about the practice of medicine from the unfathomable desire she had always felt to serve humanity. A doctor went where a doctor was most needed, and it was hard to imagine a more needy country in this respect than her own.

  But – lately there always seemed to be a ‘but’. Since the attack on her there had been a sense of … loneliness, she supposed. She felt alone, there was no doubt about it. Her family lived in New York, and in any case could not understand why she had not used her obvious gifts to make more of her life. More, that is, in terms of houses, cars and clothes. The people she worked with were the usual mixed bunch – some nice, some not so nice – but she had little in common with any of them. There were no other women doctors at the Royal Victoria Hospital, and the male doctors all wished they were somewhere else.

  The Englishman who had saved her that night had become almost a friend. Or something like that. He flirted a lot, and she supposed he would take any sexual favours that were offered, but he had a wife in England, and she guessed that he too was more than a little lonely. And he was at that age, around forty, when men started wondering whether they had made the right life for themselves, and whether it was too late to do something about it.

  She was nearly thirty herself, and there seemed little chance of finding a husband in Banjul, even if she had wanted one. She was not sure what she did want. N
ot to be alone, she supposed. Just that.

  It was a funny thing to be thinking in an empty hospital reception area in the middle of the night. She sighed. In the morning it would all look so …

  The burst of gunfire seemed to explode all around her, almost making her jump out of her skin. For a moment she thought it had to be inside the room, but then a shadowy figure went racing past in the street outside, then another, and another. They were probably heading for the Presidential Palace, whose gates were only a hundred yards away, around the next corner.

  It had to be another coup.

  There was a loud series of knocks on the concertina door and shouts of ‘open up’. She took a deep breath and went to unlock it. As she pulled it back a man half fell through the opening, wiping the blood from his head on her white coat as he did so. Behind him another man was holding a bloody side. ‘We need help,’ he groaned, somewhat unnecessarily.

  Taal had walked down the radio station’s stairs, and was just emerging onto Buckle Street when a distant burst of automatic fire crackled above the sound of the lorry’s engine. It seemed to be coming from the direction of the Presidential Palace, half a mile or so to the north.

  ‘Fuck,’ he murmured to himself. He had hoped against hope that this could be a bloodless night, but the chances had always been slim. The men guarding the Palace had received enough personal perks from their employer over the last year to guarantee at least a few hours of stubborn resistance.

  The last few bars of ‘Don’t Explain’ faded into silence, or rather into the distant sound of the waves tugging at the beach beneath the Bakau cliffs. Lady Chilel Jawara had discovered Billie Holiday on a trip to New York several years before. Her husband had been attending the UN, and she had decided, on the spur of the moment, to visit an exhibition of photographs of Afro-American music stars. It was the singer’s face she had first fallen in love with, before she’d heard a single note of her music. It was like her mother’s, but that was not the only reason. It was the face of someone who knew what it was like to be a woman.

  Not that Billie Holiday had ever been the senior wife of the president of a small African state. Lady Jawara had a lot to be thankful for, and she knew it. Her children were sleeping between sheets, went to the best school, and ate when they were hungry. If they got ill a doctor was sent for.

  As for herself, she enjoyed the role of senior wife. Her husband might rule the country but she ruled the household, and of the two administrations she suspected hers was both the more efficient and the less stressful. She hoped he had enjoyed the wedding in London, though she doubted it. Generally he was as bored by European ceremonies as she was.

  She yawned and stretched her arms, wondering whether to listen to the other side of the record or go to bed. At that moment she heard the sound of a vehicle approaching.

  Whoever it was, they were coming to the Presidential bungalow, for the road led nowhere else. She felt suddenly anxious. ‘Bojang!’ she called, walking to the living-room door.

  ‘Yes, Lady,’ he said, emerging from the kitchen just as a hammering started on the compound gate.

  They both stood there listening, she uncertain what to do, he waiting for instructions. ‘See who it is,’ she said at last.

  He let himself out, and she went in search of the gun she knew her husband kept somewhere in the house. The drawers of his desk in the study seemed the best bet, but two of them yielded no gun and the other two were locked. She was still looking for the key when an armed man appeared in the study doorway.

  ‘Who are you? And what do you want in my house?’ she asked.

  ‘You are under arrest,’ he said.

  She laughed. ‘By whose authority?’

  ‘And your children,’ the man added, looking round with interest at the President’s study. ‘By the authority of the Revolutionary Council.’

  ‘The what?’

  Her contempt stung the man. ‘Your days are over, bitch,’ he said.

  The firefight which began at the gates of the Presidential Palace soon after four a.m., and which continued intermittently across its gardens, up Marina Parade and down to the beach, for the next two hours, woke up most of those sleeping within a quarter of a mile of the Palace.

  Opposite the new Atlantic Hotel in Marina Parade, Mustapha Diop was happily snoring his way through it all until his wife’s anxiety forced her to wake him. The two of them sat up in bed listening to the gunfire, then went together to the window, where all they could see was a distant view of the moon on the surf and any number of palm fronds swaying gently in the night breeze.

  Diop and his family were from Senegal, and had been in Banjul only a few weeks, since his appointment as secretary to the committee overseeing the proposed union between the two countries. Since a treaty already existed whereby either government would intervene to save the other from an armed take-over, Diop was already aware that he might prove an important bargaining card for any Gambian rebels. The sudden violent knocking on the door downstairs made it clear that the same thought had occurred to them.

  Half a mile to the west, the gunfire was only audible, and barely so, when the breeze shifted in the right direction. Moussa Diba and Lamin Konko shared a north-east-facing cell in Banjul Prison, and Diba, prevented from sleeping as usual by the vengeful thoughts which circled his brain, was at first uncertain of what it was he could hear. The sound of lorries rolling past, headed into Banjul from the direction of the Denton Bridge, offered him another clue. Either there was a mother of an exercise going on – which seemed about as likely as an edible breakfast – or someone was trying to topple that little bastard Jawara. Diba smiled to himself in the gloom, and woke Konko with a jab of his foot.

  His cellmate groaned. ‘What is it?’ he said sleepily.

  ‘Listen.’

  Konko listened. ‘Gunfire,’ he said. ‘So what?’

  ‘So nothing. I thought you’d enjoy some excitement.’

  ‘I was having plenty in my sleep. There’s this girl I used to know in my village. I’d forgotten all about her …’

  He rambled on, making Diba think of Anja, and of what she was doubtless doing. The woman could not say no. Unfortunately, he could not say no for her, not while he was locked up in this cell.

  Another burst of gunfire sounded, this time closer. So what? Diba’s thoughts echoed his cellmate’s. Whatever was happening out there was unlikely to help him in here.

  Simon McGrath, awoken in his room on the fourth floor of the Carlton Hotel, thought for a moment he was back on the Jebel Dhofar in Oman, listening to the firqats firing off their rifles in jubilation at the successful capture of Sudh. The illusion was brief-lived. He had never had a bed in Oman, not even one as uncomfortable as the Carlton’s. And it had been more than ten years since the men he had helped to train had taken Sudh and started rolling back the tide of the Dhofari rebels.

  This was Banjul, The Gambia, and he was no longer in the SAS. Still, he thought, swinging his legs to the floor and striding across to the window, the gunfire he was listening to was coming out of Kalashnikov barrels, and they were not standard issue with the Gambian Field Force. Out there on the capital’s mean streets something not quite kosher seemed to be taking place.

  The view from his window, which faced south across the shanty compounds towards the Great Mosque, was uninstructive. Nothing was lit, nothing moving. He tried the light switch, but as usual at this time of night, the hotel’s electricity was off.

  McGrath dressed in the dark, wondering what would be the prudent thing to do. Stay in bed, probably.

  To hell with that.

  He delved into his bag and extracted the holster and semi-automatic 9mm Browning High Power handgun which he had brought with him from England. Since McGrath was in The Gambia in a civilian capacity, seconded from the Royal Engineers to head a technical assistance team engaged in bridge-building and pipe-laying, his possession of the Browning was strictly illicit, but that hardly concerned him. The Third World, as he was fo
nd of telling people who lived in more comfortable places, was like an overpopulated Wild West, and he had no intention of ending up with an arrow through his head. A little string-pulling among old contacts at Heathrow had eased the gun’s passage onto the plane, and at Yundum no one had dreamed of checking his baggage.

  He threaded the cross-draw holster to his belt, slipped on the lightweight jacket to hide the gun, and left his room. At first it seemed as if the rest of the hotel remained blissfully unaware of whatever it was that was happening outside, but as he went down the corridor he caught the murmur of whispered conversations.

  He was about to start down the stairs when the benefits of a visit to the roof occurred to him. He walked up the two flights to the fifth floor, then one more to the flat roof. With the city showing its usual lack of illumination and the moon hiding behind clouds, it was little lighter outside than in, and for almost a minute McGrath waited in the open doorway, searching the shadows for anyone who had chosen to spend the night in the open air. Once satisfied the roof was empty, he threaded his way through the washing lines to the side overlooking Independence Drive.

  As he reached this vantage point a lorry full of men swept past, heading down towards the centre of town. Several men were standing on the pavement opposite the hotel, outside the building housing the Legislative Assembly. A yellow glow came from inside the latter, as if from gas lamps or candles.

  It looked like a coup, McGrath thought, and at that moment a fresh volley of shots resounded away to his right, from the direction of the Palace. There was a hint of lights through the trees – headlights, perhaps – but he could see nothing for certain, either in that direction or any other. Banjul might be surrounded on its three sides by river, sea and swamp, but at four in the morning they all looked like so many pieces of gloom.

  The Royal Victoria Hospital, whose main entrance was little more than a hundred yards from the Palace gates, showed no more lights than anywhere else. McGrath wondered if Sibou was sleeping there that night, as she often did, or whether she had gone home for some of that rest she always seemed to need and never seemed to get.