The Henchmen's Book Club (10 page)

11.
THUNDERCLAP

A white hot flash filled the sky behind me, searing my back and making me
recoil in surprise. A supersonic blast of superheated air arrived right on its
tail and me and Captain Bolaji scrambled away to escape its wrath, throwing
ourselves behind a rocky overhang as bushes and trees spontaneously combusted
all around us as far as the eye could see.

The nuke – I’d forgotten about it.

I could tell by the confusion on Captain
Bolaji’s face that he hadn’t been part of His Most Excellent Majesty’s strategy
meetings either and was probably wondering if we’d managed to stab each other
and taken a tumble into hell as a consequence.

Because hell was exactly what we’d found.

Fire raged on all sides, sucking the
oxygen from the air and choking us where we cowered. Having seen firestorms
before I knew we’d suffocate if we stayed where we were. We had to get away,
find air and a respite from the heat. The solution was no more than fifty yards
away.

The Zambezi.

I shouted this at Captain Bolaji and he
nodded to show that he understood, so we jumped to our feet and sprinted as one
through the burning vista.

The heat was incredible, almost too much
to bear, and it came in rolling waves as we careened in zigzags through the
crackling vegetation, feeling the most bearable route down to the river. If
we’d stumbled, we would have undoubtedly roasted where we’d dropped, but our
movement prevented us from burning too deeply. Like hogs on a spit, we cooked
all over, slowly but evenly until the river was suddenly there, broad and
inviting, and we leapt into its cool waters without hesitation.

The relief was all embracing and we
bobbed in the swell as the current swept us downriver and away from the flames.
But this was when our problems really started. See, we weren’t the only ones
who’d had the brilliant idea of hitting the water the moment the bomb went off.
Every croc and hippo sunning itself on the water’s edge had decided that was
enough sun for one afternoon so that the Zambezi was now standing room only
with all creatures great and small.

The first thing to have a lunge at me was
a fifteen-foot crocodile with tan lines across his face. I managed to keep it
at arms length with a boot on the nose and a branch in its eye before I was
helped out by a passing
impala which
floated straight
into his outstretched mouth.

And the impala wasn’t the only one who
was having an off day. Lots of half-cooked antelopes and wildebeests clogged
the waters in a desperate attempt to escape the flames, some were kicking and
whinnying, some were not, but the crocodiles quickly recognised the bounty for
what it was.

I decided to take my chances back on
shore when a submerged hippo took exception to my proximity and I floundered
and thrashed about in the rip until I fished up on a silt beach nearby.

I pulled myself clear of the water, but
stayed close to the river for the air and finally allowed myself to actually
put a little thought into my next move, rather than simply reacting to whatever
was trying to shoot, roast or eat me.

After a little frantic splashing and a
cry of “Oh God please no”, I had company in the form of Captain Bolaji, who
hauled himself out of the water and who looked up at me warily. I barely had
the energy to speak, let alone continue our game of chess, so I just shrugged
to indicate that my bolt was shot and the Captain pulled himself up the beach
and collapsed next to me.

Neither of us said anything at first. We
just watched our surroundings burn and the sky turn black with smoke.

The radiation would follow, but as long
as we didn’t linger and as long as we didn’t have a stiff wind on our backs all
the way home we’d escape the worst of it. Well, maybe. We’d been about three
miles from the blast when it had gone off and judging from the fact that I was
still alive to feel my wounds I reckoned the bomb must have been a relatively
small affair. Just a couple of kilotons or so. Plus it had been a surface
detonation, maybe even a subterranean detonation if the late Admiral had driven
the payload into the mine itself. All of these things had worked in our favour.
We’d caught the bomb’s flash and had felt its breath, but we’d been on the very
fringes of the destruction zone and escaped with a couple of tanned necks and
singed eyebrows. Much of the vegetation around us had burst into flames, but
this was southern Africa, you only needed to turn on a flashlight around these
parts to burn the place down. Oh yes, we’d been lucky all right. Or rather,
Captain Bolaji had been lucky. I’d missed martyrdom by design rather than
accident.

“What was that?” Captain Bolaji finally
asked.

“His Most Excellent Majesty’s secret
weapon, I reckon,” I told him.

Captain Bolaji looked at me in confusion.

“A nuclear bomb,” I clarified.

“A nuclear bomb? You mean a nuclear bomb?
Like an Atomic Bomb?”

“Yeah. Bloody things,” I stewed, this not
being my first run-in with one of Oppenheimer’s firecrackers you see.

“The Europeans?” he immediately clicked.

“Yeah, probably,” I confirmed.

“But why?”

“To destroy the mine,” I reasoned.

“Destroy it? But why?”

“Well we weren’t going to steal it, were
we?” I laughed.

Captain Bolaji still looked confused, and
I could’ve explained that by detonating a nuke on the site of a mine, we’d just
dirtied the ground – and any diamonds dug out of it – for the next
thousand years, rendering them worthless. Not an altogether disagreeable turn
of events if you happened to own a stockpile of diamonds that were rapidly
depreciating in value following the opening of a mine in Caia, but which had
now recovered their original worth (and then some) thanks to the Special Army’s
first and last heroic outing.

I could’ve explained this, but what would
have been the point? I didn’t know any of it for a fact and what’s more, it
didn’t make a jot of difference to either of our bank accounts so who really
cared?

“Don’t ask me, mate,” I eventually
abridged, quoting the Affiliate’s mantra. “I just work here.”

But the Captain wasn’t to be flannelled
and asked me how I’d known about the bomb.

“I didn’t. But I suspected,” I told him.

“You suspected?”

“I had an idea.”

“But you didn’t tell anyone about it?”

“Tell anyone? Like who?”

“Like who? Like Mbandi? Kasanje? Jaga?
The Colonel-General? They’re all dead,” he gesticulated.

I adjusted the bandana over my bad eye
and retied the back to hold my face in place.

“Yes they are,” I confirmed when I was
done. “But I didn’t kill them.”

Captain Bolaji’s face fell, so I asked
him what he would’ve done had I troubled him with my suspicions. Off the top of
his head Captain Bolaji reckoned he didn’t know, but his reticence was clouded
by hindsight, so I suggested he might’ve reported me to His Most Excellent
Majesty at the very least, which would’ve seen me – and him –
sporting matching blindfold up against a wall to prevent us from spoiling the
surprise for everyone else.

“Either way, the Special Army would’ve
still wiped itself out at Caia. Nothing and nobody was going to stop that,” I
said, though what I actually meant was nobody like me was going to stop it.
Jack Tempest or Rip Dunbar might’ve had a crack at it had they been in my
boots, but they’d clearly had more exciting missions on this week.

As much as it galled him, Captain Bolaji
saw that I was right and tried to accept his sunny fortune with the good grace
by which it had dropped in his lap. It still narked him something rotten that
he was only alive by chance, but then again which of us wasn’t?

“How
did you suspect?” he finally plumped to ask.

It was a fair question and one to which
he had a right to know so I asked him a question in turn.

“Have you ever read
The Fourth Protocol
?”

Captain Bolaji hadn’t.

“Come on then, I’ll tell you about it on
the way to the airport.”

12.
THE SOLACE OF THANKS

As you can imagine, the towns and villages all around Caia were in a state of
pandemonium. Buildings were on fire, people were running about screaming, and
on the horizon, to everyone’s horror, an enormous swirling mushroom cloud
slowly rose towards the heavens. Me and Bolaji walked right out from underneath
it and blended in.

We’d ditched what had remained of our
Special Army uniforms and strolled into town wearing just our underpants and
each other’s blood. Nobody paid us any attention, nobody even noticed us as we
washed our burns in the town’s water pump, whipped a few clothes off a line and
knocked out a local cop to take his jeep and weapons.

I urged Captain Bolaji to cut his losses
and come with me to Harare, but the Captain was adamant about swinging by the
compound to pay his final respects to His Most Excellent Majesty, so I agreed
to go along for the ride.

Not that there’d be much point. I knew
the plan, and I knew the tactics. I’d been here before.

As expected, there was nothing left of
our old command headquarters but for a few burnt out buildings and a scattering
of bullet-riddled corpses surrounded by 9-mm shell casings. A Special Forces
unit had dropped in for tea. All His Most Excellent Majesty’s troops that had
been left behind to guard the place had either been downed in position or
marched out into the centre of the parade ground and dispatched there.

The adjutant had not escaped the clean-up
operation either and lay dead in the grass fifty yards behind the main building
looking none too happy about it. He still had his wallet (and his passport
rather interestingly) so we spent a few minutes harvesting the rest of the
bodies for petrol money and anything else we could find before Captain Bolaji
found His Most Excellent Majesty’s battered and bruised body curled up behind
the Royal outhouse.

He called to me and for several seconds
we stared down at our former Commander-in-Chief’s swollen arse before Captain
Bolaji planted a boot up the middle of it, causing His Most Excellent Majesty
to suddenly wake with a start and begin wailing with fear.

“Why didn’t they kill him too?” Captain
Bolaji asked, as we watched our magnificent leader cry his eyes out.

“I don’t know, I guess it was just more
fun to leave him alive,” I said over the sounds of weeping.

“Brigadier Jones?” His Most Excellent
Majesty finally saw through his tears. “Captain Bolaji? You came back?”

“Yes, didn’t we just,” Captain Bolaji
scowled.

“Quick, get me some clothes,” His Most
Excellent Majesty ordered, spectacularly misjudging the mood of his men.

Captain Bolaji put a second boot up his
arse to remind him of recent events and I cocked my gun theatrically to echo
the point. His Most Excellent Majesty yelped in pain, then screwed up his face
and began bawling his eyes out all over again.

It was hard to tell what he was saying,
as so often is the case with crying children, but if I’d had to guess I
would’ve said it sounded something like “please don’t hurt me” and “I just want
to go home. I want my mamma” etc.

Captain Bolaji looked at me and sucked
his teeth. I’d already holstered my weapon and rage and was now just feeling
like shit. Eventually the Captain let out a sigh of frustration, then tugged a
bloodstained jacket off a nearby sentry and threw it at His Most Excellent
Majesty’s feet.

“Put that on,” he told him.

His Most Excellent Majesty studied the
jacket and managed to stop crying long enough to pull it on, but his sleeves
were too long for his arms and the breasts were riddled with bullet holes and
this just seemed to set him off again.

“Stop crying Kimbo, or I’ll give you
something to cry about?” Captain Bolaji barked, comically dismissing His Most
Excellent Majesty’s recent run of luck as something less than a clip round the
ear.

“Kimbo?” I asked.

“Kimbo Banja, it is his name,” Captain
Bolaji told me.

“Oh,” I replied, relieved that I didn’t
have to keep on referring to this snivelling little kid as His Most Excellent
Majesty any more, though it had helped with the word count over the last couple
of chapters.

“Come on, let’s go,” Captain Bolaji said.

We gathered up a few final bits and
pieces that we’d need for the journey then climbed into our jeep and bugged
out. Kimbo didn’t say much at first. I guess he had a few things on his little
mind, but when he did it was clear he’d known less about the operation than we
had. He’d been patronised and pandered to by the Euro boys, but when all the
grown-ups had started to talk Sissiki had put him to bed. All he’d been told
was that he was going to throw some crooked diamond miners out of his country
and that when we were done, he’d be celebrated and revered, worshipped and
rewarded, and big mates with David Beckham. He didn’t have the first idea about
the nuclear bomb and started crying his eyes out all over again when we told
him about it.

The Europeans had been there with them,
apparently to pop the cork on the Special Army’s success, but the moment they
got a radio call from their spotter on the ground, the mood had changed and
their soldiers had started killing everyone. Nobody was spared, not even the
wives of his senior officers, and Kimbo thought he was going to die too, but
instead all they did was parade him around in his birthday suit and tan his
arse with their belts, before flying off into the sunset with laughs wobbling
their bellies.

“Is everyone dead?” he swallowed in
disbelief.

I looked over my shoulder from the
passenger seat and nodded.
Kimbo’s
eyes fell to his
feet and he went quiet. Where once was a cock-sure, energetic young despot, all
that remained was a fragile and scared little boy. All his authority was gone.
All his confidence, his innocence and his pluck, all had been taken from him.
Would he ever fully understand what had happened? What his part in it had been?
How he’d been used? Would he ever come to terms with this?

Maybe. Maybe not. But then again this was
Africa. And bad things happened to little boys in Africa every day. What was
one more traumatised toy soldier on a continent full of them?

After a few moments Kimbo looked up and
thanked us for coming back for him. I glanced over at Captain Bolaji, and he duly
lifted an eyebrow, but left the home truths where they lay.

“I knew you would, Brigadier Jones,”
Kimbo continued. “Just like you said you would. Just like you saved your other
commander, you saved me.”

Kimbo leaned over the passenger seat and
wrapped his arms around me in gratitude. His little body trembled against mine
and soon he was in tears again. I let him cry it out for a few seconds before
peeling his arms from my neck and putting him back in his seat. I fixed Kimbo
with my remaining eye, gave him my steeliest look and then brought my hand
smartly up to my brow to crack off the salute to end all salutes.

“It was my pleasure, Your Most Excellent
Majesty,” I told him, finally jogging a smile out of the nicest little
super-villain it’s ever been my privilege to serve.

Just outside Harare, there’s an orphanage for children of war. It was set up by
a nice old stick called Father Anthony who’d been working out in Africa since
before Bob Geldof was in short
trousers
. The orphanage
plays home to boys and girls who’d either lost everything through war or who’d
been conscripted and put through the grinder themselves. Victims and former
soldiers bedded and boarded together. They read, wrote, played, worked through
their traumas and day-by-day learned to become children again.

A new boy now resided there. To Father
Anthony and the other pupils he was simply Kimbo Banja. But I would always
remember him as His Most Excellent Majesty, Supreme Ruler and
Commander-in-Chief of the First – and hopefully last – Lumbala
Special Army.