The Henchmen's Book Club (6 page)

7.
ON HIS MOST EXCELLENT MAJESTY’S MOST SPECIAL SECRET SERVICE

After a couple of hours touring the nation’s potholes we pulled up outside a
large, freshly painted former colonial farm. The order was given to dismount so
we all piled out of the back of the truck and stood around in an informal line
jangling our change. I for one couldn’t have been happier that we’d finally
arrived at our destination. The big ebony translator had made a point of
sitting directly opposite me for the whole journey and despite the road doing
its best to get us all ready for space, his eyes hadn’t left mine for a second.

The Admiral breezed by to send the boys
to dinner then ordered me to follow him up to the house. His translator came
too, despite the fact that we didn’t need a translator, walking in my shadow
and burning his eyes into the back of my neck as we passed through a set of
double doors and into a dizzyingly cool hallway. The Admiral glanced my way to
see if I was impressed with the air conditioning and I duly shivered my
appreciation.

An adjutant in crisp white duds rushed up
with a pitcher on a tray and poured the Admiral a glass of iced water. The
Admiral quenched his thirst with a smack of his lips then replaced the glass on
the tray and sent the adjutant away. Once again, he glanced my way, though this
time my appreciation was somewhat less than forthcoming.

“Commander Dembo, how was your
reconnaissance mission?” a new crisp white adjutant asked as he waltzed by to
greet us.

“Excellent,” the Admiral confirmed,
checking his breast apparel to make sure he had enough room for a few new
medals. “Is His Most Excellent Majesty in? I wish to see him at once.”

The adjutant eyed me as if I’d just
dropped out of Commander Dembo’s nose and deduced I was the reason for the
urgency. The adjutant frowned.

“I’m afraid His Most Excellent Majesty is
attending to some very important business at the moment, he cannot be
disturbed.”

It was now my turn to glance the
Admiral’s way and he liked this about as much as I’d liked passively drinking a
glass of ice water, but His Most Excellent Majesty had better things to do and
there was nothing to be done. Rank had spoken.

“Very well, we’ll wait,” the Admiral
conceded. “But would you tell His Most Excellent Majesty that I’d like to see him
at his earliest opportunity? I have something to give him.”

“Is it this?” the adjutant guessed,
pointing at me.

“Well, yes but…” the Admiral started, but
the adjutant cut him off.

“Then might I suggest you wash it while
you wait. His Most Excellent Majesty prefers not to receive gifts that make the
eyes water so.” And with that he swept away, leaving the Admiral and I to get
better acquainted over a bar of soap.

A couple of the Admiral’s men showed me to a water barrel out back and I was
dunked and scrubbed until I was as clean as the water would allow, then pulled
out and stuck in some Russian infantry desert fatigues, with boots and cap to
match – only minus the insignia. His Most Excellent Majesty’s designers
were no doubt still working on their own motifs, but I suspected they’d
probably plump for a scorpion crawling over a dagger or something like that.
Private insignia, if nothing else, served to reflect just what sort of
dangerous bad asses the men who’d ironed these patches on were.

The downside of my bath was the fact that
I lost my gun. With an armed escort on hand there was simply no way of hiding
it. The moment it dropped from my belt the big ebony translator went spare at
me for carrying a concealed weapon and ordered me to be frisked for further
concealments to within an inch of my dignity. Happy I was finally harmless,
both to life and nose, the Admiral took me back to the house and presented me
to His Most Excellent Majesty, who pushed the peak of his oversized cap out of
his eyes and looked up at me with suspicion from behind an enormous mahogany desk.

It was a kid. It was a ten-year-old kid!

The whole of the room awaited my reaction
but I’d worked for screwier outfits than this one in the past and would’ve
happily saluted the coat stand had they’d introduced me to it, so I quickly
snapped to attention and gave His Majesty a bit of the old King’s Own.
 

The kid’s eyes narrowed further.

“Your Most Excellent Majesty,” the
Admiral lip-smacked, “I bring you this man. A soldier. I captured him for you
personally.”

A few eyebrows went up around the room
but on the whole we let him have that one. The kid, or His Most Excellent
Majesty, as he preferred to be called, nodded thoughtfully then congratulated
the Admiral on a job well done and told him to consider himself promoted to the
new rank of Colonel-General. I was tempted to ask if all the Admiral’s
promotions had been this hard won and if so, suggest they either reset him back
to Private once a year or sew a few more arms onto his jacket before the base’s
Spring clean. In the event, I just carried on saluting until my arm turned numb
and my knees started to knock. The adjutant behind His Most Excellent Majesty’s
left shoulder whispered something into his ear and His Most Excellent Majesty
suddenly remembered what was expected of him and returned my salute with a
flick of the wrist.

I snapped this way and that and then
stood at ease.

The kid began to grin.

He saluted me again, so I went through
the whole pantomime once more, although not having ever having practiced close
order drill, I couldn’t help but spot a few inconsistencies in my own routine.
Nobody else seemed to notice though, which was surprising seeing as they had
every opportunity when the kid started saluting me again and again and again
for fun, forcing me through my ill-rehearsed moves until the adjutant asked His
Most Excellent Majesty if he’d like to question the prisoner any yet.

“What?”

“The prisoner, Your Most Excellent
Majesty. Would you like to ask him any questions before we er…” the adjutant
tailed off with a look to his shoes before leaving me to fill in the blanks for
myself.

“Oh yes, very much,” His Most Excellent
Majesty confirmed, then looked at me. “What is your favourite football team?”

The adjutant spared me having to ask His
Most Excellent Majesty what
his
favourite football team was when he steered him back to the script.

“What?”

“The questions we agreed, Your Most
Excellent Majesty,” the adjutant said. “You remember?”

“Of course I remember, Sissiki. What are
you saying about me, that I am a fool?”

“Oh no, of course not Your Most Excellent
Majesty. I am most humbly sorry.”

“I should think so too, because you are
the fool, not me,” His Most Excellent Majesty bristled and for one or two
seconds a window of opportunity opened when any one of us could have suggested
whipping down this kid’s pants and belting the living daylights out of him to
concord all around.

“You,” His Most Excellent Majesty pointed
at me, “what is your name?”

“Mark Jones, Your Most Excellent
Majesty.”

“And what do you do?”

“I am a soldier, Your Most Excellent
Majesty.”

“And where is your army?”

“Destroyed, Your Most Excellent Majesty.
All dead.”

“All dead?” he blinked.

“Yes sir,” I confirmed. “All. I was the
only one who survived.”

The newly promoted
Admiral-Colonel-General, His Most Excellent Majesty and the adjutant looked at
me with mixed expressions. Only the translator continued to glare with as much
mistrust as before.

“And how did you survive?” the adjutant
asked. “Did you run away? Are you a coward?”

This hadn’t occurred to His Most
Excellent Majesty, who suddenly looked crestfallen at the thought, but I was
able to quickly restore his confidence with some boy’s own tales of dare-doing
and heroism. When I was done, His Most Excellent Majesty stared at me agog.

“You killed fifteen men single-handedly?”
he gasped.

I totted up my fantasy body count and
confirmed that I had indeed killed fifteen men. Single-handedly.

“Oh, a hero, huh?” the adjutant cooed.

His Most Excellent Majesty picked up the
baton and ran with it.

“A hero?”

“Yes,” the adjutant sneered. “But not so
much of a hero that he was able to save the lives of his comrades.”

“Very true,” I confirmed, “because we
were attacked by over a thousand men, and I was only able to save my
commander.”

Now this did catch His Most Excellent
Majesty’s attention.

“You saved your commander?”

“Yes Your Most Excellent Majesty.”

His Most Excellent Majesty mulled this
over. There was something about it that he didn’t believe, but he couldn’t
quite put his finger on it. He suddenly got it.

“If you saved your commander, where is
he?”

“He escaped in the helicopter.”

“The helicopter?”

“Yes Your Most Excellent Majesty, I
managed to get him to the helicopter and he escaped.”

“And why didn’t you escape with him?” the
adjutant was dashed to know.

“I did, but the helicopter was too heavy.
We were going to crash, so I jumped out to make the helicopter lighter and got
left behind.”

This finally broke the silence behind
me.
 

“Preposterous!” the big ebony translator
roared. “You jumped out of a helicopter and lived?”

“I landed in mud, a very dirty muddy
lake, to be sure,” I explained. “And that is why, when the…” I forgot what rank
the Admiral was momentarily before remembering, “… the Colonel-General captured
me I was covered in mud. Was that not so Colonel-General?”

The Admiral (which I think I’ll keep
calling him because he was still in his Russian naval uniform despite whatever
rank His Most Excellent Majesty had just invented for him) was on shaky ground
himself, what with the details of my capture, so he chipped in and corroborated
my version of events in order to shore up his own pile of nonsense.

That did it for His Most Excellent
Majesty and he confirmed that I was indeed a most excellent soldier, ending all
concurrent thinking on the subject.

“But Your Most Excellent Majesty, what
army did he belong to? Why were they in our territory? What were they doing
here? And who were they fighting? These are the things we need to know. Not
jumping out of helicopters and single-handed fighting,” the adjutant objected,
but he’d lost his audience and the ten-year-old kid in a wobbly hat and
over-sized uniform disagreed.

“Get away from me Sissiki. Do not tell me
what we need to know. I am His Most Excellent Majesty, the Supreme Ruler and
Commander-in-Chief of the First Lumbala Special Army and I know what we need to
know, so do not keep telling me what to do. Unless of course, you think you
would like to be the Commander of the Special Army?”

The adjutant thought about this longer
than was prudent before apologising once more and expressing his undying
loyalty to all things Excellent.

“You see Colonel Jones, my advisors are
very stupid,” His Most Excellent Majesty told me.

“I’m afraid I’m not a Colonel, Your Most
Excellent Majesty,” I told him.

“No?” he looked confused.

“No,” I shrugged. “I’m just a…” a thought
occurred, “… Brigadier.”

“A Brigadier?” His Most Excellent Majesty
repeated.

“Yes sir.”

“What is a Brigadier?” he asked.

“It’s like a Colonel-General, only more
senior.”

“Ha!” His Most Excellent Majesty clapped,
pointing to the Admiral. “He outranks you!”

The Admiral chewed on this one and noted
that I did indeed seem to suddenly outrank him.

“So, would you like to be in the Special
Army?” His Most Excellent Majesty asked me out right.

“It would be an honour Your Most
Excellent Majesty,” I saluted.

“Then that is settled,” he declared,
returning my salute three or four times. “You will be my chief of the guards
and you will be in charge of saving my life if ever the enemy attacks.”

I told him it was a job he’d never know
me to fail at.

“Excellent!” he said. “I now need to
speak with my Colonel-General alone but Captain Bolaji will show you to your
quarters,” he told me, giving our big ebony translator a name at last. “Good
day to you, Brigadier Mark Jones.”

“Good day to you too, Your Most Excellent
Majesty,” I saluted, then turned on a sixpence and marched out after Captain
Bolaji.

The door closed behind us and the Captain
turned to me and growled. “The Colonel-General is a fool. We should have left
you by the side of the road where we found you.”

“You’re not really a people person, are
you?” I deduced.

“Just know this,” he jabbed, “I will be
watching you closely at all times, and if you endanger our mission I will not
hesitate to kill you.”