The Henchmen's Book Club (8 page)

9.
DIAMOND CUTTERS

The compound vibrated against the roar of engines. Hum-Vees, Armoured Personnel
Carriers, jeeps, light armour and even a couple of big guns – mobile
artillery. American, Russian, French, South African. The Special Army was
kitted out from all four corners of the continent with whatever our benevolent
European backers could lay their hands on. Most of the vehicles were in good
working order, while others were just about serviceable for one last suicide
mission. My own Land Rover had clearly seen more action than me, but my MG 3
machine-gun that was fixed to a swivel just above the driver’s head was as
clean as a whistle, if slightly noisier.

Savimbi looked up at me from the driver’s
seat and asked me if I could hear what His Most Excellent Majesty was saying. I
glanced forward to the little podium out front and saw His Most Excellent
Majesty gesticulating and saluting away like the Duracell Bunny. I shrugged. I
could’ve guessed the theme but I couldn’t make out any of the small print. This
was probably no bad thing though. Last minute instructions to carefully laid
plans by ten-year-old megalomaniacs rarely led to victory parades for anyone
other than the other side.

Of course, before this day had come
along, I’d finally found out why the Special Army had structured itself along
the same lines as Musical Youth. Apparently, the European backers, dripping
with money and eager to back a side (any side) had found themselves a Howdy
Doody in the form of a local prophet boy who’d won friends and influenced
people by tossing chicken bones about. He’d been quite revered in his local
scrub but only to the extent that he was never short of pineapples. But then,
all of a sudden, some chaps with heavy pockets and questionable judgement
descended from the heavens to herald him as a living deity who’d been sent to
bring order to his people and unite the tribes. They’d even backed up this
rather ambitious declaration with money, guns, armour and men. Now, as odd as
this seemed to many of the locals, they figured there must’ve been something to
it. After all rich Westerners didn’t stay rich for very long throwing their
money around for giggles and despite being asked several times if they were
sure there wasn’t someone more qualified or taller they’d rather have lead
their army the Westerners were adamant. His Most Excellent Majesty was their
man – or rather boy.

Any further doubts were assuaged with a
consignment of the latest shoulder-fired Czech rocket launchers.

It seemed to work as well at first,
because a number of warring tribes soon put their differences aside to take His
Most Excellent Majesty’s shilling. Local skirmishes fell off and the Special
Army’s ranks swelled. The prophecy, it seemed, was true. God had surely sent
this boy. And guided by the voices of their ancestors and advised by his loyal
adjutant, his people would come again. Hallelujah!

And of course, let’s not forget those
benevolent Westerners who’d made it all possible and who’d never asked for a
single thing in return...

What?

They wanted what?

Actually, it wasn’t so much something
they wanted, more something they suggested. A target; a target that would
galvanise His Most Excellent Majesty’s position and free his people from the
bondage of economics.

Diamonds.

More specifically, the diamond mines
around the Zambezi basin.

And more specifically still, the new
excavation just outside Caia.

Belgian prospectors had sent ripples
around the world with a series of stunning finds at Caia and were now pulling
diamonds out of the ground the size of grapes with conveyor belt frequency;
diamonds that would be fought for and argued over for years to come; diamonds
that would lead to the rape and ruin of his people; diamonds that would corrupt
the very fabric of his culture.

Diamonds that should be His Most
Excellent Majesty’s.

The plan didn’t take much selling.

And so this became the Special Army’s
most secret mission. This was what we’d all been trained for.

And this was what we’d be doing today.

I was still a little sketchy on some of
the finer points, like what were we meant to do once we’d seized the mine and
how we were meant to hold out against the inevitable government assault when
the Special Army numbered only three hundred men and a few Cold War APCs, but
the Admiral assured us during our individual unit briefings that His Most
Excellent Majesty had a bargaining chip up his sleeve that would dissuade any
retaliation.

The chrome lock-box, I hedged.

The one we’d loaded onto the
eight-wheeler at the rear of our raiding party. A cluster of APCs and mobile
guns protected it on all sides and the Admiral took personal charge of the
vehicle.

I had a really horrible inkling about
what was inside it.

His Most Excellent Majesty emptied an
M16’s clip into the air to decorate the end of his speech with a few fireworks
then signalled his forces to move out with a regal swirl of the wrist. The roar
of the cavalcade increased and several of the gunners theatrically locked &
loaded their fixed machine-guns, despite the fact that we were a good fifty
miles from anyone to shoot. The scouts at the front of the column moved off and
the rest of us duly followed.

Me and Savimbi were somewhere towards the
middle of the fray and it was our job to protect the right flank of the convoy
on our way to our objective, then break off and take out the foot traffic once
we’d got there. The big guns would see to the fixed targets.

I pulled my goggles over my eyes and tied
a bandana around my face. My gun was also covered, protected from the dust by a
cotton sheet, but as we veered away from the main force to take up our position
on the flank, I whipped it back to at least look operational.

Look operational?

Yes well, to be perfectly honest, my
heart wasn’t in this job at all. I’d bided my time while I’d been on the base
because I’d found myself earning surprisingly good money, but Mr Smith’s covert
warning had just reminded me of my desire to desert. The Special Army could
stick its secret mission up its collective arse. And the urgency with which I
wished to abscond was cranked up even further when I saw that His Most
Excellent Majesty wasn’t coming with us. Something that always got my alarm
bells ringing for me. Very inspiring.

No one else seemed to question his
absence from the convoy but then I guess most of them were tribal guys; locals
who’d been in on this deity stunt from the ground floor. They were all going to
the promised land, but it’s different for mercenaries like myself. I couldn’t
give two figs about His Most Excellent Majesty, his people or his prophecies.
The only land I was interested in was the couple of acres around my house in
Petworth. Any and all other dirt I was happy to let the rest of the world fight
over.

Time to leave.

I think Captain Bolaji suspected I’d try
to make my exit during the mission because he took up a mobile position right
on my tail, his MG 3 locked & loaded and just looking for an excuse to chew
me and Savimbi to bits. Not that Savimbi had done anything to upset the good
Captain, or earn his suspicion, but that was just too bad. You can’t make an
omelette without killing Savimbi, as they say around these parts.

I glanced to my rear. Captain Bolaji had
his dust cover off too. I was going nowhere for the moment. Well, nowhere
except the diamond fields of Caia with a three hundred strong rolling battle
group of the chosen few.

Hail hail! And watch your cross fire.

Overhead two Alouette attack helicopters
buzzed us, spraying the convoy with even more red dust. They were our air
cover, and our first weapon of assault. They’d hit the mine’s defences five
minutes before us with rockets and 20mm cannons, then circle and hold back any
reinforcements while we filled the place with bodies.

No prisoners. That was the standing
order. No one was to be spared.

I wondered if that included us.

The
Fourth Protocol
by Frederick Forsyth. The plot revolves
around an undercover KGB agent called Valeri Petrofsky. He’s selected by his
General to travel to England to collect various packages smuggled in by KGB
mules. The pieces look innocuous enough in themselves (metal discs, odd looking
pipes, etc) but once fitted together they make a nuclear bomb. This bomb is
assembled in a little suburban house in Ipswich next to a USAF base and
prepared for detonation. The idea is that the public would think the explosion
was one of the USAF’s unpopular cruise missiles blowing up, prompting a wave of
anti-Americanism that would sweep the Yanks and their nukes from the UK and the
socialist-infiltrated Labour Party into government. On the other side is an M15
officer called John Preston, who’s investigating the infiltration of the Labour
Party by the hard (and evil) left and who follows events to a little cul-de-sac
in Ipswich. It’s a good and exciting book, like all of Forsyth’s, and
believable and thought-provoking. But the bit that always stood out for me, and
the point we discussed at length in book club, was when Petrofsky went to start
the timer he found it had been reset to zero by nuclear boffin, Irina
Vassilievna robbing him of his getaway in order to erase his (and the KGB’s)
involvement. I won’t say any more in case you want to read it for yourself, but
me, Smith, Cooper and Chang all spent hours going to town on this particular
point because we all sympathised with Petrofsky. The foot soldier’s lot is not
a happy one. And we’re so often in danger from our own side as much as from the
enemy.

Expendable. That’s how me, Mr Smith,
Savimbi and Petrofsky were seen more often than not. Mere assets, to be rolled
out and used like so much toilet paper. And when we’d done what we’d been asked
to do, and our chiefs had the moon on a stick, our rewards were invariably the
flushing of the chain.

Well that wasn’t going to happen to me.

Not again.

Not today.

I had no intention of being anywhere near
that chrome lock box when His Most Excellent Majesty phoned up the Admiral from
the safety of a concrete bunker some fifty miles away and told him to look
inside it now.

Smoke rose on the horizon after an hour
on the road. Smoke and rolling balls of fire.

As we got closer, I saw our helicopters
dancing backwards and forwards over the target like mating bluebottles, firing their
rockets and emptying their cannons into whatever ran, walked or crawled below.

Radio silence was finally broken and the
Admiral told us to break convoy and assume our attack formation. Savimbi
immediately swung off the road and took to a dirt track that swept towards the
mine’s right flank. I shouldered the MG 3 and locked home the first round of a
very long and heavy belt.

By now, we were travelling through
populated areas: townships and makeshift dwellings that had sprung up around
the mine to house its workers and their families. Dozens of confused faces
looked out as we rolled through their camps. The cleverer ones ran. The silly
ones lingered to watch what was going on. It was on a cross roads of one of
these settlements that me and Savimbi encountered our first target – a
police car. Not national police but the mine’s own private security.

I swung the heavy machinegun around and
opened up on it, blasting it with a fifty round burst and reducing it to
twisted scrap in a matter of seconds. The occupant inside fared little better,
losing his life before he even knew he was in danger.

We rolled on by.

It’s a terrible thing to take a life.
I’ve killed quite a few people in my time (and a couple of crocodiles) and I’m
sure if I were able to turn back the clock and meet them in different
circumstances I’d find very few who’d deserved it. But I couldn’t. And for that
I was grateful. But let’s not fool ourselves here. This was what I did. This
was what the job entailed. It wasn’t nice, it wasn’t justifiable and it wasn’t
right.

It was crime.

Crime on an enormous scale.

A lot of people were going to die today.

I just had to make sure I wasn’t one of
them.

A small police station approached on the
left. I swung my gun and peppered the doors and windows as we sped by but we
didn’t slow to finish the job. There was no need. The long line of vehicles
behind us all chipped in and did their bit as they ploughed on past, ripping
the station apart and blasting it with 7.62mm and RPGs until a burning shell
was all that remained.

More and more security ran out in front
of us as we got closer to the mine. Some took pot shots but most were caught
with their pants down and overwhelmed by the sudden appearance of such a
heavily armed force. They had no chance.
 
We attacked over a half-mile front with a hundred armoured vehicles. And
as much as I wasn’t silly enough to assume it was going to be a cake walk, I
did recognise a one-sided victory when I was gunning down fleeing security
guards in the back.

The big guns opened up behind us, lobbing
152mm shells over our heads so that death and destruction awaited us around
every corner. We hosed down the wreckage with machinegun fire and continued on
to our objective: