The Dark Chronicles (11 page)

Before anything else, I had to get to Slavin and find out what more he knew, and how he knew it. The obvious move would be to track him down as soon as I got out of the airport, and kill him. But murder was a last resort: his death or disappearance would automatically bring me under suspicion with London, as I had run out here without asking their permission. There was also the question of Anna – I wanted to find her, too, and that would be much harder if Pritchard were actively hunting my hide.

The arrivals terminal was heavy with sweat and frustration. A solitary fan turned high above us at an agonizing pace, while passengers stood around an unmanned desk waiting for their luggage to be brought from the plane. Thankfully, I just had my one bag, so I walked straight through to the passport control area.

There it was even worse. The queues were enormous, interlocking and unmoving. I picked one of the lines at random and joined it. As on the plane, there were a handful of white people – aid workers and diplomats, I guessed – but the rest were Nigerian. All around me, conversations were being held, sometimes in local dialects but mainly in pidgin English, which Pritchard’s dossier had told me was the lingua franca. I spent a few minutes tuning in, managing to pick out words here and there, accustoming myself to the tones in which it was used. It seemed an exuberant, rich language, a world away from the Pritchards and Osbornes of the world. The clothing was a mixture of African and Western, but there was exuberance in that, too. Businessmen in Western-style suits clutched important-looking briefcases, while matronly women
in multi-coloured loose-fitting dresses sported thin Cartier watches. Soldiers wandered between the lines, looking over passengers and prodding their rifles into bags. They were young and arrogant, and just the look of them brought the reality of the situation home more than the endless statistics and prolix phrases of Pritchard’s report. Something about them chilled the bones.

They seemed just as interested in me. Within less than ten minutes of my entering the hall, a pattern of surveillance had closed in around me: two by the gates, one by the toilets, and a small, neat-looking man in a beret operating them with nods from next to the telephones. There was nothing I could do about it. I was a journalist, and any move I made would only make things worse. They had probably marked me out because I was a white man they didn’t recognize – the aid workers they would know. It was normal. Relax.

It was getting on eleven by the time I made it to the front of the queue. The clerk had a long, narrow face and thick glasses. Behind him was draped the country’s flag – vertical strips of green, white and green. He picked up my passport and started to leaf through it slowly. I wasn’t worried – the document had been made in precisely the same way as if it had been genuine. He stopped at the back page.

‘Press?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

He looked troubled at this. He leaned down and took some papers from a drawer, then placed them in front of him and started reading, tracing the miniature lines of text with a finger. I had a mounting sense of unease. Had Dobson let me down? Surely my accreditation had come through?

The clerk suddenly glanced up at me, a pained expression on his face.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. ‘What’s the—’

He was looking behind me. I turned. There were four of them. Quite a party. Broad chests and muscle visible under their uniforms,
and patterns of scars down their cheeks. It was no use struggling – there’d be more of them elsewhere in the building, and I wouldn’t have a hope. They’d shoot me in the leg, or send a car to get me. And then I’d have a real job explaining my behaviour.

‘You come this way,’ one of them said, and pushed a rifle into my back.

Do nothing. They just want money, beer, cigarettes. Pay them, get out of here and get to work.

Do nothing.

*

They took me down a narrow, unlit staircase and shoved me into a sparse, harshly lit room.

‘Wait here.’

They slammed the door and I listened to their footsteps recede. I looked around the room: it contained two hard-backed chairs, a low table and some brochures advertising the International Year of African Tourism.

After ten minutes spent reading the brochures, the door opened and the small man in the beret walked in, followed by several of his men. His uniform was immaculate, his beret trimmed with a gold braid. In one hand, he gripped a riding crop.

‘Good evening,’ he said. ‘I am Colonel Bernard Alebayo of the Third Marine Commando Division. Who are you?’

I took out my passport and offered it to him. He took it, but didn’t open it. ‘Your full name, please.’

‘Robert David Peter Kane,’ I said.

‘That is more like it. Thank you. Cooperate with me and we will get along.’ He smiled genially. He looked very young. ‘Are you in Nigeria for business or pleasure?’

I examined his face. He appeared to be serious.

‘Business,’ I said.

‘And what is your profession, Mister Kane?’

‘If you look at my passport—’

‘I am not interested in your passport at this particular moment,’ he said, smiling sweetly again. ‘I want to hear it from the horse’s mouth, as it were.’ He spoke English quickly and precisely, accentuating each word in an almost sing-song fashion.

I’d known who he was before he introduced himself: he’d been all over Pritchard’s dossier. Alebayo, ‘The Panther’, was the Nigerian army’s most famous commander. Trained at Sandhurst – like most of the military leaders on both sides of this war – he had a reputation for brutality and unpredictability. He was known to despise do-gooders, politicians and journalists.

‘I’m a journalist,’ I said.

He stroked his chin.

‘For which newspaper?’

I told him.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘The famous
Times
of London.’ He walked around the table, his boots squeaking. ‘Of course, we have our own
Times
here.’ He swivelled and faced me. ‘Not perhaps as large a publication, or as renowned globally, but, nevertheless, quite respectable on a national level.’ He looked down at his reflection in his boots for a moment. ‘Yes, quite respectable.’

I murmured interest as best I could, and wondered where on earth this was heading.

Alebayo opened my passport, held it away from him as though it were contaminated, and squinted at my photograph.

‘Do you know Mister Winston Churchill?’ he asked, suddenly.

‘My colleague, or his grandfather?’

‘Are your articles as facetious as your speech, Mister Kane? Your colleague.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I know him. I wouldn’t say we were friends—’

‘Well, then,’ he interrupted, ‘as your newspaper has sent you to “cover” events here, you have presumably been “boning up” on what Mister Churchill has already written about this country in your newspaper? Yes?’

‘Of course.’ It had been Churchill who had alleged that the
Federal pilots were targeting Biafra’s civilian population. His articles had caused such an outcry that Parliament had held another emergency debate on the war – the same debate in which Wilson had announced his trip.

‘Your colleague appears to believe we are savages, Mister Kane,’ said Alebayo. ‘Cold-blooded killers, devoid of any moral sense.’

He suddenly held back his head and laughed, and his soldiers joined in, until he whipped the table with his crop, and the laughter abruptly stopped. It was like a very bad opera production.

‘Can you imagine it, Mister Kane? The cheek of the grandson of Winston Churchill to write such a thing! Has he forgotten Dresden?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to ask him.’ The analogy didn’t seem fair, somehow, but I wasn’t going to get into it.

He leaned in again. ‘Do you intend to file the same species of report as your colleague?’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Lagos is four hundred miles from the fighting.’

‘Quite so,’ he said. ‘You are a sharp one, my friend.’ He was pacing around, confusing the flies buzzing about his face. ‘So what will you be writing about? Expatriate dinner parties? Our local cuisine? What are your editor’s orders?’

‘Colour stories,’ I said.

He bristled. ‘I am so sorry, I didn’t quite hear. Could you please repeat yourself?’

I reminded myself to choose my words rather more carefully. ‘A picture of life in the capital of a country at war. What the feeling is in the corridors of power, how negotiations are going, that sort of—’

‘Are those what you call “colour stories”?’ he said.

I nodded.

‘I could tell you a few others. But perhaps your readership wouldn’t be interested in hearing the reverse side of the coin.’

‘We’re interested in the truth,’ I said, and he laughed again.

‘Let me be honest with you, Mister Kane. I do not like journalists.
In fact, more often than not, I find them repellent – vultures circling around others’ misery, looking for something to misconstrue.’ He said the word beautifully, savouring its syllables. He was watching me very keenly. ‘Are you certain
you are a journalist? You don’t look much like one.’

‘What do I look like?’ I asked.

‘I’m not sure.’ He used one hand to squeeze my right bicep through my shirt. ‘But this arm has lifted more than a Parker pen in its time, I think. Perhaps you are a mercenary? I could use a few decent mercenaries at this particular moment. Were you ever in the army, Mister Kane?’

‘Where’s this going?’ I said, cranking up my indignant civilian act. ‘I demand to see someone from the British—’

‘Were you ever in the
army
, Mister Kane?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A long time ago. But, look, I’m an accredited member of the press, I have all the necessary visas – why am I being detained?’

‘Because I don’t like the look of you,’ he said. ‘Your newspaper already has several correspondents in Nigeria, and I find it hard to believe it would suddenly have a need for “colour stories” hundreds of miles away from where anything of real colour is happening. So I want to know more.’ He leaned in to look at me, his nostrils flaring.

‘The British prime minister is visiting,’ I said. ‘On Thursday. I’m to report on that, too.’

‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘Of course. Our dear and esteemed Mister Harold Wilson. I had heard mention of that. How fortunate for us all that he has decided to pay a visit. How newsworthy.’ He tilted his head and looked at me as though I were a Picasso he suspected had been hung upside down. ‘Do you know what the rebels call your prime minister, Mister Kane?’

‘No,’ I said, wearily. I was losing so much time it didn’t bear thinking about.

‘“Herod”,’ he said, grinning. ‘Or sometimes “Herod Weasel”.’ He walked behind my back now, his heels clicking loudly. ‘You maintain you are a journalist!’ he suddenly shouted into my ear, making me jump. ‘And yet your press accreditation only came through
tonight
. Please explain, Mister Kane!’ He whipped the crop against the desk again, almost as though he felt he had to.

So that was it. I hadn’t thought they’d be quite so hot on it.

‘A colleague at the front was due to cover the trip,’ I said, as calmly as I could. ‘He cabled yesterday to say he was ill and wouldn’t be able to make it back to Lagos in time, so my editor decided to send me out on the first available flight instead. That’s why I’ve only just been accredited.’

Alebayo was silent for a moment.

‘Are you perhaps a spy, Mister Kane?’ he said, quietly.

I looked up at him. ‘A spy?’

‘Yes. A secret agent like your Double Oh Seven, saving the world from villains and foes… Amusing that you British have taken so long to realize that you no longer have an empire.’

‘Isn’t this approach unwise?’ I said. ‘My readers will be most interested to know how the Federal army treats the citizens of valued allies.’

‘I think
I
will decide what is wise here – not you. There have been plenty of misleading reports about me in your newspapers already. I cannot imagine another will do any further harm. That is, if you ever succeed in filing a report on this little meeting.’ He turned to the largest of his thugs. ‘Is the transport ready?’ The thug nodded. ‘Good.’ He turned back to me. ‘Perhaps a visit to one of our prisons would provide some good material for your editor? Some “colour”?’

‘This is outrageous!’ I said, and now my indignation was only half-acted. ‘Call my office in London! Call the British High Commission! I demand—’

‘Please, Mister Kane, save your tantrums. They will not do you any good here.’ He stood a little straighter and adjusted his beret. ‘I must now return to Port Harcourt, where I have many things to attend to. There is the small matter of a war to win. But you will
be well looked after by my boys here, I promise. And they may even discover what it is you came here for…’

There was a sudden banging at the door, and Alebayo glanced sharply in its direction. He nodded at one of the thugs, who walked over and opened it. Framed in the light was a large white man with a crumpled red face, wearing what looked to be a pair of pyjamas.

‘Let this man go, Bernard!’ he said in a booming English voice.

*

‘Geoffrey!’ said Alebayo through gritted teeth. ‘How delightful to see you again.’ He strode over to the door and gestured him outside.

The thugs eyed me warily – they were anxious for the order to tear me to pieces. I didn’t much fancy my chances with them.

‘Just follow your orders,’ I told them. ‘And we’ll all be fine.’

They glared at me, and I wondered if I shouldn’t try to make a run for it, after all. Then the door opened again and Alebayo shouted something at the thugs. They leapt up and ran out after him.

I looked in astonishment at the empty room. After about thirty seconds, I stood up myself, picking up my bag from the floor. At the door, I met the man with the red face. A hand was thrust out from a striped cotton sleeve.

‘I’m Geoffrey Manning,’ he said. ‘Welcome to Lagos.’

As we stepped out of the airport, a mob of taxi drivers swarmed around us.

‘Where you go, mister?’

‘I offer you best price!’

Manning waved them away and steered us to a blue Peugeot on the other side of the road.