The Spoilers / Juggernaut (39 page)

I said, ‘I came just in time to see the fun. Mind if I stick around? I brought Ritchie Thorpe up with me.’

‘Good show. We can use him. We’ll rig a couple of extra bunks after we’ve eaten,’ Kemp said, climbing into his car. Hammond joined him and I followed them back to camp, but stopped to say a few polite and appreciative things to Sadiq on the way. He assured me that any labour necessary for strengthening the bridge would be found very quickly, and I left him, marvelling at the self-assurance that a uniform lends a man.

My mind was in top gear as I thought about the bridge. Someone had made a bit of extra profit on the contract when it was built, and it was going to be interesting to watch the passage of the rig the next day. From a safe vantage point, of course. But if this bridge was run of the mill, what the hell was the tricky one going to be like?

I laid my plate on one side. ‘Good chow.’

There was humour in Kemp’s voice. ‘Not
haute cuisine,
but we survive.’

Two of the tractors were parked side by side and we sat under an awning rigged between them. Kemp was certainly more relaxed and I wondered how best to take advantage of the fact. We weren’t alone—several of the others had joined us. Obviously Kemp didn’t believe in putting a distance between himself and the men, but I wanted to get him alone for a chat. I leaned over and dropped my voice. ‘If you can find a couple of glasses, how about a Scotch?’

He too spoke quietly. ‘No thanks. I prefer to stick to the camp rules, if you don’t mind. We could settle for another
beer, though.’ As he said this he got up and disappeared into the night, returning in a moment with a four-pack of beer. I rose and took his arm, steering him away from the makeshift dining room. ‘A word with you, Basil,’ I said. ‘Where can we go?’

Presently we were settled in a quiet corner with our backs up against two huge tyres, the blessedly cool night wind on our faces, and an ice cold can of beer apiece.

‘You’ve got it made,’ I said, savouring the quietness. ‘How do you keep this cold?’

He laughed. ‘There’s a diesel generator on the rig for the lights. If you’re already carrying three hundred tons a ten cubic foot refrigerator isn’t much more of a burden. We have a twenty cubic foot deepfreeze, too. The cook says we’re having lobster tails tomorrow night.’

‘I forget the scale of this thing.’

‘You wouldn’t if you were pushing it around.’

I drank some beer. It was cold and pleasantly bitter. A little casual conversation was in order first. ‘You married?’

‘Oh yes. I have a wife and two kids in England: six and four, both boys. How about you?’

‘I tried, but it didn’t take. A man in my job doesn’t spend enough time at home to hang his hat up, and women don’t like that as a rule.’

‘Yes, indeed.’ His voice showed that he felt the same way.

‘How long since you were home?’

‘About two months. I’ve been surveying this damned road. I reckon it’ll be a while before I’m home again.’

I said, ‘Up at Bir Oassa the government is just finishing a big concrete airstrip, big enough for heavy transports. It’s just about to go into operation, we’ve been told, though we’re not sure what “just about” means.’

Kemp said, ‘No parades up there though, with no-one to see them.’

‘Right. Well, when it’s ready we’ll be flying in the expensive bits that aren’t too heavy, like the turbine shafts. There’ll be quite a lot of coming and going and it wouldn’t surprise me if there wasn’t room for a guy to take a trip back to England once in a while. That applies to your crew as well, of course.’

‘That’s splendid—we’d all appreciate it. I’ll have to make up a roster.’ He was already perking up at the thought, and I marvelled all over again at what domesticity does for some men.

‘How did you get into heavy haulage?’ I asked him.

‘It wasn’t so much getting into it as being born into it. My old man was always on the heavy side—he pushed around tank transporters in the war—and I’m a chip off the old block.’

‘Ever handled anything as big as this before?’

‘Oh yes. I’ve done one a bit bigger than this for the Central Electricity Generating Board at home. Of course, conditions weren’t exactly the same, but just as difficult, in their way. There are more buildings to knock corners off in Britain, and a whole lot more bureaucracy to get around too.’

‘Was that with Wyvern?’

‘No, before its time.’ He knew I was pumping him gently and didn’t seem to mind. ‘I was with one of the big outfits then.’

I drank the last of my beer. ‘You really
are
Wyvern Transport, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. Together with Ben and Geoff Wingstead. We’d all been in the business before, and when we got together it seemed like a good idea. Sometimes I’m not so sure.’ I saw him wave his hand, a dim gesture in the darkness, and heard the slight bitter touch in his voice. I already knew that financially this was a knife edge operation and I didn’t want to spoil Kemp’s mood by raking up any economic dirt, but I
felt I could get a few more answers out of him without pressing too hard.

He carried on without my prompting him. ‘We each came into a little money, one way or another—mine was an inheritance. Ben had ideas for modifying current rigs and Geoff and Ben had worked together before. Geoff’s our real ideas man: not only the financial end, he’s into every angle. But if we hadn’t landed this contract I don’t think we’d have got off the ground.’

I had had my own doubts about giving this enormously expensive and difficult job to a firm new to the market but I didn’t want to express them to Kemp. He went on, though, filling me in with details; the costly airlift gear, which they only realized was necessary after their tender had been accepted, was rented from the CEGB. Two of the tractors were secondhand, the others bought on the nevernever and as yet not fully paid for. The tender, already as low as possible to enable them to land the job, was now seen to be quite unrealistic and they did not expect to make anything out of the Nyalan operation: but they had every hope that a successful completion would bring other contracts to their doorstep. It was midsummer madness, and it might work.

I realized that it was late, and that I hadn’t yet broached the subject of security or danger. Too late in fact to go into the whole thing now, but I could at least pave the way; Kemp’s practical problems had rendered him oblivious to possible outside interference, and in any case he was used to working in countries where political problems were solved over the negotiation table, and not by armies.

‘How are you getting on with Captain Sadiq?’ I asked.

‘No trouble. In fact he’s quite helpful. I’ll make him into a good road boss yet.’

‘Had any problems so far? Apart from the road itself, that is.’

‘Just the usual thing of crowd control through the villages. Sadiq’s very good at that. He’s over-efficient really; puts out a guard every time we stop, scouts ahead, very busy playing soldiers generally.’ He gestured into the night. ‘If you walk down there you’ll stand a chance of getting a bullet in you unless you speak up loud and clear. I’ve had to warn my chaps about it. Road transport in the UK was never like this.’

‘He’s not really here just as a traffic cop,’ I said. ‘He is guarding you, or, more to the point, he’s guarding the rig and the convoy. There’s always a possibility that someone might try a bit of sabotage. So you keep your eyes open too, and pass that word down the line to your men, Basil.’

I knew he was staring at me. ‘Who’d want to sabotage us? No-one else wanted this job.’

He was still thinking in terms of commercial rivalry and I was mildly alarmed at his political naivety. ‘Look, Basil, I’d like to put you in the picture, and I think Ben Hammond too. But it’s late and you’ve a major job to do in the morning. It’s nothing urgent, nothing to fret about. Next time we stop for a break I’ll get you both up to date, OK?’

‘Right you are, if you say so.’ I sensed his mind slipping away; mention of the next day’s task had set him thinking about it, and I knew I should leave him alone to marshall his ideas.

‘I’ll say good night,’ I said. ‘I guess you’ll want to think about your next obstacle course.’

He stood up. ‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,’ he said sardonically. ‘Sleep well. Your bunk is rigged over there, by the way. I sleep on top of one of the tractors: less risk of snakes that way.’

‘I know how you feel,’ I grinned. ‘But with me it’s scorpions. Good night.’

I strolled in the night air over to the rig and stood looking up at the great slab of the transformer. Over one million pounds’ worth of material was being trundled precariously through Africa by a company on the verge of going bankrupt, with a civil war possibly about to erupt in its path, and what the hell was I going to do about it?

I decided to sleep on it.

Everybody was up early in the dim light before dawn. I breakfasted with the crew, standing in line at the chuck wagon. The food was washed down with hot, strong, sweet, milky tea which tasted coppery and which they called ‘gunfire’.

‘Why gunfire?’ I queried.

‘That’s what they call it in the British Army. The Army fights on this stuff,’ I was told.

I grinned. ‘If they could stomach this they’d be ready to face anything.’

‘It’s better than bloody Coca-Cola,’ someone said, and everybody laughed.

After breakfast there was a great deal of activity. I went in search of Captain Sadiq, and found him sitting in his command car wearing earphones. He saw me approaching and held up his hand in warning as he scribbled on a notepad he held on his knee. Then he called to a sergeant who came trotting over. Sadiq took off the earphones and handed them to the sergeant. Only then did he come around the car to meet me. ‘Good morning, Mister Mannix.’

‘Good morning, Captain. Sorry I was in a hurry last night. Any problems? Mister Kemp says he is very gratified by all your help.’

He smiled at that. ‘No problems at all, sir,’ he said, but it was a brushoff. He looked deeply concerned and abstracted.

The sun was just rising as I heard an engine start up. It had a deep roar and sounded like one of the big tractors. A small crowd of curious onlookers had materialized from nowhere and were being pushed back by Sadiq’s men. Small boys skylarked about and evaded the soldiers with ease.

I indicated the crowd. ‘These people are up early. Do you have much of this kind of thing?’

‘The people, they are always with us.’ I wondered for a moment whether that was an intended parody of a biblical quotation. He pointed. ‘These come from a small village about a mile over there. They are nothing.’

One of the military trucks fired up its engine and I watched it pull out. Mounted on the back was a recoilless gun. The range of those things wasn’t particularly great but they packed a hell of a wallop and could be fired from a light vehicle. One thing you had to remember was not to stand behind when they fired. ‘Nice piece of artillery,’ I said. ‘I haven’t seen one of those since Korea.’

Sadiq smiled noncommittally. I sensed that he was itching for me to be off.

‘Is there anything I can do for you, Captain?’ I wanted to see how far he’d let me go before he pulled rank on me, or tried to. But outside influences had their say instead.

‘Nothing at all, Mister Man…’

His words were drowned as three jets streaked overhead, making us both start. They were flying low, and disappeared to the south. I turned to Sadiq and raised my eyebrows. ‘We are quite close to a military airfield,’ he said. His attempt at a nonchalant attitude fooled neither of us.

I thanked him and walked away, then turned my head to see him already putting on the earphones again. Maybe he liked hi-fi.

I wanted to relieve myself so I pushed a little way into the bushes by the side of the road. It was quite thick but I came across a sort of channel in the undergrowth and was able to push along quite easily. What bothered me was that it was quite straight. Then I damn near fell down a hole, teetered for a moment on the edge and recovered by catching hold of a branch and running a thorn into my hand. I cursed, then looked at the hole with interest. It had been newly dug and at the bottom there were marks in the soil. The spoil from the hole had been piled up round it and then covered with scrub. If you had to have a hole at all this was one of the more interesting types, one I hadn’t seen since I was in the army.

I dropped into it and looked back the way I had come. The channel I had come along was clearly defined right up to the road edge, where it was screened by the lightest of cover, easy to see through from the shady side. Captain Sadiq was clearly on the ball, a real professional. This was a concealed machine gun pit with a prepared field of fire which commanded a half mile length of road. Out of curiosity I drummed up what I had been taught when Uncle Sam tried to make me into a soldier, and figured out where Sadiq would have put his mortars. After a few minutes of plunging about in the scrub I came across the emplacement and stared at it thoughtfully. I didn’t know if it was such a good idea because it made out Sadiq to be a textbook soldier, working to the rules. That’s all right providing the guys on the other side haven’t read the same book.

When I got back to the rig Kemp hailed me with some impatience, shading into curiosity. I was dusty and scratched, and already sweating.

‘We’re ready to move,’ he said. ‘Ride along with anyone you like.’ Except me, his tone added, and I could hardly blame him. He’d have enough to do without answering questions from visiting firemen.

‘Just a minute,’ I said. ‘Captain Sadiq appears to be cemented to his radio. How long has that been going on?’

Kemp shrugged. ‘I don’t know—all morning. He does his job and I do mine.’

‘Don’t you sense that he’s uneasy?’ I asked with concern. I’d seldom met a man so oblivious to outside events as Kemp. ‘By the way, what did you make of those planes?’

‘They say there’s an airfield somewhere about. Maybe they were just curious about the convoy. Look, Neil, I have to get on. I’ll talk to you later.’ He waved to Hammond, who drove up in the Land Rover, and they were off in a small cloud of dust. During my absence the rig and most of the rest of the convoy including my car had moved off, so I swung myself on to the chuck wagon and hitched a lift down to where the others were grouped around the approach to the bridge.

The scene was fascinating. Kemp was using only one tractor to take the rig across the bridge and it was already in place. Another tractor had crossed and waited on the far side. The rig was fitted with its airlift skirts and looked rather funny; they seemed to take away the brute masculinity of the thing and gave it the incongruous air of one of those beskirted Greek soldiers you see on guard in Athens. Though no doubt Kemp, who had been outraged by the bunting in Port Luard, saw nothing odd about it. Behind it was the airlift truck to which it was connected by a flexible umbilicus. Through this the air was rammed by four big engines.

If Kemp was nervous he didn’t show it. He was telling the crew what they were to do and how they were to do it. He was sparing of words but most of this team had worked with him before and needed little instruction. He put the Irishman, McGrath, in the tractor and Ben Hammond and himself on the rig.

‘No-one else on the bridge until we’re clear across,’ he said. ‘And keep that air moving. We don’t want to fall down
on our bums halfway across.’ It brought a slight ripple of amusement.

McGrath revved the tractor engine and there came a roar from the airlift truck as one after another the engines started up. A cloud of dust erupted from beneath the rig as the loose debris was blown aside by the air blast. I knew enough not to expect the rig to become airborne, but it did seem to rise very slightly on its springs as the weight was taken up from the axles and spread evenly.

The noise was tremendous and I saw Kemp with a micro phone close to his lips. The tractor moved, at first infinitesimally, so that one wasn’t sure that it had moved at all, then a very little faster. McGrath was a superb driver: I doubt that many people could have judged so nicely the exact pressure to put on an accelerator in order to shift a four hundred and thirty-ton load so smoothly.

The front wheels of the tractor crossed the bitumen expan sion joint which marked the beginning of the bridge proper. Kemp moved quickly from one side of the control cab to the other, looking forwards and backwards to check that the rig and the tractor were in perfect alignment. Behind the rig the air umbilicus lengthened as it was paid out.

I estimated that the rig was moving at most a quarter of a mile an hour; it took about six minutes before the whole length of the combine was entirely supported by the bridge. If you were nervous now was the time to hold your breath. I held mine.

Then above the uproar of the airlift engines and the rush of air I heard a faint yell, and someone tugged at my arm. I turned and saw Sadiq’s sergeant, his face distorted as he shouted something at me. At my lack of comprehension he pulled my arm again and pointed back along the road leading up to the bridge. I turned and saw a column of vehicles coming up: jeeps and motorcycles at the front
and the looming, ugly snouted silhouettes of tanks behind them.

I ran towards them with the sergeant alongside me. As soon as the volume of noise dropped enough to speak and be heard I pulled up and snapped, ‘Where’s Captain Sadiq?’

The sergeant threw out his hand towards the river. ‘On the other side.’

‘Christ! Go and get him—fast!’

The sergeant looked dismayed. ‘How do I do that?’

‘On your feet. Run! There’s room for you to pass. Wait. If Mister Kemp, if the road boss sees you he may stop. You signal him to carry on. Like this.’ I windmilled my arm, pointing forwards, and saw that the sergeant understood what to do. ‘Now go!’

He turned and ran back towards the bridge and I carried on towards the armoured column, my heartbeat noticeably quicker. It’s not given to many men to stop an army singlehanded, but I’d been given so little time to think out the implications that I acted without much reflection. A leading command car braked to a stop, enveloping me in a cloud of dust, and an angry voice shouted something in Kinguru, or so I supposed. I waved the dust away and shouted, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Do you speak English, please?’

An officer stood up in the passenger seat of the open command car, leaning over the windscreen and looking down at the bridge with unbelieving eyes. When he turned his gaze on me his eyes were like flint and his voice gravelly. ‘Yes, I speak English. What is going on there?’

‘We’re taking that load across the bridge. It’s going up to the new power plant at Bir Oassa.’

‘Get it off there!’ he shouted.

‘That’s what we’re doing,’ I said equably.

‘I mean move it faster,’ he shouted again, convulsed with anger. ‘We have no time to waste.’

‘It’s moving as fast as is safe.’

‘Safe!’ He looked back at his column, then again at me. ‘You don’t know what that word means, Mister Englishman.’ He shouted a string of orders to a motorcyclist who wheeled his bike around and went roaring back up the road. I watched it stop at the leading tank and saw the tank commander lean down from the turret to listen. The tank cut out of the column and ground to a rattling halt alongside the command car. The officer shouted a command and I saw the turret swivel and the barrel of the gun drop slightly.

I was sweating harder now, and drier in the mouth, and I wished to God Sadiq would show up. I looked round hopefully, but of Sadiq or any of his military crowd there was no sign.

‘Hey, Captain,’ I shouted, giving him as flattering a rank as possible without knowing for sure. ‘What are you doing? There are four hundred and thirty tons on that bridge.’

His face cracked into a sarcastic smile. ‘I will get it to go faster.’

I sized him up. He was obviously immune to reason, so I would have to counter his threat with a bigger one. I said, ‘Captain, if you put a shell even near that rig you’ll be likely to lose it and the whole bridge with it. It’s worth a few million pounds to your government and Major General Kigonde is personally handling its wellbeing. And I don’t think he’d like you to wreck the bridge either.’

He looked baffled and then came back with a countermove of his own. ‘I will not fire on the bridge. I will fire into the trucks and the men on the river bank if that thing does not go faster. You tell them.’

His arm was upraised and I knew that if he dropped it fast the tank would fire. I said, ‘You mean the airlift truck? That would make things much worse.’

‘Airlift? What is that?’

‘A kind of hovercraft.’ Would he understand that? No matter: at least I could try to blind him with science. ‘It is
run by the truck just off the bridge and it’s the only way of getting the rig across the bridge. You damage it, or do anything to stop our operation and you’ll be stuck here permanently instead of only for the next half-hour. Unless you’ve brought your own bridge with you.’

His arm wavered uncertainly and I pressed on. ‘I think you had better consult your superior about this. If you lose the bridge you won’t be popular.’

He glared at me and then at last his arm came down, slowly. He dropped into his seat and grabbed the microphone in front of him. The little hairs on the back of my neck lay down as I turned to see what was happening at the bridge.

Sadiq’s troops had materialized behind our men and trucks, but in a loose and nonbelligerent order. They were after all not supposed to protect us from their own side, assuming these troops were still their own side. Beyond them the rig still inched its way painfully along as Kemp stuck to the job in hand. Sadiq was standing on the running board of one of his own trucks and it roared up the road towards us, smothering me in yet another dust bath on its arrival. Before it had stopped Sadiq had jumped down and made straight for the officer in the command car. Captain Whoosit was spoiling for a fight and Sadiq didn’t outrank him, but before a row could develop another command car arrived and from it stepped a man who could only have been the battalion commander, complete with Sam Browne belt in the British tradition.

He looked bleakly around him, studied the bridge through binoculars, and then conferred with Sadiq, who was standing rigidly to attention. At one point Mr Big asked a question and jabbed a finger towards me. I approached uninvited as Sadiq was beginning to explain my presence. ‘I can speak for myself, Captain. Good morning, Colonel. I’m Neil Mannix, representing British Electric. That’s our transformer down there.’

He asked no further questions. I thought that he already knew all about us, as any good commander should. ‘You must get it out of our way quickly,’ he said.

‘It’s moving all the time,’ I said reasonably.

The Colonel asked, ‘Does the driver have a radio?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Sadiq. A pity; I might have said the opposite.