Whitethorn (88 page)

So much for all my careful training! Though, I must say, I think both Pirrou and La Pirouette would have approved of Sam's riding technique and the commanding performance that followed.

Upon my return to Embu Barracks late on Sunday evening there was a message from Colonel Peterson for me to report to him at eleven hundred hours the following morning. We'd met on several occasions in the officers' mess, but always as commanding officer and junior subaltern, a nod of the head or a crisp greeting was the extent of the contact. I'd once shared his mess table, a common formality, though one where the junior officer was expected to answer when questioned, otherwise remaining silent. On that occasion, other than enquiring whether I was enjoying my secondment to the Kenya Regiment, no other direct conversation transpired between us and I ate my dinner in silence, grateful that I wasn't required to make any contribution to the conversation. Although I was good at conjuring up reasonably perspicacious questions and at fudging interest, with Mike's background brief, I might have found speaking to Peterson an awkward process. I should add that Peterson was a popular commanding officer and the other officers, mostly Kenyan-born or postwar settlers, seemed to enjoy and respect his company greatly.

At eleven hundred hours exactly Colonel Peterson's desk sergeant ushered me into his office. Upon entry I saluted and removed my cap.

‘Sit, Fitzsaxby,' Peterson commanded, not looking up from the paperwork on his desk or returning my salute, indicating to me that our meeting was to be relatively informal.

I sat on one of the two bamboo wicker chairs in front of his desk and placed my cap on my lap and crossed my legs in an attempt to appear at ease. After signing the bottom of the typed page he'd been reading he put down his fountain pen and looked up at me. ‘Good morning, Fitzsaxby, glad you could come,' he said, smiling briefly.

‘Good morning, Sir.'

‘I'm afraid that I haven't had time to review the progress of your secondment, but Captain Miles says you're making a good fist of it. I see you're a lawyer and have a Rhodes scholarship. Good for you, Rhodesian-born?' All of this was said in a peremptory manner. Peterson was obviously a man who cut to the thrust.

‘No, Sir, South African.'

‘Good. Then I'll get on with the reason why you're here. We want you to command a pseudo gang, a week's patrol on Mount Kenya; I believe you've already received instruction on harassment techniques. The Kikuyu in your gang are highly experienced and reliable, they're originally from the Aberdares, so they don't owe their loyalty to the Mount Kenya terrorists. They've been out on the mountain on two separate occasions so you'll be quite safe, though it's always a good idea to be on your guard.' He smiled. ‘I don't suppose you'll enjoy the exercise much. That's all, do you have any questions?'

‘Yes, Sir, when will this be?'

‘Well, right away, you leave at fifteen hundred hours. I know it's short notice but Lieutenant Barnett has come down with glandular fever and his patrol is already scheduled for this afternoon. It will mess things up if you're not in your precise location by nightfall. You'll be briefed on your coordinates immediately when you leave my office. See Sergeant Pike as you leave.' I rose and replaced my cap, came to attention, saluted and turned towards the door. ‘Oh, Fitzsaxby, by the way, this is a covert operation, no phone calls. I'm told you spend some time with Mike Finger's family at Makindi?'

‘Yes, Sir, Mike Finger and I are friends. May I make a phone call to Makindi without mentioning the patrol?' I asked, then added, ‘I customarily do so every night. It would be a concern for the party at the other end if I missed calling for a week.'

Chris Peterson smiled briefly. ‘Certainly, you're a lucky man, Fitzsaxby, Sam Finger is an absolute cracker.'

I could feel myself blushing. ‘Thank you, Sir, I consider myself most fortunate.'

I dialled Sam's number and Wanjohi the cook answered and explained that Miss Sam wasn't home and
Memsahib
Bobby was at tennis.

‘Will you tell Miss Sam I will call in one week, Wanjohi?' I told him.

There was a moment's hesitation. ‘You not call every night,
Bwana
Tom?' he asked, sounding confused.

I had forgotten that the Finger servants, in fact most Kenyan household servants, were proverbial stickybeaks and knew most of their white family's business, or so Sam assured me. My nightly calls would be a feature of gossip between their two African maids, Christine and Wanjika, and no doubt among the males as well. ‘No, Wanjohi,
not
this week, I will call Miss Sam in
one
week, do you understand?'

‘
Ndio
,
Bwana
, you will call one week. I myself will tell Miss Sam.' He hung up abruptly.

I knew that Sam would phone Mike and want to know what was going on and why I couldn't call for a week. Mike was in Nyeri on army business and I didn't know how to get hold of him, but I guessed he'd be able to work out what might have happened and put Sam's mind at rest. ‘He has to attend a special course' is what he would in all likelihood say to reassure her.

The briefing was simple enough. I was given the coordinates for the week and my entry and exit point. We would need to cover five miles a day no matter what, a big ask. Five miles through the bamboo and undergrowth was no simple achievement. The point being that several gangs were operating within the mountainside forest, if we should fail to maintain our coordinates we might well find ourselves within the sweep of another pseudo gang. In the semi-dark of the undergrowth, the mist and rain, this might result in each of us mounting an attack on the other.

‘You may come across rhino or even buffalo, and sometimes they'll charge, but do not under any circumstances give away your position by firing at them,' said the briefing officer, Captain Broon, looking directly at me. Of course I'd fire if my life was at risk, what was really being said was that if one of my pseudo gang was endangered he would have to take his chances with the rhino or enraged buffalo with only his
panga
to protect him. In other words, I was not to interfere.

I indicated the Patchett submachine gun I was expected to carry. ‘May I leave my revolver behind?' I asked Broon. ‘This and my pack are pretty heavy, I'd rather not carry the extra weight.'

‘Sorry, old chap, tradition. A British army officer is never without his revolver while on active duty. When you come out of the forest you'll have a ten-mile walk to the rendezvous point where the truck will be waiting. You have permission, once you're clear of the forest, to smash your Patchett, but if you arrive back without your revolver, mark my words, you'll be in serious trouble. Righto, time to grease up,' Broon instructed, ‘you're pulling out in an hour.'

What greasing up involved was taking a shower without soap so your skin and hair contained no residue of artificial perfume. In addition your mouth had to be thoroughly rinsed to remove any smell of toothpaste and you had to chew an aromatic twig that was readily found on the slopes of Mount Kenya. After this my arms, face and legs were blackened and my entire body was smeared with the same repulsive-smelling animal fat used by the pseudo gangs. Living in the forests the Mau Mau had developed an acute sense of smell and they could sniff the whereabouts of a European long before they sighted him. I wouldn't wash again until I returned to barracks in seven days and, meanwhile, I would brush my teeth by chewing the end of a green twig and using it as a toothbrush. After greasing and blacking up I was given a filthy shirt and a pair of shorts in disrepair and a repulsive dreadlocked wig to wear. After all this there was still no chance of my ever being mistaken for a terrorist; from my blackened face framed by the absurd wig peered a set of decidedly blue eyes.

The next seven days were not going to be easy, I spoke only a few basic words of Swahili and my so-called pseudo-terrorist gang spoke no English. My most efficient form of instruction was my submachine gun. Quite frankly, I was shitting myself. It was
Voetsek
back at The Boys Farm calculating the daily odds of staying alive and not liking my chances one little bit.

I'd long since learned that it was pointless to feel sorry for yourself, but I couldn't help wondering what I might have done to deserve this. I even speculated that it was Colonel Peterson's way of getting at Mike through me. There was certainly no love lost between the two of them. He knew, I reasoned, that I'd been visiting Makindi and why. In Bobby's tennis terms, it was game, set and match to the Colonel.

But there you go. This sort of speculation usually gets one nowhere. Commonsense and any sense of fairness told me that I'd replaced Barnett at the last minute, which hardly seemed like a premeditated action on the commanding officer's part. Besides, I'd trained as a pseudo gangster so why wouldn't I be chosen to lead a gang? Anyway, I would never know and there was nothing I could do about it. Hatching a conspiracy theory wasn't going to help.

What I did know was that I was a man deeply in love, with everything I had ever wanted about to happen for me – a beautiful, generous-minded and loving woman who, miracles will never cease, loved me as much as I adored her. Now, out of the blue I'd been handed a gang of brainwashed terrorists wielding razor-sharp
pangas
and ordered to spend the next seven days and nights smelling like a badly neglected latrine, cutting my way through forest undergrowth and bamboo thickets on the slopes of Mount Kenya. I told myself that I was going to have to rely on a bunch of known killers while we hunted Mau Mau whom only weeks before they'd regarded as their comrades in arms. All the instant pardons and promises of land grants Colonel Peterson had made to them, as well as his assurances that my gang was completely reliable, counted for nothing in my febrile imagination. Tom Fitzsaxby, sitting on the passenger side in the front seat of a Bedford army truck heading for Mount Kenya, was a very reluctant and frightened pseudo-gang leader.

Mike Finger had already explained the topography of the forest to me, but as we plunged into its mist-smudged darkness at first light, after camping on the outskirts the previous night, I wondered how I would possibly endure the conditions for the next seven days. The mist and the undergrowth restricted my vision to no more than 20 feet for most of the time. After an hour my ragged clothes were blackened with sweat and I was alternately hot and cold as freezing, intermittent rain soaked through to my skin.

I confess to my misery, while better men than me might have embraced the primal magnificence of the ancient forest, all I could think was that in the stygian environment the old man's beard hung from the branches of the taller trees like the tattered banners of doom. The very idea of being ambushed by Mau Mau or even charged by an angry rhino or errant buffalo filled me with the utmost dread. I knew I would be exhausted by the day's end. How was I to sleep knowing that sprawled around me was a gang of cutthroats ready to deliver me to their terrorist brothers, my bloody corpse disembowelled and offered as a sacrifice to their true god Ngai before being eaten as
muti
to make them prevail? It was complete nonsense, of course, it was simply a part of the British propaganda that the Mau Mau were accused of being cannibals, but my imagination was nevertheless running the full gamut of possible primitive savage behaviour. It was during the course of that first day that I discovered the bravado so redolent among the men in the officers' mess of the Kenya Regiment was entirely missing in my personality; I was, by nature, an abject coward.

That night I decided I would sleep sitting with my back against a tree with the safety catch of my submachine gun on my lap released. I had made the members of my gang clear the ground for 20 feet in front of me. I then had them build a wall of twigs and leaves 6 feet from me, completely surrounding the tree and too wide for a man to step over. This was so that any member of the gang attempting to approach me during the night would cause me to wake with the single snap of a broken twig and I'd let him have a burst of machine-gun fire in the guts. I opened a box of dry rations from my pack and started to eat. I must have fallen asleep halfway through my dinner because the next thing I felt was a hand gently shaking me. In the dawn light I opened my eyes to see a member of the gang standing over me and smiling. ‘
Jambo, Bwana
,' he said politely as he handed me back my submachine gun.

The six days that followed count among the more miserable of my life, although, apart from cutting through enough bamboo to build a Chinese village, we encountered no resistance or, for that matter, charging animals other than a troop of jabbering and indignant monkeys. Either the Mau Mau heard us coming and decided to move on or I was fortunate enough to enter a clean part of the forest. I was totally exhausted when we emerged just before four o'clock on the Tuesday, seven days after we'd entered.

It was then, for the first time, that I realised the stress my gang had been under. They too had been afraid and now whooped for joy, slapping each other on the back and hugging, every bit as happy as I was to be clear of the dark and dangerous forest. One of them, who I'd discovered spoke a smidgin of English, indicated that they wanted to go ahead to the waiting truck six miles off. I agreed, marvelling that they still had the energy to run as they moved down the lower slopes of the mountain shouting joyfully, determined to get as far away from the dreaded mountain forest as quickly as possible. Chris Peterson had been correct, they wanted no more of life as a Mau Mau terrorist. Their conversion, whatever had brought it about, was complete.