James Steel
Warlord

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

AVON

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WARLORD. Copyright © James Steel 2011. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

James Steel asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Source ISBN: 9781847561619

Ebook Edition © JULY 2011 ISBN: 9780007443291

Version: 2018-07-23

Epigraph

‘There is no book on the Congo, we must write one ourselves.’

Congo Mercenary

Colonel Mike Hoare,

Commander of 5 Commando mercenary regiment,

deployed in eastern Congo, 1964.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Map

In the Beginning

Chapter One

Eve Mapendo sees the figure lit by moonlight.

Chapter Two

‘We are going to make a new country, Mr Devereux.’

Chapter Three

Alex is struggling to get a grip on the scale…

Chapter Four

‘Come on, we’ve got to hurry up.’

Chapter Five

‘You stink of piss.’

Chapter Six

Sophie’s car pulls up to the barrier and the soldier…

Chapter Seven

The megaphone crackles and squawks, ‘Move up!’ and Eve dutifully…

Chapter Eight

Alex taps the end of a wedge into a log…

Chapter Nine

‘Hello, hello, welcome to Panzi hospital! My name is Mama…

Chapter Ten

‘You are joking, Devereux! You are joking! You’ve lost it,…

Chapter Eleven

Eve is lying on her back on a gynaecological examination…

Chapter Twelve

Alex and his men walk up the hill towards their…

Chapter Thirteen

Rukuba finishes his speech to Team Devereux and a strange…

Chapter Fourteen

Gabriel watches the bare legs of Patrice, the FDLR soldier,…

Chapter Fifteen

Alex continues his talk to the Chinese, Rwandan and Kivuan…

Chapter Sixteen

Gabriel is stuck in the narrow tunnel, underwater and in…

Chapter Seventeen

Matt Hooper is a newly commissioned sergeant in the Kivu…

Chapter Eighteen

A huge explosion comes from his right and Jason Hall…

The Promised Land

Chapter Nineteen

The two undercover Unit 17 men have been hanging around…

Chapter Twenty

Alex is standing in front of another group of people.

Chapter Twenty-One

While the troops wait by the helicopters, Zacheus is lying…

Chapter Twenty-Two

Zacheus lies in the bush and waits for the rockets…

Chapter Twenty-Three

Alex hangs on as Demon 6 flares and they decelerate…

Chapter Twenty-Four

Further back along the ridge Alex is collecting Tac, Zacheus…

Chapter Twenty-Five

‘He’s so sweet.’ Eve lets the fat baby boy get…

Chapter Twenty-Six

‘Beelzebub, this is Black Hal, do you copy, over?’

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The slight, middle-aged man wears a cheap suit and an…

Chapter Twenty-Eight

A heavy explosion shakes Gabriel awake at two a.m.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Dieudonné Rukuba stands in front of a large audience seated…

Chapter Thirty

Joseph squats on the ground and looks up as eleven…

Chapter Thirty-One

Eve looks out over the elegant hotel dining room packed…

Chapter Thirty-Two

Sophie points Alex towards the large grass field just inside…

The End of Days

Chapter Thirty-Three

The United States Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs,…

Chapter Thirty-Four

Gabriel heaves himself off the back of the old blue…

Chapter Thirty-Five

‘Well, welcome to Heaven,’ Alex says, spreading his hands and…

Chapter Thirty-Six

Joseph sits on the ground in the new detention facility…

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Alex looks at Rukuba across the table from him.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Alex looks at Rukuba reclining in his hammock in front…

Chapter Thirty-Nine

The two helicopters wind up their engines on the new…

Chapter Forty

Up on top of the bluff in Tac’s position, Sophie…

Chapter Forty-One

Alex looks at Sophie.

Chapter Forty-Two

A week after the battle at Violo, on 21st June,…

Chapter Forty-Three

Secretary of State Patricia Johnson has expensive blonde hair, shrewd…

Chapter Forty-Four

Joseph and Simon are bursting with excitement as the bus…

Chapter Forty-Five

The helicopter skims low over Lake Kivu. It disappears behind…

Chapter Forty-Six

Sophie turns and looks out of the rear window of…

Chapter Forty-Seven

Sophie is sitting on Alex’s lap after dinner. He has…

Chapter Forty-Eight

Joseph stands laughing on the roof of the cab of…

Chapter Forty-Nine

The Fadoul refinery on the outskirts of Goma is a…

Chapter Fifty

Alex is pacing up and down in the ops tent,…

Chapter Fifty-One

Carla Schmidt and the other journalists are still waiting in…

Chapter Fifty-Two

Joseph and the crowd of young men watch the American…

Chapter Fifty-Three

Alex leans over the shoulder of the door gunner and…

Chapter Fifty-Four

Joseph is near the front of the mob charging towards…

Chapter Fifty-Five

One thousand kilometres away to the northeast, night has just…

Chapter Fifty-Six

Joseph has his face pressed down into the wet grass.

Chapter Fifty-Seven

A shout comes through the trees to Alex’s right.

Chapter Fifty-Eight

The second rifle grenade smashes through the windscreen of the…

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Yamba pours water from his canteen over Alex’s face and…

Chapter Sixty

The helicopter settles down gently on the lawn and sinks…

Epilogue

Author’s Notes

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other Books by the Same Author

About the Publisher

Map

In the Beginning

Chapter One

KIVU PROVINCE,

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO

Eve Mapendo sees the figure lit by moonlight.

It has the body of a muscular man stripped to the waist and the head of a kudu, a dark antelope head with two heavy horns spiralling out of it like madness.

The creature stands in an opening in the forest on the hillside above her, at the front of a file of soldiers. They wear black cloth hoods over their heads with ragged holes cut for eyes and mouths. They stand in complete silence; the silver light frosts the surface of every leaf around them.

The horned head turns in her direction, the large eyes darkened by the shadow of its heavy brows.

Her pupils dilate wide as the adrenaline hits them. She clenches her throat muscles and painfully chokes off a scream. It cannot see her in the shadows of the doorway of her shack but she feels its gaze bear down on her like a hard hand gripping her shoulder, pushing her until she crouches on the ground.

The creature unslings the assault rifle from its shoulder, cocks the weapon and gestures to the soldiers to fan out and move down the hill towards the refugee camp. They disappear into the trees.

A whimper of fear escapes her and the baby stirs inside the shack.

She knows what the creature is and she knows what it wants.

Joseph bares his teeth and screams at his enemy.

It’s his first proper firefight and he wants to prove to his platoon leader, Lieutenant Karuta, that he can fight. He’s fourteen or fifteen, maybe sixteen – he doesn’t know. He was born in a refugee camp during a war and he never knew his parents.

He sees the enemy soldiers darting in and out of the trees across the small valley, a hundred metres from him now, firing wild bursts from their AK-47s and shouting insults. They are wearing a ragtag of green uniforms and coloured tee shirts. The bushes next to him twitch and shudder with the impact of their bullets, cut branches and leaves tumble down around him. The men in his platoon fire back with a cacophony of gunfire.

He glances across at Lieutenant Karuta who is yelling away and firing his rifle in long bursts, spraying bullets. Joseph brings his AK up to his shoulder and squints through the circular sight on the muzzle. The rifle is old and heavy, its metal parts scratched and its wooden stock stained a dark brown by the sweat of many tense hands that have clutched it during the decades of Congo’s wars. He’s often cursed its weight as the platoon trudged up and down the countless hills in the bush, but now it feels light and vital in his hands, an extension of himself growing out of his shoulder.

He pulls the trigger and the gun chatters, slamming back hard into his collarbone. It clicks empty and he quickly ducks down, presses the magazine release, yanks it out, flips it over and shoves the spare one, strapped to it with duct tape, into the port. This is his first big firefight but he’s practised these moves over and over again.

He doesn’t know who the enemy are: one of the poisonous alphabet soup of groups in Kivu – PARECO, AFL-NALU, FJPC, one of the government FARDC brigades, even a rival FDLR battalion or one of the many mai-mai militias from the different tribal groups: Lendu, Hema, Nandi, Tutsi. No one knows what the hell is going on out in the bush.

This lot look like a local mai-mai militia. Joseph’s platoon of soldiers are from the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, more commonly known by their French acronym, the FDLR. They bumped into the mai-mai by accident as they were coming down the valley side into the village and the fighting broke out in a confused way.

An RPG whooshes off near him, the white fire of the propellant shoots across the valley and the rocket explodes against a tree. The enemy gunfire slackens and they begin to withdraw. This is subsistence warfare and no one actually wants to get killed – what’s the point? You can’t steal, eat or rape if you’re dead.

The FDLR soldiers that he is with start yelling and cheering. Lieutenant Karuta is next to him and Joseph looks at his excited face, eyes filled with laughter. The lieutenant is his father figure. His own father was an FDLR soldier killed when he was a baby, somewhere in the middle of the big Congo war. No one knows where or when – over five million people died so it’s not like anyone paid much attention to him.

Lieutenant Karuta is forty and a génocidaire from the old days in Rwanda. He is a big man in green army fatigues with a wispy beard patched with white that he grows to distinguish himself from the young men under his command.

He waves his rifle joyfully in the air and Joseph joins in. The village is theirs; they must get there before the peasants run off.

They charge down the valley side, jumping over tangles of vines and bursting through bamboo thickets. The ragged line of cheering fighters rushes out of the shade of the trees and into the sunshine. They hold their rifles over their heads as they bound through the waist-high grass towards the collection of round mud huts with thatched conical roofs on the flat land at the bottom of the valley. Villagers burst out of the huts and start running around screaming in panic. Women try to grab their kids, old men stumble and fall, chickens fly up, goats run around bleating. Joseph is laughing with excitement. He’s hungry after weeks in the deep bush living on pineapples and snails.

A woman in a red and blue wrap bursts up from a clump of grass to his right, squawking like a parrot, flapping one arm and dragging a goat on a string with the other. Lieutenant Karuta is onto her, changing direction and chasing fast as she flees down a path into a field of head-high maize. Joseph stumbles, recovers and follows him.

He rushes down the narrow path, the tall green stems blurring past him on either side. Lieutenant Karuta catches up with the woman quickly, kicks the goat out of the way and shoves her in the back so she goes sprawling. The goat runs on over her and the lieutenant has a moment of indecision – do I grab the goat or her?

But her shrieks excite him and he looks down at her on the ground in front of him. ‘Get the goat!’ he shouts to Joseph who squeezes past him and races down the path. The screaming starts.

Weird high-pitched animal shrieks come out of the night from all around the refugee camp. It turns her blood to cold liquid fear in her veins.

Eve crouches inside her shack clutching her baby, thinking, ‘No human being can make that sound.’

She is nineteen, with a broad face, oval eyes, a blunt nose and smooth brown skin. Short and stocky, she wears a patterned pagne wrapped around her body and a plastic cross on a string round her neck. Her free hand clutches it involuntarily.

She and her nine-month-old daughter, Marie, are alone in a shelter at the edge of the camp. She has blown out her tiny candle and crouches in terror in the darkness at the back of the hut. It is ten feet long by four feet high; the walls are made of palm leaves woven onto sticks that are fixed to a frame of branches and she can hear everything outside. A piece of blue and white UNHCR plastic sheeting completes the curved roof. Her boyfriend, Gabriel, proudly made a door for her out of a corrugated iron sheet tied onto the branch frame with some electrical flex he found. He showed her how to tie it shut before he left – ‘That will keep you safe!’

The camp mongrels started barking at the attackers as they came near but this turns to frightened whimpering once the screaming starts. She can hear the soldiers shouting now in Swahili, ‘Over there! Look in that one over there!’ ‘Open up! Open the door!’

Screams of fear come from her neighbours in return.

‘Open the door, or I’ll kill you!’

Some confused banging and shouting.

‘Where is it? Where is the albino?’

More sobbing and crying and then the dull sound of blows and screaming.

Her blood pounds so loud in her ears, she is sure they can hear it. She tries to still her heart – if she can make herself very quiet and very small she might escape. They want her baby but she can’t give it up. Marie starts crying and she forces her hand over her mouth, pressing her face into her breast and smelling her milky baby smell one last time.

The shouting nearby has gone quiet. She hears footsteps approaching the hut. The thin corrugated iron sheet is all there is between her and them. A hand grabs the edge of it and tries to open the door but the flex holds it fast to the branch frame. There is a grunt of anger and then the iron bangs loudly as a machete hacks at the flex. Heaving, banging, tearing, they pull the door off its flimsy hinges and throw it to one side.

The demonic figure silhouetted in the moonlight is half man and half animal. The kudu head and horns look huge. It is stripped to the waist and muscular and in the flat silver light she can see the artery in its neck, beating fast just under the rim of the headdress. It is breathing hard and beads of sweat roll down its chest. The smell of the forest pours into the hut, musty and damp.

Eve cowers on the floor and looks up, wide-eyed in terror. Her hand moves to hold the baby tighter and Marie lets out a loud wail.

The creature holds its Kalashnikov in its right hand and stretches out its left to her. Eve makes a noise of denial, just a whimper. The Kudu is enraged and bellows at her before ducking its long horns under the roof and grabbing her arm. Its fingers are like steel, biting deep into her flesh, dragging her out of the doorway, clutching the baby in one arm. She is screaming now with fear, ‘No! No! No!’

As soon as she is out in the open, a soldier in a black cloth hood shouts excitedly at the sight of the pale baby and hits her in the back with the butt of his rifle. A rib cracks and she makes an oof sound as the air is forced out of her.

She loses her grip on the child and the Kudu grabs it by one arm and lifts it up in the air. It throws back its horned head and howls in triumph. The other members of the gang all join in howling and firing their rifles in the air.

Eve lies winded on the ground until they finish celebrating. The baby is taken away and then they look down at her. Rough hands grab her under her arms and throw her on her back and tear off her pagne. As the first man presses his heavy weight on her stomach, something inside her says, ‘This isn’t happening.’

But the tearing and jabbing continues and she thinks, ‘Why are you doing this to me, God? Why have you made this terrible country?’

Chapter Two

‘We are going to make a new country, Mr Devereux.’

The Chinese businessman looks at him closely to gauge his reaction.

Alex Devereux has the face of a man with strong feelings deeply controlled.

Dark tides run just under the surface but you will never find out what drives them.

His eyes lock onto the businessman’s and flicker with interest before a shutter comes down and he glances away to look out of the window over the lawns of his country house.

Alex has a stern cast to his face, the habit of command engraved on his features by his time as a major in the Household Cavalry and his subsequent career as a mercenary commander. He is six foot four, broad shouldered, lean and fit, running every day up and down the hills of his Herefordshire estate – ‘exercising his demons’ he calls it.

Outwardly he is dressed like a modern gentleman with jeans, loafers and button-down shirt, black hair neatly trimmed; he’s just turned forty and there is some salt and pepper at the temples. But there is a lot more to him than that.

At the moment he is very relaxed with one arm thrown over the back of the old Chesterfield and his long legs stretched out in front of him. It’s April, a shower is thrashing the rose bushes about outside, and it’s cold so he’s lit a log fire in the oak-panelled drawing room of Akerley, the Devereux country house where he lives alone. His family has been there nearly a thousand years, since Guy D’Evereux was granted the land by William the Conqueror. He is currently restoring the house with money from his Russian adventures but it is still always freezing cold.

He looks back at Mr Fang Xei Dong and says, ‘That sounds interesting,’ without any feeling.

It is a measure of how much more relaxed he is about life than before his success that he can be so detached about such a huge project. He refused to go up to London for the meeting and only agreed to it if it was at Akerley. It is also a measure of how interested in him the businessman must be that he agreed to the demand, arriving just after lunch in the back of a chauffeur-driven Mercedes.

Alex was surprised by Fang when his long limbs unfolded themselves like a daddy longlegs from the car door. He is northern Chinese, as tall as the Englishman, with wavy black hair, blue eyes and an angular face with cheekbones that seem painfully large. His skin is smooth and he looks to be about thirty.

When he arrived he strode up the imposing stone steps of the house towards Alex, full of confidence, completely unfazed by his first time in the heart of the English countryside. He thrust his hand out, ‘Hello, my name is Fang Xei Dong but my business name is Simon Jones.’

His English is American-accented but it still has the flat, staccato Chinese diction. He clearly knows that no Westerner will ever get the sliding tones of his name right and doesn’t want them to embarrass them with untoward mispronunciations. He cheerfully laughs off Alex’s polite attempts at saying his name. ‘Don’t worry, in Congo I am called Monsieur Wu. It’s the only Chinese name they can pronounce.’

He talks in rapid bursts, his long arms often reaching forwards as he speaks, as if trying to get hold of some perceived future.

He wears the casual uniform of the modern global businessman: neatly pressed chinos, button-down blue shirt with a pen in his top pocket and iPod earphones hanging down over his top button, a casual black blazer and loafers. When he settles himself in the drawing room he sets out an iPad and two BlackBerries on the coffee table in front of him that beep and chirrup frequently.

He sits forward on the leather armchair now and pushes his narrow-lensed titanium glasses back up his nose with a rapid unconscious dab of his hand; they slip off the bridge of his nose because his head jerks about as he speaks.

‘This operation is completely covert at the moment but I understand from my contacts in the defence community that you are used to operating in this manner?’

Alex just narrows his eyes in response.

‘I am referring to your operation in Central African Republic, which I understand was a Battlegroup level command?’

Alex nods. He is very cagey about his past activities. His CAR mission has achieved legendary status in the mercenary community but they don’t know the half of it. Any mention of the word Russia or any possible operations he was involved in there and he clams up completely.

Fang is reassured by his discretion.

‘This operation will require that level of skill and more. To be candid with you, we realise that it is …’ he pauses ‘…unconventional, from an international relations point of view, and we would prefer to work with a discreet operator such as yourself rather than one of the big defence contractors. They are much more … conventional,’ he finishes, sounding evasive.

Alex knows that by conventional he means law-abiding. He nods politely in acceptance of the point but winces internally. It wasn’t the sort of reputation he had sought at the start of his career. He had always wanted to be able to serve his country for his whole life; major general was what he had been hoping for. Somehow things just didn’t work out like that.

Fang blasts on regardless. ‘I represent a consortium of Chinese business interests that will lease Kivu Province off the Congolese government for ninety-nine years. Under the terms of the lease it will effectively be ours to do what we want with.’

He stretches out his arms and says with a note of wonder in his voice, ‘In Operation Tiananmen we are going to set up a new country and bring order out of anarchy!’

Alex looks at him quizzically. ‘Is that Tiananmen as in Square?’

‘Yes, it means “the mandate of heaven”.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s the ancient Confucian right to rule, the basic authority that any government has to have in order to form a country. And you are going to establish it, Mr Devereux. It is our new vision for the world.’

Gabriel Mwamba is twenty-one and in love.

He is an itinerant salesman, pushing his tshkudu cargo-scooter uphill along a narrow track through the forest, breathing hard and sweating, beads of it stand out in his black, wiry hair like little pearls. The tendons across his shoulders and neck stand out and feel like red-hot wires.

He has covered thirty miles in two days over the hills; today he started out at 4am. To dull the pain he is thinking about Eve and how he is going to impress her when he gets back to the refugee camp where she lives. He is an ugly man and knows it, so he realises he has to compensate for it in other ways – he will be a successful businessman.

When he met Eve last year he liked the look of her, small and stocky with good firm breasts and smooth skin. When he heard of her rejection by her husband because of her albino baby, he knew she was the one for him. A fellow outcast. She looked so sad and he just wanted to put a smile on her face.

His own features have been carelessly assembled: his jaw is too big, he has tombstone teeth, puffed-out cheeks and heavy eyebrows. His body looks odd, composed of a series of bulges: a large head, powerful shoulders, protruding stomach and bulging calf muscles. It’s all out of proportion with his short legs, a broad trunk and long arms. Because he knows he looks unusual his face has an anxious, eager-to-please look that irritates people and leads them to be crueller to him than they would otherwise be. However, Gabriel is an optimist with big plans and he never gives up.

He has been reading a French translation of a self-help book – I Can Make You a Millionaire! – written by an American business guru. He has absorbed a lot about spotting opportunities in the market and is sure he is onto one now. Market intelligence is key to these breakthroughs and he listens to his battered transistor radio once a day (to preserve the batteries, which are expensive) to catch the main radio bulletin from Radio Okapi, the UN radio station that broadcasts throughout Kivu.

The local Pakistani UN commander was on the bulletin talking in very bad French about the success of their recent operation against the FDLR and how they had opened up the road into the village of Pangi and installed a Joint Protection Team to allow the market to be held there on Saturday.

Immediately Gabriel knew this was his opportunity. He got together all his money and bought a load of consumer goods off another trader who hadn’t heard the news and was selling them cheap. Pangi had been inaccessible for months so they would be crying out for what he had to offer, and that meant profit. As the self-help book put it: ‘Adversity is spelt OPPORTUNITY!’ It’s a big investment but he is going to make a killing.

The tshkudu he pushes is loaded up with old USAID sacks containing cheap Chinese-manufactured goods: soap, matches, batteries, condoms, combs, print dresses, needles and thread, some tins of tuna (way past their sell-by date), boxes of smuggled Ugandan Supermatch cigarettes and six umbrellas in a bundle. He also has sacks of charcoal from the charcoal trading network throughout the province – he is following one of their secret paths through the woods.

It is heading downhill now into Pangi. The tshkudu is heavy and tugging at his grip. It’s six feet long and made of planks – he built it himself. He hauls back on the handlebars to prevent it from running away from him, digging the toes of his flip-flops into the mud. The trail comes out of the trees and onto a dirt road leading to the village, where he passes the local massacre memorial. The date and number of people killed are scorched with a poker onto a wooden board nailed to a tree: 20 July 1999, 187 people. He doesn’t give it a second look; every village has one from the war.

He is looking to the future and full of hope. At the moment he is a small-time trader, but one day he will graduate to be one of les grosses légumes – the big vegetables, the businessmen in the regional capitals of Goma or Bukavu, running an internet café or a trucking company.

A jolt of fear goes through Gabriel and he stops daydreaming. His step falters and he wants to run away but they have seen him already and to show fear would invite an attack. Three soldiers with Kalashnikovs are lounging at the side of the road on a log, smoking and staring at him through their sunglasses. Like everyone in Kivu, Gabriel is well practised at avoiding attention from the police or the army: his head drops, his eyes look at the ground and his body seems to halve in size as he pushes the tshkudu towards them.

The UN commander said there would be a Joint Protection Team in place but there don’t seem to be any Pakistani soldiers around. That the three men are wearing the plain, dark green uniform of the government army, the FARDC, is bad enough, but what makes them even more of a threat is that they have the distinctive blue shoulder flashes of the 64th Brigade. The Congolese army is made up of militia groups that have been integrated into it over the years and the 64th Brigade is a former mai-mai group, a tribal militia of the Shi people in South Kivu.

Gabriel is terrified of them because he is a Hunde, a member of the Rwandan tribe brought into the province by the Belgians during the colonial era as cheap labour. They are hated by the ‘originaires’, the indigenous Congolese peoples.

If he can just get past this group then he can blend into the market, do his business and sneak out with the crowd at the end of the day. His eyes are wide with fear but he keeps them lowered as he passes the soldiers. Their heads turn and they watch him intently.

Sophie Cecil-Black is feeling carsick and frazzled.

The white Land Cruiser swings round another switchback on the dirt road up the hill and her head swoons horribly.

They’ve been doing this since six o’clock this morning and it’s early afternoon now. Up three thousand feet from Goma to Masisi and then down three thousand feet into the Oso valley and then up another three thousand feet to here.

God, one more swing and I am going to puke.

Saliva pours into her mouth but she tenses her throat muscles and forces the vomit back down.

She looks out of the window. Everywhere around her are stunning views out over rugged hills covered with grassland and small fields. It reminds her of a family holiday to Switzerland in the summer, but she is not in the mood to appreciate the beauty now.

Sophie is thirty-one, six foot tall and slim with straight brown hair, a striking face and a strident manner. Some men think she is very beautiful, others think she is very ugly. It’s the Cecil-Black nose that makes the difference: secretly she used to want to file down the prominent bridge of it when she was a teenager but she has learned to live with it now. She wears a tight green GAP tee shirt, hipster jeans and green Croc shoes.

The Cecil-Blacks are a branch of the Cecil family who ran the British government from the time of Elizabeth I. Sophie went to Benenden, her father is a stockbroker and her mother is very concerned that she is over thirty and not married. Sophie couldn’t care less about that: she knows she is called to higher things and has been doing her best to break the mould of being a safe, Home Counties girl ever since she refused to join the Brownies aged seven. She has a first in PPE from Oxford, a Masters in Development Economics from the School of Oriental and African Studies and an ethnic tattoo across the small of her back.

She is now a project manager with an American humanitarian aid charity, Hope Street, which has a large presence in Kivu and specialises in work with street kids, schooling and training them but she also does general humanitarian work. She leads a team of fifteen people based in Goma, where they have a large training facility.

One of her team, Natalie Zielinski, is sitting in the backseat. She doesn’t get carsick. She’s a small, bubbly Texan with brown, frizzy hair in a bob that never quite works. Sophie likes her optimism, but sometimes finds her irritating.

Nicolas, their Congolese driver, is a slim, self-effacing young man, very glad to have such a cushy job driving for an NGO, it’s a lot easier and safer than the backbreaking life of the peasants in the bush. He is quiet and calm with the soft manner of a lot of Congolese men. He drives smoothly but even that can’t iron out the constant bumping from side to side on the dirt road and those horrible lurching turns.

They started so early because they need to get a load of vaccines to a remote clinic before they go off in the heat. Several thousand dollars worth of polio, hepatitis, measles and other vaccines are packed into coolboxes in the back of the jeep. Once they get them to the clinic at Tshabura they can go into the solar-powered fridge and will be fine for the big vaccination day that they have set up later that week. The clinic is at the head of the Bilati valley and local field workers have spread the word around the farms and villages there, as well as advertising it on Radio Okapi. They are expecting two hundred children to be brought in to be inoculated.

The other reason they started at six is that Tshabura is on the edge of the area under the nominal control of the UN forces. The security situation in Kivu is always volatile; they listen to the radio every morning for the UN security update, like a weather forecast. At the moment their route is Condition Bravo – some caution is warranted, no immediate threat but follow normal security procedures. Condition Echo means evacuate urgently to save your life but it doesn’t happen often. Lawlessness is just part of everyday life in Kivu and Sophie has become used to the daily list of rapes, muggings and burglaries, as well as keeping track of which roads are closed due to militia activity.

After a prolonged security assessment and unsuccessful wrangling with the UN to do the delivery by helicopter, Sophie got fed up with waiting and decided that they could race there in the daytime, get to the clinic, stay overnight in their compound and then race back the next day. White NGO workers are generally safe in Kivu, apart from the usual hassling for bribes from the police and army, but she doesn’t want to be out on the roads after dark when armed groups roam at will.

All these factors are weighing on her mind and she’s also irate because they are behind schedule. They had a puncture on a track that had been washed out by heavy rain and then lost an hour getting over the river at Pinga where a truck had got a wheel stuck in a hole in the old metal bridge.

The car at last comes to the top of the hill and Nicolas pulls up so Natalie can look around the surrounding area and check the map. She scans either side of the jeep and all she can see are lines of green hills in bright sunshine receding into the distance. It is completely quiet but for the noise of a breeze buffeting the car.

‘Daniel Boone would get lost out here,’ she mutters, as she looks back and forth between the map and the view. ‘One hill begins to look much the same as another.’ The map has proved inaccurate already that day and there are no signposts anywhere.

‘Look, can we just get on with it, please,’ Sophie snaps.

‘OK, OK,’ Natalie says cheerfully. ‘We’re on the right route.’

Chapter Three

Alex is struggling to get a grip on the scale of the project that Fang has just outlined.

He stops being relaxed and sits forward, the fingers of one hand pressed to his temple.

‘Hang on; the Congolese government is going to lease you Kivu Province?’

Fang nods confidently. ‘Yes, just like the British government leased Hong Kong from China for ninety-nine years.’

‘OK. How many people live there?’

‘Well, that is a good question actually. No one really knows because surveys are from before the war, but we think about six million.’

‘Six million people?’ Alex looks incredulous but Fang looks back at him unfazed.

‘Yes.’

Alex shakes his head. ‘Why is the government going to do that?’

‘Well, Kivu is actually an embarrassment to the government in Kinshasa. The President promised to bring peace to the country when he got elected but he has failed to end the fighting, or deliver on any of his other Cinq Chantiers policies.

‘The government has no control there. I mean, look at the distances: Congo is the size of western Europe and trying to run Kivu from Kinshasa is like trying to run Turkey from London. Plus there are no road or rail links between the two areas.

‘The government had to get the Rwandan army in to try and defeat the FDLR but that failed. Now they throw their hands up and say it is a Rwandan problem and the Rwandans do the same back to them. No one takes responsibility for it so the whole problem just festers on and will never get solved. I mean, the whole of Congo is just …’ Fang waves his arms around trying to communicate the depth of the exasperation he feels about the country ‘…completely dysfunctional, the country makes no sense. The only reason it exists is as the area of land that Stanley was able to stake out.’

He begins ticking points off on his fingers: ‘The country makes absolutely no sense on a geographic, economic, linguistic or ethnic level. There are over two hundred different ethnic groups in it and the Belgians practised divide and rule policies that exacerbated the differences between them. The only things they have in common are music, Primus beer and suffering.’

Alex is nodding in agreement with this. He has had some dealings with the place and is aware of its legendary chaos.

‘OK, they don’t control Kivu so they might as well get some money off you for it, right?’

Fang clearly doesn’t want to be drawn into detail on money but nods. ‘Yes, we are talking very significant sums here. China is already the largest investor in the Democratic Republic of Congo with a nine billion dollar deal and we have been able to leverage this to give us more influence.’

Alex nods; he can well imagine what ‘influence’ billions of dollars of hard cash could get you amongst Kinshasa’s famously rapacious elites.

Fang continues to justify the project. ‘Actually the deal is not that unusual if you look around at the land purchases that are going on at the moment. UAE has bought six thousand square miles of southern Sudan, South Africa has bought a huge area of Republic of Congo, Daiwoo Logistics tried to buy half the agricultural land in Madagascar …’

‘Is that the one where the government was overthrown because of it?’

Fang nods, unfazed by Alex’s implied scepticism about his own project. ‘Yes, but that was different. No one in the rest of Congo cares about what happens in Kivu; when you go to Kinshasa there is nothing on the TV or in the papers about it.’

‘Hmm.’ Alex is still not reassured – the more he begins to get to grips with the project the more he can see problems with it.

Fang continues, ‘So your role would be to …’

Alex holds up a hand to stop the tide of enthusiasm. ‘Hang on, who said anything about me actually being involved? This is a huge and very risky project and I am very comfortable at the moment. I’m not looking to take on any new work.’

Fang is momentarily checked and nods. ‘OK, I can see that this is a highly unusual project that will take a while for you to absorb.’ Then he just storms on anyway. ‘The role of the military partner in the consortium would be to neutralise the FDLR.’

Alex feels he has made his point and that he can continue the discussion on a hypothetical basis. ‘The Hutus?’

‘Yes. After they conducted the Rwandan genocide in 1994 against the Tutsis they were driven out by the returning Tutsi army in exile and a million Hutu refugees fled across the border to Kivu.’

‘And have destabilised the province ever since.’

‘Yes. The genocide was twenty years ago now but their leadership have successfully maintained their ideology of Hutu power and indoctrinated a new generation of fighters. Their continued presence means that there are about thirty armed groups in Kivu but the FDLR is the main cause of the instability that breeds the others. Defeat them and the other militias would agree to negotiate; there would be no need for them to exist if a strong authority was established.’

‘So it’s a bit like Israel having the SS sitting on its border?’

‘Yes, the Hutus killed eight hundred thousand civilians in a hundred days with machetes so Rwanda’s government doesn’t feel comfortable with them there. They will be our partners in the consortium.’ Fang’s mind is racing ahead already. ‘How long would it take to set up a Battlegroup operation to deal with them?’

Alex takes a deep breath and considers the issue for a moment. ‘Well, for the sort of air mobile strike warfare you would need, you would want to start the campaign at the beginning of the dry season in May, so next year, that would be thirteen months.’

‘Is that long enough set-up time?’

‘Yes, that would be fine.’

Fang makes a note on his iPad.

Alex continues, ‘But look, President Kagame is safe now, isn’t he? Why does he need to be involved with all this?’ He’s aware of the Rwandan leader’s reputation for ruthless efficiency and running the country with an iron grip.

‘Well, yes and no. The FDLR is not capable of reinvading Rwanda right now but he is still a Tutsi in charge of a country that is eighty-five per cent Hutu. If he were assassinated like the last president in 1994 then the whole thing would start again. He is not the sort of guy who is prepared to have that level of threat right on his border.’

‘So are you saying that the Rwandan military are on board on the project?’

Fang looks momentarily uncomfortable.

‘This is a very delicate area.’ He clears his throat. ‘As I think you know, the Rwandans were involved in atrocities when they were in Kivu that attracted …’

One of the BlackBerries in front of him rings. He cuts off in mid-flow and answers it aggressively in Chinese and then starts listening with occasional grunts. He gets up and walks over to the window and looks out over the rose garden. He suddenly lets forth a tirade of angry instructions, jabbing his free hand into the air.

Joseph wrestles the goat to the ground and holds its head down.

He then faces the dilemma of how to hold both his rifle and the goat. The goat’s string has snapped; he looks back and forth between the two. Should he hitch his rifle on his chest and hold the goat on his shoulders?

Eventually he settles on dragging it by a horn in one hand with his rifle in the other. He sets off down the path in the maize field, back towards the village where he can hear shouting, screaming and gunshots as the hungry FDLR troops set about the civilians.

There is the noise of a struggle going on ahead. As he comes through the maize he sees Lieutenant Karuta wrestling with the woman on the ground. She is putting up a fierce resistance. The goat bleats and Karuta looks up, his face puffy and angry with frustrated lust. Joseph stands and stares at him.

Karuta rolls off the woman and grabs his rifle off the ground and points it at her. She lies on her back looking up at them, eyes wide in terror.

‘Cover her!’ he orders Joseph, who holds his rifle by its pistol grip and the goat in the other hand. She stares at the muzzle just above her face as Karuta pulls out a knife, gets hold of her feet and quickly slits her hamstrings. She screams in agony.

He puts the knife away and straightens his uniform. ‘Come on, she’ll keep for dessert. Let’s have dinner first.’ He walks off down the path towards the village.

When they get back there the lieutenant organises the looting of food and three women are tied to trees. He sends out a patrol under the command of Corporal Habiyakare, another old génocidaire. They are to scout around the small valley to check that the mai-mai have gone. Meanwhile the men slaughter the goat and start cooking it whilst eating foufou and drinking the farmers’ home-brewed beer from gourds.

An hour later the patrol returns, dragging a thirteen-year-old boy with them. He is barefoot, wears shorts and a ragged tee shirt, is crying and looks terrified.

Corporal Habiyakare reports back. ‘Lieutenant Karuta, we have captured a prisoner!’

Karuta’s eyes are already reddened from drinking; he is in a boisterous mood.

‘Bring the prisoner over here, we will interrogate him!’

The boy is dragged into the middle of the village and stripped to his red underpants. His belt is used to tie his elbows behind his back so tightly that his chest sticks out painfully. Karuta sits on a wonky wooden chair in front of him but the boy falls over in tears. The men gather round and laugh and clap as they drink the beer.

The corporal drags the boy to his feet.

‘What is the charge against the prisoner?’ asks the lieutenant.

‘Sir, we found him hiding in the woods, spying on our soldiers. He was armed with this axe.’

‘What have you got to say for yourself?’

The boy sniffles and mutters, ‘I was chopping wood.’

‘You were chopping wood! You think I am a fucking idiot! You are a spy!’

‘No! Not spy!’

‘You were spying on my men!’

‘No, not …’

‘Shut up!’

‘No spy …’

‘Shut up! You are a spy! You work for Rwanda! Look at his feet, he is a Rwandan!’

The crowd pushes forward and looks at the boy’s feet; none of the younger soldiers has ever been to Rwanda so they accept the older génocidaire’s word.

‘Not Rwandan!’ the boy screams in a high-pitched shriek.

‘You will admit it! Beat him!’ The lieutenant gestures to the crowd of men who push the boy to the ground and start kicking him. Others run off and pull supple branches off trees, then run back in, push through the crowd and start whipping the boy.

He curls up in a ball but his hands are behind his back and the blows rain down all over him.

‘You are a Rwandan spy! Confess!’

He cannot speak under the torrent of blows; raw red and pink gashes open up all over his dark skin from the slashing branches.

A soldier pushes the others back and jumps on him, his Wellington boots landing on his hip with a heavy thud. The man springs off laughing and others take running jumps onto the boy.

‘OK, OK!’ Lieutenant Karuta waves his hand: laughing, the men back off.

The boy lies still, covered with dust, his pants wet with urine.

‘OK, come on.’ Karuta shakes his head, grinning at the enthusiasm of his men. ‘On your feet, boy.’

The boy doesn’t move.

‘Get him on his feet.’ He gestures to Corporal Habiyakare, who gets hold of the belt holding his elbows together and yanks him up. The boy stirs and sways on his feet.

‘Over here, heh.’ Karuta points casually to the ground at the edge of the cleared area between two huts.

The boy senses something bad and starts struggling. Habiyakare tries to drag him backwards by the belt but the boy becomes desperate so the corporal kicks his legs out from under him and pulls him along by the belt. The boy shrieks with pain and fear in a high-pitched cracked voice.

Lieutenant Karuta walks ahead with his Kalashnikov and the crowd of men follow, grinning in anticipation.

‘Here!’ Karuta points to a spot on the ground and the corporal throws the boy forward and jumps out of the way.

In one smooth action the lieutenant hefts his assault rifle by its pistol grip so that the weapon is held upright in his right hand. He cocks it with a flourish with his left and then fires a long burst at point-blank range into the boy. His body bounces on the ground and a red mist appears over it briefly.

The men give a huge roar of approval and Karuta turns and brandishes his weapon with a broad grin.

He starts call and response, shouting, ‘Hutu power!’

‘Hutu power!’ the men respond, raising their guns in the air and punching out the words with their fists.

‘Free Rwanda!’

‘Free Rwanda!’

Chapter Four

‘Come on, we’ve got to hurry up.’

Sophie can hear the tetchiness in her voice. Nicolas, as ever, takes it in his stride, nods obediently and pushes the Land Cruiser on faster.

It’s four o’clock and the vaccines in the back are getting warmer by the minute. Their medical technician recommended that they get them to the clinic by late afternoon or else they would be ruined and the whole inoculation event would have to be reorganised. It will be a big waste of money and effort and a loss of face for the charity in the local community if they can’t deliver on their promises. Sophie hates not getting things right. At least the tension is making her forget her carsickness; she sits forward and swigs nervously from her water bottle.

They’re pretty sure they are on the right road. It is winding down the hill into the Bilati valley and they can now see the river far away in the bottom, a fast-flowing upland torrent.

They come down onto a flat saddle of land where another road joins theirs before dipping down into the valley. All around is lush green grassland but up ahead Nicolas spots a checkpoint, a striped pole across the road next to a dilapidated single-storey building.

‘Hmm,’ says Natalie in annoyance. ‘That’s not on the map.’

‘Bugger,’ mutters Sophie.

Yet more hassle. She has spent a lot of time getting the paperwork in place for the journey. Government officials demand documents for everything: they are rarely paid and make their living from bribes. She pulls her document wallet out of the glove box and flicks through it again. The key document, their blue permit à voyager issued by the Chief of Traffic Police in Goma, is on the top, pristine and triple-stamped.

Sophie is keyed up now. One last barrier and they can get there just in time. Several hundred kids live healthier lives – how can you argue with that?

As they drive up towards the barrier they can see government FARDC soldiers standing inside sandbagged positions on either side of it. This is the last outpost of their control before the militia-dominated land beyond and they are very nervy, assault rifles held across their chests and fingers on triggers. They are questioning the driver of a battered Daihatsu minivan, ordering his passengers out and poking around in their woven plastic sacks stuffed with vegetables and bananas.

As they wait in line Sophie asks Nicolas in French, ‘What brigade are they?’

Nicolas peers at their shoulder flashes.

‘Orange is 17th Brigade.’

‘Is that good or bad?’ She knows that the different units have different temperaments depending on which militia they come from and which colonel runs them.

Nicolas replies quietly, ‘Well, they used to be CNDP. They were a good army – Tutsi like me, and they defeated the FARDC whenever they fought them. But then they did a deal with the government and became the 17th Brigade with Congolese officers. After six months they shot up a UN base in protest because their officers had stolen their wages,’ he pauses and then finishes with a shrug and, ‘c’est la magie du Congo.’

Sophie frowns. ‘Great.’

‘Just take it easy, remember the training,’ Natalie says cautiously from the backseat. ‘Don’t make eye contact, keep your voice down, just be sweet. Maybe we’ll have to pay a bribe to get through.’

‘OK, all right!’ Sophie holds up a hand to cut her off. Natalie is really getting on her nerves. ‘We don’t pay for access, it’s our policy.’

Natalie falls silent, the soldiers wave the minivan through and they drive up to the barrier.

Gabriel makes his way past the soldiers and heads down the hillside to Pangi market.

He is torn between turning round and getting out of there immediately and his belief that he can make a killing and return to Eve with a stack of cash. He could use it to try and fix up her hut or buy her something for the baby or maybe get her that sewing machine she wants.

Pangi is a typical Kivu village, a group of palm-leaf and wooden huts in the bottom of a steep valley strung out along the banks of a small, fast-flowing river. All around are rugged hills topped with bright green forest, spotted with patches of white mist; it’s cold and overcast. Meadows and small fields of maize, beans and cassava cut into the woods on the lower slopes.

As he pushes the tshkudu onto the flat ground he keeps his head down but his eyes flick back and forth taking in little details, gauging the atmosphere. It’s ten o’clock and the market is busy, people have been cut off by the FDLR troops for months and have come in from the bush to stock up on food and consumer items. He will have to move fast to find a pitch and set out his wares. All his money is invested in his stock and he has got to get it out in front of his customers quickly before they spend the tiny reserves of cash they have.

A crowd of a couple of hundred people are milling around in a grassy area in the middle of the village, women in their brightly patterned pagne and men in an assortment of jackets and tee shirts, cast-offs from the West. Around the edge of the area women squat behind their goods, carefully laid out on banana leaves on the ground: piles of bush fruits, mangoes, blood oranges, cassava tubers, chickens tied up by the legs and silently awaiting their fate, lumps of bush meat covered in fur and some monkey flesh with little black hands sticking out. Protein is scarce as all the cattle and goats have been killed or driven off by the FDLR. People pick over the goods and pay for it warily with filthy Congolese franc notes.

Gabriel is worried, his eyes and ears taking in danger signals. The scene is unusually quiet, there is none of the usual chatter of a market and there are no children around – normally a village is teeming with them. People’s body language is tense and fearful; no one makes eye contact with each other. Heads constantly flick about looking for trouble, shooting sullen glances at the soldiers. The FDLR may have been driven off but the government FARDC troops are no better. The soldiers swagger around in groups with their rifles, occasionally taking some goods without paying and eyeing up women. The people live in patches like this between outbursts of fighting and flights into the forest. They are angry about their lives but powerless. The atmosphere is one of suppressed violence, like petrol vapour hanging in the air.

Gabriel scans the crowd; the grey sacks hang off his tshkudu, bulging with wares. A pair of soldiers stand at the side of the market with their rifle butts resting on their hips, heads flicking around in a predatory manner.

He is looking for an empty patch of ground to set up his stall. He spent a lot of time making a lightweight folding table from bamboo that he can display his goods on, rather than having them on the ground. He is sure this will draw the customers in.

As he scans around he accidentally catches the eye of one of the soldiers. He ducks his head immediately but the man has seen him and thrusts his jaw forwards aggressively, drawing his finger across his throat in a slitting gesture. Gabriel turns his head and moves away towards the other side of the market.

The soldier follows him and shouts, ‘Hey you! Where is your permit to trade?’

Gabriel freezes, turns and hurriedly goes into his most placatory mode, ducking his head into his shoulders and keeping his eyes averted. ‘Pardon, Monsieur Le Directeur, would you be interested in this small box of cigarettes?’ He holds out the packet.

This is bad; people are turning round and looking at them.

‘I said, where is your permit to trade? Are you deaf?’

The soldier snatches the cigarettes and stuffs them in the front of his combat jacket, his eyes dancing greedily over Gabriel’s sacks.

‘Ah, Monsieur Le Directeur …’

‘Hey, you sound Hunde! Are you Hunde?’

‘Err, no, I …’

‘Hey, he’s Hunde!’ the man calls to the other soldiers in the market and they start moving towards them. A crowd is forming around them, a sea of angry faces straining for an outlet for their misery.

The soldier is right up close to him – he’s big and his face is dark with anger. He shoves Gabriel in the chest. ‘You are Hunde and you come into my market with no permit to trade!’

The crowd gives an angry growl; they are mainly Shi people like the soldier.

‘We are confiscating your property!’ He grabs the handlebars of the tshkudu.

‘Hey! That’s mine!’ This can’t be happening, it’s all his worldly wealth.

The crowd closes around Gabriel, sensing his weakness. A hand shoots out and grabs a sack.

‘Hey, get off, that’s mine!’

Gabriel’s face is contorted in desperation and fear. He is surrounded; he tries to pull the handlebars back from the soldier and pushes a woman grabbing at his goods at the same time. She shrieks and slaps him across the face.

The petrol vapour ignites in a flashover.

The crowd roars and a frenzy breaks out. The soldier brings up the butt of his rifle and smashes it into his face. His nose breaks and blood gushes down his front. He falls backwards and the crowd punch and kick him.

His scooter falls over and there is a mad scramble as people yank open sacks and clamber on top of each other to get at the goods on the ground, shouting, screaming and clawing. Combs, batteries, cigarettes, condoms scatter everywhere. His bamboo display table is smashed to pieces.

Gabriel curls up in a ball on the ground, his arms over his head. He’s in the middle of a tornado, a mad whirl of screaming, kicking, spitting mayhem. Blows rain down on his arms, head, back and legs. Every part of his body is being battered.

Through it all the pain is still mind-shattering, it feels like his face has been smashed into the back of his head.

This is it … I’m going to die.

And then it stops.

The fire burns out as quickly as it started. The mob vent their anger, tear him down to their level of misery and then just as quickly lose interest in him and drift back to looking at the piles of bananas and tomatoes.

One of soldiers puts his heavy black boot on the side of his head and presses it down into the earth. He tastes the mud in his mouth mixed with the metallic tang of his own blood.

‘That will teach you to come into an authorised area without a permit from the Person Responsible! You have learned your lesson today!’

The soldiers pick over the remains of his stock but everything has either been stolen or smashed – someone has even wheeled the tshkudu away. The troops look at Gabriel’s inert body lying in the mud, laugh and wander off, lighting up some of his cigarettes.

He lies still for ten minutes, dazed and winded with broken fingers, busted lips, cracked ribs and a broken nose. People walk past him and carry on chatting. He doesn’t exist. They don’t see weakness: after decades of fighting and lawlessness there is no pity left in Kivu.

Slowly he pulls his hands away from his head and looks out. One eye is closed from a kick and his whole face is swelling from the rifle butt. He sits up, sways and looks around. Painfully, he eases himself up onto one hand and then gets his legs underneath him and creaks upright, his back bent from a kick in the kidneys.

He keeps his eyes down on the ground and shuffles away from Pangi market towards the trail he came in on, his clothes ripped and covered in blood and dirt. It is going to be a long and painful walk back to the refugee camp.

What will he say to Eve when he gets there? He has lost everything. What will she think of him now?

As he shuffles past the soldiers sitting on the log one of them is trying to make his transistor radio work but it has been trodden on. He gives up, throws it on the ground, smashes the casing with the butt of his rifle, pulls the batteries out and pockets them.

They don’t even look at him as he staggers past.

Chapter Five

‘You stink of piss.’

Eve’s older sister, Beatrice, looks at her askance and waves the flies aside that are buzzing around them.

Eve’s pagne is soaked in urine and the wetness has spread up through the cloth and into the waist of her tee shirt. She has no more clean clothes to wear; she has gone through all the ones given to her by her family in the two weeks since the rape. She feels dirty and uncomfortable, she is wet when she lies down to sleep at night and she is wet when she wakes up in the morning. The smell of sour piss is the constant companion in her life now.

Her rape was violent, involving four men and the barrel of a rifle; the metal foresight cut her deeply. It is part of the practice of warfare in Kivu province, an attempt to destroy women and smash the society they traditionally hold together. It has left her with a fistula, a tear in the wall of her vagina into her bladder so that urine constantly seeps out.

Her family look after her but their patience is finite – many victims of rape are rejected by their husbands and thrown out of their houses. She feels lucky that her family has not done that. She is broken and ruined and knows that it is her fault. Eve’s head sinks lower and she shuffles away from Beatrice.

Where is my baby?

The thought recurs in her mind at least once a minute.

The two women are squatting on the ground on a low rise overlooking the refugee camp, rows and rows of palm-leaf shelters, covered in white plastic sheeting in a sea of dark brown mud. It is morning, with a cold, grey overcast sky, there is dew on the ground and people’s breath smokes. They hear the chopping of wood, a babble of voices, the hawking and spitting of old men. It smells of mud, shit and wood smoke from the cooking fires.

People are packed into the view everywhere, clothed in a clashing kaleidoscope of patterns: red, yellow, blue, green, tartans, stripes, every possible combination of brash local styles and Western cast-offs.

Women wash naked children as they stand in battered metal bowls, making them blow their noses into their fingers and then deftly flicking away the snot. Older people stand around in groups with their arms folded and talk quietly, the men dressed in tattered old suit jackets to try to maintain some dignity. They look gloomily at what their lives have become: forced by the endemic warfare from their home villages into the camps, they cannot work and have no control over their destiny.

Everywhere there are kids, running around the shacks, playing, laughing and chattering. For them this is normal life, it’s what they have grown up with. They are dressed in rags, adult tee shirts that are stained and ripped and drag in the mud. All are barefoot, their feet and ankles covered in purple ulcers from cuts that weep pus. It is a noisy, hectic, dirty place to live.

Worst of all though is the fear. They have food from the UNHCR and other NGOs but they have no law and order and the constant uncertainty is etched in deep worry lines on people’s faces. Militia groups can wander in from the bush at any time, just as the Kudu Noir did with Eve.

They have no protection from them. The Congolese army, the FARDC, all are as bad as the militias, which is what they were before they were put into another uniform and then not paid by the central government. As former President Mobutu famously said to those generals who asked him for salaries: ‘You have rifles, why are you asking me for money?’

Rape is another one of the FARDC’s specialities. As for the police, the PNC, they don’t get out this far into the bush; they stay in the towns and anyway are just unpaid bandits who live on bribes.

When the Kudu Noir had finished with her, Eve couldn’t walk. She crawled under the piece of corrugated iron that had been her front door to hide. It did then provide some protection for her; to cover their tracks the Kudu Noir fired a white phosphorous mortar over where they had been – the airburst shell split the night with a white flash and showered burning pieces of felt soaked in the chemical. The ground around her was covered in an impossibly bright light that spewed white smoke. Wherever the pieces touched huts they burst into flame. Peering out from under the metal sheet she could see figures running around lit by orange flames and the banana palm leaves on the edge of the camp twisting in the heat.

Her hut was burnt to cinders and with it all her possessions: a short-handled hoe for tilling her vegetable patch, a plastic basin for washing, a metal cooking pot, two pieces of pagne cloth, a comb, a small piece of soap, some dried cassava, three cooking utensils, a candle stub, a tee shirt. That was it, that was her life.

Eve gets up and moves painfully away from her sister. She thinks about her boyfriend Gabriel: what will he say when he gets back from his trading trip? Will he reject her like her husband?

She rubs her forehead as if she has a terrible headache.

Where is my baby?

Fang stops shouting into his BlackBerry, hangs up and returns to his armchair, facing Alex as if nothing has happened.

He shakes his head. ‘I have a steel shipment on a freighter getting into Port Sudan and the harbour master is a pain in the ass. We pay him too much already and he wants more – we go to Mombasa if he don’t like it.’

Alex feels slightly bemused by this but doesn’t show it. ‘You were saying about the Rwandan involvement in the project?’

‘Yes, it’s delicate because they carried out massacres in Kivu when they invaded it in the main war between 1997 and 2003. So the people there hate them and they can’t send troops back in on a permanent basis. That was a big part of the international treaty at the end of the main war, that all the eight countries involved would get their troops out of Congo.’ He shrugs. ‘There are no good guys in Kivu. So now they have to try this.’

‘So what is “this”?’

‘Well, they have agreed to provide logistical support for the military operation from Rwanda. Because of the international pressure they have been under in the past and their activities in Kivu, the Congolese would not accept them just sending troops into Kivu on a long-term basis. They have been very clear about this in our negotiations.

‘We are envisaging a large Battlegroup operation that cannot just appear in Kivu – it will have to be established in secret in Rwanda first and have a supply chain running through there to the Kenyan ports.’

Alex nods. His military mind is attracted by the idea; it sounds feasible. Suddenly he stops himself.

What the hell are you doing? This is not something you are going to get involved in.

He throws out more objections to try to rubbish the plan.

‘OK, but what about the UN? I mean, they have substantial forces in Kivu and they are not just going to say OK to this sort of deal. It is unprecedented in modern times; the US will go mad on the Security Council. They can’t just let China grab a chunk of the middle of Africa.’

He looks at Fang in exasperation, sure that he has found a way to stop the flow of smooth certainty.

Fang nods to acknowledge the point but continues undaunted.

‘Yes, you are right, there are about five thousand UN troops there but the Congolese government won’t tell the UN in advance of the deal. In terms of the UN troops, they are allowed into a country only at the invitation of that country’s government, they don’t invade places. The Congolese president will simply withdraw their invitation as part of the lease agreement and they will be confined to base and then have to leave. It will just be presented as a fait accompli and there is nothing that the UN or the US will be able to do about it. If a sovereign state decides to lease some of its territory then it can do it.

‘You are right though – they won’t like it. But China and Russia will veto any action that the US want to take through the Security Council. The Americans don’t have any troops anywhere near the area; there is nothing they can do about it. The Congolese President will issue a decree and sign the province over to us and then it is Year Zero for the Republic of Kivu. We’ll have free range to start again and build a new country.’ He shrugs. ‘Although we may keep some UN troops on to continue policing work – we will see how it goes because they could be useful. No one in Kivu is very keen on them. They have been there since 2003 and they haven’t stopped the fighting. They stop it blowing up into an international war but they have been pretty ineffectual at bringing law and order. The province is just a series of fiefdoms run by different local groups.’

At this point Alex gets annoyed. ‘Well OK, but what about the local people? I mean, have you consulted them about this?’

Fang makes a moue but continues, ‘Well, the project is being developed with local political partners, the whole government will be run by them. We have found a local politician without links to any of the militias and he has agreed to be our front man.’ He looks at Alex pointedly and then adds, ‘I mean, you have to be realistic here, Mr Devereux – there really is very little government in Kivu. That’s the problem. There is some control in the areas around the main towns but outside that it is anarchy. There are thousands of rapes there every year. For most people government just doesn’t exist. This operation will establish law and order and give them the hope of a bright economic future.’

Alex sighs: he isn’t getting very far with puncturing the plan. He holds up his hands in acceptance of this.

‘All right, all right, I accept all that. But why does China want to be there in the first place? I mean, if it’s so awful?’

‘Ah, well. You see, you have a very Western view on Africa. Your media portrays it only as a basket case, a land of poverty and starvation or, even worse, a place full of smiley people who dance a lot.’

Alex has to nod ruefully; the shallow and patronising nature of most Western media coverage of African issues is a bugbear for him.

‘But in China, we see Africa as a long-term investment opportunity. The main thing we want in Kivu are minerals. The trade in tin, gold and coltan is worth about two hundred million dollars a year at the moment because it is all artisanal mining, just guys with hammers and spades. But once we get in there and mechanise it, it will be worth billions.

‘The main mineral we want is coltan: columbite-tantalum. We need the tantalum for pinhead capacitors in things like mobile phones, laptops and game consoles.’

Fang grins, thinking about the future. ‘When we get going, the profit margins will be immense! But apart from that, we have big plans to develop the agriculture export trade in Kivu. It’s very fertile and has a great climate. We want to use Goma airport as an export hub for cut flowers, fruit and veg to the Middle East and Europe. We’ll come to rival Kenya pretty quickly and the return on capital will be very attractive.

‘The other big draw for us is that we are building the Chinese corridor from Tanzania to Sudan, up through the middle of Africa to open the whole continent up to trade, and we can’t put the railway through Kivu at the moment because of the fighting so we need to pacify the province first.’ He grins and points at Alex. ‘That’s your job, Mr Devereux.’

Joseph has just raped a woman.

He has never had sex before and is not sure what he thinks about it. His confusion is not helped by the fact that he is drunk on home-brewed beer. He staggers back across the bumpy ground following Lieutenant Karuta towards the firelight. It is dark and the FDLR troops have made a big campfire in the centre of the village to accompany their ongoing celebrations. He can see figures around it silhouetted in the firelight and hear them singing and shouting.

Everyone in the platoon is drunk, they have been eating and drinking all afternoon, stuffing themselves after months hiding out in the deep bush in western Kivu province.

Joseph stumbles along, doing up his trousers. Lieutenant Karuta regards what has just happened as a rite of passage for an FDLR soldier and led the initiation on the woman that he had hamstrung in the maize field in the morning. She had only crawled a few hundred yards by the time they got to her in the evening and it was easy to follow the marks on the ground and the bloodstains smeared on the maize stems. More men are finishing their business behind them.

They rejoin the main group and the men leer and wink at Joseph. He’s the youngest in the platoon and a new recruit. He’s a rather gormless-looking boy, heavily built and with shaggy hair from months in the bush. They giggle and pass him a gourd; he sits down on a log looking dazed, drinks deep and then stares into the bonfire.

After a while, the initiation continues – they blindfold him and make him walk around the fire. The soldiers have fun shouting and pushing him about and he feels scared.

‘Now you do target practice, boy!’

‘What?’

He feels Lieutenant Karuta’s hot, sweaty arm around his shoulder and his beery breath in his face. ‘Come on, you fought well today but you need to learn how to fight better.’

He leads Joseph away from the fire and then a rifle is shoved into his hands. He fumbles around, gets hold of it properly and slips his finger onto the trigger.

‘Whoa, whoa! Careful!’

Men around him laugh.

‘I can’t see.’

‘Doesn’t matter, just point the gun here.’

Karuta’s rough hands guide his so that the rifle is pointing slightly downwards.

‘Now select automatic.’

He clicks the small lever on the casing downward, proud that he can do it blindfold.

‘OK, now give it the magazine.’

Joseph pulls the trigger and thirty bullets blast out.

A howl of laughter goes up around him and Karuta claps him on the back.

‘Heh! Well done, Hutu boy!’

Joseph grins, not sure what he has done, and tentatively pushes up the blindfold.

Sitting on the ground in front of him with her back propped up against a log, her hands tied behind her and a rag stuffed in her mouth is the woman from the maize field. Her body is riddled with bullet holes, her face looks ridiculous with the mouth wedged open with rags but there is an expression of terror frozen in her eyes.

Joseph stares at her aghast.

Karuta carries on laughing. ‘You see how easy it is to kill someone! Come on!’ He throws his arm around him again and wheels him back to the fire where there is another huge cheer as he stumbles in.

Joseph is numb.

‘Hey, come on!’ Karuta shakes him and starts singing a war song to get him over it. He jabs his rifle in the air and shouts at the men to get on their feet. They all jump up, grab their rifles and start jogging on the spot, shaking their rifles in time. Their black faces gleam silver with sweat in the firelight as they sing the words over and over again.

Hutu boy, why are you sitting down?

Kill your enemy!

Kwa! Kwa! Kwa!

They make machete gestures with their free hands.

Hutu boy, why are you sitting down?

Kill your enemy!

Kwa! Kwa! Kwa!

Chapter Six

Sophie’s car pulls up to the barrier and the soldier steps towards her window. He is heavy-set with a fuzz of stubble and a sergeant’s stripes on his uniform.

She winds down her window and he leans his rifle on the ledge.

‘Your papers! Where is your accreditation?’ he says in the aggressive, officious tones of Congolese officials. She smells beer on his breath. As he leans in to take the documents his wrist stretches from his sleeve and she sees he is wearing three gold watches.

Six other soldiers stand around the car. Their faces are impassive but their eyes flick back and forth watching everything, rifles held across their chests, fingers on their triggers.

Usually white NGO workers are regarded as neutral in the multi-sided conflict in the province and only get minor hassle for bribes rather than serious assaults. They float around in white Land Cruisers like some magic tribe with ‘No weapons’ stickers on the windshield (an AK-47 with a red cross over it) proclaiming their neutrality, but Sophie still feels nervous. The edge of the manila folder in her grasp is damp with sweat.

She opens it to show the sergeant. ‘All our papers are in order and we have our permit à voyager here.’ She shows him the document on the top of the stack in the folder.

He grunts in reply and takes it from her.

‘You are in a security zone, this is a military installation here!’ He points at the cement block building with a rusting corrugated iron roof and ochre paint that is flaking off like a skin disease. Bullet holes are dotted across the front of it and there is a larger one where an RPG exploded. Piles of rubbish and plastic bags are caught in the grass and bushes around it. The ground on either side has been used as a latrine by the soldiers and drivers. ‘You must park over there, switch off the engine and deposit the key with the security manager for safekeeping.’ He points to a teenager with a rifle. ‘I will confirm your accreditation with the captain.’

He snatches the folder away from her and marches into the building.

She glances nervously across at Nicolas who calmly reverses the vehicle and parks off the road where the teenager is pointing. He then reluctantly hands over the keys and they sit and wait in tense silence. Sophie gets out and paces up and down, glancing at her watch and the building. Nicolas leans against the jeep and lights a cigarette.

Five minutes later the sergeant comes marching back out with the folder and strides up to her.

‘There is a problem with your documents. You must come and see the captain.’

‘What?’

‘Your permit à voyager is not present, you must see the captain to explain yourself!’

Sophie is incredulous and stares at him. ‘My permit à voyager?’

‘Yes.’

‘It was on the top of the folder.’

‘There is no permit.’

‘It was on the top of the folder.’ She raises her voice and gestures at him in exasperation, trying to think how he could have missed it. She is tired, hungry, frazzled and desperate to get to the clinic. Her frustration boils over. ‘It was right there! I showed it to you!’ She snatches the folder from his hand, opens it and shows him the place where the blue document had been.

The sergeant stiffens and glares at her angrily.

Nicolas is suddenly at her side. ‘Ah, Monsieur le Directeur, can I offer you a cigarette?’

The sergeant brushes him aside and grabs the folder back from Sophie, jabbing his finger at her and shouting, ‘You are in contravention of regulations on a military installation! You must see the captain immediately!’

Four other soldiers run over and stand around him.

Sophie glares back at him, refusing to be intimidated. ‘We have vaccines – humanitarian aid – in the Land Cruiser that will go off in an hour’s time if we don’t get it to the clinic! This is for the children of the Congo! Your children! OK, fine, let’s go and see the captain!’

She marches off towards the building and the sergeant and the four soldiers hurry after her. He pushes in front of her as she gets to the door and then halts outside a chipped and scratched inner door. He knocks and then opens it and walks in, Sophie follows; she is so angry she is not afraid.

The room is bare with grey breeze block walls and a hurricane lamp hanging from the ceiling. The captain sits behind an old plywood desk which is empty except for an old IBM PC and keyboard with a power lead but no plug. He stares up angrily at the commotion of their entry; both the sergeant and Sophie’s faces are flushed with anger.

They both start talking at the same time.

‘Here is the illegal traveller!’

‘The permit à voyager was on the top of the folder! I showed it to him when he took it off me, you know you have it! I have vaccines to deliver in an hour or they will be ruined!’

The captain sits and looks at her insolently from his chair, head on one side.

‘We can issue you with an emergency permit à voyager for a thousand dollars.’

‘A thousand dollars! Jesus Christ!’ She looks at him as if he is an idiot. ‘We don’t pay bribes. Where do you think I am going to get that kind of money!’ She turns and points angrily at the sergeant next to her. ‘You had it! This is ridiculous! Can we stop playing …’

The captain bangs the table and is on his feet in one fluid move. He switches from angry insolence to rage in the blink of an eye. He moves round the desk to stand in front of her and pulls his pistol out of his holster at the same time. The gun suddenly looks very large and solid as he points it at her.

‘You are an alien travelling without the correct documentation! You are coming in here and making accusations against my men! You come in to my office and you do not salute me! Why do you not salute me?’

He slaps her across the face with his left hand.

Sophie is stunned. No one has ever hit her before or threatened her with a gun.

Her indignation suddenly turns to helpless terror and a feeling of total powerlessness. She has overstepped the magic line that surrounds white NGO workers, pushed her luck too far and broken the spell. She is in a small room with five large men. She now knows what it is like to be a local Congolese, totally at the mercy of the men with guns.

There is nothing she can do, no clever argument, no grand family connections, no degree from Oxford, no right or law that she can wave at them to stop them doing whatever they want to her.

Chapter Seven

The megaphone crackles and squawks, ‘Move up!’ and Eve dutifully shuffles forward in the line of refugees.

The local Red Cross worker at the head of the line wears a fluorescent yellow waistcoat over his white Red Cross tee shirt. He wears the megaphone on a strap over his shoulder, holding a clipboard in one hand and the microphone and a pen in the other. He looks harassed as he tries to tick people off his list and keep the food distribution session under control. It’s only a small refugee camp, at Ikozi in south Kivu, just off the road from Bukavu out to Shabunda, but it still has five thousand people and is chaotic.

A former headmaster who lives in the camp helps him by measuring out the rice from sacks piled on the ground into the battered bowls and tatty sacks that people have brought with them.

Eve never wanted this passive life and it still feels alien to her. She was used to the hard work of village life: cooking, washing, tending the family vegetable patch. She is just an average girl with average dreams: she hopes one day to get the money to buy a hand-cranked sewing machine so she can set up as a seamstress and repair and make clothes.

Life has been pretty hard to her so far though. Her first husband, Bertrand, left her when she gave birth to an albino baby, regarding it as unclean. Eve’s own mother had shrieked with fear when the baby had emerged and run out of the hut. Bertrand left to return to his home village and she hasn’t heard from him since.

Some people do want albinos though. Hundreds are kidnapped and murdered in East Africa every year, their body parts dried and used as charms: tied to fishermen’s nets in Lake Kivu to attract a good catch, ground into powder and sprinkled by miners on the sides of their pits to draw precious metals to the surface, strapped to the front of traders’ trucks to bring them good fortune on journeys.

Where is my baby?

The thought of little Marie cut up and used in one of those scenarios is too much to bear.

Gabriel is the only piece of good news in her life. He met her when he was travelling through her village and was fascinated by her calm manner. The other girls teased Eve about him because he was so ugly. He wouldn’t have been Eve’s first pick but, as one of her friends said, love is a choice as well and in her circumstances she had to be realistic.

Gabriel is certainly ugly and he scares her sometimes with his intensity but he does also make her laugh. He is always so intent on impressing her, going on about his grand plans, angry in his desire to make money. He talks about his schemes for hours, using terms he has learned and that she doesn’t understand: brand value, profit margins, return on investment. She just sits and looks blank as he rants at her.

After a while though, he eases up and starts talking about people he has met on his travels. She has never travelled outside her village, but he has been all over the province, to the main towns of Goma, Bukavu and Uvira in the south and even as far as Beni in the goldfields in the far north. When he relaxes he can make her laugh with his stories about scrapes he has got into and deals he has done. That’s when she likes him, when his big jaw opens in a wide white grin and his prominent stomach shakes with laughter. They used to sit on the bench outside her hut and laugh and chat.

She hasn’t heard from him in a while though; he is overdue from his latest journey. She wonders what has happened to him – will he reject her because of the rape?

‘Move up!’

She shuffles forward and the headmaster bustles around, directing people to fill up their sacks and watching carefully that they don’t take too much. She hands over the chit for her family and then heaves the sack onto her back and walks away slowly and painfully.

Alex is showing Fang back out to his chauffeur-driven car parked on the gravel drive in front of the house. The April shower has passed and they make small talk about the weather and the best route back to London.

Alex is relieved that the meeting is over; he isn’t going to take the mission but he feels strangely disconcerted and cannot work out why.

As he gets to the car Fang turns and shakes his hand. The two tall men stand facing each other.

‘I realise that Operation Tiananmen is very large scale and takes a while to get used to but I am confident that once you have had time to think about it you will want to be involved. It would be the largest operation you could ever command.’

Alex smiles politely. ‘Well, thank you very much for your time in coming here today to explain it to me.’ He shakes the man’s hand.

He waves the car off as it moves away into the distance down the mile-long drive through the parkland until it passes the beech copse and is lost. He turns and looks at the dogs sitting at the top of the stone steps – his father’s two black labs, Bert and Audrey, that he inherited along with the title and estate when Sir Nicholas died a little while back.

The dogs miss the old man but Alex doesn’t. His father had been another Blues and Royals officer, a cantankerous alcoholic who had beaten his wife and whose influence had blighted Alex’s career in the regiment. He refused to let Alex go to university, which in the army, effectively barred him from promotion to colonel. Apart from which, in the small and snobbish world of the Household Cavalry, the reputation of drunkenness attached to the Devereux name had always made it hard for Alex to prove himself in the regiment.

His father’s final summation of his career had come in an argument over the phone during which he had shouted, ‘If you hadn’t been such a fucking failure, the family wouldn’t be in the mess it is!’ Alex had been struggling to disprove this assessment ever since.

Although Alex bears a grudge against his father and the British upper class, he isn’t going to bear one against the dogs. They need a walk, having been locked up in the kitchen during the meeting.

‘Come on!’ he says and walks off briskly round the corner of the house to the rose gardens in front of the Regency façade. The shower has blown over a trellis and he fossicks about, tutting and putting it back up. After that he spends a while throwing an old tennis ball for the dogs and they tangle with each other on the lawn.

He looks out over the parkland and then walks back round, entering the house from the other end through the door on the terrace into the library that he uses as his study in the red-brick Tudor section of the house. His desk is surrounded with piles of old copies of the Economist and periodicals from Chatham House, Royal United Services Institute, International Crisis Group and other defence think-tanks. The dogs jostle after him, puffing and grinning and wagging their tails. Now he has got his meeting out of the way he wonders what he will do today.

Life proceeds at a pretty slow pace. The repairs on the house are nearing completion, paid for with the money from his last big operation in Russia. It had fallen into disrepair as a result of his father’s drinking but has now been restored to something like its former glory: the roof has been redone, the dry rot sorted out and the gardens replanted. He’s got a final meeting in Hereford with the English Heritage surveyor but that’s not until next week.

Alex stops and realises he really is feeling unsettled by the meeting with Fang. He was supposed to be the Englishman at home in his castle, lord of all he surveys, and yet on a personal level he feels unnerved.

It was like sitting in a room with a global business droid looking at him through the narrow metal vision slits of his titanium glasses. He was a commercial chameleon, with a different name for every market he operated in, a multi-tasking, open-sourcing, integrated business platform capable of working simultaneously in multiple time zones. The guy was ten years younger than him but he was the one driving the meeting, the man in a hurry who wasn’t taking any prisoners. If Alex didn’t accept the project he would just find another way – like his steel delivery in Port Sudan.

Alex wondered where did the business stop and the person start? The answer was nowhere. Fang was a money-making organism, unimpeded by morality or etiquette. He ate, slept and breathed money.

It wasn’t just the personality though. It’s the scale and audacity of the vision he presented that makes Alex feel old and out of date. He was talking about infrastructure projects to open up an entire continent. There was a tone of disdain in the way Fang talked about the Western view of Africa and how his was the new vision for the future.

And maybe he was right? Alex had done his best to trip him up but he hadn’t managed to even make him stumble; the businessman had it all covered.

But the idea was bonkers.

It was all very well being young and enthusiastic and having visions about new world orders, but Iraq and Afghanistan had shown very well how the law of unintended consequences came into play when you started naively messing around with other people’s countries.

Where was the exit strategy?

What the hell would the US and the UN say to it all?

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Alex pauses in thought and then turns and makes his way through the oak-panelled library, the dogs following him. He goes into the medieval hall and then walks across its huge stone flags and into the large archway that leads up into the fortified tower. This is the original part of the house from the time when the area was the lawless Welsh Marches, prone to invasions and cattle rustling from Welsh bandits across the border.

The eighty-foot-high tower has thick stone walls and he walks up the spiral staircase, stepping in the groove worn into the stone by generations of his ancestors’ feet. He is feeling disconcerted and defensive and somehow the tower feels the right place to be.

He walks up to the top, opens the narrow wooden door and stands at the battlements. The dogs accompany him and sit smiling up at him uncertainly. The various roofs of the house are below him with their pointed gables and gargoyles, the gardens, parklands and outhouses all clearly visible.

But Alex stares out over them at the magnificent green hills beyond.

The captain glares at Sophie, his eyes wide and angry; white spittle flecks his upper lip. She stares at the black hole of his pistol muzzle. It’s 9mm across but looks much larger.

The soldier behind her pushes her in the back with his rifle and she stumbles forward onto her knees in front of him.

Sophie is terrified and starts babbling, ‘I’m sorry, terribly sorry, Captain. It’s all a mistake, a terrible mistake. Forgive me please!’

The door behind her opens and Nicolas slips into the room, speaking quietly and with a large fan of twenty-dollar bills in his outstretched hand. He has hurriedly fished them out of the emergency stock that he carries wrapped in a plastic bag in the petrol tank of the Land Cruiser.

‘Ah, Monsieur le Directeur, here is the payment for the permit à voyager, our sincere apologies for forgetting to buy one before we set out.’

He proffers them towards the captain, keeping his eyes and head down. The captain looks down at him. The intrusion has broken the violent tension in the room and the money is what he really wants. Somewhere in the back of his head he also knows that killing or injuring a white NGO worker would cause a fuss and could get him into trouble.

His ego has been assuaged by the grovelling of the woman on her knees in front of him; she looks pathetic. Nicolas is also in a suitably fawning posture and he takes the offer of a ladder to climb down. He grabs the money from his hand. ‘Get out of my office! Your paperwork will be issued in due course, when we are ready. Wait in your vehicle.’

Nicolas hustles Sophie out of the office and hurries her over to the Land Cruiser with his arm around her. Natalie is sitting on the backseat looking anxious.

‘What happened?’

Sophie gets into the backseat next to her, white as a sheet and shaking. The American goes to put her arm around her.

‘I’m fine!’ Sophie pushes her away, forcing herself to get a grip. ‘I’m fine! We just had some issues, that’s all, they’re sorting it out. We just have to wait a while.’

With that she shifts away from Natalie and stares out of the window. Natalie looks stunned and gazes out of the opposite window. Nicolas sits in the driver’s seat and waits patiently. The soldiers have their keys so they can’t go anywhere. Time is running out for the vaccines but there is nothing they can do. No one can even bring themselves to look at the building, they are too scared of it.

After ten minutes of strained silence Sophie says, ‘I’m just getting some air,’ slips out, walks away from the car and stands looking at the view, feeling the gentle breeze blow over her.

She stays like that for an age, in a numb trance of her own thoughts. Time ticks on and the sun suddenly drops out of the sky; they’re on the equator and there is only a short sunset. It gets chilly straightaway at six thousand feet and she goes back to the car to get her brightly coloured Kenyan shawl.

Eventually at seven o’clock the captain has judged that he has inconvenienced them enough and the sergeant walks back over to the car with their permit tucked back in its original place on the top of the folder. He hands the keys wordlessly back to Nicolas who accepts them with profuse gratitude.

They drive away from the shabby little station and some of the tension drains from them. Natalie mutters, ‘Thank the Lord,’ but otherwise they don’t talk – Nicolas because he is comfortable driving in silence, Natalie because she is afraid of Sophie and is now crying quietly on the backseat, and Sophie because she is shocked but also because she is furious.

She is furious at the soldiers for their pigheaded, money-grubbing wickedness and contempt for the people of their own country. The journey has been a complete waste, the vaccines are lukewarm and she will have to explain to the local field workers that she has wasted their time and effort and made them look stupid in front of the desperate people who are crying out for their help.

However, she is most furious with herself. She can hear a recording of her voice playing in her head pleading with the captain: ‘I’m sorry, terribly sorry, Captain. It’s all a mistake, a terrible mistake. Forgive me please!’

Pathetic! Utterly pathetic!

She rages at herself, staring into the night as the car headlights swing back and forth following the road down to the clinic at Tshabura. The indignity of it; Cecil-Blacks were not born to grovel. It goes against every fibre of her being. Her family would be ashamed of her if they knew. She is ashamed of herself.

Yet she did it. The memory of what happened in the grubby little office will stay locked up with her never to be revealed to anyone.

They finally arrive at the clinic at eight o’clock. The local workers run out anxiously holding up lanterns to greet them. Sophie immediately switches back into professional mode, addressing the circle. ‘I’m sorry we are late; we were stopped at a checkpoint. I’m sorry, the vaccines are …’ She shakes her head and looks round at the deflated faces in the lamplight.

She tries to be upbeat. ‘Look, we can try again next month, I’ll get onto the UN and we’ll do it by helicopter next time.’

But they remain downcast; to her their expressions seem to say, ‘Hoping for anything in Kivu always brings disappointment. This place will never improve.’ She feels awful.

They drive the car through the high metal gates of the compound. Like any NGO facility it has items of value that could be stolen so it’s surrounded by rolls of barbed wire and there are two watchmen with old shotguns and machetes.

They have a brief meal of foufou, tomato paste and beer and then they are shown to their rooms. As project manager, Sophie gets the luxury of a room to herself across the other side of the compound, a bare, cement-floored place with a camp bed and a candle on a chipped plate.

She sits on the bed in the dim candlelight. Now that she is finally alone her deepest reaction to the turmoil finally comes storming out of her. It’s not that her pride and dignity have been offended – though they have – it’s the memory of her utter helplessness and loss of control that makes her shake with rage. She bends forwards and clenches her fists in front of her face until the knuckles go white. In her mind’s eye she can see the faces of the captain and the sergeant.

‘Bastards!’ she mutters through clenched teeth.

She is a humanitarian charity worker who has made sacrifices and striven hard to get where she is and is passionately committed to her work. She knows that if she had a gun and those men were in front of her now she would calmly shoot each one of them in the head and enjoy doing it.

Chapter Eight

Alex taps the end of a wedge into a log with a sledgehammer and then pounds away at it, swinging the hammer high and smashing down blows repeatedly with all his might.

He is splitting logs out on the estate. The wood divides neatly and the two halves fall over and rock back and forth on the ground until they are still. Alex stands frozen for a long time, looking down at them with the hammer still held in his hands, its head resting on the ground.

That evening he finds he can’t sit still in the drawing room by the fire and starts wandering around the huge, silent house. He opens doors into long-forgotten rooms and stands looking at the dustsheets covering the furniture, remembering scenes from his childhood.

Some of them are happy but a lot are uncomfortable: the noise of angry shouting and blows from his parents’ room, his father passed out drunk on the dining room floor with the dogs settled around him for company.

He walks around the main hall with its large portraits of Devereuxs hung between the high stained-glass windows. He stares up at the pictures: an Elizabethan knight with his head held rigid by a huge lace collar worn over a breastplate, a fleshy Georgian reclining in front of a bucolic scene on the estate, a pompous Victorian in a black uniform with his sword held stiffly at his side.

Communing with his ancestors, that’s what he’s doing. Reliving the sense of what it means to be a Devereux. Throughout the ages they were soldiers – hardly any merchants or lawyers and certainly no priests or artists. Active, restless, aggressive men who had served the Crown all over the world, commanding troops and smiting its enemies with sword and shot. The house is littered with relics from their campaigns, shields and spears from Asia and Africa.

His father might have been an ineffectual aberration but with Alex the genes are back on track. From his army schooling at Wellington (motto ‘Sons of Heroes’) to his professional career, he is an aggressive and successful commander of men. It’s what he does.

He looks at the dark doorway into the tower and crosses over to it, not turning on the light, he knows the distances. As he walks up the stone stairs each step becomes slower than the last until he pauses on a landing by a suit of armour and walks down a narrow, low corridor.

He used to play a game here with his sister, Georgina, when they were children, daring each other to come to this place. His hand finds the light switch and clicks it on. A weak bulb illuminates the short passageway.

Staring at him from the wall at the end of the corridor is a small picture, a foot high with a small title under it: Sir Henry Devereux, 1294–1356.

When Sir Henry had inherited the Devereux lands and title, they had fallen into decay and were under threat from the lawlessness of the times. He had immediately set about the problem by visiting every village in his lands and those just across the border from his and making a point of hanging a man in every one. From then on he was known as Black Hal and is still regarded as a bogeyman in the family.

The head and shoulders painting is by an itinerant Italian painter, with the crude flattened perspective of the day. It looks very formulaic and he is dressed in his armour in a very stiff pose. Even so, the artist has captured something about the man – there is a cold look in his eyes that warned of cruel violence if he was crossed.

Alex stands and looks at him for a while before switching out the light and returning down the darkened tower.

Eve’s father, Laurent, looks round the circle of men.

‘So, what are we going to do?’

He is fifty but looks seventy; his face is worn and creased like an old shoe. His eyes are rheumy and his voice rasps. He wears a tattered brown suit jacket, jeans and a grubby blue baseball cap and is sitting on a three-legged stool outside his shack in the refugee camp.

Sitting on logs and beer crates around him are the men of his extended family and in a half circle in front of him are the men of Gabriel’s family. Some older women sit on the ground behind them. A week has passed since Gabriel staggered back in from his disaster at Pangi market. He sits to one side of the circle, his face still horribly swollen, his body covered in cuts and bruises.

The two families have come together to discuss what to do with him and Eve. She is squatting behind the shack with her two sisters as her fate is decided.

Laurent scans the ring of fourteen older men around him looking gloomy and awkward, holding their chins in their hands. Their faces are lined with fear from the perpetual uncertainty that they live with and their skin is grey rather than black from lack of food. Kivu has rich soils and high rainfall but no one can grow any proper crops because they never know when the militias will come and steal them, so they subsist on cassava – easy to grow but nutritionally poor.

No one wants to respond to Laurent’s question but Gabriel’s uncle Alphonse is famously tactless. ‘Well, it doesn’t look good for her. I mean, first she produces a muzunga and then she gets raped. I think she’s cursed. Why else did the Kudu Noir come for her? Evil attracts evil, that’s what I say. Besides she stinks of piss.’

There is outraged murmuring and head-shaking from Eve’s family but none actively disagree with him: he has said what they are all thinking. She is a burden on them with her wound.

Gabriel clears his throat. Since he heard the news about her rape, he has been thinking about something and knows he has to come out with it now.

‘Well, I want to get married to her.’

‘What!’ There is an outburst from his family.

His father, Bertrand, turns and looks at him. ‘What do you mean, you stupid child? She’s been raped, she’s probably got HIV! She leaks piss the whole time. How can you marry a girl like that?’

Gabriel knows it is a ridiculous idea but since he saw her after it happened he has been mixed up with conflicting emotions. He feels a failure for losing all his money but he feels that he can still give her love to make up for the wrong that has been inflicted on her. He is young and strong, he will make it work. Someone will show compassion in this country.

He has been thinking it through and has some answers for his father. ‘We can send her to Panzi hospital.’

‘What?’

‘It’s that place in Bukavu where they stitch up rape victims. They can test her for HIV and if they can stitch her up then we can get married.’

‘Oh, and how much is that going to cost? You haven’t got any money, if you hadn’t noticed!’ The loss has had to be shared by Gabriel’s family who are very angry about it.

Eve’s father senses he is onto something here though. Normally they would have to pay a dowry to marry her off anyway, and they know she is damaged goods, so this might be a way out of the problem.

‘Well, we can give some money,’ he suggests. He looks round at his male relatives. They look unenthusiastic but they don’t disagree.

‘Yes!’ Gabriel is encouraged. ‘We could split it – if they give half then I’ll get the other half.’

‘And how are you going to get that? You haven’t got any stock left.’ His father is always hard on him. But his father is also right, his capital has been wiped out.

However, Gabriel has been thinking of something else radical whilst he’s been lying in his hut recovering.

‘I’ll go to the mines! I’ll make a packet there!’

There’s an intake of breath around the circle.

His father looks at him. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, people die in the mines the whole time! The militia will just steal your money.’

‘Well, it’s dangerous everywhere, isn’t it!’ Gabriel glares back at him and jabs a hand towards his bruised and cut face.

Bertrand grumbles and looks down.

Alex wakes up in the morning after his evening of communing with his ancestors and knows that he will make the decision to call Fang.

As soon as he heard the idea of the mission, a certainty arose in his mind that he shouldn’t do it and yet in exactly the same instant another feeling arose in his heart that he would do it. It was really just a matter of time until his rational side came up with a series of arguments to justify the decision.

Who was he trying to kid that he would be happy living the rest of his life as a provincial gentleman, fossicking around in the rose garden pinning up trellises?

Sure he has all the money he needs now but that hasn’t proved to be the point. His dream of domestic contentment is eluding him like smoke: the more he frantically tries to grasp it, the more it dissipates.

Instead, what he finds is that whenever he sits still his cloud of personal demons settles on him like horseflies, biting and goading him to move on. Is this some curse of the Devereuxs? The restlessness that drove his father to drink?

He remembers a line from Latin lessons at school. In The Aeneid it is said of Achilles: ‘His fame and his doom went hand in hand.’

Is that him? Driven on by an aggressive nature, an illustrious history and a need to compensate for the failings of his father, into ever-greater acts of daring that will eventually undo him?

He lies in bed and thinks, ‘Am I afraid of peace? Why must I always be at war?’

In the end he is just like Black Hal, an aggressive character with a need to offset his internal conflicts by imposing control on external anarchy. Kivu will be a brave new world and his personal salvation all rolled into one.

Alex gets up, goes for his run and thinks about the problem as he slogs up a hill.

What was it that Camus said? ‘All great ideas have absurd beginnings.’ They all sound ridiculous when you first hear them because they are so radically different from what has been before. But after the idea has been implemented it becomes the orthodoxy and no one can think of doing it any other way. Maybe Fang’s vision is the new world order for developing countries.

He could call Yamba or Col and just discuss it? They are his two partners in Team Devereux, the mainstays of his military operations. Both are in their late forties so in their company it is Alex who is the young challenger. Yamba Douala is a tall, severe-looking Angolan who fought for the legendary South African 32 Battalion in the long bush war in his country. He is a thinker, he wanted to be a surgeon when he was a boy and is currently using his money from their last operation to set up a health clinic back in his home province in Angola.

Colin Thwaites is a short, aggressive Northerner, formerly a sergeant major in the Parachute Regiment’s elite Pathfinder unit. He is currently using his money from their last operation to get drunk in a large house he has bought for himself outside Blackburn where he grew up.

As Alex comes back down the hill towards the house, he finally resorts to the lowest common denominator approach to the problem.

‘If the Chinese don’t recruit me they will just get someone else to do it. The project is going to happen, so it might as well be me.’ It is not actually a logical argument but in his suggestible state of mind it works for him.

He showers, has breakfast and sits down at his large desk in his study. He picks up the phone and thinks whom he will call first.

Advice is what we ask for when we know the decision we are going to take but are not yet ready to take it.

Of the two men, Yamba is the more prone to hypothetical discussions. Col’s blunt nature means he needs to make a black and white decision on an issue in a maximum of three seconds and is usually pretty scathing about it when he does.

Alex dials a number in Angola and waits as it rings.

Chapter Nine

‘Hello, hello, welcome to Panzi hospital! My name is Mama Riziki and this is Mama Jeanne and Mama Lumo!’

The head counsellor, Mama Riziki, is cheerfully upbeat, an ample middle-aged woman in a multi-coloured dress and matching headcloth with a fake Louis Vuitton handbag hooked over her shoulder. She points to two similarly smiling women standing next to her. They are both brightly dressed ladies from the town of Bukavu up the road, unlike the four peasant girls that have come in to the hospital from the bush. Mama Riziki has been doing this job for years and knows that she has to cheer up these poor traumatised rape victims. One is only eleven.

‘So, ladies, we are here to make sure that you enjoy your stay at Panzi and you go home healed and well. Some people are here for over a year and we will all become a big happy family.’

Mama Lumo butts in, ‘Yes, and when you go home they won’t recognise you, because we will feed you lots of rice and you will get big and fat like me.’

The induction session is happening on one side of the main hallway of the single-storey hospital building. A woman patient who is leaning against the wall chips in, ‘Yes, look at my hair. My husband won’t recognise me when I get back. Mama Jeanne did it for me.’ She touches her elaborately plaited hair and they both giggle with glee.

Eve is sitting on a bench with three other girls who also arrived that day. They all have the smell of stale urine hanging around them and one of them is pregnant. Eve has been feeling very nervous and awkward and so far has only talked quietly to one girl called Miriam, but the typical Congolese banter is beginning to cheer her up and she smiles nervously.

It’s just what Eve needs to get her out of her shell-shocked, stigmatised mood. The taxi driver who brought her to Bukavu initially didn’t want her in his minivan and demanded extra payment because she was unlucky. He made a big fuss about getting plastic sacks put on the seat so she didn’t leak urine on it and no one sat next to her the whole journey.

But when the security guard shut the hospital gate behind her and she was inside the compound, Eve suddenly felt safe. It is the first time in years that she has had the feeling of being protected from the men with guns.

Mama Riziki is pleased with the girls’ smiles and beams back at them.

‘OK, so when you are under the care of your Mamas here you will do lots of things. You will help with cooking and cleaning in the hospital and we will keep you busy, oh very busy, with lots of courses. You can do bookkeeping or tailoring …’

‘Yes, and cooking with me …’

‘And I’ll do medicine and hygiene.’

The courses help to keep the women busy and heal the psychological wounds of the rape as the surgeons stitch up the tears and gunshot wounds in their genito-urinary tracts to stop them urinating and defecating uncontrollably.

‘We will always make sure you leave here healed and ready to go back to your families. Sometimes it does take one or two or maybe three operations before the tears heal but we will always be with you. Praise God for your arrival here today!’ Panzi is a Pentecostal-funded hospital and Mama Riziki prays over them.

Eve bows her head and prays hard. She knows her family doesn’t have the money to let her stay for more than one operation.

‘Yamba, hi, it’s Alex.’

A guffaw of delighted laughter comes down the line.

‘What?’

The cackling continues in such an infectious way that Alex starts laughing as well. Eventually, they both draw breath.

‘Alex Devereux,’ Yamba says his name and hoots again.

Alex grins and waits.

‘It’s good to hear from you.’

‘It’s good to hear you too.’

There was a pause as they both absorbed the pleasure of hearing an old friend’s voice after a long time. They have had only sporadic email contact since the end of the last mission.

Yamba is someone Alex feels at home with. It is an odd combination – public school cavalry officers aren’t often seen with Angolan mercenaries – but the two of them have been through a lot together. More important than shared experience are their shared values: a fierce, self-reliant professionalism offset by a black sense of humour.

‘How are you, man?’ Alex asks.

‘Yees, OK …’ Yamba says, smiling and nodding thoughtfully. ‘How are you?’

‘Yeah, OK.’

‘How is your hut?’

‘My hut? Oh, yeah, it’s good, thanks,’ Alex says, looking around at his house. ‘It’s got a new roof.’

‘Oh? Like a thatched roof or maybe some tin, yes?’

Alex laughs again. ‘Yeah, that’s right, I got a piece of tin from the market, fits really well.’

‘And have you got yourself a wife yet?’

Alex guffaws. ‘No.’

‘Ah, you are behind the curve,’ Yamba says with relish; he loves using new idioms that he has picked up.

‘I know, I haven’t even got divorced yet. What about you, have you got a bird?’

‘No,’ Yamba laughs. ‘I have taken up cooking and most African women think I am gay when I tell them I cook,’ he cackles. ‘But I have a little lady friend who I visit in Luanda every now and then.’

‘A la-dy …’ Alex says in a ridiculously suggestive tone.

Yamba laughs.

‘And how are the poor and sick of Angola?’

‘Oh, they keep dying on me.’

‘Oh …’

‘Yes, I shout at them and tell them not to but they just don’t listen to me.’

Yamba is known as a strict disciplinarian with the soldiers he commands. He joined 32 Battalion as a teenager after his family had been killed by the communists and rose to the rank of sergeant major in a vicious bush war. He always wanted to be a surgeon.

He was educated at a Jesuit school as a boy – was head boy in fact – and the religious order’s disciplined morality has stayed with him. He admired Father Joao’s tough asceticism and still has him in his mind as the epitome of what a real man should be. It all shows in his appearance: six feet two, lean, shaven-headed. His face is as daunting as a dark cliff with lines like rivulets worn into it by exercise, self-denial and hardship.

‘How’s the clinic going?’

‘Oh, OK, you know. I bribe the right people in the Ministry of Health, I argue with the right people in the Ministry of Health and sometimes we get supplies and sometimes we don’t. We’re not going to save Africa but I am racking up God points big time.’

Alex laughs. ‘Good works.’

‘Yes, good works. Isn’t Catholic guilt a marvellous thing?’

‘Hmmm.’

The laughter eases out of Alex’s voice as he gets to the point of the call. ‘Well, I have a good work in mind.’

‘Oh, dear.’ Yamba sounds amused.

‘Hmm, this is quite a big good work actually.’

‘Oh no, what are we doing this time? Haven’t we interfered with enough governments? You’re not on that again, are you?’

Alex’s voice begins to sound more serious. ‘Well, this time we’re going to set up a new country.’

Yamba stops laughing.

Smoke drifts across the forest glade, catching in a shaft of lemony morning sunshine. Otherwise everything is still and silent.

It’s just after dawn and the raucous chorus of birds has died down. The glade is surrounded by high trees and thick undergrowth, wet with dew. Two large mounds covered in earth, ten feet in diameter, burn gently and little streams of smoke emerge from cracks at the top like snakes and, in the absence of any wind, slide away down the slopes.

The charcoal burner stirs from under his shelter of white plastic sheeting and pokes a long stick into the bottom of one of the piles, checking if it is ready. He is of indeterminate age – he is so black and wizened by his trade he could be middle-or old-aged. He reeks of smoke and his eyes are red and rheumy. His body is streaked with smears of sweat-congealed black charcoal powder.

He’s been up all night tending to his two kilns. He has to heat the bundles of wood cut from the forest just enough to drive off the excess water – too much and it will turn to ash, too little and it produces unsaleable smoked wood. What he wants is that light, brittle residue that the women of Kivu use to fuel their cooking fires. The trade is worth thirty million dollars a year, wood in the deep bush is free and all he needs to do is to live in this isolated spot cutting trees and tending his kilns.

Charcoal burning is not a job for every man. The skills are jealously guarded and kept within a secret community; he learned the trade from his father along with many other secrets about how to communicate with the spirits of the trees and the animals that live in the forest and how to make charms for all of life’s requirements.

He picks up a spade and starts shovelling earth over the vents at the bottom of the heap to cut off the flow of air. The combustion inside the mound gradually dies off and the streamers of smoke emanating from it fade to wisps and then stop. He makes himself a cup of black sweet tea, finds a sunny spot and settles back to wait for one of the traders he supplies.

He dozes off but about midday a call from the bush on the slopes below him wakes him up and he hears the sound of a man breathing hard and the thud of his feet on the mud.

A bare-chested man emerges through the bush heaving his tshkudu uphill. The lean fibres of his chest muscles stand out as he pushes on the handlebars.

‘Ah, Antoine, good to see you,’ the charcoal burner says quietly and offers him a drink from his yellow plastic jerrycan of water.

Antoine smiles, takes grateful glugs, and then splashes his body and wipes off the sweat. He accepts a cup of tea and the burner asks, ‘So what’s going on in the world?’

‘Oh, did you hear about that riot up in Butembo?’

‘No.’

‘Oh, Socozaki was playing Nyuki System. Nyuki were losing two–nil and so their goalkeeper walks up the pitch and tries to cast a spell on the other goal. So all the Nyuki players go mad and have a brawl on the pitch and when a policeman comes on to stop them he is pelted with stones by the spectators.’

Antoine shakes his head. ‘So then the police fire tear gas and the crowd stampedes. Eleven people were crushed to death. What can you do?’

‘Eh,’ the burner agrees, ‘the goalkeeper should have been more crafty.’

‘Hmm. So how much for the bags?’ Antoine jerks his head towards the pile of grubby sacks.

The burner names his price and Antoine looks disappointed. Then he pauses and a sly look creeps onto his face. ‘Ah, but I have a present for you from the Kudu Noir.’

The charcoal burner sits up. ‘Show me.’

The trader gets up and pulls a bundle out of a plastic sack on his tshkudu; it’s about a foot long and carefully wrapped up. ‘Have a look, it’s the real thing.’

The burner opens it, looks inside and smiles slyly. ‘A girl?’

‘Yes.’

The burner nods with satisfaction. ‘That’s good, female spirits are more powerful. I’ll make the powder; the Kudus will be pleased with this. OK, so now we can trade.’ He also gets up, goes over to his shelter and pulls out a small packet of grey powder in a clear plastic bag.

The trader looks at it with bright eyes. ‘The real thing?’

‘Yes. It’s pure albino bone. Sprinkle it in a mine and the gold will come rushing to you.’

He rubs his jaw. ‘OK, what’s your price?’

Chapter Ten

‘You are joking, Devereux! You are joking! You’ve lost it, mate …Oh my God.’ Col rubs his forehead and draws his hand down the side of his face in disbelief. ‘Who d’ya think we are, the UN? We’re mercenaries, mate, not … whatever … nation builders or summat, you know the Red Cross, like.’

Alex looks back at him with a raised eyebrow. ‘Col, I’m not asking you to put on a nurse’s uniform.’

Col and Yamba are both in the drawing room at Akerley. Alex didn’t tell Col the plan beforehand: he knew this would be his response and is prepared to ride out the storm.

Col is five foot six and balding with his remaining hair shaved down to grey bristles. He has grim eyes, a small moustache stained with nicotine and tattoos of the Parachute Regiment on one forearm and Blackburn Rovers on the other.

Alex sits in the armchair and waits for the tide of scorn to abate; his expression is as calm and patient as Fang’s was the week before.

Col eventually sees this. ‘You’re not joking, are you? Oh Jesus.’ He rubs his face before trying again. ‘It’ll be just the same as when they went into Iraq and Afghanistan. You just don’t know what chain reaction you are going to set off. Better to leave well alone, let ’em stew in their own juice. If they want to fooking kill each other and run shitty countries then let ’em. People get the governments they deserve. All Africans are fooking mad, you know that!’

He looks at Yamba who keeps his face pointedly blank. This is a favourite topic of Col’s for riling him and he is not going to rise to the bait that easily.

Despite appearances, the three of them actually get on well together because they are all exiles from their social backgrounds, united by their sense of professionalism and dedication to each other. Alex’s troubled upbringing makes him loathe the rigid mental straitjacket of county society. Yamba was forced out of his homeland as a boy and has only been grudgingly let back in recently. Col should just be a Northern hard man but his quick mind was bored rigid by its staid culture and he sought escape in the army. He speaks good French (with a strong Lancashire accent) and travels widely in Africa to see his favourite bands. Despite his attempts to appear to the contrary, he is actually a book lover. He only learned to read when he joined the army aged seventeen, but since then he has devoured books. As a ferociously self-reliant man he likes the fact that he is never alone with one.

He points at Alex. ‘Mixing soldiers and civilians is bad news. You and I have both been in Northern Ireland and you remember what a bag a shite that was.’

Alex thinks back to his days as a junior officer on foot patrol with his men, slogging round council estates with bored youths taunting them and throwing bottles and bricks.

‘It takes very disciplined troops to do that work and I’m not sure we could get them in a mercenary unit. And you look at what happens when it goes wrong – Bloody Sunday, My Lai, Haditha where those marines raped that girl and shot her.’

Alex responds calmly. ‘We’re not going to be doing patrols in urban areas, it will be proper war fighting against the FDLR in the bush.’

‘Well, the UN is going to hate us; you know what they think about white mercenaries. They’ll get the ICC onto us or summat.’

‘We will be legitimate employees of the new state. Besides, we won’t be on show – the whole thing will be fronted by local politicians.’

Yamba sits and watches the exchange; he is wary of the scheme but open to discussing the issues. He is passionate about African politics and can see that the idea could improve Kivu and set up a new model for developing countries. However, what he is worried about is the look in Alex’s eye. He has seen that slightly fanatical gleam before – a cocksure, knowing look that concerns him. He sometimes wonders what makes Alex such a compelling commander, what gives him the mystical charisma that makes men follow him into battle. He’s not sure what it is but it works.

He looks at Alex now and asks cautiously, ‘Are you sure this isn’t so much about establishing the Republic of Kivu as the Republic of Devereux?’

‘You mean, is this just a monumental egotistical folly?’

‘Yes, is this just a toy country to play with, to set up a perfect world, the one we are always talking about?’

Alex looks away for a moment. ‘I know what you mean and we should be wary of that, but on a practical level I think it is actually a lot more doable than it first looks and I think it would benefit the people. Executive Outcomes ended the war in Angola as did the Paras in Sierra Leone; I think we can do the same.’

Yamba nods. Executive Outcomes was a small South-African-led mercenary army that had a huge impact in ending the long-running war in his homeland simply by being very professional and imposing order on anarchy.

Alex continues. ‘The UN has shown it can’t impose order in Kivu and the world community likes to talk about it but doesn’t actually do anything. They let five million people die in the main Congo war and no one really noticed.’

Col looks at the two of them and can see that Yamba is warming to the idea. What he hasn’t told either of them is that last week he was horrified to find himself opening a can of beer at breakfast. After his large payoff he has found himself living the life of luxury he always dreamed of, sinking into sloth sitting on the sofa in front of his huge home cinema screen, drinking Thwaites Original.

When he realised what he was doing he threw the beer can out of the window, ran upstairs, got on his running kit and went for a ten miler out on the moors.

He can see now that Alex has got ‘that look’ in his eyes and is committed to the plan; he doesn’t want to hear whatever objections Col has to it.

Col drops the scornful tone and slumps back on the sofa. ‘Look – I’ll do it, course I will, you know I’ll back you, lad. I just think we need to be careful, that’s all I’m saying.’

Joseph stands to attention and thrusts out his chest.

He is carrying a short-handled digging hoe in one hand and rests it on his shoulder in what he thinks is a military fashion. He is wearing shorts and is covered in mud and ash from burning and clearing a new field that morning.

His platoon is drawn up in three ranks of ten men in the centre of the village; they have just come back in from the fields and look a mess.

His platoon commander, Lieutenant Karuta, has also been working and stands in his wellies and shorts and a tee shirt in front of them. He paces around, looking annoyed, and thinking hard.

The soldiers stand to attention and eye him nervously; when he’s in a bad mood he can be a right bastard.

He turns to them and shouts in his most commanding voice, ‘I have had an urgent message from FDLR High Command.’

He takes hold of the bulky satellite phone on a strap over his shoulder and holds it in the air to emphasise the importance of the message. He’s worried about the order he has to give and is trying to emphasise that it hasn’t come from him.

‘We have been instructed to pack up and fall back to base in the Lubonga valley.’

A groan goes through the ranks of the thirty men. Karuta had told them that they would be staying in Lolo for months and they were looking forward to some easy times. They have spent the last week clearing and burning the bush to make fields and hoeing the land ready to plant extra crops. It’s been backbreaking work and now it seems it was all for nothing.

‘Hey, shut up!’ Lieutenant Karuta snaps and glares at them. They all drop their eyes. ‘I’m not asking your opinion! We have been given an order – a direct order! By High Command! We will obey!’

He was perturbed by the order as well – they had been told to scatter into the bush to avoid the UN forces but now they are being told to concentrate again. He was talking to another platoon commander on the phone who had had the same order.

The soldiers look glum but don’t say anything.

‘You will pack up your kit and be ready to leave in an hour; we will take the women as bearers. Corporal Habiyakare, go and get them ready!’

The corporal goes off with three men to where some women are tied up in a hut.

The lieutenant continues. ‘We have a journey of forty kilometres to get to Utiti.’ He points north. ‘We must wait there and they will send transport to collect us.’

One of the older men in the platoon asks from the back rank, ‘Lieutenant, why are we going?’

Karuta looks awkward. He hasn’t been told anything but doesn’t like showing that he is not in the command loop, so he just shrugs. ‘I don’t know, but there is a rumour from the government in Kinshasa that it will ask the UN to leave the province soon so I think the FDLR High Command want to concentrate our forces.’

He shrugs again and turns away.

The group of five men coming through arrivals at Kigali airport in Rwanda are an unlikely crowd.

There’s a tall, dark-haired man with a stern face, a serious-looking black man, a short balding man with a moustache and grim eyes, and a lanky Chinese businessman with a laptop case. The fifth man is middle aged and heavily built with a crewcut and a chunky gold necklace. He is pale-skinned and Slavic in appearance.

Arkady Voloshin is the other mainstay of Team Devereux. Formerly in the Russian Air Force he moved on to work for Victor Bout’s air transport company in the 1990s, running guns, diamonds, booze, cigarettes, TVs and hookers in and out of Africa. He is an experienced pilot of both fixed wing and rotary aircraft and has good contacts in the world of international arms dealers and aircraft leasing companies.

Since his last mission with the team he has bought himself a red Ferrari and been touring the south of France with some Serbian arms dealer friends. He spent a lot of time and money in Monte Carlo casinos where he took up with a French-Senegalese prostitute called Celeste who looks a bit like Naomi Campbell. She then ‘accidentally’ became pregnant and he now finds himself both married, a French citizen and a father of a baby girl called Anastasia. He’s not quite sure how it all happened but he does know that Celeste wants to remain in their nice apartment in Cannes and that she spends a lot of money.

Although the group in the airport look disparate, they are very at ease with each other and switched on, eyes scanning around the crowded arrivals area as they claim their luggage and move through the doorway into the large entrance hall in the 1970s airport.

It’s early May, a month after Alex’s initial meeting with Fang, and Team Devereux have spent the last two weeks holed up in Akerley brainstorming, planning the operation and writing their logistics wish list. They are here to see Rwandan staff officers to discuss this before heading over the border into Kivu to meet the local politician who will front the whole operation.

Alex spots a man holding a sign saying ‘Mr Jones’ in the line of people crowding along the rail awaiting the Sabena flight from Brussels and heads over towards him. He is a gloomy, dutiful-looking Rwandan in his mid-thirties, wearing casual trousers with a white shirt neatly belted in.

‘Good morning, Mr Devereux,’ he says in English and offers a soft handshake. He has a quiet voice with a heavy Rwandan accent and keeps his face still as he speaks. His eyes watch everyone very carefully as he shakes hands with the group.

‘I am Major Zacheus Bizimani of the Directorate of Military Intelligence; I will be your liaison officer for your visit. Please come this way.’

Like Congo, Rwanda is a former Belgian colony and French used to be the language of its educated classes. However, because of French support for the Hutus during the genocide, President Kagame cut diplomatic links with France, joined the Commonwealth and made English the alternative national language. All the signs in the airport are pointedly in English.

They push their luggage trolleys through and load into two unmarked minivans waiting outside with plain-clothes drivers. Any observer would say that they look like a group of businessmen arriving for a meeting.

As they drive into Kigali, the team scan around with interest trying to get a feel of the country that they will be working for. It is mid-morning and the sun is already high in the bright blue sky, the fierce light washing out the colour in the red soil of the hills around them, each one capped with a little white cloud. As with the whole Rift Valley, the area is at five thousand feet so the temperature is in the mid-twenties with a pleasantly fresh feel to the air.

‘All looks very neat, don’t it?’ Col says to Alex.

Major Bizimani is keen to reassure them that Rwanda is an organised country that will be able to cope with a complex military logistical operation and leans back from the front passenger seat. ‘Plastic bags are banned in Rwanda and every citizen has to do compulsory community work each week. President Kagame is following the Singapore model of development. It is all part of our Vision 2020 development plan for the country.’

‘Right ho,’ Col nods, looking impressed.

The road weaves between the crowded hills of the city and they arrive at the Top Tower Hotel with its ultra-modern entrance foyer and efficient red-suited staff. Yamba nods at a sign as they walk into the foyer and chuckles. ‘Five star. Better than we usually get in Africa, eh?’

They check into their five rooms, all on the top floor with views out over the golf course on the hill opposite, before getting out their laptops and briefcases and heading up to the Ministry of Defence building on a hill on the other side of the hotel.

Zacheus checks the vans through the heavily fortified gatehouse at the bottom of the hill and points to a soldier on guard with his rifle held rigidly in front of him. He indicates the soldier’s rifle.

‘You see the stencilled number there?’ Alex looks at the yellow lettering. ‘We know the number and location of every rifle in Rwanda. In Congo they don’t even know how many soldiers they have in the army. The government estimates between one hundred and one hundred and sixty thousand.’

The vans park in two reserved places in the car park at the top of the hill and the major then leads them through the manicured gardens and into the large complex of low-rise offices. Everything has an understated air of quiet efficiency and smartly dressed officers and suited civil servants move about purposefully.

Zacheus continues his propaganda. ‘President Kagame is the only African leader to have a Diploma of Management from the Open University in Britain. He is very opposed to corruption and it is punished very severely. All government employees must be at their desks ready to start work by seven o’clock in the morning.’

He shows them into a large meeting room and directs them to one side of a table; they settle in and get their laptops out. A minute later and seven Rwandan staff officers walk into the room; they are all middle-aged, reserved and wear crisply ironed dress uniforms.

Their leader, an austere man in his late forties, introduces himself in perfect English. ‘My name is Colonel Rutaremara and this is my Directorate of Logistics planning team.’

Colonel Rutaremara and his men take their time opening their briefcases on the table, carefully setting out laptops and piles of notes and aligning them squarely. Team Devereux sit and watch this slow process with interest.

The colonel eventually moves to stand in front of the large screen at the head of the table and fusses about with his laptop getting the PowerPoint slides correct. Finally he looks up and clears his throat.

‘My team and I began logistics work in the DRC during our first invasion of Congo in 1997 when we marched an army through fourteen hundred miles of bush, right the way across the continent and took Kinshasa, ending Mobutu’s twenty-seven years of rule. We believe we are practised in supplying armies in the field in Congo.’

Alex and his men nod appreciatively: it was one of the greatest feats of arms ever achieved in African history.

‘We then occupied Kivu for six years from 1997 to 2003 and have been engaged in military operations there since then. Our Directorate of Military Intelligence have maintained an excellent secret intelligence network in the province. A lot of this is using agents that are part of the charcoal trading network that crosses the forests along the border.’

Chapter Eleven

Eve is lying on her back on a gynaecological examination bench with her legs up in the air in stirrups.

Dr Bangana is sitting on a stool between her legs doing a preliminary examination. There is a cloth screen between him and her but she can see the top of his head over it. His short curly hair is speckled with pepper and salt. He trained as a gynaecologist in Paris, building up a healthy practice there and learning a lot. But he had to come back to his homeland because he also learned that he had a conscience. Now his voice is grave from years of dealing with terrible damage like that inflicted on Eve.

‘So, I know this is difficult but did they use an object?’

Eve can’t bring herself to reply and just sniffs but Miriam, her new friend who is holding her hand, whispers, ‘A gun.’

Dr Bangana nods and sighs, he wishes he could get the yobs that do this and make them come and see the results of their ‘fun’. But he knows he has no power to do so and that no one else in Kivu does either so he just forces himself to focus on repairing some of the consequences of the problem. He can do nothing to affect its causes. He continues examining her and Eve flinches as she feels the cold instruments poking around inside her.

Eventually he sits back and looks up at her. ‘OK, your wounds are stable for the moment; I will put you on the waiting list for a procedure. I’m afraid it could take weeks – we have a lot of casualties coming in every day from all over South Kivu and some of them require emergency treatment. The wall of the bladder is a very thin membrane and after the operation it will take a couple of weeks to see if the sutures hold and the tissue is able to heal.’

Eve and Miriam go out into the courtyard between some of the low hospital blocks and sit on the grass in the sun. Miriam gets out her knitting – they sit around a lot killing time – and they talk quietly.

‘So have you heard from Gabriel?’

‘Hmm, he passed a message through the watermelon seller at the gate.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He says he is leaving soon for the mines and hopes to make good money and that he will come and see me when he has paid off his family.’

‘Do you think he loves you?’

Eve pauses. Panzi is a wonderful peaceful environment to live in and she loves all the Mamas and Miriam but her other experiences have taught her to be circumspect about anything positive.

She shrugs. ‘He says he does. I don’t know if he will come, I’ll just have to see.’

A week after the meeting in Kigali, two Land Cruisers pull up in a meadow and Alex and the others get out. The jeep doors slam shut in quick succession and he is conscious that there is then absolutely no noise.

The group wander away from the cars stretching their legs and getting the feeling of carsickness out of their heads. It’s been a long drive up here from Goma – six hours to cover thirty miles as the crow flies.

Everyone stands still staring at their surroundings. They are in a sea of grass with an almost luminous green glow in the sunshine and everywhere they look beyond that are lines of rugged hills stretching away into the distance, each one more muted than the previous, all under a perfect blue sky, polka-dotted with white clouds.

Col wanders over to him. ‘It’s beautiful, reminds me of the Lakes in the summer,’ he says wistfully.

Zacheus says, ‘I’ll go and check they are ready for us,’ and walks off through the thick wet grass towards a hut by the stream.

They are in phase two of their reconnaissance mission in Kivu, and about to meet the local politician they will be working with in setting up the new state, although Fang has stayed in Kigali for more meetings. They have had a week of intense discussions. The Rwandans really do start work at 7am and seem to think it was normal that their partners should as well. They have made a lot of progress planning weapons, ammunition, supply bases next to the border, recruitment and training and getting the latest Rwandan intelligence on the distribution of the FDLR forces and the best way to tackle them. Evenings have been spent in team meetings in their hotel rooms preparing for the next day’s schedule and emailing contacts to get plans rolling around the world.

So it came as a relief when they could pack a rucksack and drive three hours west to the border with Kivu. The roads were all brand new and smooth; Zacheus pointed out the British Department for International Development signs on the roadside with his usual pride.

They went over the border into the Democratic Republic of Congo on tourist visas with Zacheus posing as their local Congolese guide. He dealt very efficiently in Swahili with the border police, bribing them only a part of what they were asking and quietly talking his way through the rest of their obstreperousness.

Going into the DRC was certainly a big change; from the land of dour but efficient Rwandans to the lively freewheeling chaos of Goma. ‘There is a lot of money in Goma but not much law and order,’ was Zacheus’s disdainful comment. ‘I was actually born in Kivu, I am Banyamulenge – that’s a Tutsi living in Kivu – but I think I prefer Rwanda,’ he said, with the first inkling of a smile they had seen all week.

The centre of Goma was scruffy and packed with rubbish and traffic, mainly motorbike taxis and flashy SUVs belonging to comptoirs, the middlemen who process and export the minerals. They threaded their way through the town and out along the shore of Lake Kivu, gleaming a glorious blue in the afternoon sunshine. They drove past many comptoir villas along the lake, swanky places with swimming pools and satellite TV dishes, shut away behind high security gates, until they came to the total tranquillity of Hotel Bruxelles, a large, elegant colonial era building newly renovated and with grounds overlooking the lake.

It was late afternoon when they checked in and only then did Zacheus finally tell them the name of the politician they would be seeing the following day. An intelligence agent by nature, he was under strict orders from Fang not to reveal the information until the last minute. ‘Dieudonné Rukuba.’ He said the name quietly. None of them had heard of the man.

In a quick meeting after dinner Alex issued a terse order. ‘Have a look on the net, make any calls you can tonight to contacts, get anything you can on his background. If we are going to build a country with this guy we have got to find out if he’s trustworthy. The British government thought Idi Amin was just the sort of chap they needed to sort out Uganda when they put him in power and we don’t want to repeat that cockup.’

In the morning, they left early and headed down the N2 main road, south along the western shore of Lake Kivu. That was the easy bit. It started getting tricky when they turned west off the road and headed up a track into the steep hills. After that it was up hill and down dale. Their two drivers, both Directorate of Military Intelligence agents living in Kivu, threaded their way expertly along the narrow muddy lane twisting through upland meadows and woods.

Having gone up over six thousand feet, they came down into a valley with a fast-flowing stream and drove through the village of Mukungu, a primitive and rustic place with wooden huts and cowsheds. The residents stared at the jeeps and white men as they passed; none had ever been seen before in such a remote rural location.

After the village they turned up another small valley into a plateau area of lush meadows where brown cattle grazed quietly.

Now, standing in the meadow, Alex knows they haven’t got long before Zacheus returns. ‘Anybody find out anything last night?’ he asks.

Yamba shrugs. ‘Only that he is a local Kivuan and runs a political party called the Kivu People’s Party.’

‘Ah well, I’m one up on you there,’ says Col knowingly. ‘While you were all tapping away on t’internet, I were in the bar and had a beer with this South African bloke. He were a Parabat and saw me tatt when I were leaning on the bar, see? Crap tatts, can’t beat ’em.’ He holds up his forearm with his Parachute Regiment tattoo to Yamba, who rolls his eyes. Parabat is the South African army’s Parachute Battalion, originally founded from the British army Parachute Regiment.

‘He’s been doing security work for a comptoir in Goma for the last few years, so we gets chatting and I says who’s this Rukuba bloke then? Turns out he’s quite a well-known figure in the province but no real power. Runs a sorta non-militia-based mutual aid society or summat. Does a lot a music with church groups. This bloke says he’s a good politician and seems to get on with most people, which sounds like an achievement in Kivu. Although he said he thinks he’s a slimy bastard and he doesn’t trust ’im. Apparently there’s some rumour that he was involved with something called the Kudu Noir when he started out in politics.’

Alex looks at him askance. ‘What the hell is that?’

‘Don’t know, some sorta bush cult, animist whatever, to do with the spirit of the land in Kivu. You know, all that usual bollocks.’

Zacheus was heading back towards them, taking long steps over the grass. Alex looks round his men guardedly. ‘Well, let’s see what’s he like.’

Gabriel squats down next to the broken moped at the side of the road. He’s on his way to the mines and met its owner while he was walking along.

‘Have you tried the fuel line?’

‘No, where’s that?’

‘It’s here, look.’ Gabriel pulls the clear plastic tube off the engine of the battered blue 49cc Peugeot Mobylette and sucks the petrol out of it; he’s always been good at fixing things.

He spits out the fuel and tastes some grit in his mouth. He tinkers with the carburettor and then says, ‘It’s just grit in the fuel, should be OK now. Give it another go.’

‘It needs a push.’

‘OK.’

The man gets on the bike and Gabriel puts his hands on the back of his denim jacket and pushes him down the road. The moped splutters and then coughs into life.

The man brakes and revs the engine. He twists around in the saddle and flashes a warm smile. He’s in his early twenties and has a kind, open face. ‘You want a lift? Where are you going?’

‘Sure. Thanks.’ Gabriel jumps onto the seat behind him. ‘I’m going to Lugushwa, to the gold mines.’ An uncle of his recommended it as the best place to earn good money. Gabriel has never thought much of the man’s opinion but he hasn’t got any better information.

‘No, don’t go there. Come to Mabala, it’s coltan and you get better rates because it’s underground not opencast. My cousin Vernon runs a tunnel and needs guys. Come on.’

That sounds like sense and Gabriel doesn’t need much persuading.

‘OK. I’m Gabriel.’

‘I’m Marcel.’

They shake hands over Marcel’s shoulder and then he revs up and the moped putters away slowly.

‘Why are you going to the mines?’ Gabriel shouts into his ear over the whine of the engine.

‘I’m a teacher but I haven’t been paid in six months.’ He shrugs. ‘You’ve got to eat and what other jobs are there? What about you?’

Gabriel is reluctant to talk about Eve and what happened to her. ‘Oh, I just need the money; like you say, what other jobs are there? Where’s Mabala?’

‘It’s in the mountains above Shabunda. It’s run by the FDLR.’

‘Is that OK?’

‘Yeah, it’s fine. They’re all the same, they all take pretty much the same cut.’

Chapter Twelve

Alex and his men walk up the hill towards their meeting with the politician who will lead their new country.

They cross a small stream at the foot of the hill and nod at an old man with a machete who stands guard outside a hut. He smiles uncertainly back at them.

They follow a muddy track as it curves up a large grassy hill. After winding around it comes out at the top into a farmyard of two large wooden barns and two cowsheds. A few farm workers stare at them, resting on their pitchforks. They cross over the muddy ground in the middle and walk towards the farmstead, a single-storey plank building with a wide veranda and lawn overlooking the valley they drove up. A hammock is slung between two trees on the lawn.

As they near the house Alex suddenly stops and listens. It is completely silent on the hilltop but he can hear the faint sound of a piano from inside; delicate, sparing notes that form a haunting tune.

‘That’s a Chopin nocturne?’ He looks at Arkady quizzically.

‘I don’t know, I’m Russian not Polish.’

Col shrugs. ‘I’ll take yer word for it.’

As they walk on towards the house, the music cuts off abruptly and a group of ten young children, scruffily-clad boys and girls, come scampering out of a door and run away, giggling and shouting ‘Muzungu!’ at them.

The men smile and Col calls back in Swahili, ‘Habari za mchana.’ They all know a little of the East African lingua franca and are used to having ‘Whiteman’ shouted at them in remote locations.

A tall, slim man in his mid-thirties comes out onto the veranda wearing traditional dress – a long white gown and white pointed leather slippers. He is smiling broadly and has a sensitive, fine-boned face.

‘I am sorry about the kids,’ he says in accented English. ‘I was just entertaining them a bit as we were waiting for you to arrive.’

He walks towards Alex with a dazzling white smile and shakes his hand firmly. Alex notes how his sharp facial features contrast with a shaved head and high forehead. He has long, fine fingers and his movements are neat and quick.

He shakes everyone’s hand warmly and says laughing, ‘Welcome to my humble abode. As you can see, I am just a simple farmer. Please come in.’

He shows them into a large low room with plank flooring and an old upright piano in one corner. They settle down around a white plastic garden table with white plastic chairs.

Rukuba sits at the head of the table and looks around at them, beaming. ‘Gentlemen, it is so exciting for me to meet you here today, I am so glad that you have come.’ There is an earnest pleasure in his voice and he sweeps his hand around as if he is speaking on behalf of the whole of Kivu.

‘Let me tell you about myself. Well, in the beginning I am a Kivuan, I am one of the people of Kivu. I am half Tutsi and half Nande, so I feel I represent both the Banyamulenge and the originaires.’ He presses his long-fingered hands to his chest and pauses for a moment.

His hands sweep outwards again and he continues with enthusiasm, ‘Our political organisation is the Kivu People’s Party. Unlike the militias and their political fronts we are deliberately non-ethnically aligned. We are a broad-based political group with a programme of pragmatic community activities, like building bridges or digging village fishponds, and we focus on raising awareness of issues such as sexual violence against women and livestock improvement. In so many ways we struggle to make the lives of the people of Kivu better.

‘But I am not judgemental; I talk to the leaders of all the main militias, I know the commanders of the FDLR very well. They are always giving me shopping tips for the best tailors in Paris – they tell me I should stop wearing these.’ He holds up his traditional robes and smiles at Alex’s surprised look. ‘The top commanders are very wealthy from their mines and they come and go to Europe a lot.

‘So, when I am not talking to them, I publicise our work through my radio broadcasts on UN Radio Okapi and through my music. I am so blessed by God to have a good voice and I love to play for the people in the churches – Catholic, Pentecostal, the bush cults, I don’t mind who. I play to bring the people of Kivu together, to try to heal our wounds and to bring peace at last to this land of such great beauty and yet such great pain.’

Alex finds himself being entranced by the man, his voice rising and falling, his hands sweeping back and forth like a magician’s and his face so sincere and expressive. He glances at the others and they are all staring at him.

He continues, ‘So, you will say, Dieudonné, all this sounds good, but you are not getting very far are you, my friend?’ He flashes his big smile at them. ‘Yes, I say, I regret that you are right. We have supporters throughout the country, I have good contacts with the charcoal traders, we know a lot of what is happening in Kivu, we have moral authority, we have soft power – but we have no real power, no hard power.’

He suddenly switches from a light tone to a fervent one and a vein begins to stand out on his temple. ‘So, as you can see, I live a simple life here in the heart of my country. Yet every day I feel its pain. When I travel around and I see the thugs manning the roadblocks, when I speak to so many women who tell me how they are dragged off and raped every day on the way to their fields, when I see the FDLR and the army brigades continue to grow rich on the mineral wealth of our land, oh my heart cries out! I long for something else … something else.’ A bright light of sincerity and conviction shines in his eyes as he looks round at them. ‘And that, gentlemen, is where you come in. That is why we are so grateful to you and my dear friend, Monsieur Wu, because together I believe that we have found a way at last, after long years of struggle, to solve the problems of Kivu.’

He looks at them with such searching honesty that Alex for the first time really understands the pain of the people of Kivu. Up to now it has been a challenge for him, a fascinating experiment in international relations, a reassertion of the Devereuxs’ role in the world, but he hasn’t really connected to the six million people who will be affected by what he is going to do.

Cousin Vernon is an intelligent, weary-looking man in his forties with a neat moustache, short hair and a chewed yellow Bic biro tucked behind his right ear. He’s wearing a mudstained tracksuit and anorak.

‘OK, I need two more guys! Come on, good rates, I pay three dollars a kilo!’ he shouts to the crowd of men milling around. It’s 7 a.m. and he is recruiting for the morning shift in his tunnel, which he has named Versailles in a bid to attract labour.

The miners range in age from teens to thirties. They stand around dozily on the muddy track leading from the manoir, the village where they sleep, up the hillside to the Mabala mine. The manoir is at four thousand feet so it’s cold and misty.

Gabriel can feel a light rain begin to patter on the hood of his cheap nylon anorak. He shivers, wraps his arms tighter around himself and shuffles his feet in his Wellingtons. Next to him, Marcel does likewise; it’s their first day at work.

Other tunnel bosses are hawking for labour for the day, shouting rates and proclaiming the virtues of the different seams that they are chasing deeper into the mountainside.

On the edge of the crowd are some FDLR troops in dark green rain capes that reach down to their wellies at the front and back. They are part of the Gorilla Brigade under Colonel Etienne and several hundred of them live in a base on a hill overlooking the manoir.

One of the soldiers hears Vernon’s rate and discusses it quickly with a friend. They unhitch their rifles off their shoulders, hand them to another soldier and stroll down to Vernon. ‘OK, boss.’ Soldiers need extra cash like anyone else.

Vernon nods. ‘Names?’ He whips his biro out from behind his ear.

‘Robert.’

‘Patrice.’

‘OK.’ He scribbles down their names in a little pocket book that he pulls out of his anorak. ‘You got your own tools?’

They both nod and each pulls three bits of equipment out from under their rain slickers: a short-handled masonry hammer, chisel and torch with a rubber strap attached.

Vernon writes a symbol next to their names and points. ‘Over there.’

The soldiers come to stand with Gabriel and Marcel and the other six men. They grunt a greeting and then Vernon comes over and they follow him and trudge up the hillside.

The Mabala mine is a huge hill of red mud that looks like it has been attacked by an army of termites. The green forest all over it has been chopped down and the hillside is littered with tree trunks and uprooted stumps. In between the patches of mist and drifting rain Gabriel can see the small entrances to many tunnels: Fort Knox, ATM, Golden Goose. Outside each one is a cluster of men; the night shift is coming out and their produce is being weighed and bagged up.

Vernon leads his new team half a mile round the side of the hill to Versailles. His nightshift manager is wearily bagging up the produce and they talk briefly before Vernon takes tools and torches off some of the workers and gives them to Gabriel and Marcel. Two small portable pumps attached to hosepipes leading into the tunnel whirr noisily next to the entrance.

Gabriel eyes the men nervously. They are covered in mud that has dried to a light ochre colour. As one of them wipes his forehead with the back of his rain-wet hand, he cleans a streak of dark brown skin in it.

Vernon gives them new batteries for the torches – ‘I’ll charge you for those’ – and issues each of them with a plastic sack stained brown with mud. Gabriel pulls the strip of black tyre rubber attached to it round his head so that the torch sits above his left ear.

Clutching their sacks with their tools in them, the men duck down and follow Vernon into the narrow entrance. The tunnel is about four feet high so they have to stoop and proceed in an awkward slouching walk for fifty metres. It slopes down, water drips on Gabriel’s head and it gets very cold.

Vernon leads the way and the others follow the wobbling circle of his head torch as it illuminates the wet brown rock. He stops just as the tunnel turns a sharp right. ‘OK, this is the tricky bit. To get to the seam we have to go under this outcrop of hard rock.’ He thumps the rock with his hand. ‘The passage is very small but it’s worth it when you get to the other side, the ore is very high grade. OK, Pierre will lead the way, come up.’

They flatten themselves against the side and Pierre squeezes past to the front. Vernon then crabs along to the back, and checks his watch. ‘OK, I’ll see you at eight o’clock tonight. Bonne chance.’

Gabriel watches the white circle of light retreat back down the tunnel and glances at Marcel who has switched on his headlamp so that it silhouettes the side of his face. He sees him shrug.

‘OK, follow me. This is scary but it’s OK,’ Pierre says in an unreassuring way. He crawls over to a muddy hole in the floor just wide enough for a man to fit into. ‘You have to put your sack in front of you, push it forwards and then wriggle on a bit. It’s about six metres to the gallery and the tunnel bends a bit under the outcrop. There’s a kind of sump at the bottom where the water accumulates but don’t shit yourself – it’s fine. Just keep going.’

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