It was far too late for me to jump. I saw Sam, far below us, on his knees beside the boy. Annabel lay motionless, face down in the scrub.
As we climbed, I saw Davy running towards them from his wagon. Beyond, burning wrecks sent plumes of black smoke into the sky. Bodies lay scattered below the Cobra two-ship that hovered to cover our withdrawal. Grey smoke puffed from their 20mms and the rounds bounced off the ground like hard rain hitting a pond.
I turned towards Standish.
He wasn’t interested in anything on the ground. He was already giving the general a slap on the shoulder and a big victory grin.
PART TWO
Cafe Raffaelli
Lugano, Switzerland
Thursday, 8 June 2006
1
There’s an entire street of jewellers and designer clothes shops in Lugano that probably shift half of Prada’s and Rolex’s annual output between them. You can positively smell the money walking along Riva Albertolli, or resting its rather large arse at one of the outdoor cafes beside the lake.
The small but perfectly formed city is in the south-east, Italian-speaking region of Switzerland, just ten minutes’ drive from the border. It’s unlike anywhere else in the land of Toblerone and tax-dodging; for starters, the mountains protect it from the north wind, so the place enjoys its own temperate microclimate. In fact, the whole place is Little Italy, from the frescos in the cathedral-sized churches to the brands of ice-cream sold on the palm- tree-lined boulevards. The only thing non-Italian is the driving. This is still Switzerland, after all.
Silky had been working at the Mercy Flight office ever since we’d got there. ‘It’s the only way I don’t feel guilty about my life,’ she said. ‘A year or two on the road, six months putting something back.’
Her office was as close to the Gucci quarter as the charity could afford so it could tap into some of that passing wealth. She and I had got into the habit of meeting for lunch at one of the pavement restaurants; she took an hour off from saving the world, and I took an hour off from reading the English papers and wishing we were back on the road.
We’d been in Lugano a month, and as far as I was concerned that was three and a half weeks too long. I wanted us to be in the Far East, India, any of the places we’d talked about. Maybe even back to Australia. I didn’t really care where, quite frankly, so long as she came with me.
She’d fucked me off on that idea for a month or two, but to make sure she didn’t fuck me off altogether, my Visa card had just taken a two-thousand-Swiss-franc dent – and all I had to show for it was a little box containing a billion-billionth of the world’s gold reserves and a diamond you needed an electron microscope to see. She often said that less was more, and I hoped she’d stick to her guns on that, but in any case, it was all I could afford. I needed to keep something back for my airfare to Sydney, and a few weeks’ pocket money in case there were no freefall meets and therefore no rigs to pack to make enough to live on. She had money, of course, but that wasn’t the point.
I’d been tempted to head straight from the jeweller’s to her office and get it over and done with, but quickly thought better of it. When it came to a sense of humour, there were some areas where she remained decidedly German. If I was going to sweep her off her feet, I had to do it correctly.
So I wandered down the road instead, bought a copy of
I ordered a cappuccino, put on my shades and got to grips with the day’s front page as the sun beat down on my neck. Same old, same old. Car bomb in Baghdad. Political scandal in Washington. And the big news from London? John Prescott playing croquet when he should have been running the country.
I couldn’t be arsed to read on. I put the paper on the table and stretched my legs and arms as I looked out over the lake.
There wasn’t a breath of wind: Lake Lugano was a mirror, reflecting the sun back at a cloudless sky. There had to be worse places on earth to sit and pass the time of day.
A gaggle of women walked past, heads under
More class than Zurich or Geneva, though. Not a scrap of litter on the streets or pavements, not a fag-end in the gutter. They had guys here whose only job was to water the public flower-beds. American universities and schools had sprung up, even a research centre for artificial intelligence. Whoever they were and wherever they came from, everybody was in town to either deposit cash or spend it.
A car horn blared. Riva Albertolli was clogged with Bentleys and Japanese tourists who’d just got off a coach and hadn’t worked out how to cross a street.
Lugano was small, just over fifty thousand people in the city proper, but it had its own airport, with frequent flights to and from other major financial centres, including the City of London. According to Silky, Lugano was where the Cosa Nostra kept their money. They had even built a school here in the 1980s during the Mafia wars so their kids could get educated in safety while they left horses’ heads in each other’s beds at home.
A coach the size of an airliner parked with a deafening hiss of brakes and ejected its payload of retired Americans. There was a tidal wave of plaid shorts, socks and sandals. Enough gold and diamonds dangled from liver-spotted wrists to pay off a developing country’s national debt and still leave Bob Geldof enough change for a haircut.
A plan started to form in my head. After lunch, I’d walk Silky back to her office, past the glittering display windows of the jewellery shops. I’d reach into my pocket, pull out the box, and say something like, ‘I’ve always preferred economy-sized, myself . . .’ Maybe I’d buy her an ice-cream at the place at the end of the street, put it behind my back, and say, ‘Which hand?’ I wondered how Hugh Grant would do it.
Twelve thirty came and went, and Silky didn’t call. I knew she was busy, so I didn’t call her. I ordered another coffee and decided to hit the inside pages.
There was an election crisis in Peru, and a hosepipe ban in London. Two volunteers with a medical charity had been kidnapped at gunpoint by one of the factions in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Nobody seemed to know why they were being held, and the outlook was bleak. None of the players up there was ever going to win a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The country’s name had changed from Zaire since I was there on the team job in ’85, but not much else. For over seven years, the Congolese had been involved in the biggest conflict the world had seen since the Second World War. Hutus responsible for murdering nearly a million Tutsis in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide had fled across the border to escape the avenging Tutsi army. Zaire had imploded from civil war and incursions by neighbouring states. Rwanda invaded again in 1998, sparking a war that, at its height, sucked in nine other African countries. Four million had died, and the rest of the world had barely heard about it. The only people who had were the medical charities, like Mercy Flight, who had guys on the ground doing their best to patch up the wounded and fucked- up.
The place was a nightmare for exactly the same reasons as it had been when I was there: greed, and the struggle to control the country’s vast gold, diamond and mineral resources. If it wasn’t rival groups backed by one foreign power or another in their fight to get their hands on the mineral wealth, it was people starving to death simply because they had fuck-all to offer – no diamonds, no oil, no crops – and, as a result, no money to buy stuff from the West. So we turned our backs. Sir Bob the Knob and Bono the Dog Biscuit did their bit, but they were pissing into a force ten.
