orders that if anything happens, to get down, stay down, keep out of fields of fire and shoot anything that comes at you. Bushbaby and Rose back-mark. Rose lets Dog off his leash to run ahead.
Every few seconds we turn and check that the faces beside and behind us are the ones we saw last time. The fog grows thicker. My shorts and top are silver with dew, but I can feel the sweat running down my sides. My saturated pack feels like it weighs eighty tons. My blisters are bleeding into my boots. My calves are wrenched with cramp from yesterday’s climb. At any moment, two hands may reach out of the fog and take my head off with a monofilament garotte. I have never felt more afraid. I have never felt more alive.
When I used to go out with Private Pete the Soldier, I would parade my offended Political Correctness when he hoped that his unit would get transferred to Bosnia because he wanted to see some action. I understand him now. My God. This place is turning me into a War Bore.
M’zee holds up a hand. Dog is standing five feet in front of him, hackles raised, lip curled.
I am in cover before Moran can wave us down. I roll into a water-filled channel where two strands of branch twine over each other. Something oozes from under my thighs. I don’t think about it.
M’zee and Moran go forward. Dog trots after them. They disappear into fog. I lie in the cold water listening for gun fire. It doesn’t come. I grow chilled. It must come. It doesn’t. It feels like hours, down in the cold ditch. A rustle of movement. I roll onto my back, grabbing for the Magnum,
‘If I were your enemy, you would be dead now,’ Bushbaby says. ‘Get up. We are moving.’
On Jake’s signal I unholster the camcorder and follow him in.
We find them in a small amphitheatre of dwarf hand-trees. The men have been crucified on the white fingers of the hand-trees. The women have been hung by their heels. The bodies have been stripped. All have been killed by a single bullet in the head. The bodies have been mutilated. The men’s penises have been cut off and stuffed in the women’s mouths. The Chaga has started to claim the corpses. The men hang like images from Medieval plague crosses: high-relief crucifixes half-fused into the flesh of the hand-trees. Gaping mouths, eyes staring out of the melt of flesh and forest. The women’s trailing fingers have elongated into tendrils that weave seamlessly into the web of cables and branch fibres.
Flies, and things like green thistle-down, rise in clouds as Moran examines the dead. He finds a tattoo on the ball of the first woman’s shoulder: an outline of a cube, the sign of Sheik Mohammed Obeid’s Children of the Hajji Cartel. He reckons they have been dead for four or five hours. It looks like they were surprised setting up an ambush for us. They were undoubtedly killed after they were strung up.
My berserker adrenalin burn has gone cold in my blood. War sickens me. There is nothing glorious about it, nothing noble. Just cruel and sad. This is a terrible place to speak your last word, think your last thought, breathe your last breath and know absolutely that the last thing you will see is the figure standing over you with the gun.
I keep thinking back to a boy in my class at uni. We were never friends, our social circles did not intersect. I only got to know him by the manner of his death. He had the worst death I can imagine. He was into cave diving; which is insane at the best of times, let alone the suicidal solo dive he made against all advice into the flooded tunnels under the Marble Arch cave system. He didn’t even learn when the piece of grit jammed a valve and blew all his air supply away and he only just made it back to atmosphere. He was certain there was an undiscovered major cavern at the end of the narrow tunnel he had been squeezing through when he got into trouble. He went down the next day to find that cavern. He never came back. They reckon the same thing happened again, but he was too far along the pipe to make it back. He died alone, under miles of rock, in the cold and the dark, knowing his air was bubbling away, knowing that he wouldn’t make it, knowing that the last, the very last thing he would ever see would be his headlamp beam shining on limestone tunnel.
The body’s still down there. It’s too dangerous to recover it. In water that cold, that far from light, it could remain intact just about forever, floating trapped under those miles of rock.
I had nightmares for weeks after I heard how he had died. It’s the scariest story I know, because it’s true.
I think of those three men and two women, dying alone, helpless, where no one will ever find them, where no one will ever know, and a shaft of ice drives deep into my soul.
Before we leave them, M’zee pauses to rip out a tremendous fingers-in-mouth whistle and yell ‘Wa- chagga!’ at the top of his voice. As we advance, he repeats the call. Eventually I distinguish an answering whistle out of the forest sound-track of unearthly whoopings and chimings and twitterings. M’zee returns a long monotone blast; a complex twitter replies. We’ve given the passwords and crossed the firewall. What wrong note, what incorrect response, did those poor bastards back there give?
The Wa-chagga await us in a large natural atrium encircled by curtain walls of woven tendrils drooping enormous folded flower buds. They number nine: six men, three women. But for the colour of their combat pants, which are Chaga purples, crimsons, lilacs, they are indistinguishable from the Black Simbas. I am a little disappointed, I had been expecting Noble Savages. One of the women’s T-shirts has a picture of the Brazilian international striker Arcangeles printed on it.
They all look very young. They all carry very big guns. They all have red-green things looped around the backs of their heads, with one tendril that goes into the ear and another that brushes the upper lip. They are a combined defence patrol/ trading mission, like the armed merchant adventurers of the age of the navigators. They are all the Tacticals are permitted to see of the Wa-chagga nation and its organic towns scattered across the foothills of Kilimanjaro. I pull the camera out to video this historic moment.
Everything goes horribly quiet.
A Wa-chagga boy with straight-bobbed dreadlocks suddenly exclaims, ‘I know who you are!’ His English is almost accentless. ‘You are from television: Jake Aarons, SkyNet News! And you are Gaby McAslan. You did all these funny end of the news stories.’
And we are deluged with hands wanting to be shaken and smiling faces and voices welcoming us and asking for an autograph and will they get on the satellite news?
Later, Mr Natty-Dread, whose name is Lucius, an Economics graduate from the University of Dar Es Salaam, shows me how it is that we are such big stars among the Wa-chagga. It may have been designed as a Daewoo microvision, but then someone ripped off the casing and half the electronics and shoved in a slab of Danish blue cheese with half a pound of
Black Simbas and Wa-chagga sit down to trade. The weapons are swiftly agreed; Sugardaddy, the Black Simbas’ chief negotiator, takes an order for ammunition. The computer software, sealed in metal cases, is taken after animated bargaining in Swahili between Sugardaddy and Lucius, who seems to be a boy of some authority. The cigarettes are set aside while their merits are weighed. The flasks of Coca Cola concentrate provoke great excitement. Sugardaddy personifies superior aloofness while fingers are dipped in the flask and sucked to make sure this is the real thing. If any people are experts on cola, it is Africans. Words are exchanged, hands slapped; all the cigarettes are accepted and the deal is sealed. The Coke, I learn, is a one-off trade; once the Chaga picks its molecules and synthesizes it, the forest will be raining Coca Cola. Will it do Diet too, I wonder?
In return, Sugardaddy gets two steel vacuum flasks. In the first vacuum flask is a powerful all-purpose antibiotic that will kill even penicillin-immune bacteria. In the second is a cure for cholera. The Chaga synthesized both. Lucius tells me that none of his people have been sick since they escaped from the camps and returned to the mountain.
‘You cannot get sick,’ he says. ‘Not with counter-agents to every disease blowing on the wind. You take them in by the million with every breath.’
Including, it seems, something that stops HIV 4 dead in its tracks.
(Later)
I rather think Lucius is trying to come on to me.
The rest of the men are sprawled around the microvision watching women’s kick-boxing relayed from Bangkok and drinking native beer. They mutter doubtless obscene comments at the screen and laugh. The women
