Free The Perfect Soldier by Graham Hurley Page A

enough to organise the safe evacuation of the aid community. In all, according to the Red Cross, there were twenty-eight aid workers in Muengo, most of whom were under orders from their parent organisations to leave. Leaving, though, was difficult. Beyond UNITA lines, mines had made the roads impassable in every direction and without a ceasefire no pilot would dream of taking his aircraft within fifty miles of the city’s crumbling airstrip.
    McFaul limped between the bodies on the floor and paused beside the radio. The duty Red Cross official was a greying Swiss called François who’d once worked in a Geneva bank. He and McFaul shared the same sense of humour, a wry assumption that making plans in Africa was an act of the purest optimism, and that if anything could go wrong then it surely would. The Swiss glanced up, stifling a yawn. Then he gestured at the HF set, thin far-away voices crackling through the ether, part of someone else’s conversation.
    ‘Luanda,’ he said simply. ‘They wanted an update earlier.’
    ‘What did you tell them?’
    ‘I told them it was like last night. Except worse.’
    ‘And what did they say?’
    ‘Nothing.’
    McFaul nodded. The civil war was like a bush fire, smouldering for months on end then suddenly erupting at localflashpoints, stirred by unfathomable political currents. Wherever the rebels or the government troops sensed an advantage, then the fighting would begin again. The slaughter would go on for weeks and weeks until both sides were either bored or exhausted, and the last item on any commander’s list was the welfare of the local people. They’d long since ceased to matter, helpless victims of a catastrophe they neither wanted nor understood.
    A call sign came through on one of the Motorolas and McFaul recognised the rich bass voice of the local UN rep, Fernando, a middle-aged white from Mozambique. Evidently he was still trying to sell a ceasefire to Colonel Katilo, though negotiations appeared to have stalled.
    McFaul reached across, dipping a Styrofoam cup into the big 40-gallon drum of tepid water that would supply the bunker until further notice. The water was already rationed, seven cups per day per person, and McFaul knew the ration would be reduced the longer the siege went on. It was hot underground, a stuffy, airless atmosphere that smelled of damp earth and unwashed bodies. From time to time, people would leave to use one of the two lavatories upstairs, but the nearest of these was already blocked and the stench seeped in as soon as the door was opened at the top of the stairs.
    François, the Swiss, was still bent to the desk, scribbling on a pad. McFaul watched him, unable to keep up with the stream of Portuguese from the Motorola. Eventually, François leaned back, laying down his pen. McFaul offered him the Styrofoam cup.
    ‘Well?’ he said.
    The Swiss sipped at the cup, ever thoughtful. Finally, he shrugged.
    ‘Usual problem,’ he said. ‘Both sides want to handle the evacuation, take the credit.’
    ‘Play the white man?’
    ‘Tout à fait.’
He glanced up, acknowledging the dig with a tired smile. ‘Which means, I guess, another couple of days.’
    ‘Minimum.’
    He nodded.
    ‘Exactly.’
    ‘And Geneva? New York?’ McFaul gestured at the big HF set. ‘You talk to them at all?’
    ‘Only once. To Geneva. They say they’re getting everything they need through Luanda.’
    ‘Anything else?’
    ‘Yeah,’ he looked up again, a grin this time, ‘they told me the weather’s awful. Rain. Snow. Big falls in the mountains.’
    Another conversation crackled into life on the Motorola and McFaul turned away. He had a small Sony radio of his own and he’d been listening to the BBC World Service, curious to know whether this latest outbreak of insanity in Muengo would feature on the news from Bush House. Inevitably it didn’t, though a couple of bulletins had mentioned the death of a young British aid worker. On neither occasion was James