If anyone spoke English we were likely to find him here, though I did curse my lack of foresight in not bringing an interpreter with us. It proved not to be necessary.

At first there was nobody to be seen and few sounds; a water pump chugging somewhere, scrawny chickens pecking about, the monotonous link of some wild bird. I eyed the chickens speculatively, then blew a blast on the horn which scattered them, though not very far. They were used to traffic. A hornbill rose lazily from a tree and settled in another, cocked its head and looked down with beady eyes, as unconcerned as the chickens. At the sixth blast the door of the cabin behind the pumps opened, and a brown face peered warily at us through the crack.

We'd had this sort of nervous reaction before and could hardly blame the locals for being cautious, but at least our non-military car and clothing should prove reassuring. I called out cheerfully, 'Good morning. Are you open for business?'

The door opened wider and a Nyalan stepped out into the sun. He wore a tired overall on which the logo of Lat-Am was printed, a travesty of the livery which they inflicted on their gas station attendants in more affluent places.

'I am not open,' he said. 'I got no custom.'

I got out of the car into the scorching morning air. 'You have now,' I told him. Through the open door I saw a familiar red pattern painted on an ice box. 'You got cold Coca-Cola in there?'

'How many?' he asked cautiously.

'I could drink two. Two each – six of them. I'll pay.' I pulled out a handful of coins, wondering as I did so how he managed to keep them cold. He thought about it, then went in and returned with the Cokes, blissfully chilling to the touch in the narrow-waisted bottles that were still used in this part of the world. I sank half of my first in one swallow. 'Quiet around here, is it?'

He shrugged. 'There is trouble. Trouble come and the people they stop coming.'

'Trouble meaning the war?'

He shook his head. 'I don't know about no war. But there are many soldiers.'

Kemp asked, 'Soldiers where – here?' It certainly didn't look like it. Our untapped mine of information doled out another nugget. 'Not here. In Fort Pirie they are come.'

I swallowed air this time. Soldiers in Fort Pirie could be bad news if they were rebels, and I wondered how Sadiq was getting on.

'Has there been any fighting here at all?' Kemp asked.

A headshake. 'Not here.'

'Where then?'

This time we got the shrug again. 'Somewhere else. I do not know.'

This was like drawing teeth the hard way. I downed some more Coke in silence and tried to keep my impatience under control. Then, surprisingly, the attendant carried on unasked. Two tanks come two days ago from Fort Pirie. Then they go back again. They not buy nothing.'

'Did they threaten you? I mean, were they bad people?'

'I think not so bad. Gov'ment people.'

They might or might not be, but it sounded a little better. At least they weren't hellbent on destruction like the last lot we'd met up with.

The attendant suddenly went into his cabin and returned with another opened Coke, which he began to drink himself. I recognized a social gesture; he must have decided that we were acceptable, and was letting his guard down a little by drinking with us. I wondered with amusement how much of his stock vanished in this way, and how he fiddled his books to account for it. I didn't yet know him very well.

'Soldiers come by now, one half-hour ago. Not many. They go that way. Also they go that way this morning, then come back. They not stop here.'

He indicated the direction of the river and I realized that he was talking about Sadiq, but we weren't in a hurry to enlighten him about our association with any military force.

We exchanged a few more generalities and then, noticing the wires leading down to the cabin from a pole across the road, I said, 'Do you mind if we use your telephone?'

'No use. It dead.'

That would have been too easy. 'It's the trouble that caused it, I suppose. What about your radio?'

'It play dance music, long time only music. Sometimes nothing at all.' He decided that it was his turn to ask questions. 'You people. Where you from?'

'We've come from Kodowa.'

'A man said that Kodowa is not there no more. Is bombed, burnt. Is that true?'

'Yes, it's true. But Makara is all right. 'Was Fort Pirie bombed?'

Now we were trading information. 'No bombs there. No fighting, just many soldiers, the man he say. Where you go?'

'We are going to Fort Pirie, if it's safe there. We have more people waiting back there for us, men and women. We are not soldiers.'

'White women? Very bad for them here. They should stay in city, here is dangerous.' He seemed genuinely anxious.

'Believe me, my friend, they'd like nothing better. We are going to go back and get them, tell them it's safe here. When we come back we would like to buy gas, OK?'

'I not sell gas.'

'Sorry, I mean petrol. Petrol and other things if you have them to sell. Meantime, how many Cokes have you got in that ice box in there?'

'Many. Maybe twenty, twenty-four.'

'I'll buy the lot. Find a box and if you've got any more, put them in the cold right away. We'll buy them when we come back.'

He seemed bemused by this but was quite ready to deal with me, especially as I produced the cash at once. Kemp said, 'Do you have many people living here? Could we get food for our people, perhaps?'

The attendant thought about this. He was careful with his answers. 'Not so many people. Many of them go away when trouble comes, but I think maybe you can get food.'

Kemp had noticed the chickens, and caught a glimpse of a small field of corn out behind the cabin. Even his mind, running mainly to thoughts of fuel, road conditions and other such technicalities, could spare a moment to dwell on the emptiness of our stomachs. The station hand was back with us now with some twenty icy bottles in a cardboard box, for which he gravely accepted and counted my money and rung it into his little till. Zimmerman, who'd said nothing, watched with interest as he filled our tank with gas and rung up that sale as well. After we drove off he said, 'He runs a pretty tight ship. That's good to see. We're both on the same payroll, him and me. We've got to give him a square deal when we bring the convoy in.'

Zimmerman was a Lat-Am man and he regarded the station in a rather proprietorial manner.

'Don't worry, Harry,' I said to him, feeling unwarranted optimism rising inside me. 'We won't rip him off, I promise you.' I patted the box of Cokes. 'This is going to make them sit up, isn't it? Something tells me that it's going to be easy all the way from now on.'

It wasn't quite like that.

CHAPTER 23

There was some restrained rejoicing when we got back to camp with the news and the Cokes, which hadn't yet lost all their chill. Geoff Wingstead decided that unless we heard anything to the contrary from Sadiq within an hour, he'd move the rig on as far as the filling station, thus saving some valuable time. I suggested that he leave Kemp in charge of this phase of the operation and come on ahead again with me. I'd had a couple of ideas that I wanted to check out.

He agreed and we left taking Zimmerman with us and adding Ben Hammond to the Land Rover complement. Proctor was quite able to take Hammond's place for this easy run. This time I bypassed the gas station and we carried on for a little way, with the forest, which was still quite dense at the station, now thinning away until there was only a narrow screen between the road and the gleam of sunlight on water. When we had a clear view I pulled off and stopped. At this point Lake Pirie was about five miles wide, broadening out to our right. We were told that where the ferry crossed it was a couple of miles across, with the far bank visible, but I wasn't sure how far downwater that would be from where the road came out; local maps were not entirely accurate, as we had often discovered. Wingstead said, 'It doesn't look like a river.' It wouldn't, to an Englishman to whom the Thames was the Father of Waters, but I recalled the Mississippi and smiled. 'It's all part of the Katali,' I said. 'It would have been better if they hadn't put the word Lake into it at all. Think of it as the Pirie Stretch and you'll have a better mental picture.' It was a long stretch, being in fact about thirty miles from where it broadened out to where it abruptly narrowed again, a pond by African standards but still a sizeable body of water.