'It's the ferry!'

She was anchored offshore, bobbing gently, a marvellous and welcome sight. She was big. Visions of a hand-poled pontoon, one-car sized and driven by chanting ferrymen, not at all an uncommon sight in Africa, receded thankfully from my mind. Kironji had said it took trucks, and trucks he meant. This thing would take several vehicles at one crossing. And there was something else about her profile in the watery light which nagged at me: a long low silhouette, bow door's slanted inwards to the waterline and a lumpy deck structure aft. She was a far cry from the sleek and sophisticated modern ferries of Europe.

We slid out from under the shadow of her bow and made rapidly for shore. Hammond rowed us out of sight of the ferry point and tucked into the bank in as secretive a spot as we could find, setting both anchors. We disembarked into the fringe of vegetation.

I looked to McGrath. He and Sadiq were the experts now, and I wasn't sure which of the two was going to take command. But there wasn't any doubt really; with assurance Sadiq started giving instructions, and McGrath took it with equanimity. I think he'd approved of Sadiq as a fighting man and was prepared to take his orders.

'Mister Mannix, you and Mister Zimmerman come with me, please,' Sadiq said. 'Mister McGrath will take Mister Hammond. We are going towards the buildings. We three will take the further side, Mister McGrath the nearer. Nobody is to make any disturbance or touch anything. Observe closely. We must know how many men and officers are here, and what weapons they have. Where they keep the radio and telephone. What transport they have. The layout of the terrain. Whether there are people on the ferry, and what other boats there are.'

I whistled silently. It was a tall order. All he wanted to know was absolutely everything.

'If you are caught,' he went on, 'make as much outcry as you can, to alarm the others. But try not to reveal that they exist. If the opportunity arises for you to steal weapons do so, but do not use them.'

He looked intently at McGrath who showed no reaction but that of careful attention. Sadiq said, 'I think that is all. Good luck, gentlemen.'

The astounding thing was that it worked exactly as he planned it. In my imagination I had seen a hundred things going drastically wrong: ourselves captured, tortured, shot, the site overrun with soldiers armed to the teeth, the ferry incapacitated or nonexistent… every obstacle under the sun placed between us and success. In fact it was all extremely easy and may well have been the most fruitful reconnaissance mission in the annals of warfare.

This was because there were so few men there. Our team made a count of fifteen, McGrath said seventeen, and the highest-ranking soldier we could spot was a corporal. They had rifles and one light machine-gun but no other weapons that we could see. There was a radio equipped with headphones and another in one of the cars, but it was defunct; Hammond reported having seen its guts strewn about the passenger seat.

There were two trucks, one with a shattered windscreen, a Suzuki four-wheel drive workhorse and a beat-up elderly Volvo.

This was a token detachment, set there to guard something that nobody thought to be of the least importance. After all, nobody from Manzu was going to come willingly into a neighbouring battle zone, especially when the craft to bring them was on the wrong side of the water.

The two teams met an hour and a half later back at the dinghy and compared notes. We were extremely pleased with ourselves, having covered all Sadiq's requirements, and heady with relief at having got away with it. Perhaps only McGrath was a little deflated at the ease of the mission.

I would have liked another look at that ferry but anchored as she was out in midstream there was no way we could approach her unseen. Whatever it was about her that bothered me would have to wait.

We did some energetic baling with the beer cans and set off upriver, again keeping close to the bank and using oars until we were out of earshot of the ferry point. It was harder work rowing upstream, but once the outboard was persuaded to run we made good time. It was midday when we got back.

We reported briefly on our findings which cheered everyone enormously. We had discovered that the landing point was called Kanjali, although the joke of trying to call it the Fort Pirie Ferry, a genuine tongue twister, had not yet palled. But we didn't know if the ferry itself was in good running order. It might have been sabotaged or put out of action officially as a safeguard. And the problem of who was to run it was crucial.

After a light meal we went to see the raft builders at work.

Dufour had a dry, authoritative manner which compensated for his lack of Nyalan, which was supplemented by Atheridge. With Sadiq's men as interpreters they had rounded up a number of Nyalans who were willing to help in return for a ride to Manzu, and some who didn't want even that form of payment. These people were free in a sense we could hardly understand,. free to melt back into the bush country they knew, to go back to their villages where they were left to get along unassisted by government programmes, but also untrammelled by red tape and regulations. But the rig had come to mean something extra to them, and because of it they chose to help us. It was as simple as that.

One of our problems was how to fasten the outer ring of 'B'-gons together. We'd not got anywhere with this until Hammond gave us the solution.

'You'd think we could come up with something,' he said, 'with all the friends we've got here pulling for us.'

'Friends,' I murmured. 'Polonius.'

'What?'

'I was just thinking about a quote from Hamlet. Polonius was giving Laertes advice about friendship.' I felt rather pleased with myself; it wasn't only the British who could play literary games. 'He said, "Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel." I could do with some hoops of steel right now.'

Hammond said, 'Would mild steel do?'

'You mean you've got some?' I asked incredulously.

He pointed to an empty drum. 'Cut as many hoops as you like from one of these things.'

'By God, so we can! Well done, Ben. Is there a cutting nozzle with the oxyacetylene outfit?'

'Hold on, Neil,' he said. 'Those drums will be full of petrol vapour. You put a flame near one and it'll explode. We have to do it another way.'

'Then we need a can opener.'

'You'll have one,' he promised.

Hammond's idea of a can opener was interesting. If you can't invent the necessary technology then you fall back on muscle. Within an hour he had twenty Nyalan men hammering hell out of the empty drums, using whatever they could find in the way of tools, old chisels, hacksaw blades, sharp-edged stones. They made the devil of a row but they flayed the drums open, cutting them literally into ribbons.

At the 'A'-gon construction site Dufour had assembled four teams and it took each team about one hour to make one 'A'-gon. In a factory it would have been quicker, but here the work force chatted and sang its way through the allotted tasks at a pace not exactly leisurely but certainly undemanding. Dufour knew better than to turn martinet and try to hurry them.

In some of the old school textbooks there were problems such as this; if it takes one man six hours to dig a pit seven feet long by six feet deep by two feet wide, then how long will it take three men to perform the same task? The textbook answer is two hours, which is dead wrong. Those who have done the dismal job know that it's a one-man operation because two men get in each other's way and three men can hardly work at all.

Dufour, knowing this, had seen to it that nobody could get in each other's way and not one motion was wasted. For an inexperienced work force it was miraculous, any efficiency expert would have been proud of it. Altogether it was a remarkable operation.