‘Take off your clothes,’ he instructed Jimfish, handing him the Commandant’s uniform, finishing with his cap and dark glasses. Then very neatly he scissored off Deon Arlow’s great beard and fixed it to Jimfish’s chin with duct tape.
‘This is what we do next.’ He handed Jimfish the dead man’s bag of diamonds, assuring him they would come in useful. ‘I’ll fetch the Commandant’s jeep and you jump in the back. Soon as they see you, the Commandant’s men will snap to attention and salute. You salute in return and while all this saluting is going on, we drive away. We’ll be airborne in the Blackhawk and heading for Somalia before they know what’s happened.’
And so it was that Jimfish escaped from Sierra Leone, laden with diamonds, but with a heavy heart, knowing that he had once again failed to land on the right side of history.
CHAPTER 23
Mogadishu, Somalia, 1992–93
The Blackhawk floated above Mogadishu, giving Jimfish his first glimpse of Somalia, and touched down in a field outside town. John Doe seemed anxious to get away the moment he had deposited his passenger, and just before closing the hatch he shouted a rapid briefing on his role as a harbinger.
‘Restore hope — that’s us. Harbinger — that’s you. Surgical strikes. Food aid. Votes for all. Mission accomplished. Got that? God bless!’
With that the chopper lifted into the sky and Jimfish set off to walk into the capital under the fierce January summer sun.
He had not gone far when a pickup drew level with him and for a moment he thought he was being offered a lift. Then he noticed the machine gun mounted on the truck and glowering soldiers, strung with ammunition, who demanded to know if he was an American.
Jimfish was happy he could put the record straight: ‘I am a harbinger of hope.’
‘Without doubt, an American,’ they said, pointing their guns at him. ‘Tie him up.’
Jimfish pulled out his bag of rough diamonds and offered to trade, but his captors laughed. What would they do with dirty pebbles? Jimfish explained the stones could be swapped for a fortune. They laughed again. Who would trade stones for Kalashnikovs? It was dollars they wanted, but Jimfish had none. The soldiers explained that kidnapping had become the best new Somali thing. Leveraging high-end hostages into cash. Americans were blue-chip stocks. With that they tied him up, tossed him into the back of their truck and drove into Mogadishu, firing happily at anything that moved.
The truck moved through empty, silent, potholed streets lined with billboards and plastered with pictures of a stern, uniformed soldier, whose formal title was ‘Victorious Leader’ and whom he took to be Siad Barre, one-time and most recent dictator of Somalia. On the left-hand side of the road the former dictator was pictured in fading posters, hanging alongside Karl Marx, Lenin and the dear leader of North Korea Kim Il-sung; he was also shown locked in a bear hug with none other than Jimfish’s late acquaintance Nicolae Ceauşescu, the Genius of the Carpathians.
On the right-hand side of the road were more recent posters, showing Presidents Jimmy Carter and George Bush Senior, and Jimfish remembered John Doe telling him that the Americans had replaced the Russians in supplying the dictator’s need for cash and arms.
As the pickup bounced over Mogadishu’s dusty, pot-holed roads Jimfish was once again filled with wonder at how effortlessly people reversed positions.
Seeing Nicolae Ceauşescu’s face brought back to him the show trial of the dictator and his wife in Târgovişte; and how long-serving lieutenants of Ceauşescu’s iron rule, abruptly and unhesitatingly switched from being life-long patriarchs of the Communist Party into proud fighters for freedom by firing squad.
Clearly, this was what sensible, pragmatic people did. Hadn’t the redoubtable Robert Mugabe once gone to war to liberate his people from colonial bondage only to cheer the shooting of those who mistakenly took their freedom at face value? The liberator turned liquidator showed adaptability of a high degree.
And what of those armed guards he had seen at the Berlin Wall as it was falling down? So ready to shoot on sight anyone crossing the wall on, say, Tuesday, yet on Wednesday, calmly helping people through the breaches made by the woodpeckers with their chisels. Was this not the acme of pragmatism?
In Liberia, when Master Sergeant Samuel Doe murdered President William Tolbert, together with all his ministers to become the new President, he was demonstrating his talent, not for criminal cruelty, but for robust common sense. Samuel K. Doe, in turn, had been murdered by Prince Johnson, in about the time it takes to sink a Budweiser, setting off a race to rule Liberia amongst those warlords still standing. Which of their election promises would speak most winningly to Liberians as they were frogmarched into the voting booths? Would it be Prince Johnson, who had carved up the late President on camera and marketed the home movie? Or Charles Taylor, running on his record of killing the mothers and fathers of his compatriots and ready to do the same to any of their children who made the wrong choice. Or would the winner be the dark horse, Brigadier Bare-Butt and his horde of hopped-up, bewigged boys, one of whom turned into the team breakfast before each battle? Hard to say.
Oh, where was Soviet Malala now? Jimfish wanted to tell him he was wrong. If this is how things were, then he no longer believed in rage and he did not care whether or not he arrived on the right side of history. If this was what adaptability meant, then he would rather die, and he said so to the soldiers as they were hauling him out of the back of the truck.
That was something they could very well offer him, they assured him, but first they would use him to set the floor price in living hostages. It was all a question of testing and trusting the market. If it turned out, when they had collected more prisoners, that they got almost as much for a dead American, then they might execute their captives and settle for a lower margin on larger volumes. With that they flung Jimfish into a cell and left him to his misery.
But he was not alone. Sitting on a bunk watching him closely was a tall fellow with a good head of hair.
‘The men who have locked us up — what do they want?’ Jimfish wondered. ‘I offered them diamonds, but they weren’t interested.’
‘In a civil war there is always only one good convertible currency. In my war, dollars didn’t work, nor did British pounds. For bribes or ransoms or customs fees it had to be German Deutschmarks.’
‘Where was your war?’ Jimfish asked him.
‘Hard to say,’ said his fellow prisoner with a sad smile.
‘You can’t have a war without a country to have it in,’ said Jimfish. ‘That stands to reason.’
‘We don’t bother much with reason where I come from,’ said the other. ‘Let’s just say I had a country once, but it went away.’
Jimfish had to laugh. ‘Where on earth did it go?’
The melancholy man shrugged. ‘Who knows? One day it was there. On all the maps, in the travel brochures, available on package tours. But the next time I looked, it was gone.’
CHAPTER 24
Jimfish was baffled. Maybe the man was mad. Though, looking at him, what his fellow prisoner showed was a great and sombre calmness, as if he had faced some terrible fate and accepted it, but what he had faced was so depressing he simply could not talk about it. So he spoke in riddles.
Jimfish pressed him. ‘But surely, strictly speaking, you must be someone from somewhere?’
‘Strictly speaking, I’m Zoran the Serb, from Belgrade,’ said the sad man with the good head of hair. ‘I was a serving soldier in what was once the Yugoslav National Army. Created by a man called Tito, who made a country called Yugoslavia. I’m still a Tito man. To hear what they say about him these days, you’d think Tito wasn’t a Croatian genius who kept Yugoslavia in one piece. No, he was another Hitler. And this from idiots who want only certified Serbs in Serbia and kosher Croats in Croatia and model Muslims in Sarajevo. Right down to the tribal wire, in every pathetic little Balkanette born from ex-Yugoslavia. Each run by ex-Communists turned chauvinists, like Tuđjman in Croatia and Milošević in Serbia — savage sectarians who worship village gods.