Warlord. James Steel

damp with sweat.

      She opens it to show the sergeant. ‘All our papers are in order and we have our permit à voyager here.’ She shows him the document on the top of the stack in the folder.

      He grunts in reply and takes it from her.

      ‘You are in a security zone, this is a military installation here!’ He points at the cement block building with a rusting corrugated iron roof and ochre paint that is flaking off like a skin disease. Bullet holes are dotted across the front of it and there is a larger one where an RPG exploded. Piles of rubbish and plastic bags are caught in the grass and bushes around it. The ground on either side has been used as a latrine by the soldiers and drivers. ‘You must park over there, switch off the engine and deposit the key with the security manager for safekeeping.’ He points to a teenager with a rifle. ‘I will confirm your accreditation with the captain.’

      He snatches the folder away from her and marches into the building.

      She glances nervously across at Nicolas who calmly reverses the vehicle and parks off the road where the teenager is pointing. He then reluctantly hands over the keys and they sit and wait in tense silence. Sophie gets out and paces up and down, glancing at her watch and the building. Nicolas leans against the jeep and lights a cigarette.

      Five minutes later the sergeant comes marching back out with the folder and strides up to her.

      ‘There is a problem with your documents. You must come and see the captain.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘Your permit à voyager is not present, you must see the captain to explain yourself!’

      Sophie is incredulous and stares at him. ‘My permit à voyager?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘It was on the top of the folder.’

      ‘There is no permit.’

      ‘It was on the top of the folder.’ She raises her voice and gestures at him in exasperation, trying to think how he could have missed it. She is tired, hungry, frazzled and desperate to get to the clinic. Her frustration boils over. ‘It was right there! I showed it to you!’ She snatches the folder from his hand, opens it and shows him the place where the blue document had been.

      The sergeant stiffens and glares at her angrily.

      Nicolas is suddenly at her side. ‘Ah, Monsieur le Directeur, can I offer you a cigarette?’

      The sergeant brushes him aside and grabs the folder back from Sophie, jabbing his finger at her and shouting, ‘You are in contravention of regulations on a military installation! You must see the captain immediately!’

      Four other soldiers run over and stand around him.

      Sophie glares back at him, refusing to be intimidated. ‘We have vaccines – humanitarian aid – in the Land Cruiser that will go off in an hour’s time if we don’t get it to the clinic! This is for the children of the Congo! Your children! OK, fine, let’s go and see the captain!’

      She marches off towards the building and the sergeant and the four soldiers hurry after her. He pushes in front of her as she gets to the door and then halts outside a chipped and scratched inner door. He knocks and then opens it and walks in, Sophie follows; she is so angry she is not afraid.

      The room is bare with grey breeze block walls and a hurricane lamp hanging from the ceiling. The captain sits behind an old plywood desk which is empty except for an old IBM PC and keyboard with a power lead but no plug. He stares up angrily at the commotion of their entry; both the sergeant and Sophie’s faces are flushed with anger.

      They both start talking at the same time.

      ‘Here is the illegal traveller!’

      ‘The permit à voyager was on the top of the folder! I showed it to him when he took it off me, you know you have it! I have vaccines to deliver in an hour or they will be ruined!’

      The captain sits and looks at her insolently from his chair, head on one side.

      ‘We can issue you with an emergency permit à voyager for a thousand dollars.’

      ‘A thousand dollars! Jesus Christ!’ She looks at him as if he is an idiot. ‘We don’t pay bribes. Where do you think I am going to get that kind of money!’ She turns and points angrily at the sergeant next to her. ‘You had it! This is ridiculous! Can we stop playing …’

      The captain bangs the table and is on his feet in one fluid move. He switches from angry insolence to rage in the blink of an eye. He moves round the desk to stand in front of her and pulls his pistol out of his holster at the same time. The gun suddenly looks very large and solid as he points it at her.

      ‘You are an alien travelling without the correct documentation! You are coming in here and making accusations against my men! You come in to my office and you do not salute me! Why do you not salute me?’

      He slaps her across the face with his left hand.

      Sophie is stunned. No one has ever hit her before or threatened her with a gun.

      Her indignation suddenly turns to helpless terror and a feeling of total powerlessness. She has overstepped the magic line that surrounds white NGO workers, pushed her luck too far and broken the spell. She is in a small room with five large men. She now knows what it is like to be a local Congolese, totally at the mercy of the men with guns.

      There is nothing she can do, no clever argument, no grand family connections, no degree from Oxford, no right or law that she can wave at them to stop them doing whatever they want to her.

      Chapter Seven

      The megaphone crackles and squawks, ‘Move up!’ and Eve dutifully shuffles forward in the line of refugees.

      The local Red Cross worker at the head of the line wears a fluorescent yellow waistcoat over his white Red Cross tee shirt. He wears the megaphone on a strap over his shoulder, holding a clipboard in one hand and the microphone and a pen in the other. He looks harassed as he tries to tick people off his list and keep the food distribution session under control. It’s only a small refugee camp, at Ikozi in south Kivu, just off the road from Bukavu out to Shabunda, but it still has five thousand people and is chaotic.

      A former headmaster who lives in the camp helps him by measuring out the rice from sacks piled on the ground into the battered bowls and tatty sacks that people have brought with them.

      Eve never wanted this passive life and it still feels alien to her. She was used to the hard work of village life: cooking, washing, tending the family vegetable patch. She is just an average girl with average dreams: she hopes one day to get the money to buy a hand-cranked sewing machine so she can set up as a seamstress and repair and make clothes.

      Life has been pretty hard to her so far though. Her first husband, Bertrand, left her when she gave birth to an albino baby, regarding it as unclean. Eve’s own mother had shrieked with fear when the baby had emerged and run out of the hut. Bertrand left to return to his home village and she hasn’t heard from him since.

      Some people do want albinos though. Hundreds are kidnapped and murdered in East Africa every year, their body parts dried and used as charms: tied to fishermen’s nets in Lake Kivu to attract a good catch, ground into powder and sprinkled by miners on the sides of their pits to draw precious metals to the surface, strapped to the front of traders’ trucks to bring them good fortune on journeys.

      Where is my baby?

      The thought of little Marie cut up and used in one of those scenarios is too much to bear.

      Gabriel is the only piece of good news in her life. He met her when he was travelling through her village and was fascinated by her calm manner. The other girls teased Eve about him because he was so ugly. He wouldn’t have been Eve’s first pick but, as one of her friends said, love is a choice as well and in her circumstances she had to be realistic.

      Gabriel is certainly ugly