Warlord. James Steel

He is always so intent on impressing her, going on about his grand plans, angry in his desire to make money. He talks about his schemes for hours, using terms he has learned and that she doesn’t understand: brand value, profit margins, return on investment. She just sits and looks blank as he rants at her.

      After a while though, he eases up and starts talking about people he has met on his travels. She has never travelled outside her village, but he has been all over the province, to the main towns of Goma, Bukavu and Uvira in the south and even as far as Beni in the goldfields in the far north. When he relaxes he can make her laugh with his stories about scrapes he has got into and deals he has done. That’s when she likes him, when his big jaw opens in a wide white grin and his prominent stomach shakes with laughter. They used to sit on the bench outside her hut and laugh and chat.

      She hasn’t heard from him in a while though; he is overdue from his latest journey. She wonders what has happened to him – will he reject her because of the rape?

      ‘Move up!’

      She shuffles forward and the headmaster bustles around, directing people to fill up their sacks and watching carefully that they don’t take too much. She hands over the chit for her family and then heaves the sack onto her back and walks away slowly and painfully.

      Alex is showing Fang back out to his chauffeur-driven car parked on the gravel drive in front of the house. The April shower has passed and they make small talk about the weather and the best route back to London.

      Alex is relieved that the meeting is over; he isn’t going to take the mission but he feels strangely disconcerted and cannot work out why.

      As he gets to the car Fang turns and shakes his hand. The two tall men stand facing each other.

      ‘I realise that Operation Tiananmen is very large scale and takes a while to get used to but I am confident that once you have had time to think about it you will want to be involved. It would be the largest operation you could ever command.’

      Alex smiles politely. ‘Well, thank you very much for your time in coming here today to explain it to me.’ He shakes the man’s hand.

      He waves the car off as it moves away into the distance down the mile-long drive through the parkland until it passes the beech copse and is lost. He turns and looks at the dogs sitting at the top of the stone steps – his father’s two black labs, Bert and Audrey, that he inherited along with the title and estate when Sir Nicholas died a little while back.

      The dogs miss the old man but Alex doesn’t. His father had been another Blues and Royals officer, a cantankerous alcoholic who had beaten his wife and whose influence had blighted Alex’s career in the regiment. He refused to let Alex go to university, which in the army, effectively barred him from promotion to colonel. Apart from which, in the small and snobbish world of the Household Cavalry, the reputation of drunkenness attached to the Devereux name had always made it hard for Alex to prove himself in the regiment.

      His father’s final summation of his career had come in an argument over the phone during which he had shouted, ‘If you hadn’t been such a fucking failure, the family wouldn’t be in the mess it is!’ Alex had been struggling to disprove this assessment ever since.

      Although Alex bears a grudge against his father and the British upper class, he isn’t going to bear one against the dogs. They need a walk, having been locked up in the kitchen during the meeting.

      ‘Come on!’ he says and walks off briskly round the corner of the house to the rose gardens in front of the Regency façade. The shower has blown over a trellis and he fossicks about, tutting and putting it back up. After that he spends a while throwing an old tennis ball for the dogs and they tangle with each other on the lawn.

      He looks out over the parkland and then walks back round, entering the house from the other end through the door on the terrace into the library that he uses as his study in the red-brick Tudor section of the house. His desk is surrounded with piles of old copies of the Economist and periodicals from Chatham House, Royal United Services Institute, International Crisis Group and other defence think-tanks. The dogs jostle after him, puffing and grinning and wagging their tails. Now he has got his meeting out of the way he wonders what he will do today.

      Life proceeds at a pretty slow pace. The repairs on the house are nearing completion, paid for with the money from his last big operation in Russia. It had fallen into disrepair as a result of his father’s drinking but has now been restored to something like its former glory: the roof has been redone, the dry rot sorted out and the gardens replanted. He’s got a final meeting in Hereford with the English Heritage surveyor but that’s not until next week.

      Alex stops and realises he really is feeling unsettled by the meeting with Fang. He was supposed to be the Englishman at home in his castle, lord of all he surveys, and yet on a personal level he feels unnerved.

      It was like sitting in a room with a global business droid looking at him through the narrow metal vision slits of his titanium glasses. He was a commercial chameleon, with a different name for every market he operated in, a multi-tasking, open-sourcing, integrated business platform capable of working simultaneously in multiple time zones. The guy was ten years younger than him but he was the one driving the meeting, the man in a hurry who wasn’t taking any prisoners. If Alex didn’t accept the project he would just find another way – like his steel delivery in Port Sudan.

      Alex wondered where did the business stop and the person start? The answer was nowhere. Fang was a money-making organism, unimpeded by morality or etiquette. He ate, slept and breathed money.

      It wasn’t just the personality though. It’s the scale and audacity of the vision he presented that makes Alex feel old and out of date. He was talking about infrastructure projects to open up an entire continent. There was a tone of disdain in the way Fang talked about the Western view of Africa and how his was the new vision for the future.

      And maybe he was right? Alex had done his best to trip him up but he hadn’t managed to even make him stumble; the businessman had it all covered.

      But the idea was bonkers.

      It was all very well being young and enthusiastic and having visions about new world orders, but Iraq and Afghanistan had shown very well how the law of unintended consequences came into play when you started naively messing around with other people’s countries.

      Where was the exit strategy?

      What the hell would the US and the UN say to it all?

      The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

      Alex pauses in thought and then turns and makes his way through the oak-panelled library, the dogs following him. He goes into the medieval hall and then walks across its huge stone flags and into the large archway that leads up into the fortified tower. This is the original part of the house from the time when the area was the lawless Welsh Marches, prone to invasions and cattle rustling from Welsh bandits across the border.

      The eighty-foot-high tower has thick stone walls and he walks up the spiral staircase, stepping in the groove worn into the stone by generations of his ancestors’ feet. He is feeling disconcerted and defensive and somehow the tower feels the right place to be.

      He walks up to the top, opens the narrow wooden door and stands at the battlements. The dogs accompany him and sit smiling up at him uncertainly. The various roofs of the house are below him with their pointed gables and gargoyles, the gardens, parklands and outhouses all clearly visible.

      But Alex stares out over them at the magnificent green hills beyond.

      The captain glares at Sophie, his eyes wide and angry; white spittle flecks his upper lip. She stares at the black hole of his pistol muzzle. It’s 9mm across but looks much larger.

      The soldier behind her pushes her in the back with his rifle and she stumbles forward onto her knees in front of him.

      Sophie is terrified and starts babbling, ‘I’m sorry, terribly sorry, Captain. It’s all a mistake, a terrible mistake. Forgive me please!’

      The