Warlord. James Steel

bills in his outstretched hand. He has hurriedly fished them out of the emergency stock that he carries wrapped in a plastic bag in the petrol tank of the Land Cruiser.

      ‘Ah, Monsieur le Directeur, here is the payment for the permit à voyager, our sincere apologies for forgetting to buy one before we set out.’

      He proffers them towards the captain, keeping his eyes and head down. The captain looks down at him. The intrusion has broken the violent tension in the room and the money is what he really wants. Somewhere in the back of his head he also knows that killing or injuring a white NGO worker would cause a fuss and could get him into trouble.

      His ego has been assuaged by the grovelling of the woman on her knees in front of him; she looks pathetic. Nicolas is also in a suitably fawning posture and he takes the offer of a ladder to climb down. He grabs the money from his hand. ‘Get out of my office! Your paperwork will be issued in due course, when we are ready. Wait in your vehicle.’

      Nicolas hustles Sophie out of the office and hurries her over to the Land Cruiser with his arm around her. Natalie is sitting on the backseat looking anxious.

      ‘What happened?’

      Sophie gets into the backseat next to her, white as a sheet and shaking. The American goes to put her arm around her.

      ‘I’m fine!’ Sophie pushes her away, forcing herself to get a grip. ‘I’m fine! We just had some issues, that’s all, they’re sorting it out. We just have to wait a while.’

      With that she shifts away from Natalie and stares out of the window. Natalie looks stunned and gazes out of the opposite window. Nicolas sits in the driver’s seat and waits patiently. The soldiers have their keys so they can’t go anywhere. Time is running out for the vaccines but there is nothing they can do. No one can even bring themselves to look at the building, they are too scared of it.

      After ten minutes of strained silence Sophie says, ‘I’m just getting some air,’ slips out, walks away from the car and stands looking at the view, feeling the gentle breeze blow over her.

      She stays like that for an age, in a numb trance of her own thoughts. Time ticks on and the sun suddenly drops out of the sky; they’re on the equator and there is only a short sunset. It gets chilly straightaway at six thousand feet and she goes back to the car to get her brightly coloured Kenyan shawl.

      Eventually at seven o’clock the captain has judged that he has inconvenienced them enough and the sergeant walks back over to the car with their permit tucked back in its original place on the top of the folder. He hands the keys wordlessly back to Nicolas who accepts them with profuse gratitude.

      They drive away from the shabby little station and some of the tension drains from them. Natalie mutters, ‘Thank the Lord,’ but otherwise they don’t talk – Nicolas because he is comfortable driving in silence, Natalie because she is afraid of Sophie and is now crying quietly on the backseat, and Sophie because she is shocked but also because she is furious.

      She is furious at the soldiers for their pigheaded, money-grubbing wickedness and contempt for the people of their own country. The journey has been a complete waste, the vaccines are lukewarm and she will have to explain to the local field workers that she has wasted their time and effort and made them look stupid in front of the desperate people who are crying out for their help.

      However, she is most furious with herself. She can hear a recording of her voice playing in her head pleading with the captain: ‘I’m sorry, terribly sorry, Captain. It’s all a mistake, a terrible mistake. Forgive me please!’

      Pathetic! Utterly pathetic!

      She rages at herself, staring into the night as the car headlights swing back and forth following the road down to the clinic at Tshabura. The indignity of it; Cecil-Blacks were not born to grovel. It goes against every fibre of her being. Her family would be ashamed of her if they knew. She is ashamed of herself.

      Yet she did it. The memory of what happened in the grubby little office will stay locked up with her never to be revealed to anyone.

      They finally arrive at the clinic at eight o’clock. The local workers run out anxiously holding up lanterns to greet them. Sophie immediately switches back into professional mode, addressing the circle. ‘I’m sorry we are late; we were stopped at a checkpoint. I’m sorry, the vaccines are …’ She shakes her head and looks round at the deflated faces in the lamplight.

      She tries to be upbeat. ‘Look, we can try again next month, I’ll get onto the UN and we’ll do it by helicopter next time.’

      But they remain downcast; to her their expressions seem to say, ‘Hoping for anything in Kivu always brings disappointment. This place will never improve.’ She feels awful.

      They drive the car through the high metal gates of the compound. Like any NGO facility it has items of value that could be stolen so it’s surrounded by rolls of barbed wire and there are two watchmen with old shotguns and machetes.

      They have a brief meal of foufou, tomato paste and beer and then they are shown to their rooms. As project manager, Sophie gets the luxury of a room to herself across the other side of the compound, a bare, cement-floored place with a camp bed and a candle on a chipped plate.

      She sits on the bed in the dim candlelight. Now that she is finally alone her deepest reaction to the turmoil finally comes storming out of her. It’s not that her pride and dignity have been offended – though they have – it’s the memory of her utter helplessness and loss of control that makes her shake with rage. She bends forwards and clenches her fists in front of her face until the knuckles go white. In her mind’s eye she can see the faces of the captain and the sergeant.

      ‘Bastards!’ she mutters through clenched teeth.

      She is a humanitarian charity worker who has made sacrifices and striven hard to get where she is and is passionately committed to her work. She knows that if she had a gun and those men were in front of her now she would calmly shoot each one of them in the head and enjoy doing it.

      Chapter Eight

      Alex taps the end of a wedge into a log with a sledgehammer and then pounds away at it, swinging the hammer high and smashing down blows repeatedly with all his might.

      He is splitting logs out on the estate. The wood divides neatly and the two halves fall over and rock back and forth on the ground until they are still. Alex stands frozen for a long time, looking down at them with the hammer still held in his hands, its head resting on the ground.

      That evening he finds he can’t sit still in the drawing room by the fire and starts wandering around the huge, silent house. He opens doors into long-forgotten rooms and stands looking at the dustsheets covering the furniture, remembering scenes from his childhood.

      Some of them are happy but a lot are uncomfortable: the noise of angry shouting and blows from his parents’ room, his father passed out drunk on the dining room floor with the dogs settled around him for company.

      He walks around the main hall with its large portraits of Devereuxs hung between the high stained-glass windows. He stares up at the pictures: an Elizabethan knight with his head held rigid by a huge lace collar worn over a breastplate, a fleshy Georgian reclining in front of a bucolic scene on the estate, a pompous Victorian in a black uniform with his sword held stiffly at his side.

      Communing with his ancestors, that’s what he’s doing. Reliving the sense of what it means to be a Devereux. Throughout the ages they were soldiers – hardly any merchants or lawyers and certainly no priests or artists. Active, restless, aggressive men who had served the Crown all over the world, commanding troops and smiting its enemies with sword and shot. The house is littered with relics from their campaigns, shields and spears from Asia and Africa.

      His father might have been an ineffectual aberration but with Alex the genes are back on track. From his army schooling at Wellington (motto ‘Sons of Heroes’) to his professional career, he is an aggressive and successful commander of men. It’s what he does.

      He