Caskey and Wynwood set foot again on British soil the following Sunday afternoon, having flown from the reopened Yundum Airport to Luton with a plane full of complaining package tourists. Despite assurances to the contrary from the High Commission in Bakau, their passage through customs and immigration was neither smooth nor speedy. No one at Luton had been given any advance warning of two returning SAS men bearing semi-automatic handguns, and the ensuing phone calls took much longer than the process under way in the main hall, that of relieving the tourists of their duty-free excesses.
Caskey had been half-expecting a posse of journalists, but not even a single newshound was waiting to dog their steps, and the two men ended up boarding the bus for the railway station like any pair of returning holiday-makers. A newspaper left lying on one of the seats gave no clue that The Gambia existed, let alone that anything newsworthy had happened there.
They sat on Luton Station, waiting for the delayed train to London, eyeing their fellow travellers as if they were from another planet. ‘We’ve been gone almost exactly eight days,’ Wynwood murmured, ‘and it seems like a couple of months.’
‘It always feels like that,’ Caskey said. ‘This time next week it’ll feel like three months since we came back.’
The train finally arrived, and while Caskey read the paper Wynwood stared out of the window at the darkening countryside and suburbs, mentally comparing the silhouettes of oaks and poplars with palms and mango trees. Caskey was right, he thought, already Africa was turning into a dream.
In London the MOD had arranged for a taxi to whisk them across town in time to catch the last connecting train from Paddington to Hereford. Wynwood had time to call Susan before it left, and found himself, wholly unexpectedly, almost in tears simply from hearing the sound of her voice.
She brought the car to Hereford Station, and they gave Caskey a lift back to his flat in the centre of town. ‘It was a pleasure working with you,’ the Major told Wynwood as he climbed out of the back seat.
‘It was mutual, boss,’ Wynwood said.
Caskey walked slowly upstairs, feeling faintly envious of Wynwood’s youth, not to mention the Welshman’s obvious joy in being in love. He let himself into the flat, poured himself a generous drink, and sat down on the sofa. The previous Saturday’s paper was still sitting on the coffee table, its back page headlining the news of England’s inevitable defeat.
He leaned back in the chair and smiled. What a summer it had been!
Late that night Mamadou Jabang and three of his young acolytes arrived in the small town of Cacheu on the river of the same name. After a day holed up in a terrified supporter’s house in Bakau they had travelled south in the President’s speedboat, which Junaidi Taal had used for his escape from the Denton Bridge a week before, and which the Senegalese had not thought to either guard or remove from the beach beneath the African Village Hotel. The fuel had soon run out, but two days of drifting on the prevailing southerly current, the second without water, had brought them, bedraggled but hopefully safe, to this estuary town in the small republic of Guinea-Bissau.
What the next twenty-fours hours held in store none of them could know. They had no money, and no way of sending for any. The local authorities might simply return them to The Gambia, or they might agree to give them political asylum. Most likely of all, if Jabang knew anything about his fellow African politicians, they would choose to do neither. Letting revolutionaries stay in one’s country invited trouble, and sending them back reminded your own people how oppressive your regime had become. No, the local authorities would simply find some way to pass on the problem to someone else.
Through such means, sooner or later, Jabang hoped to find himself back among friends willing and able to support him in a second attempt at rescuing The Gambia from international capitalism.
Next time, though, he would steel himself to be harder.
Arriving at his office that Monday morning, Cecil Matheson found a full report waiting for him on the events of the past two weeks in The Gambia. The status quo ante had been satisfactorily restored, thanks in large part to the efforts of the three SAS military advisers.
By this account – and by most others that Matheson had picked up on the Whitehall grapevine – they had somewhat exceeded their authority. Questions were also being asked about the activities of a fourth man, apparently an ex-SAS officer, who had not even had any authority to exceed.
Still … Matheson smiled to himself and closed the folder. Perhaps he should send his American counterpart a copy, he thought. After the farcical mess they had made of trying to rescue their hostages from Iran the previous year, Lubanski and the Pentagon could do with some professional advice.
That same morning McGrath dropped in on Mansa Camara at his home in Serekunda. McGrath still had headaches, but the Medical Research Centre had given him a clean bill of health, provided he agreed to avoid excitement for a fortnight. Chance would be a fine thing, he thought, as he parked the jeep. His SAS friends were gone, and Sibou would not be back for a few days yet.
He found Mansa in cheerful mood, despite the announcement that The Gambia was now to have an official army of its own. ‘It’s either that or risk the Senegalese Army marching across the border every time there’s any trouble,’ the ex-Field Force officer said. ‘Sooner or later they might just decide it would be easier to keep their troops here on a permanent basis. And if we have to have an army I’d rather it was made up of Gambians. No country deserves an army that speaks another language.’
‘So the Field Force is being abolished?’
‘Yes.’ Mansa grunted. ‘Too many officers ended up on the wrong side. Some of them good men,’ he added, as if surprised by his own readiness to admit such a thing. ‘And there is one good thing about an army. It means the police force can be just that, and not get itself mixed up in politics.’
‘Maybe,’ McGrath agreed. ‘I’ve been an Army man since I left school, but I was kind of getting used to being in a country where there wasn’t one.’
‘I noticed,’ Mansa said wryly. ‘Yes, well … Jabang and the comrades wanted to bring about change, and in that at least they were successful – The Gambia will never be the same again.’ He shrugged. ‘But in the long run I expect all the tourism will change us even more, and not for the better.’
McGrath thought about that as he drove back to Banjul. Mansa was probably right, but there seemed to be very few other ways that the country could earn the money to pay for all those consumer goods which most of its people seemed to want. It was sad, he thought. From what he had seen, the African people deserved better.
It had taken Franklin two days to sum up the courage to talk to Sibou about their relationship, and when he finally did so it came out much more negatively than he intended. ‘I know you can’t give up what you do,’ he said, ‘and I can’t give up what I do. How can we keep anything alive when we live and work three thousand miles apart?’
She had looked at him for a moment. ‘Do you want to keep it alive?’
‘Yes, but …’
‘There are things called planes,’ she said. ‘If you’re coming from England, The Gambia is the cheapest place to get to in Africa. And that works both ways.’ She had taken him by the shoulders. ‘It won’t be easy, and it may be impossible, but we can try. What have we got to lose?’
He had her to lose, he thought that afternoon, as they sat together on a stone wall overlooking the ocean. They had come to the Île de Gorée, the island off Dakar which the man in the French café had recommended to him and Wynwood, and which she had visited and loved several years before. Most tourists came over on the ferry, visited the famous Slave House, shopped for souvenirs, walked along the bougainvillaea-covered lanes, and returned to Dakar a few hours later, but there was one hotel on the island, with three high-ceilinged rooms and shuttered windows that opened onto a view across the beach and jetty.
Now they were sitting at the rear of the red-stoned Slave House, above the cells where hundreds of thousands had waited in suffocating squalor for a voyage to the New World. Here was where their two lives divided. His ancestors had been taken, and hers had not.
‘Did you read that report,’ she asked, ‘the Senegalese General saying that he only let your friends lead the assault because the rebels would not shoot at white faces?’
‘Yeah,’ Franklin said. ‘And all the reports I’ve seen only mention two SAS men, or two British soldiers.’ He laughed. ‘I might as well have been invisible.’
‘Doesn’t that make you angry?’ she asked.
‘Two weeks ago it would have,’ he said. ‘And I guess if I think about it then it still does …’ He looked at her. ‘But if I hadn’t had a black face when I came to your door that night, Diba would have killed me, and probably you and McGrath as well …’ He opened his palms in a gesture of resignation, and smiled at her.
‘I like your face,’ she said.