Part One

One

‘In these tense days,’ the notice on the wall said, ‘the eyes of the country are upon you and, knowing the onerousness of your task, I am sure you will be patient, ardent and above all strong. Britain relies on you.’

The message was from the Prime Minister of Great Britain, the Right Honourable Arthur Starke, and, addressed to all members of Hodgeforce as part of a big morale build-up, a copy had been attached to the wall of the guardroom of the 17th/105th Assault Battalion – as it had in every unit orderly room and all messrooms and canteens of the great base camp at Pepul. It had been properly printed, with a nice line in decorative edging, and proclaimed its ringing message just above the head of Private Kevin Lawrence Bowen as he worked over the fire bucket which, traditionally, as a petty military criminal, he had scraped and polished until he could see his blunted, pale face in it, even the thatch of stiff ginger hair, yellow fox’s eyes and freckles that blurred the outline of his features.

He had already painted the bucket red, and scraped and polished it and shone it again – a task designed especially to bore him to tears by the unsympathetic Sergeant Patrick O’Mara, of the Royal Military Police, who was an expert at such things.

Outside, the wind that came from the sea was warm and sticky and, on its passage through the mangrove swamps that surrounded the largest part of the camp’s perimeter, it had picked up the curious smell of the mangroves, that odd mixture of acid gas and rotten vegetation.

Dark masses of thick-trunked cotton trees leaned over the base, shutting out the yellow moon and making it a chequerboard of blacks and ghostly whites. Beneath the trees, the splintered leaves of the banana plants rasped in the hot wind and, beyond them, the sky, carved into segments by the curving boles of palms, was pricked by starlight.

Outside the camp boundary, the mud and wattle huts of the village of Pepul, huddled among the foliage, were thrown out here and there in silhouette by the faint light of an oil lamp or the glare of a fire, and what few stone buildings there were picked up the moonlight on their whitewashed fronts and tossed it back in a silvery glow. The aromatic air of the Equator was heavy with the acrid scent of woodsmoke and the ancient heady smell of Africa.

Not that Ginger Bowen cared much about the acrid scent of woodsmoke or the ancient heady smell of Africa. And, while he was very well aware of the onerousness of his task, he felt neither ardent nor patient, nor even particularly strong. And, just at that moment, he couldn’t have cared less whether Britain relied on him or not.

In a mild puzzled way, he felt he had become familiar with all the emotions of a cold-blooded murderer before the act. The sound of the bullfrogs, the crickets and the mosquitoes made music with the cheep of bats and the screech of the owls, and from time to time he heard the rats making love in the undergrowth and the noise of a beetle roaring round the room like a flying bomb. The thermometer on the wall registered eighty-eight and the heat stood in the shadows with the suffocating menace of an assassin. His shirt was black with sweat and he was suffering from prickly heat, which he felt was a personal imposition not inflicted on the other men about him in the camp.

He had no wish to be where he was. In fact, he wasn’t at all sure why he was there. All he knew was that two months before he had been an unwilling recruit at one of the few remaining training camps in England, and eleven months before that, before the new National Service Act which a hard-pressed Britain had been forced to bring in again, had caught him up, a bricklayer’s labourer – still unwilling – in a Sheffield wireworks.

Ginger Bowen’s unwillingness was not brought on by his unexpected presence in Africa. It was a built-in unwillingness that had been with him most of his life. Where it had started, he didn’t know – even if he’d ever thought about it – perhaps somewhere on the cheerless council estate that covered the tilted acres of a wind-swept Yorkshire hillside, perhaps in the out-of-date school that successive governments had been promising for generations to replace and never had, perhaps in the cramped home, noisy with television and transistor and disputatious voices, where he’d been brought up. Wherever it originated, the fact remained that Ginger’s unwillingness was a real thing, as real as the blunt and shapeless nose in the centre of his face.

It wasn’t that he was devoid of humour – rather the contrary – it was simply that the welfare state and the permissive society in which he had lived had never fitted him for doing anything else but what he pleased.

He put aside the bucket at last and stood up, flexing his fingers and staring at the green polish marks on his hand with disgust. Then he carefully put away the rags he’d been using and folded the dusters as O’Mara always insisted, and picked up the bucket.

‘Ah, the good Ginger!’ O’Mara looked up as he put the bucket down in the entrance to the guardroom. ‘See that it’s filled with water, old boy – and, mind, not a splash on the outside. Any fires that now occur will be put out all the more efficiently for the work you’ve put into that bucket.’

‘Nail a plank across it, Sarge,’ Ginger protested, not without friendliness. Over the months, both in Africa and in England, through all his numerous arrests and detentions, Ginger had got to know Sergeant O’Mara well and bore him no ill will. There was, in fact, quite a lot of mutual trust and liking between them, in spite of the fact that more often than not they were firmly on opposite sides of military law.

‘You know what they say,’ O’Mara said gaily, enjoying the leg-pulling. ‘Excreta tauri cerebrum vincit. Bulsh baffles brains. And if your cup of happiness, Ginger, has been soured by the gall that led Lieutenant Jinkinson to shove you on the peg, then perhaps the rumour that we’re leaving here soon might bring roses to your cheeks.’

‘Leaving?’ Ginger looked up, interested. ‘When?’

O’Mara gestured. ‘When the boys back in Westminster run out of ideas what to do next,’ he said. ‘That’s when we come into the picture. Didn’t anybody ever tell you? War’s a failure of diplomacy. And warriors like us are the dogsbodies they drag out when the politicians can’t think of anything else to say.’

Ginger gave him a disgusted look and went to fill the bucket at the standpipe at the back of the hut. Beyond the camp boundary, he could see the road into Pepul, open to all but criminals like Ginger, and along its fringe the huts where the native women sat, selling mangoes or bananas from the wide calabashes between their feet, and the tailors huddled over their ancient machines, slaving away in the yellow glow of kerosene lamps. From among the foliage behind, came the drab plink-plonk of a tuneless melody in fragments of broken sound from an instrument made from a biscuit tin – and like an accompaniment across the stifling air the thud of a drum through the crowding trees.

Listening to it, Ginger wondered what malignant fates had conspired to land him in this god-forsaken part of Africa. He was aware in the casual manner of a man who never reads anything but the sports page of his daily paper that some sort of emergency existed. He was aware that a British base at King Boffa Port in Khanzi just to the south had been summarily nationalised by Khanzians still revelling in the fact that they had tossed aside the yoke of one of the decadent new African states, whose corrupt politicians had undone all the good that a hundred years of British colonial rule had done, so that all the provinces in their dominions were now trying to do exactly what they had done themselves twenty years before. The fact that the Khanzians had happily ignored the treaty made with Britain by their erstwhile rulers, Malala, and closed the base, had been sufficient to rouse in a Great Britain still smarting at no longer having either Empire or foreign bases a feeling of bitter resentment which had been supported by the African rulers of the land where Ginger now unwillingly resided, who were for once eager to uphold Britain’s rights because they marched in step with their own.

The result was that the somewhat ramshackle base at Pepul, some two hundred miles to the north of King Boffa Port, had been hastily built up with a view to forcing the new owners of King Boffa Port to stand by the treaty and hand their loot back to Britain.

All these somewhat confused international politics were way over Ginger’s head, however. Since Macmillan’s ‘wind of change’ had swept across Africa, the newly independent states changed their names as often as they had changed rulers so that no one, least of all Ginger, was any longer certain where they were or what they were currently titled, and Ginger was quite indifferent to whether Britain got her base back or not. He was unmoved by the cries of treachery that certain elderly Members of Parliament who could still remember Britain’s greatness were sending up. He was untouched by all the haste and urgency that existed around the new base, all the scurrying hither and thither of Mokes and Landrovers and Champs and Donkeys containing high-ranking officers, all the departures and arrivals of aircraft on the hastily enlarged airfields at Pepul and Korno to the north, all the urgent and uncomfortable conferences between British and Malalan commanders that went on incessantly in the newly-erected huts of the operations block and in the white concrete parliament buildings of Machingo, the capital of Malala, just to the south. Ginger was untouchable.

It never occurred to him that, but for the crisis, he might have spent the rest of his days in the provincial English city where he was born. On his trip to Malala he had seen Gibraltar, Dakar and Casablanca. He had smelt the exciting smell of Africa, that strange mixture of charcoal and vegetation that could always stir the hearts of old Coasters. He had seen the sea in half a dozen moods. He had experienced blazing dawns and roaring sunsets that he would never have experienced in Britain. He had seen the moon like a huge orange in the sky, and stars that seemed so close and so glowing bright he could almost touch them. He had seen the Slave Coast – the old White Man’s Grave – and palm-fringed beaches so shimmering they looked like bleached ribs in the sun, and the brilliant green of jungle foliage covering the harsh red land.

He had travelled as he would normally never have had a chance to travel. And it had left him only with a numb horror that the National Service Act, which had had to be introduced when the crises of the Seventies had forced military preparedness on Britain, had scooped him out of his little niche in Yorkshire and forced him to live in a wider, higher and more colourful world than he was used to.

As he put down the full bucket and went inside the guardroom again, Sergeant O’Mara looked up.

‘Do you know, Ginger,’ he said cheerfully, ‘you never told me. What was it for this time?’

Ginger grinned and his lumpy face warmed and crumpled in a way that always amused O’Mara. ‘Out without a pass,’ he said shortly.

‘Girl?’ O’Mara asked.

‘Yeh.’

‘Was she worth it?’

Ginger’s grin widened. ‘She was that.’

‘Who is she?’

‘Sulfika Achmet’s her name.’

‘Nig?’

‘White bints out here don’t look at me,’ Ginger said. ‘One of coffee, two of milk.’

‘On the knock, or just a friend?’

‘Bit of both, I suppose.’

O’Mara grimaced. ‘All you’ll get out of that lark,’ he commented, ‘will be a bad reputation and kinks in your spine.’

He bent over the transistor he was toying with, his head cocked as he tuned it carefully.

‘How about a bit of music, Sarge?’ Ginger asked. ‘Makes my load lighter.’

O’Mara shook his head. ‘Not this time, Ginger,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to get the Prime Minister. I don’t suppose you’re aware of it, you probably couldn’t care less if you did know, but it might – it just might – interest you to know that he’s about to address you. He’s making a broadcast to the nation to explain why we’re here and what he intends to do about us.’

The radio crackled and a solemn voice filled the little guardroom.

‘This is him, Ginger,’ O’Mara pointed out. ‘Talking to me, Ginger – and to you.’

Ginger paused to light a cigarette as the sonorous steady voice, with all its politician’s tricks of emphasis and inflection, forced him to listen.

‘…the first and most urgent task,’ it was saying, ‘is to uphold the rights of Malala in its dispute with the provincial government of Khanzi. We do not wish to use force – God forbid! – but when Malala became a sovereign state twenty years ago, it was part of the agreement she made with Britain that she could call on us, in the event of aggression or disorder, to support her. That is what we seek to do, and all we seek to do.’ The fact – unknown to all but a few technicians – that the performance was not as spontaneous as it seemed but had been well rehearsed and put on tape at Downing Street earlier in the day in no way detracted from the Prime Minister’s performance.

Ginger drew on his cigarette, his eyes blank and opaque. The sombre phrases could hardly have been said to have caught his attention.

‘It is sad,’ the heavy voice continued, ‘to find the provinces of a former member of our great Commonwealth at loggerheads with each other, but it is still our duty to separate them. We are concerned, we are anxious to assure the world, first with protecting the rights of Malala and secondly with taking care of British nationals at King Boffa Port where the disputed base is situated. These and these only were in our thoughts in preparing Operation Stabledoor. We pray it will never have to be used.’

O’Mara lifted his feet to the desk, his face expressionless, and Ginger leaned on the doorpost, his mind already far away in the Moyama Bar in Pepul, where Sulfika Achmet would probably be queening it with his friends, her olive face alive with laughter, her slender body sinuous under the gaudy lappas she favoured. Ginger drew a deep breath at the thought, and, drawing his hand heavily across his face, he coughed harshly in an effort to shatter the uneasy picture.

‘If the United Nations…’ the slow voice nagged at his attention again just when he was enjoying the memory of Sulfika’s soft golden skin and the way the light from the oil lamps caught her shoulders and breast ‘…if they were to take over the physical task of restoring order in the area, no one would be more pleased than Her Majesty’s Government. But some sort of police action there must be. Treaties solemnly made cannot thus be summarily broken, and agreements must be upheld, both by us and by those who made them with us. Otherwise the globe will descend into anarchy. We have therefore asked the American ambassador at Khanzi – we ourselves have no embassy there as we have never recognised the state – to inform the so-called President of Khanzi, Colonel Scepwe, that unless they are prepared to withdraw from the base in King Boffa Port, we are prepared in the end to resort to force to take back what belongs to us…’

O’Mara’s face was sombre as he listened. He was an intelligent enough man to believe that the Prime Minister’s self-righteous words were a little suspect. The issue as he saw it unclouded by ambition and half-truths, was simply that Britain had lost a base and that she was determined, by threats if not by force, to get it back. She was finally taking a stand against the cheerful plundering of the remaining parts of her Empire, to which – harassed by well-meaning pacifists and racialists, by the anti-imperialistic groups in the United Nations, and by the United States who gaily stepped in whenever she withdrew – she had hitherto been obliged to submit. The whole point of the force gathering at Pepul was that it was a pistol pointed at the heart of Khanzi. Every new man who was jammed into the crowded tents and hutments, every new aircraft that roared down the hastily prepared runway, and every new ship that anchored in the creeks and bays nearby, increased the threat; and all the nonsense that the politicians talked about going to the help of the Malalans was just a lot of cloudy oratory to obscure the real point.

O’Mara mopped at his face, not at all sure what to make of it all. He looked up at Ginger’s unprepossessing form as he listened. Under the clauses of the new National Service Act, which had been brought in unwillingly by a Government eager not to offend the trade unions, no man in a profession or a trade, or training for a profession or a trade, could be called up, with the result that only the leftovers like Ginger could be used – and most of them, though they were cleverer than Ginger, weren’t half so likeable. Regulars like the sergeant were in the habit of sweating blood to rouse enthusiasm in people like Ginger and, as pay had recently been cut for all but those with over ten years’ service in an effort to stave off Britain’s growing economic problems, enthusiasm was not an emotion that was easy any longer to find in the Forces.

As the country’s Chief Minister stopped speaking, O’Mara switched off the set and sat for a moment, staring at it. Whether the severe cut in Servicemen’s pay which had taken place a mere three months before the present crisis had blown up was a wise move was now something very much to be doubted. With eleven years’ service behind him, the sergeant was not affected, but he’d heard Ginger sounding off more than once about it, and he had a feeling that in the uncomfortable and crowded camp a feeling of greater fury than Ginger was capable of expressing was hardening into resentment. The Government, he thought, might have got away with it if it hadn’t been for the crisis.

He looked up and saw Ginger still standing in the doorway, waiting to be dismissed.

‘Well, Ginger,’ he said, his smile returning. ‘Did you listen to your First Minister?’

Ginger shook his head. ‘No,’ he said frankly. ‘Not really.’

‘Perhaps you ought to have. It might have a great effect on your future. It looks very much to me as though we might be going to war.’

Ginger’s sweating face didn’t alter much. ‘Whacko,’ he said, a slow grin spreading across his features.

‘You like the idea of being incinerated by an atom bomb?’

Ginger shrugged. ‘They won’t use an atom bomb for this,’ he said confidently.

‘No, they won’t,’ O’Mara agreed. ‘But somebody – probably the Russians – might decide it’s more than just an attempt to get a base back, and they might make a stand. There might even be a line-up, and then – then, Ginger – there might be an atom war. After all, it only wants some bloody fool somewhere to pull the trigger.’

‘Ah, well,’ Ginger grinned, ‘it might come down on you, Sarge.’

O’Mara shook his head, with all an old soldier’s contempt for an unwilling recruit.

‘Shove off,’ he said. ‘And see you’re here tomorrow – on time!’

As he watched Ginger disappear into the darkness outside, his brows came down in a frown. Ginger was careless, lazy, stupid and unwilling, and the sharpest punishment never impressed on him the necessity for listening to what he was told to do. It would be a bad day for England, O’Mara thought, if she ever had to depend on men like that. Yet Pepul camp, he knew, was full of Ginger Bowens – and worse– rounded up from a dozen camps all over the country at the urgent request of the Government in its efforts to raise an army.

The sergeant flung his cigarette away angrily. What he knew, what his officers knew, what the general down in the capital knew, but what the politicians back in England, without their intimate knowledge of the workings of the military mind, did not appear to know, was that the demand for soldiers to make up depleted units had resulted only in commanding officers taking the opportunity to get rid of as many of their troublemakers as possible.

They’d all since arrived in Malala, and Pepul was full of them.