‘I do not. That’s an insult.’
‘Listen,’ I went, growing reckless. ‘We’ve seen them. And who’s that guy behind you?’
Muende glanced round at the heavy in the background, glared at me, and ostentatiously drew his pistol. I thought he was going to shoot all three of us there and then, but he laid the weapon on the table in front of him.
Then, with a kind of snarl, he said, ‘You’re lucky.’
‘How’s that?’
‘We need to do a deal.’
‘Sorry, I’m not with you.’
‘Your lives in exchange for the stone.’
‘What stone?’
‘What stone?’ He echoed my words with a tenor shout and crashed his fist on the table. ‘See here, Englishman! I’m not taking any shit from you!’
Still I was determined not to provoke the bastard, so I said nothing. When he glowered at me, I lowered my eyes submissively. The bare bulbs hanging from the roof flickered down very faint, then came back bright again. Then, into the silence, Whinger mumbled, all too audibly, ‘Tell him he’s a cunt, from me.’
I saw Muende’s bloodshot eyeballs bulge. With shaking hands he unscrewed the stopper of his water-bottle again and raised it to his mouth. Genesis, obviously feeling the tension needed to be lowered, said mildly, ‘General, if you tell us what you’re on about, we may be able to help.’
‘You better,’ he said. ‘Have you got families?’
‘Families?’ I was taken aback. ‘No. None of us.’ In a kind of lightning flash I saw Tim’s face looking back at me from the door of the departure lounge at Birmingham airport, the last time I sent him back to Belfast. But I thought it better to pretend we were all single.
‘Just as well,’ said Muende, with heavy menace. ‘But look, all you need do, to get out of here alive, is say what you did with it.’
I felt panic threatening. The guy was making no sense, and I reckoned his patience would soon run out. I should have gone on being obsequious, but instead I said sharply, ‘Come on! This is ridiculous. Stop pissing about and tell us what you want.’
Muende gave an upward flick with his right hand. A second later a crashing blow caught me on the left cheekbone and sent me lurching against Whinger. For a few seconds the light bulbs spun and swam.
‘You went to the airplane!’ Muende shouted. ‘Do you deny that?’
‘What airplane?’
‘The Beechcraft. When it crashed.’
‘Of course. Yes. I mean, no.’
‘Yes or no? Were you there or not?’
‘Of course I was there.’
‘Why deny it, then?’
‘That’s what I meant. I don’t deny it. My colleague was with me. Both of us were there together. That’s where he got burned. He nearly killed himself rescuing this bloody woman.’
That brought a signal from her, and another clout. I felt a trickle of blood run down my temple.
Muende shouted, ‘Where is it, then?’
‘What?’
‘The diamond!’
At that moment the lights went out. Instantly there was a stir all round us. Guards moved in and gripped us by arms and shoulders, as if we might try to do a runner in the darkness. Outside the hut distant shouting started up. Inside, the woman barked out an order. I heard one man detach himself from our group, hurry to the door, feel for the handle and let himself out. Under cover of the commotion, I whispered to Gen, ‘The guy’s pissed, and getting worse.’
‘Don’t wind him up any more,’ he answered. ‘He’s right on the edge. Highly dangerous.’
Once again, Whinger muttered, ‘Tell him he’s a cunt.’
Luckily his words were muffled by the general hubbub, but out of the darkness, the woman shouted, ‘No speech without questions!’
So, Muende as well as Joss now – both having a seizure because neither knew the whereabouts of the diamond the old Belgian had told us about in his coded note. It had obviously been somewhere on the crashed plane, otherwise why was the general – and Ingeborg Braun, for that matter – so manically concerned about it?
For the moment I kept quiet, thinking furiously. Then the outer door opened again, and a man came in carrying an oil lamp, which he stood on the corner of the table. Knock it off, I thought. Set the place on fire. Make them all scatter. I measured the distance. The lamp was about eight feet from me. Tethered as I was, I’d never make it. But at least, with the generator down, they couldn’t start giving us electric shocks.
In the faint lamplight beads of sweat were shining as they trickled down Muende’s plump jowls.
‘General,’ I said. ‘Now I know what you’re talking about. The big diamond found in the mine at Gutu.’
‘So!’ Inge gave a yell of triumph. ‘I told you! This man knows. He is all the time lying. He knows absolutely.’
‘Where is it?’ Muende repeated.
‘I haven’t a clue. I’ve never seen it.’
‘You took it from the plane.’
‘I never got near the plane. The bloody thing was on fire.’
‘
Nein!
’ shouted Inge. ‘It was this one, the middle one! The sick one!’ In her excitement she broke into German. ‘
Er war in dem Flugzeug
!’ Seeing Muende hadn’t understood her, she translated, ‘He was inside of the plane.’
‘Search my kit,’ said Whinger, thickly. ‘That’s what you were doing in the camp, anyway. Search it again. Search the vehicles. You’ll find fuck all, because it isn’t there.’
‘No, of course!’ she cried. ‘You have hidden it in the bush. Tell me where! Tell!’
She shouted an order at the guards. Two of them started to beat Whinger about the head with rifle butts, one from either side, with sickening thuds. He made no sound as his head was hit to and fro like a football.
‘Stop!’ I roared. ‘You fucking bitch! Tell them to leave him alone!’
I’d have done better to keep quiet. A second later, Inge was on her feet, limping down off the stage, coming at Whinger, jabbing at his face with her nails.
‘See!’ she screeched. ‘He is burned! Because he was inside! He knows the diamond, where it is. He has hidden it in a special place.’
The next thing I knew, she’d started pulling patches of dead or dying skin away from Whinger’s cheek. ‘Tell!’ she shouted. ‘Tell!’
Doped though he was, Whinger gave a roar and rocked away from her, knocking Genesis over sideways.
‘This is the one who knows!’ she cried, turning back to Muende. ‘Quite sure! He tells us! I make him tell us!’ With her long nails she peeled off another flap of skin and threw it towards the side of the hut. Again Whinger bellowed like a wounded bull.
That was too much. With all my strength I lunged forward and sideways. The chair I was tied to brought me down almost in my own length, but I had enough forward impetus to head-butt the woman in the flank and put her flat on the deck. Immediately a rush of guards swarmed over me, kicking and stamping at my head and body. By the time they hauled me upright again I was bleeding freely from nose and scalp. One trickle ran down the middle of my forehead into both eyes, blurring my vision.
I could see enough to know that Muende was on his feet, drinking again. He held the bottle high for several seconds, gulping. Then he smacked it down on the table and lurched towards us. Inge was also on her feet, bent and gasping, holding her ribs, white in the face. I reckoned she was coming for me, but she was confused, and thought it was Whinger who’d attacked her. She screamed at him from close-up, but this time in Afundi, or whatever African language she was using. Then she turned and screamed at Muende.
The noise and the drink seemed to get to him, and he too suddenly began yelling orders. The whole room erupted into movement, a nightmare scrummage. Two or three men cut Whinger free from his chair, picked him up bodily and carried him to the stage, where they laid him flat on his back on the table and held him down. The poor bugger made no effort to resist: he hardly knew what was happening. Muende lurched round the far side of the table, bent over the prostrate figure until his face was nearly touching Whinger’s chest, and flung his arms out, sweeping them round and back as if swimming breaststroke. Three times he did it, giving loud grunts: ‘
Uh! Uh! Uh!
’ Then he stepped back and his place was taken by another man brandishing a machete. Its curved blade gleamed in the lamplight as he raised it aloft. I thought he was going to whack Whinger’s head off with one downward sweep, so I gave an almighty roar and tried to surge upright again. My reward was a stunning blow on the back of the neck, a rabbit punch delivered with the butt of a rifle, which put me down and out for several seconds.
Perhaps it was a mercy in disguise. When I came round on the deck, the whole room was buzzing with noise. Our guards were chattering with excitement. Through a forest of legs I could see half the platform and part of the table. Inge was standing over it with her mouth gaping in a wolf-like grin of triumph, holding out a hand. A black hand passed her a long, thin strip of what looked like dark meat, shiny and dripping. She took it between finger and thumb and handed it to Muende, who raised it high over his head and lowered it into his mouth.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. My eyes were still cloudy with blood. I blinked again and again, trying to clear them. The result was that I made out a tangle of grey, slippery intestines sliding down over the side of the table, reaching to the floor. The coils were moving, twitching. My gorge rose and my stomach heaved up into my mouth, but there was nothing to come up except bile. I lay gasping for breath. God almighty. What I’d seen was Whinger’s guts. They’d disembowelled him. Did they think he’d swallowed the diamond and was hiding it in his gut? No. Jesus Christ! They were eating his liver. Was he still alive? I hadn’t heard him yell out. Had they cut his throat? Or coshed him?
It’s a terrible thing to pray that your oldest, closest mate is dead. But I did then. I wished him dead with all my might so that he wouldn’t suffer any more. I told myself that he was going to die anyway, from his burns. I closed my eyes and felt sweat break out all over my upper body. Then I started to shudder uncontrollably. One of the blacks gave me a couple of kicks, but I couldn’t stop shaking.
It was anger that came to my rescue, sheer rage at what these people had done. As the shudders subsided I seemed to go cold with fury and the desire for revenge. At the first opportunity I got, I was going to kill this man. The woman, too. The woman first. In a flash my hatred of her had become all-consuming. Whether I shot her full of holes or blew her into vapour, I’d make fucking certain she never saw Windhoek again.
My head, neck and jaw were aching, but my mind had cleared. From what Muende had said, the big diamond must have been on board the Beechcraft. How in hell had it got there? The answer came in a flash: the woman and her South African escorts had picked it up from the mine. That’s what they’d been doing. That’s where they’d just come from when we first saw them. That would account for the course the aircraft had been on. They’d just cleared the ridge, coming away from the river, and were heading west. Her spiel about flying from Mozambique had been a load of bollocks. She was Muende’s courier. On his behalf, with his instructions, she’d been trying to smuggle the stone out of Kamanga, away to Namibia or South Africa.
Would it have survived the crash? Yes. Diamond is one of the hardest stones on earth, well able to withstand fire. In any case, the fiercest blaze had been in the wings, around the fuel tanks, and if the stone had been stowed in the cabin, or the luggage compartment in the nose-cone, it would have escaped the hottest flames.
Lying on the floor, I shut my eyes, and tried to shut my ears to the repulsive gurgling, slurping noises coming from the stage. So much for an education at West Point. Whatever it had taught Muende, it hadn’t stopped him being a cannibal.
I needed a plan. The start of it was simple enough. Without my help, he and his sidekick might search for weeks before they found the wreck. Only I could locate it quickly. If I offered to lead them to the site, they’d have to accept – and somehow, on the way, I’d call in the rest of the lads to knock them off.
I was racking my brain to think how we could make contact when a sudden recollection drove into my plan like a dagger: my GPS. The thieving soldier bastards at the convent had nicked it. And in it, marked as Waypoint Seven, was the precise location of the crash. Anyone who realised that Waypoint Seven was the vital spot, and understood how the device worked, could make his way directly to the place. The GPS would give him bearing and distance to target – a dead giveaway.
They had Whinger’s GPS as well. Or did they? No – we’d left it behind with the rest of his kit in the mother wagon. And anyway, I was pretty certain he’d never punched in a waypoint for the plane; he’d been too busy trying to come to terms with his burns. The only other GPS with the coordinates in it was Mart’s. Who’d got mine by now? With any luck, some dickhead of a black squaddie, who would run the batteries down by trying to figure out how it worked, and have no means of recharging them.
For a few moments, chasing possibilities in my mind, I’d managed to attain a state of more or less suspended animation. I was brought back to reality by scraping, bumping noises. By squinting sideways I could see that men were dragging Whinger’s body out through the door. Instinct screamed at me to go after it, take possession of it, to hold it, keep it. Reason told me none of that was possible. Reason said the only way Geordie and Genesis could get out of this alive would be to appear to cooperate.