The Devil`s Feather (2 page)

Along with everyone else, I tended to avoid him. Life was too short to get involved with loners with chips on their shoulders. However, I did make one overture during the six months I was there when I asked him to pass on a request for an interview with his boss. Diamonds were a hot topic in the aftermath of the conflict. The question of who owned them and where the money was going had been a bone of contention in Sierra Leone for decades. None of the wealth was fed back into the country and the people’s resentment at their grinding, subsistence-level poverty had been the spark which ignited the civil war.

Predictably, I got nowhere near Harwood’s boss, but I had a brief exchange with Harwood himself. None of the local women would cook or clean for him, so most evenings he could be found eating alone at Paddy’s Bar, which was where I approached him. I said I thought our paths had crossed before, and he acknowledged it with a nod.

“You’re bonnier than I recall, Ms. Burns,” he said in a broad Glaswegian accent. “Last time I saw you you were a little mouse of a thing.”

I was surprised he remembered my name, even more surprised by the backhanded compliment. The one fact everyone knew about Harwood was that he didn’t like women. It poured out of him under the influence of Star beer, and gossip had it that he was in the tertiary stage of syphilis after contracting it from a whore. It was a convenient explanation for his aggressive misogyny, but I didn’t believe it myself. Penicillin was too freely available for any Westerner to progress beyond the primary stage.

I told him what I wanted and placed a list of questions on the table, together with a covering letter explaining the nature of the piece I was planning. “Will you pass these on to your boss and give me his answer?” Access to anyone was difficult except through a third party. The rebel fighters had destroyed most of the communications network and, with everyone living in secure compounds, it was impossible to blag your way past the guards without an appointment.

Harwood prodded the papers back at me. “No to both requests.”

“Why not?”

“He doesn’t talk to journalists.”

“Is that him speaking or you?”

“No comment.”

I smiled slightly. “So how do I get past you, Mr. Harwood?”

“You don’t.” He crossed his arms and stared up at me through narrowed eyes. “Don’t push your luck, Ms. Burns. You’ve had your answer.”

My dismissal, too, I thought wryly. Even with a score of ex-pats within hailing distance, I didn’t have the nerve to press him further. I’d seen the kind of damage he could do, and I didn’t fancy being on the receiving end.

Paddy’s was the favoured watering-hole of the international community because it remained open throughout the eleven-year conflict. It was a large open-sided bar-cum-restaurant, with tables on a concrete veranda, and it was a magnet for local hookers in search of dollars. They learnt very quickly to avoid Harwood after he hurt one so badly that she was hospitalized. He spoke pidgin English, which is the lingua franca of Sierra Leone, and cursed the girls vilely in their own tongue if they tried to approach him. He called them “devil’s feathers” and lashed out with his fists if they came too close.

He was rather more careful around Europeans. The charities and missions had a high percentage of female staff, but if a white woman jogged his arm he always let it go. Perhaps he was intimidated by them—they were a great deal brighter than he was, with strings of letters after their names—or perhaps he knew he wouldn’t be able to get away with it. The less articulate black girls were easier targets for his anger. It persuaded most of us that he was a racist as well as a woman-hater.

There was no telling how old he was. He had a shaven head, tattooed with a winged scimitar at the base of his skull, and the sun had dried his skin to leather. When drunk, he boasted that he’d been in the SAS unit that stormed the Iranian embassy in London in 1980 and the scimitar was his badge of honour. But, if true, that would have put him in his late forties or early fifties, and his devastating punches suggested someone younger. Despite the strong Scottish accent, he claimed to come from London, although no one in the UK ex-pat community believed him, any more than they believed that John Harwood was the name he had been born with.

Nevertheless, if Alan Collins hadn’t made his remark about the foreign contingent, it wouldn’t have occurred to me that there might be more to Harwood’s violence than anyone realized. Even when it did, there was nothing I could do about it. Alan had returned to Manchester by then and the murders of the women had quickly faded from memory.

I ran my suspicions past a few of my colleagues, but they were sceptical. As they pointed out, the killings had stopped with the arrest of the boys, and Harwood’s modus operandi was to use his fists, not a machete. The tenor of their argument seemed to be that, however despicable Harwood was, he wouldn’t have raped the women before murdering them. “He can’t even bring himself to
touch
a black,” said an Australian cameraman, “so he’s hardly likely to soil himself by dipping his wick into one.”

I gave it up because the only evidence I could cite against Harwood was a particularly brutal attack on a young prostitute in Paddy’s Bar. A good hundred people had witnessed it, but the girl had taken money in lieu of prosecution so there wasn’t even a report of the incident. In any case, my stint in Sierra Leone was almost at an end and I didn’t want to start something that might delay my departure. I persuaded myself it wasn’t my responsibility and confined justice to the dustbin of apathy.

By then I’d spent most of my life in Africa, first as a child, then working for newspapers in Kenya and South Africa, and latterly for Reuters as a newswire correspondent. It was a continent I knew and loved, having grown up in Zimbabwe as the daughter of a white farmer, but by the summer of 2002 I’d had enough. I’d covered too many forgotten conflicts and too many stories of financial corruption. I planned to stay a couple of months in London, where my parents had been living since 2001, before moving on to the Reuters bureau in Singapore to write about Asian affairs.

The night before I left Freetown for good, I was in the middle of packing when Harwood came to my house. He was escorted to my door by Manu, one of the Leonean gate-guards, who knew enough about the man’s reputation to ask if I wanted a chaperone. I shook my head, but protected myself by talking to Harwood on my veranda in full view of the rest of the compound.

He studied my unresponsive expression. “You don’t like me much, do you, Ms. Burns?”

“I don’t like you at all, Mr. Harwood.”

He looked amused. “Because I wouldn’t pass on your request for an interview?”

“No.”

The one-word response seemed to throw him. “You shouldn’t believe everything people say about me.”

“I don’t have to. I’ve seen you in action.”

A closed expression settled on his face. “Then you’ll know not to cross me,” he murmured.

“I wouldn’t bet on it. What do you want?”

He showed me an envelope and asked me to mail it in London. It was a common request to anyone going home because the Leonean postal service was notoriously unreliable. The usual routine was to leave the package open so that the bearer could show Customs at both ends that there was nothing illegal in it, but Harwood had sealed his. When I refused to accept it unless he was prepared to reveal the contents, he returned it to his pocket.

“You’ll be needing a good turn from me one day,” he said.

“I doubt it.”

“If you do, you won’t get it, Ms. Burns. I have a long memory.”

“I don’t expect to meet you again, so the situation won’t arise.”

He turned away. “I wouldn’t bet on it,” he said in ironic echo. “For people like us the world’s smaller than you think.”

As I watched him walk to the gate, I was curious about the name I’d glimpsed on the envelope, “Mary MacKenzie,” and the last line of the address, “Glasgow.” It flipped a switch in my memory. It
was
Kinshasa where I’d seen him before—he’d been part of a mercenary group fighting for Laurent Kabila’s regime—and the name he’d been using then was Keith MacKenzie.

I must have wondered why he’d assumed an alias, and how he’d acquired a passport as John Harwood, but it wouldn’t have been for long. I spoke the truth when I’d said I didn’t expect to meet him again.

2

T
WO YEARS LATER,
in the spring of 2004, I recognized him immediately. I was on a three-month assignment to Baghdad to cover the rapidly deteriorating situation in Iraq, which was about as long as any newswire journalist could take the stress of the unfolding shambles. Editors around the world were demanding instant copy since the publication of photographs showing US soldiers abusing prisoners in Abu Ghraib jail.

It was a dangerous time for Westerners. Civilian contractors were being targeted for hostage-taking and execution, and private security firms were recruiting ex-soldiers by the thousands to bodyguard them. Iraq had become a bonanza for mercenaries. They were paid double what they could earn anywhere else, but the risks were enormous. Shoot-outs between private security agents and Iraqi insurgents were common, but they rarely hit the headlines. Discreet veils were drawn over the incidents to protect client confidentiality, for as often as not the client was the US government.

In the wake of Abu Ghraib, with the coalition lurching from one public relations disaster to another, a charm offensive was launched to mitigate the damage done by the “torture” photographs. This involved bussing the press corps to different types of detention and training facilities with promises of full and free access. Being cynical hacks, few of us expected to hear anything that wasn’t “on message,” but we went along for the ride just to escape the claustrophobia of our fortress hotels.

There was no venturing out on the streets of Iraq alone at that time, not if we valued our lives and freedom. With an al-Qaeda bounty on every Western head—and women being targeted as potential “sex slaves” after Lynndie England’s part in the prisoner abuse—press accreditation was no protection. Baghdad had been dubbed the most dangerous city in the world and, rightly or wrongly, women journalists saw rapists round every corner.

One of these PR tours ended at the police academy, where they were pushing out five hundred newly trained Iraqi policemen every two months. The coalition authorities had briefed their people well, and we received the same human rights spiel at the academy as we’d heard everywhere else. The buzz phrases of the moment were: “in accordance with the law,” “clarified chains of command,” “absolute commitment to humanitarian principles,” “proper checks and balances.”

They were fine-sounding sentiments, and honestly meant by the smart young Iraqi who pronounced them, but they were no more likely to prevent future abuse than the Nazi Nuremberg trials or the inquiry into the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. If I’d learnt anything from my forays into the world’s conflicts, it was that sadists exist everywhere and war is their theatre.

Thoroughly bored, I glanced through an open office window as the press crocodile wound around the main building. In the centre of the room, several uniformed dog-handlers, with Alsatians on leashes, faced a man in civvies with his back to me. I’d have known MacKenzie’s bullet head anywhere from the winged scimitar tattoo, but he turned as his listeners’ attention was drawn by the voice of our escort and there was no mistaking his face. More out of surprise than any desire to speak to him, I came to a halt, but if he recognized me he gave no sign of it. With an impatient scowl, he reached for the handle and jerked the window shut.

I caught up with the guide and asked him about the civilian with the shaven head. Who was he and where did he fit into the chain of command? Was he training Iraqis to handle dogs? What were his qualifications? The guide didn’t know, but said he’d find out before I left.

Half an hour later, I learnt that MacKenzie was now calling himself Kenneth O’Connell and was a consultant with the Baycombe Group—a private security firm that was providing specialist training at the academy. When I requested an interview, I was informed O’Connell was no longer on the premises. I was given a phone number to call the next day. As I made a note of it, I asked the Iraqi what O’Connell’s speciality was. Control and restraint techniques, he told me.

The phone number turned out to be the Baycombe Group’s main office, which was inside a fortified compound near the bombed-out United Nations headquarters. I was given the immediate run-around when I asked for an interview with O’Connell, and it took a further week to set up a general interview with BG’s spokesman, Alastair Surtees. I assumed MacKenzie was making his point about “good turns” and, if so, I was supremely indifferent to it. In terms of what I planned to write—a hard-hitting piece on the calibre of personnel these firms were recruiting—I expected Surtees to be a lot more forthcoming than a Glaswegian bully who changed names whenever it suited him.

I was wrong. Surtees was urbane and courteous, and as tight as a drum when it came to giving out information. He told me he was ex–British army, forty-one years old, and had reached the rank of major in the Parachute Regiment before deciding to join the private sector. He reminded me that the agreed interview was thirty minutes, then filled the first twenty with a slick presentation of his firm’s history and professionalism.

I learnt very little about BG’s sphere of operations in Iraq—other than that they were wide-ranging and almost exclusively concentrated on the protection of civilians—and a great deal about the type of men that BG recruited. Ex-soldiers and policemen of the highest integrity. Tired of this spin, I asked if I could speak to an individual operative in order to hear his story firsthand.