The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue

  The only three I could like were, Alec, a Scot, who survived, returned to the UK, married, and qualified as a truck driver; the Rhodesian, Johnny Erasmus, the explosives king, ex-Rhodesian army; and Armand, from Paris, who had been amicably advised by the police chief to leave the city for a while until “things blew over.” He was the one who quietly donated his salary to the missionaries to buy food for the children.

  And finally there was the mythical Major Atkinson, in the form of this writer. One day in the autumn of 1968, I turned up at a Biafran advance headquarters, intending to go up to the front line to see if there was a journalistic story worth covering. Seeing me in the usual pale safari jacket, the brigade commander objected.

  His case was perfectly sound. It was well known that the Nigerian army was quite paranoid about white mercenaries and had never heard of a war correspondent. To show up in a leaf-green forest environment with a white face and a pale jacket was asking for trouble. If anyone were to glimpse me through the trees, the entire zone would be drenched in automatic fire. If nothing else, it would be unfair on the Biafran soldiers who might be close by.

  He insisted I change into a camouflage jacket and ordered one of his staff officers to lend me his spare. It happened to have the half-a-yellow-sun emblem of Biafra on each sleeve and a major’s crowns on each shoulder. In order not to waste the day, I put it on and went into the front.

  That apart, I had taken to carrying a French automatic in a holster at the waist. This was because I’d had described to me in detail what the Hausa soldiers would do to any white mercenary who was taken alive. So my borrowed pistol had one slug in it—for me, if worse ever came to worst.

  On the way back, I ran into a group of British press, also being refused access to the front line and not happy about it. One of them recognized me, and that was that. On their return to London, the Foreign Office press desk seized upon it with alacrity. Too late to protest that I always changed out of the “camo” jacket when not at the front, and that the pistol remained locked in the glove compartment of the Volkswagen.

  As for the real mercenaries, I think they are all dead now, though when this book comes out, I may be in for a couple of surprises!

  MEMORIES

  There is nothing noble about war. The adjective may apply to those who have to fight in them in defense of cause or country. But war itself is cruel and brutal. Things happen in it that coarsen the senses and scar the memory. And the most vicious of all conflicts is the civil war.

  Of the thousand memories I bore back from the two years I spent trying to convey the realities of Biafra to the readers of Britain, Europe, and the United States, the most abiding is that of the dying children.

  They died in the villages, by the roadsides, and, alongside those who survived on the relief food, in the feeding centers. These were established almost wholly around the missions—churches, schools, dispensaries, and a field the size of a football pitch, where they lay in the grass, on rush mats, or in the laps of their mothers, who held them close, watching them wither and slip away, and wondering why.

  As the effects of kwashiorkor intensified, the children’s curly dark-brown hair diminished to a ginger fuzz. Their eyes lost focus but appeared immense in their wizened faces. The weakness from departed muscle made them listless until, unable to move at all, they passed away and a figure in a cassock came to intone a last blessing and take them to the pit.

  The bellies ballooned, but only with air; the lower limbs were drenched with feces; the heads lolled on vanished muscles. And always the low moan as they cried in pain. And one image above all, on the grass field outside the window of my hut.

  I was tapping away at my typewriter with the window wide open. It was late summer 1969 and the air was balmy. I almost missed the low sound above the clatter of the keys. Then I heard it and went to the window.

  She was standing on the grass outside, a scrap of a girl of seven or eight, stick thin, in a flimsy cotton shift stained with dirt. In her left hand she held the hand of her baby brother, stark naked, with listless eyes, a bulbous belly. She stared up at me and I down at her.

  She raised her right hand to her mouth and made the universal sign that means “I am hungry, please give me food.” Then she held her hand up toward the window and her lips moved with no sound. I looked down at the tiny pink-palmed hand, but I had no food.

  My food came twice daily from the cooking compound behind the cluster of Nissen huts where the few visiting whites lived. But that night I would dine with Kurt Jaggi of the Red Cross—good, nutritious food imported from Switzerland. But not for three hours. The kitchens were closed and locked, and there was no way either child could take solid food. Until dinner I would exist on king-size cigarettes. But you cannot eat cigarettes; there is no nutriment in a Bic lighter.

  Foolishly, I tried to explain. I’m sorry, really sorry, but I have no food. I had no Ibo, she no English, but it did not matter. She understood. Slowly her outstretched arm sank back to her side. She did not spit, she did not shout. She just nodded in silent understanding. The white man in the window would do nothing for her or her brother.

  In a long life, I have never seen such resignation, such towering dignity, as in that wasted form as she turned away, all last hope gone. Together the two little forms walked away across the field to the tree line. In the forest she would find a shady tree, sit at its foot, and wait to die. And she would hold on to her kid brother, like a good sister, all the way.

  I watched them until the trees took them, then sat at my table, put my head on my hands, and cried until the dispatch was damp.

  That was the last time I wept for the children of Biafra. Since then, others have written documentaries about what happened in those last eighteen months of the thirty months of the “ten-day war” predicted out of Lagos. But no investigative writer has ever undertaken to expose why it happened and who exactly enabled it to happen. For the Whitehall establishment, the subject is closed. It is taboo.

  FLIGHT OUT

  It was two nights before Christmas 1969, and clear that the last embattled enclave of the Biafran revolt was finally crumbling. The Ibos were simply exhausted to the point that their soldiers could hardly stand. In the manner of Africans when all hope is lost, they simply “went for bush.” Meaning, they just vaporized into the rain forest and returned, without weapon or uniform, to their native villages.

  The Nigerian army could have taken the remnant of the enclave that night, but they continued their snaillike progress for another fortnight until the formal surrender on January 15. I had no way of knowing it would be that slow and found myself at Uli airstrip to see Emeka Ojukwu leave for years of exile.

  His supporter President Houphouët-Boigny of the Ivory Coast had sent his personal jet for him, but that was a very crowded flight, with no room for hitchhikers. Also on the airstrip that night was another plane, wholly unexpected and unheralded.

  It was a very old and pretty clapped-out Douglas DC-4, a four-propeller job that seemed to have an awful lot of air miles under its belt. The pilot and, as it turned out, owner was a South African whom I had met, surrounded by Irish nuns. His story was bizarre.

  His name was Jan van der Merwe and he had never met Ojukwu. But he had seen him on television and been impressed. Without any invitation and at considerable risk, he had flown in from Libreville, Gabon, to see if he needed a flight out to safety.

  I was surprised that an Afrikaner, almost certainly a keen supporter of apartheid, should decide to take such a risk to help a failed black man whom he had never met. But I had noticed Ojukwu sometimes had that effect on people.

  Van der Merwe’s offer was politely rejected on the grounds that the Biafra leader already had transport, but the nuns had ideas of their own. They were in charge of two or three lorry loads of children and babies so emaciated that if they did not get professional care without delay, they would also surely die. So the South African
agreed reluctantly to take them on board instead. The nuns began to carry them one by one up the gangway to the dark interior of the freighter. There were no beds or seats, so they laid them on the floor and came back down for more.

  Eventually, on what had once been the busiest nocturnal airport in Africa, there were three planes left: the Douglas and two official jets from the Ivory Coast and the Red Cross. I later described all this, just the way it was, in the first few pages of my novel The Dogs of War.

  I gratefully accepted a king-size filter from Jan and asked if he had a copilot. He had not; he had flown alone. Up on the flight deck, the right-hand seat was free. It was mine if I wanted it. I did.

  The Nigerians had been kind enough to put a price on my head, rumored at 5,000 naira: not a fortune but more than enough for a poor Hausa soldier to claim it eagerly. And the terms were dead or alive, so survival seemed unlikely. The third-from-last plane out was a better bet than trying to hide among the missionaries. My knowledge of the Creed was a bit shaky.

  When the loading was finished, Jan and I climbed to the flight deck, and, one by one, he started the engines. It was pitch-dark and the airport lights were off when we taxied out to the far end, turned around, and faced down the runway. After a pause, waiting for runway lights that never came on, Jan just pushed the four throttles open and we took off in darkness, apart from the low glimmer of the stars. There were Nigerian jets up there somewhere, and had they seen us, it would have been “game over.”

  The first problem began out over the Niger Delta. Jan wanted to get clear of the landmass before turning for Gabon, so he took the shortest route to the sea, due south. The last of the mangroves of the delta were dropping behind us when the port outer failed. It coughed several times and cut out. Jan closed down the fuel lines to it and the moon came out. We could see the propeller blades rigid and motionless in the moonlight. He carefully turned east for Gabon. We were hugely overloaded and flying on three.

  I rose, walked back, and looked through the door from the flight deck to the hold. The babies lay in their blankets wall to wall, while the nuns tried to minister to them by dimmed torches, surviving somehow amid the stench of vomit and diarrhea. I closed the door and returned to the right-hand seat. Over the Gulf of Guinea, the starboard outer began to cough and splutter. If it packed in, we were all dead. Jan coaxed and nursed it to stay turning.

  He began to sing hymns—in Afrikaans, of course. I just sat in the right-hand seat, staring out at the moon on the water, coming closer and closer as we dropped toward it. Far away on the forward horizon was a dim line of lights. Libreville airport.

  The French colonists had built their airport right on the sea. The DC-4, wheels dangling, came over the sand dunes with a few feet to spare. As the tarmac appeared, the spluttering engine gave up the ghost and stopped. The old crate dropped with a noisy clunk onto the runway and ran to a stop.

  Red Cross ambulances appeared for the Biafran children, and the Catholic Church for the nuns. Jan Van Der Merwe and I sat on the flight deck wondering why we were still alive. He was muttering the old Dutch prayers of thanksgiving; I listened to the ticking of the engine blocks cooling in the tropical night.

  We adjourned to the airport crew room and I met an officer from the officers’ mess of the Foreign Legion. I said good-bye and thank you to Jan and went across to the mess for food and a bath as a guest of the Legion, simply because they were avid for news. A bit of influence was brought to bear and I secured a free flight back to Paris on the morning Air Afrique plane. From there, my last remaining funds got me home to Kent via Beauvais and Lydd. Thence a hitchhike to my parents’ retirement cottage at Willesborough, outside Ashford. They were quite surprised to see me, but at least we had Christmas together.

  They were elderly, so New Year’s Eve was quiet and I returned to London on New Year’s Day. My situation was pretty dire.

  I had no flat, but a mate let me doss on the sofa. I had no savings left, but my father loaned me a few hundred pounds to get by. I certainly had no job and no prospects of ever getting one for a long time.

  In my absence, I had been comprehensively smeared from the usual official quarters. I was not the only one. The late Winston Churchill, grandson of the war leader, had also visited Biafra representing the Times, had written of his horror at what he had seen, and had been denounced as a professional publicist for “the rebels.” And there were others. From the pro-Establishment organs of the media, the gloating was unrestrained.

  The situation was so miserable that I decided to do something that even then was seen as crazy by all I knew. I thought I might get myself out of this mess by writing a novel.

  As a recourse, it was lunatic. I did not know how to write a novel, let alone secure its publication. I knew nothing of publishing or the finances of book writing. I thought you could take a manuscript to a publisher and, if he liked it, he would buy it for a single sum like a pound of butter. I had no agent and knew nothing of royalties, or the years-long delay before they actually arrived.

  But I did have a story—or I thought I did. I cast my mind back to the Paris years and my conviction back then that the OAS was not going to succeed in assassinating Charles de Gaulle with their own volunteers being hunted high and low by the far more professional counterintelligence forces that Paris could bring to bear. Unless they brought in a professional from outside.

  On January 2, 1970, I sat down at the kitchen table in my borrowed flat with my trusty old portable typewriter, with its bullet scar across the tin cover, rolled in the first sheet of paper, and began to type.

  Charles de Gaulle was still alive, in retirement at Colombey-les-deux-Églises. He died on November 9 that year. I was told later that no one had ever postulated the murder of a living statesman since Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, about an attempt to kill Adolf Hitler. But that gunman never went through with it.

  I was also told no one had ever had an entire novel with an anonymous hero, or featured real politicians and police officers in a fictional manhunt. And no one had attempted such an obsession for technical accuracy. In other words, it was all madness. Still, when you have nothing else to do and nowhere else to go, you might as well get on with it.

  I wrote for thirty-five days, from when my friend went off to work until her return after dark; that is to say, all through January, seven days a week, and the first two weeks of February. Then I typed the last line of the last page.

  I rolled the first page back into the machine and stared at it. I had called it THE JACKAL. That seemed a bit bare and might be taken for a nature documentary set in Africa. So in front of the title, I typed THE DAY OF. If I say so myself, not a single word has been changed since.

  I was still very broke, but I had a manuscript. The remaining problem was that I had not a clue what to do with it.

  AN UNWANTED MANUSCRIPT

  For the whole of the spring and summer of 1970, I hawked the manuscript of The Day of the Jackal around the publishing houses of London, choosing my targets from Willings Press Guide. It actually went to four; three rejected it outright and I withdrew it from the fourth. But along the road, at least I learned what was wrong—apart from the fact that it might be a rotten novel.

  The unsolicited manuscript is the bane of the publisher’s life. They arrive by the trolleyload: typed (in those days), handwritten, illegible, ungrammatical, unreasonable. There used to be a tradition in which on Monday mornings they were distributed among the junior readers for first assessment.

  The junior reader was often a student or very recent arrival in-house and a long way down the pecking order. His or her job was to read it and provide a brief synopsis with a judgment, and that was what would go up to the next level of assessment. But no one high up the food chain would dream of reading anything other than an established author or possibly a very famous person who had put pen to paper.

  The horror stories were the legends of publis
hing. Most authors, hailed as mega–best sellers, had had their first manuscript rejected over and over again; and it still goes on, because no one has the faintest idea who will be the next Ken Follett or John Grisham or J. K. Rowling.

  Among authors, the nightmare stories that go the rounds concern the yearlong struggle to find anyone to publish their masterpiece. Among publishers, the horror takes are about those who turned down Harry Potter because who cares about a schoolboy wizard with a wand? And usually it is only the first chapter that is read anyway.

  The Day of the Jackal had a major problem here because the first chapter is ridiculous. It purported to outline plans for the killing of a former French president who was very much alive, and everyone knew it. So the junior readers’ judgments probably said, “We know the climax already, the plan fails.” Manuscript returned.

  Two of my rejections were simple printed forms. One was kind enough to write a letter. I wish I had retained and framed it, but I threw it away. It said the very idea would have “no reader interest.” Then I had yet another lucky break.

  I was at a party and was introduced just socially to someone called Harold Harris. I had no idea who he was. Toward the end of the party, someone mentioned that he was the editorial director of Hutchinson, a major publisher.

  I had already decided my solution might be to write a three-page synopsis of the plot, pointing out that the point of the story was not the death of de Gaulle, which clearly did not happen, but the manhunt as the assassin came closer and closer, eluding the huge machine ranged against him.