Meanwhile, I was in the creeks peering through the undergrowth at the white sculpted mansion of the Colombians. Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I figured this coup was too good to ignore, so the passages in The Cobra are not simply accurate but autobiographical.
Back at Jan’s house, I borrowed his communications technology to contact the Daily Express in London and offer them the story. To their utter bewilderment, I insisted I wanted a copy taker on the other end of the line with headphones and a keypad or a typewriter. Of course I was talking to youngsters who had never heard of any of these things. But eventually the lovely Gladys came on the line and I dictated a thousand-word despatch, old style, the way it used to be.
Dinner that evening was most convivial. Next to me was the Dutch forensic pathologist. Part of the foreign aid from Holland was a state-of-the-art mortuary adjacent to the general hospital. It was well placed, because patients tended to enter by the main doors but only exit in a horizontal box straight into the morgue.
The kindly pathologist was in retirement, but serving a three-year stint in return for a nice, plump pension when he got home. I asked him if he had had a busy day.
“Extremely busy,” he agreed.
“What were you doing?”
“Putting the president back together again,” he said.
According to custom, the dead head of state had to be presented in an open casket, which was not easy because none of the bits recovered from the garden actually fitted. That problem solved, we tucked into our veal escalopes.
After two days, I had all my research done, and the next day the airport opened. The TAP flight from São Tomé dropped in and picked up the few of us returning to Lisbon. From there, I could take a BA flight back to London.
My wife’s laptop remained unusable for five days and then suddenly cleared as the mysterious ban-on-use was removed without explanation. But I retain a silly fantasy of the morning conference at Langley when the news came through.
“No, Mr. Director, sir, we don’t know what is going on inside. The borders are closed, ditto the airport. There’s some weird Limey in there who has a bit of a track record on coups in West Africa and he seems to know what is going down. Yes, sir, we have tried to contact him, but to no avail. He doesn’t have a laptop and he won’t use a cell phone.”
“Oh, well, let’s just screw up his wife’s lunch dates.”
PEACE HOTEL AND TRACERS
This time, my wife, Sandy, was in serious voice and she had a point.
“You are an old fool to be even thinking of going to a place like that,” she said.
“Calm down,” I advised. “You could be a rich widow.”
“I don’t want to be a rich widow,” she replied.
I thought that was rather touching. There are quite a few women on planet Earth who would do the trade. But that did not solve my problem. I was in the last stages of the research for the last novel I intend to write. It already had a title, The Kill List, after a document that really exists and in which are written the names, continuously updated, of all the terrorists the United States intends to “terminate” without benefit of the habitual formalities.
The usual travels had taken me around the “official” tour of agencies, ministries, technical establishments, weapons stores, and a score of experts in their various fields. That was all in note form. But there is one thing that is too often missing.
As a reader, I am disagreeably picky. When reading about a place in someone else’s work, I cannot avoid a nagging question: Has he actually been there? There is a reason.
Reading about a place is one thing, going there is another. A personal visit, it is my long-held view, reveals a whole range of discoveries that is not available from reading research, and certainly miles more than is on the Internet. The next best thing, if a personal visit is not feasible, is spending hours with someone who knows the place intimately.
When I needed to describe Iraq under Saddam Hussein for The Fist of God, I was advised that if I slipped in, the dictator’s secret police would take about an hour to work out who I was, what I was doing, and that it was not going to be complimentary to the tyrant. The occasional risk is tolerable, but suicide is just stupid. So for Iraq I relied on a score of people who had lived, worked, and traveled there for years.
But this was going to be different. I had tried academic sources, including the Internet and passages from other fiction writers, and it was clear none of them had been near the ravaged city that had to occupy a whole chapter in The Kill List. Not many people had been to Mogadishu, the notional capital of the permanently-at-war Somalia.
The country appeared to be pirates in the north, Al-Shabaab terrorists in the south, and a capital under siege in the middle. And my wife had a point. Seventy-four is getting on a bit for bullet dodging. One slows up. So we agreed on a compromise. She would not blast it all over the Internet in her e-mails about lunch and I would go in with a bodyguard for the first time ever.
Through a few contacts, I got in touch with a specialist agency run by Rob Andrew out of Nairobi. He agreed to lend me Dom, who had escorted whiteys in there before and brought them out again. Dom was British, ex–Special Forces, knew the terrain, and was steady as a rock if things got lively.
There was one airline servicing Mogadishu, or “Mog,” as everyone called it. Turkish Airlines ran a flight out of Istanbul, with a stopover at Djibouti (formerly French Somaliland, still run by the French with a huge American air base), a stopover at Mog, and a final leg to Nairobi. Then a turnaround and back. Passengers could get on and off at Mog. Dom agreed to be there to meet me on the tarmac. It was a night flight arriving at dawn, already blazing hot at seven thirty a.m., and there he was.
He saw me through the formalities of passport control and customs, with the usual gratuities to the unpaid officials and outside in the shade explained to me the local layout.
Mog has two quite different zones: the inner zone, and the city zone. The former is hemmed in by sandbag blast walls, razor wire, guarded gates, and an entire garrison of soldiers from AMISOM—the African Union Mission in Somalia. These are almost all Burundians and Ugandans. They are armed to the teeth, but have taken casualties that would cause government-toppling scandals in a European country, but are shrugged off in Africa.
Colloquially, the inner zone is known as the Bancroft Camp, or the Camp. It encloses the entire airport, all the (not many) embassies, the HQ of the African military mission, and the living quarters of everyone else who is not Somali. These include mercenaries, bodyguards, technical aides, and relief workers—in a word, the whites.
Separate at one end of the single runway is the highly secretive American embassy, also walled, with its huge CIA mission, suspected UAV drones, and a training school for young Somalis destined, hopefully, to become US agents when they qualify. The point is, no one can pretend to be a Somali who is not a born Somali, so no one can infiltrate “the bad guys” except a Somali.
Somewhere in the undergrowth, there is a British embassy pretending not to be. And right in the heart of the Camp is the cluster of lodgings, bars, and mess halls where the non-military, non-diplomatic whites hang out. The hutments are converted steel sea containers, the bar chairs are plastic rejects, the beer supplies are constant (the place would be in revolt without them), and the atmosphere is raucous. Dom and I spent a few hours there and then, in our rented jeep, headed out of the guarded gate and into town. What I needed, I had explained, was to spend time in the Mog City that my Mossad agent in the novel would be visiting on a covert mission.
Our Somali driver weaved his way through the donkeys, camels, and ubiquitous pickup trucks, known as “technicals,” and deep into the heart of Somali Mogadishu. We finally arrived at a side street and, driving up it, found a sealed gate. Dom exercised his linguistic magic, and it slowly opened to reveal a courtyard, into which we drove as the gate closed behind u
s. We had arrived at the Peace Hotel, charmingly named as it was in a war zone.
The AMISOM troops attempt to hold the outer perimeter of the capital city, while beyond their ring of garrison strongpoints the country belongs to Al-Shabaab, who attack fairly regularly. That is where the casualties occur. But many jihadist fanatics are also inside the cordon. That apart, there are the gangs. There are no police—the life span would be too short. As Dom explained to me after we checked in, “It’s not so much that they want to kill you, though the fanatics might. The danger is kidnap. Most of these people are living on a dollar a day, if that. With your face, you are two million dollars on the hoof. So a snatch is what I am here to prevent.”
Thus reassured, we dumped our luggage in the pretty spartan rooms and headed back out to explore the real Mog. I had just two days, then the Turkish airliner would come in from Nairobi at dawn of the third day to head north to Istanbul—hopefully with me on board.
And the two-day tour was really fascinating. We had the jeep with its Somali driver, and behind us a second jeep with four Ugandans. They were happy to be earning enough to go home at the end of their contract of service with enough to become wealthy in their villages, with wives and cattle as befitted their new status.
I had noticed that Dom was carrying something metallic under his left armpit and was confident he knew exactly how to use it. The Ugandans had rifles, though I was not quite so confident of their expertise.
Dom took us to the principal mosque, untouched by shot or shell despite twenty years of civil war that had reduced most of the once-handsome Italian-designed colonial city to rubble. We saw just one of the sixteen pitiful refugee camps, where the destitute and homeless lived in urine-wet squalor beneath tarpaulins and sacks; the old fishing port; and the Portuguese quarter.
At one point, we found the crossroads where the U.S. helicopter in the film Black Hawk Down was grounded and besieged by the fighters of the warlord Aideed. Eighteen Rangers died there, so it seemed the decent thing to stand and say the Lord’s Prayer for them. Until the growing crowd became rather disagreeable and Dom thought it wise to move on.
That first night we were sitting in the hotel window, relishing our camel stew, when something red and feathery drifted past the window. I remarked that it seemed odd that someone was celebrating with fireworks. Dom looked at me pityingly and said, “Tracer.”
Then I recalled that with tracer fire only about one bullet in six or seven is illuminated. The rest you cannot see. Fortunately, these rounds were going left to right and not straight at the glass.
Nevertheless, I fingered my lucky bullet, worn on a gold chain round my neck. It passed through my hair one day in Biafra and lodged in the doorpost behind me. After the firefight, I dug it out, brought it back to London, and had it mounted on a chain. Though not particularly superstitious, I adopted the habit of wearing it around my neck if going into any “rough” environment.
Before bed, I tried to shower off, but the tap had the strength and capacity of a urinating rabbit, so I settled for a bowl and a scrap of towel.
We checked out the next morning, spent part of the day completing our tour of Mog City, and withdrew to the ramparts of Bancroft Camp. There at least we could check into a steel container, enjoy a few beers, and be free of camel stew. Or it might have been goat, but it was rich and sustaining. We still settled for imported steak.
The next morning Dom saw me back through the airport formalities and onto the Turkish airliner. He later found his way back to his family in Nairobi on a small chartered flight.
When I returned home I had a warm welcome. “That’s it,” said Sandy, “the next time you pull a stunt like that, I’m going to see Fiona.”
She was referring to a mutual friend and the best divorce lawyer in London. But of course, she doesn’t really mean it. Anyway, I agreed that those days really are over, and then a year later . . .
DREAM COME TRUE
It was a very small news item and one might have missed it. Down in the heart of the county of Kent, where I came from long ago, is a grass airfield called Lashenden, just outside the pretty town of Headcorn. Lashenden is the home of several clubs including a branch of the Tiger Club, flying Tiger Moth biplanes, plus a skydiving club and another dedicated to classic aircraft called Aero Legends. The item that caught my eye revealed that Lashenden wished to upgrade all its buildings and facilities and sought donations.
I had an idea and made a call; that was in August 2014. I mentioned the news item to the voice that answered and said I was prepared to be very generous, but there was a condition. The voice replied he doubted it would be possible, but he would ask. Four weeks went by. My seventy-sixth birthday came and went. Then the phone rang. Her name was Andrea.
“Are you free tomorrow?” she asked. “We have one flying in from Duxford.”
I know RAF Duxford; it is the aeronautical end of the Imperial War Museum, a collection of classic and revered warplanes, some still flying. Including a Spitfire. Of course I was available. I had been available for seventy years. So I motored down, parked, checked in, and waited. I was issued a flying suit and a cup of coffee. There was a problem. Morning mist hung over the Weald of Kent, but the sun of our Indian summer was burning it off. Up in Cambridgeshire, where Duxford is situated, the fog was worse. Would old Fred’s luck still hold? It held. The mist lifted, and she took off and headed south, over the Thames and into Kent. She landed just before noon. A Spitfire Mark 9, green-and-brown RAF combat camouflage. And she was beautiful; an icon that had once changed the history of Britain, Europe, and the world. And she had been adapted with a second cockpit for a single passenger.
She taxied into the apron near the dispersal huts and closed down. Her pilot, Cliff Spink, a professional who flies classic warplanes for a living—ex-RAF, of course—came over and introduced himself. “Who’s first?” he asked. There were two donors awarded a flight. I was ready. He nodded and we walked out into the sun.
She was just as I had remembered her from seventy years earlier, when, aged five, I was dropped into an open cockpit at Hawkinge field and became mesmerized by the power and beauty of the Supermarine Spitfire. The long, lean lines, only slightly degraded by the bubble Perspex dome behind the pilot’s cockpit; the recognizable-anywhere elliptical wings, the genius of designer R. J. Mitchell. The four-bladed propeller, stark against the Kentish late-summer sky the same cerulean blue it had been in the summer of 1944. That was when I swore my little boy’s oath; that one day I, too, would fly a Spitfire.
One is older and stiffer than long ago. It took a hefty shove to get me onto the wing, and thence I could step into the tiny rear cockpit. Helpful hands belted on the parachute and then the seat straps. A brief lecture on how to bail out if need be. Unhook the seat straps but not the parachute straps as well. Jettison the canopy, stand, turn, dive. Of course. But that was not going to happen.
Cliff climbed up front, his head disappeared out of sight. I used the seat-height adjuster and rose out of the cavern into the bubble dome itself. The Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, all thirty-seven liters of her, coughed once, then roared and settled down to a throaty growl. Chocks away. A bit more power. She moved away from dispersal and taxied to takeoff. Cliff turned her into the wind and checked with the tower. Clear to take off.
The engine note rose smoothly from low growl to maddened roar and the Spitfire threw herself across the grass field, bumping over the ruts. Then the vibration stopped, the grass drifted downward, clunk clunk, wheels up, a lurch forward as the impediment vanished. Cliff held her low over the field as the speed built up, then hauled back.
A raging climb into that blue, blue sky. Kent dropping away like a discarded map in a gale. At three thousand feet, Cliff’s voice on the intercom: “You have her.” His hands raised to head height, visible through two layers of Perspex to prove it. So I gripped the control column and flew her.
Just as I had been led to b
elieve. Ultrasensitive to the touch, eager, willing, wanting to obey before the order was complete. It had been an awfully long time, but as with the bicycle it never quite leaves you. Diffident at first, confidence growing. Bank, turn, climb, twist, correct. I pulled into a rate-two left-hand turn and looked down.
There was the Weald of Kent as it had been since the times of the Crusaders. A patchwork quilt of woods and fields, manors and meadows, farms and streams, hop oasts and orchards, ancient villages clustered around the cricket green, timbered pubs, Norman churches. The same Weald I had pedaled through as a boy, just as it was in 1940, when Spitfires and Hurricanes hurled themselves at the oncoming Luftwaffe. Enough to make even a cynical old journalist choke up. England, our England.
It was over too soon, but it was done. The seventy-year-old promise was fulfilled and the little boy’s dream had come true.
Ready . . . Here I am (above) in the garden in Ashford aged three in the early war years. RAF Hawkinge and its Spitfires were just down the road (bottom).
Steady . . . With my mother and father. My father was a major in the army during the war, but as a member of the fire brigade he was not allowed to go on active service overseas.
Go . . . Off to Blue Bell Hill aged sixteen on my second-hand Vespa and then up into the clouds. The knife in my sock came in handy later when I found myself in a tight spot in Paris.
Thanks to my father’s efforts, I spent the school holidays abroad learning how to speak French and German like a native. Here I am with Herr and Frau Dewald and their children.