GM

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

It was past midnight. Light and noise drifted up from the city, bringing with it exotic smells and the occasional sharp report that, these days, was probably just some kid letting off firecrackers.

Mitchel Behane allowed the binoculars to drift down towards the streets. The boss lifted them again with the tip of his walking stick. The ship was still just a cluster of twinkling dots on the dark horizon, but they knew this was the one they were waiting for.

The Karamov was an ageing red and black hulk out of Marseilles. It plied the routes between Europe and West Africa, often moving on down the coast to Cape Town. At one time it would move on up the east coast to pick up coffee and tea, but piracy had put paid to that. It was a small ship, carrying maybe two thousand twenty- or forty-foot containers, bringing aid supplies in and taking fair trade goods out. Bengara was always its first stop. When it left, it was often with a few rough diamonds hidden in the captain’s private quarters, but when it arrived it regularly carried something that was of even more value to the Freedom Brotherhood.

If nothing else, it brought containers which, once landed and freed from the port, made very profitable little condos that the Brotherhood rented out along the main I-6 out of the city. Since the end of the war they had set up so many such dwellings that even the police referred to that stretch of the I-6 as Maersk Road, since that was what was painted on the side of every house. But it was not just containers he was waiting for tonight.

The good old EU Aid programme, fronted this time by the optimistically named Future Farming Alliance, was rumoured to be sending tractors, ploughs, threshers, parts for grain silos and even a pop-up bagging plant, God bless them. In this stultifying peace Colonel Jelani fancied himself as a bit of a farmer – or at least a farm supplier – and he intended to make good use of whichever bits of that generous donation were destined for the Eastern provinces.

He lay back and pulled the brim of his stained and frayed cricket hat down over his face. The hat was functional and ironic. He loathed cricket as much as he loathed the old colonialists that indulged in it. The only rules he respected were those of the military; arbitrary, ritualised order made his flesh crawl.

Tonight he wore plain dark trousers and had forgone his camouflaged jacket in favour of a simple dark blue shirt. Only the heavy black boots remained of his military persona. To a casual passer-by he and Behane were just a couple of regular guys out watching the stars and dozing in the sticky night.

Behane took the binoculars from his eyes, but kept watching the twinkle of the Karamov’s lights just the same.

An hour and a half later the ship docked and cranes began to relieve her of some three hundred or so containers. Colonel Jelani himself scanned the port with the binoculars, nodding slightly as he did so.

‘There!’ Behane said. Jelani glanced at him then trained the binoculars on the little house just outside the port. What had previously been just another shack burning a dim white light in its windows now appeared red. It was a simple and effective signal. When Amadu had seen the target cargos off the Karamov and the trucks checked out of the port, he’d walk the three blocks to his house and drape an old red shawl over the lamp. Four out of five times the lamp stayed white, indicating that the cargo was all UN or military (the Brotherhood hadn’t graduated to ripping off either of them yet), and they would all convene for a beer at Jojo’s on East Road. Tonight the light went red. Tonight was what they had been waiting for.

Mitchel Behane helped the colonel up, passed him his walking stick and opened the passenger door of the Land Cruiser. Jelani was not a big man – five-eight and narrow in the shoulder, which made his head look slightly too large for his body. In most walks of life he might be dismissed as insignificant, someone on the unfortunate side of ordinary, but what he lacked in raw muscularity he more than made up for in ruthlessness. A twelve-year-old farm worker could have beaten him in an arm wrestle without breaking a sweat, except that Jelani would have blown his head off before they’d even locked hands.