Black Mongoose

By Jon Haylett

A “fast-paced, sexy and blood-spattered” political thriller set in Africa from the award-winning author of Cry of the Justice Bird (Robert Guest, international bestselling author of The Shackled Continent).
 
USuzwe is an African country rotten with corruption. Its rulers systematically pillage the economy, rob the charities and drain the aid budgets of gullible Western countries. However, a group of citizens rebel against the poverty, food shortages, bankrupt social services, disease and early deaths and plan to topple the regime within a week—and their unsuspecting instrument is ex-Royal Marine Commando Johnny Strowger.
 
Johnny arrives in the Kingdom of USuzwe like any other tourist, intent on enjoying its palm-fringed beaches, game parks and beautiful girls. But when his brother mysteriously disappears, he finds himself the object of a huge police manhunt. Guided by Ephraim and the beautiful Lindiwe Dhlimani, Johnny begins to destroy the political snakes of Kisingo’s regime, but at a terrible price.
 
“Black Mongoose is a terrific novel . . . Jon Haylett writes hard-boiled fiction with tremendous energy and an eye for unsettling truths.”—Robert Guest, former Africa editor of The Economist and international bestselling author

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 19, 2009
• ISBN: 9781907461002

Book preview

Chapter 1

USuzwe

I, too, came to the Elephant Dance. I came all the way from Caister, a sad little village on the Norfolk coast which the sea’s been eating for years. I didn’t come with the intention of dancing – you have to be female – nor could I attend as one of the King’s guests – as only very exclusive, upper-crust, native-born USuzwans are invited. In part, I was allowed to witness it as a reward for a rather nasty, if quite straightforward, job I was doing; in part because my presence at the dance allowed me to finish the business. Either way, I believe I am the only Englishman ever to witness this historic event.

My activities in the country had rather upset some senior members of the USuzwe establishment who, if they’d caught me within the walls of the great palace at Gonwangombe, if they’d managed to keep me alive, wouldn’t have bothered about my human rights or any fine points of law. Like they treated some of the winning girls from the Elephant Dance, the ones that caused them bother by asking awkward questions, I’d have ended up with my brains beaten out with a knobkerrie or buried up to my neck in the red African earth, but not before the local equivalent of the CID had enjoyed exploring numerous pain-points around my body.

I came to the land of the Elephant Dance, the African kingdom of USuzwe, quite innocently – if that word can ever be applied to someone with my history – to visit my brother Mark, who’d been working there for a couple of years. I’ll explain a lot more about Mark later, but the sort of holiday he’d planned for us was the business-class version of a fortnight in Ibiza. It started well. In fact, it was going splendidly, with one or two little bumps along the way, until I met a mother.

Mothers, in case you haven’t noticed, from the moment they qualify for the name, are hostages to the little maggots we call babies; squalling beasts that do nothing but demand, and only sleep when they’re satisfied. I don’t think most prospective mothers, and certainly not the thirteen-year-olds who get laid by some thoughtless yob on a Norfolk park bench on a freezing February evening, have the first idea what they’re letting themselves in for. Even at that age, they’ve no excuse for not knowing what’s coming to them, particularly in a place like Britain where they can have it removed before it becomes a problem. So mothers are fools for their babies, and most remain fools, however big and ugly their brats become. But there are limits, and one of them, one I can’t take, is a mother weeping for the death of her child. I’ve seen it in Iraq and the Congo amongst the rubble of bombed and blasted houses, and I’ve seen it in Norfolk beside burnt-out homes and on grass verges beside road traffic accidents. Children shouldn’t die before their parents. It’s about the only up-side to the deal, one of the few logical reasons for parents to procreate, an assumption that bears them through sleepless nights, brown nappy changing and oceans of puke; an insurance, if you like, so they know they stand some chance of being looked after in their dribbling old age and getting a decent send-off when they die.

Miriam, the mother I met, had been crying since the birth of her first. A bonny, strapping little lad, Joshua died within a week, the cause of his death no more than the USuzwe Health Service’s chronic inability to provide even basically-trained midwives in rural areas. The hag who attended Miriam’s labour, a so-called traditional healer, wore a filthy leather skirt and blew her nose using fingers that hadn’t been washed in weeks. Miriam began crying all over again after the arrival of her second, Ephraim, a man whom I’m privileged to call a friend; not because Ephraim died, but because something happened that was almost worse than him dying. I could sympathise with Miriam over him – my mother cried about me for much the same reason. But, as for the second child she lost: no mother should ever have to weep for what happened to Ephraim’s sister.

At the end of my first week in USuzwe, I landed the job of driving Ephraim out to his home so he could tell his mother her daughter was dead. It was my brother Mark who conned me into it. In retrospect, I wish to God I’d never agreed – aren’t there so many things in life where we volunteer, and then wish we’d never offered? But he asked, he’d done me more than a few favours, I badly needed a break from the girls, so I did it, and it turned out to be a heavy occasion for more reasons than the bearing of rotten news. I’d never met Ephraim before, so I knew nothing about him except that Mark said he was a special friend, very special, but I soon discovered he was a remarkable man. For a start, he lived permanently in darkness: he had to. For him to emerge that day, like a pink slug into the bright sunlight, took some courage. For him to go home, to a village which had rejected him at birth, required the sort of nerve I don’t have.

Easyman Strowger, that’s me. Easyman’s not my given name – that’s Johnny – but it’s what they all called me at school, if not always to my face, and it summed me up very neatly. I was bright, I was sharp – everyone agreed on that, and, to prove it statistically, I had a reading age of ten when I was six – but I was far too lazy to do any work. If I pulled anything off, and I did, because my GCSE grades came out okay, it was because I could mug the stuff up in a few days before the exam. The other kids admired me, the teachers moaned, my parents despaired, I regularly swore I’d mend my ways, but it didn’t make the blindest difference. However, the reason I left school at seventeen had less to do with idleness than my temper. I was asked to leave by the Head after a disagreement in the playground that put a bully in hospital for a week and provided me with the start of a criminal record. Despite this, I could still have gone on to great things. Mum wanted me to sign up at the local college to carry on with my English, Dad had lined me up a job with his printing firm, and no one wanted me to go into the forces. Yet, as I saw it, it was a good move, the best I’d made up until then: the discipline, the teamwork and, amazingly, the responsibility I was given, suited me. It’s not that it prevented me from losing my temper fairly regularly, in outbursts that damaged both the idiots who got in my way and a fair amount of MOD property, yet I spent seven years with Royal Marine Commando units 40, 42 and 45, made it to corporal after five, had been told I’d make sergeant and, if I kept going, might be offered a corps commission. But something happened, something that sent me back to civvy street, something that was my fault and for which I could never forgive myself.

I’d hoped that fire-fighting for Norfolk Fire & Rescue would offer the same sort of discipline but better opportunities and, in some ways, it did: good pay, good conditions, the same camaraderie I’d found in the Marines, a strong union to protect me, a short working week and, when I came to earn my money, it could be fast, furious work and almost as exciting as Iraq. But I had too much free time, too much money, and Yarmouth offered too many easy distractions and opportunities for argument. If someone felt like a beer and good company, they knew who to phone. In particular, anything that involved fast excitement, I was your man, and, if there was a girl attached, I’d be at the front of the queue. It was fun, I had a damn sight more girls than I’d had in the forces, but it didn’t challenge me, it didn’t help me control my temper, and it certainly didn’t bury what was in the past.

My next break came when a friend told me there was a job going in his outfit up in London, a job that paid megabucks compared to fire-fighting, a job for an individual rather than a team; a job where I could prove myself. They were looking for someone with a quick brain, pushiness, nerves of steel, and the ability to take a bit of punishment. The business specialised in tracking down and retrieving assets: abandoned wives looking for their husband’s money, business partners chasing after the capital that their accountant had nicked, money siphoned off a company by a dishonest employee. I didn’t do all the searching – much of that was done by men on computers – but the retrieving was definitely part of my job. I was good at it, nosy, assertive, pretty fearless, sharp and, when it was necessary, forceful. I discovered easy ways of getting cash back, methods that weren’t necessarily legal, certainly weren’t pleasant, and involved using some of the skills I’d learnt in the Marines. I also made a lot of money myself but, far more important, I learned where bad money is kept.

USuzwe was my first real holiday after two years in the job. My brother Mark had been on a contract out there for over a year and his emails had been full of how the nightlife was unbelievable, the girls plentiful, pretty and loose, and everything so cheap it was embarrassing. Life was so excellent, he declared, that he didn’t ever see himself coming home, not for longer than it took to say hello to the family. So, when he suggested that I spend a couple of weeks with him, I packed a gross of condoms and went.

I need to say a little about this place, the Kingdom of USuzwe. It’s one of Africa’s bigger countries, roughly the size of France, with the same sort of Indian Ocean tourist-type coastline as Kenya, a mountainous western border and miles of savanna plains between. To north and south it’s bounded by two great rivers, the Lowabengwa and the Zimbandeze. Like so many African countries, it’s stuffed with natural bounty – diamonds, gold, chrome, copper, platinum, sapphires, a strange mineral called coltan, which you’ve probably never heard of but without which your mobile phone doesn’t work, timber and acres of unspoiled landscapes including unbelievable, palm-fringed beaches, a wealth of wild animals and wall-to-wall sunshine. You name it, USuzwe’s got it, and its development had been rapid because the country had been blessed with a government that had been stable and pro-western ever since independence. I noticed it the moment I landed at the capital’s, Sosweza’s, airport. It was brand new, emptily huge, immaculately clean, with girls strutting across marble floors in bright uniforms with spectacularly tight short skirts that revealed truly exquisite legs, and with immigration officers who hardly glanced at my passport before smiling and wishing me a good stay.

Mark drove me into the capital along a three-lane motorway that cut like a bulldozer track through miles of shanty towns, whisking us straight into downtown where wide streets and upmarket shops reminded me of Manhattan, except it was cleaner and there were even more bars and night clubs. Everything I saw in the first couple of days seemed to buzz with vibrant excitement. When I went with Mark to the bars and night clubs to meet his friends – and there seemed to be armies of them, businessmen, aid workers, engineers, people, like Mark, installing the latest technology in factories and offices, accountants (hordes of them, from top companies like KPMG and Deloitte) and bankers – they couldn’t stop gushing about how dynamic Sosweza was, comparable, as a place to do business, with world centres like Hong Kong, Tokyo and Shanghai. Every time I asked one of them why – because, to me, this just didn’t sound like the flyblown, heat-sapped, corrupt and regressive Africa I’d expected – they all nodded their heads wisely, took a long pull on their Sosweza Slammers, and put it all down to one man: King Ndlovlana ‘Freddie’ Mpureza II, thirty-six-year-old scion of the ancient but very up-to-date USuzwan monarchy.

What Mark hadn’t told me was that he’d lined up a job for me, if I was interested. So, one midday early in the first week of my stay, Mark wheeled me round to one of the high-rise offices in downtown Sosweza, one of those buildings that’s all steel and tinted glass. It wasn’t exactly an interview. Mark came too, which surprised me a bit, and we met a couple of pinstripe-suited USuzwans who worked hard to pretend they weren’t the shrewd cookies they actually were, instead almost falling over backwards to offer me something I couldn’t refuse. They laid on a gigantic buffet and spent their time urging me to eat more, perhaps in the hope I’d become immovable and have to stay. The job was in security. Amongst other things, I was in charge of the twenty-three-storey building where the interview took place. But it was more than that. They wanted me to be pro-active, to look for trouble before it arrived, and do something about it. I could tell there was a hidden agenda and I didn’t want to be part of it. I even suspected that Mark knew what it was.

There were other things that should have seriously bothered me, rather than simply raising the mild puzzlement they did. After the first few mind-bending days, when our time was spent almost exclusively in the presence of breathtakingly attractive and willing young women, things changed. In the afternoons, after he’d finished at work, Mark would leave the big, air-conditioned Ford Expedition his company provided and take his personal transport, a dirty, beaten up, open-topped, short wheelbase Land Rover. In this rattletrap banger, we ground our way around the capital and into its outskirts, and, while there were some things which were a blast, there was too much I didn’t like.

Most of Sosweza isn’t bright, shiny, modern buildings. That’s the public face, the international face, the face the tourists see, the face they show the visiting businessmen and dignitaries, the face on the tourist adverts back in the UK. Most of it is a fucking dump, a heaving, stinking, shit-filled slum. In England, if you’d kept a pig in those conditions, the RSPCA would have prosecuted you. Once you’re in these human scrap heaps, they stretch for miles, shacks built of tottering wooden frames to which are fixed anything that’s vaguely waterproof; top end construction is rusty corrugated iron, bottom end is layers of plastic carrier bags. For every fat-faced businessman dressed in a pin-striped suit, there’s an army of raggedly dressed, half-starved humanity that would give its eye-teeth for half of one of the cocktail sausages I’d left on my plate at lunch. I think what left the biggest impression was the stench, and you didn’t have to look far to find its source. Every street, every alleyway was both a rubbish tip and an open drain. I’d arrived in a drought, the longest and worst Usuzwe had seen in decades, yet the alleyways still managed to run with streams of raw, yellow-brown sewage. I hated to imagine what it was like in the rains.

Mark did take me to some interesting places. I particularly enjoyed Bunyangi market, the huge open-air market which served the big slum to the north of the city. There must have been thousands of ramshackle stalls, and, at every one we passed, the owner – most of them women – came out and tried to flog us something. It was done with such good spirit, so much banter and laughter, yet ours might be the only good sale they’d hope to make that day. One thing about the repartee really impressed me: Mark spoke the language with an easy fluency, and the ladies loved it.

As we moved between stalls groaning under multicoloured heaps of fruit, or laden with Indian saris, or piled with cheap plastic toys from Taiwan, or sparkling with Arab copperwork, or a paint-palette of spices from every corner of God’s Earth, Mark stopped and turned to me and said how you could buy anything here, anything, particularly if you had foreign currency. When I laughed – it wasn’t a nasty laugh, just a bit unbelieving – he became quite upset, and said to name something, something bizarre, something you wouldn’t dream of setting out to buy down Norwich market on a sunny Saturday afternoon. So I said something stupid. I said, What about a girl?

Too easy, Mark said.

Okay, I said, what about a five-year-old girl?

Easy, said Mark.

What, buy her? I asked, in horrified disbelief.

Yeah, he replied.

Go on, then, I challenged. Okay, I was half pissed, but I wish to God I hadn’t challenged him, because it was so easy. We went home that afternoon with a snot-nosed imp in the back of the Land Rover.

I can’t ever remember something that started as a laugh turning so suddenly horrific. I know now why Mark did it, but even that doesn’t help. He left me in the care of a whale of a woman called Beatrice with a bosom the size of two bolsters, who ran a jewellery store. Now, I did want some jewellery to take home to Mum and my two sisters, but I’d been thinking semi-precious stones rather than the sort of plastic junk Beatrice had to offer. But I bought a load of it anyway as, if I hadn’t, I think she’d have either flattened me with a blow from the bolsters, or removed my arm just like you twist a chicken leg off the Sunday roast. About a quarter of an hour later, after an appreciative Beatrice had fed me a cup of tea so sweet I left my teeth behind in the mug, Mark reappeared. I followed him to a garage, a corrugated iron shed where a small army of men did everything from repair tyres to fit reconditioned engines. Round the back, he introduced me to Constance. Constance was five, and Constance, Mark announced, was mine.

I don’t think I need to describe how I felt. I’m not a paedophile and I’m perfectly prepared to have a laugh with young kids if they’re up for it. But this little waif – Jesus! She wore a torn and grubby blue gingham dress and a pair of ancient plimsolls with her big toes showing. Her legs and arms were all bone, knobbly at the joints, and her skin patterned with purple scars. But her face… It was pitifully thin with big, round black eyes, a snub nose, buck teeth, and, plastered across the front of it, the biggest, widest, yet shyest smile I’ve ever seen.

Mark took one hell of a risk. He, of all people, understood me, and he must have calculated that I’d be horrified rather than angry, because he knew only too well that Constance was exactly the sort of thing that tips me into an abyss of black fury. As it was, I grabbed Mark’s arm and dragged him round the corner, raised a meaty fist and said things like, You fucking little shit, you can’t do this! and, Take her back or I’ll tear your fucking head off! – all, by my standards, pretty controlled stuff – but it made not the slightest difference. He’d paid just under thirty quid for her and the ‘uncle’ who’d sold her would be miles away by now.

Anyway, he said, she was an AIDS orphan and whatever I did with her would be better than the misery she’d come from. At least, Mark said, you’ll probably feed her.

So Constance went home with us, via a market stall where I bought her a new dress, some underwear with daisies on it, and a pair of pink trainers she cried over. And she stayed for tea, but after she’d eaten enough biscuits and fruit cake to make a hippo pop, Mark and I stuck her back in the Land Rover and drove her round to an orphanage he knew. I paid – he made bloody sure I paid – two years’ keep in advance.

That rollercoaster of highs and lows in the first few days in USuzwe lasted until the moment Ephraim and I jolted our way along the broken road that took us the last few miles to Kibonane, the village where Ephraim’s mother lived. After that, my whole life lurched again from a far bigger shock than anything that had happened in the corps, because, as we were pitched back and forth in Mark’s battered Land Rover, Ephraim began to tell me how his sister had died. The unexpectedness, the suddenness of his story, a story from a man I’d only just met, and the sheer horror of what he described, all told in a flat, unemotional monotone, appalled me. It was as if I’d breezed round a corner and walked straight into a fucking great sheet of toughened glass.

She’d been murdered, not down some dark alleyway in one of Sosweza’s stinking shanty towns but at one of the King’s palaces. They’d started by binding her wrists with sisal twine, so tight they bled, before dragging her into a shower room and beating her until her blood ran across the tiles and trickled down the drains. When she hadn’t co-operated, they’d gone on to do indescribable things to her lovely body, things so bestial they defy description. After that, they’d dragged her bruised and invaded body out into the King’s vegetable garden, a place where only the women usually go, and, while she was still alive and fully conscious, buried her in the rhubarb patch. They dug a hole, sat her in it, filled it up to her neck with sand, and left her there.

For the rest of the morning, the sun roasted the top of her head and broiled her brains, the flies had fun with her eyes and nose and mouth, and the fire ants explored the depths of her ears. When the pied crows arrived about midday, they hopped around her for some time before they deprived the by now seething mass of ants of the pleasure of her eyes, pecking them out as she watched – she had no choice as her torturers had done a neat job of sewing her eyelids open. A jackal found its way into the compound during the first night and chewed off most of the side of her face. The ants finished her: that’s what the sand was for, to make it easy for them to reach even the most intimate parts of her body. Ephraim didn’t know at what point his sister died, though one of the other girls told him she was still screaming at four in the morning, some twenty hours after they’d started beating her, that her head was a grossly enlarged black ball of insects, and she was down to a few weak moans a day later; but he did know that Fatima, who was in charge of the garden, planned to plant a new rhubarb heart on top of her remains.

Ephraim didn’t tell me at the time why he’d unburdened himself to me so suddenly, and I was too shocked to either ask or stop him. He didn’t blame the boys who did it. They’d acted under instruction. Who exactly had issued the instructions, Ephraim wouldn’t tell me, not until much later. It was, he said, part of the way USuzwe worked, the way the governing élite ran things, the reason why, by African standards, the place functioned so very well.

As Ephraim told me his story, he referred, almost casually, to other barbarities of which he had first-hand knowledge. He spoke in his characteristically calm, matter-of-fact manner, while I felt myself torn apart by an emotional tornado brought on by the certainty that all the fun I’d had over the past week had been like dancing on the tip of that proverbial iceberg: the fun bit, the white, sparkly ten per cent chunk basking in bright sunshine above the surface, floating courtesy of a monumental mass of hidden corruption, greed, and exploitative violence; and what worried me was that I could see how easy it would be for me, or for Mark, or for anyone, to slip off the icy top into the piranha waters beneath.

My spinelessness disgusted me. I felt desperately sorry for Ephraim’s poor mother, but for him especially, that he appeared so determined to function normally in this unbelievable shit. Had it been one of my sisters, I’d have been after someone with murder on my mind. But I quickly found a solution: I would leave, pack my bags that evening and put a few miles between me and that dreadful country. I would have done it, I almost did, but something happened at the end of that day out with Ephraim that, even for someone as jack selfish as myself, made running quite impossible.

Chapter 2

The Shuffle of Tiny Genes

I didn’t tell Ephraim, but I already knew about the section of the palace at Gonwangombe where he had said the torture and slow murder of his sister took place, because he had mentioned that it was a place that only women go. In fact, it housed almost a hundred young women. They were a bonus, if you like, from the King’s annual feast of female talent, because he quietly kept more than just the new Queen. These ‘extras’ were his private preserve, so other men were banned from their quarters. The ones swinging around in the top of the tree with the King, the nine official wives he’d collected during his nine-year reign, had proper houses and servants and BMWs and mixed in with humanity, if under close scrutiny, and he was duty-bound to visit them and procreate from them. But the girls of Freddie Mpureza’s secret harem – because that, in effect, is what it was – were segregated from men… or were supposed to be.

I knew about it because Mark was one of the few men permitted inside. And this is where a girl called Leila comes in. Leila explained something which, when I first arrived in USuzwe, puzzled me. My younger brother is as good with women as I am, but he was strangely reserved when we began working the rampant beauties in Sosweza’s night clubs, Basil’s in particular. Before he went abroad, Mark and I had been doing a double act for years – though never before across such fertile ground. Now, suddenly, Mark was drinking more and fucking, not less, but not at all. I finally pinned him down one early morning after we’d arrived back at his bungalow from a blast of a night at Basil’s. I sat him on his front veranda, gave him a beer, and asked him what the hell was wrong with him. He didn’t tell me much, just that there was a girl, a local girl called Leila, who was beautiful and intelligent and fun and… I’d never, ever known Mark talk like this about a bird. And then, having sworn me to deadly secrecy, he explained that Leila couldn’t be seen around town because she was confined in a palace; that Leila wasn’t exactly one of King Freddie’s lesser wives, his harem, but the job she’d won at the Elephant Dance involved working with them. Mark told me that he should only have met Leila on the strictest business terms and certainly shouldn’t be continuing to meet her, increasingly often and in dreadful secrecy. In fact, by the time he told me about her, they were more than what I would term ‘meetings’.

To go back to Ephraim and our journey to Kibonane: throughout his story, he’d referred to ‘my sister’, as if he couldn’t bear to pronounce her name. It was only as we accelerated up the slight incline into his home village that he let it slip. It gave me such a gut-jerking shock that I nearly drove the car into one of the giant granite boulders that surrounded the settlement. I recovered quickly enough, but my mind, my whole being, felt numb, divorced from the everyday actions of