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.