The horizon behind us was awash with oncoming headlights.
“That’s the army,” he said, and told me about the army chief six hours earlier. “They are coming into town from their bases.”
“What do they want?”
“Revenge,” he said, and stepped on the gas. We made it to the center of the shattered city ahead of the army and he deposited me at the only hotel in town a European would be wise to stay at. Then he left in a hurry to return to his wife and family to lock themselves in. Considering that he knew about the assassination, it was extremely decent of him to have come to the airport at all.
I checked myself in, went to my room, and tried to sleep. But to no avail. At four a.m., I put on the bedside light, hauled myself upright, and started to read a paperback I had already started on the airplane. At four thirty, about five hundred yards down the street, there was one almighty bang.
There are three reasons for noises that big in an African city in the darkness before dawn. One is the first thunderclap of a tropical storm. The second is a head-to-head crash between two speeding vehicles. The third is a bomb. This was a bomb. Only later was I able to piece together the events of the night.
The local authorities—army, navy, port and harbor, customs, police—were all on the Colombian payroll, but the payoffs are not in the worthless local currency but in a “skim” of the cocaine shipments themselves. It looked as if the chief of staff had been skimming too much, and paid for it. But for the Balanta tribesmen who made up the army, it was the Papel president they wanted. So they left their out-of-town barracks and came to get him.
The poor old booby was fast asleep in his bed. Because the once-grandiose presidential palace, former home of the Portuguese governor, was a ruin, his residence was a low-build hacienda-style complex in a walled garden. The bedroom was on the ground floor.
The army trucks smashed down the gate and someone put a rocket-propelled grenade through the bedroom window. That was the bang. The seventy-one-ye
ar-old politician must have been tough. As his bedroom wing collapsed around him, he stumbled through the rubble and out into the garden. The soldiers put three bullets through him.
But still he would not die. Then they realized what a foolish mistake they had made. He clearly possessed a juju that kept him immune to death by bullet. But there is one thing that no juju can proof against. They went to the gardener’s store, got a machete, and chopped him to pieces. Then he died. The soldiers went off into the night to break into a bar or two and celebrate. And Bissau City waited for dawn.
Before dawn arrived, the rest of the government had vaporized and headed for their indigenous villages where they would be safe. I descended to the dining room and asked for breakfast. Jan appeared an hour later to say the city was quiet, apart from patrolling jeeps of army men looking for Papel victims but not interested in whites. So we got into his SUV and drove to his home.
Business would be very slight that day, he opined, so he could drive me out into the area of the creeks and swamps to get an idea where the cocaine cargoes came in and see the Colombians’ mansions by the beach. This we did. While we were away, other things happened. At sub-politician level, various functionaries closed both the land borders, north and south, and the airport. The tiny republic was sealed off.
In London, my wife, Sandy, knowing nothing of this, e-mailed a girlfriend to set up a lunch date. Part of her text read: “I’m free this week ’cos Freddie is in Guinea-Bissau.”
Someone in Fort Meade, Maryland, or maybe Langley, Virginia, intercepted this and her screen went berserk. Her message disappeared. Things flashed up with the insignia of the Great Seal of the United States warning her not to use her laptop under any circumstances. She had not the faintest idea what she had done. I was later advised it was those two words “Guinea-Bissau” that did the trick. Word had leaked out. You can close borders nowadays, shut the telephone switchboard and the cable office, but you cannot silence the Internet.
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.