Juggernaut

I'd been wondering who was going to handle the ferry. There would be a lot of local knowledge involved apart from familiarity with the craft itself. I said, 'Good thinking. Once we've taken the ferry point here we send a delegation and get the ferry back in business – just for us.'

'Well, it might work,' said McGrath dubiously. His form of payment would probably be a gun at the pilot's belly.

'First let's take the ferry,' I said. Perhaps it would be held by about five men whom we could capture or rout with a minimum of fuss, but I doubted that it would be that easy.

There was no further talk as we cruised steadily on until we saw the shapes of man-made buildings along the bank. We had arrived, and it still lacked half an hour to dawn.

There it is,' I whispered, pointing. Instantly Zimmerman cut the engine and we used the oars to hold us stemming the tide. Shapes were emerging but confusingly, all detail obscured. There was a huge dark shape in the water a hundred yards offshore that we couldn't identify as yet. An island, perhaps? Hammond and McGrath back watered to keep us upstream while we scanned the shore anxiously for movement.

As all dawns do in central Africa, this one came in minutes. The air became grey and hazy, a shaft of early sunlight sprang out across the water and it was as if a veil had been lifted. Several voices whispered together.

'It's the ferry!'

She was anchored offshore, bobbing gently, a marvellous and welcome sight. She was big. Visions of a hand-poled pontoon, one-car sized and driven by chanting ferrymen, not at all an uncommon sight in Africa, receded thankfully from my mind. Kironji had said it took trucks, and trucks he meant. This thing would take several vehicles at one crossing. And there was something else about her profile in the watery light which nagged at me: a long low silhouette, bow door's slanted inwards to the waterline and a lumpy deck structure aft. She was a far cry from the sleek and sophisticated modern ferries of Europe.

We slid out from under the shadow of her bow and made rapidly for shore. Hammond rowed us out of sight of the ferry point and tucked into the bank in as secretive a spot as we could find, setting both anchors. We disembarked into the fringe of vegetation.

I looked to McGrath. He and Sadiq were the experts now, and I wasn't sure which of the two was going to take command. But there wasn't any doubt really; with assurance Sadiq started giving instructions, and McGrath took it with equanimity. I think he'd approved of Sadiq as a fighting man and was prepared to take his orders.

'Mister Mannix, you and Mister Zimmerman come with me, please,' Sadiq said. 'Mister McGrath will take Mister Hammond. We are going towards the buildings. We three will take the further side, Mister McGrath the nearer. Nobody is to make any disturbance or touch anything. Observe closely. We must know how many men and officers are here, and what weapons they have. Where they keep the radio and telephone. What transport they have. The layout of the terrain. Whether there are people on the ferry, and what other boats there are.'

I whistled silently. It was a tall order. All he wanted to know was absolutely everything.

'If you are caught,' he went on, 'make as much outcry as you can, to alarm the others. But try not to reveal that they exist. If the opportunity arises for you to steal weapons do so, but do not use them.'

He looked intently at McGrath who showed no reaction but that of careful attention. Sadiq said, 'I think that is all. Good luck, gentlemen.'

The astounding thing was that it worked exactly as he planned it. In my imagination I had seen a hundred things going drastically wrong: ourselves captured, tortured, shot, the site overrun with soldiers armed to the teeth, the ferry incapacitated or nonexistent… every obstacle under the sun placed between us and success. In fact it was all extremely easy and may well have been the most fruitful reconnaissance mission in the annals of warfare.

This was because there were so few men there. Our team made a count of fifteen, McGrath said seventeen, and the highest-ranking soldier we could spot was a corporal. They had rifles and one light machine-gun but no other weapons that we could see. There was a radio equipped with headphones and another in one of the cars, but it was defunct; Hammond reported having seen its guts strewn about the passenger seat.

There were two trucks, one with a shattered windscreen, a Suzuki four-wheel drive workhorse and a beat-up elderly Volvo.

This was a token detachment, set there to guard something that nobody thought to be of the least importance. After all, nobody from Manzu was going to come willingly into a neighbouring battle zone, especially when the craft to bring them was on the wrong side of the water.