Tenth Man Down by Chris Ryan Page B

He’d done two years there as an officer cadet, he told me: No. 1 Company in Victory College. He was quite disappointed when he found I hadn’t been there too and couldn’t swap reminiscences.
    The cooks had prepared a special supper table for the presidential party, but he insisted that we all got together, so the tables were pushed up into one, and we ate in a single group – spiced meat balls, rice, tinned pineapple. The heavy bodyguards looked ill-at-ease using knives and forks; I reckoned it was normally fingers. Then, after the meal, Bakunda said to one of them, ‘Hey, Basil, where’s that beer?’
    Out came cans of King Lion lager, brewed in Mulongwe, and soon we were swapping stories round our fire. Normally, I wouldn’t have started drinking until the exercise was well and truly finished, but I knew that with Pavarotti and Genesis in charge the last phase of it was in good hands, and in any case I felt I had a duty to entertain our visitor. At first I was on edge, but when a radio call confirmed that the party had reached their transport and was on its way in, I was able to relax.
    ‘In my day,’ the President was saying, ‘we didn’t have anything like the equipment you chaps have. Satellite communications, for instance – unheard of. Spy satellites – ditto. GPS – nothing like it existed. We had to find our own way around.’
    ‘In my day’. That was one of his favourite phrases. It came out again and again. It was clear he’d enjoyed his time at Sandhurst, and he had nostalgic feelings about England. Apart from anything else, he’d managed to lay some white woman there during a passing-out dance. He’d got her into some attic room, and banged the back of his head on the sloping roof when he stood up after the performance. But at the same time he genuinely admired our modern equipment and methods.
    By the time we were on our third round of beers the atmosphere had grown quite mellow. Chalky White was well away, trying out his few, newly acquired words of Nyanja on the President.
    Bakunda himself was becoming indiscreet, and I felt the moment had come to ask a few pertinent questions. I turned to Whinger, and said quietly, ‘Crack out a bottle of rum – see if we can get this guy going.’ Then I turned back to our guest, and said, ‘I don’t want to seem rude, but can you explain why we’re here?’
    ‘Because I asked for you!’ he exclaimed with his bark of a laugh. ‘I asked Her Majesty’s Government for assistance in fighting the Afundi rebels, and here you are!’
    ‘Yeah, but HMG get a lot more requests than the SAS can fulfil. Again, no offence, but what’s special about Kamanga?’
    ‘My dear fellow, the well-being of our country is critical to the stability of the whole region. If we come apart at the seams, the rot will spread very fast. Zaire, Angola, Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Malawi – every country will be in danger. They could go down like dominoes.’
    He lit off into a political tirade, talking angrily, denouncing Marxists and revolutionaries in general. I couldn’t help smiling at the thought of him, personally, coming apart at the seams. He looked as though he might do that at any moment, so tight was his tunic stretched over his stocky torso, and his out-of-date colonial expressions gave his speech a wonderful period flavour.
    The only thing that broke his flow was Whinger looming up at his elbow and offering him a plastic cup, with the words, ‘Try this, General.’
    Bakunda sniffed it, and rolled his eyes theatrically. ‘Rum! I thought rum was reserved for the British navy. Splicing the mainbrace, and all that.’
    ‘It is,’ Whinger agreed. ‘But we get it too when we’re on arduous duties.’
    ‘You call this arduous?’ Bakunda beamed round at us. ‘I call it a holiday! A busman’s holiday – when you do what you normally do, but for fun!’
    ‘Cheers, anyway,’ I said, raising the cup that Whinger had given me. ‘Sod the