Tom Cain - Dictator

The air-traffic controller hesitated. There was, indeed, a full-length runway right under the Twin Otter’s flight path. It was one of the many Forward Air Fields built thirty years earlier by the former white minority rulers of Malemba. Fighting a war in which the enemy could appear anywhere in the country, at any time, they’d wanted to be able to fly troops in and out of battle zones as fast as possible. Today, many of these airfields were derelict and overgrown, but the strips were still there, for all the plants that were pushing through them.

The controller wasn’t sure whether the positions of the forward fields were considered a state secret. Of course, everyone knew where they were, but could one say so in public? In a government based on unreason and downright madness, it was so hard to tell.

‘It is possible that there may be facilities close to your current position, but I am not at liberty to be specific,’ he said, with painstaking caution.

To his surprise, the controller heard laughter in his headphones.

‘Ja,’ the pilot agreed. ‘I have a feeling I may have heard of facilities like that, too.’

Seconds later, the Otter adjusted its course and began a rapid descent towards the crumbling remains of the airstrip.

‘Bang on time,’ said Sonny Parkes with a nod of satisfaction as he watched the Otter coming in to land.

Of the original two-thousand-yard runway less than half was still usable, but that was plenty for a plane with the Otter’s short takeoff and landing capability. It came bumping along the runway, swung through one hundred and eighty degrees and paused, engines still running, just long enough for its seven passengers to clamber aboard before the pilot raced back the way he had come and climbed into the dimming light of the late-afternoon sky. Then he banked to the south and headed for the South African border, some forty miles away.

Watching the Otter reappear on his radar, the air-traffic controller suddenly felt a lot less pleased with himself. He had been conned. The plane had never had anything wrong with it at all. It had landed in order to make a drop or a pick-up. And since it had left Buweku empty, a pick-up was the overwhelming likelihood. For the past two hours he had been hearing snatches of news and gossip about the attack on the prison van. Several prisoners were still missing. Had some of them been spirited away on that plane? Men willing to commit such a crime in broad daylight, in the middle of Buweku’s busiest street, would surely not baulk at such a dramatic escape. Well, they were not going to get away with it.

Feeling personally insulted, somewhat humiliated and very, very angry, the air-traffic controller got straight on the line to the air force.

In the aftermath of the coup, all of Malemba’s armed forces had been put on an ultra-heightened state of alert. Everyone from the lowliest cadet to the highest-ranking officer knew of the glory and preferment that would be heaped on anyone responsible for capturing Patrick Tshonga, or any of his associates. They also knew of the terrible price to be paid if, by chance, they missed the opportunity to apprehend him. So three Malemban Air Force interceptors were airborne less than five minutes after the call came through from Buweku control.

They were Chengdu F-7 interceptors, a Chinese fighter plane based on the Russian MiG-21. They were twenty-year-old models of a fifty-five-year-old design, and as modern combat aircraft they were a sorry joke. They would have been as helpless as Wendell Klerk’s clay pigeons against any twenty-first-century fighter. But the Malemban F-7s were not going up against an RAF Typhoon or an American F-22 Raptor. Their prey was an unarmed, propeller-driven passenger aircraft. And they could deal with that just fine.

Their turbojets blasted them through the sound barrier as they hurtled towards their target. There had not been time to arm the planes with air-to-air missiles, but each was equipped with a pair of thirty-millimetre cannons. The three pilots, all honed by years of combat missions during Malemba’s participation in the Congo’s endless civil wars, chattered happily on the radio. If modern rockets were not available, they were happy to do this the old-fashioned way.

In a cellar beneath a government building in the capital city of Sindele, Moses Mabeki watched the sight presented before him with eyes that glittered with greedy excitement.

The man whose arms and legs were currently being strapped to a long wooden board was a senior official in Patrick Tshonga’s political party, the Popular Freedom Movement. He and Tshonga were known to be close friends as well as allies. He had thus been one of the first enemies of the regime to be rounded up when Mabeki initiated the counterstrike against Tshonga’s attempted coup. For the past twenty-four hours he had been deprived of food, water and sleep. He had been stripped naked, repeatedly hosed in icy water and beaten savagely at random, unpredictable intervals, so that he remained in a state of constant fear of when the next agonizing assault might come. Now his interrogators, their skills honed by twenty years of experience working for a psychopathic dictatorship, were moving in for the coup de grace.

This was a moment for connoisseurs, a display of artistry that was guaranteed to produce the desired results. Mabeki would not have missed it for the world.

The board upon which the man now lay was tilted at an angle of twenty degrees, so that his head was below the level of his feet and, more importantly, his heart. His mouth was covered in black masking tape so that he was unable to cry out. But his terror was evident in his bulging eyes, their lids stretched so wide apart that the whites were clearly visible right around the deep brown iris; the sweat that glittered on his forehead and ran between the veins that had distended beneath his skin; and the involuntary spurt of urine that was so cruelly and humiliatingly exposed for all to see.

Looking at the man, Mabeki thought that what was about to happen was probably superfluous. He was ready to talk, regardless. But it was always worth taking that extra little bit of trouble, just to be sure. Especially when the trouble was also such a pleasure.

Mabeki nodded to one of the men standing by the board. He, in turn, clicked his fingers at an underling, who handed him a white cotton towel. It had been soaked in water. With an almost tender solicitousness, the towel was draped across the face of the man on the board.

Another click of the fingers: a second towel, also wet, was handed over, and it was placed on top of the first.

The body on the board jerked from side to side, desperately struggling to break free from its restraints. The man’s back arched in a taut rictus of agony. He tried to thrash his head, to shake off the towels, but strong, gentle hands pressed down and kept them in place.

Mabeki was fascinated by the perfect simplicity of waterboarding. A couple of planks, some cheap towels and a bucket of water were all it took to reduce anyone to a helpless wreck. The stifling press of the towels and the water that passed into the victim’s nose with every inward breath created a perfect simulation of drowning. And if the towels were left in place long enough, the man would actually drown. Even if he tried to hold his breath – and only those with ice-cold nerves had the self-control to do that – he would have to breathe again eventually and the drip, drip, drip of water into his lungs would work its inexorable magic.

A minute went by. The thrashing body was reduced to feeble twitches.

Ninety seconds.

Mabeki gave another nod.

The towels were removed and the tape torn from the man’s mouth. With a rasp like tearing canvas, he breathed again, dragging air into his starving lungs with desperate intensity.