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independence in 1964. The name of the country was changed and so was the name of the capital city – to Sinsikrou (it had been Gustavberg, Victoireville and Shackleton in its short colonial history). Zanzarim had a creditable balance of trade surplus, its main exports being cocoa beans, bananas, copper and timber. Then oil had been discovered in the Zanza River Delta – a vast, apparently limitless, subterranean ocean of oil. This benediction soon began to turn sour. The problem was that Zanzarim’s capital and seat of government, Sinsikrou, was in the north. The government, moreover, was dominated by the Lowele tribe, the largest in a country of some two dozen tribes. In the south, in the river delta, the paramount tribe was the Fakassa. All the oil deposits had been discovered squarely in the middle of the Fakassa’s tribal lands. Not surprisingly, the Fakassa viewed the prospect of an endless flow of petro-dollars as a blessing conferred primarily on them. The Zanzarim government, and the Lowele tribe, disagreed: the oil was for the benefit of the whole country and all Zanzaris regardless of their tribal affiliation. Internecine bickering ensued between Fakassa and Lowele representatives and became more aggressive as it seemed no compromise could be reached. There was a form of uneasy stalemate until 1967 when the first proper assessments of the potential reserves and the scale of their potential revenues were made known.
    In Port Dunbar, the central town in the river delta, 200,000 Fakassa took to the streets in protest against this Lowele ‘theft’ of their patrimony. There were anti-Fakassa riots in Sinsikrou and over 300 Fakassa were massacred by a rampaging Lowele mob. In the south a revanchist anti-Lowele pogrom took place – shops were burnt, traders expelled and their assets seized. Eight Lowele policemen, attempting to flee, were caught and lynched. As the trouble increased and more indiscriminate slaughter ensued, attempts to broker a peace by British and UN diplomats failed and tensions rose inexorably on both sides as massacre and counter-massacre occurred in a deadly and inhuman tit-for-tat. A rush of Fakassa refugees from elsewhere in Zanzarim fled into the tribal heartlands around Port Dunbar. Towards the end of 1967 the south of the country – effectively the Fakassa tribal lands – formally seceded from Zanzarim and a new independent state was created: the Democratic Republic of Dahum. Two brigades of the Zanzarim army invaded Dahum and were repulsed. The Zanzarim civil war had begun.
    Bond put the briefing document down. It was like that old Chinese curse: ‘May you live in interesting times’ – reconfigured as ‘May vast reserves of oil be discovered in your country.’ He shuffled through the newspaper clippings and selected one written by a defence expert whose name he recognised. In the two years since the war had begun the overwhelmingly superior Zanzarim forces had managed to drive the Dahumians back from their ostensible frontiers to a small hinterland in the river delta concentrated around the town of Port Dunbar. The Democratic Republic of Dahum now consisted of Port Dunbar, an airstrip near a place called Janjaville and a few hundred square miles of dense forest, river creeks and mangrove swamps. Dahum was surrounded and a blockade commenced. The desperate population of Fakassa began to starve and die.
    Her Majesty’s Government supported Zanzarim (as well as providing military materiel for the Zanzarim army) and urged Dahum to sue for peace and return to the ‘status quo ante’. To all observers it seemed that unless this occurred there would be a human catastrophe. It had seemed inconceivable that Dahum could hold out for more than a week or two.
    Bond recalled what M had recounted.
    ‘However, it simply hasn’t happened,’ he had said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘It seems heroic – this small, makeshift Dahum army holding out against hugely superior and well-equipped forces. To be sure, there’s a clandestine air-bridge flying in supplies at night to this airstrip at Janjaville. But somehow they’ve completely stopped the Zanzari advance. Every time there’s a push from the Zanzarim army it ends in humiliating disaster. It seems the Dahumian army is being brilliantly led by some kind of tactical genius producing victory after victory. The war could drag on forever at this rate.’
    Bond picked up a clipping from
Time
magazine that showed an African soldier, a