Solo

and trousers and had a moss-green beret on his head.
    ‘Stay there,’ Blessing said, and stepped out of the car. Bond watched her talking to the officer in Lowele. From time to time she pointed back at Bond, clearly the topic of their conversation. Then they both returned to the car. The officer looked in the window at Bond, smiling. Bond smiled back.
    ‘Morning, Captain,’ Bond said, elevating his rank by two pips.
    ‘Pleased to assist you, sir,’ he said and snapped a salute.
    Blessing climbed into the car, started the engine, did a three-point turn, then drove back the way they had just come.
    ‘We’d have been there all day,’ she said. ‘I told him you were late for an interview with Major General Basanjo – he’s the commander-in-chief of Zanza Force. The officer said we were heading in the wrong direction.’ She glanced over at him and grinned. ‘Plan B?’
    ‘Over to you,’ Bond said, quietly impressed with Blessing’s powers of improvisation. He tried to ignore the little spasms of sexual interest he was suddenly feeling for her, watching her muscles tauten and flex in her slim brown arms as she turned the wheel of the car, seeing the glow of perspiration on her throat, noting the contour-hugging tightness of the T-shirt she was wearing. Keep your mind on the job, he told himself.
    They turned off the road at the next junction and headed east for the transnational highway. They made slow progress for an hour or so once they reached the highway as they were constantly waved off the road to give military vehicles right of way. During one of their enforced pauses Bond counted a convoy of over forty army lorries, packed with troops. At another stage, further down the road, they passed five tank-transporters with what looked like brand-new Centurion tanks sitting on them. A low-level flight of MiGs, heavy with napalm canisters, screeched past, ripping through the air with a sound like tearing linen. Everything Bond saw said ‘major offensive looming’: it was as if Zanza Force was preparing for the final thrust into the rebel heartland. He said as much to Blessing but she was more sceptical.
    ‘They’ve got all the arms and men, sure,’ she said. ‘But these new troops are conscripts – badly trained and nervy. They only advance if given free beer and cigarettes. And those tanks are useless in the delta. They don’t like the terrain and all the key bridges are blown.’
    Then, as if someone had been overhearing them, they passed a line of parked flatbed trucks loaded with the cantilevered sections of Bailey bridges. As they drove by Bond saw white soldiers in what he thought were British Army fatigues.
    ‘Slow down,’ Bond said, craning his head round to catch a final glimpse. ‘Could they be British? Royal Engineers?’
    ‘There are some “military advisers” out here,’ Blessing said. ‘I met three of them at the airport the week before you arrived.’
    Bond sat back, thinking. If he was right about those soldiers being British then this urgency, this hands-on military aid, also had an oblique bearing on his mission. The British government was clearly keen for this war to end as soon as possible. Why? Bond wondered. Conceivably, he thought, British ‘military advisers’ could also be manning those tanks . . .
    Bond took over at the wheel after a snatched lunch at a roadside food-shack – more beer and dago-dago. He became aware of the landscape changing as they drove south into the river delta – small lakes and stagnant pools of water began to appear on either side of the highway, great expanses of reed beds and more palm trees and mangroves.
    Blessing told him to turn off the highway and follow the signs for a small town called Lokomeji on whose outskirts their next rest-house, Cinnamon Lodge, was situated. It was late afternoon by the time they arrived. Blessing dropped him at the portico-ed entrance and drove on into Lokomeji to rendezvous with the local fisherman who would guide Bond into Dahum.
    Cinnamon Lodge was virtually identical in structure and layout to Good Companion and belonged to the same colonial era. Standing on his bedroom balcony Bond could look across the dense low-lying forest that made up the Zanza River Delta. From his vantage point he could see the late afternoon sun glinting silver on the creeks and channels that wove their way sinuously through the vegetation. They were perched right on the edge of the huge delta, Bond could see from the map.