Solo

mentioned that the chief executive of OG Palm Oil Export and Agricultural Services was currently indisposed. Blessing’s fate would at least be investigated now.
    He spent another bibulous evening with Dupree, Haas and Breadalbane and learned from Haas that anyone could book a seat on an empty outbound flight on the Super Constellation for $100. The actual port of Port Dunbar was completely blockaded and the only way out of the country was by air – or overland, if you were prepared to risk your neck beneath the watchful eye of the MiGs.
    Bond climbed upstairs to bed in a bad mood, wondering if he should just pay his $100, quit Dahum and admit failure. It went against his nature, but he couldn’t see how there was any way he could get close to Adeka, short of storming his headquarters. And he had a horrible feeling that this military stalemate might leave him stranded in Dahum for weeks or months, like Digby Breadalbane.
    He was woken before dawn by an urgent knocking on his door. It was Sunday, in a state of real excitement.
    ‘We have a scoop, Mr Bond. There has been a small battle and we have defeated the enemy. I thought you might like to see it.’
    Bond dressed as quickly as possible and Sunday drove him north out of Port Dunbar on increasingly minor roads. As they bumped along through the pearly, misty light Bond wondered if this was a simple propaganda exercise – something staged for him, the gullible newly arrived journalist, who would duly report it as a Dahumian feat of arms. His mood was still sour – he wasn’t expecting much.
    After an hour’s drive, they turned off the metalled road and entered an area of mangrove swamp and winding creeks. The road they drove along was built up above the watercourses on a kind of revetted embankment. Then they began to pass jubilant Dahumian troops returning from the front and in the morning sky they saw smoke curling up above the treeline.
    The village they arrived at had been burnt out and destroyed weeks previously: shattered mud huts, charred roof timbers and leafless trees signalled a napalm strike. Bond and Sunday left the Peugeot and walked through exuberant milling Dahumian soldiers towards the giant shade tree at the village’s centre. Here they found Breed and half a dozen other white mercenaries standing round eight Zanzari soldiers’ corpses laid out in a row. A little way off at another entrance to the village was a still smoking, upended armoured personnel carrier, a hole punched through its side – perhaps, Bond wondered, from a bazooka or an anti-tank gun unloaded from the Super Constellation the night before.
    Breed turned to meet him, wiping away a tear. He was wearing a grey T-shirt with ‘HALO’ printed on the front and his bashed kepi was pushed back on his head at a rakish angle. He was exhibiting his usual shifting cocktail of moods – at once jovial, wired and sinister.
    ‘Yah, we know they were coming so we just waited up here in the village,’ Breed said. ‘Bang-bang – got these fellas and the others just ran away. We’re gonna chase them back to Sinsikrou.’
    He shouted orders and some soldiers shinned up into the shade tree with lengths of rope that they secured to the branches and let fall. Then Breed had a man bring him a clinking, heavy sack and from it drew out what looked like giant fish hooks, six inches long, with a large eye. Breed attached the dangling ropes to the hooks and then, to Bond’s shock and surprise, he thwacked the sharp end in and under the jaws of the dead soldiers, like a stevedore walloping a bale hook into a sack. He tugged sharply at the hook to make sure its grip was secure under the jawbone.
    ‘Pull away, boys,’ he shouted.
    The men in the tree hauled on the ropes and the dead bodies were lifted aloft by their jaws. Like so many fishing trophies – like marlin or bluefin, Bond thought – on a dock after a successful fishing expedition.
    ‘Stop!’ Breed shouted when the dead men were three feet off the ground. ‘Secure them there!’
    The ropes were lashed to the branches and the dead men hung there, twirling gently. Bond had seen lynched men before but these bodies looked different, unusually dehumanised by the hooks and the forced jut of their lower jaws and the tearing stretching strain on their necks that were taking the full weight of their bodies. He thought as they hung there that they looked like ghoulish sides of beef in a butcher’s chill room, the dangling arms and legs