Wings of the Morning E-Book

Kenneth MacVicar

• Herausgeber: Umbria Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 733

Beschreibung

Wings of the Morning is an adventure story of Africa spanning sixty years and three generations. Five university friends - the Oxford Five - become life-long friends, their lives moulded by drama and romance as they set off on different paths but reunite to pursue a shared ideal, to establish a new model country in West Africa - Millennium - in the dawn of the 21st century. A marvellous cast of characters includes the five key characters, their loves and families, whose fate is inextricably entwined; the experts and entrepreneurs who are essential for the enterprise; and the villains who do everything they can to derail 'Project Zero'. Steeped in intrigue and adventure, Julian Beale, with first-hand experience of Africa, has written a marvellous, fast flowing and exciting saga in the bestselling tradition of Wilbur Smith.

Leseprobe

WINGS OF THE MORNING

Julian Beale

for the love of Africa

Royalties from the sale of this book are donated to registered charities which support Africans in need.

Copyright © Julian Beale 2012

Julian Beale has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

Cover image: Shutterstock

Umbria Press London SW15 5DPwww.umbriapress.co.uk

Printed and bound by Ashford Colour Press, Gosport

MAJOR CHARACTERS

THE OXFORD FIVE

OTHER KEY PEOPLE

If I take the wings of the morning,

and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;

Even there shall thy hand lead me,

and thy right hand shall hold me.

PSALM 139

CONTENTS

OLIVER AVELING — 2021

MICHEL LABARRE — 1963

DAVID HEAVEN — 1943 to 1965

JOSH TROLLOPE — 1965

SOLOMON KIRCHOFF — 1965

DAVID HEAVEN —1965

THE OXFORD FIVE — 1970

THIERRY CESTAC — 1970

KINGSTON OFFENBACH — 1970

ALEXA LABARRE — 1970

CONRAD AVELING — 1970

DAVID HEAVEN — 1970

ALEXA BUSHELL — 1971

DAVID HEAVEN — 1973

THIERRY CESTAC — 1974

CONRAD AVELING — 1975

ALEXA BUSHELL — 1977

THE OXFORD FIVE — 1977

THIERRY CESTAC — 1980

KINGSTON OFFENBACH — 1984

DAVID HEAVEN & MARTIN KIRCHOFF — 1985

THIERRY CESTAC — 1986

ALEXA BUSHELL — 1987

AISCHA GOMES — 1989

HUGH DUNDAS —1990

THIERRY CESTAC — 1991

AISCHA GOMES — 1994

DAVID HEAVEN — 1995

THE OXFORD FIVE — 1996

CONRAD AVELING — 1996

DAVID HEAVEN — 1997

FERGUS CARRADINE — 1997

THE OXFORD FIVE — 1997

CONRAD AVELING — 1998

DAVID HEAVEN — 1998

JOSH TROLLOPE — February 1999

THIERRY CESTAC — July 1999

DAVID HEAVEN & AISCHA GOMES — September 1999

DAVID HEAVEN — December 1999

FERGUS CARRADINE — New Year’s Day 2000

MARTIN KIRCHOFF — March 2000

KINGSTON OFFENBACH — May 2000

PENTE BROKE SMITH — December 2000

AISCHA HEAVEN — May 2003

ALEXA DUNDAS — August 2004

DAVID HEAVEN — May 2013

OLIVER AVELING — 2021

OLIVER AVELING — 2021

Most people call me ‘Olty’. I turn thirty today, the first of January 2021. I enjoy my birthday on New Year’s Day. It wasn’t so great when I was a child, but since reaching my teenage years, I’ve had a lot of fun with extra celebration after the partying on New Year’s Eve. This year’s a bit special of course: thirty is a major number and a dozen of us have planned a big bash for tonight. But I want to make a start on this project first. It’s going to be a challenge.

I’m a diplomat by profession. I’m white, single, straight, solvent. I work with a great bunch of people and I’m lucky with my friends. I travel a lot, but I love coming home to this apartment with its brilliant view over the ocean. I have company from time to time, but there’s no one really serious in my life.

I was born in England, but I’ve lived here since I finished school twelve years ago. ‘Here’ is Century City, Capital of Millennium, a country occupying a landmass on the West Coast of Africa as old as time itself, although our nation was born only twenty-one years ago today.

Millennium’s struggle into existence is the kernel of my story, but there’s a more personal element to it as well. Our country’s founding president was David Heaven who’s been long gone from life and much longer from that post. I was twenty-two when he died and I knew him a bit because he had been close to our family since I was a boy and he features in my earliest memories. He was gruff but kind, and to give him his due, he was a pretty good communicator with all age groups. Plus of course, David Heaven was for a while the man of Millennium and was therefore a significant figure. Until his death, I thought of him as an important family friend and after he had gone, I simply thought about him less and less. I certainly had no idea that he was my biological grandfather, the father of my mother. So this news hit me like a thunderbolt.

A little over a year ago, I was spending a lot of working time in New York and I had a visit from a Frenchman called Guy Labarre. He’s not a relative but our families have been intertwined over many years. Guy is a human rights lawyer and we did have a bit of business to do together, but that was not the reason to bring him calling. He bought me lunch and took the opportunity to hand over a letter written to me by David Heaven. It doesn’t say much, just a simple message addressed to me in his handwriting which I recognised on the envelope.

‘To my grandson, Oliver Aveling.’

The letter inside is not dated. It reads as follows:

‘Dear Olty,

I do not know when you will receive this, neither do I know who will give it to you, but I leave it in safe hands and in confidence that it will reach you one day. I could not acknowledge you in life, but here is my legacy in death. Here is a record of my time and my efforts. There is untold history and there are unrecorded facts. Above all, Olty, I leave you my memories. I am certain that you will become the man who will make the most of them.’

There is no signature.

With this letter came a small suitcase, full of photographs, newspaper cuttings, memorabilia of all sorts. And there was a journal. I have one volume in front of me now. It’s not a diary and it’s hardly a memoire. It’s not ‘it’. There are eleven hardback books and the lined pages of all of them are filled with Heaven’s neat handwriting. There’s no concession to modernity. He might as well have drawn a pirate’s map with a quill pen. There’s no index, no summary and only a few of the photos are dated. But the journal is compelling and I was hooked from the moment I started to browse.

It’s recorded history that my grandfather started a revolution. He raised an army and planned an invasion. He came in from the ocean with three ships and three thousand people in the small hours of the new century. He aimed to take over an established sovereign state and to replace it with a new country, a new order and a new society. Human engineering on a grand scale.

It’s people who shape events on this planet and the personalities which drive the people are formed from background, relationships, opportunity and sheer damn fortune. It’s the ‘humanity of history’ as my grandfather calls it somewhere in this tome of his. Mostly, however, he keeps his emotional side in check. He writes in facts and figures and dates. He uses terse language, abbreviating his inner feelings.

I could have tidied this up and published his journal as a posthumous autobiography. But I wanted more. I wanted flesh on the bones of his sparse account and so I have spent the past year in research and conversations with survivors of the era.

This is an extraordinary story of momentous times. It starts with a relative of my family friend Guy Labarre – his Uncle Michel.

MICHEL LABARRE — 1963

On the evening of the fourth day, the young man standing on tip toes accepted that his death was imminent and found that he was quite looking forward to it.

When he was snatched from the hotel, his first reaction had been disbelief larded with a sheer, raging terror. He liked to talk as tough as any red-blooded young man when a bit taken in drink and surrounded by his mates, but that would have been in Paris or in his home city of Limoges. Out here he was in strange territory, without the familiar points of reference and he had felt both excitement and isolation from the moment he had stepped off his direct flight from France into the arrivals hall at Niamey International Airport in the Republic of Niger.

Michel Labarre was twenty-three years old with a reasonable degree in chemical engineering from the University of Sorbonne. He came from a quality family, possessed of money, status and standing. He was an enthusiastic sportsman, a good looking, fun-loving young man, with a lively and likeable personality.

The oyster of Michel’s world was opening up as he arrived that day from Paris. He was joining, as a management trainee, a substantial French conglomerate in civil engineering called Georges DuLame & Cie which had global interests but especially in the former French colonies of West Africa. Newly recruited university graduates could expect to spend at least half of their first three years on short term postings overseas, and for most of them, this was a significant attraction of the job.

Michel was therefore one of a kind and he relished the chance, following his inaugural stint at the DuLame training centre outside Nanterre, to cut his teeth on some proper work in Africa. For the first couple of months, the company’s well established practice was to apply a regime of strict acclimatisation. The young men, and there were precious few women of any age, were required to knuckle down to big company discipline, to work diligently and to get their bodies used to the extreme climate with its 40 degree heat. They must tolerate the sometimes dodgy food and accept the basic accommodation. The incentives were that expatriate life offered decent money, infrequent but long leaves, and satisfaction for the Beau Geste spirit if that turned you on.

Michel loved it all. He liked the work, liked the heat, liked his fellow workers be they French or Nigerien, especially liked the feeling of accomplishment that he was doing something different, and doing it well. The French management at the DuLame compound took to him also, congratulating themselves that they had an asset in Michel Labarre, all the more impressive as he came from a pretty toffee-nosed background. And all his colleagues appreciated his ability to keep up with the pace of beer when they had a night out in the bars and dives of Niamey, especially as he was something of a musician and could play a reasonable guitar even when several sheets to the wind.

That single talent led to his undoing. A group of them finished up one night at La Chatte, a lively club in the red light ghetto, notorious for its innovative band which was delighted to welcome Michel into an impromptu jamming session at which his playing ability shone out as brightly as his face whilst the drinks poured down and the heat of pressing bodies mounted. It was during a beer break that he talked rather loosely to the double bass player who encouraged Michel in his account of learning to play the guitar at his exclusive school in France and applauded him for working hard in the Sahara despite obviously coming from a pretty wealthy background. Michel was well past picking up any danger signals from this trend of conversation and his new friend took care that their little talk did not include the other members of Labarre’s group from the company.

Half an hour after that, the girl arrived. She might have been from Mali or perhaps from Mauritania, but she was actually a Senegalese and strikingly beautiful — tall, very slim, angel face and totally poised. The entire package was white hot sexy, and Michel was overboard when she came straight over to talk to him. She gurgled with the claim that word of his excellence had reached her from her friends in the band and she just had to see him perform. She delivered that line with such clear innuendo that Michel felt as if he had been that kicked in the groin.

A little more music was played and a good deal more beer lowered before the senior DuLame man announced that their group was leaving. That was an absolute instruction. No one got left behind, certainly not Michel Labarre with his hormones pumping, but the girl, who called herself Salacia, managed to whisper that she could not say adieu and just must meet him two nights hence in the main square of the city at 6:30 pm, and that he must come alone.

The following day was a Sunday and Michel spent it in a fever of indecision mixed with lust. Company instructions were explicit. No employee to leave the compound without a pass and never alone in the evening. But Michel knew, like everybody else, that the wire perimeter was holed like a Swiss cheese, that many of the inhabitants went out from time to time and that the African workers in the camp brought their own women in through the selfsame holes. So practicality was not an issue. But then there was risk assessment, and he made a steadily less objective job of this as his animal instincts drove his brain south.

Monday was therefore passed with the electricity of planning and anticipation, with the enticing body of Salacia ever dancing before his eyes. He finished his work, showered, grabbed some cash and slipped out of the compound. He picked up a flea bitten cab immediately which was surely a good omen and was in the square by 6:20 pm feeling relaxed and sure of himself. She would be pleased to see him and he paused by the fountain to light a cigarette with luxuriant pleasure.

Salacia was indeed delighted to see him. She had a good feeling about this one, but you still needed the proof that the fish was on the line. She was sitting at the back of an open fronted cafe across the square, hidden by the awning overhead and pleased to see her mark exhibiting the body language of nerves drowned in expectation. Now she whispered a final instruction to her companion, a huge man in a flat white cap which obscured a little of his beard, unusually luxuriant for an African, and then she rose to slip away, lithe in her sea green dress with the skirt just a bit too short. Minutes later, she could be seen approaching Michel from the other side of the square having circled around. The big man shook his head. She was almost too sharp and sexy this one, but she knew her business and made more money more easily than any of his former partners. Plus she liked a bit of rough and brawny occasionally, so no way was he going to complain about taking orders from Salacia.

Meanwhile, Michel was in heaven. This gorgeous girl was treating him like manna from heaven, a little decorous kiss on his cheek, smoothing his hair, compliments on his appearance and her finger nails skittering down his arm in a gesture of welcome and possession. Supremely sexy.

She slipped her arm through his and led him away out of the square into the main street and towards the misnamed Hotel du Parc, which was nonetheless the best establishment in town. As they walked, she explained that she worked for the Foreign Service of Senegal, she had flown in a week ago on a visit mixing business with pleasure and that she always stayed in this hotel. Michel was entranced and questioned none of this. They went into the foyer, in which he felt instinctively that he should be discreet if not furtive, but Salacia continued their conversation uninterrupted as she waited for her key, saying that their plan should be to go and listen to some more music, but first perhaps, a refreshing drink and a little relax. She looked demurely at him with a twinkle in her eye which would have debauched a monk.

Upstairs in her spacious room, she poured him a cold beer, lit a cigarette for them both, kicked off her shoes and slipped gracefully onto the double bed, patting the sheets alongside her in invitation. Michel put down his glass and moved towards her, his throat, despite the lager, already dry with expectation.

‘Cheri’, she invited him calmly, ‘I think you should first remove your clothes ... just like me’.

She smiled encouragement as she let slip the dress from around her neck and lay back in the middle of the bed, hair spread out, breasts high, nipples thrust in excitement, legs ajar, the whole marvellously naked. She held out her arms to him and Michel stumbled awkwardly out of his trousers, almost tripping as he simultaneously ripped off his shirt. In his fevered state, he didn’t notice the lift whirring to a halt on their floor, neither did he hear the door to the bedroom being gently opened, nor sense the large man with the white cap enter with a silence which belied his bulk. But at that moment, Michel might not have noticed a rampaging bull — he was one himself. With a groan of delight, he got onto the bed and leaned forward to rest his belly against Salacia’s knees which she had drawn up into her chest. Michel supported himself on his arms, his hands palm down on either side of his lover. Classic missionary stuff, he had time to think to himself as he pushed forward quite gently and was thrilled to feel her knees begin to part before his thrust. Nirvana, here we come, he thought.

But in an instant, his every instinct turned from slaking lust to fighting panic as he seemed to levitate in a manner which defied all his senses. Michel was suddenly powerless, overcome by extraordinary strength. One large human hand gripped his throat so he could gurgle but not breathe. Another slipped between his legs and gathered all his rampant genitalia in one massive grip which would have made him scream if he could have used his larynx. He felt himself being swung effortlessly into the air, the same two hands in the same two places, but now he was being held upside down and then lowered into a heavy hessian sack with fumes which drove the breath from his nose as he started to choke. But neither hand released its hold until Salacia, who had snatched the bag from under the bed and opened the neck to receive its human burden, pulled tight a drawstring which laced the bottom of the sack around Michels’s down-stretched neck so that the giant could pull out his hand and permit the cord and the fumes to stifle any cries which the captive might make. Without delay, the big man stood on the bed, lifted up Michel by balls and body and thumped him head down on the wooden floor. The lights went out for Michel.

The giant and Salacia looked at each other. There was a prevailing silence, with only the normal sounds of street and public building to reach them. White Cap had a sheen of light sweat on his upper arms but his breathing was steady and normal. Almost effortless work for him. But Salacia was snorting and throwing her head about, cascades of glittering black hair whirling around her shoulders and her limbs trembling as if in trauma. White Cap recognised the symptoms, not of fear or crisis but of battle lust and he proposed the remedy with one uplifted eyebrow. She nodded at him. Michel lay like a donkey’s dumped burden. White Cap scooped up Salacia with one arm and released his jeans with the other. He chucked her on the bed, face down, bottom up and pulled her roughly back onto him. She cursed at him to go harder. He grunted and went at it. He was over in a minute, she was dressed in two more. They left the room without a backward glance, the hessian bag and its unseen occupant slung casually over the giant’s shoulder. He passed through the lobby with a direct but unhurried gait whilst she lingered briefly at reception to pass over an envelope which made good a prior agreement. They joined up again at the front door and walked into the car park to retrieve a battered Nissan pickup. Salacia drove. White Cap tossed the sack with casual abandon into the load bed. He got in beside her and they drove off without a word.

Michel Labarre came to briefly around midnight but lapsed in and out of consciousness during the early hours and it was not until the African dawn came blazing up around 6 am that he was able to take any stock of his position. It was not good.

Vision for him remained very faint. He was being held in the middle of a warehouse which permitted scant daylight through its few dusty windows. Worse, he was still inside the heavy, musty sacking and his head was splitting from its treatment the previous evening. It took him some time and freshly rising panic to understand that although there were no bindings on his limbs, he was still trussed like an animal for market as he remained upside down, one drawstring still around his neck at the bottom of the sack, and a second below his feet, thus sealing him in a hessian tomb. He struggled with a desperation born of horror and this action made him swing. He fought his claustrophobia and regained just enough self control to work it out. The sack was suspending him from some fixture above, but he had no means of knowing at what height nor whether there was any sort of help within earshot. He tried to shout, but the resultant noise was feeble and blanketed. The effort also caused him to suck in more dust and he started to choke, causing yet greater panic. Mercifully, this led him to pass out again and he spent the next few hours in a state of semiconscious delirium.

Meanwhile, there was progress of a sort. At 5 am, a ragged urchin had scrambled through one of the holes into the DuLame compound and, as instructed by Salacia, who remained at a safe distance sitting in the old pickup, left an envelope under a heavy stone at the door to the main administration block. It was addressed to the senior French executive of the company. Inside was a message from a fictitious revolutionary group demanding a ransom in CFA francs for the safe return of their captive whose battered and unconscious face was quite recognisable in the poor photograph enclosed. Cash payment was to be made according to precise instructions within forty-eight hours or Labarre would be executed.

By 9 am, the telex lines to the DuLame Headquarters in Lille were chattering and by the end of the day, it became clear that retired Colonel Joffrey Labarre, a wealthy man in his own right and with considerable experience of the African colonies, would personally underwrite the price of his son’s return. With a speed and pragmatism of which the French are most capable when roused, the details were arranged and a note left out for collection by another small boy, which requested an extension of twenty four-hours simply to get the cash together and to parcel it as instructed.

Salacia relayed this to Paulus, the personable double bass player from the club La Chatte who had provided the brains and the organisation behind the kidnap. He ordered an agreement to the extension. He had anyway been planning for it. Meanwhile, they were to keep young Labarre safe but scared, not fed but watered, secure from any possibility of escape and Paulus did not want to know where they were holding him.

The other parties to the agreement were content if not happy. DuLame management did not want to rock any commercial boats by running for help to either the Niamey Police or the Niger Government. Colonel Labarre knew best and would pay for his preference to be respected. Payment would be made and young Labarre recovered. He would have to leave Niger immediately and the employ of DuLame just after that, but the parents would get their first born back – very severely chastened but nonetheless intact.

Whilst this process took its course, Michel’s circumstances improved, if only a little. On that first day, he returned to some normality just after noon, had the beginnings of a further panic attack but fought it down and was just starting to think through the desperation of his position when he heard a heavy footfall and felt his sacking prison being first lifted and then lowered roughly to the floor. The strings were untied, the material pulled back and the unaccustomed light battered his brain. He was hauled to his feet. He made out the all too familiar features of the giant above him as his arms were swept together in front of him and bound palm to palm by White Cap using insulating tape over which he placed a heavy rope tied in a noose. The big man thrust a plastic bottle into his mouth and upturned it, waiting almost patiently while Michel choked and gurgled to get some of the warm and dirty water down his throat. Then he threw the end of the rope over the rafter from which Michel’s sack had been suspended and heaved until the prisoner was obliged to take his weight on his arms or to stand on his toes. The rope was secured to a stanchion in the floor.

Michel was looking around as Salacia came sashaying out of the shadows, a slight smile playing over her sexy features, another slinky dress, long legs, long black hair. The nightmare returned to him and he felt simultaneously a terror at his prospects and humiliation at his filthy nakedness which he could do nothing to hide. She came right up close to him and gripped his head in her two hands.

‘You were never too attractive,’ she said, ‘and you’ll look and smell horrible by the time we’re finished. But you’ll be alive at least. So do as you’re told. No shouting or you go back in the sack. No complaining or Claude here will beat the shit out of you. And he’ll enjoy it’.

Behind her, White Cap gave a slow, broad grin, full of infinite menace. She looked into Michel’s face for a long time until he could no longer bear her gaze and he dropped his eyes in abjection. Only then did she turn on her heel and walk off into the darkness of the building’s extremities.

And so began for Michel Labarre a terrible test of endurance which had brought him, four days almost to the hour after his abduction, to a point of suicidal despair. By day, they left him roped up to a height at which he could choose to give some slight respite to either his arms or his feet. But not both together and increasingly he came to stand on tip toes. At night, they placed a stool by him on which he could climb to rest and try to sleep vertically, overcome by exhaustion until he fell over or was disturbed by the rats which crept out of the shadows to sniff around the droppings from his increasingly nauseating body and even to nibble at his feet. They kept him alive on water only. He saw only Claude whom he once asked for something to eat to be rewarded with a kick in the groin and belt welts to his back and buttocks. Sometimes, he thought of home and wept. He tried to keep his hopes alive, knowing that he was worth money and that money would be found and paid if only the communications would work.

Michel could not know that they did work, and pretty smoothly in the circumstances. The delay stretched beyond the deadline, but Paulus was not fazed by that. An intelligent man, well educated in Kinshasa, he had spent some years living in France. He knew the systems and could read the characters. He had seen the opportunity and acted decisively. But this was a big job — the largest which they had pulled together and as soon as they had the cash safe, it would be time to move out. It would be best to be on his own for a few months, give the band a rest, let Salacia go back to a little whoring in the expatriate community somewhere, encourage Claude into more body building. While for him — well, perhaps a trip back to France would be good. He was relaxed.

But then it all went horribly wrong.

The ransom sum was assembled and packaged as demanded. It was delivered to the petrol station and truck stop on the route out of Niamey towards the border with Mali to the north. Inconspicuously parked amongst the big vehicles, Paulus could see the drop made, just another 45 gallon oil drum amongst so many others, and he could see Claude arrive five minutes later to collect the drum with the big red stripe and sweep it into the back of the old Nissan whilst Salacia waited at the wheel. They did as he had told them, and went to the pumps to buy fuel so that he would have some minutes to see if there was any suspicious car looking to follow them. Nothing and no one. Salacia and Claude drove out of the truck stop to circle the city back towards the warehouse where Michel was hanging from his rope, shortly to be released to find his way towards help and home, filthy, naked and lost whilst the three perpetrators and the rest of the band would make their way quietly from the city, dividing their takings and then go their separate ways.

But as Salacia drove at modest speed with Claude beside her, she put an alternative scheme to him which he liked very much indeed. They had done all the work and taken all the risks. Why share the profits and why anyway on such an unequal basis as Paulus proposed? As a partnership, they felt confident together. She the style and brain, he the unstoppable bulk. But they had to be ruthless, with nothing left behind to assist either Paulus or the authorities. And thus was sealed the fate of Michel Labarre.

They drove the pick up into the warehouse and shut out behind them the waning sunlight. Michel was unmoving and looked at them through a face masked with the pain of standing on his toes. Salacia walked right up to him, just as she had done when she left him three days before. She wrinkled her nose at the smell but managed a sexy, secret smile. Michel was far gone in fear and exhaustion, but he opened his eyes as she stroked him gently and gazed at her as she stepped back a pace, lifting her arms above her head, pushing her hair out onto her shoulders, striking a provocative pose with one leg cocked in front of the other. Michel was never conscious of White Cap circling behind him.

‘Well Monsieur’, said Salacia, ‘most men say that I have a body to die for. I hope you agree?’ She smiled as Claude broke his neck from behind with the speed and indifference which a farmer might use on a chicken.

Claude stuffed the corpse of the young man into the sack in which he had arrived. He put this next to the oil drum with the red stripe in the load bed of the pickup, and then took the wheel himself as they drove sedately out of the city towards Ouagadougou, capital of Upper Volta. Eighty kilometres later, and by now in complete darkness, Claude took the body in its sack and carried it a further kilometre over rough desert ground away from the road and there abandoned it in a slight depression in the ground.

Claude returned to Salacia with the keys of the car in his pocket. You can never be too careful. But probably, they did not go much further together. Not only had they made an enemy of a brighter man, but they had also made a serious mistake. Paulus had no cause to suspect them, but he was ever cautious. Thus, they had collected the drum with the stripe as he told them, but that was not the drum with the money. Paulus himself had awaited their departure from the fuel station before moving in to find the correct article and even now he was counting the money to share with his confederates. But two of them would not now dare to return.

The body was never found. Over time, decay and vermin stripped away the flesh, whilst the searing sun and desert wind bleached the bones. There was never to be Christian resting place for Michel Labarre, and it was to be many months before his family could accept that he was forever gone from them, and in circumstances which they would never know.

DAVID HEAVEN — 1943 to 1965

David Charles Heaven was born on the 9th May 1943, the youngest by six years of four children. His father, Lawrence, was the headmaster of a boys’ boarding school in the home counties of England to the west of London. Running a school may have been a worthy occupation during the war years, but it was a hard and thankless task for a man who felt jilted of his opportunity to join up and see some action.

As he grew up, David had difficulty in establishing much of a relationship with his father who was austere and preoccupied with his own disappointments. In school time, the boy tended to merge as a statistic into the crowd of responsibilities as David started his education, quite literally, at home.

David’s three older siblings were all girls, which served to increase the already considerable age gap. Almost nothing is recorded about these sisters, and not much more about their mother Esther. There seems to have been no sense of family. No Christmas together, no birthday celebrations, no holidays, no wedding announcements. Most significantly, no photographs of the individuals, still less the family as a group, saving one only of a school assembly showing David, just discernible in the back row with his father looking stern in the middle of his teaching staff.

So, a rather sad childhood and an unpromising start in life, yet many people have risen from beginnings more different and difficult. At the age of thirteen, David went on to school at Lancing College in Sussex where he prospered in his work and especially on the sports field and the running track. But as for earlier years, there is scant record of social activity and of course, an absolute absence of family events.

In 1962, rather older at nineteen years and some months than was the norm for those days, David went up to Oxford University to read history at Brasenose College. Behind him, he left those shallow roots and slight beginnings. Oxford and the society he kept became overnight his home and his heartbeat.

David Heaven made the most of his time at Oxford and loved all of it. He worked quite hard out of enjoyment as much as duty and took a creditable degree. He socialised, debated, became an enthusiastic club man and was active if not outstanding in his chosen sports. He lived life to the full. He drank and dined and womanised. He became like a sponge in his eagerness to soak up the benefits, the warmth and the experience of all the relationships which could be persuaded to come his way. He was making up for lost ground in earlier years. Very seldom did he feel any sense of abiding commitment. He was fulfilled by just working his way around the smorgasbord of life. He was well spoken, but no snob: he had a bit of money, but was not flash with it: he was not bad looking and was easy company: he had a sharp sense of humour and was apparently game for just about anything.

And so he flirted with everything which crossed his path, and in later life he thanked his stars and a rather remote God that he had not been irretrievably hooked or damaged by any of it. Looking back, he could see that all the experiments with bookmakers and poker players, with dodgy booze and nameless drugs, with women both wanton and weary, and once, disastrously, with a cultured chorister, all this frenzied activity had been as for a child on a first outing to the sweet shop.

David made four significant friendships at Oxford, one woman and three men.

First, there was Alexandra Labarre who was a little younger than the rest of them having come up early to university to escape the aftermath of a family tragedy which was never articulated. Neither age nor gender could hold her back. Alexa — as she liked to be called — was of Anglo French birth and a most magical girl. She had stunning, ethereal looks and a most beautiful figure, the highest quality wrapping for a razor brain and a diamond core. Being bilingual from childhood, it was perhaps too obvious that Alexa should be a language specialist but she nonetheless distinguished herself. Her French father Joffrey travelled extensively in South America and spoke both Spanish and Portuguese whilst her English mother Elizabeth was an authority on the churches in Venice and thus fluent in Italian. Alexa was competent to masterful in all these languages, but trumped her parents’ aces by taking Russian at Oxford. She was extremely talented but wore her ability lightly and was ever marvellous company. David enjoyed a tide of laughter with her and endless, provocative debate on any subject. Never once did he look like winning either the arguments or access to her bed, and perhaps he loved her all the more for it.

The three men batted in no particular order. Rupert Broke Smith, who came to be known to one and all as ‘Pente’, was a gentle giant of a man who entered the priesthood immediately after leaving Oxford and abandoned forever the study of physics which had won him an exceptional degree. Pente had a background not dissimilar to David’s. He was the lonely, only child of ageing parents who lived in a remote part of Herefordshire, eking out a living in the rare book trade. Pente was schooled locally, and had hardly been beyond Bristol until he surprised everyone by gaining entry to Oxford in considerable style. He was the brightest of David’s contemporaries and would have succeeded in any subject. Pente was tremendous company too. A huge beer drinker and an energetic party animal, he was an impressive rugby player reckoned to have missed a Blue only through insufficient training. But during one vacation, he vanished for six weeks into the Hindu Kush and returned with the ‘call’ from which he never wavered. He was no Holy Joe, did not tax his friends with the strengths of his vocation and was in no way a lesser companion. He may have been a little better behaved, but he still drank a great deal and laughed even more as he became overnight a man with a mission and a faith.

And the sobriquet? He won it at the seminary which he attended for an introductory course following his return from India and the story always warmed David despite his natural disregard for most men of the cloth. It went that his fellow students suffered just so much of his fondness for mixing pickled onions and pints of bitter with explosive results to his digestion before they nicknamed him ‘Pentecost’ to recall another rushing, mighty wind and of course, the abbreviated version became his for a lifetime.

Then there was Conrad Aveling, born to be the successful soldier which he duly became. Conrad was the youngest child of the four sons and two daughters produced by General Sir Anstruther and his Lady Vivien Aveling. The family lived in baronial style in a vast and ugly mansion located in a village only just outside Oxford. On first acquaintance, Conrad seemed a bit quiet for David’s taste, but it became quickly apparent that he was simply withdrawn from his overwhelming family. His mother was of towering personality, a physically dominant woman who was said to have given birth to one of her brood only hours before returning to the hunting field. All the Avelings, boys and girls alike, were large and brave. Conrad was the exception in that he had a brain as well and with it came a waspish sense of humour.

During their first year at Oxford, David was invited to spend a good deal of time, weekends and summer evenings, at the Aveling pile of Barrington Park and he grew increasingly to value Conrad’s companionship. The rambunctious family atmosphere was so completely different from his own experience. There was always activity, sometimes close to chaos, but set against a prevailing background of relaxation tinged with a faded elegance. Conrad’s siblings seemed to drift comfortably in and out of his life. Their father, the jovial General, had achieved war time distinction and retired to manage his land from the draughty old house, but it was generally accepted that he was forcefully guided by his imposing wife. Lady Vivien could be a battle axe, but wise and thoughtful too, as David learnt from his very first visit to the Park. Once she had recovered from mild astonishment that he had never sat on a horse or held a gun, Lady Vivien had managed to draw from him more about his early life and distant family than he had ever previously confessed.

‘She’s a shrewd old bat, my Mum’, Conrad had spoken of her lovingly, ‘and we all owe her more than we can say or she would accept. She holds our team together, no question’. David had found himself quite moved: this sort of family experience was completely new to him. It made a deep and lasting impression.

As the Oxford years progressed, David became close to Connie Aveling. They had shared interests in sporting, carousing and the politics of the day. But while David was undecided on a future career path, Conrad was entirely committed to the army, although unusual at the time in having opted for university rather than going straight from school into the army. Connie had a relaxed good humour and a wry turn of phrase, but he kept a close counsel and it was hard to read where his thoughts were turning. This led David to an increasing concern that Conrad’s similarly lustful pursuit of Alexa Labarre was more successful than his own, but Connie would give nothing away. And then again, it often seemed that her favourite was Pente, but at least he came to put himself out of the chase. Whatever else, it was all a lot of fun.

When they came down from university, Conrad went to Sandhurst and then to take up his commission in the Rifle Brigade where his military career was soon to prosper. He and David kept in close touch to further a friendship which built on the diversities of their interests and lifestyles. Conrad was a man of perception which he inherited from his mother and nurtured in the shabby grandeur and windy corridors of Barrington Park.

The third man was an exception in every respect. Kingston Horace Offenbach was different in age, nationality, religion, politics and colour. An unusual man to be found at Oxford University in the mid 1960’s, King Offenbach was born in South Carolina in September 1938. He had one brother less than a year older and their father abandoned his small family when Kingston was three months old. His mother was left high and dry with two tiny children, no money and precious little support from her family. But she was an intelligent girl with guts, looks and the determination that she would do right by her children. She managed to succeed, but not without further heartbreak. Her elder son had been a sickly little boy from birth, and she lost him to pneumonia just before his third birthday at a point when she had no reserves of energy or money to buy him the drugs which might have saved him. She had retreated from his pathetic little grave, vowing that that she would channel her every effort into raising his brother. King rewarded her by exceeding her wildest expectations, becoming in due time an outstanding student who worked his way through secondary education and exhibited such promise that he was taken into US Government Service under which sponsorship he won an excellent degree and then was sent to the UK to do a postgraduate thesis at Oxford. Now, at the age of twenty-six, this was the first time that he could not make his monthly visit back home to his mother’s small house in a small town.

King Offenbach was older than the undergraduates with whom he shared life at Oxford and he had little in common with any of them. In addition, he was a self-effacing man, much more inclined to listen than to offer opinions. Despite his colour, King had a talent for melding into the background, present but not accounted for.

King’s course at Oxford was for one year, and David first met him one gloomy evening in November 1964. He was running late for an appointment with his tutor as he rounded a corner in his college and collided with the unbending Offenbach frame. To make matters worse, David assumed him to be a tourist visitor or a new member of staff and had been less than polite.

From such an unpromising start can sometimes grow the strongest relationships. People would say of Offenbach that he stood a little apart from the rest of them by reason of his age and others would cite his colour, his Deep South accent or his religious fervour. Or could it have been the ‘transatlantic flavour’ as one Don famously labelled a prejudice for which he could find no other name.

It was Pente Broke Smith who became closest to Kingston Offenbach, and even he talked of deep and still waters. Pente remarked one day to David, ‘I know this is being pretty pompous, but I reckon that on a spiritual level, King will always keep a bit back. He has this compulsion to hold onto his reserve. But of course that personality trait is cranked up further by his profession.’

David looked at him with surprise.

‘What profession? He’s a student like the rest of us. Just a little more mature, that’s all. Oh, and a bit darker too!’

‘Dimwit’, rejoined Pente as they walked together, ‘no David, you’re missing it. Our Kingston is on the CIA payroll and has been since he was at school, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘Balls,’ said David, but he had his doubts even then.

David, Alexa, Pente, Conrad and King: a group of friends drawn into a coterie which was recognised by their many colleagues and contacts throughout the university — so much so that someone dubbed them the ‘Oxford Five’, a collective which they were all happy to embrace and to retain down the years to come.

There was another man too, in his own way just as vital an ingredient, but he was not at Oxford and was about as different to David Heaven as could be imagined. Perhaps that’s why it worked as well as it did. In the long vacation of David’s second year, he joined a party of bright young characters to spend a month on the Riviera near Menton. The arrangement was as might be expected. One fellow undergraduate blessed with plenty of money and some good connections is keen to acquire a wider circle of friends and thus a house party is assembled.

They swam, sailed, caroused and gambled. Towards the end of the holiday, they were returning from a casino outing when one of the party’s cars, with David at the wheel, was in a minor traffic jam collision with a sprightly sports car driven by a young man of about his age. Damage was minimal, there was no police involvement and hardly any delay. But the following day brought a telephone call for David from the other party, politely asking him over for a quick drink to deal with some insurance questions. What the hell, David said to himself, and went. That was the introduction to his first employer who was to become also his business partner, mentor and a much valued friend.

Unlike some of his companions in Menton, it troubled David not at all to sit down in the company of a Jew. Martin Kirchoff was also on holiday, and during the couple of hours they spent together in the lobby of his smart hotel, they found an instinctive enjoyment in each other’s company. Martin had a sense of fun which he tried to keep under tight control but which David was able to tease out of him. He was transparently entranced by the vision of an undergraduate lifestyle and presented himself as a sort of social thoroughbred yearning to escape from a commercial carthorse existence — but only occasionally since he was so deeply committed to his business aspirations. For his part, David was stimulated by Martin’s status as an emerging entrepreneur. It seemed to David that this guy was already embarked on life with a capital L, whilst his own existence was dilettante in comparison. It further appealed to David that Martin was in partnership with his father. The image of a dynasty fired his imagination.

They concluded their form filling and exchanged contact details but parted without a plan to meet again. Yet each took away the firm expectation that there was more to come from this chance encounter. They were right.

JOSH TROLLOPE — 1965

David Heaven’s graduation day on 13th July 1965 was significant also for Rory Trollope as it was the date of his birth. Rory was pugnacious from conception, a kicker and a puncher in the womb. He gave his mother a hard time of it in the Pretoria hospital where Rory came into the world. She lay in the hot and foetid cot staring at the fan above her head beating vainly at the successive waves of pain which broke about her.

This was not Moira Trollope’s first experience of labour, but it was infinitely the worst of her three pregnancies and was bearable only because she could feel the living child within her whereas the previous two births had resulted in stillborn girls. But the monster about to emerge felt all too like a man with a demanding nature. She bit her tongue and ground her teeth against the astonishing pain, determined that she could and would get through this to triumph in her healthy son but she did so wish that his father Josh could have been there with her, or at least within call. Instead of which, he was lost to her, hundreds of miles to the north somewhere, a soldier of fortune fighting in some squalid little war in which he had only two interests — to stay alive and to pick up his mercenary’s pay with which to establish a home and hearth for his wife and child.

Josh Trollope had come late to marriage and to any thought of settling down. A career soldier, he had joined the British Army straight from school and the elite Grenadier Guards had enveloped him as a member of their lifelong family. Josh had seen action in Normandy after D-Day and had remained in the thick of it until the end of the War. He had gone on with his Regiment, serving as much overseas as at home, steadily increasing his status with the passage of time and the building of experience.

He had been a senior NCO serving in Germany when he met Moira five years previously. She was a South African over on a working holiday and they had fallen for each other in a style which had amazed Josh’s mates. Moira’s father had land in South Africa, but he was widowed with no son to take it on and he himself was running short of strength and morale. Josh and Moira paid one visit to the farm, in the process using up much of their savings and his accumulated leave, but it was worth it. For Josh, seeing was believing and understanding, so he returned to hand in his papers, taking an immediate chance to leave the Guards after twenty years of loyal and productive service.

He was now just forty years old and on the day of his son’s birth he was lying prone, silent and sweating behind inadequate cover in a small village many miles northeast of Libreville, capital city of the republic of Gabon. In 1965, all this region of West Africa remained under the colonial influence of France, but it had become destabilised by the bloody war which had been raging in the Belgian Congo since the early sixties. Josh knew a fair bit of the history. He was too good a soldier not to take an interest, but he cared very little as to who would win. He had been able to see at the outset that this conflict was all about possession, not politics and certainly not principles despite all the high flown language and the international debate.

When Josh and Moira had disembarked in Durban after their emigration voyage, he had seen newspaper advertisements which sought trained and battle experienced soldiers to sign on as mercenaries. The logic of a short term engagement was compelling. They did really need some capital to take over the farm and to plan for the future.

So within weeks of arriving to settle in South Africa, Josh was on the move again and back into soldiering, but now as a mercenary in the Belgian Congo, a member of the force working to re-establish the charismatic Moishe Tshombe. Trollope signed on with the English speaking 5th Commando led by the legendary Mike Hoare and stayed with him through most of the Simba war until Hoare’s retirement in December 1964. By then, Josh reckoned that he had put by enough in savings and was more than ready to move on to his new life on the farm with Moira and her father in the background to help.

But then came the baby. A few days of unexpected leave started the bulge which was just showing on Moira by the time of his contract termination. When he returned home to the farm, there was news that the baby was fit and strong in the womb, but the final stages were expected to be testing. Moira was going to need expert and expensive help to deliver the infant so they must invest much of their nest egg in the best medical care they could find and worry about replacing the money later.

And worry he did. Josh was preoccupied when he went into a bar in Pretoria during the Christmas period and bumped into a friend from way back in his British Army days. Barry Bingham was established as a soldier of fortune, and as it happened, looking for help. He had little difficulty in talking Josh into one last tour which was to be with the private army of a character who called himself General Moses Samson. This self appointed general, whose birth name was never discovered, was recruiting a dozen white officers to manage the efforts of a rabble which he referred to as a battalion, and his objective was brigandry, pure and simple. Josh was to come to tax himself for being so quick to commit, but he was seduced by the lure of enormous money for a short and dirty contract. There was neither time nor opportunity for Josh to meet Moses Samson in advance. He simply relied on the version of events as set out by his old mate Barry Bingham and although Josh was mindful of Barry and had taken several pinches of salt with his story, it still remained a long way wide of the mark of reality.

Samson claimed to be the leader of a recessionary tribal group occupying a small wedge of territory in the extreme south of the Central African Republic, seeking independence from the colonial government installed in the capital city of Bangui. In truth, Samson was after much more than this. He aimed to annex a small corner in the north west of the vast country which was then the Belgian Congo. Samson was not the only privateer to see the opportunities to be afforded under the convenient cloak of civil war and he was at least as cunning as any who tried. His target patch of ground was something of the size of Switzerland and it was not so much the land which took his fancy as the valuable minerals beneath it, especially the iron ore which the French had been extracting from two mines in this region for the past decade.

Profiting from the unsettled politics of the day, Samson had approached the East Germans who, fronting for Moscow, had been prepared to advance him some funding. With this help, and his own powers of persuasion, he had contrived to recruit his modest team, no more than 500 strong and some materiel. Most of his fighters were hired guns who brought with them their own motley armaments. In a gesture towards some military professionalism, he was recruiting a few white mercenaries, but this was also to make his insurrection the more newsworthy in Europe and the United States.

Samson raised his force in Cabinda in northern Angola, right by the Congolese border. He then took his men further north by a cheaply chartered tramp steamer and disembarked in Equatorial Guinea, a tiny country with a lawless reputation in which he could buy an unopposed reception for modest price. From there, the column had marched and driven in a ragbag of vehicles almost due east with an outline plan to pass swiftly through the extreme north of Gabonese territory en route to their end objective, a few hundred kilometres distant.

Barry Bingham and Josh Trollope were late to join the force, and Barry had insisted on first passing through Libreville to collect fifty per cent of the contract price up front which was the deal he had struck with Moses Samson. It was enough for signing on and starting up. There were all sorts of reasons why the balance might never get paid.

When Barry went sick, he and Josh had been in Libreville for twenty-four hours, just long enough for them to pick up their money from Samson’s bag man and get it safely into the French banking system. It was over an evening meal before their onward journey that Bingham collapsed without warning, literally into the soup. Josh knew enough about Africa’s sicknesses and malaria in particular to speculate that Barry would be lucky to survive this attack, never mind catching up with ‘the army of Moses’.

This left Josh in a difficult situation but not with a decision over which he hesitated for long. He knew that he couldn’t return the money to a nameless man who had long since vanished and he couldn’t hope to hang on to it and bail out without the risk of Samson’s retribution overtaking him. He would never be free of that worry and besides, he would be condemning Barry to an unpleasant end if the malaria didn’t get him first. And then there was another aspect. If Josh went ahead and did some of Bingham’s job for him, he could count on picking up a fair proportion of Barry’s pay as well as his own.