Gambian Bluff

‘So far,’ Taal said. ‘We’ll move on to the Presidential Palace now. Are our men in position around the hotels yet?’

‘They should be,’ Jabang replied. ‘The tourists never leave their hotels anyway,’ he added sourly, ‘so it hardly seems necessary to use our men to keep them in.’

‘We don’t want any of them wandering out and getting shot,’ Taal reminded him. Their chances of success were thin enough, he thought, without bringing the wrath of the white world down on their heads.

‘No, we don’t,’ Jabang agreed without much conviction. ‘We’re on our way, then. I’ll see you at the radio station.’

Dr Sibou Cham yawned and rubbed her eyes, then sat for a moment with her hands held, as if in prayer, over her nose. You should pray for a decent hospital, she told herself, one with all the luxuries, like beds and medicines. She looked down at the pile of patients’ records on her desk, and wondered if it was all worth it.

There was a muffled crack, like a gun being fired some way off. She got wearily to her feet and walked through the treatment room to the empty reception area, grateful for the excuse to leave her paperwork behind. The heavyweight concertina door, which would have seemed more at home in a loading dock than a hospital, was locked, as she had requested. Ever since the incident the previous May this had been done. Her attacker might be in prison, but there were others.

She put the chain on the door before unlocking it, then pulled it open a foot, letting in the balmy night air. Almost immediately there was another sound like gunfire, but then silence. It was a shot, she was sure of it. Perhaps a gang battle. She might be bandaging the victims before the night was over.

She closed the door again and sat down at the receptionist’s desk. All the drawer knobs were missing, which seemed to sum up the state of the place. It was all of a piece with the peeling cream paint on the walls, the concrete-block partition which had been half-finished for six months, the gaping holes in the mosquito screens, and the maddening flicker of the fluorescent light. It went with a pharmacy which had fewer drugs than the sellers in the marketplace.

What was she doing here? Why did she stay? One person could not make all that much difference, and maybe the very fact that she was there, working herself into the ground day after day, took away any urgency the authorities might feel about improving the situation.

But where else could she go? Into private practice, of course. It would be easier, more lucrative. She might even get some sleep once in a while. But she could not do it. In The Gambia it was the poor who needed more doctors, not the rich. If money and an easy life was what she wanted, she could have stayed in England, got a job in a hospital there, even become a GP.

Most of the other Africans and Asians she had known at medical school had done just that. They had escaped from the Third World, so why on earth would they want to go back? They would bitch about the English weather, bitch about the racism, but they liked being able to shop at Sainsburys, watch the TV, give their children a good education. And she could hardly blame them. Their countries needed them back, but to go back would be a sacrifice for them, and why should they be the ones to pick up the tab for a world that was not fair?

She could hardly pretend it had been a sacrifice for her, because she had never been able to separate her feelings about the practice of medicine from the unfathomable desire she had always felt to serve humanity. A doctor went where a doctor was most needed, and it was hard to imagine a more needy country in this respect than her own.

But – lately there always seemed to be a ‘but’. Since the attack on her there had been a sense of…loneliness, she supposed. She felt alone, there was no doubt about it. Her family lived in New York, and in any case could not understand why she had not used her obvious gifts to make more of her life. More, that is, in terms of houses, cars and clothes. The people she worked with were the usual mixed bunch – some nice, some not so nice – but she had little in common with any of them. There were no other women doctors at the Royal Victoria Hospital, and the male doctors all wished they were somewhere else.

The Englishman who had saved her that night had become almost a friend. Or something like that. He flirted a lot, and she supposed he would take any sexual favours that were offered, but he had a wife in England, and she guessed that he too was more than a little lonely. And he was at that age, around forty, when men started wondering whether they had made the right life for themselves, and whether it was too late to do something about it.

She was nearly thirty herself, and there seemed little chance of finding a husband in Banjul, even if she had wanted one. She was not sure what she did want. Not to be alone, she supposed. Just that.

It was a funny thing to be thinking in an empty hospital reception area in the middle of the night. She sighed. In the morning it would all look so…

The burst of gunfire seemed to explode all around her, almost making her jump out of her skin. For a moment she thought it had to be inside the room, but then a shadowy figure went racing past in the street outside, then another, and another. They were probably heading for the Presidential Palace, whose gates were only a hundred yards away, around the next corner.

It had to be another coup.

There was a loud series of knocks on the concertina door and shouts of ‘open up’. She took a deep breath and went to unlock it. As she pulled it back a man half fell through the opening, wiping the blood from his head on her white coat as he did so. Behind him another man was holding a bloody side. ‘We need help,’ he groaned, somewhat unnecessarily.

Taal had walked down the radio station’s stairs, and was just emerging onto Buckle Street when a distant burst of automatic fire crackled above the sound of the lorry’s engine. It seemed to be coming from the direction of the Presidential Palace, half a mile or so to the north.

‘Fuck,’ he murmured to himself. He had hoped against hope that this could be a bloodless night, but the chances had always been slim. The men guarding the Palace had received enough personal perks from their employer over the last year to guarantee at least a few hours of stubborn resistance.

The last few bars of ‘Don’t Explain’ faded into silence, or rather into the distant sound of the waves tugging at the beach beneath the Bakau cliffs. Lady Chilel Jawara had discovered Billie Holiday on a trip to New York several years before. Her husband had been attending the UN, and she had decided, on the spur of the moment, to visit an exhibition of photographs of Afro-American music stars. It was the singer’s face she had first fallen in love with, before she’d heard a single note of her music. It was like her mother’s, but that was not the only reason. It was the face of someone who knew what it was like to be a woman.

Not that Billie Holiday had ever been the senior wife of the president of a small African state. Lady Jawara had a lot to be thankful for, and she knew it. Her children were sleeping between sheets, went to the best school, and ate when they were hungry. If they got ill a doctor was sent for.

As for herself, she enjoyed the role of senior wife. Her husband might rule the country but she ruled the household, and of the two administrations she suspected hers was both the more efficient and the less stressful. She hoped he had enjoyed the wedding in London, though she doubted it. Generally he was as bored by European ceremonies as she was.

She yawned and stretched her arms, wondering whether to listen to the other side of the record or go to bed. At that moment she heard the sound of a vehicle approaching.

Whoever it was, they were coming to the Presidential bungalow, for the road led nowhere else. She felt suddenly anxious. ‘Bojang!’ she called, walking to the living-room door.

‘Yes, Lady,’ he said, emerging from the kitchen just as a hammering started on the compound gate.

They both stood there listening, she uncertain what to do, he waiting for instructions. ‘See who it is,’ she said at last.

He let himself out, and she went in search of the gun she knew her husband kept somewhere in the house. The drawers of his desk in the study seemed the best bet, but two of them yielded no gun and the other two were locked. She was still looking for the key when an armed man appeared in the study doorway.

‘Who are you? And what do you want in my house?’ she asked.

‘You are under arrest,’ he said.

She laughed. ‘By whose authority?’

‘And your children,’ the man added, looking round with interest at the President’s study. ‘By the authority of the Revolutionary Council.’

‘The what?’

Her contempt stung the man. ‘Your days are over, bitch,’ he said.

The firefight which began at the gates of the Presidential Palace soon after four a.m., and which continued intermittently across its gardens, up Marina Parade and down to the beach, for the next two hours, woke up most of those sleeping within a quarter of a mile of the Palace.

Opposite the new Atlantic Hotel in Marina Parade, Mustapha Diop was happily snoring his way through it all until his wife’s anxiety forced her to wake him. The two of them sat up in bed listening to the gunfire, then went together to the window, where all they could see was a distant view of the moon on the surf and any number of palm fronds swaying gently in the night breeze.

Diop and his family were from Senegal, and had been in Banjul only a few weeks, since his appointment as secretary to the committee overseeing the proposed union between the two countries. Since a treaty already existed whereby either government would intervene to save the other from an armed take-over, Diop was already aware that he might prove an important bargaining card for any Gambian rebels. The sudden violent knocking on the door downstairs made it clear that the same thought had occurred to them.

Half a mile to the west, the gunfire was only audible, and barely so, when the breeze shifted in the right direction. Moussa Diba and Lamin Konko shared a north-east-facing cell in Banjul Prison, and Diba, prevented from sleeping as usual by the vengeful thoughts which circled his brain, was at first uncertain of what it was he could hear. The sound of lorries rolling past, headed into Banjul from the direction of the Denton Bridge, offered him another clue. Either there was a mother of an exercise going on – which seemed about as likely as an edible breakfast – or someone was trying to topple that little bastard Jawara. Diba smiled to himself in the gloom, and woke Konko with a jab of his foot.

His cellmate groaned. ‘What is it?’ he said sleepily.

‘Listen.’

Konko listened. ‘Gunfire,’ he said. ‘So what?’

‘So nothing. I thought you’d enjoy some excitement.’

‘I was having plenty in my sleep. There’s this girl I used to know in my village. I’d forgotten all about her…’

He rambled on, making Diba think of Anja, and of what she was doubtless doing. The woman could not say no. Unfortunately, he could not say no for her, not while he was locked up in this cell.

Another burst of gunfire sounded, this time closer. So what? Diba’s thoughts echoed his cellmate’s. Whatever was happening out there was unlikely to help him in here.

Simon McGrath, awoken in his room on the fourth floor of the Carlton Hotel, thought for a moment he was back on the Jebel Dhofar in Oman, listening to the firqats firing off their rifles in jubilation at the successful capture of Sudh. The illusion was brief-lived. He had never had a bed in Oman, not even one as uncomfortable as the Carlton’s. And it had been more than ten years since the men he had helped to train had taken Sudh and started rolling back the tide of the Dhofari rebels.

This was Banjul, The Gambia, and he was no longer in the SAS. Still, he thought, swinging his legs to the floor and striding across to the window, the gunfire he was listening to was coming out of Kalashnikov barrels, and they were not standard issue with the Gambian Field Force. Out there on the capital’s mean streets something not quite kosher seemed to be taking place.

The view from his window, which faced south across the shanty compounds towards the Great Mosque, was uninstructive. Nothing was lit, nothing moving. He tried the light switch, but as usual at this time of night, the hotel’s electricity was off.

McGrath dressed in the dark, wondering what would be the prudent thing to do. Stay in bed, probably.

To hell with that.

He delved into his bag and extracted the holster and semi-automatic 9mm Browning High Power handgun which he had brought with him from England. Since McGrath was in The Gambia in a civilian capacity, seconded from the Royal Engineers to head a technical assistance team engaged in bridge-building and pipe-laying, his possession of the Browning was strictly illicit, but that hardly concerned him. The Third World, as he was fond of telling people who lived in more comfortable places, was like an overpopulated Wild West, and he had no intention of ending up with an arrow through his head. A little string-pulling among old contacts at Heathrow had eased the gun’s passage onto the plane, and at Yundum no one had dreamed of checking his baggage.

He threaded the cross-draw holster to his belt, slipped on the lightweight jacket to hide the gun, and left his room. At first it seemed as if the rest of the hotel remained blissfully unaware of whatever it was that was happening outside, but as he went down the corridor he caught the murmur of whispered conversations.

He was about to start down the stairs when the benefits of a visit to the roof occurred to him. He walked up the two flights to the fifth floor, then one more to the flat roof. With the city showing its usual lack of illumination and the moon hiding behind clouds, it was little lighter outside than in, and for almost a minute McGrath waited in the open doorway, searching the shadows for anyone who had chosen to spend the night in the open air. Once satisfied the roof was empty, he threaded his way through the washing lines to the side overlooking Independence Drive.

As he reached this vantage point a lorry full of men swept past, heading down towards the centre of town. Several men were standing on the pavement opposite the hotel, outside the building housing the Legislative Assembly. A yellow glow came from inside the latter, as if from gas lamps or candles.

It looked like a coup, McGrath thought, and at that moment a fresh volley of shots resounded away to his right, from the direction of the Palace. There was a hint of lights through the trees – headlights, perhaps – but he could see nothing for certain, either in that direction or any other. Banjul might be surrounded on its three sides by river, sea and swamp, but at four in the morning they all looked like so many pieces of gloom.

The Royal Victoria Hospital, whose main entrance was little more than a hundred yards from the Palace gates, showed no more lights than anywhere else. McGrath wondered if Sibou was sleeping there that night, as she often did, or whether she had gone home for some of that rest she always seemed to need and never seemed to get.

He would go and have a look, he decided, one part of his mind commending him for his thoughtfulness, the other thanking his lucky stars that he had come up with a good excuse to go out in search of adventure.

It was almost six-thirty before Colonel Taal felt confident enough of the outcome of the fighting around the Presidential Palace to delegate its direction, and to head back down Buckle Street to the radio station for the prearranged meeting. Mamadou Jabang and his deputy, Sharif Sallah, had arrived in their commandeered taxi more than half an hour earlier, and the subsequent wait had done little to soothe their nerves.

‘What is happening?’ Jabang asked, when Taal was only halfway through the door. He and Sallah were sitting at either end of a table in the station’s hospitality room. ‘Has anything gone wrong?’

‘Nothing.’

‘The Palace is taken?’ Sallah asked.

‘The Palace is cordoned off,’ Taal answered. ‘Some of the guards have escaped, either down the beach or into the town, but that was expected.’ He sat down and looked at the two of them: the wiry Jabang with his hooded eyes and heavy brow, Sallah with the face that always seemed to be smiling, even when it was not. Both men were sweating heavily, which perhaps owed something to the humidity, but was mostly nerves. Jabang in particular seemed exhausted by the combination of stress and tiredness, which did not exactly bode well for the new government’s decision-making process. Nothing perverted the exercise of judgement like lack of sleep, and somehow or other all three of them would have to make sure they got enough in the days to come.

‘It will be light in half an hour,’ Jabang said.

‘And the country will wake to a better government,’ Sallah said, almost smugly.

Taal supposed he meant it. For some reason he could never quite put his finger on, he had always doubted Sallah’s sincerity. Whereas Jabang was transparently honest and idealistic almost to a fault, Sallah’s words and deeds invariably seemed to carry a taint of opportunism.

Maybe he was wrong, Taal thought. He hoped he was. Jabang trusted the man and there had to be easier ways to glory than taking part in the mounting of a coup like this one. Everyone knew their chances of lasting success were no better than even, and in the sanctum of his own thoughts Taal thought the odds considerably longer. Seizing control was one thing, holding on to it something else entirely.

McGrath had decided that even in the dark a stroll along Independence Drive might not prove wise, and had opted for the long way round, making use of Marina Parade. On this road there was less likely to be traffic or headlights, and the overarching trees made the darkness even more impenetrable. He worked his way along the southern side, ears alert for the sound of unwelcome company, and was almost level with the Atlantic Hotel when two headlights sprang to life some two hundred yards ahead of him, and rapidly started closing the distance. There was no time to run for better cover, and McGrath flattened himself against the wall, hoping to fall outside the vehicle’s cone of illumination.

He need not have bothered. The lights swerved to the left, disappearing, as he immediately realized, into the forecourt of the Atlantic Hotel. He wondered what the rebels had in store for the hundred or so guests, most of them Brits, and all of whom had come to The Gambia on package tours in search of a sunny beach, not the wrong end of a Kalashnikov.

He would worry about that later. For the moment he wanted to make sure Sibou was all right. Hurrying on past the Atlantic, he came to the doors of the Royal Victoria’s Maternity Wing, and decided that it might be better to use them than attempt the front entrance. Ten minutes later, having threaded his way through the labyrinth of one-storey buildings and courtyards, he found himself looking across at the lit windows of the emergency department some twenty yards away. Several men were standing around inside, some of them bending down to talk to those who were presumably lying, out of sight, on the cubicle beds and waiting-room benches. One man was moaning continuously, almost forlornly, but otherwise there was virtual silence.

Then he saw Sibou, rising wearily into view after treating one of the prone casualties. Her dark eyes seemed even darker, the skin stretched a little tighter across the high cheekbones, the usually generous mouth pursed with tension and tiredness. McGrath worked his way round the perimeter of the yard to the open window of her private office and clambered over the sill. He opened the door a quarter of an inch and looked out through the crack. The corridor was empty.

Sooner or later she would come, and he settled down to wait, thinking about the first time they had met, a couple of months earlier, soon after he had arrived on his secondment. The circumstances could hardly have been more propitious for an intending Galahad. He had come to the Royal Victoria looking for the tetanus shot he should have had before leaving home, and found himself face to face with a room full of terrified Gambians, her half-naked on the floor and a man about to rape her at knife-point in full view of everyone else. All the old training had come instantly into use, and before he had had time to ponder the risks McGrath had used the man’s neck for a chopping board and his genitals for a football.

The damsel in distress had been grateful enough to have dinner with him, but he had foolishly allowed himself to be a little too honest with her, and she had declined to be anything more than a friend. That had not been as difficult as he had expected, though he still dreamed of covering her ebony body with his kisses, not to mention her covering his with hers. But Sibou was great company even fully clothed, and he had even found himself wishing his wife and children could meet her.

He could not remember being so impressed by someone’s dedication – in the face of such awe-inspiring odds – for a long, long time. She could have had a doctor’s job, and a doctor’s ample rewards, anywhere in the world, but here she was, in this ramshackle office, struggling to stretch always inadequate resources in the service of the ordinary people who came in off the street, and offering every one of them a smile almost beautiful enough to die for.

McGrath looked at his watch. In twenty minutes it would begin to get light: where did he want to be when that happened? At the Atlantic, he decided, where there would probably be a working telephone and some chance of finding out what was happening. After all, now he had found out that Sibou was all right, there had to be more pressing things to do than watch her smile.

He was halfway out of the window when she came in through the door. She jumped with surprise, then burst out laughing. ‘What are you doing, you crazy Englishman?’ she asked.

He pulled himself back into the room, wondering how anyone could look so sexy in a white coat and stethoscope. ‘I’ve come to take you away from all this,’ he said grandly.

‘Through the window?’

‘Well…’

‘And anyway, I like all this. And I’m busy,’ she added, rummaging around in her desk drawer for something.

‘I just came to check you were OK,’ he said.

She turned and smiled at him. ‘Thank you.’

‘What’s happening out there?’ he asked.

‘Out in the city? Oh, another bunch of fools have decided to overthrow the government.’

‘And are they succeeding?’

She shrugged. ‘Who knows? Who cares?’

‘I thought you didn’t like Papa Jawara.’

‘I don’t. But playing musical chairs at the Palace is not going to get me the medicines I need. In fact I’m having to use the little I’ve got to patch up those toy soldiers in there.’

‘How many of them?’

‘About a dozen or so. We’re already running out of blood. Look, I have to go…’ She suddenly noticed the holstered gun inside his jacket. ‘What are you wearing that for?’ she demanded to know.

‘Self-defence.’

‘It will give them a reason to shoot you.’

‘Yeah, well…’

She threw up her hands in disgust. ‘You play what games you want,’ she said, adding over her shoulder, ‘and take care of yourself.’

‘I’ll come back later,’ he called after her, although he was not sure if she had heard. ‘What a woman,’ he muttered to himself, and worked his body back out through the window. He retraced his steps through the sprawling grounds to the Maternity Wing entrance, crossed over the still-dark Marina Parade and scaled the wall of the grounds opposite. Five minutes and another wall later he was standing on the beach. Away to his right, over the far bank of the river mouth, the sky was beginning to lighten. He turned the other way, and walked a couple of hundred yards along the deserted sand to the hotel’s beach entrance.