The UN commander said there would be a Joint Protection Team in place but there don’t seem to be any Pakistani soldiers around. That the three men are wearing the plain, dark green uniform of the government army, the FARDC, is bad enough, but what makes them even more of a threat is that they have the distinctive blue shoulder flashes of the 64th Brigade. The Congolese army is made up of militia groups that have been integrated into it over the years and the 64th Brigade is a former mai-mai group, a tribal militia of the Shi people in South Kivu.
Gabriel is terrified of them because he is a Hunde, a member of the Rwandan tribe brought into the province by the Belgians during the colonial era as cheap labour. They are hated by the ‘originaires’, the indigenous Congolese peoples.
If he can just get past this group then he can blend into the market, do his business and sneak out with the crowd at the end of the day. His eyes are wide with fear but he keeps them lowered as he passes the soldiers. Their heads turn and they watch him intently.
Sophie Cecil-Black is feeling carsick and frazzled.
The white Land Cruiser swings round another switchback on the dirt road up the hill and her head swoons horribly.
They’ve been doing this since six o’clock this morning and it’s early afternoon now. Up three thousand feet from Goma to Masisi and then down three thousand feet into the Oso valley and then up another three thousand feet to here.
God, one more swing and I am going to puke.
Saliva pours into her mouth but she tenses her throat muscles and forces the vomit back down.
She looks out of the window. Everywhere around her are stunning views out over rugged hills covered with grassland and small fields. It reminds her of a family holiday to Switzerland in the summer, but she is not in the mood to appreciate the beauty now.
Sophie is thirty-one, six foot tall and slim with straight brown hair, a striking face and a strident manner. Some men think she is very beautiful, others think she is very ugly. It’s the Cecil-Black nose that makes the difference: secretly she used to want to file down the prominent bridge of it when she was a teenager but she has learned to live with it now. She wears a tight green GAP tee shirt, hipster jeans and green Croc shoes.
The Cecil-Blacks are a branch of the Cecil family who ran the British government from the time of Elizabeth I. Sophie went to Benenden, her father is a stockbroker and her mother is very concerned that she is over thirty and not married. Sophie couldn’t care less about that: she knows she is called to higher things and has been doing her best to break the mould of being a safe, Home Counties girl ever since she refused to join the Brownies aged seven. She has a first in PPE from Oxford, a Masters in Development Economics from the School of Oriental and African Studies and an ethnic tattoo across the small of her back.
She is now a project manager with an American humanitarian aid charity, Hope Street, which has a large presence in Kivu and specialises in work with street kids, schooling and training them but she also does general humanitarian work. She leads a team of fifteen people based in Goma, where they have a large training facility.
One of her team, Natalie Zielinski, is sitting in the backseat. She doesn’t get carsick. She’s a small, bubbly Texan with brown, frizzy hair in a bob that never quite works. Sophie likes her optimism, but sometimes finds her irritating.
Nicolas, their Congolese driver, is a slim, self-effacing young man, very glad to have such a cushy job driving for an NGO, it’s a lot easier and safer than the backbreaking life of the peasants in the bush. He is quiet and calm with the soft manner of a lot of Congolese men. He drives smoothly but even that can’t iron out the constant bumping from side to side on the dirt road and those horrible lurching turns.
They started so early because they need to get a load of vaccines to a remote clinic before they go off in the heat. Several thousand dollars worth of polio, hepatitis, measles and other vaccines are packed into coolboxes in the back of the jeep. Once they get them to the clinic at Tshabura they can go into the solar-powered fridge and will be fine for the big vaccination day that they have set up later that week. The clinic is at the head of the Bilati valley and local field workers have spread the word around the farms and villages there, as well as advertising it on Radio Okapi. They are expecting two hundred children to be brought in to be inoculated.
The other reason they started at six is that Tshabura is on the edge of the area under the nominal control of the UN forces. The security situation in Kivu is always volatile; they listen to the radio every morning for the UN security update, like a weather forecast. At the moment their route is Condition Bravo – some caution is warranted, no immediate threat but follow normal security procedures. Condition Echo means evacuate urgently to save your life but it doesn’t happen often. Lawlessness is just part of everyday life in Kivu and Sophie has become used to the daily list of rapes, muggings and burglaries, as well as keeping track of which roads are closed due to militia activity.
After a prolonged security assessment and unsuccessful wrangling with the UN to do the delivery by helicopter, Sophie got fed up with waiting and decided that they could race there in the daytime, get to the clinic, stay overnight in their compound and then race back the next day. White NGO workers are generally safe in Kivu, apart from the usual hassling for bribes from the police and army, but she doesn’t want to be out on the roads after dark when armed groups roam at will.
All these factors are weighing on her mind and she’s also irate because they are behind schedule. They had a puncture on a track that had been washed out by heavy rain and then lost an hour getting over the river at Pinga where a truck had got a wheel stuck in a hole in the old metal bridge.
The car at last comes to the top of the hill and Nicolas pulls up so Natalie can look around the surrounding area and check the map. She scans either side of the jeep and all she can see are lines of green hills in bright sunshine receding into the distance. It is completely quiet but for the noise of a breeze buffeting the car.
‘Daniel Boone would get lost out here,’ she mutters, as she looks back and forth between the map and the view. ‘One hill begins to look much the same as another.’ The map has proved inaccurate already that day and there are no signposts anywhere.
‘Look, can we just get on with it, please,’ Sophie snaps.
‘OK, OK,’ Natalie says cheerfully. ‘We’re on the right route.’
Chapter Three
Alex is struggling to get a grip on the scale of the project that Fang has just outlined.
He stops being relaxed and sits forward, the fingers of one hand pressed to his temple.
‘Hang on; the Congolese government is going to lease you Kivu Province?’
Fang nods confidently. ‘Yes, just like the British government leased Hong Kong from China for ninety-nine years.’
‘OK. How many people live there?’
‘Well, that is a good question actually. No one really knows because surveys are from before the war, but we think about six million.’
‘Six million people?’ Alex looks incredulous but Fang looks back at him unfazed.
‘Yes.’
Alex shakes his head. ‘Why is the government going to do that?’
‘Well, Kivu is actually an embarrassment to the government in Kinshasa. The President promised to bring peace to the country when he got elected but he has failed to end the fighting, or deliver on any of his other Cinq Chantiers policies.
‘The government has no control there. I mean, look at the distances: Congo is the size of western Europe and trying to run Kivu from Kinshasa is like trying to run Turkey from London. Plus there are no road or rail links between the two areas.
‘The government had to get the Rwandan army in to try and defeat the FDLR but that failed. Now they throw their hands up and say it is