The Night of the Cobra - Chapter 5

Chapter 5

“Passport! Passport! Please you must give me your passport. And where is your visa? No visa? No visa? Oh very bad, very bad.”

Nina was struggling to remain on her feet in the human maelstrom that was Monrovia’s arrivals terminal. The stifling room was packed with journalists, officials plastered with plastic badges and an army of shady fixers and members of the quick-buck brigade.

A fat man in a sweat-stained shirt had grabbed her arm and was attempting to drag her into a tiny, inner office, already packed with irate passengers and shoulder-shrugging officials.

She scanned the sea of heads desperately for Glenn. He would have their regular airport fixer nearby to smooth her passage. She had lost Shaun again, but they were bound to meet later at the city’s only functioning hotel.

The sun was already slanting lower over the swamps and marshes that gave Liberia the look of a prehistoric paradise from the air. She really wanted to get to town before night brought the hoodlums with guns out to play.

So far she had managed to cling onto her luggage and her papers. She knew that if she surrendered her passport it would disappear for hours perhaps only to reappear once a wad of dollars had changed hands. And goodness knows what the going price was now that the city was on the frontline.

“Nina!” She felt a strong hand grip her upper arm and almost lift her out of the crowd.

It was Joseph, their wiry 70-year-old local fixer. Glenn was standing behind him, round glasses slipping down his sweaty nose.

“Man, this place is the pits,” he muttered as he grasped her hand and gave her an awkward hug. “Give Joseph your papers and let’s try to get the hell out of here as quickly as possible. I’ve got a car, costs a fortune but hey we need wheels.”

Joseph slid into the crowd with her documents. Nina managed to find space to light a cigarette.

“So what’s the story in town” she asked.

Glenn wearily swabbed his streaming face with the ends of a grubby cream towel hanging around his neck.

“The rebels were in the port his morning and were shelling the town, but it’s quiet now. We don’t know where the president is. Some say he might have gone upcountry but it’s impossible to know. His guys are pretty worked up and it’s not so easy to move around. Earlier today, it was all heads under beds because the rebels were whacking mortars across the river and the government guys were firing left, right and centre. Personally, I don’t want to be a statistic at the business end of a stray bullet in Liberia.”

Glenn was only 28 but he already had the studied veneer of callous cynicism that marked out an experienced Africa hand.

A veteran of brutality from Ethiopia to Sierra Leone, the Australian did not look like an adrenaline-junkie war correspondent. Nina, who had worked with him in Ivory Coast, always thought he was made to sell doughnuts in a warm bakery with his round, happy face and his tubby shape.

But he had one of the best eyes in the business and despite an almost constant whine of complaint when not shooting, he was quick and calm on the job and a good man in a tight spot.

Now, however, he was suffering.

“It’s got worse since I arrived this morning. I managed to get you a room at the hotel, at a price. It’s almost full already so I expect they will be doubling up guests soon.”

He adjusted his glasses again and scanned the room.

“I see the wires are here and even the U.S. papers are sending in their own shooters. It’s going to be fun.”

“Do you know a Shaun Ridge?” Nina asked. She knew she was blushing but hoped Glenn would put it down to the heat and the crush.

“Yes, I worked with him in Somalia. A cool guy. Do you know him?” Glenn replied.

Nina filled him in on their meeting in Freetown, amazed that she could make it all sound so matter-of-fact and banal. Maybe it was. She still wasn’t sure.

They had chatted easily on the plane, and she had imagined a tingle as their legs brushed against each other below the cramped seats. But what if it was all just in her head? And wouldn’t that be better anyway?

She spotted Joseph fighting his way back to them, stepped off the mental roundabout and focused on getting out of the airport.

Half an hour later, the road to Monrovia was almost deserted. Nina thought the country looked somehow malevolent in the shadowy light of half-dusk. She rolled down the windows but the air was stagnant as if petrified.

Night fell like a curtain. Years of war had left Liberia in the dark and Monrovia a medieval capital of flickering candles. Only the lucky few could afford generators.

Nina and Glenn stopped talking as their rented four-by-four crawled through the dead streets. The fighting had stopped and she could hear faint voices through the drumming rain but she saw only shadows. At least the dark hid the destruction of a city clubbed to smithereens by a decade of war.

Suddenly, a soldier appeared in the headlights, his poncho slick with rain, an AK-47 in his hands. They slowed to a stop and he leaned into the car, demanding papers. He was only about 16 and he was high.

Nina pulled out her press badge as the driver kept up a soothing patter.

“Hey man, these journalists coming here to write about you. They good for us, man. Not looking for no trouble.”

The boy didn’t register the words. He just stared into their faces with empty eyes. Nina could now see five other shapes beyond the windscreen in front of a roadblock hurled together from an iron bedframe, pieces of wood and a few barrels.

One boy had his rifle pointed straight at the car’s windscreen. She noticed the safety was off. Breathe, breathe, she told herself silently, struggling to keep her face steady, her eyes unconcerned and her body relaxed.

Two packs of cigarettes, a couple of dollars and 10 minutes of surreal chat and they were driving past the barricade. Nina shuddered as she caught the eye of one of the rain-soaked gunmen, who glared at her coldly through the falling droplets and his own personal haze.

“The president’s militia boys started putting up roadblocks earlier today,” Glenn said when they were safely on their way. “Of course, they should be on the other side of the city pushing the lunatic rebels out of the port but not a chance. I tried to go down there today but no can-do. The rebels were firing across the New Bridge and the Old Bridge and I just didn’t fancy it.”

He sniffed. “Some French shooters said they might try tomorrow, with a white flag and all. Maybe I’ll go with them. The rebels have set up camp on the other side. It’d be good to see who’s there. I’m hearing the ladies’ brigade are on the frontline and that would make great pix.”

By now, they were pulling into the hotel’s yard, squeezing past rows of pickups and jeeps marked Press.

“It’s a bit of a cluster-fuck,” Glenn warned as he took Nina to her room. “Everyone is in town now so it’ll be tough to get any exclusives. And it’s really hard to move around when they’re going at it hammer and tongs. They just don’t have a clue how to use those mortars. One guy told me he saw a rebel – just a boy – trying to fire one and actually shooting backwards into his own guys because it was turned the wrong way around. This is the kind of shit we are dealing with.”

He paused to scratch his head.

“See you later in the bar. It’s the only sensible place to talk about what we are doing here.”

With an almost cheery wave, he was gone, leaving Nina to settle into her room. She switched on the light, threw her bags on the bed and lit a cigarette.

She went out onto the balcony, and stood looking down onto the dripping courtyard and listening to the rumble of the generator. The receptionist had said the electricity would be on only for a few hours each morning and night.

God, she needed a beer but she had better call Paris first and let them know she had arrived.

“I say let’s try anyway. We can always come back if it looks dodgy.” Glenn looked around seeking approval. There were seven or eight of them, sitting at a plastic table on the hotel’s covered terrace.

Below them, across the road, the sea was a darker, sibilant mass etched through with white lines of foam. Glenn’s face was lit by a sputtering candle and the glow from the cigarettes smoked by almost everyone at the table.

Nina was sitting beside him, her elbows on the table, her hands cupping her face. Shaun sat at the end of the table, his face shrouded in shadows.

Nina stole glances at his fingers, watching as they slowly shredded a plastic cup. She could not tell where his eyes were looking and she was grateful for the dark.

The talk washed over her. She had already decided she would go across the bridge into rebel territory with Glenn tomorrow. It was partly principle – you stuck with your photographer – and partly professional pride.

If there was a story to be had by going across the bridge, then she would have it.

In any case, if others went and she stayed behind, her editors would want to know why and she could hardly say she was scared. The two French journalists at the table had said they would go and the remaining Americans – two young men in expensive sandals and baggy T-shirts – seemed almost won.

“Hey chaps, going over the top tomorrow then?” It was Peter. He stopped at their table and waved his aromatic cigarette vaguely as a general and somewhat royal greeting.

“Looks like it,” Glenn replied.

“So are we,” Peter said smiling. “Good to know we are among friends…or at least fellow madmen..and women.” He bowed graciously in Nina’s direction.

She smiled wanly, lost in her own personal battle. Shaun hadn’t yet said what he would do. She would ask him later.

So there it was. The thought had risen unbidden into her mind, part of the splish-splash of musings spilling around.

If she was honest, she’d known since she looked up to see him on the plane that there would be a later. In her soul, she was already committed even if her mind was still struggling with what she wanted to do.

The talk was winding down. “So tomorrow at 6.30 down here. OK?” Glenn had his quorum and happily headed off, exchanging wisecracks with Peter as they walked.

One by one the others stubbed out cigarettes, gulped down the last dregs of lukewarm beer and the whiskey that never ran out at the hotel – even in war – and said goodnight.

Nina and Shaun were left. If was as if Fate was throwing them together, Nina thought, abandoning her usual pragmatism in her eagerness to unburden herself of responsibility for what might happen, what she hoped would happen.

“Another drink?”

His voice was soft, almost a whisper. She nodded and he signalled to the tired waitress, who was leaning on a nearby table, one slim wrist languorously fanning her face with a damp napkin.

The rain had stopped but the very air seemed to be wet. The sea hissed and the palm trees around the hotel flapped reluctantly in a drenched sea breeze. The terrace was now almost empty. Two men were noisily stacking the white plastic chairs.

Suddenly the dull crack of gunfire rang out from across the river. Four or five shots, then silence. Then an answering burst from this side. Nina saw red tracer flare over the bridge and then die.

She had jumped at the initial volley and hoped Shaun had not seen.

“I hope it will be OK tomorrow. It’s quite risky,” he said, his eyes still in shadow.

“If we take it slow, fly a white flag and wear our flak jackets, it should be OK,” she replied, hoping she sounded downbeat. “Are you coming?”

“I dunno.” He shook his head. “It’s not that I’m scared…” That grin again.

“Who am I kidding! I am scared. These guys are nuts. They’d shoot you as soon as speak to you. I just dunno if it’s worth it. Why not wait another day and see how things go.”

He paused and the silence was rent by more gunfire, the thuds ringing out from their right. But it lasted just seconds and they both laughed when it died away.

“It’s just that I’ve made these kinds of decisions so many times and I still hate it.” He sounded a little ashamed. “I always wonder if this will be the time that the right decision was to stay behind. Because I can’t help thinking that that day will come. It’s got to when you spend this much time looking for trouble.”

“I know what you mean,” Nina said.

For a moment, she thought of Robert, a South African journalist and friend shot dead at a roadblock in Ivory Coast last year. He didn’t die for a reason. His killers were ruffians from neither side, thugs using war to profiteer and get some cheap thrills by killing a white man.

It was wrong place, wrong time – a cliché with deadly consequences that took on all its tragic meaning so often in Africa.

She tidied away the thought and smiled.

“But hey, there will be a group of us and we are going to be careful. It’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, I guess. And of course, I’ll go. It was never really an option to stay behind,” he said draining his beer. “But you have to at least pretend the choice is one.”

He grimaced. “Well, better turn in if we are going to face the enemy at the crack of dawn.”

They walked towards the main building. Nina thought of Tim. She had spoken to him earlier. He might be in Monrovia in a few days to help feed the thousands of refugees from the countryside who had fled to the city and were now sleeping out there in the mud-filled dark.

He had said he loved her, and missed her and told her to be careful. He always said that when she was on a trip.

She stopped at her door. “Do you fancy a nightcap?” She thought she sounded breathless, sought to control her voice. “I picked up some nasty, cheap whiskey on the way here.”

Shaun had gone ahead and turned around slowly. His eyes found hers and she felt the false laugh die away.

“It’s an early start.” His voice was apologetic, his eyes unreadable.

“Of course, of course. Sorry. We’ll break into it tomorrow after the Great Adventure.” She felt tears well in her eyes and cursed her stupidity. “See you tomorrow then.”

She fumbled with the key as the lock swam before her burning eyes. Why didn’t he go? Why was he still standing there? Jesus, she was humiliated enough.

She opened the door and turned to say goodnight, still trying to smile.

And then he was pushing past her, slamming the door and pulling her to him. He kissed her frantically. Her hands found the soft hair at the back of his neck and her mind stopped at last.

Stopped wondering why, and what if and why not and what next. She was just a mouth, and hands and skin. Everything was touch and only touch as they collapsed onto the bed, struggling out of their clothes, still kissing, still desperately clasping each other.