A Most Unholy War

WAR

A MOST UNHOLY WAR

The story of a Godless Revolution

GRANT SHANKS

Published by Grant Shanks at Smashwords

Copyright Grant Shanks 2012

Cover Copyright 2012 by Grant Shanks

All rights reserved.

The author has asserted his moral and legal right to be recognised as the Author of this work.

This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, organisations or persons is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.

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Prologue.

They met in the night shadows under the trees on the lakeshore where the fishermen grounded their boats. They were alone. The village a half-mile distant was quiet. The cooking fires were out and the voices silent. The dogs were sleeping.

The leaves above dappled the cool silver light of the full moon. It played softly on their naked ebony bodies as they caressed each other. Their movements and sounds were urgent - for they were lovers long-parted now snatching a moment of bliss. He drew her to the nearest boat whispering as he fondled her. She responded, her hands stroking him, gripping his sex.

They coupled with her lying across the upturned hull of the canoe, her rump was raised, her hands pressed wide against the smooth wood. He entered her from behind. They gasped at the moment as he leaned across her, pushing himself deeply inside, his hands on her shoulders. Then he began to move, slowly, still whispering his love to her, his big hands clutching her smooth shoulders. His grip tightened and his voice became louder as he began to lose himself. Soon, he was thrusting faster and faster, the sound of flesh slapping flesh became loud in the still of the night. She was moaning, biting her lips to keep from shouting her passion at the moon.

Neither of the lovers saw the shadow figure that moved silently behind them. The figure carried a long, wide, gleaming blade that caught the moon as it was raised it high in a two-handed grip.

The male lover was beginning to climax. He leaned back, his body arched as every muscle and nerve sought release. His breath hissed between his clenched teeth, biting back the sound of his ecstasy.

The long, broad blade sang through the air and there was another sound in the night, one that was almost unheard over the sound of the woman's breathing. The noise was that which a heavy razor-edged weapon makes when it cuts cleanly through skin and flesh and sinew and bone. It was little more than a 'snick!' Although severed at the neck, the head of the man sat on his shoulders for seconds before gravity intervened and it toppled forward over the canoe hull, over the woman to thud to the dirt.

Locked in her own orgasm, the woman saw her lover's head fall to the ground in front of her. She had no comprehension of that, or the burning black liquid that was pouring over her own head and shoulders. All she felt was her own climax and that of her lover who was still buried deep inside her; his weight pressing against her buttocks, his hands still gripping her shoulders. She didn't see the blade once again raised high in the moonlight. She didn't hear its song as it swept down, sending her head spinning away to join that of her lover.

With their life's blood spurting from their severed necks, the bodies of the lovers stayed where they were, still joined. For a few seconds, the body of the man continued to move in a grotesque parody of the act of love. And then, like a toy with its spring wound down, the man crumpled, down and backwards, leaving the body of the woman spread against the hull of the canoe.

The heads of the two lovers lay side by side in the pooled blood. His eyes were closed. Hers were open - unseeing.

*****

Contents

Chapter 1 Mad Dogs

Chapter 2 Angel

Chapter 3 Momma

Chapter 4 Hollywood

Chapter 5 Hog Heaven

Chapter 6 Border

Chapter 7 Hell on Earth

Chapter 8 El President

Chapter 9 Captured

Chapter 10 Hospital

Chapter 11 Fate

Chapter 12 Counterfeit

Chapter 13 Awakening

Chapter 14 Kidnapped

Chapter 15 Angola

Chapter 16 The Camp

Chapter 17 The Third Day

Chapter 18 The Welshman

Chapter 19 Lumaga

Chapter 20 Camp 30

Chapter 21 Protect My Family

Chapter 22 The Hueys

Chapter 23 Trapped

Chapter 24 Aftermath

Chapter 25 Nightmares

Chapter 26 Karada

Chapter 27 The Return Home

Chapter 28 The New Emperor

Chapter 29 The Truth

Chapter 30 Finished

Chapter 31 Brotherhood of Warriors

Chapter 32 The Courier

Chapter 33 The Sandmen Cometh

CHAPTER. 1.

Mad Dogs

Debni was hot. Too hot for a white man! That was the phrase Sean Mackey had appropriated from someone, somewhere. He was too tired to even think who had first said it. Whatever, he wholly endorsed the sentiment.

Being in the town was like being trapped inside an oven but there was no fan setting. The air wasn't moving. It just sat, stifling and dry and as thick as molasses. However, the act of walking did stir it a little, and the fetid stench of the street rose like swamp gas as it trailed the lone pedestrian.

The journalist waded on through the heat of the day. He looked up at the sun for the briefest of moments. Even through his Ray Bans the orb glowered down at him like the bloodshot eye of a weary and sick God, squinting to make sense of this place he, she or it had created.

The red glare was an unholy shade, a product of the desert dust that had blown into the stratosphere following the storms in the Kalahari to the south. For two weeks the dust had not settled, it just stayed with the clouds and it turned the day sky into a sullen, searing dusk. If anything, the temperatures in Dhaman were hotter than those Mackey had experienced in Abyssinia just two months previously.

Sean Mackey was an African veteran. He knew he had been to and survived worse places on the continent than Dhaman. He just couldn't remember when, and he wasn't about to search his jaded memory banks to identify the where. It didn't matter. All that was relevant was the now! The image of an ice-cold beer drove him onwards. There was only one bar in town that served anything other than the foul local brew. This magical brew, as Murphy's Law dictated, was to be found in an establishment as far from his hotel as it was possible to get in the town.

Mackey wouldn't have called for a cab even if he could have found one at this time of day. The Debni cab was to be avoided at all costs. These were the most dangerous vehicles Mackey had ever had the misfortune to ride in during his more than twelve years in Asia and Africa. He had used one to get from the airport into town, that was it as far as he was concerned.

Beer! His mind came back to it of its own accord. They called the local brew Elphant. Copyright and branding restrictions held no sway in Dhaman. The name had originally been intended to read Elephant but somewhere along the way, a typesetter had dropped the e. The logo on the bottles was the same as that used by the famous Danish beer. Apart from that and the fact the brew was wet and vaguely beerish, Elphant, had nothing what-so-ever in common with the fine Danish product.

Mackey was alone on the street apart from the dogs that scavenged wearily in the open sewers, these and the vultures that listlessly squabbled with each other as they waited for something to die.

The ugly birds hobbled and danced in the dirt like obscene half-plucked chickens, stupid, noisy, and omnipresent. These were Africa to the journalist. The images he carried with him had nothing to do with noble lions or majestic elephants. His jaundiced perspective of the continent as a whole was dominated by death. There were no pretty pictures for Mackey, just visions of the countless scavengers worrying the flesh off the bones of Africa. The hyenas and the jackals. The vultures and the flies. The poverty and the bloodshed. These were Mackey's Africa.

Here on the street the midday heat was so stupefying that even the airborne pests droned around at half speed. They sounded like miniaturised versions of the heavily laden C130 transports that constantly overflew Debni on their way to disgorge their deadly cargoes at the single strip airfield on the outskirts of the town.

The quest for a cold drinkable beer to be supped in a cool cellar had sent Mackey off on his noonday trek every day for the past two weeks. There was simply no other way to beat the heat, not even in his hotel. The Regal was the best hostelry in town. The former French establishment, although elegant and spacious, was also a blast furnace in the noon day sun. The hotel would have been at least bearable had the air-conditioning generator not gone down the day after Mackey checked in. The manager, an apologetic Indian named Karmoudi had assured the journalist that the ancient diesel unit would be repaired, that very day. Karmoudi had been saying that for thirteen days now and the tune had worn very thin. The pair of them avoided each other - it was a thing borne of mutual desperation.

Mackey knew exactly why the repairs weren't going to happen this day or any other in the foreseeable future. The generator occupied a low priority in the overall scheme of things at this particular point in time. Revolution had a way of establishing its very own priorities.

The self-styled Freedom Fighters were gathered on the northern border with Angola, a bare forty-miles away from this, the state's second city. The mildly Marxist ideals of the rebels were nothing more than a flimsy and convenient charade. The majority of the rebels were exiled Tidau tribesmen who had fled Dhaman when Azuma Ruaba, a Kasma, and the current and twice past President had returned to power in 89.

However, Mixed political ideals or not, the rebels had their AK47's and their grenade launchers, compliments of whomever would supply them. There had been plenty of takers. Both in Africa and from donors from further afield. The prize for anyone befriending the new regime in waiting could be the lion's share of the immense oil reserves that lay under the sunburned dirt.

Compared to the rebels, the government troops of Ruaba, all Kasma, who made up two-thirds of the population, had started this year with rusted, turn of the century Mausers and Lee Enfield rifles and almost no ammunition. The traditional weapon of the totally Kasma military was their variation of the venerable machete, the kiva, a weapon that they wielded at any opportunity and with ferocious effectiveness, as was the African way.

When it became obvious to Ruaba that the Freedom Fighters were in fact a seriously armed threat, the dictator had called on the largess of all and sundry to supply him with modern weaponry. His bait had been vague promises about mining and oil drilling rights.

Many nations, like oil-hungry sharks struck at the bait. Now, every available aircraft that flew into Dhaman was packed with bright, shiny, new military hardware. Not only the hardware of course. The Diamond Dogs, the mercenaries were there as well and by the score. They were advising Ruaba, struggling to turn his raggle-taggle army into anything other than the gang of thieves and tribal thugs that they were. The rebels on the other hand were well trained, they were disciplined and they were ready to fight. The mercenaries who had been working with them for almost two years had done their work well.

Part of Mackey despised the mercenaries as opportunists trading in human misery. The rest of him acknowledged they and he were alike. They both turned up to participate in the rituals of war and revolution, each from their own perspective. If he called the mercenaries vultures, then he had to call himself a jackal.

The rock hard fists of a merc had driven that lesson home one night in a bar in Namibia, following a drunken diatribe Mackey had delivered at a group of mercenaries. The journalist still bore the scars on his chin and his nose now bent to the left, as the result of a short right hook. From that one-sided brawl to the present day, Mackey had resisted the temptation to call mercenaries ‘Dogs,’ at least to their faces. Sober, he had to concede that in Africa of all places, the mercs and the people like himself were simply fixtures, and misery was the only reason for their being.

For the last two years Sean Mackey had worked exclusively for WorldView. It was an arrangement that suited him well. The money was excellent and the perks even better. What made WorldView different from the other journals whose payroll he had been on over the years, was the fact that its editor, Daryl East, never put a deadline to his star reporter. Mackey filed when he was ready. It was an arrangement that suited the journalist admirably. If it didn't suit East, he had never given Mackey a hint that it did. He just waited patiently for a Mackey scoop. All the photo-journalist and wordsmith had to do to honour his contract was risk his life in every Godforsaken corner of the globe and capture it all on word and film.

This didn't bother the Kiwi at all. He enjoyed it because he was an adrenaline junkie. Mackey also acknowledged to himself that he was in all probability hiding a death wish deep in his psyche. The problem with the ‘now’ was that he was still alive and as yet the adrenaline hadn't started flowing. Sean Mackey was terminally bored.

The Northern Commander of Ruaba's forces, the unlikely named Charles Truffort, like so many in the country, owed more than a little of his heritage to the French influence of years past. Truffort was a lanky beanpole of a man with a pronounced aquiline nose and an angular humourless face carved of ebony. Mackey had found him as haughty as a waiter in a Paris bistro. Under fear of deportation or worse, Truffort had forbidden Mackey to leave the town to visit what was euphemistically called the front line. The journalist had stayed put and waited for Truffort to change his mind - the change was a long time coming.

As he trudged on slowly down the broken concrete slab that constituted the footpath, the journalist couldn't help reflecting that Dhaman was so absolutely, boringly par for the course as far as his Africa was concerned.

The huge mineral resources that had initially attracted the French in the 1800s were still mostly intact, despite the concerted efforts of the former colonial masters to wrench everything they could from the flinty ground. The inhospitable desert, disease, lack of mechanical expertise, tribal conflicts, plague and everything else about this remote African land conspired to defeat their best efforts.

The French pulled out of Dhaman in 1978 when faced with a disorganised but exceptionally violent bid for self-rule, as Ruaba the self-proclaimed revolutionary savior came to power over what was to become one of the most valuable pieces of real estate on the planet.

But it wasn't the plentiful supply of rich minerals that had promoted Dhaman up the ladder of global desirability. It was those immense oil reserves that lay beneath the shimmering heat haze and iron hard dirt.

The French had located several small oil deposits but it was exploration by an American oil company during the reign of one of Ruaba's rivals that revealed the mother lode. This was an oil deposit that in potential held more barrels of crude than any other existing field on earth.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, yet another revolution rolled in and Ruaba was back in power and no attempt by any oil consortium had been made to tap the huge field of black gold. The Russians of course suggested it, but even they backed off. Ruaba was too much of a loose cannon even for even them to deal with.

Only a few years ago Mackey would have been content to leave the Dhaman experiment in the box marked, 'The Dark Continent Emerging', but he had done too many tours of Eastern European over those years. His vision of tribalism had taken on a whole terrible new meaning. In Bosnia the white man had kicked the lid off the coffin of history and let the ghosts and demons escape. He had been left with the uneasy feeling that maybe the tribes of Africa and Europe weren't so different after all. This was a vision that scared him more than any other.

The deserted street sent the journalist's mind momentarily in another direction, as he contemplated the conspicuous absence of the other members of the media horde. Virtually to a man a woman, the media horde had stayed south in the capital, Karada. There they knew they would find comparative civilisation, with plenty of bars and what passed for nightlife in this part of the world. The ex-pat Kiwi was one of the serious few who had headed to the borderlands and the impending action. That was his style.

Mackey had covered conflicts from the front line in more skirmishes and full-on wars than he cared to remember. He had built a career by being there when the shit came down. The career had brought fame, money, two divorces and dozens of awards. At any given time there were a half-dozen offers on the table as newspapers and magazines bid for his services.

The journalist's could see the distant sculpture of Azuma Ruaba waiting for him further along the street and his thoughts followed the prompt as he contemplated the architect of the disaster to come. The wizened little Monkey Man as he was referred to by anyone out of the dictator's hearing had, since the French withdrawal in 1978, been in and out of power three times. Somehow Ruaba had survived being overthrown by his generals, and ministers, all in fact fellow tribesmen. By some miracle or series of them, none of those who had ousted him had killed the former dictator. A fact that virtually everyone conceded truly was a miracle.

Each time he had stepped out of the wilderness to don the mantle of dictator, Ruaba had calmly recommenced stacking the bulk of his country's liquid assets into his unmarked Swiss and Cayman Island accounts. While simultaneously, he proceeded to stack his enemies into unmarked graves in the bush or simply tossed them to the scavengers.

Ruaba owned and controlled every functioning business and resource in the country. It had the highest rate of inflation in the world outside of Zimbabwe. The ruler of that ruined nation was a bosom buddy of Ruaba's. To buy a loaf of bread in either country required a wheelbarrow full of all but worthless script.

So for Mackey, when he arrived in Dhaman, he found everything was exactly as he expected. Different African nation. Same scenario. It was simply the well-used African revolutionary-dictatorial template in use once again. Unless this revolution succeeded, the people would stay poor and afraid with Ruaba's rabble standing over them wielding their bloody kivas.

Despite being a quarter of Amin's stature, Azuma Ruaba had all of that madman's ruthlessness and more besides. Because of this and of Dhaman's reputation for rapid and decidedly unconstitutional changes in political status the world had hung back and waited. The continual re-emergence of Ruaba himself as dictator – meant there had, until this moment in time, been no rush of foreign companies eager to invest in Dhaman enterprise. In fact there was at present zero representation from anyone but for the Russians. The end of the USSR and the birth of the new-improved Russian model, meant had even they had finally all but given up on Dhaman. Their former embassy had become a whorehouse.

It was plain that the continuing oil crises' were the reason that the world had suddenly focussed on Dhaman. Now after years in the wilderness, both figuratively and literally it had taken to the centre stage. Half of the world's oil and mineral companies were sitting on the fence licking their lips in anticipation of a return to a stable government - one they could deal with. A government without Azuma Ruaba!

One of the many theories that played itself over and over in Mackey's heat-stunted brain was that an oil company or a consortium of mineral and oil giants was possibly funding the revolution. In fact, this theory was the major sub-plot he was here to prove or disprove. He hadn't voiced his opinion aloud to anyone. He wouldn't until the story was complete. He had no intention of becoming more of a target than he already was.

Dust tickled the journalist's nostrils. He stopped in the vague shade of a doorway and groped out a handkerchief and blew his nose. His eye settled back on the larger than life bronze statue of Ruaba on its concrete pedestal in the middle of the street fifty-metres further on. He snorted. This version of the wizened little Monkey Man looked for all the world like Denzel Washington. The sculptor had taken more than a few liberties. He had silk-pursed the sow's ear big time.

Fucking African politics, Mackey muttered as he buried his handkerchief back in his pocket and pushed off again on his marathon walk. To the journalist African politics revolved around two things, money and tribalism, and ultimately, tribalism boiled to the top. Thousands of years of history just couldn't be pushed aside. Not even for personal wealth. Until Bosnia he always thought that tribalism had been the major difference between the white man and the black African. Tribalism he had figured was the black man's burden. On the other hand he would argue that the white man's demon was the fact he was always for sale to the highest bidder.

To Mackey, The Diamond Dogs illustrated the point to perfection. Mercenaries on both sides had been brothers in arms in a dozen conflicts, now they were enemies in the coming one. When it was over and they had their coin, they would do it again and again until the fatal bullet or grenade ended it for them. Mackey forced the thought of endings away. Like the mercs, there was an end for him somewhere along the way and a copper coin for each eye.

He was passing a bar. He glanced into the black hole that beckoned a welcome to him. As bars went, it wasn't much of one, but it was shade. There was no door as such, just an iron grill that pulled across the front when, and if the place ever closed. The grill was open now but there were no customers. Even the whores were away somewhere cooler. The barman was lying stretched out on the counter. Mackey lost a half step. He almost stopped for a cold drink to see him on his way. If he couldn't drink the beer, at least he might be able to force down the rotgut that passed as whisky. It was the fear of lead poisoning, of going mad and blind that made him step out again.

Most of the home made spirits were brewed in old car radiators. A situation that manifest itself in the dozens of ravaged, blinded wrecks who died slowly in the terrible madness caused by lead poisoning. The local solution and that in many of the other areas he had been in, was to toss the derelicts onto a truck and take them into the countryside for the hyenas to finish off. As to the whores? Mackey never used them. Of all the bargirls in the world, the ones he was least likely to take up with were those anywhere in Africa and in particular those right here. For the most part, they were cheerful, some beautiful, many with bodies made in heaven and wicked eyes and smiles from hell. But, that was just on the outside.

Those that didn't have AIDS had something else or something's else. Every venereal disease and associated sexual malaise known to man and many that weren't, were reputedly to be found in just about any bar in the country. TB was also another reality. The dark-age disease had re-emerged on the continent big time just a few years previously.

The major problem regarding AIDs, was that those whores who weren't ignorant and were prepared to use condoms would run into a client who wasn't prepared to have his enjoyment stifled by a rubber. It was a no-win situation. If the girl insisted, she got beaten and raped and of course no money. Most just sighed and accepted what would be.

Apart from a couple of instances of half-hearted self-abuse in the shower purely to promote his on-going sanity, Mackey had been without recreational sex for three weeks. That was a long time for him. His last encounter had been with a young English tourist he'd met in his transit hotel in Singapore. That particular bout had been energetically adequate, but now he was feeling a growing itch. His only worry was finding someone to scratch it for him.

The journalist's destination was a bar called Emiles’. The Frenchman of the same name had originally been part of the occupational force. Born in Algeria, Emile Shafonte was the illegitimate son of a French officer and an ebony maiden from that country's south. The offspring of the union was a huge man of indeterminable age. Emile stood six foot five and weighed in at something just short of a Sherman tank. There was fat, lots of it under a glistening dark brown skin that was covered with tattoos distorted by the weight he had put on since he had demoted himself. The Frenchman's eyes were shrewd and the huge mouth laughed often.

Emile, Mackey knew, wasn't a man to meddle with. The first night he had been in the bar, he saw the former legionnaire deal to a pair of drunken soldiers who had stumbled down off the street. Both men had been armed with the inevitable kiva. They had threatened one of the bargirls. Emile had intervened and the result had been that neither of the rag-tag privates would be capable of anything much for some time to come. The lesson had etched itself into Mackey's brain Don't get out of control in Emiles!

Curious as always, Mackey had asked Emile his story. The Frenchman had obliged over the very large rum Mackey paid for.

Emile Shafonte had arrived in Dhaman when things had started going sour for the tricolour. He had been Foreign Legion, his only alternative after a serious scrape with the gendarmerie back in France. When the legion and the rest of his countrymen had hurriedly departed in the face of the revolution Emile simply stayed behind. His fellow legionnaires hadn't wasted any time looking for him. It was expedient to report him MIA. A situation that suited the big man just fine thank you.

So, Emile had remained in Dhaman and witnessed the various dictators and governments come and go. Somehow he survived it all. Part of that was due to his coloration. He fitted in. Then there was his reputation as a fearsome fighter. So, he had, in the main been left to run his little bar in peace and to father dozens of children to his five wives and assorted mistresses. Monogamy was not a feature of Dhaman life or Emile Shafonte's for that matter.

Mackey's eyes went to a sound coming from an advancing dust cloud. Apart from himself and the few scattered representatives of the local fauna, the Citroen was the only thing moving in the wide dusty street.

The ancient vehicle was one of a fleet that the French had abandoned when they bugged out. The incoming dictator naturally enough had immediately appropriated the cars. When Ruaba had finished with them they were sold-off for a vastly inflated profit or turned into taxis. Ruaba owned the only taxi company in the country.

This particular thirty-something year old relic rode lopsided on its suspension. Part of the reason for its attitude could be attributed to the wrecked springs. The other factor in the equation was the thirty-stone driver who piloted the struggling antique. The driver was the same man who had brought Mackey in from the airport.

The Citroen had gaping rust holes everywhere. Canvas showed through the rubber of the tires. The exhaust worked as effectively as the funnel of a destroyer laying down a smoke screen.

As the car passed Mackey there was a flash of huge white teeth and the lazy wave that showed off the pink palm of the driver's left hand. The hand and the arm attached to it hung out the glass-less side window and almost touched the ground. Mackey returned the wave.

The vehicle was almost past him when the journalist noted the passenger sitting in the deeply shaded back seat. The image was fleeting. It combined long red-blond hair and an impression of deep blue eyes. Eyes that were staring straight at him!