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necessary.’
    ‘Something like that. So, you got the gear I asked for?’
    Morrison grinned. ‘Mr Heckler and Mr Koch are in the building, and so are all their friends, stripped, checked, reassembled and in perfect working order.’
    ‘I’ll be the judge of that.’
    ‘Quite right. Never trust another bugger to check your weapon. So, they told me you were a Royal Marine, hey?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘Regular bootie or SBS?’
    ‘That’s not something I talk about.’
    Morrison gave a slightly narrower, slyer smile. ‘Ja, you were SBS, I can tell. Did you see action, may I ask? Contacts with the enemy?’
    ‘Yeah, I’ve had contacts.’
    ‘Good. Because let me tell you, I don’t want to fuck about with any more plum-in-mouth so-called experts in fancy suits who don’t know how to fight. “Conflict resolution” they call it, “a negotiated settlement”. Bullshit, man! They’re just sitting on their fat backsides in the bar of the Zambezi Hotel making bloody telephone calls to Mabeki, the treacherous, ungrateful black bastard, while that poor little chibba Zalika Stratten is all alone, scared out of her fucking mind, wondering why no one’s come to get her.’
    ‘She hasn’t been moved in the past twenty-four hours?’
    ‘Nah, still in Chitongo. It’s a village up by the Cahora Bassa dam, just another back-country shithole. Now me, I’d go and get her myself. Fuck, I’ve killed enough of them in my time. Wasted more than a hundred gooks, way more. Rebels, their women, children … hell, you see something moving in the elephant grass, you don’t stop to ask questions, you just empty your magazine before the other fucker bends you over and gives you one right up the nought. But sometimes, hey, sometimes you should not have fired …’
    Morrison’s voice trailed away. For a moment Carver could have sworn he was welling up. But then Morrison coughed, wiped a hand across his flushed, scarlet face, whispered, ‘Christ,’ to himself and went on, ‘So, anyway, I offered to do it, but the boss said, “No, Flattie. We must have a man who is more clinical than you. In, out, no mess, that is the plan.”’
    Carver wondered what kind of kid Morrison had been before someone stuck some pips on his shoulder, put a gun in his hand and sent him off into the bush to destroy anything he found, himself included. The man was barely keeping it together. But Carver wasn’t about to judge. The ghosts of his own dead haunted him too, visiting him in nightmares that left him sweat-soaked, wide-eyed and fighting to hold back the screams. Anyone who’d truly been to war was scarred by the experience. If they told you any different they were lying.
    ‘How come you work for Klerk?’ he asked. ‘You don’t seem the corporate type.’
    Morrison broke into a chuckle that ended in a wheezing cough. ‘You mean, why does a man like him put up with a crazy old bastard like me, hey? Well, I will tell you. I used to be his company commander. Klerk was just a corporal back then. After the war, well, let’s just say that our lives took very different courses. But we were comrades. We fought side by side. You don’t forget a thing like that.’
    They drove down a broad avenue, the tarmac hardly visible beneath a thick coat of dust whose red-ochre colour seemed tinted by all the bloodshed it had absorbed. Tall palms poked up between the trees on either side.
    ‘We could not put you up at the Zambezi because we don’t want those other useless buggers knowing what’s really going on,’ said Morrison, pulling up in front of a dilapidated attempt at an American-style motel. ‘This place will have to do. Don’t worry, though, you won’t be stopping here long.’
    Morrison walked into a lobby whose mint-green paint was mottled with black stains of mould. He had a brisk, argumentative shout at the man behind the reception desk then led Carver to his room.
    ‘Sling your gear in there, then we will cut into town,’ he said, standing by