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the heavy equipment they’d agreed to leave behind, locked in the closet they’d turned into a strongroom. If the schoolhouse suffered a direct hit, the stuff would probably be destroyed but much of it was too bulky to take with them. The beam of the torch pooled on the survey maps pinned to what had once been the blackboard. The maps were large scale, big blow-ups of the locations where they’d been working, a painstakingly accurate record of exactly what they’d achieved. They held all the vital information, which paths were safe, which fields were still mined, which areas had yet to be surveyed. Without them, they’d have to start all over again.
    McFaul held the torch steady, telling Bennie they’d take the maps with them. Bennie was crouched in the darkness, rolling up his sleeping-bag.
    ‘You want me to bring them?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    McFaul left the room. Out in the corridor, he peered through the window at the new rubber dinghy, lashed to its trailer. They’d only had it a month, airlifted in from the coast, and already it had proved invaluable on the river. Should he try and wrestle it indoors? Protect it somehow? He heard the crump of another mortar and ducked beneaththe window, waiting for the blast. With luck, the dinghy would survive the bombardment. Tomorrow he’d try and sort something out.
    Back in the classroom, McFaul found Bennie unpinning the maps. He had a torch in his mouth and muttered something incomprehensible when McFaul told him they’d be moving out in five minutes. Next to the classroom, through another door, was the storeroom where they kept the generator and the big freezer they’d inherited from an outgoing UN crew. The freezer was powered from the gennie and they normally ran it in bursts, three or four times a day. That was plenty enough to keep the stuff inside decently chilled but now was different. They might be gone for days, quite long enough to lose their precious supply of meat and fish and chilled Sagres beer. McFaul bent to the generator, checking the level of the fuel. On a full tank, it would run for forty-eight hours. Satisfied, he primed the tiny carburettor and pulled the starter cord. The gennie fired first time, settling into a steady thump, and McFaul locked the storeroom door behind him, adjusting the ‘DANGER – MINES’ sign they used as an extra deterrent against looters.
    Bennie was in the corridor now, peering out into the darkness. He’d found a rubber band for the maps and had wedged them under one arm, tightly rolled. McFaul paused by the open door. The place already reeked of exhaust fumes.
    ‘OK?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    Bennie slipped out of the building, following McFaul. The agreed route took them down Muengo’s pot-holed main street, hugging the shadows, moving from house to house. Many of these buildings were already derelict, carrying the scars of earlier fighting: shattered roofs, fire-blackened walls, whole rooms laid open by weeks of bombardment. Whatwood they contained – floorboards, doors, the odd cupboard – had long gone, stripped out by the refugees, desperate for cooking fuel. By the big, ghost-like Roman Catholic cathedral, McFaul paused, signalling Bennie to take cover. The UNITA mortars were busy again, five or six of them, firing at what McFaul judged to be maximum range. There seemed to be no pattern to the fall of shell, just the random dispatch of high explosive, the usual bid to bludgeon the city into submission. Already, he knew, the hospital would be under siege, relatives arriving with their dying and their wounded, long queues in the candle-lit darkness, kids sitting cross-legged, their faces upturned, uncomprehending. The surgeons at the hospital were Norwegian. There were just two of them but they only stayed a month at a time and they seemed to have limitless reserves of energy. With the recent drugs resupply, and a great deal of luck, they might just cope.
    The mortars fell silent at last and McFaul and Bennie crossed the dusty