Bad Intentions Read online

  He heard a shout through the smoke, then it went quiet.

  Yasin called out for his father, who was already awake and coming up to the roof in his nightclothes. Yasin told him they had guns, and as soon as he saw the smoke, his father ran down downstairs, picked up his old rifle from the cupboard in his bedroom, loaded it and ran out past the Pepsi crates and even out beyond the water urns so that he was in the street facing the villa. Others were stopping like passers-by at a traffic accident. Yasin heard his mother from the bedroom calling for his father to come back.

  Everything happened in seconds, but for Yasin each movement was slow and vivid. As the smoke thinned the attackers threw a dead body over the balcony.

  The two vehicles beyond the alley started up. They stopped between Yasin's house and the villa, next to the blown-down gate, and now Yasin could see the machine guns of the men as they came out of the villa. On some, their turbans or emas had come off, and Yasin was sure that they had the light hair of Europeans, although it was dark and there was still smoke around.

  One of them was led along by two men. He was definitely a European, and not a soldier, with glasses and a beard, his face white and smudged. He wore blue jeans, a white shirt, and there was the blank look of shock on his face.

  They jumped into the back. Two vehicles moved off. The engine of the third vehicle started across the street. The headlights went on. Yasin looked across to the villa, where he could now see the broken windows and the bodies of more guards on the ground near the gate. Smoke rose up from small burnt patches of grass.

  Yasin saw his father step out in the path of the vehicles, defending the home and the town, shaking with anger, raising the rifle to fire.

  This time there was a shout in Arabic, but bad Arabic, the student Arabic of a European who might have come to his father's shop. Before the shout had finished, his father was falling. Yasin thought he heard the crack of a weapon, but as the years passed he wasn't sure if he even knew then what the sound would have been like. The rifle fell from his father's hands and he buckled, not like in the movies when people are thrown backwards with force, but like a man who had suddenly lost all strength and energy.

  Yasin did recognise the sound of the gun going off when it hit the ground because it was an old weapon which his great-grandfather had used in the time of the British. He heard the scream of his mother as she stumbled into the open, her arms flailing, and this time Yasin saw the man with the gun, in the passenger seat of the vehicle across the road which was turning to head north, its headlamps lighting up his father, who was writhing from side to side, his legs twitching in the dry dirt.

  The man fired and his mother stopped just like that, standing perfectly still for a moment until she fell over and he saw blotches of blood seeping through her clothes.

  Yasin burst through the door from the roof and ran downstairs. Samira was coming from their bedroom, just ten feet from the Pepsi crates and about to run outside, straight after her mother.

  He threw himself at her, bringing them both down onto the concrete floor. He held her head tight in his arms and lay on top of her to protect her. He breathed heavily and felt her breathing as well.

  He heard the vehicles drive off north, and felt the sweep of the headlights as they turned past the shop. He heard people shouting and through the legs of the tables and underneath the crates of drinks, he saw people gathering around his parents, saying that his mother was dead, but that his father was still alive.

  Tim set off for the archaeological sites at dawn. Khartoum was not a city which woke early. Nor was it crowded like other African and Asian city nightmares. It was dirty and broken down and nothing had been invested in its roads and infrastructure since the British left in 1956. It was like the Toyota four-wheel drive with its air-conditioning unit ripped out and windows so caked with grit that they had jammed, the right back window permanently open.

  Nervous young soldiers were on duty outside the villa which had been attacked during the night. Fear showed in their eyes and in the way their hands slid erratically up and down their weapons and around the trigger guard. Tim's guide, Ahmed, showed documents at the road block outside of Yasin's house, with the permit to visit the archaeological sites and the document to allow Tim to carry a camera.

  Ahmed told them Tim was an archaeological student from England, and he pressed a packet of cigarettes into the soldiers' hands.

  'Road block,' said Tim, stating the obvious and wishing at least to acknowledge an abnormality in the situation.

  'Routine,' said Ahmed, lighting a cigarette.

  'The Meroitic era lasted for about 700 years from 350 BC to AD 350. This was one of the very important eras in the history of the Sudan,' Ahmed recited as they walked away from the four-wheel drive towards the Roman-style kiosk which marked the entrance to the settlement of Naqa.

  The ruins rose starkly from the drab yellowness of the desert. Ahmed hunched himself up and cupped his hand to light a cigarette. 'You should do your PhD on this site,' he said. 'It is more interesting than anything you will find in Egypt.'

  'It's been written about a lot, 'said Tim, gently touching the sandstone carvings. 'Pliny, Diodorus and Strabo, the Greek geographer, all mention the Kingdom of Meroe.'

  d Herodotus wrote about the Sun Temple at Meroe,' said Ahmed, more enthused now with his subject. 'The lion and Amun temples were built by King Natakamani and

  Queen Amanitore at the beginning of the Christian era. You notice how the faces of these subjects show every culture, Arab, Christian and African.'

  Ahmed dropped his cigarette into the sand. 'What sort of archaeology are you interested in,' he suddenly asked.

  'Oh', said Tim. 'I've been in Canada where all you get is the old flints from the Indian tribes. Nothing like this.' He took a photograph of the kiosk and then asked Ahmed to take one of him with the city of Naga and desert as the backdrop.

  Mills sent a FLASH message to London, copied it SINGER so it went to SIS and to POWDER BOX, because Tim Pack was a British citizen so MIS had to be informed. The message from Khartoum simply told Stephen Walmsley that Tim Pack had been seen in the Hilton Hotel, writing postcards. In Cyprus the hostage, Jack Jensen had been given a clean bill of health and was now flying to Britain, together with the men who had rescued him. There had been no diplomatic response from the Sudanese government, although one was expected. The shooting in al-Kadarou was unfortunate, but given that they did not leave a trail of wrecked vehicles and British casualties, it could be seen as a minor hitch in an otherwise successful mission. Walmsley closed the file and placed it in his out-tray. In a few hours' time, Tim Pack would call in from Frankfurt while changing planes for London.

  Ahmed and the driver squinted against the sun as the four-wheel drive headed north along an unmarked desert track towards Musawwarat el-Sufra, the next stop on the itinerary.

  'This is one of the most intriguing sites,' Ahmed explained, although his concentration seemed to be more on the desert ahead than on his recitation. 'But it remains the focus of much discussion among scholars as to its function.'

  There were numerous tracks, criss-crossing each other.

  Ahmed adjusted his headgear and talked to the driver in Arabic. Tim picked up that Ahmed thought they had taken the wrong track at a fork about five hundred yards behind them. The driver stopped the vehicle and began to reverse, then appeared to get bored and, putting it onto low ratio four-wheel drive, he swung round to cut straight across the sand to the other track.

  In front of them, two men were herding goats towards a settlement with children scampering by their side. Trees rose out of the sand in clumps and desert nomads peered against the sun into a cloudless sky, holding their rags around them as if a sandstorm was about to sweep through the desert.

  The rear wheels of the vehicle began to spin and the driver twisted the steering wheel violently back and forth, revving the engine, trying to get through the sand.

  He opened the door, engine still on, and jumped down
. Tim and Ahmed got out on the other side. The wheels had dug themselves into soft sand. The driver, back in his seat, tried to reverse, but each spin of the wheel carved a deep hole in the sand. Children broke away from the goat herd and came to gawk.

  Ahmed and Tim tried to push the vehicle, while the driver powered the engine, shoulders against the back, heads down, sand spewing in their faces, breaking sweat, dry mouths and the roar of the engine, so close and desperate that neither heard the helicopter until it was low and landing, sand flying up around them like a storm.

  Then the sound of the Wessex helicopter, with black smoke spewing from the huge exhaust just under the fuselage door, became overwhelming. Sand flew every where and the children fled back to the goat herd, curled up and lay face-down in the sand as the aircraft came in to land.

  The noise made any words indecipherable. Armed troops jumped out of the doorway. They grabbed Tim by each arm and dragged him onto the Wessex. It took off in a swirl of sand, cutting visibility to zero, until the helicopter rose above it, its nose twisting to the south, gaining height, and heading back to Khartoum.

  General Ahmed Ali Uttman, director of the Sudanese National Security Council, ordered Tim handcuffed and brought into the air-conditioned and windowless office in the basement of the prison.

  'The President wants you executed this evening,' he began, snapping open a can of Fanta orange juice and pushing it across the table towards his prisoner. Tim took it with both hands and drank thirstily. 'But frankly I want you the hell out of my country alive. My government does not need the international condemnation that your death would bring.'

  'I'm a student archaeologist,' said Pack, putting the can on the table, welcoming the cool dryness of the air-conditioning.

  'It doesn't matter,' said Uttrnan. He spoke in fluent and

  clipped English.

  'Yes it does.'

  Uttrnan shook his head. 'In fact, if you are an archaeologist, I feel sorry for you because you don't have people in Britain who can help you.'

  'I carne here to investigate the possibility of doing a PhD on the decline of the Meroitic . . .'

  'It isn't an issue, Mr Raison,' Uttrnan interrupted. 'I'm not even interested to know what an archaeologist was doing outside the villa in al-Kadarou a few hours before it was targeted for attack by British special forces last night.'

  'My great-grandfather used to be district commissioner there.'

  Uttrnan held up his hand. 'You're not hearing me, Mr

  Raison. I said I don't care. The President is angry. He needs to show his strength by executing you. He has the advantage of being a Third World dictator, so he usually gets what he wants.'

  Uttrnan swept his hand around the room to take in the wider images of the prison they were in. 'Most of your fellow inmates here are neither innocent nor guilty. There is no such thing with dictatorships. They are simply enemies of the regime.'

  If things go wrong, Walmsley had said, try not to involve us. Too much to lose. Tim Pack stared straight at Uttman and rested his hands, cuffed together, on the table.

  'If you work for the special forces or the SIS,' Uttman was saying, 'tell me whom you report to. I will call them and we will try to work something out because we do each other favours. We have a little less than twenty-four hours.'

  'I don't value your chances.'

  Tim's jailer took his clothes, then beat him and left him on the concrete floor of a cell. There was no blanket, no latrine, just heat, mosquitoes and cockroaches scuttling across the floor. The cell was in the basement with light coming in through a window wide enough for three bars. After sunset it was dark and cold. Tim tried to warm himself by moving around, but the food had got to him and he vomited and felt so weak that he lay on the floor shivering.

  He spent the night amid the stench of his own vomit, shit and urine. The whole prison smelt of decay, rotten food and disease. Tim listened to the racking coughs of other inmates. He tried to haul himself up to look out through the bars, breaking his fingernails on the wall, but it was too dark outside. Music played from across the compound where the guards were.

  In the morning they locked him in shackles hanging off the wall. Then they fed him, but he couldn't keep it down. When the jailer pulled him up, his chains clanked on the concrete, disturbing flies in the comer of the cell so they broke out and buzzed around him. Tim stumbled outside, the sun blinding him, and he was made to sit down on a chipped concrete bench. He watched as they threw buckets of water into his cell, the filth swilling around, then they pushed him back inside while it settled and dried.

  Just past midday, when heat seemed to blast straight through the roof of the prison, they unlocked the doors and dragged Tim into the courtyard again. His legs buckled and they had to hold him up. He shut his eyes against the glare of the sun and they sat him in a chair. They gave him water in a tin cup and let him drink it without hitting him.

  Slowly, he got used to the light and saw Uttman standing in front of him, sweat patches under the arms of his tunic. Charlie Mills was with him, tie undone, jacket slung over his shoulders, taking off his dark glasses when Tim was opening his eyes: 'Your fucking animals do this, did they?' said Mills to the general, in English, loud enough for Tim to hear, pointing at the bruises round his eyes.

  Uttman didn't answer. Instead he barked a command in Arabic and Yasin was brought forward, to stand in between Uttman and Mills. Tim's sight wavered and blurred, but he saw Yasin's eyes hard on him.

  'Raison,' shouted Mills. This is an identity parade. Your taxi driver is a petty criminal so we objected to his taking part. If the kid doesn't recognise you, then you're off the hook.'

  Yasin glanced up at Mills, then to Uttman, then to Tim again. He shook his head and spoke in Arabic.

  'He says the guy at al-Kadarou was much taller,' said Mills.

  Uttman turned to leave: 'Get him onto a plane, before the President finds out what I've done,' he said to Mills, putting his hand on Yasin's shoulder, propelling him out of the prison yard, Yasin glancing round, a last look at Tim, knowing who he was, telling Tim that in his expression, but defiant, to the general, to Tim and only Yasin knowing why he had done it.

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