Max Markham is the author of Indigo Bird – An Erotic Novel. For more information on the author and his work, please visit Max Markham’s Section on this website.
I unintentionally risked death by firing squad by ill-advisedly visiting my friend Jake, who was working in Zaire (now the DRC) in some murky import-export business. I was on my way back to the UK from South Africa, where I had been on holiday. To be fair to Jake, he had not been in Zaire for very long and did not know his way about. He cocked up at the start of my visit by breaking down on the way to the airport (probably because he had forgotten to put petrol in his car), so that I had to pay a huge sum for a taxi; find the Jake’s office; learn from the staff there where Jake lived; and then get delivered there. Having done so, Jake of course was not there; he was bumbling round the airport, looking for me. His servants were all out at the market; the house was locked. So I sat sweating on the verandah, while a collection of parrots in cages screeched, whistled and said “fuck off” to me in English and French. I could not even strip off and jump in the swimming pool. That did not work either. It was empty, except for about six inches of green slime on the bottom, in which horrible animals were sliding around. Eventually Jake reappeared.
To compensate for this unsatisfactory start to my visit, Jake organised a picnic by Stanley Pool, with copious amounts of chilled wine, and invited two or three of his beauteous Zairian lady friends to join us. Stanley Pool is where the River Congo is at its widest, like a sea. The other side, Congo Brazzaville, is barely visible. The tropical sunset over the Pool was magnificent. We poured drinks and prepared to relax.
Suddenly: “Ooh wah! ooh wah!! OOOOH WAH!!!” Heavily armed Zairian Para-Commandos in maroon berets and leopard-print combat kit erupted from every bush and arrested us. They fingered their weapons in a rather inexpert way. None of them seemed to know what the safety-catch was for… The Zairian ladies were no help at all; they started screaming and continued to do so for the whole of this incident. It appeared that we had no business to be there: what we had taken for an exceptionally unkempt bit of jungle was actually part of the President’s country estate. It was a capital offence to intrude there. They then lined us up, apparently intending to shoot us, while they chuckled about what they would do to the young women before shooting them, and the money that they might make from the illegal sale of Jake’s car and other valuable items. They were then going to throw our bodies to the crocodiles.
I remember thinking “Goodbye, world. What a stupid way to die!” The thing about Africa is that human life really is held very cheaply there. They were certainly capable of doing it and would probably have thought it amusing. Having been fed to the crocodiles, we would just disappear off every radar screen: the mystery of our disappearance probably never to be cleared up.
As I said, the ladies were no help. Fortunately both Jake and I spoke good French. We eventually persuaded the Para Commandos that it really was not a good idea to shoot important citizens of an important aid donor country. As for the young ladies, we said that they were senior officials from the Ministry, who were giving us a cultural tour. It was unfortunate that they looked more like tarts, but that was just a detail. We then persuaded the Para-Commandos to accept some fistfuls of worthless Zairian currency and some of our wine and let us go: it would be less work for them! We left them celebrating with some bottles of Rose d’Anjou. That was not however the end of the story.
As we drove off, with the women still screaming gently, I seemed suddenly to see the Forbidden City of Beijing, dominated by the Temple of Heaven, rising out of the African jungle, like the ruins of Borobodur or Angkor Wat. I looked again. This was not an hallucination produced by my disordered brain; it was real. Back in the nineteen-sixties, China had tried to woo newly-independent Zaire and had presented the President (Mobutu) with a replica of the Forbidden City as his country palace, or “Versailles”. It had originally been surrounded by attractive Chinese gardens, but these had long been swallowed by the exuberant African vegetation. So we really had been picnicking in Mobutu’s back garden, dump though it might have appeared.
As we sped along the exit route, we suddenly met a convoy of military vehicles coming in the opposite direction. OMG, here we go again, I thought. We screeched to a halt, having little option. The girls, whom I could cheerfully have slaughtered; they were so irritating, started screaming again, with renewed vigour.
The convoy also ground to a halt. The soldiers inside were white: mercenaries, in fact. The President, probably rightly, did not trust his black guards, so he had a separate bodyguard of white mercenaries, to keep an eye on them. They were most unlikely to make common cause against him. The whites were a mixed grab-bag of Belgians, French, ex-Nam Americans, ex-Selous Scouts…you name it. They had overheard the whole incident at the river – the Para-Commandos had unwisely left their radio switched on, with the “send” button down – and had been alarmed by what they had heard. They came tearing to the rescue, fully expecting to find only our remains. Having worked out that we were still alive, they disappeared in the direction from which we had just come.
“Let’s pull over for a moment.” said Jake.
We did, and I took a pull at my hip-flask. There was a distant sound of machine-gun fire. Presently the white mercenaries came back. The commander, who was (I suspect) Rhodesian, seemed about nine feet high and built like the rugby player he almost certainly was. Blond and blue-eyed, Himmler would have signed him up for the Waffen-SS within seconds. He bent double and looked through the window at us, with his hard, sapphire-blue executioner’s eyes.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “you have seen nothing. You have heard nothing. You will suffer no further insult or inconvenience. Now get the hell out of here.”
He and his men had just wiped out the black guards, who had definitely exceeded their mandate – gone too far – this time. Evidently this kind of thing was all in the day’s work to him. The fuckers had met with the fate with which they had so recently threatened us.
“Yes, Sir!” we said, “and please can you tell us where we are allowed to picnic?”
The commander gave us a curious look, as though questioning our sanity. He may have had a point. But he directed us to a place about a mile away. We then got the hell out, as instructed. The commander had directed us to a pleasant stretch of river where we found a friendly Belgian family, who were partying with friends on their houseboat and invited us to join them. We contributed the remainder of our wine and the rest of our Eskimo box’s contents. On balance, it had been quite a good – African – evening.
But this kind of incident was always occurring during my visit to Zaire. One can have just so much excitement. I did not really relax until I was aboard the SABENA flight to Brussels and the plane was in the air.
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The Vertical Land – Book Two of the Richard Finch Series
A Gay Erotic Thriller by Max Markham
1982, London: James Graveney (now a Lieutenant-Colonel) and Richard Finch (now promoted to Captain), the heroes of Book One of the Richard Finch Series, The Indigo Bird, have both had a “good war” in the Falklands, serving respectively with the Fusiliers and the Special Air Service (SAS). So has James’s dynamic wife, Tori, a researcher, who was also caught up in the war. Now they all have to come back to earth with a bump. James is a Lieutenant-Colonel without a command; Richard’s attachment to the SAS has come to an end.
Fate comes to their rescue. James is unexpectedly posted to Nairobi as Military Attaché to the amiable British High Commissioner, Sir Tom Sheridan. A bloody coup in August 1982 ensures that no-one but Richard wants the job of James’s Assistant Military Attaché. James may be married and outwardly respectable; Richard may be professionally ambitious, but it is not long before the two friends are caught up in a series of adventures – amorous, erotic and positively dangerous – in Kenya and Sudan.
Once more Max Markham provides a rollercoaster of shocks and surprises against backdrops ranging from sophisticated London to raffish Nairobi, to mercilessly beautiful and dangerous remote, up-country Africa.
The Vertical Land is available at Amazon.Com incl. the US Kindle version, Amazon.co.uk incl. the UK Kindle version, Barnes & Noble, and any other good bookstore.
