I hoped Davy hadn't broken down. The Yammy wasn't exactly in showroom condition. We'd stolen it from outside a bar on the outskirts of the capital. With luck the poor fucker it belonged to didn't depend on it for his livelihood.

Way in the distance, a few clouds dotted the sky. I wondered whether there was any chance of them teaming up and delivering a downpour. Anything to clear the heat haze bouncing off the scrubland in front of me.

Somewhere down in the dead ground in front of us there was an old plantation, abandoned when the Belgian colonials finally did a runner in the sixties, and inside the gated walls a cavalcade of Mercs: it had been heading west to rendezvous somewhere along Zaire's thirty-six kilometres of South Atlantic coastline with a fast boat from the American Third Fleet. They'd got this far, but couldn't go any further. Rebels – nobody knew how many – were blocking the only road out.

The int we'd been given was sketchy. All we knew was that the limos had stuff in the boot that nobody was telling us much about, and three officials from the British High Commission were stranded alongside them. Their job had been to liaise with the Zaireans and supervise the handover to the Americans.

'Politically sensitive material,' was all Captain Standish, the team's rupert, was telling us. 'Important to the West's relationship with Mobutu.'

The joke going round the team was that the most sensitive material of all was the stuff covering Annabel's tits; she was one of the three from the High Commission and Standish had been shagging her from the day we'd arrived. He was stupid enough to think we didn't know.

2

We'd been in Zaire a month, training Mobutu's military to fire their weapons and use explosives without killing themselves – or us. We'd put all that on hold for a day or two when trouble brewed in the capital. Our students were needed to quell opposition on the streets.