Decisive by David Hickson (early reader books txt) 📕

and gazing into my eyes before we left. She said nothing, but I found her intense gaze a little unnerving. The comments she had made had unsettled me. They had broken my focus, and that was a dangerous thing to have happen this close to the conclusion of the operation.

Alassane placed his dustpan of glass onto a kitchen counter.

“Let’s go,” he said.

The grandmother still held my hand in both of hers. Then she nodded, released my hand, and I followed Alassane out of the room.

Seven

The military headquarters in Ouagadougou had been the focus of a terrorist attack a few months earlier. The dusty orange walls were still blackened in areas where some grenades had not made it over the wall into the compound. There were three steel gates we needed to pass through. They were opened one at a time, then closed behind us before the next one opened. While we were waiting between the first pair of gates, two soldiers peered in at us with interest, but their focus was mostly on Bibata. She was more interesting than the foreigner sitting beside her, or the shadowy figure in the back.

I presented my credentials to the soldier who clicked his fingers and held out an open palm for them. Passport and a letter on the official letterhead of the president’s office. My invitation from General Kanazoe and the rubber stamp of approval.

He carried the letter and passport over to a small security hut, where another soldier paged through the passport with careful deliberation, then read the letter three times, looking up to squint at the silver Mercedes between each reading. He lifted an old-fashioned telephone handset to his face and spoke into it, his eyes on our car. I wondered aloud whether the missing back window had caused any alarm. But Bibata assured me I worried unnecessarily; many of the cars in Ouagadougou were missing windows and even doors.

Eventually the next gate opened for us. We drove through to another holding area, where two soldiers pointed their automatic weapons at us, and we stared straight ahead as the gate squeaked closed.

The third gate opened, and we advanced to a parking space. Alassane spoke from the back seat.

“We will wait for you here,” he said.

“It would be better if you waited outside the compound,” I replied.

“How will you get out?”

“Let me worry about that.”

I climbed out of the car and closed the door behind me. Bibata looked as if she wanted to say something, but I didn’t give her the time to say it. I gave them both a terse nod and walked to the entrance.

The general’s office was not a grand one. It occurred to me as I entered it that I had never, despite many years in the military, actually seen the inside of a general’s office. I have always imagined that their senior rank is a motivation for the interior designers to stretch the budget a little: dark wood panelling, spotlights over etchings of historical battles, and so forth. But General Kanazoe did not have that type of office. A threadbare carpet on a concrete floor, a desk made of cheap wood from which the veneer was peeling. A large photograph of the president of Burkina Faso hung behind his desk, but no spotlight over it, and the lower half of the picture had faded, presumably from the intense tropical sunlight that came in through the barred windows.

The general was seated behind his desk, a soldier dressed in camouflage fatigues had opened the door. The soldier stood to attention as I shook the general’s hand across his desk.

“Mr Johnson,” said the general.

“A pleasure to finally meet you, General Kanazoe,” I said.

The general did not smile. Three stripes gouged into the skin on the right side of his face – a relic of tribal markings according to my briefing papers – puckered slightly in greeting. He indicated I should take a seat in a wooden chair that looked as if it came from the same batch as those in the kitchen of Bibata’s grandmother. I sat down, and folded one leg over the other, so that I did not look like a man who might be tempted to spring out of his chair, leap across the desk and throttle the leader of the Burkinabé military.

The general pursed his lips and studied me through narrowed eyes. After a minute of silence, he turned to the soldier at the door and dismissed him with a curt order.

Another beat of silence when we were alone, and then the general opened a drawer in his desk. He fumbled a little with something heavy and metallic, and then produced an old MAC-50, a handgun favoured by the French military at the end of the twentieth century. He pointed it at me.

“You have come to kill me?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I have.”

The general rested the grip of the MAC-50 on the desk, but kept the barrel pointed at my chest.

“Your people said I would probably not even see you.”

“That was the plan,” I said. “But there have been complications.”

“What complications? You haven’t changed your mind? Decided to go ahead with it?”

“I haven’t, General. I am a soldier following orders. I don’t have a mind that can be changed.”

The general puckered his mouth again, which I realised was his way of smiling.

“I was wondering whether you would make it,” he said. “They told me you had run into some trouble. An accident of some kind?”

“Someone accidentally discharged an automatic weapon in the outskirts of Ouagadougou,” I said.

“Ah, and those were your complications? Someone firing at you? Who were they? Soldiers?”

“They didn’t look like soldiers to me.”

“Certainly not my soldiers,” said the general. “That would have been a foolish thing for me to do, after all the planning.”

He lowered the barrel of the gun and replaced it in the drawer with a clatter.

“It is not loaded,” he admitted. “Like so many things the French have done. They have left us with only the