Thunderbolt by Wilbur Smith (reading strategies book .txt) 📕

‘Nothing. That’s the point.’

‘Nothing?’

‘They’re just empty cages buried in the ground. Smallish cages. I think they were meant for animals. You can’t stand up in them, or lie straight. You just have to sit there on your own until General Sir lets you out. It’s dark in the pits and they get hot. He had them dug all the way out here so that anybody yelling doesn’t disturb him back in camp.’

The little kid had shot at us accidentally and hurt nobody. To be buried in an underground cage for doing something stupid hardly seemed fair, particularly when the guy doing the burying was responsible for giving the boy in question an assault rifle in the first place.

‘How long does he put people in there for?’ asked Amelia. She gets claustrophobia. A punishment like that would be bad for anyone, but from the look on her face it was obviously her idea of hell.

‘It depends on what you’ve done,’ Mo replied. ‘A day or two, normally.’

Xander shuddered. ‘Is it his way of making an example of people who, say, get caught running away?’ he asked.

‘Yeah,’ said Mo, looking at me. ‘One of them.’

36.

Later that afternoon there was a commotion in camp. Two white Land Rovers rolled up in a dust cloud and crunched to a stop next to General Sir’s shack. He materialised at once to greet whoever had come to pay us a visit, and in response to his barked order a group of kids immediately assembled beyond the vehicles. When I say assembled, I mean it; the boys, twelve of them in total, stood four abreast in three loose ranks.

Most of the boys, I noticed, were smiling. They were stealing glances at each other, exchanging smirks and even giggling. General Sir, with his oiled head and amazingly dirt-free boots glistening in the evening sun, was smiling too. Three adults who’d jumped down from the 4x4s stood next to the General to inspect this impromptu parade.

Two were young black guys dressed in khaki fatigues. The nearest had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. The other, beyond him, was quite fat. His shirt buttons were so taut it looked ready to pop. I realised I hadn’t seen a fat person in ages.

Odd as that was, it was the third guy who shocked me most. He was white and middle-aged with a firm jaw and an upright military bearing. Though I’d only ever seen his image on a screen before, I recognised him instantly. This was the man whose face I’d seen on General Sir’s laptop, and also Mum’s.

The sight of this man made my skin prickle. He hadn’t looked my way yet but it was as if an electric current was already running through me. This guy had cropped up on Mum’s laptop first, then General Sir’s, and now he was here in person. Who the hell was he and what did he want?

It soon became obvious. He and the other adults began looking over the rag-tag rank before them. Among the troop of boys, the jokey atmosphere had faded, replaced with shifting uncertainty. They realised they were being judged, and in some cases rejected.

We watched as the fat guy and his friend with the cigarette walked up and down in front of the kids looking them over, poking them, manhandling them generally. The fat guy was the worst. He yanked one little kid out of line by the wrist, lifted up the boy’s skinny arm and laughed in his face. Then he pushed him back into place so hard the kid tripped over and landed on his bum in the dirt. Cue more laughter.

General Sir let this happen without objecting. In fact, he smiled at the men’s hilarity. All the while he was talking to the white guy, flicking his little baton in the direction of the kids for sale, talking up their value, or so it seemed.

The white man appeared unmoved. I couldn’t see his face in full, but in profile it looked stony. He had a stillness about him. No matter what General Sir said to him, he wasn’t about to react.

The men in uniform were now separating the boys into two groups, those they wanted and those – such as the skinny little kid the fat one had pushed over – that hadn’t made the cut. Those in the latter group looked crestfallen.

‘The irony is too much,’ Amelia whispered. ‘From the look of it these men are selecting fighters for actual war, in which those boys could easily be killed. Staying here, though boring, is the comparatively safe option. Yet that lot there, the rejects, look miserable, while those off to face the real danger seem delighted.’

It was true; as the selection drew to an end the five boys who’d been successful were grinning at one another again. That wiry teenager there, in mismatched, broken shoes, now had a ticket out of here and was thumping his fist into his palm with a ‘let’s do this!’ look on his face.

Amelia was right about the irony of the situation, but unlike her I sympathised with the whole success-over-failure thing: it doesn’t really matter what the competition is, if I’ve entered into it, I want to win. The flip side of that is that losing hurts.

Mo put it more accurately. ‘It’s the way soldiers are trained the world over,’ he murmured to Amelia. ‘The most important step is making them want to fight. A soldier, once he’s had his training, should feel it’s his duty to use it in battle.’

General Sir, still joking with the white guy, had drifted around to his other side, so that we were now standing in his line of sight. As he was motioning the man towards his quarters, he spotted us and grinned broadly. He beckoned us over with his arms held wide, shooting sidelong glances at the white guy,