is never finished with. Remember Nigeria – it happened there, and that’s almost next door. It exists in Kenya. It exists throughout Africa. And we know that it’s hard to disentangle fact from fiction, but we can’t afford to ignore either. John, who are the top dogs in Nyala, the majority tribe?’
‘The Kinguru.’
‘The President and most of the Cabinet will be Kinguru, then? The Civil Service? Leading merchants and businessmen?’ He nodded at each category. ‘The Army?’
Here he shook his head. ‘Surprisingly enough, apparently not. The Kinguru don’t seem to make good fighters. The Wabi people run the military, but they have some sort of tribal affiliation with the Kinguru anyway. You’ll need a sociologist’s report if you want to go into details.’
‘If the Kinguru aren’t fighters they may damn well have to learn,’ I said, ‘Like the Ibo in Nigeria and the Kikuyu in Kenya.’
Someone said, ‘You’re presupposing conflict, Neil.’
Geddes backed me. ‘It’s not unwise. And we do have some comments in the dossier, Neil – your homework.’ He tapped the bulky file on the table and adroitly lightened the atmosphere. ‘I think we can leave the political issues for the moment. How do we stand on progress to date, Bob?’
‘We’re exactly on schedule,’ said Milner with satisfaction. He would have been pained to be behind schedule, but almost equally pained to have been ahead of it. That would show that his computers weren’t giving an absolutely optimum arrangement, which would be unthinkable. But then he leaned forward and the pleased look vanished. ‘We might be running into a small problem, though.’
There were no small problems in jobs like this. They were all big ones, no matter how small they started.
Milner said, ‘Construction is well advanced and we’re about ready to take up the big loads. The analysis calls for the first big haul to be one of the boilers but the government is insisting that it be a transformer. That means that the boiler fitters are going to be sitting around on their butts doing nothing while a transformer just lies around because the electrical engineers aren’t yet ready to install it.’ He sounded aggrieved and I could well understand why. This was big money being messed around.
‘Why would they want to do that?’ I asked.
‘It’s some sort of public relations exercise they’re laying on. A transformer is the biggest thing we’re going to carry, and they want to make a thing of it before the populace gets used to seeing the big flat-bed trundling around their country.’
Geddes smiled. ‘They’re paying for it. I think we can let them have that much.’
‘It’ll cost us money,’ warned Milner.
‘The project is costing them a hundred and fifty million pounds,’ said Geddes. ‘I’m sure this schedule change can be absorbed: and if it’s all they want changed I’ll be very pleased. I’m sure you can reprogramme to compensate.’ His voice was as smooth as cream, and it had the desired effect on Milner, who looked a lot happier. He had made his point, and I was sure that he had some slack tucked away in his programme to take care of such emergencies.
The meeting carried on well into the morning. The finance boys came in with stuff about progress payments in relationship to cash flow, and there was a discussion about tendering for the electrical network which was to spread after the completion of the power plant. At last Geddes called a halt, leaned over towards me and said quietly, ‘Lunch with me, Neil.’
It wasn’t an invitation; it was an order. ‘Be glad to,’ I said. There was more to come, obviously.
On the way out I caught up with Milner. ‘There’s a point that wasn’t brought up. Why unship cargo at Port Luard? Why not at Lasulu? That’s at the junction of the spur road leading upcountry.’
He shook his head. ‘Port Luard is the only deep water anchorage with proper quays. At Lasulu cargo is unshipped in to some pretty antique lighters. Would you like to transship a three hundred ton transformer into a lighter in a heavy swell?’
‘Not me,’ I said, and that was that.
I expected to lunch with Geddes in the directors’ dining room but instead he took me out to a restaurant. We had a drink at the bar while we chatted lightly about affairs in Africa, the state of the money market, the upcoming by-elections. It was only after we were at table and into our meal that he came back to the main topic.
‘We want you to go out there, Neil.’
This was very unsurprising, except that so far there didn’t seem to be a reason. I said, ‘Right now I should be out at Leopard Rock south of Mombasa, chatting up the girls. I suppose the sun’s just as hot on the west coast. Don’t know about the birds though.’
Geddes said, not altogether inconsequentially, ‘You should be married.’
‘I have been.’
We got on with the meal. I had nothing to say and let him make the running. ‘So you don’t mind solving the problem,’ he said eventually.
‘What problem? Milner’s got things running better than a Swiss watch.’
‘I don’t know what problem,’ Geddes said simply. ‘But I know there is one, and I want you to find it.’ He held up a hand to stop me interrupting. ‘It’s not as easy as it sounds, and things are, as you guessed, far from serene in Nyala under the surface. Sir Tom has had a whisper down the line from some of the old hands out there.’
Geddes was referring to our Chairman, Owner and Managing Director, a trinity called Sir Thomas Buckler. Feet firmly on the earth, head in Olympus, and with ears as big as a jack rabbit’s for any hint or form of peril to his beloved company. It was always wise to take notice of advice from that quarter, and my interest sharpened at once. So far there had been nothing to tempt me. Now there was the merest breath of warning that all might not be well, and that was the stuff I thrived on. As we ate and chatted on I felt a lot less cheesed off at having lost my Kenya vacation.
‘It may be nothing. But you have a nose for trouble, Neil, and I’m depending on you to sniff it out,’ Geddes said as we rose from the table. ‘By the way, do you know what the old colonial name for Port Luard used to be?’
‘Can’t say that I do.’
He smiled gently. ‘The Frying Pan.’
I left for Nyala five days later, the intervening time being spent in getting a run down on the country. I read the relevant sections of Keesing’s Archives but the company’s own files, prepared by our Confidential Information Unit, proved more valuable, mainly because our boys weren’t as deterred by thoughts of libel as the compilers of Keesing.
It seemed to be a fairly standard African story. Nyala was a British colony until the British divested themselves of their Empire, and the first President under the new constitution was Maro Ofanwe. He had one of the usual qualifications for becoming the leader of an ex-British colony; he had served time in a British jail. Colonial jails were the forcing beds of national leaders, the Eton and Harrow of the dark continent.
Ofanwe
