Wings of the Morning (2 page)

‘Dear Olty,

I do not know when you will receive this, neither do I know who will give it to you, but I leave it in safe hands and in confidence that it will reach you one day. I could not acknowledge you in
life, but here is my legacy in death. Here is a record of my time and my efforts. There is untold history and there are unrecorded facts. Above all, Olty, I leave you my memories. I am certain that
you will become the man who will make the most of them.’

With this letter came a small suitcase, full of photographs, newspaper cuttings, memorabilia of all sorts. And there was a journal. I have one volume in front of me now. It’s not a diary
and it’s hardly a memoire. It’s not ‘it’. There are eleven hardback books and the lined pages of all of them are filled with Heaven’s neat handwriting. There’s
no concession to modernity. He might as well have drawn a pirate’s map with a quill pen. There’s no index, no summary and only a few of the photos are dated. But the journal is
compelling and I was hooked from the moment I started to browse.

It’s recorded history that my grandfather started a revolution. He raised an army and planned an invasion. He came in from the ocean with three ships and three thousand people in the small
hours of the new century. He aimed to take over an established sovereign state and to replace it with a new country, a new order and a new society. Human engineering on a grand scale.

It’s people who shape events on this planet and the personalities which drive the people are formed from background, relationships, opportunity and sheer damn fortune. It’s the
‘humanity of history’ as my grandfather calls it somewhere in this tome of his. Mostly, however, he keeps his emotional side in check. He writes in facts and figures and dates. He uses
terse language, abbreviating his inner feelings.

I could have tidied this up and published his journal as a posthumous autobiography. But I wanted more. I wanted flesh on the bones of his sparse account and so I have spent the past year in
research and conversations with survivors of the era.

This is an extraordinary story of momentous times. It starts with a relative of my family friend Guy Labarre – his Uncle Michel.

MICHEL LABARRE — 1963

On the evening of the fourth day, the young man standing on tip toes accepted that his death was imminent and found that he was quite looking forward to it.

When he was snatched from the hotel, his first reaction had been disbelief larded with a sheer, raging terror. He liked to talk as tough as any red-blooded young man when a bit taken in drink
and surrounded by his mates, but that would have been in Paris or in his home city of Limoges. Out here he was in strange territory, without the familiar points of reference and he had felt both
excitement and isolation from the moment he had stepped off his direct flight from France into the arrivals hall at Niamey International Airport in the Republic of Niger.

Michel Labarre was twenty-three years old with a reasonable degree in chemical engineering from the University of Sorbonne. He came from a quality family, possessed of money, status and
standing. He was an enthusiastic sportsman, a good looking, fun-loving young man, with a lively and likeable personality.

The oyster of Michel’s world was opening up as he arrived that day from Paris. He was joining, as a management trainee, a substantial French conglomerate in civil engineering called
Georges DuLame & Cie which had global interests but especially in the former French colonies of West Africa. Newly recruited university graduates could expect to spend at least half of their
first three years on short term postings overseas, and for most of them, this was a significant attraction of the job.

Michel was therefore one of a kind and he relished the chance, following his inaugural stint at the DuLame training centre outside Nanterre, to cut his teeth on some proper work in Africa. For
the first couple of months, the company’s well established practice was to apply a regime of strict acclimatisation. The young men, and there were precious few women of any age, were required
to knuckle down to big company discipline, to work diligently and to get their bodies used to the extreme climate with its 40 degree heat. They must tolerate the sometimes dodgy food and accept the
basic accommodation. The incentives were that expatriate life offered decent money, infrequent but long leaves, and satisfaction for the Beau Geste spirit if that turned you on.

Michel loved it all. He liked the work, liked the heat, liked his fellow workers be they French or Nigerien, especially liked the feeling of accomplishment that he was doing something different,
and doing it well. The French management at the DuLame compound took to him also, congratulating themselves that they had an asset in Michel Labarre, all the more impressive as he came from a
pretty toffee-nosed background. And all his colleagues appreciated his ability to keep up with the pace of beer when they had a night out in the bars and dives of Niamey, especially as he was
something of a musician and could play a reasonable guitar even when several sheets to the wind.

That single talent led to his undoing. A group of them finished up one night at La Chatte, a lively club in the red light ghetto, notorious for its innovative band which was delighted to welcome
Michel into an impromptu jamming session at which his playing ability shone out as brightly as his face whilst the drinks poured down and the heat of pressing bodies mounted. It was during a beer
break that he talked rather loosely to the double bass player who encouraged Michel in his account of learning to play the guitar at his exclusive school in France and applauded him for working
hard in the Sahara despite obviously coming from a pretty wealthy background. Michel was well past picking up any danger signals from this trend of conversation and his new friend took care that
their little talk did not include the other members of Labarre’s group from the company.

Half an hour after that, the girl arrived. She might have been from Mali or perhaps from Mauritania, but she was actually a Senegalese and strikingly beautiful — tall, very slim, angel
face and totally poised. The entire package was white hot sexy, and Michel was overboard when she came straight over to talk to him. She gurgled with the claim that word of his excellence had
reached her from her friends in the band and she just had to see him perform. She delivered that line with such clear innuendo that Michel felt as if he had been that kicked in the groin.

A little more music was played and a good deal more beer lowered before the senior DuLame man announced that their group was leaving. That was an absolute instruction. No one got left behind,
certainly not Michel Labarre with his hormones pumping, but the girl, who called herself Salacia, managed to whisper that she could not say adieu and just must meet him two nights hence in the main
square of the city at 6:30 pm, and that he must come alone.

The following day was a Sunday and Michel spent it in a fever of indecision mixed with lust. Company instructions were explicit. No employee to leave the compound without a pass and never alone
in the evening. But Michel knew, like everybody else, that the wire perimeter was holed like a Swiss cheese, that many of the inhabitants went out from time to time and that the African workers in
the camp brought their own women in through the selfsame holes. So practicality was not an issue. But then there was risk assessment, and he made a steadily less objective job of this as his animal
instincts drove his brain south.

Monday was therefore passed with the electricity of planning and anticipation, with the enticing body of Salacia ever dancing before his eyes. He finished his work, showered, grabbed some cash
and slipped out of the compound. He picked up a flea bitten cab immediately which was surely a good omen and was in the square by 6:20 pm feeling relaxed and sure of himself. She would be pleased
to see him and he paused by the fountain to light a cigarette with luxuriant pleasure.

Salacia was indeed delighted to see him. She had a good feeling about this one, but you still needed the proof that the fish was on the line. She was sitting at the back of an open fronted cafe
across the square, hidden by the awning overhead and pleased to see her mark exhibiting the body language of nerves drowned in expectation. Now she whispered a final instruction to her companion, a
huge man in a flat white cap which obscured a little of his beard, unusually luxuriant for an African, and then she rose to slip away, lithe in her sea green dress with the skirt just a bit too
short. Minutes later, she could be seen approaching Michel from the other side of the square having circled around. The big man shook his head. She was almost too sharp and sexy this one, but she
knew her business and made more money more easily than any of his former partners. Plus she liked a bit of rough and brawny occasionally, so no way was he going to complain about taking orders from
Salacia.

Meanwhile, Michel was in heaven. This gorgeous girl was treating him like manna from heaven, a little decorous kiss on his cheek, smoothing his hair, compliments on his appearance and her finger
nails skittering down his arm in a gesture of welcome and possession. Supremely sexy.

She slipped her arm through his and led him away out of the square into the main street and towards the misnamed Hotel du Parc, which was nonetheless the best establishment in town. As they
walked, she explained that she worked for the Foreign Service of Senegal, she had flown in a week ago on a visit mixing business with pleasure and that she always stayed in this hotel. Michel was
entranced and questioned none of this. They went into the foyer, in which he felt instinctively that he should be discreet if not furtive, but Salacia continued their conversation uninterrupted as
she waited for her key, saying that their plan should be to go and listen to some more music, but first perhaps, a refreshing drink and a little relax. She looked demurely at him with a twinkle in
her eye which would have debauched a monk.

Upstairs in her spacious room, she poured him a cold beer, lit a cigarette for them both, kicked off her shoes and slipped gracefully onto the double bed, patting the sheets alongside her in
invitation. Michel put down his glass and moved towards her, his throat, despite the lager, already dry with expectation.

‘Cheri’, she invited him calmly, ‘I think you should first remove your clothes ... just like me’.

She smiled encouragement as she let slip the dress from around her neck and lay back in the middle of the bed, hair spread out, breasts high, nipples thrust in excitement, legs ajar, the whole
marvellously naked. She held out her arms to him and Michel stumbled awkwardly out of his trousers, almost tripping as he simultaneously ripped off his shirt. In his fevered state, he didn’t
notice the lift whirring to a halt on their floor, neither did he hear the door to the bedroom being gently opened, nor sense the large man with the white cap enter with a silence which belied his
bulk. But at that moment, Michel might not have noticed a rampaging bull — he was one himself. With a groan of delight, he got onto the bed and leaned forward to rest his belly against
Salacia’s knees which she had drawn up into her chest. Michel supported himself on his arms, his hands palm down on either side of his lover. Classic missionary stuff, he had time to think to
himself as he pushed forward quite gently and was thrilled to feel her knees begin to part before his thrust. Nirvana, here we come, he thought.

But in an instant, his every instinct turned from slaking lust to fighting panic as he seemed to levitate in a manner which defied all his senses. Michel was suddenly powerless, overcome by
extraordinary strength. One large human hand gripped his throat so he could gurgle but not breathe. Another slipped between his legs and gathered all his rampant genitalia in one massive grip which
would have made him scream if he could have used his larynx. He felt himself being swung effortlessly into the air, the same two hands in the same two places, but now he was being held upside down
and then lowered into a heavy hessian sack with fumes which drove the breath from his nose as he started to choke. But neither hand released its hold until Salacia, who had snatched the bag from
under the bed and opened the neck to receive its human burden, pulled tight a drawstring which laced the bottom of the sack around Michels’s down-stretched neck so that the giant could pull
out his hand and permit the cord and the fumes to stifle any cries which the captive might make. Without delay, the big man stood on the bed, lifted up Michel by balls and body and thumped him head
down on the wooden floor. The lights went out for Michel.

The giant and Salacia looked at each other. There was a prevailing silence, with only the normal sounds of street and public building to reach them. White Cap had a sheen of light sweat on his
upper arms but his breathing was steady and normal. Almost effortless work for him. But Salacia was snorting and throwing her head about, cascades of glittering black hair whirling around her
shoulders and her limbs trembling as if in trauma. White Cap recognised the symptoms, not of fear or crisis but of battle lust and he proposed the remedy with one uplifted eyebrow. She nodded at
him. Michel lay like a donkey’s dumped burden. White Cap scooped up Salacia with one arm and released his jeans with the other. He chucked her on the bed, face down, bottom up and pulled her
roughly back onto him. She cursed at him to go harder. He grunted and went at it. He was over in a minute, she was dressed in two more. They left the room without a backward glance, the hessian bag
and its unseen occupant slung casually over the giant’s shoulder. He passed through the lobby with a direct but unhurried gait whilst she lingered briefly at reception to pass over an
envelope which made good a prior agreement. They joined up again at the front door and walked into the car park to retrieve a battered Nissan pickup. Salacia drove. White Cap tossed the sack with
casual abandon into the load bed. He got in beside her and they drove off without a word.