LITMIR.BIZ

       17 NOVEMBER, MBOMOU PROVINCE, CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

      There is no more mournful scene than the aftermath of a fire.

      The morning air was still. Wisps of smoke twisted up into it from the ashes of the torched village. Everything was burned black and white: the stumps of the hut walls, the kapok tree in the centre, the men and women who had resisted the attack the night before.

      Colonel Ninja looked at the burned-out village but was no longer capable of feeling anything for it. He took a slow drag on his cigarette; the sound of a child crying was coming from somewhere nearby; there was a burst of machine-gun fire and it stopped.

      His real name was André Kakodamba but that belonged to a person who was no longer alive. He was eighteen now but André had died aged ten when his home village in Congo had been raided by MLC militia. They took away all the children and brutalised them into soldiers; forced to mutilate and murder; each action a blow falling on his soul until it was numbed and his eyes frozen into blocks of ice.

      He had killed his own soul. Now all he knew was how to force others to do the same. He had learned that fear was the key to life: fear of being hungry, beaten or shot. Gradually he had learned that it was best to be feared — fear gave you first pick of the food, the drink, the drugs and the girls. Fear was now his friend — the more the better.

      He cultivated it in the gang he led: the Muti Boys.

      Muti: La Science Africaine, Black Magic. His child soldiers were captured on raids like this and forced to murder their relatives to make them complicit in the gang. They dreamed that in their sleep they would travel to a demi-world to kill and eat human flesh. Awake they were not much better.

      He shouted in Sango at a boy dawdling under a tree smoking a joint. ‘Hey, hurry up! Get in the ute!’ and pointed him over to the Toyota that was waiting to drive out of the village ahead of the truck with the prisoners.

      The boy was sixteen and dressed in combat trousers, dirty white singlet, round mirror shades and a woman’s curly blonde wig. Muti charms and amulets hung around his neck — Colonel Ninja had told him that the bullets of their enemies would flow off them like water. Ammunition belts for his light machine gun were wrapped around him. He hefted the gun on its sling and stumped over to join his eight friends in the back of the truck. Its windscreen was shattered by three bullet holes and the bonnet had a collection of filthy teddy bears strapped to it as charms.

      The boys sat in the back with their legs sticking out over the side, displaying a collection of bare feet and flip-flops; they bristled with RPGs and AK-47s. Tired after their night of destruction and slaughter, they slumped against each other and passed round a plastic bottle of home brew.

      Colonel Ninja was tall and heavily muscled; he deliberately fought stripped to the waist to show off his physique to the younger boys. As he slung his PKM machine gun over his shoulder the veins stood out on his biceps. He flicked his cigarette away, scratched his head and walked over to the blue truck behind the Toyota.

      It was a battered container lorry specially adapted for its new job with the addition of airholes shot through the sides. They didn’t want anyone suffocating on the way back home. The Boss had said that they needed more labourers; for some reason they kept dying in the mine; coughing up blood and wasting away.

      ‘They all in?’ he asked the boy standing at the open rear doors, pointing his rifle at the prisoners inside; the terrified faces of the men and women stared at him out of the dark.

      The boy nodded.

      ‘Bon, allez!’ Colonel Ninja swung the heavy door shut in their faces and locked it.