Pharmageddon Chapter 17

Cape of Good Hope, April, year three (cont)

I was back on the mountain overlooking Ladysmith, watching as the Mi-8 and the Hind gunships returned with the survivors of the Battle of Ladysmith. Once again the noise was overwhelming until their engines wound down. I ran over the coarse grass to the big transporter, my mini-cam rolling. Inside the wounded lay, but against the far wall of the chopper I saw the blue turban and calm eyes of captain Singh. He held my eyes and gave a half-smile before turning back to the groaning soldier at his feet.

Sergeant Chowdary touched my arm. ‘It is time, Dr North. They are asking for you.’ His touch became more insistent, and then I realized it wasn’t Chowdary, and I wasn’t on the mountain. I was on a camp bed in the ‘guest tent’ at the Three Sisters Treatment Camp, and a female soldier was patting my arm.

‘I’m... sorry. What?’

‘The general has arrived, ma’am. Breakfast will be served in 20 minutes, then you will be leaving.’

‘Twenty minutes? Oh crap! Okay, I’m up.’

Thirty minutes later I was in the officer’s mess, where we’d eaten the night before. I walked over to the table loaded with brass, and the men all rose to their feet. Major general Ao looked more like a martial arts instructor than a soldier. He was about my height but lean and hard, with slightly oriental features and hands designed to break things. He offered one of his deadly weapons and I shook it. It was as yielding as the handle of a tennis racket, but his grip was gentle. His accent was typically north-Indian but his eyes were gray-blue and his very short hair was brown, graying around the temples.

‘Dr North. Pleased to meet you.’

He rattled off the names of three officers at the table that I hadn’t met, and one that I had – brigadier Bhardwaj. He also pointed to six officers in overalls eating at the next table and introduced them collectively as the helicopter pilots. They waved back.

As soon as we were seated I was given a plate of spicy Indian food, without being asked what I wanted. They all had empty plates and full coffee-cups in front of them. While Bhardwaj pretended not to mind, Ao checked that I’d signed and understood the confidentiality agreement, and surrendered all means of communication.

‘Good. You come very highly recommended, Dr North. Both for your journalistic skills and your experience in this... affair. I am also told you are a person of great integrity.’

‘I can’t imagine who would have told you that, general.’

He was taken aback by my response, but Bhardwaj smiled. ‘Dr North has a rather... Australian... sense of humor, sir.’

‘Oh, I see.’ He giggled. ‘A spin bowler.’ The other officers echoed his giggle. Arse-wipes.

‘Dr North, you are about to witness history being made. We ask only that you record it faithfully.’ He looked me directly in the eyes, engraving his words in stone. ‘Will you forgive me if I continue to speak to my men in Hindi? We have much to get through. Please, continue with your breakfast.’

Twenty minutes later the general, his two minions and I were on board a Sea King helicopter as the engine spooled up. The Hind gunships were already airborne, circling and ready to kill anything that threatened the general. The Sea King was smaller than the Mi-8 but more comfortable. General’s transport. I learned later it was the same as the American president’s ride, Marine One. With the door closed it was quiet enough to hold a conversation without headphones, just. However most of the discussion was in Hindi, and I wondered whether my inability to speak it was one of the reasons I was there.

One of the officers turned out to be the guy I’d spoken to when I was clarifying the invitation on this ‘tour’, colonel Sewraj, and it appeared that one of his tasks was to look after me. He told me we were on our way to join the reinforcements, and that it would be a long flight. When I asked where we were meeting them, he smiled and said he didn’t want to spoil the surprise.

Ao spent the first hour of the flight talking quietly into a headset, but he must have run out of things to say, or maybe lost his radio link to whoever he was talking to, because he took his headset off and began to make conversation with me.

It turned out he was born in the north east Indian state of Nagaland, on the Burmese border. He followed his father and grandfather into the army. His grandfather was killed during the siege of Kohima in 1944 – often called the Stalingrad of the East – which led to Ao being burdened with the Christian names of Randle Harman, the surnames of two soldiers awarded the Victoria Cross after that battle.

Randle Harman himself joined the army because there ‘wasn’t much else to do in Nagaland’. He gave the credit for his meteoric rise to a series of lucky breaks, but I guessed he’d made his own luck. He’d fought against the Pakistanis in the Battle of Tiger Hill in Kashmir in 1999, and served with UN peacekeeping missions in Sierra Leone and Burundi. He was now based at Army HQ in New Delhi where his job involved ‘doing anything that needs doing outside our borders.’

I was interested to see the glow of hero-worship in the other men’s eyes. Their guy was clearly one of the sharpest blades in India’s cutlery drawer. ‘You look like you spend some time in the dojo, general.’

He smiled, but didn’t respond. The other guys were closely following our conversation and I guessed they didn’t often have the opportunity to grill their commanding officer, or know what a ‘dojo’ was. He wasn’t about to tell them.

Having told me his first names, and how he got them, general Ao asked about mine and it seemed churlish not to tell him about my father, Bertie North, who nurtured a life-long belief that he was a great painter despite all evidence to the contrary. Briana, my mother, told me he was funny, charming and built like a brick outhouse, but couldn’t paint to save his life. In other words it was a fling.

Inspired by the exploits of Frances Chichester, who was knighted for his amazing feats of seamanship in Gipsy Moth IV, Bertie’s dream was to build a yacht and sail around the world, living off the proceeds of his pastels of waves crashing on rocks and craggy seamen mending nets. Unfortunately for him one of his own semen found a safe harbor in my mother’s egg and his dream floundered, while mum abandoned any dreams of her own to support three dependents – me, my father and then my brother – on a legal secretary’s salary.

After sending me down the slipway, mum was anxious to get back to work and entrusted Bertie with the registration of my birth. Fortified with one too many ambers he decided there were already too many Mary Janes in the world, and wrote ‘Gipsy Moth North’ on the dotted line. Mum only found out when she had to produce my birth certificate to register me for school, by which time I was old enough and opinionated enough to decide I’d much rather be Gipsy Moth than Mary Jane.

Mum died from a stroke shortly after I graduated from medical school, proud but exhausted, and Bertie promptly drank himself to death rather than confront his inability to cook, clean or support Mag and me.

‘Mag?’

‘Yeah, it’s short for Magnetic. Actually his birth certificate says John William – mum took care of it herself – but Mag decided that if I could choose my name, so could he, so he called himself Magnetic Due North. Mum thought it was a fad, and he’d drop it after a while, but he didn’t.’

The other two guys in the chopper decided Mag’s name was the funniest thing they’d ever heard, and I watched them trying to swallow their hysteria in a paroxysm of coughing and holding of breath. Ao was of sterner stuff.

‘Where is... Magnetic... now?’

‘Good question, general. I think he inherited Bertie’s genes, and he’s using the legal degree that my mother paid for to find the best surfing wave in the world. I get an occasional email asking for money.’

‘And whose genes did you collect?’

‘Well, definitely my father’s aversion to taking responsibility. Being a doctor seemed too... dangerous to me. One slip and someone dies. In my final year of medicine I dated a newspaper editor, and he said he would give me a job until I decided what I wanted to do with my life. From there is was just... a series of lucky breaks, I suppose. Just like you.’

He smiled at me. We understood each other. ‘And your mother’s genes?’

‘Well, I look like her. A bit. And she also loved the finer things in life, even if she could never afford them. Sometimes I feel as if I’m having fun for both of us.’

‘But she was also a warrior, wasn’t she?’

I gave him a taste of his own inscrutability. 

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After a bit there was a call from the pilot and Ao put his headset back on and started talking to someone. Then, without warning, the helicopter banked to one side. I looked out of my window and saw nothing but blue sky, while the opposite porthole showed only a small square of ocean. Then the chopper banked the other way and... my brain refused to accept what my eyes were telling it. The great span of brilliant blue ocean below was peppered with ships, seemingly as far as the eye could see!

I grabbed for my mini-cam and pointed it out the window. I counted 24 vessels laid out in a huge rectangle, smaller ships around the sides, bigger ones in the middle. The smaller ones looked like warships – pale gray with stubby guns, lots of antennae and boxy appendages which I assumed were missile housings. In the centre of the rectangle the boats got bigger, with a couple of bigger warships, some freighters and small tankers. Right in the middle were five enormous passenger ships and an aircraft carrier.

Colonel Sewraj leaned over so he wouldn’t disturb Ao’s discussion. ‘She’s the Viraat. It means “giant”. She was designed at the end of World War 2 and commissioned in the 1950s as HMS Hermes. We bought her from the British in 1985 after the Falklands War and refurbished her. Twice. She’s already past retirement age and we have another carrier which we bought from Russia, the Vikramaditya, and a third we built for ourselves, the Vikrant. But the Viraat is perfect as a floating air-base for this particular operation.’

I had been trying to regain my breath. ‘Holy mother... that’s quite a sight! But I thought aircraft carriers were... bigger.’

I heard Ao giggle and saw that he’d removed his headset. ‘Oh, she’s big enough Dr North. Well over 200 meters in length, and carrying a dozen Sea Harriers and the same number of helicopters. But next to those ocean liners... well, they’re enormous – more than double her tonnage. We chartered them to carry two divisions – that’s 30,000 men under arms – and a lot of support staff. The freighters are carrying equipment and supplies of course. And the destroyers and frigates are here to protect us all.

‘So... I suppose this is a fairly typical... reinforcement?’ 

This time Ao caught my ‘Australian humor’ and smiled. ‘It might be more accurate to call it a liberation. Liberating the division of Indian troop who are confined to the treatment camps. And of course the patients they are protecting.’

We’d been flying in a giant arc around the fleet and now I could just make out the coast – a thin line on the horizon. I pressed the zoom button on my mini-cam and watched the line grow fatter and acquire a white frilly skirt from ocean breakers. Although the picture was hazy I could make out green coastal bush broken by a speckle of small buildings. As I panned to the right and left I saw clusters of larger buildings.

‘Where are we?’

There was a pause as Sewraj waited to see if the general wanted to respond, before he spoke himself. ‘We’re about 20 miles north-east of Durban. Directly opposite the city’s international airport.’

‘Ah! When are you going to take control of the airport?’

I swung the mini-cam around towards the men in the chopper, and caught the two officers exchanging a look, before Ao answered. ‘We already have.’

‘Oooh-kay! Any resistance?’

‘No. The airport was deserted, as we expected. There is a small chance that militants may try to eject us from the airport, so we’re in the process of... making sure they can’t.’

I was going to ask what would happen next when the movement of the chopper changed again. I swung the mini-cam back to the window to find we were now low over the aircraft carrier, with a man in a yellow shirt and helmet signaling with ping-pong bats, just like in Top Gun. I could see rows of Harriers and a few evil looking choppers, similar to the Hinds I saw in action at the battle of Ladysmith. A moment more and we hit the deck with a heavy thump. The army obviously doesn’t reward pilots for passenger comfort, just survival.

Sewraj asked me to stay put while the general disembarked, so I squatted at the open door as Ao was welcomed aboard by a line of sailors and a clutch of naval officers. Indians look sensational in white – not a paunch to be seen anywhere. When Ao and the penguins had disappeared the other officer on our flight – who hadn’t uttered a word – along with the colonel and I were escorted into the part of the aircraft carrier that sticks up above the flight deck, which Sewraj told me is called an ‘island’.

Inside I dug into my war-movie lexicon and told a female sailor who appeared to be hanging around that I desperately needed the ‘head’. She turned to Sewraj in confusion. He presumably told her to take me to the crapper because that’s what she did. Just in time. Then I was escorted down some stairs to the officers’ mess for lunch with the guys – more curry and Hindi. Again I was introduced to a lot of brass, who solemnly shook my hand if they were near, or waved at me if they weren’t. This time Sewraj and I weren’t at the top table, which contained two navy captains and a rear admiral along with Ao and another man in civvies. And a lot of serious discussion.

Sewraj told me there’d be a briefing for the journalists after lunch.

‘Journalists? Plural?’

‘Yes. You’re the only international reporter, but we have two from the military and two from the Indian press.’ I wondered how many TWO stringers there were, scattered around the fleet. Although I doubted they’d have cellular reception or access to satellite phones.

Ao conducted the briefing, flanked by the rear admiral and the civilian, who was introduced as a representative of the parliamentary defense committee. My ‘colleagues’ from the Indian press were a subservient lot – the civilians kowtowing just as much as the military hacks – and it was left to me to ask most of the questions.

‘General, how many airports will you secure?’

‘Six, Dr North. Three civilian and three military. And three harbors.’

‘Harbors?’

‘Yes – Durban, Richards Bay and Port Elizabeth, so we can land troops, equipment and supplies.’ He explained they would secure a part of the harbor entrances and quays so they could safely dock the liners and freighters. Then they would secure the surrounding cities, and push inland to do the same for some of the bigger cities. In the process the army would re-open a dozen major hospitals, set up a hundred or so distribution points for food aid, and escort the assessors while they developed a recovery plan.

I was beginning to understand why they’d brought 30,000 troops along with them. In fact I was beginning to wonder... ‘General, I imagine by the time you’ve spread yourselves across the country, the army won’t be able to run the hospitals and food distribution. Are you bringing in more medics and volunteers – I mean in addition to those already working in the treatment camps?’

‘Very astute, Dr North. Army personnel will simply kick-start the process. We have already recruited civilian teams to take over from them as soon as it is safe to do so. It will be a kind of rolling operation...’

‘So give us an idea of how many people will be arriving over time.’

He gave me a small smile and nodded at a soldier standing at the side of the room. The man handed out folders while the general turned the sheet on a flip-chart, revealing a table of numbers just like the first page in the folder.

‘Here are our deployments. In round numbers we have one division – 15,000 troops – and the same number of medical staff in the treatment camps right now. And we have a second division in reserve, divided between the bases in Namibia, Botswana, Mozambique and the Cape. Taking into account army support personnel, administrators and volunteers we have roughly 50,000 Indian nationals in South Africa.’

I wanted to ask how many family members there were, but not in front of my ‘colleagues’.

‘In this expeditionary force we have two more divisions – that’s another 30,000 professional soldiers and about half that number of support personnel, not counting the navy sailors and airmen. Within five days we will have a lakh – 100,000 personnel – on the ground, including several mechanized and armored battalions.’

He paused and looked at me, but I didn’t think he was waiting for questions. I got it – I was here to make sure the world heard these numbers. But not yet. He continued.

‘As soon as we have secured our points of entry we will begin flying in 15,000 medical personnel, about 12,000 multi-skilled volunteers, and about 5,000 assessors and their staff. This phase will be completed in ten weeks...’

He was cut off by the roar of jet engines, and waited until he could speak without raising his voice. I got in first.

‘And phase three, general? What about the time-line’ I could see some numbers on the table in front of me, but no dates.

‘We expect phase three will start between one and three years from today.’ He read the question on the other hacks’ faces. ‘Phase three is when we implement the recommendations of the assessment group. The recovery phase. But the numbers you’re seeing are the rotation of staff, when their tours of duty end. They are all on a one-year rotation.’

‘So until phase three your numbers will remain at 130,000 Indian nationals?’

‘Yes, roughly that number on active service.’

‘What happens at the end of their rotation? Do they go home?’

He seemed surprised by the question. ‘Well... yes, I imagine most will want to return to their families. It’s up to them.’

‘So they can stay if they want?’

‘They are free to volunteer for a second tour, Dr North.’

It wasn’t what I asked, but I knew the answer anyway.

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Weng was too experienced to show emotion, but he left no doubt about his government’s feelings.

‘Madam secretary general, the Indian action is in direct violation of their mandate. It must be stopped.’

‘Excellency, how do you respond to ambassador Dutta’s argument that there is no other way to close the treatment camps without risking the lives of their patients?’

‘With respect, madam, it is a specious argument. Naturally we concur with the need to restore social order in South Africa, but the correct procedure would be to develop a multi-lateral response, supported by a security council mandate.’

‘And the Indians’ concerns that this would take too long?’

‘The People’s Republic of China would be happy to relieve the Indian forces, so they can repatriate their people while the international process continues...’

‘I’m sorry, excellency, but I think their concern is for their patients, not their own people. The best estimates are that if we do not provide food aid and medical support to virtually the entire population immediately, we are looking at a further two million deaths this winter.’

‘Madam, is that not the function of the World Food Program, and the World Health Organization?’

‘Indeed. But they are not equipped to launch an operation on that scale, that soon, or without military protection. Apparently the Indians are.’

‘Then why the need for the secrecy? Why not ask for an extension of their mandate from the security council?’

‘Excellency, is Dutta wrong when he says your veto was a foregone conclusion? And that in the event of a veto their hands would be tied?’

Weng was too experienced to fall into this trap. ‘Madam secretary general, we propose to table a resolution in the security council condemning the Indian intervention, and calling on them to submit their forces to independent command.’

‘To what end, excellency?’

‘With a view to phasing out their troops, and replacing them with men from other countries.’

‘Again, may I ask why?’

‘Because it is inappropriate for a single nation to impose themselves on another nation, even if the subject is in... disarray, and even if India’s motives are ostensibly humanitarian.’

‘You have the right to table such a motion, of course, but you understand that in so doing you will be giving India a platform to defend their actions on the global stage?’

‘Of course.’

‘It’s just that... they are widely perceived as heroes in this matter, excellency. Their work has already saved hundreds of thousands of lives, and it promises to save many more. They have asked for nothing in return, merely the opportunity to restore a country which is home to more than a million Indian descendants, and to honor the memory of the father of their own nation, who found political enlightenment in that country.’

Weng permitted himself a small smile. ‘Not to mention the refuge they have provided to the Dalai Llama, ever since the Chinese army stole his country?’

‘Excellency, it is not for me to put words into ambassador Dutta’s mouth. However, for better or worse, we live in an age when public opinion weighs at least as much as military might in shaping the future. It does seem the Indians have managed to combine the two with... some skill.’

‘Madam secretary general, do not expect the People’s Republic of China to concede defeat like a second-rate chess-player.’

‘But excellency, I do not. I was rather hoping you would attempt instead to seize the moral high-ground in this matter.’

‘In what way?’

‘Why, by playing to your strength, of course. You have the world’s biggest economy. Instead of focusing on a withdrawal of Indian military, why not offer to support the rebuilding of South Africa’s economy? We all know the balance sheet is a much better indicator of control than a head-count.’

Weng remained dead-pan, and said nothing.

‘It is hardly my place to suggest your strategy in the security council, excellency, but I would imagine a resolution by the People’s Republic of China to establish and lead a global reconstruction fund for South Africa would not only attract considerable support from the council members, but would do for China’s public image what India’s military initiative has done for theirs. Not to mention the number of heart attacks it would cause in Delhi when you put your queen into play...’

Weng’s face softened into a broad smile.

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