Just as my years in France had convinced me the OAS was not going to succeed in toppling Charles de Gaulle, my years in Africa taught me something else.
This was that in the immediate aftermath of the colonial era, there were several independent republics on the continent so small, so chaotic, so badly governed and defended that they could be toppled and taken over by a small group of professional soldiers with the right weaponry and a few dozen loyal levies. Thinking to write my third novel and set it in Africa, I notionally selected three.
Top of the list was Equatorial Guinea, an island republic off the coast of Nigeria. It had once been Spain’s only African colony, linked to an enclave on the mainland called Rio Muni. For a while, under Spain, it had been a stopover for Biafra-bound food flights by the International Red Cross. Independence came in 1968 and it plunged into chaos and terror.
The ruler was Francisco Macías Nguema, a Fang from Rio Muni. He was probably mad and certainly savagely cruel. He transferred his government to the island, then called Fernando Po, now renamed Bioko. He had a small army of Fangs, which terrorized the indigenous Bubi people. His cruelties soon became legendary. But behind the screen of terror, he was immensely weak.
His bodyguard/army was hung with weapons, but he was so paranoid that they had no bullets because he could not trust them. Had he fallen, no one would have come to his aid. His fellow Fangs were hundreds of miles away, the Bubi loathed him, and the very few diplomats and aid workers left despised him.
He lived in the barracks of the former Spanish gendarmerie, converted into his fortress, on top of the national armory and the national treasury, which he had confiscated. If that one building fell, so would the republic.
Researching all this was no problem. There was no need for me to risk going there, so I did not. But I was able to talk to a score of former inhabitants, mainly Spanish, who gleefully explained how he could be toppled by a small attacking force. One remarked, “To knock off a bank is merely crude. To knock off an entire republic has a certain style.”
With control of a republic comes membership to the United Nations, international loans, arrest-free diplomatic passports, and various other Christmas treats. There was even an exiled rival in Madrid who could be installed on the presidential throne as a puppet successor.
There need only be five rules. Strike hard, strike fast, and strike by night. Come unexpected and come by sea. Parenthetically, the eventual book was imitated twice. In 1975, the French mercenary Bob Denard attacked and took over the Comoro Islands, at the top of the Mozambique Channel.
He was acting with the knowledge, assistance, and on behalf of the French government. Amusingly, as his French mercenaries came up the beach in the predawn darkness, they all carried a paperback edition of Les Chiens de Guerre (The Dogs of War in French), so that they could constantly find out what they were supposed to do next. Denard succeeded because he came by sea.
In 1981, South African mercenary Mike Hoare tried the same trick on the Seychelles, but failed because he came by air.
For my own story, I soon had all in place—the men, the ship, the target—but lacked vital knowledge. The weapons. Where in Europe could a clandestine mercenary operation secure its weapons? The cover story would be a plausible private-sector operation involving deep-sea diving for oil exploration and upon invitation.
But the African levies to be picked up en route, one of the subplots, would need submachine carbines and plenty of ammunition. The half dozen mercs would need a heavy machine gun, RPGs (then called bazookas), grenades, 60mm mortar flares, and explosive charges. All that would also require practice and rehearsal time, hence the long, slow cruise on a small merchantman out at sea.
But where to get all this stuff? Back then I could not call on informational help from the authorities. To find out, I would have to penetrate the world of the black market arms dealers and see it from the inside, and I was not prepared to attempt a thriller without such vital areas explained.
My contacts advised me that the heart of the black market arms world was in Hamburg and its kingpin was a certain Otto X, who posed as a respectable businessman—but then they all do. So to Hamburg I went with another advance from Hutchinson, which was very happy with the sales of the first two.
I thought it unwise to use my own name, so I took that of the pilot who flew me out of Biafra and declared I was Frederik van der Merwe, a South African. I even had papers to prove it, prepared by the forger who had taught me about false passports in The Day of the Jackal. Mr. van der Merwe was the youthful assistant of a South African multimillionaire wishing to assist Jonas Savimbi in the Angolan civil war. And thus I managed to get into the inner councils of Herr Otto X.
There I learned about End User Certificates, the documents purporting to come from a reputable sovereign government entitled to purchase defense equipment for its legitimate purposes. For a fee, Otto X could obtain false ones on the right-headed paper and signed by a “purchased” African diplomat assigned to an embassy somewhere in Europe. It was all going swimmingly, until something happened that I had not foreseen.
One morning, Herr Otto X was in his limousine when it stopped at a red light next to a bookshop that was launching the German version of Der Schakal (The Day of the Jackal) that same day. There was a display in the window, but one copy had fallen over and on the rear cover was a picture of the author.
Herr Otto X found himself staring at Meneer van der Merwe and suffered a complete sense-of-humor failure. Fortunately I had an unknown and unsuspected friend at court. I was in my hotel room opposite the main station when the phone rang. There were no introductions. A voice spoke, clearly British, with the clipped tones of education.
“Freddie, get out of Hamburg now. And I mean now. They are coming for you.”
Like my father in 1938, I did a runner. I grabbed my passport and a fistful of money, left the luggage, and went down the stairs, past the receptionist and across the Station Square. I did not bother with the ticket office, but went straight for the trains. One was just beginning to move, its doors closed but with one window wide open.
I went through it on a forward roll and landed on the lap of a plump German businessman, who also lacked the gift of humor. I was still apologizing when the conductor appeared to check tickets. No ticket.
I explained I had just had time to catch the train, which was gathering speed through the suburbs, and asked to pay in cash.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Well, where are you going?” I replied.
“Amsterdam,” he said.
“What a coincidence. A single to Amsterdam, in economy.”
“You are in first,” he said, “you’ll have to move.” So I got my ticket, apologized again, and went to find a harder seat.
My father’s younger brother was living and working for a British company in Scheveningen at the time. He managed to get me a passage on a merchantman out of Flushing for England.
Back in my London flat, I gathered my research papers around me, sat down, and wrote The Dogs of War, presenting the manuscript to Harold Harris just before the deadline.