Juggernaut

We walked back to where Daondo, leaning negligently against the hood of his Mercedes, was holding forth to a small circle of underlings. Sutherland was in the thick of it, together with a short, stocky man with a weathered face. Sutherland introduced him to me.

‘Neil, this is Ben Hammond, my head driver. Ben, Mister Mannix of British Electric. I think Ben’s what you’d call my ranch foreman.’

I grinned. ‘Nice herd of cattle you’ve got there, Ben. I’d like to meet the crew later. What’s the schedule?’

‘I’ve just told Mister Daondo that I think they’re ready to roll any time now. But of course it’s Mister Kemp’s show really.’

‘Thank you, Mister Sutherland. I’ll have a word with Daondo and then we can get going,’ Kemp said.

I marvelled at the way my British companions still managed to cling to surnames and honorifics. I wondered if they’d all be dressing for dinner, out there in the bush wherever the rig stopped for the night. I gave my attention to Daondo to find that he was being converged upon by a band of journalists, video and still cameras busy, notebooks poised, but with none of the free-for-all shoving that might have taken place anywhere in Europe. The presence of several armed soldiers nearby may have had a bearing on that.

‘Ah, Mister Mannix,’ Daondo said, ‘I am about to hold a short press conference. Would you join me, please?’

‘An honour, Minister. But it’s not really my story – it’s Mister Kemp’s.’

Kemp gave me a brief dirty look as I passed the buck neatly to him. ‘May I bring Mister Hammond in on this?’ he asked, drawing Ben Hammond along by the arm. ‘He designed this rig; it’s very much his baby.’

I looked at the stocky man in some surprise. This was something I hadn’t known and it set me thinking. Wyvern Haulage might be new as an outfit, but they seemed to have gathered a great deal of talent around them, and my respect for Geoff Wingstead grew fractionally greater.

The press conference was under way, to a soft barrage of clicks as people were posed in front of the rig. Video cameramen did their trick of walking backwards with a buddy’s hand on their shoulder to guide them, and the writer boys ducked and dodged around the clutter of ropes, chain, pulleys and hawsers that littered the ground. Some of the inevitable questions were coming up and I listened carefully, as this was a chance for me to learn a few of the technicalities.

‘Just how big is this vehicle?’

Kemp indicated Ben Hammond forward. Ben, grinning like a toothpaste advertisement, was enjoying his moment in the limelight as microphones were thrust at him. ‘As the transporter is set up now it’s a bit over a hundred feet long. We can add sections up to another eighteen feet but we won’t need them on this trip.’

‘Does that include the engines?’

‘The tractors? No, those are counted separately. We’ll be adding on four tractors to get over hilly ground and then the total length will be a shade over two hundred and forty feet.’

Another voice said, ‘Our readers may not be able to visualize that. Can you give us anything to measure it by?’

Hammond groped for an analogy, and then said, ‘I notice that you people here play a lot of soccer – football.’

‘Indeed we do,’ Daondo interjected. ‘I myself am an enthusiast.’ He smiled modestly as he put in his personal plug. ‘I was present at the Cup Final at Wembley last year, when I was Ambassador to the United Kingdom.’

Hammond said, ‘Well, imagine this. If you drove this rig onto the field at Wembley, or any other standard soccer pitch, it would fill the full length of the pitch with a foot hanging over each side. Is that good enough?’

There was a chorus of appreciative remarks, and Kemp said in a low voice, ‘Well done, Ben. Carry on.’

‘How heavy is the vehicle?’ someone asked.

‘The transporter weighs ninety tons, and the load, that big transformer, is three hundred tons. Add forty tons for each tractor and it brings the whole lot to five hundred and fifty tons on the hoof.’

Everybody scribbled while the cameras ground on. Hammond added, airing some knowledge he had only picked up in the last few days, ‘Elephants weigh about six tons each; so this is worth nearly a hundred elephants.’

The analogy was received with much amusement.

‘Those tractors don’t look big enough to weigh forty tons,’ he was prompted.

‘They carry ballast. Steel plates embedded in concrete. We have to have some counterbalance for the weight of the load or the transporter will overrun the tractors – especially on the hills. Negotiating hill country is very tricky.’

‘How fast will you go?’

Kemp took over now. ‘On the flat with all tractors hooked up I dare say we could push along to almost twenty miles an hour, even more going downhill. But we won’t. Five hundred and fifty tons going at twenty miles an hour takes a lot of stopping, and we don’t take risks. I don’t think we’ll do much more than ten miles an hour during any part of the journey, and usually much less. Our aim is to average five miles an hour during a ten hour day; twenty days from Port Luard to Bir Oassa.’

This drew whistles of disbelief and astonishment. In this age of fast transport, it was interesting that extreme slowness could exert the same fascination as extreme speed. It also interested me to notice that Nyala had not yet converted its thinking to the metric unit as far as distances were concerned.

‘How many wheels does it have?’

Hammond said, ‘Ninety-six on the ground and eight spares.’

‘How many punctures do you expect?’

‘None – we hope.’ This drew a laugh.

‘What’s the other big truck?’

‘That’s the vehicle which carries the airlift equipment and the machinery for powering it,’ said Kemp. ‘We use it to spread the load when crossing bridges, and it works on the hovercraft principle. It’s powered by four two hundred and forty-hp Rolls Royce engines – and that vehicle itself weighs eight tons.’

‘And the others?’

‘Spares, a workshop for maintenance, food and personal supplies, fuel. We have to take everything with us, you see.’

There was a stir as an aide came forward to whisper something into Daondo’s ear. He raised his hand and his voice. ‘Gentlemen, that will be all for now, thank you. I invite you all to gather round this great and marvellous machine for its dedication by His Excellency, the Minister of the Interior, the Right Honourable Hamah Ousemane, OBE.’ He touched me on the arm. ‘This way, please.’

As we followed him I heard Hammond saying to Kemp, ‘What’s he going to do? Crack a bottle of champagne over it?’

I grinned back at him. ‘Did you really design this thing?’

‘I designed some modifications to a standard rig, yes.’

Kemp said, ‘Ben built a lot of it, too.’

I was impressed. ‘For a little guy you sure play with big toys.’

Hammond stiffened and looked at me with hot eyes. Clearly I had hit on a sore nerve. ‘I’m five feet two and a half inches tall,’ he said curtly. ‘And that’s the exact height of Napoleon.’

‘No offence meant,’ I said quickly, and then we all came to a sudden stop at the rig to listen to Ousemane’s speech. He spoke first in English and then in Nyalan for a long time in a rolling, sonorous voice while the sun became hotter and everybody wilted. Then came some ribbon cutting and handshakes all round, some repeated for the benefit of the press, and finally he took himself off in his Mercedes. Kemp mopped his brow thankfully. ‘Do you think we can get on with it now?’ he asked nobody in particular.

Daondo was bustling back to us. In the background a surprising amount of military deployment was taking place, and there was an air of expectancy building up. ‘Excellent, Mister Kemp! We are all ready to go now,’ Daondo said. ‘You will couple up all the tractors, won’t you?’

Kemp turned to me and said in a harassed undertone, ‘What for? We won’t be doing more than five miles an hour on the flat and even one tractor’s enough for that.’

I was getting a bit tired of Kemp and his invincible ignorance and I didn’t want Daondo to hear him and blow a gasket. I smiled past Kemp and said, ‘Of course. Everything will be done as you wish it, Minister.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘I must get to Independence Square before you arrive. I leave Captain Sadiq in command of the arrangements.’ He hurried away to his car.

I said to Kemp, putting an edge on my voice, ‘We’re expected to put on a display and we’ll do it. Use everything you’ve got. Line ’em up, even the chow wagon. Until we leave town it’s a parade every step of the way.’