The Rwandan Hostage Read online

  CHRISTOPHER LOWERY

  The second book in the

  African Diamonds Trilogy

  First published in Great Britain in 2016

  by Urbane Publications Ltd

  Suite 3, Brown Europe House,

  3/34 Gleamingwood Drive,

  Chatham, Kent ME5 8RZ

  Copyright © Christopher Lowery, 2016

  The moral right of Christopher Lowery to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organisations and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Apart from historical fact, any resemblance to actual events, organisations, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Paperback ISBN 978-1-910692-96-7

  Kindle ISBN 978-1-910692-98-1

  epub ISBN 978-1-910692-97-4

  Cover design and typeset at Chandler Book Design, King’s Lynn, Norfolk

  Front cover images sourced through royalty free photo libraries:

  © Subbotina Anna|shutterstock.com (burnt paper)

  © Peshkova|shutterstock.com (concrete room)

  © Jag_cz|shutterstock.com (flames)

  © Nadya Lukic|istockphoto.com (hands)

  Printed in Great Britain by

  CPI Antony Rowe,

  Chippenham, Wiltshire

  The publisher supports the Forest Stewardship Council® (FSC®), the leading international forest-certification organisation. This book is made from acid-free paper from an FSC®-certified provider. FSC is the only forest-certification scheme supported by the leading environmental organisations, including Greenpeace.

  Dedicated to my parents, Christopher Dawson (Kit) Lowery

  and Lilian May (Lily) Lowery

  Thank you. For everything.

  My thanks for their advice and assistance go to:

  SWITZERLAND:

  My beloved wife Marjorie, ‘red liner in chief’, cutting down my wordy phrases into bite-sized chunks.

  My dear daughter, Kerry-Jane, whose experience in Rwanda was the genesis of this book and whose editing was essential to its authenticity.

  Martin Panchaud and Sig Ramseyer.

  SPAIN:

  Mo & Barry Nay

  UK:

  Mike Jeffries and my nephew Nick Street.

  And especially to my publisher, Mathew Smith, at Urbane Publications, who had faith in my first book and encouraged me to finish this one (and start the next one).

  Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.’

  Sir Walter Scott, 1808

  There’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip.

  Old English proverb

  Contents

  Prologue

  February, 2010

  One

  Two

  Three

  Day One: Sunday, July 11, 2010

  Four

  Five

  Day Two: Monday July 12, 2010

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Day Three: Tuesday, July 13, 2010

  Fifteen

  Rwanda: 1995

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Marbella: Tuesday, July 13, 2010

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Day Four: Wednesday, July 14, 2010

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Day Five: Thursday, July 15, 2010

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Alexandra: Johannesburg, 2007

  Forty-Nine

  Delmas: Mpumalanga, South Africa, 2010

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Day Six: Friday, July 16, 2010

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  Fifty-Five

  Fifty-Six

  Fifty-Seven

  Fifty-Eight

  Fifty-Nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-One

  Sixty-Two

  Day Seven: Saturday, July 17, 2010

  Sixty-Three

  Sixty-Four

  Sixty-Five

  Day Eight Sunday, July 18, 2010

  Sixty-Six

  Day Nine: Monday, July 19, 2010

  Sixty-Seven

  Day Ten: Tuesday, July 20, 2010

  Sixty-Eight

  Sixty-Nine

  Seventy

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  April 6th, 1994

  Kamenjye Neighbourhood, Kigali, Rwanda

  It was six forty-five on a warm, airless evening. Darkness had fallen. Cigarette smoke drifted out of the open windows of the three lorries and music could be heard, the same song being played over and over, a kind of folk music mixed with a rap beat that sounded right across the valley. The tarpaulin-covered army trucks were driving at only sixty kilometres an hour, heading eastwards away from the city on the Kanombe Military Hospital Road, along the north side of the airport runway. At the end of the airport property, they turned to the south, driving along several smaller roads through the Kamenjye neighbourhood. The drivers dimmed their lights as they left this populous area, passing Basanza Cemetery and heading up a dirt track on Colline Karama. The occupants weren’t so much concerned with noise as with unnecessary light. The sound of the engines increased as they began the slow climb up the incline on the way to the upper slopes. The children playing by the roadside ran after them for a little while and the inhabitants of the shacks pointed and chattered until they were out of sight, then resumed their evening conversations amongst themselves.

  Each vehicle contained an officer and four soldiers of the Forces Armées Rwandaises, the Rwandan Armed Forces, as well as two wooden crates, about two metres long. The officers were members of the Hutu akazu movement and the soldiers, dressed in ill-fitting army uniforms and carrying AK-47 assault rifles, were all specialists in Interahamwe training – professional murderers. In the first truck, two men, dressed in European civilian outfits, smoking Gitanes and wearing sunglasses, sat alongside the officer on the driver’s bench seat. They leaned over to the open window so that the incoming fresh air, although not cool enough to be refreshing, at least blew away the stink of the soldiers’ sweat.

  The music was coming from the akazu controlled radio station, Radio-Télévision Libres des Mille Collines – Thousand Hills Free Radio-TV. The song, ‘Nanga Abahutu, I hate Hutus’, was sung by Simon Bikindi, a Hutu extremist. Bikindi’s lyrics berat
ed those Hutus who failed to continue to supress the Tutsis and maintain the power they had gained during the 1959 revolution. This ideology was indoctrinated in Hutus of all walks of life, especially those in the army, who were taught to recite verbatim a 1992 army memorandum, which defined the Hutu’s enemy as ‘the Tutsi, inside or outside the country’. Mutual racial hatred was the common currency of Rwanda and there was nothing the intervention of the outside world could do about it.

  During the years since the revolution, hundreds of thousands of Tutsis had fled, settling in refugee camps in the huge and populous countries surrounding their homeland. There were now over half a million of them in Zaire and Tanzania and in their smaller neighbours, Uganda and Burundi. Rwandan exiles were amongst the largest communities of refugees in Africa. Many had been born in the refugee camps and what little they knew of their country, known as the ‘Land of a thousand hills,’ was learned only from hearsay and traditional songs and stories repeated by the older generation who still had vague memories of the tiny, magical land, lying like a beautiful island in the Great Lakes region of eastern-central Africa.

  Inside the country, there was little opportunity for the Tutsis to change their fortunes, but in 1987, a growing movement of refugee exiles in southern Uganda had created the Rwanda Patriotic Front, and they had other ideas. In October 1990, four thousand Tutsis of the RPF invaded Rwanda with the intention of replacing the Hutu regime. The invasion was a catastrophic failure, which would have far-reaching and horrendous consequences that no one could possibly have imagined.

  Dar es Salaam International Airport, Tanzania

  In the luxuriously equipped cabin of the Dassault Falcon 50, the eight VIP passengers settled back in their seats as the plane taxied towards the runway for their short flight to Kigali. The private jet, a gift from Francois Mitterrand, the French president, to Juvénal Habiyarimana, the Rwandan Hutu president, was carrying them back from a one-day summit meeting of regional African leaders in Dar es Salaam. In addition to Habiyarimana, there were three senior members of his cabinet and his personal doctor, as well as Cyprien Ntaryamira, the newly elected president of Burundi, with two members of his government.

  There was only one flight attendant on board, Marie-Ange Lemurier, a shapely black woman from the French island of Réunion, with thick brown burnished hair. A young aide de camp, Benoît Umotomi, seconded as a security officer, was sitting beside her in the spare flight attendant’s seat. His name was a throw-back to the fifty years of occupation by Belgium which Rwanda had suffered prior to independence in 1962.

  The purpose of the summit meeting had been formally announced as a debate on the problems faced by Burundi since the assassination of the previous Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye, after only two months in office. However, Habiyarimana had been mercilessly harassed once again by his African counterparts for his prevarication over the signing of the Arusha Peace Accords. This agreement, which was effectively a power sharing coalition between the Rwandan Hutu government and the Tutsi Patriotic Front, had been published in August 1993, but never signed by Habiyarimana and it seemed it never would be. The presence in Rwanda of the French and Belgian UNamir peace-keeping force was a sign, albeit a feeble sign, of the interest of the international community, but more especially the UN, to avoid yet another African disaster, but it wasn’t yet working.

  Habiyarimana was trapped between the extreme members of the akazu Hutus, who would never agree to share power with the Tutsis, and the African and western powers, who insisted that he had to. Whichever way he moved he would lose, and after eleven years in power, he didn’t want to lose, but he was running out of time. He refused the glass of champagne offered by Marie-Ange and closed his eyes and tried to sleep as the triple Garrett turbofan engines roared to life and thrust the aircraft up into the night sky.

  At the end of the track the three trucks pulled into a circle on a desolate grassy plateau that had been cordoned off with red and white tape that morning. The plateau faced north-east, towards the presidential palace, about three kilometres away. It was now pitch black and the lights of the runway at the airport could be seen, at about half that distance. The approach to the airport was from the East, going across in front of their position and directly over the palace on its final descent. At a command from one of the men in civilian clothes, the twelve soldiers formed themselves into a cordon around the vehicles, holding their rifles at the ready. The officers unloaded the crates from the lorries, opened them up and placed the contents on a large plastic sheet, laid out between the trucks. The two civilians supervised their work until they were satisfied with the placement of the equipment. They tested each piece to ensure it hadn’t been damaged in transit then they prepared them for use.

  “Bon. Tout est prêt. Attendez notre signal. Everything’s ready. Wait for our signal.” One of the men took out a pack of Gitanes and offered them round. The men and the officers sat smoking quietly, surrounded by the trucks and the cordon of guards. The time was seven thirty.

  * * *

  At five minutes past eight, the French pilot announced that they would be landing in ten minutes. Marie-Ange collected the empty champagne glasses from the passengers and ensured they were buckled into their seats. After depositing the glasses in the small galley at the back of the aircraft, she went into the toilet just opposite.

  At ten minutes past eight, the air traffic controller at Gregoire Kayibanda International Airport repeated his instructions to the pilot of a United Nations C-130 Hercules transport plane which was approaching the airport. “Please make a turn to your starboard, descend to twenty-five thousand feet, take a holding pattern to the north and await further instructions. Another aircraft has been given priority over your slot time.” The weekly Belgian Hercules flight was carrying UN troops, part of the UNamir contingent stationed in Rwanda, who were returning from leave. The pilot responded affirmatively and the plane banked away into the clear, starlit sky to leave the airspace clear for the presidential plane.

  “You are cleared for approach, Falcon Fifty.”

  “Roger that, tower.” The Falcon pilot started to line up for his approach. Habiyarimana was exhausted. The Burundi president and even some of his own officials had continued to harangue him during the flight and he had spent the last hour trying to find good reasons to defend his procrastination. He leaned back in his seat, wondering how he would be able to hold them off for much longer. He would consult his wife, Agathe Kanzinga, the power behind his throne, when he arrived home.

  “Quick, quickly now!” Marie-Ange pushed Benoît, the aide de camp, down onto the toilet seat. His trousers were around his ankles. She hoisted her short skirt, pulled down her panties and straddled him. “We’ll arrive in a couple of minutes and I have to be present for landing.”

  On the hillside, the group were listening to the voice of the announcer of Radio Milles Collines berating his audience for not taking decisive action against the Tutsi enemy. He suddenly stopped speaking for a moment then announced that the presidential jet was coming in to land. A selection of classical music began and the commentary ceased.

  “Ça y’est. Allons-y! Let’s go!” The plain-clothed men barked out orders and picked up two of the Russian-made 9K38 Igla-type surface-to-air missile launchers, loaded up with their 9M39 missiles. Each man held a weapon in place, facing the presidential palace, which was exactly on the approach path to the airport. At between three and four kilometres, the target would be well within the range of the Igla missiles. The army officers had the remaining weapons loaded and ready, but they knew if the first shots missed, they would be unlikely to get another chance.

  Everyone in the group was motionless, listening intently and scouring the skies with narrowed eyes. The UN transport plane had appeared a few minutes ago, but had turned away without landing and was no longer in sight. “Voilà. Là bas!” One of the civilians pointed towards the airport. They could discern the faint lights of the Falcon circling from the north side of the airport all the
way back to the south of them, then turning into a final approach path from the east that would take it across their line of vision. The muted sound of the aircraft’s engines became louder in the silence of the night. They watched the lights approach them until the aircraft was almost level with their position, about three and a half kilometres away.

  The two men adjusted the range finders on their weapons, squinting through the sights at the dual infra-red images that would enable the rockets to seek out the aircraft’s heat track. “Tirez!” The first missile streaked away, its fiery tail lighting up the hillside. The second followed a couple of seconds later, arrowing after the first, straight towards the Falcon.

  “Oui, Oui! Yes, Yes! Keep going! Faster, faster!” Marie-Ange cried out as she and Benoît began to climax at the same time. He was already holding her tight with his hands around her middle, but she grabbed him around the neck with both hands to hold herself in position.

  President Habiyarimana was dreaming. He was piloting a helicopter and could hear the rotors spinning faster and faster. It was almost out of control, but Agathe, his wife, was giving him instructions through the headphones. He felt reassured. His wife was always right.

  The first missile struck the Falcon just behind the portside wing, ripping off a two metre section, exposing the toilet area. Marie-Ange and Benoît, still sitting in the coital position, were sucked out of the gaping hole in the fuselage and hurled through the air, clinging to each other in abject terror.

  The impact pushed the wing upwards and the tail section down, directly into the path of the second rocket. The tail was completely blown off by the explosion of the missile and landed in splinters on the western end of the runway. The forward section of the aircraft was immediately engulfed in flames as the fuel tanks erupted and the remains of the Falcon spiralled like a flaming comet in a deathly descent towards the earth, ironically smashing into the ground just short of Habiyarimana’s presidential palace, the bodies of the ten remaining occupants strewn outside the landscaped gardens.

  The soldiers loaded up the three lorries with the remaining material and they trundled quietly off back down the mountain on their way to the Kanombe military barracks. After a few minutes, the classical music on the radio stopped and the announcer said, in a respectful tone, “We have just learned that the presidential aircraft has crashed, resulting in the death of our beloved President Habiyarimana and several of his government members.”