They entered alpine cool, and Jonathan was transferred to the forests above Miirren, headed for the foot of the Lobhorn for a one-day climb. He felt intensely happy. The jungle is another homecoming. The path led beside steaming rapids; the sky was overcast. As they crossed a dried riverbed, the veteran of many assault courses glimpsed ropes, trip wires, shell cases and netting, blackened pampas and blast marks on the tree trunks. They scrambled up a slope between grass and rock, reached a brow and looked down. The camp that lay below them was at first glance deserted. Fire smoke rose from the cookhouse chimney, to the sound of plaintive Spanish singing. All able-bodied men are in the jungle. Only the cooks, cadre and men on the sick list have leave to stay behind.
"Under Noriega, many paramilitary was being trained here," Fernandez was saying in his methodical way, when Jonathan tuned back to him. "Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Americano, Colombia. Spanish people, Indian people, all was trained here very good. To fight Ortega. To fight Castro. To fight many bad people."
It was not till they walked down the slope and entered the camp that Jonathan realised that Fabergé was a madhouse.
* * *
A commanding officer's lookout point dominated the camp, and it was backed by a triangular white wall daubed with slogans. Below it stood a ring of cinder-block houses, each with its function painted in obscene figures on the door: the cookhouse with a topless female cook, the bathhouse with its naked bathers, the clinic with its bloody bodies, the schoolhouse for technical instruction and political enlightenment, the tiger house, the snake house, the monkey house, the aviary and, on a small rise, the chapel house, its walls illuminated with a bulbous Virgin and Child watched over by jungle fighters with Kalashnikovs. Painted effigies stood waist-high among the houses, staring with truculent eyes down the concrete paths: a fat-bellied merchant in tricorn hat, blue tailcoat and ruff; a rouged fine lady of Madrid in her mantilla; an Indian peasant girl with bare breasts, her head turned in fear, eyes and mouth open, as she frantically works the handle of a mystic well. And protruding from the windows and fake chimneys of the houses, flesh-pink plaster arms, feet and frenzied faces, blood-spattered like the severed limbs of victims cut down while trying to escape.
But the maddest part of Fabergé was not the wall daubings or the voodoo statues, not the magic words of Indian dialect sprinkled between Spanish slogans or the rush-roofed Crazy Horse Saloon with its barstools and jukebox, and naked girls cavorting on the walls. It was the living zoo. It was the demented mountain tiger crammed beside a chunk of rotting meat in a cage barely his own size. It was the tethered bucks and crated jungle cats. It was the parakeets, eagles, cranes, kites and vultures in their filthy aviary, beating their clipped wings and raging at the dying of the light. It was the despairing monkeys mute in their cages and the rows of green ammunition boxes covered with wire mesh, each box containing a separate species of snake so that jungle fighters could learn the difference between friend and foe.
"Colonel Emmanuel love very much animal," Fernandez explained as he showed his guests to their quarters. "To fight we must be children of the jungle, Mr. Thomas."
The windows of their hut were also barred.
* * *
It is mess night at Fabergé, miniatures to be worn. The regimental guest of honour is Mr. Richard Onslow Roper, our patron, colonel in chief, comrade in arms and love. All heads are turned to him, and to the no-longer-languid lordling seated at his side.
They are thirty strong, they are eating chicken and rice and drinking Coca-Cola. Candles in jars, not Paul de Lamarie candlesticks, light their faces down the table. It is as if the twentieth century has emptied its garbage truck of leftover warriors and vanished causes into a camp called Faberge: American veterans sickened first by war and then by peace; Russian Spetsnaz, trained to guard a country that disappeared while their backs were turned; Frenchmen who still hated de Gaulle for giving away North Africa; the Israeli boy who had known nothing but war, and the Swiss boy who had known nothing but peace; the Englishmen in search of military nobility because their generation somehow missed the fun (if only we could have had a British Vietnam!); the huddle of introspective Germans torn between the guilt of war and its allure. And Colonel Emmanuel, who according to Tabby had fought every dirty war from Cuba to Salvador to Guatemala to Nicaragua and points between in order to please the hated Yanqui: well, now Emmanuel would balance the score a little!
And Roper himself ― who had summoned this ghostly legion to the feast ― floated over it like some presiding genius, now commandant, now impresario, now sceptic, now fairy godfather.
