The Sand Tiger

Jools Du Martin was not trying to kill The General, but we didn’t know that until 1975; by the time it made it to my employers that he wasn’t, he was already dead.

I remember it well, that awful September in 1974, when it felt like the sun didn’t once rise, and we lived, eternally, in the confines of darkness from the overcast skies. One day, the rain set in and it didn’t leave until October.

I was still working for the newspaper back then, writing copy about whatever my bosses told me to write about, sometimes being allowed out to write about travel and current affairs from somewhere that wasn’t the smoky room on the fifth floor of that South London building I went to every day.

It was on another grim morning, the fifteenth of September I think but I may be wrong, when I got called into Harris’ office for an early conference. I thought, as always, that he either wanted me taking notes on some public address, or covering the football hooligans. I headed up, opened the door without a knock, and sat myself down at the desk.

“What is it this time?” I remember asking.

Harris Hendley, the newspaper mogul who died in 1986, sat opposite me flanked by two men. He was a gaunt man even when I knew him, almost as skeletal as a prisoner of war you see in history books. The men on either side looked more alive, but somehow less real, a feeling I’ve never shaken to this day.

On his left, a man in a full suit sat holding a fountain pen and a notebook, and on his right, the other man stood smoking out of the open window, hi white shirt buttoned low to show off his healthy forest of chest hair and his silver chain. Both men were Caucasian, though the one by the window was considerably more tanned.

The details of the two men, beyond their silhouettes, slip me by now that I am an old man, but It’s what the man by the window said that I remember:

“What can you tell us about General Khyree Alamar?” He was an American, not what I had expected.

His companion was meek in comparison to him, with a slim face and beady eyes punctuated by the presence of a pair of small, gold rimmed spectacles that hugged the bridge of his nose tightly. The American’s face was fat around the jowls, and the tan lines seemed to dance around an outline of white flesh where he’d clearly worn sunglasses. In some patches, the tan had turned to burns.

I coughed, thought for a moment, and spoke:

“Khyree Alamar?” I repeated back, receiving a nod from The American. “He took power in Viromo after a coup, he runs the country on a platform of launching some great African industrial revolution. I remember him saying he’s trying to bring his people up to speed with the Soviets, funny since he has ties to The Kremlin, probably started the coup that put him into power, and is reportedly working on a programme to build a bomb worse than the H-bomb. Is that good enough?" I asked, eyeballing The American.

The American swigged the last of his cigarette and picked up a folder, the kind they hand out in spy movies with big letters that say ‘FOR YOUR EYES ONLY’ in red ink. This didn’t say anything on the front, not in giant red lettering at least, but it did have a small label at the top on which someone had pencilled the words ‘top priority’. He threw it dismissively and it landed on the desk before me, so I took a second to study the front, the small message, and then opened it.

“We think somebody is trying to kill The General.” The American’s Companion finally spoke, his accent was thickly Irish, and I assumed he was probably from Donegal, but that was all he said for the whole meeting.

“You mean somebody is trying to kill a dictator?” I laughed. “Sorry, gentlemen, I don’t mean to laugh, but that’s just what people do with dictators.”

Nobody found my joke funny, and everything collapsed into the worst kind of icy cold, awkward silence. It was like the room was frozen, and at the centre of it all was me gawping away and chuckling at some badly timed sentiment. I felt like a fool then, and still do.

Trying to set the meeting back on course, I read the next page of the dossier in my head. It had been typed, probably by some desk-clerk on a vintage typewriter, and at the top was stapled a picture of a man. I didn’t recognise him immediately, but most of that was down to the ghostly focus of the frame. It wasn’t a photo of him, more a photo he was breaking his way into. He had a moustache, pencil thin and well-trimmed, and the widow’s peak atop his leathery face was black and slicked back with either hair oil or sweat. He was wearing a stained tan outfit, boots that came to his shins, and he was holding a rifle almost the size of him freely in his left hand.

He was Jools Du Martin.

“What about him?” The American asked, placing another cigarette between his lips. “What can you tell us about him?”

I knew a bit more about Jools Du Martin than I did The General, so I told them everything I could remember:

“Born in Southampton, educated in economics, eventually graduated Oxford and went into politics. He’s been in parliament for about a decade now, I think. I interviewed him a few years back about some big proposal he was launching, something about nationalising something-or-other in an effort to boost the economy. He put his bid in to lead the Conservative party not long after I interviewed him, and then he called me in to interview him while he was running. He lost, he never called on me for an interview, and last I heard of him he was at his holiday home in Scotland.”

I knew a lot about Jools Du Martin, and I suspected he knew a lot about me from the time we spent together. He had a way with people, a charm that bordered on the hypnotic qualities of a cartoon snake; one never simply left Jools Du Martin’s company without quickly becoming his friend, and what I had left out of my assessment was that we had been seeing each other in a social manner since that first interview. It was only when I thought about it then that I realised I hadn’t seen him, heard from him, or even heard anybody mention him since the year previous, when he went on the holiday to Scotland.

“We know you two are close,” The American nodded, “and that’s why we need your help.”

Something pleading came across The American’s worn out blueish eyes, and I almost felt sympathy for him. He was making love to every drag of his cigarette, and those moments of smoky bliss were clearly the only reprieve he got from thinking about the business at hand.

“Last year, Du Martin was on a hunting holiday in Scotland, told family in Winchester he’d be home for his nephew’s birthday, then the guy up and vanished like Houdini. Nobody saw him leave his home, nobody saw him get on a flight, and nobody reported him arriving in Africa. He just shows up in Viromo one day, with a gun, and tells anybody he sees that he’s there to kill The Sand Tiger.”

I wasn’t told much more in person; I was just given a copy of the file to read on the flight. It alleged that Du Martin was calling The General by an old army nickname of his, an innuendo to tell all his intentions without ever letting it slip. He had enough of a motive, and my employers were worried that this motive was all the notice they needed to move in and stop a global catastrophe.

Viromo was the kind of place I had only seen on the news, and now I was here, in the beating heart of a nation in turmoil; trying to find a man who either had a blood-lust or a death-wish. I was to find him before he did anything, and report back to my employers everything I learned.

Most importantly, I was, under no circumstances, to try and stop him myself.

I was to interview him, find out as much as I could, and nothing else. I was not to see him again after I met up with him, I was not to mention him again aside from passing information back to The American. I was to go into Viromo, find Jools Du Martin, interview him, and then leave as if I had never even been there.

“We just need to know one thing,” this was the last thing The American said to me before I left England, “when he says ‘The Sand Tiger’, does he mean The General? If you so much as think he means The General then you tell us so we can handle him ourselves.”

The American met me regularly during my time in Viromo, every Thursday at eleven at the cafe across from my hotel. During these meetings, he handed me my week’s salary and asked for updates.

Those first few weeks were slow.

Jools Du Martin blended in. He understood Africa, he understood the way of life, and he understood how to not be seen. I traced leads, that’s all I did from the end of September until nearly the middle of December, by which time The American was getting angsty over my lack of progress. I told him that if it was so easy then he should try it; he backed off, and the hunt continued.

On the seventeenth of January, 1975, I got my first real lead. On the twentieth, I found myself face to face with Jools Du Martin for the first time in years.

“My good man, how long has it been? Please sit.”

We were in a canvas tent, about the size of a small bungalow by my memory, somewhere out on the eastern arm of the most remote, deserted stretch of Viromo. The inside was fitted with all a man needed to survive, and a lot of the home comforts he decided he needed. He had a writing desk, chairs, tables littered with maps, and a globe that I suspected opened into a drinks cabinet. On the canvas walls, he had pinned up prints of artworks with no frames, under each hung a small plaque explaining the name and artist.

Jools Du Martin looked no different than he did when I first met him. He groomed himself well, looked after his skin, and for his age he was looking impeccable, if a little weary.

“Must be five years.” I responded, nervously approaching the table at which he was sitting, and upon which his rifle slept on a bed of maps. “You’re looking well.” I added, trying to fill the silence as I sat.

“African air,” He grinned, “good for the soul.”

My shirt was wet through already, and sand was clinging to the wet-patches like mud. The notebook in my breast pocket was lodged inside, and getting it out took an awkward, fumbling battle.

“So, you came all the way here to see me?” He continued to grin.

I remember wondering: at what point would grinning that hard would begin to burn out the muscles of his mouth. He never gave an answer, he just kept smiling.

“Sure did.” I said, finally folding open the notebook and vetting my list of questions I had before me. “So,” I began, “what brought you out to Viromo? I mean, it’s a world away from Scotland.” I joked.

Thankfully, he laughed. It was a dry, rasping cough of a laugh passed through teeth that never parted.

“Well, that’s what everybody said really. I mean, I’ve been in England my whole life, and suddenly I upend it all to move out here. I see why people were concerned, but those who knew me had no doubts I could survive out here.” He explained, brushing the wooden part of his gun’s body with his fingertips. “You see, the reason I bought the house up in Scotland was to practice my shooting.”

I nodded, noted down what he said, and returned to listening intently.

“My father was a hunter. He was a military man first, but he travelled the world to hunt, and he was good at it too, damn good at it. He was on the front lines of keeping The Empire up and running after World War One, you see, and used his time out in places like this to keep up his skills. I would sometimes come out with him as a boy.”

“Your father would take you hunting?”

I was getting ready to run for the cafe to tell The American to do his job.

“Certainly, what good man would not teach his boy how to?” He shook his head, his greased hair staying stiff as a rock. “He was taking me to Viromo before it was even Viromo. Back then, this was little more than a hunting ground, and my father always took me out with his friends to hunt dinner.” He paused, lost in a maze of nostalgia behind his wizened old eyes. “But of course, I’m here for a much bigger prize now.”

My ears pricked. My nostrils were flared to the harsh scent of animal dung and whiskey that made up the perfume of the tent, but now my brain was firing on all cylinders, awaiting what he was going to say next.

“I’m sure you’re here because of my talk about The Sand Tiger.”

I nodded, unable to pass words through the slowly closing passage of my dried-out throat.

“Well why just ask about it? I’m ready to go in for the kill.”

That’s how I ended up in the back of an offroad vehicle, bouncing over the uneven terrain of the African landscape and holding on for dear life as we tore through the arid lands.

We stopped in a clearing about ten miles out from camp; there, I was let out of the car to watch as Jools readied his weapon. He was ready, but was The Sand Tiger?

I was nervously scanning everything on the horizon. I didn’t know what to look for, but part of me expected to see The General’s parade pulling past and into the sights of the madman. Another part of me expected to see the orange-glow of The American’s burnt face off in the distance, perhaps armed himself to stop Du Martin from starting world war three.

Jools Du Martin placed himself at the top of a small rise overlooking the skeleton of an old truck, probably once green but now devoid of all light and life. He whistled once, loud enough for the sound to bounce off every nearby surface, and brought the gun up.

“Down there,” he began, talking back at me, “sleeps The Sand Tiger.”

I finally realised the truth: Jools Du Martin was not trying to kill The General. My unsteady mind rushed with relief, but the camera in my hands still shook unsteadily. I knew that I just needed to get that information back to my employer, back to The American who was probably sipping coffee in the cafe right about now.

I wish I could have got the news back to him before Jools Du Martin fired that warning shot into the truck, because in doing that he woke up The Sand Tiger, and signed his own death warrant.

I’d half expected nothing to happen when the bullet struck the truck, and I forget how long passed before something did stir, but something did. It was almighty, but it was not a tiger, it was far too ancient. I realised, much to my weary amusement as it limped from the open rear of the truck, that what Jools Du Martin intended to kill was clearly incapable of dying. It was almost totally white, white as the sands got when the sun struck them, and it had a mouth full of overgrown, sharp teeth that resembled the gnarly roots of abandoned trees. The tiger was as old as time, an elderly model of nature’s wrath, and the look in its eyes spoke to the fact that the wrath was not yet to dissipate; black beads that said nothing but: death.

“The Sand Tiger killed my father.” He spat into the sand at his feet. “Now, today, I kill him.”

I wish I remembered the events of Jools Du Martin’s death. All I have is the photograph I snapped when my finger twitched down onto the button. I caught that terrible angle, I caught Jools’ body between the jaws of death itself. His face, even in monochrome, was in the process of eerily losing all hue, leaving behind a death mask of unimaginable pain and terror. I remember the sounds, those screams and the crunches and the coughing as blood rose up and out of his throat like water from a broken tap, but I can’t seem to picture any second of it that wasn’t caught in that photograph.

I told The American everything I knew, and I was back in London in time for my birthday.