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I still remember sitting with him in a wet trench, protected from the drizzle by a plastic sheet held up on poles. He was a small man, wiry and so dark that his skin was almost blue-black. He had a habit of grinning at all times, so it wasn’t ever really possible to gauge his moods.

This Ojogor was not just a man, he told me, after I’d given him an entire pack of cigarettes. He could change form if he wanted, and fly away like a bird, or crawl through the forest as a snake. He could disappear with a snap of his fingers, and make himself invisible, or he could make himself as big as a mountain if he chose. Jean Philippe knew someone who knew someone who had seen some of these wonders for himself.

"But you didn’t see it yourself," I said. We were speaking French, of course. Krahania is a Francophone country, and back then not one in a thousand spoke a word of English.

"No," he admitted after a little thought. "But it must be true. Francois, my friend, he knows someone who has seen it."

"I see. And you don’t doubt that anyone can do these things?"

He shrugged. "What do I know? I am only one man, not educated either. But I know these strange things happen."

"Ojogor has to go," I told my unit commander, a South African named Piet, that evening.

He agreed. "We’ll never get these kaffirs to fight otherwise, man. But how do we get rid of him?"

"We know where he’s supposed to live, don’t we? Maybe we could take a small team – just three or four of us – and cross the lines tonight. We could take him out and return before dawn with his head. Prove to the Krahanians that he’s not just mortal but very dead."

"I like it," Piet agreed. He was a big man, all angular bone under sunburnt skin, as tawny as the Karoo. "But how do we know which is his house? We’d need a guide, and none of these kaffirs will guide us. One mention of the bastard and they’ll drop dead with fear."

"I have just the man," I said.

"No," Jean Philippe replied, as I’d anticipated, as soon as I’d put the question. "No, I’m not going to do it."

"Oh yes you are," I said, and got down to it. I’m not going to talk about what I said to him – it isn’t relevant, and it would give away too many clues to his real identity – but after an hour’s persuasion he agreed. He wasn’t happy about it, of course, but he recognised that he didn’t have a choice. 

"Don’t worry," I told him. "All you have to do is take us to the village and point the house out. After that you can leave it to us."

"And you won’t do anything to anyone else?" he asked for the fourth or fifth time. "It’s only Ojogor you’re after?"

"That’s what I told you," I repeated. "We aren’t planning on a bloodbath. The last thing we want is to rouse the whole village, wanting revenge. We’ll just go in, take care of Ojogor, and leave."

"On your head be it, if you hurt anyone else," he said.

We set out soon after dark. There were four of us in all – Jean Philippe in the lead, followed by Piet, a Frenchman called Marcel, and me. We’d decided that any larger numbers would simply mean to tip off the rebels. We hadn’t even told anyone else in the commando that we were going.

At that point our lines lay along a low ridge on one side of a shallow stream, with barbed wire entanglements in the bushes between our forward trenches and the water. The rebels didn’t even have a front line; their positions were scattered across the other side of the river, within hearing distance of each other; but at night, as long as we were silent, they would be easy enough to slip through.

It had rained most of the day and the sky was still heavily overcast when we set out. The water dripped from the trees, and the stream was running high, the noise of the flow combining with the croak of frogs downstream to cover most of our sound. We crawled on our stomachs through the brush till we came to the barbed wire, at a point where we had kept a break. Only Marcel cut a hand on the wire as we passed through, and he knew enough not to make a sound.

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