It could have been a scene right out of one of his own thrillers. And when his next novel is published, it may very well be.
British author Frederick (The Day of the Jackal) Forsyth jetted into coup-prone, cocaine-plagued Guinea-Bissau this week to research his latest novel, and found real life trumping fiction.
Hours before he touched down in the West African nation, a bomb hidden under a staircase blew apart the armed forces chief. Hours later the president was gunned down, and Forsyth said, hacked to pieces.
The double assassination of Guinea-Bissauan President Joao Bernardo “Nino” Vieira and his military rival, General Batiste Tagme na Waie, shocked Guinea-Bissau and clouded the equatorial capital in the kind of mystery and intrigue often detailed in Forsyth’s own fiction about assassins, spies and coups.
Forsyth’s presence there inevitably raised the association with his hit novel, The Dogs of War, about mercenaries trying to stage a coup in a mineral-rich, African backwater.
“I didn’t come for a coup d’etat or regime change, but that’s what I ran into,” Forsyth said over coffee at his hotel, where reporters found him.
He said he couldn’t sleep and was in his hotel bed reading when he heard a boom before dawn on Monday and thought, “That wasn’t a car door slamming.”
The explosion was blocks away at Vieira’s modest downtown villa — the beginning of the president’s end.
Forsyth went out that day and saw army troops patrolling the streets. They left him alone.
That night, he had dinner with the Dutch pathologist who autopsied Vieira and had spent the morning “trying to put the president back together again.”
Forsyth’s sources said the 71-year-old ruler survived an initial rocket attack, got up, was shot four times, then was “slung into the back of a pickup truck ... and cut to pieces with machetes” by soldiers bent on avenging their own chief’s death.
Forsyth said he came here for “the flavor, the odor, of a pretty washed up, impoverished, failed West African mangrove swamp.”
“I thought, what is the most disastrous part of West Africa, and by a mile, it’s Guinea-Bissau,” he said. “If you drive around you’ll see why: one wrecked building after another, one mountain of garbage after another. A navy with no ships, an air force with no airplanes. No infrastructure, no electricity. Everything is purchasable.”
Forsyth was a Royal Air Force pilot in the late 1950s, then spent 12 years as a foreign correspondent for the Reuters news agency and the BBC.
His first attempt at fiction, The Day of the Jackal, was about a plot to assassinate former French president Charles de Gaulle.
Published in 1971, it was an international best-seller.
In 1974 came The Dogs of War, set in the fictional nation of “Zangoro,” which he said was modeled after the oil-rich Central African dictatorship of Equatorial Guinea, 2,735km southeast of Guinea-Bissau.
Forsyth’s next novel, which he expects to publish next year, will be set in Guinea-Bissau.
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