The Dark of the Sun

The Congo during the political collapse that followed Belgian colonial rule. Mercenary officer Bruce Curry is ordered to lead a train through rebel-held territory and evacuate civilians from an isolated mining town. The stated mission is humanitarian, but the organisers are equally determined to recover a valuable consignment of industrial diamonds. Curry’s force includes soldiers with incompatible motives, and the journey soon becomes as dangerous because of internal hatred and greed as because of the fighting outside the train.

As communications fail and atrocities multiply, Curry must decide whom he can protect and which orders still deserve obedience. His relationship with Shermaine, a Belgian survivor, gives the mission a personal urgency, while racial hostility within the column threatens every attempt at discipline. The novel draws on the Congo Crisis and the Katanga secession to portray decolonisation as a struggle involving rebels, foreign mining interests, mercenaries and civilians trapped between them. It is a brutal historical adventure about the disintegration of authority and the moral limits of professional soldiering.