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photograph was on it. ‘James Bond. Journalist. Agence Presse Libre’ it stated.
    ‘Right . . .’ Bond said slowly. ‘So I’m to be a journalist for this French press agency.’
    M smiled, knowingly. Bond knew he was enjoying himself, drip-feeding the information about his mission this way, toying with him.
    ‘Small, left-of-centre press agency. Good reputation. International reach,’ M said. ‘Your old friend René Mathis from the Deuxième Bureau arranged it all, cleared everything.’
    ‘And where am I going to be doing my journalism?’ Bond asked dutifully, playing along, knowing the answer.
    ‘Zanzarim.’
    ‘And what am I meant to do once I get there?’
    M smiled, again, more broadly. ‘Stop the war, of course.’
     
    Bond told his new secretary, Araminta Beauchamp (pronounced Beecham) that he was not to be disturbed and sat down at his desk to read through all the material on Zanzarim contained in the file that Moneypenny had handed him.
    Bond leafed through the newspaper cuttings. The civil war in Zanzarim had become an international crisis because of the mass malnutrition of civilians. There were many shocking and heart-rending images of starving children – stick figures with macrocephalic heads, protruding bellies and glaucous, staring, uncomprehending eyes. Bond selected a Foreign Office briefing document entitled ‘The Origins of the Zanzarim Civil War’ and began to read.
     
    Zanzarim had been a small stable West African country when it gained independence in 1964. The name of the country was changed and so was the name of the capital city – to Sinsikrou (it had been Gustavberg, Victoireville and Shackleton in its short colonial history). Zanzarim had a creditable balance of trade surplus, its main exports being cocoa beans, bananas, copper and timber. Then oil had been discovered in the Zanza River Delta – a vast, apparently limitless, subterranean ocean of oil. This benediction soon began to turn sour. The problem was that Zanzarim’s capital and seat of government, Sinsikrou, was in the north. The government, moreover, was dominated by the Lowele tribe, the largest in a country of some two dozen tribes. In the south, in the river delta, the paramount tribe was the Fakassa. All the oil deposits had been discovered squarely in the middle of the Fakassa’s tribal lands. Not surprisingly, the Fakassa viewed the prospect of an endless flow of petro-dollars as a blessing conferred primarily on them. The Zanzarim government, and the Lowele tribe, disagreed: the oil was for the benefit of the whole country and all Zanzaris regardless of their tribal affiliation. Internecine bickering ensued between Fakassa and Lowele representatives and became more aggressive as it seemed no compromise could be reached. There was a form of uneasy stalemate until 1967 when the first proper assessments of the potential reserves and the scale of their potential revenues were made known.
    In Port Dunbar, the central town in the river delta, 200,000 Fakassa took to the streets in protest against this Lowele ‘theft’ of their patrimony. There were anti-Fakassa riots in Sinsikrou and over 300 Fakassa were massacred by a rampaging Lowele mob. In the south a revanchist anti-Lowele pogrom took place – shops were burnt, traders expelled and their assets seized. Eight Lowele policemen, attempting to flee, were caught and lynched. As the trouble increased and more indiscriminate slaughter ensued, attempts to broker a peace by British and UN diplomats failed and tensions rose inexorably on both sides as massacre and counter-massacre occurred in a deadly and inhuman tit-for-tat. A rush of Fakassa refugees from elsewhere in Zanzarim fled into the tribal heartlands around Port Dunbar. Towards the end of 1967 the south of the country – effectively the Fakassa tribal lands – formally seceded from Zanzarim and a new independent state was created: the Democratic Republic of Dahum. Two brigades of the Zanzarim army