The Ship's Cat

Book excerpt: 1969. The Nigerian civil war has attracted a strange mix of idealists and mercenaries. We meet them in scenes of nightly chaos. Large aircraft come and go on this temporary airstrip in the bush. Overhead, Nigerian bombers wait for easy targets. Food and medical supplies come in, some dying babies leave. John A. Moose, a taciturn Canadian Indian working as a mechanic, and his friend Will van der Molen, watch the high hopes for a truly independent Black African nation collapse into a grim struggle for survival. And then a small problem appears in the form of a little boy, smuggled onto their airplane by a desperate mother. Unwilling to give his name he becomes Tim, John A.’s `pet African’. With the inevitable defeat, and retreat to a nearby Portuguese prison colony, Tim leaves his homeland and grows up as John A.’s son in the Canadian North. Seventeen years later, the strangest of circumstances pulls an unwilling John A. back to Nigeria on a seemingly impossible task. His adopted son insists on going along. A strange re-union of war veterans follows. Only Tim can find a way to save his troubled saviors.