"If it has come to this, that you are conscripting somebody my age, then Biafra has died," the elderly man said quietly.

The second soldier was watching him.

The first soldier shouted, "Shut up your stinking mouth, agadi!" and slapped the elderly man.

"Stop that!" the second soldier said. He turned to the elderly man. "Papa, go."

"Eh?" The elderly man looked uncertain.

"Go, gawa."

The elderly man began to walk away, at first slowly and uncertainly, his hand rubbing the cheek where he had been slapped; then he broke into an unsteady run. Ugwu watched him disappear down the road and wished he could leap across and clutch his hand and be propelled along to freedom.

"Get into the van!" the first soldier said. It was as if the elderly man's leaving had angered him and that he held not the second soldier but the new conscripts responsible. He shoved the teenager and Ugwu. The teenager fell and quickly scrambled to his feet before they climbed into the back of the van. There were no seats; old raffia bags and rawhide canes and empty bottles lay scattered on the rusting floor. Ugwu was startled to see a boy sitting there, humming a song and drinking from an old beer bottle. Ugwu smelled the harshness of local gin as he lowered himself next to the boy and thought that perhaps he was a stunted man and not a boy.

"I am High-Tech," he said, and the scent of local gin became stronger.

"I am Ugwu." Ugwu glanced at his oversize shirt, tattered shorts, boots, and beret. He was indeed a boy. No more than thirteen. But the dry cynicism in his eyes made him seem much older than the teenager crumpled down opposite them.

"Gi kwanu? What is your own name?" High-Tech asked the teenager.

The teenager was sobbing. He looked familiar; perhaps he was one of the neighborhood boys who had fetched water at the borehole before dawn. Ugwu felt sorry for him and yet angry, too, because the teenager's crying made the hopelessness of their situation stark and final. They really had been conscripted. They really would be sent to the war front with no training.

"Aren't you a man?" High-Tech asked the teenager. "I bu nwanyi? Why are you behaving like a woman?"

The teenager had his hand pressed against his eyes as he cried. High-Tech's sneer turned into mocking laughter. "This one doesn't want to fight for our cause!"

Ugwu said nothing; High-Tech's laughter and the smell of gin nauseated him.

"I do rayconzar meechon," High-Tech announced, speaking English for the first time. Ugwu wanted to correct his pronunciation of reconnaissance mission; the boy certainly would benefit from Olanna's class.

"Our battalion is made up of field engineers and we use only the mighty ogbunigwe." High-Tech paused and belched, as if he expected delight from his listeners. The teenager kept crying. Ugwu listened without expression. He suspected it would be important to win High-Tech's respect, and he would succeed only by showing nothing of the fear that was crawling all over him.

"I am the one who detects where the enemy is. I move close by and climb trees and find out the exact location and then our commander will use my information to decide where to set up for our operation." High-Tech watched Ugwu and Ugwu kept his face indifferent. "With my last battalion I used to pretend that I was an orphan and infiltrate the enemy camp. They call me High-Tech because my first commander said I am better than any high-technology spying gadget." He sounded eager to impress Ugwu. Ugwu stretched out his legs.

"That word you call re-con-zar is reconnaissance" he said.

High-Tech looked at him for a moment and laughed and offered the bottle, but Ugwu shook his head. High-Tech shrugged and drank and hummed "Biafra Win the War," tapping his foot on the floor of the van. The teenager kept crying. The first soldier was at the wheel, smoking dried leaves rolled in paper and the smoke was pungent and the drive took so long that Ugwu could no longer hold his urge to urinate.

"Please, I want to piss!" he called out.

The soldier stopped the van and pointed his gun. "Step down and piss. You run, I shoot."

It was the same soldier who, when they arrived at the training camp, a former primary school with buildings sheathed in palm fronds, shaved Ugwu's hair with a piece of broken glass. The rough scraping left his scalp tender, littered with nicks. The mats and mattresses arranged in the classrooms crawled with vicious bedbugs. The skinny soldiers-with no boots, no uniforms, no half of a yellow sun on their sleeves-kicked and slapped and mocked Ugwu during physical training. The parade left Ugwu's arms stiff. The obstacles training left his calves throbbing. The rope-climbing left his palms bleeding. The wraps of garri hestood in line to receive, the thin soup scooped from a metal basin once a day, left him hungry. And the casual cruelty of this new world in which he had no say grew a hard clot of fear inside him.

A family of birds had nested on the roof of the classroom. In the mornings their chirping was interrupted by the sharp trill of the commander's whistle, a voice shouting "Fall in, fall in!" and the running and scrambling of men and boys. In the afternoons, the sun sapped energy and goodwill and the soldiers quarreled and played Biafran whot and spoke of the vandals they had blown up in past operations. When one of them said, "Our next operation will be very soon!" Ugwu's fear mixed with excitement at the thought that he was a soldier fighting for Biafra. If only he was with a real battalion, fighting with a gun. He remembered Professor Ekwenugo describing the ogbunigwe: "high-impact land mine." How glamorous it sounded, this Biafran-made mine, this Ojukwu Bucket, this wonder that was so perplexing to the vandals that they were said to send cattle herds ahead to understand just how the ogbunigwe killed so many. But when he went to the first training session, he stared at what was before him: a dull metal container full of scrap metal.

He wished he could tell Eberechi about his disappointment. He wanted to tell her, too, about the commander, the only one with a full uniform, sharply ironed and stiff, how he often barked into a two-way radio, and how, when the teenager tried to run away during a training session, he beat him with his bare hands until blood ran down the teenager's nose and then screamed, "Lock him in the guardroom!" Ugwu thought most about Eberechi when the village women came with wraps of garri, thin soup, and, once in a while, win-the-war rice cooked with some palm oil and little else. Sometimes younger women came and went in the commander's quarters and emerged with sheepish smiles. The sentries at the entrance always raised the barriers to let the women in, although they did not have to, since the women could easily walk in by the sides. Once Ugwu saw a figure with rounded rolling buttocks leaving the compound and he wanted to call out, Eberechi! although he knew it was not her. It was while looking for bits of paper on which he could write down what he did from day to day, for whenever he saw Eberechi again, that he found the book Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave: Written by Himself slipped into a tight corner beneath the blackboard. On the front page, property of government college was printed in dark blue. He sat on the floor and read. He finished it in two days and started again, rolling the words round his tongue, memorizing some sentences:

Even if it cost me my life, I was determined to read. Keep the black man away from the books, keep us ignorant, and we would always be his slaves.

High-Tech liked to sit next to him while he read. Sometimes he would hum Biafran songs in an annoying monotone, and other times he would chatter about this and that. Ugwu ignored him. But one afternoon the women did not bring any food, and a whole day went by with the grumbling of men. High-Tech nudged Ugwu at night and held out a tin of sardines. Ugwu grasped it. High-Tech laughed. "We have to share it," he said and Ugwu wondered how he managed to get it, how a child so young seemed so flexibly in control. They went to the back of the building and shared the oily fish.