The Dogs of War

1

There were no stars that night on the bush airstrip, nor any moon; just the West African darkness wrapping round the scattered groups like warm, wet velvet. The cloud cover was lying hardly off the tops of the iroko trees, and the waiting men prayed it would stay a while longer to shield them from the bombers.

At the end of the runway the battered old DC-4, which had just slipped in for a landing by runway lights that stayed alight for just the last fifteen seconds of final approach, turned and coughed its way blindly toward the palm-thatch huts.

Between two of them, five white men sat crouched in a Land Rover and stared toward the incoming aircraft. They said nothing, but the same thought was in each man’s mind. If they did not get out of the battered and crumbling enclave before the forces of the central government overran the last few square miles, they would not get out alive. Each man had a price on his head and intended to see that no man collected it. They were the last of the mercenaries who had fought on contract for the side that had lost. Now it was time to go. So they watched the incoming and unexpected cargo plane with silent attention.

A Federal MIG-17 night fighter, probably flown by one of the six East German pilots sent down over the past three months to replace the Egyptians, who had a horror of flying at night, moaned across the sky to the west. It was out of sight above the cloud layers.

The pilot of the taxiing DC-4, unable to hear the scream of the jet above him, flicked on his own lights to see where he was going, and from the darkness a voice cried uselessly, “Kill de lights!” When the pilot had got his bearings, he turned them off anyway, and the fighter above was miles away. To the south there was a rumble of artillery where the front had finally crumbled as men who had had neither food nor bullets for two months threw down their guns and headed for the protecting bush forest.

The pilot of the DC-4 brought his plane to a halt twenty yards from the Superconstellation already parked on the apron, killed the engines, and climbed down to the concrete. An African ran over to him and there was a muttered conversation. The two men walked through the dark toward one of the larger groups of men, a blob of black against the darkness of the palm forest. The group parted as the two from the tarmac approached, until the white man who had flown in the DC-4 was face to face with the one who stood in the center. The white man had never seen him before, but he knew of him, and, even in the darkness dimly illumined by a few cigarettes, he could recognize the man he had come to see.

The pilot wore no cap, so instead of saluting he inclined his head slightly. He had never done that before, not to a black, and could not have explained why he did it.

“My name is Captain Van Cleef,” he said in English accented in the Afrikaner manner.

The African nodded his acknowledgment, his bushy black beard brushing the front of his striped camouflage uniform as he did so.

“It’s a hazardous night for flying, Captain Van Cleef,” he remarked dryly, “and a little late for more supplies.”

His voice was deep and slow, the accent more like that of an English public-school man, which he was, than like an African. Van Cleef felt uncomfortable and again, as a hundred times during his run through the cloudbanks from the coast, asked himself why he had come.

“I didn’t bring any supplies, sir. There weren’t any more to bring.”

Another precedent set. He had sworn he would not call the man “sir.” Not a kaffir. It had just slipped out. But they were right, the other mercenary pilots in the hotel bar in Libreville, the ones who had met him. This one was different.

“Then why have you come?” asked the general softly. “The children perhaps? There are a number here the nuns would like to fly out to safety, but no more Caritas planes will come in tonight.”

Van Cleef shook his head, then realized no one could see the gesture. He was embarrassed, and thankful that the darkness hid it. Around him the bodyguards clutched their submachine carbines and stared at him.

“No. I came to collect you. If you want to come, that is.”

There was a long silence. He could feel the African staring at him through the gloom, occasionally caught a flash of eye-white as one of the attendants raised his cigarette.

“I see. Did your government instruct you to come in here tonight?”

“No,” said Van Cleef. “It was my idea.”

There was another long pause. The bearded head was nodding slowly in what could have been comprehension or bewilderment.

“I am very grateful,” said the voice. “It must have been quite a trip. Actually I have my own transport. The Constellation. Which I hope will be able to take me away to exile.”

Van Cleef felt relieved. He had no idea what the political repercussions would have been if he had flown back to Libreville with the general.

“I’ll wait till you’re off the ground and gone,” he said and nodded again. He felt like holding out his hand to shake, but did not know whether he ought. If he had but known it, the African general was in the same quandary. So he turned and walked back to his aircraft.

There was silence for a while in the group of black men after he had left.

“Why does a South African, and an Afrikaner, do a thing like that, General?” one of them asked.

There was a flash of teeth as the general smiled briefly. “I don’t think we shall ever understand that,” he said.

A match spluttered as another cigarette was lit, the glow setting for a parting instant into sharp relief the faces of the men in the group. At the center was the general, taller than all but two of the guards, heavily built with burly chest and shoulders, distinguishable from others at several hundred yards by the bushy black beard that half the world had come to recognize.

In defeat, on the threshold of an exile he knew would be lonely and humiliating, he still commanded. Surrounded by his aides and several ministers, he was as always slightly aloof, withdrawn. To be alone is one of the prices of leadership; with him it was also a state of reflex.

For two and a half years, sometimes by sheer force of personality when there was nothing else to employ, he had kept his millions of people together and fighting against the central Federal Government. All the experts had told the world they would have to collapse in a few weeks, two months at most. The odds were insuperable against them. Somehow they had kept fighting, surrounded, besieged, starving but defiant.

His enemies had refuted his leadership of his people, but few who had been there had any doubts. Even in defeat, as his car passed through the last village before the airstrip, the villagers had lined the mud road to chant their loyalty. Hours earlier, at the last meeting of the cabinet, the vote had asked him to leave.

There would be reprisals in defeat, the spokesman for the caucus said, but a hundred times worse if he remained. So he was leaving, the man the Federal Government wanted dead by sunrise.

By his side stood one of his confidants, one of those whose loyalty had not been changed. A small, graying professor, he was called Dr. Okoye. He had decided to remain behind, to hide in the bush until he could return quietly to his home when the first wave of reprisals had ended. The two men had agreed to wait six months before making the first steps to contact each other.

Farther up the apron, the five mercenaries sat and watched the dim figure of the pilot return to his plane. The leader sat beside the African driver, and all five were smoking steadily.

“It must be the South African plane,” said the leader and turned to one of the four other whites crouched in the Land Rover behind him. “Janni, go and ask the skipper if he’ll make room for us.”

A tall, rawboned, angular man climbed out of the rear of the vehicle. Like the others, he was dressed from head to foot in predominantly green jungle camouflage uniform, slashed with streaks of brown. He wore green canvas jackboots on his feet, the trousers tucked into them. From his belt hung a water bottle and a Bowie knife, three empty pouches for magazines for the FAL carbine over his shoulder. As he came round to the front of the Land Rover the leader called him again.

“Leave the FAL,” he said, stretching out an arm to take the carbine, “and, Janni, make it good, huh? Because if we don’t get out of here in that crate, we could get chopped up in a few days.”

The man called Janni nodded, adjusted the beret on his head, and ambled toward the DC-4. Captain Van Cleef did not hear the rubber soles moving up behind him.

“Naand, meneer.”

Van Cleef spun round at the sound of the Afrikaans and took in the shape and size of the man beside him. Even in the darkness he could pick out the black and white skull-and-crossbones motif on the man’s left shoulder. He nodded warily.

“Naand. Jy Afrikaans?”

The man nodded. “Jan Dupree,” he said and held out his hand.

“Kobus Van Cleef,” said the airman and shook.

“Waar gaan-jy nou?” asked Dupree.

“To Libreville. As soon as they finish loading. And you?”

Janni Dupree grinned. “I’m a bit stuck, me and my mates. We’ll get the chop for sure if the Federals find us. Can you help us out?”

“How many of you?” asked Van Cleef.

“Five in all.”

As a fellow mercenary, Van Cleef did not hesitate. Outlaws sometimes need each other.

“All right, get aboard. But hurry up. As soon as that Connie is off, so are we.”

Dupree nodded his thanks and jog-trotted back to the Land Rover. The four other whites were standing in a group round the hood.

“It’s okay, but we have to get aboard,” the South African told them.

“Right, dump the hardware in the back and let’s get moving,” said the group leader. As the rifles and ammunition pouches thumped into the back of the vehicle, he leaned over to the black officer with second lieutenant’s tabs who sat at the wheel.

“We have to go now,” he said. “Take the Land Rover and dump it. Bury the guns and mark the spot. Leave your uniform and go for bush. Understand?”

The lieutenant, who had been in his last term of high school when he volunteered to fight and had been with the mercenary-led commando unit for the past year, nodded somberly, taking in the instructions.

“G’by, Patrick,” the mercenary said. “I’m afraid it’s over now.”

The African looked up. “Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps it is over.”

“Don’t go on fighting,” urged the white man. “There’s no point.”

“Not now,” the lieutenant agreed. He nodded toward the steps of the Constellation, where the leader and his group were saying good-by. “But he is leaving for safety. That is good. He is still the leader. While he lives, we will not forget. We will say nothing, do nothing, but we will remember.”

He started the engine of the Land Rover and swung the vehicle into a turn. “Good-by,” he called.

The four other mercenaries called good-by and walked toward the DC-4.

The leader was about to follow them when two nuns fluttered up to him from the darkness of the bush behind the parking apron.

“Major.”

The mercenary turned and recognized the first of them as the sister he had met months earlier, when fighting had raged in the zone where she ran a hospital and he had been forced to evacuate the whole complex.

“Sister Mary Joseph! What are you doing here?”

The elderly Irish nun began talking earnestly, holding the stained uniform sleeve of his jacket.

He nodded. “I’ll try, I can do no more than that,” he said when she had finished.

He walked across the apron to where the South African pilot was standing under the wing of his DC-4, and the two of them talked for several minutes. Finally the man in uniform came back to the waiting nuns.

“He says yes, but you must hurry, Sister. He wants to get this crate off the ground as soon as he can.”

“God bless you,” said the figure in the white habit and gave hurried orders to her companion. The latter ran to the rear of the aircraft and began to climb the short ladder to the passenger door. The other scurried back to the shade of a patch of palms behind the parking apron, from which a file of men soon emerged. Each carried a bundle in his arms. At the DC-4 the bundles were passed up to the waiting nun at the top of the steps. Behind her the co-pilot watched her lay the first three side by side in the beginning of a row down the aircraft’s hull, then began gruffly to help, taking the bundles from the stretching hands beneath the aircraft’s tail and passing them inside.

“God bless you,” whispered the Irish nun.

One of the bundles deposited a few ounces of liquid green excrement onto the co-pilot’s sleeve. “Bloody hell,” he muttered and went on working.

Left alone, the leader of the group of mercenaries glanced toward the Superconstellation. A file of refugees, mainly the relations of the leaders of the defeated people, was climbing up the rear steps. In the dim light from the airplane’s door he caught sight of the man he wanted to see. As he approached, the man was about to mount the steps while others waited to pull them away. One of them called to him.

“Sah. Major Shannon come.”

The general turned as Shannon approached, and even at this hour he managed a grin.

“So, Shannon, do you want to come along?”

Shannon stepped in front of him and brought up a salute. The general acknowledged it.

“No thank you, sir. We have transport to Libreville. I just wanted to say good-by.”

“Yes. It was a long fight. Now it’s over, I’m afraid. For some years, at any rate. I find it hard to believe my people will continue to live in servitude forever. By the way, have you and your colleagues been paid up to the contract?”

“Yes, thank you, sir. We’re all up to date,” replied the mercenary. The African nodded somberly.

“Well, good-by, then. And thank you for all you were able to do.” He held out his hand, and the two men shook.

“There’s one more thing, sir,” said Shannon. “Me and the boys, we were talking things over, sitting in the jeep. If there’s ever any time— Well, if you should ever need us, you only have to let us know. We’ll all come. You only have to call. The boys want you to know that.”

The general stared at him for several seconds. “This night is full of surprises,” he said slowly. “You may not know it yet, but half my senior advisers and all of the wealthy ones are crossing the lines tonight to ingratiate themselves with the enemy. Most of the others will follow suit within a month. Thank you for your offer, Mr. Shannon. I will remember it. But how about yourselves? What do the mercenaries do now?”

“We’ll have to look around for more work.”

“Another fight, Major Shannon?”

“Another fight, sir.”

“But always somebody else’s.”

“That’s our way of life,” said Shannon.

“And you think you will fight again, you and your men?”

“Yes. We’ll fight again.”

The general laughed softly. “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war,” he murmured.

“Sir?”

“Shakespeare, Mr. Shannon, just a bit of Shakespeare. Well, now, I must go. The pilot is waiting. Good-by again, and good luck.”

He turned and walked up the steps into the dimly lit interior of the Superconstellation just as the first of the four engines coughed into life. Shannon stepped back and gave the man who had employed his services for a year and a half a last salute.

“Good luck to you,” he said, half to himself. “You’ll need it.”

He turned and walked back to the waiting DC-4. When the door had closed, Van Cleef kept the aircraft on the apron, engines turning, as he watched the dim droop-nosed shape of the Super Connie rumble down the runway through the gloom past his nose, and finally lift off. Neither plane carried any lights, but from the cockpit of the Douglas the Afrikaner could make out the three fins of the Constellation vanishing over the palm trees to the south and into the welcoming clouds. Only then did he ease the DC-4 forward to the take-off point.

It was close to an hour before Van Cleef ordered his co-pilot to switch on the cabin lights, an hour of jinking from cloudbank to cloudbank, breaking cover and scooting across low racks of altostratus to find cover again with another, denser bank, always seeking to avoid being caught out in the moonlit white plains by a roving MIG. Only when he knew he was far out over the gulf, with the coast many miles astern, did he allow the lights on.

Behind him they lit up a weird spectacle which could have been drawn by Dore in one of his blacker moods. The floor of the aircraft was carpeted with sodden and fouled blankets. Their previous contents lay writhing in rows down both sides of the cargo space, forty small children, shrunken, wizened, deformed by malnutrition. Sister Mary Joseph rose from her crouch behind the cabin door and began to move among the starvelings, each of whom had a piece of sticking plaster stuck to his or her forehead, just below the line of the hair long since turned to an ocher red by anemia. The plaster bore in ball-point letters the relevant information for the orphanage outside Libreville. Just name and number; they don’t give rank to losers.

In the tail of the plane the five mercenaries blinked in the light and glanced at their fellow passengers. They had seen it all before, many times, over the past months. Each man felt some disgust, but none showed it. You can get used to anything eventually. In the Congo, Yemen, Katanga, Sudan. Always the same story, always the kids. And always nothing you can do about it. So they reasoned, and pulled out their cigarettes.

The cabin lights allowed them to see one another properly for the first time since sundown the previous evening. The uniforms were stained with sweat and the red earth, and the faces drawn with fatigue. The leader sat with his back to the washroom door, feet straight out, facing up the fuselage toward the pilot’s cabin. Carlo Alfred Thomas Shannon, thirty-three, blond hair cropped to a ragged crew-cut. Very short hair is more convenient in the tropics because the sweat runs out easier and the bugs can’t get in. Nicknamed Cat Shannon, he came originally from County Tyrone in the province of Ulster. Sent by his father to be educated at a minor English public school, he no longer carried the distinctive accent of Northern Ireland. After five years in the Royal Marines, he had left to try his hand at civilian life and six years ago had found himself working for a London-based trading company in Uganda. One sunny morning he quietly closed his accounts ledgers, climbed into his Land Rover and drove westward to the Congolese border. A week later he signed on as a mercenary in Mike Hoare’s Fifth Commando at Stanleyville.

He had seen Hoare depart and John-John Peters take over, had quarreled with Peters and driven north to join Denard at Paulis, had been in the Stanleyville mutiny two years later and, after the Frenchman’s evacuation to Rhodesia with head wounds, had joined Black Jacques Schramme, the Belgian planter-turned-mercenary, on the long march to Bukavu and thence to Kigali. After repatriation by the Red Cross, he had promptly volunteered for another African war and had finally taken command of his own battalion. But too late to win, always too late to win.

He lay with his back against the washroom door as the DC-4 droned on toward Libreville and let his mind range back over the past year and a half. Thinking of the future was harder, for his claim to the general that he and his men would go to another war was based more on optimism than on foreknowledge. In fact he had no idea where the next job would come from. But although he could not know it that night in the plane, he and his men would fight again and would shake some mighty citadels before they finally went down.

To his immediate left sat the man who was arguably the best mortarman north of the Zambesi. Big Jan Dupree was twenty-eight and came from Paarl in Cape Province, a descendant of impoverished Huguenots whose ancestors had fled to the Cape of Good Hope from the wrath of Mazarin more than three hundred years ago. His hatchet face, dominated by a curved beak of a nose above a thin-lipped mouth, looked even more haggard than usual, his exhaustion furrowing deep lines down each cheek. The eyelids were down over the pale blue eyes, the sandy eyebrows and hair were smudged with dirt. He glanced down at the children lying along the aisle of the plane, muttered “Bliksems” (bastards) at the world of possession and privilege he held responsible for the ills of this planet, and tried to get to sleep.

By his side sprawled Marc Vlaminck, Tiny Marc, so called because of his vast bulk. A Fleming from Ostend, he stood 6 feet 3 inches in his socks, when he wore any, and weighed 250 pounds. Some people thought he might be fat. He was not. He was regarded with trepidation by the police of Ostend, for the most part peaceable men who would rather avoid problems than seek them out, and was viewed with kindly appreciation by the glaziers and carpenters of that city for the work he provided them. They said you could tell a bar where Tiny Marc had become playful by the number of artisans it needed to put it back together again.

An orphan, he had been brought up in an institution run by priests, who had tried to beat some sense of respect into the overgrown boy, and so repeatedly that even Marc had finally lost patience and, at the age of thirteen, laid one of the cane-wielding holy fathers cold along the flagstones with a single punch.

After that it had been a series of reformatories, then approved school, a dose of juvenile prison, and an almost communal sigh of relief when he enlisted in the paratroops. He had been one of the five hundred men who dropped onto Stanleyville with Colonel Laurent to rescue the missionaries whom the local Simba chief, Christophe Gbenye, threatened to roast alive in the main square.

Within forty minutes of hitting the airfield, Tiny Marc had found his vocation in life. After a week he went AWOL to avoid being repatriated to barracks in Belgium, and joined the mercenaries. Apart from his fists and shoulders, Tiny Marc was extremely useful with a bazooka, his favorite weapon, which he handled with the easy nonchalance of a boy with a peashooter.

The night he flew out of the enclave toward Libreville he was just thirty.

Across the fuselage from the Belgian sat Jean-Baptiste Langarotti, thirty-one. Short, compact, lean, and olive-skinned, he was a Corsican, born and raised in the town of Calvi. At the age of eighteen he had been called up by France to go and fight as one of the hundred thousand “appeles” in the Algerian war. Halfway through his eighteen months he had signed on as a regular and later had transferred to the 10th Colonial Paratroops, the dreaded red berets commanded by General Massu and known simply as les paras. He was twenty-one when the crunch came and some units of the professional French colonial army rallied to the cause of an eternally French Algeria, a cause embodied for the moment in the organization of the OAS. Langarotti went with the OAS, deserted, and, after the failure of the April 1961 putsch, went underground. He was caught in France three years later, living under a false name, and spent four years in prison, eating his heart out in the dark and sunless cells of first the Sante in Paris, then Tours, and finally the Ile de Re. He was a bad prisoner, and two guards would carry the marks to prove it until they died.

Beaten half to death several tunes for attacks on guards, he had served his full time without remission, and emerged in 1968 with only one fear in the world, the fear of small enclosed spaces, cells and holes. He had long since vowed never to return to one, even if staying out cost him his life, and to take half a dozen men with him if “they” ever came for him again. Within three months of release he had flown down to Africa by paying his own way, talked himself into a war, and joined Shannon as a professional mercenary. Since being released from prison he had practiced steadily with the weapon he had learned to use first as a boy in Corsica and with which he had later made himself a reputation in the back streets of Algiers. Round his left wrist he wore a broad leather razor strop, which was held in place by two press-studs. In moments of idleness he would take it off, turn it over to the side unmarked by the studs, and wrap it round his left fist. That was where it was as he whiled away the time to Libreville. In his right hand was the knife, the six-inch-bladed bone-handled weapon that he could use so fast it was back in its sleeve-sheath before the victim knew he’d been cut. In steady rhythm the blade, already razor-sharp, moved backward and forward across the tense leather of the strop, becoming with each stroke a mite sharper. The movement soothed his nerves. It also annoyed everybody else, but no one ever complained. Nor did those who knew him ever quarrel with the soft voice or the sad half-smile of the little man.

Sandwiched between Langarotti and Shannon was the oldest man in the party, a German. Kurt Semmler was forty, and it was he who, in the early days back in the enclave, had devised the skull-and-crossbones motif that the mercenaries and their African trainees wore. It was also he who had cleared a five-mile sector of Federal soldiers by marking out the front line with stakes, each bearing the head of one of the previous day’s Federal casualties. For a month after that, his was the quietest sector of the campaign. Born in 1930, he had been brought up in Hitler’s Germany, the son of a Munich engineer who had later died on the Russian front with the Todt Organisation.

At the age of fifteen, a fervent Hitler Youth graduate, as indeed was almost the entire youth of the country after twelve years of Hitler, he had commanded a small unit of children younger than himself and old men over seventy. His mission, armed with one Panzerfaust and three bolt-action rifles, had been to stop the columns of General George Patton’s tanks. Not surprisingly, he had failed, and spent his adolescence in Bavaria under American occupation, which he hated. He had little time for his mother, a religious fanatic who wanted him to become a priest. At seventeen he ran away, crossed the French frontier at Strasbourg, and signed on in the Foreign Legion at the recruiting office sited in Strasbourg for the purpose of picking up runaway Germans and Belgians. After a year in Sidi-bel-Abbes, he went with the expeditionary force to Indochina. Eight years and Dien Bien Phu later, with a lung removed by surgeons at Tourane (Danang), fortunately unable to watch the final humiliation in Hanoi, he was flown back to France. After recuperation he was sent to Algeria in 1958 as a top sergeant in the elite of the elite of the French colonial army, the ler Regiment Etranger Parachutiste. He was one of a handful who had already survived the utter destruction of the ler REP twice in Indochina, when it was at battalion size and later at regiment size. He revered only two men, Colonel Roger Faulques, who had been in the original Compagnie Etrangere Parachutiste when, at company strength, it had been wiped out the first time, and Commandant le Bras, another veteran, who now commanded the Garde Republicaine of the Republic of Gabon and kept that uranium-rich state safe for France. Even Colonel Marc Rodin, who had once commanded him, had lost his respect when the OAS finally crumbled.

Semmler had been in the ler REP when it marched to a man into perdition in the putsch of Algiers and was later disbanded permanently by Charles de Gaulle. He had followed where his French officers had led, and later, picked up just after Algerian independence in Marseilles in September 1962, had served two years in prison. His four rows of campaign ribbons had saved him from worse. A civilian for the first time in twenty years in 1964, he had been contacted by a former cellmate with a proposition—to join him in a smuggling operation in the Mediterranean. For three years, apart from one spent in an Italian jail, he had run spirits, gold, and occasionally arms from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. He had been making a fortune on the Italy-Yugoslavia cigarette run when his partner had double-crossed the buyers and the sellers at the same tune, pointed the finger at Semmler, and vanished with the money. Wanted by a lot of belligerent gentlemen, Semmler had hitched a hit by sea to Spam, ridden a series of buses to Lisbon, contacted an arms-dealer friend, and taken passage to the African war, about which he had read in the papers. Shannon had taken him like a shot, for with sixteen years of combat he was more experienced than all of them in jungle warfare. He too dozed on the flight to Libreville.

It was two hours before dawn when the DC-4 began to circle the airport. Above the mewling of the children, another sound could be made out, the sound of a man whistling. It was Shannon. His colleagues knew he always whistled when he was going into action or coming out of it. They also knew from Shannon that the tune was called “Spanish Harlem.”

The DC-4 circled the airport at Libreville twice while Van Cleef talked to ground control. As the old cargo plane rolled to a halt at the end of a runway, a military jeep carrying two French officers swerved up in front of the nose; they beckoned Van Cleef to follow them round the taxi track.

They led him away from the main airport buildings to a cluster of huts on the far side of the airport, and it was here that the DC-4 was signaled to halt but keep its engines running. Within seconds a set of steps was up against the rear of the airplane, and from the inside the co-pilot heaved open the door. A kepi poked inside and surveyed the ulterior, the nose beneath it wrinkling in distaste at the smell. The French officer’s eyes came to rest on the five mercenaries, and he beckoned them to follow him down the tarmac. When they were on the ground the officer gestured to the co-pilot to close the door, and without more ado the DC-4 moved forward again to roll around the airport to the main buildings, where a team of French Red Cross nurses and doctors was waiting to receive the children. As the aircraft swung past them, the five mercenaries waved their thanks to Van Cleef up in his flight deck and turned to follow the French officer.

They had to wait an hour in one of the huts, perched uncomfortably on upright wooden chairs, while several other young French servicemen peeked in through the door to take a look at les affreux, the terrible ones. Finally a jeep squealed to a halt outside and there was the smack of feet coming to attention in the corridor. When the door opened it was to admit a tanned, hard-faced senior officer in tropical fawn uniform and a kepi with gold braid ringing the peak. Shannon took in the keen, darting eyes, the iron-gray hair cropped short beneath the kepi, the parachutist’s wings pinned above the five rows of campaign ribbons, and the sight of Semmler leaping to ramrod attention, chin up, five fingers pointing straight down what had once been the seams of his combat trousers. Shannon needed no more to tell him who the visitor was—the legendary Le Bras.

The Indochina/Algeria veteran shook hands with each, pausing in front of Semmler longer.

“Alors, Semmler?” he said softly, with a slow smile. “Still fighting. But not an adjutant any more. A captain now, I see.”

Semmler was embarrassed. “Oui, mon commandant —pardon, mon colonel. Just temporary.”

Le Bras nodded pensively several times. Then he addressed them all. “I will have you quartered comfortably. No doubt you will appreciate a bath, a shave, and some food. Apparently you have no other clothes; some will be provided. I am afraid for the time being you will have to remain confined to your quarters. This is solely a precaution. There are a lot of newspapermen in town, and all forms of contact with them must be avoided. As soon as it is feasible, we will arrange to fly you back to Europe.”

He had said all he came to say. Raising his right hand to his kepi brim, he left.

An hour later, after a journey in a closed truck and entrance by the back door, the men were in their quarters, the five bedrooms of the top floor of the Gamba Hotel, a new construction situated only five hundred yards from the airport building across the road, and therefore miles from the center of town. The young officer who accompanied them told them they would have to take their meals in their rooms and remain there until further notice. He provided them with towels, razors, toothpaste and brushes, soap, and sponges. A tray of coffee had already arrived, and each man sank gratefully into a deep, steaming, soap-smelling bath, the first in more than six months.

At noon an army barber came, and a corporal with piles of slacks and shirts, underwear and socks, pajamas and canvas shoes. They tried them on and selected the ones they wanted, and the corporal retired with the surplus. The officer was back at one with four waiters bearing lunch, and told them they must stay away from the balconies. If they wanted to exercise in their confinement they would have to do it in their rooms. He would return that evening with a selection of books and magazines, though he could not promise English or Afrikaans.

After eating as they never had in the previous six months, since their last leave period from the fighting, the five men rolled into bed and slept. While they snored on unaccustomed mattresses between unbelievable sheets, Van Cleef lifted his DC-4 off the tarmac in the dusk, flew a mile away past the windows of the Gamba Hotel, and headed south for Caprivi and Johannesburg. His job was done.

The five mercenaries spent four weeks on the top floor of the hotel, while press interest in them died down and the reporters were all called back to their head offices by editors who saw no point in keeping men in a city where there was no news to be had. One evening, without warning, a captain on the staff of Commandant le Bras came to see the men. He grinned broadly.

“Messieurs, I have news for you. You are flying out tonight. To Paris. You are all booked on the Air Afrique flight at twenty-three-thirty hours.”

The five men, bored to distraction by their prolonged confinement, cheered.

The flight to Paris took ten hours, with stops at Douala and Nice. Just before ten the following day they emerged into the blustery cold of Le Bourget airport on a mid-February morning. In the airport coffee lounge they said their good-bys. Dupree elected to take the transit coach to Orly and buy himself a single ticket on the next SAA flight to Johannesburg and Cape Town. Semmler opted to go too, but first he would return to Munich for a visit. Vlaminck said he would head for the Gare du Nord and take the first express to Brussels and connect for Ostend. Langarotti was going to the Gare de Lyon to take the train to Marseilles.

They agreed to stay in touch and looked to Shannon. He was their leader; it would be up to him to look for work, another contract, another war. Similarly, if any of them heard of anything that involved a group, he would want to contact one of the group, and Shannon was the obvious one.

“I’ll stay in Paris for a while,” said Shannon. “There’s more chance of an interim job here than in London.”

So they exchanged addresses—poste restante addresses, or cafés where the barman would pass on a message or keep a letter until the addressee dropped in for a drink. And then they parted and went their separate ways.

The security surrounding their flight back from Africa had been tight, and there were no waiting newspaperman at Le Bourget. But someone had heard of their arrival, for he was waiting for Shannon when, after the others had left, the group’s leader came out of the terminal building.

“Shannon.” The voice pronounced the name in the French way, and the tone was not friendly. Shannon turned, and his eyes narrowed fractionally as he saw the figure standing ten yards from him. The man was burly, with a down-turned mustache. He wore a heavy coat against the winter cold and walked forward until the two men faced each other at two feet. To judge by the way they surveyed each other, there was no love lost between them.

“Roux,” said Shannon.

“So, you’re back,” snarled the Frenchman.

“Yes. We’re back.”

The man called Roux sneered. “And you lost.”

“We didn’t have much choice,” said Shannon.

“A word of advice, my friend,” snapped Roux. “Go back to your own country. Do not stay here. It would be unwise. This is my city. If there is any contract to be found here, I will hear first news of it, I will conclude it. And I will select those who share in it.”

For answer Shannon walked to the first taxi waiting at the curb and humped his bag into the back. Roux walked after him, his face mottling with anger.

“Listen to me, Shannon. I’m warning you—”

The Irishman turned to face him again. “No, you listen to me, Roux. I’ll stay in Paris just as long as I want. I was never impressed by you in the Congo, and I’m not now. So get stuffed.”

As the taxi moved away, Roux stared after it angrily. He was muttering to himself as he strode toward the parking lot and his own automobile.

He switched on the engine, slipped into gear, and sat for a few moments staring through the windscreen. “One day I’ll kill that bastard,” he murmured to himself. But the thought hardly put him in a better mood.

2

Jack Mulrooney shifted his bulk on the canvas-and-frame cot beneath the mosquito netting and watched the slow lightening of the darkness above the trees to the east. A faint paling, enough to make out the trees towering over the clearing. He drew on his cigarette and cursed the primeval jungle which surrounded him, and, like all old Africa hands, asked himself once again why he ever returned to the pestiferous continent.

If he had really tried to analyze himself, he would have admitted he could not live anywhere else, certainly not in London or even Britain. He couldn’t take the cities, the rules and regulations, the taxes, the cold. Like all old hands, he alternately loved and hated Africa but conceded it had got into his blood over the past quarter-century, along with the malaria, the whisky, and the million insect stings and bites.

He had come out from England in 1945 at the age of twenty-five, after five years as a fitter in the Royal Air Force, part of them at Takoradi, where he had assembled crated Spitfires for onward flight to East Africa and the Middle East the long way around. That had been his first sight of Africa, and on demobilization he had taken his discharge pay, bidden good-by to frozen, rationed London in December 1945, and taken ship for West Africa. Someone had told him there were fortunes to be made in Africa.

He had found no fortunes but after wandering the continent had got himself a small tin concession in the Benue Plateau, eighty miles from Jos in Nigeria. Prices had been good while the Malay emergency was on. He had worked alongside his Tiv laborers, and at the English club where the colonial ladies gossiped away the last days of the empire they said he had “gone native” and it was a damned bad show. The truth , was, Mulrooney really preferred the African way of life. He liked the bush; he liked the Africans, who did not seem to mind that he swore and roared and cuffed them to get more work done. He also sat and took palm wine with them and observed the tribal taboos. He did not patronize them. His tin concession ran out in 1960, around the time of independence, and he went to work as a charge hand for a company running a larger and more efficient concession nearby. It was called Manson Consolidated, and when that concession also was exhausted, in 1962, he was signed on the staff.

At fifty he was still a big, powerful man, large-boned and strong as an ox. His hands were enormous, chipped and scarred by years in the mines. He ran one of them through his wild, crinkly gray hair and with the other stubbed out the cigarette in the damp red earth beneath the cot. It was lighter now; soon it would be dawn. He could hear his cook blowing on the beginnings of a fire on the other side of the clearing.

Mulrooney called himself a mining engineer, although he had no degree in mining or engineering. He had taken a course in both and added what no university could ever teach — twenty-five years of hard experience. He had burrowed for gold on the Rand and copper outside Ndola; drilled for precious water in Somaliland, grubbed for diamonds in Sierra Leone. He could tell an unsafe mineshaft by instinct, and the presence of an ore deposit by the smell. At least that was his claim, and after he had drunk his habitual twenty bottles of beer in the shanty town of an evening, no one was going to argue with him. In reality, he was one of the last of the old prospectors. He knew ManCon gave him the little jobs, the ones in the deep bush, the wild country that was miles from civilization and still had to be checked out, but he liked it that way. He preferred to work alone; it was his way of life.

The latest job had certainly fulfilled these conditions. For three months he had been prospecting in the foothills of the range called the Crystal Mountains in the hinterland of the republic of Zangaro, a tiny enclave on the coast of West Africa.

He had been told where to concentrate his survey, around the Crystal Mountain itself. The chain of large hills, curved hummocks rising to two or three thousand feet, ran in a line from one side of the republic to the other, parallel to the coast and forty miles from it. The range divided the coastal plain from the hinterland. There was only one gap in the chain, and through it ran the only access to the interior, a narrow dirt road, baked like concrete in summer, a quagmire in winter. Beyond the mountains, the natives were the Vindu, a tribe of almost Iron Age development, except that their implements were of wood. He had been in some wild places but vowed he had never seen anything as backward as the hinterland of Zangaro.

Set on the farther side of the range of hills was the single mountain that gave its name to the rest. It was not even the biggest of them. Forty years earlier a lone missionary, penetrating the hills into the ulterior, branched to the south after following the gap in the range and after twenty miles glimpsed a hill set aside from the rest. It had rained the previous night, a torrential downpour, one of the many that gave the area its annual rainfall of three hundred inches during five soaking months. As the priest looked, he saw that the mountain seemed to be glittering in the morning sun, and he called it the Crystal Mountain. He noted this in his diary. Two days later he was clubbed and eaten.

The diary was found by a patrol of colonial soldiers a year later, being used as a juju by a local village. The soldiers did their duty and wiped out the village, then returned to the coast and handed the diary to the mission society. Thus the name the priest had given to the mountain lived on, even if nothing else he did for an ungrateful world was remembered. Later the same name was given to the entire range of hills.

What the man had seen in the morning light was not crystal but a myriad of streams caused by the water of the night’s rain cascading off the mountain. Rain was also cascading off all the other mountains, but the sight of it was hidden by the dense jungle vegetation that covered them all, like a chunky green blanket when seen from afar, which proved to be a steaming hell when penetrated. The one that glittered with a thousand rivulets did so because the vegetation was substantially thinner on the flanks of this hill. It never occurred to the missionary, or to any of the other dozen white men who had ever seen it, to wonder why.

After three months living in the steaming hell of the jungles that surrounded Crystal Mountain, Mulrooney knew why.

He had started by circling the entire mountain and had discovered that there was effectively a gap between the seaward flank and the rest of the chain. This set the Crystal Mountain eastward of the main chain, standing on its own. Because it was lower than the highest peaks to seaward, it was invisible from the other side. Nor was it particularly noticeable in any other way, except that it had more streams running off it per mile of hillside than ran off the other hills, to north and south.

Mulrooney counted them all, both on the Crystal Mountain and on its companions. There was no doubt of it. The water ran off the other mountains after rain, but a lot of water was soaked up in the soil. The other mountains had twenty feet of topsoil over the basic rock structure beneath, the Crystal Mountain hardly any. He had his native workers, locally recruited

Vindu, bore a series of holes with the augur he had with him, and confirmed the difference in depth of the topsoil in twenty places. From these he would work out why.

Over millions of years the earth had been formed by the decomposition of the rock and by dust carried on the wind, and although each rainfall had eroded some of it down the slopes into the streams, and from the streams to the rivers and thence to the shallow, silted estuary, some earth had also remained, lodged in little crannies, left alone by the running water, which had bored its own holes in the soft rock. And these holes had become drains, so that part of the rainfall ran off the mountain, finding its own channels and wearing them deeper and deeper, and some had sunk into the mountain, both having the effect of leaving part of the topsoil intact. Thus the earth layer had built up and up, a little thicker each century or millennium. The birds and the wind had brought seeds, which had found the niches of earth and flourished there, their roots contributing to the process of retaining the earth on the hill slopes. When Mulrooney saw the hills, there was enough rich earth to sustain mighty trees and tangled vines which covered the slopes and the summits of all the hills. All except one.

On this one the water could not burrow channels that became streams, nor could it sink into the rock face, especially on the steepest face, which was to the east, toward the hinterland. Here the earth had collected in pockets, and the pockets had produced clumps of bush, grass, and fern. From niche to niche the vegetation had reached out to itself, linking vines and tendrils in a thin screen across bare patches of rock regularly washed clean by the falling water of the rain season. It was these patches of glistening wet amid the green that the missionary had seen before he died. The reason for the change was simple: the separate hill was of a different rock from the main range, an ancient rock, hard as granite as compared to the soft, more recent rock of the main chain of hills.

Mulrooney had completed his circuit of the mountain and established this beyond a doubt. It took him a fortnight to do it and to establish that no less than seventy streams ran off the Crystal Mountain. Most of them joined up into three main streams that flowed away eastward out of the foothills into the deeper valley. He noticed something else. Along the banks of the streams that came off this mountain, the soil color and the vegetation were different. Some plants appeared unaffected; others were stunted or nonexistent, although they flourished on the other mountains and beside the other streams.

Mulrooney set about charting the seventy streams, drawing his map as he went. He also took samples of the sand and gravel along the beds of the streams, starting with the surface gravel, then working down to bedrock.

In each case he took two buckets full of gravel, poured them out onto a tarpaulin, and coned and quartered. This is a process of sample-taking. He piled the gravel into a cone, then quartered it with a shovel blade, took the two opposite quarters of his choice, remixed them, and made another cone. Then he quartered that one, working down till he had a cross-section of the sample weighing two to three pounds. Then this went into a polyethylene-lined canvas bag after drying; the bag was sealed and carefully labeled. In a month he had fifteen hundred pounds of sand and gravel in six hundred bags from the beds of the seventy streams. Then he started on the mountain itself.

He already believed his sacks of gravel would prove to contain, under laboratory examination, quantities of alluvial tin, minute particles washed down from the mountain over tens of thousands of years, showing that there was cassiterite, or tin ore, buried in the Crystal Mountain.

He divided the mountain faces into sections, seeking to identify the birthplaces of the streams and the rock faces that fed them in the wet season. By the end of the week he knew there was no mother lode of tin inside the rock, but suspected what geologists called a disseminated deposit. The signs of mineralization were everywhere. Beneath the trailing tendrils of vegetation he found faces of rock shot through with stringers, half-inch-wide veins like the capillaries in a drinker’s nose, of milky-white quartz, lacing yard after yard of bare rock face.

Everything he saw about him said “tin.” He went right around the mountain again three times, and his observations confirmed the disseminated deposit, the ever-present stringers of white in the dark gray rock. With hammer and chisel he smashed holes deep in the rock, and the picture was still the same. Sometimes he thought he saw dark blurs in the quartz, confirming the presence of tin.

Then he began chipping in earnest, marking his progress as he went. He took samples of the pure white stringers of quartz, and to be on the safe side he also took samples of the country rock, the rock between the veins. Three months after he had entered the primeval forest east of the mountains, he was finished. He had another fifteen hundred pounds of rock to carry back to the coast with him. The whole ton and a half of rock and alluvial samples had been carried in portions every three days back from his working camp to the mam camp, where he now lay waiting for dawn, and stacked in cones under tarpaulins.

After coffee and breakfast the bearers, whose terms he had negotiated the previous day, would come from the village and carry his trophies back to the track that called itself a road and linked the hinterland with the coast. There, in a roadside village, lay his two-ton truck, immobilized by the absence of the key and distributor rotor that lay in his knapsack. It should still work, if the natives had not hacked it to bits. He had paid the village chief enough to look after it. With his samples aboard the truck and twenty porters walking ahead to pull the lurching vehicle up the gradients and out of the ditches, he would be back in the capital in three days. After a cable to London, he would have, to wait several days for the company’s chartered ship to come and take him off. He would have preferred to turn north at the coast highway and drive the extra hundred miles into the neighboring republic, where there was a good airport, and freight his samples home. But the agreement between ManCon and the Zangaran government specified that he would take them back to the capital.

Jack Mulrooney heaved himself out of his cot, swung aside the netting, and roared at his cook, “Hey, Dinga-ling, where’s my bloody coffee?”

The Vindu cook, who did not understand a word except “coffee,” grinned from beside the fire and waved happily. Mulrooney strode across the clearing toward his canvas washbucket and began scratching as the mosquitoes descended on his sweating torso.

“Bloody Africa,” he muttered as he doused his face. But he was content that morning. He was convinced he had found both alluvial tin and tin-bearing rock. The only question was how much tin per rock-ton. With tin standing at about $3300 per ton, it would be up to the analysts and mining economists to work out if the quantity of tin per ton of rock merited establishing a mining camp with its complex machinery and teams of workers, not to mention improved access to the coast by a narrow-gauge railway that would have to be built from scratch. And it was certainly a godforsaken and inaccessible place. As usual, everything would be worked out, taken up or thrown away, on the basis of pounds, shillings, and pence. That was the way of the world. He slapped another mosquito off his upper arm and pulled on his T-shirt.

Six days later Jack Mulrooney leaned over the rail of a small coaster chartered by his company and spat over the side as the coast of Zangaro slid away.

“Bloody bastards,” he muttered savagely. He carried a series of livid bruises about his chest and back, and a raw graze down one cheek, the outcome of swinging rifle butts when the troops had raided the hotel.

It had taken him two days to bring his samples from the deep bush to the track, and another grunting, sweating day and night to haul the truck along the pitted and rutted earth road from the interior to the coast. In the wet he would never have made it, and in the dry season, which had another month to run, the concrete-hard mud ridges had nearly smashed the Mercedes to pieces. Three days earlier he had paid and dismissed his Vindu workers and trundled the creaking truck down the last stretch to the blacktop road which started only fourteen miles from the capital. From there it had been an hour to the city and the hotel.

Not that “hotel” was the right word. Since independence, the town’s main hostelry had degenerated into a flophouse, but it had a parking lot, and here he had parked and locked the truck, then sent his cable. He had only just been in time. Six hours after he sent it, all hell broke loose, and the port, airport, and all other communications had been closed by order of the President.

The first he had known about it was when a group of soldiers, dressed like tramps and wielding rifles by the barrels, had burst into the hotel and started to ransack the rooms. There was no point in asking what they wanted, for they only screamed back in a lingo that meant nothing to him, though he thought he recognized the Vindu dialect he had heard his workers using over the past three months.

Being Mulrooney, he had taken two clubbings from rifle butts, then swung a fist. The blow carried the nearest soldier halfway down the hotel corridor on his back, and the rest of the pack had gone wild. It was only by the grace of God no shots were fired, and also owing to the fact that the soldiers preferred to use their guns as clubs rather than search for complicated mechanisms like triggers and safety catches.

He had been dragged to the nearest police barracks and had been alternately screamed at and ignored in a subterranean cell for two days. He had been lucky. A Swiss businessman, one of the rare foreign visitors to the republic, had witnessed his departure and feared for his life. The man had looked through Mulrooney’s belongings and contacted the Swiss embassy, one of the only six European and North American embassies in the town, and it had contacted ManCon.

Two days later the called-for coaster had arrived from farther up the coast, and the Swiss consul had negotiated Mulrooney’s release. No doubt a bribe had been paid, and no doubt ManCon would foot the bill. Jack Mulrooney was still aggrieved. On release he had found his truck broken open and his samples strewn all over the parking lot. The rocks had all been marked and could be reassembled, but the sand, gravel, and chippings were mixed up. Fortunately each of the split bags, about fifty in all, had half its contents intact, so he had resealed them and taken them to the boat. Even here the customs men, police, and soldiers had searched the boat from stem to stern, screamed and shouted at the crew, and all without saying what they were looking for.

The terrified official from the Swiss consulate who had taken Mulrooney back from the barracks to his hotel had told him there had been rumors of an attempt on the President’s life and the troops were looking for a missing senior officer who was presumed to be responsible.

Four days after leaving the port of Clarence, Jack Mulrooney, still nursemaiding his rock samples, arrived back at Luton, England, aboard a chartered aircraft. A truck took his samples away for analysis at Watford, and after a checkout by the company doctor he was allowed to start his three weeks’ leave. He went to spend it with his sister in Dulwich and within a week was thoroughly bored.

Exactly three weeks later to the day, Sir James Man-son, Knight of the British Empire, chairman and managing director of Manson Consolidated Mining Company Limited, leaned back in his leather armchair in the penthouse office suite on the tenth floor of his company’s London headquarters, glanced once more at the report in front of him and breathed, “Jesus Christ.”

He rose from behind the broad desk, crossed the room to the picture windows on the south face, and gazed down at the sprawl of the City of London, the inner square mile of the ancient capital and heart of a financial empire that was still worldwide, despite what its detractors said. To some of the scuttling beetles in somber gray, topped by black bowler hats, it was perhaps a place of employment only, boring, wearisome, exacting its toll of a man, his youth, his manhood, his middle age, until final retirement. For others, young and hopeful, it was a palace of opportunity, where merit and hard work were rewarded with the prizes of advancement and security. To romantics it was no doubt the home of the houses of the great merchant-adventurers, to a pragmatist the biggest market in the world, and to a left-wing trade unionist a place where the idle and worthless rich, born to wealth and privilege, lolled at ease in luxury. James Manson was a cynic and a realist. He knew what the City was; it was a jungle pure and simple, and in it he was one of the panthers.

A born predator, he had nevertheless realized early that there were certain rules that needed to be publicly revered and privately ripped to shreds; that, as in politics, there was only one commandment, the eleventh, “Thou shalt not be found out.” It was by obeying the first requirement that he had acquired his knighthood in the New Year’s Honours List a month before. This had been proposed by the Conservative Party (ostensibly for services to industry, but in reality for secret contributions to party funds for the general election), and accepted by the Wilson government because of his support for its policy on Nigeria. And it was by fulfilling the second requirement that he had made his fortune and now, holding twenty-five per cent of the stock of his own mining corporation and occupying the penthouse floor, was a millionaire several times over.

He was sixty-one, short, aggressive, built like a tank, with a thrusting vigor and a piratical ruthlessness that women found attractive and competitors feared. He had enough cunning to pretend to show respect for the establishments of both the City and the realm, of commercial and political life, even though he was aware that both organs were rife with men of almost complete moral unscrupulousness behind the public image. He had collected a few on his board of directors, including two former ministers in Conservative administrations. Neither was averse to a fat supplementary fee over and above director’s salary, payable in the Cayman Islands or Grand Bahama—and one, to Manson’s knowledge, enjoyed the private diversion of waiting at table upon three or four leather-clad tarts, himself dressed in a maid’s cap, a pinafore, and a bright smile. Manson regarded both men as useful, possessing the advantage of considerable influence and superb connections without the inconvenience of integrity. The rest of the public knew both men as distinguished public servants. So James Manson was respectable within the set of rules of the City, a set of rules that had nothing whatever to do with the rest of humanity.

It had not always been so, which was why inquirers into his background found themselves up against one blank wall after another. Very little was known of his start in life, and he knew enough to keep it that way. He would let it be known that he was the son of a Rhodesian train-driver, brought up not far from the sprawling copper mines of Ndola, Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia. He would even let it be known that he had started work at the minehead as a boy and later had made his first fortune in copper. But never how he had made it.

In fact he had quit the mines quite early, before he was twenty, and had realized that the men who risked their lives below ground amid roaring machinery would never make money, not big money. That lay above ground, and not even in mine management. As a teenager he had studied finance, the using and manipulating of money, and his nightly studies had taught him that more was made in shares in copper in a week than a miner made in his whole life.

He had started as a share-pusher on the Rand, had peddled a few illicit diamonds in his time, started a few rumors that sent the punters reaching into their pockets, and sold a few worked-out claims to the gullible. That was where the first fortune came from. Just after the Second World War, at thirty-five, he was in London with the right connections for a copper-hungry Britain trying to get its industries back to work, and in 1948 had founded his own mining company. It had gone public in the mid-fifties and in fifteen years had developed worldwide interests. He was one of the first to see Harold Macmillan’s wind of change blowing through Africa as independence for the black republics approached, and he took the trouble to meet and know most of the new power-hungry African politicians while most City businessmen were still deploring independence in the former colonies.

When he met the new men, it was a good match. They could see through his success story, and he could see through their professed concern for their fellow blacks. They knew what he wanted, and he knew what they wanted. So he fed their Swiss bank accounts, and they gave Manson Consolidated mining concessions at prices below par for the course. ManCon prospered.

James Manson had also made several fortunes on the side. His latest was in the shares of the nickel-mining company in Australia called Poseidon. When Poseidon shares in late summer 1969 had been standing at four shillings, he had got a whisper that a survey team in central Australia might have found something on a stretch of land whose mining rights were owned by Poseidon. He had taken a gamble and paid out a very hefty sum to have a sneak preview of the first reports coming out of the interior. Those reports said nickel, and lots of it. In fact nickel was not in shortage on the world market, but that never deterred the punters, and it was they who sent share prices spiraling, not investors.

He contacted his Swiss bank, an establishment so discreet that its only way of announcing its presence in the world was a small gold plate no larger than a visiting card, set into the wall beside a solid oak door in a small street in Zurich. Switzerland has no stockbrokers; the banks do all the investments. Manson instructed Dr. Martin Steinhofer, the head of the investments section of the Zwingli Bank, to buy on his behalf five thousand Poseidon shares. The Swiss banker contacted the prestigious London firm of Joseph Sebag & Co., in the name of Zwingli, and placed the order. Poseidon stood at five shillings a share when the deal was concluded.

The storm broke in late September when the size of the Australian nickel deposit became known. The shares began to rise, and, assisted by helpful rumors, the rising spiral became a rush. Sir James Manson had intended to start to sell when they reached £50 a share, but so vast was the rise that he held on. Finally he estimated that the peak would be £115 and ordered Dr. Steinhofer to start selling at £100 a share. This the discreet Swiss banker did and cleared the lot at an average of £ 103 for each share. In fact the peak was reached at £120 a share, before common sense began to prevail and the shares slid back to £ 10. Man-son did not mind the extra £20, for he knew the time to sell was just before the peak, when buyers are still plentiful. With all fees paid, he netted a cool £500,-000, which was still stashed in the Zwingli Bank.

It happens to be illegal for a British citizen and resident to have a foreign bank account without informing the Treasury, and also to make half a million sterling profit in sixty days without paying capital gains tax on it. But Dr. Steinhofer was a Swiss resident, and

Dr. Steinhofer would keep his mouth shut. That was what Swiss banks were for.

On that mid-February afternoon Sir James Manson, strolled back to his desk, sat back in the lush leather chair behind it, and glanced again at the report that lay on the blotter. It had arrived in a large envelope, sealed with wax and marked for his eyes only. It was signed at the bottom by Dr. Gordon Chalmers, the head of ManCon’s Department of Study, Research, Gee-Mapping, and Sample Analysis, situated outside London. It was the analyst’s report on tests conducted on the samples a man called Mulrooney had apparently brought back from a place called Zangaro three weeks earlier.

Dr. Chalmers did not waste words. The summary of the report was brief and to the point. Mulrooney had found a mountain, or a hill, some 1800 feet high above ground level and close to 1000 yards across the base. It was set slightly apart from a range of such mountains in the hinterland of Zangaro. The hill contained a widely disseminated deposit of mineral in apparently evenly consistent presence throughout the rock, which was of igneous type and millions of years older than the sandstone and ragstone of the mountains that surrounded it.

Mulrooney had found numerous, and ubiquitous stringers of quartz and had predicated the presence of tin. He had returned with samples of the quartz, the country rock surrounding it, and shingle from the beds of the streams surrounding the hill. The quartz stringers did indeed contain small quantities of tin. But it was the country rock that was interesting. Repeated and varied tests showed that this country rock, and the gravel samples, contained minor quantities of low-grade nickel. They also contained remarkable quantities of platinum. It was present in all the samples and was fairly evenly distributed. The richest rock in platinum known in this world was in the Rustenberg mines in South Africa, where concentrations or “grades” ran as high as Point Two Five of a Troy ounce per rock ton. The average concentration in the Mulrooney samples was Point Eight One. I have the honour to remain, Sir, Yours, etc …

Sir James Manson knew as well as anyone in mining that platinum was the third most precious metal in the world, and stood at a market price of $130 a Troy ounce as he sat in his chair. He was also aware that, with the growing world hunger for the stuff, it had to rise to at least $150 an ounce over the next three years, probably to $200 within five years. It would be unlikely to rise to the 1968 peak price of $300 again, because that was ridiculous.

He did some calculations on a scratch pad. Two hundred and fifty million cubic yards of rock at two tons per cubic yard was five hundred million tons. At even half an ounce per rock ton, that was two hundred and fifty million ounces. If the revelation of a new world source dragged the price down to ninety dollars an ounce, and even if the inaccessibility of the place meant a cost of fifty dollars an ounce to get it out and refined, that still meant.. .

Sir James Manson leaned back in his chair again and whistled softly.

“Jesus Christ. A ten-billion-dollar mountain.”

3

Platinum is a metal and, like all metals, it has its price. The price is basically controlled by two factors. These are the indispensability of the metal in certain processes that the industries of the world would like to complete, and the rarity of the metal. Platinum is very rare. Total world production each year, apart from stockpiled production, which is kept secret by the producers, is a shade over one and a half million Troy ounces.

The overwhelming majority of it, probably more than ninety-five per cent, comes from three sources: South Africa, Canada, and Russia. Russia, as usual, is the uncooperative member of the group. The producers would like to keep the world price fairly steady so as to be able to make long-term plans for investment in new mining equipment and development of new mines in the confidence that the bottom will not suddenly drop out of the market should a large quantity of stockpiled platinum suddenly be released. The Russians, by stockpiling unknown quantities and being able to release large quantities any time they feel like it, keep tremors running through the market whenever they can.

Russia releases on the world each year about 350,000 Troy ounces out of the 1,500,000 that reach the same market. This gives her between 23 and 24 per cent of the market, enough to ensure her a considerable degree of influence. Her supplies are marketed through Soyuss Prom Export. Canada puts on the market some 200,000 ounces a year, the whole production coming from the nickel mines of International Nickel, and just about the whole of this supply is bought up each year by the Engelhard Industries of the United States. But should the United States need for platinum suddenly rise sharply, Canada might well not be able to furnish the extra quantity.

The third source is South Africa, turning out close to 950,000 ounces a year and dominating the market. Apart from the Impala mines, which were just opening when Sir James Manson sat considering the world position of platinum, and have since become very important, the giants of platinum are the Rustenberg mines, which account for well over half the world’s production. These are controlled by Johannesburg Consolidated, which had a big enough slice of the stock to be sole manager of the mines. The world refiner and marketer of Rustenberg’s supply was and is the London-based firm of Johnson-Matthey.

James Manson knew this as well as anyone else. Although he was not into platinum when Chalmers’ report hit his desk, he knew the position as well as a brain surgeon knows how a heart works. He also knew why, even at that time, the boss of Engelhard Industries of America, the colorful Charlie Engelhard, better known to the populace as the owner of the fabulous racehorse Nijinsky, was buying into South African platinum. It was because America would need much more than Canada could supply for the mid-seventies. Man-son was certain of it.

And the particular reason why American consumption of platinum was almost certain to rise, even triple, by the mid- to late seventies, lay in that simple piece of metal the car exhaust pipe and in those dire words “air pollution.”

With legislation already passed in the United States projecting ever more stringent controls, and with little likelihood that any nonprecious-metal car exhaust-control device would be marketed before 1980, there was a strong probability that every American car would soon require one-tenth of an ounce of pure platinum. This meant that the Americans would need one and a half million ounces of platinum every year, an amount equal to the present world production, and they would not know where to get it.

James Manson thought he had an idea where. They could always buy it from him. And with the absolute indispensability of a platinum-based anti-pollutant catalyst in every fume-control device established for a decade, and world demand far outstripping supply, the price would be nice, very nice indeed.

There was only one problem. He had to be absolutely certain that he, and no one else, would control all mining rights to the Crystal Mountain. The question was, how?

The normal way would be to visit the republic where the mountain was situated, seek an interview with the President, show him the survey report, and propose to him a deal whereby ManCon secured the mining rights, the government secured a profit-participation clause that would fill the coffers of its treasury, and the President would secure a fat and regular payment into his Swiss account. That would be the normal way.

But apart from the fact that any other mining company in the world, if advised of what lay inside the Crystal Mountain, would counterbid for the same mining rights, sending the government’s share up and Man-son’s down, there were three groups who more than any other would want to take control, either to begin production or to stop it forever. These were the South Africans, the Canadians, and most of all the Russians. For the advent on the world market of a massive new supply source would cut the Soviet slice of the market back to the level of the unnecessary, removing from the Russians their power, influence, and money-making capacity in the platinum field.

Manson had a vague recollection of having heard the name of Zangaro, but it was such an obscure place he realized he knew nothing about it. The first requirement was evidently to learn more. He leaned forward and depressed the intercom switch.

“Miss Cooke, would you come in, please?”

He had called her Miss Cooke throughout the seven years she had been his personal and private secretary, and even in the ten years before that, when she had been an ordinary company secretary, rising from the typing pool to the tenth floor, no one had ever suggested she might have a first name. In fact she had. It was Marjory. But she just did not seem the sort of person one called Marjory.

Certainly men had once called her Marjory, long ago, before the war, when she was a young girl. Perhaps they had even tried to flirt with her, pinch her bottom, those long thirty-five years ago. But that was then. Five years of war, hauling an ambulance through burning rubble-strewn streets, trying to forget a Guardsman who never came back from Dunkirk, and twenty years of nursing a crippled and whining mother, a bedridden tyrant who used tears for weapons, had taken away the youth and the pinchable qualities of Miss Marjory Cooke. At fifty-four, she was tailored, efficient, and severe; her work at ManCon was almost all her life, the tenth floor her fulfillment, and the terrier who shared her neat apartment in suburban Chigwell and slept on her bed, her child and lover.

So no one ever called her Marjory. The young executives called her a shriveled apple, and the secretary birds “that old bat.” The others, including her employer, Sir James Manson, about whom she knew more than she would ever tell him or anyone else, called her Miss Cooke.

She entered through the door set in the beech-paneled wall which, when closed, looked like part of the wall.

“Miss Cooke, it has come to my attention that we have had, during the past few months, a small survey —one man, I believe—in the republic of Zangaro.”

“Yes, Sir James. That’s right.”

“Oh, you know about it.”

Of course she knew about it. Miss Cooke never forgot anything that had crossed her desk.

“Yes, Sir James.”

“Good. Then please find out for me who secured that government’s permission for us to conduct the survey.”

“It will be on file, Sir James. I’ll go and look.”

She was back in ten minutes, having first checked in her daily diary appointment books, which were cross-indexed into two indices, one under personal names and the other under subject headings, and then confirmed with Personnel.

“It was Mr. Bryant, Sir James.” She consulted a card in her hand. “Richard Bryant, of Overseas Contracts.”

“He submitted a report, I suppose?” asked Sir James.

“He must have done, under normal company procedure.”

“Send me in his report, would you, Miss Cooke?”

She was gone again, and the head of ManCon stared out through the plate-glass windows across the room from his desk at the mid-afternoon dusk settling over the City of London. The lights were coming on in the. middle-level floors—they had been on all day in the lowest ones—but at skyline level there was still enough winter daylight to see by. But not to read by. Sir James Manson flicked on the reading lamp on his desk as Miss Cooke returned, laid the report he wanted on his blotter, and receded back into the wall.

The report Richard Bryant had submitted was dated six months earlier and was written in the terse style favored by the company. It recorded that, according to instructions from the head of Overseas Contracts, he had flown to Clarence, the capital of Zangaro, and there, after a frustrating week in a hotel, had secured an interview with the Minister of Natural Resources. There were three separate interviews, spaced over six days, and at length an agreement had been reached that a single representative of ManCon might enter the republic to conduct a survey for minerals in the hinterland beyond the Crystal Mountains. The area to be surveyed was deliberately left vague by the company, so that the survey team could travel more or less where it wished. After further haggling, during which it was made plain to the Minister that he could forget any idea that the company was prepared to pay the sort of fee he seemed to expect, and that there were no indications of mineral presence to work on, a sum had been agreed on between Bryant and the Minister. Inevitably, the sum on the contract was just over half the total that changed hands, the balance being paid into the Minister’s private account.

That was all. The only indication of the character of the place was in the reference to a corrupt minister. So what? thought Sir James Manson. Nowadays Bryant might have been in Washington. Only the going rate was different.

He leaned forward to the intercom again. “Tell Mr. Bryant of Overseas Contracts to come up and see me, would you, Miss Cooke?”

He lifted the switch and pressed another one. “Martin, come in a minute, please.”

It took Martin Thorpe two minutes to come from his office on the ninth floor. He did not look the part of a financial whiz-kid and protege of one of the most ruthless go-getters in a traditionally ruthless and go-getting industry. He looked more like the captain of the Rugby team from a good public school—charming, boyish, clean-cut, with dark wavy hair and deep blue eyes. The secretaries called him dishy, and the directors, who had seen stock options they were certain of whisked out from under their noses or found their Companies slipping into control of a series of nominee shareholders fronting for Martin Thorpe, called him something not quite so nice.

Despite the looks, Thorpe had never been either a public-school man or an athlete. He could not differentiate between a batting average and the ambient air temperature, but he could retain the hourly movement of share prices across the range of ManCon’s subsidiary companies in his head throughout the day. At twenty-nine he had ambitions and the intent to carry them out. ManCon and Sir James might provide the means, so far as he was concerned, and his loyalty depended on his exceptionally high salary, the contracts throughout the City that his job under Manson could bring him, and the knowledge that where he was constituted a good vantage point for spotting what he called “the big one.”

By the time he entered, Sir James had slipped the Zangaro report into a drawer, and the Bryant report alone lay on his blotter. He gave his protege a friendly smile.

“Martin, I’ve got a job I need done with some discretion. I need it done in a hurry, and it may take half the night.”

It was not Sir James’s way to ask if Thorpe had any engagements that evening. Thorpe knew that; it went with the salary.

“That’s okay, Sir James. I had nothing on that a phone call can’t kill.”

“Good. Look, I’ve been going over some old reports and came across this one. Six months ago one of our men from Overseas Contracts was sent out to a place called Zangaro. I don’t know why, but I’d like to. The man secured that government’s go-ahead for a small team from here to conduct a survey for any possible mineral deposits in unchartered land beyond the mountain range called the Crystal Mountains. Now, what I want to know is this: Was it ever mentioned in advance or at the time, or since that visit six months ago, to the board?”

“To the board?”

“That’s right. Was it ever mentioned to the board of directors that we were doing any such survey? That’s what I want to know. It may not necessarily be on the agenda. You’ll have to look at the minutes. And in case it got a passing mention under ‘any other business,’ check through the documents of all board meetings over the past twelve months. Secondly, find out who authorized the visit by Bryant six months ago and why, and who sent the survey engineer down there and why. The man who did the survey is called Mulrooney. I also want to know something about him, which you can get from his file in Personnel. Got it?”

Thorpe was surprised. This was way out of his line of country.

“Yes, Sir James, but Miss Cooke could do that in half the time, or get somebody to do it—”

“Yes, she could. But I want you to do it. If you look at a file from Personnel, or boardroom documents, it will be assumed it has something to do with finance. Therefore it will remain discreet.”

The light began to dawn on Martin Thorpe. “You mean …they found something down there, Sir James?”

Manson stared out at the now inky sky and the blazing lights below him as the brokers and traders, clerks and merchants, bankers and assessors, insurers and jobbers, buyers and sellers, lawyers and, in some offices no doubt, lawbreakers, worked on through the winter afternoon toward the witching hour of five-thirty.

“Never mind,” he said gruffly to the young man behind him. “Just do it.”

Martin Thorpe was grinning as he slipped through the back entrance of the office and down the stairs to his own premises. “Cunning bastard,” he said to himself on the stairs.

“Mr. Bryant is here, Sir James.”

Manson crossed the room and switched on the main lights. Returning to his desk, he depressed the intercom button. “Send him in, Miss Cooke.”

There were three reasons why middle-level executives had occasion to be summoned to the sanctum on the tenth floor. One was to hear instructions or deliver a report that Sir James wanted to issue or hear personally, which was business. One was to be chewed into a sweat-soaked rag, which was hell. The third was that the chief executive had decided he wanted to play favorite uncle to his cherished employees, which was reassuring.

On the threshold Richard Bryant, at thirty-nine a middle-level executive who did his work competently and well but needed his job, was plainly aware that the first reason of the three could not be the one that brought him here. He suspected the second and was immensely relieved to see it had to be the third.

From the center of the office Sir James walked toward him with a smile of welcome. “Ah, come in, Bryant. Come in.”

As Bryant entered, Miss Cooke closed the door behind him and retired to her desk.

Sir James Manson gestured to his employee to take one of the easy chairs set well away from the desk in the conference area of the spacious office. Bryant, still wondering what it was all about, took the indicated chair and sank into its brushed suede cushions. Manson advanced toward the wall and opened two doors, revealing a well-stocked bar cabinet.

“Take a drink, Bryant? Sun’s well down, I think.”

“Thank you, sir—er—scotch, please.”

“Good man. My own favorite poison. I’ll join you.”

Bryant glanced at his watch. It was quarter to five, and the tropical maxim about taking a drink after the sun has gone down was hardly coined for London winter afternoons. But he recalled an office party at which Sir James had snorted his derision of sherry-drinkers and the like and spent the evening on scotch. It pays to watch things like that, Bryant reflected, as his chief poured his special Glenlivet into two fine old crystal glasses. Of course he left the ice bucket strictly alone.

“Water? Dash of soda?” he called from the bar.

Bryant craned around and spotted the bottle. “Is that a single malt, Sir James? No, thank you, straight as it comes.”

Manson nodded several times in approval and brought the glasses over. They ‘Cheers’ed each other and savored the whisky. Bryant was still waiting for the conversation to start. Manson noted this and gave him the gruff-uncle look.

“No need to worry about me having you up here like this,” he began. “I was just going through a sheaf of old reports in my desk drawers and came across yours, or one of them. Must have read it at the time and forgotten to give it back to Miss Cooke for filing.”

“My report?” queried Bryant.

“Eh? Yes, yes, the one you filed after your return from that place — what’s it called again? Zangaro? Was that it?”

“Oh, yes, sir. Zangaro. That was six months ago.”

“Yes, quite so. Six months, of course. Noticed as I reread it that you’d had a bit of a rough time with that Minister fellow.”

Bryant began to relax. The room was warm, the chair extremely comfortable, and the whisky like an old friend. He smiled at the memory. “But I got the contract for survey permission.”

“Damn right you did,” congratulated Sir James. He smiled as if at fond memories. “I used to do that in. the old days, y’know. Went on some rough missions to bring home the bacon. Never went to West Africa, though. Not in those days. Went later, of course. But after all this started.”

To indicate “all this” he waved his hand at the luxurious office.

“So nowadays I spend too much time up here, buried in paperwork,” Sir James continued. “I even envy you younger chaps going off to clinch deals in the old way. So tell me about your Zangaro trip.”

“Well, that really was doing things the old way, One look, and I half expected to find people running around with bones through their noses,” said Bryant.

“Really? Good Lord. Rough place is it, this Zangaro?” Sir James Manson’s head had tilted back into the shadows, and Bryant was sufficiently comfortable not to catch the gleam of concentration in the eye that belied the encouraging tone of voice.

“Too right, Sir James. It’s a bloody shambles of a place, moving steadily backward into the Middle Ages since independence five years ago.” He recalled something else he had heard his chief say once in an aside remark to a group of executives. “It’s a classic example of the concept that most of the African republics today have thrown up power groups whose performance in power simply cannot justify their entitlement to leadership of a town dump. As a result, of course, it’s the ordinary people who suffer.”

Sir James, who was as capable as the next man of recognizing his own words when he heard them played back at him, smiled quietly, rose, and walked to the window to look down at the teeming streets below.

“So who does run the show out there?” he asked quietly.

“The President. Or rather the dictator,” said Bryant from his chair. His glass was empty. “A man called Jean Kimba. He won the first and only election, just before independence five years ago, against the wishes of the colonial power—some said by the use of terrorism and voodoo on the voters. They’re pretty backward, you know. Most of them didn’t know what a vote was. Now they don’t need to know.”

“Tough guy, is he, this Kimba?” asked Sir James.

“It’s not that he’s tough, sir. He’s just downright mad. A raving megalomaniac, and probably a paranoid to boot. He rules completely alone, surrounded by a small coterie of political yes-men. If they fall out with him, or arouse his suspicions in any way, they go into the cells of the old colonial police barracks. Rumor has it Kimba goes down there himself to supervise the torture sessions. No one has ever come out alive.”

“Hm, what a world we live in, Bryant. And they’ve got the same vote in the UN General Assembly as Britain or America. Whose advice does he listen to in government?”

“No one of his own people. Of course, he has his voices—so the few local whites say, those who’ve stuck it out by staying on.”

“Voices?” queried Sir James.

“Yes, sir. He claims to the people he is guided by divine voices. He says he talks to God. He’s told the people and the assembled diplomatic corps that in so many words.”

“Oh dear, not another,” mused Manson, still gazing down at the streets below. “I sometimes think it was a mistake to introduce the Africans to God. Half their leaders now seem to be on first-name terms with Him.”

“Apart from that, he rules by a sort of mesmeric fear. The people think he has a powerful juju, or voodoo, or magic or whatever. He holds them in the most abject terror.”

“What about the foreign embassies?” queried the man by the window.

“Well, sir, they keep themselves to themselves. It seems they are just as terrified of the excesses of this maniac as the natives. He’s a bit like a cross between Sheikh Abeid Karume in Zanzibar, Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti, and Sékou Touré in Guinea.”

Sir James turned smoothly from the window and asked with deceptive softness, “Why Sekou Touré?”

“Well, Kimba’s next best thing to a Communist, Sir James. The man he really worshiped all his political life was Lumumba. That’s why the Russians are so strong. They have an enormous embassy, for the size of the place. To earn foreign currency, now that the plantations have all failed through maladministration, Zangaro sells most of its produce to the Russian trawlers that call. Of course the trawlers are electronic spy ships or supply ships for submarines. Again, the money they get from the sale doesn’t go to the people; it goes into Kimba’s bank account.”

“It doesn’t sound like Marxism to me,” joked Man-son.

Bryant grinned widely. “Money and bribes are where the Marxism stops,” he replied. “As usual.”

“But the Russians are strong, are they? Influential? Another whisky, Bryant?”

While Bryant replied, the head of ManCon poured two more glasses of Glenlivet.

“Yes, Sir James. Kimba has virtually no understanding of matters outside his immediate experience, which has been exclusively inside his own country and maybe a couple of visits to other African states nearby. So he sometimes consults on matters when dealing with outside concerns. Then he uses any one of three advisers, black ones, who come from his own tribe. Two Moscow-trained, and one Peking-trained. Or he contacts the Russians direct. I spoke to a trader in the bar of the hotel one night, a Frenchman. He said the Russian ambassador or one of his counselors was at the palace almost every day.”

Bryant stayed for another ten minutes, but Manson had learned most of what he needed to know. At five-twenty he ushered Bryant out as smoothly as he had welcomed him. As the younger man left, Manson beckoned Miss Cooke in.

“We employ an engineer in mineral exploration work called Jack Mulrooney,” he said. “He returned from a three-month sortie into Africa, living in rough bush conditions, three months ago, so he may be on leave still. Try and get him at home. I’d like to see him at ten tomorrow morning. Secondly, Dr. Gordon Chalmers, the chief survey analyst. You may catch him at Watford before he leaves the laboratory. If not, reach him at home. I’d like him here at twelve tomorrow. Cancel any other morning appointments and leave me time to take Chalmers out for a spot of lunch. And you’d better book me a table at Wilton’s in Bury Street. That’s all, thank you. I’ll be on my way in a few minutes. Have the car round at the front in ten minutes.”

When Miss Cooke withdrew, Manson pressed one of the switches on his intercom and murmured, “Come up for a minute, would you, Simon?”

Simon Endean was as deceptive as Martin Thorpe but in a different way. He came from an impeccable background and, behind the veneer, had the morals of an East End thug. Going with the polish and the ruthlessness was a certain cleverness. He needed a James Manson to serve, just as James Manson, sooner or later on his way to the top or his struggle to stay there in big-time capitalism, needed the services of a Simon Endean.

Endean was the sort to be found by the score in the very smartest and smoothest of London’s West End gambling clubs—beautifully spoken hatchet men who never leave a millionaire unbowed to or a showgirl unbruised. The difference was that Endean’s intelligence had brought him to an executive position as aide to the chief of a very superior gambling club.

Unlike Thorpe, he had no ambitions to become a multimillionaire. He thought one million would do, and until then the shadow of Manson would suffice. It paid for the six-room pad, the Corvette, the girls.

He too came from the floor below and entered from the interior stairwell through the beech-paneled door across the office from the one Miss Cooke came and left by. “Sir James?”

“Simon, tomorrow I’m having lunch with a fellow called Gordon Chalmers. One of the back-room boys. The chief scientist and head of the laboratory out at Watford. He’ll be here at twelve. Before then I want a rundown on him. The Personnel file, of course, but anything else you can find. The private man, what his home life is like, any failings; above all, if he has any pressing need for money over and above his salary. His politics, if any. Most of these scientific people are Left. Not all, though. You might have a chat with Errington in Personnel tonight before he leaves. Go through the file tonight and leave it for me to look at in the morning. Sharp tomorrow, start on his home environment. Phone me not later than eleven-forty-five. Got it? I know it’s a short-notice job, but it could be important.”

Endean took in the instructions without moving a muscle, filing the lot. He knew the score; Sir James Manson often needed information, for he never faced any man, friend or foe, without a personal rundown on the man, including the private life. Several times he had beaten opponents into submission by being better prepared. Endean nodded and left, making his way straight to Personnel.

As the chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce slid away from the front of ManCon House, taking its occupant back to his third-floor apartment in Arlington House behind the Ritz, a long, hot bath, and a dinner sent up from the Caprice, Sir James Manson leaned back and lit his first cigar of the evening. The chauffeur handed him a late Evening Standard, and they were abreast of Charing Cross Station when a small paragraph in the “Stop Press” caught his eye. It was in among the racing results. He glanced back at it, then read it several times. He stared out at the swirling traffic and huddled pedestrians shuffling toward the station or plodding to the buses through the February drizzle, bound for their homes in Edenbridge and Sevenoaks after another exciting day in the City.

As he stared, a small germ of an idea began to form in his mind. Another man would have laughed and dismissed it out of hand. Sir James Manson was not another man. He was a twentieth-century pirate and proud of it. The nine-point-type headline above the obscure paragraph in the evening paper referred to an African republic. It was not Zangaro, but another one. He had hardly heard of the other one either. It had no known mineral wealth. The headline said:

NEW COUP D’ETAT IN AFRICAN STATE

4

Martin Thorpe was waiting in his chief’s outer office when Sir James arrived at five past nine, and followed him straight in.

“What have you got?” demanded Sir James Manson, even while he was taking off his vicuña topcoat and hanging it in the closet. Thorpe flicked open a notebook he had pulled from his pocket and recited the result of his investigations of the night before.

"One year ago we had a survey team in the republic lying to the north and east of Zangaro. It was accompanied by an aerial reconnaissance unit hired from a French firm. The area to be surveyed was close to, and partly on the border with, Zangaro. Unfortunately there are few topographical maps of that area, and no aerial maps at all. Without Decca or any other form of beacon to give him cross-bearings, the pilot used speed and time of flight to assess the ground he had covered.

“One day when there was a following wind stronger than forecast, he flew several times up and down the entire strip to be covered by aerial survey, to his own satisfaction, and returned to base. What he did not know was that on each downwind leg he had flown over the border and forty miles into Zangaro. When the aerial film was developed, it showed that he had overshot the survey area by a large margin.”

“Who first realized it? The French company?” asked Manson.

"No, sir. They developed the film and passed it to us without comment, as per our contract with them. It was up to the men in our own aerial-survey department to identify the areas on the ground represented by the pictures they had. Then they realized that at the end of each run was a stretch of territory not in the survey area. So they discarded the pictures, or at any rate put them on one side. They had realized that in one section of pictures a range of hills was featured that could not be in our survey area because there were no hills in that part of the area.

“Then one bright spark had a second look at the surplus photographs and noticed a part of the hilly area, slightly to the east of the main range, had a variation in the density and type of the plant life. The sort of thing you can’t see down on the ground, but an aerial picture from three miles up will show it up like a beermat on a billiard table.”

“I know how it’s done,” growled Sir James. “Go on.”

“Sorry, sir, I didn’t know this. It was new to me. So, anyway, half a dozen photos were passed to someone in the Photo-Geology section, and he confirmed from a blow-up that the plant life was different over quite a small area involving a small hill about eighteen hundred feet high and roughly conical in shape. Both sections prepared a report, and that went to the head of Topographic section. He identified the range as the Crystal Mountains and the hill as probably the original Crystal Mountain. He sent the file to Overseas Contracts, and Willoughby, the head of O.C., sent Bryant down there to get permission to survey.”

“He didn’t tell me,” said Manson, now seated behind his desk.

“He sent a memo, Sir James. I have it here. You were in Canada at the time and were not due back for a month. He makes plain he felt the survey of that area was only an off-chance, but since a free aerial survey had been presented to us, and since Photo-Geology felt there had to be some reason for the different vegetation, the expense could be justified. Willoughby also suggested it might serve to give his man Bryant a bit of experience to go it alone for the first time. Up till then he had always accompanied Willoughby.”

“Is that it?”

“Almost. Bryant got visaed up and went in six months ago. He got permission and arrived back after three weeks. Four months ago Ground Survey agreed to detach an unqualified prospector-cum-surveyor called Jack Mulrooney from the diggings in Ghana and send him to look over the Crystal Mountains, provided that the cost would be kept low. It was. He got back three weeks ago with a ton and a half of samples, which have been at the Watford laboratory ever since.”

“Fair enough,” said Sir James Manson after a pause. “Now, did the board ever hear about all this?”

“No, sir.” Thorpe was adamant. “It would have been considered much too small. I’ve been through every board meeting for twelve months, and every document presented, including every memo and letter sent to the board members over the same period. Not a mention of it. The budget for the whole thing would simply have been lost in the petty cash anyway. And it didn’t originate with Projects, because the aerial photos were a gift from the French firm and their ropy old navigator. It was just an ad hoc affair throughout and never reached board level.”

James Manson nodded in evident satisfaction. “Right Now, Mulrooney. How bright is he?”

For answer, Thorpe tended Jack Mulrooney’s file from Personnel. “No qualifications, but a lot of practical experience, sir. An old sweat. A good African hand.”

Manson flicked through the file on Jack Mulrooney, scanned the biography notes and the career sheet since the man had joined the company. “He’s experienced all right,” he grunted. "Don’t underestimate the old

Africa hands. I started out in the Rand, on a mining camp. Mulrooney just stayed at that level. But never condescend; such people are very useful. And they can be perceptive."

He dismissed Martin Thorpe and muttered to himself, “Now let’s see how perceptive Mr. Mulrooney can be.”

He depressed the intercom switch and spoke to Miss Cooke. “Is Mr. Mulrooney there yet, Miss Cooke?”

“Yes, Sir James, he’s here waiting.”

“Show him in, please.”

Manson was halfway to the door when his employee was ushered in. He greeted him warmly and led him to the chairs where he had sat with Bryant the previous evening. Before she left, Miss Cooke was asked to produce coffee for them both. Mulrooney’s coffee habit was in his file.

Jack Mulrooney in the penthouse suite of a London office building looked as out of place as Thorpe would have in the dense bush. His hands hung way out of his coat sleeves, and he did not seem to know where to put them. His gray hair was plastered down with water, and he had cut himself shaving. It was the first time he had ever met the man he called the gaffer. Sir James used all his efforts to put him at ease.

Just before he left, Mulrooney had reiterated his view. “There’s tin down there, Sir James. Stake my life on it. The only thing is, whether it can be got out at an economical figure.”

Sir James had slapped him on the shoulder. “Don’t you worry about that. We’ll know as soon as the report comes through from Watford. And don’t worry, if there’s an ounce of it that I can get to the coast below market value, we’ll have the stuff. Now how about you? What’s your next adventure?”

“I don’t know, sir. I have three more days’ leave yet; then I report back to the office.”

“Like to go abroad again?” said Sir James expansively.

“Yes, sir. Frankly, I can’t take this city and the weather and all.”

“Back to the sun, eh? You like the wild places, I hear.”

“Yes, I do. You can be your own man out there.”

“You can indeed.” Manson smiled. “You can indeed. I almost envy you. No, dammit, I do envy you. Anyway, we’ll see what we can do.”

Two minutes later Jack Mulrooney was gone. Man-son ordered Miss Cooke to send his file back to Personnel, rang Accounts and instructed them to send Mulrooney a £ 1000 merit bonus and make sure he got it before the following Monday, and rang the head of Ground Survey.

“What surveys have you got pending in the next few days or just started?” he asked without preamble.

There were three, one of them in a remote stretch of the extreme north of Kenya, close to the Somaliland border, where the midday sun fries the brain like an egg in a pan, the nights freeze the bone marrow like

Blackpool rock, and the shift a bandits prowl. It would be a long job, close to a year. The head of Ground Survey had nearly had two resignations trying to get a man to go there for so long.

“Send Mulrooney,” said Sir James and hung up.

He glanced at the clock. It was eleven. He picked up the Personnel report on Dr. Gordon Chalmers, which Endean had left on his desk the previous evening.

Chalmers was a graduate with honors from the London School of Mining, which is probably the best of its kind in the world, even if Witwatersrand liked to dispute that claim. He had taken his degree in geology and later chemistry and gone on to a doctorate in his mid-twenties. After five years of fellowship work at the college he had joined Rio Tinto Zinc in its scientific section, and six years earlier ManCon had evidently stolen him from RTZ for a better salary. For the last four years he had been head of the company’s Scientific Department situated on the outskirts of Watford in Hertfordshire, one of the counties abutting London to the north. The ID photograph in the file showed a man in his late thirties glowering at the camera over a bushy ginger beard. He wore a tweed jacket and a purple shut. The tie was of knitted wool and askew.

At eleven-thirty-five the private phone rang and Sir James Manson heard the regular pips of a public coin box at the other end of the line. A coin clunked into the slot, and Endean’s voice came on the line. He spoke concisely for two minutes from Watford station. When he had finished, Manson grunted his approval.

“That’s useful to know,” he said. “Now get back to London, There’s another job I want you to do. I want a complete rundown on the republic of Zangaro. I want the lot. Yes, Zangaro.” He spelled it out.

“Start back in the days when it was discovered, and work forward. I want the history, geography, lie of the land, economy, crops, mineralogy if any, politics, and state of development. Concentrate on the ten years prior to independence, and especially the period since. I want to know everything there is to know about the President, his cabinet, parliament if any, administration, executive, judiciary, and political parties. There are three things that are more important than all else. One is the question of Russian or Chinese involvement and influence, or local Communist influence, on the President. The second is that no one remotely connected with the place is to know any questions are being asked, so don’t go there yourself. And thirdly, under no circumstances are you to announce you come from ManCon. So use a different name. Got it? Good. Well, report back as soon as you can, and not later than twenty days. Draw cash from Accounts on my signature alone, and be discreet. For the record, consider yourself on leave; I’ll let you make it up later.”

Manson hung up and called down to Thorpe to give further instructions. Within three minutes Thorpe came up to the tenth floor and laid the piece of paper his chief wanted on the desk. It was the carbon copy of a letter.

Ten floors down, Dr. Gordon Chalmers stepped out of his taxi at the corner of Moorgate and paid it off. He felt uncomfortable in a dark suit and topcoat, but Peggy had told him they were necessary for an interview and lunch with the Chairman of the Board.

As he walked the last few yards toward the steps and doorway of ManCon House, his eye caught a poster fronting the kiosk of a seller of the Evening News and Evening Standard: THALIDOMIDE PARENTS URGE SETTLEMENT. He curled his lip in a bitter sneer, but he bought both papers.

The stories backed up the headline in greater detail, though they were not long. They recorded that after another marathon round of talks between representatives of the parents of the four-hundred-odd children in Britain who had been born deformed because of the thalidomide drug ten years earlier, and the company that had marketed the drug, a further impasse had been reached. So talks would be resumed “at a later date.”

Gordon Chalmers’ thoughts went back to the house outside Watford that he had left earlier that same morning, to Peggy, his wife, just turned thirty and looking forty, and to Margaret, legless, one-armed Margaret, coming up to nine years, who needed a special pair of legs and a specially built house, which they now lived in at long last, the mortgage on which was costing him a fortune.

“At a later date,” he snapped to no one in particular and stuffed the newspapers into a trash basket. He seldom read the evening papers anyway. He preferred the Guardian, Private Eye, and the left-wing Tribune. After nearly ten years of watching a group of almost unmoneyed parents try to face down the giant distillers for their compensation, Gordon Chalmers harbored bitter thoughts about big-time capitalists. Ten minutes later he was facing one of the biggest.

Sir James Manson could not put Chalmers off his guard as he had Bryant and Mulrooney. The scientist clutched his glass of beer firmly and stared right back. Manson grasped the situation quickly and, when Miss Cooke had handed him his whisky and retired, he came to the point.

“I suppose you can guess what I asked you to come and see me about, Dr. Chalmers.”

“I can guess, Sir James. The report on Crystal Mountain.”

“That’s it. Incidentally, you were quite right to send it to me personally in a sealed envelope. Quite right.”

Chalmers shrugged. He had done it because he realized that all important analysis results had to go direct to the Chairman, according to company policy. It was routine, as soon as he had realized what the samples contained.

“Let me ask you two things, and I need specific answers,” said Sir James. “Are you absolutely certain of these results? There could be no other possible explanation of the tests of the samples?”

Chalmers was neither shocked nor affronted. He knew the work of scientists was seldom accepted by laymen as being far removed from black magic, and that they therefore considered it imprecise. He had long since ceased trying to explain the precision of his craft.

“Absolutely certain. For one thing, there are a variety of tests to establish the presence of platinum, and these samples passed them all with unvarying regularity. For another, I not only did all the known tests on every one of the samples, I did the whole thing twice. Theoretically it is possible someone could have interfered with the alluvial samples, but not with the internal structures of the rocks themselves. The summary of my report is accurate beyond scientific dispute.”

Sir James Manson listened to the lecture with head-bowed respect, and nodded in admiration. “And the second thing is, how many other people in your laboratory know of the results of the analysis of the Crystal Mountain samples?”

“No one,” said Chalmers with finality.

“No one?” echoed Manson. “Come now, surely one of your assistants …”

Chalmers downed a swig of his beer and shook his head. "Sir James, when the samples came in they were crated as usual and put in store. Mulrooney’s accompanying report predicated the presence of tin in unknown quantities. As it was a very minor survey, I put a junior assistant onto it. Being inexperienced, he assumed tin or nothing and did the appropriate tests. When they failed to show up positive, he called me over and pointed this out: I offered to show him how, and again the tests were negative. So I gave him a lecture on not being mesmerized by the prospector’s opinion and showed him some more tests. These too were negative. The laboratory closed for the night, but I stayed on late, so I was alone in the place when the first tests came up positive. By midnight I knew the shingle sample from the stream bed, of which I was using less than half a pound, contained small quantities of platinum. After that I locked up for the night.

“The next day I took the junior off that assignment and put him on another. Then I went on with it myself. There were six hundred bags of shingle and gravel, and fifteen hundred pounds’ weight of rocks—over three hundred separate rocks taken from different places on the mountain. From Mulrooney’s photographs I could picture the mountain. The disseminated deposit is present in all parts of the formation. As I said in my report.” With a touch of defiance he drained his beer.

Sir James Manson continued nodding, staring at the scientist with well-feigned awe.

“It’s incredible,” he said at length. “I know you scientists like to remain detached, impartial, but I think even you must have become excited. This could form a whole new world source of platinum. You know how often that happens with a rare metal? Once in a decade, maybe once in a lifetime.”

In fact Chalmers had been excited by his discovery and had worked late into the night for three weeks to cover every single bag and rock from the Crystal Mountain, but he would not admit it. Instead he shrugged and said, “Well, it’ll certainly be very profitable for ManCon.”

“Not necessarily,” said James Manson quietly. This was the first time he shook Chalmers.

“Not?” queried the analyst. “But surely it’s a fortune?”

“A fortune in the ground, yes,” replied Sir James, rising and walking to the window. “But it depends very much who gets it, if anyone at all. You see, there is a danger it could be kept unmined for years, or mined and stockpiled. Let me put you in the picture, my dear Doctor. ..”

He put Dr. Chalmers in the picture for thirty minutes, talking finance and politics, neither of which was the analyst’s forte.

“So there you are,” he finished. “The chances are it will be handed on a plate to the Russian government if we announce it immediately.”

Dr. Chalmers, who had nothing in particular against the Russian government, shrugged slightly. “I can’t change the facts, Sir James.”

Manson’s eyebrows shot up in horror. “Good gracious, Doctor, of course you can’t.” He glanced at his watch in surprise. “Close to one,” he exclaimed. “You must be hungry. I know I am. Let’s go and have a spot of lunch.”

He had thought of taking the Rolls, but after En-dean’s phone call from Watford that morning and the information from the local news agent about the regular subscription to the Tribune, he opted for an ordinary taxi.

A spot of lunch proved to be pat, truffled omelet, jugged hare in red-wine sauce, and trifle. As Manson had suspected, Chalmers disapproved of such indulgence but at the same time had a healthy appetite. And even he could not reverse the simple laws of nature, which are that a good meal produces a sense of repletion, contentment, euphoria, and a lowering of moral resistance. Manson had also counted on a beer-drinker’s being unused to the fuller red wines, and two bottles of Cote du Rhone had encouraged Chalmers to talk about the subjects that interested him: his work, his family, and his views on the world.

It was when he touched on his family and their new house that Sir James Manson, looking suitably sorrowful, mentioned that he recalled having seen Chalmers in a television interview in the street a year back.

“Do forgive me,” he said, “I hadn’t realized before—• I mean, about your little girl. What a tragedy.”

Chalmers nodded and gazed at the tablecloth. Slowly at first, and then with more confidence, he began to tell his superior about Margaret.

“You wouldn’t understand,” he said at one point.

“I can try,” replied Sir James quietly. “I have a daughter myself, you know. Of course, she’s older.”

Ten minutes later there was a pause in the talking. Sir James Manson drew a folded piece of paper from his inside pocket. “I don’t really know how to put this,” he said with some embarrassment, “but—well, I am as aware as any man how much time and trouble you put in for the company. I am aware you work long hours, and the strain of this personal matter must have its effect on you, and no doubt on Mrs. Chalmers. So I issued this instruction to my personal bank this morning.”

He passed the carbon copy of the letter across to Chalmers, who read it. It was brief and to the point. It instructed the manager of Coutts Bank to remit by registered mail each month on the first day fifteen banknotes, each of value £10, to Dr. Gordon Chalmers at his home address. The remittances were to run for ten years unless further instructions were received.

Chalmers looked up. His employer’s face was all concern, tinged with embarrassment.

“Thank you,” said Chalmers softly.

Sir James’s hand rested on his forearm and shook it. “Now come on, that’s enough of this matter. Have a brandy.”

In the taxi on the way back to the office, Manson suggested he drop Chalmers off at the station where he could take his train for Watford.

“I have to get back to the office and get on with this Zangaro business and your report,” he said.

Chalmers was staring out of the cab window at the traffic moving out of London that Friday afternoon. “What are you going to do about it?” he asked.

“Don’t know, really. Of course, I’d like not to send it. Pity to see all that going into foreign hands, which is what must happen when your report gets to Zangaro. But I’ve got to send them something, sooner or later.”

There was another long pause as the taxi swung into the station forecourt.

“Is there anything I can do?” asked the scientist.

Sir James Manson breathed a long sigh. “Yes,” he said in measured tones. “Junk the Mulrooney samples in the same way as you would junk any other rocks and bags of sand. Destroy your analysis notes completely. Take your copy of the report and make an exact copy, with one difference—let it show the tests prove conclusively that there exist marginal quantities of low-grade tin which could not be economically mined. Burn your own copy of the original report. And then never mention a word of it.”

The taxi came to a halt, and as neither of his passengers moved, the cabbie poked his nose through the screen into the rear compartment. “This is it, guv.”

“You have my solemn word,” murmured Sir James Manson. “Sooner or later the political situation may well change, and when that happens, ManCon will put in a tender for the mining concession exactly as usual and in accordance with normal business procedures.”

Dr. Chalmers climbed out of the taxi and looked back at his employer in the corner seat. “I’m not sure I can do that, sir,” he said. “I’ll have to think it over.”

Manson nodded. “Of course you will. I know it’s asking a lot. Look, why don’t you talk it over with your wife? I’m sure she’ll understand.”

Then he pulled the door to and told the cabbie to take him to the City.

Sir James dined with an official of the Foreign Office that evening and took him to his club. It was not one of the very uppercrust clubs of London, for Manson had no intention of putting up for one of the bastions of the old Establishment and finding himself blackballed. Besides, he had no time for social climbing and little patience with the posturing idiots one found at the top when one got there. He left the social side of things to his wife. The knighthood was useful, but that was an end to it.

He despised Adrian Goole, whom he reckoned for a pedantic fool. That was why he had invited him to dinner. That, and the fact that the man was in the Economic Intelligence section of the FO.

Years ago, when his company’s activities in Ghana and Nigeria had reached a certain level, he had accepted a place on the inner circle of the City’s West Africa Committee. This organ was and still is a sort of trade union of all major firms based in London and carrying on operations in West Africa. Concerned far more with trade, and therefore money, than, for example, the East Africa Committee, the WAC periodically reviewed events of both commercial and political interest in West Africa—and usually the two were bound to become connected in the long term—and tendered advice to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on what would in its view constitute an advisable policy for British interests.

Sir James Manson would not have put it that way. He would have said the WAC was in existence to suggest to the government what to do in that part of the world to improve profits. He would have been right, too. He had been on the committee during the Nigerian civil war and heard the various representatives of banks, mines, oil, and trade advocate a quick end to the war, which seemed to be synonymous with a Federal victory in double time.

Predictably, the committee had proposed to the government that the Federal side be supported, provided it could show it was going to win and win quickly, and provided corroborative evidence from British sources on the spot confirmed this. The committee then sat back and watched the government, on Foreign Office advice, make another monumental African cock-up. Instead of lasting six months, the war had lasted thirty. But the businessmen were sick to their teeth at the whole mess and would, with hindsight, have preferred a negotiated peace at month three rather than thirty months of war. But Harold Wilson, once committed to a policy, was no more going to concede that his minions might have made a mistake on his behalf than fly to the moon.

Manson had lost a lot in revenue from his disrupted mining interests and because of the impossibility of shipping the stuff to the coast on crazily running railways throughout the period, but MacFazdean of Shell-BP had lost a lot more in oil production.

Adrian Goole had been the FO’s liaison officer on the committee for most of the time. Now he sat opposite James Manson in the alcove dining recess, his cuffs shot the right inch and a quarter, his face registering earnest intent.

Manson told him some of the truth but kept the reference to platinum out of it. He stuck to a tale of tin but increased the quantities. It would have been viable to mine it, of course, but quite frankly he’d been scared off by the close dependence of the President on the Russian advisers. The profit-participation of the Zangaran government could well have made it a tidy sum, and since the despot was almost a puppet of the Russkies, who wanted to increase the republic’s power and influence through wealth? Goole took it all in. His face wore a solemn expression of deep concern.

“Damnably difficult decision,” he said with sympathy. “Mind you, I have to admire your political sense. At the moment Zangaro is bankrupt and obscure. But if it became rich— Yes, you’re quite right. A real dilemma. When do you have to send them the survey report and analysis?”

“Sooner or later,” grunted Manson. “The question is, what do I do about it? If they show it to the Russians at the embassy, the trade counselor is bound to realize the tin deposits are viable. Then it will go out for tender. So someone else will get it, still help to make the dictator rich, and then who knows what problems he’ll make for the West? One is back to square one.”

Goole thought it over for a while.

“I just thought I ought to let you chaps know,” said Manson.

“Yes, yes, thank you.” Goole was absorbed. “Tell me,” he said at length, “what would happen if you halved the figures showing the quantity of tin per rock-ton in the report?”

“Halved them?”

“Yes. Halved the figures, showing a purity figure of tin per rock-ton of fifty per cent the figures shown by your rock samples?”

“Well, the quantity of tin present would be shown to be economically unviable.”

“And the rock samples could have come from another area, a mile away, for example?” asked Goole.

“Yes, I suppose they could. But my surveyor found the richest rock samples.”

“But if he had not done so,” pursued Goole. “If he had taken his samples from a mile from where he actually operated. The content could be down by fifty per cent?”

“Yes, it could. They probably would, probably would show even less than fifty per cent. But he operated where he did.”

“Under supervision?” asked Goole.

“No. Alone.”

“And there are no real traces of where he worked?”

“No,” replied Manson. “Just a few rock chippings, long since overgrown. Besides, no one goes up there. It’s miles from anywhere.”

He paused for a few instants to light a cigar. “You know, Goole, you’re a damnably clever fellow. Steward, another brandy, if you please.”

They parted with mutual jocularity on the steps of the club. The doorman hailed a taxi for Goole to go back to Mrs. Goole in Holland Park.

“One last thing,” said the FO man by the taxi door. “Not a word to anyone else about this. I’ll have to file it, well classified, at the department, but otherwise it remains just between you and us at the FO.”

“Of course,” said Manson.

“I’m very grateful you saw fit to tell me all this. You have no idea how much easier it makes our job on the economic side to know what’s going on. I’ll keep a quiet eye on Zangaro, and if there should be any change in the political scene there, you’ll be the first to know. Good night.”

Sir James Manson watched the taxi head down the road and signaled to his Rolls-Royce waiting up the street.

“You’ll be the first to know,” he mimicked. “Too bloody right I will, boy. ’Cause I’m going to start it.”

He leaned through the passenger-side window and observed to Craddock, his chauffeur, “If pisswilly little buggers like that had been in charge of building our empire, Craddock, we might by now just about have colonized the Isle of Wight.”

“You’re absolutely right, Sir James,” said Craddock.

When his employer had climbed into the rear, the chauffeur slid open the communicating panel. “Gloucestershire, Sir James?”

“Gloucestershire, Craddock.”

It was starting to drizzle again as the sleek limousine swished down Piccadilly and up Park Lane, heading for the A40 and the West Country, carrying Sir James Manson toward his ten-bedroom mansion bought three years earlier for him by a grateful company for £250,000. It also contained his wife and nineteen-year-old daughter, but these he had won himself.

An hour later Gordon Chalmers lay beside his wife, tired and angry from the row they had had for the past two hours. Peggy Chalmers lay on her back, looking up at the ceiling.

“I can’t do it,” Chalmers said for the umpteenth time. “I can’t just go and falsify a mining report to help James Bloody Manson make more money.”

There was a long silence. They had been over it all a score of times since Peggy had read Manson’s letter to his banker and heard from her husband the conditions of future financial security.

“What does it matter?” she said in a low voice from the darkness beside him. “When all’s said and done, what does it matter? Whether he gets the concession, or the Russians, or no one. Whether the price rises or falls. What does it matter? It’s all pieces of rock and grains of metal.”

Peggy Chalmers swung herself across her husband’s torso and stared at the dim outline of his face. Outside, the night wind rattled the branches of the old elm close to which they had built the new house with the special fittings for their crippled daughter.

When Peggy Chalmers spoke again it was with passionate urgency. “But Margaret is not a piece of rock, and I am not a few grains of metal. We need that money, Gordon, we need it now and for the next ten years. Please, darling, please just one time forget the idea of a nice letter to Tribune or Private Eye and do what he wants.”

Gordon Chalmers continued to stare at the slit of window between the curtains, which was half open to let in a breath of air.

“All right,” he said at length.

“You’ll do it?” she asked.

“Yes, I’ll bloody do it.”

“You swear it, darling? You give me your word?”

There was another long pause. “You have my word,” said the low voice from the face above her.

She pillowed her head in the hair of his chest. “Thank you, darling. Don’t worry about it. Please don’t worry. You’ll forget it in a month. You’ll see.”

Ten minutes later she was asleep, exhausted by the nightly struggle to get Margaret bathed and into bed, and by the unaccustomed quarrel with her husband.

Gordon Chalmers continued to stare into the darkness. “They always win,” he said softly and bitterly after a while. “The bastards, they always bloody win.”

The following day, Saturday, he drove the five miles to the laboratory and wrote out a completely new report for the republic of Zangaro. Then he burned his notes and the original report and trundled the core samples over to the scrap heap, where a local builder would remove them for concrete and garden paths. He mailed the fresh report, registered, to Sir James Manson at the head office, went home, and tried to forget it.

On Monday the report was received in London, and the instructions to the bankers in Chalmers’ favor were mailed. The report was sent down to Overseas Contracts for Willoughby and Bryant to read, and Bryant was told to leave the next day and take it to the Minister of Natural Resources in Clarence. A letter from the company would be attached, expressing the appropriate regret.

On Tuesday evening Richard Bryant found himself in Number One Building at London’s Heathrow Airport, waiting for a BEA flight to Paris, where he could get the appropriate visa and make a connecting flight by Air Afrique. Five hundred yards away, in Three Building, Jack Mulrooney humped his bag through Passport Control to catch the BOAC overnight Jumbo to Nairobi. He was not unhappy. He had had enough of London. Ahead lay Kenya, sun, bush, and the chance of a lion.

By the end of the week only two men had in their heads the knowledge of what really lay inside the Crystal Mountain. One had given his word to his wife to remain silent forever, and the other was plotting his next move.

5

Simon Endean entered Sir James Manson’s office with a bulky file containing his hundred-page report on the republic of Zangaro, a dossier of large photographs, and several maps. He told his chief what he had brought.

Manson nodded his approval. “No one learned while you were putting all this together who you were or who you worked for?” he asked.

“No, Sir James. I used a pseudonym, and no one questioned it.”

“And no one in Zangaro could have learned that a file of data could have been put together about them?”

“No. I used existing archives, sparse though they are, some university libraries here and in Europe, standard works of reference, and the one tourist guide published by Zangaro itself, although in fact this is a leftover from colonial days and five years out of date. I always claimed I was simply seeking information for a graduate thesis on the entire African colonial and postcolonial situation. There will be no comebacks.”

“All right,” said Manson. “I’ll read the report later. Give me the main facts.”

For answer Endean took one of the maps from the file and spread it across the desk. It showed a section of the African coastline, with Zangaro marked.

"As you see, Sir James, it’s stuck like an enclave on the coast here, bordered on the north and east by this republic and on the short southern border by this one. The fourth side is the sea, here.

“It’s shaped like a matchbox, the short edge along the seacoast, the longer sides stretching inland. The borders were completely arbitrarily drawn in the old colonial days during the scramble for Africa, and merely represent lines on a map. On the ground there are no effective borders, and due to the almost complete nonexistence of roads there is only one border-crossing point—here, on the road leading north to the neighbor country, Manandi. All land traffic enters and leaves by this road.”

Sir James Manson studied the enclave on the map and grunted. “What about the eastern and southern borders?”

"No road, sir. No way in or out at all, unless you cut straight through the jungle, and in most places it is impenetrable bush.

"Now, in size it has seven thousand square miles, being seventy miles along the coast and a hundred miles deep into the hinterland. The capital, Clarence, named after the sea captain who first put in there for fresh water two hundred years ago, is here, in the center of the coast, thirty-five miles from the northern and southern borders.

“Behind the capital lies a narrow coastal plain which is the only cultivated area in the country, apart from the bush natives’ tiny clearings in the jungle. Behind the plain lies the river Zangaro, then the foothills of the Crystal Mountains, the mountains themselves, and beyond that, miles and miles of jungle up to the eastern border.”

“How about other communications?” asked Man-son.

“There are virtually no roads at all,” said Endean. “The river Zangaro flows from the northern border fairly close to the coast across most of the republic until it reaches the sea just short of the southern border. On the estuary there are a few jetties and a shanty or two which constitute a small port for the exporting of timber. But there are no wharves, and the timber businesses have virtually ceased since independence. The fact that the Zangaro River flows almost parallel to the coast, slanting in toward it, for sixty miles, in effect cuts the republic in two; there is this strip of coastal plain to the seaward side of the river, ending in mangrove swamps which make the whole coast unapproachable by shipping or small boats, and the hinterland beyond the river. East of the river are the mountains, and beyond them the hinterland. The river could be used for barge traffic, but no one is interested. Manandi has a modern capital on the coast with a deep-water harbor, and the Zangaro River itself ends in a silted-up estuary.”

“What about the timber-exporting operations? How were they carried out?”

Endean took a larger-scale map of the republic out of the file and laid it on the table. With a pencil he tapped she Zangaro estuary in the south of Zangaro.

“The timber used to be cut upcountry, either along the banks or in the western foothills of the mountains. There’s still quite good timber there, but since independence no one is interested. The logs were floated downriver to the estuary and parked there. When the ships came they would anchor offshore and the log rafts were towed out to them by power boats. Then they hoisted the logs aboard by using their own derricks. It always was a tiny operation.”

Manson stared intently at the large-scale map taking in the seventy miles of coast, the river running almost parallel to it twenty miles inland, the strip of impene trable mangrove swamp between the river and the sea, and the mountains behind the river. He could identify the Crystal Mountain but made no mention of it.

“What about the main roads? There must be some.”

Endean warmed to his explanation. "The capital is stuck on the seaward end of a short, stubby peninsula here, midway down the coast. It faces toward the open sea. There’s a small port, the only real one in the country, and behind the town the peninsula runs back to join the main landmass. There is one road which runs down the spine of the peninsula and six miles inland, going straight east. Then there is the junction— here. A road runs to the right, heading south. It is laterite for seven miles, then becomes an earth road for the next twenty. Then it peters out on the banks of the Zangaro estuary.

“The other branch turns left and runs north, through the plain west of the river and onward to the northern border. Here there is a crossing point manned by a dozen sleepy and corrupt soldiers. A couple of travelers told me they can’t read a passport anyway, so they don’t know whether there is a visa in it or not. You just bribe them a couple of quid to get through.”

“What about the road into the hinterland?” asked Sir James.

Endean pointed with his finger. “It’s not even marked, it’s so small. Actually, if you follow the north-running road after the junction, go along it for ten miles, there is a turn-off to the right, toward the hinterland. It’s an earth road. It crosses the remainder of the plain and then the Zangaro River, on a rickety wooden bridge—”

“So that bridge is the only communication between the two parts of the country on either side of the river?” asked Manson in wonderment.

Endean shrugged. “It’s the only crossing for wheeled traffic. But there is hardly any wheeled traffic. The natives cross the Zangaro by canoe.”

Manson changed the subject, though his eyes never left the map. “What about the tribes who live there?”

“There are two,” said Endean. “East of the river and right back to the end of the hinterland is the country of the Vindu. For that matter, more Vindu live over the eastern border. I said the borders were arbitrary. The Vindu are practically in the Stone Age. They seldom, if ever, cross the river and leave their bush country. The plain to the west of the river and down to the sea, including the peninsula on which the capital stands, is the country of the Caja. They hate the Vindu, and vice versa.”

“Population?”

“Almost uncountable in the interior. Officially put at two hundred and twenty thousand in the entire country. That is, thirty thousand Caja and an estimated one hundred and ninety thousand Vindu. But the numbers are a total guess—except probably the Caja can be counted accurately.”

“Then how the hell did they ever hold an election?” asked Manson.

“That remains one of the mysteries of creation,” said Endean. “It was a shambles, anyway. Half of them didn’t know what a vote was or what they were voting for.”

“What about the economy?”

“There is hardly any left,” replied Endean. "The Vindu country produces nothing. The lot of them just about subsist on what they can grow in yam and cassava plots cut out of the bush by the women, who do any work there is to be done, which is precious little— unless you pay them well; then they will carry things. The men hunt. The children are a mass of malaria, trachoma, bilharzia, and malnutrition.

“In. the coastal plain there were in colonial days plantations of low-grade cocoa, coffee, cotton, and bananas. These were run and owned by whites, who used native labor. It wasn’t high-quality stuff, but it made enough, with a guaranteed European buyer, the colonial power, to make a bit of hard currency and pay for the minimal imports. Since independence, these have been nationalized by the President, who expelled the whites, and given to his party hacks. Now they’re about finished, overgrown with weeds.”

“Got any figures?”

“Yes, sir. In the last year before independence total cocoa output, that was the main crop, was thirty thousand tons. Last year it was one thousand tons, and there were no buyers. It’s still rotting on the ground.”

“And the others—coffee, cotton, bananas?”

“Bananas and coffee virtually ground to a halt through lack of attention. Cotton got hit by a blight, and there were no insecticides.”

“What’s the economic situation now?”

“Total disaster. Bankrupt, money worthless paper, exports down to almost nothing, and nobody letting them have any imports. There have been gifts from the UN, the Russians, and the colonial powers, but as the government always sells the stuff elsewhere and pockets the cash, even these three have given up.”

“A cheap tinhorn dictatorship, eh?” murmured Sir James.

“In every sense. Corrupt, vicious, brutal. They have seas off the coast rich in fish, but they can’t fish. The two fishing boats they had were skippered by whites. One got beaten up by the army thugs, and both quit. Then the engines rusted up, and the boats were abandoned. So the locals have protein deficiency. There aren’t even goats and chickens to go around.”

“What about medicines?”

“There’s one hospital in Clarence, which is run by the United Nations. That’s the only one in the country.”

“Doctors?”

“There were two Zangarans who were qualified doctors. One was arrested and died in prison. The other fled into exile. The missionaries were expelled by the President as imperialist influences. They were mainly medical missionaries as well as preachers and priests. The nuns used to train nurses, but they got expelled as well.”

“How many Europeans?”

"In the hinterlands, probably none. In the coastal plain, a couple of agronomists, technicians sent by the United Nations. In the capital, about forty diplomats, twenty of them in the Russian embassy, the rest spread among the French, Swiss, American, West German, East German, Czech, and Chinese embassies, if you call the Chinese white. Apart from that, about five United Nations hospital staff, another five technicians manning the electrical generator, the airport control tower, the waterworks, and so on. Then there must be fifty others, traders, managers, businessmen who have hung on hoping for an improvement.

“Actually, there was a ruckus six weeks ago and one of the UN -men was beaten half to death. The five nonmedical technicians threatened to quit and sought refuge in their respective embassies. They may be gone by now, in which case the water, electricity, and airport will soon be out of commission.”

“Where is the airport?”

“Here, on the base of the peninsula behind the capital. It’s not of international standards, so if you want to fly in you have to take Air Afrique to here, in Manandi, and take a connecting flight by a small two-engined plane that goes down to Clarence three times a week. It’s a French firm that has the concession, though nowadays it’s hardly economic.”

“Who are the country’s friends, diplomatically speaking?”

Endean shook his head. “They don’t have any. No one is interested, it’s such a shambles. Even the Organization of African Unity is embarrassed by the whole place. It’s so obscure no one ever mentions it. No newsmen ever go, so it never gets publicized. The government is rabidly anti-white, so no one wants to send staff men down there to run anything. No one invests anything, because nothing is safe from confiscation by any Tom, Dick, or Harry wearing a party badge. There’s a party youth organization that beats up anyone it wants to, and everyone lives in terror.”

“What about the Russians?”

“They have the biggest mission and probably a bit of say over the President in matters of foreign policy, about which he knows nothing. His advisers are mainly Moscow-trained Zangarans, though he wasn’t schooled in Moscow personally.”

“Is there any potential at all down there?” asked Sir James.

Endean nodded slowly. “I suppose there is enough potential, well managed and worked, to sustain the population at a reasonable degree of prosperity. The population is small, the needs few; they could be self-sufficient in clothing, food, the basics of a good local economy, with a little hard currency for the necessary extras. It could be done, but in any case, the needs are so few the relief and charitable agencies could provide the total necessary, if it wasn’t that their staffs are always molested, their equipment smashed or looted, and their gifts stolen and sold for the government’s private profit.”

“You say the Vindu won’t work hard. What about the Caja?”

“Nor they either,” said Endean. “They just sit about all day, or fade into the bush if anyone looks threatening. Their fertile plain has always grown enough to sustain them, so they are happy the way they are.”

“Then who worked the estates in the colonial days?”

“Ah, the colonial power brought in about twenty thousand black workers from elsewhere. They settled and live there still. With their families, they are about fifty thousand. But they were never enfranchised by the colonial power, so they never voted in the election at independence. If there is any work done, they still do it.”

“Where do they live?” asked Manson.

“About fifteen thousand still live in their huts on the estates, even though there is no more work worth doing, with all the machinery broken down. The rest have drifted toward Clarence and grub a living as best they can. They live in a series of shanty towns scattered down the road at the back of the capital, on the road to the airport.”

For five minutes Sir James Manson stared at the map in front of him, thinking deeply about a mountain, a mad President, a coterie of Moscow-trained advisers, and a Russian embassy. Finally he sighed. “What a bloody shambles of a place.”

“That’s putting it mildly,” said Endean. “They still have ritual public executions before the assembled populace in the main square. Death by being chopped to pieces with a machete. Quite a bunch.”

“And who precisely has produced this paradise on earth?”

For answer, Endean produced a photograph and placed it on the map.

Sir James Manson found himself looking at a middle-aged African in a silk top hat, black frock coat, and checked trousers. It was evidently inauguration day, for several colonial officials stood in the background, by the steps of a large mansion. The face beneath the shining black silk was not round, but long and gaunt, with deep lines on each side of the nose. The mouth was twisted downward at each corner, so that the effect was of deep disapproval of something.

But the eyes held the attention. There was a glazed fixity about them, as one sees in the eyes of fanatics.

“That’s the man,” said Endean. “Mad as a hatter, and nasty as a rattlesnake. West Africa’s own Papa Doc. Visionary, communicant with spirits, liberator from the white man’s yoke, redeemer of his people, swindler, robber, police chief and torturer of the suspicious, extractor of confessions, hearer of voices from the Almighty, seer of visions, Lord High Everything Else, His Excellency, President Jean Kimba.”

Sir James Manson stared longer at the face of the man who, unbeknownst to himself, was sitting in control of ten billion dollars’ worth of platinum. I wonder, he thought to himself, if the world would really notice his passing on.

He said nothing, but, after he had listened to Endean, that event was what he had decided to arrange.

Six years earlier the colonial power ruling the enclave now called Zangaro, increasingly conscious of world opinion, had decided to grant independence. Overhasty preparations were made among a population wholly inexperienced in self-government, and a general election and independence were fixed for the following year.

In the confusion, five political parties came into being. Two were wholly tribal, one claiming to look after the interests of the Vindu, the other of the Caja. The other three parties devised their own political platforms and pretended to make appeal through the tribal division of the people. One of these parties was the conservative group, led by a man holding office under the colonialists and heavily favored by them. He pledged he would continue the close links with the mother country, which, apart from anything else, guaranteed the local paper money and bought the exportable produce. The second party was centrist, small and weak, led by an intellectual, a professor who had studied in Europe. The third was radical and led by a man who had served several prison terms under a security classification. This was Jean Kimba.

Long before the elections, two of his aides, men who during their time as students in Europe had been contacted by the Russians (who had noticed their presence in anti-colonial street demonstrations) and who had accepted scholarships to finish their schooling at the Patrice Lumumba University outside Moscow, left Zangaro secretly and flew to Europe. There they met emissaries from Moscow and, as a result of their conversations, received a sum of money and considerable advice of a very practical nature.

Using the money, Kimba and his men formed squads of political thugs from among the Vindu and completely ignored the small minority of Caja. In the unpoliced hinterland the political squads went to work. Several agents of the rival parties came to very sticky ends, and the squads visited all the clan chiefs of the Vindu.

After several public burnings and eye-gougings, the clan chiefs got the message. When the elections came, acting on the simple and effective logic that you do what the man with the power to extract painful retribution tells you, and ignore or mock the weak and the powerless, the chiefs ordered their people to vote for Kimba. He won the Vindu by a clear majority, and the total votes cast for him swamped the combined opposition and the Caja votes. He was aided by the fact that the number of the Vindu votes had been almost doubled by the persuasion of every village chief to increase the number of people he claimed lived in his village. The rudimentary census taken by the colonial officials was based on affidavits from each village chief as to the population of his village.

The colonial power had made a mess of it. Instead of taking a leaf from the French book and ensuring that the colonial protege won the first, vital election and then signed a mutual defense treaty to ensure that a company of white paratroops kept the pro-Western president in power in perpetuity, the colonials had allowed their worst enemy to win. A month after the election, Jean Kimba was inaugurated as first President of Zangaro.

What followed was along traditional lines. The four other parties were banned as “divisive influences,” and later the four party leaders were arrested on trumped-up charges. They died under torture in prison, after making over the party funds to the liberator, Kimba. The colonial army and police officers were dismissed as soon as a semblance of an exclusively Vindu army had been brought into being. The Caja soldiers, who had constituted most of the gendarmerie under the colonists, were dismissed at the same time, and trucks were provided to take them home. After leaving the capital, the six trucks headed for a quiet spot on the Zangaro River, and here the machine guns opened up. That was the end of the trained Caja.

In the capital, the police and customs men, mainly Caja, were allowed to stay on, but their guns were emptied and all their ammunition was taken away. Power passed to the Vindu army, and the reign of terror started. It had taken eighteen months to achieve this. The confiscation of the estates, assets, and businesses of the colonists began, and the economy ran steadily down. There were no Vindu trained to take over who could run the republic’s few enterprises with even moderate efficiency, and the estates were in any case given to Kimba’s party supporters. As the colonists left, a few UN technicians came in to run the basic essentials, but the excesses they witnessed caused most sooner or later to write home to their governments insisting they be removed.

After a few short, sharp examples of terror, the timorous Caja were subdued into absolute submission, and even across the river in Vindu country several savage examples were made of chiefs who mumbled something about the pre-election promises. After that the Vindu simply shrugged and went back to their bush. What happened in the capital had never affected them anyway in living memory, so they could afford to shrug. Kimba and his group of supporters, backed by the Vindu army and the unstable and highly dangerous teenagers who made up the party’s youth movement, continued to rule from Clarence entirely for their own benefit and profit.

Some of the methods used to obtain the latter were mind-boggling. Simon Endean’s report contained documentation of an instance where Kimba, frustrated over the nonarrival of his share of a business deal, arrested the European businessman involved and imprisoned him, sending an emissary to his wife with the pledge that she would receive her husband’s toes, fingers, and ears by post unless a ransom were paid. A letter from her imprisoned husband confirmed this, and the woman raised the necessary half-million dollars from his business partners and paid. The man was released, but his government, terrified of black African opinion at the United Nations, urged him to remain silent. The press never heard about it. On another occasion two nationals of the colonial power were arrested and beaten in the former colonial police barracks, since converted into the army barracks. They were released after a handsome bribe was paid to the Minister of Justice, of which a part evidently went to Kimba, Their offense was failing to bow as Kimba’s car drove past.

In the previous five years since independence, all conceivable opposition to Kimba had been wiped out or driven into exile, and those who suffered the latter were the lucky ones. As a result there were no doctors, engineers, or other qualified people left in the republic. There had been few enough in the first place, and Kimba suspected all educated men as possible opponents.

Over the years he had developed a psychotic fear of assassination and never left the country. He seldom left the palace, and, when he did, it was under a massive escort. Firearms of every kind and description had been rounded up and impounded, including hunting rifles and shotguns, so that the scarcity of protein food increased. Import of cartridges and black powder was. halted, so eventually the Vindu hunters of the interior, coming to the coast to buy the powder they needed to hunt game, were sent back empty-handed and hung up their useless dane guns in their huts. Even the carrying of machetes within the city limits was forbidden. The carrying of any of these items was punishable by death.

When he had finally digested the lengthy report, studied the photographs of the capital, the palace, and Kimba, and pored over the maps, Sir James Manson sent again for Simon Endean.

The latter was becoming highly curious about his chief’s interest in this obscure republic and had asked Martin Thorpe in the adjoining office on the ninth floor what it was about. Thorpe had just grinned and tapped the side of his nose with a rigid forefinger. Thorpe was not completely certain either, but he suspected he knew. Both men knew enough not to ask questions when their employer had got an idea in his head and needed information.

When Endean reported to Manson the following morning, the latter was standing in his favorite position by the plate-glass windows of his penthouse, looking down into the street, where pygmies hurried about their business.

"There are two things I need to know more about,

Simon,“ Sir James Manson said without preamble and walked back to his desk, where the Endean report was lying. ”You mention here a ruckus in the capital about six to seven weeks ago. I heard another report about the same upset from a man who was there. He mentioned a rumor of an attempted assassination of Kimba. What was it all about?"

Endean was relieved. He had heard the same story from his own sources but had thought it too small to include in the report.

“Every time the President has a bad dream there are arrests and rumors of an attempt on his life,” said Endean. "Normally it just means he wants justification to arrest and execute somebody. In this case, in late January, it was the commander of the army, Colonel Bobi. I was told, on the quiet, the quarrel between the two men was really about Kimba’s not getting a big enough cut in the rake-off from a deal Bobi put through. A shipment of drugs and medicines had arrived for the UN hospital. The army impounded them at the quayside and stole half. Bobi was responsible, and the stolen portion of the cargo was sold elsewhere on the black market. The proceeds of the sale should have passed to Kimba. Anyway, the head of the UN hospital, when making his protest to Kimba and tendering his resignation, mentioned the true value of the missing stuff. It was a lot more than Bobi had admitted to Kimba.

“The President went mad and sent some of his own guards out looking for Bobi. They ransacked the town, arresting anyone who got in the way or took their fancy.”

“What happened to Bobi?” asked Manson.

“He fled. He got away in a jeep and made for the border He got across by abandoning his jeep and walking through the bush round the border control point.”

“What tribe is he?”

"Oddly enough, a halfbreed Half Vindu and half

Caja, probably the outcome of a Vindu raid on a Caja village forty years ago."

“Was he one of Kimba’s new army, or the old colonial one?” asked Manson.

“He was corporal in the colonial gendarmerie, so presumably he had some form of rudimentary training. Then he was busted, before independence, for drunkenness and insubordination while drunk. When Kimba came to power he took him back in the early days because he needed at least one man who could tell one end of a gun from the other. In the colonial days Bobi styled himself a Caja, but as soon as Kimba came to power he swore he was a true Vindu.”

“Why did Kimba keep him on? Was he one of his original supporters?”

“From the time Bobi saw which way the wind was blowing, he went to Kimba and swore loyalty to him. Which was smarter than the colonial governor, who couldn’t believe Kimba had won the election until the figures proved it. Kimba kept Bobi on and even promoted him to command the army, because it looked better for a half-Caja to carry out the reprisals against the Caja opponents of Kimba.”

“What’s he like?” asked Manson pensively.

“A big thug,” said Simon. “A human gorilla. No brains as such, but a certain low annual cunning. The quarrel between the two men was only a question of thieves falling out.”

“But Western-trained? Not Communist?” insisted Manson.

“No, sir. Not a Communist. Not anything politically.”

“Bribable? Cooperate for money?”

“Certainly. He must be living pretty humbly now. He couldn’t have stashed much away outside Zangaro. Only the President could get the big money.”

“Where is he now?” asked Manson.

“I don’t know, sir. Living somewhere in exile.”

“Right,” said Manson. “Find him, wherever he is.”

Endean nodded. “Am I to visit him?”

“Not yet,” said Manson. “There was one other matter. The report is fine, very comprehensive, except in one detail. The military side. I want to have a complete breakdown of the military security situation in and around the President’s palace and the capital. How many troops, police, any special presidential bodyguards, where they are quartered, how good they are, level of training and experience, the amount of fight they would put up if under attack, what weapons they carry, can they use them, what reserves are there, where the arsenal is situated, whether they have guards posted overall, if there are armored cars or artillery, if the Russians train the army, if there are strike-force camps away from Clarence—in fact, the whole lot.” ,

Endean stared at his chief in amazement. The phrase “If under attack” stuck in his mind. What on earth was the old man up to? he wondered, but his face remained impassive.

“That would mean a personal visit, Sir James.”

“Yes, I concede that. Do you have a passport in another name?”

“No, sir. In any case, I couldn’t furnish that information. It requires a sound judgment of military matters, and a knowledge of African troops as well. I was too late for National Service. I don’t know a thing about armies or weapons.”

Manson was back at the window, staring across the City. “I know,” he said softly. “It would need a soldier to produce that report.”

“Well, Sir James, you would hardly get an army man to go and do that sort of mission. Not for any money. Besides, a soldier’s passport would have his profession on it. Where could I find a military man who would go down to Clarence and find that sort of information?”

“There is a kind,” said Manson. “The mercenaries. They fight for whoever pays them and pays them well. I’m prepared to do that. So go and find me a mercenary with initiative and brains. The best in Europe.”

Cat Shannon lay on his bed in the small hotel in Montmartre and watched the smoke from his cigarette drifting up toward the ceiling. He was bored. In the weeks that had passed since his return from Africa he had spent most of his saved pay traveling around Europe trying to set up another job.

In Rome he had seen an order of Catholic priests he knew, with a view to going to South Sudan on their behalf to set up in the interior an airstrip into which medical supplies and food could be ferried. He knew there were three separate groups of mercenaries operating in South Sudan, helping the Christian blacks in their civil war against the Arab North. In Bahr-el-Gazar two other British mercenaries, Ron Gregory and Rip Kirby, were leading a small operation of Dinka tribesmen, laying mines along the roads used by the Sudanese army in an attempt to knock out their British Saladin armored cars. In the south, in Equatoria Province, Rolf Steiner had a camp that was supposed to be training the locals in the arts of war, but nothing had been heard of him for months. In Upper Nile, to the east, there was a much more efficient camp, where four Israelis were training the tribesmen and equipping them with Soviet weaponry from the vast stocks the Israelis had taken from the Egyptians in 1967. The warfare in the three provinces of South Sudan kept the bulk of the Sudanese army and air force pinned down there, so that five squadrons of Egyptian fighters were based around Khartoum and thus not available to confront the Israelis on the Suez Canal.

Shannon had visited the Israeli embassy in Paris and talked for forty minutes to the military attaché. The latter had listened politely, thanked him politely, and just as politely ushered him out. The only thing the officer would say was that there were no Israeli advisers on the rebel side in South Sudan, and therefore he could not help. Shannon had no doubts the conversation had been tape-recorded and sent to Tel Aviv, but doubted he would hear any more. He conceded the

Israelis were first rate as fighters and good at intelligence, but he thought they knew nothing about black Africa and were heading for a fall in Uganda and probably elsewhere.

Apart from Sudan, there was little else being offered. Rumors abounded that the CIA was hiring mercenaries for training anti-Communist Meos in Cambodia, and that some Persian Gulf sheiks were getting fed up with their dependence on British military advisers and were looking for mercenaries who would be entirely their own dependents. The story was that there were jobs going for men prepared to fight for the sheiks in the hinterland or take charge of palace security. Shannon doubted all these stories; for one thing he wouldn’t trust the CIA as far as he could spit, and the Arabs were not much better when it came to making up their minds.

Outside of the Gulf, Cambodia, and Sudan, there was little scope and there were no good wars. In fact he foresaw in the offing a very nasty outbreak of peace. That left the chance of working as a bodyguard for a European arms dealer, and he had had one approach from such a man in Paris who felt himself threatened and needed someone good to give him cover.

Hearing Shannon was in town and knowing his skill and speed, the arms dealer had sent an emissary with the proposition. Without actually turning it down, the Cat was not keen. The dealer was in trouble through his own stupidity: a small matter of sending a shipment of arms to the Provisional IRA and then tipping off the British as to where it would be landed. There had been a number of arrests, and the Provos were furious. Having Shannon giving gun-cover would send most professionals back home while still alive, but the Provos were mad dogs and probably did not know enough to stay clear. So there would be a gunfight, and the French police would take a dun view of one of their streets littered with bleeding Fenians. Moreover, as he was an Ulster Protestant, they would never believe Shannon had just been doing his job. Still, the offer was open.

The month of March had opened and was ten days through, but the weather remained dank and chill, with daily drizzle and rain, and Paris was unwelcoming. Outdoors meant fine weather in Paris, and indoors cost a lot of money. Shannon was husbanding his remaining resources of dollars as best he could. So he left his telephone number with the dozen or so people he thought might hear something to interest him and read several paperback novels in his hotel room.

He lay staring at the ceiling and thinking of home. Not that he really had a home any more, but for want of a better word he still thought of the wild sweep of turf and stunted trees that sprawls across the border of Tyrone and Donegal as the place that he came from.

He had been born and brought up close to the small village of Castlederg, situated inside County Tyrone but lying on the border with Donegal. His parents’ house had been set a mile from the village on a slope looking out to the west across Donegal.

They called Donegal the county God forgot to finish, and the few trees were bent toward the east, curved over by the constant beating of the winds from the North Atlantic.

His father had owned a flax mill that turned out fine Irish linen and had been in a small way the squire of the area. He was Protestant, and almost all the workers and local farmers were Catholic, and in Ulster never the twain shall meet, so the young Carlo had had no other boys to play with. He made his friends among the horses instead, and this was horse country. He could ride before he could mount a bicycle, and had a pony of his own when he was five, and he could still remember riding the pony into the village to buy a halfpennyworth of sherbet powder from the sweetshop of old Mr. Sam Gailey.

At eight he had been sent to boarding school in England at the urging of his mother, who was English and came from moneyed people. So for the next ten years he had learned to be an Englishman and had to all intents and purposes lost the stamp of Ulster in both speech and attitudes. During the holidays he had gone home to the moors and the horses, but he knew no contemporaries near Castlederg, so the vacations were lonely if healthy, consisting of long, fast gallops in the wind.

It was while he was a sergeant in the Royal Marines at twenty-two that his parents had died in a car crash on the Belfast Road. He had returned for the funeral, smart in his black belt and gaiters, topped by the green beret of the Commandos. Then he had accepted an offer for the run-down, nearly bankrupt mill, closed up the house, and returned to Portsmouth.

That was eleven years ago. He had served the remainder of his five-year contract in the Marines, and on returning to civilian life had pottered from job to job until taken on as a clerk by a London merchant house with widespread African interests. Working his probationary year in London, he had learned the intricacies of company structure, trading and banking the profits, setting up holding companies, and the value of a discreet Swiss account. After a year in London he had been posted as assistant manager of the Uganda branch office, from which he had walked out without a word and driven into the Congo. So for the last six years he had lived as a mercenary, often as outlaw, at best regarded as a soldier for hire, at worst as a paid killer. The trouble was, once he was known as a mercenary, there was no going back. It was riot a question of being unable to get a job in a business house; that could be done at a pinch, or even by giving a different name. Even without going to these lengths, one could always get hired as a truck-driver, as a security guard, or for some manual job if the worst came to the worst. The real problem was being able to stick it out, to sit in an office under the orders of a wee man in a dark gray suit and look out of the window and recall the bush country, the waving palms, the smell of sweat and cordite, the grunts of the men hauling the jeeps over the river crossings, the copper-tasting fears just before the attack, and the wild, cruel joy of being alive afterward. To remember, and then to go back to the ledgers and the commuter train, that was what was impossible. He knew he would eat his heart out if it ever came to that. For Africa bites like a tse-tse fly, and once the drug is in the blood it can never be wholly exorcised.

So he lay on his bed and smoked some more and wondered where the next job was coming from.

6

Simon Endean was aware that somewhere in London there had to exist the wherewithal to discover just about any piece of knowledge known to man, including the name and address of a first-class mercenary. The only problem sometimes is to know where to start looking and whom to start asking.

After a reflective hour drinking coffee in his office, he left and took a taxi down to Fleet Street. Through a friend on the city desk of one of London’s biggest daily papers, he got access to that paper’s morgue and to virtually every newspaper clipping in Britain over the previous ten years concerning mercenaries. There were articles about Katanga, the Congo, Yemen, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Sudan, Nigeria, and Rwanda; news items, commentaries, editorial feature articles, and photographs. He read them all and paid special attention to the names of the writers.

At this stage he was not looking for the name of a mercenary. There were in any case too many names— pseudonyms, noms de guerre, nicknames—and he had little doubt some of them were false. He was looking for the name of an expert on mercenaries, a writer or reporter whose articles seemed to be authoritative enough to indicate that the journalist knew his subject well, who could find his way around the bewildering labyrinth of rival claims and alleged exploits and give a balanced judgment. At the end of two hours he had secured the name he was looking for, although he had never heard of the man before.

There were three articles over the previous three years carrying the same byline, apparently that of an Englishman or American. The writer seemed to know what he was talking about, and he mentioned mercenaries from half a dozen different nationalities, neither overpraising them nor sensationalizing their careers to set spines a tingling. Endean noted the name and the three newspapers in which the articles had appeared, a fact which seemed to indicate that the writer was freelancing. A second phone call to his newspaper friend eventually produced the writer’s address. It was a small flat in North London.

Darkness had already fallen when Endean left Man-Con House, and, having taken his Corvette from the underground parking lot, he drove northward to find the journalist’s flat. The lights were off when he got there, and there was no answer to the doorbell. En-dean hoped the man was not abroad, and the woman in the basement flat confirmed that he was not. He was glad to see the house was not large or smart and hoped the reporter might be hard up for a little extra cash, as freelances usually are. He decided to come back in the morning.

Simon Endean pressed the bell next to the writer’s name just after eight the following morning, and half a minute later a voice tinkled “Yes” at him from the metal grill set in the woodwork.

“Good morning,” said Endean into the grill. “My name is Harris. Walter Harris. I’m a businessman. I wonder if I might have a word with you?”

The door opened, and he mounted to the fourth floor, where a door stood open onto the landing. Framed in it was the man he had come to see. When they were seated in the sitting room, Endean came straight to the point.

“I am a businessman in the City,” he lied smoothly. “I am here, in a sense, representing a consortium of friends, all of whom have this in common: that we all have business interests in a state in West Africa.”

The writer nodded warily and sipped his coffee.

“Recently there have been increasing reports of the possibility of a coup d’etat. The President is a moderate and reasonably good man, as things go down there, and very popular with his people. One of my business friends was told by one of his workers that the coup, if and when it came, could well be Communist-backed. Do you follow me?”

“Yes. Go on.”

“Well now, it is felt that no more than a small portion of the army would support a coup unless the speed of it threw them into confusion and left them leader-less. In other words, if it were a fait accompli, the bulk of the army might agree to go along in any case, once they realized the coup had succeeded. But if it came and half failed, the bulk of the army would, we all feel sure, support the President. As you may know, experience shows the twenty hours following the strike are the vital ones.”

“What has this to do with me?” asked the writer.

“I’m coming to that,” said Endean. “The general feeling is that, for the coup to succeed, it would be necessary for the plotters first to assassinate the President. If he remained alive, the coup would fail, or might not even be tried, and all would be well. Therefore the question of palace security is vital and becoming more so. We have been in touch with some friends in the Foreign Office, and they feel it is out of the question to send a professional British officer to advise on security in and around the palace,”

“So?” The writer sipped more coffee and lit a cigarette. He reckoned his visitor was too smooth, too smooth by half.

“So the President would be prepared to accept the services of a professional soldier to advise, on the basis of a contract, on all security matters regarding the person of the President. What he is seeking is a man who could go down there, make a complete and thorough survey of the palace and all its security arrangements, and plug any loopholes in the existing security measures surrounding the President.”

The freelance nodded several times. He had few doubts that the story of the man who called himself Harris was some way from true. For one thing, if palace security was really what was sought, the British government would not be against providing the expert to advise on its improvement. For another, there was a perfectly capable firm at 22 Sloane Street, London, called Watchguard International, whose specialty was precisely that. In a few sentences he pointed this out to Harris.

Endean was not fazed in the slightest. “Ah,” he said, “evidently I have to be a little more candid.”

“It would help,” said the writer.

“The point is, you see, that HMG might agree to send an expert merely to advise, but if the advice was that the palace security troops needed extensive further training—and a crash course, at that—politically speaking a Britisher sent by the government could not do that. And if the President wished to offer the man a longer-term post on his staff, the same would apply. As for Watchguard, one of their ex-Special Air Service men would be fine, but if he were on the staff of the palace guard and a coup were tried despite his presence, there might be a question of combat. Now you know what the rest of Africa would think about a staff man from Watchguard, which most of these blacks regard as being linked to the Foreign Office in some way, doing that. But a pure outsider, although not respectable, would at least be understandable, without exposing the President to the sneer of being a tool of the dirty old imperialists.”

“So what do you want?” asked the writer.

“The name of a good mercenary soldier,” said Endean. “One with brains and initiative, who’ll do a workmanlike job for his money.”

“Why come to me?”

“Your name was recalled by one of our group from an article you wrote several months ago. It seemed very authoritative.”

“I write for my living,” said the freelance.

Endean gently withdrew £200 in £10 notes from his pocket and laid them on the table. “Then write for me.”

“What? An article?”

“No, a memorandum. A list of names and track records. Or you can talk if you like.”

“I’ll write,” said the freelance. He walked to a corner, where his desk, a typewriter, and a stack of white paper comprised the working area of the open-plan flat. Having run a sheet into his machine, he wrote steadily for fifty minutes, consulting occasionally from a set of files beside his desk. When he rose, he walked over to the waiting Endean with three sheets of quarto paper and held them out.

“These are the best around today, the older generation of the Congo six years ago and the new up-and-comers. I haven’t bothered with men who couldn’t command a platoon well. Mere heavies would be no use to you.”

Endean took the sheets and studied them intently.

The contents were:

COLONEL LAMOULINE. Belgian, probably government man. Came into Congo in 1964 under Moi’se Tshombe. Probably with full approval of Belgian government. First-class soldier, not really a mercenary in full sense of the word. Set up Sixth Commando (French-speaking) and commanded until 1965, when he handed over command to Denard and left.

ROBERT DENARD. Frenchman. Police background, not army. Was in Katanga secession in 1961-62,-probably as gendarmerie adviser. Left after failure of secession and exile of Tshombe. Commanded French mercenary operation in Yemen for Jacques Foccart Returned Congo 1964, joined Lamouline. Commanded Sixth after Lamouline and up till 1967. Took part, halfheartedly, in second Stanleyville revolt (the mercenaries’ mutiny) in 1967. Wounded badly in head by ricocheting bullet from own side. Flown out of Rhodesia for treatment. Tried to return by mounting November 1967 mercenary invasion of Congo from the south at Dilolo. Operation delayed, some said as a result of CIA bribes, was a fiasco when it happened. Since lived in Paris.

JACQUES SCHRAMME. Belgian. Planter-turned-mercenary. Nicknamed Black Jacques. Formed own unit of Katangese early in 1961 and was prominent in Katangese secession attempt. One of the last to flee into Angola on defeat of the secession. Took his Katangese with him. Waited in Angola until return of Tshombe, then marched back into Katanga. Through the 1964-65 war against the Simba rebels, his 10th Codo was more or less independent. Sat out the first Stanleyville revolt of 1966 (the Katangese mutiny), and his mixed mercenary/Katangese force was left intact. Launched 1967 Stanleyville mutiny, in which Denard later joined. Took joint command after wounding of Denard and led the march to Bukavu. Repatriated 1968, no further mercenary work since.

ROGER FAULQUES. Much-decorated French professional officer. Sent, probably by French govt., into Katanga during secession. Later commanded Denard, who ran the French operation in the Yemen. Was not involved in Congolese mercenary operations. Mounted small operation at French behest in Nigerian civil war. Ferociously brave but now nearly crippled by combat wounds.

MIKE HOARE. British-turned-South African. Acted as mercenary adviser in Katanga secession, became close personal friend of Tshombe. Invited back to Congo in 1964, when Tshombe returned to power, and formed English-speaking Fifth Commando. Commanded through bulk of anti-Simba war, retired in December 1965 and handed over to Peters. Well off and semi-retired.

JOHN PETERS. Joined Hoare in 1964 in first mercenary war. Rose to become deputy commander. Fearless and totally ruthless. Several officers under Hoare refused to serve under Peters and transferred or left 5th Godo. Retired wealthy late 1966.

N.B. The above six count as “the older generation,” inasmuch as they were the originals who came to prominence in the Katanga and Congolese wars. The following five are younger in age, except Roux, who is now in his mid-forties, but may be considered the “younger” generation because they had junior commands in the Congo or came to prominence since the Congo.

ROLF STEINER. German. Began first mercenary operation under Faulques-organized group that went into Nigerian civil war. Stayed on and led the remnants of the group for nine months. Dismissed. Signed on for South Sudan.

GEORGE SCHROEDER. South African. Served under Hoare and Peters in 5th Codo in the Congo. Prominent in the South African contingent in that unit. Their choice as leader after Peters. Peters conceded and gave him the command. 5th Codo disbanded and sent home a few months later. Not heard of since. Living in South Africa.

CHARLES Roux. French. Very junior in Katangese secession. Quit early and went to South Africa via Angola. Stayed there and returned with South Africans to fight under Hoare in 1964. Quarreled with Hoare and went to join Denard. Promoted and transferred to 6th Codo subsidiary unit, the 14th Codo, as second-in-command. Took part in 1966 Katangese revolt in Stanleyville, in which his unit was nearly wiped out. Was smuggled out of the Congo by Peters. Returned by air with several South Africans and joined Schramme, May 1967. Took part in 1967 Stanleyville revolt as well. After wounding of Denard, proposed for overall command of 10th and 6th Commandos, now merged. Failed. Wounded at Bukavu in a shoot-out, quit, and returned home via Kigali. Not in action since. Lives in Paris.

CARLO SHANNON. British. Served under Hoare in 5th, 1964. Declined to serve under Peters. Transferred to Denard 1966, joined the 6th. Served under Schramme on march to Bukavu. Fought throughout siege. Repatriated among the last in April 1968. Volunteered for Nigerian civil war, served under Steiner. Took over remnants after Steiner’s dismissal, November 1968. Commanded till the end. Believed staying in Paris.

LUCIEN BRUN. Alias Paul Leroy. French, speaks fluent English. Served as enlisted officer French Army, Algerian war. Normal discharge. Was in South Africa 1964, volunteered for Congo. Arrived 1964 with South African unit, joined Hoare’s 5th Commando. Fought well, wounded late 1964. Returned 1965. Refused to serve under Peters, transferred to Denard and the 6th in early 1966. Left Congo May 1966, sensing forthcoming revolt. Served under Faulques in Nigerian civil war. Wounded and repatriated. Returned and tried for his own command. Failed. Repatriated 1968. Lives in Paris. Highly intelligent, also very politically minded.

When he had finished, Endean looked up. “These men would all be available for such a job?” he asked.

The writer shook his head. “I doubt it,” he said. “I included all those who could do such a job. Whether they would want to is another matter. It would depend on the size of the job, the number of men they would command. For the older ones there is a question of the prestige involved. There is also the question of how much they need the work. Some of the older ones are more or less retired and comfortably off.”

“Point them out to me,” invited Endean.

The writer leaned over and ran his finger down the list. "First the older generation. Lamouline you’ll never get. He was always virtually an extension of Belgian government policy, a tough veteran and revered by his men. He’s retired now. The other Belgian, Black Jacques Schramme, is now retired and runs a chicken farm in Portugal. Of the French, Roger Faulques is perhaps the most decorated ex-officer of the French Army. He also is revered by the men who fought under him, in and out of the Foreign Legion, and regarded as a gentleman by others. But he’s also crippled with wounds, and the last contract he got was a failure because he delegated the command to a subordinate who failed,

"Denard was good in the Congo but got a very bad head wound at Stanleyville. Now he’s past it. The French mercenaries still stay in contact with him, looking for a bite, but he hasn’t been given a command or a project to set up since the fiasco at Dilolo. And little wonder.

“Of the Anglo-Saxons, Mike Hoare is retired and comfortably off. He might be tempted by a million-pound project, but even that’s not certain. His last foray was into Nigeria, where he proposed a project to each side, costed at half a million pounds. They both turned him down. John Peters is also retired and runs a factory in Singapore. All six made a lot of money in the heyday, but none has adapted to the smaller, more technical mission that might be called for nowadays, some because they don’t wish to, or because they can’t!”

“What about the other five?” asked Endean.

"Steiner was good once, but deteriorated. The press publicity got to him, and that’s always bad for a mercenary. They begin to believe they are as fearsome as the Sunday papers say they are. Roux became bitter when he failed to get the Stanleyville command after Denard’s wounding and claims leadership over all French mercenaries, but he hasn’t been employed since Bukavu. The last two are better; both in their thirties, intelligent, educated, and with enough guts in combat to be able to command other meres. Incidentally, meres only fight under a leader they choose themselves. So hiring a bad mercenary to recruit others serves no purpose, because no one else wants to know about serving under a guy who once ran out. So the combat record is important.

“Lucien Brun, alias Paul Leroy, could do this job. Trouble is, you would never be quite sure if he was not passing stuff to French intelligence, the SDECE. Does that matter?”

“Yes, very much,” said Endean shortly. “You left out Schroeder, the South African. What about him? You say he commanded Fifth Commando in the Congo?”

“Yes,” said the writer. “At the end, the very end. It also broke up under his command. He’s a first-class, soldier, within his limitations. For example, he would command a battalion of mercenaries excellently, providing it were within the framework of a brigade with a good staff. He’s a good combat man, but conventional. Very little imagination, not the sort who could set up his own operation starting from scratch. He’d need staff officers to take care of the admin.”

“And Shannon? He’s British?”

“Anglo-Irish. He’s new; he got his first command only a year ago, but he did well. He can think unconventionally and has a lot of audacity. He can also organize down to the last detail.”

Endean rose to go. “Tell me something,” he said at the door. “If you were mounting an—seeking a man to go on a mission and assess the situation, which would you choose?”

The writer picked up the notes on the breakfast table. “Cat Shannon,” he said without hesitation. “If I were doing that, or mounting an operation, I’d pick the Cat.”

“Where is he?” asked Endean.

The writer mentioned a hotel and a bar in Paris. “You could try either of those,” he said.

“And if this man Shannon was not available, or for some other reason could not be employed, who would be second on the list?”

The writer thought for a while. “If not Lucien Brun, then the only other who would almost certainly be available and has the experience would be Roux,” he said.

“You have his address?” asked Endean.

The writer flicked through a small notebook that he took from a drawer in his desk.

“Roux has a flat in Paris,” he said and gave Endean the address. A few seconds later he heard the clump of Endean’s feet descending the stairs. He picked up the phone and dialed a number. “Carrie? Hi, it’s me. We’re going out tonight. Somewhere expensive. I just got paid for a feature article.”

Cat Shannon walked slowly and pensively up the rue Blanche toward the Place Clichy. The little bars were already open on both sides of the street, and from the doorways the hustlers tried to persuade him to step inside and see the most beautiful girls in Paris. The latter, who, whatever else they were, most certainly were not that, peered through the lace curtains at the darkened street. It was just after five o’clock on a mid-March evening, with a cold wind blowing. The weather matched Shannon’s mood.

He crossed the square and ducked up another side street toward his hotel, which had few advantages but a fine view from its top floors, since it was close to the summit of Montmartre. He was thinking about Dr. Dunois, whom he had visited for a general checkup a week earlier. A former paratrooper and army doctor, Dunois had become a mountaineer and gone on two French expeditions to the Himalayas and the Andes as the team medico.

He had later volunteered for several tough medical missions in Africa, on a temporary basis and for the duration of the emergency, working for the French Red Cross. There he had met the mercenaries and had patched up several of them after combat. He had become known as the mercenaries’ doctor, even in Paris, and had sewn up a lot of bullet holes, removed many splinters of mortar casing from their bodies. If they had a medical problem or needed a checkup, they usually went to him at his Paris surgery. If they were well off, flush with money, they paid on the nail in dollars. If not, he forgot to send his bill, which is unusual in French doctors.

Shannon turned into the door of his hotel and crossed to the desk for his key. The old man was on duty behind the desk.

“Ah, monsieur, one has been calling you from London. All day. He left a message.”

The old man handed Shannon the slip of paper in the key aperture. It was written in the old man’s scrawl, evidently dictated letter by letter. It said simply “Careful Harris,” and was signed with the name of a freelance writer he knew from his African wars and who he knew lived in London.

“There is another, m’sieur. He is waiting in the salon.”

The old man gestured toward the small room set aside from the lobby, and through the archway Shannon could see a man about his own age, dressed in the sober gray of a London businessman, watching him as he stood by the desk. There was little of the London businessman in the ease with which the visitor came to his feet as Shannon entered the salon, or about the build of the shoulders. Shannon had seen men like him before. They always represented older, richer men.

“Mr. Shannon?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Harris, Walter Harris.”

“You wanted to see me?”

“I’ve been waiting a couple of hours for just that. Can we talk here, or in your room?”

“Here will do. The old man understands no English.”

The two men seated themselves facing each other.

Hams relaxed and crossed his legs. He reached for a pack of cigarettes and gestured to Shannon with the pack. Shannon shook his head and reached for his own brand in his jacket pocket.

“I understand you are a mercenary, Mr. Shannon?”

“Yes.”

“In fact you have been recommended to me. I represent a group of London businessmen. We need a job done. A sort of mission. It needs a man who has some knowledge of military matters, and who can travel to a foreign country without exciting any suspicions. Also a man who can make an intelligent report on what he saw there, analyze a military situation, and then keep his mouth shut.”

“I don’t kill on contract,” said Shannon briefly.

“We don’t want you to,” said Harris.

“All right, what’s the mission? And what’s the fee?” asked Shannon. He saw no sense in wasting words. The man in front of him was unlikely to be shocked by a spade being called a spade.

Harris smiled briefly. “First, you would have to come to London for briefing. We would pay for your trip and expenses, even if you decided not to accept.”

“Why London? Why not here?” asked Shannon.

Harris exhaled a long stream of smoke. “There are some maps and other papers involved,” he said. “I didn’t want to bring them with me. Also, I have to consult my partners, report to them that you have accepted or not, as the case may be.”

There was silence as Harris drew a wad of French 100-franc notes from his pocket.

“Fifteen hundred francs,” he said. “About a hundred and twenty pounds. That’s for your air ticket to London, single or return, whichever you wish to buy. And your overnight stay. If you decline the proposition after hearing it, you get another hundred for your trouble in coming. If you accept, we discuss the further salary.”

Shannon nodded. “All right. I’ll listen—in London. When?”

“Tomorrow,” said Harris and rose to leave. “Arrive any time during the course of the day, and stay at the Post House Hotel on Haverstock Hill. I’ll book your room when I get back tonight. At nine the day after tomorrow I’ll phone you in your room and make a rendezvous for later that morning. Clear?”

Shannon nodded and picked up the francs. “Book the room in the name of Brown, Keith Brown,” he said.

The man who called himself Harris left the hotel and headed downhill, looking for a taxi. He had not seen any reason to mention to Shannon that he had spent three hours earlier that afternoon talking with another mercenary, a man by the name of Charles Roux. Nor did he mention that he had decided, despite the Frenchman’s evident eagerness, that Roux was not the man for the job; he had left the man’s flat with a vague promise to get in touch again, with his decision.

Twenty-four hours later Shannon stood at his bedroom window in the Post House Hotel and stared out at the rain and the commuter traffic swishing up Haver-stock Hill from Camden Town toward Hampstead and the commuter suburbs.

He had arrived that morning on the first plane, using his passport in the name of Keith Brown. Long since, he had had to acquire a false passport by the normal method used in mercenary circles. At the end of 1967 he had been with Black Jacques Schramme at Bukavu, surrounded and besieged for months by the Congolese army. Finally, undefeated but running out of ammunition, the mercenaries had vacated the Congolese lakeside city, walked across the bridge into neighboring Rwanda, and allowed themselves, with Red Cross guarantees which the Red Cross could not possibly fulfill, to be disarmed.

From then on, for nearly six months, they had sat idle in an internment camp at Kigali while the Red Cross and the Rwanda government hassled over their repatriation to Europe. President Mobutu of the Congo wanted them sent back to him for execution, but the mercenaries had threatened if that was the decision they would take the Rwandan army barehanded, recover their guns and find their own way home. The Rwandan government had believed, rightly, that they might do it.

When finally the decision was made to fly them back to Europe, the British consul had visited the camp and soberly told the six British mercenaries present that he would have to impound their passports. They had soberly told him they had lost everything across the lake in Bukavu. On being flown home to London, Shannon and the others had been told by the Foreign Office that each man owed £350 for the air fare and would receive no new passport ever again.

Before leaving the camp, the men had been photographed and fingerprinted and had had their names taken. They also had to sign documents pledging never to set foot on the continent of Africa. These documents would be sent in copy to every African government.

The reaction of the mercenaries was predictable. Every one had a lush beard and mustache and hair left uncut after months in the camp, where no scissors were allowed in case they went on the warpath with them. The photographs were therefore unrecognizable. Each man then submitted his own fingerprints for another man’s prints, and they all exchanged names. The result was that every identity document contained one man’s name, another man’s fingerprints, and a third man’s photograph. Finally, they signed the pledge to leave Africa forever with names like Sebastian Weetabix and Neddy Seagoon.

Shannon’s reaction to the Foreign Office demand was no less unhelpful. As he still had his “lost” passport, he kept it and traveled where he wished until it expired. Then he took the necessary steps to secure another one, issued by the Passport Office but based on a birth certificate, secured from the Registry of Births in Somerset House for the standard fee of five shillings, which referred to a baby who had died of meningitis in Yarmouth about the time Shannon was born[1].

On arrival in London that morning, he had contacted the writer he had first met in Africa and learned how Walter Harris had found him. He thanked the man for recommending him and asked if he knew the name of a good agency of private inquirers. Later that afternoon he visited the agency and paid a deposit of £20, promising to phone the next morning with further instructions.

Harris called, as he had promised, on the dot of nine the following morning and was put through to Mr. Brown’s room.

“There’s a block of flats in Sloane Avenue called Chelsea Cloisters,” he said without preamble. “I have booked flat three-seventeen for us to talk. Please be there at eleven sharp. Wait in the lobby until I arrive, as I have the key.” Then he hung up.

Shannon checked the address in the telephone book under the bedside table and called the detective agency. “I want your man in the lobby of Chelsea Cloisters in Sloane Avenue at ten-fifteen,” he said. “He had better have his own transport.”

“He’ll have a scooter,” said the head of the agency.

An hour later Shannon met the man from the agency in the lobby of the apartment house. Rather to his surprise, the man was a youth in his late teens, with long hair.

Shannon surveyed him suspiciously. “Do you know your job?” he asked.

The boy nodded. He seemed full of enthusiasm, and Shannon only hoped it was matched by a bit of skill.

“Well, park that crash helmet outside on the scooter,” he said. “People who come in here don’t carry crash helmets. Sit over there and read a newspaper.”

The youth did not have one, so Shannon gave him his own. “I’ll sit on the other side of the lobby. At about eleven a man will come in, nod to me, and we’ll go into the lift together. Note that man, so you will recognize him again. He should come out about an hour later. By then you must be across the road, astride the scooter, with the helmet on and pretending to be busy with a breakdown. Got it?”

“Yes. I’ve got it.”

“The man will either take his own car from nearby, in which case grab the number of it. Or he’ll take a taxi. In either case, follow him and note where he goes. Keep on his tail until he arrives at what looks like his final destination.”

The youth drank in the instructions and took his place in the far corner of the lobby behind his newspaper.

The lobby porter frowned but left him alone. He had seen quite a few meetings take place in front of his reception desk.

Forty minutes later Simon Endean walked in. Shannon noticed that he dismissed a taxi at the door, and hoped the youth had noticed it as well. He stood up and nodded to the newcomer, but Endean strolled past him and pressed the summons button for the lift. Shannon joined him and remarked the youth peering over his newspaper.

For God’s sake, thought Shannon and mentioned something about the foul weather lest the man who called himself Harris should glance round the lobby.

Settled into an easy chair in flat 317, Harris opened his briefcase and took out a map. Spreading it out on the bed, he told Shannon to look at it. Shannon gave it three minutes and had taken in all the details the map had to give. Then Harris began his briefing.

It was a judicious mixture of fact and fiction. He still claimed he represented a consortium of British businessmen, all of whom did some form of business with Zangaro and all of whose businesses, including some which were virtually out of business, had suffered as a result of President Kimba.

Then he went into the background of the republic from independence onward, and what he said was truthful, most of it out of his own report to Sir James Manson. The punch line came at the end.

"A group of officers in the army has got in touch with a group of local businessmen—who are, incidentally, a dying breed. They have mentioned that they are considering toppling Kimba in a coup. One of the local businessmen mentioned it to one of my group, and put their problem to us. It is basically that they are virtually untrained in military terms, despite their officer status, and do not know how to topple the man, because he spends too much time hidden inside the walls of his palace, surrounded by his guards.

“Frankly, we would not be sorry to see this Kimba go, and neither would his people. A new government would be good for the economy of the place and good for the country. We need a man to go down there and make a complete assessment of the military and security situation in and around the palace and the important institutions. We want a complete report on Kimba’s military strength.”

“So you can pass it on to your officers?” asked Shannon.

“They are not our officers. They are Zangaran officers. The fact is, if they are going to strike at all, they had better know what they are doing.”

Shannon believed half of the briefing, but not the second half. If the officers, who were on the spot, could not assess the situation, they would be incompetent to carry out a coup. But he did not say so.

“I’d have to go in as a tourist,” he said. “There’s no other cover that would work.”

“That’s right.”

“There must be precious few tourists that go there. Why cannot I go in as a company visitor to one of your friends’ business houses?”

“That will not be possible,” said Harris. “If anything went wrong, there would be all hell to pay.”

If I get caught, you mean, thought Shannon, but kept silent. He was being paid, so he would take risks. That, and his knowledge, was what he was being paid for.

“There’s the question of pay,” he said shortly.

“Then you’ll do it?”

“If the money’s right, yes.”

Harris nodded approvingly. “Tomorrow morning a round-trip ticket from London to the capital of the neighboring republic will be at your hotel,” he said. “You have to fly back to Paris and get a visa for this republic. Zangaro is so poor there is only one embassy in Europe, and that’s in Paris also. But getting a Zangaran visa there takes a month. In the next-door republic’s capital there is a Zangaran consulate. There you can get a visa for cash, and within an hour if you tip the consul. You understand the procedure.”

Shannon nodded. He understood it very well.

“So get visaed up in Paris, then fly down by Air Afrique. Get your Zangaran visa on the spot and take the connecting plane service from there to Clarence, paying cash. With the tickets at your hotel tomorrow will be three hundred pounds in French francs as expenses.”

“I’ll need five,” said Shannon. “It’ll be ten days at least, possibly more, depending on connections and how long the visas take to get. Three hundred leaves no margin for the occasional bribe or any delay.”

“All right, five hundred in French francs. Plus five hundred for yourself,” said Harris.

“A thousand,” said Shannon.

“Dollars? I understand you people deal in U.S. dollars.”

“Pounds,” said Shannon. “That’s twenty-five hundred dollars, or two months at flat salary if I were on a normal contract.”

“But you’ll only be away ten days,” protested Harris.

“Ten days of high risk,” countered Shannon. “If this place is half what you say it is, anyone getting caught on this kind of job is going to be very dead, and very painfully. You want me to take the risks rather than go yourself, you pay.”

“Okay, a thousand pounds. Five hundred down and five hundred when you return.”

“How do I know you’ll contact me when I return?” said Shannon.

“How do I know you’ll even go there at all?” countered Harris.

Shannon considered the point. Then he nodded. “All right, half now, half later.”

Ten minutes later Harris was gone, after instructing Shannon to wait five minutes before leaving himself.

At three that afternoon the head of the detective agency was back from his lunch. Shannon called at three-fifteen.

“Ah, yes, Mr. Brown,” said the voice on the phone. “I have spoken to my man. He waited as you instructed, and when the subject left the building he recognized him and followed. The subject hailed a taxi from the curb, and my man followed him to the City. There he dismissed the taxi and entered a building.”

“What building?”

“ManCon House. That’s the headquarters of Manson Consolidated Mining.”

“Do you know if he works there?” asked Shannon.

“It would seem he does,” said the agency chief. “My man could not follow him into the building, but he noticed the commissionaire touched his cap to the subject and held the door open for him. He did not do that for a stream of secretaries and evidently junior executives who were emerging for lunch.”

“He’s brighter than he looks,” conceded Shannon. The youth had done a good job. Shannon gave several further instructions and that afternoon mailed £50 by registered mail to the detective agency. He also opened a bank account and put down £10 deposit in it. The following morning he banked a further £500 and that evening flew to Paris.

Dr. Gordon Chalmers was not a drinking man. He seldom touched anything stronger than beer, and when he did he became talkative, as his employer, Sir James Manson, had found out for himself over their luncheon at Wilton’s. The evening that Cat Shannon was changing planes at Le Bourget to catch the Air Afrique DC-8 to West Africa, Dr. Chalmers was having dinner with an old college friend, now also a scientist and working in industrial research.

There was nothing special about their meal. He had run into his former classmate in one of those coincidental meetings on the street a few days earlier, and they had agreed to have dinner together.

Fifteen years earlier they had been young undergraduates, single and working hard on their respective degrees, earnest and concerned as so many young scientists feel obliged to be. In the mid-1950s the concern had been the bomb and colonialism, and they had joined thousands of others marching for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the various movements that sought an instant end to empire, and world freedom now. Both had been indignant, serious, committed, and both had changed nothing. But in their indignation over the state of the world they had dabbled with the Young Communist movement. Chalmers had grown out of it, married, started his family, secured a mortgage for his house, and slowly merged into the salaried middle class.

The combination of worries that had come his way over the previous two weeks caused him to take more than his usual single glass of wine with dinner, considerably more. His friend, a kindly man with soft brown eyes, noticed his worry and asked if he could help.

It was over the brandy that Dr. Chalmers felt he had to confide his worries to someone, someone who, unlike his wife, was a fellow scientist and would understand the problem. Of course it was highly confidential, and his friend was solicitous and sympathetic.

When he heard about the crippled daughter and the need for the money to pay for her expensive equipment, the man’s eyes clouded over with sympathy, and he reached across the table to grip Dr. Chalmers’ forearm.

“Don’t worry about it, Gordon. It’s completely understandable. Anyone else would have done the same thing,” he told him. Chalmers felt better when they left the restaurant and made their separate ways home. He was easier in his mind, his problem somehow shared.

Though he had asked his old friend how he had fared in the intervening years since their undergraduate days together, the man had been slightly evasive. Chalmers, bowed under his own worries and his observation blunted by wine, had not pressed for detail. Even had he done so, it was unlikely the friend would have told him that, far from merging into the bourgeoisie, he had remained a fully committed member of the Communist party.

7

The Convair 440 that ran the connecting air service into Clarence banked steeply over the bay and began its descent toward the airfield. Being intentionally on the left side of the plane, Shannon could look down toward the town as the aircraft overflew it. From a thousand feet he could see the capital of Zangaro occupying the end of the peninsula, surrounded on three sides by the palm-fringed waters of the gulf, and on the fourth side by the land, where the stubby peninsula, just eight miles long, ran back to join the main coastline.

The spit of land was three miles wide at its base, set in the mangrove swamps on the coastline, and a mile wide at the tip, where the town was situated. The flanks along each side were also composed of mangrove, and only at the end did the mangroves give way to some shingly beaches.

The town spanned the end of the peninsula from side to side and stretched about a mile back down the length of it. Beyond the fringes of the town at this end, a single road ran between cultivated patches the remaining seven miles to the main coast.

Evidently all the best buildings were set toward the seaward tip of the land, where the breezes would blow, for the aerial view showed the buildings to be set at their own plots of land, one to an acre. The landward side of the town was evidently the poorer section, where thousands of tin-roofed shanties intersected with narrow muddy alleys. He concentrated on the richer section of Clarence, where the colonial masters had once lived, for here would be the important buildings, and he would only have a few seconds to see them from this angle.

At the very end was a small port, formed where, for no geological reason, two long curving spits of shingle ran out into the sea like the antlers of a stag beetle or the pincers of an earwig. The port was set along the landward side of this bay. Outside the arms of the bay, Shannon could see the water ruffled by the breeze, while inside the three-quarter-circle enclosed within the arms, the water was a flat calm. No doubt it was this anchorage, tacked onto the end of the peninsula in one of nature’s afterthoughts, which had attracted the first mariners.

The center of the port, directly opposite the opening to the high seas, was dominated by a single concrete quay without any ship tied up to it, and a warehouse of sorts. To the left of the concrete quay was evidently the natives’ fishing area, a shingly beach littered with long canoes and nets laid out to dry, and to the right of the quay was the old port, a series of decrepit wooden jetties pointing toward the water.

Behind the warehouse there were perhaps two hundred yards of rough grass, ending with a road along the shore, and behind the road the buildings started. Shannon caught a glimpse of a white colonial-style church and what could have been the governor’s palace in bygone days, surrounded by a wall. Inside the wall, apart from the main buildings, was a large courtyard surrounded by lean-to hutments of evidently recent addition.

At this point the Convair straightened up, the town disappeared from view, and they were on final approach.

Shannon had already had his first experience of Zangaro the previous day when he had applied for his visa for a tourist visit. The consul in the neighboring capital had received him with some surprise, being unused to such applications. He had to fill out a five-page form giving his parents’ first names (as he had no idea of Keith Brown’s parents’ names, he invented them) and every other conceivable piece of information.

His passport, when he handed it over, had a handsome banknote idly lying between the first and second pages. This went into the consul’s pocket. The man then examined the passport from every angle, read every page, held it up to the light, turned it over, checked the currency allowances at the back. After five minutes of this, Shannon began to wonder if there was something wrong. Had the British Foreign Office made an error in this particular passport?

Then the consul looked at him and said, “You are an American.”

With a sense of relief Shannon realized the man was illiterate. He had his visa in five minutes more. But at Clarence airport the fun stopped.

He had no luggage in the aircraft hold, just a hand grip. Inside the main (and only) passenger building the heat was overpowering, and the place buzzed with flies. About a dozen soldiers lounged about, and ten policemen. They were evidently of different tribes. The policemen were self-effacing, hardly speaking even to each other, leaning against the walls. It was the soldiers who attracted Shannon’s attention. He kept half an eye on them as he filled in another immensely long form (the same one he had filled the previous day at the consulate) and penetrated Health and Passport Control, both manned by officials whom he took to be Caja, like the policemen.

It was when he got to customs that the trouble started. A civilian was waiting for him and instructed him with a curt gesture to go into a side room. As he did so, taking his bag with him, four soldiers swaggered in after him. Then he realized what it was about them that rang a bell in his memory.

Long ago in the Congo he had seen the same attitude, the blank-eyed sense of menace conveyed by an African of almost primeval cultural level, armed with a weapon, in a state of power—wholly unpredictable, with reactions to a situation that were utterly illogical, ticking away like a moving time bomb. Just before the worst of the massacres he had seen launched by Congolese on Katangese, Simbas on missionaries, and Congolese army on Simbas, he had noticed this same menacing mindlessness, the sense of power without reason, that can suddenly and for no recollected explanation turn to frenetic violence. The Vindu soldiers of President Kimba had it.

The civilian customs officer ordered Shannon to put his bag on the rickety table and then began to go through it. The search looked thorough, as if for concealed weapons, until he spotted the electric shaver, took it from its case, examined it, tried the “on” switch. Being a Remington Lektronic and fully charged, it buzzed furiously. Without a trace of expression, the customs man put it in his pocket.

Finishing with the bag, he gestured to Shannon to empty his pockets onto the table. Out came the keys, handkerchief, coins, wallet, and passport. The customs man went for the wallet, extracted the travelers’ checks, looked at them, grunted, and handed them back. The coins he swept into his hand and pocketed them. Of the banknotes, there were two 5000-French-African-franc notes and several 100s. The soldiers had crowded nearer, still making no sound but for their breathing in the roasting atmosphere, gripping guns like clubs, but overcome with curiosity. The civilian behind the table pocketed the two 5000-franc notes, and one of the soldiers picked up the smaller denominations.

Shannon looked at the customs man. The man looked back. Then he lifted his singlet and showed the butt of a Browning 9-mm. short, or perhaps an 875, jammed into his trouser band. He tapped it.

“Police,” he said, and kept staring. Shannon’s fingers itched to smash the man in the face. Inside his head he kept telling himself: Keep cool, baby, absolutely cool.

He gestured slowly, very slowly, to what remained of his belongings on the table and raised his eyebrows. The civilian nodded, and Shannon began to pick them up and put them back. Behind him he felt the soldiers back off, though they still gripped their rifles with both hands, able to swing or butt-jab as the mood took them.

It seemed an age before the civilian nodded toward the door and Shannon left. He could feel the sweat running in a stream down the spine toward the waistband of his pants.

Outside in the main hall, the only other white tourist on the flight, an American girl, had been met by a Catholic priest, who, with his voluble explanations to the soldiers in coast pidgin, was having less trouble. He looked up and caught Shannon’s eye. Shannon raised an eyebrow slightly. The father looked beyond Shannon at the room he had come from and nodded imperceptibly.

Outside, in the heat of the small square before the airport building, there was no transport. Shannon waited. Five minutes later he heard a soft Irish-American voice behind him.

“Can I give you a lift into town, my son?”

They traveled in the priest’s car, a Volkswagen beetle, which he had hidden for safety in the shade of a palm grove several yards outside the gate. The American girl was shrill and outraged; someone had opened her handbag and gone through it. Shannon was silent, knowing how close they could all have come to a beating. The priest was with the UN hospital, combining the roles of chaplain, almoner, and doctor of medicine. He glanced across at Shannon with understanding.

“They shook you down.”

“The lot,” said Shannon. The loss of £15 was nothing but both men had recognized the mood of the soldiery.

“One has to be very careful here, very careful indeed,” said the priest softly. “Have you a hotel?”

When Shannon told him he had not, the priest drove him to the Independence, the only hotel in Clarence where Europeans were permitted to stay.

“Gomez is the manager, he’s a good enough sort,” said the priest.

Usually when a new face arrives in an African city there are invitations from the other Europeans to visit the club, come back to the bungalow, have a drink, come to a party that evening. The priest, for all his helpfulness, issued no such offers. That was another thing Shannon learned quickly about Zangaro. The mood affected the whites as well. He would learn more in the days to come, much of it from Gomez.

It was that same evening that he came to know Jules Gomez, formerly proprietor and latterly manager of the Independence Hotel. Gomez was fifty and a pied noir, a Frenchman from Algeria. In the last days of French Algeria, almost ten years earlier, he had sold his flourishing business in agricultural machinery just before the final collapse, when one could not give a business away. With what he had made, he returned to France, but after a year found he could not live in the atmosphere of Europe any longer and looked around for another place to go. He had settled on Zangaro, five years before independence and before it was even in the offing. Taking his savings, he had bought the hotel and steadily improved it over the years.

After independence, things had changed. Three years before Shannon arrived, Gomez had been brusquely informed that the hotel was to be nationalized and he would be paid in local currency. He never was, and it was worthless paper in any case. But he hung on as manager, hoping against hope that one day things might improve again and something would be left of his only asset on this planet to secure him in his old age. As manager, he ran the reception desk and the bar. Shannon found him at the bar.

It would have been easy to win Gomez’ friendship by mentioning the friends and contacts Shannon had who were former OAS men, fighters in the Legion and the paras, who had turned up in the Congo. But that would have blown his cover as a simple English tourist who, with five days to kill, had flown down from the north, impelled only by curiosity to see the obscure republic of Zangaro. So he stuck to his role of tourist.

But later, after the bar closed, he suggested Gomez join him for a drink in his room. For no explicable reason, the soldiers at the airport had left him a bottle of whisky he had been carrying in his case. Gomez’ eyes opened wide at the sight of it. Whisky was another import the country could not afford. Shannon made sure Gomez drank more than he. When he mentioned that he had come to Zangaro out of curiosity, Gomez snorted.

“Curiosity? Huh, it’s curious, all right. It’s bloody weird.”

Although they were talking French, and alone in the room, Gomez lowered his voice and leaned forward as he said it. Once again Shannon got an impression of the extraordinary sense of fear present in everyone he had seen, except the bully-boy army thugs and the secret policeman who posed as a customs officer at the airport. By the time Gomez had sunk half the bottle, he had become slightly garrulous, and Shannon probed gently for information. Gomez confirmed much of the briefing Shannon had been given by the man he knew as Walter Harris, and added more anecdotal details of his own, some of them highly gruesome.

He confirmed that President Kimba was in town, that he hardly ever left it these days, except for the occasional trip to his home village across the river in Vindu country, and that he was in his presidential palace, the large, walled building Shannon had seen from the air.

By the time Gomez bade him good night and wove his way back to his own room at two in the morning, further nuggets of information had been culled. The three units known as the civilian police force, the gendarmerie, and the customs force, although all carried sidearms, had, Gomez swore, no ammunition in their weapons. Being Caja, they were not trusted to have any, and Kimba, with his paranoia about an uprising, kept them without one round of ammunition between the lot of them. He knew they would never fight for him and must not have the opportunity of fighting against him. The sidearms were just for show.

Gomez had also vouchsafed that the power in the city was exclusively in the hands of Kimba’s Vindu. The dreaded secret police usually wore civilian clothes and carried automatics, the soldiers of the army had bolt-action rifles such as Shannon had seen at the airport, and the President’s own Praetorian Guards had submachine guns. The latter lived exclusively in the palace grounds and were ultra-loyal to Kimba, and he never moved without at least a squad of them hemming him in.

The next morning Shannon went out for a walk. Within seconds he found a small boy of ten or eleven scampering by his side, sent after him by Gomez. Only later did he learn why. He thought Gomez must have sent the boy as a guide, though, as they could not exchange a word, there was not much point in that. The real purpose was different, a service Gomez offered to all his guests, whether they asked or not. If the tourist was arrested for whatever reason, and carted off, the small boy would speed away through the bushes and tell Gomez, who would slip the information to the Swiss or West German embassy so that someone could begin to negotiate the tourist’s release before he was beaten half dead. The boy’s name was Boniface.

Shannon spent the morning walking, mile after mile, while the small boy trotted at his heels. As he expected, they were stopped by no one. Shannon knew that the sheer inefficiency of the place meant that no one would seriously question why a foreigner should spend a week as a tourist. Such countries even advertise for tourism in the waiting rooms of their embassies in Europe. Moreover, in the case of Zangaro there was a community of about a hundred whites in the capital, and no soldier was going to know that the white walking down the street was not a local one, or care, provided he was given a dollar for beer.

There was hardly a vehicle to be seen, and the streets in the residential area were mainly deserted. From Gomez, Shannon had obtained a small map of the town, a leftover from colonial days, and with this he tracked down the main buildings of Clarence. At the only bank, the only post office, half a dozen ministries, the port, and the UN hospital there were groups of six or seven soldiers lounging about the steps. Inside the bank, where he went to cash a travelers’ check, he noticed bedrolls in the lobby, and in the lunch hour he twice saw pots of food being carried by a soldier to his colleagues. Shannon judged that the guard details lived on the premises of each building. Gomez confirmed this later the same evening.

He noticed a soldier in front of each of six embassies he passed, three of them asleep in the dust. By the lunch hour he estimated there were about a hundred soldiers scattered in twelve groups around the main area of the town. He noted what they were armed with. Each carried an old Mauser 7.92 bolt-action rifle, most of them looking rusted and dirty. The soldiers wore drab green trousers and shirts, canvas boots, webbing belts, and peaked caps rather like American baseball caps. Without exception they were shabby, impressed, unwashed, and unprepossessing. He estimated their level of training, weapons familiarization, leadership, and fighting capacity at nil. They were a rabble, undisciplined thugs who could terrify the timorous Caja by their arms and their brutishness, but had probably never fired a shot in anger and certainly had never been fired at by people who knew what they were doing. Their purpose on guard duty seemed to be to prevent a civilian riot, but he estimated that in a real firefight they would quit and run.

The most interesting thing about them was the state of their ammunition pouches. They were pressed flat, empty of magazines. Each Mauser had its fixed magazine, of course, but Mausers hold only five shells.

That afternoon Shannon patrolled the port. Seen from the ground, it looked different. The two spits of sand running out across the water and forming the natural harbor were about twenty feet high at the base and six feet above the water at the tip. He walked down both until he reached the end. Each one was covered in knee-to-waist-high scrub vegetation, burned brown at the end of the long dry season, and invisible from the air. Each spit was about forty feet wide at the tip, forty yards wide at the base, where it left the shoreline. From the tip of each, looking back toward the port area, one had a panoramic view of the waterfront.

The concreted area was at dead center, backed by the warehouse. To the north of this stood the old wooden jetties, some long crumbled away, their supports sticking up like broken teeth above or below the water. To the south of the warehouse was the shingly beach where the fishing canoes lay. From the tip of one sandspit the President’s palace was invisible, hidden behind the warehouse, but from the other spit the uppermost story of the palace was plainly visible. Shannon walked back to the port and examined the fishing beach. It was a good place for a landing, he thought idly, a gentle slope to the water’s edge.

Behind the warehouse the concrete ended and a sloping bank of waist-high scrub, dissected by numerous footpaths and one laterite road for trucks, ran back toward the palace. Shannon took the road. As he breasted the top of the rise the full façade of the old colonial governor’s mansion came into view, two hundred yards away. He continued another hundred yards and reached the lateral road running along the seashore. At the junction a group of soldiers waited, four in all, smarter, better dressed than the army, armed with Kalashnikov AK 47 assault rifles. They watched him in silence as he turned right along the road toward his hotel. He nodded, but they just stared back. The palace guards.

He glanced to his left as he walked and took in the details of the palace. Thirty yards wide, its ground-floor windows now bricked up and painted over the same off-white wash as the rest of the building, it was dominated at ground level by a tall, wide, bolt-studded timber door, almost certainly another new addition. In front of the bricked-up windows ran a terrace, now useless because there was no access from the building to it. On the second floor a row of seven windows ran from side to side of the façade, three left, three right, and one above the main entrance. The topmost floor had ten windows, all much smaller. Above these were the gutter and the red-tiled roof sloping away toward the apex.

He noticed more guards lounging around the front door, and that the second-floor windows had shutters which might have been of steel (he was too far away to tell) and were drawn down. Evidently no closer access to the front of the building than the road junction was permitted, except on official business.

He completed the afternoon just before the sun went down by making a tour of the palace from afar. At each side he saw that a new wall eight feet high ran from the main mansion toward the land for a distance of eighty yards, and the fourth wall joined them together at the rear. Interestingly, there were no other gates to the entire compound. The wall was uniformly eight feet high—he could tell by the height of a guard he saw walking near the wall—and topped by broken bottles. He knew he would never see inside, but he could retain the image from the air. It almost made him laugh.

He grinned at Boniface. “You know, kid, that bloody fool thinks he has protected himself with a big wall topped with glass and only one entrance. All he has really done is pin himself inside a brick trap, a great big closed-in killing ground.”

The boy grinned widely, not understanding a word, and indicated he wanted to go home and eat. Shannon nodded, and they went back to the hotel, feet burning and legs aching.

Shannon made no notes or maps but retained every detail in his head. He returned Gomez’ map and after dinner joined the Frenchman at the bar.

Two Chinese from the embassy sat quietly drinking beer at the back tables, so conversation between the Europeans was minimal. Besides, the windows were open. Later, however, Gomez, longing for company, took a dozen bottles of beer and invited Shannon up to his room on the top floor, where they sat on the balcony and looked out through the night at the sleeping town, mainly in darkness because of an electricity breakdown.

Shannon was of two minds whether to take Gomez into his confidence, but decided not to. He mentioned that he had found the bank and it had not been easy to change a £50 check.

Gomez snorted. “It never is,” he said. “They don’t see travelers’ checks here, or much foreign currency for very long.”

“They must see it at the bank, surely.”

“Not for long. The entire treasure of the republic Kimba keeps locked up inside the palace.”

Shannon was at once interested. It took two hours to learn, in dribs and drabs, that Kimba kept not only the national armory of ammunition in the old wine cellar of the governor’s palace, under his own lock and key, but also the national radio-broadcasting station so that he could broadcast direct from his communications room to the nation and the world and no one else could take control of it from outside the palace. National radio stations always play a vital role in coups d’etat. Shannon also learned he had no armored cars and no artillery, and that apart from the hundred soldiers scattered around the capital there were another hundred outside the town, a score in the native township on the airport road, and the rest dotted in the Caja villages beyond the peninsula toward the Zangaro River bridge. These two hundred were half the army. The other half were in the army barracks, which were not barracks in truth but the old colonial police lines four hundred yards from the palace—rows of low tin shanties inside a reed fence enclosure. The four hundred men constituted the entire army, and the personal palace guards numbered from forty to sixty, living in the lean-to sheds inside the palace courtyard walls.

On his third day in Zangaro, Shannon checked out the police lines, where the two hundred army men not on guard duty lived. They were, as Gomez had said, surrounded by a reed fence, but a visit to the nearby church enabled Shannon to slip unnoticed into the bell-tower, run up the circular brick staircase, and sneak a view from the belfry. The lines were two rows of shanties, adorned with some clothes hung out to dry. At one end was a row of low brick kilns, over which pots of stew bubbled. Twoscore men lounged around in various stages of boredom, and all were unarmed. Their guns might be in the hutments, but Shannon guessed they were more probably in the armory, a small stone pillbox set aside from the huts. The other facilities of the camp were primitive in the extreme.

It was that evening, when he had gone out without Boniface, that he met his soldier. He spent an hour circling the darkened streets, which fortunately for him had never seen lamp lighting, trying to get close to the palace.

He had managed a good look at the back and sides and had assured himself there were no patrolling guards on these sides. Trying the front of the palace, he had been intercepted by two of the palace guards, who had brusquely ordered him on his way home. He had established that there were three of them sitting at the road junction halfway between the top of the rise from the port and the front gate of the palace. More importantly, he had also established that they could not see the harbor from where they stood. From that road junction the soldiers’ eyeline, passing over the top of the rise, would meet the sea beyond the tips of the arms of the harbor, and without a brilliant moon they would not even see the water five hundred yards away, though undoubtedly they would see a light out there, if there were one.

In the darkness on the road junction, Shannon could not see the front gate of the palace a hundred yards inland, but assumed there were two other guards there as usual. He offered packets of cigarettes to the soldiers who had accosted him, and left.

On the road back to the Independence he passed several bars, lit inside by kerosene lamps, and then moved on down the darkened street. A hundred yards farther on, the soldier stopped him. The man was evidently drunk and had been urinating in a rain ditch by the roadside. He swayed up to Shannon, gripping his Mauser two-handed by the butt and barrel. In the moonlight Shannon could see him quite clearly as he moved toward him. The soldier grunted something Shannon failed to understand, though he assumed it was a demand for money.

He heard the soldier mutter, “Beer,” several times and add some more indistinguishable words. Then, before Shannon could reach for money or pass on, the man snarled and jabbed the barrel of the gun toward him. From then on it was quick and silent. Shannon took the barrel in one hand and moved it away from his stomach, jerking hard and pulling the soldier off balance. The man was evidently surprised at the reaction, which was not what he was accustomed to. Recovering, he squealed with rage, reversed the gun, gripped it by the barrel, and swung it clubwise. Shannon stepped in close, blocked the swing by gripping the soldier by both biceps, and brought up his knee.

It was too late to go back after that. As the gun dropped he brought up his right hand, crooked into a ninety-degree angle, stiff-armed, and slammed the base of the hand under the soldier’s jawbone. A stab of pain went up his arm and shoulder as he heard the neck crack, and he later found he had torn a shoulder muscle with the effort. The Zangaran went down like a sack.

Shannon looked up and down the road, but no one was coming. He rolled the body into the rain ditch and examined the rifle. One by one, he pumped the cartridges out of the magazine. At three they stopped coming. There had been nothing in the breech. He removed the bolt and held the gun to the moon, looking down the barrel. Several months’ accumulation of grit, dirt, dust, grime, rust, and earth particles met his eye. He slipped the bolt back home, replaced the three cartridges where they had been, tossed the rifle onto the corpse, and walked home.

“Better and better,” he murmured as he slipped into the darkened hotel and went to bed. He had few doubts there would be no effective police inquiry. The broken neck would be put down to a fall into the rain ditch, and tests for fingerprints were, he was sure, unheard of.

Nevertheless, the next day he pleaded a headache, stayed in, and talked to Gomez. On the following morning he left for the airport and took the Convair 440 back to the north. As he sat in the plane and watched the republic disappear beneath the port wing, something Gomez had mentioned in passing ran like a current through his head.

There were not, and never had been, any mining operations in Zangaro.

Forty hours later he was back in London.

Ambassador Leonid Dobrovolsky always felt slightly uneasy when he had his weekly interview with President Kimba. Like others who had met the dictator, he had few doubts about the man’s insanity. Unlike most of the others, Leonid Dobrovolsky had orders from his superiors in Moscow to make his utmost efforts to establish a working relationship with the unpredictable African. He stood in front of the broad mahogany desk in the President’s study on the second floor of the palace and waited for Kimba to show some sort of reaction.

Seen close to, President Kimba was neither as large nor as handsome as his official portraits indicated. Behind the enormous desk he seemed almost dwarfish, the more so as he held himself hunched in his chair in a state of total immobility. Dobrovolsky waited for the period of immobility to end. He knew it could end one of two ways. Either the man who ruled Zangaro would speak carefully and lucidly, in every sense like a perfectly sane man, or the almost catatonic stillness would give way to a screaming rage, during which the man would rant like someone possessed, which was in any case what he believed himself to be.

Kimba nodded slowly. “Please proceed,” he said.

Dobrovolsky breathed a sigh of relief. Evidently the President was prepared to listen. But he knew the bad news was yet to come, and he had to give it. That could change things.

“I am informed by my government, Mr. President, that it has received information that a mining survey report recently sent to Zangaro by a British company may not be accurate. I am referring to the survey carried out several weeks ago by a firm called Manson Consolidated of London.”

The President’s eyes, slightly bulging, still stared at the Russian Ambassador without a flicker of expression. Nor was there any word from Kimba to indicate that he recalled the subject that had brought Dobrovolsky to his palace.

The Ambassador continued to describe the mining survey that had been delivered by a certain Mr. Bryant into the hands of the Minister for Natural Resources.

“In essence, then, Your Excellency, I am instructed to inform you that my government believes the report was not a true representation of what was really discovered in the area that was then under survey, specifically, the Crystal Mountain range.”

He waited, aware that he could say little more. When Kimba finally spoke, it was calmly and cogently, and Dobrovolsky breathed again.

“In what way was this survey report inaccurate?” whispered Kimba.

“We are not sure of the details, Your Excellency, but it is fair to assume that since the British company has apparently not made any effort to secure from you a mining concession, the report it submitted must have indicated that there were no mineral deposits worth exploiting in that region. If the report was inaccurate, then it was probably in this respect. In other words, whatever the mining engineer’s samples contained, it would appear there was more than the British were prepared to inform you.”

There was another long silence, during which the Ambassador waited for the explosion of rage. It did not come.

“They cheated me,” whispered Kimba.

“Of course, Your Excellency,” cut in Dobrovolsky hurriedly, “the only way of being completely sure is for another survey party to examine the same area and take further samples of the rocks and the soil. To this end I am instructed by my government most humbly to ask Your Excellency to grant permission for a survey team from the Institute of Mining of Sverdlovsk to come to Zangaro and examine the same area as that covered by the British engineer.”

Kimba took a long time digesting the proposal. Finally he nodded. “Granted,” he said.

Dobrovolsky bowed. By his side Volkov, ostensibly Second Secretary at the embassy but more pertinently the resident of the KGB detachment, shot him a glance.

“The second matter is that of your personal security,” said Dobrovolsky. At last he secured some reaction from the dictator. It was a subject that Kimba took extremely seriously. His head jerked up, and he shot suspicious glances around the room. Three Zangaran aides standing behind the two Russians quaked.

“My security?” said Kimba in his usual whisper.

"We would respectfully seek once again to reiterate the Soviet government’s view of the paramount importance of Your Excellency’s being able to continue to lead Zangaro on the path of peace and progress that

Your Excellency has already so magnificently established," said the Russian. The flow of flattery caused no incongruous note; it was Kimba’s habitual due and a regular part of any words addressed to him.

“To guarantee the continued security of the invaluable person of Your Excellency and in view of the recent and most dangerous treason by one of your army officers, we would respectfully once again propose that a member of my embassy staff be permitted to reside inside the palace and lend his assistance to Your Excellency’s own personal security corps.”

The reference to the “treason” of Colonel Bobi brought Kimba out of his trance. He trembled violently, though whether from rage or fear the Russians could not make out. Then he began to talk, slowly at first, in his usual whisper, then faster, his voice rising as he glared at the Zangarans across the room. After a few sentences he lapsed back into the Vindu dialect, which only the Zangarans understood, but the Russians already knew the gist: the everpresent danger of treason and treachery that Kimba knew himself to be in, the warnings he had received from the spirits telling him of plots in all corners, his complete awareness of the identity of all those who were not loyal and who harbored evil thoughts in their minds, his intention to root them out, all of them, and what would happen to them when he did. He went on for half an hour in this vein, before calming down and reverting to a European language the Russians could understand.

When they emerged into the sunlight and climbed into the embassy car, both men were sweating, partly from the heat, for the air-conditioning in the palace was broken yet again, partly because that was the effect Kimba usually had on them.

“I’m glad that’s over,” muttered Volkov to his colleague as they drove back toward the embassy. “Anyway, we got permission. I’ll install my man tomorrow.”

“And I’ll get the mining engineers sent in as soon as possible,” said Dobrovolsky. “Let’s hope there really is something fishy about that British survey report. If there isn’t, I don’t know how I’ll explain that to the President.”

Volkov grunted. “Rather you than me,” he said.

Shannon checked into the Lowndes Hotel off Knightsbridge, as he had agreed with Walter Harris to do before he left London. The agreement was that he would be away about ten days, and each morning at nine Harris would phone that hotel and ask for Mr. Keith Brown. Shannon arrived at noon to find the first call for him had been three hours earlier that morning. The news meant he had till the next day to himself.

One of his first calls after a long bath, a change, and lunch, was to the detective agency. The head of it recognized the name of Keith Brown after a few moments’ thought, and Shannon heard him sorting out some files on his desk. Eventually he found the right one.

“Yes, Mr. Brown, I have it here. Would you like me to mail it to you?”

“Rather not,” said Shannon. “Is it long?”

“No, about a page. Shall I read it over the phone?”

“Yes, please.”

The man cleared his throat and began. “On the morning following the client’s request, my operative waited close to the entrance of the underground parking lot beneath ManCon House. He was lucky, in that the subject, whom he had noted the day before arriving back there by taxi from his interview at Sloane Avenue with our client, arrived by car. The operative got a clear view of him as he swung into the parking lot tunnel entrance. It was beyond doubt the subject. He was at the wheel of a Chevrolet Corvette. The operative took the number as the car went down the ramp. Inquiries were later made with a contact at the Licensing Department at County Hall. The vehicle is registered in the name of one Simon John Endean, resident in South Kensington.” The man paused. “Do you want the address, Mr. Brown?”

“Not necessarily,” said Shannon. “Do you know what this man Endean does at ManCon House?”

“Yes,” said the private agent. “I checked up with a friend who’s a City journalist. He is the personal aide and right hand man of Sir James Manson, chairman and managing director of Manson Consolidated.”

“Thank you,” said Shannon and put the phone down.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” he murmured as he left the hotel lobby and strolled down to Jermyn Street to cash a check and buy some shirts. It was the first of April, April Fool’s Day; the sun was shining and daffodils covered the grass around Hyde Park Corner.

Simon Endean had also been busy while Shannon was away. The results of his labors he imparted to Sir James Manson that afternoon in the penthouse over Moorgate.

“Colonel Bobi,” he told his chief as he entered the office.

The mining boss furrowed his brow. “Who?”

“Colonel Bobi. The former commander of the army of Zangaro. Now in exile, banished forever by President Jean Kimba. Who, incidentally, has sentenced him to death by presidential decree for high treason. You wanted to know where he was.”

Manson was at his desk by this time, nodding in recollection. “All right, where is he?” he asked.

“In exile in Dahomey,” said Endean. “It took a hell of a job to trace him without being too obvious about it. But he’s taken up residence in the capital of Dahomey. Place called Cotonou. He must have a little money, but probably not much, or he’d be in a walled villa outside Geneva with all the other rich exiles. He has a small rented villa and lives very quietly, probably because it is the safest way of ensuring the Dahomey government doesn’t ask him to leave. It’s believed Kimba has asked for his extradition back home, but no one has done anything about it. Besides, he’s far enough away from Kimba to assume he’ll never present a threat.”

“And Shannon, the mercenary?” asked Manson.

“Due back sometime today or tomorrow,” said En-dean. “I booked him into the Lowndes from yesterday onward to be on the safe side. He hadn’t arrived this morning at nine. I’m due to try again tomorrow at the same time.”

“Try now,” said Manson.

The hotel confirmed to Endean that Mr. Brown had indeed arrived, but that he was out. Sir James Manson listened on the extension.

“Leave a message,” he growled at Endean. “Ring him tonight at seven.”

Endean left the message, and the two men put the phones down.

“I want his report as soon as possible,” said Manson. “He should finish it at noon tomorrow. You meet him first and read the report. Make sure it covers every point I told you I wanted answered. Then bring it to me. Put Shannon on ice for two days to give me time to digest it.”

Shannon got Endean’s message just after five and was in his room to take the call at seven. He spent the rest of the evening between supper and bed making up his notes and the memorabilia he had brought back from Zangaro—a series of sketches done freehand on a pad of cartridge paper he had bought in the airport in Paris to while away the time, some scale-drawings done from measurements between fixed points in Clarence that he had paced out stride by stride, a local guidebook showing “points of interest,” of which the only interesting one was titled “the residence of His Excellency the Governor of the Colony” and dated from 1959, and an official and highly flattering portrait of Kimba, one of the few items not in short supply in the republic.

The next day he strolled down Knightsbridge just as the shops opened, bought himself a typewriter and a pad of paper, and spent the morning writing his report. It covered three subjects: a straight narrative of his visit, including the episode of the soldier he had killed; a detailed description of the capital, building by building, accompanied by the diagrams; and an equally detailed description of the military situation. He mentioned the fact that he had seen no signs of either an air force or a navy, and Gomez’ confirmation that neither existed. He did not mention his stroll down the peninsula to the native shanty towns, where he had seen the clustered shacks of the poorer Caja and beyond them the shanties of the thousands of immigrant workers and their families, who chattered to one another in their native tongue, brought with them from many miles away.

He finished the report with a summary:

The essence of the problem of toppling Kimba has been simplified by the man himself. In all respects the majority of the republic’s land area, the Vindu country beyond the river, is of nil political or economic value. If Kimba should ever lose control of the coastal plain producing the bulk of the nation’s few resources, he must lose the country. To go one step further, he and his men could not hold this plain in 4he face of the hostility and hatred of the entire Caja population, which, although muted by fear, exists beneath the surface, if he had once lost the peninsula. Again, the peninsula is untenable by Vindu forces if once the town of Clarence is lost. And lastly, he has no strength within the town of Clarence if he and his forces have lost the palace. In short, his policy of total centralization has reduced the number of targets necessary to be subdued for a take-over of the state to one—his palace complex, containing himself, his guards, the armory, treasury and radio station.

As to means of taking and reducing this palace and compound, they have been reduced to one, by virtue of the wall surrounding the entire place. It has to be stormed.

The main gate could perhaps be rammed down by a very heavy truck or bulldozer driven straight at it by a man prepared to die in the attempt. I saw no evidence of any such spirit among the citizenry or the army, nor signs of a suitable truck. Alternatively, self-sacrificing courage by hundreds of men with scaling ladders could overwhelm the palace walls and take the place. I saw no signs of such spirit either. More realistically, the palace and grounds could be taken with little life loss after being first pulverized with mortar fire. Against a weapon like this the encircling wall, far from being a protection, becomes a deathtrap to those inside. The door could be taken apart by a bazooka rocket. I saw no signs of either of these weapons, nor any sign of one single person capable of using them. The unavoidable conclusion reached from the above has to be as follows:

Any section or faction within the republic seeking to topple Kimba and take over must destroy him and his Praetorian Guards inside the palace compound. To achieve this they would require expert assistance at a technical level they have not reached, and such assistance would have to arrive, complete with all necessary equipment, from outside the country. With these conditions fulfilled, Kimba could be destroyed and toppled in a firefight lasting no longer than one hour.

“Is Shannon aware that there is no faction inside Zangaro that has indicated it wants to topple Kimba?” asked Sir James Manson the following morning when he read the report.

“I haven’t told him so,” said Endean. “I briefed him as you told me. Just said there was an army faction inside, and that the group I represented, as interested businessmen, were prepared to pay for a military assessment of their chances of success. But he’s no fool. He must have seen for himself there’s no one there capable of doing the job anyway.”

“I like the sound of this Shannon,” said Manson, closing the military report. “He’s obviously got nerve, to judge by the way he dealt with the soldier. He writes quite well; he’s short and to the point. Question is, could he do the whole of this job himself?”

“He did mention something significant,” interjected Endean. “He said when I was questioning him that the caliber of the Zangaran army was so low that any assisting force of technicians would have to do practically the whole job anyway, then hand over to the new men when it was done.”

“Did he now? Did he?” Manson said musingly. “Then he suspects already the reason for his going down there was not the stated one.”

He was still musing when Endean asked, “May I put a question, Sir James?”

“What is it?” asked Manson.

“Just this: What did he go down there for? Why do-you need a military report on how Kimba could be toppled and killed?”

Sir James Manson stared out of the window for some time. Finally he said, “Get Martin Thorpe up here.” While Thorpe was being summoned, Manson walked to the window and gazed down, as he usually did when he wanted to think hard.

He knew he had personally taken Endean and Thorpe as young men and promoted them to salaries, and positions beyond their years. It was not simply because of their intelligence, although they had plenty of it. It was because he recognized an unscrupulousness in each of them that matched his own, a preparedness to ignore so-called moral principles in pursuit of the goal success. He had made them his team, his hatchet-men, paid by the company but serving him personally in all things. The problem was: Could he trust them with this one, the big one? As Thorpe entered the office, he decided he had to. He thought he knew how to guarantee their loyalty.

He bade them sit down and, remaining standing with his back to the window, he told them, “I want you two to think this one over very carefully, then give me your reply. How far would you be prepared to go to be assured of a personal fortune in a Swiss bank of five million pounds each?”

The hum of the traffic ten floors down was like a buzzing bee, accentuating the silence in the room.

Endean stared back at his chief and nodded slowly. “A very, very long way,” he said softly.

Thorpe made no reply. He knew this was what he had come to the City for, joined Manson for, absorbed his encyclopedic knowledge of company business for. The big one, the once-in-a-decade grand slam. He nodded assent.

“How?” whispered Endean. For answer Manson walked to his wall safe and extracted two reports. The third, Shannon’s, lay on his desk as he seated himself behind it.

Manson talked steadily for an hour. He started at the beginning and soon read the final six paragraphs of Dr. Chalmers’ report on the samples from the Crystal Mountain.

Thorpe whistled softly and muttered, “Jesus.”

Endean required a ten-minute lecture on platinum to catch the point; then he too breathed a long sigh.

Manson went on to relate the exiling of Mulrooney to northern Kenya, the suborning of Chalmers, the second visit of Bryant to Clarence, the acceptance of the dummy report by Kimba’s Minister. He stressed the Russian influence on Kimba and the recent exiling of Colonel Bobi, who, given the right circumstances, could return as a plausible alternative in the seat of power.

For Thorpe’s benefit he read much of Endean’s general report on Zangaro and finished with the conclusion of Shannon’s report.

“If it is to work at all, it must be a question of mounting two parallel, highly secret operations,” Man-son said finally. “In one, Shannon, stage-managed throughout by Simon, mounts a project to take and destroy that palace and all its contents, and for Bobi, accompanied by Simon, to take over the powers of state the following morning and become the new president. In the other, Martin would have to buy a shell company without revealing who had gained control or why.”

Endean furrowed his brow. “I can see the first operation, but why the second?” he asked.

“Tell him, Martin,” said Manson.

Thorpe was grinning, for his astute mind had caught Manson’s drift. “A shell company, Simon, is a company, usually very old and without assets worth talking about, which has virtually ceased trading and whose shares are very cheap—say, a shilling each.”

“So why buy one?” asked Endean, still puzzled.

“Say Sir James has control of a company, bought secretly through unnamed nominees, hiding behind a Swiss bank, all nice and legal, and the company has a million shares valued at one shilling each. Unknown to the other shareholders or the board of directors or the Stock Exchange, Sir James, via the Swiss bank, owns six hundred thousand of these million shares. Then Colonel—beg his pardon—President Bobi sells that company an exclusive ten-year mining franchise for an area of land in the hinterland of Zangaro. A new mining survey team from a highly reputable company specializing in mining goes out and discovers the Crystal Mountain. What happens to the shares of Company X when the news hits the stock market?”

Endean got the message. “They go up,” he said with a grin.

“Right up,” said Thorpe. “With a bit of help they go from a shilling to well over a hundred pounds a share. Now do your arithmetic. Six hundred thousand shares at a shilling each cost thirty thousand pounds to buy. Sell six hundred thousand shares at a hundred pounds each—and that’s the minimum you’d get—and what do you bring home? A cool sixty million pounds, in a Swiss bank. Right, Sir James?”

“That’s right.” Manson nodded grimly. “Of course, if you sold half the shares in small packets to a wide variety of people, the control of the company owning the concession would stay in the same hands as before. But a bigger company might put in a bid for the whole block of six hundred thousand shares in one flat deal.”

Thorpe nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, control of such a company bought at sixty million pounds would be a good market deal. But whose bid would you accept?”

“My own,” said Manson.

Thorpe’s mouth opened. “Your own?”

“ManCon’s bid would be the only acceptable one. That way the concession would remain firmly British, and ManCon would have gained a fine asset.”

“But,” queried Endean, “surely you would be paying yourself sixty million quid?”

“No,” said Thorpe quietly. “ManCon’s shareholders would be paying Sir James sixty million quid, without knowing it.”

“What’s that called—in financial terms, of course?” asked Endean.

“There is a word for it on the Stock Exchange,” Thorpe admitted.

Sir James Manson tendered them each a glass of whisky. He reached round and took his own. “Are you on, gentlemen?” he asked quietly.

Both younger men looked at each other and nodded.

“Then here’s to the Crystal Mountain.”

They drank.

“Report to me here tomorrow morning at nine sharp,” Manson told them, and they rose to go.

At the door to the back stairs Thorpe turned. “You know, Sir James, it’s going to be bloody dangerous. If one word gets out…”

Sir James Manson stood again with his back to the window, the westering sun slanting onto the carpet by his side. His legs were apart, his fists on his hips.

“Knocking off a bank or an armored truck,” he said, “is merely crude. Knocking off an entire republic has, I feel, a certain style.”

8

“What you are saying in effect is that there is no dissatisfied faction within the army that, so far as you know, has ever thought of toppling President Kimba?”

Cat Shannon and Simon Endean were sitting in Shannon’s room at the hotel, taking midmorning coffee. Endean had phoned Shannon by agreement at nine and told him to wait for a second call. He had been briefed by Sir James Manson and had called Shannon back to make the eleven-o’clock appointment.

Endean nodded. “That’s right. The information has changed in that one detail. I can’t see what difference it makes. You yourself said the caliber of the army was so low that the technical assistants would have to do all the work themselves in any case.”

“It makes a hell of a difference,” said Shannon. “Attacking the palace and capturing it is one thing. Keeping it is quite another. Destroying the palace and Kimba simply creates a vacuum at the seat of power. Someone has to step in and take over that power. The mercenaries must not even be seen by daylight. So who takes over?”

Endean nodded again. He had not expected a mercenary to have any political sense at all.

“We have a man in view,” he said cautiously.

“He’s in the republic now, or in exile?”

“In exile.”

“Well, he would have to be installed in the palace and broadcasting on the radio that he has conducted an internal coup d’etat and taken over the country, by midday of the day following the night attack on the palace.”

“That could be arranged.”

“There’s one more thing.”

“What’s that?” asked Endean.

“There must be troops loyal to the new regime, the same troops who ostensibly carried out the coup of the night before, visibly present and mounting the guard by sunrise of the day after the attack. If they don’t show up, we would be stuck—a group of white mercenaries holed up inside the palace, unable to show themselves for political reasons, and cut off from retreat in the event of a counterattack. Now your man, the exile, does he have such a back-up force he could bring in with him when he comes? Or could he assemble them quickly once inside the capital?”

“I think you have to let us take care of that,” said Endean stiffly. “What we are asking you for is a plan in military terms to mount the attack and carry it through.”

“That I can do,” said Shannon without hesitation. “But what about the preparations, the organization of the plan, getting the men, the arms, the ammo?”

“You must include that as well. Start from scratch and go right through to the capture of the palace and the death of Kimba.”

“Kimba has to get the chop?”

“Of course,” said Endean. “Fortunately he has long since destroyed anyone with enough initiative or brains to become a rival. Consequently, he is the only man who might regroup his forces and counterattack. With him dead, his ability to mesmerize the people into submission will also end.”

“Yeah. The juju dies with the man.”

“The what?”

“Nothing. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me,” said Endean coldly.

“The man has a juju,” said Shannon, “or at least the people believe he has. That’s a powerful protection given him by the spirits, protecting him against his enemies, guaranteeing him invincibility, guarding him from attack, ensuring him against death. In the Congo the Simbas believed their leader, Pierre Mulele, had a similar juju. He told them he could pass it on to his supporters and make them immortal. They believed him. They thought bullets would run off them like water. So they came at us in waves, bombed out of then: minds on dagga and whisky, died like flies, and still kept coming. It’s the same with Kimba. So long as they think he’s immortal, he is. Because they’ll never lift a finger against him. Once they see his corpse, the man who killed him becomes the leader. He has the stronger juju.”

Endean stared in surprise. “It’s really that backward?”

“It’s not so backward. We do the same with lucky charms, holy relics, the assumption of divine protection for our own particular cause. But we call it religion in us, savage superstition in them.”

“Never mind,” snapped Endean. “All the more reason why Kimba has to die.”

“Which means he must be in that palace when we strike. If he’s upcountry it’s no good. No one will support your man if Kimba is still alive.”

“He usually is in the palace, so I’m told.”

“Yes,” said Shannon, “but we have to guarantee it. There’s one day he never misses. Independence Day. On the eve of Independence Day he will be sleeping in the palace, sure as eggs is eggs.”

“When’s that?”

“Three and a half months away.”

“Could a project be mounted in that time?” asked Endean.

“Yes, with a bit of luck. I’d like at least a couple of weeks longer.”

“The project has not been accepted yet,” observed Endean.

“No, but if you want to install a new man in that palace, an attack from outside is the only way of doing it. Do you want me to prepare the whole project from start to finish, with estimated costings and time schedule?”

“Yes. The costing is very important. My—er—associates will want to know how much they are letting themselves in for.”

“All right,” said Shannon. “The report will cost you five hundred pounds.”

“You’ve already been paid,” said Endean coldly.

“I’ve been paid for a mission into Zangaro and a report on the military situation there,” replied Shannon. “What you’re asking for is a new report right outside the original briefing you gave me.”

“Five hundred is a bit steep for a few sheets of paper with writing on them.”

“Rubbish. You know perfectly well if your firm consults a lawyer, architect, accountant, or any other technical expert you pay him a fee. I’m a technical expert in war. What you pay for is the knowledge and the experience—where to get the best men, the best arms, how to ship them, et cetera. That’s what costs five hundred pounds, and the same knowledge would cost you double if you tried to research it yourself in twelve months, which you couldn’t anyway because you haven’t the contacts.”

Endean rose. “All right. It will be here this afternoon by special messenger. Tomorrow is Friday. My partners would like to read your report over the weekend. Please have it prepared by tomorrow afternoon at three. I’ll collect it here.”

He left, and as the door closed behind him Shannon raised his coffee cup in mock toast. “Be seeing you, Mr. Walter Harris oblique stroke Simon Endean,” he said softly.

Not for the first time he thanked his stars for the amiable and garrulous hotelkeeper Gomez. During one of their long nightly conversations Gomez had mentioned the affair of Colonel Bobi, now in exile. He had also mentioned that, without Kimba, Bobi was nothing, being hated by the Caja for his army’s cruelties against them on the orders of Kimba, and not able to command Vindu troops either. Which left Shannon with the problem of a back-up force with black faces to take over on the morning after.

Endean’s brown manila envelope containing fifty £10 notes arrived just after three in a taxicab and was delivered to the reception desk of the Lowndes Hotel. Shannon counted the notes, stuffed them into the inside pocket of his jacket, and began work. It took him the rest of the afternoon and most of the night.

He worked at the writing desk in his room, poring over his own diagrams and maps of the city of Clarence, its harbor, port area, and the residential section that included the presidential palace and the army lines.

The classical military approach would have been to land a force on the side of the peninsula near the base with the main coastline, march the short distance inland, and take the road from Clarence to the interior, with guns covering the T-junction. That would have sealed off the peninsula and the capital from reinforcement. It would also have lost the element of surprise.

Shannon’s talent was that he understood Africa and the African soldier, and his thinking was unconventional. Tactics suited to African terrain and opposition are almost the exact opposite of those that will work in a European situation.

Had Shannon’s plans ever been considered by a European military mind thinking in conventional terms, they would have been styled as reckless and without hope of success. He was banking on Sir James Man-son’s not having been in the British army—there was no reference in Who’s Who to indicate that he had— and accepting the plan. Shannon knew it was workable and the only one that was.

He based his plan on three facts about war in Africa that he had learned the hard way. One is that the European soldier fights well and with precision in the dark, provided he has been well briefed on the terrain he can expect, while the African soldier, even on his own terrain, is sometimes reduced to near helplessness by his fear of the hidden enemy in the surrounding darkness. The second is that the speed of recovery of the disoriented African soldier—his ability to regroup and counterattack—is slower than the European soldier’s, exaggerating the normal effects of surprise. The third is that firepower and hence noise can bring African soldiers to fear, panic, and headlong flight, without consideration of the smallness of the actual numbers of their opponents.

So Shannon based his plan on a night attack of total surprise in conditions of deafening noise and concentrated firepower.

He worked slowly and methodically and, being a poor typist, tapped out the words with two forefingers. At two in the morning the occupant of the bedroom next door could stand no more and banged on the wall to ask plaintively for a bit of peace so that he could get to sleep. Shannon concluded what he was doing five minutes later and packed up for the night. There was one other sound that disturbed the man next door, apart from the clacking of the typewriter. As he worked, and later as he lay in bed, the writer kept whistling a plaintive little tune. Had the insomniac next door known more of music, he would have recognized “Spanish Harlem.”

Martin Thorpe was also lying awake that night. He knew he had a long weekend ahead, two and a half days of monotonous and time-consuming poring over cards, each bearing the basic details of one of the forty-five hundred public companies registered at Companies House in the City of London.

There are two agencies in London which provide their subscribers with such an information service about British companies. These are Moodies and the

Exchange Telegraph, known as Extel. In his office in ManCon House, Thorpe had the set of cards provided by Extel, the agency whose service ManCon took as a necessary part of its commercial activities. But for the business of searching for a shell company, Thorpe had decided to buy the Moodies service and have it sent to his home, partly because he thought Moodies did a better information job on the smaller companies registered in the United Kingdom, and partly for security reasons.

After his briefing from Sir James Manson on Thursday, he had gone straight to a firm of lawyers. Acting for him, and keeping his name to themselves, they had ordered a complete set of Moodies cards. He had paid the lawyer £260 for the cards, plus £50 for the three gray filing cabinets in which they would arrive, plus the lawyer’s fee. He had also engaged a small moving firm to send a van around to Moodies, after being told the set of cards would be ready for pickup on Friday afternoon.

As he lay in bed in his elegant detached house in Hampstead Garden Suburb, he too was planning his campaign—not in detail like Shannon, for he had too little information, but in general terms, using nominee shareholders and parcels of voting stock as Shannon used submachine guns and mortars. He had never met the mercenary and never would. But he would have understood him.

Shannon handed his completed project to Endean at three on Friday afternoon. It contained fourteen pages, four of them diagrams and two of them lists of equipment. He had finished it after breakfast and had enclosed it in a brown folder. He was tempted to put “For Sir James Manson’s Eyes Only” on the cover, but had resisted. There was no need to blow the affair wantonly, and he could sniff a good contract in the offing if the mining baron offered the job to him.

So he continued to call Endean Harris and to refer to “your associates” instead of “your boss.” After taking the folder, Endean told him to stay in town over the weekend and to be available from Sunday midnight onward.

Shannon went shopping during the rest of the afternoon, but his mind was on the references he had already seen in Who’s Who to the man he now knew employed him, Sir James Manson, self-made millionaire and tycoon.

He had an urge, partly from curiosity, partly from the feeling that one day he might need the information, to learn more about Sir James Manson, about the man himself and about why he had hired a mercenary to make war in Zangaro on his behalf.

The reference from Who’s Who that stuck in his mind was the mention of a daughter Manson had, a girl who would now be in her late teens or just turned twenty. In the middle of the afternoon he stepped into a phone booth off Jermyn Street and called the private inquiry agents who had traced Endean from their first meeting in Chelsea and identified him as Manson’s aide.

The head of the agency was cordial when he heard his former client on the phone. Previously, he knew, Mr. Brown had paid promptly and in cash. Such customers were valuable. If he wished to remain on the end of a telephone, that was his affair.

“Do you have access to a fairly comprehensive newspaper cuttings library?” Shannon asked.

“I could have,” the agency chief admitted.

“I wish to get a brief description of a young lady to whom there has probably at one time been a reference in society gossip columns somewhere in the London press. I need very little, simply what she does and where she lives. But I need it quickly.”

There was a pause on the other end. “If there are such references, I could probably do it by phone,” said the inquiry agent. “What is the name?”

“Miss Julia Manson, daughter of Sir James Manson.”

The inquiry agent thought it over. He recalled that this client’s previous assignment had concerned a man who turned out to be Sir James Manson’s aide. He also knew he could find out what Mr. Brown wanted to know within an hour.

The two men agreed on the fee, a modest one, and Shannon promised to mail it in cash by registered mail within the hour. The inquiry agent decided to accept the promise and asked his client to call him back just before five.

Shannon completed his shopping and called back on the dot of five. Within a few seconds he had what he wanted. He was deep in thought as he walked back to his hotel and phoned the writer who had originally introduced him to “Mr. Harris.”

“Hi,” he said gruffly, “it’s me, Cat Shannon.”

“Oh, hello, Cat,” came the surprised reply. “Where have you been?”

“Around,” said Shannon. “I just wanted to say thanks for recommending me to that fellow Harris.”

“Not at all. Did he offer you a job?”

Shannon was cautious. “Yeah, a few days’ worth. It’s over now. But I’m in funds. How about a spot of dinner?”

“Why not?” said the writer.

“Tell me,” said Shannon, “are you still going out with that girl you used to be with when we met last?”

“Yeah. The same one. Why?”

“She’s a model, isn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Look,” said Shannon, “you may think this crazy, but I very much want to meet a girl who’s also a model but I can’t get an introduction to. Name of Julie Man-son. Could you ask your girl if she ever met her in the modeling world?”

The writer thought it over. “Sure. I’ll call Carrie and ask her. Where are you now?”

“In a call box. I’ll call you back in half an hour.”

Shannon was lucky. The two girls had been at modeling school together. They were also handled by the same agency. It took another hour before Shannon, by then speaking directly to the writer’s girlfriend, learned that Julia Manson had agreed to a dinner date, providing it was a foursome with Carrie and her boyfriend. They agreed to meet at Carrie’s flat just after eight, and she would have Julie Manson there.

Shannon and the writer turned up within a few minutes of each other at Carrie’s flat off Maida Vale, and the four of them went off to dinner. The writer had reserved a table at a small cellar restaurant called the Baker and Oven in Marylebone, and the meal was the kind Shannon liked, enormous portions of English roast meats and vegetables, washed down with two bottles of Piat de Beaujolais. He liked the food, and he liked Julie.

She was quite short, a little over five feet, and to give the impression of more height she wore high heels and carried herself well. She said she was nineteen, and she had a pert, round face that could be innocently angelic when she wanted, or extremely sexy when she thought no one else was looking.

She was evidently spoiled and too accustomed to getting things her own way—probably, Shannon estimated, the result of an overindulgent upbringing. But she was amusing and pretty, and Shannon had never asked more of a girl. She wore her dark brown hair loose so that it fell to her waist, and beneath her dress she evidently had a very curved figure. She also seemed to be intrigued by her blind date.

Although Shannon had asked his friend not to mention what he did for a living, Carrie had nevertheless let it slip that he was a mercenary. But the conversation managed to avoid the question during dinner. As usual Shannon did less talking than anyone, which was not difficult because Julie and the tall auburn-haired Carrie did enough for four between them.

As they left the restaurant and climbed back into the cool night air of the streets, the writer mentioned that he and his girlfriend were taking the car back to his flat. He hailed a taxi for Shannon, asking him if he would take Julie home before going on to his hotel.

As the mercenary climbed in, the writer gave him a slow wink. “I think you’re on,” he whispered. Shannon grunted.

Outside her Mayfair flat Julie suggested he might like to come in for coffee, so he paid off the taxi and accompanied her up to the evidently expensive apartment. Only when they were seated on the settee drinking the appalling coffee Julie had prepared did she refer to the way he earned his living.

He was leaning back in the corner of the settee; she was perched on the edge of the seat, turned toward him.

“Have you killed people?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“In battle?”

“Sometimes. Mostly.”

“How many?”

“I don’t know. I never counted.”

She savored the information and swallowed several times. “I’ve never known a man who had killed people.”

“You don’t know that,” countered Shannon. “Anyone who has been in a war has probably killed people.”

“Have you got any scars from wounds?”

It was another of the usual questions. In fact Shannon carried over a score of marks on his back and chest, legacies of bullets, fragments of mortar, and shards of grenade. He nodded. “Some.”

“Show me,” she said.

“No.”

“Go on, show me. Prove it.” She stood up.

He grinned up at her. “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours,” he taunted, mimicking the old kindergarten challenge.

“I haven’t got any,” Julie said indignantly.

“Prove it,” said Shannon shortly and turned to place his empty coffee cup on the table behind the sofa. He heard a rustle of cloth. When he turned back he nearly choked on the last mouthful of coffee. It had taken her less than a second to unzip her dress at the back and let it slip to a pool of crumpled cloth around her ankles. Beneath it she wore a thin gold waist-chain.

“See,” she said softly, “not a mark anywhere.”

She was right. Her small nubile teenager’s body was an unblemished milky white from the floor to the mane of dark hair that hung round her shoulders and almost touched the waist-chain.

Shannon swallowed. “I thought you were supposed to be Daddy’s sweet little girl,” he said.

She giggled. “That’s what they all think, especially Daddy,” she said. “Now it’s your turn.”

Sir James Manson sat at the same hour in the library of his country mansion not far from the village of Notgrove in the rolling Gloucestershire countryside, Shannon’s file on his knee and a brandy and soda at his elbow. It was close to midnight, and Lady Manson had long since gone up to bed. He had saved the Shannon project to read alone in his library, resisting the temptation to open it in the car on the way down or to slip away early from dinner. When he wanted to concentrate hard he preferred the night hours, and on this document he wanted to concentrate hard.

He flicked the cover open and set on one side the maps and sketches. Then he started on the narrative. It read:

Preamble. The following plan has been prepared on the basis of the report on the republic of Zangaro prepared by Mr. Walter Harris, my own visit to Zangaro and my own report on that visit, and the briefing given by Mr. Harris on what it is desired to achieve. It cannot take into account elements known to Mr. Harris but undisclosed by him to me. Notable among these must be the aftermath of the attack and the installation of the successor government. Nevertheless, this aftermath may well require preparations built in to the planning of the attack, and these I have obviously not been able to make.

Object of the Exercise. To prepare, launch, and carry out an attack on the presidential palace at Clarence, capital of Zangaro, to storm and capture that palace, and to liquidate the President and his personal guards living inside. Also, to take possession of the bulk of the weapons and armory of the republic, its national treasury and broadcasting radio station, also inside the palace. Lastly, to create such conditions that any armed survivors of the guard unit or the army are scattered outside the town and in no position to mount a viable counterattack.

Method of Attack. After studying the military situation of Clarence, there is no doubt the attack must be from the sea, and launched directly from the sea at the palace itself. I have studied the idea of an airborne landing at the airport. It is not feasible. Firstly, the authorities at the airport of take-off would not permit the necessary quantity of arms and men to board a charter aircraft without suspecting the nature of the flight. Any authorities, even if they permitted such a take-off, would constitute a serious risk of arrest, or a breach of security.

Secondly, a land attack offers no extra advantages and many disadvantages. To arrive in an armed column over the northern border would only mean the men and arms would have to be smuggled into the neighboring republic, which has an efficient police and security system. The risk of premature discovery and arrest would be extremely high, unacceptably so. To land elsewhere on the coast of Zangaro and march to Clarence would be no more realistic. For one thing, most of the coast is of tangled mangrove swamp impenetrable by boats, and such tiny coves as there are would be unfindable in darkness. For another, being without motor transport, the attack force would have a long march to the capital, and the defenders would be forewarned. For a third, the paucity of the numbers of the attacking force would be visible in daylight, and would hearten the defenders to put up a stiff resistance.

Lastly, the idea was examined to smuggle the arms and the men into the republic clandestinely and hide them out until the night of the attack. This too is unrealistic, partly because the quantity of weapons would be too great in weight terms, partly because such quantities and so many unaccustomed visitors would inevitably be spotted and betrayed, and partly because such a plan would require an assisting organization on the ground inside Zangaro, which does not exist.

In consequence it is felt the only realistic plan must be for an attack by light boats, departing from a larger vessel moored out at sea, straight into the harbor of Clarence, and an attack on the palace immediately on landing.

Requirements for the Attack. The force should be not less than a dozen men, armed with mortars, bazookas, and grenades, and all carrying as well submachine carbines for close-quarters use. The men should come off the sea between two and three in the morning, giving ample time for all in Clarence to be asleep, but sufficiently before dawn for no visible traces of white mercenaries to be available by sunrise of the same day.

The report continued for six more pages to describe exactly how Shannon proposed to plan the project and engage the necessary personnel; the arms and ammunition he would need, the ancillary equipment of radio sets, assault craft, outboard engines, flares, uniforms, webbing, food and supplies; how each item could be costed; and how he would destroy the palace and scatter the army.

On the question of the ship to carry the attacking force he said:

Apart from the arms, the acquisition of the ship will prove the most difficult part. On reflection I would be against chartering a vessel, since this involves crew who may turn out to be unreliable, a captain who could at any time change his mind, and the security hazard that vessels of a kind likely to undertake such a charter are probably notorious to the authorities of the countries bordering on the Mediterranean. I advocate spending more money to buy outright a small freighter, crew it with men paid by and loyal to the patrons and with a legal reputation in shipping circles. Such a boat would in any case be a returnable asset and might work out cheaper in the long run.

Shannon had also stressed the necessity of security at all times. He pointed out:

Since I am unaware of the identity of the patrons, with the exception of Mr. Harris, it is recommended that, in the event of the project being accepted, Mr. Harris remain the sole link between the patrons and me. Payments of the necessary money should be made to me by Mr. Harris, and my accounting of expenditure returned the same way. Similarly, although I would need four subordinate operatives, none would know the nature of the project, and certainly not the destination, until all are well out to sea. Even the coastal charts should be handed over to the captain only after sailing. The above plan takes in the security angle, since wherever possible the purchases may be made legally on the open market, and only the arms an illegal purchase. At each stage there is a cut-out at which any investigator comes up against a blank wall, and also at each stage the equipment is being bought separately in different countries by different operatives. Only myself, Mr. Harris, and the patrons would know the whole plan, and in the worst event I could not identify the patrons, nor, probably, Mr. Harris.

Sir James Manson nodded and grunted in approval several times as he read. At one in the morning he poured himself another brandy and turned to the costings and timings, which were on separate sheets. These read:

COMPLETED

Reconnaissance visit to Zangaro.

Two reports £ 2,500

Project commander’s fee £ 10,000

Engagement all other personnel

and their salaries £ 10,000

Total administrative costs, traveling, hotels, etc., for CO and all subordinates £ 10,000

Purchase of arms £ 25,000

Purchase of vessel £ 30,000

Purchase of ancillary equipment £ 5,000

Reserve £ 2,500

TOTAL £ 100,000

The second sheet bore the estimated timings.

Preparatory Stage: Recruitment and assembly of personnel. Setting up of bank account. Setting up of foreign-based company to cover purchases. 20 days

Purchasing Stage: Period to cover purchase of all items in sections. 40 days

Assembly Stage: Assembly of equipment and personnel onto the vessel, culminating in sailing day. 20 days

Shipment Stage: Transporting entire project by sea from embarkation port to point off coast of Clarence. 20 days

Strike day would take place on Zangaran Independence Day, which in the above calendar, if set in motion not later than next Wednesday, would be Day 100.

Sir James Manson read the report twice and slowly smoked one of his Upmann Coronas while he stared at the rich paneling and Morocco-bound books that lined his walls. Finally he locked the project file in his wall safe and went upstairs to bed.

Cat Shannon lay on his back in the darkened bedroom and ran his hand idly over the girl’s body that lay half across his own. It was a small but highly erotic body, as he had discovered during the previous hour, and whatever Julie had spent her time learning in the two years since she left school, it had not had much to do with shorthand and typing. Her appetite and taste for sexual variety were equaled only by her energy and almost constant stream of chatter between meals.

As he stroked her she stirred and began to play with him.

“Funny,” he said reflectively, “it must be a sign of the times. We’ve been screwing half the night, and I don’t know a thing about you.”

She paused for a second, said, “Like what?” and resumed.

“Where your home is,” he said. “Apart from this pad.”

“Gloucestershire,” she mumbled.

“What does your old man do?” he asked softly. There was no answer. He took a handful of her hair and pulled her face around to him.

“Ow, you’re hurting. He’s in the City. Why?”

“Stockbroker?”

“No, he runs some company to do with mining. That’s his specialty, and this is mine. Now, watch.”

Half an hour later she rolled off him and asked, “Did you like that, darling?”

Shannon laughed, and she caught a flash of teeth in the darkness as he grinned.

“Oh yes,” he said softly, “I enjoyed that enormously. Tell me about your old man.”

“Daddy? Oh he’s a boring old businessman. Spends all his day in a stuffy office in the City.”

“Some businessmen interest me. So tell me, what’s he like?”

Sir James Manson was enjoying his midmorning coffee in the sun lounge on the south side of his country mansion that Saturday morning when the call came through from Adrian Goole. The Foreign Office official was speaking from his own home in Kent.

“I hope you won’t mind my calling you over the weekend,” he said.

“Not at all, my dear fellow,” said Manson quite untruthfully. “Any time.”

“I would have called at the office last night, but I got held up at a meeting. Recalling our conversation some time ago about the results of your mining survey down in that African place. You remember?”

Manson supposed Goole felt obliged to go through the security rigmarole on an open line.

“Yes indeed,” he said. “I took up your suggestion made at that dinner. The figures concerned were slightly changed, so that the quantities revealed were quite unviable from a business standpoint. The report went off, was received, and I’ve heard no more about it.”

Goole’s next words jerked Sir James Manson out of his weekend relaxation.

“Actually, we have,” said the voice on the phone. “Nothing really disturbing, but odd all the same. Our Ambassador in the area, although accredited to that country and three other small republics, doesn’t five there, as you know. But he sends in regular reports, gleaned from a variety of sources, including normal liaison with other friendly diplomats. A copy of a section of his latest report, concerned with the economic side of things out there, landed on my desk yesterday at the office. It seems there’s a rumor out there that the Soviet government has secured permission to send in a mining survey team of their own. Of course, they may not be concerned with the same area as your chaps….”

Sir James Manson stared at the telephone as Goole’s voice twittered on. In his head a pulse began to hammer, close to his left temple.

“I was only thinking, Sir James, that if these Russian chaps go over the same area your man went over, their findings might be somewhat different. Fortunately, it’s only a question of minor quantities of tin. Still, I thought you ought to know. Hello? Hello? Are you there?”

Manson jerked himself out of his reverie. With a massive effort he made his voice appear normal.

“Yes indeed. Sorry, I was just thinking. Very good of you to call me, Goole. I don’t suppose they’ll be in the same area as my man. But damn useful to know, all the same.”

He went through the usual pleasantries before hanging up, and walked slowly back to the sun terrace, his mind racing. Coincidence? Could be, it just could be. If the Soviet survey team was going to cover an area miles away from the Crystal Mountain range, it would be purely a coincidence. On the other hand, if it went straight toward the Crystal Mountain without having done any aerial survey work to notice the differences in vegetation in that area, then that would be no coincidence. That would be bloody sabotage. And there was no way he could find out, no way of being absolutely certain, without betraying his own continuing interest. And that would be fatal.

He thought of Chalmers, the man he was convinced he had silenced with money. His teeth ground. Had he talked? Wittingly? Unwittingly? He had half a mind to let Endean take care of Dr. Chalmers, or one of En-dean’s friends. But that would change nothing. And there was no proof of a security leak.

He could shelve his plans at once and think no more of them. He considered this, then considered again the pot of pure gold at the end of this particular rainbow. James Manson was not where he was because he had the habit of backing down on account of risk.

He sat down in his deck chair next to the now cold coffeepot and thought hard. He intended to go forward as planned, but he had to assume the Russian mining team would touch on the area Mulrooney had visited, and he had to assume that it too would notice the vegetation changes. Therefore there was now a new element, a time limit. He did some mental calculation and came up with the figure of three months. If the Russians learned the content of the Crystal Mountain, there would be a “technical aid” team in there like a dose of salts. A big one at that, and half the members would be hard men from KGB.

Shannon’s shortest schedule had been a hundred days, but he had originally told Endean that another fortnight added to the timetable would make the whole project that much more feasible. Now they did not have that fortnight. In fact, if the Russians moved faster than usual, they might not even have a hundred days.

He returned to the telephone and called Simon En-dean. His own weekend had been disturbed; there was no reason why Endean should not start doing a bit of work.

Endean called Shannon at the hotel on Monday morning and set up a rendezvous for two that afternoon at a small apartment house in St. John’s Wood. He had hired the flat on the instructions of Sir James Manson, after having had a long briefing at the country mansion on Sunday afternoon. He had taken the flat for a month in the name of Harris, paying cash and giving a fictitious reference which no one checked. The reason for the hiring was simple: the flat had a telephone that did not go through a switchboard.

Shannon was there on time and found the man he still called Harris already installed. The telephone was hung in a desk microphone set that would enable a telephone conference to be held between one or more people in the room and the person on the other end of the line.

“The chief of the consortium has read your report,” he told Shannon, “and wants to have a word with you.”

At two-thirty the phone rang. Endean threw the “speak” switch on the machine, and Sir James Man-son’s voice came on the line. Shannon already knew who it would be but gave no sign.

“Are you there, Mr. Shannon?” asked the voice.

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, I have read your report, and I approve your judgment and conclusions. If offered this contract, would you be prepared to go through with it?”

“Yes, sir, I would,” said Shannon.

“There are a couple of points I want to discuss. I notice in the budget you award yourself the sum of ten thousand pounds.”

“Yes, sir. Frankly, I don’t think anyone would do the job for less, and most would ask more. Even if a budget were prepared by another person which quoted a lower sum, I think that person would still pass a minimum of ten per cent to himself, simply by hiding the sum in the prices of purchases that could not be checked out.”

There was a pause; then the voice said, “All right. I accept that. What does this salary buy me?”

“It buys you my knowledge, my contacts, my acquaintanceship with the world of arms dealers, smugglers, gun-runners, and mercenaries. It also buys my silence in the event of anything’s going wrong. It pays me for three months’ damned hard work, and the constant risk of arrest and imprisonment. Lastly, it buys the risk of my getting killed in the attack.”

There was a grunt. “Fair enough. Now as regards financing. The sum of one hundred thousand pounds will be transferred into a Swiss account which Mr. Harris will open this week. He will pay you the necessary money in slices, as and when you need it over the forthcoming two months. For that purpose you will have to set up your own communications system with him. When the money is spent, he will either have to be present or to receive receipts.”

“That will not always be possible, sir. There are no receipts in the arms business, least of all in black-market deals, and most of the men I shall be dealing with would not have Mr. Harris present. He is not in their world. I would suggest the extensive use of travelers’ checks and credit transfers by banks. At the same tune, if Mr. Harris has to be present to countersign every banker’s draft or check for a thousand pounds, he must either follow me around everywhere, which I would not accept on grounds of my own security, or we could never do it all inside a hundred days.”

There was another long pause. “What do you mean by your own security?” asked the voice.

“I mean, sir, that I don’t know Mr. Harris. I could not accept that he be in a position to know enough to get me arrested in a European city. You have taken your security precautions. I have to take mine. These are that I travel and work alone and unsupervised.”

“You’re a cautious man, Mr. Shannon.”

“I have to be. I’m still alive.”

There was a grim chuckle. “And how do I know you can be trusted with large sums of money to handle on your own?”

“You don’t, sir. Up to a point Mr. Harris can keep the sums low at each stage. But the payments for the arms have to be made in cash and by the buyer alone. The only alternatives are to ask Mr. Harris to mount the operation personally, or to hire another professional. And you would not know if you could trust him either.”

“Fair enough, Mr. Shannon. Mr. Harris.”

“Sir?” answered Endean immediately.

“Please return to see me at once after leaving where you are now. Mr. Shannon, you have the job. You have one hundred days, Mr. Shannon, to steal a republic. One hundred days.”