The Dogs of War

21

For the remainder of the sea voyage, Cat Shannon worked his men without pause. Only the middle-aged African whom he called “Doctor” was exempt. The rest were divided into parties, each with a separate job to do.

Marc Vlaminck and Kurt Semmler broke open the five green Castrol oil drums by hammering off the false bottoms, and from each plucked the bulky package of twenty Schmeissers and a hundred magazines that was inside. The superfluous lubricating oil was poured into smaller containers and saved for the ship’s use.

Aided by the six African soldiers, the pair stripped the masking tape from each of the hundred submachine guns, which were then individually wiped clean of oil and grease. By the time they had finished, the six Africans had already learned the operating mechanisms of the Schmeisser in a way that was as good if not better than any weapons-familiarization course that they could have undergone.

After breaking open the first ten boxes of 9mm. ammunition, the eight of them sat around the decks slotting the shells into the magazines, thirty to each, until the first fifteen thousand rounds from their store had gone into the five hundred magazines at their disposal. Eighty of the Schmeissers were then set aside while Jean-Baptiste Langarotti prepared sets of uniforms from the bales stored in the hold. These sets consisted of two T-shirts, two pairs of shorts, two pairs of socks, one pair of boots, one set of trousers, one beret, one combat blouse, and one sleeping bag. When these were ready, the bundle was wrapped up, one Schmeisser and five full magazines were wrapped in an oily cloth and slipped into a polyethylene bag, and the whole lot was stuffed into the sleeping bag. Tied at the top and ready for handling like a sack, each sleeping bag contained the necessary clothing and weaponry for one future soldier.

Twenty sets of uniforms and twenty Schmeissers with five magazines per carbine were set aside. These were for the attack force itself, although the force numbered only eleven, with spares for the crew if necessary. Langarotti, who had learned while in the army and in prison to handle a needle and thread, altered and sewed eleven sets of uniforms for the members of the attack party until each man was fitted out.

Dupree and Cipriani, the deckhand, who turned out to be a useful carpenter, stripped down several of the packing crates that had once contained ammunition, and turned their attention to the outboard engines. All three were Johnson 60-horsepower units. The two men built a wooden box to fit neatly over the top of each engine, and lined the boxes with foam rubber from the mattresses that had been brought along. With the exhaust noise of the engines muffled by the underwater exhausts, the mechanical noise emanating from the engine casings could also be reduced to a low murmur by the muffling boxes.

When Vlaminck and Dupree had finished these tasks, each turned his attention to the weapon he would be using on the night of the strike. Dupree un-crated his two mortar tubes and familiarized himself with the aiming mechanisms. He had not used the Yugoslav model of mortar before, but was relieved to see it was simple. He prepared seventy mortar bombs, checking and arming the primers in the nose-cone of each bomb.

Having repacked the prepared bombs into their boxes, he clipped two boxes, one above the other, to the webbing harness that had already been prepared from the army-style knapsacks he had bought in London two months earlier.

Vlaminck concentrated on his two bazookas, of which only one would be used on the night of the attack. Again, the main limitation to what he could take with him was the weight factor. Everything had to be carried on a human back. Standing on the forepeak, using the tip of the flagpole sticking above the stern as a fixed point, his aiming disk slotted to the end of the bazooka, he carefully adjusted the sights to the weapon until he was certain he could take a barrel at two hundred yards with no more than two shots. He had already picked Patrick as his back-up man, for they had been together before and knew each other well enough to make a good team. With his backpack, the African would be carrying ten bazooka rockets as well as his own Schmeisser. Vlaminck added another two rockets as his personal load, and Cipriani sewed him two pouches to hang from his belt, which could contain the extra rockets.

Shannon concentrated on the ancillary gear, examining the magnesium-flare rockets and explaining to Dupree how they worked. He distributed one compass to each mercenary, tested the gas-powered foghorn, and checked the portable radio sets.

Having tune, Shannon had the Toscana heave to for two days well out at sea in an area where the ship’s radar told them there was no other shipping within twenty miles. As the ship lay almost stationary, heaving slightly on the swell, each man tested his personal Schmeisser. The whites had no problems; they had each in their tune used half a dozen different submachine guns, and these weapons vary but slightly. The Africans took longer to get used to them, for most of their experience had been with bolt-action 7.92mm. Mausers or the standard 7.62 NATO self-loading rifle. One of the German carbines jammed repeatedly, so Shannon threw it overboard and gave the man another. Each African fired off nine hundred rounds, until he was accustomed to the feel of the Schmeisser in his hands, and each man had been cured of the annoying habit African soldiers tend to adopt, of closing their eyes while they fire. There was no point in testing the mortars, since they have no moving parts—the bombs do the work—and they cannot be fired with accuracy anyway from the deck of a ship at sea.

The five empty and open-topped oil barrels had been stored for later use, and these were now streamed astern of the Toscana for bazooka practice. At a hundred yards all of the men, black and white, could riddle a barrel before they had ceased their practice. Four barrels were destroyed and sunk in this manner, and the fifth was used by Marc Vlaminck. He let it stream to two hundred yards, then planted himself in the stern of the Toscana, feet apart and braced, the bazooka across his right shoulder, right eye applied to the sight. Judging the gentle heave of the deck, he waited until he was sure and fired off his first rocket It screamed over the top of the barrel and exploded with a spout of spray into the ocean. His second rocket took the barrel in the center. There was a crash, and the boom of the explosion echoed back over the water to the watching mercenaries and crew. Fragments of tinplate spattered the water close to where the barrel had been, and a cheer came from the watchers. Grinning widely, Vlaminck turned to Shannon, ripped off the glasses he had used to protect his eyes, and wiped the specks of smut from his face.

“You said you wanted a door taken off, Cat?”

“That’s right, a bloody great wooden gate, Tiny.”

“I’ll give it to you in matchsticks, and that’s a promise,” said the Belgian.

Because of the noise they had made, Shannon ordered the Toscana to move on the next day, and two days later he called his second halt. In the period under way, the men had hauled out the three assault craft and inflated them. They lay side by side along the main deck. Each, despite being a deep, dark gray in color, had a brilliant orange nose and the name of the manufacturer in the same luminous color down each side. These were painted out with black paint from the ship’s store.

When they were hove-to for the second time, they tested all three. Without the muffling boxes placed over the top of each engine, the Johnsons made an audible mutter even when four hundred yards away from the Toscana. With the boxes in place and the engines throttled back to less than quarter-power, there was hardly a sound at thirty yards. They tended to overheat after twenty minutes at half-power, but this could be stretched to thirty minutes if power was reduced. Shannon took one of the craft out for two hours, checking throttle settings for speed against noise, to get the best combination. As the powerful out-boards gave him a large reserve, he elected never to push them beyond one-third of full power, and advised his men to close down to less than quarter-power for the last two hundred yards as they approached the landing beaches of the target area.

The walkie-talkies were also tested at up to four miles, and despite the heavy atmospherics and the hint of thunder in the stifling air, messages could still be heard if read over clearly and slowly. To get them tised to the notion, the Africans were also given trips in the power craft, at a varying range of speeds, in daylight and at night. The night exercises were the most important.

For one of them Shannon took the other four whites and the six Africans three miles out from the Toscana, which burned one small light at her masthead. On the journey away from the ship, the ten men had their eyes bandaged. When the masks were taken off, each was given ten minutes to accustom his vision to the blackness of the sky and the ocean, before the move back to the boat began. With the engine throttled down and dead silence maintained aboard, the assault craft moved quietly back toward the light that represented the Toscana. Sitting with the tiller bar in his hand, holding the power setting steady at one-third, then cutting back to less than a quarter for the final run-in, Shannon could feel the tension of the men in front of him. They knew this was what it would be like when they struck, and there would be no second chances.

Back on board, Carl Waldenberg came up to Shannon as the two men watched the crew winch the vessel inboard by torchlight.

“I hardly heard a sound,” he said. “Not until you were a couple of hundred meters away, and I was listening hard. Unless they have very alert guards posted, you should be able to make the beach, wherever you are going. Incidentally, where are you going? I need more charts if I have to proceed much farther.”

“I think you’d all better know,” said Shannon. “We’ll spend the rest of the night going through the briefing.”

Until dawn, the crew (with the exception of the engineer, who still slept with his engines), the seven Africans, and the four mercenaries listened to Shannon in the main saloon while he went through the entire plan of attack. He had prepared and set up his projector and slide transparencies, some of which were pictures he had obtained of Zangaro, others of which were the maps and charts he had bought or drawn for himself.

When he had finished, there was dead silence in the stifling cabin, the blue wreaths of cigarette smoke trickling out through the open portholes into the equally clammy night outside.

Finally Waldenberg said, “Gott in Himmel.” Then they all started. It took an hour before the questions were answered. Waldenberg wanted reassurance that if anything went wrong the survivors would be back on board and the Toscana well over the horizon before sunrise. Shannon gave it to him.

“We have only your word for it they have no navy, no gunboats,” Waldenberg said.

“Then my word will have to do,” said Shannon. “They have none.”

“Just because you did not see any—”

“They have none,” snapped Shannon. “I spent hours talking with people who have been there for years. There are no gunboats, no navy.”

The six Africans had no questions. Each would stick close to the mercenary who would lead him and trust that he knew what he was doing. The seventh, the doctor, asked briefly where he would be, and accepted that he would remain on board the Toscana. The four mercenaries had a few purely technical questions, which Shannon answered in technical terms.

When they came back up on deck, the Africans stretched themselves out on their sleeping bags and went to sleep. Shannon had often envied their ability to sleep at any time, in any place, in almost any circumstances. The doctor retired to his cabin, as did Norbiatto, who would take the next watch. Waldenberg went into his wheelhouse, and the Toscana began to move again toward her destination, just three days away.

The five mercenaries grouped themselves on the afterdeck behind the crew quarters and talked until the sun was high. They all approved of the plan of attack and accepted that Shannon’s reconnaissance had been accurate and precise. If anything had changed since then, if there had been an unforeseen addition to the town’s defenses or improvements to the palace, they knew they could all die. They would be very few, dangerously few, for such a job, and there was no margin for things going wrong. But they accepted that either they had to win within twenty minutes or they would have to get back to their boats and leave in a hurry—those that could leave. They knew that no one was going to come looking for wounded, and that anyone finding one of his colleagues badly hurt and immovable would be expected to give him one mercenary’s last gift to another, the quick, clean way out, preferable to capture and the slow death. It was part of the rules, and they had all had to do it before.

Just before noon they parted company and turned in.

They all woke early on the morning of Day Ninety-nine. Shannon had been up half the night, watching beside Waldenberg as the coastline loomed out of the perimeter of the tiny radar screen at the rear of the wheelhouse.

“I want you to come within visual range of the coast to the south of the capital,” he had told the captain, “and spend the morning steaming northwards, parallel to the shore, so that at noon we are off the coast here.”

His finger jabbed the sea off the coast of Manandi. During the twenty days at sea he had come to trust the German captain. Waldenberg, having taken his money in Ploce port, had stuck by his side of the bargain, giving himself completely to making the operation as successful as he could. Shannon was confident the seaman would hold his ship at readiness four miles off the coast, a bit to the south of Clarence, while the firefight went on, and if the distress call came over the walkie-talkie, that he would wait until the men who had managed to escape rejoined the Toscana in their speedboats, before making at full power for the open sea. There was no spare man Shannon could leave behind to ensure this, so he had to trust Waldenberg.

He had already found the frequency on the ship’s radio on which Endean wanted him to transmit his first message, and this was timed for noon.

The morning passed slowly. Through the ship’s telescope Shannon watched the estuary of the Zangaro River move past, a long, low line of mangrove trees along the horizon. At midmorning he could make out the break in the green line where the town of Clarence lay, and passed the telescope to Vlaminck, Langarotti, Dupree, and Semmler. Each studied the off-white blur in silence and handed the glass to the next man. They smoked more than usual and mooched around the deck, tense and bored with the waiting, wishing, now they were so close, that they could go straight into action.

At noon Shannon began to transmit his message. He read it clear into the radio speaker. It was just one word, “Plantain.” He gave it every ten seconds for five minutes, then broke for five minutes, then gave it again. Three times within thirty minutes, each time over a five-minute period, he broadcast the word and hoped that Endean would hear it somewhere on the mainland. It meant simply that Shannon and his men were on time and in position, and that they would strike Clarence and Kimba’s palace in the small hours of the following morning.

Twenty-two miles away across the water, Simon Endean heard the word on his Braun transistor radio, folded the long wasp-antenna, left the hotel balcony, and withdrew into the bedroom. Then he began slowly and carefully to explain to the former colonel of the Zangaran army that within twenty-four hours he, Antoine Bobi, would be President of Zangaro. At four in the afternoon the colonel, grinning and chuckling at the thought of the reprisals he would take against those who had assisted in his ousting, struck his deal with Endean. He signed the document granting Bormac Trading Company a ten-year exclusive mining concession in the Crystal Mountains for a flat annual fee, a tiny profits-participation by the Zangaran government, and watched Endean place in an envelope and seal a check certified by a Swiss bank for half a million dollars in the name of Antoine Bobi.

In Clarence preparations went ahead through the afternoon for the following day’s independence celebrations. Six prisoners, lying badly beaten in the cells beneath the former colonial police station, listened to the cries of the Kimba Patriotic Youth marching through the streets above them, and knew that they would be battered to death in the main square as part of the celebrations Kimba had prepared. Photographs of the President were prominently hung on every public building, and the diplomatic wives prepared their migraines so they would be excused attendance at the ceremonies.

In the shuttered palace, surrounded by his guards, President Jean Kimba sat alone at his desk, contemplating the advent of his sixth year of office.

During the afternoon the Toscana and her lethal cargo put about and began to cruise slowly back down the coast from the north.

In the wheelhouse Shannon sipped his coffee and explained to Waldenberg how he wanted the Toscana placed.

“Hold her just north of the border until sundown,” he told his captain. "After nine p.m., start her up again and move diagonally toward the coast. Between sundown and nine, we will have streamed the three assault craft astern of the ship, each loaded with its complement. That will have to be done by flashlight, but well away from the land, at least ten miles out.

“When you start to move, around nine, keep her really slow, so you end up here, four miles out from the shore and one mile north of the peninsula at two a.m. You’ll be out of sight of the city in that position. With all lights doused, no one should see you. So far as I know, there’s no radar on the peninsula, unless a ship is in port.”

“Even if there is, she should not have a radar on,” growled Waldenberg. He was bent over his inshore chart of the coast, measuring his distances with compasses and set-square. “When does the first craft set free and move inshore?”

"At two. That will be Dupree and his mortar crew.

The other two boats cast adrift and head for the beach one hour later. Okay?"

“Okay,” said Waldenberg. “I’ll have you there.”

“It has to be accurate,” insisted Shannon. “We’ll see no lights in Clarence, even if there are any, until we round the headland. So we’ll be on compass heading only, calculating by speed and heading, until we see the outline of the shore, which might be no more than a hundred meters. It depends on the sky; cloud, moon, and stars.”

Waldenberg nodded. He knew the rest. After he heard the firefight begin, he was to ease the Toscana across the mouth of the harbor four miles out, and heave to again two miles to the south of Clarence, four miles out from the tip of the peninsula. From then on he would listen on his walkie-talkie. If all went well, he would stay where he was until sunup. If things went badly, he would turn on the lights at the masthead, the forepeak, and the stern, to guide the returning force back to the Toscana.

Darkness that evening came early, for the sky was overcast and the moon would not rise until the small hours of the morning. The rains had already started, and twice in the previous three days the men had weathered drenching downpours as the skies opened. The weather report from Monrovia, listened to avidly on the radio, indicated there would be scattered squalls along the coast that night, but no tornadoes, and they could only pray there would be no torrential rains while the men were in their open boats or while the battle for the palace was on.

Before sundown the tarpaulins were hauled off the equipment piled in rows along the main deck, and when darkness fell Shannon and Norbiatto began organizing the departure of the assault craft. The first over the side was the one Dupree would use. There was no point in using the derrick; the sea was only eight feet beneath the deck at the lowest point. The men lowered the fully inflated craft into the water manually, and Semmler and Dupree went down into it as it bobbed against the Toscana’s side in the slow swell.

The two of them hoisted the heavy outboard engine into place over the stern and screwed it tight to the backboard. Before placing the muffler on top of it, Semmler started the Johnson up and ran her for two minutes. The Serbian engineer had already given all three engines a thorough check-over, and it ran like a sewing machine. With the muffling box on top, the noise died to a low hum.

Semmler climbed out, and the equipment was lowered to Dupree’s waiting hands. There were the baseplates and sighting gear for both mortars, then the two mortar tubes. Dupree was taking forty mortar bombs for the palace and twelve for the barracks. To be on the safe side, he took sixty bombs, all primed and fused for detonation on impact.

He also took both flare-launching rockets and the ten flares, one of the gas-powered foghorns, one walkie-talkie, and his night glasses. Slung over his shoulder he had his personal Schmeisser, and tucked in his belt were five full magazines. The two Africans who were going with him, Timothy and Sunday, were the last into the assault craft.

When it was ready, Shannon stared down at the three faces that looked back up at him in the dun glow from the flashlight. “Good luck,” he called softly.

For answer Dupree raised one thumb and nodded. Holding the painter of the assault craft, Semmler moved back along the rail while Dupree fended off from down below. When the craft was streamed astern of the Toscana in complete darkness, Semmler tied her painter to the after rail, leaving the three men to bob up and down on the swell.

The second boat took less time to get into the water, for the men had got the hang of it. Marc Vlaminck went down with Semmler to set the outboard engine in position, for this was their boat. Vlaminck was taking one bazooka and twelve rockets, two on his own body, the other ten carried by his back-up man, who was Patrick. Semmler had his Schmeisser and five magazines in easy-extraction pouches hung around his belt. He had a set of night glasses around his neck and the second walkie-talkie strapped to one thigh. As he was the only man who could speak German, French, and reasonable English, he would double as the main attack party’s radio operator. When the two whites were ensconced in their craft, Patrick and Jinja, who would be Semmler’s back-up man, slid down the Jacob’s ladder from the Toscana and took their places.

The boat was streamed astern of the ship, and Dupree’s painter was passed to Semmler, who made it fast to his own assault craft. The two inflatable vessels bobbed behind the Toscana in line astern, separated by the length of rope, but none of their occupants said a word.

Langarotti and Shannon took the third and last boat. They were accompanied by Bartholomew and Johnny, the latter a big, grinning fighter who had been promoted at Shannon’s insistence when they last fought together, but who had refused to take his own company, as his new rank entitled him to, preferring to stick close to Shannon and look after him.

Just before Shannon, who was the last man into the boats, descended the ladder, Captain Waldenberg appeared from the direction of the bridge and tugged at his sleeve. The German pulled the mercenary to one side and muttered quietly, “We may have a problem.”

Shannon was immobile, frozen by the thought that something had gone seriously wrong. “What is it?” he asked.

“There’s a ship. Lying off Clarence, farther out than we are.”

“How long since you saw it?”

“Some time,” said Waldenberg, “but I thought it must be cruising south down the coast, like us, or moving northward. But it’s not; it’s riding to.”

“You’re sure? There’s no doubt about it?”

“None at all. When we came down the coast we were moving so slowly that if the other had been steaming in the same direction, she’d be well away by now. If northward, she’d have passed us by now. She’s immobile.”

“Any indication of what she is, who she belongs to?”

The German shook his head. “The size of a freighter. No indication who she is, unless we contact her.”

Shannon thought for several minutes. “If she were a freighter bringing cargo to Zangaro, would she anchor till morning before entering harbor?” he asked.

Waldenberg nodded. “Quite possible. Entry by night is frequently not allowed in some of the smaller ports along this coast. She’s probably riding out until the morning before asking permission to enter port.”

“If you’ve seen her, presumably she’s seen you?” Shannon suggested.

“Bound to,” said Waldenberg. “We’re on her radar all right.”

“Could her radar pick up the dinghies?”

“Unlikely,” said the captain. “Too low in the water, most probably.”

“We go ahead,” said Shannon. “It’s too late now. We have to assume she’s just a freighter waiting out the night.”

“She’s bound to hear the firefight,” said Waldenberg.

“What can she do about it?”

The German grinned. “Not much. If you fail, and we’re not out of here before sunrise, she’ll recognize the Toscana through binoculars.”

“We mustn’t fail, then. Carry on as ordered.”

Waldenberg went back to his bridge. The middle-aged African doctor, who had watched the proceedings in silence, stepped forward.

“Good luck, Major,” he said in perfectly modulated English. “God go with you.”

Shannon felt like saying that he would have preferred a Wombat recoilless rifle, but held his tongue.

He knew these people took religion very seriously. He nodded, said, “Sure,” and went over the side.

Out in the darkness, as he looked up at the dim blob of the Toscana’s stern above him, there was complete silence but for the slap of the water against the rubberized hulls of the boats. Occasionally it gurgled behind the ship’s rudder. From the landward side there was not a sound, for they were well out of earshot of the shore, and by the time they came close enough to hear shouts and laughter it would be well past midnight and, with luck, everyone would be asleep. Not that there was much laughter in Clarence, but Shannon was aware how far a single, sharp sound can travel over water at night, and everyone in his party, in the boats and on the Toscana, was sworn to silence and no smoking.

He glanced at his watch. It was quarter to nine. He sat back to wait.

At nine the hull of the Toscana emitted a low rumble, and the water beneath her stern began to churn and bubble, the phosphorescent white wake running back to slap against the snub nose of Shannon’s assault craft. Then they were under way, and by dipping his fingers over the side he could feel the caress of the passing water. Five hours to cover twenty-eight nautical miles.

The sky was still overcast, and the air was like that inside an old greenhouse, but a hole in the cloud cover let a little dim starlight through. Astern he could make out the craft of Vlaminck and Semmler at the end of twenty feet of rope, and somewhere behind them Janni Dupree was moving along in the wake of the Toscana.

The five hours went by like a nightmare. Nothing to do but watch and listen, nothing to see but the darkness and the glitter of the sea, nothing to hear but the low thump of the Toscana’s old pistons moving inside her rusted hull. No one could sleep, despite the mesmeric rocking of the light craft, for the tensions were building up in every man in the operation.

But the hours did pass, somehow. Shannon’s watch said five past two when the noise of the Toscana’s engines died and she slowed to idle in the water. From above the after rail a low whistle came through the darkness—Waldenberg, letting him know they were in position for cast-off. Shannon turned his head to signal Semmler, but Dupree must have heard the whistle, for a few seconds later they heard his engine cough into life and begin to move away toward the shore. They never saw him go, just heard the low buzz of the engine under its muffler vanishing into the darkness.

At the helm of his assault craft big Janni checked his power setting on the twist-grip he held in his right hand, and held his left arm with the compass as steady as he could under his eyes. He knew he should have four and a half miles to cover, angling in toward the coast, trying to make landfall on the outer side of the northern arm that curved around the harbor of Clarence. At that power setting, on that course, he should make it in thirty minutes. At twenty-five minutes he would shut the engine almost off and try to make out his landfall by. eyesight. If the others gave him one hour to set up his mortars and flare-rockets, they should move past the tip of the point toward their own beach landing just about the time he was ready. But for that hour he and his two Africans would be the only ones on the shore of Zangaro. That was all the more reason why they should be completely silent as they set up their battery.

Twenty-two minutes after he left the Toscana, Dupree heard a low post from the bow of his dinghy. It was Timothy, whom he had posted as a lookout Dupree glanced up from his compass, and what he saw caused him to throttle back quickly. They were already close to a shoreline, little more than three hundred yards away, and the dim starlight from the hole in the clouds above them showed a line of deeper darkness right ahead. Dupree squinted hard, easing the craft another two hundred yards inshore. It was mangrove; he could hear the water chuckling among the roots. Far out to his right he could discern the line of vegetation ending and the single line of the horizon between sea and night sky running away to the end of vision. He had made landfall three miles along the northern coast of the peninsula.

He brought his boat about, still keeping the throttle very low and virtually silent, and headed back out to sea. He set the tiller to keep the shoreline of the peninsula in vision at half a mile until he reached the limit of the strip of land at whose end the town of Clarence stood, then again headed slowly inshore. At two hundred yards he could make out the long, low spit of gravel that he was seeking, and in the thirty-eighth minute after leaving the Toscana he cut the engine and let the assault craft drift on its own momentum toward the spit. It grounded with a soft grating of fabric on gravel.

Dupree stepped lightly down the boat, avoiding the piles of equipment, swung a leg over the prow, and dropped onto the sand. He felt for the painter and kept it in his hand to prevent the boat from drifting, away. For five minutes all three men remained immobile, listening for the slightest sound from the town they knew lay over the low hummock of gravel and scrub in front of them, and four hundred yards to the left. But there was no sound. They had arrived without causing any alarm.

When he was certain, Dupree slipped a marlin spike out of his belt, rammed it deep into the shingle of the shore, and tied the painter securely to it. Then he rose to a crouch and ran lightly up the hummock ahead of him. It was barely fifteen feet above sea level at its top, and covered in knee-high scrub that rustled against his boots. The rustling was no problem; it was drowned by the slap of the sea on the shingle and far too soft to be heard away in the town. Crouching at the spine of the strip of land that formed one arm of the harbor, Dupree looked over the top. To his left he could make out the spit running away into the darkness, and straight ahead lay more water, the flat mirror-calm of the protected harbor. The end of the spit of gravel was ten yards to his right.

Returning to the assault craft, he whispered to the two Africans to begin unloading the equipment in complete silence. As the bundles came onto the shore he picked them up and carried them one by one up to the top of the rise. Each metallic piece was covered in sacking to prevent noise if two should knock together.

When the whole of his weaponry was assembled, Dupree began to set it up. He worked fast and quietly. At the far end of the spit, where Shannon had told him there was a round, flat area, he set up his main mortar. He knew, if Shannon’s measurements were accurate— and he trusted they would be—that the range from the tip of the land to the center of the palace courtyard was 781 yards. Using his compass, he pointed the mortar on the exact compass bearing Shannon had given him from the point he stood to the presidential palace, and carefully adjusted his mortar’s elevation to drop his first range-finding bomb as near to the center of the palace courtyard as possible.

He knew that when the flares went up he would see not the whole palace but just the top story, so he could not watch the bomb hit the ground. But he would see the upward flash of the explosion over the brow of the ground behind the warehouse at the other end of the harbor, and that would be enough.

When he was finished with the first mortar, he set up the second. This was pointed at the barracks, and he put the baseplate ten yards away from the first, down the spine of the land on which he stood. He knew both range and bearing from this mortar to the barracks, and that the accuracy of the second mortar was not vital, since its purpose was to drop bombs at random into the acreage of the former police lines and scatter the Zangaran army men through panic. Timothy, who had been his sergeant on mortars the last time they fought, would handle the second mortar on his own.

He established a pile of a dozen mortar bombs next to the second tube, settled Timothy beside it, and whispered a few last instructions into his ear.

Between the two mortars he established the two flare-launching rockets and jammed one rocket down each launcher, leaving the other eight lying handy. Each flare was reputed to have a life of twenty seconds, so if he was to operate both his own mortar and the illuminations, he knew he would have to work fast and skillfully. He needed Sunday to pass him his mortar bombs from the stack he had built beside the emplacement.

When he was finished, he looked at his watch. Three twenty-two in the morning. Shannon and the other two boats must be off the shore somewhere, heading for the harbor. He took his walkie-talkie, extended the aerial to its full length, switched on, and waited the prescribed thirty seconds for it to warm up. From then on, it would not be switched off again. When he was ready, he pressed the blip button three times at one-second intervals.

A mile off the shore, Shannon was at the helm of the leading assault craft, eyes straining into the darkness ahead. To his left side, Semmler kept the second craft in formation order, and it was he who heard the three buzzes from the walkie-talkie on his knee. He steered his boat softly into the side of Shannon’s, so the two rounded sides scuffed each other. Shannon looked toward the other boat. Semmler hissed and pulled his boat away again to maintain station at 2 yards. Shannon was relieved. He knew Semmler had heard Dupree’s signal across the water, and that the rangy Afrikaner was set up and waiting for them. Two minutes later, 1000 yards off the shore, Shannon caught the quick flash from Dupree’s flashlight, heavily masked and bunkered to a pinpoint of light. It was off to his right, so he knew that he was heading too far north. In unison, the two craft swung to starboard, Shannon trying to recall the exact point from which the light had come and to head for a point 100 yards to the right of it. That would be the harbor entrance. The light came again when Dupree caught the low buzz of the two outboard engines as they were 300 yards from the tip of the point. Shannon spotted the light and changed course a few degrees.

Two minutes later, shut down to less than quarter-power and making no noise louder than a bumblebee, the two assault craft went by the tip of the spit where Dupree was crouching, fifty yards out The South African caught the glitter of the wake, the bubbles from the exhausts rising to the surface; then they were gone into the harbor entrance and across the still water toward the warehouse on the other side.

There was still no sound from the shore when Shannon’s straining eyes made out the bulk of the warehouse against the marginally lighter skyline, steered to the right, and grounded on the shingle of the fishing beach among the natives’ dugout canoes and hanging fishnets.

Semmler brought his own boat to the shore a few feet away, and both engines died together. Like Dupree, all the men remained motionless for several minutes, waiting for an alarm to be called. They tried to make out the difference between the humped backs of the fishing canoes and the shape of a waiting ambush party. There was no ambush. Shannon and Semmler stepped over the side; each jabbed a marlin spike into the sand and tethered the boats to it. The rest followed. With a low, muttered “Come on, let’s go,” Shannon led the way across the beach and up the sloping incline to the 200-yard-wide plateau between the harbor and the silent palace of President Jean Kimba.

22

The eight men ran in a low crouch, up through the scrubland of the hillside and out onto the plain at the top. It was after half past three, and no lights were burning in the palace. Shannon knew that halfway between the top of the rise and the palace 200 yards away they would meet the coast road, and standing at the junction would be at least two palace guards. He expected he would not be able to take them both silently, and that after the firing started the party would have to crawl the last hundred yards to the palace wall. He was right.

Out across the water, in his lonely vigil, big Janni Dupree waited for the shot that would send him into action. He had been briefed that whoever fired the shot, or however many there were, the first one would be his signal. He crouched close to the flare-launching rockets, waiting to let the first one go. In his spare hand was his first mortar bomb.

Shannon and Langarotti were out ahead of the other six when they made the road junction in front of the palace, and already both were wet with sweat. Their faces, darkened with sepia dye, were streaked by the running perspiration. The rent in the clouds above them was larger, and more stars showed through, so that, although the moon was still hidden, there was a dim light across the open area in front of the palace. At 100 yards Shannon could make out the line of the roof against the sky, though he missed the guards until he stumbled over one. The man was seated on the ground, snoozing.

Shannon was too slow and clumsy with the commando knife in his right hand. After stumbling, he recovered, but the Vindu guard rose with equal speed and emitted a brief yell of surprise. The call attracted his partner, also hidden in the uncut grass a few feet away. The second man rose, gurgled once as the Corsican’s knife opened his throat from carotid artery to jugular vein, and went back down again, choking out his last seconds. Shannon’s man took the swipe with the Bowie knife in the shoulder, let out another scream, and ran.

A hundred yards in front, close to the palace gate, there was a second cry, and the sound of a bolt operating in the breech of a rifle. It was never quite certain who fired first. The wild shot from the palace gate and the snarling rip of Shannon’s half-second burst that sliced the running man almost in two blended with each other. From far behind them came a whoosh and a scream in the sky; two seconds later the sky above them exploded in blistering white light. Shannon caught a brief impression of the palace in front of him, two figures in front of its gate, and the feeling that his other six men were fanning out to right and left of him. Then the eight of them were face down in the grass and crawling forward.

Janni Dupree stepped away from the rocket-launcher the instant he had torn the lanyard off the first rocket, and was slipping his mortar bomb down the tube as the rocket screamed upward. The smack-thump of the mortar bomb departing on its parabola toward the palace blended with the crash of the magnesium flare exploding away toward the land, over the spot he hoped his colleagues would have reached. He took his second bomb and, squinting into the light from the palace, waited to watch the first one fall. He had given himself four sighting shots, on an estimate of fifteen seconds for each bomb in flight. After that he knew he could keep up a fire rate of one every two seconds, with Sunday feeding him the ammunition singly but fast and in rhythm.

His first sighting bomb hit the front right-hand cornice of the palace roof, high enough for him to see the impact. It did not penetrate but blew tiles off the roof just above the gutter. Stooping, he twirled the traverse knob of the directional aiming mechanism a few mils to the left and slipped in his second bomb just as the flare fizzled out. He had stepped across the other rocket-launcher, ripped off the firing lanyard of the rocket, sent it on its way, and stuffed a fresh pair into the two launchers before he needed to look up again. The second flare burst into light above the palace, and four seconds later the second bomb landed. It was dead center, but short, for it fell onto the tiles directly above the main door.

Dupree was also pouring with sweat, and the grub-screw was slick between his fingers. He brought the angle of elevation slightly down, lowering the nose of the mortar a whisker toward the ground for extra range. Working the opposite way from artillery, mortars have to be lowered for extra range. Dupree’s third mortar bomb was on its way before the flare fizzled out, and he had a full fifteen seconds to send up the third flare, trot down the spit a short way to actuate the foghorn, and be back in time to watch the mortar explode. It went clean over the palace roof and into the courtyard behind. He saw the red glow for a split second; then it was gone. Not that it mattered. He knew he had got his range and direction exactly right. There would be no shortfalls to endanger his own men in front of the palace.

Shannon and his men were face down in the grass as the three flares lit up the scene around them and Janni’s ranging shots went in. No one was prepared to raise his head until the Afrikaner was sending the hardware over the top of the palace and into the rear courtyard.

Between the second and third explosions Shannon risked putting his head up. He knew he had fifteen seconds until the third mortar went home. He saw the palace in the glare of the third magnesium flare, and two lights had gone on in the upper rooms. After the reverberations of the second mortar bomb died away, he heard a variety of screams and shouts from inside the fortress. These were the first and last sounds the defenders made before the roar of explosives blotted out all else.

Within five seconds the foghorn had gone on, the long, maniacal scream howling across the water from the harbor spit, filling the African night with a wail like a thousand released banshees. The crash of the mortar going into the palace courtyard was almost drowned out, and he heard no more screams. When he raised his head again he could see no further damage to the front of the palace and assumed Janni had dropped the bomb over the top. By agreement, Janni would use no more testing shots after his first on target, but go straight into the faster rhythm. From the sea behind him, Shannon heard the thud of mortars begin, steady, pulsing like a heartbeat in the ears, backed by the now monotonous wail of the foghorn, which had a life of seventy seconds on its gas canister.

To get rid of forty bombs, Janni would need eighty seconds, and it was agreed that, if there were a ten-second pause at any point after halfway, he would cease the bombardment so his colleagues would not run forward and be blown apart by a latecomer. Shannon had few worries that Janni would muff it.

When the main barrage began to hit the palace fifteen seconds after the thumps of their firing were heard, the eight men in the grass had a grandstand view. There was no more need for flares; the roaring crash of the mortar bombs going into the flagstone-covered courtyard behind the palace threw up gobbets of red light every two seconds. Only Tiny Marc Vlaminck had anything to do.

He was out to the left of the line of men, almost exactly in front of the main gate. Standing foursquare to the palace, he took careful aim and sent off his first rocket. A twenty-foot-long tongue of flame whirled out of the rear of the bazooka, and the pineapple-sized warhead sped for the main gate. It exploded high on the right-hand edge of the double doors, ripping a hinge out of the masonry and leaving a yard-square hole in the woodwork.

Kneeling by his side, Patrick slipped the rockets out of his backpack spread on the ground, and passed them upward. The second shot began to topple in midair and exploded against the stonework of the arch above the door. The third hit the center lock. Both doors seemed to erupt upward under the impact; then they sagged on the twisted hinges, fell apart, and swung inward.

Janni Dupree was halfway through his barrage, and. the red glare from behind the roof of the palace had become constant. Something was burning in the courtyard, and Shannon supposed it was the guardhouses. When the doors swung open, the men crouching in the grass could see the red glare through the archway, and two figures swayed in front of it and fell down before they could emerge.

Marc sent four more rockets straight through the open gate into the furnace beyond the archway, which apparently was a through passage to the courtyard behind. It was Shannon’s first glimpse of what lay beyond the gate.

The mercenary leader screamed to Vlaminck to stop firing, for he had used seven of his dozen rockets, and for all Shannon knew there might be an armored vehicle somewhere in the town, despite what Gomez had said. But the Belgian was enjoying himself. He sent another four rockets through the front wall of the palace at ground level and on the second floor, finally standing exultantly waving both his bazooka and his last rocket at the palace in front, while Dupree’s mortar bombs caromed overhead.

At that moment the foghorn whined away to a whisper and died. Ignoring Vlaminck, Shannon shouted to the others to move forward, and he, Semmler, and Langarotti began to run at a crouch through the grass, Schmeissers held forward, safety catches off, fingers tense on the triggers. They were followed by Johnny, Jinja, Bartholomew, and Patrick, who, having no more bazooka rockets to carry, unslung his submachine gun and joined the others.

At twenty yards, Shannon stopped and waited for Dupree’s last bombs to fall. He had lost count of how many were still to come, but the sudden silence after the last bomb fell told him they were over. For a second or two the silence itself was deafening. After the foghorn and the mortars, the roar and crash of Tiny’s bazooka rockets, the absence of sound was uncanny. So much so that it was almost impossible to realize the entire operation had lasted less than five minutes.

Shannon wondered for a second if Timothy had sent off his dozen mortar bombs to the army barracks, if the soldiers had scattered as he surmised they would, and what the other citizens of the town had thought of the inferno that must have nearly deafened them. He was jerked into wakefulness when the next two magnesium flares exploded over him, one after the other, and without waiting longer he leaped to his feet, screamed, “Come on,” and ran the last twenty yards to the smoldering main gate,

He was firing as he went through, sensing more than seeing the figure of Jean-Baptiste Langarotti to his left and Kurt Semmler closing up on his right. Through the gate and inside the archway the scene was enough to stop anybody in his tracks. The arch went straight through the main building and into the courtyard. Above the courtyard the flares still burned with a stark brilliance that lit the scene behind the palace like something from the Inferno.

Kimba’s guards had been caught asleep by the first sighting shots, which had brought them out of their lean-to barrack huts and into the center of the paved area. That was where the third shot and the succeeding forty quick-succession bombs had found them. Up one wall ran a ladder, and four mangled men hung from its rungs, caught in the back as they tried to run to the top of the enclosing wall. The rest had taken the full force of the mortars, which had exploded on stone flags and scattered lethal shards of Steel in all directions.

There were piles of bodies, some still half alive, most very dead. Two army trucks and three civilian vehicles, one the presidential Mercedes, were standing shredded from end to end against the rear wall. Several palace servants about to flee the horror in the rear had apparently been grouped behind the main gate when Vlaminck’s mortars came through. They were strewn all over the undercover area beneath the archway.

To right and left were further arches, each leading to what seemed to be a set of stairs to the upper floors. Without waiting to be asked, Semmler took the right-hand set, Langarotti the left. Soon there were bursts of submachine-carbine fire from each side as the two mercenaries laundered the upper floor.

Just beyond the stairs to the upper floors were doors at ground level, two on each side. Shouting to make himself heard above the screams of the maimed Vindu and the chattering of Semmler’s Schmeisser upstairs, Shannon ordered the four Africans to take the ground floor. He did not have to tell them to shoot everything that moved. They were waiting to go, eyes rolling, chests heaving.

Slowly, cautiously, Shannon moved through the archway into the threshold to the courtyard at the rear. If there was any opposition left in the palace guards, it would come from there. As he stepped outside, a figure with a rifle ran screaming at him from his left. It could be that a panic-stricken Vindu was making a break for safety, but there was no time to find out. Shannon whirled and fired; the man jackknifed and blew a froth of blood from an already dead mouth onto Shannon’s blouse front. The whole area and palace smelled of blood and fear, sweat and death, and over it all was the greatest intoxicant smell in the world for mercenaries, the reek of cordite.

He sensed rather than heard the scuff of footsteps in the archway behind him and swung around. From one of the side doors, into which Johnny had run to start mopping up the remaining Vindu alive inside the palace, a man had emerged. What happened when he reached the center of the flagstones under the arch, Shannon could recall later only as a kaleidoscope of images. The man saw Shannon the same time Shannon saw him, and snapped off a shot from the gun he clenched in his right hand at hip level.

Shannon felt the slug blow softly on his cheek as it passed. He fired half a second later, but the man was agile. After firing he went to the ground, rolled, and came up in the fire position a second time. Shannon’s Schmeisser had let off five shots, but they went above the gunman’s body as he went to the flagstones; then the magazine ran out. Before the man in the hallway could take another shot, Shannon stepped aside and out of sight behind a stone pillar, snapped out the old magazine, and slapped in a new one. Then he came around the corner, firing. The man was gone.

It was only then he became fully conscious that the gunman, stripped to the waist and barefoot, had not been an African. The skin of his torso, even in the dim light beneath the arch, had been white, and the hair dark and straight.

Shannon swore and ran back toward the embers of the gate on their hinges. He was too late.

As the gunman ran out of the shattered palace, Tiny Marc Vlaminck was walking toward the archway.

He had his bazooka cradled in both hands across his chest, the last rocket fitted into the end. The gunman never even stopped. Still running flat out, he loosed off two fast shots that emptied his magazine. They found the gun later in the long grass. It was a Makarov 9mm., and it was empty.

The Belgian took both shots in the chest, one of them in the lungs. Then the gunman was past him, dashing across the grass for safety beyond the reach of the light cast by the flares Dupree was still sending up. Shannon watched as Vlaminck, moving in a kind of slow motion, turned to face the running man, raised his bazooka and slotted it carefully across his right shoulder, took steady aim, and fired.

Not often does one see a bazooka the size of the warhead on the Yugoslav RPG-7 hit a man in the small of the back. Afterward, they could not even find more than a few pieces of cloth from his trousers.

Shannon had to throw himself flat again to avoid being broiled in the backlash of flame from the Belgian’s last shot. He was still on the ground, eight yards away, when Tiny Marc dropped his weapon and crashed forward, arms outspread, across the hard earth before the gateway. Then the last of the flares went out.

Big Janni Dupree straightened up after sending off the last of his ten magnesium flares and yelled, “Sunday.”

He had to shout three times before the African, standing ten yards away could hear him. All three men were partly deaf from the pounding their ears had taken from the mortar and the foghorn. He shouted to Sunday to stay behind and keep watch over the mortars and the boat, then, signaling to Timothy to follow him, he began to jog-trot through the scrub and bushes along the spit of land toward the mainland. Although he had loosed off more firepower than the other four mercenaries put together, he saw no reason why he should be denied all the action.

Besides, his job was still to silence the army barracks, and he knew, from his memory of the maps on board the Toscana, roughly where it was. It took the pair of them ten minutes to reach the road that ran across the end of the peninsula from side to side, and, instead of turning right toward the palace, Dupree led the way left, toward the barracks. Janni and Timothy had slowed to a walk, one on each side of the laterite road, their Schmeissers pointing forward, ready to fire the moment trouble showed itself.

The trouble was around the first bend in the road. Scattered twenty minutes earlier by the first of the mortar bombs dispatched by Timothy, which fell between the hutments that made up the barracks line, the two hundred encamped men of Kimba’s army had fled into the night. But about a dozen of them had regrouped in the darkness and were standing at the edge of the road, muttering in low whispers among themselves. If they had not been so deaf, Dupree and Timothy would have heard them sooner. As it was, they were almost on the group before they saw them, shadows in the shadows of the palm trees. Ten of the men were naked, having been roused from sleep. The other two had been on guard duty and were clothed and armed.

The previous night’s torrential rain had left the ground so soft that most of Timothy’s dozen mortar bombs had embedded themselves too deeply in the earth to have their full intended impact. The Vindu soldiers Dupree and Timothy found waiting around that corner still had something of their wits about them. One of them also had a hand grenade.

It was the sudden movement of the soldiers when they saw the white gleam of Dupree’s face, from which the dye had long since run away with his sweat, that alerted the South African. He screamed, “Fire,” and opened up at the group. Four of them were cut apart by the stream of slugs from the Schmeisser. The other eight ran, two more falling as Dupree’s fire pursued them into the trees. One of them, as he ran, turned and hurled the thing he carried in his hand. He had never used one before and never seen one used. But it was his pride and joy, and he had always hoped to use it one day.

The grenade went high in the air, out of sight, and when it fell, it hit Timothy full in the chest. In instinctive reaction, the African veteran clutched at the object as he went over backward and, sitting on the ground, recognized it for what it was. He also saw that the fool who had thrown it had forgotten to take the pin out. Timothy had seen a mercenary catch a grenade once. He had watched as the man hurled it straight back at the enemy. Rising to his feet, Timothy whipped the pin out of the grenade and threw it as far as he could after the retreating Vindu soldiers.

It went high into the air a second time, but this time it hit a tree. There was a dull clunk, and the grenade fell short of where it was intended to go. At that moment Janni Dupree started in pursuit, a fresh magazine in his carbine. Timothy shouted a warning, but Dupree must have thought it was a scream of elation. He ran eight paces forward into the trees, still firing from the hip, and was two yards from the grenade when it exploded.

He did not remember much more. He remembered the flash and the boom, the sensation of being picked up and tossed aside like a rag doll. Then he must have passed out. He came to, lying out on the laterite road, and there was someone kneeling in the road beside him, cradling his head. He could feel that his throat was very warm, as it had been the time he had had fever as a boy—a comfortable, drowsy feeling of being half awake and half asleep. He could hear a voice talking to him, saying something repeatedly and urgently, but he could not make out the words. “Sorry, Janni, so sorry, sorry …”

He could understand his own name, but that was all. This language was different, not his own language, but something else. He swiveled his eyes around to the person who was holding him and made out a dark face in the half-light beneath the trees. He smiled and said quite clearly in Afrikaans, “Hallo Pieter.”

He was staring up at the gap between the palm fronds when finally the clouds shifted to one side and the moon came out. It looked enormous, as it always does in Africa, brilliant white and shining. He could smell the rain in the vegetation beside the road and see the moon sitting up there glistening like a giant pearl, like the Paarl Rock after the rain. It was good to be back home again, he thought. Janni Dupree was quite content when he closed his eyes again and died.

It was half past five when enough natural daylight filtered over the horizon for the men at the palace to be able to switch off their flashlights. Not that the daylight made the scene in the courtyard look any better. But the job was done.

They had brought Vlaminck’s body inside and laid it out straight in one of the side rooms off the ground-floor hallway. Beside him lay Janni Dupree, brought up from the seashore road by three of the Africans. Johnny was also dead, evidently surprised and shot by the white bodyguard who had seconds later stopped Vlaminck’s last bazooka rocket. The three of them were side by side.

Semmler had summoned Shannon to the mam bedroom on the second floor and showed him by flashlight the figure he had gunned down as it tried to clamber out of the window.

“That’s him,” said Shannon.

There were six survivors from among the dead President’s domestic staff. They had been found cowering in one of the cellars, which they had found, more by instinct than by logic, to be the best security from the rain of fire from the skies. These were being used as forced labor to tidy up. Every room in the main part of the palace was examined, and the bodies of all the other friends of Kimba and palace servants that had been lying around the rooms were carried down and dumped in the courtyard at the back. The remnants of the door could not be replaced, so a large carpet taken from one of the state rooms was hung over the entrance to mask the view inside.

At five o’clock Semmler had gone back to the Toscana in one of the speedboats, towing the other two behind him. Before leaving, he had contacted the Toscana on his walkie-talkie to give the code word meaning all was in order.

He was back by six-thirty with the African doctor and the same three boats, this time loaded with stores, the remaining mortar bombs, the eighty bundles containing the remaining Schmeissers, and nearly a ton of 9mm. ammunition.

At six, according to a letter of instruction Shannon had sent to Captain Waldenberg, the Toscana had begun to broadcast three words on the frequency to which Endean was listening. The words, paw-paw, cas save, and mango, meant respectively: The operation went ahead as planned, it was completely successful, and Kimba is dead.

When the African doctor had viewed the scene of carnage at the palace, he sighed and said, “I suppose it was necessary.”

“It was necessary,” affirmed Shannon and asked the older man to set about the task he had been brought to do.

By nine, nothing had stirred in the town and the clearing-up process was almost complete. The burial of the Vindu would have to be done later, when there was more manpower available. Two of the speedboats were back at the Toscana, slung aboard and stowed below, while the third was hidden in a creek not far from the harbor. All traces of the mortars on the point had been removed, the tubes and baseplates brought inside, the rocket-launchers and packing crates dropped out at sea. Everything and everyone else had been brought inside the palace, which, although battered to hell from the inside, bore only two areas of shattered tiles, three broken windows in the front, and the destroyed door to indicate from the outside that it had taken a beating.

At ten, Semmler and Langarotti joined Shannon in the main dining room, where the mercenary leader was finishing off some jam and bread that he had found in the presidential kitchen. Both men reported on the results of their searches. Semmler told Shannon the radio room was intact, apart from several bullet holes in the wall, and the transmitter would still send. Kimba’s private cellar in the basement had yielded at last to the persuasion of several magazines of ammunition. The national treasury was apparently in a safe at the rear of the cellar, and the national armory was stacked around the walls—enough guns and ammunition to keep an army of two or three hundred men going for several months in action.

“So what now?” asked Semmler when Shannon had heard him out.

“So now we wait,” said Shannon.

“Wait for what?”

Shannon picked his teeth with a spent match. He thought of Janni Dupree and Tiny Marc lying below on the floor, and of Johnny, who would not liberate another farmer’s goat for his evening supper. Langarotti was slowly stropping his knife on the leather band around his left fist.

“We wait for the new government,” said Shannon.

The American-built 1-ton truck carrying Simon Endean arrived just after one in the afternoon. There was another European at the wheel, and Endean sat beside him, clutching a large-bore hunting rifle. Shannon heard the growl of the engine as the truck left the shore road and came slowly up to the front entrance of the palace, where the carpet hung lifeless in the humid air, covering the gaping hole where the main gate had been.

He watched from an upper window as Endean climbed suspiciously down, looked at the carpet and the other pockmarks on the front of the building, and examined the eight black guards at attention before the gate.

Endean’s trip had not been completely without incident. After the Toscana’s radio call that morning, it had taken him two hours to persuade Colonel Bobi that he was actually going back into his own country within hours of the coup. The man had evidently not won his colonelcy by personal courage.

They had set off from the neighboring capital by road at nine-thirty on the hundred-mile drive to Clarence. In Europe that distance may take two hours; in Africa it takes more. They arrived at the border in midmorning and began the haggle to bribe their way past the Vindu guards, who had still not heard of the night’s coup in the capital. Colonel Bobi, hiding behind a pair of large and very dark glasses and dressed in a white flowing robe like a nightshirt, posed as their car-boy, a personal servant who, in Africa, never requires papers to cross a border. Endean’s papers were in order, like those of the man he brought with him, a hulking strong-arm from London’s East End, who had been recommended to Endean as one of the most feared protectors in Whitechapel and a former enforcer for the Kray Gang. Ernie Locke was being paid a very handsome fee to keep Endean alive and well and was carrying a gun under his shut, acquired locally through the offices of ManCon’s mining enterprise in the republic. Tempted by the money offered, he had already made the mistake of thinking, like En-dean, that a good hatchet man in the East End will automatically make a good hatchet man in Africa.

After crossing the frontier, the truck had made good time until it blew a tire ten miles short of Clarence. With Endean mounting guard with his rifle, Locke had changed the tire while Bobi cowered under the canvas in the back. That was when the trouble started. A handful of Vindu troops, fleeing from Clarence, had spotted them and loosed off half a dozen shots. They all went wide except one, which hit the tire Locke had just replaced. The journey was finished in first gear on a flat tire.

Shannon leaned out the window and called down to Endean.

The latter looked up. “Everything okay?” he called.

“Sure,” said Shannon. “But get out of sight. No one seems to have moved yet, but someone is bound to start snooping soon.”

Endean led Colonel Bobi and Locke through the curtain, and they mounted to the second floor, where Shannon was waiting. When they were seated in the presidential dining room, Endean asked for a full report on the previous night’s battle. Shannon gave it to him.

“Kimba’s palace guard?” asked Endean.

For answer Shannon led him to the rear window, whose shutters were closed, pushed one open, and pointed down into the courtyard, from which a ferocious buzzing of flies mounted.

Endean looked out and drew back. “The lot?” he asked.

“The lot,” said Shannon. “Wiped out.”

“And the army?”

“Twenty dead, the rest scattered. All left their arms behind except perhaps a couple of dozen bolt-action Mausers. No problem. The arms have been gathered up and brought inside.”

“The presidential armory?”

“In the cellar, under our control.”

“And the national radio transmitter?”

“Downstairs on the ground floor. Intact. We haven’t tried the electricity circuits yet, but the radio seems to have a separate Diesel-powered generator.” “ Endean nodded, satisfied. ”Then there’s nothing for it but for the new President to announce the success of his coup last night, the formation of a new government, and to take over control," he said.

“What about security?” asked Shannon. “There’s no army left intact until they filter back, and not all of the Vindu may want to serve under the new man.”

Endean grinned. “They’ll come back when the word spreads that the new man has taken over, and they’ll serve under him just so long as they know who is in charge. And they will. In the meantime, this group you seem to have recruited will suffice. After all, they’re black, and no European diplomats here are likely to recognize the difference between one black and another.”

“Do you?” asked Shannon.

Endean shrugged. “No,” he said, “but it doesn’t matter. By the way, let me introduce the new President of Zangaro.”

He gestured toward the Zangaran colonel, who had been surveying the room he already knew well, a broad grin on his face.

“Former commander of the Zangaran army, successful operator of a coup d’etat as far as the world knows, and new president of Zangaro. Colonel An toine Bobi.”

Shannon rose, faced the colonel, and bowed. Bobi’s grin grew even wider.

Shannon walked to the door at the end of the dining room. “Perhaps the President would like to examine the presidential office,” he said. Endean translated.

Bobi nodded and lumbered across the tiled floor and through the door, followed by Shannon. It closed behind them. Five seconds later came the crash of a single shot.

After Shannon reappeared, Endean sat for a moment staring at him. “What was that?” he asked unnecessarily.

“A shot,” said Shannon.

Endean was on his feet, across the room, and standing in the open doorway to the study. He turned around, ashen-faced, hardly able to speak.

“You shot him,” he whispered. “All this bloody way, and you shot him. You’re mad, Shannon, you’re fucking crazy.”

His voice rose with his rage and bafflement. “You don’t know what you’ve done, you stupid, blundering maniac, you bloody mercenary idiot.”

Shannon sat back in the armchair behind the dining table, gazing at Endean with scant interest. From the corner of his eye he saw the bodyguard’s hand move under his floppy shirt.

The second crash seemed louder to Endean, for it was nearer. Ernie Locke went back out of his chair in a complete somersault and sprawled across the tiles, varying the pattern of the old colonial marquetry with a thin filament of blood that came from his midriff. He was quite dead, for the soft bullet had gone through to shatter his spine.

Shannon brought his hand out from under the Oak table and laid the Makarov 9mm. automatic on the table. A wisp of blue smoke wriggled out of the end of the barrel.

Endean seemed to sag at the shoulders, as if the knowledge of the certain loss of his personal fortune, promised by Sir James Manson when Bobi was installed, had suddenly been compounded by the realization that Shannon was the most completely dangerous man he had ever met. But it was a bit late for that.

Semmler appeared in the doorway of the study, behind Endean, and Langarotti slipped quietly through the dining-room door from the corridor. Both held Schmeissers, catch off, very steady, pointing at Endean.

Shannon rose. “Come on,” he said, “I’ll drive you back to the border. From there you can walk.”

The single unpunctured tire from the two Zangaran trucks in the courtyard had been fitted to the vehicle that had brought Endean into the country. The canvas behind the cab had been taken away, and three African soldiers crouched in the back with submachine carbines. Another twenty, fully uniformed and equipped, were being marshaled into a line outside the palace.

In the hallway, close to the shattered door, they met a middle-aged African in civilian clothes. Shannon nodded to him and exchanged a few words.

“Everything okay, Doctor?”

“Yes, so far. I have arranged with my people to send a hundred volunteer workers to clean up. Also another fifty will be here this afternoon for fitting out and equipping. Seven of the Zangaran men on the list of notables have been contacted at their homes and have agreed to serve. They will meet this evening.”

“Good. Perhaps you had better take time off to draft the first bulletin from the new government. It should be broadcast as soon as possible. Ask Mr. Semmler to try to get the radio working. If it can’t be done, we’ll use the ship.”

“I have just spoken to Mr. Semmler,” said the African. “He has been in touch with the Toscana by walkie-talkie. Captain Waldenberg reports there is another ship out there trying to raise Clarence port authorities with a request for permission to enter port. No one is replying, but Captain Waldenberg can hear her on the radio.”

“Any identification?” asked Shannon.

“Mr. Semmler says she identifies herself as the Russian ship Komarov, a freighter.”

“Tell Mr. Semmler to man the port radio before going to work on the palace transmitter. Tell him to make to Komarov: ‘Permission refused. Permanently.’ Thank you, Doctor.”

They parted, and Shannon took Endean back to his truck. He took the wheel himself and swung the truck back on the road to the hinterland and the border.

“Who was that?” asked Endean sourly as the truck sped along the peninsula, past the shantytown of the immigrant workers, where all seemed to be bustle and activity. With amazement Endean noticed that each crossroads had an armed soldier with a submachine carbine standing on point duty.

“The man in the hallway?” asked Shannon.

“Yes.”

“That was Doctor Okoye.”

“A witch doctor, I suppose.”

“Actually he’s an Oxford Ph.D.”

“Friend of yours?”

“Yes.”

There was no more conversation until-they were on the highway toward the north.

“All right,” said Endean at last, “I know what you’ve done. You’ve ruined one of the biggest and richest coups that has ever been attempted. You don’t know that, of course. You’re too bloody thick. What I’d like to know is, why? In God’s name, why?”

Shannon thought for a moment, keeping the truck steady on the bumpy road, which had deteriorated to a dirt track.

“You made two mistakes, Endean,” he said carefully. Endean started at the sound of his real name.

“You assumed that because I’m a mercenary, I’m automatically stupid. It never seemed to occur to you that we are both mercenaries, along with Sir James Manson and most of the people who have power in this world. The second mistake was that you assumed all black people were the same, because to you they look the same.”

“I don’t follow you.”

"You did a lot of research on Zangaro; you even found out about the tens of thousands of immigrant workers who virtually keep this place running. It never occurred to you that those workers form a community of their own. They’re a third tribe, the most intelligent and hard-working one in the country. Given half a chance, they can play a part in the political life of the country. What’s more, you failed to recognize that the new army of Zangaro, and therefore the power in the country, might be recruited from among that third community. In fact, it just has been. Those soldiers you saw were neither Vindu nor Caja. There were fifty in uniform and armed when you were in the palace, and by tonight there’ll be another fifty. In five days there will be over four hundred new soldiers in

Clarence—untrained, of course, but looking efficient enough to keep law and order. They’ll be the real power in this country from now on. There was a coup d’etat last night, all right, but it wasn’t conducted for or on behalf of Colonel Bobi."

“For whom, then?”

“For the general.”

“Which general?”

Shannon told him the name.

Endean faced him, mouth open in horror. “Not him. He was defeated, exiled.”

“For the moment, yes. Not necessarily forever. Those immigrant workers are his people. They call them the Jews of Africa. There are one and a half million of them scattered over this continent. In many areas they do most of the work and have most of the brains. Here in Zangaro they live in the shantytown behind Clarence.”

“That stupid great idealistic bastard—”

“Careful,” warned Shannon.

“Why?”

Shannon jerked his head over his shoulder. “They’re the general’s soldiers too.”

Endean turned and looked at the three impassive faces above the three Schmeisser barrels.

“They don’t speak English all that well, do they?”

“The one in the middle,” said Shannon mildly, “was a chemist once. Then he became a soldier; then his wife and four children were wiped out by a Saladin armored car. They’re made by Alvis in Coventry, you know. He doesn’t like the people who were behind that.”

Endean was silent for a few more miles. “What happens now?” he asked.

“The Committee of National Reconciliation takes over,” said Shannon. “Four Vindu members, four Caja, and two from the immigrant community. But the army will be made up of the people behind you. And this country will be used as a base and a headquarters. From here the newly trained men will go back one day to avenge what was done to them. Maybe the general will come and set up residence here—in effect, to rule.”

“You expect to get away with that?”

“You expected to impose that slobbering ape Bobi and get away with it. At least the new government will be moderately fair. That mineral deposit, or whatever it was, that you were after—I don’t know where or what it is, but I can deduce that there has to be something here to interest Sir James Manson. No doubt the new government will find it, eventually. And no doubt it will be exploited. But if you want it, you will have to pay for it. A fair price, a market price. Tell Sir James that when you get back home.”

Around the corner they came within view of the border post. News travels fast in Africa, even without telephone, and the Vindu soldiers on the border post were gone.

Shannon stopped the truck and pointed ahead. “You can walk the rest,” he said.

Endean climbed down. He looked back at Shannon with undiluted hatred. “You still haven’t explained why,” he said. “You’ve explained what and how, but not why.”

Shannon stared ahead up the road. “For nearly two years,” he said musingly, "I watched between half a million and a million small kids starved to death because of people like you and Manson. It was done basically so that you and your kind could make bigger profits through a vicious and totally corrupt dictatorship, and it was done in the name of law and order, of legality and constitutional justification. I may be a fighter, I may be a killer, but I am not a bloody sadist I worked out for myself how it was done and why it was done, and who were the men behind it. Visible up front were a bunch of politicians and Foreign Office men, but they are just a cage full of posturing apes, neither seeing nor caring past their interdepartmental squabbles and their re-election. Invisible behind them were profiteers like your precious James Manson.

That’s why I did it. Tell Manson when you get back home. I’d like him to know. Personally. From me. Now get walking."

Ten yards on, Endean turned around. “Don’t ever come back to London, Shannon,” he called. “We can deal with people like you there.”

“I won’t,” yelled Shannon. Under his breath he murmured, “I won’t ever have to.” Then he turned the truck around and headed for the peninsula and Clarence.