by Larry Johns
“Yes, sir?” A woman’s voice. Pinched. Nasal. And grating.
Mitchell winced. So far he had held out against the trend towards dishy-looking, soft-spoken young secretaries. But that could change if Molly-goddam-Spears didn’t get rid of that cold in a hurry! “Some coffee, please, Molly.”
“Yes, sir. Right away...”
Mitchell looked like a man who had bitten into something hard. “Gusuntite,” he said after he had broken the connection. Fifteen minutes later, refreshed and watered, Mitchell pulled the third file towards him.
“OPERATION TAME BOAR”
Mitchell found three files in the one folder, containing copies of “incoming” from various far stations: Japan, Australia, and unified Germany. Mitchell groaned. He had hoped to find a “Closed” stamp. But mister-fucking-X was still making monkeys out of them! Mister-X was a Hungarian triple agent, and he had proved himself more than just a pain in the arse. Mitchell opened the first file and he read how Randy Butler - Tokyo - had traced mister-X to an address in USA. Not, Mitchell noted, U.S.A., but USA.
“Made in USA,” he intoned dryly. “Smart-arsed bastards! How would you like it if we named some hick town in Texas: JAPAN?!
Butler, it appeared, had lost the man after a chase half across the Japanese mainland. The address was now under surveillance. “Oh, shit!” Mitchell snapped. He made a note:
“John! Relieve whoever needs relieving on the Japanese station. Let’s get these out-of-town operations on the fuc...” He crossed the last out. “...ball” He waded the rest of the way through the file, and then opened the next element.
MELBOURNE.
Mister-X had met a courier there. “Thank the Lord for that,” said Mitchell. At least the bastard hadn’t gone underground. There were notes about how Jameson - the Melbourne station officer - thought mister-X had tainted parts of the Australian administration. Mitchell pursed his lips and scribbled: “Under your hat, John!” He read on.
Next, FRANKFURT.
Tucker had mister-X in his sights, living in an apartment on Kaiserstrasse. His - mister-X’s - cover was reasonably tight. He was posing as a teacher. Mitchell wrote: “Tell Tucker to lose him if he fuc...” Again the deletion. “...dares! Keep low. Mister-X slips out again, let me know right off. And find out who he’s working this contract for. If it’s the east, then tell Phelps. If it’s the west, tell me! I want all the names, John, before we nail the sunufabitch! Also tell Tucker about Tokyo...”
Mitchell shook his head. “Sweet Mary!” he said to no-one but himself. Then he looked up at the flag. “Abe,” he said, “It’s like kid’s playtime out there. Keep an eye on the saps for me, will you, if you find yourself in that part of the world?”
Mitchell enclosed the three files in the folder and consigned it to the pile on his left. Then he reached for the last one, the one Lee Barclay had hand-delivered. He held it to his nose and sniffed. He grimaced at the flag. “See that, Abe? It’s even on the goddam paperwork!” He sighed heavily and opened the file.
The heading was: “CONGO (misc.)”
Mitchell read how Barclay - he of the sweet-smelling chops - had decided to up-grade the Central Africa operations. Off his own bat!
“Now, why’d you do that, smelly?”
He read on. Then he said, “Ah!...” Then, “Maybe so. But you still wear girl’s perfume.”
He read how the British really had their teeth into something strong. And with Aaron Motanga (he of the stuff-your-money-Yanks!) He read about an individual called Robert McCann, and how the Chinese had recruited him to...
Mitchell leant forward over the file, occasionally saying things like, “Jesus!”
“You don’t goddam say!” “Well, why the hell not?”, “Who?”, and, “Ah, them, for crissakes!” Then he made a note on the slip of paper Barclay had affixed to the head of each page of the report (Barclay was the only member of the executive committee to do this): Lee, surely to God we can slip in there someplace! Work on it, we don’t want to be left out cold on this one, whatever the hell it is! I have a feeling that Armageddon approacheth...”
“Approacheth,” Mitchell said to the flag. “Not half bad, eh, Abe?”
He waded through the bits and pieces' reports from his men in both Brazzaville and Kinshasa, then two pages of garbage from the Pretoria cover station. Then, sitting back, Mitchell read Barclay’s six-page resume of what he thought was going on down in the Congo, with more about the Chinese connection, the British connection, the South African connection, and the Zaire short-stop.
“Jesus H. Christ!” Mitchell said to the flag, “Abe? If you’re listening, old buddy, have a word in the right ear and let me know what the blue blazes is happening in deepest Africa.”
Lastly, Mitchell read Barclay’s hand-written addendum:
“Sir, I respectfully submit that Central African operations must hold the highest priority. To allow matters to proceed as they are would be to open the flood gates to catastrophe.” Cryptic stuff, thought Mitchell, reading on: “I will call in the morning and arrange an extended personal meeting.”
Mitchell carefully shuffled the pages together and replaced them in the folder, which he left there in front of him. To the flag, he said, “Well?”
*
The rain forests are like a land bewitched. The moisture-laden air is a drug of languidity, of disorientation. It’s an illusion, of course, but no less real for that. Most natives do not know the meaning of the word illusion. To them, especially the Simba; a tribe steeped in superstition and taboo, illusion means witchcraft: unknown and unspeakable. I have been a skeptical for as long as I can remember, but when the drivers switched off their engines and doused the lights, and the claustrophobic silence of that gloomy monastery of perpetual silence crashed in around us, I felt the urge to duck. To hide. It was a feeling that had been building inside me ever since we had hacked our way through the swamp growth and into the rain forests proper. I called back to Augarde.
“Close them up! Tight around the transports!”
Augarde waved an acknowledgement and I turned to the wiry Swede, who had ridden shotgun in the lead jeep. “Lay on a picket, Bjoran. The Kenyans. You know what to do.”
Bjoran nodded. He lifted his AK and vaulted out over the jeep’s side. “Ya, zur,” he said, the sing-song lilt of his accent oddly out of step with the cold blue steel of his eyes and the grim set of his scarred jaw. “I know yus fine. We keep the li’l babies fra scampering off, ya?”
There had been no desertions so far, but now that we were pushing deeper and deeper into the forests, the critical time was fast approaching.
Bjoran loped back to the surging crowd of men. Here was a time when his reputation paid for itself. If the men feared Bjoran and his penchant for the bayonet more than they feared the invisible dawa, the combined forces of evil, then it was all well and good.
I had purposely had Bjoran ride in my jeep, though it had only taken a short time to realize that the man was basically a sadist, that he enjoyed the sensation of drawing cold steel through human flesh. I had mentioned the Brazzaville incident and had been marginally surprised when he had recounted the whole thing with something approaching lust in his eyes. Since it had happened before my arrival on the scene I saw little point in taking him to task over it, so I said nothing. I guess he took my apparent lack of interest as a sign of tacit approval. He had, of course, gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick entirely. But, for the moment, it suited me to have him on my side willingly.
I turned to our driver, one of the Kangatzi who smelt of stale sweat and gun oil. “Go get some food, Tahagi.” The man was sitting there, hands still gripping the wheel, seemingly mesmerized by a particularly voluminous and repetitive drip from the leaves way up in the dark vermillion canopy overhead, that was hitting the bonnet over the radiator. It made a sound like someone tapping out a boring rhythm on a loose-snared drum. “Tahagi!”
“Nkosi?” Unwillingly, he dragged his attention to me.
“Go get some food.”
“Yes, Nkosi.” He glanced upward once, shook his head, then heaved himself out of the seat and plodded back to where Augarde and the other white, Brook, were issuing ration tins. I switched on the goose-neck map light and calculated how far we had moved since dawn. The result was disappointing. And it would not have helped had there been sufficient transport for all the men; because the speed we made, or the lack of it, depended not upon how fast a man could march, or trot. It depended upon how many times, and to what degree of difficulty, the wildly over-laden truck and trailer had to be manhandled out of potholes and bogs; the latter perfectly firm enough to take the weight of a man, or even the jeeps - the weedy crust being several inches thick - but not the weight of the truck unit.
“Rations, sir.”
I looked up. It was Brook. He was holding out a tin. “Pulled, sir,” he added as I reached for it. I nodded and took it by its lower section. The ten-in-one tins had been invented back in WW1, and I cannot remember a time when I would have survived without them. You pulled a tab which broke a seal and allowed two chemicals to interact, producing a fair amount of heat which transferred itself to the food in the upper section. Brook also handed me a spoon.
Brook was a strange character for a mercenary. He always managed to look “Regimental”, right down to keeping his hair neatly trimmed. Luang had fitted us out with unmarked fatigue uniforms, ex British S.A.S., I guessed. He had also given Brook, Augarde and Bjoran sergeant’s chevrons, which they had sewn into place. Brook had added the flashes of a regiment of Marines. And where I was already mud-spattered from top to bottom, and soaked through from the incessant rain of dew, Brook looked reasonably presentable. He had an eager, intelligent face, though with an odd kind of vulnerability about his expression. He could have been no more than twenty-five or -six; a little younger perhaps than Augarde. Bjoran was older, in his mid to late thirties. Brook had no accent that I could pin down, and could have been brought up in any part of England. I had brushed with a lot of Englishmen in Africa and was getting better at pinpointing accents. Brook’s, I couldn’t fathom. He did not sound like a Londoner.
“How’s it going back there?” I asked.
Brook shrugged. “As expected, sir.” He tried to dodge a drip that had already exploded on his shoulder. “Bloody place!” he hissed, glaring uselessly up into the murk. As if in answer, a monkey screamed; a thin, echoey sound that seemed to reverberate everywhere.
I swallowed a spoonful of ten-in-one. “What is this stuff?”
“Chicken stew, it says on the carton, sir. And there’s custard and something to follow, if you want it.” He added, “I was up in this part of the world a while ago, sir.”
“Makanza?”
“No,sir. Close. Bogbonga.”
I guessed that Augarde had not mentioned Camp-One, and I did not feel like another explanation. Besides which, Brook struck me as the type who did not require explanations; he went where he was told. End of story. “Ah!” I said. Bogbonga was, or it used to be until the tungsten deposits petered out, a mining settlement. Upstream of Makanza by some fifty kays. And Makanza was upstream of Camp-One by about the same distance. “When was that?” I asked, for something to say.
“Jungle training programme, sir. With the regiment. Marines, sir. Back in eighty-three. An exchange deal, or something. Filthy place. We’re headed close to Makanza, aren’t we, sir?”
I nodded. “Close.”
“Is it a big town, sir? Makanza?”
I recognized the signs. Brook just wanted to talk for the sake of it. I did not mind that. “Not since the Simbas razed it.”
Brook frowned. “What’s up there, then, sir?”
I sighed a secret sigh. “Where? Makanza? Or where we’re going?”
His frown deepened. “I thought...” he began, and I waited to hear what he thought. He did not enlarge. We ate in silence for a while. Then he said, “I’m signed on for three months, sir. Will we be at this...where we’re going ...all that time,sir?”
I relented and ploughed through another explanation of Camp-One. “It’s the safest place in the world, Brook,” I concluded. “Probably also the dullest. But you won’t be bored, I promise you. And the place is not what you’re thinking. The last time I saw Camp-One it housed two hundred men in ten portacabins. Two of them with air-conditioning. It had latrines, a dispensary, a cookhouse, and even a parade ground. It’ll be pretty much overgrown now, but three days after we get there you’ll think you were back in Portsmouth.”
“Chatham, sir,” he corrected me, “And thanks for the explanation...” He glared up at the dark nothingness. “Truth told, this place gives me the willies. I thought I’d seen the worst of Africa over in Bogbonga. Now I’m not so sure. The trees there are kid’s stuff compared to these.” He again shot a glance upward. “I joke not, sir...Fair gives me the willies.”
I shrugged and tossed my empty can into the back of the jeep. “Well, if it eases your load any, you’re not alone. How long have you been in Africa - discounting the official stint?”
“Four years, sir. Off and on. Mostly over in Uganda, plus a bit down in Namib...” He looked at his feet. “You know I was DD’d from the Marines, don’t you, sir.” He seemed embarrassed by it. I thought about reminding him that he was not alone in that, either.
“Augarde told me.”
He nodded glumly. “Don’t get me wrong, sir. This is a good life. Been good to me, at any rate. But I regret the DD. I really do. Stupid, I was. In line for a staff posting, too. Pure bloody stupid!”
I said nothing. Personal confessions of that kind had no place in a mercenary outfit.
“All for fifty quid,” Brook went on bitterly, “Fifty lousy quid!”
This was no good. I was beginning to feel like a Father Confessor instead of a mercenary leader. “Brook,” I said, putting some starch in my voice, “This is neither the time nor the place. Forget all that crap. It’s past history.” The Bjorans and the Augardes of this world I understood all too well. The Brooks made me feel uneasy. I added a firm, “Let’s get moving!”
Eight hours later we saw the sun for the first time since leaving the Giri Rapids. It was a setting sun; a great blast of fire in the western sky. And morale lifted noticeably; excessively in the case of the Simbas, who took up some obscure chant I had never heard before, as they marched through the shoulder-high elephant grass - a feature of the landscape bordering the real swamps west of the Zaire River. The chant had only a single stanza, its vocabulary nonsensical to my understanding of the language, and each stanza was punctuated by an arm being flung in the air as the heads turned, tongues poked out, to glance over the shoulder. The meaning was clear: Rain forest! We survived you!
SIX
“The word is,” said Jan Bluthen, grinding his cigarette out in the ashtray, “that the Americans are now more than superficially interested.”
The three men; Bluthen, Jean-Paul Winterhoek, and Bluthen’s assistant station commander, a man called Con Benoit, were sitting at one of the patio tables of Casa Bianca. The night was unusually calm and balmy with no clouds to create humidity. Also, it was that changeable time of year when the use of air-conditioners was questionable by day, as was the use of heaters by night; any deficiency in comfort being made up by either the addition or the subtraction of an item of clothing. Winterhoek, more at home with the climate far to the south, wore jacket and tie, whilst Bluthen and Benoit preferred open necked shirtsleeves. The time stood at 9-30, and two of the servants could be heard clearing the table in the dining room, their voices subdued, but the clattering of the dishes noisy by comparison. It was a balance, Bluthen mused, having just returned from a telephone conversation with an American source, which the staff never seemed to get quite right.
Benoit, a dour-looking man in his early forties, whose parents had raised him on a veld farm before shooing him off to a military life, said, “You can blame the Chinese for that. They have more west-bound leaks than anyone.” He turned to W
interhoek. “Let the Americans scrabble for tit-bits, sir. They have far less to gain than we had at their stage.”
Winterhoek stretched languidly. He was delighted at the way things were panning out. Ex-president Lumimba, informed now of the possibilities, was like a cat with ten tails, and itching to get his teeth back into Zaire; which no doubt he would promptly rename Congo. The Sudanese were willing to cooperate in a practical, if covert fashion; to the tune of a flight of helicopter gun ships plus crews. And the McCann girl was ripe for the plucking. All that remained was to contact the man Vryburg. He said, “The Americans will, must, content themselves in assuming the role of a possible scavenger; opportunistically rushing in at the last possible moment, rather akin to the cinema portrayals of their famous Fifth Cavalry, to save Aaron Motanga from disaster should the Brits blunder. They do not know that such a blunder has already happened!”
Bluthen nodded. “But I’d give a lot to know how much of their intelligence is a result of astute guesswork, and how much is fact.”
“No doubt they have a source of which we are unaware,” conceded Winterhoek, in no way grudgingly. “But I remain convinced they do not know about Brown’s little episode at the airport – which means they do not know that McCann is, if only temporarily, operating under British instruction. Indeed, if the Americans know anything concrete at all, it will be appertaining to Chi Luang’s operation; and that was the first venture to be upstaged.” He paused for a moment’s thought before continuing, “However, the last thing we require is for the Americans to blunder in at this stage of the game. And, who knows, they may just have an ear in Brown’s organization.” He turned to Bluthen. “When can you next speak to your man in Washington?”
Bluthen looked dubious. “I could get him more or less straight away, sir, if it’s desperately urgent. But he’s in a ticklish enough situation as it is. I’d prefer to wait twenty-four hours. At least!”