Place of Bones

by Larry Johns

“Very well,” Winterhoek nodded. “Let us not compromise him needlessly.”

  The head servant, dressed in his white uniform, appeared in the open doorway with the coffee tray in his hands. He hovered there until Bluthen noticed him and waved him on. “Set it down on the table, Ngani, please.” The man shuffled forward and laid the tray carefully on the table. He passed the cups around, filled them, bowed slightly at the waist, and then turned to withdraw. “Tell the boys to make less noise,” added Bluthen. It was an instruction he issued almost nightly. A moment later the man could be heard taking his charges to task.

  “What I find amazing, sir,” said Benoit, “is that the Brits saw fit to utilize such a small team in Jo-burg; only Walton and this man Clancey – and he is only a part timer. And not even privy, I’d guess.”

  “Ah!” said Winterhoek, adding milk to his cup and sipping contemplatively for a moment. “But that is – was – its beauty. The subject was after all a civilian. An innocent girl, and a very young girl at that. All Brown required for his purpose was a watchman. To have abducted her before it was absolutely necessary,” he shrugged,” and I’m not sure that would ever have been necessary, would have been to create more problems than it solved; police, civil investigations and what have you. There was no point in risking that.”

  Benoit nodded. “Yes, sir. In any event, we will have no such problems.” He smiled. “I just wonder how Brown will take it – throw a blue fit, probably.”

  “What about that, sir?” asked Bluthen, “How do we handle Walton and Clancey?” He was thinking specifically of an SAI directive of long standing; a directive that preached a lenient, an elastic view with regard to British agents – “Sleeping dogs,” as they were called amongst the rank and file. He knew that the sentiment behind the directive, issued long before the recent changes in South Africa, was aimed at future British cooperation and mutual goodwill.

  Winterhoek grunted. “There, we have little option. To allow either man his freedom – Walton more especially – would be to hand the British a signed confession that it was we who had come between them and their aspirations in Zaire. Pretoria would not condone this. Matters at home are at a critical enough stage as things are. Stability is needed. At this time more than any in the past. Also, it would not be feasible, or practicable, to hold them in secret captivity until such a time as our involvement could be admitted. So, with regret, they must be eliminated.”

  Bluthen and Benoit exchanged glances but said nothing. Each had his own view on this particular matter.

  “Timing will be critical,” Winterhoek continued. “Too soon, and Brown would have time to react in some positive manner. Too late, and we would miss the opportunity of Vryburg. And he remains our only practical link with McCann – a link we must handle with care and precision.”

  “He’s South African, isn’t he, sir,” stated Benoit. “That must count for something.”

  “Yes,” agreed Winterhoek. “But he is also a mercenary. Therefore, ostensibly stateless. I consider it more beneficial to us that he and McCann are friends. Which leads me to Ryan. Is he standing by?”

  Bluthen nodded. “Ready and waiting, sir.”

  “Very well. He must have the girl with him when he confronts Vryburg, which adds to the problem of timing.”

  Bluthen said, “Well, sir, he will not leave Uganda for some days, perhaps as long as a week. Or so he informed the Chinese.”

  “But he has accepted the commission?”

  “Oh, yes, sir. Was delighted to do so, apparently.”

  Winterhoek nodded as if this were a forgone conclusion, and his mind slipped back to the Americans. “What is the US presence in Brazzaville?”

  “There is a trade mission, sir,” answered Bluthen. “At least two of its personnel are CIA. And the AMEX office has a couple more, which we know of.” He pulled a mildly impressed face. “Fairly strong, sir.”

  “Keep your eyes on them, major.”

  “In hand, sir. Brown and associates, too. They are fairly scattered at the moment; some in the Hilton, some at a private address.”

  “And Brown himself?”

  “The Hilton, sir.”

  “And Luang?”

  Bluthen smiled. “Funny thing about that man, sir. Do you know that with all his resources he can only come up with one helicopter pilot.”

  “Reynolds?”

  Bluthen nodded. “Just so, sir.”

  Winterhoek returned the smile, but weakly. “Let us hope his luck holds, major. Eh?”

  *

  Only a quirk of the mercator projection prevents us from understanding the full enormity of the African continent. Whether Henry Morton Stanley believed this when in 1874 he set out on what was to prove his epic voyage of discovery, is a matter for debate. He would most certainly have subscribed to it upon his return some four years later.

  Stanley’s adventures and discoveries are well documented. What is not so well documented, perhaps due to contemporary prejudice, is that the greater part of the territory through which he traveled remains to this day “undiscovered”: that there are huge tracts of land, thousands of square miles of Mother Earth – as opposed to treetops which are today easily photographed at height from an aircraft or satellite – upon which no man, let alone no white man, has ever trodden; has ever looked! Even in the field of remote sensing the rain forests of the Great Rift Valley – the Congo basin – have proved frustrating, presenting to even the most sophisticated lens, the most perfect electronic “eye”, an impenetrable canopy of vegetation which effectively conceals whatever lies beneath; even large features such as a wide river!

  The world of the rain forest is a world of enormous, imagination-staggering trees, widely spaced for the most part, with trunks 40 feet in diameter and rising two hundred feet into the dense, perpetually dripping leafy canopy – monoliths of some gigantic, reverberant cathedral.

  Very few people indeed, if any, would describe the rain forests as a good place to be. In all its million and a half square miles it is only inhabited at all – aside from reptiles and small monkeys – along the banks of the greater, wider and slow-moving rivers.

  On the maps of Stanley’s era a single phrase would have repeated itself over and over again; TERRA INCOGNITO. Unknown land. Modern-day maps have been arbitrarily wiped clean of this entry. Yet there remains in Central Africa Terra Incognito in abundance, as there has for over sixty million years.

  Some small idea of the vastness concealed beneath the foliage of the rain forests can be gleaned from a map belonging to the mercenary Robert McCann, who fought first in the Congo in 1963. On it, marked in ink, are several addenda:

  “Fifty foot cliff with gorge.” This entry is a single line, one and a half inches long. The scale of the map is twenty miles to the inch!

  “Clarence Well.”

  “Hill. (Volcano?)”

  And, “La Guardia.”

  The latter is an oblique reference to what is now JFK airport, New York. And the reason behind it is the 727 jetliner of what used to be called CONGAIR; an aircraft which was lost in a not-so-freak electrical storm, and which now lies, or hangs, some sixty feet above the floor of the forest, securely wedged between and among five of these giant tree trunks – only one wing and an engine having made it to the ground. There is no reference on the map as to whether the wreck was examined or left in peace. Certainly there were no long-term survivors to tell its tale, though some of the skeletons periodically found in that general area may well be of some of the passengers or crew. A later official expedition, armed with an anonymously supplied map reference, and with the close cooperation of three radar-equipped helicopters, failed utterly to locate the wreck. The telephone “tip-off” was finally put down as a crank call. Yet “La Guardia” remains an important landmark on most current mercenary maps:

  “We’ll regroup at La Guardia and cut south…”

  There is a saying amongst most Kikuyu tribes-people to the effect that: Since mercenaries originated in Hell, they ought
to find their way about that place better than most!

  *

  There was an air of orderly, energetic confusion about the entire scene. The sun, almost directly overhead though mostly unseen because of the foliage, cast its threadbare light over groups of sweating men, tearing and hacking at the vines which hung in tangles around the aluminum portacabins and huts, vintage 1963, arranged neatly around an area of moisture-gleaming, huge fern, that was once a parade ground. Several men were at work with bayonets and pangas, prising the parasitic orchid plants from the smooth surfaces to which, leech-like, they had attached themselves. The truck, stripped of its canvas cover, and the huge four-wheeled trailer, swarmed men; grunting, heaving and pushing, their naked torsos glistening sweat, as they off-loaded the heavy equipment and stores, piling it in the tall grass.

  At intervals, clouds of dirt and dust and weeds billowed from the mostly glassless window apertures of the huts, adding to a scene of apparent confusion. But the main impression was one of swinging pangas. There were men actually up in the branches of the trees, hacking the prolific vines off at source. Snakelike, these leaf-smothered ropes of vegetation would come twisting down. There were men all around the perimeter, like sword fighters, slashing and parrying at the jungle; forcing it back into temporary submission, whilst small hordes of others cleaned up the mess, carrying it in armfuls out to the dumping ground. The Mylar tents were going up, their skins inflating like square, silvered balloons, tethered to the ground. Men were digging latrine pits. There were men out beyond the perimeter, relocating and marking the extent of the firm ground. Everyone was doing something, and Camp-One was again beginning to live and breathe.

  *

  My W/T squawked. “Base” Red-one.” That was Augarde. “Yes, Red-one?”

  “We’re here.”

  He had reached the river. “Solid?”

  “All the way. We’ve marked and are starting to cut.”

  “Do it well, sergeant. Just like I told you.”

  “Will do, sir. Roots and all. Out!”

  Augarde and Bjoran had taken small details out along the tracks; Augarde to the east, Bjoran back west. Both carried with them cans of red, light-reflecting paint for marking the foliage. This, because there might not always be time to check for the Dicindra; or the lack of it. I switched channels. “Blue-one!”

  “Ya, base?” Bjoran’s voice came mixed up with a lot of static. Not surprisingly. The jungle thickened east to west, and Bjoran would be further out in any case.

  “How’s it coming?”

  “Close, zur. Five or six kays, I t’ink.”

  The west track would see a lot of traffic. “Mark it well, Bjoran. Do you need any help for the clearing work?”

  “Nah. We fix.”

  “Okay. Out!” I switched the W/T on stand-by and checked my watch. We had been at Camp-One for hardly more than five hours and already the place was taking shape. I walked through the melee to where Brook was overseeing the unloading. He was standing atop the truck’s cab. He raised his clipboard in a loose salute. “You didn’t lie. sir. Bloody ‘ome from ‘ome, almost!” Like everyone else he was stripped to the waist and sweating rivers. That was the worst time of day for physical exertion, with close to one hundred percent humidity in the stinking air. This meant that you were breathing as much water into your lungs as you were air - if it could be called air. The flies and the mosquitoes thrived on it, homing in on the unexpected banquet of bare flesh with their usual maddening intensity. One slap would kill five of them, but six more would immediately fill the gap. I had doled out anti-malaria pills like peppermints.

  “Any problems?”

  Brook shook his head and sweat flew everywhere. “No, sir. The genny and the SSB are over there.” He pointed. “Under the canvas.”

  I nodded. The Single Side Band transceiver was to be our only link with Luang in Brazzaville. Brook added, “The aerial and the balloons are there, too. Shall I put someone on it?”

  “Later. Let’s get everything under cover first.” I moved on.

  I walked from group to group, remembering other groups, other faces, other names. “Cat” Souchet was a very real presence in my mind’s eye. So was Yance Elland. And Marty Shuman, the tough little German Jew. Some instinct prompted me to step over to what was now going to be Brook’s hut. I looked inside. For a split second I did not see the dirt and the fungi and the piles of monkey droppings and marching armies of ants; I saw pin-ups, a neat pile of clothing on a hand-made chair, letter-writing gear on an old table and a bed squared up with “boxed” blankets. I did not see Marty. Whenever I “see” him nowadays, his round face wears an expression of agony as he smothers in his own blood. I leant back out of the door and took a deep breath. I tried to conjure up a memory of something lighter. Luckily, I did. Over by one of the other portacabins I saw “Sharks-tooth” Mbibi, the mad Senegalese arms' dealer and mercenary recruiter. He had his pants down around his knees as he ran for the water tank, his backside lost beneath a layer of red ants. At the time, we thought it served the bastard right for disdaining use of the latrine pits; the branch he had been holding as he crouched down in the grass, had broken. He had sat plum in the ants' nest. And the red ants, apparently, did not think much of someone shitting down on them from a height. It was a pleasurable memory, for which I was grateful.

  I spent some time helping the men clearing up what had always been a sad excuse for a parade ground; digging up roots and bushes, filling in the holes and stamping it flat. I thought about Brown. And Karen. Then I forced myself to stop thinking about anything but the job in hand. Oddly enough, I found myself able to do that fairly easily, if I concentrated hard.

  I walked out beyond the perimeter. Our old crocodile warning system had long since disintegrated, though I did find one or two rusted tins filled with pebbles amongst the leaves and rot. I put four men on the job of fixing it up again; something I had forgotten about. That early warning system, primitive though it may have been, had saved lives. Then I checked the latrine pits detail. The job was coming on. The tract of solid land stretching from the elephant grass to the river, of which Camp-One was merely a widening, was clay and rocks as far down and further than a man could dig. Therefore there was no noticeable water table to content with. But by first digging the pits, then cutting a channel running out to the swamp, they would eventually fill by as much as you needed. Then the channel was blocked off and you had a reasonably sanitary latrine; provided the trelliswork seating arrangement passed muster.

  I then helped a bit on clearing what was to be - what always had been - the cookhouse. Then the ammunition store, for which we had brought an air-conditioning unit to be powered by the ten kilowatt generator. Strangely enough, after one of the boys had worked on the old unit, which, left to my eyes, would have been consigned to the swamp, the damned thing actually worked! I had it installed in my command portacabin, persuading myself with no difficulty at all that I was doing it for the sake of the SSB transceiver, which, ideally, needed a cool atmosphere to work on top line. To one of the boys putting it in, I said, “Rank hath its privileges,” to which he replied a short, “Yes, Nkosi,” but understood neither the words nor the wit. I think he understood a little of the injustice, though.

  Then I wandered off and had a quiet smoke. Another of the privileges of rank is that it is never a good idea to be seen doing too much manual labor. Enough is just about enough. Whilst this is true for many, I have never found myself able to fully relax back into an overseer’s job.

  In the middle of the afternoon Augarde roared in behind the wheel of the jeep. We all thought there was trouble, but relaxed when he announced that all he wanted was more pangas; they had worn theirs out on the roots. His hands were calloused and bleeding but he seemed happy enough. He grabbed fresh pangas and an armful of ten-in-one and was off again. Bjoran called and said he was on the way in, clearing as he came. He called again sometime before dusk. They had lost our first man to the swamps near the S’s. The S’s were pa
rt of the track that kept almost doubling back on itself, twisting like a puff adder, something like an alpine road, but on the flat. In some places only a matter of twenty feet separates the coils; twenty feet of lethal swamp that could suck you in quicker than a sharp intake of breath.

  Slowly the arrows of sunlight turned yellow, then red. The wet heat began to dissipate tangibly and a cooling breeze wafted through the camp. Sweat droplets turned cold on the flesh and men started to put their shirts back on. We had a meal of ten-in-one on the hoof and got the genny rigged up before full dark. Bjoran came back in. He said the red paint showed up fine in the jeep’s headlights, but would have to finish the job next day. He seemed in better physical shape than Augarde had been. We fixed some of the floodlights in the trees and connected them to the genny. Camp-One turned into a football ground at night.

  Work went on.

  Brook volunteered to draw up a work roster and I told him to go ahead. Augarde came back with his detail. He would also have to finish the job the next day. I was surprised at how well they had done. The last time we had to clear the tracks it took us a full three days. There was a difference, of course. Last time we were also sending out regular sorties. I called a halt to proceedings shortly after midnight and the men fell about in exhausted heaps. Some of them made it to the Mylar tents and fired up their pressure lamps. The hissing drowned out the chunter of the over-silenced genny, which had been positioned way out on the perimeter.

  I had not requested it, but my portacabin was the first to have been cleaned. It now smelt of disinfectant and rot, as opposed to monkey shit and rot. I always wondered about those damned monkeys; where the hell did they shit when Camp-One had occupants? The hastily renovated a/c unit packed up, but the man who had fixed it in the second place, a Kenyan, said he would see to it in the morning. I was not going to hold my breath. Generally, a good day’s work.

  I woke up lying fully clothed on the floor of the cabin. I had not realized I’d even lain down. It was full dawn and the daylight blasted in the open doorway like a torch with a run-down battery. Such was a Camp-One dawn. I lay there for a while, sorting it all out in my mind. My body ached like ten men and what I had in my mouth, I couldn’t imagine. And the smell. Jesus! It was overpowering. The disinfectant caught my throat like acid. I creaked to my feet and made it to the door.