by W. T. Tyler
“What the goddamned hell for? The perimeter is back there, along the wall. Where’s the Gunny?”
“In the security room, sir.” From down the corridor they could hear the calls coming in through the emergency radio hookup in the security office. A second Marine standing at the desk behind the reception counter replaced one phone and lifted another.
“Yes, ma’am. A coup d’etat? I reckon so. Yes, ma’am. Stay inside and listen to the radio. Well, if you don’t know no French, get someone else to listen. Wait for your warden to call you. No ma’am. No one’s been evacuated yet.”
Selvey dodged into the security office and told the Marine Gunny to pull his people off the roof. He rejoined Lowenthal in the stairwell. Standing at the cipher lock on the metal-clad door at the top of the steps, they could smell the forced air furnace from the floor above. The commo unit was already at work burning tapes and top secret files.
In the political section suite, two junior officers sat at glass-topped desks in the outer office, one taking queries from other embassies, the other monitoring the national radio and taping the communiqués as they were transmitted. The bearded officer at the phone put his hand over the mouthpiece, looking at Lowenthal. “The Brits don’t have anything. They know less than we do. Cecil is holed up at his residence, just like the ambassador.”
The commo chief from the floor above waited against the wall outside Lowenthal’s office, ankles crossed, arms folded, holding a sealed manila envelope marked in red crayon: “Secret NODIS: Ambassador Only.”
“He’s immobilized at the residence,” Lowenthal told him. “Becker’s there too.”
“So I heard.” He gave Lowenthal the envelope. “You’d better get this to him pretty quick. Washington wants to know what the shit’s going on.” He went out quickly, before Lowenthal could detain him with an instruction. The political counselor wasn’t popular among the commo clerks on the third floor, disliked most for the windy pedantry of his reporting cables, which invariably reached the clerks at close-down time, keeping them at their machines long after the diplomatic staff had gone home.
“What’s the radio saying?” Lowenthal asked.
“Nothing right now.” The young political officer turned up the volume. A military band was playing “Yes, We Have No Bananas” in three-quarter time. The recording was old, the clarinets and trombones blurred by surface noise, but Colonel Selvey recognized the melody and smiled.
“You got to get that in your next cable, son,” he told the young political officer. “Back in Foggy Bottom, that’ll tell them a ton.”
A violent explosion rocked the silence somewhere up the street, rattling the windows. “Probably a stray,” Lowenthal murmured as no sounds followed. He looked inquiringly at Selvey, who’d been in Vietnam and knew all the sounds.
“Maybe a gas tank too. How the shit do I know?”
Lowenthal turned to his secretary, a stout young woman from the Pennsylvania coal fields with rabbit-brown hair and a chain-smoker’s cough. “Please get Andy Reddish for me. It’s absolutely essential that I talk to him. Find out if he’s come back.”
She picked up the phone without enthusiasm, her eyes still registering the shock of the explosion. “They used to tell me it’d happen like this,” she grumbled as she dialed Reddish’s extension. “I wish I’d taken my R and R when I was supposed to. I’d be in Mombasa by now, soaking up sun and the Indian Ocean.”
“Gin you mean, don’t you, sugar,” Selvey said with a sympathetic pat as he followed Lowenthal into his office.
“Yeah,” she muttered irritably, waiting for the door to close. She spent most of her idle hours drinking bourbon at the Marine house bar and knew their secret nicknames for the embassy staff as well as if she’d helped invent them. The door closed. “Up yours too, Gomer Pyle.”
Lowenthal pulled the drapes closed, turned on the desk lamp, and passed Selvey the three telegrams he’d sent to Washington. The first had been sent out a little before six o’clock when the fighting in Malunga had been confirmed. The second and third had been dispatched after the President had come on the national radio declaring martial law and asking the rebels to lay down their arms.
The Sunday had begun routinely for both men, neither warned of the possibility of trouble. Selvey had spent the morning playing golf at the Belgian Club with his Air Force attaché and the departing administrative counselor. Lowenthal had passed the afternoon on the rear terrace of his villa, reading old copies of the New York Times and Le Monde, which he’d been collecting for several weeks, while his wife Pam loafed in the nearby pool, sculling lazily from time to time to the pool’s edge near his chair to remind him of some conversational or gastronomical triumph of the evening before. She was an Episcopalian from an old Philadelphia family, and Lowenthal was now an Episcopalian too. They’d met in Paris, where she was a staff writer for a New York fashion magazine, he, at the embassy, an American diplomat who spoke that flawless French she’d never expected to hear from a countryman. Diplomacy was for her the ultimate social pretext; perfection was what she’d always reached for; and she’d reached for Lowenthal. Now her ambitions excited his.
At their dinner the night before, the French Ambassador had remained until twelve-thirty, an unheard-of hour for a Frenchman who seldom accepted American hospitality, and departed promptly at ten-thirty when he did. The Belgian and Israeli counselors had stayed until one, the Italian until two. Not a word of English had been heard that evening; the cuisine had been French too, the gossip Continental, and the dinner not at all compromised by the failure of the French-educated minister of justice to appear.
After a nap, Lowenthal had retired to his study to reconstruct his talk with the French Ambassador for a Monday cable to Washington. The phone call from the embassy duty officer had interrupted his memo, the events that followed had demolished it. Nothing was salvageable. No hint of the afternoon’s disasters had been implicit in the table talk of the previous night.
“I hope to hell you birds can do better than this,” Selvey complained, returning the three cables. “There’s not a goddamned thing there Washington couldn’t get off the AP ticker.”
The young political officer stuck his head in the door. “They’ve postponed the President’s nine o’clock announcement again. Now they’re calling for all off-duty doctors, nurses, and attendants to report to the hospitals. They’ve shoved back the ten o’clock curfew so they can bring the wounded in off the streets.”
The bearded officer followed, carrying a report passed from the Belgians, advising that Radio Brazzaville across the river was claiming that the army was trying to destroy the local workers party. “They’re saying that some army officers tried to pull off a coup this afternoon, but it didn’t work, and now they’re trying to blame the workers party. They say some workers party officials escaped across the river by pirogue.” The young man with the beard was an ex-Peace Corps volunteer who spoke Swahili and had served in Uganda. “Sounds pretty logical to me.”
“That’s bullshit,” Selvey growled. “The army’s trying to put down a revolt, not start one.” The army was his turf and the political section didn’t belong there.
“I think that’s most improbable,” Lowenthal said.
“I said ‘sounds logical,’ I didn’t say it was,” the younger man retreated. “The Belgians don’t believe it either.”
“What do they think?”
“The same as us, that the workers party is behind it.”
“You can’t pay any attention to Radio Brazza anyway,” Selvey said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Brazza isn’t trying to infiltrate some of those Cuban-trained militia across the river to help out. What do they call it?”
“Défense Civile,” Lowenthal said. Selvey’s French wasn’t very good; his Tennessee accent made it worse.
“With the Russians and Cubans over there, they’ve got more guns than burrs on a baboon’s ass, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them aren’t in Malunga right now. I think that’s
why the paras have closed off Malunga, why you’ve got all these goddamned roadblocks—scared of the Cubans coming over.”
Lowenthal’s secretary came in. “Sorry, but it’s Franz from USIS. He says it’s urgent.”
Lowenthal picked up the phone, listened for a minute, and turned to Selvey. “Dick Franz says there’s a tank burning near the USIS cultural center. That’s in the commercial district, outside Malunga, so the fighting has spread.”
“That’s bullshit too,” Selvey drawled. “Everyone’s an expert all of a sudden, even my wife. Tell him it’s a sound truck from the national radio trying to scare them bimbos back into Malunga. I saw it myself. Some bird put a couple of rounds in the gas tank—shooting with his eyes closed, like you folks. You got any coffee out there, hon?”
“I’ll see,” Lowenthal’s secretary answered. “Just instant, I think.”
Lowenthal put the phone down. “How bad is it in Malunga? What’s the Belgian military attaché saying?”
Selvey took out his notebook and pulled on his half-moon reading glasses. “He says the workers party has guns and is passing them out to anyone who can use them, automatic weapons, mostly. He saw a few crates of Molotov cocktails taken by the paras. He also saw a para ammo carrier loaded with captured weapons outside Malunga—Kalashnikovs, he said. The Israeli attaché saw a weapons carrier too, but it could have been the same one. That’s another problem—everyone singing from the same sheet of music, so maybe it sounds worse than it is.” He turned the page. “A few Simonov semi-automatic carbines too, some Makarov pistols—all Russian. The Israeli counted twenty-seven dead jeunesse at the government hospital, most dead of chest wounds, blown away at close range. Some had bandoliers of 7.65 ammo, he said, like Chinese bandits. More dead bodies at the Swedish hospital, the British attaché told me, but the paras closed off the gate, and he couldn’t get a body count.”
“How much worse do you think it will get?” Lowenthal asked, troubled.
“I dunno. It’s hard to say. But any time the communes have guns, you’ve got a peck of trouble, that’s for goddamn sure, I don’t care how many guns they’ve got. Then you turn the paras loose and the army too, you’ve got more, I don’t care if all they’re packing is beer bellies and barrel staves. If the native communes bust out, then we’re in for it. This whole city will go up in smoke and there’s not a goddamn thing GHQ or the para brigade or anyone else can do about it.
“You’ve got maybe a million nigras out there in the slums with nothing between them and us but a half-assed army that’ll run sooner than it’ll get shot at, and after ten minutes ain’t an army any more. If the communes get mad enough, get the grit in their craw bad enough, and get moving quick enough, they’ll take it all, the whole farm—the commercial district, the embassies, the port, all of it. Everything they can tote away they will, and if they can’t tote it, eat it, or smash it, they’ll burn it. They’ll go through this town like salts through grandma, nothing but green gravy left where they’ve done their business—
“Thanks, sugar.” He took the cup of instant coffee passed to him by Lowenthal’s secretary, who stood listening in terror. “And after that the paras and the army will pull back to a hilltop perimeter around the President’s compound and let it blow itself out. Then in a few days after everyone’s dead drunk, sleeping it off back in shanty town, the army and paras will come on back in, shoot a few strays, and hose out the streets. But that’s assuming the army holds together. You got this tribal mess to think about too—the President’s generals on the one hand, the colonels on the other, the sergeants down below, the lieutenants and captains somewhere in the middle. So that could blow the army apart too, everyone fighting each other. So I wouldn’t bet on anything right now. What worries me is the embassy, the dependents. My headquarters want to know what we’re going to do about an evacuation. They’ve got a couple of C-141 MAC flights holding in Jo-burg, waiting for me to let them know.”
Selvey drank from his coffee cup, grimacing painfully.
“The airport’s closed,” Lowenthal said, discouraged.
“Then we’ll get them to open it. There’s no fighting out there.” He looked at his coffee cup. “What the shit did she put in this—saltpeter?”
“It’s something we can talk to the ambassador about. I doubt that he’d favor it. It would suggest he was not at all sanguine about the regime’s ability to keep order.”
“What the hell does he want—a few dead bodies? I’m talking about dependents, women and kids, not a few old grunts like us.”
“We’ll ask him, certainly. But what he’ll want to know is how the guns got into Malunga, where they came from.” Lowenthal sat back, picking up his yellow pad. “How do you think they managed it?”
“Who managed it?”
“The workers party,” Lowenthal said, surprised.
“I don’t know,” Selvey said. “I’m not sure of anything right now. You’d have to say they came from across the river, I reckon—from the Sovs and Cubans. Maybe they cut a deal with Masakita, told him they’d support a peoples republic. You have to figure something like that, but I’d say it’s goddamn stupid. Ask Andy when he comes in. He’s the one doing the bean count on the Sovs.”
“It’s clear it started in Malunga.”
Selvey nodded. “I’d say so.”
“At the workers party compound, where these radio appeals for foreign help are coming from?”
“I don’t know about that.”
“We know they’ve been training a paramilitary brigade at their agricultural camp at Mundi,” Lowenthal continued, “just as we’ve always known it was a Marxist party, masquerading as a professional workers union under the President’s policy of national reconciliation. Why should we now be surprised to discover they have guns? They’ve probably had guns for a long time.”
The symmetry pleased Lowenthal. Nothing else he’d heard had. But Colonel Selvey was silent, still undecided. He shared the army’s suspicions of Pierre Masakita. The return from exile had been a fait accompli, arranged secretly by the President and kept from the army, the cabinet, and the old politicians until the day of his return, when the old cabinet was dismissed, new elections promised, and a new government of national reconciliation formed. With the ban on political parties lifted, Masakita worked to rebuild the old teachers and professional workers party, but his activity only increased army suspicions, convincing the general staff and GHQ, all loyal to the President, that Masakita was quietly rebuilding his power base while transforming the youth wing of the party, the jeunesse, into a paramilitary unit, similar to the old jeunesse who’d devastated the countryside during the rebellions.
“I’d say you’re probably right, except for the police camp at Bakole,” Selvey said finally. “Those grunts out there aren’t socialists or Marxists. So how come they’re getting clobbered by the paras?”
“There’s always been bad blood between the police and army,” Lowenthal replied, still searching for symmetry, “but it’s primarily tribal. Therefore, it has no ideological base, while the other manifestly does.”
“You mean it’s still a little fucked up,” Selvey drawled cheerfully, as bright as a street sparrow suddenly, bobbing after the junkman’s horse.
Chapter Ten
Between the mud walls, the laterite road in Malunga was blocked by abandoned carts, trucks, and cars. The commune was partially ablaze to the south. Africans were moving away from the fires and the tattoo of rifle shot, four and five abreast in the road and along the septic ditches. As Reddish watched, sixty meters down the road a wooden building took a phosphorus grenade through a window, flared like a gasoline-soaked rag, and began to burn. He stood in the door of his Fiat, his face wet, blue tennis shirt soaked, ashes from a burning hut nearby falling against his brow and shoulders. He heard quick bursts of rifle fire echo from the rear of a building beyond and watched a long flaming timber fall from the second-floor roof, pulling a tail of blazing embers after it to the road. A few minutes earlier
, youths from the workers party jeunesse had been on the roof firing pistols at the paras.
“Kende, patron,” an old African voice urged him. “Kende, go now.” But the dark wrinkled face passed beneath him in the shadows before he turned. Beyond the stalled vehicles further down the road, the headquarters compound of the workers party was under siege. A few weak muzzle tongues of flame licked from the darkness of the second-floor windows and along the roof under the trees. In the road a quartet of armored cars blocked the approaches from both directions. Firing popped from the rear of the two-acre compound where a dilapidated old building lay. Once a Protestant mission school, it had been converted by the party into barracks and classrooms for the youth wing. Behind the armored cars, crouched in the shelter of the compound wall, a score of red-bereted paras crouched or sat, their fire desultory. None wore helmets. In the light of a truck’s headlights, a para captain with a swagger stick chased away the curious. A small boy who’d passed Reddish’s Fiat a minute earlier pushed his way through the small crowd and dropped a wooden beer crate at the feet of the captain, who lifted a bottle for himself and pushed the crate with his foot toward his two subalterns squatting in the lee of the armored car. An old woman was selling groundnuts nearby.
Several vehicles were overturned inside the party compound. A cream-colored auto smoldered steadily, its upholstery ignited, its windows broken out.
Behind Reddish’s Fiat, an army truck blocked the road in front of a small petit marché. The squad of soldiers who’d climbed from beneath the rear canvas were examining the identity papers of the Africans retreating down the road, searching for weapons and fleeing rebels. To the west, an orange glow hovered over the trees in the direction of the Bakole police camp.
The gunfire from the party compound was sporadic—smallbore handguns, he thought, crossing the road and moving through the crowd. He climbed the bank to the wall beyond, hoisting himself into the shadows of a barren avocado tree, looking toward the center of the compound to see if the paras inside had taken prisoners. He saw no one. A few dead bodies lay crumpled behind the burning vehicles, automatic rifles lying nearby. In the compound directly in front of him, hidden two walls away from the firefight, a plump woman was calmly sweeping the bare earth with a palm frond, indifferent to the gunfire. Two small boys were pounding a manioc pestle, brought back to their work by a sharp command from their mother when they let their attention escape to the nearby confusion. Government business, not hers, Reddish guessed, looking at a man in a blue fishnet undershirt who sat slumped against the wall of the house. An empty palm wine vessel was at his feet. He was massaging his woolly head drunkenly, muttering to himself, and lifting his swimming eyes from time to time to shout threats at the rifle fire beyond the two walls.