Special Ops

by W. E. B Griffin

  Father didn’t hesitate.

  “Your call, Jack. You know the sooner we see Colonel Supo the better, and I don’t think you want to die any more than I do.”

  Jack banked to the left, dropped to 3,000 feet, and looked for and found the Congo River. He had just started to fly over it when he entered the soup.

  “Rather bumpy” turned out to be a massive understatement.

  Several times, Jack had almost turned back, deciding each time at the last moment that it couldn’t possibly be this bad all the way to Stanleyville and continuing on “for a little more.” And then, finally, that choice was not available; it was a greater distance to return than it was to continue to Stanleyville.

  Mr. Hakino of the Defense Ministry got airsick first, and then Dr. Dannelly, which Jack more or less expected. But when, a half hour later, Father Lunsford got sick, Jack was afraid that it would be contagious, and he didn’t like the notion of trying to fly through the storm while airsick, but he managed to fight it back.

  Finally, the white bulk of the Immoquateur apartment building could be made out through the rain, and he knew the airfield was only a few miles farther. He was not surprised when the Stanleyville tower did not respond to his calls.

  He dropped lower and made two low-level passes across the field, to make sure that no one had blocked the runway here with a burned-out truck or Caterpillar tractor. The runways were clear, but there were four crashed airplanes: two B-26s, a Douglas DC-3, and the blackened hulk of something with twin engines burned beyond recognition on the field. Parked near the terminal building was a Boeing C-46 with “Air Simba” painted on the fuselage and the leaping lion logotype on the tail. It appeared undamaged. Jack wondered who had flown it in, and when; no one in Léopoldville had said anything about an Air Simba aircraft going to be in Stanleyville.

  He made his approach and landed.

  The downpour beating on the fuselage and wings also restricted visibility, and he taxied very slowly to the terminal building, trying to remember where there would be tie-down ropes for the airplane, and then finding them. The wind was gusting, and he was going to have to tie it down carefully.

  He told Father, and when he turned to him to do so, Father was nauseated a last time. This time it was very nearly contagious.

  When he shut the engines down, he turned to Dr. Dannelly.

  In the old days, when a plane landed in rain like this, a dozen or more terminal employees would come out to the plane carrying enormous umbrellas, either to escort people directly into the terminal or to load them aboard the tarmac busses.

  The tarmac buses were still there, all riddled with bullet holes, two of them with flat tires and smashed windows, and the third a fire-gutted hulk. Jack remembered seeing it on fire the last time he’d been at the airport.

  No one came out of the terminal building now.

  “Obviously, nobody’s going to come out here with an umbrella, ” he said, turning in his seat to speak to Dannelly. “When Major Lunsford gets out, you and Mr. Hakino take a run for the terminal. See about getting us some wheels. Lunsford and I are going to have to tie the airplane down well.”

  Dr. Dannelly nodded but said nothing.

  “You’re going to have to run to the terminal, I’m afraid, Chief Hakino,” Jack added in Swahili.

  Hakino nodded.

  Jack got out of his seat, walked through the fuselage, opened the door, and lowered the step. Dr. Dannelly and Mr. Hakino got out and ran across the tarmac to the terminal building.

  Jack was soaked by the rain before he found the tie-down ropes on the ground under an inch of water, and by the time they were finished, there was no point in running to the terminal building. They were as rain-soaked as it was possible to get.

  Jack pushed open the door to the passenger terminal, and had just enough time to see that the neon sign urging passengers to “Fumez Lucky Strike” was working when he was jabbed painfully in the stomach with the barrel of a Fabrique National 7-mm automatic rifle in the hands of a tall, dirty-looking Congolese soldier.

  Jack looked over his shoulder worrying what Lunsford would do when similarly threatened.

  A moment later, Lunsford came through the door and another Congolese soldier advanced on him with the barrel of his rifle.

  “You touch me with that,” Father snapped in Swahili, “and I’ll take it away from you and stick it so far up your ass it’ll come out your nose.”

  The soldier stopped.

  “Identify yourself,” a voice said in French, to Jack.

  Jack saw that the speaker was a Congolese lieutenant, in a surprisingly immaculate uniform.

  “My name is Major George Washington Lunsford,” Lunsford replied in French, “and you will address any questions to me, preceded by a salute and the term ‘sir.’ ”

  The lieutenant hesitated just a moment.

  “Sir, this field is closed by order of the military commander—”

  “Colonel Supo? Where is he?” Father interrupted. He turned to Mr. Hakino, switching to Swahili. “Chief, please tell this officer who you are.”

  Thirty seconds later, everything was sweetness and light. The lieutenant expressed profound regret that he had no word of the coming of the distinguished assistant secretary and his party, in which case he would have made preparations for their arrival.

  Colonel Supo was en route by road from Costersmanville, he said, and expected within the hour, although, of course, with the rain there was no way of telling how long he might be delayed.

  “We will require quarters, of course, and food,” Lunsford said, not very pleasantly. “What is available?”

  “The officers are billeted in the Immoquateur—it is an apartment building—”

  “I know what it is,” Lunsford snapped. “Is it habitable?”

  “Yes, of course,” the lieutenant said, as if the question surprised him.

  Jack thought: That probably means the roof is still in place.

  “Take us there,” Lunsford ordered.

  “Yes, sir,” the Lieutenant said.

  There was a Buick station wagon outside the terminal. Jack wondered if had been taken from the stocks of the Buick dealer who had once done business in Stanleyville, or whether it was one of the cars that had been left at the airfield with the keys in the ignition as the Belgians had fled—or tried to flee and failed— as the Simbas approached. Or whether it had been taken from some Belgian’s garage.

  The lieutenant got behind the wheel, with the two soldiers crowded beside him. The others got in the back.

  Three hundred yards from the terminal building, Jack saw that the Sabena Airlines guest house now housed Congolese soldiers; there were a dozen of them sprawled in lawn chairs on the verandah.

  There wasn’t any visible activity the rest of the way to the Immoquateur. There were still neat cottages lining the streets; here and there were cottages that had been set on fire and allowed to burn. There were abandoned automobiles all over, some of them looking as if they had just been parked, others with their windows and everything else breakable shattered with bullet holes or simply heavy objects, and some burned-out hulks.

  He was surprised when they approached the Immoquateur that there were lights on all over the twelve-story building. The lieutenant pulled under the portico where there had once been a white-jacketed porter to open the doors. Now there were half a dozen Congolese soldiers, all armed with automatic rifles, two standing, the others sitting on the sidewalk.

  He remembered then that the Immoquateur had emergency diesel generators in the basement. Obviously, someone had gotten them running.

  The soldiers stood up when they saw the lieutenant get out of the Buick, but it was not as if someone had called “Attention” at the sight of an officer. And only one of them saluted the lieutenant.

  They entered the lobby. Some of the leather furniture was still there, fewer pillows on the seats, and only the chrome frame remained of what had been a large glass-topped table.

 
But there were electric lights burning in the ceiling, and the elevators were apparently running, for the lieutenant led them to the narrow corridor leading to the elevators.

  One of the elevators was waiting. There were only a few shreds of its mirrored walls left, and there were bullet holes in the side and rear walls.

  The last time he’d been on this elevator, he’d had to drag the body of a Simba out of it, and the moment he had, the elevator door had closed, leaving him on the ground floor.

  The lieutenant bowed them into the elevator. The door closed, and the elevator began to rise. At the fourth floor, it stopped.

  On the corridor wall, there was a bullet-chipped area, and a dark splotch running from the chipped area almost to the floor.

  The last time Jack had been on the fourth floor of the Immoquateur, when the door opened, there had been a Simba in parts of a Belgian officer’s uniform standing in the corridor. He had not had time to raise his pistol—a 9-mm Luger parabellum—before a burst from Jack’s assault rifle had smashed into his midsection.

  Jack had taken the pistol and gotten back on the elevator and ridden to the tenth floor, absolutely terrified of what he would find there.

  “No,” Jack said in Swahili. “Take us to the tenth floor first.”

  The lieutenant gave him a strange look but pushed the tenth-floor button, and the door closed and they rode to the tenth floor.

  Jack got out first and went to the door of the Portet apartment.

  The door was closed but could not be locked. Jack had smashed the doorknob and lock first with the butt of his FN—which had caused the stock to break—and then with the heel of his boot.

  He pushed the door open and entered the apartment, expecting almost anything but what he got; there was no question in his mind that the apartment would be stripped of anything that could be picked up or torn loose.

  It was not. Everything was there. Furniture, lamps, rugs on the floor, and even Hanni’s Grundig radio, tuned to the BBC’s Light Programme from London.

  “Mon Dieu, c’est Monsieur Jacques!” Tomo, the houseboy, exclaimed in surprise as he came into the living room from the kitchen.

  He wasn’t wearing his usual crisply starched white jacket, but he was alive, well, and apparently on duty.

  The last Jack had heard of him, from Mary Magdalene, was that she had ordered him to go to his village and stay there until the trouble was over.

  Jack, his eyes tearing and his throat painfully restricted, walked to Tomo and embraced him.

  When he could find his voice, Jack said: “We’ll be staying here, Lieutenant.”

  “When Colonel Supo gets to Stanleyville, tell him where we are,” Lunsford said.

  “Yes, sir,” the lieutenant said.

  “That will be all. You may go,” Lunsford said.

  “Yes, sir,” the lieutenant said, and saluted.

  “Tomo, when did you come back?” Jack asked.

  “I did not go home,” Tomo said. “I stayed in the bush across the river until the whites from South Africa came. Then I came here and protected things.”

  “Tomo, you’re wonderful.”

  “I am the number-one boy,” Tomo said. “It was my duty.”

  Tomo took a good look at Lunsford.

  “I know you,” he challenged. “You are a Simba!”

  “No,” Jack said. “You saw him here?”

  “I saw him enter the building when the Belgians came,” Tomo said. “And then I saw him leave the building with Mary Magdalene and your mother and sister and the young white woman with the baby. He was a Simba.”

  “He is an American officer who was dressed like a Simba,” Jack said, and then he felt overcome by an urge to giggle. He switched to English, and through his giggles said, “It’s a good thing he recognized you as a Simba now, Major, sir, rather than later, or you would have woken up in the morning with your throat neatly sliced open.”

  “I am a friend, Tomo,” Lunsford said in Swahili.

  “If M’sieu Jacques says so,” Tomo replied dubiously.

  “First things first, Tomo. We have to get out of these wet clothes. Is there anything we can wear? And what about these clothes?”

  “There are underthings,” Tomo said. “I found them above the ceiling. Under things and your Browning gun, and some other things . . . Madame Portet’s radio . . . but all the men’s clothing is gone. I can dry those clothes, and iron them.”

  By “above the ceiling” Tomo meant between the concrete floor of the floor above and the false ceiling of acoustic tiles in the apartment.

  “And food?”

  “Fish from the river, M’sieu Jacques. And manioc. And tomatoes. And eggs. No wine, but there is, of course, beer.”

  “He just said the magic word,” Father Lunsford said. “Give him a hundred dollars.”

  “I think first the underwear, and then the beer. Then, if you will get us the fish, we’ll cook while you see what you can do about our clothing.”

  At that point, Jack remembered Dr. Dannelly and Mr. Hakino.

  “Tomo, these gentlemen are Mr. Hakino, who is a very important official of the government, and Dr. Dannelly, who is a very good friend of General Mobutu.”

  Tomo did not seem very impressed with either of them.

  “They will be staying, M’sieu Jacques?”

  “For not more than two days, or three.”

  "I think there is enough underthings for everybody,” Tomo said.

  [FOUR]

  Apartment 10-C, The Immoquateur

  Stanleyville, Oriental Province

  Republic of the Congo

  1645 17 January 1965

  Colonel Jean-Baptiste Supo, military commandant of Oriental and Equatorial provinces, was a tall, muscular, 210-pound thirty-six -year-old with very black skin and sharp features. When, at eighteen, he had left his home in the Katanga Province to enlist in the Force Publique, his basic training instructors—black and white—had cruelly teased him by saying his mother had obviously been very friendly with an Arab. They had called him “Camel Boy.”

  He had not understood the teasing. His mother was a fine Christian woman who had been educated by the Catholics and became a teacher. She had been very disappointed when he had finished secondary school at the head of his class and chosen the Force Publique over a career with Union Miniere, who were always looking for young men from good families and good academic records.

  He had to take the teasing in training, but when he was assigned to his first unit, he knew he didn’t want to and didn’t have to. Five days after he had reported to his first unit, he found himself standing before the company commander, a Belgian captain named Dommer, charged with breaking three teeth from the mouth of his corporal by striking him with his fist.

  Captain Dommer asked him, in Swahili, if he had anything to say before he announced his sentence; he expected at least ninety days, possibly longer, of punishment.

  “If he insults my mother again, my captain,” Private Supo had replied in French, “I will knock the rest of the teeth from his mouth.”

  “Exactly how did the corporal insult your mother?”

  “He called me a motherfucker, my captain. My mother is a good Christian woman.”

  Captain Dommer had then asked him about his mother, and where he had gone to school, and what his father did, and he told him about his mother being assistant principal of St. Matthew’s School in Kiowa; that he had graduated from St. Matthew’s with honors in mathematics and French; and that his father was maintenance supervisor for the Union Miniere mine at Kamundo.

  At the evening parade that day, it was announced that Private Supo had been sentenced to four months’ imprisonment for striking his corporal, and he was handcuffed and put into the back of a truck with everybody watching as the truck drove out of the compound.

  He had a hard time keeping from crying. His mother and father would learn that he was in prison, and would be ashamed of him.

  Five miles out of the compound, the s
ergeant driving stopped the truck and came in the back and took the handcuffs off and told him that Captain Dommer was giving him a second chance. He was not going to prison, but to the 23rd Company, which had need for someone who read and wrote French fluently and had a knowledge of mathematics.

  The sergeant chef of the 23rd Company was a tall, large man in an immaculate, crisply starched khaki uniform.

  If Private Supo ever even thought about hitting another noncommissioned officer, the sergeant chef of the 23rd Company said, or did anything that in any way made Captain Van de Waele, the commanding officer of the 23rd Company, sorry that he had given Private Supo a second chance when Captain Dommer asked him to, he would know about it and he would slice off Private Supo’s balls and cock and feed them to the pigs.

  The sergeant chef of the 23rd Company when Private Supo joined it was named Joseph Désiré Mobutu. When Sergeant Chef Mobutu left the 23rd Company three years later, it was to become the youngest sergeant major ever in the Force Publique. By then Private Supo had become Corporal Supo.

  Five years later, Senior Sergeant Supo became sergeant chef of the 23rd Company and the youngest sergeant chef ever of the Force Publique. He received his sergeant major’s chevrons at the same parade that honored Sergeant Major Mobutu on his retirement from the Army, and they saw one another frequently after that, when Mobutu was working as a journalist on the L’Avenir in Léopoldville.

  When, after Independence, the Force Publique had mutinied against its Belgian officers, and Secretary of State for National Defense Mobutu had to find officers for the Force from the black ranks of the Force, the first colonel named was Sergeant Major Jean-Baptiste Supo.

  Mobutu had placed him in charge of dealing with the Belgians who had returned to the Congo to stop the Simbas from massacring the people (white and black) at Stanleyville, mainly because the senior Belgian officer was Colonel Van de Waele, the same man who had given him his second chance after he’d beaten up the corporal for insulting his mother. He had been their captain in the 23rd Company, and was one of the very few Belgians they knew they could trust.