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 ripped 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 main 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,” “cassava,” 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, and 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 door 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 shirt, 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 Endean, 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?”
&nb
sp; “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’état as far as the world knows, and new President of Zangaro, Colonel Antoine 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.