‘Not the front door, boss. Our boys will get you for sure. Go out the window.’
Bruce dived through the window head first, rolled over behind the cover of the verandah wall and came to his knees in one movement. He felt strong and invulnerable. Ruffy was beside him.
‘Here come our boys,’ said Ruffy, and Bruce could see them coming down the street, running forward in short bursts, stopping to fire, to throw a grenade, then coming again.
‘And there are Lieutenant Hendry’s lot.’ From the opposite direction but with the same dodging, checking run, Bruce could see Wally with them. He was holding his rifle across his hip when he fired, his whole body shaking with the juddering of the gun.
Like a bird rising in front of the beaters one of the shufta broke from the cover of the grocery store and ran into the street unarmed, his head down and his arms pumping in time with his legs. Bruce was close enough to see the panic in his face. He seemed to be moving in slow motion, and the flames lit him harshly, throwing a distorted shadow in front of him. When the bullets hit him he stayed on his feet, staggering in a circle, thrashing at the air with his hands as though he were beating off a swarm of bees, the bullets slapping loudly against his body and lifting little puffs of dust from his clothing. Beside Bruce, Ruffy aimed carefully and shot him in the head, ending it.
‘There must be more,’ protested Bruce. ‘Where are they hiding?’
‘In the offices, I’d say.’
And Bruce turned his attention quickly to the block of Union Minière offices. The windows were in darkness and as he stared he thought he saw movement. He glanced quickly back at Wally’s men and saw that four of them had bunched up close behind Wally as they ran.
‘Hendry, watch out!’ he shouted with all his strength. ‘On your right, from the offices!’
But it was too late, gunfire sparkled in the dark windows and the little group of running men disintegrated.
Bruce and Ruffy fired together, raking the windows, emptying their automatic rifles into them. As he reloaded Bruce glanced back at where Wally’s men had been hit. With disbelief he saw that Wally was the only one still on his feet; crossing the road, sprinting through an area of bullet-churned earth towards them, he reached the verandah and fell over the low wall.
‘Are you wounded?’ Bruce asked.
‘Not a touch – those bastards couldn’t shoot their way out of a French letter,’ Wally shouted defiantly, and his voice carried clearly in the sudden hush. He snatched the empty magazine off the bottom of his rifle, threw it aside and clipped on a fresh one. ‘Move over,’ he growled, ‘let me get a crack at those bastards.’ He lifted his rifle and rested the stock on top of the wall, knelt behind it, cuddled the butt into his shoulder and began firing short bursts into the windows of the office block.
‘This is what I was afraid of.’ Bruce lifted his voice above the clamour of the guns. ‘Now we’ve got a pocket of resistance right in the centre of the town. There must be fifteen or twenty of them in there – it might take us days to winkle them out.’ He cast a longing look at the canvas-covered trucks lined up outside the station yard. ‘They can cover the lorries from here, and as soon as they guess what we’re after, as soon as we try and move them, they’ll knock out that tanker and destroy the trucks.’
The firelight flickered on the shiny yellow and red paint of the tanker. It looked so big and vulnerable standing there in the open. It needed just one bullet out of the many hundred that had already been fired to end its charmed existence.
We’ve got to rush them now, he decided. Beyond the office block the remains of Wally’s group had taken cover and were keeping up a heated fire. Bruce’s group straggled up to the hotel and found positions at the windows.
‘Ruffy.’ Bruce caught him by the shoulder. ‘We’ll take four men with us and go round the back of the offices. From that building there we’ve got only twenty yards or so of open ground to cover. Once we get up against the wall they won’t be able to touch us and we can toss grenades in amongst them.’
‘That twenty yards looks like twenty miles from here,’ rumbled Ruffy, but picked up his sack of grenades and crawled back from the verandah wall.
‘Go and pick four men to come with us,’ ordered Bruce.
‘Okay, boss. We’ll wait for you in the kitchen.’
‘Hendry. Listen to me.’
‘Yeah. What is it?’
‘When I reach that corner over there I’ll give you a wave. We’ll be ready to go then. I want you to give us all the cover you can – keep their heads down.’
‘Okay,’ agreed Wally and fired another short burst.
‘Try not to hit us when we close in.’
Wally turned to look at Bruce and he grinned wickedly.
‘Mistakes happen, you know. I can’t promise anything. You’d look real grand in my sights.’
‘Don’t joke,’ said Bruce.
‘Who’s joking?’ grinned Wally and Bruce left him. He found Ruffy and four gendarmes waiting in the kitchen.
‘Come on,’ he said and led them out across the kitchen yard, down the sanitary lane with the steel doors for the buckets behind the outhouses and the smell of them thick and fetid, round the corner and across the road to the buildings beyond the office block. They stopped there and crowded together, as though to draw courage and comfort from each other. Bruce measured the distance with his eye.
‘It’s not far,’ he announced.
‘Depends on how you look at it,’ grunted Ruffy.
‘There are only two windows opening out on to this side.’
‘Two’s enough – how many do you want?’
‘Remember, Ruffy, you can only die once.’
‘Once is enough,’ said Ruffy. ‘Let’s cut out the talking, boss. Too much talk gets you in the guts.’
Bruce moved across to the corner of the building out of the shadows. He waved towards the hotel and imagined that he saw an acknowledgement from the end of the verandah.
‘All together,’ he said, sucked in a deep breath, held it a second and then launched himself into the open. He felt small now, no longer brave and invulnerable, and his legs moved so slowly that he seemed to be standing still. The black windows gaped at him.
Now, he thought, now you die.
Where, he thought, not in the stomach, please God, not in the stomach.
And his legs moved stiffly under him, carrying him half way across.
Only ten more paces, he thought, one more river, just one more river to Jordan. But not in the stomach, please God, not in my stomach. And his flesh cringed in anticipation, his stomach drawn in hard as he ran.
Suddenly the black windows were brightly lit, bright white oblongs in the dark buildings, and the glass sprayed out of them like untidy spittle from an old man’s mouth. Then they were dark again, dark with smoke billowing from them and the memory of the explosion echoing in his ears.
‘A grenade!’ Bruce was bewildered. ‘Someone let off a grenade in there!’
He reached the back door without stopping and it burst open before his rush. He was into the room, shooting, coughing in the fumes, firing wildly at the small movements of dying men.
In the half darkness something long and white lay against the far wall. A body, a white man’s naked body. He crossed to it and looked down.
‘André,’ he said, ‘it’s André – he threw the grenade.’ And he knelt beside him.
– 17 –
Curled naked upon the concrete floor, André was alive but dying as the haemorrhage within him leaked his life away. His mind was alive and he heard the crump, crump of Bruce’s grenades, then the gunfire in the street, and the sound of running men. The shouts in the night and then the guns very close, they were in the room in which he lay.
He opened his eyes. There were men at each of the windows, crouched below the sills, and the room was thick with cordite fumes and the clamour of the guns as they fired out into the night.
André was cold, the coldness was all thro
ugh him. Even his hands drawn up against his chest were cold and heavy. His stomach only was warm, warm and immensely bloated.
It was an effort to think, for his mind also was cold and the noise of the guns confused him.
He watched the men at the windows with a detached disinterest, and slowly his body lost its weight. He seemed to float clear of the floor and look down upon the room from the roof. His eyelids sagged and he dragged them up again, and struggled down towards his own body.
There was suddenly a rushing sound in the room and plaster sprayed from the wall above André’s head, filling the air with pale floating dust. One of the men at the windows fell backwards, his weapon ringing loudly on the floor as it dropped from his hands; he flopped over twice and lay still, face down within arm’s length of André.
Ponderously André’s mind analysed the sights his eyes were recording. Someone was firing on the building from outside. The man beside him was dead and from his head wound the blood spread slowly across the floor towards him. André closed his eyes again, he was very tired and very cold.
There was a lull in the sound of gunfire, one of those freak silences in the midst of battle. And in the lull André heard a voice far off, shouting. He could not hear the words but he recognized the voice and his eyelids flew open. There was an excitement in him, a new force, for it was Wally’s voice he had heard.
He moved slightly, clenching his hands and his brain started to sing.
Wally has come back for me – he has come to save me. He rolled his head slowly, painfully, and the blood gurgled in his stomach.
I must help him, I must not let him endanger himself – these men are trying to kill him. I must stop them. I mustn’t let them kill Wally.
And then he saw the grenades hanging on the belt of the man that lay beside him. He fastened his eyes on the round polished metal bulbs and he began to pray silently.
‘Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.’
He moved again, straightening his body.
‘Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.’
His hand crept out into the pool of blood, and the sound of the guns filled his head so he could not hear himself pray. Walking on its fingers, his hand crawled through the blood as slowly as a fly through a saucer of treacle.
‘Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Oh, Jesus. Pray for me now, and at the hour. Full of grace.’
He touched the smooth, deeply segmented steel of the grenade.
‘Us sinners – at the day, at the hour. This day – this day our daily bread.’
He fumbled at the clip, fingers stiff and cold.
‘Hallowed be thy – Hallowed be thy—’
The clip clicked open and he held the grenade, curling his fingers round it.
‘Hail, Mary, full of grace.’
He drew the grenade to him and held it with both hands against his chest. He lifted it to his mouth and took the pin between his teeth.
‘Pray for us sinners,’ he whispered, and pulled the pin.
‘Now and at the hour of our death.’
And he tried to throw it. It rolled from his hand and bumped across the floor. The firing handle flew off and rattled against the wall. General Moses turned from the window and saw it – his lips opened and his spectacles glinted above the rose-pink cave of his mouth. The grenade lay at his feet. Then everything was gone in the flash and roar of the explosion.
Afterwards in the acrid swirl of fumes, in the patter of falling plaster, in the tinkle and crunch of broken glass, in the small scrabbling noises and the murmur and moan of dying men, André was still alive. The body of the man beside him had shielded his head and chest from the full force of the blast.
There was still enough life in him to recognize Bruce Curry’s face close to his, though he could not feel the hands that touched him.
‘André!’ said Bruce. ‘It’s André – he threw the grenade!’
‘Tell him—’ whispered André and stopped.
‘Yes, André—?’ said Bruce.
‘I didn’t, this day and at the hour. I had to – not this time.’ He could feel it going out in him like a candle in a high wind and he tried to cup his hands around it.
‘What is it, André? What must I tell him?’ Bruce’s voice, but so far away.
‘Because of him – this time – not of it, I didn’t.’ He stopped again and gathered all of what was left. His lips quivered as he tried so hard to say it.
‘Like a man!’ he whispered and the candle went out.
‘Yes,’ said Bruce softly, holding him. ‘This time like a man.’
He lowered André gently until his head touched the floor again; then he stood upright and looked down at the terribly mutilated body. He felt empty inside, a hollowness, the same feeling as after love.
He moved across to the desk near the far wall. Outside the gunfire dwindled like half-hearted applause, flared up again and then ceased. Around him Ruffy and the four gendarmes moved excitedly, inspecting the dead, exclaiming, laughing the awkward embarrassed laughter of men freshly released from mortal danger.
Loosening the chin straps of his helmet with slow steady fingers, Bruce stared across the room at André’s body.
‘Yes,’ he whispered again. ‘This time like a man. All the other times are wiped out, the score is levelled.’
His cigarettes were damp from the swamp, but he took one from the centre of the pack and straightened it with calm nerveless fingers. He found his lighter and flicked it open – then, without warning, his hands started to shake. The flame of the lighter fluttered and he had to hold it steady with both hands. There was blood on his hands, new sticky blood. He snapped the lighter closed and breathed in the smoke. It tasted bitter and the saliva flooded into his mouth. He swallowed it down, nausea in his stomach, and his breathing quickened.
It was not like this before, he remembered, even that night at the road bridge when they broke through on the flank and we met them with bayonets in the dark. Before it had no meaning, but now I can feel again. Once more I’m alive.
Suddenly he had to be alone; he stood up.
‘Ruffy.’
‘Yes, boss?’
‘Clean up here. Get blankets from the hotel for de Surrier and the women, also those men down in the station yard.’ It was someone else speaking; he could hear the voice as though it were a long way off.
‘You okay, boss?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your head?’
Bruce lifted his hand and touched the long dent in his helmet.
‘It’s nothing,’ he said.
‘Your leg?’
‘Just a touch, get on with it.’
‘Okay, boss. What shall we do with these others?’
‘Throw them in the river,’ said Bruce and walked out into the street. Hendry and his gendarmes were still on the verandah of the hotel, but they had started on the corpses there, using their bayonets like butchers’ knives, taking the ears, laughing also the strained nervous laughter.
Bruce crossed the street to the station yard. The dawn was coming, drawing out across the sky like a sheet of steel rolled from the mill, purple and lilac at first, then red as it spread above the forest.
The Ford Ranchero stood on the station platform where he had left it. He opened the door, slid in behind the wheel, and watched the dawn become day.
– 18 –
‘Captain, the sergeant major asks you to come. There is something he wants to show you.’
Bruce lifted his head from where it was resting on the steering wheel. He had not heard the gendarme approach.
‘I’ll come,’ he said, picked up his helmet and his rifle from the seat beside him and followed the man back to the office block.
His gendarmes were loading a dead man into one of the trucks, swinging him by his arms and legs.
‘Un, deux, trois,’ and a shout of laughter as the limp body flew over the tailboard on to the gruesome pile already there.
br /> Sergeant Jacque came out of the office dragging a man by his heels. The head bumped loosely down the steps and there was a wet brown drag mark left on the cement verandah.
‘Like pork,’ Jacque called cheerily. The corpse was that of a small grey-headed man, skinny, with the marks of spectacles on the bridge of his nose and a double row of decorations on his tunic. Bruce noted that one of them was the purple and white ribbon of the military cross – strange loot for the Congo. Jacque dropped the man’s heels, drew his bayonet and stooped over the man. He took one of the ears that lay flat against the grizzled skull, pulled it forward and freed it with a single stroke of the knife. The opened flesh was pink with the dark hole of the eardrum in the centre.
Bruce walked on into the office and his nostrils flared at the abattoir stench.
‘Have a look at this lot, boss.’ Ruffy stood by the desk.
‘Enough to buy you a ranch in Hyde Park,’ grinned Hendry beside him. In his hand he held a pencil. Threaded on to it like a kebab were a dozen human ears.
‘Yes,’ said Bruce as he looked at the pile of industrial and gem diamonds on the blotter. ‘I know about those. Better count them, Ruffy, then put them back in the bags.’
‘You’re not going to turn them in?’ protested Hendry. ‘Jesus, if we share this lot three ways – you, Ruffy and I – there’s enough to make us all rich.’
‘Or put us against a wall,’ said Bruce grimly. ‘What makes you think the gentlemen in Elisabethville don’t know about them?’ He turned his attention back to Ruffy. ‘Count them and pack them. You’re in charge of them. Don’t lose any.’
Bruce looked across the room at the blanket-wrapped bundle that was André de Surrier.
‘Have you detailed a burial squad?’
‘Yes, boss. Six of the boys are out back digging.’
‘Good,’ Bruce nodded. ‘Hendry, come with me. We’ll go and have a look at the trucks.’
Half an hour later Bruce closed the bonnet of the last vehicle. ‘This is the only one that won’t run. The carburettor’s smashed. We’ll take the tyres off it for spares.’ He wiped his greasy hands on the sides of his trousers. ‘Thank God, the tanker is untouched. We’ve got six hundred gallons there, more than enough for the return trip.’