Dogs of War (22 page)

With the last call taken, Shannon read Small Arms of the World for an hour and switched off the light. It was the end of Day One.
Sir James Manson, first class on the businessman's Trident III to Zurich, ate a hearty breakfast that Wednesday morning. Shortly before noon he was ushered respectfully into the paneled office of Dr. Martin Stein-hofer.
The two men had known each other for ten years, and during this time the Zwingli Bank had several times carried out business on Manson's behalf in situations where he had needed a nominee to buy shares which, had it become known that the name of Manson was behind the purchase, would have trebled in value. Dr. Steinhofer valued his client and rose to shake hands and usher the English knight to a comfortable armchair.
The Swiss offered cigars, and coffee was brought, along with small glasses of Kirschwasser. Only when the male secretary had gone did Sir James broach his business.
"Over the forthcoming weeks I shall be seeking to acquire a controlling interest in a small British company, a public company. At the moment I cannot give the name of it, because a suitable vehicle for my particular operation has not yet come to light. I hope to know it fairly
soon."
Dr. Steinhofer nodded silently and sipped his coffee.
"At the start it will be quite a small operation, involving relatively little money. Later, I have reason to believe news will hit the Stock Exchange that will have quite an interesting effect on the share value of that company," Sir James went on.
There was no need for him to explain to the Swiss banker the rules that apply in share dealings on the London Stock Exchange, for Steinhofer was as familiar with them as Manson, as he was also with the rules of all the main exchanges and markets throughout the world.
Under British company law, any person acquiring 10 per cent or more of the shares of a public quoted company must identify himself to the directors within fourteen days. The aim of the law is to permit the public to know who owns what, and how much, of any public company.
For this reason, a reputable London stockbrokerage house, buying on behalf of a client, will also abide by the law and inform the directors of their client's name, unless the purchase is less than 10 per cent of the company's stock, in which case the buyer may remain anonymous.
One way around this rule for a tycoon seeking to gain secret control of a company is to use nominee buyers. But again, a reputable firm on the Stock Exchange will soon spot whether the real buyer of a big block of shares is in fact one man operating through nominees, and will obey the law.
But a Swiss bank, not bound by the laws of Britain,
abiding by its own laws of secrecy, simply refuses to answer questions about who stands behind the names it presents as its clients, nor will it reveal anything else, even if it privately suspects that the front men do not exist at all.
Both of the men in Dr. Steinhofer's office that morning were well aware of all the finer points involved.
"In order to make the necessary acquisition of shares," Sir James went on, "I have entered into association with six partners. They will purchase the shares on my behalf. They have all agreed they would wish to open small accounts with the Zwingli Bank and to ask you to be so kind as to make the purchases on their behalf."
Dr. Steinhofer put down his coffee cup and nodded. As a good Swiss, he agreed there was no point in breaking rules where they could be legally bent, with the obvious proviso that they were not Swiss rules, and he could also see the point in not wantonly sending the share price upward, even in a small operation. One started by saving pfennigs, and one became rich after a lifetime of application.
"That presents no problem," he said carefully. "These gentlemen will be coming here to open their accounts?"
Sir James exhaled a stream of aromatic smoke. "It may well be they will find themselves too busy to come personally. I have myself appointed my financial assistant to stand in for me—to save time and trouble, you understand. It may well be the other six partners will wish to avail themselves of the same procedure. You have no objection to that?"
"Of course not," murmured Dr. Steinhofer. "Your financial assistant is who, please?"
"Mr. Martin Thorpe." Sir James Manson drew a slim envelope from his pocket and handed it to the banker. "This is my power of attorney, duly notarized and witnessed, and signed by me. You have my signature for comparison, of course. In here you will find Mr. Thorpe's full name and the number of his passport, by
which he will identify himself. He will be visiting Zurich in the next week or ten days to finalize arrangements. From then on he will act in all matters on my behalf, and his signature will be as good as mine. Is that acceptable?"
Dr. Steinhofer scanned the single sheet in the envelope and nodded. "Certainly, Sir James. I see no problems."
Manson rose and stubbed out his cigar. "Then I'll bid you good-by, Dr. Steinhofer, and leave further dealings in the hands of Mr. Thorpe, who of course will consult with me on all steps to be taken."
They shook hands, and Sir James Manson was ushered down to the street. As the solid oak door clicked quietly shut behind him, he pulled up his coat collar against the still chilly air of the north Swiss town, stepped into the waiting hired limousine, and gave instructions for the Baur au Lac for lunch. One ate well there, he reflected, but otherwise Zurich was a dreary place. It did not even have a good brothel.
Assistant Under Secretary Sergei Golon was not in a good humor that morning. The mail had brought a letter to his breakfast table to notify him that his son had failed the entrance examination for the Civil Service Academy, and there had been a general family quarrel. In consequence, his perennial problem of acid indigestion had elected to ensure him a day of unrelenting misery, and his secretary was out sick.
Beyond the windows of his small office in the West Africa section of the Foreign Ministry, the canyons of Moscow's windswept boulevards were still covered with snow slush, a grimy gray in the dim morning light, waiting tiredly for the thaw of spring.
"Neither one thing nor the other," the attendant had remarked as he had berthed his Moskvitch in the parking lot beneath the ministry building.
Golon had grunted agreement and taken the elevator to his eighth-floor office to begin the morning's work. Devoid of a secretary, he had taken the pile of files
brought for his attention from various parts of the building and started to go through them, an antacid tablet revolving slowly in his mouth.
The third file had been marked for his attention by the office of the Under Secretary, and the same clerkish hand had written on the cover sheet: "Assess and Instigate Necessary Action." Golon perused it gloomily. He noted that the file had been started on the basis of an interdepartmental memorandum from Foreign Intelligence, that his ministry had, on reflection, given Ambassador Dobrovolsky certain instructions, and that, according to the latest cable from Dobrovolsky, they had been carried out. The request had been granted, the Ambassador reported, and he urged prompt action.
Golon snorted. Passed over for an ambassadorship, he held firmly to the view that men in diplomatic posts abroad were far too prone to believe their own parishes were of consummate importance.
"As if we have nothing else to bother about," he grunted. Already his eye had caught the folder beneath the one he was reading. He knew it concerned the Republic of Guinea, where the constant stream of telegrams from the Soviet Ambassador reported the growth of Chinese influence in Conakry. Now that, he mused, was something of concern. Compared to this, he could not see the importance of whether there was, or was not, tin in commercial quantities in the hinterland of Zan-garo. Besides, the Soviet Union had enough tin.
Nevertheless, action had been authorized from above, and, as a good civil servant, he took it. To a secretary borrowed from the typing pool, he dictated a letter to the director of the Sverdlovsk Institute of Mining, requiring him to select a small team of survey geologists and engineers to carry out an examination of a suspected tin deposit in West Africa, and to inform the Assistant Under Secretary in due course that the team and its equipment were ready to depart.
Privately he thought he would have to tackle the question of transportation to West Africa through the appropriate directorate, but pushed the thought to the
back of his mind. The painful burning in his throat subsided, and he observed that the scribbling stenographer had rather pretty knees.
Cat Shannon had a quiet day. He rose late and went into the West End to his bank, where he withdrew most of the £1000 his account contained. He was confident the money would be replaced, and more, when the transfer came through from Belgium.
After lunch he rang his friend the writer, who seemed surprised to hear from him. "I thought you'd left town."
"Why should I?" asked Shannon.
"Well, little Julie has been looking for you. You must have made an impression. Carrie says she has not stopped talking. But she rang the Lowndes, and they said you had left, address unknown."
Shannon promised he'd call. He gave his own phone number, but not his address. With the small talk over, he requested the information he wanted.
"I suppose I could," said the friend dubiously. "But honestly, I ought to ring him first and see if it's okay."
"Well, do that," said Shannon. "Tell him it's me, that I need to see him and am prepared to go down there for a few hours with him. Tell him I wouldn't trouble him if it wasn't important, in my opinion."
The writer agreed to put through the call and ring him back with the telephone number and address of the man Shannon wished to talk to, if the man agreed to speak to Shannon.
In the afternoon Shannon wrote a letter to Mr. Goos-sens at the Kredietbank to tell him that he would in the future give two or three business partners the Kredietbank as his mailing address and would keep in contact by phone with the bank to check whether any mail was waiting for collection. He would also be sending some letters to business associates via the Kredietbank, in which case he would mail an envelope to Mr. Goossens from wherever he happened to be. He requested Mr. Goossens to take the envelope which would be enclosed, addressed but not stamped, and forward it from Brugge
to its destination. Last, he bade Mr. Goossens deduct all postal and bank charges from his account.
At five that afternoon Endean called him at the flat, and Shannon gave him a progress report, omitting to mention his contact with his writer friend, whom he had never mentioned to Endean. He told him, however, that he expected three of his four chosen associates to be in London for their separate briefings that evening, and the fourth to arrive on Thursday evening at the latest.
Martin Thorpe had his fifth tiring day, but at least his search was over. He had perused the documents of another seventeen companies in the City Road, and had drawn up a second short list, this time of five companies. At the top of the list was the company that had caught his eye the previous day. He finished his reading by midafternoon and, as Sir James Manson had not returned from Zurich, decided to take the rest of the day off. He could brief his chief in the morning and later begin his private inquiries into the set-up of his chosen company, a series of inquiries to determine why such a prize was still available. By the late afternoon he was back in Hampstead Garden Suburb, mowing the lawn.
10
The first of the mercenaries to arrive at London's Heathrow Airport was Kurt Semmler, on the Lufthansa flight from Munich. He tried to reach Shannon by phone soon after clearing customs, but there was no reply. He was early for his check-in call, so he decided to wait at the airport and took a seat by the restaurant window overlooking the apron of Number Two building. He chain-smoked nervously as he sat over coffee and watched the jets leaving for Europe.
Marc Vlaminck phoned to check in with Shannon just after five. The Cat glanced down the list of three hotels in the neighborhood of his apartment and read out the name of one. The Belgian took it down in his Victoria Station phone booth, letter by letter. A few minutes later he hailed a taxi outside the station and showed the paper to the driver.
Semmler was ten minutes after Vlaminck. He too received from Shannon the name of a hotel, wrote it down, and took a minicab from the front of the airport building.
Langarotti was the last, checking in just before six from the air terminal in Cromwell Road. He too hked a taxi to take him to his hotel.
At seven Shannon rang them all, one after the other, and bade them assemble at his flat within thirty minutes.
When they greeted one another, it was the first indication any of them had had that the others had been invited. Their broad grins came partly from the pleasure of meeting friends, partly from the knowledge that Shannon's investment in bringing them all to London with a guarantee of a reimbursed air fare could only mean he had money. If they wondered who the patron might be, they knew better than to ask.
Their first impression was strengthened when Shannon told them that he had instructed Dupree to fly in from South Africa on the same terms. A £500 air ticket meant Shannon was not playing games. They settled down to listen.
"The job I've been given," he told them, "is a project that has to be organized from scratch. It has not been planned, and the only way to set it up is to do it ourselves. The object is to mount an attack, a short, sharp attack, commando-style, on a town on the coast of Africa. We have to shoot the shits out of one building, storm it, capture it, knock off everyone in it, and pull back out again."
The reaction was what he had confidently expected. The men exchanged glances of approval. Vlaminck gave a wide grin and scratched his chest; Semmler muttered, "Klasse," and lit a fresh cigarette from the stub of the old one. Langarotti remained deadpan, his eyes on Shannon, the knife blade slipping smoothly across the black leather around his left fist.
Shannon spread a map out on the floor in the center of the circle, and the men eyed it keenly. It was a hand-drawn map depicting a section of seashore and a series of buildings on the landward side. It was not accurate, for it excluded the two curving spits of shingle that were the identifying marks of the harbor of Clarence, but it sufficed to indicate the kind of operation required.
The mercenary leader talked for twenty minutes, outlining the kind of attack he had already proposed to his patron as the only feasible way of taking the objective, and the three men concurred. None of them asked the name of the destination. They knew he would not tell