Rogue's March (7 page)

Reddish adjusted his glasses and opened the tattered cover. It was a copy of
Robinson Crusoe
. “I know it,” he muttered, studying the brittle flyleaf. Pasted inside the front cover was a faded gum sticker: “Property of Chapel Library, Birmingham.”

“Chap I knew in the Fifty-fifth Merc Brigade used to carry a copy in his kit. A Yorkshireman. The way he talked, you'd think it was the only book he ever read. Maybe it was. Didn't save him though. Took a tracer in the throat, and his friends buried the book with him. He was clever with words. Maybe that's where he got them, out of that book.” He took back the volume and opened it. “I read it to keep my English up, read it by myself to learn what a man can do, the way he did. It helps. Relaxation, see, but it's not a boy's book. Never was. There's a lot there if you've got the patience for it.” He pushed the book aside. “So what's this about the PLO. On their way south, you say?”

Reddish gave him the typewritten list of Jordanian passport numbers and the names of the Palestinians. De Vaux studied it silently. On the wall behind him was a military map of the nation, the location of army groups and their zone of responsibility marked in heavily with a grease pencil. Before the President had moved Colonel N'Sika to the para brigade following the student clashes, N'Sika had been the chief of intelligence at GHQ and de Vaux his aide in charge of the foreign intelligence collection effort. Reddish guessed that the map probably dated from those days at G-2.

“I was wondering if anyone over at G-2 would be interested in the list,” Reddish began as de Vaux lifted his eyes. “I don't have any contacts over there, not since you left.”

“There's a major who follows it now. He might be interested. But the internal security directorate would have responsibility. They're the chaps that would take charge.”

“I can't get hold of anyone at internal security. A little odd, I thought.”

De Vaux shrugged. “It's the way they are. You can't find them until they need you. I can get this to them.”

“We have another report that interests us more. It could have something to do with this Palestinian group. Maybe not.”

“You brought it with you?”

“No. It's not that kind of report. We think guns might have been brought in from Brazza, smuggled in.” He watched de Vaux's eyes. “You still follow that, do you? Guns brought in from across the river. It's something the para brigade watches.”

“It interests us,” de Vaux said diffidently.

“These would be Soviet guns, guns just shipped in.”

De Vaux said nothing.

Reddish picked up his glass and drank from it, then took off his glasses, sitting back. “That worries us. More than the Palestinians. If this group isn't to use them, maybe someone else is. We wouldn't want that to happen.”

“If these chaps are headed here, they'd be picked up at the frontier, at the airport. I'll talk to internal security myself.”

“Then we'd still have the problems of the guns already here, wouldn't we? Someone else using them?”

“How many guns?”

“Quite a few.”

“Where'd they come in?”

“That's not important, is it? They're here.”

De Vaux smiled shrewdly. “What is it, your ambassador worried? His migraine comes on and all you chaps get a headache, just because some diplomat gets himself stuffed in Khartoum. Tell him no one is going to hijack him. I'll send a company down to your embassy myself if that's what he wants, another to his residence out on the river. Is that what he wants?”

“That still leaves the guns,” Reddish replied. “Let's talk about the guns, what they're doing here, who's going to use them.”

De Vaux turned in his chair, pulling a package of cigarettes from the table. He lit a cigarette quickly, fanned away the smoke, and picked up his beer glass, settling back in his chair. “I know bloody well what you're faced with, Reddish. We all know. Someone gives you a list like this and tells you you'd better bloody well do something about it. Go talk to x, y, and z. All right. I'll take care of it. Guns and terrorists, guns and someone about to blow your ambassador's head off. He's been in Europe all these years, hasn't he? What'd he learn there? Nothing that's any good here, I'll wager. So now someone's about to come through the embassy gates with rifles and grenades, someone with a grudge to settle, maybe because of the Middle East, maybe because of something else. A local problem, say. Well, you tell him this. It won't happen. We won't let it happen, see. I won't let it happen.”

Reddish watched him, aware that de Vaux might have misunderstood.

“It's simple for you, you're dealing with a diplomat, a man who can understand these things if he wants to. But I know the corner he's backed you into. He wants you to
guarantee
his security, doesn't he? Well, you guarantee it for him. You tell him whatever you need to—”

“I'm not talking about his personal safety,” Reddish interrupted, “the embassy's either. I'm talking about guns smuggled into the city, guns that might be used—”

“Guns? What guns? Tell him there aren't any guns. What's happened? Has someone gotten to him the way they have the President? Listen, why do you think Colonel N'Sika and I left GHQ? Because every morning there were guns somewhere in the city, every bloody morning! And we'd sit there, the way you're sitting there now, trying to write up the morning intelligence brief, knowing he wouldn't believe a bloody word. But you're not working for the President. You're working with a man who knows what a Chinaman or a Marxist looks like, a sensible man. N'Sika and I were dealing with something else—crazy superstitious wogs whose brains fear had eaten away, like gonorrhea. You know the President. You know him as well as anyone. He's made his pile now and he thinks everyone's trying to take it away from him. What happened, did the President talk to your ambassador recently?”

“He saw him last week.”

De Vaux got up and closed the shade. “He wants to know everything these days. That's why N'Sika and I were ready to get out of GHQ. Who can keep up with all the rumors? You have to be half mad and a charlatan to keep up with them—Rasputin himself. Palestinians, you say?” He laughed bitterly and sat down again. “We were dealing with all of them—Palestinians, Russians, Chinese, Cubans, Belgian royalists, Maoists, anarchists, and God knows what else. Everywhere he looked, he saw a conspiracy. Everyone trying to get his knife in. Don't let your ambassador catch the same disease, all right?

“Let's put it all out on the table now, just the two of us. It was a Chinaman's nightmare up there at GHQ. Every morning. N'Sika got an ulcer. At six o'clock in the morning we'd meet to put together the daily foreign intelligence brief, N'Sika and I. Six o'clock in the bloody morning! At eight, the old man would be waiting for us at the
présidence
. It was our neck in the noose. We never knew when he'd spring the trap. ‘What did the Russian Ambassador do last night?' he'd want to know. ‘Who did the East German meet with at the finance ministry?' That wasn't our brief. Internal security had the Soviet and East German watch, but he was checking on them. Sometimes we'd wing it, but that was risky. Half the time he was testing us. Then there were the rumors those little bastards in the
présidence
put into his head, and we'd have to chase those down too.

“We finally worked out a system. We watched his daily appointment schedule. If he'd met with the Belgians, we'd dig up all we could about what the French were doing and have it for him the next morning. If the Israeli Ambassador had been in, we'd cram the morning brief with what the Arabs were up to. For a time after the sixty-seven Israeli war all he cared about were UN and OAU questions. He could never make up his mind about the Sinai, whether it was in Africa or the Middle East. ‘How many Bantus are there in the Sinai?' he asked N'Sika one day, and we knew the Israelis had gotten their teeth into him again. The sixty-seven war was a royal mess. Israelis in French Mirages and American Phantoms, Jordanians in American Pattons and British Centurians, Egyptians in MIG's, Jordanians in British Hawkers—who could make sense of it? Not him. Senility was getting to him, and that made it worse. He began to forget things, but that just made him slyer. Today is all he knows, and he's just hanging on.”

He lifted his glass and drank, Reddish watching him silently from across the table.

“It was a regular Comédie Française,” de Vaux resumed. “‘Worry about the Portuguese in Angola,' N'Sika muttered one day while the old man was lecturing us about the Chinese in Burundi, and the old man must have heard him. ‘Your stomach growls,' he told N'Sika the following day. ‘Get out.' It was the ulcer. He saw a MIG-17 over Brazzaville one afternoon as he was returning from the OAU meeting in Addis Ababa, and that worried him. It was after that that he began looking for someone to give him ground-to-air missiles. He asked the Israelis. He knew the Americans wouldn't supply them. N'Sika had told him that. After the coup attempt in Brazza last year, he asked for M-16 rifles for the para brigade and the palace guard, remember? You chaps came through in the end, and for a month or so he was his old self again.”

The State Department had denied the M-16 request for policy reasons, a breach of the embargo on sophisticated weaponry for Africa. At Haversham's insistence, Reddish had contacted a former Agency colleague who worked for Euroarm, a Luxembourg-based arms broker, and the M-16s had come through commercial channels, bought in Hanoi.

“They say he's worse now than ever,” de Vaux was saying. “He believes what he wants to believe. Fear poisons every cup you take him. God knows how the internal security people put up with it, but they do, every morning when they give him the internal security brief. Guns in every commune every day, old Simbas returning from the north every night with new Kalashnikovs on their backs, about to retake Kisangani.”

Reddish watched de Vaux's face silently, knowing the falsity of much of his characterization but puzzled by something else. Sedition was in his words, but he spoke in the same level tone.

“What he wanted was what they all want, men like him—absolute security, someone to tell him he'll never die. And what does that mean for the poor sods around him? Absolute terror, every day. But your ambassador isn't like that. He's a sensible man. That makes it a simpler world. That's what N'Sika and I wanted too. What's a simpler world than one you make yourself, eh, like the para hilltop. Don't worry about guns. Tell your ambassador that—”

The phone rang and de Vaux picked it up, his eyes still on Reddish. “
Oui, oui,
” he said easily. “
C'est ça. Non, non. Pas du tout. Rien. Je suis sur—oui—à cinq heures
.” He looked at his watch.

The voice hadn't changed, moving with the same fluency with which he'd dominated their conversation, and Reddish was struck by the ease of de Vaux's transition, moving from one interlocutor to the other, from English to French, with no change in tone or register.

“
Oui, Colonel. Oui. Bon
…”

The tone puzzled Reddish: the same casualness, the same familiarity, moving from Reddish, an outsider, to a fellow officer and colleague with the same ease. The caller was his confidant and Reddish wasn't; yet he might have been talking to either.

Or to no one, he thought suddenly, and he realized then that he'd been listening to a man wholly alone with his own ambition, as Michaux had said.

They crossed the porch and went out into the sunlit yard toward the car. Reddish had been right. De Vaux's caller was Colonel N'Sika, summoning him to para headquarters down the sand road in the center of the compound.

Reddish stopped at the edge of the oyster-shell drive, looking south along the road toward the dense growth of trees where the maximum security prison was located. De Vaux paused too, following his gaze.

“It's been a long time since I was up here,” Reddish said. “Is the prison still being used back there, below the crown of the hill?”

“Still used.”

“I wonder if Cobby Molloy is still there with the other mercenaries. He sent me a note a few months back asking for help.”

“Crocodile tears, eh? Had to wring it out to read it, did you? Probably peed all over it.”

“Still there?”

De Vaux shrugged, pulling on his beret, his gray eyes even blanker in the piercing sunlight. “Could be. I don't follow it. The ministry can tell you.”

“I knew Cobby better than the others. Maybe I should try to see him. A little mixed up maybe, but not a killer.”

“Our mates never are,” de Vaux said dryly.

“I suppose they've learned their lesson, the rest of them—that they know the old days are over now, finished.”

“It's not lessons we give them,” de Vaux muttered indifferently, “just rag gravy and prison clogs.”

Banda had said that the mercenaries would be involved too, but that made no sense either. Nothing did. He'd seen no emotion in de Vaux's face, but he remembered what Michaux had told him that day at Kindu months earlier, how de Vaux had looked through him as he stood in the jeep beyond the
cercle
gate with the blindfolded witch doctor in the back seat.

Michaux had been right. De Vaux wasn't a man of trifling ambition, whatever else he was, no more a man to find release in the hero's welcome given him by a grateful bush town than he would in the hot, empty silence of a hillside military camp that had rescued him from the President's paranoia.

“If not, we can teach them again,” de Vaux added as he climbed into his own jeep, but Reddish only nodded as he went back to his car, still troubled.

Chapter Six

After Reddish disappeared down the sand road toward the front gate, de Vaux drove to Colonel N'Sika's headquarters in the center of the compound. Three jeeps, a gray Mercedes, and a weapons carrier were parked in the circular drive outlined with whitewashed rocks. The low whitewashed stucco building had once been a Belgian officers' club. An outdoor dance floor and open terrace lay to one side under the raffia palms. A few idle para officers sat behind the dusty shrubbery drinking beer. Two corporals stood on the wide porch, caps low over their eyes, watching the road. Inside the building, the NCO at the orderly table had been replaced by two para lieutenants with side arms. More officers waited in the rooms along the central corridor, four and five to an office, sitting on chairs and desks or leaning against the wall waiting, weapons in hand.