Rogue's March (2 page)

“
Que voulez-vous
?” Fachon asked, provoked to cruelty by Hamoud's awkward silence. “
Avec de la merde, on ne fait pas de la menthe
. You don't make these fine things with shit, do you?”

Hamoud nodded blankly, his olive face suddenly warm with shame. Fachon would keep the manifest and pay him for it, even if the guns were intended for African insurgents, not Russian-equipped armies; but he had intruded too far into this curious Frenchman's personal life, that little space of privacy, like their little gardens and private clubs in whose sanctuary Hamoud would be regarded as a savage and infidel too, like that little African whom Hamoud now described for him.

He had even managed to learn his name from an Algerian officer who'd come the following day—he was Lieutenant Bernardo dos Santos of the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola—but Fachon thought the name unimportant. Hamoud left the flat with the slip on which he'd written the name still in his pocket.

Chapter Two

Andy Reddish was alone in his villa that Saturday evening and had just finished dressing for a diplomatic reception when the telephone interrupted him in the downstairs hall. Within the walled courtyard outside the night guard was preparing his evening
mwamba
on the charcoal stove under the avocado tree shading the study window. The lamps had been lit in the downstairs rooms by the houseboy before he'd pedaled his bicycle out the gate through the warm African dusk toward the sprawling native commune of Malunga on the fringes of the capital, the family laundry freshly washed and bundled on the rear seat.

He hadn't known the houseboy had used the washing machine that afternoon. The roof reservoir had emptied before he'd finished his shower, like the hot-water tank; now he couldn't find the key to the liquor cabinet. He could overlook the half-finished shower but he wanted a drink.

He took the call in the downstairs study, still pulling on his seersucker jacket. An American diplomat had been kidnapped in Khartoum two days earlier, and the crisis had dominated the incoming cable traffic for two days as Washington brought sleepy embassies to life across the continent with instructions for action and support. He thought the call might be from the communications watch officer at the embassy. As acting station chief in Haversham's absence, he'd twice been summoned earlier that day.

But the call wasn't from the embassy. The voice belonged to a frightened African who sounded vaguely familiar but who refused to identify himself.

“That's right, this is Reddish. Who's this?” In a sprawling African nation devastated three times by rebellion during the first years of independence, anonymous voices usually brought warnings of impending coups or foreign plots; and after four years Reddish had heard them all. Now he listened morosely as his caller told him the army had guns brought in from Congo-Brazzaville and was preparing to stir up trouble. Did he understand what that meant—for the President, for him, for the Americans?

“Yeah, I get the message, friend,” he drawled in a vulgar voice calculated to discourage whispered intimacies, whether from bored embassy wives or Third World diplomats looking for the American bagman. “Loud and clear, like the last time or whenever it was, but it's not my problem. You've got the wrong number. Try the police.” He turned, pushing his arm through his jacket, looking out through the window at the night watchman's fire under the avocado tree.

“
Mais non, non
,” the whispered voice came back, very shocked. “
C'est M'sieur Reddish
?”

“That's right, Reddish. Like last time. So what? Who the hell's this?”

His caller renewed his warning: the army was preparing to overthrow the President. Reddish still couldn't place the voice. There were few in positions of power whose voice he wouldn't have recognized. For nearly four years their history had been his history, their lives grown over his own like a kind of scrofula, a canker, separating him from his own past.

“
C'est votre ami
, your old friend,” the voice continued in an agonized whisper. “
Vous me connaissez très bien—très, très bien
.”

For an instant, the voice was fleetingly familiar, but Reddish was impatient: “You've got the wrong man, friend. Sorry. Why don't you try the internal security directorate. Maybe they can help you.” He looked across the room. Atop the locked liquor cabinet, the houseboy had set out the ice bucket, soda siphon, and a single glass on the silver tray, but no bottle.

“
Mais non, non
,” the voice pleaded. “
C'est à vous, mon
ami! It's up to you, the Americans! The paratroopers have guns, Russian guns, brought in from across the river! I tell you it's true. The paras and their mercenaries too! The first trucks have gone out. Tomorrow they'll send more. It's up to you, you the Americans!
Vous êtes notre espérance, notre conscience! Vous, mon ami! Il faut donner toute votre puissance au president
! We want no more rebellions, no more anarchy!”

The emotion of the appeal was suddenly as familiar as the voice, and for the first time a face swam into focus—the gold-rimmed spectacles, the dark face, the damp, embarrassed toffee-colored eyes.

“Look,” Reddish said, “if you've got something to say to me, maybe we'd better meet someplace.”

“There's no time. They're watching me. They know, you see.
C'est à vous, mon ami.
”

Somewhere off in the background a goat cried out, two women were shouting in Lingala, but then a truck engine revved up, drowning out everything else. The connection was broken.

Reddish stood with the dead phone in his hand, remembering too late his caller's name. He was Mr. Banda, an obscure little civil servant who worked in a dusty little office in customs clearing incoming shipments. Reddish had once done him a favor, a small thing, of little consequence at the time, but one the older man had never forgotten.

During the Simba rebellions, Banda had been assigned to a provincial town in the north, where he'd been captured, imprisoned, and sentenced to death by the rebels. The death sentence hadn't been carried out by the time the town had been liberated by government troops. The prison had been blown to rubble by army mortars, but Banda had escaped, bloody yet alive. The army was systematically killing the wounded in the small rural hospital, and Banda had taken refuge in the deserted UN compound, where he was discovered by the team of UN doctors and nurses who reoccupied the clinic. By then his name had appeared on the army death list as a rebel collaborator.

When Reddish visited the town following the Simba retreat, a dossier had been assembled on Banda's behalf by the sympathetic UN staff—attestations and affidavits gathered among the townspeople, all duly signed or thumbprinted, swearing to Banda's imprisonment by the rebels. The senior UN doctor, a nervous Austrian, had tried to present the dossier to the army commander, who refused to meet with him. The doctor asked Reddish to discuss Banda's case with the colonel. It was filthy hot that day and Reddish's C-130 was waiting at the airfield. He looked at the dossier, all tricked up with red ribbons, green ink, and official cachets, the way the UN would do it, guessed that it wouldn't solve Banda's problem with a drunken, brutal army colonel who'd twice been humiliated by the rebels in battle, and he had done the simpler thing, smuggling Banda through the military roadblocks in his borrowed Landrover and flying him back to Kinshasa in the C-130 for hospitalization.

Banda was reinstated at the ministry of interior after his convalescence. Reddish saw him from time to time on the streets and had been invited to meet his family. He'd attended his daughter's wedding. Banda, like many other minor officials, had become effusively pro-American, part of a small frightened middle class who found in American military and economic support their only escape from the bloody legacy left them by the Belgians. Maimed by the past and frightened by the future, they were patriots of the status quo, even a corrupt or oppressive one, which protected them against the mindless anarchy of the truly dispossessed and the waiting sedition of the Russians and Cubans across the river. Their fears, like those of the pro-Western regime, were those American success hadn't solved.

Night had fallen beyond the windows. The watchman's fire blazed brightly in the side garden. Reddish left the villa and walked out into the darkness, light with wood smoke, to stand near the iron gate listening. Trucks were being sent out now, Banda had said, but sent where? To do what? That made as little sense as the infiltration of foreign guns from across the river. What kept the paratroopers and the army loyal wasn't lack of guns, but tribal antagonisms and fear of Western reaction if they smashed parliamentary rule and toppled a pro-Western regime.

The mercenary threat made even less sense. Less than two dozen were left in the country and all of them in prison, a handful of killers and psychopaths rotting in their felons' rags in the maximum security dungeon at the para camp on the hilltop behind the city. He knew a few of them, foul-mouthed liars and braggarts, most of them; others pathetic in their weaknesses, like Cobby Molloy and Rudy Templer, the two Brits who once hung around the airstrip at Stanleyville before the mercenary rebellions, cadging cigarettes and whiskey from the incoming C-130 crews hauling in ammo, offering free favors from their fifteen-year-old bush bunnies in return. From time to time he still received appeals for his help, smuggled out of prison and posted to the embassy in dirty envelopes, his name misspelled.

Standing at the gate, he heard only the sound of traffic on the boulevard a few blocks away. He returned to the study and telephoned Yvon Kadima, the minister of interior, his controlled asset. There was no answer on his private line at the ministry. He called his villa, and the houseboy who answered told him Kadima was still at his office. Kadima kept a suite at the old Portuguese hotel where he entertained his
métisse
concubines and mistresses, but if he was there, he was probably drinking.

“Tell him Robert called,” Reddish said irritably. “Tell him he can reach me at home after ten.”

He called Bintu, the President's
chef du cabinet
and another controlled asset. The switchboard operator said Bintu had gone to the coast for the weekend. He searched the drawers of the desk for the local phone directory. Banda's name wasn't listed. He looked instead for the spare key to the liquor cabinet, but couldn't find that either. A man without memory is like a lizard without legs, he recalled, taking out the screwdriver. The President had told him that, at their first meeting nearly four years earlier, but it wasn't until later that he'd finally understood what he meant. A man without memory wouldn't survive his enemies.

He knew what Banda's memory was. The poor little bastard was scared to death of the army.

The liquor cabinet lock was single-toothed and tightly mortised. He tried to jimmy it with the screwdriver, but the teak doors were stouter than the old metal and the tooth snapped off. Only after he brought out the whiskey bottle from the cabinet, opened it, and picked up the glass did he see the missing key, lying there on the napkin in front of the soda siphon where the houseboy had left it, concealed from the discovery of the cook. From separate Kwilu tribes, they mistrusted each other, each complaining of the other's peculations. Tired of their accusations but unwilling to fire either, he'd taken possession of both pantry and liquor cabinet keys, but frequently misplaced them. When he did, they were always returned to him on the sly, like the key on the napkin, the truce kept alive.

But he'd broken the lock. “God damn it,” he swore softly. The cabinet had been made in Saigon, the only piece he'd brought back with him.

Reddish was of medium height, with sandy hair receding from a high sunburned forehead and a crooked nose that looked as if it had been broken a few times over the years and never reset properly. The eyes were neutral. He was in his mid-forties, a bit thick in the waist, his hair thinning on top. His suits were usually rumpled and nondescript. They were bought off the rack from a Baltimore wholesaler every three or four years during home leave and never settled into comfortably until they were out of fashion. He looked like a man already reconciled to whatever face or destiny the age of fifty would settle upon him, a man who probably drank and smoked too much, whose ambition might have slipped some since his divorce, like his hairline and tennis game; but he was an intelligence officer, not a career diplomat, and for him appearances didn't count for much. He'd joined the overseas ranks as a case officer after five years as a weapons expert in the Agency's technical services division, where appearances hadn't counted for much either. To his foreign colleagues, he was simply another diplomat. He stood with three of them now near the rear wall of the Belgian Ambassador's residence, come to say farewell to the departing Belgian counselor.

“Terrible about your chap in Khartoum,” the Pakistani Ambassador said.

“Very bad news,” agreed Abdul-Aziz, the Egyptian chargé.

“Have you any information?” inquired Federov, the Soviet Ambassador.

“No,” Reddish said, his mind elsewhere. “Nothing at all.”

“A pity,” Federov murmured.

“The PLO office in Damascus denies any knowledge,” Abdul-Aziz offered consolingly.

“It's impossible to know which terrorists are doing what,” the Pakistani complained. “Who blew up the Portuguese oil tanks at Luanda? The MPLA claimed credit. So did GRAE.”

“Freedom fighters, not terrorists,” Abdul-Aziz disagreed.

“Terrorists,” the Pakistani insisted, smiling slyly at Federov, who said nothing. The Russian was short and paunchy, with stiff gray hair and a scholarly squint that sometimes stirred mysteriously in the gray eyes lurking behind the steel-rimmed spectacles. His peers sometimes found the squint an annoyance, a cipher they couldn't read. Did it signal myopia, contempt, or secret amusement at possession of the facts they didn't know? Vanity sometimes provoked the more aggressive to thrust and parry, as the Pakistani was doing now. “When they're our chaps, they're freedom fighters,” he said to Federov. “When they're yours, they're terrorists. You don't agree it wasn't terrorism that blew up those oil tanks?”