The Ian Fleming Files (47 page)

“The flies don’t sting here, they stab,” jibed Dutch as he swatted at a
pesky tsetse fly the size of a bullet. Dutch, Dalzel and the others were armed
and at the ready as the trading post neared, a cleared speck in the silent
wilderness deep in the jungle’s interior.

Beyond the lake there was a series of fumaroles, sulfurous bubbling pools
of mud that constantly shuddered and spouted up little fountains. From yards
away, Fleming and his boys could feel the heat and see steaming cracks in the
mud. Jets of stinking steam puffed out and disappeared, wraith-like, towards
the sky.

The post was nothing more than a cluster of tumble-down shacks and hovels
surrounded by a border of mud and partly enclosed by a haphazard fence of
rushes. Fleming noted the crude security - sandbagged gun emplacements with
rusting Spandaus, bundles of looped barbed wire hither and tither and by the
main entrance two skinny, malnourished teenage boys armed with submachine guns.

A freight wagon pulled by four spans of oxen trudged along through the
sludge. The oxen lunged, stumbling through the mud as natives shouted and used
whips.

It took just a few minutes for Fleming to be rudely dismissed by the
belligerent owner of the place, a wiry, cold-eyed skinny local gangster chewing
coffee beans who claimed to know nothing about any traders paying for goods
with raw diamonds.

Dalzel removed his sun cap and ran his hand through his thinning hair.
“What do we do now skipper?” he asked Fleming.

“Now we wait,” was Fleming’s terse reply.

Day Three was almost at an end and there had been no sign of Krupp’s
minions. The only visitors to the lakeside settlement that day was a family of
Kikuyus looking to barter blankets for food before being sent packing by the
two teenage guards with nail-studded cudgels.

The evening brought torrential rain. Fleming and his boys were crowded
despondently under the tarpaulin of the moored PT playing rummy and swilling
brandy in a haze of tobacco smoke, using the inverted lid of an ammunition box
for an ashtray. Dutch was sitting cross-legged with his eyes closed and
communed with the others through the silence of his meditation. They were used
to his peccadillos and played as if he wasn’t there.

The soaked flap lifted and Bob Raines appeared, splashing rainwater onto
Archer who leapt up and yelled, “Oy! Watch it mate!”

“Any luck?” asked Fleming.

“Got talking to a vendor,” said Raines squeezing inside. “Claims he saw
three men pay for supplies in diamonds last month. Uncut stones. Says they
usually show up on either Tuesday or Wednesday.”

“However did a moron like you learn to speak Kikuyu?” said an incredulous
Archer as he toweled off.

“The Kikuyu people speak Gikuyu,” said Raines. “Get it right,
shit-for-brains.”

Archer went to throttle Raines when Fleming intervened and got between
them. “Knock it off. I want you ready for these people come sunrise.” Fleming
leaned back against the bulkhead and drew heavily on his cigarette. “If they
pay in diamonds they must be Krupp’s men. The cut-throat who runs this place is
probably on the payroll which means he will most likely tip them to our
presence. Doesn’t matter. We just need to get a look at them so we can pursue.
Got it?”

In the morning it had stopped raining. It was very early in the dawn. A
strange violet light circled the lake and clung to the trees.

Fleming emerged from the PT and hopped ashore. In the limpid quietness of
the early morning he could already feel the sticky jungle heat. A toucan
squawked in the trees, preening its mustard and scarlet plumage.

A tinkle of voices carried downriver. Fleming stopped and listened as the
chatter increased in clarity. He turned to wake the others when he saw a flat
pontoon-style banana barge floating toward him helmed by an oarsman and two men
wielding Schmeisser machine-pistols. He ducked behind a hitching post and
watched as the oarsman raised his pole to let the barge drift, following the
current to the edge of the delta where its three occupants debarked and secured
the vessel to the muddy embankment with tow-rope. They marched toward Fleming
en route to the outpost gate.

Fleming silently shifted backwards to a stand of mangroves and crouched
behind the mighty exposed roots that stretched to the lake like enormous
crooked straws. The crazed chortle of a nearby cheetah sent his heart into his
throat and caused the traders to look his way, one of them, the oarsman, with a
particularly cold stare. A long slimy millipede slithered along an overhanging
limb and onto Fleming’s arm. He held his breath as the triumvirate continued to
its destination and then jerked his arm rapidly to fling the sticky insect.

The three men were arguing with the teenage sentinels, rousing them from
sleep and demanding entrance. The oarsman’s hand lurched for the young guard’s
throat revealing a distinctive double-eagle tattoo scorched into his fist which
Fleming noted with great interest.

The nefarious triumvirate exited half an hour later laden with supplies.
Once they had stowed everything on board and shoved off, Fleming stepped forth
from the mangrove roots and sauntered to the outpost where he ostentatiously
snapped open his cigarette case, revealing a healthy supply of smokes, took one
out and luxuriously puffed away. The boys watched him enviously until he
pretended to just notice them and then offered them the opened case, gesturing
to them to help themselves.

As they joyfully fingered the fags, Fleming flicked his eyes beyond them
into the main office. The wiry owner could be seen squinting his eyes at
something through a loupe. He put the eye-piece aside and picked up another
stone for examination. Fleming nodded farewells to his two new best friends and
scurried back to the boat.

The unit followed the river upstream until it forked and then they disembarked
and hightailed it through the dense brush clinging at the lake’s edge. They
came to a broad grassy plain and continued on in double-time making a beeline
for a bend in the river about a mile south. Ten efficient minutes later they
were perfectly positioned lying in wait to attack.

A striking coldness befell the faces of the small unit.

The sound of a pole sloshing through water made itself known. Fleming
tensed. No one moved a muscle. The flat boat appeared and on it the figures of
the three men.

It was all over very quickly. Dalzel signaled silently to Jones and
Mortensen who leapt up like lizards and shot the two gunners on the barge with
two precision silenced shots. Pfft! Pffft! The oarsman shouted out in a tongue
no one recognized. Bob Raines whipped out a bowie knife and sprinted to the
river’s edge, leapt to the barge and after a brief tussle grabbed the oarsman
from behind in a chokehold then neatly slit his throat. He signaled to the
others and the six soldiers clambered aboard the pontoon-style raft which
dipped significantly with the extra burden but remained steadily afloat.

They took the PT upstream following the narrow tributary heading west
that the traders were bound for. The canopy of trees grew taller and blotted
out the sun. The men tensed with the collective sense that they were deep into
the jungle now. Fleming was fully alert, senses pricked, conscious that the
forest itself had grown darker and more twisted with ferns and creepers.
Strange birds flew out of the trees as the boat passed. They moved ahead at
half speed, alert, ready for anything.

There were huge shadows in the water which the Captain steered clear of.
“What are those?” asked Archer.

“Mines,” said the Captain. “Wine casks holding a three hundred pound
charge of gunpowder floating suspended ten feet from the surface by a mooring
chain linked to a slab of concrete. Crude but effective.”

He steered deftly around the ominous shadows which would be invisible but
for the powerful mid-day sun.

“Blimey,” exclaimed Archer, his eyes agog. “I guess this means we’re
headed in the right direction.”

“Precisely,” concurred Fleming who stepped forward whittling a stick and
peered over the gunwale at the waterlogged bombs.

“These buoyant buggers are like big breadcrumbs showing us the way.
Dangerous and nasty but breadcrumbs all the same.” He hurled the spear
powerfully like a javelin and skewered a river trout. The fish flopped as
Fleming pulled the string at the end of the stick toward him.

The river arm dried out and they were forced to continue on foot.

The Captain remained with the mother ship. “There may be another fork,
allowing us to cut across this patch of jungle here,” the wise man said,
indicating on a map. “I will explore and meet you on the other side or back
here in two hours.”

Fleming synced his new waterproof wristwatch and nodded.

After a light lunch of fish stew they moved out and were soon swallowed
by the darkness. They were deep in the tangled gloom when Fleming felt a worm
of unease. It was quieter than usual. There were no animal and avian sounds.
Suddenly, unusual bird calls shattered the silence, eerie in their high-pitched
timbre and perfect repetition as if artificially produced. The twigs shook,
swayed, and rustled.

Archer, Raines and Jones cocked their weapons.

“Easy,” cautioned Dalzel.

Fleming roved his eyes about. Unseen behind him, in the depths of the
tall tufts of grass, a young Masai warrior raised his head tentatively,
nostrils flared, and scented the wind. He curled his front lip inward and
repeated the signal, three pitched bird calls.

The swastikas stitched on the warriors’ shields and painted on their
chests were of a different style to the classic Nazi emblem with strange curved
spiraling lines. They were naked and bore the savage ornaments, tattoos and
ritualistic scars that marked them as members of an elite warrior caste.

Suddenly the vegetation was alive with flashes of naked limbs and chests
and glaring eyes. A shower of arrows streamed wildly at the unit who dropped
and flattened themselves.

“Take cover!” hollered Dalzel.

Raines, Mortensen and Archer leveled their rifles at the charging killers
and let rip. Three spears swooshed close past them. The edge of a fourth sliced
Archer’s arm and drew blood.

Six assassins rushed them, some of them throwing lethal blades others
wielding clubs and huge skinned shields. Dutch shot one of them and then a
second one right between the eyes. He took a hurled dagger to the sternum and
collapsed. The last four overwhelmed Raines as Fleming unloaded his Browning
and blasted a Masai at close range in the neck, ripping his throat out. Archer
tried to get a shot off but his rifle was no good up close so he held it by the
muzzle and clubbed the head of one Masai until it was a red pulp.

Fleming aimed his pistol at the last two and motioned for them to desist
but they ignored him and came screaming. He pressed the trigger to hear a
soul-crushing click. He was in the path of certain death.

The first Masai held his spear with two hands and sprinted, the top of
his weapon on a course for skewering Fleming just below the rib cage.

The charger’s friend was right behind him in similar formation if by some
miracle he were to somehow fail in his inexorable purpose.

A short ripple of automatic fire echoed and both spear-wielders collapsed
instantly, flesh torn away by the impact of two dozen rounds fired off in the
blink of an eye. Fleming turned in breathless relief to see the Captain manning
the guns of the PT visible on the river through a gap in the trees, the boat’s
twin 50s still smoking.

Dutch Mortensen’s wound had been fatal. They interred him in the
riverbank with a rough-hewn cross of branches and as decent a ceremony as they
could patch together under the circumstances. Archer knew him best and
volunteered the eulogy which he choked out through stifled sobs and with hate
flaming in his eyes. It was the standard text for fallen comrades of the unit:

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori:

mors et fugacem persequitur virum

nec parcit inbellis iuventae

poplitibus timidove tergo.

Fleming listened in savage despair. Why did such men have to die, he
wondered? He was beginning to detest Wolfgang Krupp.

The five of them listened to Archer with ritualistic reverence, recited
the Lord’s Prayer as a fitting coda and after a moment or two of lingering
decided that they had done all they could for the poor bastard and continued
onward into the unending gloom.

Night fell quickly. A glow beckoned them. The jungle at this point was
very dark and high, impenetrable and deep. They crept up in stealth fashion to
a space hewn out of the brush for a tribal gathering. The source of the light
was a huge revolving drum heated by a wood-burning furnace stoked by sweating
natives. The chanters were in a circle their faces lit by huge kerosene lamps drawing
hordes of suicidal moths. In the shadows past the throng sat a fortified
encampment built around the ruins of a former Bantu temple.

Fleming and his men crept past the revelers and studied the layout in the
dim light. Stone walls, barbed wire, cracked pyramids and rows and rows of
split sandbags were arranged in an endless maze around the fortress.

Pfft! A bullet sliced through Jones’s shoulder. The crew crouched, guns
trained, barely had time to react when from the depths of the darkness came a
stream of gunfire. It looked like a swarm of angry fireflies. Bullets smashed
through the undergrowth and ricocheted off stone pillars in powders of dust.
Raines dived on Jones and tried to apply pressure to his wound. Jones shuddered
in agony, his arm dislocated and barely connected to its socket.

Fleming jammed a fresh clip in his Browning and started to unload when
there was a low pop and a whistle and a grenade described a graceful arc toward
them.

“Incoming,” he hollered as all men flew to the ground and the bomb blew
into a stand of ebony trees obliterating bark and branches in a blazing hail of
TNT.