Rogue's March Read online

  “He went up north,” Reddish replied, “to Orientale.” Michaux was curious, listening silently as Reddish explained. De Vaux had bought a coffee plantation in the north after the Simba rebellions were put down. When his old mercenary colleagues had rebelled against the central government, he’d refused their appeals to join them and had retreated with his African wife to a remote village on the Sudan frontier. Returning after the mercenaries were defeated, he’d found his house burned, his trees ravaged, his trucks stolen, and the bodies of his wife’s two sisters rotting in the coffee-drying sheds, murdered by the retreating mercenaries and their Katangese soldiers. De Vaux had dropped from sight, reappearing a year later when he’d been named to the training staff of the old general who commanded the northern sector. A few months afterward, the old general had been killed in a plane accident, his small aircraft mysteriously blown apart as it descended through a rain squall to the Mbandaka airstrip. De Vaux had accompanied the general’s deputy, N’Sika, to the capital as his aide. Among the Belgian commercial community in the north, a rumor had circulated claiming that sabotage was responsible, a bomb rigged to the aircraft’s landing gear and wired to detonate as the wheels were lowered.

  “Don’t know anything about that,” Michaux admitted. “A man’s bound to make enemies, I suppose, but when Jean-Bernard is around, you have to be doubly careful. The last time I saw him he was outside the gate there”—he lifted the knife again, pointing off through the darkness—“standing on the front seat of a mercenary jeep with a captured Simba witch doctor in the back seat, a manioc sack pulled down over the poor bugger’s head. There were flowers all over the bonnet, thrown there by the villagers as they’d driven in. He had twenty mercs with him, the worst of the bunch, I’d say. The Simbas were on the run, the last of them around here smashed just on the other side of the ferry by de Vaux and his unit. The blacks who’d stayed loyal wanted to put the torch to the poor old bastard de Vaux had in the back seat.”

  Michaux smiled with the recollection, gazing beyond Reddish toward the gate. “He wouldn’t hear of it. Reading the riot act to them, Jean-Bernard was, giving them a piece of his mind. He was a merc captain by then. They say he’d been a real soldier too, all spit and polish, not one of those cutthroats or thieves masquerading as a Sandhurst field marshal amongst the bow-and-arrow savages of the bush, but a real soldier. Shot a Rhodesian corporal, they say, after he’d raped a young girl. So there he was, standing up for discipline again, standing up for that ignorant savage in the back seat with the manioc sack pulled down over his head. I called out to him from just inside the gate over there, wearing the same filthy rags I’d been wearing for three months dodging the rebels. They’d have had my tongue on a skewer if they’d caught me, same as they’d have had Jean-Bernard’s. ‘Jean-Bernard,’ I called out to him. ‘Hey there, Jean-Bernard! What’s tin bring in the Kivu these days?’

  “Everyone was a little out of his head that morning, and maybe I was too. I’d been burned out like everyone else, but that was all right too. I was alive, like them, and we were all delirious that morning. ‘What are you cooking up now?’ I shouted to him. ‘What’s next for you—a seat on the Brussels bourse?’ I thought maybe the rebellions had changed things for him, everyone in town kneeling down to him and his men that way. Maybe he thought I was a ghost. Maybe he never saw me, I don’t know, but he never said a word, not a bloody word. He just looked at me like I wasn’t even there, still in the iron grip of whatever it was that brought him out here in the first place.

  “So after a while the jeep went away with him in it, up the track like it was the road to Goma and Bunia again back in forty-six, the witch doctor on the back seat not moving a muscle, and that was the last time I set eyes on him. Now he’s back in the capital, eh? Working for the paras?” Michaux laughed. “That’s Jean-Bernard, all right, the same man. Make of him what you will, he’ll never change.”

  Chapter Five

  Reddish left his Fiat in the oyster-shell drive next to a para jeep. A black trooper sat slumped behind the wheel, dressed in the leopard-spot fatigues of the para battalion, sunglasses across his eyes, a red beret on his head. An American-made M-16 lay across his knees. A second para lounged against the front fender, ankles crossed, weapon in his arms, his eyes moving with Reddish as he passed in front of them. Reddish nodded, but the paras didn’t acknowledge the greeting. Annoyed with himself, he crossed the drive to the gravel path under the palm trees. The paras were the pampered hoodlums of the presidency, insolent, brutal, and vain, eager to test their skills whenever GHQ turned them loose, as it had against the striking students and transit workers, but more often in the ugly ceremony of crowd control, clubbing a path for the President and his retinue through a mob of the urban poor already whipped to frenzy by the loudspeaker trucks and the paid political claques of the communes.

  He followed the path toward a whitewashed cottage roofed in red tile, similar to the dozen or so other cottages scattered among the trees along the sand road. The hilltop had once been a Belgian police cantonment. A few of the cottages had fallen into disrepair, gutters gone, windows cracked, gardens unweeded, and the turf trampled to sand under the raffia palms; but de Vaux’s cottage was bright and neat, freshly painted. Red blossoms bloomed in the flower beds along the foundation wall; a poinsettia tree stood near the front steps.

  De Vaux waited for him on the porch, a slim figure in starched khaki drill shorts and shirt, knee-length tan hose, and high-topped boots. A red beret was stuck in his belt.

  “Worried about terrorists, are you, Reddish? I wouldn’t have thought it of an old bush sergeant like you.” He didn’t misplace the accent, like most French speakers.

  “I lost my stripes, I suppose. Like you.”

  “I heard about your bloke in Khartoum. On the wireless. Too bad. Didn’t know him, did you?” He was ivory-skinned, thin-faced, and slightly built, but tightly muscled, the sharp features under the blondish hair lit by eyes as cool as sea water. Size belied his strength. He had quick hands, as quick as his temper, which had once been unpredictable. At Goma, Reddish had once seen him drop an unruly mercenary corporal to the floor, jaw broken, so quickly he hadn’t believed it had happened.

  “No, I don’t, but he’s not dead yet, is he?”

  “You’re the expert, not me.”

  It was sweltering in the midday heat, and Reddish mopped his face and neck as he climbed the steps. At the gate he’d been kept waiting inside his boiling car for twenty minutes while the guard phoned ahead.

  “Come inside. It’s cooler on the side porch.”

  “Not on duty today, are you?”

  “Always on duty. Why?”

  “The uniform.”

  “My Sunday kit.”

  “I was thinking at the gate I should be playing more tennis,” Reddish said, following de Vaux’s trim figure, which reminded him of his own lack of conditioning. His blue tennis shirt clung to his wet back, sweat rolled from his cheeks and neck. He was annoyed at himself again. Small talk too was a surrender of strength, and de Vaux would surely recognize it.

  “Tennis won’t do. Not diplomats’ tennis. Don’t even chase their own balls at the Belgian Club do they? Not unless there’s a thousand-franc whore at the end of it.” De Vaux laughed, opening the screen door, and Reddish was conscious of the poor teeth, the result of his years in the bush. The trace of Cockney in the English was as strong as ever, but with an exaggerated nasality which bordered on parody, a navvy’s version of how a sergeant-major talked.

  “The ball boys go with the club. I don’t think they’d chase them off, not with unemployment what it is.”

  “Frightened, are they? What do they think, those dips of yours, that ball boys will solve the bloody labor problem?” He laughed again.

  “It’s hard to tell what they think.”

  The sitting room was small and sparsely furnished. A few children’s toys lay abandoned on the worn Wilton carpet. An expensive cabinet radio and phonograph sat against the
wall below a dusty mirror and a reproduction of a painting of a Normandy cottage and hedgerow. On the footstool nearby someone had left a rag doll and a half-eaten croissant. There was no air conditioning. From the rear of the cottage drafted a babble of voices, children, women, and men, all gossiping together in an African dialect Reddish couldn’t identify and which, for that very reason, sounded aggressively loud. It was likely that de Vaux’s African wife, a cousin of Colonel N’Sika, the para commander, had brought a few of her family with her to the capital.

  They moved to the side porch, separated from the living room by the dining area and a pair of louvered doors. “Something to drink?” de Vaux asked. “Or is it too early yet? Whiskey, beer?” The nasality again, the exaggerated manners.

  “Beer would be fine, thanks.”

  He sat back as he waited, his shirt wet against his back. Beyond the white-enameled iron latticework the sunlight drifted through the trees, splintered in bright patches; but over the distant city, visible from the porch, it paled like smoke over rubble in the gaseous heat. A metal coffee table with a glass top sat in front of the rattan chair where Reddish waited. Nearby was a small bookcase, the lower shelves crammed with local and Belgian newspapers, together with the daily mimeographed bulletins circulated by the ministry of information, many yellow with age. Two books lay on the top shelf next to a candlestick, the only books Reddish saw. Behind the empty rattan chair at the far end of the coffee table was a reading light. Alongside was a table holding a telephone, yellow legal pads, and a clay pot filled with pencils.

  He supposed de Vaux used the porch as a study, shut away from the distractions of domestic life. The two books drew his eyes. They were dog-eared, their bindings tattered, the cloth covers ringed with watermarks. He couldn’t read their titles, but they interested him, clues to the man many had heard of but few knew. He’d been collecting the odd pieces for years, and now he leaned forward and was putting on his steel-rimmed reading glasses as de Vaux returned carrying glasses and beer bottles.

  “The UN left them here,” he explained, guessing Reddish’s intentions. “A crate of them. That’s all that’s left, those two. Used this place as a reading room, game room. Even had an Indian librarian. That’s the UN for you, wogs everywhere. This was the place where a soldier could write home, feel sorry for himself after the sun went down.” He lifted one of the books from the shelf and pushed it across the glass-topped table. “You’ll know this one. They say there’s not an Englishman that doesn’t.”

  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 t
he 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.