Dogs of War (46 page)

At half past noon the Toscana slipped out of Cas tellףn harbor and turned her helm south to Cape San Antonio. Cat Shannon, feeling sick now that it was all over, knowing that from then on he was virtually unstoppable, was leaning against the after rail, watching the flat green orange groves south of Castellףn slip away as they headed for the sea.
Carl Waldenberg came up behind him. "That's the last stop?" he asked.
"The last where we have to open our hatches," said Shannon. "We have to pick up some men on the coast of Africa, but we'll moor in the roads. The men will come out by launch. Deck cargo native workers. At least, that's what they'll be shipped as."
"I've only got charts as far as the Strait of Gibraltar," objected Waldenberg.
Shannon reached into his zip-up windbreaker and pulled out a sheaf of charts, half of the number En-dean had handed him in Rome. "These," he said, handing them to the skipper, "will get you as far as Freetown, Sierra Leone. That's where we anchor and pick up the men. Please give me an arrival time at noon on July second. That is the rendezvous."
As the captain left to return to his cabin and start to plot his course and speed, Shannon was left alone at the rail. Seagulls wheeled around the stern, seeking morsels dropped from the galley, where Cipriani was preparing lunch, squealing and cawing as they dipped toward the foaming wake to snatch up a scrap of bread or vegetable.
Anyone listening would have heard another sound amid their screaming, the sound of a man whistling "Spanish Harlem."
Far away to the north, another ship slipped her moorings and under the guidance of a port pilot eased her way out of the harbor of Archangel. The motor vessel Komarov was only ten years old and something over five thousand tons.
Inside her bridge, the atmosphere was warm and cosy. The captain and the pilot stood side by side, staring forward as the quays and warehouses slipped past to her port side, and watching the channel ahead to the open sea. Each man held a cup of steaming coffee. The helmsman kept the vessel on the heading given him by the pilot, and to his left the radar screen gleamed and died endlessly, its iridescent sweep arm picking up on each turn the dotted ocean ahead and beyond it the fringe of the ice that would never melt, even in high summer.
In the stern two men leaned over the rail beneath the flag with the hammer-and-sickle emblem and watched the Russian Arctic port slip past. Dr. Ivanov
clipped the crushed cardboard filter of his black cigarette between his teeth and sniffed the crisp, salt-caked air. Both men were wrapped against the cold, for even in June the wind off the White Sea is no invitation to shirtsleeves. By his side, one of his technicians, younger, eager for his first trip abroad, turned to him.
"Comrade Doctor," he began.
Ivanov took the stump of the Papiross from his teeth and flicked it into the foaming wake. "My friend," he said, "I think, as we are now aboard, you can call me Mikhail Mikhailovich."
"But at the institute—"
"We are not at the institute. We are on board a ship. And we will be in fairly close confinement either here or in the jungle for months to come."
"I see," said the younger man, but he was not to be repressed. "Have you ever been to Zangaro before?"
"No," said his superior.
"But to Africa," insisted the younger man.
"To Ghana, yes."
"What is it like?"
"Full of jungle, swamps, mosquitoes, snakes, and people who don't understand a damn thing you say."
"But they understand English," said the assistant. "We both speak English."
"Not in Zangaro, they don't."
"Oh." The junior technician had read all he could find, which was not much, in the encyclopaedia borrowed from the vast library at the institute, about Zangaro.
"The captain told me if we make good time we should arrive at Clarence in twenty-two days. That will be their Independence Day."
"Bully for them," said Ivanov and walked away.
Past Cape Spartel, nosing her way from the Mediterranean into the Atlantic, the MV Toscana radioed a ship-to-shore telegram to Gibraltar for onpassing to London. It was to Mr. Walter Harris at a London
address. It said simply: "Pleased announce your brother completely recovered." It was the sign meaning the Toscana was on her way and on schedule. Slight variations of the message about Mr. Harris's brother's health could have meant she was on course but late, or in some kind of trouble. No telegram of any kind meant she had not been cleared from Spanish territorial waters.
That afternoon there was a conference in Sir James Manson's office.
"Good," said the tycoon when Endean broke the news. "How much time has she got to reach target?"
"Twenty-two days, Sir James. It is now Day Seventy-eight of the hundred estimated for the project. Shannon had allowed Day Eighty for his departure from Europe, and that would have left him twenty days. He estimated the time at sea between sixteen and eighteen days, allowing for adverse weather or a two-day breakdown. He had four days in hand, even on his own estimate."
"Will he strike early?"
"No, sir. Strike Day is still Day One Hundred. He'll kill time hove-to at sea if he has to."
Sir James Manson paced up and down his office. "How about the rented villa?" he asked.
"It has been arranged, Sir James."
"Then I don't see any point in your waiting around London any longer. Get over to Paris again, get a visa for Cotonou, fly down there, and get our new employee, Colonel Bobi, to accompany you to this place next to Zangaro. If he seems shifty, offer him more money.
"Get settled in, get the truck and the hunting guns ready, and when you receive Shannon's signal that he is going in for the attack that evening, break the news to Bobi. Get him to sign that mining concession as President Bobi, date it one month later, and send all three copies by registered post in three different envelopes to me here.
"Keep Bobi virtually under lock and key until
Shannon's second signal to say he has succeeded. Then in you go. By the way, that bodyguard you are taking with you—is he ready?"
"Yes, Sir James. For the kind of money he's getting, he's good and ready."
"What's he like?"
"As nasty as they come. Which is what I was looking for."
"You could still have problems, you know. Shannon will have all his men round him, at least those who survive the battle. He could prove troublesome."
Endean grinned. "Shannon's men will follow Shannon," he said. "And I can handle him. Like all mercenaries, he's got his price. I'll just offer it to him— but in Switzerland and out of Zangaro."
When he had gone, Sir James Manson stared down at the City below him and wondered if any man did not have his price. "They can all be bought, and if they can't, they can be broken," one of his mentors had once said to him. And after years as a tycoon, watching politicians, generals, journalists, editors, businessmen, ministers, entrepreneurs and aristocrats, workers and union leaders, blacks and whites, at work and play, he was still of that view.
Many years ago a Spanish seafarer, looking from the sea toward the land, had seen a mountain which, with the sun behind it in the east, appeared to him to have the shape of a lion's head. He called the land Lion Mountain and passed on. The name stuck, and the country became known as Sierra Leone. Later another man, seeing the same mountain in a different light, or through different eyes, called it Mount Aureole. That name also stuck. Even later, and in a more whimsical bout of fantasy, a white man named the town founded in its shadow Freetown, and it still bears the name today. It was just after noon on July 2, Day Eighty-eight in Shannon's private calendar, that the motor vessel Toscana dropped anchor a third of a mile out from the shore, off Freetown, Sierra Leone.
On the voyage from Spain, Shannon had insisted that the cargo remain just where it was, untouched and unopened. This was just in case there was a search at Freetown, although since they had nothing to discharge and no cargo to take on board, that would have been most unusual. The ammunition crates had been scrubbed clean of their Spanish markings and sanded down with a disk sander to the bright white wood. Stenciled markings showing that the crates contained drilling bits for the oil rigs off the Cameroon coast had been painted on.
Only one job had he allowed to be done on the way south. The bundles of mixed clothing had been sorted, and the one containing the haversacks and webbing had been opened. With canvas needle and palm, Cipriani, Vlaminck, and Dupree had passed the days cutting the haversacks to pieces and transforming them into backpacks fitted with a score of long, narrow pouches, each capable of taking one bazooka rocket. These now shapeless and inexplicable bundles were stored in the paint locker among the cleaning rags.
The smaller knapsacks had also been altered. The packs had been cut away so that only the shoulder straps remained, with braces across the chest and around the waist. Dog-clips had been fastened atop each shoulder strap, and others at the belt, and later these frames would accommodate an entire crate of mortar bombs, enabling up to twenty to be carried at one time.
The Toscana had announced her presence while six miles offshore to the harbormaster's office of Freetown, and had been given permission to enter port and anchor out in the bay. As she had no cargo to load or unload, there was no need for her to take up room at the port's precious Queen Elizabeth II Quay. She had come only to take on deck crew.
Freetown is one of the favorite ports along the West African coast for taking aboard these brawny laborers who, trained in the use of tackle and winches, are used by the tramp steamers frequenting the smaller tim-
ber ports along the coast. They board at Freetown on the outward voyage and are discharged with their pay on the way back. In a hundred coves and creeks along the coast, where cranes and jetties are at a premium, ships have to use their own jumbo derricks to load cargo. It is grindingly hard work, as one sweats in the tropical fever heat, and white seamen are paid to be seamen, not stevedores. Locally recruited labor might not be available and probably would not know how to handle cargo, so Sierra Leonians are brought along. They sleep in the open on the ship's deck for the voyage, brewing up their own food and performing their ablutions over the stern. It caused no surprise in Freetown when the Toscana gave this as her reason for calling.
When the anchor cable rattled down, Shannon scanned the shoreline right around the bay, almost all of it taken up by the outer shantytown of the country's capital.
The sky was overcast, no rain fell, but beneath the clouds the heat was like a greenhouse, and he felt the sweat clamping his shirt to his torso. It would be like this from here on. His eyes riveted on the central area of the city's waterfront, where a large hotel stood looking out over the bay. If anywhere, this was where Langarotti would be waiting, staring out to sea. Perhaps he had not arrived yet. But they could not wait forever. If he was not there by sundown, they would have to invent a reason for staying on—like a broken refrigerator. It would be unthinkable to sail without the cold store working. He took his eyes away from the hotel and watched the tenders plying around the big Elder Dempster ship tied up at the quay.
On shore, the Corsican had already seen the Toscana before she dropped anchor, and was heading back into the town. He had been there for a week and had all the men Shannon wanted. They were not the same tribal group as the Leonians, but no one minded. A mixture of tribes was available as stevedores and deck cargo.
Just after two, a small pinnace came out from the customs house with a uniformed man standing in the back. He was the assistant chief customs officer, white socks agleam, khaki shorts and tunic pressed, epaulettes sparkling, and stiff peaked cap set dead straight. Among the regalia a pair of ebony knees and a beaming face could be distinguished. When he came aboard, Shannon met him, introduced himself as the owner's representative, shook hands profusely, and led the customs man to the captain's cabin.
The three bottles of whisky and two cartons of cigarettes were waiting. The officer fanned himself, sighed gustily with pleasure at the cool of the air-conditioning, and sipped his beer. He cast an incurious eye over the new manifest, which said the Toscana had picked up machine parts at Brindisi and was taking them to the AGIP oil company's offshore concessions near the Cameroon coast. There was no mention of Yugoslavia or Spain. Other cargo was listed as power boats (inflatable), engines (outboard), and tropical clothing (assorted), also for the oil drillers. On the way back she would wish to load cocoa and some coffee at San Pedro, Ivory Coast, and return to Europe. He exhaled on his official stamp to moisten it, and placed his approval on the manifest. An hour later he was gone, his presents in his tucker bag.
Just after six, as the evening cooled, Shannon made out the longshore boat moving away from the beach. Amidships the two local men who ran passengers out to the waiting vessels in the bay heaved at their oars. Aft sat seven other Africans, clutching bundles on their knees. In the prow sat a lone European. As the craft swung expertly in to the side of the Toscana, Jean-Baptiste Langarotti came nimbly up the ladder that hung to the water.
One by one the bundles were heaved from the bobbing rowboat up to the rail of the freighter; then the seven Africans followed. Although it was indiscreet to do so in sight of land, Vlaminck, Dupree, and Semmler started to clap them on the back and shake hands.
The Africans, grinning from ear to ear, seemed as happy as the mercenaries. Waldenberg and his mate looked on in surprise. Shannon signed to the captain to take the Toscana back to sea.
After dark, sitting in groups on the main deck, taking with gratitude the cooling breeze off the sea as the Toscana rolled on to the south, Shannon introduced his recruits to Waldenberg. The mercenaries knew them all, as they did the mercenaries. Six of the Africans were young men, called Johnny, Patrick, Jinja (nicknamed Ginger), Sunday, Bartholomew, and Timothy.
Each of them had fought with the mercenaries before; each of them had been personally trained by one of the European soldiers; each of them had been tried and tested in battle many times and would stick it out however hard the firefight. And each of them was loyal to his leader. The seventh was an older man, who smiled less, bore himself with a confident dignity, and was addressed by Shannon as "Doctor." He too was loyal to his leader and his people.