Rogue's March (19 page)

Behind him, Miss Browning found the light switches, doused both the pool and garden lights, and fled into the kitchen. The two soldiers stood for a few minutes looking up at the sky, oblivious of a dazed Cecil, who was crawling forward miserably out of a gumbo of compost onto the poolside flagstones. Finally satisfied, they turned back around the house and went out through the gate.

A few minutes later, Miss Browning kneeled at Cecil's side in the darkness, a damp towel at his head.

“More embarrassed than stunned, I suppose. Silly thing. No blood is there? No, I think not. Haven't gone incoherent, have I?” He lay on his back, delicately holding the towel to the side of his face, looking up at the stars. His uncle had fought in Flanders.

She helped him into the house and he limped down the corridor to the study, where he stretched out gratefully on the couch. “To be quite honest with you, I'm not sure whether it was the gin, the steps, or the shrubbery. I think it may have cleared my head. ‘Bloodied in battle.' Is that what they say?”

Miss Browning kneeled at his side, knees on the rug. “Are you sure you're not hurt?”

“Not in the slightest. Rather preposterous, the whole evening, but what's one to do?” He was painfully conscious of her suntan lotion, an almost edible aroma that lifted from her brown neck and shoulders. “You shouldn't squat there, my dear. Most uncomfortable for you.”

“I don't think it's preposterous at all.” Her breath touched his face.

“But it is, quite ridiculous.” He tried to sit up, but felt giddy quite suddenly and sank back weakly. “I should get out of these wet trunks. You too. That's a lovely fragrance you're wearing, by the way, quite lovely.” He heard an old man's voice.

“You're making fun of me.”

“Oh, no, I assure you. Quite the contrary.” He was aware of the damnable heat on his face, water running off in all directions from his brow and cheeks. “You're quite a lovely girl with a lovely figure and one doesn't mind saying so, you see.”

“I do have a nice figure, I know, and I'm not ashamed of it.”

“Oh, no. Certainly not.”

“I don't mind if others notice, so long as I want them to notice.”

“Of course not.”

“I was beginning to think you hadn't noticed.”

“Then that was rude of me, wasn't it? Is that the phone ringing?” He lifted his head but heard nothing. “I think we should get out of these wet suits,” he suggested.

“I do too.” Elbows raised, she undid the knot at the back of her neck and let the bikini halter fall forward across her knees. She stood up and stepped out of her briefs.

“I mean upstairs,” Cecil murmured, gaping.

“You took a long time getting around to it. Why not here?” In full silhouette for an instant, she turned off the study lamp.

Having skated far past his intentions, Cecil was now floundering haplessly in dark, open water, struggling with a wrenched back, a gaseous head, and damp creeping shorts, which, stiffened suddenly by an improbable iron stay, like a balky umbrella, refused to come down.

“Move over,” Miss Browning whispered. “Maybe I can help.”

Cecil's was a military family, grandfather at Khartoum with Kitchener, father on the Somme just down from Sandhurst, gravely wounded, lying on his back under the wire while the tracers screamed overhead, not reading Greek, mind you, like MacMillan, but a casualty nevertheless, flat on his back waiting for the litter, as Cecil was now, unhorsed, supine on the couch, pressed down by a slippery but resolute Miss Browning who still rode her exhausted English mount over a course Cecil had jumped five minutes earlier. Lying on his back, fallen but not disgraced, not disengaged either, Cecil would have liked to remember a little Greek, something that found the quintessence of the moment in a barbaric world going berserk in the streets outside, since it seemed to him that his performance on the couch was as heroic as other English heroism on other battlefields—the lance lifted, the combat accepted, the aristocratic ideal of
arete
eloquently sustained in ways quite beyond the grasp of his American and Russian counterparts, who, somewhere else at that hour, were undoubtedly performing their drab custodial duties, gray peas in the same gray pod.

Chapter Fifteen

In the dawn light the high windows of the old prison were a shade lighter than the stone walls. A gentle wind had begun to move, stirring the air without blowing away the heat. Still they waited in their separate cells, backs slumped against the walls, some lifting themselves from time to time to the high barred windows to watch. The gunfire had stopped now, and no trucks had passed on the road for over an hour.

“What do you see?” called De Groot, the South African killer with the anarchist's black beard.

“Not a bloody thing,” Templer answered from his cell window. “Still too dark.”

“It's over then,” Cobby Molloy groaned, “and we'll rot, same as Mühler's lungs.”

“Shut up, you limey bastard!” Mühler shot back from the cell opposite, lying tensely on his bunk with his hands cradled behind his head.

“W-w-when? W-w-what time?” called Sterner, the stuttering mixed-up Frenchman who'd gone berserk in a Goma bar and killed two Pakistani UN advisers. He began to rattle the door of his cell, afraid he'd be left behind.

“Fuck off!” Mühler shouted. “We ain't going! No one's going!”

“
Kangana monoko, mbwa
! Shut up, you dogs!” the turnkey cried through the small door into the passageway. “
Chiens! Mbwa
!” He beat his billy club rhythmically against the stout oak door.

Von Stumm laughed, a low guttural laugh, from the cot in the next cell.

“Dogs, is it!” Cobby Molloy yelled through the barred window of his own cell down the passageway. “Fetch your arse in here, you black bastard! Kick seven shades of shit out of you! You'll be wearing your fucking tail like a wog's necktie, blood and gravy, right around your neck! Come on! Come on in.”

But the African turnkey only spat through the small barred window in the passageway door, slammed the panel closed, and returned to his stool.

“Chin up, lads,” Templer soothed through the window of his own cell door. “It's not over yet, I tell you. He hasn't forgotten us, not Jean-Bernard. He's our man, you'll see. March us out of here like the Scottish Borderers, he will, with those monkeys out there blowing swamp wind out of one cheek and ‘Bonny Prince Charley' out o' the other. You'll see. Jean-Bernard will send for us when the going gets quick and dirty.”

“Stuff it!” Cobby cried.

“Stuff it yerself!” Mühler shouted. Von Stumm laughed again, moving to the door and looking out, his eyes as cold as bullets in the thin light. He was German, an ex-lieutenant from the Wehrmacht's Sixth Panzer Front on the Danube who'd escaped the Russians and found his way to Spain. He'd fought with the French in Indochina and Algiers before he'd been recruited as a mercenary in Marseilles. If he ever spoke in English or French, no one had heard.

“
Was ist, ein
de Vaux?” He laughed softly and went back to his cot and stretched out again.

“What'd he say?” Molloy called.

“He said, ‘Stuff it,' same as you did.”

“He doesn't bloody well care, because he's already dead! You're already dead, you bloody Kraut! Dead! You hear me?”

Von Stumm laughed. Sterner began to rattle his door again.

“Quiet lads, quiet now,” Templer urged. “He'll come, I'm telling you.” His voice no longer carried the conviction it had ten hours earlier as they realized a coup was under way. It was Templer, the cell-block leader and de Vaux's former adjutant, who'd promised them deliverance.

He was British, stout, heavy-shouldered, with a cinnamon mustache and a sergeant-major's booming voice, the same man who'd boasted to the American and British journalists before his trial that what he'd practiced with his own mercenary brigade was discipline as proper as in his own King's Shropshire Light Infantry in Korea. He'd been cashiered in Seoul, a detail he'd failed to mention. Now he was sentenced to hang for raping and murdering a Dutch nurse at a remote mission station and throwing her body into the rapids of the Lulua River.

Only twelve mercenaries were left in the cell block.

“Twelve is all, but it's enough,” Templer was fond of bragging to the young, nervous British vice consul who visited him periodically. “Enough to keep the Bolshies out and the local scum from running amok.” The young man's damp, uneasy face only encouraged Templer's rollicking imagination: “Enough to control this whole bloody country if it comes to that! Christ almighty, two-a-penny privates are all that's running this country, lad! Do you think you ruddy diplomats are safe down there in the capital? Never! The day will come when the streets will go up like straw, chappie! Hear what I'm saying! Those monkeys out there are just waiting to trade in their tails for a few Bolshie guns! Look what happened in Czechoslovakia! Look at Vietnam! It'll be AK-47s and Stalin Organs in the streets, and then where'll you be? Up here with us, that's where you'll be. Get the word out, lad! There's a whole bloody army in chains up on the hilltop, on fatigue for the duration, ready to get into khaki again. Law and order or the Queen's dominion, whatever you say—black and white together under the Union Jack. You're a son of the Commonwealth, are you, lad? Same as us, every one of us.”

But it wasn't their governments, embassies, or lawyers they put their faith in. It was Jean-Bernard de Vaux. He had appeared at the prison unexpectedly earlier in the year, accompanying Colonel N‘Sika during his first inspection of the para camp after assuming command. Darkness had fallen as the four men came down through the wire-enclosed dogtrot to the prison door, de Vaux leading the way, a Belgian automatic rifle over his shoulder.

Inside the mercenary cell block, he banished the prison guards, called the prisoners to attention within their cells, and unlocked each cell door in turn. He brought Colonel N'Sika and his two subalterns from the main gallery outside, and, as they watched, with typical bravado ordered each prisoner to step forward into the cell-block corridor as his name was called. The prison guards never dealt with the mercenary prisoners in such a way, even when armed; yet now they obliged de Vaux like trained dogs. He didn't miss a name; each obeyed silently, standing rigidly at attention in the dim yellow light.

N'Sika's subalterns hung back, but not the colonel. He coolly studied each prisoner in turn as he strolled through their ranks like a drill instructor inspecting new recruits—the haggard bearded faces, the matted hair, the lice-infested prison rags, and the bare horny feet in the fungus-dark prison clogs.

Only after the prisoners were returned to their cells and he stood beyond the cell-block door did he speak: “
Comme les chiens
, like wild dogs.”

“Still disciplined,” de Vaux said.

“Yes, but for how long?”

“
Nous n'avons rien à craindre des mercs
, nothing to fear,” a perspiring Major Fumbe said, but his popeyed face belied it. So did Major Lutete's from nearby. Both were terrified.

N'Sika ignored them. “
Tu vas être le gardien de ces bêtes
,” he told de Vaux. “You'll be their warden now.”

Templer had had his ear to his grating and heard the familiar
tu
. So had Mühler. “
Tu
,” Templer had whispered to the others as the jeep had driven away. “
Tu
—did you mark that, lads? Chums. Brothers in arms now.”

“
Oui. Tu
! So what? What's it mean for us?” Mühler asked suspiciously, his whisper wiped away an instant later in a paroxysm of coughing.

A week later, clean cotton uniforms arrived.

“You can bet your bloody arse what it means now,” Templer told them the same night. “As thick as thieves, those two, cooking up something! Brothers in arms, like the old days. He's our man, Jean-Bernard, still a bloody empire builder, like his colonel, you'll see.”

But now, despite Templer's promise of deliverance, the gunfire was dying out, and the former sergeant-major was growing uneasy.

“Chin up, lads!” he called. “It's not over yet. He'll come.”

“In a pig's eye.” Mühler swore.

“Two lorries coming,” Molloy announced.

“They'll pass, same as the others,” De Groot predicted from his cot.

“They're not passing! Look!”

Templer lifted himself high into the back window. “Great Mother of Mary! Come to us, Jean-Bernard,” he murmured. “Come to us, you lovely lad.” A jeep stopped behind the army trucks on the road above. A shadowy figure left the jeep and came alone down through the wire-enclosed dogtrot carrying an automatic rifle. “Back to your cots, lads! Look sharp now. Still as a wet dream, sleeping your way home. Not a sound. It's him.”

A moment later the corridor lights flooded on, the cell-block door opened, and the cells were unlocked. De Vaux banished their cries. “No time, no time for that. Later. I need every good man I can muster. We'll go by truck to the armory on the other side of the hill to draw weapons. They'll be watching, see. Discipline, that's what I want. Quiet as thieves but your backbones straight, hear me! It's not over yet, but in two hours it will be. It's good men and sharpshooters I need. Watch your clogs—like flint on steel here. Set this camp ablaze if we're not careful. Not a word now.”

They followed him out silently, single file. Beyond the cell-block door he stopped, flashing his torch through the grill of a single isolated cell beyond the turnkey's table. Inside sat a Frenchman named Vitrac, the manager of a French forwarding agency in Brazzaville, Bernard Delbeques, Frères, huddled on his pallet, a thin blanket over his shoulders. His eyes lifted, terrified, into de Vaux's flashlight.