Rogue's March (20 page)

“Out,” de Vaux commanded. From the corner, a light-skinned mulatto rose too, but de Vaux said, “Later for you. Go back to sleep.” His name was Nogueira, a lieutenant in the MPLA, the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola.

“Sleep.” Lieutenant Nogueira smiled. “Who will sleep this night?” He shrugged and sat down.

“Double quick, old man,” Templer called as Vitrac crept forward. “No harm out here, just Christians and missionaries.”

They moved again in single file up through the wire enclosure and into the truck, de Vaux the last, sitting on the tailgate as they rolled forward, rifle over his shoulder, clipboard on his knees.

Darkness still lay entangled in the trees, but the sky had lightened. The air was heavy and oppressive, tinged with the carbon of wood smoke.

“Smell that sweet air,” Mühler said, wanting to draw in deeply but afraid of coughing.

“Lord God almighty, I never believed it,” Cobby Molloy confessed.

“Queen's dominion,” Templer boasted, lighting a crazy corkscrewed cigarette. It was his last, the one he'd been saving for this moment.

“The day will be hot,” De Groot predicted, his eyes fastened to the sky, the last fading stars.

Von Stumm only smiled.

The trucks crossed the crown of hill and bounced down the narrow road between the palm trees to the secluded armory hidden behind a high stone wall. Built of stone and reinforced concrete, it resembled a small airplane hangar. A concrete loading dock lay along the wall nearest the gate. The trucks backed up to the dock, and they climbed out, de Vaux leading the way. On the far edge of the loading dock, unseen by the mercenaries, sat a small wooden figure two feet high. Crudely carved, it was touched with fresh kaolin. Its cruel cowrie-shell eyes stared blankly across the courtyard toward the far wall, where two jeeps were parked. A stuffed snake-skin was about its neck; an antelope horn projected from the orifice in its head.

De Vaux led the group across the cavernous bay. A high metal bulkhead divided the armory in two; on the far side of the bulkhead were the magazine and ordnance lockers. De Vaux quickly unlocked the door to the ordnance office.

“We'll draw weapons first, then ammo,” he told them, stepping aside as the metal door swung open. “You tell me what you fancy, I'll tell you what we have.” He moved away two steps, his voice echoing hollowly among the high trusses.

For the first time Templer noticed there were no guards. The trucks had gone too. He pinched the last breath of smoke from the damp cigarette butt and turned, puzzled, but de Vaux was quicker.

“Why don't we muster. Quicker that way. Step up, Templer first. Line up off the door. Molloy, you be the ordnance clerk. You're quick that way.”

He tossed Molloy the clipboard and stepped further back, unshouldering his automatic rifle, though not dropping it against the bulkhead, butt down, as he seemed about to do, but stepped further away, the breech cradled. Molloy saw the larger magazine popped into the breech, heard the click of the release as the trigger was readied for rapid fire, and a split second later, heard the deafening roar which followed, wiping everything else away—the horrifying paralysis as he understood what de Vaux intended, the flame from the muzzle, the deafening reverberations from the steel plate, and Templer's bullying voice of deliverance now crushed in his chest.

He shot them all, Von Stumm first, because he seemed to have sensed danger before the others, Templer next with Molloy in a single burst, Mühler moving away, De Groot who fell sprawling, Sterner as he bolted crazily for the safety of the ordnance office, the others as they scattered in panic, still herded together, not understanding why he was doing this.

Vitrac, the Frenchman, knew. He had known as soon as he'd seen the wads of cotton in de Vaux's eardrums as he'd turned back from the ordnance-room door, giving up the clipboard—suspected as much when de Vaux had summoned him from the cell where he and Nogueira had been held since the Bernard Delbeques, Frères trucks had delivered the MPLA weapons north of Matadi. He had moved away, shrinking backwards, the last in line. De Vaux's final burst had caught him twenty meters away and sent him pinwheeling into the stone wall, glasses smashed, his face bleeding. But he was alive. His mind hovered, counting the single shots as de Vaux moved through the carnage. He had hopes, infallible hopes—his mother's memory, his wife's stooping figure in the garden of the seaside cottage near St. Lo … Five. Now six. His mind registered them, an involuntary twitch. Seven now! Just numbers.

A foot prodded him. He didn't move, his breath suspended in his terrified muscles.

De Vaux stood over him, seeing the eyelids twitch. “Don't pretend,” he said. “Don't pretend now, Vitrac. You're dying.” Still, Vitrac didn't stir. “A spineless back-crabbing little écrevisse in the nets with the sharks.” De Vaux waited. “Don't pretend, little crayfish. You're dying. Five, six minutes, that's all. Do you want me to make it easier?”

Slowly Vitrac opened his eyes. He could see nothing. The numbers were gone. “No,” he murmured, closing his eyes again.

De Vaux turned and walked back across the bay to where Von Stumm lay. “
Kommt nicht
?” he whispered, sensing a presence near.

Of all those in the bay, it was Von Stumm he most admired and pitied, the man whose biography he'd borrowed in part, the man he might have been. He left him there and continued out onto the loading dock.

The parking lights of the two jeeps parked across the courtyard had come on. Colonel N'Sika sat in one, chin sunk upon his chest, his hands across the automatic rifle across his knees. The shadows were lifting as de Vaux crossed the gravel toward the two jeeps. A light mist hovered over the city beyond. The finches were stirring in the trees and shrubbery on the other side of the wall.

Standing between the two jeeps, de Vaux emptied the magazine as Majors Lutete and Fumbe watched silently from the seat behind N'Sika. He put the weapon in the rear of his jeep behind his African father-in-law, who sat huddled under an army overcoat. A skullcap sewn with cowrie shells and leopard teeth covered his small head; a stuffed snakeskin similar to that on the neck of the wooden fetish hung across his thin wasted chest. No one spoke. Like Colonel N'Sika, Fumbe, and Lutete, the old man didn't move, still watching the open door of the bay, where the smoke still curled from beneath the overhang and out into the morning light.

“All right now?” Colonel N'Sika muttered finally, rousing himself, turning to the two majors. “Finished, eh? Nothing to fear?”

Neither Fumbe nor Lutete spoke.

“So they'll trust you now, eh, cousin,” N'Sika said.

“His strength, not mine,” de Vaux said, nodding toward his father-in-law.

“Like sheep,” Fumbe muttered, transfixed.

“Satisfied, eh. Go see for yourself,” N'Sika called back to Lutete. “Don't sit there. Your zombies are buried, like your suspicions. Go see. Go see for yourselves. Still afraid someone might give them guns? Are you small boys?”

Lutete climbed reluctantly from the jeep, followed by Major Fumbe. They moved too cautiously for N'Sika. “Go on! Are you afraid? Help them,” he said to de Vaux. “Go show them my uncle's power. Yours too.”

De Vaux helped his father-in-law from the jeep. He was still weak from the flu and coughed as he shed the heavy coat.

“What is it?” N'Sika called, troubled, his smile gone. “He's not sick, is he?”

“It's the night air,” de Vaux lied. He led his father-in-law across the gravel, but the old man moved slowly, wasted by fever and now frightened by the recent gunfire, an old man who understood nothing of what had happened, only that his strength was failing. He wanted only to return to his village far in the north to die in peace.

When they were out of N'Sika's hearing, de Vaux said, “Walk strongly now. He'll be watching you.”

“My power is dying,” the old man muttered in confusion, gripping de Vaux's arm tightly. “Someone is taking it from me.”

“
Shhh
. Don't say that now. It's the fever, that's all. It'll pass.”

Gently, de Vaux led him up the steps and into the armory bay. The old man hesitated at the door, seeing the terrible carnage inside, white men's power he knew nothing about. His thin bony arm reached for the door frame, but de Vaux steadied him.

“What is it?” N'Sika called, standing up in the jeep.

“He's watching now,” de Vaux said. “Be strong now, like Kindu. You remember Kindu, when we drove into the town and you were in the back seat? You didn't move, not a muscle. Do you remember how strong you were?”

“Who are these men,” he asked, standing alone, sickened at the sight.

De Vaux told him that among them were those who burned his village in the north and murdered his two youngest daughters and left them for the vultures in the coffee-drying sheds.

The old man stood motionless in the bay door and for the first time in weeks de Vaux saw the dim light of recognition glow in his cloudy, troubled sight. It was N'Sika's coup, but the old man was part of its power, the power to safeguard and protect. He moved forward alone into the bay, de Vaux following, the two majors also beginning to mount the steps behind them, their fears banished.

Book Two

Chapter One

During the East German freighter's voyage down the African coast weeks earlier, the weather was stormy. The African kept to his cabin aboard the
Potsdam
. Behind him spilled the cold green waters of the Atlantic—now violet, now indigo, now blue—as impenetrable as iron to the glaze of the weak autumn sun. His wrinkled twill uniform had been put away and he was dressed as any returning African student might dress after his years in Belgium or France: blue coat with flared woolen trousers, thin-soled black shoes with elevated heels and sharp toes, footgear suddenly made treacherous by high seas and the torrential rains that swept out from the coast.

One stormy morning the freighter took on water amidships. The gangways were slippery and the African slipped on a ship's ladder and gashed his knee. He was alone at the time but one of the crewmen saw the splashes of fresh blood. The ship's doctor found the African in his cabin lying on his bunk with a pencil in his hand, a notebook at his side, his leg wrapped in a towel and elevated on a metal suitcase. The doctor dressed the laceration and, as they talked, discovered that the notebooks contained sketches of small birds and mammals. The African described them as sketches he'd made years earlier as a young student in São Salvador in Angola. He could remember the day he'd begun each drawing—the hour, the day, and the season; all this from the angle of the sun through the trees and the small window near his bench in the village school.

As the days grew warmer and the storms passed, he would move about the deck during the late afternoon, ending his promenade on the fantail, from which he would watch the sun dissolve into the Atlantic. Petrels and terns swept in over the slick left by the Potsdam's gliding passage; vaults of towering cloud, as black as anvils, traced the hidden African coast. When the stars were visible, he would bring his portable radio to the deck and sit on a winch cover, turning the dial until he found a signal from one of the coastal cities, bringing to him the African music he'd learned to live without. He would sit in the darkness until the sound of music was lost, drowned by the sound of the sea hissing past, in silence again, his isolation returned. But his isolation was less than it had been during the long years of exile, in the bidonvilles of Paris, in Rome, Cairo, and finally the Algerian guerrilla camp in the mountains. The recollection of those years was not so different to him from pain, but now it was eased by the knowledge that he'd survived to remember those moments, the recognition that in the very act of memory he would soon be released from them.

He was going home. His name was Bernardo dos Santos. He was a lieutenant in the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola, returning with weapons to infiltrate the savannahs of his native São Salvador in Angola to liberate it from the Portuguese.

Rain shrouded the Congolese port at Pointe-Noire the afternoon of his arrival, the steaming green hills hidden in the mist. In the harbor freighters lay like ghosts in the drizzle, their lights on. The wooden crates were swung to quayside, where they sat in the rain outside a warehouse, ignored by the Congolese customs officials as dos Santos waited nearby, his green uniform hidden beneath a dark poncho glistening with rain. A chief inspector finally arrived, examined his documents, told him that the shipment had already been cleared, and directed him across the port area to the administration building. Dos Santos spent an hour in the cramped overheated office, where a score of European and African traders competed for the attention of the few overworked clerks, waving their manifests and shipping forms, stuffed with francs or dollars, across the wooden counter.

Afterward, he was sent to immigration, where a suspicious clerk studied his passport, pored over his confidential ledgers, and finally waved him upstairs to the security office. He was interrogated for an hour before the clerk finally grunted his approval and stamped his passport. Downstairs, he telephoned the local office of the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola but was told by a sleepy clerk that the office was closed for the day. He telephoned the freight forwarder Bernard Delbeques. A truck would be sent immediately.

He walked back to the warehouse where the guns still lay at dockside among standing pools of water. He waited in the door of the warehouse, listening to the rain drum against the roof and watching the mist roll down from the hills, his hunger as keen as his despair. A dozen meters away, the
Potsdam
stood at dockside, its ventilators blowing the galley smells of the evening meal in his direction. Its world inside was warm, reassuring, habitable, like the Algerian commando camp in the mountains. His wasn't. He remembered both now with affection and regret. Thinking of the crowded customs office and the insolent clerks who knew nothing of guns transshipped through their independent nation to Portuguese-occupied Angola, he knew that he would grow to despise this country if he remained here too long. He smelled misery and hunger about him, as sharp as a serpent's tooth. Darkness fell. An old Mercedes truck with broken fenders loomed through the mist, its ancient headlights gleaming as feebly as kerosene lanterns. As it stopped near the East German freighter, he read the hand-lettered words on the door:
BERNARD DELBEQUES, FRERES.