Rogue's March (30 page)

“May be what?”

“Where the guns came from,” Reddish said. “Shut the door.” He picked up the packet of letters he'd found in Masakita's jacket and sorted through them until he found the pale blue envelope postmarked from Algiers three weeks earlier. Dos Santos had written in French, very good French, but the stubby, fluid script was hard to read. He'd recently finished a training school in Algeria and was bound for São Salvador in Angola. He would be arriving at Pointe-Noire, Congo, and needed help in arranging his return to São Salvador, but the nature of the assistance he was asking wasn't at all clear. At that point, the narrative thread vanished—the French illegible, the words hasty, the reminiscences too furtive for Reddish to follow.

“Maybe and maybe not,” he puzzled, frowning as Sarah watched, returning again to the CIA report obtained in Algiers a few weeks earlier. The report was attributed to a lower-level Algerian official with good contacts in military and shipping circles whose reporting had been consistently substantiated. It read:

1.
THE EAST GERMAN FREIGHTER
POTSDAM
TO BE OFF-LOADED AT POINTE-NOIRE, CONGO, CARRIED THE FOLLOWING ORDNANCE FOR THE POPULAR MOVEMENT FOR THE LIBERATION OF ANGOLA [MPLA]:

—650
MAKAROV PISTOLS

—500
AK-47 ASSAULT RIFLES

—50
DEGYAREY LIGHT MACHINE GUNS

—20 81-
MM MORTARS

—1,500
GRENADES

—
UNSPECIFIED QUANTITIES OF AMMUNITION FOR THE ABOVE WEAPONS.

2.
THE ABOVE LISTED ORDNANCE WAS SHIPPED IN WOODEN CRATES MARKED “AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENTS” AND CONSIGNED TO BERNARD DELBEQUES, FRÈRES, POINTE-NOIRE. [HEADQUARTERS NOTE: BERNARD DELBEQUES, FRÈRES, IS A BRAZZAVILLE FREIGHT FORWARDER WHICH HAS COOPERATED IN THE PAST WITH FOREIGN SHIPPERS SENDING MATERIALS TO THE MPLA.]

3.
THE MPLA ARMS WERE LOADED ABOARD THE
POTSDAM
ON SEPTEMBER 15 AT MERS-AL-KABIR, ALGERIA. THE ORDNANCE WAS ACCOMPANIED BY AN UNKNOWN MPLA OFFICER WHO RECENTLY COMPLETED TRAINING AT THE ALGERIAN SKIDA COMMANDO SCHOOL.

“If you'd explain to me what you're doing, maybe it would help,” Sarah offered, sinking slowly into the chair at the side of the desk.

“I don't need help. I need a goddamned Ouija board.”

“You said, ‘where the guns came from.' What guns? The ones in Malunga?”

“Agricultural implements again,” Reddish mumbled disagreeably. “Coincidences all over the place—too goddamned many. Street brawls don't happen that way.” He sat hunched over the Agency report, then turned aside to the blue envelope, puzzling over the Algiers postmark dated September 12, the bright green stamp, and the watermarked envelope. Something else caught his eye. A coffee ring stained the right center of the envelope, washing away a few letters from Masakita's name and title. His own coffee cup was empty; yet he reached for it. How long had Masakita said he'd had it? A week? He put his mug on top of the envelope. The base was too large. Puzzled, he picked up the letter again and reread it slowly. Suddenly he frowned, turned to the back of the first page, looked at the last word, glanced at the top of the second page, and then quickly at the back, sitting up startled. “For Christ's sake, you stupid pilgrim, don't you read your own bloody mail! A page is missing!”

Chapter Six

The local office of Bernard Delbeques, Frères, was closed and locked, a heavy chain shackling the iron shutter. The small fenced yard behind the office, opening to the alleyway behind the port, was also closed, the gate padlocked. Two empty lift vans stood on the loading dock, but Reddish saw no trucks. He returned to his car and drove on to the apartment house.

“They were reading your mail,” he told Masakita in the sunny silence of the kitchen, still sweating from his jog up the stairs. He wiped his brow and neck, still standing as Masakita gazed up at him blankly from the kitchen table, where he'd been reading. “It was dos Santos.”

“I don't understand.”

“The letter from dos Santos, remember? Someone got his hands on it. My guess is that the help dos Santos wanted was getting guns to Angola. The missing page may have told you that, or it may have given you more details than they wanted you to know. How long was the letter on your desk?”

“A week, maybe more. What difference does that make?”

“Who had access to your office?”

“At party headquarters? Everyone. The door was never locked. What difference does it make? Dos Santos didn't say anything about guns. If he had, I would have remembered. I would have told him it was impossible—”

“Read the goddamned letter!” He pulled the envelope from his pocket and thrust it at Masakita and stood watching as he read it slowly. He read it a second time, even more carefully, puzzling as Reddish had between the first and second pages.

“It doesn't make sense,” he admitted finally. “Something has been left out.”

“A page is missing.” Reddish lit a cigarette impatiently. “They pulled a page, the one that probably talked about the guns dos Santos wanted help with.”

“But this was the letter in my office—just two pages.”

“Then they intercepted it before you got it. They had you on a watch list at the post office and maybe the ministry too. This thing was probably cooking a long time. These guys may not be bright, but they're not stupid. They had the dos Santos letter asking for your help with the MPLA guns. They knew about the hand tools you were expecting from the East Germans. Someone had told them that a few
jeunesse
in the compound had guns of their own and were ready for a fight. You put all that together and you've got what they had—a scenario for wiping out this regime.”

He took the letter back, disappointed at Masakita's reaction.

“So you know about things like this. You said yesterday that was how it was done.”

“I told you—it's not something you know; it's something you smell. There were too many coincidences. That's not the way things work. Someone was pulling the strings.”

“But not just Colonel N'Sika and his council. More men were involved. If my mail was being intercepted, then the internal security directorate was involved. Kadima.”

“Probably,” Reddish conceded. “People from your own party too.”

“How did they get these MPLA guns?”

“I'm not sure. Bought them maybe, stole them. Who the hell knows?” He doused his cigarette under the tap. “You'd better start thinking about what you're going to do. The radio bulletin this morning announced a mass rally tomorrow. N'Sika's going to show the nation the traitors and their guns at Martyr's Square. This crowd is still running scared. Maybe they'll come running here. They're looking for you—”

“So now that you know how it was done, you no longer feel cheated, is that it?” As his strength had returned, so had Masakita's anger; Reddish felt it now.

“I told you. It's not over yet.”

“But you have the advantage now—you, the Americans. You know how it was done. You could expose these lies for what they are. That gives you the advantage.”

“What advantage?” Reddish said with quiet contempt. “Use your head. This wasn't a very popular regime this past year or so. Look at the headlines—strikes, student riots, the threat of an army mutiny. It was dead on its feet. So we know how they buried it? Fine, but who gives a shit? Where's the proof? A screwy letter with a page missing? But even if we had the proof, who cares? A few journalists maybe, not because they liked the old President but because it grabs an editor's eye back in Paris or Brussels, where they're trying to sell papers. No one out there in the streets is going to worry about the old regime and how N'Sika put the gun to its head. They're going to start thinking about whether rice prices or cooking oil prices are coming down.”

“But not injustice,” Masakita asked, “not your government either?”

“For Christ's sake,” Reddish said, searching for another cigarette. “Do I have to explain your own people to you?”

“Explain to me why your embassy can't confront N'Sika and his council with what you know.”

“Because that's not the way the game is played, not yet anyway. It depends upon N'Sika, what kind of man he is. When we know that, maybe we can start thinking about a way out. But right now I wouldn't bet on it. In the meantime you'd better start thinking about where you want to go and what you want to do.”

“But you know what N'Sika's going to say,” Masakita said. “Of course you do. Why should that matter? I listened to Nasser in Cairo for years. Strong words every time, and next month even stronger. This nation is weak. The people are poor, every day growing poorer. N'Sika will speak tomorrow, strong words, but in a month nothing will have changed, and so his next speech will be even stronger. Do you think I haven't made such speeches myself in the interior during the rebellions? So regardless of what kind of man this N'Sika is, every speech will be stronger than the last. N'Sika will understand that too, and at last he'll realize that there is nothing he can do to change their condition or his, not in their lifetime. So regardless of what he hopes to do, he will change, only he, not the condition of the people; and he'll end up what Nasser is, a demagogue. There's no escape from it.”

He looked at Reddish as if he were expecting him to deny it. Reddish said nothing.

“It doesn't change,” Masakita said hotly.

“I suppose not.” Reddish looked at his watch. “I've got to go.”

Masakita followed him. “I remember a time during the rebellions when a delegation of churchmen came to talk to us at the headquarters of the new provisional government in Stanleyville—the rebel government. All faiths were represented—the Catholic fathers, the Baptists, even two sheikhs from the Moslem commercial community. Suddenly they'd felt the change in the air, a new beginning, the old despotism dead, and they'd all become millennialists, all leaving their pulpits to join the masses in the streets, all expecting a new era of social and economic justice.

“They were disappointed. In a week nothing had changed. In two weeks it was worse than before. In three it was intolerable. Why? Because we were weak, their leaders, because the people were still poor, justice still an abstraction, and Caesar still Caesar except more tyrannical than ever, which was why the pulpits were there in the first place. But they were churchmen, churchmen, men of the cloth! What right had they to be there! What could we say to them? Nothing! The expectation never dies, you see, buried even in those who've forsworn it, men of the cloth! It doesn't change. The rebel government lasted two months, you remember? It was over then, all over. And when the government troops took Stanleyville, you remember what happened, don't you?”

Reddish was at the rear door of the kitchen, the limits of Masakita's world, anxious to go. “I remember.”

“They hanged the churchmen with the rebels,” Masakita said. “Do you understand? They hanged the churchmen with the rebels, those men who had no right to ask anything of us!”

Chapter Seven

Reddish thought the diplomatic life something of an anachronism, in style, ceremony, and much of its substance. The personification of its archaic order was the ambassador himself, who—in an age that had leveled empires, titles, and the cutaway coat—still survived at the very core of diplomacy's mystique, pursuing an elaborate code of preening manners and wooden decorum as alien to the workaday world as an aviary of tropical birds. The few aviaries Reddish had seen were in public zoos; the few ambassadors he'd known had been resident in gardens like this one where he sat now examining the bright banks of flower beds as he waited for Bondurant to conclude his conversation with Cecil, the British Ambassador.

It was late afternoon; the day was hot. They sat at poolside where the two Americans had been deep in conversation when Cecil had interrupted them, desperate for information on the new National Revolutionary Council, whose leadership had been revealed that morning. Bondurant was trying to be responsive to Cecil while at the same time attempting to conceal those ugly details he'd just learned from Reddish, who sat to one side saying nothing. Embarrassed by Bondurant's predicament—his attempting to be forthcoming enough not to be thought totally ignorant of what had happened, as Cecil was, yet circumspect enough not to yield his diplomatic advantage—Reddish had tried to excuse himself for a walk about the garden, but Bondurant had waved him back to his chair.

Cecil was disappointed that Bondurant could clarify so little. He'd arrived in the expectation that the new council was well and favorably known to Bondurant, to be told that contact had already been established, and that the full details of the events of the past two days could now be explained to him.

Bondurant had quietly disabused him of those hopes. Cecil's face had fallen. “I'm most anxious to reassure London, you understand, but I rather suppose it will all come clear in the next few days, don't you? I mean it usually does. The city is already peaceful again, despite those gunshots during the night. The question of diplomatic recognition won't arise, will it? We recognize nations, not regimes like you chaps. We may be a bit slow establishing contact, however. God knows we don't want to go running about encouraging colonels everywhere to go smashing established authority, do we? Well, I suppose, we're all in the same boat,” he offered sympathetically, “drifting in the same fog. If it's any consolation, the French, Belgian, and Israeli embassies are as much in the dark as everyone else.”

“It isn't,” Bondurant replied. “No other country has provided military and economic assistance at the same level as we. No other embassy was thought to know as much as we either.”

“Quite, oh yes. One forgets that side of it.” Cecil's look traveled toward Reddish, as if the rebuke might have been intended for him. Extraordinary eyes, he'd often thought—brutally cold, they seemed, like some of the South African farmers he'd met. The way they got after treating some of these Kaffirs in their own coin, he supposed, all the color bleached out. He had forgotten to ask Carol Browning about Reddish. He assumed Bondurant had been very cross with him, as he'd been with Major Murray, his own attaché, who'd proved to be such an ignoramus as the streets were going berserk.