Bobi nodded and lumbered across the tiled floor and through the door, followed by Shannon. It closed behind him. Five seconds later came the crash of a single shot.
After Shannon reappeared, Endean sat for a moment staring at him. “What was that?” he asked unnecessarily.
“A shot,” said Shannon.
Endean was on his feet, across the room, and standing in the open doorway to the study. He turned around, ashen-faced, hardly able to speak.
“You shot him,” he whispered. “All this bloody way, and you shot him. You’re mad, Shannon. You’re fucking crazy.”
His voice rose with his rage and bafflement. “You don’t know what you’ve done, you stupid, blundering maniac, you bloody mercenary idiot.”
Shannon sat back in the armchair behind the dining table, gazing at Endean with scant interest. From the corner of his eye he saw the bodyguard’s hand move under his floppy shirt.
The second crash seemed louder to Endean, for it was nearer. Ernie Locke went back out of his chair in a complete somersault and sprawled across the tiles, varying the pattern of the old colonial marquetry with a thin filament of blood that came from his midriff. He was quite dead, for the soft bullet had gone through to shatter his spine.
Shannon brought his hand out from under the oak table and laid the Makarov 9mm. automatic on the table. A wisp of blue smoke wriggled out of the end of the barrel.
Endean seemed to sag at the shoulders, as if the knowledge of the certain loss of his personal fortune, promised by Sir James Manson when Bobi was installed, had suddenly been compounded by the realization that Shannon was the most completely dangerous man he had ever met. But it was a bit late for that.
Semmler appeared in the doorway of the study, behind Endean, and Langarotti slipped quietly through the dining room door from the corridor. Both held Schmeissers, catch off, very steady, pointing at Endean.
Shannon rose. “Come on,” he said, “I’ll drive you back to the border. From there you can walk.”
The single unpunctured tire from the two Zangaran trucks in the courtyard had been fitted to the vehicle that had brought Endean into the country. The canvas behind the cab had been taken away, and three African soldiers crouched in the back with submachine carbines. Another twenty, fully uniformed and equipped, were being marshaled into a line outside the palace.
In the hallway, close to the shattered door, they met a middle-aged African in civilian clothes. Shannon nodded to him and exchanged a few words.
“Everything okay, Doctor?”
“Yes, so far. I have arranged with my people to send a hundred volunteer workers to clean up. Also another fifty will be here this afternoon for fitting out and equipping. Seven of the Zangaran men on the list of notables have been contacted at their homes and have agreed to serve. They will meet this evening.”
“Good. Perhaps you had better take time off to draft the first bulletin from the new government. It should be broadcast as soon as possible. Ask Mr. Semmler to try to get the radio working. If it can’t be done, we’ll use the ship’s.”
“I have just spoken to Mr. Semmler,” said the African. “He has been in touch with the Toscana by walkie-talkie. Captain Waldenberg reports there is another ship out there trying to raise Clarence port authorities with a request for permission to enter port. No one is replying, but Captain Waldenberg can hear her on the radio.”
“Any identification?” asked Shannon.
“Mr. Semmler says she identifies herself as the Russian ship Komarov, a freighter.”
“Tell Mr. Semmler to man the port radio before going to work on the palace transmitter. Tell him to make to Komarov: ‘Permission refused. Permanently.’ Thank you, Doctor.”
They parted, and Shannon took Endean back to his truck. He took the wheel himself and swung the truck back on the road to the hinterland and the border.
“Who was that?” asked Endean sourly as the truck sped along the peninsula, past the shantytown of the immigrant workers, where all seemed to be bustle and activity. With amazement Endean noticed that each crossroads had an armed soldier with a submachine carbine standing on point duty.
“The man in the hallway?” asked Shannon.
“Yes.”
“That was Dr. Okoye.”
“A witch doctor, I suppose.”
“Actually he’s an Oxford PhD.”
“Friend of yours?”
“Yes.”
There was no more conversation until they were on the highway toward the north.
“All right,” said Endean at last, “I know what you’ve done. You’ve ruined one of the biggest and richest coups that has ever been attempted. You don’t know that, of course. You’re too bloody thick. What I’d like to know is, why? In God’s name, why?”
Shannon thought for a moment, keeping the truck steady on the bumpy road, which had deteriorated to a dirt track.
“You made two mistakes, Endean,” he said carefully. Endean started at the sound of his real name.
“You assumed that because I’m a mercenary, I’m automatically stupid. It never seemed to occur to you that we are both mercenaries, along with Sir James Manson and most of the people who have power in this world. The second mistake was that you assumed all black people were the same, because to you they look the same.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“You did a lot of research on Zangaro; you even found out about the tens of thousands of immigrant workers who virtually keep this place running. It never occurred to you that those workers form a community of their own. They’re a third tribe, the most intelligent and hardworking one in the country. Given half a chance, they can play a part in the political life of the country. What’s more, you failed to recognize that the new army of Zangaro, and therefore the power in the country, might be recruited from among that third community. In fact, it just has been. Those soldiers you saw were neither Vindu nor Caja. There were fifty in uniform and armed when you were in the palace, and by tonight there’ll be another fifty. In five days there will be over four hundred new soldiers in Clarence—untrained, of course, but looking efficient enough to keep law and order. They’ll be the real power in this country from now on. There was a coup d’état last night, all right, but it wasn’t conducted for or on behalf of Colonel Bobi.”
“For whom, then?”
“For the general.”
“Which general?”
Shannon told him the name.
Endean faced him, mouth open in horror. “Not him. He was defeated, exiled.”
“For the moment, yes. Not necessarily forever. Those immigrant workers are his people. They call them the Jews of Africa. There are one and a half million of them scattered over this continent. In many areas they do most of the work and have most of the brains. Here in Zangaro they live in the shantytown behind Clarence.”
“That stupid great idealistic bastard—”
“Careful,” warned Shannon.
“Why?”
Shannon jerked his head over his shoulder. “They’re the general’s soldiers too.”
Endean turned and looked at the three impassive faces above the three Schmeisser barrels.
“They don’t speak English all that well, do they?”
“The one in the middle,” said Shannon mildly, “was a chemist once. Then he became a soldier; then his wife and four children were wiped out by a Saladin armored car. They’re made by Alvis in Coventry, you know. He doesn’t like the people who were behind that.”
Endean was silent for a few more miles. “What happens now?”
“The Committee of National Reconciliation takes over,” said Shannon. “Four Vindu members, four Caja, and two from the immigrant community. But the army will be made up of the people behind you. And this country will be used as a base and a headquarters. From here the newly trained men will go back one day to avenge what was done to them. Maybe the general will come and set up residence here—in effect, to rule.”
“You expect to get away
with that?”
“You expected to impose that slobbering ape Bobi and get away with it. At least the new government will be moderately fair. That mineral deposit, or whatever it was, that you were after—I don’t know where or what it is, but I can deduce that there has to be something here to interest Sir James Manson. No doubt the new government will find it, eventually. And no doubt it will be exploited. But if you want it, you will have to pay for it. A fair price, a market price. Tell Sir James that when you get back home.”
Around the corner they came within view of the border post. News travels fast in Africa, even without telephone, and the Vindu soldiers on the border post were gone.
Shannon stopped the truck and pointed ahead. “You can walk the rest,” he said.
Endean climbed down. He looked back at Shannon with undiluted hatred. “You still haven’t explained why,” he said. “You’ve explained what and how, but not why.”
Shannon stared ahead up the road. “For nearly two years,” he said musingly, “I watched between half a million and a million small kids starved to death because of people like you and Manson. It was done basically so that you and your kind could make bigger profits through a vicious and totally corrupt dictatorship, and it was done in the name of law and order, of legality and constitutional justification. I may be a fighter, I may be a killer, but I am not a bloody sadist. I worked out for myself how it was done and why it was done, and who were the men behind it. Visible up front were a bunch of politicians and Foreign Office men, but they are just a cage full of posturing apes, neither seeing nor caring past their interdepartmental squabbles and their reelection. Invisible behind them were profiteers like your precious James Manson. That’s why I did it. Tell Manson when you get back home. I’d like him to know. Personally. From me. Now get walking.”
Ten yards on, Endean turned around. “Don’t ever come back to London, Shannon,” he called. “We can deal with people like you there.”
“I won’t,” yelled Shannon. Under his breath he murmured, “I won’t ever have to.” Then he turned the truck around and headed for the peninsula and Clarence.
epilogue
The new government was duly installed, and at the last count was ruling humanely and well. There was hardly a mention of the coup in the European newspapers, just a brief piece in Le Monde to say that dissident units of the Zangaran army had toppled the President on the eve of Independence Day and that a governing council had taken over the administration pending national elections. But there was nothing in the newspaper to report that one of the council’s first acts was to inform Ambassador Dobrovolsky that the Soviet mining survey team would not be received, and new arrangements for surveying the area would be made in due course.
Big Janni Dupree and Tiny Marc Vlaminck were buried down on the point, beneath the palm trees, where the wind blows off the gulf. The graves were left unmarked at Shannon’s request. The body of Johnny was taken by his own people, who keened over him and buried him according to their own ways.
Simon Endean and Sir James Manson kept quiet about their parts in the affair. There was really nothing they could say publicly.
Shannon gave Jean-Baptiste Langarotti the £5000 remaining in his money belt from the operations budget, and the Corsican went back to Europe. He was last heard of heading for Burundi, where he wanted to train the Hutu partisans who were trying to oppose the Tutsi-dominated dictatorship of Micombero. As he told Shannon when they parted on the shore, “It’s not really the money. It was never for the money.”
Shannon wrote out letters to Signor Ponti in Genoa in the name of Keith Brown, ordering him to hand over the bearer shares controlling the ownership of the Toscana in equal parts to Captain Waldenberg and Kurt Semmler. A year later Semmler sold out his share to Waldenberg, who raised a mortgage to pay for it. Then Semmler went off to another war. He died in South Sudan, when he, Ron Gregory, and Rip Kirby were laying a mine to knock out a Sudanese Saladin armored car. The mine went off, killing Kirby instantly and badly injuring Semmler and Gregory. Gregory got home via the British Embassy in Ethiopia, but Semmler died in the bush.
The last thing Shannon did was to send letters to his bank in Switzerland through Langarotti, ordering the bank to make a credit transfer of £5000 to the parents of Janni Dupree in Paarl, Cape Province, and another in the same sum to a woman called Anna who ran a bar in the Kleinstraat in Ostend’s red-light district.
He died a month after the coup, the way he had told Julie he wanted to go, with a gun in his hand and blood in his mouth and a bullet in the chest. But it was his own gun and his own bullet. It was not the risks or the danger or the fighting that destroyed him, but the trivial black mole on the back of his neck. That was what he had learned from Dr. Dunois in the Paris surgery. Up to a year if he took things easy, less than six months if he pushed himself, and the last month would be bad. So he went out alone when he judged the time had come, and walked into the jungle with his gun and a fat envelope full of typescript, which was sent to a friend in London some weeks later.
The natives who saw him walking alone, and later brought him back to the town for burial, said he was whistling when he went. Being simple peasants, growers of yams and cassava, they did not know what the whistling was. It was a tune called “Spanish Harlem.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Frederick Forsyth is the author of fifteen novels and short story collections. A former Air Force pilot and print and television reporter for the BBC, he has had four movies and two television miniseries made from his works. He lives in Hertfordshire, England.
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FREDERICK FORSYTH
THE AFGHAN
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THE COBRA
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THE AFGHAN
If the young Talib bodyguard had known that making the cell phone call would kill him, he would not have done it. But he did not know, so he did, and it did.
On the seventh of July 2005, four suicide bombers let off their haversack bombs in Central London. They killed fifty-two commuters and injured about seven hundred, at least one hundred crippled for life.
Three of the four were British born and raised out of Pakistani immigrant parentage. The fourth was a Jamaican by birth, British by naturalization, and had converted to Islam. He and one other were still teenagers; the third was twenty-two and the group leader thirty. All had been radicalized, or brainwashed, into extreme fanaticism, not abroad but right in the heart of England after attending extremist mosques and listening to similar preachers.
Within twenty-four hours of the explosion, they had been identified and traced to various residences in and around the northern city of Leeds; indeed, all had spoken with varying strengths of Yorkshire accent. The leader was a special-needs teacher called Mohammad Siddique Khan.
During the scouring of their homes and possessions, the police discovered a small treasure trove that they chose not to reveal. There were four receipts showing that one of the senior two had bought cell phones of the buy-use-and-throw variety, triband versions usable almost anywhere in the world, and each containing a prepaid SIM card worth about twenty pounds sterling. The phones had all been bought for cash and all were missing. But the police traced their numbers and “red-flagged” them all in case they ever came onstream.
It was also discovered that Siddique Khan and his closest intimate in the group, a young Punjabi called Shehzad Tanweer, had visited Pakistan the previous November and spent three months there. No trace was found of whom they had seen, but weeks after the explosions the Arab TV station Al Jazeera broadcast a defiant video made by Siddique Khan as he planned his death, and it was clear this video had been made during that visit to Islamabad.
It was not until late 2006 that it also became clear that one of the bombers took one of the “lily-white” untraceable cell phones with him and presented it to his Al Qaeda organizer
/instructor. (The British police had already established that none of the bombers had the technical skill to create the bombs themselves without instruction and help.)
Whoever this AQ higher-up was, he seems to have passed on the gift as a token of respect to a member of the elite inner committee grouped around the person of Osama bin Laden in his invisible hideaway in the bleak mountains of South Waziristan that run along the Pakistani/Afghan border west of Peshawar. It would have been given for emergency purposes only, because all AQ operatives are extremely wary of cell phones, but the donor could not have known at the time that the British fanatic would be stupid enough to leave the receipt lying around his desk in Leeds.
There are four divisions to bin Laden’s inner committee. They deal with operations, financing, propaganda and doctrine. Each branch has a chieftain, and only bin Laden and his coleader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, outrank them. By September 2006, the chief organizer of finance for the entire terror group was al-Zawahiri’s fellow Egyptian, Tewfik al-Qur.
For reasons which became plain later, he was under deep disguise in the Pakistani city of Peshawar on September 15, not departing on an extensive and dangerous tour outside the mount redoubt but returning from one. He was waiting for the arrival of the guide who would take him back into the Waziri peaks and into the presence of the Sheikh himself.
To protect him in his brief stay in Peshawar, he had been assigned four local zealots belonging to the Taliban movement. As befits men who originate in the northwestern mountains, the chain of fierce tribal districts that runs along this ungovernable frontier, they were technically Pakistanis but tribally Waziris. They spoke Pashto rather than Urdu, and their loyalties were to the Pashtun people, of whom the Waziris are a subbranch.
All were raised from the gutter in a madrassah, or Koranic boarding school, of extreme orientation, adhering to the Wahhabi sect of Islam, the harshest and most intolerant of all. They had no knowledge of, or skill in, anything other than reciting the Koran, and were thus, like teeming millions of madrassah-raised youths, virtually unemployable. But, given a task to do by their clan chief, they would die for it. That September, they had been charged with protecting the middle-aged Egyptian, who spoke Nilotic Arabic but had enough Pashto to get by. One of the four youths was Abdelahi, and his pride and joy was his cell phone. Unfortunately, its battery was flat because he had forgotten to recharge it.