Dogs of War (23 page)

them and that they did not need to know. It was not a question of lack of trust, simply of security. If a leak were sprung in the secret, they did not want to be among the possible suspects.
Shannon spoke in strongly accented French, which he had picked up in the Sixth Commando in the Congo. He knew Vlaminck had a reasonable grasp of English, as a barman in Ostend must have, and that Semmler commanded a vocabulary of about two hundred words. But Langarotti knew very little indeed, so French was the common language, except when Dupree was present, when everything had to be translated.
"So that's it," said Shannon as he finished. "The terms are that you all go on a salary of twelve hundred and fifty dollars a month from tomorrow morning, plus expenses for living and traveling while in Europe. The budget is ample for the job. Only two of the tasks that have to be done in the preparation stages are illegal, because I've planned to keep the maximum strictly legal. Of these tasks, one is a border crossing from Belgium to France, the other a problem of loading some cases onto a ship somewhere in southern Europe. We'll all be involved in both jobs.
"You get three months' guaranteed salary, plus five thousand dollars' bonus each for success. So what do you say?"
The three men looked at each other. Vlaminck nodded. "I'm on," he said. "Like I said yesterday, it looks good."
Langarotti stropped his knife. "Is it against French interests?" he asked. "I don't want to be an exile."
"You have my word it is not against the French in Africa."
"D'accord," said the Corsican simply.
"Kurt?" asked Shannon.
"What about insurance?" asked the German. "It doesn't matter for me, I have no relatives, but what about Marc?"
The Belgian nodded. "Yes, I don't want to leave Anna with nothing," he said.
Mercenaries on contract are usually insured by the contractor for $20,000 for loss of life and $6000 for loss of a major limb.
"You have to take out your own, but it can be as high as you want to go. If anything happens to anyone, the rest swear blind he was lost overboard at sea by accident. If anyone gets badly hurt and survives, we all swear the injury was caused by shifting machinery on board. You all take out insurance for a sea trip from Europe to South Africa as passengers on a small freighter. Okay?"
The three men nodded.
"I'm on," said Semmler.
They shook on it, and that was enough. Then Shannon went into the jobs he wanted each man to do.
"Kurt, you'll get your first salary check and one thousand dollars for expenses on Friday. I want you to go down to the Mediterranean and start looking for a boat. I need a small freighter with a clean record. Get that: it must be clean. Papers in order, ship for sale. One hundred to two hundred tons, coaster or converted trawler, possibly converted navy vessel if need be, but not looking like an MTB. I don't want speed, but reliability. The sort that can pick up a cargo in a Mediterranean port without exciting attention, even an. arms cargo. Registered as a general freighter owned by a small company or its own skipper. Price not over twenty-five thousand pounds, including the cost of any work that needs doing on it. Absolute latest sailing date, fully fueled and supplied for a trip to Cape Town, not later than sixty days from now. Got it?"
Semmler nodded and began to think at once of his contacts in the shipping world.
"Jean-Baptiste, which city do you know best in the Mediterranean?"
"Marseilles," said Langarotti without hesitation.
"Okay. You get salary and five hundred pounds on Friday. Get to Marseilles, set up in a small hotel, and start looking. Find me three large inflatable semi-rigid craft of the same kind as Zodiac makes. The sort de-
veloped for water sports from the basic design of the Marine Commando assault craft. Buy them from separate suppliers, then book them into the bonded warehouse of a respectable shipping agent for export to Morocco. Purpose, water-skiing and sub-aqua diving at a holiday resort. Color, black. Also three powerful outboard engines, battery-started. The boats should take up to a ton of payload. The engines should move such a craft and that weight at not less than ten knots, with a big reserve. You'll need about sixty horsepower. Very important: make sure they are fitted with underwater exhausts for silent running. If they can't be had in that condition, get a mechanic to make you three exhaust-pipe extensions with the necessary outlet valves, to fit the engines. Store them at the same export agent's bonded warehouse, for the same purpose as the dinghies: water sports in Morocco. You won't have enough money in the five hundred. Open a bank account and send me the name and number, by mail, to this address. I'll send the money by credit transfer. Buy everything separately, and submit me the price lists by mail here. Okay?"
Langarotti nodded and resumed his knife-stropping.
"Marc. You remember you mentioned once that you knew a man in Belgium had knocked off a German store of a thousand brand-new Schmeisser submachine pistols in nineteen-forty-five and still had half of them in store? I want you to go back to Ostend on Friday with your salary and five hundred pounds and locate that man. See if he'll sell. I want a hundred, and in first-class working order. I'll pay a hundred dollars each, which is way over the rate. Write me by letter only, here at this flat, when you have found the man and can set up a meeting between him and me. Got it?"
By nine-thirty they were through, the instructions memorized, noted, and understood.
"Right. What about a spot of dinner?" Shannon asked his colleagues.
He took them around the corner to the Paprika for a meal. They still spoke in French, but no one else took much notice, except to glance over when a loud burst of laughter came from the group of four. Evidently they were excited at something, though none of the diners could have surmised that what elated the group in the corner was the prospect of going once again to war under the leadership of Cat Shannon.
Across the Channel another man was thinking hard about Carlo Alfred Thomas Shannon, and his thoughts were not charitable. He paced the living room of his apartment on one of the residential boulevards near the Place de la Bastille and considered the information he had been gathering for the previous week, and the snippet from Marseilles that had reached him several hours earlier.
If the writer who had originally recommended Charles Roux to Simon Endean as a second possible mercenary for Endean's project had known more about the Frenchman, his description would not have been so complimentary. But he knew only the basic facts of the man's background and little about his character. Nor did he know, and thus was unable to tell Endean, of the vitriolic hatred that Roux bore for the other man he had recommended, Cat Shannon.
After Endean had left Roux, the Frenchman had waited a full fortnight for a second contact to be made. When it never came, he was forced to the conclusion either that the project in the mind of the visitor who had called himself Walter Harris had been abandoned, or that someone else had got the job.
Pursuing the latter line of inquiry, he had looked for anyone among the other possible selections that the English businessman could have made. It was while he was making these inquiries, or having them made for him, that he had learned Cat Shannon had been in Paris, staying under his own name at a small hotel in Montmartre. This had shaken Roux, for he had lost trace of Shannon after their parting at Le Bourget Airport and had thought the man had left Paris.
At this point, more than a week earlier, he had briefed one of the men he knew to be loyal to him to make intensive inquiries about Shannon. The man was called Henri Alain and was a former mercenary.
Alain had reported back within twenty-four hours that Shannon had left his Montmartre hotel and not reappeared. He had also been able to tell Roux two other things: that Shannon's disappearance had taken place the morning after Roux had received the London businessman in his own apartment, and that Shannon had also received a visitor the same afternoon. The hotel clerk, with a little currency persuasion, had been able to describe Shannon's visitor, and privately Roux had no doubt the visitor in Montmartre had been the same man who came to him.
So Mr. Harris from London had seen two mercenaries in Paris, although he needed only one. As a result, Shannon had disappeared while he, Roux, had been left on the shelf. That it was Shannon of all people who seemed to have got the contract made his rage even worse, for there was no one the man in the flat in the 11th arrondissement hated more.
He had had Henri Alain stake out the hotel for four days, but Shannon had not come back. Then he tried another tack. He recalled that newspaper reports had linked Shannon with the Corsican Langarotti in the fighting in the last days of the enclave. Presumably if Shannon was back in circulation, so was Langarotti. So he had sent Henri Alain to Marseilles to find the Corsican and discover where Shannon might be. Alain had just arrived back, bearing the news that Langarotti had left Marseilles that same afternoon. Destination, London.
Roux turned to his informant. "Bon, Henri. That's all. I'll contact you when I need you. Meantime, the clerk in the Montmartre place will let you know if Shannon returns?"
"Sure," said Alain as he rose to go.
"Then ring me immediately if you hear."
When Alain had gone, Roux thought things over. For him the disappearance of Langarotti to London of all places meant the Corsican had gone to join Shannon there. That in turn meant Shannon was recruiting, and that could only mean he had got a contract. Roux had no doubt it was Walter Harris's contract, one he felt he personally should have had. It was an impertinence, compounded by the recruiting of a Frenchman, and on French territory, which Roux regarded as being his own exclusive preserve.
There was another reason why he wanted the Harris contract. He had not worked since the Bukavu affair, and his ability to keep his hold over the French mercenary community was likely to slip unless he could produce some form of work for it. If Shannon was unable to continue, if for instance he were to disappear permanently, Mr. Harris would presumably have to come back to Roux and engage him, as he should have done in the first place.
Without further delay he made a local Paris phone call.
Back in London, the dinner was nearing its end. The men had drunk a lot of carafe wine, for, like most mercenaries, they preferred it. Tiny Marc raised his glass and proposed the often-heard toast of the Congo.
Vive la mort, vive la guerre,
Vive le sacrי mercenaire.
Sitting back in his chair, clear-headed while the rest got drunk, Cat Shannon wondered idly how much havoc would be wreaked when he let slip this group of dogs on Kimba's palace. Silently he raised his own glass and drank to the dogs of war.
Charles Roux was forty-eight, and several parts mad, although the two facts were quite unconnected. He could never have been certified insane, but most psy-
chiatnsts would at least have held him to be mentally unstable. The basis for such a diagnosis would have been the presence of a fair degree of megalomania, but this is present in many people outside lunatic asylums and is usually more kindly interpreted, at least when present in the rich and famous, as merely exaggerated egocentricity.
The same psychiatrists would probably have detected a tinge of paranoia, and a severe examiner might have gone so far as to suggest there was a streak of the psychopath in the French mercenary. But as Roux had never been examined by a skilled psychiatrist, and as his instability was usually well camouflaged beneath an exterior of some intelligence and considerable cunning, these questions were never raised.
The only exterior clues to his make-up lay in his capacity to impute a status and importance to himself that was wholly illusory, a self-pity that insisted he had never once been at fault but that all others who disagreed with him were wholly in the wrong, and the capacity for vicious hatred toward those he felt had wronged him.
Often the victims of his hatred had done little or nothing beyond frustrating Roux, but in Shannon's case there were at least grounds for the dislike.
Roux had been a top sergeant in the French army until his late thirties, when he was dismissed after an affair involving certain missing funds. In 1961, at a loose end, he had paid his own fare to Katanga and proposed himself as a well-qualified adviser to the secessionist movement of the then Katangese leader, Moi'se Tshombe. That year was the height of the struggle to tear the mineral-rich province of Katanga out of the union with the sprawling, anarchic, and newly independent Congo. Several of the men who later became mercenary chieftains began their freelance careers in the imbroglio in Katanga. Hoare, Denard, and Schramme were among them. Despite his claims to greater things, Roux was permitted only a small role
in the Katangese events, and when the mighty United Nations finally managed to vanquish the small bands of freebooting pistoleros—which had to be done politically, since it could not be done militarily—Roux was among those who got out.
That was in 1962. Two years later, with the Congo falling like a set of skittles to the Communist-backed Simbas, Tshombe was recalled from exile to take over not Katanga but the whole Congo. He in turn sent for Hoare, and Roux was among those who flew back to enter service under Hoare. As a Frenchman, he naturally would have been in the French-speaking Sixth Commando, but as he had been in South Africa at the time, it was to the Fifth that he went. Here he was put in charge of a company, and one of his section commanders six months later was a young Anglo-Irishman called Shannon.
Roux's break with Hoare came three months later. Already becoming convinced of his own superiority as a military commander, Roux was entrusted with the job of knocking out a Simba roadblock. He devised his own plan of attack, and it was a total disaster. Four white mercenaries were killed and more than a score of his Katangese levies. Part of the reason was the plan of attack, part the fact that Roux had been blind drunk. Behind the drunkenness was the secret certainty that, for all his bombast, Roux did not like combat.
Colonel Hoare called for a report from Roux and got it. Parts of it did not tally with the known facts. Hoare sent for the only surviving section commander, Carlo Shannon, and questioned him closely. From what emerged, he sent for Roux and dismissed him on the spot.
Roux went north and joined the Sixth Commando under Denard at Paulis, explaining his defection from the Fifth as being due to dislike of a superb French commander by the inferior British, a reason Denard found little difficulty in believing. He posted Roux as