Rogue's March (12 page)

Lowenthal's secretary came in. “Sorry, but it's Franz from USIS. He says it's urgent.”

Lowenthal picked up the phone, listened for a minute, and turned to Selvey. “Dick Franz says there's a tank burning near the USIS cultural center. That's in the commercial district, outside Malunga, so the fighting has spread.”

“That's bullshit too,” Selvey drawled. “Everyone's an expert all of a sudden, even my wife. Tell him it's a sound truck from the national radio trying to scare them bimbos back into Malunga. I saw it myself. Some bird put a couple of rounds in the gas tank—shooting with his eyes closed, like you folks. You got any coffee out there, hon?”

“I'll see,” Lowenthal's secretary answered. “Just instant, I think.”

Lowenthal put the phone down. “How bad is it in Malunga? What's the Belgian military attaché saying?”

Selvey took out his notebook and pulled on his half-moon reading glasses. “He says the workers party has guns and is passing them out to anyone who can use them, automatic weapons, mostly. He saw a few crates of Molotov cocktails taken by the paras. He also saw a para ammo carrier loaded with captured weapons outside Malunga—Kalashnikovs, he said. The Israeli attaché saw a weapons carrier too, but it could have been the same one. That's another problem—everyone singing from the same sheet of music, so maybe it sounds worse than it is.” He turned the page. “A few Simonov semi-automatic carbines too, some Makarov pistols—all Russian. The Israeli counted twenty-seven dead
jeunesse
at the government hospital, most dead of chest wounds, blown away at close range. Some had bandoliers of 7.65 ammo, he said, like Chinese bandits. More dead bodies at the Swedish hospital, the British attaché told me, but the paras closed off the gate, and he couldn't get a body count.”

“How much worse do you think it will get?” Lowenthal asked, troubled.

“I dunno. It's hard to say. But any time the communes have guns, you've got a peck of trouble, that's for goddamn sure, I don't care how many guns they've got. Then you turn the paras loose and the army too, you've got more, I don't care if all they're packing is beer bellies and barrel staves. If the native communes bust out, then we're in for it. This whole city will go up in smoke and there's not a goddamn thing GHQ or the para brigade or anyone else can do about it.

“You've got maybe a million nigras out there in the slums with nothing between them and us but a half-assed army that'll run sooner than it'll get shot at, and after ten minutes ain't an army any more. If the communes get mad enough, get the grit in their craw bad enough, and get moving quick enough, they'll take it all, the whole farm—the commercial district, the embassies, the port, all of it. Everything they can tote away they will, and if they can't tote it, eat it, or smash it, they'll burn it. They'll go through this town like salts through grandma, nothing but green gravy left where they've done their business—

“Thanks, sugar.” He took the cup of instant coffee passed to him by Lowenthal's secretary, who stood listening in terror. “And after that the paras and the army will pull back to a hilltop perimeter around the President's compound and let it blow itself out. Then in a few days after everyone's dead drunk, sleeping it off back in shanty town, the army and paras will come on back in, shoot a few strays, and hose out the streets. But that's assuming the army holds together. You got this tribal mess to think about too—the President's generals on the one hand, the colonels on the other, the sergeants down below, the lieutenants and captains somewhere in the middle. So that could blow the army apart too, everyone fighting each other. So I wouldn't bet on anything right now. What worries me is the embassy, the dependents. My headquarters want to know what we're going to do about an evacuation. They've got a couple of C-141 MAC flights holding in Jo-burg, waiting for me to let them know.”

Selvey drank from his coffee cup, grimacing painfully.

“The airport's closed,” Lowenthal said, discouraged.

“Then we'll get them to open it. There's no fighting out there.” He looked at his coffee cup. “What the shit did she put in this—saltpeter?”

“It's something we can talk to the ambassador about. I doubt that he'd favor it. It would suggest he was not at all sanguine about the regime's ability to keep order.”

“What the hell does he want—a few dead bodies? I'm talking about dependents, women and kids, not a few old grunts like us.”

“We'll ask him, certainly. But what he'll want to know is how the guns got into Malunga, where they came from.” Lowenthal sat back, picking up his yellow pad. “How do you think they managed it?”

“Who managed it?”

“The workers party,” Lowenthal said, surprised.

“I don't know,” Selvey said. “I'm not sure of anything right now. You'd have to say they came from across the river, I reckon—from the Sovs and Cubans. Maybe they cut a deal with Masakita, told him they'd support a peoples republic. You have to figure something like that, but I'd say it's goddamn stupid. Ask Andy when he comes in. He's the one doing the bean count on the Sovs.”

“It's clear it started in Malunga.”

Selvey nodded. “I'd say so.”

“At the workers party compound, where these radio appeals for foreign help are coming from?”

“I don't know about that.”

“We know they've been training a paramilitary brigade at their agricultural camp at Mundi,” Lowenthal continued, “just as we've always known it was a Marxist party, masquerading as a professional workers union under the President's policy of national reconciliation. Why should we now be surprised to discover they have guns? They've probably had guns for a long time.”

The symmetry pleased Lowenthal. Nothing else he'd heard had. But Colonel Selvey was silent, still undecided. He shared the army's suspicions of Pierre Masakita. The return from exile had been a fait accompli, arranged secretly by the President and kept from the army, the cabinet, and the old politicians until the day of his return, when the old cabinet was dismissed, new elections promised, and a new government of national reconciliation formed. With the ban on political parties lifted, Masakita worked to rebuild the old teachers and professional workers party, but his activity only increased army suspicions, convincing the general staff and GHQ, all loyal to the President, that Masakita was quietly rebuilding his power base while transforming the youth wing of the party, the
jeunesse
, into a paramilitary unit, similar to the old
jeunesse
who'd devastated the countryside during the rebellions.

“I'd say you're probably right, except for the police camp at Bakole,” Selvey said finally. “Those grunts out there aren't socialists or Marxists. So how come they're getting clobbered by the paras?”

“There's always been bad blood between the police and army,” Lowenthal replied, still searching for symmetry, “but it's primarily tribal. Therefore, it has no ideological base, while the other manifestly does.”

“You mean it's still a little fucked up,” Selvey drawled cheerfully, as bright as a street sparrow suddenly, bobbing after the junkman's horse.

Chapter Ten

Between the mud walls, the laterite road in Malunga was blocked by abandoned carts, trucks, and cars. The commune was partially ablaze to the south. Africans were moving away from the fires and the tattoo of rifle shot, four and five abreast in the road and along the septic ditches. As Reddish watched, sixty meters down the road a wooden building took a phosphorus grenade through a window, flared like a gasoline-soaked rag, and began to burn. He stood in the door of his Fiat, his face wet, blue tennis shirt soaked, ashes from a burning hut nearby falling against his brow and shoulders. He heard quick bursts of rifle fire echo from the rear of a building beyond and watched a long flaming timber fall from the second-floor roof, pulling a tail of blazing embers after it to the road. A few minutes earlier, youths from the workers party
jeunesse
had been on the roof firing pistols at the paras.

“
Kende, patron,
” an old African voice urged him. “
Kende
, go now.” But the dark wrinkled face passed beneath him in the shadows before he turned. Beyond the stalled vehicles further down the road, the headquarters compound of the workers party was under siege. A few weak muzzle tongues of flame licked from the darkness of the second-floor windows and along the roof under the trees. In the road a quartet of armored cars blocked the approaches from both directions. Firing popped from the rear of the two-acre compound where a dilapidated old building lay. Once a Protestant mission school, it had been converted by the party into barracks and classrooms for the youth wing. Behind the armored cars, crouched in the shelter of the compound wall, a score of red-bereted paras crouched or sat, their fire desultory. None wore helmets. In the light of a truck's headlights, a para captain with a swagger stick chased away the curious. A small boy who'd passed Reddish's Fiat a minute earlier pushed his way through the small crowd and dropped a wooden beer crate at the feet of the captain, who lifted a bottle for himself and pushed the crate with his foot toward his two subalterns squatting in the lee of the armored car. An old woman was selling groundnuts nearby.

Several vehicles were overturned inside the party compound. A cream-colored auto smoldered steadily, its upholstery ignited, its windows broken out.

Behind Reddish's Fiat, an army truck blocked the road in front of a small
petit marché
. The squad of soldiers who'd climbed from beneath the rear canvas were examining the identity papers of the Africans retreating down the road, searching for weapons and fleeing rebels. To the west, an orange glow hovered over the trees in the direction of the Bakole police camp.

The gunfire from the party compound was sporadic—smallbore handguns, he thought, crossing the road and moving through the crowd. He climbed the bank to the wall beyond, hoisting himself into the shadows of a barren avocado tree, looking toward the center of the compound to see if the paras inside had taken prisoners. He saw no one. A few dead bodies lay crumpled behind the burning vehicles, automatic rifles lying nearby. In the compound directly in front of him, hidden two walls away from the firefight, a plump woman was calmly sweeping the bare earth with a palm frond, indifferent to the gunfire. Two small boys were pounding a manioc pestle, brought back to their work by a sharp command from their mother when they let their attention escape to the nearby confusion. Government business, not hers, Reddish guessed, looking at a man in a blue fishnet undershirt who sat slumped against the wall of the house. An empty palm wine vessel was at his feet. He was massaging his woolly head drunkenly, muttering to himself, and lifting his swimming eyes from time to time to shout threats at the rifle fire beyond the two walls.

Reddish left the wall and went back down the road toward the
marché
. Old women still sat in the rush-covered stalls whose counters were stacked with piles of two and three cigarettes, silver flakes of dried fish, and bright red peppers of
pele-pele
, all husbanded in small frugal heaps purchasable for a few francs. Next door a small open-air bar still served customers, although most had fled. A pair of young prostitutes remained, drinking beer. The soldiers checking documents behind the truck sometimes called to them, but they only giggled to themselves, covering their mouths as they turned away.

A gasoline tank in one of the overturned vehicles exploded suddenly, and the crowd surged forward along the road, blown forward by the detonation. The Africans in their compounds were drawn to their gates to watch, even the prostitutes stood up to join the market women at the edge of the road. “Has the army finally finished with them?” called an old grandmother. “Sent them to the devil so we can walk in peace now?”

A burst of automatic weapons fire followed from the paras. Through the heat of the burning car, Reddish followed the curling images of a few paras dodging through the gate and into the compound. The army truck at the
marché
began to crawl forward, followed by the squad of soldiers examining identity cards. Reddish moved quickly back toward his Fiat before they accosted him.

“
Monsieur! Oh, monsieur
!” He heard a voice, as light and exhausted as the night wind, and stopped abruptly, searching the faces passing in the shadows. No one turned his way and he went back to the car. As he reached the door Alphonse Nyembo's face lifted through the open window on the far side where he'd been waiting. An embassy consular clerk, he worked as a librarian at the workers party headquarters on evenings and weekends. At four-thirty he'd called Reddish to warn him there would be shooting in Malunga.

“I've been looking all over for you. Get in.”

“No, follow me. Quickly. Bring the car.”

“Where? What for?”

“There's no time. Follow me. This way.”

Nyembo dodged ahead and Reddish drove forward after him down the road toward the approaching truck, turned across a shallow ditch and into a narrow cart lane concealed behind the compound walls. The lane disappeared in a narrow footpath under the trees where a small white Volkswagen stood abandoned, engine hood up. Reddish left the car and followed Nyembo to a concrete-block wash house twenty meters beyond, hidden behind a screen of shrubbery. Reddish stopped outside warily, listening.

“Here,” Nyembo called from inside. “Hurry, please.”

The interior was dark. Reddish struck his lighter. Nyembo was kneeling next to a figure lying on the floor.

“Who is it?”

“They left him here, left him here for the soldiers.”

“Left who here?” Reddish asked softly, kneeling. He supposed the wounded man was a tribal cousin. A bloody rag was tied across his forehead, partially masking his face. Blood soaked the front of his Mao tunic. His body was twisted awkwardly, as if he were protecting a shoulder wound.