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It had cost Sir James Manson 2 shillings to buy each of the 300,000 shares, then quoted at 1 shilling and 1 pe
All in all, Thorpe reckoned it was cheap at the price. Even more important, it was untraceable. Thorpe’s name appeared nowhere on any document; the a
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Benoit Lambert, known to friends and police as Be
For some strange reason the mercenary leader had taken a liking to the timorous little man and had given him a job at headquarters, which kept him well away from combat. He had been useful in his job, because it enabled him to exercise to good effect the one talent he really did possess. He was a wizard at obtaining things. He seemed to be able to conjure up eggs where there were no chickens and whisky where there was no still. In the headquarters of any military unit, such a man is always useful, and most units have one. He had stayed with the Sixth Commando for nearly a year, until May 1967, when he spotted trouble brewing in the form of a pending revolt by Schramme’s Tenth Commando against the Congolese government He felt—rightly, as it turned out—that Denard and the Sixth might be drawn into this fracas and there would be an opportunity for all, including headquarters staff, to see some real combat. For Be
To his surprise, he had been allowed to go.
Back in France, he had cultivated the notion of himself as a mercenary and later had called himself an arms dealer. The first he certainly was not, but as for arms, with his variety of contacts he had occasionally been able to provide an item of weaponry here and there, usually hand guns for the underworld, occasionally a case of rifles. He had also come to know an African diplomat who was prepared, for a price, to provide a moderately serviceable End User Certificate in the form of a letter from the Ambassador’s personal desk, complete with embassy stamp. Eighteen months earlier he .had mentioned this in a bar to a Corsican called Langarotti.
Nevertheless, he was surprised on Friday evening to hear the Corsican on the phone, calling long distance to tell him he would be visited at his home the next day or Sunday by Cat Sha
“Yes, I think I can get that certificate,” he said when Sha
It was a lie, for his dealings were very infrequent, but he was sure he could swing the deal.
“How much?” asked Sha
“Fifteen thousand francs,” said Be
“Merde,” said Sha
Lambert calculated. The sum was just over eleven thousand francs at the current rate. “Okay,” he said.
“You let out one word of this, and I’ll slit your gizzard like a chicken,” said Sha
“Not a word, honest,” protested Be
Sha
Lambert was about to protest but realized it would do no good. The Irishman did not trust him.
“I’ll call you here on Wednesday,” said Sha
When he had gone, Be
The following evening Sha
It was a long drive upcountry. The taxi was hot and rattled abominably. It was still the height of the dry season, and the sky above the oil-palm plantations was robin’s-egg blue, without a cloud. Sha
It was familiar to him, more so than the cities of Western Europe. Familiar were the sounds and the smells, the villagers walking along the edge of the road to market, columns of women in Indian file, their gourds and bundles of wares balanced on their heads, unwaveringly steady.
At each village they passed, the usual morning market was set out beneath the shade of the palm-thatch roofs of the rickety stalls, the villagers bargaining and chattering, buying and selling, the women tending the stalls while the men sat in the shade and talked of important matters that only they could understand, and the naked brown children scampering through the dust between the legs of their parents and the stalls.
Sha
The guards checked him at the gate, frisking him from ankles to armpits, before letting him pay off the taxi and enter the gate. Inside, he recognized a face, one of the personal attendants of the man he had come to see. The servant gri
He was staring out of the windows, feeling the cool of the air-conditioner dry out his clothes, when he heard the creak of a door and the soft sound of a sandal on tiles behind him. He turned around.
The general was much the same as when they had last met on the darkened airstrip, the same luxuriant beard, the same deep bass voice.
“Well, Major Sha
He was bantering, as he usually did. Sha
“I’ve come down because I need something, sir. And because there is something I think we ought to talk over. An idea in the back of my head.”
“There’s not much that an impoverished exile can offer you,” said the general, “but I’ll always listen to your ideas. If I remember rightly, you used to have some fairly good ones.”
Sha
The two men talked through the lunch hour and through the afternoon. They were still discussing when darkness fell, Sha