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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, Sha
“I won’t,” yelled Sha
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 Ja
Simon Endean and Sir James Manson kept quiet about their parts in the affair. There was really nothing they could say publicly.
Sha
Sha
The last thing Sha
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.”