The Dogs Of War Part 28

Before sundown the tarpaulins were hauled off the equipment piled in rows along the main deck, and when darkness fell Shannon and Norbiatto began organizing the departure of the a.s.sault craft. The first over the side was the one Dupree would use. There was no point in using the derrick; the sea was only eight feet beneath the deck at the lowest point. The men lowered the fully inflated craft into the water manually, and Semmler and Dupree went down into it as it bobbed against the Toscana's side in the slow swell.

The two of them hoisted the heavy outboard engine into place over the stern and screwed it tight to the backboard. Before placing the m.u.f.fler on top of it, Semmler started the Johnson up and ran her for two minutes. The Serbian engineer had already given all three engines a thorough check-over, and it ran like a sewing machine. With the m.u.f.fling box on top, the noise died to a low hum.

Semmler climbed out, and the equipment was lowered to Dupree's waiting hands. There were the baseplates and sighting gear for both mortars, then the two mortar tubes. Dupree was taking forty mortar bombs for the palace and twelve for the barracks. To be on the safe side, he took sixty bombs, all primed and fused for detonation on impact.

He also took both flare-launching rockets and the ten flares, one of the gas-powered foghorns, one walkie-talkie, and his night gla.s.ses. Slung over his shoulder he had his personal Schmeisser, and tucked in his belt were five full magazines. The two Africans who were going with him, Timothy and Sunday, were the last into the a.s.sault craft.

When it was ready, Shannon stared down at the three faces that looked back up at him in the dun glow from the flashlight. "Good luck," he called softly.

For answer Dupree raised one thumb and nodded. Holding the painter of the a.s.sault craft, Semmler moved back along the rail while Dupree fended off from down below. When the craft was streamed astern of the Toscana in complete darkness, Semmler tied her painter to the after rail, leaving the three men to bob up and down on the swell.

The second boat took less time to get into the water, for the men had got the hang of it. Marc Vlaminck went down with Semmler to set the outboard engine in position, for this was their boat. Vlaminck was taking one bazooka and twelve rockets, two on his own body, the other ten carried by his back-up man, who was Patrick. Semmler had his Schmeisser and five magazines in easy-extraction pouches hung around his belt. He had a set of night gla.s.ses around his neck and the second walkie-talkie strapped to one thigh. As he was the only man who could speak German, French, and reasonable English, he would double as the main attack party's radio operator. When the two whites were ensconced in their craft, Patrick and Jinja, who would be Semmler's back-up man, slid down the Jacob's ladder from the Toscana and took their places.

The boat was streamed astern of the ship, and Dupree's painter was pa.s.sed to Semmler, who made it fast to his own a.s.sault craft. The two inflatable vessels bobbed behind the Toscana in line astern, separated by the length of rope, but none of their occupants said a word.

Langarotti and Shannon took the third and last boat. They were accompanied by Bartholomew and Johnny, the latter a big, grinning fighter who had been promoted at Shannon's insistence when they last fought together, but who had refused to take his own company, as his new rank ent.i.tled him to, preferring to stick close to Shannon and look after him.

Just before Shannon, who was the last man into the boats, descended the ladder, Captain Waldenberg appeared from the direction of the bridge and tugged at his sleeve. The German pulled the mercenary to one side and muttered quietly, "We may have a problem."

Shannon was immobile, frozen by the thought that something had gone seriously wrong. "What is it?" he asked.

"There's a ship. Lying off Clarence, farther out than we are."

"How long since you saw it?"

"Some time," said Waldenberg, "but I thought it must be cruising south down the coast, like us, or moving northward. But it's not; it's riding to."

"You're sure? There's no doubt about it?"

"None at all. When we came down the coast we were moving so slowly that if the other had been steaming in the same direction, she'd be well away by now. If northward, she'd have pa.s.sed us by now. She's immobile."

"Any indication of what she is, who she belongs to?"

The German shook his head. "The size of a freighter. No indication who she is, unless we contact her."

Shannon thought for several minutes. "If she were a freighter bringing cargo to Zangaro, would she anchor till morning before entering harbor?" he asked.

Waldenberg nodded. "Quite possible. Entry by night is frequently not allowed in some of the smaller ports along this coast. She's probably riding out until the morning before asking permission to enter port."

"If you've seen her, presumably she's seen you?" Shannon suggested.

"Bound to," said Waldenberg. "We're on her radar all right."

"Could her radar pick up the dinghies?"

"Unlikely," said the captain. "Too low in the water, most probably."

"We go ahead," said Shannon. "It's too late now. We have to a.s.sume she's just a freighter waiting out the night."

"She's bound to hear the firefight," said Waldenberg.

"What can she do about it?"

The German grinned. "Not much. If you fail, and we're not out of here before sunrise, she'll recognize the Toscana through binoculars."

"We mustn't fail, then. Carry on as ordered."

Waldenberg went back to his bridge. The middle-aged African doctor, who had watched the proceedings in silence, stepped forward.

"Good luck, Major," he said in perfectly modulated English. "G.o.d go with you."

Shannon felt like saying that he would have preferred a Wombat recoilless rifle, but held his tongue.

He knew these people took religion very seriously. He nodded, said, "Sure," and went over the side.

Out in the darkness, as he looked up at the dim blob of the Toscana's stern above him, there was complete silence but for the slap of the water against the rubberized hulls of the boats. Occasionally it gurgled behind the ship's rudder. From the landward side there was not a sound, for they were well out of earshot of the sh.o.r.e, and by the time they came close enough to hear shouts and laughter it would be well past midnight and, with luck, everyone would be asleep. Not that there was much laughter in Clarence, but Shannon was aware how far a single, sharp sound can travel over water at night, and everyone in his party, in the boats and on the Toscana, was sworn to silence and no smoking.

He glanced at his watch. It was quarter to nine. He sat back to wait.

At nine the hull of the Toscana emitted a low rumble, and the water beneath her stern began to churn and bubble, the phosph.o.r.escent white wake running back to slap against the snub nose of Shannon's a.s.sault craft. Then they were under way, and by dipping his fingers over the side he could feel the caress of the pa.s.sing water. Five hours to cover twenty-eight nautical miles.

The sky was still overcast, and the air was like that inside an old greenhouse, but a hole in the cloud cover let a little dim starlight through. Astern he could make out the craft of Vlaminck and Semmler at the end of twenty feet of rope, and somewhere behind them Janni Dupree was moving along in the wake of the Toscana.

The five hours went by like a nightmare. Nothing to do but watch and listen, nothing to see but the darkness and the glitter of the sea, nothing to hear but the low thump of the Toscana's old pistons moving inside her rusted hull. No one could sleep, despite the mesmeric rocking of the light craft, for the tensions were building up in every man in the operation.

But the hours did pa.s.s, somehow. Shannon's watch said five past two when the noise of the Toscana's engines died and she slowed to idle in the water. From above the after rail a low whistle came through the darkness-Waldenberg, letting him know they were in position for cast-off. Shannon turned his head to signal Semmler, but Dupree must have heard the whistle, for a few seconds later they heard his engine cough into life and begin to move away toward the sh.o.r.e. They never saw him go, just heard the low buzz of the engine under its m.u.f.fler vanishing into the darkness.

At the helm of his a.s.sault craft big Janni checked his power setting on the twist-grip he held in his right hand, and held his left arm with the compa.s.s as steady as he could under his eyes. He knew he should have four and a half miles to cover, angling in toward the coast, trying to make landfall on the outer side of the northern arm that curved around the harbor of Clarence. At that power setting, on that course, he should make it in thirty minutes. At twenty-five minutes he would shut the engine almost off and try to make out his landfall by. eyesight. If the others gave him one hour to set up his mortars and flare-rockets, they should move past the tip of the point toward their own beach landing just about the time he was ready. But for that hour he and his two Africans would be the only ones on the sh.o.r.e of Zangaro. That was all the more reason why they should be completely silent as they set up their battery.

Twenty-two minutes after he left the Toscana, Dupree heard a low psst from the bow of his dinghy. It was Timothy, whom he had posted as a lookout Dupree glanced up from his compa.s.s, and what he saw caused him to throttle back quickly. They were already close to a sh.o.r.eline, little more than three hundred yards away, and the dim starlight from the hole in the clouds above them showed a line of deeper darkness right ahead. Dupree squinted hard, easing the craft another two hundred yards insh.o.r.e. It was man- grove; he could hear the water chuckling among the roots. Far out to his right he could discern the line of vegetation ending and the single line of the horizon between sea and night sky running away to the end of vision. He had made landfall three miles along the northern coast of the peninsula.

He brought his boat about, still keeping the throttle very low and virtually silent, and headed back out to sea. He set the tiller to keep the sh.o.r.eline of the peninsula in vision at half a mile until he reached the limit of the strip of land at whose end the town of Clarence stood, then again headed slowly insh.o.r.e. At two hundred yards he could make out the long, low spit of gravel that he was seeking, and in the thirty-eighth minute after leaving the Toscana he cut the engine and let the a.s.sault craft drift on its own momentum toward the spit. It grounded with a soft grating of fabric on gravel.

Dupree stepped lightly down the boat, avoiding the piles of equipment, swung a leg over the prow, and dropped onto the sand. He felt for the painter and kept it in his hand to prevent the boat from drifting, away. For five minutes all three men remained immobile, listening for the slightest sound from the town they knew lay over the low hummock of gravel and scrub in front of them, and four hundred yards to the left. But there was no sound. They had arrived without causing any alarm.

When he was certain, Dupree slipped a marlin spike out of his belt, rammed it deep into the shingle of the sh.o.r.e, and tied the painter securely to it. Then he rose to a crouch and ran lightly up the hummock ahead of him. It was barely fifteen feet above sea level at its top, and covered in knee-high scrub that rustled against his boots. The rustling was no problem; it was drowned by the slap of the sea on the shingle and far too soft to be heard away in the town. Crouching at the spine of the strip of land that formed one arm of the harbor, Dupree looked over the top. To his left he could make out the spit running away into the dark- ness, and straight ahead lay more water, the flat mirror-calm of the protected harbor. The end of the spit of gravel was ten yards to his right.

Returning to the a.s.sault craft, he whispered to the two Africans to begin unloading the equipment in complete silence. As the bundles came onto the sh.o.r.e he picked them up and carried them one by one up to the top of the rise. Each metallic piece was covered in sacking to prevent noise if two should knock together.

When the whole of his weaponry was a.s.sembled, Dupree began to set it up. He worked fast and quietly. At the far end of the spit, where Shannon had told him there was a round, flat area, he set up his main mortar. He knew, if Shannon's measurements were accurate- and he trusted they would be-that the range from the tip of the land to the center of the palace courtyard was 781 yards. Using his compa.s.s, he pointed the mortar on the exact compa.s.s bearing Shannon had given him from the point he stood to the presidential palace, and carefully adjusted his mortar's elevation to drop his first range-finding bomb as near to the center of the palace courtyard as possible.

He knew that when the flares went up he would see not the whole palace but just the top story, so he could not watch the bomb hit the ground. But he would see the upward flash of the explosion over the brow of the ground behind the warehouse at the other end of the harbor, and that would be enough.

When he was finished with the first mortar, he set up the second. This was pointed at the barracks, and he put the baseplate ten yards away from the first, down the spine of the land on which he stood. He knew both range and bearing from this mortar to the barracks, and that the accuracy of the second mortar was not vital, since its purpose was to drop bombs at random into the acreage of the former police lines and scatter the Zangaran army men through panic. Timothy, who had been his sergeant on mortars the last time they fought, would handle the second mortar on his own.

He established a pile of a dozen mortar bombs next to the second tube, settled Timothy beside it, and whispered a few last instructions into his ear.

Between the two mortars he established the two flare-launching rockets and jammed one rocket down each launcher, leaving the other eight lying handy. Each flare was reputed to have a life of twenty seconds, so if he was to operate both his own mortar and the illuminations, he knew he would have to work fast and skillfully. He needed Sunday to pa.s.s him his mortar bombs from the stack he had built beside the emplacement.

When he was finished, he looked at his watch. Three twenty-two in the morning. Shannon and the other two boats must be off the sh.o.r.e somewhere, heading for the harbor. He took his walkie-talkie, extended the aerial to its full length, switched on, and waited the prescribed thirty seconds for it to warm up. From then on, it would not be switched off again. When he was ready, he pressed the blip b.u.t.ton three times at one-second intervals.

A mile off the sh.o.r.e, Shannon was at the helm of the leading a.s.sault craft, eyes straining into the darkness ahead. To his left side, Semmler kept the second craft in formation order, and it was he who heard the three buzzes from the walkie-talkie on his knee. He steered his boat softly into the side of Shannon's, so the two rounded sides scuffed each other. Shannon looked toward the other boat. Semmler hissed and pulled his boat away again to maintain station at 2 yards. Shannon was relieved. He knew Semmler had heard Dupree's signal across the water, and that the rangy Afrikaner was set up and waiting for them. Two minutes later, 1000 yards off the sh.o.r.e, Shannon caught the quick flash from Dupree's flashlight, heavily masked and bunkered to a pinpoint of light. It was off to his right, so he knew that he was heading too far north. In unison, the two craft swung to starboard, Shannon trying to recall the exact point from which the light had come and to head for a point 100 yards to the right of it. That would be the harbor entrance. The light came again when Dupree caught the low buzz of the two outboard engines as they were 300 yards from the tip of the point. Shannon spotted the light and changed course a few degrees.

Two minutes later, shut down to less than quarter-power and making no noise louder than a b.u.mblebee, the two a.s.sault craft went by the tip of the spit where Dupree was crouching, fifty yards out The South African caught the glitter of the wake, the bubbles from the exhausts rising to the surface; then they were gone into the harbor entrance and across the still water toward the warehouse on the other side.

There was still no sound from the sh.o.r.e when Shannon's straining eyes made out the bulk of the warehouse against the marginally lighter skyline, steered to the right, and grounded on the shingle of the fishing beach among the natives' dugout canoes and hanging fishnets.

Semmler brought his own boat to the sh.o.r.e a few feet away, and both engines died together. Like Du pree, all the men remained motionless for several minutes, waiting for an alarm to be called. They tried to make out the difference between the humped backs of the fishing canoes and the shape of a waiting ambush party. There was no ambush. Shannon and Semmler stepped over the side; each jabbed a marlin spike into the sand and tethered the boats to it. The rest followed. With a low, muttered "Come on, let's go," Shannon led the way across the beach and up the sloping incline to the 200-yard-wide plateau between the harbor and the silent palace of President Jean Kimba.

22.

The eight men ran in a low crouch, up through the scrubland of the hillside and out onto the plain at the top. It was after half past three, and no lights were burning in the palace. Shannon knew that halfway between the top of the rise and the palace 200 yards away they would meet the coast road, and standing at the junction would be at least two palace guards. He expected he would not be able to take them both silently, and that after the firing started the party would have to crawl the last hundred yards to the palace wall. He was right.

Out across the water, in his lonely vigil, big Janni Dupree waited for the shot that would send him into action. He had been briefed that whoever fired the shot, or however many there were, the first one would be his signal. He crouched close to the flare-launching rockets, waiting to let the first one go. In his spare hand was his first mortar bomb.

Shannon and Langarotti were out ahead of the other six when they made the road junction in front of the palace, and already both were wet with sweat. Their faces, darkened with sepia dye, were streaked by the running perspiration. The rent in the clouds above them was larger, and more stars showed through, so that, although the moon was still hidden, there was a dim light across the open area in front of the palace. At 100 yards Shannon could make out the line of the roof against the sky, though he missed the guards until he stumbled over one. The man was seated on the ground, snoozing.

Shannon was too slow and clumsy with the commando knife in his right hand. After stumbling, he recovered, but the Vindu guard rose with equal speed and emitted a brief yell of surprise. The call attracted his partner, also hidden in the uncut gra.s.s a few feet away. The second man rose, gurgled once as the Corsi can's knife opened his throat from carotid artery to jugular vein, and went back down again, choking out his last seconds. Shannon's man took the swipe with the Bowie knife in the shoulder, let out another scream, and ran.

A hundred yards in front, close to the palace gate, there was a second cry, and the sound of a bolt operating in the breech of a rifle. It was never quite certain who fired first. The wild shot from the palace gate and the snarling rip of Shannon's half-second burst that sliced the running man almost in two blended with each other. From far behind them came a whoosh and a scream in the sky; two seconds later the sky above them exploded in blistering white light. Shannon caught a brief impression of the palace in front of him, two figures in front of its gate, and the feeling that his other six men were fanning out to right and left of him. Then the eight of them were face down in the gra.s.s and crawling forward.

Janni Dupree stepped away from the rocket-launcher the instant he had torn the lanyard off the first rocket, and was slipping his mortar bomb down the tube as the rocket screamed upward. The smack-thump of the mortar bomb departing on its parabola toward the palace blended with the crash of the magnesium flare exploding away toward the land, over the spot he hoped his colleagues would have reached. He took his second bomb and, squinting into the light from the palace, waited to watch the first one fall. He had given himself four sighting shots, on an estimate of fifteen seconds for each bomb in flight. After that he knew he could keep up a fire rate of one every two seconds, with Sunday feeding him the ammunition singly but fast and in rhythm.

His first sighting bomb hit the front right-hand cornice of the palace roof, high enough for him to see the impact. It did not penetrate but blew tiles off the roof just above the gutter. Stooping, he twirled the traverse k.n.o.b of the directional aiming mechanism a few mils to the left and slipped in his second bomb just as the flare fizzled out. He had stepped across the other rocket-launcher, ripped off the firing lanyard of the rocket, sent it on its way, and stuffed a fresh pair into the two launchers before he needed to look up again. The second flare burst into light above the palace, and four seconds later the second bomb landed. It was dead center, but short, for it fell onto the tiles directly above the main door.

Dupree was also pouring with sweat, and the grub-screw was slick between his fingers. He brought the angle of elevation slightly down, lowering the nose of the mortar a whisker toward the ground for extra range. Working the opposite way from artillery, mortars have to be lowered for extra range. Dupree's third mortar bomb was on its way before the flare fizzled out, and he had a full fifteen seconds to send up the third flare, trot down the spit a short way to actuate the foghorn, and be back in time to watch the mortar explode. It went clean over the palace roof and into the courtyard behind. He saw the red glow for a split second; then it was gone. Not that it mattered. He knew he had got his range and direction exactly right. There would be no shortfalls to endanger his own men in front of the palace.

Shannon and his men were face down in the gra.s.s as the three flares lit up the scene around them and Janni's ranging shots went in. No one was prepared to raise his head until the Afrikaner was sending the hardware over the top of the palace and into the rear courtyard.

Between the second and third explosions Shannon risked putting his head up. He knew he had fifteen seconds until the third mortar went home. He saw the palace in the glare of the third magnesium flare, and two lights had gone on in the upper rooms. After the reverberations of the second mortar bomb died away, he heard a variety of screams and shouts from inside the fortress. These were the first and last sounds the defenders made before the roar of explosives blotted out all else.

Within five seconds the foghorn had gone on, the long, maniacal scream howling across the water from the harbor spit, filling the African night with a wail like a thousand released banshees. The crash of the mortar going into the palace courtyard was almost drowned out, and he heard no more screams. When he raised his head again he could see no further damage to the front of the palace and a.s.sumed Janni had dropped the bomb over the top. By agreement, Janni would use no more testing shots after his first on target, but go straight into the faster rhythm. From the sea behind him, Shannon heard the thud of mortars begin, steady, pulsing like a heartbeat in the ears, backed by the now monotonous wail of the foghorn, which had a life of seventy seconds on its gas canister.

To get rid of forty bombs, Janni would need eighty seconds, and it was agreed that, if there were a ten-second pause at any point after halfway, he would cease the bombardment so his colleagues would not run forward and be blown apart by a latecomer. Shannon had few worries that Janni would m.u.f.f it.

When the main barrage began to hit the palace fifteen seconds after the thumps of their firing were heard, the eight men in the gra.s.s had a grandstand view. There was no more need for flares; the roaring crash of the mortar bombs going into the flagstone- covered courtyard behind the palace threw up gobbets of red light every two seconds. Only Tiny Marc Vlaminck had anything to do.

He was out to the left of the line of men, almost exactly in front of the main gate. Standing foursquare to the palace, he took careful aim and sent off his first rocket. A twenty-foot-long tongue of flame whirled out of the rear of the bazooka, and the pineapple-sized warhead sped for the main gate. It exploded high on the right-hand edge of the double doors, ripping a hinge out of the masonry and leaving a yard-square hole in the woodwork.

Kneeling by his side, Patrick slipped the rockets out of his backpack spread on the ground, and pa.s.sed them upward. The second shot began to topple in midair and exploded against the stonework of the arch above the door. The third hit the center lock. Both doors seemed to erupt upward under the impact; then they sagged on the twisted hinges, fell apart, and swung inward.

Janni Dupree was halfway through his barrage, and. the red glare from behind the roof of the palace had become constant. Something was burning in the courtyard, and Shannon supposed it was the guardhouses. When the doors swung open, the men crouching in the gra.s.s could see the red glare through the archway, and two figures swayed in front of it and fell down before they could emerge.

Marc sent four more rockets straight through the open gate into the furnace beyond the archway, which apparently was a through pa.s.sage to the courtyard behind. It was Shannon's first glimpse of what lay beyond the gate.

The mercenary leader screamed to Vlaminck to stop firing, for he had used seven of his dozen rockets, and for all Shannon knew there might be an armored vehicle somewhere in the town, despite what Gomez had said. But the Belgian was enjoying himself. He sent another four rockets through the front wall of the palace at ground level and on the second floor, finally standing exultantly waving both his bazooka and his last rocket at the palace in front, while Dupree's mortar bombs caromed overhead.

At that moment the foghorn whined away to a whisper and died. Ignoring Vlaminck, Shannon shouted to the others to move forward, and he, Semmler, and Langarotti began to run at a crouch through the gra.s.s, Schmeissers held forward, safety catches off, fingers tense on the triggers. They were followed by Johnny, Jinja, Bartholomew, and Patrick, who, having no more bazooka rockets to carry, unslung his submachine gun and joined the others.

At twenty yards, Shannon stopped and waited for Dupree's last bombs to fall. He had lost count of how many were still to come, but the sudden silence after the last bomb fell told him they were over. For a second or two the silence itself was deafening. After the foghorn and the mortars, the roar and crash of Tiny's bazooka rockets, the absence of sound was uncanny. So much so that it was almost impossible to realize the entire operation had lasted less than five minutes.

Shannon wondered for a second if Timothy had sent off his dozen mortar bombs to the army barracks, if the soldiers had scattered as he surmised they would, and what the other citizens of the town had thought of the inferno that must have nearly deafened them. He was jerked into wakefulness when the next two magnesium flares exploded over him, one after the other, and without waiting longer he leaped to his feet, screamed, "Come on," and ran the last twenty yards to the smoldering main gate, He was firing as he went through, sensing more than seeing the figure of Jean-Baptiste Langarotti to his left and Kurt Semmler closing up on his right. Through the gate and inside the archway the scene was enough to stop anybody in his tracks. The arch went straight through the main building and into the courtyard. Above the courtyard the flares still burned with a stark brilliance that lit the scene behind the palace like something from the Inferno.

Kimba's guards had been caught asleep by the first sighting shots, which had brought them out of their lean-to barrack huts and into the center of the paved area. That was where the third shot and the succeeding forty quick-succession bombs had found them. Up one wall ran a ladder, and four mangled men hung from its rungs, caught in the back as they tried to run to the top of the enclosing wall. The rest had taken the full force of the mortars, which had exploded on stone flags and scattered lethal shards of Steel in all directions.

There were piles of bodies, some still half alive, most very dead. Two army trucks and three civilian vehicles, one the presidential Mercedes, were standing shredded from end to end against the rear wall. Several palace servants about to flee the horror in the rear had apparently been grouped behind the main gate when Vlaminck's mortars came through. They were strewn all over the undercover area beneath the archway.

To right and left were further arches, each leading to what seemed to be a set of stairs to the upper floors. Without waiting to be asked, Semmler took the right-hand set, Langarotti the left. Soon there were bursts of submachine-carbine fire from each side as the two mercenaries laundered the upper floor.

Just beyond the stairs to the upper floors were doors at ground level, two on each side. Shouting to make himself heard above the screams of the maimed Vindu and the chattering of Semmler's Schmeisser upstairs, Shannon ordered the four Africans to take the ground floor. He did not have to tell them to shoot everything that moved. They were waiting to go, eyes rolling, chests heaving.

Slowly, cautiously, Shannon moved through the archway into the threshold to the courtyard at the rear. If there was any opposition left in the palace guards, it would come from there. As he stepped outside, a figure with a rifle ran screaming at him from his left. It could be that a panic-stricken Vindu was making a break for safety, but there was no time to find out. Shannon whirled and fired; the man jackknifed and blew a froth of blood from an already dead mouth onto Shannon's blouse front. The whole area and palace smelled of blood and fear, sweat and death, and over it all was the greatest intoxicant smell in the world for mercenaries, the reek of cordite.

He sensed rather than heard the scuff of footsteps in the archway behind him and swung around. From one of the side doors, into which Johnny had run to start mopping up the remaining Vindu alive inside the palace, a man had emerged. What happened when he reached the center of the flagstones under the arch, Shannon could recall later only as a kaleidoscope of images. The man saw Shannon the same time Shannon saw him, and snapped off a shot from the gun he clenched in his right hand at hip level.

Shannon felt the slug blow softly on his cheek as it pa.s.sed. He fired half a second later, but the man was agile. After firing he went to the ground, rolled, and came up in the fire position a second time. Shannon's Schmeisser had let off five shots, but they went above the gunman's body as he went to the flagstones; then the magazine ran out. Before the man in the hallway could take another shot, Shannon stepped aside and out of sight behind a stone pillar, snapped out the old magazine, and slapped in a new one. Then he came around the corner, firing. The man was gone.

It was only then he became fully conscious that the gunman, stripped to the waist and barefoot, had not been an African. The skin of his torso, even in the dim light beneath the arch, had been white, and the hair dark and straight.

Shannon swore and ran back toward the embers of the gate on their hinges. He was too late.

As the gunman ran out of the shattered palace, Tiny Marc Vlaminck was walking toward the archway.

He had his bazooka cradled in both hands across his chest, the last rocket fitted into the end. The gunman never even stopped. Still running flat out, he loosed off two fast shots that emptied his magazine. They found the gun later in the long gra.s.s. It was a Makarov 9mm., and it was empty.

The Belgian took both shots in the chest, one of them in the lungs. Then the gunman was past him, dashing across the gra.s.s for safety beyond the reach of the light cast by the flares Dupree was still sending up. Shannon watched as Vlaminck, moving in a kind of slow motion, turned to face the running man, raised his bazooka and slotted it carefully across his right shoulder, took steady aim, and fired.

Not often does one see a bazooka the size of the warhead on the Yugoslav RPG-7 hit a man in the small of the back. Afterward, they could not even find more than a few pieces of cloth from his trousers.

Shannon had to throw himself flat again to avoid being broiled in the backlash of flame from the Belgian's last shot. He was still on the ground, eight yards away, when Tiny Marc dropped his weapon and crashed forward, arms outspread, across the hard earth before the gateway. Then the last of the flares went out.

Big Janni Dupree straightened up after sending off the last of his ten magnesium flares and yelled, "Sunday."

He had to shout three times before the African, standing ten yards away could hear him. All three men were partly deaf from the pounding their ears had taken from the mortar and the foghorn. He shouted to Sunday to stay behind and keep watch over the mortars and the boat, then, signaling to Timothy to follow him, he began to jog-trot through the scrub and bushes along the spit of land toward the mainland. Although he had loosed off more firepower than the other four mercenaries put together, he saw no reason why he should be denied all the action.

Besides, his job was still to silence the army barracks, and he knew, from his memory of the maps on board the Toscana, roughly where it was. It took the pair of them ten minutes to reach the road that ran across the end of the peninsula from side to side, and, instead of turning right toward the palace, Dupree led the way left, toward the barracks. Janni and Timothy had slowed to a walk, one on each side of the laterite road, their Schmeissers pointing forward, ready to fire the moment trouble showed itself.

The trouble was around the first bend in the road. Scattered twenty minutes earlier by the first of the mortar bombs dispatched by Timothy, which fell between the hutments that made up the barracks line, the two hundred encamped men of Kimba's army had fled into the night. But about a dozen of them had regrouped in the darkness and were standing at the edge of the road, muttering in low whispers among themselves. If they had not been so deaf, Dupree and Timothy would have heard them sooner. As it was, they were almost on the group before they saw them, shadows in the shadows of the palm trees. Ten of the men were naked, having been roused from sleep. The other two had been on guard duty and were clothed and armed.

The previous night's torrential rain had left the ground so soft that most of Timothy's dozen mortar bombs had embedded themselves too deeply in the earth to have their full intended impact. The Vindu soldiers Dupree and Timothy found waiting around that corner still had something of their wits about them. One of them also had a hand grenade.

It was the sudden movement of the soldiers when they saw the white gleam of Dupree's face, from which the dye had long since run away with his sweat, that alerted the South African. He screamed, "Fire," and opened up at the group. Four of them were cut apart by the stream of slugs from the Schmeisser. The other eight ran, two more falling as Dupree's fire pursued them into the trees. One of them, as he ran, turned and hurled the thing he carried in his hand. He had never used one before and never seen one used. But it was his pride and joy, and he had always hoped to use it one day.

The grenade went high in the air, out of sight, and when it fell, it hit Timothy full in the chest. In instinctive reaction, the African veteran clutched at the object as he went over backward and, sitting on the ground, recognized it for what it was. He also saw that the fool who had thrown it had forgotten to take the pin out. Timothy had seen a mercenary catch a grenade once. He had watched as the man hurled it straight back at the enemy. Rising to his feet, Timothy whipped the pin out of the grenade and threw it as far as he could after the retreating Vindu soldiers.