Two hours before the attack, Commandant Wautier was shot dead, and although it was never proved, it was Roux who murdered him with a shot in the back of the head. A wiser man might have called off the attack. Roux insisted on taking command, and the mutiny was a disaster. His forces never got across the river to the left bank, the Congolese army rallied on learning the armory was still in its hands, and Roux’s unit was wiped out to the last man. Schramme thanked his stars he had kept his own men out of the fiasco. On the run and terrified, Roux sought refuge with John Peters, new commander of the English-speaking Fifth, which was also not involved. Peters smuggled the desperate Roux, swathed in bandages and masquerading as an Englishman, out of the country.
The only plane out was heading for South Africa, and that was where Roux went. Ten months later, he flew back into the Congo, this time accompanied by five South Africans. He had got wind of the coming July 1967 revolt and come to join Schramme at the headquarters of the Tenth Commando near Kindu. He was in Stanleyville again when mutiny broke out, this time with Schramme and Denard participating. Within hours Denard was out of action, hit in the head by a ricochet bullet loosed off in error by one of his own men. At a crucial point the leader of the joint forces of the Sixth and Tenth was out of the fight. Roux, claiming that as a Frenchman he should take precedence over the Belgian Schramme, maintaining he was the best commander present and the only one who could command the mercenaries, put himself forward for overall command.
The choice fell on Schramme, not because he was the best man to command the whites but because he was the only man who could command the Katangese, and without these levies the small band of Europeans would have been too badly outnumbered.
Roux’s claim failed on two fronts. The Katangese loathed and distrusted him, remembering the unit of their own people he had led to annihilation the previous year. And at the mercenaries’ council, held the night Denard was flown out on a stretcher to Rhodesia, one of those who spoke against Roux’s nomination was one of Denard’s company commanders, Shannon, who had left the Fifth eighteen months earlier and joined the Sixth rather than serve under Peters.
A second time the mercenaries failed to take the arsenal, and Schramme opted for the long march from Stanleyville to Bukavu, a resort town on Lake Bukavu, abutting the neighboring republic of Rwanda and offering some form of retreat if things went wrong.
By this time Roux was gunning for Shannon, and to keep them apart Schramme gave Shannon’s company the hazardous job of point unit, breaking trail up front as the column of mercenaries, Katangese, and thousands of camp followers fought their way through the Congolese toward the lake. Roux was given a job at the rear of the convoy, so the two never met on the march.
They finally met in Bukavu town after the mercenaries had settled in and the Congolese had surrounded them on all sides except the lake behind the town. It was September 1967, and Roux was drunk. Over a game of cards he lost through lack of concentration, he accused Shannon of cheating. Shannon replied that Roux made as big a mess of his poker as he had of attacks on Simba roadblocks and for the same reason—he had no nerve. There was dead silence among the group around the table as the other mercenaries edged back toward the walls. But Roux backed down. Glaring at Shannon, he let the younger man get up and walk toward the door. Only when the Irishman had his back turned did Roux reach for the Colt .45 he, like all of them, carried, and take aim.
Shannon, listening, heard the scrape of a chair and reacted first. He turned, pulled his own automatic, and fired down the length of the hall. The slug was a lucky one for a shot from the hip on a half-turn. It took Roux high in the right arm, tore a hole through the biceps, and left his arm hanging limp from his side, the fingers dripping blood onto the useless Colt on the floor by his side.
“There’s one other thing I remember,” Shannon called down the room. “I remember what happened to Wautier.”
Roux was finished after the shoot-out. He evacuated himself across the bridge into Rwanda, had himself driven to Kigali, the capital, and flew back to France. Thus he missed the fall of Bukavu when finally the ammunition ran out in November, and the five months in an internment camp in Kigali. He also missed a chance to settle scores with Shannon.
Being the first back into Paris from Bukavu, Roux had given several interviews in which he spoke glowingly of himself, his battle wound, and his desire to get back and lead his men. The fiasco at Dilolo, when a recuperated Denard tried a badly planned invasion of the Congo from Angola in the south as a diversion to take the strain off his men in Bukavu, and the virtual retirement of the former leader of the Sixth, gave Roux the impression he had every right to claim leadership over the French mercenaries. He had made quite a lot of money from looting in the Congo and had salted it away.
With the money, he was able to make a splash among the barflies and street corner bums who like to style themselves mercenaries, and from them he still retained a certain degree of loyalty, but of the bought kind.
Henri Alain was one such, and so was Roux’s next visitor, who came in answer to his telephoned summons. He was another mercenary, but of a different type.
Raymond Thomard was a killer by instinct and profession. He too had been in the Congo once, when on the run from the police, and Roux had used him as a hatchet man. For a few small handouts and in the mistaken view that Roux was a big shot, Thomard was as loyal as a paid man can ever be.
“I’ve got a job for you,” Roux told him. “A contract worth five thousand dollars. Are you interested?”
Thomard grinned. “Sure, patron. Who’s the bugger you want knocked off?”
“Cat Shannon.”
Thomard’s face dropped.
Roux went on before he could reply. “I know he’s good. But you’re better. Besides, he knows nothing. You’ll be given his address when he checks into Paris next time. You just have to wait till he leaves, then take him at your own convenience. Does he know you by sight?”
Thomard shook his head. “We never met,” he said.
Roux clapped him on the back. “Then you’ve got nothing to worry about. Stay in touch. I’ll let you know when and where you’ll find him.”
eleven
Simon Endean’s letter sent on Tuesday night arrived at ten on Thursday morning at the Handelsbank in Zurich. According to the instructions the bank telexed £10,000 to the account of Mr. Keith Brown at the Kredietbank in Brugge.
By noon Mr. Goossens had seen the telex and wired £5000 to Mr. Brown’s account in the West End of London. Shortly before four that afternoon, Shannon made a check call to his bank and learned the credit was there waiting for him. He asked the manager personally to give him drawing facilities in cash up to £3500 the following morning. He was told it would be available for collection by eleven-thirty.
Shortly after nine the same morning Martin Thorpe presented himself in Sir James Manson’s office with his findings. The two men went over the short list together, studying the pages of photostat documents acquired at Companies House on Tuesday and Wednesday. When they finished, Manson sat back in his chair and gazed at the ceiling.
“There’s no doubt you are right about Bormac, Martin,” he said, “but why the hell hasn’t the major stockholder been bought out long ago?”
It was the question Martin Thorpe had been asking himself all the previous night and day.
The Bormac Trading Company Limited had been founded in 1904 to exploit the output of a series of vast rubber plantations that had been created during the last years of the previous century on the basis of slave labor by Chinese coolies.
The founder of the estates had been an enterprising and ruthless Scot by the name of Ian Macallister, later created Sir Ian Macallister in 1921, and the estates were situated in Borneo, hence the name of the company.
Mo