“That’s right, a bloody great wooden gate, Tiny.”
“I’ll give it to you in matchsticks, and that’s a promise,” said the Belgian.
Because of the noise they had made, Shannon ordered the Toscana to move on the next day, and two days later he called his second halt. In the period under way, the men had hauled out the three assault craft and inflated them. They lay side by side along the main deck. Each, despite being a deep, dark gray in color, had a brilliant orange nose and the name of the manufacturer in the same luminous color down each side. These were painted out with black paint from the ship’s store.
When they were hove to for the second time, they tested all three. Without the muffling boxes placed over the top of each engine, the Johnsons made an audible mutter even when four hundred yards away from the Toscana. With the boxes in place and the engines throttled back to less than quarter-power, there was hardly a sound at thirty yards. They tended to overheat after twenty minutes at half-power, but this could be stretched to thirty minutes if power was reduced. Shannon took one of the craft out for two hours, checking throttle settings for speed against noise, to get the best combination. As the powerful outboards gave him a large reserve, he elected never to push them beyond one-third of full power, and advised his men to close down to less than quarter-power for the last two hundred yards as they approached the landing beaches of the target area.
The walkie-talkies were also tested at up to four miles, and despite the heavy atmospherics and the hint of thunder in the stifling air, messages could still be heard if read over clearly and slowly. To get them used to the motion, the Africans were also given trips in the power craft, at a varying range of speeds, in daylight and at night. The night exercises were the most important.
For one of them Shannon took the other four whites and the six Africans three miles out from the Toscana, which burned one small light at her masthead. On the journey away from the ship, the ten men had their eyes bandaged. When the masks were taken off, each was given ten minutes to accustom his vision to the blackness of the sky and the ocean, before the move back to the boat began. With the engine throttled down and dead silence maintained aboard, the assault craft moved quietly back toward the light that represented the Toscana. Sitting with the tiller bar in his hand, holding the power setting steady at one-third, then cutting back to less than a quarter for the final run-in, Shannon could feel the tension of the men in front of him. They knew this was what it would be like when they struck, and there would be no second chances.
Back on board, Carl Waldenberg came up to Shannon as the two men watched the crew winch the vessel inboard by torchlight.
“I hardly heard a sound,” he said. “Not until you were a couple of hundred meters away, and I was listening hard. Unless they have very alert guards posted, you should be able to make
the beach, wherever you are going. Incidentally, where are you going? I need more charts if I have to proceed much farther.”
“I think you’d all better know,” said Shannon. “We’ll spend the rest of the night going through the briefing.”
Until dawn, the crew (with the exception of the engineer, who still slept with his engines), the seven Africans, and the four mercenaries listened to Shannon in the main saloon while he went through the entire plan of attack. He had prepared and set up his projector and slide transparencies, some of which were pictures he had obtained of Zangaro, others of which were the maps and charts he had bought or drawn for himself.
When he had finished, there was dead silence in the stifling cabin, the blue wreaths of cigarette smoke trickling out through the open portholes into the equally clammy night outside.
Finally Waldenberg said, “Gott im Himmel.” Then they all started. It took an hour before the questions were answered. Waldenberg wanted reassurance that if anything went wrong the survivors would be back on board and the Toscana well over the horizon before sunrise. Shannon gave it to him.
“We have only your word for it they have no navy, no gunboats,” Waldenberg said.
“Then my word will have to do,” said Shannon. “They have none.”
“Just because you did not see any—”
“They have none,” snapped Shannon. “I spent hours talking with people who have been there for years. There are no gunboats, no navy.”
The six Africans had no questions. Each would stick close to the mercenary who would lead him and trust that he knew what he was doing. The seventh, the doctor, asked briefly where he would be, and accepted that he would remain on board the Toscana. The four mercenaries had a few purely technical questions, which Shannon answered in technical terms.
When they came back up on deck, the Africans stretched themselves out on their sleeping bags and went to sleep. Shannon had often envied their ability to sleep at any time, in any place, in almost any circumstances. The doctor retired to his cabin, as did Norbiatto, who would take the next watch. Waldenberg went into his wheelhouse, and the Toscana began to move again toward her destination, just three days away.
The five mercenaries grouped themselves on the afterdeck behind the crew quarters and talked until the sun was high. They all approved of the plan of attack and accepted that Shannon’s reconnaissance had been accurate and precise. If anything had changed since then, if there had been an unforeseen addition to the town’s defenses or improvements to the palace, they knew they could all die. They would be very few, dangerously few, for such a job, and there was no margin for things going wrong. But they accepted that either they had to win within twenty minutes or they would have to get back to their boats and leave in a hurry—those that could leave. They knew that no one was going to come looking for wounded, and that anyone finding one of his colleagues badly hurt and immovable would be expected to give him one mercenary’s last gift to another, the quick, clean way out, preferable to capture and the slow death. It was part of the rules, and they had all had to do it before.
Just before noon they parted company and turned in.
They all woke early on the morning of Day Ninety-nine. Shannon had been up half the night, watching beside Waldenberg as the coastline loomed out of the perimeter of the tiny radar screen at the rear of the wheelhouse.
“I want you to come within visual range of the coast to the south of the capital,” he had told the captain, “and spend the morning steaming northwards, parallel to the shore, so that at noon we are off the coast here.”
His finger jabbed the sea off the coast of Manandi. During the twenty days at sea he had come to trust the German captain. Waldenberg, having taken his money in Ploc?e port, had stuck by his side of the bargain, giving himself completely to making the operation as successful as he could. Shannon was confident the seaman would hold his ship at readiness four miles off the coast, a bit to the south of Clarence, while the firefight went on, and if the distress call came over the walkie-talkie, that he would wait until the men who had managed to escape rejoined the Toscana in their speedboats, before making at full power for the open sea. There was no spare man Shannon could leave behind to ensure this, so he had to trust Waldenberg.
He had already found the frequency on the ship’s radio on which Endean wanted him to transmit his first message, and this was timed for noon.
The morning passed slowly. Through the ship’s telescope Shannon watched the estuary of the Zangaro River move past, a long, low line of mangrove trees along the horizon. At midmorning he could make out the break in the green line where the town of Clarence lay, and passed the telescope to Vlaminck, Langarotti, Dupree, and Semmler. Each studied the off-white blur in silence and handed the glass to the next man. They smoked more than usual and mooched around the deck, tense and bored with the waiting, wishing, now they were so close, that they could go straight into action.
At noon Shannon began to transmit his message. He read it clear into the radio speaker. It was just one word, “Plantain.” He gave it every ten seconds for five minutes, then broke for five minutes, then gave it again. Three times within thirty minutes, each time over a five-minute period, he broadcast the word and hoped that Endean would hear it somewhere on the mainland. It meant simply that Shannon and his men were on time and in position, and that they would strike Clarence and Kimba’s palace in the small hours of the following morning.
Twenty-two miles away across the water, Simon Endean heard the word on his Braun transistor radio, folded the long wasp antenna, left the hotel balcony, and withdrew into the bedroom. Then he began slowly and carefully to explain to the former colonel of the Zangaran army that within twenty-four hours he, Antoine Bobi, would be President of Zangaro. At four in the afternoon the colonel, grinning and chuckling at the thought of the reprisals he would take against those who had assisted in the ousting, struck his deal with Endean. He signed the document granting Bormac Trading Company a ten-year exclusive mining concession in the Crystal Mountains for a flat annual fee, a tiny profits participation by the Zangaran government, and watched Endean place in an envelope and seal a check certified by a Swiss bank for half a million dollars in the name of Antoine Bobi.
In Clarence preparations went ahead through the afternoon for the following day’s independence celebrations. Six prisoners, lying badly beaten in the cells beneath the former colonial police station, listened to the cries of the Kimba Patriotic Youth marching through the streets above them, and knew that they would be battered to death in the main square as part of the celebrations Kimba had prepared. Photographs of the President were prominently hung on every public building, and the diplomatic wives prepared their migraines so they would be excused attendance at the ceremonies.
In the shuttered palace, surrounded by his guards, President Jean Kimba sat alone at his desk, contemplating the advent of his sixth year of office.