“The one in the middle,” said Shannon mildly, “was a chemist once. Then he became a soldier; then his wife and four children were wiped out by a Saladin armored car. They’re made by Alvis in Coventry, you know. He doesn’t like the people who were behind that.”
Endean was silent for a few more miles. “What happens now?”
“The Committee of National Reconciliation takes over,” said Shannon. “Four Vindu members, four Caja, and two from the immigrant community. But the army will be made up of the people behind you. And this country will be used as a base and a headquarters. From here the newly trained men will go back one day to avenge what was done to them. Maybe the general will come and set up residence here—in effect, to rule.”
“You expect to get away
with that?”
“You expected to impose that slobbering ape Bobi and get away with it. At least the new government will be moderately fair. That mineral deposit, or whatever it was, that you were after—I don’t know where or what it is, but I can deduce that there has to be something here to interest Sir James Manson. No doubt the new government will find it, eventually. And no doubt it will be exploited. But if you want it, you will have to pay for it. A fair price, a market price. Tell Sir James that when you get back home.”
Around the corner they came within view of the border post. News travels fast in Africa, even without telephone, and the Vindu soldiers on the border post were gone.
Shannon stopped the truck and pointed ahead. “You can walk the rest,” he said.
Endean climbed down. He looked back at Shannon with undiluted hatred. “You still haven’t explained why,” he said. “You’ve explained what and how, but not why.”
Shannon stared ahead up the road. “For nearly two years,” he said musingly, “I watched between half a million and a million small kids starved to death because of people like you and Manson. It was done basically so that you and your kind could make bigger profits through a vicious and totally corrupt dictatorship, and it was done in the name of law and order, of legality and constitutional justification. I may be a fighter, I may be a killer, but I am not a bloody sadist. I worked out for myself how it was done and why it was done, and who were the men behind it. Visible up front were a bunch of politicians and Foreign Office men, but they are just a cage full of posturing apes, neither seeing nor caring past their interdepartmental squabbles and their reelection. Invisible behind them were profiteers like your precious James Manson. 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, Shannon,” he called. “We can deal with people like you there.”
“I won’t,” yelled Shannon. Under his breath he murmured, “I won’t ever have to.” Then he turned the truck around and headed for the peninsula and Clarence.
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 Janni Dupree and Tiny Marc Vlaminck were buried down on the point, beneath the palm trees, where the wind blows off the gulf. The graves were left unmarked at Shannon’s request. The body of Johnny was taken by his own people, who keened over him and buried him according to their own ways.
Simon Endean and Sir James Manson kept quiet about their parts in the affair. There was really nothing they could say publicly.
Shannon gave Jean-Baptiste Langarotti the £5000 remaining in his money belt from the operations budget, and the Corsican went back to Europe. He was last heard of heading for Burundi, where he wanted to train the Hutu partisans who were trying to oppose the Tutsi-dominated dictatorship of Micombero. As he told Shannon when they parted on the shore, “It’s not really the money. It was never for the money.”
Shannon wrote out letters to Signor Ponti in Genoa in the name of Keith Brown, ordering him to hand over the bearer shares controlling the ownership of the Toscana in equal parts to Captain Waldenberg and Kurt Semmler. A year later Semmler sold out his share to Waldenberg, who raised a mortgage to pay for it. Then Semmler went off to another war. He died in South Sudan, when he, Ron Gregory, and Rip Kirby were laying a mine to knock out a Sudanese Saladin armored car. The mine went off, killing Kirby instantly and badly injuring Semmler and Gregory. Gregory got home via the British Embassy in Ethiopia, but Semmler died in the bush.
The last thing Shannon did was to send letters to his bank in Switzerland through Langarotti, ordering the bank to make a credit transfer of £5000 to the parents of Janni Dupree in Paarl, Cape Province, and another in the same sum to a woman called Anna who ran a bar in the Kleinstraat in Ostend’s red-light district.
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.”