Shannon looked at the customs man. The man looked back. Then he lifted his singlet and showed the butt of a Browning 9mm. short, or perhaps an 875, jammed into his trouser band. He tapped it.

“Police,” he said, and kept staring. Shannon’s fingers itched to smash the man in the face. Inside his head he kept telling himself: Keep cool, baby, absolutely cool.

He gestured slowly, very slowly, to what remained of his belongings on the table and raised his eyebrows. The civilian nodded, and Shannon began to pick them up and put them back. Behind him he felt the soldiers back off, though they still gripped their rifles with both hands, able to swing or butt-jab as the mood took them.

It seemed an age before the civilian nodded toward the door and Shannon left. He could feel the sweat running in a stream down his spine toward the waistband of his pants.

Outside in the main hall, the only other white tourist on the flight, an American girl, had been met by a Catholic priest, who, with his voluble explanations to the soldiers in coast pidgin, was having less trouble. He looked up and caught Shannon’s eye. Shannon raised an eyebrow slightly. The father looked beyond Shannon at the room he had come from and nodded imperceptibly.

Outside, in the heat of the small square before the airport building, there was no transport. Shannon waited. Five minutes later he heard a soft Irish-American voice behind him.

“Can I give you a lift into town, my son?”

They traveled in the priest’s car, a Volkswagen Beetle, which he had hidden for safety in the shade of a palm grove several yards outside the gate. The American girl was shrill and outraged; someone had opened her handbag and gone through it. Shannon was silent, knowing how close they could all have come to a beating. The priest was with the UN hospital, combining the roles of chaplain, almoner, and doctor of medicine. He glanced across at Shannon with understanding.

“They shook you down.”

“The lot,” said Shannon. The loss of £15 was nothing but both men had recognized the mood of the soldiery.

“One has to be very careful here, very careful indeed,” said the priest softly. “Have you a hotel?”

When Shannon told him he had not, the priest drove him to the Independence, the only hotel in Clarence where Europeans were permitted to stay.

“Gomez is the manager—he’s a good enough sort,” said the priest.

Usually when a new face arrives in an African city there are invitations from the other Europeans to visit the club, come back to the bungalow, have a drink, come to a party that evening. The priest, for all his helpfulness, issued no such offers. That was another thing Shannon learned quickly about Zangaro. The mood affected the whites as well. He would learn more in the days to come, much of it from Gomez.

It was that same evening that he came to know Jules Gomez, formerly proprietor and latterly manager of the Independence Hotel. Gomez was fifty and a pied noir, a Frenchman from Algeria. In the last days of French Algeria, almost ten years earlier, he had sold his flourishing business in agricultural machinery just before the final collapse, when one could not give a business away. With what he had made, he returned to France, but after a year found he could not live in the atmosphere of Europe any longer and looked around for another place to go. He had settled on Zangaro, five years before independence and before it was even in the offing. Taking his savings, he had bought the hotel and steadily improved it over the years.

After independence, things had changed. Three years before Shannon arrived, Gomez had been brusquely informed that the hotel was to be nationalized and he would be paid in local currency. He never was, and it was worthless paper in any case. But he hung on as manager, hoping against hope that one day things might improve again and something would be left of his only asset on this planet to secure him in his old age. As manager, he ran the reception desk and the bar. Shannon found him at the bar.

It would have been easy to win Gomez’ friendship by mentioning the friends and contacts Shannon had who were former OAS men, fighters in the Legion and the paras, who had turned up in the Congo. But that would have blown his cover as a simple English tourist who, with five days to kill, had flown down from the north, impelled only by curiosity to see the obscure republic of Zangaro. So he stuck to his role of tourist.

But later, after the bar closed, he suggested Gomez join him for a drink in his room. For no explicable reason, the soldiers at the airport had left him a bottle of whisky he had been carrying in his case. Gomez’ eyes opened wide at the sight of it. Whisky was another import the country could not afford. Shannon made sure Gomez drank more than he. When he mentioned that he had come to Zangaro out of curiosity, Gomez snorted.

“Curiosity? Huh, it’s curious, all right. It’s bloody weird.”

Although they were talking French, and alone in the room, Gomez lowered his voice and leaned forward as he said it. Once again Shannon got an impression of the extraordinary sense of fear present in everyone he had seen, except the bully-boy army thugs and the secret policeman who posed as a customs officer at the airport. By the time Gomez had sunk half the bottle, he had become slightly garrulous, and Shannon probed gently for information. Gomez confirmed much of the briefing Shannon had been given by the man he knew as Walter Harris, and added more anecdotal details of his own, some of them highly gruesome.

He confirmed that President Kimba was in town, that he hardly ever left it these days, except for the occasional trip to his home village across the river in Vindu country, and that he was in his presidential palace, the large, walled building Shannon had seen from the air.

By the time Gomez bade him good night and wove his way back to his own room at two in the morning, further nuggets of information had been culled. The three units known as the civilian police force, the gendarmerie, and the customs force, although all carried sidearms, had, Gomez swore, no ammunition in their weapons. Being Caja, they were not trusted to have any, and Kimba, with his paranoia about an uprising, kept them without one round of ammunition between the lot of them. He knew they would never fight for him and must not have the opportunity of fighting against him. The sidearms were just for show.

Gomez had also vouchsafed that the power in the city was exclusively in the hands of Kimba’s Vindu. The dreaded secret police usually wore civilian clothes and carried automatics, the soldiers of the army had bolt-action rifles such as Shannon had seen at the airport, and the President’s own Praetorian Guards had submachine guns. The latter lived exclusively in the palace grounds and were ultraloyal to Kimba, and he never moved without at least a squad of them hemming him in.

The next morning Shannon went out for a walk. Within seconds he found a small boy of ten or eleven scampering by his side, sent after him by Gomez. Only later did he learn why. He thought Gomez must have sent the boy as a guide, though, as they could not exchange a word, there was not much point in that. The real purpose was different, a service Gomez offered to all his guests, whether they asked or not. If the tourist was arrested for whatever reason, and carted off, the small boy would speed away through the bushes and tell Gomez, who would slip the information to the Swiss or West German embassy so that someone could begin to negotiate the tourist’s release before he was beaten half dead. The boy’s name was Boniface.

Shannon spent the morning walking, mile after mile, while the small boy trotted at his heels. As he expected, they were stopped by no one. Shannon knew that the sheer inefficiency of the place meant that no one would seriously question why a foreigner should spend a week as a tourist. Such countries even advertise for tourism in the waiting rooms of their embassies in Europe. Moreover, in the case of Zangaro there was a community of about a hundred whites in the capital, and no soldier was going to know that the white walking down the street was not a local one, or care, provided he was given a dollar for beer.

There was hardly a vehicle to be seen, and the streets in the residential area were mainly deserted. From Gomez, Shannon had obtained a small map of the town, a leftover from colonia

l days, and with this he tracked down the main buildings of Clarence. At the only bank, the only post office, half a dozen ministries, the port, and the UN hospital there were groups of six or seven soldiers lounging about the steps. Inside the bank, where he went to cash a travelers’ check, he noticed bedrolls in the lobby, and in the lunch hour he twice saw pots of food being carried by a soldier to his colleagues. Shannon judged that the guard details lived on the premises of each building. Gomez confirmed this later the same evening.

He noticed a soldier in front of each of six embassies he passed, three of them asleep in the dust. By the lunch hour he estimated there were about a hundred soldiers scattered in twelve groups around the main area of the town. He noted what they were armed with. Each carried an old Mauser 7.92 bolt-action rifle, most of them looking rusted and dirty. The soldiers wore drab green trousers and shirts, canvas boots, webbing belts, and peaked caps rather like American baseball caps. Without exception they were shabby, unpressed, unwashed, and unprepossessing. He estimated their level of training, weapons familiarization, leadership, and fighting capacity at nil. They were a rabble, undisciplined thugs who could terrify the timorous Caja by their arms and their brutishness, but had probably never fired a shot in anger and certainly had never been fired at by people who knew what they were doing. Their purpose on guard duty seemed to be to prevent a civilian riot, but he estimated that in a real firefight they would quit and run.

The most interesting thing about them was the state of their ammunition pouches. They were pressed flat, empty of magazines. Each Mauser had its fixed magazine, of course, but Mausers hold only five shells.

That afternoon Shannon patrolled the port. Seen from the ground, it looked different. The two spits of sand running out across the water and forming the natural harbor were about twenty feet high at the base and six feet above the water at the tip. He walked down both until he reached the end. Each one was covered in knee-to-waist-high scrub vegetation, burned brown at the end of the long dry season, and invisible from the air. Each spit was about forty feet wide at the tip, forty yards wide at the base, where it left the shoreline. From the tip of each, looking back toward the port area, one had a panoramic view of the waterfront.

Tags: Frederick Forsyth Thriller
Source: readsnovelonline.net