Rogue's March (11 page)

Martinez laughed. “This is the place for it, sucker. Din't they tell you that in Nam? The big A, the big asshole. It's all shit, ain't none of your jungle bunny cunt sacks told you that?”

“They ain't like your women. They don't wanna talk to my dick, baby. They just wanna listen to the music.”

An embassy sedan spun into the drive and stopped at the gate; a dark face lifted into the headlights from the shadows of the bougainvillea inside. “
Fungola
!” the driver called. “
Fungola
!” The gateman dragged away the chain as the two Marines watched, and the sedan idled into the courtyard. The sedan belonged to Lowenthal, the political counselor, returning from the French Embassy a few blocks away.

“Who is it?” Tucker called from the rear coping. “Captain Cheese?”

“Shut up, God damn it. He'll hear. It's Squirrel Balls.”

Lowenthal looked up toward the whispered voices as the two Marines stumbled backwards into the shadows. Martinez dropped his tear gas gun as he fell over an antenna guy wire and it clattered across the roof.

“What is it up there,” Lowenthal called.

“God damn it, that mother was pointed at
me
!” Tucker whispered angrily, rising from the coping. “You coulda blowed my fucking head off, you goddamn Cuban—”

“Shhh.” The two corporals crouched in the shadows out of Lowenthal's line of sight, laughing.

Lowenthal continued to look skyward, puzzled, but saw nothing. He was short and small-boned, wearing a dark turtleneck sweater under a bush jacket. A scalp disorder had compelled him to have his head shaved shortly after his arrival, and his hair had returned very slowly. “Just like his balls, I'll bet,” the Marine Gunny had said morosely to himself one day as the small, fuzzy partially bald head disappeared down the corridor after the Marine sergeant had received one of Lowenthal's fatuous peremptory orders. Lowenthal's nickname was announced over a game of hearts at the Marine house bar the same night.

A siren wailed in the distance and Lowenthal turned away from the roof toward the street. The siren moved away from the embassy, but the headlights of a car came closer and turned into the gate. The sedan belonged to Colonel Selvey, the defense attaché, who parked behind Lowenthal's vehicle. As the engine died away, a voice from the car radio drifted into the courtyard: “
Citoyens! Citoyens! Déposez vos armes! Déposez vos armes
!”

It was the voice of the old President, urging the rebels to put down their guns. A volley of rifle fire echoed through the streets from the direction of the port; as the reverberations died away, a Panhard armored car lumbered slowly around the corner in low gear. A dozen soldiers trotted alongside.

“
Je répéte! Déposez vos armes! C'est votre président qui parle
!”

Colonel Selvey reached through the window and turned off the radio. The rear window had been smashed.

“What happened?” Lowenthal asked.

“Someone clobbered it when I came through a roadblock.” He was Lowenthal's size but trimmer. His square saturnine face under his military brush cut was the color of old saddle leather. He wore a white tennis shirt, red plaid golfing trousers, and white loafers with tassels.

“How are the paras doing in Malunga? Are they holding?”

“How the shit do I know,” Selvey drawled. He wasn't unfriendly, just a Tennessee country boy with a soldier's disdain for nervous State Department diplomatists who wanted to fire off a cable to Washington every time a rifle shot rattled a window. He didn't know what was happening and he didn't think anyone else did either.

“You didn't get anything?”

“I couldn't get near GHQ. They got it bunged up tighter than an old maid's asshole—roadblocks all over the place. One thing I do know is an awful lot of folks out there are toting guns. Malunga looks like the worst. You can see the fires burning from the boulevard. I heard the President's gonna parlez-vous over the radio at nine, a special announcement. Maybe he's gonna tell us.”

A crippled wind moved from the river, stirring through the trellised roses of the compound wall, dimming the distant sounds of gunfire and the baffled
crump-crump
of mortars from the besieged police camp at Bakole.

In the embassy reception hall, a dozen staff members were milling about in confusion. The Marine receptionist told Lowenthal the duty officer had been looking for him.

“Tell him I'll be upstairs. Any word from the ambassador?”

“Negative, sir. We sent the car back, like you asked, but the driver got turned back again.”

“What about the DCM, Mr. Becker?”

“He's with the ambassador. He got stopped too, but he turned back and hot-footed it over to the ambassador's. That's where he is now. The duty officer says they got three roadblocks between here and the parliament building, closing off the downtown, real pissers too, with BAR's, shooting people.”

“Any word from the foreign ministry?”

“Negative, but a whole bunch of people have been calling in about the evacuation. The phones have been tied up—”

“No one's said anything about an evacuation.”

“Yes, sir, but everyone's been asking. We got almost a hunnert people back in the dispensary and motor pool, scared to go home.”

“No decision's been made,” Lowenthal said, “but tell them to stay calm. We'll keep them informed.”

“Yes, sir, that's what I've been telling them. The Gunny wants to know can he take his guys off the roof?”

“What the hell are they doing on the roof?” Colonel Selvey broke in.

“I told them that's where they should be,” Lowenthal said briskly, “commanding the optimum field of fire.” In the absence of the ambassador and Becker, Lowenthal was in charge.

“What the goddamned hell for? The perimeter is back there, along the wall. Where's the Gunny?”

“In the security room, sir.” From down the corridor they could hear the calls coming in through the emergency radio hookup in the security office. A second Marine standing at the desk behind the reception counter replaced one phone and lifted another.

“Yes, ma'am. A coup d'etat? I reckon so. Yes, ma'am. Stay inside and listen to the radio. Well, if you don't know no French, get someone else to listen. Wait for your warden to call you. No ma'am. No one's been evacuated yet.”

Selvey dodged into the security office and told the Marine Gunny to pull his people off the roof. He rejoined Lowenthal in the stairwell. Standing at the cipher lock on the metal-clad door at the top of the steps, they could smell the forced air furnace from the floor above. The commo unit was already at work burning tapes and top secret files.

In the political section suite, two junior officers sat at glass-topped desks in the outer office, one taking queries from other embassies, the other monitoring the national radio and taping the communiqués as they were transmitted. The bearded officer at the phone put his hand over the mouthpiece, looking at Lowenthal. “The Brits don't have anything. They know less than we do. Cecil is holed up at his residence, just like the ambassador.”

The commo chief from the floor above waited against the wall outside Lowenthal's office, ankles crossed, arms folded, holding a sealed manila envelope marked in red crayon: “Secret
NODIS:
Ambassador Only.”

“He's immobilized at the residence,” Lowenthal told him. “Becker's there too.”

“So I heard.” He gave Lowenthal the envelope. “You'd better get this to him pretty quick. Washington wants to know what the shit's going on.” He went out quickly, before Lowenthal could detain him with an instruction. The political counselor wasn't popular among the commo clerks on the third floor, disliked most for the windy pedantry of his reporting cables, which invariably reached the clerks at close-down time, keeping them at their machines long after the diplomatic staff had gone home.

“What's the radio saying?” Lowenthal asked.

“Nothing right now.” The young political officer turned up the volume. A military band was playing “Yes, We Have No Bananas” in three-quarter time. The recording was old, the clarinets and trombones blurred by surface noise, but Colonel Selvey recognized the melody and smiled.

“You got to get that in your next cable, son,” he told the young political officer. “Back in Foggy Bottom, that'll tell them a ton.”

A violent explosion rocked the silence somewhere up the street, rattling the windows. “Probably a stray,” Lowenthal murmured as no sounds followed. He looked inquiringly at Selvey, who'd been in Vietnam and knew all the sounds.

“Maybe a gas tank too. How the shit do I know?”

Lowenthal turned to his secretary, a stout young woman from the Pennsylvania coal fields with rabbit-brown hair and a chain-smoker's cough. “Please get Andy Reddish for me. It's absolutely essential that I talk to him. Find out if he's come back.”

She picked up the phone without enthusiasm, her eyes still registering the shock of the explosion. “They used to tell me it'd happen like this,” she grumbled as she dialed Reddish's extension. “I wish I'd taken my R and R when I was supposed to. I'd be in Mombasa by now, soaking up sun and the Indian Ocean.”

“Gin you mean, don't you, sugar,” Selvey said with a sympathetic pat as he followed Lowenthal into his office.

“Yeah,” she muttered irritably, waiting for the door to close. She spent most of her idle hours drinking bourbon at the Marine house bar and knew their secret nicknames for the embassy staff as well as if she'd helped invent them. The door closed. “Up yours too, Gomer Pyle.”

Lowenthal pulled the drapes closed, turned on the desk lamp, and passed Selvey the three telegrams he'd sent to Washington. The first had been sent out a little before six o'clock when the fighting in Malunga had been confirmed. The second and third had been dispatched after the President had come on the national radio declaring martial law and asking the rebels to lay down their arms.

The Sunday had begun routinely for both men, neither warned of the possibility of trouble. Selvey had spent the morning playing golf at the Belgian Club with his Air Force attaché and the departing administrative counselor. Lowenthal had passed the afternoon on the rear terrace of his villa, reading old copies of the New York
Times
and
Le Monde
, which he'd been collecting for several weeks, while his wife Pam loafed in the nearby pool, sculling lazily from time to time to the pool's edge near his chair to remind him of some conversational or gastronomical triumph of the evening before. She was an Episcopalian from an old Philadelphia family, and Lowenthal was now an Episcopalian too. They'd met in Paris, where she was a staff writer for a New York fashion magazine, he, at the embassy, an American diplomat who spoke that flawless French she'd never expected to hear from a countryman. Diplomacy was for her the ultimate social pretext; perfection was what she'd always reached for; and she'd reached for Lowenthal. Now her ambitions excited his.

At their dinner the night before, the French Ambassador had remained until twelve-thirty, an unheard-of hour for a Frenchman who seldom accepted American hospitality, and departed promptly at ten-thirty when he did. The Belgian and Israeli counselors had stayed until one, the Italian until two. Not a word of English had been heard that evening; the cuisine had been French too, the gossip Continental, and the dinner not at all compromised by the failure of the French-educated minister of justice to appear.

After a nap, Lowenthal had retired to his study to reconstruct his talk with the French Ambassador for a Monday cable to Washington. The phone call from the embassy duty officer had interrupted his memo, the events that followed had demolished it. Nothing was salvageable. No hint of the afternoon's disasters had been implicit in the table talk of the previous night.

“I hope to hell you birds can do better than this,” Selvey complained, returning the three cables. “There's not a goddamned thing there Washington couldn't get off the AP ticker.”

The young political officer stuck his head in the door. “They've postponed the President's nine o'clock announcement again. Now they're calling for all off-duty doctors, nurses, and attendants to report to the hospitals. They've shoved back the ten o'clock curfew so they can bring the wounded in off the streets.”

The bearded officer followed, carrying a report passed from the Belgians, advising that Radio Brazzaville across the river was claiming that the army was trying to destroy the local workers party. “They're saying that some army officers tried to pull off a coup this afternoon, but it didn't work, and now they're trying to blame the workers party. They say some workers party officials escaped across the river by pirogue.” The young man with the beard was an ex-Peace Corps volunteer who spoke Swahili and had served in Uganda. “Sounds pretty logical to me.”

“That's bullshit,” Selvey growled. “The army's trying to put down a revolt, not start one.” The army was his turf and the political section didn't belong there.

“I think that's most improbable,” Lowenthal said.

“I said ‘sounds logical,' I didn't say it was,” the younger man retreated. “The Belgians don't believe it either.”

“What do they think?”

“The same as us, that the workers party is behind it.”

“You can't pay any attention to Radio Brazza anyway,” Selvey said. “I wouldn't be surprised if Brazza isn't trying to infiltrate some of those Cuban-trained militia across the river to help out. What do they call it?”

“Défense Civile,” Lowenthal said. Selvey's French wasn't very good; his Tennessee accent made it worse.

“With the Russians and Cubans over there, they've got more guns than burrs on a baboon's ass, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of them aren't in Malunga right now. I think that's why the paras have closed off Malunga, why you've got all these goddamned roadblocks—scared of the Cubans coming over.”