Rogue's March (15 page)

Masakita said nothing for a minute, staring at the ceiling. Then he closed his eyes. “I understand.”

Reddish closed the first aid kit and moved toward the door, turning back in the doorway. “What about your family, your wife? Can I get word to her?”

Masakita said she'd gone to visit her mother, deep in the bush behind Funzi, in a village so remote that no one could reach her.

“You mean you got her out of the way,” Reddish said. “You didn't have much faith in that little army of yours, did you?”

But Masakita didn't respond.

Chapter Twelve

In the embassy reception hall, a plump woman in tangerine slacks and a bloody white blouse lay on the leather sofa behind the reception desk, bleeding from her nose and mouth. A second woman in tight yellow slacks and sneakers was holding a towel to her forehead. “They just beat her up,” Reddish heard her explain tearfully to Colonel Selvey, whose back was to him. “They just laid into her, all of them.”

The two women were wives of NCO's from the US military assistance mission. In the brightly lit corridor a dozen or so American families were bedded down on blankets, the children sleeping with their faces to the wall.

“The doc's on the way now,” explained a Marine guard. “The dispensary's so jammed up with people she couldn't get in.”

“They like to tore her clothes off,” said the woman holding the towel. Her hair was up in pink curlers. “It's all right, honey. It's all right, hon. Don't you fret none. They're sending planes. We're gonna bomb those baboons back to Alley Oop, that's what we're gonna do.”

“What'd she do,” Selvey asked, “run a roadblock?”

“Run her Mustang plumb into a ditch and they drug her out …”

Reddish met Lowenthal in the stairwell, descending from the second floor. “Did Miss Ogilvy tell you? The car's waiting outside. Where in God's name have you been?”

“Trying to find out what the hell's going on. Sarah told me the ambassador wants us at the residence, which is stupid. He should be here, where he has communications.”

“He spoke to someone at the
présidence
, an
adjoint
—Bintu, I suppose—who promised
laissez-passe
for diplomatic cars in the parliament area, but no place else. He asked Bondurant to stay at the residence, since it's closer to the
présidence
. The President may want to see him, and they can get a helicopter in there. We'd better hurry, Andy.”

“Go ahead. I'll be down in a minute.”

Sarah Ogilvy was waiting for him in the station suite. He pulled her after him into his office and shut the door. “Kadima's dead. I've got to get word to the others.”

“Bintu too.”

“Bintu?”

“Walker got word from one of his sources before he vanished too. Everyone's disappeared.”

He pulled open the door and crossed to young Walker's office. Todd, the newly arrived junior officer, was with him.

“Does either of you have anyone still operating out there?”

“Not me,” said Walker. “Where have you been? This place is going ape.”

“You, Todd?”

He shook his head. “All we know is that Malunga's got guns and the
jeunesse
is getting clobbered by the army, which suits just about everyone fine, as far as I can tell.”

“What's the political section reporting?”

“Lowenthal thinks Masakita's party started the shooting with guns brought over from Brazza. That's what Selvey's beginning to think too. What about you?”

“Kadima's dead and so is Bintu. Everyone else has disappeared. I think we've been wiped out.”

Reddish turned and went out.

“What if I hear something?” Sarah called after him as he crossed the suite.

“I'll be at the residence.”

Selvey and Lowenthal were waiting in the courtyard below. “What the shit have you been doing out there?” Selvey asked as Reddish climbed into the back seat. “Putting your local pussy to bed? What'd they tell you?”

“If I knew, I'd be upstairs writing it.”

Selvey laughed. “Don't tell me they caught you holding your dick too, like the rest of these birds.”

Lowenthal joined them, carrying a portable radio tuned to the emergency net. A Congolese night guard had joined the Marine at the front gate, sent from the AID compound with his spear and bow and arrow.

Selvey turned as they drove out, watching him through the rear window. “Is that what the President's gonna protect us with? Where's his tepee and squaw.” He winked at Reddish and nudged Lowenthal in the front seat. “Is that bird one of yours, perfessor?” Lowenthal didn't turn.

Twice they were stopped by roadblocks. They talked their way through the first, but at the second the soldiers were more stubborn. Unlike the paras Reddish had seen in Malunga, they seemed less sure of what was going on and more frightened. They also wore steel helmets. Selvey had finally drawn the lieutenant away into the shadows and given him a thousand francs.

“How much?” Lowenthal asked as they drove forward again.

“A thousand,” Selvey muttered, still angered by the trooper's insolence.

“That's a month's pay, isn't it?” Lowenthal asked. “One of their grievances, why extortion is so blatant?”

“For Christ's sake!” Selvey shouted.

“Just turn it off,” Reddish muttered to Lowenthal. “For God's sake, not now.”

The parliament building was dark. In the residential quarter along the river the air smelled of mown grass and flowering trees, all mixed with the musk of the great gland of water itself. The lights of Brazzaville glimmered from across the great pool. The streets would be quiet over there, the diplomatic missions closed—Cuban, East German, Russian, Chinese, and North Korean—but their staffs would be listening to the radio, wondering if this was the night the government across the river would die in the streets. For them its death was inevitable. Reddish watched the lights, troubled, wondering which jackals would drag off the bloody corpse.

After almost four years, he believed its end inevitable too.

The moon was high over the river, untouched by clouds as he watched it. Years ago, on a night very much like this one, he'd been declared persona non grata by the Syrians after he'd been compromised by a ministry of defense official with documents to sell—Soviet weapons agreements that supplied the sort of detail not available in those days: unit prices, terms, financing, barter clauses. Entrapment, they'd discovered later. He'd spent three days incommunicado in Al Mezze prison near Damascus. During the interrogation, a team of KGB advisers shuttled between the Soviet mission and
sûreté
headquarters. On the fourth night, he was driven to the border and released to Lebanese authorities. He'd been without sleep for two days. As they pulled him from the car to remove the handcuffs, a Syrian interrogator had broken the two small fingers of his right hand.

“The tools of ignorance again,” his father had said when he'd learned Reddish had taken a job as a weapons specialist with the Agency's technical services division after his army stint. In the small Wisconsin college town where the townspeople still turned out for the spring baseball games, he was remembered as the catcher who'd hit .385 his senior year, but had failed his tryout with a Chicago Cubs farm club. He'd played Legion ball that summer. In the Agency, he was still remembered as the case officer who'd been PNG'd in Damascus, some blue-collar technician out of Legion ball.

Reddish climbed from the car in the ambassador's drive, the fatigue of the past six hours settled in his joints like rheumatism. He stopped for a minute to flex the stiffness from his back and legs, listening to the wind rustling in the treetops. He had no enthusiasm for the meeting with the ambassador. He knew he couldn't talk to him here and make sense. It was a different world.

They gathered in the ambassador's study, Bondurant deep in his armchair next to the sofa, Becker next to him in a wing-backed chair. He was a Princetonian, like the ambassador. His short gray hair was carefully brushed to one side as it must have been during his undergraduate years, with the same mannered precision that marked his ambition, his conjugal habits, his drafting. The mouth was thin without being humorless, the blue eyes brisk without being unkind. He was clever, but with the intelligence of a banker or broker, an actuarial keenness which might have made him a success on Wall Street. Why he'd become a diplomat, Reddish never knew. Spontaneity meant for him a day on the tennis courts, where his enthusiasm was that of a small boy. Diplomacy meant for him neither vision nor art but administrative success, which solved problems as they were defined. He was, for Reddish, merely another careerist, a man who, after twenty years, could never be persuaded that bureaucratic truths weren't also moral and historical ones.

Lowenthal sat silently on the sofa with Reddish, watching Bondurant nervously as he read the cables they'd brought. Selvey puffed on a thin cigar, gaze lifted toward the modern abstractions hanging on the study wall. They'd never made sense to him but took meaning with his mood—circus balloons on bright afternoons, goiters or lymph glands when his prostate was acting up, empty anarchic shit on nights like these.

“Washington's confused,” Bondurant began, handing the cables to Becker as he peered owlishly through his reading glasses at Lowenthal, Selvey, and Reddish in turn. “They say they're getting more from Reuters and Agence France Presse than from us. What's happening? I take it Malunga has guns. Where did they come from?” He looked at Selvey.

“According to the Belgians and Israelis, they're Russian guns.”

“What does that mean, that it's a Soviet-backed coup?”

“No, sir, but right now, I'm not sure of anything.”

“What else could it mean?”

The room was silent. Becker shifted in his chair, searching the faces, trying to find the consensus.

“I take it then we're not sure of anything.”

“No, sir,” Selvey volunteered, almost eagerly.

Bondurant asked, “Is Malunga under control?”

“It's under control,” Reddish said.

“Can the army guarantee the safety of the embassy?”

“If Malunga goes up in smoke, so will the rest of the city,” Selvey said. “The army will pull back to protect GHQ and the
présidence
—”

“That's a worse-case scenario,” Lowenthal intruded, leaning forward, his notes on his knee. “The paras seem to be doing quite well at present. The hospitals are evidently full of
jeunesse
wounded, no military. And the commercial section appears to be free of disorders—”

Bondurant waited impatiently, listening to Lowenthal do what he did best, supply a clever rhetorical context in which unpleasant facts could be embedded and neutralized, like wasps in amber. He grew restless.

“—in addition we've heard that some rebels have escaped by pirogue to Brazza. That's a positive sign too. We've heard a few Cubans might be in Malunga. If so, they certainly must be in disarray by now.”

“What Cubans?” Reddish asked.

“We've had reports. The Belgians for one.”

There were three hundred Cubans in Brazzaville, some training the youth cadres, others the local militia, the Défense Civile. When the President had appealed to the ambassador for the M-16 rifles which State had denied, the Cuban threat was the one he'd cited. An ex-trade unionist with prewar ties to the Belgian socialists, he was convinced that his old colleagues would stop at nothing to destroy moderate Third World heretics like him. A few diplomats, like Lowenthal, shared his fears. Reddish had a different view.

A month later the station had handled the defection of a Cuban captain from the Défense Civile advisory staff who'd described Cuban problems across the river—the anarchy of local administration, local suspicions and hostility, but most importantly, the hostility of the Soviet mission which had insisted on restraint. Havana had supported the Russians and had ordered the Cuban support staff to confine its activities solely to cadre formation in Brazzaville.

Reddish had offered to brief the ambassador, but he'd received a peremptory note as acid as any Lowenthal had gotten back following receipt of one of his memos: “I'm sure this Cuban's motives were eminently ingenious,” Bondurant had scrawled. “Men who betray their countries do so for a variety of reasons, all of them ingenious, but necessarily so, I'm sure, since all of them are despicable.”

Bondurant felt the same disdain for Agency case officers like Reddish masquerading as diplomats, but it hadn't been motives or his success in managing the defection that Reddish had wanted to talk about, just Soviet and Cuban policy in the region.

“You've been in Malunga?” Bondurant now asked Lowenthal.

“No, but Houlet at the French Embassy had some firsthand reports from a few of his sources.”

“I was in Malunga an hour ago,” Reddish said. “The paras are mopping up. In another three or four hours, it will probably be all over.”

“What about the other communes?” Becker asked.

“I don't know about the other communes, but my guess would be Malunga's the trouble spot.”

“So you're encouraged?” Bondurant asked.

“The paras are mopping up,” Reddish repeated. “What I don't know is what's happening at the presidential compound or GHQ.”

“The radio station is still on the air,” Bondurant said. “I take that as a good omen, or am I being overly optimistic, Colonel? Radio stations are the first targets of coup attempts, aren't they? Isn't that what your counterinsurgency texts say? The President's still on the air.”

“He's still on the air, yes, sir.”

“Telling the rebels to lay down their arms.”

“Maybe with a gun at his head,” Selvey suggested.