there's something conservative.'
He cast a surreptitious glance at Lord Granville. 'For tonight.'
The young Englishman stared into his drink.
'Take Frau Apfel with you, Pieter,' Horn suggested. 'She can provide
her sizes.' He turned to Ilse with a smile.
'Would you, my dear?'
Ilse hesitated a moment, then she silently followed Smuts.
She didn't know what to make of Alfred Horn's eccentricities, but she
remembered the Afrikaner's warning against disobeying him. She would do
anything to keep her unborn child off the torture table that waited in
the X-ray ROOMHom watched her walk into the house, a look of rapture on
his face. Stanton observed him with growing disgust. The oldfool's
past it, he thought. There's no stopping things now.
You never learned the natural law, Alfred You pass the torrh to the
young or you die. As Stanton drained the dregs of his Bloody Mary, he
made a silent toast to Sir Neville Shaw.
3.30 P.M. Mozambique Channel, Indian Ocean
Sixty-five miles off the wooded coastline of southern Mozambique, the MV
Casilda hove to in the 370-mile-wide stretch of water that separates the
old Portuguese colony from the island of Madagascar. A medium-sized
freighter of Panamanian registry, her holds were full of denim fabric
bound for Dares Salaam on the Tanzanian coast to the north. After
unloading this cargo Casilda would sail to Beira, the great railhead and
port on the Mozambique coast, where she would take on a consignment of
asbestos bound for Uruguay. But just now she had other business.
Strapped to the aft deck of the freighter like giant insects pinned to a
display board were two Bell JetRanger HI helicopters scheduled for
delivery to RENAMO, the antiMarxist guerrillas in Mozambique- Although
the choppers would eventually be delivered to their official buyers,
they had a job to do first-a slight detour to take. Supplied by a very
wealthy gentleman in South America, the JetRangers were configured as
commercial aircraft-with the papers required for legal transfer all in
order-but a military man might I e quick to notice that they could be
easily modified for combat duty in a pinch.
The sun-blistered man who surveyed the two helos from the shadow of the
wheelhouse awning was just such a man.
An Englishman, and the only white man on the entire ship, his name was
Alan Burton. During the entire five-week voyage, Burton had watched
over the helicopters as if they were his own. In the next two days he
would have to entrust his life to them, and as he did not particularly
trust any of the men he would be working with, he felt that the most he
could do was be sure of the choppers. They were his lifeline.
His way in-his way out.
Casilda had been lucky so far. At no port of call had any customs
officials conducted more than a cursory search of her holds. If they
had, they would almost certainly have discovered the two large crates
secreted in the stacks of bolted denim, which contained a rather
amateurish assortment of assault rifles, ammunition, and grenades.
They might even have discovered the special cargo hidden in Alan
Burton's cabin, but the Englishman doubted it. He had hidden the mortar
tube well.
In spite of this luck, Burton was angry. The man who had contracted for
his services had led him to believe that his companions on this mission
would know what they were about. They did not. Burton was the only man
in the entire unit who knew this part of Africa, and, excepting the
pilots, he was the only professional of the lot. The Cubans were all
right, but there were only two of them-the pilots. The sloppiness of
the Colombians was appalling. Burton considered them a rabble-no better
than d bandits. From his first contact with them, serious doubts about
the mission had begun to eat at his confidence.
He lit a Gauloise and cursed the luck that had forced him to work under
these circumstances. The company stank, but what could he do?
He wasn't complaining about the money-the Colombian paid cash on the
barrel head and lots of it. The Cuban pilots were getting six thousand
in flight pay, plus salary, and Burton's bonus was twice that.
But he had not taken this assignment for the money. He had taken it for
The Deal. The Deal was a mysterious and wondrous arrangement of a kind
he had never before heard-a solemn pact between a government and an
exiled mercenary.
The price to be paid was not money, but a treasure that only one
government in the world could pay. Burton didn't like to think about
The Deal too much, for fear it would evaporate like every other precious
hope in his life. Only in a few unguarded moments, on the foredeck at
dawn watching the sea, had he caught himself thinking of green hills, of
an old stone cottage, the smell of hothouse orchids, and sharing a pint
with a man much like himself. At those times he would angrily push the
visions from his mind.
He had enough to worry about. He worried what would happen if the
Cubans discovered what lay inside one of the elongated boxes labelled
RPG. Two million rand in gold was enough money to tempt even a man of
Burton's high professional standards, and he doubted the Cuban pilots
had any such pretensions. Strangely,'the Colombians didn't worry him on
that score. They would know enou h about the price I 9
of betraying their master to keep clear of such temptations.
But their lack of combat experience did worry him. He'd heard them
boasting about violent shootouts in and around Medellfn, but such
hooliganism hardly qualified them to face the kind of opposition they
were likely to meet in Africa.
They'll find out soon enough, he thought bitterly.
Burton expected a message today, relaying the latest situation from the
target. There was supposedly an informer in side the target-an
Englishman, no less-which Burton found very interesting. At least he
isn't a bloody Colombian, he thought. Burton hoped the strike order
would come today.
He was ready to get off the goddamn ship.
As he smoked beneath the blue wheelhouse awning, a thin, deeply tanned
man emerged from a hatch in the afterdeck and walked over to the
helicopters. it was one of the Cuban pilots-a bright-eyed youngster
named Diazchecking the moorings of the choppers. Spying Burton, he made
