attack had climbed out of the water.
All seven men, Harris included, were wearing full jungle camouflage BDUs, paratrooper boots and jungle camo slouch hats. They were armed with Heckler amp; Koch MP5s, Browning Hi-Power semiautomatic pistols and eight-inch KA-BAR knives. Several also carried M67 hand grenades on Sam Brownes looped over their shoulders. Harris carried a Glock 9 instead of a Browning.
The seven men came up the muddy riverbank yelling loudly. The quickest one up the slope died first. A two- foot-long arrow shot from Holliday’s rudimentary English longbow caught him just left of the heart and penetrated to his spine. The arrow had been fletched with duct-tape feathers and the point was just fire-hardened wood. Nevertheless at one hundred and eight foot-pounds per square inch of force it was just as lethal as the MP5 he never got to fire.
Numbers two and three stepped on muddy cardboard packing laid out on the riverbank, dropping down into a shallow pit onto twenty-four Ginsu steak knives.
The fourth man made it to the top of the bank, where Holliday’s second homemade arrow pierced his groin, slicing into his bladder and intestine. Lying flat in the jungle foliage a few yards to the right, just out of the clearing, Captain Eddie saw that the man was still alive and dangerous. He hurled himself forward out of the bushes in a diving tackle, hitting the wounded man waist high. He drove the bowie knife underhanded into the man’s belly, then sawed upward under the ribs, slicing into the right lung and finally piercing the heart.
Seeing the odds so drastically reduced within less than a minute, Harris veered into the jungle, trying to put as much distance between the clearing and himself as quickly as possible. The remaining members of Harris’s team were right behind him, the Viking code forgotten. With an arrow already notched and drawn Holliday let fly. The hardened point of the arrow struck Harris between the first and second cervical vertebra and without the cutting point of a steel head the arrow slipped sideways and punctured the internal carotid artery before jerking upward and piercing the tongue. Harris was paralyzed instantly, fell to his knees and watched mutely as his lifeblood poured from his mouth onto the dark rich earth of the jungle floor.
In the clearing Holliday tossed the longbow aside and pulled the MP5 out of one dead man’s loosened grip. He fired a burst in the direction of the fleeing men, but managed only to clip the foliage above their heads.
There was a sudden, stunned silence. Rafi and Peggy stared at the bodies, paying particular attention to their own grisly handiwork. Captain Eddie went from dead man to dead man, stripping their weapons, their floppy slouch hats and finally their paratrooper boots.
“Their shoes?” Rafi queried, stunned at the Cuban’s methodical concentration.
“The floor of the jungle can be very dangerous for your feet,” said Eddie.
“He’s right,” said Holliday, who was pulling the bodies from the hidden knife pit. Each knife came out of the dead flesh with soft, almost obscene sucking noises. Holliday began stripping both men. “Give us a hand,” he instructed. “The quicker we get this done the sooner we can get out of here.”
They gathered up anything useful, left the bodies and headed down the riverbank to the two dugouts. As they climbed into the crudely built canoes it began to rain.
“Wonderful.” Holliday grunted, pushing his dugout away from the shore. “Just what we needed.”
15
Captain Jean-Luc Saint-Sylvestre sat in his bedroom and stared through the viewfinder of the Canon EOS 5D at the hotel across from him. The Ali Pasha Hotel was on Clapham Street, just off the Brixton Road in south London.
The policeman could imagine the interior: six floors of tiny rooms and toilets the size of cupboards. Narrow stairways, peeling wallpaper and groaning pipes. Bedbugs, roaches and mice. Ten thousand places in London just like it. Anonymity defined.
The whole area was unofficially known as the capital of Afro-Caribbean England and it was easy enough for Saint-Sylvestre to fit in as long as he kept a check on his university-educated accent.
As well as being the densest part of black London, Brixton was also the crime capital of the city. Behind the colorful facade of the fresh fruit and vegetable stands and the street-long markets for African and Caribbean clothes, you could trade in just about any vice the human mind could think of, from heroin to hookers, smuggled cigarettes to smuggled women, blood diamonds to body parts, machine guns, stolen goods, counterfeit handbags, wristwatches and haute couture.
From your heart’s desire and passions to your soul’s blackest cravings-all were the stock-in-trade of Brixton. All of which made Brixton a logical end for Saint-Sylvestre’s pursuit of the still enigmatic Konrad Lanz.
During Lanz’s six-day stay in Kukuanaland he had made four official attempts to see Kolingba and gone for five afternoon walks. He had remained in the Trianon hotel during the evenings, sometimes eating in his room and sometimes in the Marie Antoinette Bar.
During these evenings he spoke only to Marcel Boganda, the bartender, a longtime paid informant of Saint- Sylvestre’s. According to Boganda their conversation had never gotten onto subjects of any more interest than the weather. Although Saint-Sylvestre had heard or seen nothing to dispute Oliver Gash’s presumption that Lanz was in Fourandao to reconnoiter a coup d’etat, neither had he heard or seen anything to support it.
Saint-Sylvestre had been a policeman in the Central African Republic a great deal longer than Gash had been a resident there, and something about the Rwandan/ American refugee triggered the policeman’s distrust.
If there had ever been a man more of an opportunist than President Kolingba, it was his newly minted second in command Oliver Gash, and if Gash wanted to know about an upcoming coup it was only to decide which side he should take or whether he should flee to his secret accounts in a number of Switzerland-, Panama- and Liechtenstein-based banks, all of which Saint-Sylvestre knew about.
Saint-Sylvestre also knew about Kolingba’s secret accounts, and was well aware that one of his own people at the Department of Internal Affairs had similar documentation regarding the African leader. On more than one occasion during Saint-Sylvestre’s long career it had occurred to the policeman that the government of the Central African Republic in general, and Kukuanaland in particular, was no more nor less corrupt and corruptible than any other nation; it was simply smaller and more overt. Like an expectation of personal privacy, in Kukuanaland there wasn’t the slightest expectation of a government that was incorruptible.
Corruption had been expected on the African continent with the first delivery of foreign-aid powdered milk and penicillin. There were three thousand tribes and two thousand languages all fighting for their existence and no moral code whether Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist or otherwise had ever made more than the most superficial inroads into that wretched, poor and terrible place. Joseph Conrad knew what he was talking about when he reached the end of that river in the Congo and found nothing but “The horror! The horror!”
And now it seemed there was more to come. In the four days since Konrad Lanz’s arrival at Heathrow he had met five people at his somewhat sordid headquarters at the Ali Pasha. Of the five, four had been cast from the same mold: hard, tough-looking men with an animal sense about them, even in the bowels of a megacity like London.
One of them had even been recognizable from the photo files Saint-Sylvestre kept at the airport. His name was Stefan Whartski, a Pole who’d started his mercenary career as a transport pilot during the Eritrean civil wars of 1980 and 1981. With men like Whartski talking to Lanz, it looked more and more as though his intuitions had been correct-he was watching a coup d’etat in the making.
The fifth Saint-Sylvestre called Mr. X. It was this man who was now meeting with Lanz for the second time, and he was something else altogether. Tall, distinguished, wearing his Bond Street suit like a uniform and with a military bearing that would have looked better on the parade ground than crawling through the jungle swamps outside Fourandao. This was the money man at ground level, not the principal perhaps but a conduit leading to him.
Lanz and the mystery man suddenly came out of the hotel and stood talking for a moment, bathed in the security light over the main door of the grimy six-story building. Saint-Sylvestre twisted the big telephoto lens. After a thousand surveillances like this one, reading lips was second nature to him.
Mr. X: “You’ve checked the money, then?”
Lanz: “Yes. Quite correct.”
