the two-hundred-man companies. The end-user certificates for the small arms they’d purchased in Belgium, Spain and the Croatian port of Rijeka had passed inspection in Beirut and were supposed to be delivered to Mopti today.
The small tent city at the end of the airport’s single runway and the two hundred men occupying it had also been ignored, as had the strange paint scheme of the old prop-jet cargo planes. Enough palms had been greased to keep officials at bay for the next thirty-six hours, but Lanz knew perfectly well that rumors were flying about their presence in the town of more than a hundred thousand only a few miles away on the river.
Lanz turned away from the Vanguards and crunched across the hard-packed sand to the oversized marquee tent they were using as base headquarters. He nodded to the guards on each side of the opening. They were well kitted out in worn lowland leaf-pattern camo fatigues from the Vietnam era, and instead of berets they wore the much more useful boonie hats. Officers wore camo baseball caps, which were the only indicators of rank.
He stepped inside the tent. There were three large models laid out on tables in the center of the tent. All were to scale. The one on the left showed the airport, the one in the middle showed the compound and the surrounding square and the one on the right showed the dock area.
Captain Pierre Laframboise, leader of Vanguard One, was studying both the airport and the compound models carefully. Lanz had worked with Laframboise on several different projects over the years and the two men both liked and respected each other. Laframboise was a big man with a big beard and a big belly. He liked to eat almost as much as he liked to fight.
“Having second thoughts, Pierre?”
“I
“About what?”
“About news getting back to this
“It’s barely a mile,” said Lanz. “Fifteen minutes at a trot.”
“And all jungle. He could have a battalion waiting for us in ambush.”
“He doesn’t have a battalion-we’re going in at two-to-one odds.” Lanz smiled, listening to Laframboise clucking away like a worried hen. It was almost a ritual, this fretting of his. But it was fretting that had saved both their lives on more than one occasion. “But I see your point. Why don’t we stagger the companies-five minutes between Vanguard One and Vanguard Two down the airport road.”
“Better.” Laframboise nodded. “Not perfect, but a little better.”
“Anything else?”
“This Limbani character. It would be
“Limbani’s a myth, a pipe dream. It’s been almost seven years since Kolingba took over. If Limbani were alive he’d have made a move by now.”
“Your bones are getting brittle with age,
“He’s paying us well, Pierre, enough to retire maybe, to open that restaurant of yours in Tours, for me to see my daughter a little more, to be an ordinary citizen.”
The big man smiled sadly. “They always pay us well, Colonel, as well they should-we are supposed to die for their money if necessary. And we are not ordinary citizens; we are what we are because of you, and so we have bad blood with our families, and the restaurants in Tours are always somewhere in the future. We’re going to die in a place like this someday, Konrad, and you know it.”
Lanz turned away and stepped out of the tent into the sunlight again. He climbed up into the cab of the postwar Bedford S Type canvas van that stood beside the marquee and headed into Mopti and the waterfront, where the two big pinasse cargo vessels were bringing up the arms from Bamako.
He swung the heavy old army truck down the track that ran between the lines of tents farther along the runway. Most of the men were outside, sitting on camp stools or old lawn furniture they’d found somewhere.
They were stripped to the waist in the heat, playing cards or board games and drinking Castel beer that Lanz had figured into the budget. Some of them were doing small bits of housekeeping: shining boots, replacing laces, even pipe-claying belts.
Most of them were young, not much more than twenty-five, and of those almost all were black- discards, deserters or just plain fed up from armies of other African nations that barely fed them and rarely paid them. With the money each one of them hoped to make in the next few days they could keep their families for months and sometimes years. To these it was worth the risk.
Almost all of the boys, black or white, young or old, were laughing and smiling and telling jokes together, but as he drove by he caught the occasional long look into nowhere, usually from the scarred, sunburned older ones, his best men from the Belgian days and some from even further back. Addicted to it, just like him, throwing the dice with the devil one more time, trying to beat the odds once again.
He reached the end of the hardened track in the sand and turned onto the highway leading into Mopti. As he drove toward the town and the teeming port on the banks of the wide, sluggish river he thought about his conversation with Laframboise, one of the old guard and, like most of them, Lanz included, inclined to be superstitious.
He’d told Pierre that Limbani was a myth and for the most part he believed it, but myths and superstitions sometimes had some basis in fact. What was the old adage? “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire”? Limbani had been out of the picture for almost ten years now; was slight hope keeping a faint trail of smoke rising, or was it something more substantial? He stepped on the gas, pushing the lurching old truck a little harder. He put any thoughts of Limbani out of his mind. What was substantial was the crates of AK-47s still wrapped in their paper, and wooden boxes of ammo sitting on the docks, waiting for him.
The Kamov Ka-52 “Alligator” attack helicopter lifted nose-down to the hardstand, its counter-rotating rotors sounding like a pair of hammering commercial washing machines. The sudden furious noise and lurching takeoff brought Oliver Gash’s lunch abruptly into his throat. The takeoff was completed with an equally sudden lift of the nose, the small yellow stucco buildings of Kukuanaland International rotating in front of him like a yo-yo until all he could see was a patch of sunlit blue sky and all he could feel was his gut falling along with his lunch, his bowels simultaneously demanding to be opened.
Gash gritted his teeth but that only made it even worse. He told himself that the pilot was risking his own life as well, but the broad, gum-chewing face of Flying Officer Emmanuel Osita Ozegbe, eyes hidden behind his mirrored sunglasses, didn’t give him the security he needed. Ozegbe looked about sixteen years old and about sixty pounds overweight, like someone who smoked too much weed, watched too much TV and ate too many Doritos. He’d met lots just like him back in Baltimore. Welfare weenies who’d never get off it until Medicare cut off their legs from diabetes and they went on disability benefits instead.
“Where you want to go today, boss?” Ozegbe said, speaking the standard Sango patois. He spun the helicopter slowly around on its axis. It was only through an incredible application of willpower that Gash didn’t simultaneously soil his pants and puke all over his lap.
“Upriver,” Gash managed, using the same language. “Kazaba Falls.” This was where the rumors consistently placed Limbani.
“No problem,” said Ozegbe. He swung the helicopter around until he had the appropriate compass heading, put the stick and the helicopter into a nose-down attitude and gunned the throttles. Gash was jerked back in his seat and suddenly they were in rapid motion, tearing through the sky a hundred feet above the ground, the great sound of the big Klimov turbo shafts blotting out everything. Except the sound of his own ragged breathing and his companion’s gum snapping.
The helicopter flew like a video game, everything controlled from one complex stick with thumb buttons, finger-grip controls and toggle switches like a Christmas tree. Ozegbe threw it around the sky like a farm boy driving a tractor-there was no finesse or subtlety or sense that the young man was managing a stupendously complicated piece of machinery.
With the stick and the heads-up weapons panels and the virtual dials and controls displayed on little screens
