The Dogs of War Read online

  “FREDERICK FORSYTH HAS BEEN A HOUSEHOLD

  NAME FOR THRILLER DEVOTEES

  SINCE THE COLD WAR.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “FORSYTH CAN TELL A SUSPENSEFUL TALE

  BETTER THAN ANYONE.”

  —Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  Praise for the Novels

  of Frederick Forsyth

  “[An] incredible, imaginative mind.”

  —Larry King

  “Makes such comparable books as The Manchurian Candidate and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold seem like Hardy Boy mysteries.”

  —The New York Times

  “Relentless action…. Insight into the drug culture combined with Forsyth’s easy, exciting style guarantees a rich, entertaining read.”

  —The Columbus Dispatch

  “The master of the political thriller strikes again…. Forsyth still knows how to spring a surprise…a taut, readable, and swiftly moving tale well suited to the beach and airplane.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Devilish plot details…a first-rate read, and one that transcends fevered fantasies about CIA misdeeds.”

  —The Washington Times

  “Quite compelling…definitely worth your time…. It has the power of memorable intelligent entertainment about a moral plague and a debilitating social dilemma, second only to contemporary sex trafficking in its destructive force.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “Forsyth convincingly conjures up the world of counterterrorism and offers an all-too-plausible terrorist plot.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Frightening…builds to an exciting climax that makes the read well worth it.”

  —Library Journal

  Also by Frederick Forsyth

  The Day of the Jackal

  The Odessa File

  The Shepherd

  No Comebacks

  The Devil’s Alternative

  The Fourth Protocol

  The Deceiver

  The Fist of God

  Icon

  The Phantom of Manhattan

  The Veteran

  Avenger

  The Afghan

  The Cobra

  FREDERICK

  FORSYTH

  THE

  DOGS OF

  WAR

  NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY

  NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

  Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2,

  Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124,

  Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

  New Delhi - 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632,

  New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue,

  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Viking hardcover edition and a Bantam mass market edition.

  First New American Library Printing, October 2012

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © Danesbrook Productions Ltd., 1974

  Excerpt from The Afghan copyright © Frederick Forsyth, 2006

  Excerpt from The Cobra copyright © Frederick Forsyth, 2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-60754-1

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Printed in the United States of America

  Set in Electra

  Designed by Ginger Legato

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  For Giorgio, and Christian and Schlee,

  and Big Marc and Black Johnny,

  and the others in the unmarked graves.

  At least we tried.

  Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war.

  —William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

  That…be not told of my death,

  Or made to grieve on account of me,

  And that I be not buried in consecrated ground,

  And that no sexton be asked to toll the bell,

  And that nobody is wished to see my dead body,

  And that no mourners walk behind me at my funeral,

  And that no flowers be planted on my grave,

  And that no man remember me,

  To this I put my name.

  —Thomas Hardy

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  PART ONE

  The Crystal Mountain

  PART TWO

  The Hundred Days

  PART THREE

  The Big Killing

  Epilogue

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  A RATHER UNDESERVING SCRIBE

  It has been made plain to me over the years and from many sources that as an earner of a living out of creative writing, I am a bit of an oddity.

  For one thing I never wanted to be one. Every interview and critical assessment I have ever read of other writers stresses how they lusted from childhood one day to become a writer and a tower of the literary community. All I ever wanted to be was a fighter jock.

  I spent most of my boyhood making balsa models of MiGs, Sabres and Lightnings. My heroes were the great fliers of both World Wars, and at the first possible opportunity, I quit school and volunteered underage for the Royal Air Force.

  I probably thought Jane Eyre lived in Hollywood, just down the block from Rita Hayworth, and I thought Marlon Brando was dreadful in Sayonara because anyone with reflexes that slow would not have lasted an hour in Korea.

  Now I learn that others who became writers attended creative courses, took literary college degrees, and hung upon every word of anyone who could even spell Pulitzer. I just memorized the silhouettes of Sukhois and Tupolevs. (It was the Cold War back then.)

  When I had got the flying bug out of my system, I quit the RAF and became a journalist. The aim was not to write but to see the world as a foreign and war correspondent. And for twelve years, I did. Then I ran into a bald patch—as in skint, stony broke. Trying to make a few dollars to get out of the hole, I recalled Paris seven years earlier and wrote The Day of the Jackal. It was supposed to be a one-off. Clear the debts and return to globetrotting.

  One thing led to another. I got married at thirty-five and the bride laid down the law—as they all do. Stay home, tell stories, and make a good living or get your head blown off for peanuts in
another crazy war east of Suez if not of Eden. A no-brainer—maybe literally.

  I know I am—and I regret being—regarded as curmudgeonly because I do not frequent lit fests and seminars. Those who arrange them—and just about every two-horse town in the UK now has its festival—have seemingly given up on me. I do not wish to be disagreeable, but I honestly cannot think of anything to say.

  There may be pastimes more tiresome than talking about oneself, but offhand I cannot think of one. To some earnest questioner asking, “Can you tell me how you write your novels?” I would have to reply, “I’m afraid not.” Now, that would be rude, but it would also be true. So I just go scuba-diving with manta rays. They are awesome and never ask a damn fool question.

  Basically I think I am just a storyteller, and that was probably the first paid job on the planet. I like to think that way back some hunter-gatherers were sitting bored round a campfire when one of them suggested: “How about I tell you a story?” So the others liked the story and gave him a rock rabbit, and the first paid author was born. We are still basically exchanging stories for rock rabbits.

  So to those venturing into the pages of these reissues, I can only say that I seek for interesting, accurate, and feasible. If my stories are these three, I have done my best and hope you will like them. Oh, and thank you for the fricassee of rabbit.

  —Frederick Forsyth

  PART ONE

  THE CRYSTAL

  MOUNTAIN

  one

  There were no stars that night on the bush airstrip, nor any moon, just the West African darkness wrapping round the scattered groups like warm, wet velvet. The cloud cover was lying hardly off the tops of the iroko trees, and the waiting men prayed it would stay a while longer to shield them from the bombers.

  At the end of the runway the battered old DC-4, which had just slipped in for a landing by runway lights that stayed alight for just the last fifteen seconds of final approach, turned and coughed its way blindly toward the palm-thatch huts.

  Between two of them, five white men sat crouched in a Land Rover and stared toward the incoming aircraft. They said nothing, but the same thought was in each man’s mind. If they did not get out of the battered and crumbling enclave before the forces of the central government overran the last few square miles, they would not get out alive. Each man had a price on his head and intended to see that no man collected it. They were the last of the mercenaries who had fought on contract for the side that had lost. Now it was time to go. So they watched the incoming and unexpected cargo plane with silent attention.

  A Federal MiG-17 night fighter, probably flown by one of the six East German pilots sent down over the past three months to replace the Egyptians, who had a horror of flying at night, moaned across the sky to the west. It was out of sight above the cloud layers.

  The pilot of the taxiing DC-4, unable to hear the scream of the jet above him, flicked on his own lights to see where he was going, and from the darkness a voice cried uselessly, “Kill de lights!” When the pilot had got his bearings, he turned them off anyway, and the fighter above was miles away. To the south there was a rumble of artillery where the front had finally crumbled as men who had had neither food nor bullets for two months threw down their guns and headed for the protecting bush forest.

  The pilot of the DC-4 brought his plane to a halt twenty yards from the Super Constellation already parked on the apron, killed the engines, and climbed down to the concrete. An African ran over to him and there was a muttered conversation. The two men walked through the dark toward one of the larger groups of men, a blob of black against the darkness of the palm forest. The group parted as the two from the tarmac approached, until the white man who had flown in the DC-4 was face-to-face with the one who stood in the center. The white man had never seen him before, but he knew of him, and, even in the darkness dimly illumined by a few cigarettes, he could recognize the man he had come to see.

  The pilot wore no cap, so instead of saluting he inclined his head slightly. He had never done that before, not to a black, and could not have explained why he did it.

  “My name is Captain Van Cleef,” he said in English accented in the Afrikaner manner.

  The African nodded his acknowledgment, his bushy black beard brushing the front of his striped camouflage uniform as he did so.

  “It’s a hazardous night for flying, Captain Van Cleef,” he remarked dryly, “and a little late for more supplies.”

  His voice was deep and slow, the accent more like that of an English public-school man, which he was, than like an African. Van Cleef felt uncomfortable and again, as a hundred times during his run through the cloud banks from the coast, asked himself why he had come.

  “I didn’t bring any supplies, sir. There weren’t any more to bring.”

  Another precedent set. He had sworn he would not call the man “sir.” Not a Kaffir. It had just slipped out. But they were right, the other mercenary pilots in the hotel bar in Libreville, the ones who had met him. This one was different.

  “Then why have you come?” asked the general softly. “The children perhaps? There are a number here the nuns would like to fly out to safety, but no more Caritas planes will come in tonight.”

  Van Cleef shook his head, then realized no one could see the gesture. He was embarrassed, and thankful that the darkness hid it. Around him the bodyguards clutched their submachine carbines and stared at him.

  “No. I came to collect you. If you want to come, that is.”

  There was a long silence. He could feel the African staring at him through the gloom, occasionally caught a flash of eye-white as one of the attendants raised his cigarette.

  “I see. Did your government instruct you to come in here tonight?”

  “No,” said Van Cleef. “It was my idea.”

  There was another long pause. The bearded head was nodding slowly in what could have been comprehension or bewilderment.

  “I am very grateful,” said the voice. “It must have been quite a trip. Actually I have my own transport. The Super Constellation. Which I hope will be able to take me away to exile.”

  Van Cleef felt relieved. He had no idea what the political repercussions would have been if he had flown back to Libreville with the general.

  “I’ll wait till you’re off the ground and gone,” he said and nodded again. He felt like holding out his hand to shake, but did not know whether he ought. If he had but known it, the African general was in the same quandary. So he turned and walked back to his aircraft.

  There was silence for a while in the group of black men after he had left.

  “Why does a South African, and an Afrikaner, do a thing like that, General?” one of them asked.

  There was a flash of teeth as the general smiled briefly. “I don’t think we shall ever understand that,” he said.

  A match spluttered as another cigarette was lit, the glow setting for a parting instant into sharp relief the faces of the men in the group. At the center was the general, taller than all but two of the guards, heavily built with burly chest and shoulders, distinguishable from others at several hundred yards by the bushy black beard that half the world had come to recognize.

  In defeat, on the threshold of an exile he knew would be lonely and humiliating, he still commanded. Surrounded by his aides and several ministers, he was as always slightly aloof, withdrawn. To be alone is one of the prices of leadership; with him it was also a state of reflex.

  For two and a half years, sometimes by sheer force of personality when there was nothing else to employ, he had kept his millions of people together and fighting against the central Federal Government. All the experts had told the world they would have to collapse in a few weeks, two months at most. The odds were insuperable against them. Somehow they had kept fighting, surrounded, besieged, starving but defiant.

  His enemies had refuted his leadership of his people, but few who had been there had any doubts. Even in defeat, as his car passed through the last village before the
airstrip, the villagers had lined the mud road to chant their loyalty. Hours earlier, at the last meeting of the cabinet, the vote had asked him to leave. There would be reprisals in defeat, the spokesman for the caucus said, but a hundred times worse if he remained. So he was leaving, the man the Federal Government wanted dead by sunrise.

  By his side stood one of his confidants, one of those whose loyalty had not been changed. A small, graying professor, he was called Dr. Okoye. He had decided to remain behind, to hide in the bush until he could return quietly to his home when the first wave of reprisals had ended. The two men had agreed to wait six months before making the first steps to contact each other.

  Farther up the apron, the five mercenaries sat and watched the dim figure of the pilot return to his plane. The leader sat beside the African driver, and all five were smoking steadily.

  “It must be the South African plane,” said the leader and turned to one of the four other whites crouched in the Land Rover behind him. “Janni, go and ask the skipper if he’ll make room for us.”

  A tall, rawboned, angular man climbed out of the rear of the vehicle. Like the others, he was dressed from head to foot in a predominantly green jungle camouflage uniform, slashed with streaks of brown. He wore green canvas jackboots on his feet, the trousers tucked into them. From his belt hung a water bottle and a bowie knife, three empty pouches for magazines for the FAL carbine over his shoulder. As he came round to the front of the Land Rover the leader called him again.

  “Leave the FAL,” he said, stretching out an arm to take the carbine, “and, Janni, make it good, huh? Because if we don’t get out of here in that crate, we could get chopped up in a few days.”

  The man called Janni nodded, adjusted the beret on his head, and ambled toward the DC-4. Captain Van Cleef did not hear the rubber soles moving up behind him.

  “Naand, meneer.”

  Van Cleef spun round at the sound of the Afrikaans and took in the shape and size of the man beside him. Even in the darkness he could pick out the black-and-white skull-and-crossbones motif on the man’s left shoulder. He nodded warily. “Naand. Jy Afrikaans?”