The Dogs of War Read online

  At this point, more than a week earlier, he had briefed one of the men he knew to be loyal to him to make intensive inquiries about Shannon. The man was called Henri Alain and was a former mercenary.

  Alain had reported back within twenty-four hours that Shannon had left his Montmartre hotel and not reappeared. He had also been able to tell Roux two other things: that Shannon’s disappearance had taken place the morning after Roux had received the London businessman in his own apartment, and that Shannon had also received a visitor the same afternoon. The hotel clerk, with a little currency persuasion, had been able to describe Shannon’s visitor, and privately Roux had no doubt the visitor in Montmartre had been the same man who came to him.

  So Mr. Harris from London had seen two mercenaries in Paris, although he needed only one. As a result, Shannon had disappeared while he, Roux, had been left on the shelf. That it was Shannon of all people who seemed to have got the contract made his rage even worse, for there was no one the man in the flat in the 11th arrondissement hated more.

  He had had Henri Alain stake out the hotel for four days, but Shannon had not come back. Then he tried another tack. He recalled that newspaper reports had linked Shannon with the Corsican Langarotti in the fighting in the last days of the enclave. Presumably if Shannon was back in circulation, so was Langarotti. So he had sent Henri Alain to Marseilles to find the Corsican and discover where Shannon might be. Alain had just arrived back, bearing the news that Langarotti had left Marseilles that same afternoon. Destination, London.

  Roux turned to his informant. “Bon, Henri. That’s all. I’ll contact you when I need you. Meantime, the clerk in the Montmartre place will let you know if Shannon returns?”

  “Sure,” said Alain as he rose to go.

  “Then ring me immediately if you hear.”

  When Alain had gone, Roux thought things over. For him the disappearance of Langarotti to London of all places meant the Corsican had gone to join Shannon there. That in turn meant Shannon was recruiting, and that could only mean he had got a contract. Roux had no doubt it was Walter Harris’s contract, one he felt he personally should have had. It was an impertinence, compounded by the recruiting of a Frenchman, and on French territory, which Roux regarded as being his own exclusive preserve.

  There was another reason why he wanted the Harris contract. He had not worked since the Bukavu affair, and his ability to keep his hold over the French mercenary community was likely to slip unless he could produce some form of work for it. If Shannon was unable to continue, if for instance he were to disappear permanently, Mr. Harris would presumably have to come back to Roux and engage him, as he should have done in the first place.

  Without further delay he made a local Paris phone call.

  Back in London, the dinner was nearing its end. The men had drunk a lot of carafe wine, for, like most mercenaries, they preferred it. Tiny Marc raised his glass and proposed the often-heard toast of the Congo.

  Vive la mort, vive la guerre,

  Vive le sacré mercenaire.

  Sitting back in his chair, clearheaded while the rest got drunk, Cat Shannon wondered idly how much havoc would be wreaked when he let slip this group of dogs on Kimba’s palace. Silently he raised his own glass and drank to the dogs of war.

  Charles Roux was forty-eight, and several parts mad, although the two facts were quite unconnected. He could never have been certified insane, but most psychiatrists would at least have held him to be mentally unstable. The basis for such a diagnosis would have been the presence of a fair degree of megalomania, but this is present in many people outside lunatic asylums and is usually more kindly interpreted, at least when present in the rich and famous, as merely exaggerated egocentricity.

  The same psychiatrists would probably have detected a tinge of paranoia, and a severe examiner might have gone so far as to suggest there was a streak of the psychopath in the French mercenary. But as Roux had never been examined by a skilled psychiatrist, and as his instability was usually well camouflaged beneath an exterior of some intelligence and considerable cunning, these questions were never raised.

  The only exterior clues to his makeup lay in his capacity to impute a status and importance to himself that was wholly illusory, a self-pity that insisted he had never once been at fault but that all others who disagreed with him were wholly in the wrong, and the capacity for vicious hatred toward those he felt had wronged him.

  Often the victims of his hatred had done little or nothing beyond frustrating Roux, but in Shannon’s case there were at least grounds for the dislike.

  Roux had been a top sergeant in the French army until his late thirties, when he was dismissed after an affair involving certain missing funds. In 1961, at a loose end, he had paid his own fare to Katanga and proposed himself as a well-qualified adviser to the secessionist movement of the then Katangese leader, Moïse Tshombe. That year was the height of the struggle to tear the mineral-rich province of Katanga out of the union with the sprawling, anarchic, and newly independent Congo. Several of the men who later became mercenary chieftains began their freelance careers in the imbroglio in Katanga. Hoare, Denard, and Schramme were among them. Despite his claims to greater things, Roux was permitted only a small role in the Katangese events, and when the mighty United Nations finally managed to vanquish the small bands of freebooting pistoleros—which had to be done politically, since it could not be done militarily—Roux was among those who got out.

  That was in 1962. Two years later, with the Congo falling like a set of skittles to the Communist-backed Simbas, Tshombe was recalled from exile to take over not Katanga but the whole Congo. He in turn sent for Hoare, and Roux was among those who flew back to enter service under Hoare. As a Frenchman, he naturally would have been in the French-speaking Sixth Commando, but as he had been in South Africa at the time, it was to the Fifth that he went. Here he was put in charge of a company, and one of his section commanders six months later was a young Anglo-Irishman called Shannon.

  Roux’s break with Hoare came three months later. Already becoming convinced of his own superiority as a military commander, Roux was entrusted with the job of knocking out a Simba roadblock. He devised his own plan of attack, and it was a total disaster. Four white mercenaries were killed and more than a score of his Katangese levies. Part of the reason was the plan of attack, part the fact that Roux had been blind drunk. Behind the drunkenness was the secret certainty that, for all his bombast, Roux did not like combat.

  Colonel Hoare called for a report from Roux and got it. Parts of it did not tally with the known facts. Hoare sent for the only surviving section commander, Carlo Shannon, and questioned him closely. From what emerged, he sent for Roux and dismissed him on the spot.

  Roux went north and joined the Sixth Commando under Denard at Paulis, explaining his defection from the Fifth as being due to dislike of a superb French commander by the inferior British, a reason Denard found little difficulty in believing. He posted Roux as second-in-command of a smaller commando, nominally dependent on the Sixth but in fact almost independent. This was the Fourteenth Commando at Watsa, ruled by Commandant Tavernier.

  By 1966 Hoare had retired and gone home, and Tavernier had left. The Fourteenth was commanded by Commandant Wautier—like Tavernier, a Belgian. Roux was still second-in-command and hated Wautier. Not that the Belgian had done anything; the reason for the loathing was that Roux had expected the command after Tavernier’s departure. He had not got it. So he hated Wautier.

  The Fourteenth, heavily staffed by Katangese levies, was the spear point of the 1966 mutiny against the Congolese government. This had been planned, and well so, by Wautier, and would probably have succeeded. Black Jacques Schramme was holding his own predominantly Katangese Tenth Commando in check only to see how things went. Had Wautier led the revolt, it might well have succeeded; Black Jacques would probably have brought his Tenth into the affair, had it been successful, and the Congolese government might well have fallen. To launch the revolt, Wauti
er had brought his Fourteenth to Stanleyville, where on the left bank of the Congo River the vast arsenal stood, containing enough munitions to enable anyone holding it to rule the central and eastern Congo for years.

  Two hours before the attack, Commandant Wautier was shot dead, and although it was never proved, it was Roux who murdered him with a shot in the back of the head. A wiser man might have called off the attack. Roux insisted on taking command, and the mutiny was a disaster. His forces never got across the river to the left bank, the Congolese army rallied on learning the armory was still in its hands, and Roux’s unit was wiped out to the last man. Schramme thanked his stars he had kept his own men out of the fiasco. On the run and terrified, Roux sought refuge with John Peters, new commander of the English-speaking Fifth, which was also not involved. Peters smuggled the desperate Roux, swathed in bandages and masquerading as an Englishman, out of the country.

  The only plane out was heading for South Africa, and that was where Roux went. Ten months later, he flew back into the Congo, this time accompanied by five South Africans. He had got wind of the coming July 1967 revolt and come to join Schramme at the headquarters of the Tenth Commando near Kindu. He was in Stanleyville again when mutiny broke out, this time with Schramme and Denard participating. Within hours Denard was out of action, hit in the head by a ricochet bullet loosed off in error by one of his own men. At a crucial point the leader of the joint forces of the Sixth and Tenth was out of the fight. Roux, claiming that as a Frenchman he should take precedence over the Belgian Schramme, maintaining he was the best commander present and the only one who could command the mercenaries, put himself forward for overall command.

  The choice fell on Schramme, not because he was the best man to command the whites but because he was the only man who could command the Katangese, and without these levies the small band of Europeans would have been too badly outnumbered.

  Roux’s claim failed on two fronts. The Katangese loathed and distrusted him, remembering the unit of their own people he had led to annihilation the previous year. And at the mercenaries’ council, held the night Denard was flown out on a stretcher to Rhodesia, one of those who spoke against Roux’s nomination was one of Denard’s company commanders, Shannon, who had left the Fifth eighteen months earlier and joined the Sixth rather than serve under Peters.

  A second time the mercenaries failed to take the arsenal, and Schramme opted for the long march from Stanleyville to Bukavu, a resort town on Lake Bukavu, abutting the neighboring republic of Rwanda and offering some form of retreat if things went wrong.

  By this time Roux was gunning for Shannon, and to keep them apart Schramme gave Shannon’s company the hazardous job of point unit, breaking trail up front as the column of mercenaries, Katangese, and thousands of camp followers fought their way through the Congolese toward the lake. Roux was given a job at the rear of the convoy, so the two never met on the march.

  They finally met in Bukavu town after the mercenaries had settled in and the Congolese had surrounded them on all sides except the lake behind the town. It was September 1967, and Roux was drunk. Over a game of cards he lost through lack of concentration, he accused Shannon of cheating. Shannon replied that Roux made as big a mess of his poker as he had of attacks on Simba roadblocks and for the same reason—he had no nerve. There was dead silence among the group around the table as the other mercenaries edged back toward the walls. But Roux backed down. Glaring at Shannon, he let the younger man get up and walk toward the door. Only when the Irishman had his back turned did Roux reach for the Colt .45 he, like all of them, carried, and take aim.

  Shannon, listening, heard the scrape of a chair and reacted first. He turned, pulled his own automatic, and fired down the length of the hall. The slug was a lucky one for a shot from the hip on a half-turn. It took Roux high in the right arm, tore a hole through the biceps, and left his arm hanging limp from his side, the fingers dripping blood onto the useless Colt on the floor by his side.

  “There’s one other thing I remember,” Shannon called down the room. “I remember what happened to Wautier.”

  Roux was finished after the shoot-out. He evacuated himself across the bridge into Rwanda, had himself driven to Kigali, the capital, and flew back to France. Thus he missed the fall of Bukavu when finally the ammunition ran out in November, and the five months in an internment camp in Kigali. He also missed a chance to settle scores with Shannon.

  Being the first back into Paris from Bukavu, Roux had given several interviews in which he spoke glowingly of himself, his battle wound, and his desire to get back and lead his men. The fiasco at Dilolo, when a recuperated Denard tried a badly planned invasion of the Congo from Angola in the south as a diversion to take the strain off his men in Bukavu, and the virtual retirement of the former leader of the Sixth, gave Roux the impression he had every right to claim leadership over the French mercenaries. He had made quite a lot of money from looting in the Congo and had salted it away.

  With the money, he was able to make a splash among the barflies and street corner bums who like to style themselves mercenaries, and from them he still retained a certain degree of loyalty, but of the bought kind.

  Henri Alain was one such, and so was Roux’s next visitor, who came in answer to his telephoned summons. He was another mercenary, but of a different type.

  Raymond Thomard was a killer by instinct and profession. He too had been in the Congo once, when on the run from the police, and Roux had used him as a hatchet man. For a few small handouts and in the mistaken view that Roux was a big shot, Thomard was as loyal as a paid man can ever be.

  “I’ve got a job for you,” Roux told him. “A contract worth five thousand dollars. Are you interested?”

  Thomard grinned. “Sure, patron. Who’s the bugger you want knocked off?”

  “Cat Shannon.”

  Thomard’s face dropped.

  Roux went on before he could reply. “I know he’s good. But you’re better. Besides, he knows nothing. You’ll be given his address when he checks into Paris next time. You just have to wait till he leaves, then take him at your own convenience. Does he know you by sight?”

  Thomard shook his head. “We never met,” he said.

  Roux clapped him on the back. “Then you’ve got nothing to worry about. Stay in touch. I’ll let you know when and where you’ll find him.”

  eleven

  Simon Endean’s letter sent on Tuesday night arrived at ten on Thursday morning at the Handelsbank in Zurich. According to the instructions the bank telexed £10,000 to the account of Mr. Keith Brown at the Kredietbank in Brugge.

  By noon Mr. Goossens had seen the telex and wired £5000 to Mr. Brown’s account in the West End of London. Shortly before four that afternoon, Shannon made a check call to his bank and learned the credit was there waiting for him. He asked the manager personally to give him drawing facilities in cash up to £3500 the following morning. He was told it would be available for collection by eleven-thirty.

  Shortly after nine the same morning Martin Thorpe presented himself in Sir James Manson’s office with his findings. The two men went over the short list together, studying the pages of photostat documents acquired at Companies House on Tuesday and Wednesday. When they finished, Manson sat back in his chair and gazed at the ceiling.

  “There’s no doubt you are right about Bormac, Martin,” he said, “but why the hell hasn’t the major stockholder been bought out long ago?”

  It was the question Martin Thorpe had been asking himself all the previous night and day.

  The Bormac Trading Company Limited had been founded in 1904 to exploit the output of a series of vast rubber plantations that had been created during the last years of the previous century on the basis of slave labor by Chinese coolies.

  The founder of the estates had been an enterprising and ruthless Scot by the name of Ian Macallister, later created Sir Ian Macallister in 1921, and the estates were situated in Borneo, hence the name of the company.

  Mo
re of a builder than a businessman, Macallister had agreed in 1903 to enter into partnership with a group of London businessmen, and the following year Bormac was created and floated with an issue of half a million ordinary shares. Macallister, who had married a seventeen-year-old girl the previous year, received 150,000 shares, a place on the board, and managership during his lifetime of the rubber estates.

  Ten years after the company’s founding, the London businessmen had clinched a series of lucrative contracts with companies supplying the British war effort with rubber, and the share price had climbed from its issue price of four shillings to more than two pounds. The war profiteers’ boom lasted until 1918. There was a slump for the company just after the First World War, until the motorcar craze of the 1920s boosted the need for rubber tires, and again shares rose. This time there was a one-for-one new issue, raising the total amount of the company’s shares on the market to 1 million and Sir Ian’s block to 300,000. There had been no more share issues after that.

  The slump of the Depression sent prices and shares down again, and they were recovering by 1937. In that year one of the Chinese coolies finally ran amok and performed an unpleasantness on the sleeping Sir Ian with a heavy-bladed parang. The undermanager took over but lacked the drive of his dead master, and production fell as prices rose. The Second World War could have been a boon to the company, but the Japanese invasion of Borneo in 1941 disrupted supplies.

  The death knell of the company was finally sounded by the Indonesian nationalist movement, which wrested control of the Dutch East Indies and Borneo from Holland in 1948. When the border between Indonesian Borneo and British North Borneo was finally drawn, the estates were on the Indonesian side and were promptly nationalized without compensation.

  For more than twenty years the company had staggered on, its assets unrecoverable, fruitless lawsuits with President Sukarno’s regime eating away at the cash, prices falling. By the time Martin Thorpe went over the company’s books, the shares stood at a shilling each, and their highest price over the previous year had been one shilling and threepence.