The Dogs of War

by Frederick Forsyth

  The top paper on the file was an application for a movement order to shift a quantity of crates from Madrid to Valencia and export them on a vessel called the MV Toscana. Beneath this sheet was the export license, granted by his own signature.

  He glanced up at the civil servant in front of him. “Why the change?” he asked.

  “Colonel, it is simply that there is no berth available in Valencia port for two weeks. The place is crowded to capacity.”

  Colonel Almela grunted. The explanation was plausible. In the summer months Valencia was always crowded, with millions of oranges from the nearby Gandia area being exported. But he did not like changes. He liked to play things by the book. Nor did he like this order. It was small, too small for an entire national police force. Target practice alone for a thousand policemen would use it up in an hour. Nor did he trust Schlinker, whom he knew well and who had slipped the order through his Ministry with a batch of other orders, including more than ten thousand artillery shells for Syria.

  He glanced through the papers again. Outside, a church bell struck the hour of one, the hour of lunch. There was still nothing wrong with the papers, including the End User Certificate. Everything bore the right stamp. If only he could find one discrepancy, in the certificate, in the carrying ship of the company that owned it. But everything was clean. Making a final decision, he scrawled his signature across the bottom of the movement order and handed the file back to the civil servant.

  “All right,” he growled. “Castellón.”

  “We’ve had to change the port of embarkation from Valencia to Castellón,” said Johann Schlinker two nights later. “There was no choice if the loading date of the twentieth was to be adhered to. Valencia was full for weeks.”

  Cat Shannon was sitting on the bed in the German arms dealer’s room in the Mindanao Hotel. “Where’s Castellón?” he asked.

  “Forty miles up the coast. It’s a smaller port, and quieter. Probably better than Valencia for you. The turnaround of your ship is likely to be quicker. The cargo agent in Valencia has been informed and will personally go north to Castellón to supervise the loading. As soon as the Toscana checks in with Valencia harbor authorities by radio, she will be advised of the change of port. She will only have a couple of hours’ extra steaming if she diverts at once.”

  “What about my going aboard?”

  “Well, that’s your business,” said Schlinker. “However, I have informed the agent that a seaman from the Toscana who was left behind ten days ago in Brindisi is due to rejoin, and given him the name of Keith Brown. How are your papers?”

  “Fine,” said Shannon. “They’re in order, passport and merchant seaman’s card.”

  “You’ll find the agent at the customs office in Castellón as soon as it opens on the morning of the twentieth,” Schlinker told him. “His name is Señor Moscar.”

  “What about the Madrid end of things?”

  “The movement order provides for the truck to be loaded under army supervision between eight and midnight on the nineteenth, tomorrow. It will set off with escort at midnight, timing its arrival at Castellón harbor gates for six a.m., the hour they open. If the Toscana is on time, she should have docked during the night. The truck carrying the crates is a civilian one, from the same freight firm I always employ. They’re very good and very experienced. I have given the transport manager instructions to see the convoy depart from the warehouse and to phone me here immediately.”

  Shannon nodded. There was nothing he could think of that might go wrong. “I’ll be here,” he said, and left.

  That afternoon he hired a powerful Mercedes from one of the internationally known car agencies that have offices in Madrid.

  At half past ten the following evening he was back in the Mindanao with Schlinker while they waited for the telephone call. Both men were nervous, as men must be when a carefully laid plan rests for its success or catastrophic failure in the hands of others. Schlinker was as concerned as Shannon but for different reasons. He knew that, if anything went badly wrong, a complete investigation into the End User Certificate he had supplied could be ordered, and that certificate would not stand up to a complete investigation, which must include a check with the Interior Ministry in Baghdad. If he were exposed on that one, other, and for him far more lucrative, deals with Madrid would be forfeit. Not for the first time he wished he had not taken the order in the first place, but, like most arms dealers, he was a man so greedy that no offer of money could be turned down. It would almost be physical pain to do it.

  Midnight came, and still there was no call. Then half past midnight. Shannon paced the room, snarling his anger and frustration at the fat German, who sat drinking whisky. At twelve-forty the phone rang. Schlinker leaped at it. He spoke several words in Spanish and waited.

  “What is it?” snapped Shannon.

  “Moment,” replied Schlinker and waved his hand for silence. Then someone else came on the phone and there was more Spanish, which Shannon could not understand. Finally Schlinker grinned and said, “Gracias,” into the phone several times.

  “It’s on its way,” he said when he put the phone down. “The convoy left the depot fifteen minutes ago under escort for Castellón.”

  But Shannon was gone.

  The Mercedes was more than a match for the convoy, even though on the long motorway from Madrid to Valencia the convoy could keep up a steady 60 miles per hour. It took Shannon forty minutes to find his way out of the sprawling suburbs of Madrid, and he supposed the convoy would know the way much better. But on the motorway he could take the Mercedes to 100 mph. He kept a careful eye open as he sped past hundreds of trucks roaring through the night toward the coast, and found what he was looking for just past the town of Requena, forty miles west of Valencia.

  His lights picked up the army jeep keeping station to a covered 8-ton truck, and as he swept past he noted the name on the truck’s side. It was the name of the trucking company Schlinker had given him. Driving ahead of the truck was another army vehicle, a four-door sedan, evidently with an officer sitting alone in the back. Shannon touched the accelerator, and the Mercedes sped past toward the coast.

  At Valencia he took the ring road around the sleeping city, following the signs to the E26 highway to Barcelona. The motorway ran out just north of Valencia, and he was back to crawling behind orange trucks and early farm vehicles, past the miraculous Roman fortress of Sagunto, hacked by the legionaries out of the living rock and later converted by the Moors into a citadel of Islam. He drove into Castellón just after four and followed the signs labelled PUERTO.

  The port of Castellón lies three miles from the main town, down a narrow, arrow-straight road that leads from the city to the sea. At the end of the road it is impossible to miss the port and harbor, for there is nothing else there.

  As usual with Mediterranean ports, there are three separate harbors: one for freighters, one for yachts and pleasure craft, and one for fishing vessels. In Castellón the commercial port lies to the left as one faces the sea, and like all Spanish ports is ringed by a fence, and the gates are manned day and night by armed Guardia Civil. In the center lies the harbormaster’s office, and beside it the splendid yacht club, with a dining room looking out over the commercial port on one side and the yacht basin and fishing harbor on the other. Landward of the harbor office is a row of warehouses.

  Shannon turned to the left and parked the car by the roadside, climbed out, and started walking. Halfway around the perimeter fence of the port area he found the main gate, with a sentry dozing in a box beside it. The gate was locked. Farther on, he peered through the chain-links and with a surge of relief spotted the Toscana berthed against the far side of the basin. He settled to wait till six o’clock.

  He was at the main gate at quarter to six, smiled and nodded at the Guardia Civil sentry, who stared coldly back. In the rising sunlight he could see the army staff car, truck, and jeep, with seven or eight soldiers milling around them, parked a hundred yards away. A
t 6:10 a civilian car arrived, parked next to the gate, and sounded its horn. A small, dapper Spaniard climbed out. Shannon approached him.

  “Señor Moscar?”

  “Sí.”

  “My name’s Brown. I’m the seaman who’s got to join his ship here.”

  The Spaniard puckered his brows. “Por favor? Qué?”

  “Brown,” insisted Shannon. “Toscana.”

  The Spaniard’s face lightened. “Ah, sí. El marinero. Come, please.”

  The gate had been opened, and Moscar showed his pass. He babbled for several seconds at the guard and the customs man who had opened the gate, and pointed at Shannon. Cat caught the word “marinero” several times, and his passport and merchant seaman’s card were examined. Then he followed Moscar to the customs office. An hour later he was on board the Toscana.

  The search started at nine. There was no warning. The captain’s manifest had been presented and checked out. It was perfectly in order. Down on the quay the truck from Madrid was parked, along with the car and the jeep. The army escort captain, a thin, sallow man with a face like a Moor’s and a lipless mouth, consulted with two customs officers. Then the latter came aboard. Moscar followed. They checked the cargo to make sure it was what the manifest said and no more. They peered into nooks and crannies, but not under the floorboards of the main hold. They looked in the stores locker, gazed at the tangle of chains, oil drums, and paint cans, and closed the door. It took an hour. The main thing that interested them was why Captain Waldenberg needed seven men on such a small ship. It was explained that Dupree and Vlaminck were company employees who had missed their ship in Brindisi and were being dropped off at Malta on the way to Latakia. They had no seamen’s cards with them because they had left their gear on board their own ship. Asked for a name, Waldenberg gave them the name of a ship he had seen in Brindisi harbor. There was silence from the Spaniards, who looked at their chief for advice. He glanced down at the army captain, shrugged, and left the ship. Twenty minutes later, loading began.

  At half past noon the Toscana slipped out of Castellón harbor and turned her helm south to Cape San Antonio. Cat Shannon, feeling sick now that it was all over, knowing that from then on he was virtually unstoppable, was leaning against the after rail, watching the flat green orange groves south of Castellón slip away as they headed for the sea.

  Carl Waldenberg came up behind him. “That’s the last stop?” he asked.

  “The last where we have to open our hatches,” said Shannon. “We have to pick up some men on the coast of Africa, but we’ll moor in the roads. The men will come out by launch. Deck cargo native workers. At least, that’s what they’ll be shipped as.”

  “I’ve only got charts as far as the Strait of Gibraltar,” objected Waldenberg.

  Shannon reached into his zip-up Windbreaker and pulled out a sheaf of charts, half of the number Endean had handed him in Rome. “These,” he said, handing them to the skipper, “will get you as far as Freetown, Sierra Leone. That’s where we anchor and pick up the men. Please give me an arrival time at noon on July second. That is the rendezvous.”

  As the captain left to return to his cabin and start to plot his course and speed, Shannon was left alone at the rail. Seagulls wheeled around the stern, seeking morsels dropped from the galley, where Cipriani was preparing lunch, squealing and cawing as they dipped toward the foaming wake to snatch up a scrap of bread or vegetable.

  Anyone listening would have heard another sound amid their screaming, the sound of a man whistling “Spanish Harlem.”

  Far away to the north, another ship slipped her moorings and under the guidance of a port pilot eased her way out of the harbor of Archangel. The motor vessel Komarov was only ten years old and something over five thousand tons.

  Inside her bridge, the atmosphere was warm and cozy. The captain and the pilot stood side by side, staring forward as the quays and warehouses slipped past to her port side, and watching the channel ahead to the open sea. Each man held a cup of steaming coffee. The helmsman kept the vessel on the heading given him by the pilot, and to his left the radar screen gleamed and died endlessly, its iridescent sweep arm picking up on each turn the dotted ocean ahead and beyond it the fringe of the ice that would never melt, even in high summer.

  In the stern two men leaned over the rail beneath the flag with the hammer-and-sickle emblem and watched the Russian Arctic port slip past. Dr. Ivanov clipped the crushed cardboard filter of his black cigarette between his teeth and sniffed the crisp, salt-caked air. Both men were wrapped against the cold, for even in June the wind off the White Sea is no invitation to shirtsleeves. By his side, one of his technicians, younger, eager for his first trip abroad, turned to him.

  “Comrade Doctor,” he began.

  Ivanov took the stump of the Papiross from his teeth and flicked it into the foaming wake. “My friend,” he said, “I think, as we are now aboard, you can call me Mikhail Mikhailovich.”

  “But at the institute—”

  “We are not at the institute. We are on board a ship. And we will be in fairly close confinement either here or in the jungle for months to come.”

  “I see,” said the younger man, but he was not to be repressed. “Have you ever been to Zangaro before?”

  “No,” said his superior.

  “But to Africa,” insisted the younger man.

  “To Ghana, yes.”

  “What is it like?”

  “Full of jungle, swamps, mosquitoes, snakes, and people who don’t understand a damn thing you say.”

  “But they understand English,” said the assistant. “We both speak English.”

  “Not in Zangaro, they don’t.”

  “Oh.” The junior technician had read all he could find, which was not much, in the encyclopedia borrowed from the vast library at the institute, about Zangaro.

  “The captain told me if we make good time we should arrive at Clarence in twenty-two days. That will be their Independence Day.”

  “Bully for them,” said Ivanov and walked away.

  Past Cape Spartel, nosing her way from the Mediterranean into the Atlantic, the MV Toscana radioed a ship-to-shore telegram to Gibraltar for on-passing to London. It was to Mr. Walter Harris at a London address. It said simply: “Pleased announce your brother completely recovered.” It was the sign meaning the Toscana was on her way and on schedule. Slight variations of the message about Mr. Harris’s brother’s health could have meant she was on course but late, or in some kind of trouble. No telegram of any kind meant she had not been cleared from Spanish territorial waters.

  That afternoon there was a conference in Sir James Manson’s office.

  “Good,” said the tycoon when Endean broke the news. “How much time has she got to reach target?”

  “Twenty-two days, Sir James. It is now Day Seventy-eight of the hundred estimated for the project. Shannon had allowed Day Eighty for his departure from Europe, and that would have left him twenty days. He estimated the time at sea between sixteen and eighteen days, allowing for adverse weather or a two-day breakdown. He had four days in hand, even on his own estimate.”

  “Will he strike early?”

  “No, sir. Strike Day is still Day One Hundred. He’ll kill time hove to at sea if he has to.”

  Sir James Manson paced up and down his office. “How about the rented villa?” he asked.

  “It has been arranged, Sir James.”

  “Then I don’t see any point in your waiting around London any longer. Get over to Paris again, get a visa for Cotonou, fly down there, and get our new employee, Colonel Bobi, to accompany you to this place next to Zangaro. If he seems shifty, offer him more money.

  “Get settled in, get the truck and the hunting guns ready, and when you receive Shannon’s signal that he is going in for the attack that evening, break the news to Bobi. Get him to sign that mining concession as President Bobi, date it one month later, and send all three copies by registered post in three different envelopes to me here.

>   “Keep Bobi virtually under lock and key until Shannon’s second signal to say he has succeeded. Then in you go. By the way, that bodyguard you are taking with you—is he ready?”

  “Yes, Sir James. For the kind of money he’s getting, he’s good and ready.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “As nasty as they come. Which is what I was looking for.”

  “You could still have problems, you know. Shannon will have all his men round him, at least those who survive the battle. He could prove troublesome.”

  Endean grinned. “Shannon’s men will follow Shannon,” he said. “And I can handle him. Like all mercenaries, he’s got his price. I’ll just offer it to him—but in Switzerland and out of Zangaro.”

  When he had gone, Sir James Manson stared down at the City below him and wondered if any man did not have his price. “They can all be bought, and if they can’t, they can be broken,” one of his mentors had once said to him. And after years as a tycoon, watching politicians, generals, journalists, editors, businessmen, ministers, entrepreneurs and aristocrats, workers and union leaders, blacks and whites, at work and play, he was still of that view.

  Many years ago a Spanish seafarer, looking from the sea toward the land, had seen a mountain which, with the sun behind it in the east, appeared to him to have the shape of a lion’s head. He called the land Lion Mountain and passed on. The name stuck, and the country became known as Sierra Leone. Later another man, seeing the same mountain in a different light, or through different eyes, called it Mount Aureole. That name also stuck. Even later, and in a more whimsical bout of fantasy, a white man named the town founded in its shadow Freetown, and it still bears the name today. It was just after noon on July 2, Day Eighty-eight in Shannon’s private calendar, that the motor vessel Toscana dropped anchor a third of a mile out from the shore, off Freetown, Sierra Leone.