“You could have sent word,” Marjorie said.
“That’s what we were doing, baby,” Jack answered, a slight tone of impatience in his voice. “Setting up relay stations so we can send word when something like that happens.”
“In other words, I’m being a bitch?”
“You said it, not me,” Jack said.
“Children, children,” Lunsford said. “If you keep that up, we will be forced to suspect the honeymoon is over.”
“I forgive you,” Jack said.
“Screw you,” Marjorie said, but she kissed him.
A waiter appeared and took their breakfast order, and as a second waiter was pouring coffee, two Congolese paratroop officers, who had come to the Congo as Master Sergeant Thomas and Sergeant First Class DeGrew, appeared and sat down at the table.
“This came in last night, boss,” Doubting Thomas said, and handed Lunsford a sheet of paper from the encryption machine.
Lunsford read it, then handed it to Geoff Craig, with a gesture meaning he wanted it passed around to the others. The way they were sitting, Jack got it last.
“Can I show this to my bride?” he asked.
“Who do you think ran the tape machines?” Marjorie asked. “I know what it says.”
TOP SECRET
EARN0023 WASH DC 1740 ZULU 4 APRIL 1965
VIA WHITE HOUSE SIGNAL AGENCY
FROM: EARNEST SIX
TO: HELPER SIX
1-COMPLETELY RELIABLE SOURCE STATES GUEVARA, DREKE, AND SIX OTHERS ARRIVED IN DAR ES SALAAM 1530 ZULU 4 APRIL.
2-JAMES M. FOSTER, CIA STATION CHIEF DAR ES SALAAM, APPARENTLY CONFIRMS WITH REPORT CIA HAS GUEVARA, DREKE, AND SIX OTHERS UNDER SURVEILLANCE ON FARM IN VICINITY OF MOROGORO, 75 MILES WEST OF DAR ES SALAAM.
3-REFERENCE PREVIOUSLY FURNISHED MANIFEST, SUPPLY FLIGHT FOUR WILL NOT REPEAT NOT HAVE TWO JEEPS ABOARD INASMUCH AS LÉOPOLDVILLE MOTORPOOL NOW AVAILABLE. TWO L19 AIRCRAFT; EQUIVALENT OF $25,000 IN GOLD SWISS COINS; TWO ASA TECHNICIANS; AND ONE L19/L20/H13 MECHANIC WILL BE ABOARD. ETA WILL BE FURNISHED WHEN AVAILABLE.
FINTON FOR EARNEST SIX
SECRET
“I have the feeling,” Father said, “that Mr. Foster disproves the general rule that most agency clowns cannot find their gluteus maximus with both hands.”
“I’d like to talk to him,” Sergeant Thomas said.
“My thinking exactly,” Thomas said.
“I’d like to have an intercept team near that farm,” Spec7 Peters said.
“Lieutenant Craig, with splendid enlisted men like these two, their thinking in complete synch with that of their beloved commander, how can we fail?”
“There are several possible problems,” Geoff said. “Starting with the basic one that this CIA guy may tell you to go . . . up a rope. Sorry, Marjorie. Close on the heels of that one, how do we get to talk to him?”
“Captain Weewili and I have given the subject some thought,” Thomas said. “And then we conferred at 0600 this very day with Major Alain George Totse himself.”
Lunsford smiled, and made a gesture with both hands, meaning, “Well, let’s have it.”
[EIGHT]
Consular Section
Embassy of the United States of America
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
1210 6 April 1965
“Good afternoon,” Captain Jacques Portet of Air Simba said to the receptionist. “I’d like a word with the Consul General, please.”
He was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt with the four-striped board of a captain in its epaulets, and crisply creased black trousers. Beside him stood a stocky African wearing a loose, somewhat soiled, white shirt and loose, somewhat soiled, white trousers, held up with a knotted cord, their frayed hems a good ten inches above his heavily callused bare feet. He wore both a necklace and a bracelet of wild pig’s teeth.
“Perhaps I can help you, sir. Mr. Foster is tied up at the moment,” the receptionist replied. She was a striking, very tall, very black young woman who was made very uncomfortable by the shameless beaming approval being given her by the American’s boy.
“I really would be very grateful if Mr. Foster could spare me just a moment of his time,” Jack said. “And I really need to see him.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” she said.
Mr. Foster appeared a moment later. He was a black man in his late twenties or early thirties, wearing a flamboyantly colored, diagonally striped shirt, yellow walking shorts, knee-length white stocks with a tassel at the top, and tasseled loafers.
“I’m afraid I can’t give you much time,” he said, glancing at his watch. “I’ve a luncheon appointment.”
“I need just a moment of your time, privately,” Jack said. “Could we step in there just a moment?”
The reception room had three small cubicles against one wall.
“Well, if you think it’s important,” Mr. Foster said.
He bowed Jack into the room ahead of him, followed him in, and was greatly surprised when the white American’s boy followed him inside.
“Is uh . . . he . . . necessary for this?” Mr. Foster replied.
“I love those loafers,” the boy said. “But where the hell did you get that shirt?”
“May I present Major George Washington Lunsford?” Jack said, smiling.
“Cutting to the chase,” Father said. “I command Special Forces Detachment 17, in Costermansville, in the Congo. And you’re the CIA station chief, and you’ve got Guevara and Dreke and some others under surveillance in a farm near Morogoro, about seventy-five miles from here.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, of course,” Foster said.
“Right,” Father said. “This is Lieutenant Jack Portet, one of my officers.”
“How did you get in the country?”
“He got in by flying an Air Simba C-46—that’s his cover. And I got in by riding in the back. I guess you could say I’m passing for a native.”
“Have you got some sort of identification?”
“Oh, come on,” Lunsford said. “You have diplomatic immunity. I don’t. And I don’t want to get shot as a spy because the locals found an AGO card in my wallet. How long have you been a spook, anyway?”
“What can I do for you, Major?” Foster asked.
“First, can we find someplace larger than this phone booth, and secure? My lieutenant reeks of his wife’s cologne, and it has a distressing erotic effect on me. And I don’t want that splendidly stacked receptionist of yours taking notes.”
“No problem there,” Foster said. “She gets her paycheck from the same place I do. She’s from Philadelphia.”
He pushed open the door, waved them out.
“Close us for lunch, please,” he said to the receptionist, “and then come on in.”
“Ah, would that we were meeting elsewhere,” Father said when the woman came into Foster’s office. “Bookbinder’s, perhaps. The one on South Broad Street.”
He smiled, expecting her shocked reaction.
She smiled.
“But we’re not, are we?” she replied. “And the last time I was in Bookbinder’s you had to wear shoes.”
Father was only momentarily taken aback.
“Major George Washington Lunsford at your service, ma’am,” he said, and made a sweeping bow.
“What’s going on?” she asked of Foster.
“The rumor going around that there are Special Forces in the Congo? It’s apparently true.”
“If the Tanzanians catch you here, it would be awkward, as I suppose you know,” she said.
“It would also probably be painful, so let’s do what we can to keep that from happening, shall we?” Lunsford replied. “Are you going to tell me your name?”
“I don’t think you have the need-to-know,” she said.
“You’re legal as far as the flight is concerned?” Foster asked.
“I’m here trying to buy aircraft engine parts,” Jack said. “Major Lunsford is illegal.”
“You’
re both illegal,” she said. “You can probably get away with it. I’m not so sure about barefoot boy here.”
“What is it you want?” Foster said.
“My mission is to frustrate Guevara’s plans for the Congo,” Lunsford said. When he saw something in her face, he added: “Yeah, we know he’s here, and that you have him under surveillance on a farm near Morogoro.”
“I’d love to know where you heard that,” she said.
“The operative word is ’frustrate,’ ” Lunsford said. “We want him to return to Cuba alive and with his tail between his legs. That restriction does not apply to other Cubans, of whom, eventually, there will be about two hundred.”
“I didn’t hear that figure,” she said.
“I can have nothing to do with that,” Foster said, “with . . . uh . . . armed action against the Cubans, or anyone else.”
“It will be a lot easier for us to interdict the movement of his people, and their supplies, if we have an eye on that farm,” Lunsford said. “And it would be a lot easier for you to keep an eye on that farm if you had an intercept team listening to their communications.”
“I asked for a team and was told no,” Foster said. “That may change now, with him here.”
“I’ll loan you a team,” Lunsford said.
“How would you get it into the country?” she asked.
“It’s at the airport now, three ASA guys and two Special Forces. They’re all black, and the Special Forces guys speak Swahili, one of them well. That one also speaks Spanish. All they’d need from you is transport to the area, and a supply of food.”
“And you want us to relay the intercepts?” she asked.
“Oh, no, Katharine,” Father said. “You don’t mind if I call you Katharine, do you? You have that same, utterly charming Katharine Hepburn, between-clenched-teeth accent she had in The Philadelphia Story.”
“Oh, aren’t you clever!” she replied. “And, yes, I do mind you calling me Katharine. The question was, you want us to relay the intercepts? If so, it’s out of the question. The ambassador wouldn’t allow that.”
“What I had in mind, Kate,” Lunsford said, “was our guys up-loading to a satellite, and then we’d forward them to you, for your information.”
“You’ve got satellite authority?” Foster asked, surprised.
“And our own, as opposed to embassy, links,” Lunsford said.
“I’d have to get clearance from my superiors,” Foster said.
“This can’t have anything to do with Langley,” Father said. “I don’t have authority to operate, black or otherwise, in Tanzania. If you ask Langley—”
“Well, I can’t do it otherwise,” Foster said.
“And I don’t want anybody else to know, either, like that CIA jackass in Léopoldville.”
“Then it’s out of the question, I’m afraid,” Foster said.
“Aw, hell,” Lunsford said. “I was really hoping that you just might be in that small group of station chiefs—like Jack Stephens in Buenos Aires and Bill Colby in Saigon—who are more interested in getting the job done than in getting their tickets punched. I really should have known better.”
“Didn’t your Mommy ever tell you,” she asked, “that you get more by being nice than by being an arrogant sonofabitch?”
“I don’t have time to be nice,” Lunsford said.
“Well, you can’t put an intercept team in here,” Foster said.
“I’m going to put an intercept team in here with or without your assistance,” Lunsford said. “Get that straight.”
“How are you going to stop him?” she asked. “And what are you going to do when he does, Jim? Turn them in? Tell Langley? ”
“You sound as if you think this is a good idea,” Foster replied.
She turned to Lunsford.
“If they are discovered, it will have to be understood, we never heard of them, or you.”
“Naturally,” Lunsford said. “And it will have to be understood that if I hear Langley’s been told—and I would—or the Tanzanians, I will personally turn him into a soprano with a dull machete, and think of something equally interesting to do to you.”
“My God, Cecilia!” Foster protested.
“Oh, what a pretty name!” Lunsford said. “Wouldn’t you agree that’s a pretty name for such a pretty girl, Lieutenant Portet?”
“Yes, sir,” Jack said. “I certainly would, sir.”
“So do we have a deal, Cecilia?” Father asked.
“That, of course, would be up to Mr. Foster,” she said.
“Oh, Cecilia,” Lunsford said. “Just when I was starting to really like you, you start playing silly games again.”
“Meaning what?” she asked.
“Meaning you’re really the station chief, and, frankly, my dear, you’re not too good about keeping that the dark secret it’s supposed to be.”
“You really are a sonofabitch, aren’t you?” she snapped, but there was a tone of admiration in her voice.
She walked to Foster’s desk, picked up a notepad, wrote something on it, and handed it to Lunsford.
“That’s down by the waterfront,” she said. “They’ll be expecting your team anytime after three. With a little luck, we can move them. How much equipment do they have?”
“It will all fit inside a panel truck,” Lunsford said.
“We can probably move them to Morogoro tonight,” she said. “By then you should be almost back in the Congo.”
“I guess dinner’s out of the question, then, Cecilia?”
“For tonight, George, it is,” she said. “But maybe sometime, when you’re wearing shoes, we could talk about that again.”
XX
[ ONE ]
Near Kigali, Rwanda
1845 6 April 1965
“Kigali, Air Simba Seven-two-seven understands I am number one to land on One-eight,” Jack said into the microphone, then turned to Major Darrell Smythe, who was in the copilot’s seat of the Boeing. “Put the gear down, please, Major, sir, and then go get in the back and try to look like an African.”
Jack hadn’t wanted to press one of the Air Simba pilots into making the flight to Dar es Salaam without knowing the purpose, and he couldn’t tell them the purpose for a number of reasons, which left him with the choice of flying the C-46 alone—he had done so before, but it wasn’t a smart thing to do—or taking one of the Army aviators along in the left seat. Smythe had the most twin-engine experience of all the Army aviators, and he had been drafted by Lunsford.
“Gear down and locked,” Smythe reported a moment later, and then unstrapped himself and got out of the copilot’s seat.
“Kigali,” Jack reported, “Seven-two-seven turning on final.”
Smythe stood in the narrow aisle between the pilot’s and copilot’s seats, and waited until Jack was lined up with Runway 18.
“In the interests of precision, Lieutenant, may I remind you that I already look like an African, but now I will try to look like a native African.”
“I stand corrected, Major, sir,” Jack said as he reached for the throttle quadrant. “And may I say, sir, that you make a very credible native African in that costume. All the Tutu maidens are excited by the very sight of you.”
“Fuck you, Lieutenant,” Smythe said, and turned and walked into the fuselage.
Just as Smythe sat down beside Major George Washington Lunsford, there was a chirp of the tires and a just perceptible bump as Jack touched down.
Majors Smythe and Lunsford were dressed identically in loose white cotton jackets and trousers, except that Smythe wore crude sandals and dirty white socks, and Lunsford was barefooted. The sandals were necessary because Smythe’s feet were soft and not callused, and he could not walk barefoot as Father could. The socks were necessary because an African with feet that were not heavily callused would attract attention.
The native costumes were necessary because the airport that served Costermansville was across the Rwandan border in Kigali. The Rwandan bord
er was closed to Congolese military personnel, and to everyone else whose passport didn’t have the proper visa.
Majors Lunsford and Smythe and the ASA intercept team and their Green Beret protectors—all wearing somewhat soiled white cotton shirts and trousers—had crossed the border into Rwanda in the bed of an Air Simba Ford pickup truck, sitting atop the crates of equipment the intercept crew was taking with them.
There also had been two cases of Simba beer in the truck. One of them had been enough to get past happily smiling Rwandan border guards on the way in, and the other, Jack was reasonably confident, would get them past happily smiling border guards on their return.
The border guards were accustomed to Air Simba aircrews crossing the border to get to and from the Kigali airport, and many of them knew Jack by sight and reputation—he could always be counted on for a case of beer.
They hadn’t even looked into the crates, which was fortunate, because the teams’ weaponry, a supply of Composition C-4, and half a dozen thermite grenades had been packed on top of the communications equipment. The state-of-the-art, highly classified communications equipment could not be allowed to fall into the wrong hands, even if that meant torching it at the Rwanda border guard station, and to do that, the thermite grenades had to be right on top, rather than hidden someplace.
It had all gone off without a hitch on the way to Dar es Salaam, and there was less chance—the crates and the intercept crew were now in Tanzania—that anything would go wrong on the way back.
And nothing did.
And just across the bridge that spanned the river, and was actually the border, Jack stopped the Ford, and Aunt Jemima and Father got out of the truck bed and got in the seat with Jack.
Father was happily puffing on a fat, black cigar—his first since they’d left Costermansville—when Jack pulled the Ford up to the basement loading dock of the Hotel du Lac, on which First Lieutenant Geoffrey Craig, Spec7 William Peters, and Mrs. Jacques Portet were standing, obviously waiting for them.
“Something’s wrong,” Father announced. “Look at them.”
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