"When's that?"
"Three and a half months away."
"Could a project be mounted in that time?" asked Endean.
"Yes, with a bit of luck. I'd like at least a couple of weeks longer."
"The project has not been accepted yet," observed Endean.
"No, but if you want to install a new man in that palace, an attack from outside is the only way of doing it. Do you want me to prepare the whole project from start to finish, with estimated costings and time schedule?"
"Yes. The costing is very important. My—er—associates will want to know how much they are letting themselves in for."
"All right," said Shannon. "The report will cost you five hundred pounds."
"You've already been paid," said Endean coldly.
"I've been paid for a mission into Zangaro and a report on the military situation there," replied Shannon. "What you're asking for is a new report right outside the original briefing you gave me."
"Five hundred is a bit steep for a few sheets of paper with writing on them."
"Rubbish. You know perfectly well if your firm consults a lawyer, architect, accountant, or any other technical expert you pay him a fee. I'm a technical expert in war. What you pay for is the knowledge and the experience—where to get the best men, the best arms, how to ship them, et cetera. That's what costs five hundred pounds, and the same knowledge would cost you double if you tried to research it yourself in twelve months, which you couldn't anyway because you haven't the contacts."
Endean rose. "All right. It will be here this afternoon by special messenger. Tomorrow is Friday. My partners would like to read your report over the weekend. Please have it prepared by tomorrow afternoon at three. I'll collect it here."
He left, and as the door closed behind him Shannon raised his coffee cup in mock toast. "Be seeing you, Mr. Walter Harris oblique stroke Simon Endean," he said softly.
Not for the first time he thanked his stars for the amiable and garrulous hotelkeeper Gomez. During one
of their long nightly conversations Gomez had mentioned the affair of Colonel Bobi, now in exile. He had also mentioned that, without Kimba, Bobi was nothing, being hated by the Caja for his army's cruelties against them on the orders of Kimba, and not able to command Vindu troops either. Which left Shannon with the problem of a back-up force with black faces to take over on the morning after.
Endean's brown manila envelope containing fifty £10 notes arrived just after three in a taxicab and was delivered to the reception desk of the Lowndes Hotel. Shannon counted the notes, stuffed them into the inside pocket of his jacket, and began work. It took him the rest of the afternoon and most of the night.
He worked at the writing desk in his room, poring over his own diagrams and maps of the city of Clarence, its harbor, port area, and the residential section that included the presidential palace and the army lines.
The classical military approach would have been to land a force on the side of the peninsula near the base with the main coastline, march the short distance inland, and take the road from Clarence to the interior, with guns covering the T-junction. That would have sealed off the peninsula and the capital from reinforcement. It would also have lost the element of surprise.
Shannon's talent was that he understood Africa and the African soldier, and his thinking was unconventional. Tactics suited to African terrain and opposition are almost the exact opposite of those that will work in a European situation.
Had Shannon's plans ever been considered by a European military mind thinking in conventional terms, they would have been styled as reckless and without hope of success. He was banking on Sir James Man-son's not having been in the British army—there was no reference in Who's Who to indicate that he had— and accepting the plan. Shannon knew it was workable and the only one that was.
He based his plan on three facts about war in Africa
that he had learned the hard way. One is that the European soldier fights well and with precision in the dark, provided he has been well briefed on the terrain he can expect, while the African soldier, even on his own terrain, is sometimes reduced to near helplessness by his fear of the hidden enemy in the surrounding darkness. The second is that the speed of recovery of the disoriented African soldier—his ability to regroup and counterattack—is slower than the European soldier's, exaggerating the normal effects of surprise. The third is that firepower and hence noise can bring African soldiers to fear, panic, and headlong flight, without consideration of the smallness of the actual numbers of their opponents.
So Shannon based his plan on a night attack of total surprise in conditions of deafening noise and concentrated firepower.
He worked slowly and methodically and, being a poor typist, tapped out the words with two forefingers. At two in the morning the occupant of the bedroom next door could stand no more and banged on the wall to ask plaintively for a bit of peace so that he could get to sleep. Shannon concluded what he was doing five minutes later and packed up for the night. There was one other sound that disturbed the man next door, apart from the clacking of the typewriter. As he worked, and later as he lay in bed, the writer kept whistling a plaintive little tune. Had the insomniac next door known more of music, he would have recognized "Spanish Harlem."
Martin Thorpe was also lying awake that night. He knew he had a long weekend ahead, two and a half days of monotonous and time-consuming poring over cards, each bearing the basic details of one of the forty-five hundred public companies registered at Companies House in the City of London.
There are two agencies in London which provide their subscribers with such an information service about British companies. These are Moodies and the
Exchange Telegraph, known as Extel. In his office in ManCon House, Thorpe had the set of cards provided by Extel, the agency whose service ManCon took as a necessary part of its commercial activities. But for the business of searching for a shell company, Thorpe had decided to buy the Moodies service and have it sent to his home, partly because he thought Moodies did a better information job on the smaller companies registered in the United Kingdom, and partly for security reasons.
After his briefing from Sir James Manson on Thursday, he had gone straight to a firm of lawyers. Acting for him, and keeping his name to themselves, they had ordered a complete set of Moodies cards. He had paid the lawyer £260 for the cards, plus £50 for the three gray filing cabinets in which they would arrive, plus the lawyer's fee. He had also engaged a small moving firm to send a van around to Moodies, after being told the set of cards would be ready for pickup on Friday afternoon.
As he lay in bed in his elegant detached house in Hampstead Garden Suburb, he too was planning his campaign—not in detail like Shannon, for he had too little information, but in general terms, using nominee shareholders and parcels of voting stock as Shannon used submachine guns and mortars. He had never met the mercenary and never would. But he would have understood him.
Shannon handed his completed project to Endean at three on Friday afternoon. It contained fourteen pages, four of them diagrams and two of them lists of equipment. He had finished it after breakfast and had enclosed it in a brown folder. He was tempted to put "For Sir James Manson's Eyes Only" on the cover, but had resisted. There was no need to blow the affair wantonly, and he could sniff a good contract in the offing if the mining baron offered the job to him.
So he continued to call Endean Harris and to refer to "your associates" instead of "your boss." After tak-
ing the folder, Endean told him to stay in town over the weekend and to be available from Sunday midnight onward.
Shannon went shopping during the rest of the afternoon, but his mind was on the references he had already seen in Who's Who to the man he now knew employed him, Sir James Manson, self-made millionaire and tycoon.
He had an urge, partly from curiosity, partly from the feeling that one day he might need the information, to learn more about Sir James Manson, about the man himself and about why he had hired a mercenary to make war in Zangaro on his behalf.
The reference from Who's Who that stuck in his mind was the mention of a daughter Manson had, a girl who would now be in her late teens or just turned twenty. In the middle of the afternoon he stepped into a phone booth off Jermyn Street and called the private inquiry agents who had traced Endean from their first meeting in Chelsea and identified him as Manson's aide.
The head of the agency was cordial when he heard his former client on the phone. Previously, he knew, Mr. Brown had paid promptly and in cash. Such customers were valuable. If he wished to remain on the end of a telephone, that was his affair.
"Do you have access to a fairly comprehensive newspaper cuttings library?" Shannon asked.
"I could have," the agency chief admitted.
"I wish to get a brief description of a young lady to whom there has probably at one time been a reference in society gossip columns somewhere in the London press. I need very little, simply what she does and where she lives. But I need it quickly."
There was a pause on the other end. "If there are such references, I could probably do it by phone," said the inquiry agent. "What is the name?"
"Miss Julia Manson, daughter of Sir James Manson."
The inquiry agent thought it over. He recalled that this client's previous assignment had concerned a man
who turned out to be Sir James Manson's aide. He also knew he could find out what Mr. Brown wanted to know within an hour.
The two men agreed on the fee, a modest one, and Shannon promised to mail it in cash by registered mail within the hour. The inquiry agent decided to accept the promise and asked his client to call him back just before five.
Shannon completed his shopping and called back on the dot of five. Within a few seconds he had what he wanted. He was deep in thought as he walked back to his hotel and phoned the writer who had originally introduced him to "Mr. Harris."
"Hi," he said gruffly, "it's me, Cat Shannon."
"Oh, hello, Cat," came the surprised reply. "Where have you been?"
"Around," said Shannon. "I just wanted to say thanks for recommending me to that fellow Harris."
"Not at all. Did he offer you a job?"
Shannon was cautious. "Yeah, a few days' worth. It's over now. But I'm in funds. How about a spot of dinner?"
"Why not?" said the writer.
"Tell me," said Shannon, "are you still going out with that girl you used to be with when we met last?"
"Yeah. The same one. Why?"
"She's a model, isn't she?"
"Yes."
"Look," said Shannon, "you may think this crazy, but I very much want to meet a girl who's also a model but I can't get an introduction to. Name of Julie Man-son. Could you ask your girl if she ever met her in the modeling world?"
The writer thought it over. "Sure. I'll call Carrie and ask her. Where are you now?"
"In a call box. I'll call you back in half an hour."
Shannon was lucky. The two girls had been at modeling school together. They were also handled by the same agency. It took another hour before Shannon, by then speaking directly to the writer's girlfriend,
learned that Julia Manson had agreed to a dinner date, providing it was a foursome with Carrie and her boyfriend. They agreed to meet at Carrie's flat just after eight, and she would have Julie Manson there.
Shannon and the writer turned up within a few minutes of each other at Carrie's flat off Maida Vale, and the four of them went off to dinner. The writer had reserved a table at a small cellar restaurant called the Baker and Oven in Marylebone, and the meal was the kind Shannon liked, enormous portions of English roast meats and vegetables, washed down with two bottles of Piat de Beaujolais. He liked the food, and he liked Julie.
She was quite short, a little over five feet, and to give the impression of more height she wore high heels and carried herself well. She said she was nineteen, and she had a pert, round face that could be innocently angelic when she wanted, or extremely sexy when she thought no one else was looking.
She was evidently spoiled and too accustomed to getting thirgs her own way—probably, Shannon estimated, the result of an overindulgent upbringing. But she was amusing and pretty, and Shannon had never asked more of a girl. She wore her dark brown hair loose so that it fell to her waist, and beneath her dress she evidently had a very curved figure. She also seemed to be intrigued by her blind date.
Although Shannon had asked his friend not to mention what he did for a living, Carrie had nevertheless let it slip that he was a mercenary. But the conversation managed to avoid the question during dinner. As usual Shannon did less talking than anyone, which was not difficult because Julie and the tall auburn-haired Carrie did enough for four between them.
As they left the restaurant and climbed back into the cool night air of the streets, the writer mentioned that he and his girlfriend were taking the car back to his flat. He hailed a taxi for Shannon, asking him if he would take Julie home before going on to his hotel.
As the mercenary climbed in, the writer gave him a slow wink. "I think you're on," he whispered. Shannon grunted.
Outside her Mayfair flat Julie suggested he might like to come in for coffee, so he paid off the taxi and accompanied her up to the evidently expensive apartment. Only when they were seated on the settee drinking the appalling coffee Julie had prepared did she refer to the way he earned his living.
He was leaning back in the corner of the settee; she was perched on the edge of the seat, turned toward him.
"Have you killed people?" she asked.
"Yes."
"In battle?"
"Sometimes. Mostly."
"How many?"
"I don't know. I never counted."
She savored the information and swallowed several times. "I've never known a man who had killed people."
"You don't know that," countered Shannon. "Anyone who has been in a war has probably killed people."
"Have you got any scars from wounds?"
It was another of the usual questions. In fact Shannon carried over a score of marks on his back and chest, legacies of bullets, fragments of mortar, and shards of grenade. He nodded. "Some."
"Show me," she said.
"No."
"Go on, show me. Prove it." She stood up.
He grinned up at her. "I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours," he taunted, mimicking the old kindergarten challenge.
"I haven't got any," Julie said indignantly.