Read Games of the Hangman Online
Authors: Victor O'Reilly
She laughed
despite herself.
"What was
that?"
"‘Begin
at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end:
then stop.’"
*
*
*
*
*
Etan had been
sleeping with Fitzduane for nearly a year before she discovered he had once
been married.
He had never mentioned
it.
She had assumed that his way of life
was the primary reason he hadn't settled down, but what she learned was more
complicated.
It helped explain his
reluctance to make a further commitment.
It also cast some light on her lover's growing obsession with this latest
tragedy.
Perhaps, once again, in his
mind he had been too late.
The name in
the yellowed press clipping was Anne-Marie Thormann Fitzduane.
Etan had been putting together a documentary
on
with the various United Nations peacekeeping forces when a researcher dropped a
series of thick files on the
The Belgian
Congo — now known as
ill prepared by its former masters for its new role.
Trained administrators were virtually
nonexistent.
A handful of doctors
was
incapable of dealing with a population of more than
thirteen million.
Central government
authority collapsed.
Civil war broke
out.
Massacres and pillaging and
wholesale wanton destruction became the order of the day.
A United
Nations force was sent in to restore order and keep the peace.
Before long, to many UN troopers the
peacekeeping mission seemed more like a war.
Elite combat units like the Indian Gurkhas were seconded to the UN.
Fitzduane was a young lieutenant in
contribution, an Airborne Rangers battalion under the leadership of Colonel
Shane Kilmara.
Etan was able
to piece much of the story together from the clippings files.
She learned that Anne-Marie had been a nurse
with the Red Cross and had met Fitzduane at a mission in the bush when he was
out on long-range patrol.
They had been
married within weeks.
There was a photo
of the wedding, which had taken place in the provincial capital.
The honor guard consisted or Irish
troops,
and the bridesmaids were Red Cross nurses.
The accompanying story told of the whirlwind
romance.
The couple looked very young
and carefree and happy.
The troops in
the honor guard were smiling.
Only their
combat uniforms and sidearms gave a hint of the bloodbath to come.
The
land, and the UN forces were sorely stretched.
Fitzduane's unit moved on to another trouble spot, leaving the
provincial capital lightly guarded and under the care of central government
troops.
The troops revolted and were
joined by an invading column of rebels — Simbas, they were called.
Hostages were taken.
Etan heard the
rest of the story from Fitzduane.
Holding hands, they had walked slowly from his castle to the lake
nearby.
They sat on a log and looked out
across the lake and the intervening strip of land toward the sea and the
spectacular sunset.
The log had been
covered with moss and damp, and the air had a chill to it.
She could still vividly recall the texture of
the mossy bark.
Fitzduane had
looked into the setting sun, his face aglow, and had murmured, "A world of
cold fire."
He had been silent for
some moments before continuing.
"The UN
Secretary-General had been killed in a plane crash a few weeks earlier.
Everything was confused.
Nobody could decide what to do about the
hostages.
We were ordered to hold fast
and do nothing.
The Simbas were
threatening to kill the hostages, and we knew firsthand they weren't
bluffing.
Kilmara decided on his own
initiative to go in and asked for volunteers.
Just about the whole unit stepped forward,
which was
no surprise.
Under Kilmara we thought
we could walk on water.
"Anyway,
we went in — the place was called Konina — by land, water, and air.
Some of us sneaked in ahead at night and set
up a position in a row of houses overlooking the square where the hostages
were.
There were about seven hundred of
them — blacks, whites, Indians, men, women, and children.
The town was packed with Simbas.
There were masses of them; estimates ran as
high as four thousand.
Most of them were
looting the town, but there was a guard of several hundred around the hostages
in the square.
"The
Simbas had threatened to kill all the hostages if attacked, and God knows
,
they had had enough practice at massacres.
They were often compared with the siafus, the
soldier ants of
in their path.
The Simbas believed they
couldn't be killed.
They were mainly
primitive tribesmen stiffened by Force Publique deserters and led by witch
doctors.
Each recruit was put through a
ritual that was supposed to give him
dawa
— medicine.
If he then chanted, ‘
mai, mai
’ — water, water — as he went
into battle, enemy bullets would turn to water."
"What
happened to this belief when some of them got killed?
"
Etan
had asked.
"The
witch doctors had an answer for that."
Fitzduane smiled wryly.
"They said that the slain had lost face and broken one of the
taboos.
You had to follow the witch doctors
exactly to keep your
dawa
."
He
continued.
"The job of my command
was to lie low until the attack came and then prevent the Simbas from killing
the hostages until the main force could punch its way through.
There were only twelve of us, so it was vital
we didn't make a move until the attack started.
We knew we couldn't hope to hold out for more than a matter of minutes
unless reinforcements were right on hand.
There were just too many Simbas, and though quite a few still had only
spears and bows and arrows, most had FALs and other automatic weaponry captured
from the ANC, the Congolese Army.
So our
orders were crystal clear:
No matter
what the provocation, unless actually detected — and we weren't — do nothing until
the main force opens fire.
"For
eight hours we watched the scene below.
Most of the hostages were left alive under guard, just sitting or trying
to sleep on the ground, but a steady trickle was taken for the amusement of the
Simbas and tortured to death.
The
torturing took place in a small garden at one end of the square.
There was a statue there commemorating some
explorer, and they used the plinth to tie their victims to.
"We lay
concealed no more than fifty meters away on the second floor of the house, and
we could see it all clearly by the light of huge bonfires.
With field glasses, it seemed close enough to
touch.
We couldn't do a damn thing.
We had to wait; we just had to.
They screamed and screamed and screamed; all
goddamn night they screamed.
Men, women,
and children were raped.
It made no
difference.
They were killed in as many
disgusting ways as the Simbas could devise.
"They put
one little child — she couldn't have been more than four or five — between two
jeeps, tied ropes to her arms and legs,
and pulled her apart like a rag doll.
One guy, with a beard and longish hair, they crucified.
They shouted at him:
‘
Jésus,
Jésus, le roi des juifs
.’
He was
still alive after four hours, so they castrated him.
After they raped them, they made some nuns
drink gasoline.
Then they cut their
stomachs open and set fire to their intestines.
That was a big favorite.
We could
smell them burning from where we lay.
And we could do nothing, absolutely nothing to help.
We lay there with our GPMGs and FNs and
rocket launchers and grenades and knives and piano wire, and we didn't even
move when little babies died.
"Oh, we
were a well-trained outfit, the best the Irish Army had to offer.
We had discipline, absolute discipline.
We had our orders, and they were sensible
orders.
Premature action would have been
military suicide.
"And then
the Simbas pulled one young nurse out of the crowd.
She was tall and red-haired and
beautiful.
She still wore her white
uniform.
It happened so quickly.
One of the young Simbas — some were only
thirteen or fourteen and among the cruelest — picked up a panga and almost
casually hacked her head off.
It took
only a few blows.
It was quite a quick
death.
The nurse was Anne-Marie.
We'd been married just seven weeks."
Etan had not
known what to say or do.
What she was
hearing was so truly terrible and so much beyond her experience that she just
sat there motionless.
Then she put both
her arms around her lover and drew him to her.
After he'd finished speaking, Fitzduane had remained silent.
The sun was now a dull semicircle vanishing
into the sea.
It had grown much
colder.
She could see the lights of the
castle keep.
Fitzduane had
kissed the top of her head and squeezed her tight.
"This is a damp bloody climate, isn't
it?" he had said.
To warm
themselves up, they played ducks and drakes with flat stones on the lake in the
twilight.
Night had fallen by the time
they made it back to Duncleeve, debating furiously as to who had won the
game.
The last few throws had taken
place in near darkness.
4
The new Jury's
Hotel in
nation.
The original Jury's had vanished
except for the marble, mahogany, and brass Victorian bar that had been shipped
in its entirety to
Fitzduane
wended his way through a visiting Japanese electronics delegation, headed
toward the new bar, and ordered a Jameson.
He was watching the ice melt and thinking about postmortems and life and
the pursuit of happiness when Günther arrived.
He still looked baby-faced, so you tended not to notice at first quite
how big he was.
Close up you could see
lines that hadn't been there before, but he still looked fit and tough.
A wedding
party slid in through the glass doors.
The bride was heavily swaddled in layers of white man-made fiber.
She was accompanied by either the headwaiter
or the
bridegroom,
it was hard to tell which.
The bride's train swished into the pound and
began to sink.
Fitzduane thought it was
an unusual time of year for an Irish wedding, but then maybe not when you
looked at her waistline.
The bride's escort
retrieved her train and wrung it out expertly into the fountain.
He did it neatly and efficiently, as if it
were
a routine chore or he were used to killing
chickens.
The train now looked like a
wet diaper as it followed the bride into family life.
Fitzduane ignored the symbolism and finished
his Jameson.
"You're
losing your puppy fat, Günther," he said.
"You're either working too hard or playing too hard."
"It's the
climate here, and I'm getting older.
I
think I'm rusting."
The accent was
German and pronounced, but with more than a hint of Irishness to it.
He'd been in
time.
The government had once borrowed
him from Grenzschutzgruppe 9 (GSG-9), the West German antiterrorist force, and
somehow he'd stayed.