Lusana silently motioned to the doctor and his nurse and they withdrew to the hall and closed the door.
He leaned over the bed. “Somala, this is Hiram Lusana. Do you understand me?”
Somala’s whispered voice came out hoarse but with a trace of emotion. “I do not see well, my General. Is it really you?”
Lusana took Somala’s hand and gripped it tightly. “Yes, my brave warrior. I have come to hear your report.”
The man on the bed smiled thinly, and then a haunting, questioning look came into his eyes. “Why … why did you not trust me, my General?”
“Trust you?”
“Why did you not tell me you were sending men to raid the Fawkes farm?”
Lusana was shaken. “Describe what you saw. Describe everything. Leave out nothing.”
Twenty minutes later, exhausted by the effort, Marcus Somala lapsed back into unconsciousness. By noon he was dead.
Patrick Fawkes stood alone and shoveled the molasseslike clay soil over the coffins of his family. His clothes were soaked through by a light rain and his own sweat. It had been his wish to dig the common grave and fill it himself. The burial services were long over and his friends and neighbors had departed, leaving him to his grievous task.
At last he patted smooth the last shovelful, stood back, and looked down. The headstone had not arrived yet, and the mound seemed stark
Operation Wild Rose I 79
and forlorn among the older grave sites that had been blanketed by grass and edged with rows of neatly kept flowers. He fell to his knees and reached into a pocket of his discarded coat. His hand came out with a fistful of bougainvillea petals. These he sprinkled over the damp earth.
Fawkes let the grief flow. He wept until after the sun dipped below the horizon. He wept until his eyes could no longer produce tears.
His mind traveled back twelve years and ran off images like a movie projector. He saw Myrna and the kids in the little cottage near Aberdeen on the North Sea. He saw the looks of surprise and happiness in their faces when he told them they were all packing up and heading to Natal to start a farm. He saw how sickly white skinned Jenny and Pat Junior were beside the other schoolchildren of Umkono, and how quickly they became tanned and robust. He saw Myrna begrudgingly leaving Scotland to alter her life-style totally, and then coming to love Africa even more than he.
“You’ll never make a good farmer until you flush the salt water out of your veins,” she used to tell him.
Her voice seemed so clear to him that he could not accept the fact that she lay beneath the ground he knelt on, never to see the daylight again. He was alone now and the thought left him lost. When a woman loses a man, he recalled hearing somewhere, she picks up her life as before and perseveres. But when a man loses a woman, he dies by half.
He forced the once-happy scenes from his mind and tried to conjure the shadowy figure of a man. The face had no distinct features, because it was the face of a man Fawkes had never seen: the face of Hiram Lusana.
Fawkes’s grief was suddenly engulfed by a tidal surge of cold hatred. He balled his fists and beat them against the wet ground until his emotions finally drained away. Then he gave a great sigh and neatly arranged the bougainvillea petals so that they spelled out Myrna’s and the children’s names.
Then he rose unsteadily to his feet, and he knew what he had to do.
Lusana sat at the head of an oval conference table, his eyes pensive, his hands toying with a ball-point pen. He looked at the ever-smiling Colonel Due Phon Lo, chief military adviser to the AAR, then at the officers
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sitting in tense formation in the chairs beside him.
“Some bloodthirsty idiot takes it into his head to knock over the farm of the most respected citizen of Natal, and you all sit here looking as innocent as Zulu virgins.” He paused a moment, searching their faces. “Come, come, gentlemen. Let’s stop playing games. Who was behind it?”
Lo bowed his head and spread his hands on the table. His almond eyes and closely cropped straight hair made him seem out of place among the others. He spoke slowly and enunciated each word precisely.
“You have my word, General, no one under your command was responsible. I have studied the exact placement of every section during the time of the attack. None of them, except for the one Somala led, was within two hundred kilometers of Umkono.”
“Then how do you explain it?”
“I cannot.”
Lusana’s gaze lingered on Lo, appraising the Asian’s expression. Satisfied that he saw nothing devious in the permanently etched smile, he turned and surveyed the other men at the table.
To his right sat Major Thomas Machita, his chief intelligence analyst. Next to him was Colonel Randolph Jumana, his second-in-command. Opposite them were Lo and Colonel Oliver Makeir, coordinator of A AR propaganda programs.
“Any theories on the subject?” Lusana asked.
Jumana straightened a sheaf of papers for the tenth time and avoided Lusana’s gaze. “What if Somala imagined the Fawkes raid? Perhaps he saw it during a fit of delirium; or, then again, perhaps he made it up.”
Frowning, Lusana shook his head in irritation. “You forget, Colonel, I was the one who took Somala’s report. He was a damn good man. The best section leader we had. He was not delirious and he had no reason to create a fairy tale, knowing he was about to die.”
“There is no doubt that the raid took place,” said Makeir. “The South African papers and television newscasts have given it heavy play. Their stories all check with what Somala told the general here, except the government Defence Forces have yet to come up with any reliable witnesses who can provide a description of the attacking troops. We were fortunate that Somala was able to return from his mission and describe in detail what he saw before he died.”
“Did he see who shot him?” asked Jumana.
“He was hit in the back at great distance,” answered Lusana, “proba—
Operation Wild Rose I 81
bly by a sniper. The poor devil managed to crawl three miles to the area he assigned the rest of his scouting party. They performed what first aid they could and then beat a track back to our camp.”
Thomas Machita shook his head in utter incomprehension. “None of it tallies. I doubt that other liberation movements would dress up and masquerade as AAR soldiers.”
“On the other hand,” said Makeir, “maybe they staged the raid to cast blame on us and take the heat off themselves.”
“I am in close contact with my countrymen who are advising your brother revolutionaries,” said Colonel Lo. “They are all as angry as disturbed hornets. No one gained by the assault on the Fawkes farm. If anything, it has stiffened the resolve of the whites, the Indians, the coloreds, and many blacks, as well, to stand firm against outside intervention.”
Lusana rested his chin on clasped hands. “Okay, if they didn’t do it, and we know we didn’t do it, who does that leave as a prime suspect?”
“South African whites,” Lo answered simply.
Every eye focused on the Vietnamese adviser. Lusana stared into the inscrutable eyes. “Perhaps you’d care to repeat the statement.”
“I am merely suggesting that someone in the South African government may have ordered the murder of the Fawkes family and their field workers.”
They all stared at him wordlessly for several moments. Finally Machita broke the silence.
“I fail to see a purpose.”
“Nor I,” Lo said, and shrugged. “But consider this. Who else would have the resources to equip a group of commandos in arms and uniforms that are identical to our own? Also, and most important, does it not strike you, gentlemen, as odd that even though the attacking group retreated within the sound of Defence Force helicopters, none of them was tracked down. It is a fact of guerrilla life that we require a minimum of one hour to insure even a moderate chance of a successful escape. Less than ten minutes’ head start on a force using helicopters and dogs is suicide.”
“You make an intriguing case,” Lusana said, his fingers drumming the table. “I don’t for one minute accept it as valid. However, it won’t hurt to run a check.” He turned to Machita. “Do you have a trusted informer in the Defence Ministry?”
“Someone highly placed,” answered Machita. “Costs us a pretty
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penny, but his information is thoroughly reliable. Odd sort, though; he never appears in the same place twice under the same guise.”
“You make him sound like some kind of mystic,” said Jumana.
“Perhaps he is,” conceded Machita. “Emma materializes when we least expect him.”
“Emma?”
“His code name.”
“Either the man has a warped sense of humor or he’s a transvestite,” said Lusana.
“I cannot say, General.”
“How do you contact him?”
“We don’t. He reaches us only when he has useful information to sell.”
Jumana’s face clouded. “What guarantee have we that he isn’t feeding us falsified documents?”
“To date, everything he passed us from the Ministry has checked out one hundred percent.”
Lusana looked at Machita. “You’ll see to it, then?”
Machita nodded. “I’ll fly to Pretoria myself and await Emma’s next appearance. If anyone can clear up the mystery, it will be him.”
The African Army of Revolution’s camp was not really a camp at all; rather, it was a headquarters in what was once a small university for the Portuguese when they ruled Mozambique. A new university for the nation’s black citizens had since risen from the heart of a new city torn from the northern interior, on Lake Malawi.
The converted campus made an ideal base for Lusana’s army: dormitories for the troops, cafeterias turned mess halls, sporting facilities now utilized for combat instruction, comfortable quarters for the officers, a newly decorated ballroom for social events.
Democratic congressman Frederick Daggat, one of New Jersey’s three black congressmen, was impressed. He’d half expected a typical revolutionary movement run by tribesmen armed with Soviet rockets, dressed in drab Chinese uniforms, and spouting inane, overused Marxist cliches. Instead he was pleased to discover an organization run on the lines of an American oil corporation. Lusana and his officers came off more like business executives than guerrillas.
Operation Wild Rose I 83
Everything at the cocktail party went strictly according to New York protocol. Even the hostess, Felicia Collins, would have done a midtown Manhattan party proud.
Daggat caught her eye and she excused herself from an admiring group of Somalian legislators. She came over and laid her hand on his arm.
“Enjoying yourself, Congressman?”
“Very much.”
“Hiram and I had hoped you could stay over until the weekend.”
“Regrettably, I must be in Nairobi for a meeting with the Kenya Educational Council tomorrow afternoon.”
“I hope your quarters are satisfactory. We’re a little off the beaten track for a Hilton Hotel franchise.”
“I must admit, Mr. Lusana’s hospitality is far more than I bargained for.”
Daggat looked down at her. Tonight was the first time he had actually seen Felicia Collins up close. Celebrity, singer with three gold records, actress with two Emmys and an Oscar for a difficult role as a black suffragette in the motion picture Road of Poppies. She was every bit as ravishing as she appeared on screen.
Felicia stood cool and poised in green crepe de chine evening pajamas. The small strapless top tied at the waist and the matching pants gave a diaphanous hint of her shapely legs. She wore her hair in a chic short African cut.
“Hiram is on the threshold of greatness, you know.”
He smiled at her high-toned statement. “I imagine the same might have been said once of Attila the Hun.”
“I can easily see why Washington correspondents crowd your press conferences, Congressman.” Her hand remained on his arm. “Your tongue stabs.”
“I believe they refer to it as ‘Daggat’s shaft.’ “
“The better to screw the white establishment with, perhaps?”
He took her hand and exerted an increasing pressure until there was a tiny widening of her huge mahogany eyes. “Tell me, Ms. Collins, what brings a beautiful and renowned black entertainer to the jungle?”
“The same thing that brings the black enfant terrible of the United States Congress,” she countered. “To help a man who is fighting to advance our race.”
“I’m more inclined to believe Hiram Lusana is fighting to advance his private bank account.”
Felicia smiled derisively. “You disappoint me, Congressman. If you’d
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bothered to do your homework, you’d know that is simply not true.”
Daggat stiffened. The gauntlet had been thrown.
He released her hand and moved until his face was only a few inches from hers. “With half the world watching the African nations, waiting and wondering when they are going to get their circus act together and remove the last bastion of white supremacy, who should appear like a messiah from the wilderness, offering a proverb for every occasion, but none other than your friendly international drug smuggler Hiram Lusana. Like a revelation in the night, he unloads his thriving operation and takes up the cause of the poor foul-smelling black rabble of South Africa.
“Reinforced now by gullible black opinion and touted by a world press hungry for a personality, any personality, handsome Hiram suddenly finds his smiling face on the covers of no fewer than fourteen magazines with a combined circulation of over sixty million. Thus the sun shines down from heaven and Hiram Lusana is adored by Bible beaters everywhere for his devout piety; foreign state departments vie for his presence at parties; he demands and receives fabulous fees on the lecture circuit; and suckers like you, Ms. Collins, from the entertainment world, kiss his ass and scratch for a percentage of the box-office limelight.”
Anger flared in Felicia’s lovely features. “You’re being deliberately offensive.”
“Nakedly honest, perhaps.” Daggat paused and enjoyed Felicia’s uneasiness for a moment. “And what do you think will happen if Lusana should win his war and the white racist government in South Africa surrenders? Will he, like Cincinnatus, renounce his generalship and return to the plow? Not likely. There is little doubt in my mind that he’ll proclaim himself president and launch a virtual dictatorship. Then, with the enormous resources of Africa’s most advanced country in his pocket, he’ll shift the grand crusade into reverse and either by force or by subterfuge gobble up the weaker black nations.”