Rogue's March by W. T. Tyler

the track to Goma, right at the edge of the lake. After that he bought another mine and lost everything again. It was as worthless as the first.”
    The waiter brought chicken and rice. Michaux began to eat hungrily, without waiting.
    â€œSo he was here in the bush all those years,” Reddish said.
    â€œHe was here, no place else. Had a way with the blacks, no doubt about it. Hard worker too and clever as a snake. Went after what he wanted, but a swine too, for all the honest ambition he ever had. What good is his kind of ambition out here? Brings you closer to the grave, that’s all. Take my word for it—leave your ambitions in the old world. Take this one as you find it. Don’t try to make another. Battle of Algiers? Never. Did he graduate from Saint-Cyr too?
    â€œHe did disappear for a few years, that much I remember. Some thought he was dead, killed while poaching the King’s elephants up in Parc Albert. Nothing was out of bounds for him in those days. Others told me he went up to Juba in the Sudan, as bold as brass, trying to corner the ivory trade. Tea prices had fallen. They say he had a fleet of lorries up there. Whatever it was, when I saw him again he’d learned a little English. Spoke it well too—talked like a limey though, dockside style. Maybe he picked it up in prison in Entebbe or Khartoum. Does that make him an Oxford man too?”
    Michaux laughed, eyes lifted as he brought knife and fork together again on the plate in front of him.
    â€œWhen did you last see him?”
    Michaux raised his knife, waving it toward the dark courtyard behind Reddish. “Outside the gate there, during the rebellions. He was commanding a merc unit. Lost track of him after that.” He frowned as he drank from his glass, memory fading again. “What happened to him after that?”
    â€œHe went up north,” Reddish replied, “to Orientale.” Michaux was curious, listening silently as Reddish explained. De Vaux had bought a coffee plantation in the north after the Simba rebellions were put down. When his old mercenary colleagues had rebelled against the central government, he’d refused their appeals to join them and had retreated with his African wife to a remote village on the Sudan frontier. Returning after the mercenaries were defeated, he’d found his house burned, his trees ravaged, his trucks stolen, and the bodies of his wife’s two sisters rotting in the coffee-drying sheds, murdered by the retreating mercenaries and their Katangese soldiers. De Vaux had dropped from sight, reappearing a year later when he’d been named to the training staff of the old general who commanded the northern sector. A few months afterward, the old general had been killed in a plane accident, his small aircraft mysteriously blown apart as it descended through a rain squall to the Mbandaka airstrip. De Vaux had accompanied the general’s deputy, N’Sika, to the capital as his aide. Among the Belgian commercial community in the north, a rumor had circulated claiming that sabotage was responsible, a bomb rigged to the aircraft’s landing gear and wired to detonate as the wheels were lowered.
    â€œDon’t know anything about that,” Michaux admitted. “A man’s bound to make enemies, I suppose, but when Jean-Bernard is around, you have to be doubly careful. The last time I saw him he was outside the gate there”—he lifted the knife again, pointing off through the darkness—“standing on the front seat of a mercenary jeep with a captured Simba witch doctor in the back seat, a manioc sack pulled down over the poor bugger’s head. There were flowers all over the bonnet, thrown there by the villagers as they’d driven in. He had twenty mercs with him, the worst of the bunch, I’d say. The Simbas were on the run, the last of them around here smashed just on the other side of the ferry by de Vaux and his unit. The blacks