Rogue's March by W. T. Tyler Page A

who’d stayed loyal wanted to put the torch to the poor old bastard de Vaux had in the back seat.”
    Michaux smiled with the recollection, gazing beyond Reddish toward the gate. “He wouldn’t hear of it. Reading the riot act to them, Jean-Bernard was, giving them a piece of his mind. He was a merc captain by then. They say he’d been a real soldier too, all spit and polish, not one of those cutthroats or thieves masquerading as a Sandhurst field marshal amongst the bow-and-arrow savages of the bush, but a real soldier. Shot a Rhodesian corporal, they say, after he’d raped a young girl. So there he was, standing up for discipline again, standing up for that ignorant savage in the back seat with the manioc sack pulled down over his head. I called out to him from just inside the gate over there, wearing the same filthy rags I’d been wearing for three months dodging the rebels. They’d have had my tongue on a skewer if they’d caught me, same as they’d have had Jean-Bernard’s. ‘Jean-Bernard,’ I called out to him. ‘Hey there, Jean-Bernard! What’s tin bring in the Kivu these days?’
    â€œEveryone was a little out of his head that morning, and maybe I was too. I’d been burned out like everyone else, but that was all right too. I was alive, like them, and we were all delirious that morning. ‘What are you cooking up now?’ I shouted to him. ‘What’s next for you—a seat on the Brussels bourse?’ I thought maybe the rebellions had changed things for him, everyone in town kneeling down to him and his men that way. Maybe he thought I was a ghost. Maybe he never saw me, I don’t know, but he never said a word, not a bloody word. He just looked at me like I wasn’t even there, still in the iron grip of whatever it was that brought him out here in the first place.
    â€œSo after a while the jeep went away with him in it, up the track like it was the road to Goma and Bunia again back in forty-six, the witch doctor on the back seat not moving a muscle, and that was the last time I set eyes on him. Now he’s back in the capital, eh? Working for the paras?” Michaux laughed. “That’s Jean-Bernard, all right, the same man. Make of him what you will, he’ll never change.”

Chapter Five
    Reddish left his Fiat in the oyster-shell drive next to a para jeep. A black trooper sat slumped behind the wheel, dressed in the leopard-spot fatigues of the para battalion, sunglasses across his eyes, a red beret on his head. An American-made M-16 lay across his knees. A second para lounged against the front fender, ankles crossed, weapon in his arms, his eyes moving with Reddish as he passed in front of them. Reddish nodded, but the paras didn’t acknowledge the greeting. Annoyed with himself, he crossed the drive to the gravel path under the palm trees. The paras were the pampered hoodlums of the presidency, insolent, brutal, and vain, eager to test their skills whenever GHQ turned them loose, as it had against the striking students and transit workers, but more often in the ugly ceremony of crowd control, clubbing a path for the President and his retinue through a mob of the urban poor already whipped to frenzy by the loudspeaker trucks and the paid political claques of the communes.
    He followed the path toward a whitewashed cottage roofed in red tile, similar to the dozen or so other cottages scattered among the trees along the sand road. The hilltop had once been a Belgian police cantonment. A few of the cottages had fallen into disrepair, gutters gone, windows cracked, gardens unweeded, and the turf trampled to sand under the raffia palms; but de Vaux’s cottage was bright and neat, freshly painted. Red blossoms bloomed in the flower beds along the foundation wall; a poinsettia tree stood near the front steps.
    De Vaux waited for him on the porch, a slim figure in starched khaki drill shorts and shirt,