Free Rogue's March by W. T. Tyler

M-16s had come through commercial channels, bought in Hanoi.
    â€œThey say he’s worse now than ever,” de Vaux was saying. “He believes what he wants to believe. Fear poisons every cup you take him. God knows how the internal security people put up with it, but they do, every morning when they give him the internal security brief. Guns in every commune every day, old Simbas returning from the north every night with new Kalashnikovs on their backs, about to retake Kisangani.”
    Reddish watched de Vaux’s face silently, knowing the falsity of much of his characterization but puzzled by something else. Sedition was in his words, but he spoke in the same level tone.
    â€œWhat he wanted was what they all want, men like him—absolute security, someone to tell him he’ll never die. And what does that mean for the poor sods around him? Absolute terror, every day. But your ambassador isn’t like that. He’s a sensible man. That makes it a simpler world. That’s what N’Sika and I wanted too. What’s a simpler world than one you make yourself, eh, like the para hilltop. Don’t worry about guns. Tell your ambassador that—”
    The phone rang and de Vaux picked it up, his eyes still on Reddish. “ Oui, oui, ” he said easily. “ C’est ça. Non, non. Pas du tout. Rien. Je suis sur—oui—à cinq heures .” He looked at his watch.
    The voice hadn’t changed, moving with the same fluency with which he’d dominated their conversation, and Reddish was struck by the ease of de Vaux’s transition, moving from one interlocutor to the other, from English to French, with no change in tone or register.
    â€œ Oui, Colonel. Oui. Bon …”
    The tone puzzled Reddish: the same casualness, the same familiarity, moving from Reddish, an outsider, to a fellow officer and colleague with the same ease. The caller was his confidant and Reddish wasn’t; yet he might have been talking to either.
    Or to no one, he thought suddenly, and he realized then that he’d been listening to a man wholly alone with his own ambition, as Michaux had said.
    They crossed the porch and went out into the sunlit yard toward the car. Reddish had been right. De Vaux’s caller was Colonel N’Sika, summoning him to para headquarters down the sand road in the center of the compound.
    Reddish stopped at the edge of the oyster-shell drive, looking south along the road toward the dense growth of trees where the maximum security prison was located. De Vaux paused too, following his gaze.
    â€œIt’s been a long time since I was up here,” Reddish said. “Is the prison still being used back there, below the crown of the hill?”
    â€œStill used.”
    â€œI wonder if Cobby Molloy is still there with the other mercenaries. He sent me a note a few months back asking for help.”
    â€œCrocodile tears, eh? Had to wring it out to read it, did you? Probably peed all over it.”
    â€œStill there?”
    De Vaux shrugged, pulling on his beret, his gray eyes even blanker in the piercing sunlight. “Could be. I don’t follow it. The ministry can tell you.”
    â€œI knew Cobby better than the others. Maybe I should try to see him. A little mixed up maybe, but not a killer.”
    â€œOur mates never are,” de Vaux said dryly.
    â€œI suppose they’ve learned their lesson, the rest of them—that they know the old days are over now, finished.”
    â€œIt’s not lessons we give them,” de Vaux muttered indifferently, “just rag gravy and prison clogs.”
    Banda had said that the mercenaries would be involved too, but that made no sense either. Nothing did. He’d seen no emotion in de Vaux’s face, but he remembered what Michaux had told him that day at Kindu months earlier, how de Vaux had looked through him as he stood in the jeep beyond the cercle gate with the blindfolded witch doctor