Jack saw Felter and Finton talking to someone in a darkened doorway just outside the terminal doors.
He started to go to them, but changed his mind and went looking for his father. If there was some sort of problem, Captain Portet could deal with it better than he could.
He found his father in the men’s room. The smell of that was familiar, too.
When the two of them walked up to Felter, Lunsford, Finton, and the other man, Jack recognized him. He was the military attaché of the U.S. Embassy.
“You know Colonel Jacobs, right?” Felter asked.
Captain Portet and Jack shook Colonel Jacobs’s hand.
“Colonel Jacobs tells me that he saw Dr. Dannelly riding through town in Mobutu’s motorcade, and that as far as he knows, he’s staying with him in the chief of staff’s villa,” Felter said. “So that’s good news.”
Jack noticed that Felter was now carrying a leather briefcase he had not had with him on the airplane. After a moment, he decided that it probably contained messages for him from Washington, sent through the embassy.
Confirmation came, he thought, when Felter thanked Jacobs for coming to the field and told him he would be in touch, then indicated he was ready to go.
They got in the Ford and drove out to the house. It took them a little over half an hour. There was an Army roadblock at every major intersection, where Congolese soldiers armed with Fabrique National 7-mm automatic rifles examined their documents intently until Noki gave them a little present.
The house, too, looked like it always did.
In what Jack thought of as better times, his father had bought three hectares (about 5.5 acres) of land overlooking the Stanley Basin of the Congo River, built his house on the most desirable hectare, and then tried to sell off the rest to other Europeans as home sites.
That hadn’t worked out. Europeans, after independence, had wanted to get out of the Congo, not move in. The entire property was now surrounded by a barbed-wire-topped Cyclone fence three meters tall. There was a floodlight mounted on every other pole.
Dense shrubbery now hid the fence, which had been designed to keep people from looking in, but worked equally well to keep people from looking out.
Noki sounded the horn, and one of the barefooted security guards who endlessly circled the fence after dark, armed with shotguns and machetes, trotted up and unlocked the gate and opened it.
There was a large stack of messages for Captain Portet, but none was an acknowledgment—more important, an invitation to dinner—from Joseph Désiré Mobutu.
And neither was there an answer when Mr. Finton tried to call the number he had for Dr. Dannelly, which seemed to confirm that he was staying with Mobutu in the Chief of Staff’s official villa.
“Why don’t we get a good night’s sleep and see what happens in the morning?” Captain Portet suggested.
Felter, Lunsford, and Finton were put into the guest room—actually, a three-room suite—and Jack went to his room—also a three-room suite—and was surprised that everything seemed to be as he had left it.
He wondered about that, since he had been gone almost exactly a year, and his parents and sister since November 27—the day after the jump on Stanleyville—but then realized that Noki and the others who ran the house found nothing unusual about their absence.
He had, after all, left the house to go to the Free University in Belgium every year for months at a time for four years, and before he had been drafted his mother and sister had often been gone for months on long trips to Europe.
But before he went to sleep, he wondered what Nimbi, the houseboy responsible for his room, had thought when he’d unpacked his luggage and found his U.S. Army tropical worsted officer’s uniform and parachutist’s jump boots.
[ SEVEN ]
404 Avenue Leopold
Léopoldville, Republic of the Congo
1235 16 January 1965
When, at breakfast—at half past ten—there had been no response to the message his father had sent General Mobutu from Washington, Captain Portet said that could mean any number of things, or nothing, but the best thing for him to do was go to his office at Air Congo and see what he could find out. Jack offered to go with him, but his father said it would be best if he stayed at the house, in case Mobutu called.
When Mr. Finton tried the telephone number he had for Dr. Dannelly, there was again no answer. Captain Portet told Noki to drive him into town in Hanni’s Ford to