turned out. There was no way really to tell how much damage had been done to it without giving it sort of a thousand-hour overhaul. They’d started on that. By the time the first Intercontinental flight landed, the bullet-shredded tires had been replaced and the C-46 rolled into one of the two hangars, where the work would be completed.
When the team’s aircraft and engine mechanics—the soldiers recruited by Jack and Lunsford at Fort Rucker—saw the cranes Jack flew in to, if necessary, remove the engines from the C-46, it was immediately apparent to them that they could also be used to haul the L-20 fuselage off the skid on which it had been shipped while the landing gear was reinstalled, and when that had been accomplished, and the Beaver was sitting on its gear, to use the cranes to reinstall the Beaver’s wings.
They had been prepared to “locally fabricate” makeshift wooden cranes from trees and had brought power saws and woodworking tools with them to do so. Practice at Camp Mackall had indicated this would take 1.5 or 2.0 days.
When the second Intercontinental Air flight called for approach and landing instructions at Stanleyville, the reassembly process of the Beaver was two days ahead of schedule. It was sitting on the tarmac with its engine running, and Captain Smythe/Major Jemima in the pilot’s seat was about to take it off on its first test flight.
Captain Jacques Portet of Air Simba intended to serve as copilot.
“Well, it hasn’t blown up so far,” Aunt Jemima said. “Shall we see if it will fly?”
“Why not?” Jack replied, and, more from habit than necessity— only Captain Weewili/Spec7 Peters and one of his technicians were in the tower, installing newly arrived radios—put on earphones and reached for the microphone on the yoke.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” the earphones said in massive disgust. “Don’t tell me the fucking radio is out in the fucking Beaver!”
“Station obscenely calling the Beaver, identify yourself,” Jack said, sternly, into the microphone.
“Is that you, Captain Smythe?”
“This is Portet.”
“I’ve been trying to raise you, sir. Intercontinental Air is ten minutes out.”
“Well, I guess we better put off the test flight, then. I don’t want to get run over by a 707.”
Jack touched Aunt Jemima’s arm, then made a cutting motion across his throat.
“The 707’s ten minutes out.”
“In that case, I guess I better find Sergeant Thomas and mobilize the stevedores,” Aunt Jemima said as he began to shut the engine down. “Our noble leader is downtown playing tennis with Geoff Craig.”
“War is hell, ain’t it?” Jack said, and started to unfasten his harness.
[ FIVE ]
The Hotel du Lac
Costermansville, Kivu Province
Republic of the Congo
1745 16 March 1965
Howard Dannelly, M.D., was not in a good mood when he walked into the Hotel du Lac, and what he saw shortly afterward very nearly made him lose his temper, something he really hated to do.
It had been a long—and toward the end, very bumpy—flight in an Air Simba Boeing from Léopoldville. There had been a dozen Congolese young men in civilian clothing on the airplane. Dannelly knew they were soldiers, recent graduates of the parachutists school, intended as augmentation for Colonel Supo’s inadequate forces, and in civilian clothing because they were going to have to pass through the airport in Kigali, just across the Rwandan border from Costermansville, and the Rwandan government didn’t want soldiers passing through their airport.
They had apparently shed their military discipline with their uniforms, for not only had they brought two cases of beer onto the airplane, which they had promptly begun to consume, but, as Congolese country boys were prone to do with alcohol in their systems, began to say unkind and scatological things about the nearest white man. This was, of course, Dr. Dannelly, and the drunken paratroops of course had no idea who he was, or that he was fluent in Swahili.
Predictably, the first of them became nauseous when the bumpy weather began, and by the time the Boeing landed at the field at Kigali, most of them had become nauseous, some of them spectacularly so. His shoes and trousers had been splattered.
In the Kigali terminal building, there had been a particularly offensive—and apparently illiterate; he held Dannelly’s documents upside down while he studied them intently—immigration officer who took great joy in showing that Rwanda was now independent, and black men could now annoy white men with impunity.
There was no bottled water in the Kigali terminal, and Dr. Dannelly knew better than to drink anything else.