knowing the purpose, and he couldn’t tell them the purpose for a number of reasons, which left him with the choice of flying the C-46 alone—he had done so before, but it wasn’t a smart thing to do—or taking one of the Army aviators along in the left seat. Smythe had the most twin-engine experience of all the Army aviators, and he had been drafted by Lunsford.
“Gear down and locked,” Smythe reported a moment later, and then unstrapped himself and got out of the copilot’s seat.
“Kigali,” Jack reported, “Seven-two-seven turning on final.”
Smythe stood in the narrow aisle between the pilot’s and copilot’s seats, and waited until Jack was lined up with Runway 18.
“In the interests of precision, Lieutenant, may I remind you that I already look like an African, but now I will try to look like a native African.”
“I stand corrected, Major, sir,” Jack said as he reached for the throttle quadrant. “And may I say, sir, that you make a very credible native African in that costume. All the Tutu maidens are excited by the very sight of you.”
“Fuck you, Lieutenant,” Smythe said, and turned and walked into the fuselage.
Just as Smythe sat down beside Major George Washington Lunsford, there was a chirp of the tires and a just perceptible bump as Jack touched down.
Majors Smythe and Lunsford were dressed identically in loose white cotton jackets and trousers, except that Smythe wore crude sandals and dirty white socks, and Lunsford was barefooted. The sandals were necessary because Smythe’s feet were soft and not callused, and he could not walk barefoot as Father could. The socks were necessary because an African with feet that were not heavily callused would attract attention.
The native costumes were necessary because the airport that served Costermansville was across the Rwandan border in Kigali. The Rwandan border was closed to Congolese military personnel, and to everyone else whose passport didn’t have the proper visa.
Majors Lunsford and Smythe and the ASA intercept team and their Green Beret protectors—all wearing somewhat soiled white cotton shirts and trousers—had crossed the border into Rwanda in the bed of an Air Simba Ford pickup truck, sitting atop the crates of equipment the intercept crew was taking with them.
There also had been two cases of Simba beer in the truck. One of them had been enough to get past happily smiling Rwandan border guards on the way in, and the other, Jack was reasonably confident, would get them past happily smiling border guards on their return.
The border guards were accustomed to Air Simba aircrews crossing the border to get to and from the Kigali airport, and many of them knew Jack by sight and reputation—he could always be counted on for a case of beer.
They hadn’t even looked into the crates, which was fortunate, because the teams’ weaponry, a supply of Composition C-4, and half a dozen thermite grenades had been packed on top of the communications equipment. The state-of-the-art, highly classified communications equipment could not be allowed to fall into the wrong hands, even if that meant torching it at the Rwanda border guard station, and to do that, the thermite grenades had to be right on top, rather than hidden someplace.
It had all gone off without a hitch on the way to Dar es Salaam, and there was less chance—the crates and the intercept crew were now in Tanzania—that anything would go wrong on the way back.
And nothing did.
And just across the bridge that spanned the river, and was actually the border, Jack stopped the Ford, and Aunt Jemima and Father got out of the truck bed and got in the seat with Jack.
Father was happily puffing on a fat, black cigar—his first since they’d left Costermansville—when Jack pulled the Ford up to the basement loading dock of the Hotel du Lac, on which First Lieutenant Geoffrey Craig, Spec7 William Peters, and Mrs. Jacques Portet were standing, obviously waiting for them.
“Something’s wrong,” Father announced. “Look at them.”
They did not look happy.
Geoff Craig came down the landing dock steps as Father, Jack, and Aunt Jemima got out of the truck. Craig wordlessly handed a sheet of paper to Father, who read it, said, “Shit!” and handed it to Jack, who read it and handed it to Aunt Jemima.
SECRET
HELP0022 1730 ZULU 6 APRIL 1965
VIA WHITE HOUSE SIGNAL AGENCY
FROM: HELPER FIVE
TO: EARNEST SIX
REFERENCE MAP BAKER 08
1. AT 1425 ZULU 6 APRIL 1965, OUTPOST FOX RELAYED A RADIO REPORT FROM OUTPOST GEORGE STATING THAT UNUSUAL ACTIVITY IN THE BUSH HAD BEEN DETECTED AND