Jette, on the other hand, had apparently been endowed at birth with a degree of hand-eye coordination that had permitted him to do at least as well—after firing no more than 200 rounds through the first ’03-A4 he had ever seen—as his teacher.
While Jette could not put a 168-grain bullet into the eye of a gnat at 100 yards, as the phrase goes, he could regularly hit the neck of a Simba beer bottle bobbing in Lake Albert at 250 yards— invisible to the naked eye at that distance. This told Thomas that Jette’s brain was able to compute the time it took the bottle neck to swing from one side to the other and the time-in-flight of his bullet, and send the appropriate message to his muscles.
There was no problem vis-à-vis Sergeant First Jette’s marksmanship, but rather with his military/political sophistication. Jette was having a good deal of trouble understanding why he was absolutely forbidden to shoot any of the Simbas and their Rwandan and Cuban allies who were about to attack Bendera without having first obtained the permission of Major, Sir, Tomas in every instance.
The concept of permitting an enemy to escape when one had the ability to shoot him in the forehead was just about out of Sergeant First Jette’s ability to comprehend, although Thomas had tried to explain the situation to him many times.
Sergeant First Jette had also had trouble with the concept of protecting one’s hearing by the insertion of earplugs, and was going along with that strange idea solely because of his respect for Major, Sir, Tomas, whom he respected both as a soldier and as someone who knew how to move silently and invisibly through the bush almost as well as he himself did. Perhaps even a little better.
“Now what I think will happen, my friend,” Major, Sir had explained, pointing at a map, “is that our friends will come out of the bush here, into this open area. Their primary objective will be to take the power-generating plant, here. It’s about half a klick— five hundred meters—from the edge of the bush.”
Jette nodded.
“We know they don’t have artillery,” Thomas had gone on, “although they may have mortars, and they know that the power station is guarded by Major Hoare’s mercenaries. They also probably know that there will be no more than fifteen mercenaries on duty, and that the rest of the mercenaries will be in Bendera, and that it will take from ten to fifteen minutes for them to come to the power station from Bendera, once the attack starts.
“So what they will probably try to do is sneak up to the power station, overwhelm the mercenaries, and set themselves up to repel the mercenary counterattack fifteen minutes later. Then, when everybody—mercenaries and Congolese soldiers—has rushed to the power station, they will attack Bendera with the bulk of their forces. You understand me, Sergeant First Jette, my friend?”
Jette nodded.
“What they don’t know is that we expect them; the attack will not be a surprise. And they don’t know that we have twenty-five paratroopers with a machine gun here, on this side of the field, and another twenty-five with another machine gun here, on the other side of the field.
“And they don’t know about you and me, my friend. We will be here, on the roof of the power station building. What you and I are going to do is take down their officers. Now, we don’t want to do this until they have come—probably crawled—most of the way across the field. The paratroops will not open fire until the Americans with them tell them to, and the Americans will not do that until we fire. You understand?”
Jette nodded again.
“The idea is that if the Simbas and the Rwandans are most of the way across the field before we fire at them, the paratroops will be able to kill more of them before they retreat back into the bush than they would if we shot a couple of them the minute we saw them. We are going to have to be patient. Understand?”
Jette nodded.
“I have my orders from Colonel Dahdi that this man is not to be shot,” Thomas said, showing him—for the tenth time—a half-dozen photographs of Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, M.D. “Colonel Dahdi will be very angry with me, and Colonel Supo will be very angry with you if we kill this man.”
“Why is that, Major, sir?” Jette asked for the tenth time.
“Because those are our orders, Sergeant First Jette,”