Zanzibar Intrigue, page 1
Contents
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
DEDICATION
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1963 by Van Wyck Mason.
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidepress.com
DEDICATION
For that Prince of Parrot Shooters, Jack Murray and his long-suffering spouse Bepp
CHAPTER ONE
1
João Silveira usually looked like a roly-poly, olive-skinned, seventy-year-old child waiting for Christmas instead of the proprietor of the Nipoo, Zanzibar’s most free-wheeling hotel.
Now, however, João showed his years, every hard-working hour of them. Polly, his taffy-haired young bride of three weeks, stood on the other side of the desk in the deserted lobby and expressed her displeasure in faintly cockney English.
“I’m stuck up on that third floor all dye long,” she declared, “and this once, when you promised me some fun to make up for havin’ no honeymoon, what happens? Why, yer worthless brother, Lourenco, gets drunk again and there’s no night out, after all.”
So saying, she whirled, half ran across the lobby to the stairs and up, out of sight.
Poor little Polly: he would have to make it up to her with something nice, perhaps another piece of silver or even a fine stone. Ionel Zelreanu had written for a booking beginning the eighteenth and he would almost be sure to have some good stones with him at reasonable prices. Or if he didn’t have them on hand he could get some very quickly, no questions asked.
Zelreanu was a convenient man to know and João always made sure he got the very best the old Nipoo had to offer. The eighteenth; that was an awkward date for his friend to have chosen to visit Zanzibar, because that was when all those people would be crowding the island for the big mass meeting. The Nipoo would be crowded, too, and no doubt half the bookings had been made by wogs: it was impossible to tell a man’s color by his signature and the Africans were all taking English names these days; it was the latest fad. And even if he did know a man writing for a room was an African, he couldn’t turn the booking down, not without risking official displeasure.
The telephone switchboard at the end of the desk blinked and buzzed and he went to answer it. Suite 300 again and one of the Russians wanting more gin sent up for their miserable companion. Or would “prisoner” be a better word? He had half a mind to refuse the gin, tell them they must leave the hotel, but of course he did neither, for many reasons not the least of which was his fear of the two Russians, Meklov and Nulgin, and the guns they always carried.
He hated all Russians. His despisal of Nulgin and Meklov and what they stood for, his scorn for the black man who swigged the gin they bought him, lay behind the strange, dangerous role he had been playing, the role that had made Polly weep and storm and beg him to quit, when he had told her about it, perhaps unwisely.
Tonight, though, should mark the beginning of the end of it. Seeing that Lourenco had ruined the evening’s plans and considering the importance of the report in his pocket, he would wake Gupta-babu and have him take over the desk (the Indian assistant manager would work twenty-eight hours a day, every day, for overtime pay). Then he himself would drive out the Pemba Ferry Road to the dark cove where the pickup would be waiting in his boat, ready to take his report to—where, Kenya or Tanganyika? João didn’t know and although he was by nature a curious man, in this instance he realized it was better he did not know too much about what happened to his information, once he passed it on.
Yes, that was what he would do: a drive in the night air would perhaps clear his head of his troubles. Usually he gave the slip of coded paper—and what a job it had been for his stupid old head to learn that code!—to Wanji and let the Number One bearer take it to the drop (Wanji could be trusted with anything), but tonight he would do it himself. When he came back, refreshed by the drive, he would soothe Polly with promises of jewels that would make her eyes brighten again and might even open her arms to him.
He buzzed for Wanji, the tall, never-drowsing African bearer, unlocked the liquor closet, brought out a bottle of cheap gin for which he would charge a premium price, threatened Wanji with slow dismemberment if he touched the seal, and sent him aloft to Suite 300.
Back at the desk, he relapsed into gloom again. He hoped the gin would not prove to be the bottle that would send the black scoundrel in 300 berserk and cause Mr. and Mrs. Archibald Ring to leave the Nipoo. That would be a catastrophe: the Rings gave the Nipoo the tone the hotel had lacked since the new, finer Victoria had been built. An engineer for a Belgian mining concession in the Congo, Mr. Archibald Ring had read the handwriting on the wall when most of the others had refused to look and had moved out before the real trouble began. Now he was looking around for a new connection in Zanzibar but he was very leisurely about it. He had no need to rush around seeking a job, not Mr. Archibald Ring. He had done very well for himself, and João thought that life must be extremely pleasant for him, with his money and his lovely, gracious, never-complaining wife, Mrs. Elizabeth Ring, as fine a lady as could be found anywhere.
He, João Silveira, could read the handwriting on the wall, too, the warnings that things could be very different when Zanzibar got her independence, even as bad as they had turned out in the Congo. Yes, Silveira knew the dangers but sometimes he was tempted to pretend they weren’t there, as those poor fools had in Stanleyville and Leopoldville. There was the temptation to tell oneself: It can’t happen in sleepy, never-get-it-done Zanzibar, and blind oneself to the obvious signs that it could very well happen. Signs such as the presence of those Russians with their black companion in Suite 300. Inwardly, João Silveira knew that unless more foresighted men willing to take risks joined in fighting the people and ideologies that threatened Zanzibar, men like those two Russians and even worse types might—
His thoughts were broken off by the slam of the screen door as two men entered, walking fast. João scowled: even think of the Devil and the Devil appeared.
Two Africans were swaggering toward the desk with unbearable swank, two “spivs” in tight blue jeans and sleazy Amerikani sports shirts, ridiculous pointed black and white shoes on their big feet. Two KADOKs, probably, come over from Kenya to plot their deviltry here on Zanzibar, spread KADOK’s inflammatory doctrines among the Africans of the island, stir them out of their contented lethargy with wild threats of what would happen to them unless they took over everything with uhuru, independence.
Why didn’t they stay on the mainland, raising hell in Nairobi and Mombasa and the smaller towns? Why did they come to Zanzibar as they had in increasing numbers lately, full of their crazy plans to turn everything upside down, wanting everything in one gulp and not willing to lift a single constructive finger to earn it? They expected to be handed all they had ever wanted; they believed that a single word could change things so they would suddenly own the motorcars and the big clove and sisal and pyrethrum plantations, the ivory exchanges, and in one great reign of terror they could make up for all the years their fathers had bowed to the white man.
As the two neared the desk, João deliberately used Swahili, East Africa’s lingua franca, rather than the English he suspected this pair had learned at some mission school or even the Royal Technical College at Nairobi. “Jambo, young men. I am sorry but there is no room—”
It was as far as he got. His mouth dropped, the soft, brown eyes bulged, he felt the clammy hand of helpless fear clutch his belly, as the taller of the two Africans reached under his gaudy sports shirt and brought out a short-barreled revolver.
“Die, mzungu spy,” the gunman grunted between his teeth and fired three shots so closely together that they sounded like one ripping burst, pointblank into the roly-poly innkeeper’s chest.
João Silveira’s last thought was that he would never give Polly one of Ionel Zelreanu’s smuggled stones to soothe her feelings now nor would anybody know of the black man in Suite 300.
Then he fell between the desk and the mailboxes. His body had barely touched the floor before the second of the two murderers, who had started around the desk while his companion was pulling the trigger, crouched over the Portuguese and expertly explored the dying man’s pockets. In an inside pocket of old João’s rumpled jacket he found what he was looking for, a piece of paper no bigger than a postcard, the message Silveira had planned to give the boatman in the cove near the Pemba ferry landing.
“This is what we were sent for,” the African jerked out in Swahili. “Now let us leave, fast.”
2
“General,” said Colonel Hugh North, U.S. Army Intelligence, “I know this mission is all set, but I feel it’s my duty to say that G-2 must have a dozen men better qualified to handle a job in Zanzibar, sir.”
North had known Lieut. Gen. R. D. (Request Denied) Armiston long enough and well enough to offer that demurrer when other brave men would have preferred slow strangulation to any objection at all to an Armiston assignment. Now Hugh saw Armiston’s angled face stiffen, his eyes grow as cold as a sea turtle’s.
“I hope you don’t think we threw a lot of names in a hat and yours happened to come up in the fist of a cute blindfolded child, Colonel,” the general said politely, after a brief pause.
“No, sir, but m
“Negative, whatever it is,” the three-star broke in. “Hugh, I’m a patient man (at this his aide choked slightly) but I noticed your strange reaction when I laid out this mission and I want no more trying to wriggle off the hook.” He puffed at his cigarette and added: “Frankly, I’m surprised to see you take this attitude.”
Hugh considered an attempt to explain that he wasn’t trying to wriggle off any hooks, that he just thought somebody else must be better equipped to handle this mission. He decided against it; he had been crazy to open his mouth in the first place. He should have known that when G-2 roused him out of his sleep in his quarters at Formosa, flew him and his aide, Capt. Kenny Trotter, by Air Force jet to Istanbul to meet the general, the job was solidly set and he was elected. Which was okay except for one thing: what in hell did he know about Zanzibar?
General Armiston was not through. “You weren’t brought here because we needed a fourth at bridge, Colonel. If you don’t think we named you only after full deliberation, you don’t know me very well.”
Oh, yes, I do, Hugh North thought, unhappily. Every man in G-2 knows you only too well. Sir.
Another puff of cigarette smoke and Lieut. Gen. R. D. Armiston continued: “Perhaps you don’t quite realize what we have here, Hugh.” North did not make the mistake of thinking the general’s use of his first name denoted any softening: the word in G-2 was that when Armiston used your first name you were in trouble; when he called you by nickname, all was lost. “For perhaps the first time in history, the infallible Central Intelligence Agency has had to call on poor old, bumbling, outmoded G-2, the same Army Intelligence a lot of people seem to agree there’s no room for any longer. CIA has asked us to step in and straighten out one of their foul-ups.”
He paused and his voice was reflective, almost musing, as he added: “And all because a certain G-2 colonel—I believe he was a captain at the time—made a friend of an enlisted man named Willie Bonhart.”
Hugh’s face echoed his instinctive thought although he kept his words to himself: Damn his black heart!
Even if there had not been a long-distance friendship between North and Bonhart at one time, even if Hugh never had laid eyes on Willis Bonhart, the colonel came as close to hating the man as he ever permitted himself to despise any person himself instead of what he stood for. This animosity stemmed from the fact that because of Hugh North’s interference, Private First Class Bonhart had been spared a stretch in Leavenworth and a “kick,” a dishonorable discharge, some seventeen years before. Of late, the G-2 colonel had reminded himself bitterly that if he had kept his nose out of the Bonhart case the man would not now be belching anti-American, anti-white lies in the pay of the Soviets, lying filth that the Reds beamed at the African states and the protectorates and dependencies that stood at the threshold of independence.
Willis Bonhart was a Negro, a North Florida colored boy who had worked his way up through the Army to master sergeant and sergeant major of a good Military Police battalion before he skipped over the Berlin Wall to become one of the most hated traitors since Benedict Arnold.
Hugh North had met Willie Bonhart a couple of years before Pearl Harbor when the soldier was a Pfc stationed at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. It had been a routine assignment for the G-2 officer; army supplies ranging from undershirts to earth-movers were disappearing from warehouses and motor pools and it had been North’s job to find the thieves. He had, and among those rounded up was Pfc. Willis Bonhart, truck driver, low-ranking man on the totem pole of those implicated but the brains, the ringleader, according to the confessions of the others.
North’s mission was to round up the crooks, get the confessions, and turn the case over to the Provost Marshal’s office. But in this one instance he had done more, thereby breaking a stern G-2 rule: never get personally involved because you suspect somebody’s getting a bum deal.
To North it was fairly obvious that Willie was being made the fall guy of the whole operation. Therefore, after his mission was technically accomplished, Hugh had spent some precious leave time looking further into the case and when the trial opened, there he was, offering testimony in Bonhart’s defense. In so doing, the G-2 captain had had to label the testimony of a major, another captain, and two lieutenants perjury and prove it, thereby earning himself some cold looks at the bar of the Fort Belvoir Officers Club. And all for Willie Bonhart, a soldier Hugh had never expected to see again, a boy he privately labeled too gullible, too stupid, to keep even his one Pfc stripe for long.
Hugh left Belvoir before the court-martial ended, but he heard later that Bonhart had got off with a reprimand and a heavy load of extra duty. So far as North was concerned, that was the end of the thing.
But then one day on Okinawa, when a Retreat parade was being staged for the award of a batch of Silver Stars to a shot-up battalion and he had been snagged to serve as a member of the reviewing general’s parade staff, North had met Bonhart again. This time Willie wore a T-4 sergeant’s insignia stenciled on his fatigues and he was one of the men getting a Silver Star. He recognized Hugh despite the years that had passed and the battle grime on both faces and after the ceremony he had sought out the G-2 man.
“Colonel, sir,” Bonhart had said, “I never got a right chance to thank you for what you done that time at Belvoir. I was just a dumb Cracker boy that maybe had it comin’ to him and I heard later you spent your own leave time to get me off. So I said right then that if that was the way it was in the Army, that was for me and seein’ I was gonna stay in I’d better learn somethin’. So I went to school and—well, if I come out of this war okay I’m gonna get me three stripes up and three down, just to prove to you that you didn’t waste that leave time, sir.”
North was a busy man and his job left no room for sentiment but in the years that followed he had kept up a desultory correspondence with Willis Bonhart. He had followed the man’s military career through good times and bad and he had seen him rise to the rank of sergeant major of one of the Army’s top Military Police battalions, a unit entrusted with the touchy, showcase job of M.P. duty in West Berlin.
And then, without warning, came disaster. One fine day in Berlin, Master Sergeant Willis Bonhart, CMP, had disappeared from his barracks and the next time he was heard from he was on the Communist East Berlin radio, spouting his anti-American diatribes, screaming venomous invective against the Army, the country, the people he had pretended to serve so devotedly right up to the day he defected.
His stunned officers and battalion mates first said no, it was a damned lie; Bonhart must have wandered into East Berlin and the Commies had grabbed him and now they were making up all that crap—it couldn’t be Sergeant Bonhart. But then G-2 got word from the Central Intelligence Agency that said yes, it really was the Negro master sergeant: the no-good louse had sold out to the Reds for a big bundle of dough.
It had been a bitter blow to Hugh North even though he tried to convince himself that it was a good lesson: he had broken one of G-2’s cardinal rules by getting involved as a person, not an agent, and this was what happened. But beneath his sour philosophy rankled the thought that if he had stayed out of the case, Pfc. Willie Bonhart would have served time in Leavenworth, been kicked out of the service, and that would have been the last of him.
So now, because he once had befriended Bonhart, Hugh found himself in front of Lieut. Gen. R. D. Armiston in Istanbul, being assigned to a mission that appeared about to take him to Zanzibar, of all places. And for one of the very few times in his career, the colonel wished desperately that some other operative was getting the job. If the powers-that-be had decided that Bonhart had to be shut up the hard way, why not detail the chore to somebody who knew something about Zanzibar—and who had never counted himself a friend of the man about to be shut up?
“I guess both of us have grown too long in the tooth in this business to get shaken up very often,” General Armiston was saying quietly, “but maybe you’d better brace yourself for what’s coming, Colonel.”
So the order is to make sure Bonhart is put out of action, eh? North asked himself dismally. Aloud, he said: “All braced, sir.”
