"The Simbas had threatened to kill all the hostages if attacked, and God knows, they had had enough practice at massacres. They were often compared with the siafus, the soldier ants of Africa, destroying everything in their path. The Simbas believed they couldn't be killed. They were mainly primitive tribesmen stiffened by Force Publique deserters and led by witch doctors. Each recruit was put through a ritual that was supposed to give him dawa — medicine. If he then chanted, ‘mai, mai’ — water, water — as he went into battle, enemy bullets would turn to water."
"What happened to this belief when some of them got killed?" Etan had asked.
"The witch doctors had an answer for that." Fitzduane smiled wryly. "They said that the slain had lost face and broken one of the taboos. You had to follow the witch doctors exactly to keep your dawa."
He continued. "The job of my command was to lie low until the attack came and then prevent the Simbas from killing the hostages until the main force could punch its way through. There were only twelve of us, so it was vital we didn't make a move until the attack started. We knew we couldn't hope to hold out for more than a matter of minutes unless reinforcements were right on hand. There were just too many Simbas, and though quite a few still had only spears and bows and arrows, most had FALs and other automatic weaponry captured from the ANC, the Congolese Army. So our orders were crystal clear: No matter what the provocation, unless actually detected — and we weren't — do nothing until the main force opens fire.
"For eight hours we watched the scene below. Most of the hostages were left alive under guard, just sitting or trying to sleep on the ground, but a steady trickle was taken for the amusement of the Simbas and tortured to death. The torturing took place in a small garden at one end of the square. There was a statue there commemorating some explorer, and they used the plinth to tie their victims to.
"We lay concealed no more than fifty meters away on the second floor of the house, and we could see it all clearly by the light of huge bonfires. With field glasses, it seemed close enough to touch. We couldn't do a damn thing. We had to wait; we just had to. They screamed and screamed and screamed; all goddamn night they screamed. Men, women, and children were raped. It made no difference. They were killed in as many disgusting ways as the Simbas could devise.
"They put one little child — she couldn't have been more than four or five — between two jeeps, tied ropes to her arms and legs, and pulled her apart like a rag doll. One guy, with a beard and longish hair, they crucified. They shouted at him: ‘Jésus, Jésus, le roi des juifs.’ He was still alive after four hours, so they castrated him. After they raped them, they made some nuns drink gasoline. Then they cut their stomachs open and set fire to their intestines. That was a big favorite. We could smell them burning from where we lay. And we could do nothing, absolutely nothing to help. We lay there with our GPMGs and FNs and rocket launchers and grenades and knives and piano wire, and we didn't even move when little babies died.
"Oh, we were a well-trained outfit, the best the Irish Army had to offer. We had discipline, absolute discipline. We had our orders, and they were sensible orders. Premature action would have been military suicide.
"And then the Simbas pulled one young nurse out of the crowd. She was tall and red-haired and beautiful. She still wore her white uniform. It happened so quickly. One of the young Simbas — some were only thirteen or fourteen and among the cruelest — picked up a panga and almost casually hacked her head off. It took only a few blows. It was quite a quick death. The nurse was Anne-Marie. We'd been married just seven weeks."
Etan had not known what to say or do. What she was hearing was so truly terrible and so much beyond her experience that she just sat there motionless. Then she put both her arms around her lover and drew him to her. After he'd finished speaking, Fitzduane had remained silent. The sun was now a dull semicircle vanishing into the sea. It had grown much colder. She could see the lights of the castle keep.
Fitzduane had kissed the top of her head and squeezed her tight. "This is a damp bloody climate, isn't it?" he had said. To warm themselves up, they played ducks and drakes with flat stones on the lake in the twilight. Night had fallen by the time they made it back to Duncleeve, debating furiously as to who had won the game. The last few throws had taken place in near darkness.
4
The new Jury's Hotel in Dublin looked like nothing so much as the presidential palace of a newly emerging nation. The original Jury's had vanished except for the marble, mahogany, and brass Victorian bar that had been shipped in its entirety to Zurich by concerned Swiss bankers as a memorial to James Joyce.
Fitzduane wended his way through a visiting Japanese electronics delegation, headed toward the new bar, and ordered a Jameson. He was watching the ice melt and thinking about postmortems and life and the pursuit of happiness when Günther arrived. He still looked baby-faced, so you tended not to notice at first quite how big he was. Close up you could see lines that hadn't been there before, but he still looked fit and tough.
A wedding party slid in through the glass doors. The bride was heavily swaddled in layers of white man-made fiber. She was accompanied by either the headwaiter or the bridegroom, it was hard to tell which. The bride's train swished into the pound and began to sink. Fitzduane thought it was an unusual time of year for an Irish wedding, but then maybe not when you looked at her waistline.
The bride's escort retrieved her train and wrung it out expertly into the fountain. He did it neatly and efficiently, as if it were a routine chore or he were used to killing chickens. The train now looked like a wet diaper as it followed the bride into family life. Fitzduane ignored the symbolism and finished his Jameson.
"You're losing your puppy fat, Günther," he said. "You're either working too hard or playing too hard."
"It's the climate here, and I'm getting older. I think I'm rusting." The accent was German and pronounced, but with more than a hint of Irishness to it. He'd been in Ireland for some considerable time. The government had once borrowed him from Grenzschutzgruppe 9 (GSG-9), the West German antiterrorist force, and somehow he'd stayed.
"Doesn't it rain in Germany?"
"Only when required," replied Günther. "We're a very orderly nation."
"The colonel coming?" asked Fitzduane. He patted the airline bag slung from Günther's shoulder and then hefted it, trying to work out the weapon inside. Something Heckler & Koch at a guess. Germans liked using German products, and Heckler & Koch was state of the art. The weapon had a folding stock, and if he knew Kilmara, it was unlikely to be a nine millimeter. Kilmara had a combat-originated bias against the caliber, which he thought lacked stopping power. "The model thirty-three assault rifle?"
Günther grinned and nodded. "You keep up-to-date," he said. "Very good. But the colonel is upstairs. You're dining in a private room; these days it's wiser." He led the way out of the bar and along the glass-walled corridor to the elevator. They got out on the top floor. Günther nodded at two plainclothes security guards and opened the door with a key. Three were two more men inside, automatic weapons at the ready. Günther ushered Fitzduane into the adjoining room.