"Kinshasa. No one talk."
Americans?
A gold-toothed smile.
South Africans?
The wasting prostitutes so wanted to please, yet Taylor was utterly unable to make them understand with his shreds of high-school French. For two years, he had sat inattentively, his only thoughts concerning the wiry blond girl who sat in front of him, dreaming over her grammar. Now, at an incalculable remove, the precious words would not come. A whore raised her arm toward him, its long bone wrapped thinly in burned cork.
There was no escaping any of it. The mails did not function, phones were a memory. All that was left were the basic essentials: grim food — unnameable, slithering through the bowels — the nightmare whores who imagined that the pockets of his tattered uniform held wealth, and the incredibly resilient traders, who worked their way along the rivers on unscheduled steamers. Taylor passed through mourning towns and through villages where no sign of human life remained. Survivors of Runciman's disease wandered the bush and jungles, waiting for another death, many begging, some gone mad. The most amazing thing to Taylor was the speed with which he learned not to see, not to care.
Fragmentary details of the war filtered up the great river lines, jumbled out of chronology. On a river bank, between skewers of smoked monkey and displays of bright cotton, a merchant told him that the Americans had made a great fire, but he could supply no further details. Great fire, great fire. It wasn't until he reached Kabalo that a world-band radio shocked him with an offhanded reminder that the United States had struck the South African government center of Pretoria with a small-yield nuclear weapon weeks before. A last surviving relief worker let Taylor look through the stack of outdated newspapers awaiting service in the water closet. Taylor hurried through them, in a mental panic. Uncomprehending, he slowed, and began again, sifting the reports into the order of the calendar.
The South African military had set a trap, launching a broad, coordinated attack on the U.S. forces in Shaba Province, on those deploying downcountry, and on those remaining in Kinshasa. The same morning that Taylor's troop had been blasted out of the sky, South African commandos and rebel forces from within the Zairean military had destroyed the sixteen unnecessarily deployed B-2 bombers on the ground back in the capital. The planes had cost the United States well over one billion dollars each. The South Africans destroyed them with hand grenades, satchel explosives, and small-arms ammunition that a private could have bought with a month's pay. In the fighting downcountry the South African military's Japanese-built gunships with on-board battle lasers and a revolutionary arsenal of combat electronics had introduced a qualitatively new dimension into warfare. In the nineties the U.S. had built-down in concert with the Soviets, and even as the military force shrank, the only new weapons introduced to keep pace with the times were enormously expensive Air Force and Navy systems that had never proved to be of any practical utility. The only program that worked, even though underfunded, was strategic space defense, while the only service that saw significant action in the wake of Operation Desert Shield was the bare-bones Army, committed to a series of antinarcotic interventions in South America. But even that action was hampered by the Air Force's cutbacks in airlift capability, made in order to continue to fund the more glamorous manned bomber program. While carrier battle groups paid port calls around the world and stealth bombers flew patrols over Nevada, infantrymen cut their way through the jungles of Latin America with machetes and fought bitterly and successfully against the better-armed bands of the drug billionaires. When the Army had been ordered to Zaire, its tactical equipment proved to be, at best, a generation behind that developed by the Japanese — much of which had been based on technology initially developed in the United States in support of strategic space defenses.
The XVIII Airborne Corps fought hard, but the South Africans never dropped the initiative. The Japanese battle electronics proved impenetrable to the U.S. systems, while the lack of well-trained intelligence analysts left the Military Intelligence elements with nothing but useless equipment. The South Africans, however, always seemed to know where the U.S. forces were located and what their weaknesses were. The Japanese suite of electronic countermeasures and countercountermeasures would keep the U.S. forces deaf and blind, then the Toshiba gunships would sweep in, followed by strikes employing more conventional aircraft and fuel-air explosives.
U.S. casualties mounted so quickly, with such apparent helplessness on the U.S. side, that the commander of the XVIII Airborne Corps, after long-range consultation with the President, requested a ceasefire.
The South Africans ignored him and continued their strikes on the U.S. columns attempting to make their way northward to an imagined safety.
Finally, the corps commander attempted to surrender all remaining U.S. Army elements in Shaba in order to prevent the further loss of life.
The South African response was to strike a fifty-mile- long U.S. Army column with improved napalm.
The President ordered the U.S.S. Reagan, the nation's newest ballistic missile submarine, to strike Pretoria from its station in the Indian Ocean.
Taylor finally raised the U.S. embassy in Kinshasa on shortwave from an upriver station, only to be told that his case did not rate special evacuation consideration, given the general conditions in the country. He would have to make his own way for another thousand miles down the Zaire River.
He rode on asthmatic steamers where the crew shoveled the dead over the side at oar's length, and whose captains continued to work the channels and currents only in the hope that the next river port would be the one where the epidemic had already burned itself out and passed on. On one dying boat Taylor opened the rickety latrine door to find a corpse resting over the open hole, pants down and pockets turned inside out. Another night, he had to sit awake through the darkness, pistol in hand, to ward off the sick who insisted on sharing the magic medicine that kept the white man alive. And it truly was as though he were possessed of some remarkable power, so easily did he pass among the dead and dying, untainted except by the smell of his own filth. He began to suspect that he had some natural immunity, and, by the time he reached Kinshasa, that belief, along with a ragged uniform, dog tags, a half-empty pistol, and a folded-up, sweat-stained red and white cavalry guidon, was all he possessed.
Kinshasa, his goal, his city of dreams, proved to be the worst part of the entire journey. He had expected to be welcomed back into the safe, civilized, white fold, to be whisked away at last from this dying country. But as he approached the U.S. embassy compound, a bearded shambles of a man, the Marine guards in protective suits lowered their weapons in his direction. Stand back. Do not touch the gate. Taylor's rage eventually drew a Marine officer from the chancellery, but he only closed to shouting distance. He declared that, if Taylor truly was a U.S. serviceman, he should make his way to the U.S. armed forces liaison office at the military airfield. If everything was in order he would be evacuated to the quarantine station in the Azores. Almost all of the surviving U.S. personnel were gone now, withdrawn under the cover of the ceasefire that was the only positive result of the strike on Pretoria.
Taylor, hating the man, nonetheless craved information. About the war, about his world, about comrades and country. But the Marine officer was anxious to break off the discussion and go back inside.
Upriver the disease had created an atmosphere of resignation, a sense that the epidemic was the will of the gods, that there was nowhere to hide. For all the wails and songs of mourning, the dying out in the bush had a quiet about it. But in Kinshasa's motley attempt at civilization, the plague seemed to further distort and corrupt. Penniless, Taylor made his way across the urban landscape on foot, newly afraid now that he had come so close to rescue, forcing himself to go on. None of the few vehicles in the streets would pause to give a stranger a lift, and they drove with their windows sealed despite the torrid heat. Men and women came out into the streets to die, fleeing the premature darkness of their hovels or the broken elegance of colonial mansions. On the Zairean skin, the marks of the disease showed purple-black on the newly dead, but ashen as acid burns on those fortunate enough to live. And, despite the ravages of the epidemic, a fierce life persisted in the city. Howling children robbed the dead and dying, inventing new games in the alleys, and silken masks had come into fashion for those disfigured by the disease. Upriver, women waiting to die in way stations had made desultory overtures, but here, in the capital, brightly veiled prostitutes called out musically, playfully, threateningly. Shanty barrooms and cafes still did a noisy trade, and passing by their human froth, Taylor was glad that he looked so poor that he was hardly worth killing. After all he had seen, it struck him as all too logical that he might be killed now, at the end of his long journey. He felt that he was cheating his fate with each corner safely passed.