"No, ma'am," Marjorie said.

"Jack," Patricia Hanrahan said, "this is Mrs. Jane Rowan. General Rowan commands Bragg. Jane, this is Jack Portet. He's Marjorie's friend."

"Fiance," Marjorie corrected her quickly.

"I am so happy to know you!" Mrs. Rowan said.

Jack took the chance. "Je suis enchante, Madame," he said.

"Oh, you speak French!" Mrs. Rowan said, obviously pleased. "And you heard my accent?"

"Qui, Madame."

"Yours is not Parisian," Mrs. Rowan said. "Not even French, I think. Belgian?"

"Belgian," Jack said in French. My father is Belgian; I went to college in Brussels."

"More than Belgian," Mrs. Rowan said. "Let me show you how clever I am. You have been in the Congo. Yes?"

"Yes," Jack said and looked at General Hanrahan. "My father lives in Leopoldville."

"I knew it!" Mrs. Rowan said triumphantly. "I could hear it. I know Leo, but not very well. I was in the Congo for six years, but in Stanleyville. My father was the French Consul in Stanleyville. Stanleyville is like a second home."

"I'll even bet you know where the Stanley Falls are," Jack said with a strange look on his face.

"Of course I know! What kind of a question is that? We lived right by the falls, just down the street from the American Consulate. I am sick at heart when I hear what is going on there. I know every rock, every tree. . ." She stopped, an angry look on her face. General Hanrahan and Jack Portet had begun to chuckle, and their efforts to restrain it failed. They started laughing out loud.

"Red!" Patricia Hanrahan said, shocked.

"I am the butt of a joke I do not understand," Mrs. Rowan said coldly.

"Forgive me, Jane," General Hanrahan said. "We were not laughing at you. And we know what's going on in Stanleyville is the joke. Jack, especially. His stepmother and half sister are in the Imoquateur Apartments."

"Then what?" she said, not mollified.

"They flew Jack here from Berlin," General Hanrahan said, here goes security out the window-because they couldn't find anyone else in the whole U.S. Army who knew anything about Stanleyville."

"So you have permission to get those poor people out of there?" Mrs. Rowan asked.

"I didn't say that, Jane," Hanrahan said.

"You didn't have to," she countered.

Hanrahan stood up and walked to a wall-mounted telephone. He dialed a number. "This is General Hanrahan. 1 want a scrambled line on immediate standby to the White House switchboard in case I need it. And while you're setting it up, put me through -my code name is the Greek-to the Mouse, via the White House switchboard."

Felter came on the line almost immediately.

"Sandy, General Rowan's wife, Jane, lived for six years in Stanleyville. I'd like to pick her brains," Hanrahan said. "How much can I clear her for? She's already guessed what's going on" she identified Portet's accent as Belgian-Congo French." He turned from the telephone.

"'Jane, you have just been granted a Top Secret-Eagle clearance. Do you understand what that means?"

"-Red," Mrs. Rowan said, indignantly, "I have been in the army almost as long as Patricia. What do you want me to do?"

"You better call the General and tell him that whatever the two of you had planned for the weekend is off," Hanrahan said.

Jur) . . . . Holiday Inn Motel Fayetteville, North Carolina 1545 Hours 12 September 1964 "If you're serious about making an honest woman of me," Marjorie Bellmon said to Jack Portet, "maybe you better start saying something about it."

Jack let flow a torrent of French.

"What did that mean?" Marjorie asked.

"An old Belgian proverb," Jack said. "Afterward, a man wants to go to sleep; a woman wants to get married."

"You bastard!" Marjorie said and grabbed his male appendage.

"I'm willing to discuss the issue, of course." She laughed and put her face in his neck.

"Why the sudden interest in marriage?" he asked, running his fingers down the small of her back.

"I'm an old-fashioned girl," Marjorie said. "I am embarrassed when my parents' friends know where and how I'm spending the afternoon."

"That's the only reason?"

"Because I want to share my life with you and bear your babies," she said. "Because when I'm not with you, I'm dead inside."

"OK, I'm sold," he said. "You've talked me into it."

"I'll pull it off," she said.

"You better not, it's the only one I have."

"I told my father if you came back, I was going to marry you," Marjorie said. "I think my mother already knew how I feel."

"You do have a one-track mind, don't you?"

"I didn't mean back like this," Marjorie said. "I meant back for good."

"Huh?"

"When are they. . . when are you going over there?"

"I don't think I am," he said. "Actually, I'm pretty sure of it. They don't want me along."

"Why not?"

"These guys are pros," Jack said. "They're nice to me they're really good guys, I like them-but they can't quite hide that they think of me as a civilian in uniform, which of course is true."

"Jack, the Green Berets are not ten feet tall," Marjorie said.

"Uncle Sandy and Craig Lowell and Geoff Craig, they're all Green Berets."

"Then you underestimate all of them."

"You're really impressed, aren't you?" she asked, genuinely surprised. She raised herself on her elbows and looked down at him.

"What they're going to do, Marjorie," Jack said, "is fly several hundred miles at night without ground-navigation aids, jump out of an airplane at ten thousand feet, and hope they're over a certain spot in the Congo. From the moment they jump, they can forget having the U.S. government behind them. They're going in black."

"I don't know what that means."

"No identification. No uniforms. Not even U.S. Army weapons. If they get caught, they expect to be killed. And once they're on the ground-more accurately, in the water-and providing they don't attract the attention of a crocodile, they will inflate their rubber boats, hope the outboard engines starters're muffled, and they are a bitch to start-and- then go up to infiltrate-all twenty-four of them, presuming all twenty-four get as far as the inflate-boats phase-a town full of several thousand Simbas. They will then attempt to snatch the consular personnel, and if it doesn't look absolutely suicidal, UrmIa, the baby, and my family, and then hold off several thousand Simbas until a couple of H-34s can find them and land and then take off again. Am I impressed? You bet your ass I'm impressed. I don't think I'd have the balls to go in with them if they'd have me."

"You're sure they won't take you?"

"If you were them, would you want me along?" She didn't reply. She lowered herself onto his body and held it tightly. Please God, don't let them change their minds and take him along."

Leopoldville, Democratic Republic of the Congo 18 September 1964 URGRGENT FROM US EMBASSY LEOPOLDVILLE DEM REPCONGO 10 SECSTATE WASHDC STANLEYVILLE SITUATION UPDATE AS OF 2400 ZULU 18 SEPTEMBER 1964 INTELSOURCE RATING THREE PAREN 3 PAREN REPORTS CONGOLESE MILITARY FORCE IDENTIFIED AS QUOTE FIVE SLASH ONE COMMANDO ENDQUOTE CONSISTING OF ONE COMPANY OF 100 PLUS KATANGESE ANC TROOPS AND FORTY TWO MERCENARIES RECAPTURED LISALA APPROX THREE HUNDRED.

PAREN 300 PAREN MILES DOWNSTREAM FROM STANLEYVILLE 17 SEPTEMBER.

HAVE SLASH ONE COMMANDO BY LIEUTENANT GARRY WILSON, TWENTY-AVE YEAROLD BRITSUBJECT, EX-SANDHURST AND ROYAL ARMY CYPRUS. SAMESOURCE REPORTS SIMBA CASUALTIES 160 PLUS CONARMED DEAD. WOUNDED ESTIMATED 300 PLUS. GOVT FORCE CASUALTIES ONE REPEAT ONE WOUNDED.

SAMESOURCE REPORTS DISPROPORTIONATE SIMBA CASUALTIES CAUSED BY SORCERERS ACCOMPANYING SIMBAS WHO WAVE PALM BRANCHES AND CONVINCE SIMBAS THEY ARE IMMUNE TO BULLETS.

SAMESOURCE REPORTS AVE SLASH ONE COMMANDO LIBERA TED BUMBA APPROXIMATELY 250 MILES DOWNRIVER STANLEYVILLE AT 1240 BUMBA TIME 18 SEPTEMBER. SAMESOURCE REPORTS FOURTEEN PAREN 14 PAREN EUROPEANS IN BUMBA SCHEDULED FOR 1300 EXECUTION. LIBERATED PERSONNEL INCLUDE NO REPEAT NO AMERICAN NATIONALS.

USAMBASSADOR AUTHORIZED TRANSPORT BY US HELICOPTERS TO LEO.

CONGO INTELSOURCE RATING ONE PAREN 1 PAREN REPORTS OLENGA PREPARING FOR SECOND ASSAULT ON BUKAVU AND BELIEVES ATTACK WILL OCCUR WITH TWENTY FOUR TO THIRTY SIX HOURS.

THERE HAS BEEN NO REPEAT NO CONTACT IN THREE ATTEMPTS WITH INTELSOURCE STANLEYVILLE. ATTEMPTS CONTINUING.

DANNELLY DEPUTY CHIEF OF MISSION.

(Six) The Hotel du Lac Bukavu, Democratic Republic of the Congo 20 September 1964 Colonel Leonard Mulamba had not requested reinforcement with a platoon of mercenaries. But there had been a radio message from General Joseph-Desire Mobutu's headquarters (as opposed to from Mobutu himself) in Leopoldville informing him that a platoon was being air-lifted to him.

There was a line between really needing mercenaries-which was tantamount to needing white men-to provide the ANC with a little backbone (which inarguably it sometimes desperately needed) and having white troops dominate an operation, thus convincing the ANC that they were nearly worthless by themselves.

He was not yet sure that the time had come when he was going to need mercenaries, even with Olenga ten miles or so out of town.

Colonel Mulamba did not think much of Olenga, and certainly not as "Lieutenant General" Olenga, or indeed as any kind of officer at all. You don't get to be any kind of an officer in any kind of an army by announcing you are a lieutenant, or a colonel, or a lieutenant general, and outfitting yourself in a stolen uniform. And he refused to permit his officers to refer to Olenga as "General Olenga." If they didn't wish to refer to him by his last name, they were under orders to refer to him as "the rebel or." Colonel Mulamba didn't like the term "Simba" either, as appropriate to the forces he was facing. He admired lions, and he didn't consider his opposition lionlike. The lion was a noble beast who did not kill for pleasure. Colonel Mulamba had thus made it known that he didn't want to hear the term Simba in his presence unless it applied to a four-legged beast of the jungle. Or of course or the very decent Bukavuian Pilsener beer.

He was informed by telephone at his headquarters (which he had established in the Hotel du Lac) in Bukavu when the C-46 carrying the mercenaries he hadn't asked for landed across the . . .i River at the Kamembe airfield. He was somewhat surprised to hear that there were half a dozen ANC soldiers with the mercenaries. He ordered that they be brought by truck to the hotel du Lac.

When he heard the sound of truck gears clashing, he rose up from his desk and looked out the window down to the street. An officer, apparently the commanding officer, got out of the truck. He stood with his hands on his hips as a sergeant (who acted British, Mulamba decided) off-loaded the troops from the rear and lined them up.

The officer and the Sergeant at least looked like soldiers, Colonel Mulamba decided. Their uniforms were cleaned and neat. Their trousers were tucked neatly inside their boots, and they were cleanly shaven. Some of the mercenaries looked like rabble, which was not surprising, but they were obviously in fear of the officer and the Sergeant.

The ANC troops who got off the truck looked like rabble. He considered what in the hell their purpose was. He was further confused when three of them were ordered into line with the white soldiers, and the other three followed (shuffled after, Mulamba thought unpleasantly) the officer into the lobby of the Hotel du Lac.

By the time his administrative sergeant knocked at his door to report that a mercenary captain wished to see him, Colonel Mulamba had had time to seat himself at his desk and open a manila file.

The mercenary officer marched into Mulamba's office, stopped three feet from his desk, came to attention, and saluted.

"Captain Wagner and a detachment of Katangese Special Gendarmerie reporting to the Bukavu area commander as ordered, Sir."

Colonel Mulamba returned the salute, but did not put the Captain at rest. At some time, rather obviously, this mercenary had been a soldier. Possibly even an officer.

"I did not ask for your services, Captain," Mulamba said after a while.

Captain Wagner did not reply.

"What good do you think you can do me?"

"We are at your disposal for any service you may desire, Sir."

"Are you?"

"Several of us have some experience in situations like this, Sir."

"When you were in Katanga, you mean?"

"When we were in Vietnam," Wagner said.

"You were in the U.S. Army?"

"Sir, may we go off the record?"

"All right," Mulamba said.

"Williamson," Wagner called. "Bring them in!" Three black men in ANC uniforms marched into the room and came to attention. The smallest of them, a PFC, saluted.

"Lieutenant Williamson and a detail of two reporting as ordered, Sir."

Mulamba returned the salute and then smiled. "If I were a suspicious man, I would suspect that these three are some of those American Green Berets who are reported to be missing from the air base at Kamina."

"Sir, if I may, I think they'll turn up sooner or later, having somehow become lost in this enormous country," Wagner said.

"That wouldn't surprise me at all, Captain," Colonel Mulamba said. He looked at Williamson. "Why are you a PFC?"

"The only uniform I could find to fit, Sir, I bought from a PFC."

"And, tell me. . . Williamson, you said?"

"Yes, Sir."

"How do you think you may be of service here?"

"May I approach the Colonel's map, Sir?" Mulamba nodded.