The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur - Страница 152

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"Forty-five Scouts, that includes S'am-Major and myself, and ten specialists." "Specialists?" "We expect to find a pile of documents in Buffalo's HQ. Probably so much that we will not be able to bring it all back. We need at least four intelligence experts to evaluate on the spot, what to keep and what to burn. You pick them for us." "The other specialists?" "Medicos, two of them. Henderson and his aide. We have used them before." "Good, who else?" "Blast bunnies, to clear the house of booby-traps, to set our own when we leave, and to blow the bridges behind us on our way home." "Armourers from Salisbury?" "I can get two good lads here in Bulawayo, one is a cousin of mine." "Fine, let me have a list of names." Douglas carefully withdrew the stub of his cigarette from the ivory holder, crushed it out, and replaced it-with a fresh tube from the packet of Gold Leaf.

"What about a site for the quarantine camp?" he asked. "Have you given it some thought?" "There is the Wankie Safari Lodge on the Dett vlei. It's two hours" drive from the Zambezi, and it has been on a caretaker basis since the Wankie strip was abandoned." "Five-star comfort the Scouts are getting soft." Douglas grinned mockingly.

"Okay, I'll see that you get it." Douglas made a note and then looked up. "Now let's go over the dates. How soon can you be ready to go?"

"Fifteenth of November. That gives us eight weeks to assemble the equipment, and rehearse the raid-".

"It probably also fits in rather well with the date of your wedding, doesn't it?" Douglas tapped the ivory holder against his teeth, and delighted in Roland Bailantyne's quick flare of temper.

"The timing of the raid has nothing to do with my private affairs, it will be dictated entirely by Buffalo's movements. In any event, my wedding will take place a week before the start of quarantine. Janine and I will spend our honeymoon at the Victoria Falls Hotel which is only two hours" drive from the camp at Wankie Safari Lodge. She will fly back to Bulawayo on the airway's scheduled flight, and I will go into quarantine directly from Vic Falls." Douglas lifted a defensive hand and grinned mockingly. "I say, do keep your hair on, old man. just a civil enquiry, that's all. By the way, I think my wedding invitation must have been lost in the post.-" But Roland had returned to his list, and was studying it with all his attention.

Douglas Hunt-Jeffreys lay on the ample bed in the cool shuttered bedroom, and examined the naked woman who slept beside him. At first she had seemed a most unpromising subject, with her pale acne-scarred face and disconcerting staring eyes behind horn-rimmed spectacles, her abrupt, aggressive, almost mannish manner, and the smouldering intensity of the political militant. But stripped of her shapeless sweater and baggy skirts, of her thick woollen socks and crude leather sandals, she had a slim pale, almost girlish, body, with fine small breasts that Douglas found very much to his taste. When she removed the spectacles, her staring eyes softened into appealing unfocused myopia, and under Douglas" skilful lips and fingers, she unloosed a tumultuous physical response which had at first astonished and then delighted him. He found he could induce in her an epileptic passion, a state in which she was almost catatonic and totally susceptible to his will, her depravity limited only by the range of Douglas" fertile imagination.

"A murrain on beautiful women," he smiled contentedly to himself.

"It's the ugly little ducklings who are the absolute ravers!" They had met in the middle of the morning, and now it was careful not to disturb her, Douglas checked his gold Rolex it was two o'clock in the afternoon. Even for Douglas, a marathon performance.

"Poor lamb is exhausted." He craved a cigarette, but decided to give her ten minutes more. There was no hurry. He could afford to lie a little longer and leisurely review this case.

Like many good controllers, Douglas had found that a sexual relationship with his female agents, and occasionally even With some of his male agents, was an effective tool of manipulation, a short-cut to the dependencies and loyalties that were so desirable in his trade.

This case was a perfect example. Without the physical lever Doctor Leila St. John would be a difficult and unpredictable subject, whereas with it she had become one of his best agents ever.

Douglas Hunt-Jeffreys by a fluke of war was a born Rhodesian. His father had come out to Africa at the beginning of Hitler's war to command the Royal Air Force training station at Gwelo. He had met and married a local girl, and Douglas had been delivered in 1941 by the Air Force doctor. The family had returned to England at the end of his father's tour of duty, and Douglas had followed the well-worn family path to Eton, and then on to the Royal Air Force.

After that there had been an unusual diversion in his" career, and he found himself in British military intelligence. Back in 1964, when Ian Smith came to power in Rhodesia, and started making the first threatening noises about breaking with Britain in a unilateral declaration of independence, Douglas Hunt-Jeffreys had been the perfect choice of an agent to place in the field. He had returned to Rhodesia, taking up his Rhodesian nationality, joined the Rhodesian Air Force and began immediately to mole his way up the ladder of command.

He was now chief co-ordinator for British intelligence throughout the territory, and Doctor Leila St. John was one of his recruits.

Naturally, she had no idea as to who was her ultimate employer, any suggestion of military intelligence, no matter to which country it belonged, would have sent her scampering up the nearest tree like a frightened cat. Douglas grinned lazily at his own imagery. Leila St. John believed herself to be a member of a small courageous group of left-wing guerrillas, intent on wresting the land of her birth from its racialist fascist conquerors and delivering it unto the joys of Marxist communism.

On the other hand, the concern of Douglas Hunt-Jeffreys and his government was to arrive at the swiftest settlement acceptable to the United Nations and to the United States, France, West Germany and their other Western allies, and to withdraw from an embarrassing, untidy and costly situation with what dignity and despatch they could still muster, preferably leaving in charge the least objectionable of the African guerrilla leaders.

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