Copyright © 2005 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

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Intersect: Danger

a novel

by John T. Cullen

12.

Katanga, Belgian Congo 1942

Walther was distraught at the arrival of the blood-soaked car, with his cousin’s corpse in it. Together, Tim and Walther pulled the corpse from the car and laid it on the tarmac. Walther sobbed over Willi’s stretched out form, while Tim looked anxiously about for signs of pursuit—or the Vichy gendarmerie. “Hurry,” Tim muttered. At the same time, he patted the German understandingly on the shoulder, feeling the other’s strength and sweat, and the rage there at the way this war seemed to reach down like a fist from the clouds and destroy individual lives with heartless randomness.

They pushed the car out of the way, into the shadows beside a wall, where it would not be found soon enough. Walther decided that Willi must be wrapped in a tarp and stowed on the plane, to keep the Vichy guessing. Soon, the Junkers 52 droned south-southeast at one-mile altitude, doing 135 knots. Capable of carrying 17 passengers or about three tons of cargo, Auntie Ju was the workhorse of the Luftwaffe. This exemplar the Märzig cousins had stolen in happier days was no exception.

Walther gently pounded the steering yoke with both hands, fighting back tears. Willi’s body lay wrapped in a paint-stained canvas on the steel floor. Gradually, he got himself together, while Tim sat awkwardly in the dead man’s seat hoping for his own safety and not sure how to comfort Walther.

“It will begin to smell soon in the heat,” Walther shouted over the engine din. “We’ll have to lay him to rest, but I can’t land to bury him. We’ll throw him overboard in the desert and pray for his soul.”

And so it happened. The Ju-52 swooped in low over a broad stretch of sand dunes. Tim thought of the lions as Willi’s body went sailing out into the night, like a package, with one corner of the canvas flapping. Then Walther throttled up and slowly brought the plane to cruising altitude heading southeast toward the Congo.

Tim found a cot in the bulkhead, as Walther directed. It was even made, with dusty white sheets and an old green blanket. The sheets and the blanket both had eagle and swastika markings on them. Tim didn’t care. He finished a bit of fresh tasting Bambari beer brewed a Germanic sounding house with Ubangi River water in French Equatorial Africa just north of the Belgian Congo in the heart of the Dark Continent. “How long?” he asked, sitting casually in the copilot seat, rubbing salve on his still-raw ankles.

Everything rattled, and the plane sounded like the interior of a giant chain saw, but the aircraft was solid as a tree. It was one of the best-designed planes in the world, after newer glamour models like the DC-3 and the Pan Am Clipper planes. Soon, Tim was fast asleep.

Tim awoke after a long sleep tortured by nightmares. He felt rested, though somehow spiritually exhausted from the struggles in his dreams. He stepped forward amid the clamor of the engines and the rattling of metal surfaces. A mile below, Tim saw tawny desert stretching from horizon to horizon. The dawn sky was aflame with colors, and Tim was glad to be escaping from the hell in which he’d spent the past two weeks. “How much longer?”

“About twenty hours,” Walther said. He wore a headset and looked relaxed and comfortable at the controls of the plane. His eyes were dark with shadows, but other than that he betrayed no sign of his loss yesterday. “We make a stopover for fuel and to trade goods at Lomé, Togo. Without Willi, I don’t have a second pilot, so I have to sleep. Then we travel on from there one more stop in Douala, French Cameroon, and then the last leg directly to the Belgian Congo.”

“Will you carry on alone?”

Walther shrugged. “What choice do I have? I cannot go back to Germany. You want to fly this Afrika route with me?”

Tim shook his head. “Thanks, but I need to connect with an American Embassy as soon as possible.”

“You stay with me until Leopoldville, is my advice. Togo might be tricky. Next door are Ghana on the left, and Nigeria on the right, both British, but we don’t go there.”

“You can’t stop in Accra?” Tim asked looking at the map.

“Sticky for me,” Walther said. “Nazi plane. You understand.”

“Ah yes” Tim said. “Why can’t things be simple here?”

“They just did for poor Willi,” Walther said.

Tim nodded. “I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault. You go sleep now,” Walther said. He pointed down at a smallish city of mud buildings baking in the desert. “Timbuktoo,” he said. “Famous center of Islamic learning. Terminus of slave caravans from all Africa.”

Tim let his gaze linger on the fabled city until it had passed beyond the horizon. Then he went back to sack out on the Wehrmacht ambulance stretcher.

The plane touched down once or twice during the night, and the air smelled of aviation fuel and spicy African food.

On the second stop, there was more of a fruity jungle smell, and the atmosphere seemed more humid. Tim kept on sleeping exhaustedly.

Tim awoke from his deep, sound sleep many hours later, as the plane’s engine pitch changed noticeably. “We are landing soon!” Walther said.

Tim sat up rubbing his eyes. He yawned and stretched.

“Good morning!” Walther said. “You have been asleep since yesterday.”

“My God, I was in another world. Are we in the Congo yet?” He walked forward and sat in the copilot’s seat. Below was a solid canopy of jungle as far as the eye could see. A tropical haze enveloped the horizon on all sides. Flashes of light blinked occasionally below as they flew over some wide river, perhaps a tributary of the great Congo River.

Walther pointed to a thermos. “There is fresh hot coffee in there, black.” He pointed to a package wrapped in a blanket. “That is cold saucisse and baguette from Douala. You must be hungry.”

“Starving,” Tim said. He found a knife with SS markings and made himself a butter sandwich with the fresh bread, adding Alsatian style hard salami and a kind of Gouda-like cheese. He washed big chewy mouthfuls down with hot black coffee.

“About three hours we land in Leopoldville,” Walther said. “You have to understand that nominally it’s German controlled but the Belgian exile government runs the place, and there are Americans and other Allies swarming all over the place. Must be strategically very important, but all of that is beyond me.”

“What will you do now without your cousin?”

Walther shrugged. “What choice do I have? He was my helper and my good friend. I miss him terribly, but what I dread most is writing to his mother to tell her the news.” He sighed. Then he pulled the navigation board close and raised his aviator sunglasses to stare at the map. “I think it is the Dja, my friend. Very big river. Flows together with the Sangha and the Likouala and then into the Congo, which empties into the Atlantic Ocean between Boma and Soyo.”

It was an enormous land, Tim saw, staring down from a mile high as the continuous strip of jungle unfolded tens, hundreds, thousands of miles of it.

Walther said, “Meanwhile, I will continue to haul bananas, typewriters, auto parts, whatever I can, to get by.”

In the early afternoon, the Ju-52 dropped down, slowing to about 100 knots, and landed at a large macadam airfield on the outskirts of the Belgian Congo capital. Tropical heat rose from the concrete apron at the edge of a peripheral commercial hangar where Walther parked the Ju-52.

Tim stepped from the plane into the blinding tropical heat, which was like a steam bath, and looked across the runway to a small circle of U.S., British, Belgian, Soviet, and Free French flags fluttering in a small breeze.

“Good luck!” Walther called, waving from the cockpit window.

Tim walked across the sun-baked tarmac, where molten tar oozed like liquid liquorice in puddles. Two very black skinned men in blue overalls pushed a kind of platform along on which was a pile of gravel. They had shovels, and dumped a pile of gravel on each oozing patch. Still, the tires of passing trucks and baggage carts were glossy with tar.

There was a frantic, businesslike air. Military operations and commerce mingled, and judging from the rapt looks of men in business suits hurrying here and there, plenty of opportunity for the right person in the right place to make a hefty buck. Most of the businessmen were white. A small number looked like well-heeled local officials, representatives of tribal chiefs, the small number of Congolese natives allowed into the restrictive and paternal Belgian administrative bureaucracy.

Tim had his suitcase in hand. He had his shirt collar open and was mopping his neck with a large handkerchief by the time he arrived at the grassy half circle where the flags of the main Allied nations flew.

He pushed through a glass, aluminum-framed door into a gloomy, cooler lobby where several large fans blew the turgid air around, but it was noticeably cooler than outside. Tim walked up to a reception counter, where one black Congolese woman and two white Belgian women were busy answering phones and being secretarial.

“Hello,” he said, “I’d like to see the American consul.”

A Belgian woman, a pretty young blue-eyed blonde, looked up. “Bonjour, Monsieur. You are Anglais?”

“American,” he said.

“Bien. I will send you in.” She depressed an intercom switch and spoke in French. Then she nodded to him. She twisted in her seat and pointed down a dark tiled hallway. “You go there, s’il vous plait.”

“Thanks.” He headed down the pleasantly gloomy corridor that smelled of cigarettes and coffee. He passed doors with tiny flags on them, until he came to one with a stars and stripes and the legend: “U.S. Affairs.”

He knocked, heard a man’s voice, and found himself in a cluttered office with four desks, three women busily typing, and a middle-aged man in shirtsleeves practicing a golf stroke on the red carpeting. The man hardly looked up. “You American?”

“Yessir.” He gave name, rank, and serial number. “I was shipwrecked off Mauritania and escaped from slavers. I want to be repatriated to my unit.”

The man laughed. “You’re shitting.”

“Why do you think that?” Tim was beginning to think he’d look cute with the golf club sticking out of his rear end.

“Slavers? I’ve heard some stories, but that’s original.” He putted and his ball rolled unevenly across the carpet to make a small pok sound going into an empty soup can lying on its side. “Yeah! Damn, am I good.” He wiped his brow and set his putter aside. “What’s your name again?”

“Tim Nordhall, Lieutenant (j.g.), U.S. Navy.”

“Got papers?”

“Not my own.”

The man frowned. “What does that mean?”

Tim felt a prickling of concern on his neck. Reluctantly, he waved the dead Malone’s papers. “Took these off a dead man to escape Vichy cops.”

The man looked at him with mean laughter in his eyes, but snatched the papers. As he arrogantly flicked the papers open, he said: “What’s your game, pal? What’s your racket?”

Tim didn’t answer. Why get into a scene with this paper pusher?

The man, whose name plate on his desk read Edward Bouvard, GS-7, said in a slightly louder tone: “I am asking you, what’s your game?”

Tim put one foot up on his suitcase and folded his hands on his knee. “Mr. Bouvard, you need to see your audiologist. I already told my story.”

“All right,” Bouvard said. “Be an asshole. Sit down outside in the waiting room. I’ll hang on to these.” He waved the papers, as if he’d fight Tim for them if Tim were to lunge for them.

Tim picked up his suitcase. “Don’t make me wait, Mr. Bouvard, or I’ll come in and ruin your day for you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Bouvard said with outthrust chin.

“You figure it out, Eddy boy.”

Tim went outside, down the hall, back to the reception area. He found a bench and a stack of old Life magazines, and sat back to kill time reading while keeping an eye on the occasional attractive secretary wandering past on high heels and with padded shoulders.

A quarter hour, a half hour, an hour went by. Tim put his magazine down and strode down the hall carrying his suitcase. If Mr. Bouvard, or Eddy boy, was making him wait just to bust balls, he’d have a word or two with him. He thrust the door open so that it slammed against the wall. The three women stopped typing and looked up.

“Where is my friend Eddy?” Tim said.

The women looked at each other. One said: “He was making some phone calls about you and suddenly got called away.”

Another woman said: “You wait. They are anxious to see you.”

“Who?” Tim asked.

The women looked at each other again. “The men in Building 405.”

Tim set his suitcase down. He was relieved to hear of some progress—now if only he knew what it meant. “What men are those?”

“Why,” the oldest of the three women said, “the mystery boys. We have no idea what they do in there, but there are guards all over the place.”

Tim went back to the lobby and cooled his heels some more. He felt agitated, as the day waned and he was getting hungry again. A water cooler with New Jersey nomenclature and little paper cone cups offered some comfort and solace. The bathroom was a wooden shack outside that smelled to high heaven and offered warning notices about checking for snakes before sitting down on its dark, whispering secrets. There were even pictures of the offending vipers, including the deadly green mamba. Tim felt it would be fine to urinate standing up, but he decided to wait before sitting down for more serious business.

When he returned to the front of the building, a dark blue sedan was parked in the drive, surrounded by three big guys in suits and hats. The license plate was Belgian, with palm trees and a crown. The shoes on one of the men were distinctly American white-walls of the golfing variety. A fourth man, spectacled, slick-haired, graying, came out of the building looking very worried and trailed by a much-humbled Edward Bouvard.

“Major Malone!” said Spectacles.

“Nordhall,” Tim said, “but we’re getting close. Did dumb-nuts here forget my name, rank, and serial number already?”

Bouvard looked like a different fellow, utterly meek, but Tim grasped the top of his ear to shake it. Bouvard feebly resisted. Tim said: “I told this stupid bastard who I really am.” He let go of Bouvard and repeated his name, rank, and serial number.

The three heavies had a rear door open, and their Führer took Tim by the elbow. “Major Malone, I apologize for what you have been through. I was away on business and just debarked from the airplane. I have had words with Mr. Bouvard, and he assures me that it would never happen again.” He pushed gently, persuasively, and Tim crawled into the ample backseat that smelled of leather and cloth. The four men piled in, the doors slammed, and the car pulled away leaving a glowering Bouvard at the curb. Tim sat jammed between two men in the back. One rode in front with the driver.

“My name is Crane,” the spectacled man said offering a soft white hand with severely trimmed pink nails. The other hand, upon closer inspection, was a pink prosthesis. He smelled of starch, stamp pad ink, and gun oil. “Ivor Crane. I’m sort of a loose intelligence wheel rolling around here. I’ll be in charge of helping you.”

“Nice to meet you,” Tim said cautiously.

“You’ll find it’s hush-hush, but I have top credentials. Your name again?”

“Nordhall.”

“Ah yes.” Crane lit a cigarette and placed it in a green onyx holder. “H.M.S. Sturmer.”

“Oh my God,” Tim said, “you know.”

Smoke wrinkled around Crane’s unperturbed face. “Of course. We thought the entire crew was lost, but here you are. You were testing a variation of H.D. The Navy will want to brief you about that, but I have other plans for you. You just happened to get stuck in a bureaucratic bottleneck with Mr. Bouvard. Let me apologize again for Eddy. He’s rather dense, but useful. He filters out the occasional diamond smuggler and other unsavory character we get.”

“Why did you call me Malone back there?”

“You’ll figure it out soon enough, Lieutenant Nordhall. By the way, I’m a colonel in the U.S. Army. I’m not pulling rank on you, but you should feel comfortable knowing this is a very high-level show.”

“Yessir,” Tim said. That would make Crane very senior to him. He was gratified and relieved, since this guy seemed to have clout.

“The Navy will want to debrief you about the sinking of your ship,” Crane repeated, “but I have other plans for you.”

Tim laughed. “Are you transferring me between services, Sir?”

“Sort of. Actually, you’ll be two people, in two different services, with a security clearance so high you’ll have to kill yourself just for knowing.” Crane winked.

“Nice joke, Sir. Good to be with my own people again.”

Crane made a wry face. “I never joke unless I’m holding a glass of scotch in one hand and a cigar in the other. Welcome back to the world.”

The car sped through city streets, slowing for pedestrian crowds, treating red lights as suggestions rather than commands. Tim glimpsed dark-skinned men in business suits carrying newspapers, women in colorful garb with bundles on their heads, school children in their uniforms, all the trappings of modern society under that layer of Belgian governance.

“The situation with Major Malone was very unfortunate,” Crane said. “Good family, good breeding, lots of money, all the right jokes, and he has to ruin himself by gambling. I learned just minutes ago that he died. That creates inconveniences, but also an opportunity.”

“Oh?” Tim felt sorry for the dead man, but he was tired and had no stomach for intrigue. “I really would like to get back to my engineering duties in a regular U.S. Navy capacity.”

“I understand,” Crane said. He held high his cigarette holder. Smoke dribbled from his lips while they waited in the middle of a throng of people and two large white cows. “You are a clockmaker at heart, are you?”

Tim wrinkled his lip. “Hardly.”

“You left New Haven because your country called you, but also because you are looking for something more out of life. Is that correct?”

Tim nodded.

“What was the name of your first girlfriend, Lieutenant?”

“Huh?” He had to think...back to summer nights at Lighthouse Point or Morris Cove, football games, the marching band playing, and people enjoying themselves as best they could. Prohibition was over, but the Depression was still on. Buying a cola and a hot dog was a bit of an expenditure. But you took a girl to the Yale Bowl, treated her just right, admired the new gray sweater she’d bought for the occasion...

“In high school,” Crane said helpfully.

“Sally,” Tim said. “Sally Levesque.” He could see her in front of him, green-eyed, brunette, with dimpled cheeks and a smile that sort of lit up her whole face. And she had soft, thick short thighs like creamery butter, just asking to be touched. She liked that, in the back of the old Chevy, and started breathing faster...

“Very good,” Crane said. “And what street does your mother live on?”

“Orange Street. Why?”

“Just some questions I need to ask. To make sure you are who you say you are.” Crane flicked ashes out a partially cracked window, and said patiently as if explaining gravity to a child: “Major Malone was not only starting to deal drugs to pay his gambling debts—he was also working both sides of the fence. That’s what got him killed.”

“Meaning?”

“Malone was a good officer and a good soldier. He hated the Nazis and the Communists as much as you do. It’s just that he compromised himself.”

“And the woman with him?”

Crane made a disagreeable face. “Wife of a prominent Belgian mining official. It’s caused quite a flap, and we’ve had to cover it up. It’s one of these social things. The husband is in Katanga, having affairs, and she’s bored and stepping out up here. The simple solution is to say they were on a plane together with several others and went down over the jungle.” Crane grinned. “Convenient, having one of the world’s largest primordial rainforests all around us. Don’t you think?”

“Yessir.” Something about Crane didn’t sit right with Tim, but he wrote it off to the fact that the colonel was in the intelligence business. That seemed to speak for itself. Unsavory.

“We’ll put you up in a nice hotel room for a few days,” Crane said. “I want to show you what we are into here. Very important stuff. I hope you will play along.”

“I’ll do my best, sir. This isn’t my cup of tea, Sir, I’ll be honest.”

“I appreciate your honesty, Lieutenant.”

“I am so damned glad to be safely back in American hands that I’ll be happy to help my country in any way I can. I just hope...”

“Yes?”

“I’d like to get back stateside soon, Sir. Been away for a long time.”

“I understand. A lot of good men and women are serving in dreadful little corners all over the world.”

“Of course.” Tim almost thought he should square his shoulders and accept whatever load was put on his back by his country. Crane had that odd tendency to yank someone's leash a bit. It was a long ride, and as they talked, Crane sometimes scribbled in a small notebook with a tiny pencil. Sometimes he rubbed his prosthesis absently with his other hand, as if the artificial limb ached. Outside, plantations passed in the afternoon sun, and everywhere black people were on the move, walking, carrying bales, hanging wash out before blue or green houses, children running in alleys, policemen on bicycles. They came to a group of two story cinderblock office buildings in the austere modern style, lots of glass, flags in front, very official, very colonial, with black men looking subservient in ill-fitting suits opening and closing the doors of cars that pulled into the front arcade.

The car drove past all that, around the side of the buildings. All but Tim, Crane, and the driver got out. Crane put a finger on his lip to signal Tim to be quiet. The car went around the back, into a garage, up to a set of indoor gasoline pumps where men in Marine Corps fatigues stood wearing .45s and carrying clipboards.

“We get out here,” Crane said.

A Marine Corps corporal opened the door and stood at attention, saluting.

Tim and the colonel got out. Crane casually returned the corporal’s salute. The driver of the car handed off the keys to a private and left by another way as Tim and Crane walked across the indoor parking lot to a small doorway. In a small lobby, they took an elevator up two flights and emerged in a solarium with its own receptionist, a man in a white shirt wearing a gun in a shoulder strap. He had a crew cut and looked very efficient as he pushed a clipboard across the counter for Crane and his companions to sign in. Crane ordered coffee and pastries from a small canteen in passing—just poking his head in, speaking French to a heavyset black woman in a gray smock, who nodded and turned to relay his order back into the tiled kitchen.

Then they sat together in Crane’s spacious office, which had carpeting, walnut furniture, big glass windows, and cool air coming out of a wall duct. “Air conditioning,” Crane said noticing Tim’s stare at the ceiling. “Really helps us to concentrate here.” Crane sat behind the desk while Tim sat in a plush leather chair before the desk. It was a client-manager kind of arrangement and felt very comforting, homey somehow.

“I am sorry you’ve been through all that,” Crane said.

Coffee and pastries arrived, served by two young Congolese whose skin was so black it seemed to glow with bluish highlights. An old man with white hair who had only one hand supervised them.

“Merci,” Crane said patiently. With a few friendly nods, the men left. The old man closed the door loudly and turned the handle with a noticeable click to indicate they’d have privacy in the office.

“Bad old days,” Crane said quietly. “The Belgians are going to lose the Congo. All the colonial powers are going to have to leave, it’s clear. And that opens up a huge can of worms.” Crane smiled gravely. “Humor me for a few moments, Tim. The old man, his name is Henri. That’s not his real name, it’s a name the Belgians forced on him. He was given a real Congolese name by his parents, who belonged to the Zande people, when he was born in the 1880s. The Congo was the personal property of the Belgian king, and he exploited it mercilessly. Their favorite games included cutting children’s hands off if the parents didn’t work hard enough. Or they’d hold a man’s wife and children hostage, and kill them if he didn’t bring enough rubber out of the bush. The Belgians were the cruelest of all the colonial rulers in the world. It got so bad that the world became outraged, and Brussels forced the king to relinquish the Congo, which became the property of the Belgian people. You’ll see pictures of Congolese men in chains, with nets over their heads, waiting to be deported to work camps for the slightest crimes real or imagined. Oh, yes, Henri, he was nine years old when an overseer with a machete whacked off his hand, because the overseer was having a bad day. Well, I could go on. The point is, you see, whites aren’t too popular here. The European powers have bled each other dry in two wars, have beaten each other to death, and cannot hold on to old colonial possessions. That means there will be a power vacuum. We’re still fighting this world war, Tim, but the Axis is already beaten here in Africa. It’s just a matter of time until the rest follows, and then, with fascism in the trash, the world will become an arena between capitalism and communism.”

Tim sipped his coffee, munched sweet almond-chocolate pastries, and listened in silence. Crane sipped black coffee and lit another of his endless cigarettes. “Tim, we are headed for a huge showdown with the Soviets.”

“We?”

“The United States. Capitalism. Free enterprise against state controlled life. I’d like you to go to work for me in London. Work for Donovan, O.S.S., for your country. What do you say?”

Tim thought about it. “If it will help my country, I’m in.” The fan blades spun in hypnotic rhythm, rotating shadows over desk and carpet.

“Excellent. I thought you’d say that. Rest up for a day or two, and then I’ll take you down into Katanga Province and show you a thing or two.”

They drove out of the downtown area and along a broad boulevard, through an area of sidewalk vegetable markets, along a short stretch of highway, and into a wealthy European settlement with parks, mansions, and palm trees lining the street.

“Welcome to Gombe,” Crane said, flicking a cigarette out the window into the steamy air. “Nearby is the Mbala Mbala Park. Very scenic. I’m sure it’s quite a difference from what you’re used to back home.”

They came to a small house on a side street, and the driver helped Tim in the front door. Black servant women with high turbans clucked worriedly and helped Tim into a back bedroom. It was a small, pleasant, sunny ranch style house with Boma trees in the back yard and a swimming pool with a small waterfall. Coconut palms graced the background. Black gardeners worked at a steady but unhurried pace. Tim found himself fading quickly as someone closed heavy yellow drapes, shrouding the room in darkness.

Within a few days, Tim started to feel better, but it took months to recover from his ordeal

The American resident surgeon, a tall red-haired man with a deep Mississippi drawl, shook his head over the mangled wounds around Tim’s ankles, and prescribed ample amounts of the newly invented thing called an antibiotic, or penicillin. Some sort of mold made from bread. Sounded awful, but worked fabulously.

Crane was not married, but appeared to have at least one live-in black woman, a voluptuous young Kongo with short, thick hair and bluish-black skin. She had a bruised, worldly-wise humor that suggested she was a survivor who knew how to keep her mouth shut and serve. Or service. But she was exclusively Crane’s. He could not, of course, parade her about, but she went shopping several times a week in a red Mercedes that he kept for her in an apart garage in nearby Matele. Tim learned this because their driver, Moise, liked to combine his chores into a complicated itinerary that served everyone’s purposes including Crane’s. Moise was a young Congolese with a cocky, wise attitude but no apparent rancor against whites. Rather, he regarded himself as a kind of fixer-homme who could make things happen, whether it was bringing Marianne (the mistress) to a fashion show downtown, or the delivery of used clothing to an orphanage in Brazzaville across the river, or running Tim by the improvised U.S. Legation commissary/PX in Kinshasa to pick up favorite items like his green Colgate soap, Burma-Shave, Juicy Fruit gum, Maxwell House coffee, just about anything one could buy on the streets of the good old U.S.A.

A few days after Tim had rested, he and Crane were in a DC-4 traveling at 10,000 feet above the jungle headed southeast into Katanga Province. A chartered Sabena flight carried a bunch of noisy European executives down to see diamond mines owned by DeBeers and the Belgian government. They drank Stella Artois or Lambic. Tim chose Pepsi-Cola, while Crane sipped Canadian Club. The cabin filled with cigarette smoke. Below, league upon hazy league of thickly carpeted jungle glided past with the occasional flash of hidden river, the wink of sunlight on muddy gold.

Crane and Tim sat in the rear, sheltered by a carpeted half-wall, talking. Crane said: “We’re going to send you back to London, Tim, and you’ll be promoted a grade in the Navy. That’s your life as Timothy Nordhall. At the same time, secretly, you’ll be Major Robert Malone, and I’ll make sure you get paid as a major. That’s part of the plan. We’ll be watching you while you will be watching whomever we tell you to watch. No strong-arm stuff, nothing dangerous. Brains over brawn.”

They set down on a jungle strip on the edge of Elisabethville, capital of Katanga Province. The surrounding countryside was lush, with plenty of activity showing agricultural wealth. Mines and refineries belched forth smoke as men from the region found work. In particular, copper and diamonds from Katanga were prized. But Crane had something quite different to show Tim.

They rode in a private car owned by a local black official, whose female chauffeur drove. They rode along narrow asphalt roads, following a railroad line into the highlands. There, among the low mountain ranges, entire hillsides were being gouged out. “The mineral wealth of this area is staggering,” Crane said. “The Belgians have been sitting on a strategic goldmine, and it’s more valuable than ever now that uranium is about to get a new boost.”

“You mean that stuff that makes watch dial numbers glow at night?”

Crane grinned darkly. “It makes more than watch dials glow.” He drew a circle in pencil on a napkin on the little dinner tray that folded out from the seat back before Tim. He drew a mass of dots in the circle. “You can read this in any good newspaper, but it’s little more than fantasy as yet.” Crane tapped his pencil on the paper. “This is a uranium atom. It’s a very heavy element, with lots of protons and neutrons in the nucleus. In fact, we are interested in two kinds of uranium—U235 and U239. Those are isotopes.” He drew a plus sign and a minus sign. “Basic physics. Protons live in the nucleus of an atom and have a plus charge. Electrons whiz around the outside of the nucleus and have a minus charge. Every atom has exactly the same number of protons and electrons, starting with hydrogen, which has one of each, and helium, which has two of each.” He drew several circles around the first one. “Know anything about quantum mechanics?”

“Just a little bit from my general physics and chemistry classes. Niels Bohr has lately dreamed up the idea that electrons aren’t exactly just particles, but packets of energy that zoom around at certain predictable levels or orbits.”

“Right,” Crane said, pausing over his rough sketch. “Or quantum jackets, or orbitals. Whatever you want to call them. Then there are those electrically neutral particles called neutrons, which sit in the nucleus. They look a lot like protons, except the neutrons have no charge. If you add up the number of protons, electrons, and neutrons, you get the mass number of a given isotope. So Uranium-235 has a total of 235 of these major subatomic particles. Uranium-239 has 239. And so forth.”

He paused for a moment, trying to succinctly capture the next step. “These very huge atoms don’t stick together long. They decay. They give off neutrons, which whiz away. That’s called radioactivity, and it’s measurable with a Geiger counter. If you get exposed to too much radioactivity, you get sick and possibly die.” He drew an arrow pointing away from an atom. “When you put a lot of uranium together in one place, the neutrons hit other uranium atoms and cause them to shed their neutrons. If you get a whole lot of uranium in one pile, it’s called critical mass. When you have critical mass, the chain reaction multiplies in just seconds, so the mass explodes. That’s the theory, anyway. It explodes with a big bang, so it would make a dandy super-bomb.” He put the pencil down. “The world’s best supply of uranium comes from right here in Katanga.”

“Ah!” Tim said. “That brings about the new strategic value of this place.”

“Right. When Belgium was invaded by the Krauts, the Belgian government transferred its stocks of uranium to the Americans. The Germans, however, captured some of the Belgian stocks and took them inside Germany. That tells you, my friend, they are working on the same thing we are. The Japanese, the Soviets, the British—they all have research going. We all have the same problem: it’s not hard to understand how the critical mass leads to the explosion. What’s devilishly hard, Tim, is figuring out how to filter the raw oxide so you get 98% pure uranium-235. One of the things we’re going to need you to do in London is help us find out how far along the Germans are, and British for that matter. Remember, there are no friends in international politics—only alliances of convenience.”

Toward nightfall, they arrived at a lake, a tributary of Lake Tanganyika in the east. They drove along deserted hilly roads above jungle level, until they arrived at a sheltered cove. There, they drove about a mile down into the shore area. A narrow gauge railway ran to the lake shore, where Congolese men busily loaded uraninite, or uranium oxide, into small cars for transport to a main rail line and thence mysteriously to Europe or America.

Crane lit a cigarette and stood with one foot up on a boulder, smoking quietly in the evening air. The men below sang as they worked. “I can practically see that stuff glowing from here,” he said softly. “We’ll never need to touch the stuff. Poor bastards, they’ll all die of radiation sickness. Nobody will warn them, not we or these Belgian bastards. They’ll never know what made them sick. Just bad ju-ju. And do you know—they’ll be right about that.”