End Road.
The last little jaunt had decided him.
There had been five of them set down in Mozambique by a South African Alouette III Astazou. His group – an American, another Briton and two white Rhodesians – were landed at dusk in a clearing in Tete, tasked to check out a report that terrorists – ‘ters’, as the Rhodesian authorities sneeringly called them – were establishing a new camp near a village somewhere in the area. Their plan was to make their way by night across ten miles of bush, to be picked up the next morning. Four of them, including the radio operator, were all lightly armed with British Sterling L2A3 sub-machine-guns. One of the Rhodesians carried an L7 light machine-gun in case of real trouble.
Rourke anticipated no action at all. The information was too sparse. Any contact would be pure luck. All they would do, he guessed, was establish that the country along their line of march was clear.
But things hadn’t gone quite as he thought they would. They had moved a mile away from the landing zone and treated themselves to a drink from their flasks, then moved on cautiously. It was slow work, edging through the bush guided between shadow and deeper shadow by starlight alone. Though they could scarcely be heard from more than twenty yards away, their progress seemed to them riotous in the silent air – a cacophony of rustling fatigues, grating packs, the dull chink and rattle of weaponry. To penetrate their cocoon of noise, they stopped every five minutes and listened for sounds borne on the night air. Towards dawn, when they were perhaps a mile from their pick-up point, Rourke ordered a rest among some bushes.
They were eating, with an occasional whispered comment, when Rourke heard footsteps approaching. He peered through the foliage and in the soft light of the coming dawn saw a figure, apparently alone. The figure carried a rifle.
He signalled for two others, the American and the Briton, to position themselves either side of him, and as the black came to within thirty feet of their position he called out: ‘All right. Far enough’. The figure froze.
Rourke didn’t want to shoot. It would make too much noise.
‘Do as we tell you and you won’t be hurt. Put your gun on the ground and back away. Then you’ll be free to go’.
That way, they would be clear long before the guerrilla could fetch help, even if there were others nearby.
Of course, there was no way of telling whether the black had understood or not. They never did know. Unaccountably, the shadowy shape loaded the gun, clicking the bolt into place. It was the suicidal action of a rank amateur.
Without waiting to see whether the weapon was going to be used, the three men, following their training and instinct, opened fire together. Three streams of bullets, perhaps 150 rounds in all, sliced across the figure, which tumbled backwards into the grass.
In the silence that followed, Rourke realized that the victim was not dead. There was a moan.
The noise of the shooting would have carried over a mile in the still air. He paused only for a moment.
‘Wait one,’ he said.
He walked towards the stricken guerrilla. It was a girl. She had been all but severed across the stomach. He caught a glimpse of her face. She was perhaps fifteen or sixteen, a mere messenger, probably with no experience of warfare, little training and no English. He shot her through the head.
He would have been happy to make it his war; he would have been happy to risk his life for a country that wasn’t his; but he was not happy to lose. The place was going to the blacks anyway. So when they offered to extend his contract, when they showed him the telex from Hereford agreeing that he could stay on if he wished, he told them: thanks, but no thanks. There was no point being here any more.
Now he was going home, for a month’s R and R, during which time he fully intended to rediscover a long-forgotten world, the one that lay beneath Lucy’s white coat.
The clock on the Royal Exchange in the heart of the City of London struck twelve. Two hundred yards away, in a quiet courtyard off Lombard Street, equidistant from the Royal Exchange and the Stock Exchange, Sir Charles Cromer stood in his fifth-floor office, staring out of the window. Beyond the end of the courtyard, on the other side of Lombard Street, a new Crédit Lyonnais building, still pristine white, was nearing completion. To right and left of it, and away down other streets, stood financial offices of legendary eminence, bulwarks of international finance defining what was still a medieval maze of narrow streets.
Cromer, wearing a well-tailored three-piece grey suit and his customary Old Etonian tie, was a stocky figure, his bulk still heavily muscled. One of the bulldog breed, he liked to think. He stuck out his lower lip in thought and turned to walk slowly round his office.
As City offices went, it was an unusual place, reflecting the wealth and good taste of his father and grandfather. It also expressed a certain cold simplicity. The floor was of polished wood. To one side of the ornate Victorian marble fireplace were two sofas of button-backed Moroccan leather. They had been made for Cromer’s grandfather a century ago. The sofas faced each other across a rectangular glass table. On the wall, above the table, beneath its own light, was a Modigliani, an early portrait dating from 1908. In the grate stood Cromer’s pride and joy, a Greek jug, a black-figure amphora of the sixth century BC. The fireplace was now its showcase, intricately wired against attempted theft. The vase could be shown off with two spotlights set in the corners of the wall opposite. Cromer’s desk, backing on to the window, was of a superb cherrywood, again inherited from his grandfather.
Cromer walked to the eight-foot double doors that led to the outer office and flicked the switch to spotlight the vase, in preparation for his next appointment. It was causing him some concern. The name of the man, Yufru, was unknown to him. But his nationality was enough to gain him immediate access. He was an Ethiopian, and the appointment had been made by him from the Embassy.
Cromer was used to dealing with Ethiopians. He was, as his father for thirty years had been before him, agent for the financial affairs of the Ethiopian royal family, and was in large measure responsible for the former Emperor’s stupendous wealth. Now that Selassie was dead, Cromer still had regular contact with the family. He had been forced to explain several times to hopeful children, grandchildren, nephews and nieces why it was not possible to release the substantial sums they claimed as their heritage. No will had been made, no instructions received. Funds could only be released against the Emperor’s specific orders. In the event, the bank would of course administer the fortune, but was otherwise powerless to help…
So it wasn’t the nationality that disturbed Cromer. It was the man’s political background. Yufru came from the Embassy and hence, apparently, from the Marxist government that had destroyed Selassie. He guessed, therefore, that Yufru would have instructions to seek access to the Imperial fortune.
It was certainly a fortune worth having, as Cromer had known since childhood, for the connections between Selassie and Cromer’s Bank went back over fifty years.
The story was an odd one, of considerable interest to historians of City affairs. Cromer’s Bank had become a subsidiary of Rothschild’s, the greatest bank of the day, in 1890. The link between Cromer’s Bank and the Ethiopian royal family was established in 1924, when Ras Tafari, the future Haile Selassie, then Regent and heir to the throne, arrived in London, thus becoming the first Ethiopian ruler to travel abroad since the Queen of Sheba – whom Selassie claimed as his direct ancestor – visited Solomon.
Ras Tafari had several aims. Politically, he intended to drag his medieval country into the twentieth century. But his major concerns were personal and financial. As heir to the throne, he
