"You came back for me," Job said.
"Because sometimes I'm just a bloody fool."
"Me too." Job smiled. "Sometimes I'm just a bloody fool."
"Listen, Job, this is not your shauri anymore. There is nothing in it for you. Get out. Go back to your village, buy yourself another couple of pretty young wives with Capo's dollars. Sit in the sun and drink a few pots of beer."
"Nice try, Sean. Pity it didn't work. I'm coming back with you."
"I'm giving you a direct order."
"I'm refusing to obey it. So convene a court-martial."
Sean laughed and shook his head. "She's my woman, so it's okay for me to risk my life."
"I've been nursemaiding you for almost twenty years, and I'm not giving up now," Job said. He opened the cab door. "Let's go and find Cuthbert in his Superman suit."
Sean left his cap and tunic on the seat; the insignia of a famous regiment would be out of place in a cheap nightclub. The Stardust was at the end of the lane in a converted furniture factory, a barnlike building with all its windows blacked out. They could bear the music from a hundred paces out, the hypnotic repetitive beat of new wave African jazz.
Women were clustered around the entrance. In the overhead light their dresses were as colorful as butterfly wings. Their hairstyles were flocculent Afros or the intricate beaded dreadlocks of the Rastafarians, their faces were painted into death masks of ds like iguana rouge and purple lipstick with iridescent green eyeli lizards.
They swarmed around Sean and Job, rubbing themselves against them like cats.
"Hey man, get me in!" they lDleaded. "Give me five dollars to get in, darling, I'll dance with Y'O and jig-jig, man. Everything."
"Come on, whitqyj" A child with a tender, immature body in a shiny dress of cheap nylon, the face of a black Madonna, and ancient weary eyes, seized Sean's arm. "Take me with you and I'll give you something you've never had before." S re the front of Sean's body and cupped her hand to fondle him. Sean took her wrist and restrained her.
"What have you got that I've never had before, sweetheart?
AID ST They pushed their Way through the rustling nylon skirts and lawyers will handle that. You will be entitled to half of that... clouds of cheap perfume and at the door paid their five dollars.
The doorman stamped their wrists with an indelible dye in lieu of an entrance ticket and they ducked through the black curtain.
The music was a stunning, painful assault, the lights were revolving strobes and ultraviolet. The dance floor pulsated with humanity transformed into a single primitive organism, like some gigantic amoeba.
"Where's the bar?" Sean bellowed into Job's ear.
"I'm a stranger here myself." Job seized his arm and they struggled through the engulfing sea of light and sound and gyrating bodies.
The faces around them were transported as if in a religious fervor, eyeballs rolled glaring white in the rays of the ultraviolet $ V, lamps, sweat glistened on upraised arms and streamed in rivulets down jet black cheeks.
They reached the bar. "Don't risk the whisky!" Job yelled. "And make them open the beer in front of you."
They drank directly from the cans, besieged in a corner of the bar with the ocean of humanity pressing hard against them.
There were a few white faces, all male, tourists and Peace Corps and military advisors, but most of the clientele were black soldiers still in uniform so that Sean and Job blended into their surroundings.
"Where are you, Cuthbert, in your Superman shirt?" Sean pushed away one of the more persistent bar girls and peered over the heads of the dancers. "We'll never find him in here."
"Ask one of the harm en Job suggested.
"Good thinking." Sean reached across and grabbed the front of the Barman's shirt to get his attention, then stuck a five-dollar bank note into his top pocket and shouted the question in his ear.
The Barman grinned and yelled back, "Wait! I find him."
Ten minutes later they saw Cuthbert working his way down the bar toward them, a skinny little man wearing a Superman T-shirt at least two sizes too large for him.
"Hey, Cuthbert, anybody ever tell you that you look like Sammy Davis Junior?" Sean greeted him.
"All the time, man." Cuthbert looked pleased. Sean had obviously picked out his pet vanity.
"Your uncle sends his love. Can we go somewhere to talk?"
Sean suggested as they shook hands.
"Best place to talk is here," Cuthbert answered. "Nobody else going to hear a thing you say. Get me a beer, can't talk with a dry throat."
Cuthbert downed half his beer at a draft and then asked, breathless from the effort, "You were supposed to be here last night.
Where you been, man?"
"We were delayed."
you should have been here last night. Would have been easy, man.
Tonight, well, tonight is different." - "What has changed?" Sean asked with a sink of dread in his chest.
"Everything changed." Cuthbert said. "The Hercules arrived seventeen hundred hours. Come to pick up the goods."
"Has it left yet?" Sean demanded anxiously.
Don't know for sure. She was still there when I left the base at twenty hundred hours. Sitting out there in front of number three hangar. Perhaps she still there now, perhaps she long gone. Who knows?"
"Thanks a lot," Sean said. "That's a great help."
"That's not all, man." Cuthbert clearly enjoyed being the bearer of evil tidings.
"Hit us with it, Cuthbert."
He finished the beer in another long swallow and held up the empty can. Sean ordered another and Cuthbert waited for it, drawing out the suspense masterfully.
"Two full para commandos of the Fifth Brigade came down from Harare in the Hercules. They real cool, those Fifth Brigade cats," Cuthbert said with relish. "They real mean dudes, no shit."
"Cuthbert, you've been watching too much Miami Vice on television," Sean accused, but he was worried. The Fifth Brigade were the elite of the Zimbabwean Army, converted by their North Korean instructors into ruthlessly efficient killing machines. Two full para commandos of a hundred men each, added to the standing garrison of Third Brigade troops-almost a thousand crack veterans on base.
"Your uncle says you are going to take us in, Cuthbert. Pass us through the gates."
"No way, man!" C#thbert was vehement. "Not with those Fifth Brigade cats in there."
"Your uncle will be pissed off with you, Cuthbert. He's a pretty al cat himself, man, Uncle China is." Sean imitated Cuthbert's co hip jargon.
Cuthbert looked worried. "Man, I've fixed your pass," he explained hurriedly. "You'll have no trouble getting in. The guards are expecting you. You don't need me, man. No sense I should compromise myself, no sense at all."