Shannon spread a map out on the floor in the center of the circle, and the men eyed it keenly. It was a hand-drawn map depicting a section of seashore and a series of buildings on the landward side. It was not accurate, for it excluded the two curving spits of shingle that were the identifying marks of the harbor of Clarence, but it sufficed to indicate the kind of operation required.

The mercenary leader talked for twenty minutes, outlining the kind of attack he had already proposed to his patron as the only feasible way of taking the objective, and the three men concurred. None of them asked the name of the destination. They knew he would not tell them and that they did not need to know. It was not a question of lack of trust, simply of security. If a leak were sprung in the secret, they did not want to be among the possible suspects.

Shannon spoke in strongly accented French, which he had picked up in the Sixth Commando in the Congo. He knew Vlaminck had a reasonable grasp of English, as a barman in Ostend must have, and that Semmler commanded a vocabulary of about two hundred words. But Langarotti knew very little indeed, so French was the common language, except when Dupree was present, when everything had to be translated.

“So that’s it,” said Shannon as he finished. "The terms are that you all go on a salary of twelve hundred and fifty dollars a month from tomorrow morning, plus expenses for living and traveling while in Europe. The budget is ample for the job. Only two of the tasks that have to be done in the preparation stages are illegal, because I’ve planned to keep the maximum strictly legal. Of these tasks, one is a border crossing from Belgium to France, the other a problem of loading some cases onto a ship somewhere in southern Europe. We’ll all be involved in both jobs.

“You get three months’ guaranteed salary, plus five thousand dollars’ bonus each for success. So what do you say?”

The three men looked at each other. Vlaminck nodded. “I’m on,” he said. “Like I said yesterday, it looks good.”

Langarotti stropped his knife. “Is it against French interests?” he asked. “I don’t want to be an exile.”

“You have my word it is not against the French in Africa.”

“D’accord,” said the Corsican simply.

“Kurt?” asked Shannon.

“What about insurance?” asked the German. “It doesn’t matter for me, I have no relatives, but what about Marc?”

The Belgian nodded. “Yes, I don’t want to leave Anna with nothing,” he said.

Mercenaries on contract are usually insured by the contractor for $20,000 for loss of life and $6000 for loss of a major limb.

“You have to take out your own, but it can be as high as you want to go. If anything happens to anyone, the rest swear blind he was lost overboard at sea by accident. If anyone gets badly hurt and survives, we all swear the injury was caused by shifting machinery on board. You all take out insurance for a sea trip from Europe to South Africa as passengers on a small freighter. Okay?”

The three men nodded.

“I’m on,” said Semmler.

They shook on it, and that was enough. Then Shannon went into the jobs he wanted each man to do.

“Kurt, you’ll get your first salary check and one thousand dollars for expenses on Friday. I want you to go down to the Mediterranean and start looking for a boat. I need a small freighter with a clean record. Get that: it must be clean. Papers in order, ship for sale. One hundred to two hundred tons, coaster or converted trawler, possibly converted navy vessel if need be, but not looking like an MTB. I don’t want speed, but reliability. The sort that can pick up a cargo in a Mediterranean port without exciting attention, even an. arms cargo. Registered as a general freighter owned by a small company or its own skipper. Price not over twenty-five thousand pounds, including the cost of any work that needs doing on it. Absolute latest sailing date, fully fueled and supplied for a trip to Cape Town, not later than sixty days from now. Got it?”

Semmler nodded and began to think at once of his contacts in the shipping world.

“Jean-Baptiste, which city do you know best in the Mediterranean?”

“Marseilles,” said Langarotti without hesitation.

“Okay. You get salary and five hundred pounds on Friday. Get to Marseilles, set up in a small hotel, and start looking. Find me three large inflatable semi-rigid craft of the same kind as Zodiac makes. The sort developed for water sports from the basic design of the Marine Commando assault craft. Buy them from separate suppliers, then book them into the bonded warehouse of a respectable shipping agent for export to Morocco. Purpose, water-skiing and sub-aqua diving at a holiday resort. Color, black. Also three powerful outboard engines, battery-started. The boats should take up to a ton of payload. The engines should move such a craft and that weight at not less than ten knots, with a big reserve. You’ll need about sixty horsepower. Very important: make sure they are fitted with underwater exhausts for silent running. If they can’t be had in that condition, get a mechanic to make you three exhaust-pipe extensions with the necessary outlet valves, to fit the engines. Store them at the same export agent’s bonded warehouse, for the same purpose as the dinghies: water sports in Morocco. You won’t have enough money in the five hundred. Open a bank account and send me the name and number, by mail, to this address. I’ll send the money by credit transfer. Buy everything separately, and submit me the price lists by mail here. Okay?”

Langarotti nodded and resumed his knife-stropping.

“Marc. You remember you mentioned once that you knew a man in Belgium had knocked off a German store of a thousand brand-new Schmeisser submachine pistols in nineteen-forty-five and still had half of them in store? I want you to go back to Ostend on Friday with your salary and five hundred pounds and locate that man. See if he’ll sell. I want a hundred, and in first-class working order. I’ll pay a hundred dollars each, which is way over the rate. Write me by letter only, here at this flat, when you have found the man and can set up a meeting between him and me. Got it?”

By nine-thirty they were through, the instructions memorized, noted, and understood.

“Right. What about a spot of dinner?” Shannon asked his colleagues.

He took them around the corner to the Paprika for a meal. They still spoke in French, but no one else took much notice, except to glance over when a loud burst of laughter came from the group of four. Evidently they were excited at something, though none of the diners could have surmised that what elated the group in the corner was the prospect of going once again to war under the leadership of Cat Shannon.

Across the Channel another man was thinking hard about Carlo Alfred Thomas Shannon, and his thoughts were not charitable. He paced the living room of his apartment on one of the residential boulevards near the Place de la Bastille and considered the information he had been gathering for the previous week, and the snippet from Marseilles that had reached him several hours earlier.

If the writer who had originally recommended Charles Roux to Simon Endean as a second possible mercenary for Endean’s project had known more about the Frenchman, his description would not have been so complimentary. But he knew only the basic facts of the man’s background and little about his character. Nor did he know, and thus was unable to tell Endean, of the vitriolic hatred that Roux bore for the other man he had recommended, Cat Shannon.

After Endean had left Roux, the Frenchman had waited a full fortnight for a second contact to be made. When it never came, he was forced to the conclusion either that the project in the mind of the visitor who had called himself Walter Harris had been abandoned, or that someone else had got the job.