So I was a natural shot with something of a genius for handguns, but I had never aimed at a human being. What happened next seemed so natural that, in retrospect, it was frightening. I flung open the door, dropped to one knee and grabbed for Gilberto’s Luger where it lay on the floor. In the same moment, I shot Coimbra through the hand.

Burke swung, crouched for action, a tiger ready to spring, his own gun in one hand, Herrara’s in the other. Although I didn’t realise it then, it said a lot for his control that he didn’t shoot me as a reflex action.

He gave me one brief glance and I thought he would smile. Instead, he opened the outside door, listened, then closed it again.

“The kind of place where people mind their own business,” I told him.

He walked slowly to the desk. Gilberto crouched against the wall clutching his chest, blood at the corner of his mouth. His eyes were open, but he was obviously in deep shock. Coimbra had gone very pale and held his right hand under his left arm as if trying to stop the bleeding. Burke touched him between the eyes with the barrel of his revolver.

“Five thousand dollars.”

Even then Coimbra hesitated and I put in quickly, “There’s a safe inside the walnut cabinet by the door.”

Burke thumbed back the hammer of his revolver with an audible click and Coimbra said hastily, “The key is in the cigar box under the tray.”

“Get it,” Burke told me. “Bring whatever you find.”

There was certainly considerably more than five thousand dollars in the cash box I brought to the desk although I never did find out exactly how much. Burke took the lot, the neat packets of banknotes vanishing into the capacious pockets of his bush jacket.

“One must be prepared to take risks for quick returns, isn’t that what you said, Coimbra?”

But Coimbra was past caring and fainted across the desk. Herrara still leaned against the wall, hands flat. Burke turned and hit him almost casually, striking with clenched fist at the base of the skull. Herrara went down with a groan.

The Banker’s special was returned to its clip inside the crown of the bush hat and he replaced it on his head, adjusting the angle of the brim in the mirror. He turned to face me.

“First rule in the bush,” he said. “Walk, don’t run. Remember that on the way out.”

We left by the side entrance which was usually kept open for those clients who wanted direct access to the girls and didn’t welcome publicity. A Ford truck was parked just around the corner from the café, an African dozing behind the wheel. Burke told me to get in the back, spoke to the driver and joined me.

As the truck started to move, I said, “Where to now?”

“The old army airstrip at Caruba. Do you know it?”

“I’ve only been in town a couple of weeks. That job at the ‘Lights of Lisbon’ wasn’t intended to be my life’s work. I was just trying to raise the price of a ticket to Cape Town.”

“Any special reason?”

“A man has to have an aim in life.”

He accepted it, looking quite serious and nodded. “That was good shooting back there. Where did you learn?”

When I explained he was obviously surprised. At that time I didn’t realise how good I must have looked because it wasn’t until later that I learned that I acted instinctively like a real professional who always aims for the shooting hand with his first bullet, knowing that a dying man can still get off a shot at him.

We moved out through the edge of town; there were no longer any street lamps and we were shrouded in darkness. After a while he asked if I had my passport.

I reached for my wallet instinctively and nodded. “About all I have got.”

And then, as if it had only just occurred to him, he said, “My name is Burke, by the way – Sean Burke.”

“Stacey Wyatt.” I hesitated. “Didn’t I hear Coimbra call you major?”

“That’s right. I was twenty years in the British Army – Paratroops. Left last year. I’ve just been granted a commission by the Katanga government.”

“The Congo?” I said.

“I’m forming a special unit to help keep order. Coimbra was supposed to find me a few men. The bastard didn’t even try. Now I’ve got an old D.C.3 waiting at the airstrip and no one to fly out in her.”

“Except me.”

The words were out without thought and impossible to go back on, even if I’d wanted to. There was pride for one thing, but there was more to it than that. For some reason I found that I wanted his approval. I don’t suppose a psychologist would have had much difficulty in analysing the situation. I’d lost my father too early in life for a growing boy, plus the whole of that side of my family. Now I was running hard, trying to erase the memory of the events of the last few terrible months that had taken my mother and had left me with only one individual on top of earth who really cared for me – my grandfather. The one person I was afraid to love.

Burke’s voice cut in on my thoughts. “You mean it?” he said softly.

“ Coimbra was the first person I ever shot at in my life,” I told him. “I think I should make that clear in fairness to you.”

“Four hundred thousand francs a month,” he said, “and all found.”

“Including a shroud? I hear it’s rough up there.”

He changed – altered completely, became almost a different person. He laughed out of the darkness, reached over and squeezed my arm. “I’ll teach you, Stacey – everything you need to know. We’ll cut a path from one end of the Congo to the other and come out laughing with our pockets full of gold.”

Thunder rumbled beyond the horizon like distant drums and rain started to fall, heavy and warm, thumping against the canvas roof. The air was electric. I was seized with excitement. I suppose the simple fact was that I wanted to be like him. Tough, unafraid, not caring, able to look the world straight in the eye and stare it down.

God, but I was happy then – happy for the first time in years as the truck lurched through the night, filling my nostrils with the dust of Africa.

BURKE’S BASTARDS, THAT was the name some newspaperman came up with after that first foray into Katanga. We lost a lot of men, but others lost more and the newspaper stories certainly helped recruiting. They built Burke up into something of a legend for a while and then forgot him, but then our reputation as an elite corps was secure. There was no more difficulty in finding men and Burke was able to pick and choose.

And they were marvellous days – the best I had ever known. Hard living, hard training. I felt my strength then for the first time, tried my courage and found, as I suspect most men do, that I could keep going when afraid which, when you come down to it, is all that really matters.

Burke was never satisfied. During one lull between engagements, he even forced us through paratroop training, dropping over Lumba Airport from an old de Havilland Rapide. A month later we used it for real and parachuted into a mission station in the Kasai just ahead of a force of Simbas. We pushed our way out through a couple of hundred miles of unfriendly bush bringing eight nuns with us.

They made Burke a colonel for that little jaunt and I got a captain’s commission around the time I would have been in my third year at Harvard. Life was good then, full of action and passion as it should be and the money poured in as he had promised it would. Two years later, those of us who were left were lucky to get out in what we stood up in.

Contrary to popular opinion, most mercenaries in the Congo were there for the same reason that young men used to join the Foreign Legion. It was what happened when you experienced the reality that was the trouble. I had seen what was left of settlers who had been quartered on the buzz saw of a lumber mill. I had also known mercenaries who had been in the habit of disposing of prisoners by locking them inside old ammunition boxes and dropping them into Lake Kivu, but only when they were too tired to use them for target practice.