Janni Dupree was halfway through his barrage, and. the red glare from behind the roof of the palace had become constant. Something was burning in the courtyard, and Shannon supposed it was the guardhouses. When the doors swung open, the men crouching in the grass could see the red glare through the archway, and two figures swayed in front of it and fell down before they could emerge.

Marc sent four more rockets straight through the open gate into the furnace beyond the archway, which apparently was a through passage to the courtyard behind. It was Shannon’s first glimpse of what lay beyond the gate.

The mercenary leader screamed to Vlaminck to stop firing, for he had used seven of his dozen rockets, and for all Shannon knew there might be an armored vehicle somewhere in the town, despite what Gomez had said. But the Belgian was enjoying himself. He sent another four rockets through the front wall of the palace at ground level and on the second floor, finally standing exultantly waving both his bazooka and his last rocket at the palace in front, while Dupree’s mortar bombs caromed overhead.

At that moment the foghorn whined away to a whisper and died. Ignoring Vlaminck, Shannon shouted to the others to move forward, and he, Semmler, and Langarotti began to run at a crouch through the grass, Schmeissers held forward, safety catches off, fingers tense on the triggers. They were followed by Johnny, Jinja, Bartholomew, and Patrick, who, having no more bazooka rockets to carry, unslung his submachine gun and joined the others.

At twenty yards, Shannon stopped and waited for Dupree’s last bombs to fall. He had lost count of how many were still to come, but the sudden silence after the last bomb fell told him they were over. For a second or two the silence itself was deafening. After the foghorn and the mortars, the roar and crash of Tiny’s bazooka rockets, the absence of sound was uncanny. So much so that it was almost impossible to realize the entire operation had lasted less than five minutes.

Shannon wondered for a second if Timothy had sent off his dozen mortar bombs to the army barracks, if the soldiers had scattered as he surmised they would, and what the other citizens of the town had thought of the inferno that must have nearly deafened them. He was jerked into wakefulness when the next two magnesium flares exploded over him, one after the other, and without waiting longer he leaped to his feet, screamed, “Come on,” and ran the last twenty yards to the smoldering main gate,

He was firing as he went through, sensing more than seeing the figure of Jean-Baptiste Langarotti to his left and Kurt Semmler closing up on his right. Through the gate and inside the archway the scene was enough to stop anybody in his tracks. The arch went straight through the main building and into the courtyard. Above the courtyard the flares still burned with a stark brilliance that lit the scene behind the palace like something from the Inferno.

Kimba’s guards had been caught asleep by the first sighting shots, which had brought them out of their lean-to barrack huts and into the center of the paved area. That was where the third shot and the succeeding forty quick-succession bombs had found them. Up one wall ran a ladder, and four mangled men hung from its rungs, caught in the back as they tried to run to the top of the enclosing wall. The rest had taken the full force of the mortars, which had exploded on stone flags and scattered lethal shards of Steel in all directions.

There were piles of bodies, some still half alive, most very dead. Two army trucks and three civilian vehicles, one the presidential Mercedes, were standing shredded from end to end against the rear wall. Several palace servants about to flee the horror in the rear had apparently been grouped behind the main gate when Vlaminck’s mortars came through. They were strewn all over the undercover area beneath the archway.

To right and left were further arches, each leading to what seemed to be a set of stairs to the upper floors. Without waiting to be asked, Semmler took the right-hand set, Langarotti the left. Soon there were bursts of submachine-carbine fire from each side as the two mercenaries laundered the upper floor.

Just beyond the stairs to the upper floors were doors at ground level, two on each side. Shouting to make himself heard above the screams of the maimed Vindu and the chattering of Semmler’s Schmeisser upstairs, Shannon ordered the four Africans to take the ground floor. He did not have to tell them to shoot everything that moved. They were waiting to go, eyes rolling, chests heaving.

Slowly, cautiously, Shannon moved through the archway into the threshold to the courtyard at the rear. If there was any opposition left in the palace guards, it would come from there. As he stepped outside, a figure with a rifle ran screaming at him from his left. It could be that a panic-stricken Vindu was making a break for safety, but there was no time to find out. Shannon whirled and fired; the man jackknifed and blew a froth of blood from an already dead mouth onto Shannon’s blouse front. The whole area and palace smelled of blood and fear, sweat and death, and over it all was the greatest intoxicant smell in the world for mercenaries, the reek of cordite.

He sensed rather than heard the scuff of footsteps in the archway behind him and swung around. From one of the side doors, into which Johnny had run to start mopping up the remaining Vindu alive inside the palace, a man had emerged. What happened when he reached the center of the flagstones under the arch, Shannon could recall later only as a kaleidoscope of images. The man saw Shannon the same time Shannon saw him, and snapped off a shot from the gun he clenched in his right hand at hip level.

Shannon felt the slug blow softly on his cheek as it passed. He fired half a second later, but the man was agile. After firing he went to the ground, rolled, and came up in the fire position a second time. Shannon’s Schmeisser had let off five shots, but they went above the gunman’s body as he went to the flagstones; then the magazine ran out. Before the man in the hallway could take another shot, Shannon stepped aside and out of sight behind a stone pillar, snapped out the old magazine, and slapped in a new one. Then he came around the corner, firing. The man was gone.

It was only then he became fully conscious that the gunman, stripped to the waist and barefoot, had not been an African. The skin of his torso, even in the dim light beneath the arch, had been white, and the hair dark and straight.

Shannon swore and ran back toward the embers of the gate on their hinges. He was too late.

As the gunman ran out of the shattered palace, Tiny Marc Vlaminck was walking toward the archway.

He had his bazooka cradled in both hands across his chest, the last rocket fitted into the end. The gunman never even stopped. Still running flat out, he loosed off two fast shots that emptied his magazine. They found the gun later in the long grass. It was a Makarov 9mm., and it was empty.

The Belgian took both shots in the chest, one of them in the lungs. Then the gunman was past him, dashing across the grass for safety beyond the reach of the light cast by the flares Dupree was still sending up. Shannon watched as Vlaminck, moving in a kind of slow motion, turned to face the running man, raised his bazooka and slotted it carefully across his right shoulder, took steady aim, and fired.

Not often does one see a bazooka the size of the warhead on the Yugoslav RPG-7 hit a man in the small of the back. Afterward, they could not even find more than a few pieces of cloth from his trousers.

Shannon had to throw himself flat again to avoid being broiled in the backlash of flame from the Belgian’s last shot. He was still on the ground, eight yards away, when Tiny Marc dropped his weapon and crashed forward, arms outspread, across the hard earth before the gateway. Then the last of the flares went out.