The Dogs of War

The story of how military coups are made, and the motives behind such especially when instigated by foreign powers, which ultimately is tied down to the economic interests of a few faceless individuals. It begins with a scene reminiscent of the end of the Nigerian Civil War: Respectable shaggy bearded general boarding an aircraft in the bush to take him to exile; white mercenaries, diseased babies being taken to an orphanage in Gabon. The dogs of war are the mercenaries.

Zangaro is the (fictitious) African nation that is the object of the coup in this story. An accidental geological survey of one of its mountains turned up solid gold—the mountain contains precious and expensive platinum with economic value of about ten billion dollars. Sir James Manson is the British head of the conglomerate whose employee did the survey. Rather than reveal the truth to Zangaro’s dictator, he decides it would be more profitable for him to have the man overthrown and then install a puppet leader who would sign away mining rights to his company for peanuts. He is a ruthless sort of fellow—nice public face but ugly private dealings—whose wealth began in questionable circumstances, who believes all men have a price, if not in money then in the level of fear they would bear. Through his hatchet man Simon Endean, he hires a reputable Anglo-Irish mercenary in the person of C.A.T. Shannon.

But unknown to Manson and Endean, Shannon is not just a stupid soldier for hire. He is a man of his own mind, who has asked himself why millions of kids had to die in war, and had gotten to the answer that ultimately it was to massage the economic egos of men like Manson. So while he accepts the job from Endean, first to go to Zangaro and assess their military strengths, then to plan and wage the coup proper, he decides on his own agenda, after finding out the identity of Endean’s boss and his business. While screwing Manson’s only daughter without his knowledge, he contacts some black African friends to provide some backup force for the coup. He also learns about the platinum, and swears that Manson would not have it cheap.

Most of the story is taken over by the planning stages of the coup on one hand; procuring hardware and other logistics including the vessel to take the team to West Africa, with some crew, and the technicalities involved in this: “end user certificates” for procuring arms between governments, the politics of arms export and the black market dealings, the bribery and corruption that has to be done. On the other hand Manson and Endean plotted on secretly acquiring one of the vehicles they would use to enrich themselves from the coup, a public company with lowly-priced shares. They calculated on making at least 80 million pounds from the rise in share price of this company after it becomes public that the company has discovered platinum in Zangaro after the coup.

The coup is executed successfully. Shannon and his team of mercenaries and their African backups attacked the dictator’s presidential palace, killing him and most of his guards, and also the nearby military barracks, killing or scattering the soldiers there. And Shannon imposes his own agenda over that of Manson. When Endean turns up with the illiterate man that Manson had wanted to install as president, Shannon shoots him dead. In self-defense, he also shoots the notorious bodyguard Endean was banking on. Shannon tells Endean to tell his boss that if he wanted the platinum he should be ready to pay a fair price for it, as the country would now be run by a more representative and responsive government. Endean is forced to leave the country in defeat. His vow that they would deal with Shannon back in the UK is useless as Shannon had no intention of returning.

So at the end it is the people from which Shannon’s African friends came that took up the formation of a new government and policing of the country. These were from a migrant population, as opposed to the two native ethnic groups in the country. The ethnic identity of this group was not spelt out, but several pointers make this clear. One of the men that accompanied Shannon to Zangaro was named Dr. Okoye, with a PhD from Oxford. All but one of the African backup soldiers that joined the mercenaries with Okoye bore English names. Finally, the group was said to be scattered over Africa and being referred to as the Jews of Africa.

January 16, 2015. Review initially written in 2010. Novel first published in 1974 by Hutchinson, this Transworld (Corgi Books) edition being published in 1990, ISBN 0-552-10050-1.