The Falcon Thief

by Joshua Hammer

  Three years later Adrian and Jeffrey took over a survey of the African hawk eagle, the park’s second-most-prevalent bird of prey, which constructs large, heavy stick nests in tree forks. Gargett passed on to her protégés dozens of nest locations. Back in his element, Jeffrey—now lithe, strong, and brimming with a self-confidence in the outdoors that verged on brashness—scrambled to nests at the tops of euphorbias, ficuses, and brown ironwood, or Homalium dentatum trees, and though his father wasn’t nearly the climber that Jeffrey was, he sometimes joined his son. “They would throw up a claw, and climb up the tree as high as they could,” Lorber remembers. “It required a lot of skill, and involved some risk. This was derring-do stuff.”

  Adrian and his son didn’t confine their contributions to the field. In their nine years working with Gargett and her team of volunteers, the Lendrums published a total of eighteen academic studies of hawk eagles, augur buzzards, crowned eagles, and other birds of prey, chiefly for Ostrich, a quarterly produced by the South African Ornithological Society. The pair also contributed to Bokmakierie, another South African magazine for bird-watchers. These were serious-minded and technical articles filled with exhaustive descriptions of clutch and egg sizes, the types of green foliage used in nests, the establishment of hunting territory, and, on a lurid note, examples of what Gargett called “Cain-and-Abel conflict”—the killing of one raptor sibling by the other shortly after hatching, usually by pecking it to death. Adrian Lendrum was the brains of the team, colleagues understood, while his son provided the derring-do.

  Delighted by his development as an ornithologist, Gargett invited the elder Lendrum to join the Rhodesian Ornithological Society’s steering committee, a select set of half a dozen individuals who met once a month to organize the bird-watching and film program for the next half year. She also took the Lendrums on field trips across Matobo, sharing the society’s most closely guarded secrets: the exact locations of hundreds of nests.

  * * *

  In the late 1970s, as the Lendrums were surveying birds in Matobo, the Rhodesian Bush War crept up on Bulawayo. Rhodesia didn’t have the brutal apartheid system of neighboring South Africa, but the country was riddled with injustices. The 1961 Constitution guaranteed that whites would hold fifty of the sixty-five seats in Parliament, even though they made up only 8 percent of the population. Other laws forced two-thirds of the country’s black population to live in communally held Tribal Trust lands, which quickly became overpopulated and overgrazed; banned black-opposition groups; and forbade speech and writing critical of Prime Minister Ian Smith. In 1972 the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army, an Ndebele force in the south led by the trade union leader, politician, and activist Joshua Nkomo, joined with Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union guerrillas, most of whom belonged to Rhodesia’s majority Shona tribe, to try to bring down the country’s racist white-minority regime.

  By 1978, 12,500 insurgents were fighting in Rhodesia. About 10,800 Rhodesian Army regulars and 40,000 white reservists opposed them. All white males between eighteen and sixty were obligated to train and serve part of the year in the reserve. Lorber’s husband, a German national who wasn’t even a Rhodesian citizen, volunteered to be a police reservist. Adrian Lendrum was drafted into service, too. “My dad used to go up on call-ups every six weeks to serve in the bush,” Richard Lendrum recalled. “The war affected everyone.”

  At sixteen, in 1977, Jeffrey Lendrum transferred from Christian Brothers to Gifford High School, a boys-only, government-run institution with a reputation for strict discipline. But he failed most of his O levels—nationwide qualification exams in a variety of subjects—and left school in 1978, with no hope of continuing to college. That same year, as warfare intensified, he applied, at the age of seventeen, to join the Rhodesian Special Air Service (SAS) C Squadron, an elite unit originally formed during the Second World War. Lendrum has said that he spent about six months going through the unit’s arduous selection process but was then felled by a hernia and never completed the training. His sister, Paula, remembers it differently. “Being a nonconformist [he] gave up,” she says. He transferred to Internal Affairs, a unit responsible for guarding villages in the Rhodesian bush, a less-than-heroic posting that usually meant hunkering down with a rifle behind a pile of sandbags. Still, Lendrum claims that he saw some action, conducting “hot extractions” of troops under fire by military helicopter. “He saw some terrible things,” says his friend Michelle Conway, who grew up with the Lendrums in Bulawayo and later attended university in South Africa with Jeffrey’s brother, Richard.

  Today Lendrum’s name adorns a “Wall of Shame” on the SAS C Squadron website, comprised of individuals who falsely claim to have served with the unit. “Some of these impostors are coming out with such ludicrous stories about their time spent in [C Squadron] that we have to expose them for the sad cases they are,” the website says. “One thing you get to know about Jeff,” says a friend of twenty years, “is that he likes to think that he’s done everything and seen everything, and he has done a lot of things, but you got to take some of it with a pinch of salt.”

  In the last year of the war, Joshua Nkomo’s guerrillas sought sanctuary in the rocky redoubts of the Matobo Hills just outside the national park. They buried land mines on roads, sabotaged water pumps, ambushed cars, and laid explosives on tracks. The Rhodesian Ornithological Society struggled to keep its projects going. Some volunteers dropped out. At her husband’s insistence, Lorber never ventured into the field without stashing her nine-millimeter pistol under her seat. Gargett, who refused to carry a gun, made the twenty-mile journey to Matobo alone until her husband demanded that she either ride with him or find another armed escort.

  As the war heated up, the Ornithological Society became an escape, a bit of normality in terrible times. Society members’ opinions on the war ran across the spectrum, from hard-liners who backed Ian Smith and his Rhodesian Front and feared that black rule would lead to catastrophe, to liberals like Val and Eric Gargett, who wished for power-sharing and a more just society. Val Gargett had taught at a black high school before becoming a full-time ornithologist, and her husband had fought to improve health and education for black Rhodesians while serving on Bulawayo’s city council. But no matter their differences, all bird lovers flocked to the monthly meetings at the national museum to forget, briefly, the threat of being blown up by a land mine, ambushed by guerrillas—or jumpy government troops—or shot by a surface-to-air missile from out of the sky, as had happened to a mother and daughter the Lendrums knew.

  It was around this time that Gargett began to notice disturbing things happening to her surveys in Matobo. The irregularities were small at first: a lanner falcon or snake eagle nest being monitored would suddenly turn up empty. Monkeys or other predators, people assumed, had eaten the eggs. Then the survey turned up an alarming rise in the number of “incomplete breeding cycles” among Gargett’s black eagles. Breeding pairs built nests with sticks and lined them with greenery—the standard pre-laying ritual—but no eggs were ever seen by researchers. It could have been that the birds couldn’t find enough to eat, which would have affected productivity. But scientists had determined that the park’s dassie population had grown by 20 percent in recent years. The evidence pointed to sabotage or theft. And it seemed to be an inside job. “This had never happened before,” Lorber remembers. “This was a small, tight community, threatened by a bush war, and you don’t want internal strife. You are holding people together.”

  In the last weeks of 1979, with the war at a stalemate, Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith entered into negotiations with the insurgents. The British government, led by Margaret Thatcher, brokered the talks in London. On December 12, the sides announced a cease-fire, and the following March, Robert Mugabe was elected the first president of Zimbabwe. Most blacks were jubilant. White reactions ranged from exhilaration to restrained optimism to a conviction that the country was about to descend into chaos. Pat Lorber tried to persuade her fa
ther and her husband, both of whom were strong Rhodesian Front supporters, that Mugabe intended to rule inclusively and transparently. But, unlike her friend and mentor Val Gargett, she also harbored doubts about the new state’s viability.

  Even as the fate of the new nation dominated thoughts and conversations, the inexplicable little troubles in Matobo continued. One day Adrian Lendrum joined Gargett to photograph a breeding pair of the rare Mackinder’s eagle owl (Bubo mackinderi), one of the largest owls in Africa, a tawny brown bug-and-lizard-eater with massive talons and startlingly bright pumpkin-colored eyes. Only a single pair had ever been sighted in the park. Gargett carefully guarded the nest location, telling only Lendrum and a few other confidants. The nest had a clutch of two eggs inside it when Gargett and Lendrum visited. When Gargett returned alone to inspect the nest a week later, she was shocked to discover that the clutch was gone.

  The Lendrums, meanwhile, were gaining more official responsibilities. In May 1982, the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management issued the Lendrums a permit to place tracking tags on birds of prey in Matobo and in Hwange National Park, a fifty-six-hundred-square-mile reserve, two hundred miles northwest of Bulawayo, that was home to one of Southern Africa’s largest populations of elephants. Jeffrey Lendrum, still living with his parents, was working as the manager of a local cannery, and he and his father now had carte blanche to roam both parks.

  Later that same year Steve Edwards, a senior warden at Matobo, came across a spectacular find: a crowned eagle nest with a single egg—large, creamy white, with dark brown specks and blotches—perched in a high fork of a 120-foot-tall tree off one of the park roads. The crowned eagle was, like the Mackinder’s eagle owl, one of the rarest Southern African raptors; only three mating pairs had been counted in the park. Edwards, exhilarated by the discovery, headed back for another look two days later, the usual time it took for a crowned eagle to lay the second egg in its two-egg clutch. This time Edwards encountered Jeffrey Lendrum heading in the other direction.

  “Have you just been to the crowned eagle nest?” Edwards asked him.

  “Yes, and there are two eggs in there,” Lendrum replied, adding, oddly, that the ranger now had no reason to check. Edwards clambered up the tree anyway and discovered that the nest was empty.

  What the hell is going on here? he wondered. All but certain that Lendrum had stolen them, he would soon report to Val Gargett what he had seen.

  Gargett had been wrestling with conflicted feelings about her protégés. She found it hard to imagine that the father and son she had watched grow into self-assured ornithologists might be engaged in anything unethical. She and her husband had mentored the Lendrums, spent many hours with them in the field, and come to view them almost as family; the possibility that they had betrayed the Gargetts’ trust, lied to them, and corrupted their surveys was emotionally wrenching for her even to consider. Still, she began quietly increasing her visits to the aeries that the Lendrums had surveyed. At one African hawk eagle nest—where the Lendrums had reported that the eaglet had fledged—the surrounding rocks were missing the telltale “whitewash,” or bird feces, that always accumulates as the chick grows older. She saw no indication that the eggs had ever hatched.

  Gargett shared her suspicions about the Lendrums with Steve Edwards, and he agreed to initiate an investigation.

  SIX LIVERPOOL

  Andy McWilliam fell into police work by a process of elimination. McWilliam’s father had left school at fourteen following the death of his own father in his thirties from the lingering effects of a poison-gas attack in the trenches during World War I. After dropping out, the elder McWilliam had joined the British Merchant Navy, the national commercial fleet, and worked until retirement as a shipboard electrician. Growing up in the 1960s in Litherland, a working-class town in the Metropolitan Borough of Sefton, just north of Liverpool, and later in nearby Crosby, the young McWilliam had shown similar restlessness and no great enthusiasm for study. He couldn’t wait to escape the classroom and join his friends on the rugby field or cricket ground. The only facts and figures that grabbed his attention were the wins and losses of the Everton Football Club, his family’s favorite team for three generations.

  Everton’s archrival, Liverpool FC, had begun its rise to the championship of English football in the early 1960s, and matches between the two clubs were charged with tension. McWilliam watched them play from the standing-room-only tier at Goodison Park, Everton’s home ground. On occasion he ventured into enemy territory, walking half a mile across Stanley Park, a 110-acre spread of lawns, flower gardens and lakes, to Liverpool’s Anfield stadium. After every Liverpool goal, thousands of fans would break into spirited renditions of “She Loves You” and other hits by the hometown Beatles. The crowd would surge, and McWilliam would be right in the thick of it.

  As a boy and into his adolescence, McWilliam watched two popular police procedurals each week on the BBC. Z Cars, a half-hour midweek drama set in the fictional town of Newton in northwest England, featured a rotating pair of patrolmen and a rousing theme song that Everton adopted as its anthem in 1963. On Saturdays came Dixon of Dock Green, centering around the relationship between a grizzled desk sergeant, Constable George Dixon, and a young detective, Andy Crawford, at a fictional station in London’s East End. Each week the policemen cracked crimes ranging from missing persons cases to bank robberies to gangland killings. McWilliam loved everything about the dramas: the investigations, interrogations, banter between the police, and even Dixon’s famous catchphrases that started and ended the program each Saturday night: “Evening all” and “Night all.” Later, at Waterloo secondary school, McWilliam began searching regularly through the index card file at the Career Office for an occupation that matched his poor academic credentials. Great Britain’s police forces in those years were desperate to fill their ranks, and paid little attention to test scores or grades. “I thought, I can do this,” he recalls. The only other option, as he saw it, was joining the Merchant Navy like his father, which, considering his proclivity for seasickness, held little appeal.

  In the summer of 1973, while waiting for the results of his O levels, he sat for the police exam to become a cadet in the Liverpool and Bootle Constabulary. It turned out to be more challenging than he had anticipated. “What is the Ku Klux Klan?” was one multiple-choice question. Flummoxed, he answered, “A Chinese political party.” He failed the test. Then, as he pondered what possible career options he had left, his mother found an advertisement in the local newspaper, seeking recruits for the police in Surrey, a county in southeast England. The glossy brochure that the force sent him when he requested more information stressed “the active side of the job,” he recalled, promising a heavy emphasis on sports and physical fitness. McWilliam decided to take the county’s test. “They must have been really struggling to find recruits,” he says, “because the questions were along the lines of, ‘What is wet and puts out fires? And here’s another clue: Ducks swim in it.’ ” This time, he passed.

  Shortly after that, McWilliam received his O level results: he had failed six out of his eight exams, eking out passing grades in only mathematics and English. It was a dismal performance, but he consoled himself with the knowledge that he was already on his way to a career. In the fall, he took a part-time job in the toy section of Owen Owens, a Liverpool department store, waiting for his police training to begin at the start of the new year.

  On the third of January, 1974, McWilliam’s parents drove him down to the Hendon Police Cadet College in north London and dropped him and his single suitcase at the front gate of the urban complex. He was sixteen, the same age as most of his fellow students, facing his first extended period away from home, and he was terrified. A cadet in full regalia met McWilliam at the entrance and escorted him across the parade ground to a room with eight bunks in one of three concrete dormitories. Cadets rose at dawn, put on their uniforms, made their bedrolls, ate a quick breakfast, and then assembled on the field at seven
-thirty. Inspection officers moved up and down the rows, searching for signs of sloppiness—“You, boots!”—and sentencing those who failed to “fourteen days’ default” or “twenty-eight days’ default”—two weeks or a month of extra predawn dress parades alongside other transgressors. McWilliam felt alone, friendless, and overwhelmed by regimented life. What the hell am I doing here? he thought. By the end of the second week, half the four hundred recruits had dropped out.