Shelter Rock

by MP Miles

  He grabbed a prisoner and screamed at him.

  “Where’s Dimo? Where’s Greenwell?”

  He slapped him and pulled out another, a Cuban.

  “Where’s Dimo?”

  The Cuban stared at him.

  “Spanish. Anyone speak Spanish?” he asked.

  Angel stepped forward.

  “We need to know where Dimo is,” Angel said to the man.

  The Cuban’s Spanish was slow and lazy.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him.”

  Angel shook his head at the Intelligence officer who pulled an African prisoner up and made him stand with his arms outstretched.

  “There’s only one thing they’ll understand,” he said.

  He brought a machete that had been leaning against the wall. The man started shaking.

  Angel pleaded with the Cuban, “Please. Please tell me. Where is Dimo?”

  The Cuban said nothing. The Intelligence officer moved quickly and the machete severed the African’s right arm at the elbow. The man stood still then looked around and sat down carefully, as if looking for a park bench. He picked up his severed arm from the floor as if it was something he didn’t want to leave behind, like a jacket or a bag of shopping.

  “Ask him again,” the Intelligence officer said to Angel.

  Outside, Cassinga had been razed. Ammunition continued to explode. Bodies were everywhere, mostly African, scorched by flames. Charred papers scattered in all directions, some still in the air. The downdraughts from the helicopters fanned the fires, and documents, maps and scraps of paper floated around like leaves.

  Angel saw a box on the ground. He wondered if it was a booby trap and went to have a closer look. It was a wooden box: ‘Romeo y Julieta’ Cuban cigars.

  The first wave of helicopters had left, the sound of them leaving soon replaced by the rumbling of heavy vehicles approaching from the south. The radio jamming had worked for a while but they were over two hours behind schedule due to the haphazard drop. The Cubans fifteen kilometres to the south had heard the news and were now responding. There were still two hundred men waiting for extraction by helicopter, tired and shocked now that it felt like it was over. A Buccaneer fired into the approaching Cuban reinforcements. They were only armoured personnel carriers and World War Two vintage Soviet tanks but they had far more firepower than the paratroopers were carrying. The Buccaneer jet left, its rockets expended. Twenty-two paratroopers with ten rocket-propelled grenades stood between the armour and the landing zone where dispirited paratroopers prepared to make a last stand, their spirit now broken, like a team fifty points down with just ten minutes to the whistle.

  The loading of the second wave of helicopters took place in chaos, all discipline eroded by the threat of the advancing Cuban column. Angel saw the chief of the Army remove his insignia of rank and cap badge and hide them under a rock in case of capture. He probably should never have been there. He looked guilty, as though he’d committed a shameful act. Other men saw him do it and looked away.

  South African jets attacked the Cuban column. A ragged exhausted cheer came from the paratroopers. The Cuban reinforcements had about thirty vehicles and four hundred troops. Some had been destroyed but still they came, ever closer. When they were only two hundred metres from the helicopters, scrubby trees being pushed over in front of them, a Buccaneer without ammunition repeatedly dived at them, skimming the treetops to disorientate the drivers and give the paratroopers more time.

  At the landing zone there seemed too many men for the helicopters and Angel was sure they’d never all fit. Men were running crazed from helicopter to helicopter trying to find space. Overloaded helicopters attempted to take off, engines screaming, only to sink back down heavily on their landing gear. Equipment was being thrown away. The prisoners were offloaded and released. The Intelligence officer kept hold of the Cuban, Angel with them, the last ones to leave. The helicopter staggered under the load. It climbed first to treetop height and then accelerated before climbing again. Angel couldn’t tell what height they were at. It may have been at five or six hundred feet when the Cuban tumbled out of the door.

  The Intelligence officer who pushed him had a tattoo on the inside of his forearm. It was Angel’s cap badge, but upside down.

  *

  Angel, his collar damp, walked quickly away from Waltloo station. His commute home on the train took just twenty-five minutes but it always felt longer. He continued past his house at the end of Loutus Avenue into bare parkland crisscrossed with brown trails, striding towards the river. He knew a jacaranda tree there he could stand against, feel the bark through his wet shirt and in October look up at its purple flowers. He could remind himself, as he had every day for nearly four years, that there had been nothing as beautiful at Cassinga.

  *

  The director general’s office in Pretoria was in darkness, Lombard and Roux illuminated only by the flickering of the television as a video tape abruptly ended.

  Lombard stood and stretched and half opened a blind, his back and neck aching with the curse of all very tall men. Roux blinked and then sneezed, his body arcing forward, both hands to his face.

  “Excuse me.”

  Lombard sat uncomfortably in a straight-backed chair staring at the blank screen. Roux waved a handkerchief in the direction of the television.

  “Where did this come from?” he asked.

  “Marcel at the DST.”

  “The French?”

  Lombard shrugged.

  “Trade,” he said, twisting his head from side to side, stretching an unidentifiable fault in his neck or spine.

  Roux knew what that meant. France was the centre of South Africa’s weapons trading activities across Europe, senior French politicians and intelligence officials approving the flow of weapons technology to Pretoria despite a UN arms embargo. Roux had visited the South African Embassy in Paris, the secret home to dozens of their own officials controlling the illegal arms procurement, and was stunned by the scale of money laundering it required: over a hundred front companies in Liberia and Panama depositing money in nearly five hundred South African owned accounts in Belgium and Luxembourg.

  “So, the French want to sell a power station or a frigate and this video is a little sweetener to encourage us to sign the deal.”

  “Something like that.”

  “The obvious question is how did the French get it?”

  “They recruited a Soviet KGB officer, Vlad someone, code name ‘Farewell’. He’s a miner.”

  Roux knew that Lombard didn’t mean that Vladimir worked in a mine. Instead, the French had struck gold, a rich seam being dug by their agent ‘Farewell’ and passed back to the DST.

  “The ship, is it ours?”

  “Yes, that’s been confirmed. The location was twelve miles south-west of Cape Point. You can almost make out Table Mountain.”

  Lombard rewound the tape. A naval ship rolled in a big sea, it’s engines stopped. The cameraman had rolled with it, the start of the video a blurred image of deck and funnel.

  “That number, there,” Lombard pointed to white on the grey superstructure, “is P1566. It’s the Oswald Pirow, our newest Minister class strike craft.”

  The cameraman had panned out, the coastline visible across whitecaps, then zoomed in on an aircraft approaching fast and close to the wave tops. It gained height as it got closer until, directly over the ship, it dropped a grey cigar shape like a torpedo. Lombard paused the video.

  “It’s a Buccaneer bomber from 24 Squadron. The test is for a new stand-off weapon called, unimaginatively, the S-O1.”

  “What does it do?”

  “It’s a glide bomb to deliver a nuke. You can release it sixty kilometres from the target, little wings pop out the side and it steers itself with optical control and inertial navigation, like in a submarine when underwater. Accurate to
within three metres.”

  Roux could see a round glass nose cone reflecting the sun and sparkling in the morning light. It didn’t look as if it was designed to fly. The cylindrical shape and the domed front end made it look more like a fish than a bird. As the weapon fell from the aircraft, thin rectangular wings sprang out, swept backwards like a fast jet. It stabilised, heading away from the ship, then pitched up like a horse taking a fence. It seemed to stutter, jerking forward in jumps rather than flying, then fell tail first into the choppy South Atlantic Ocean.

  “What went wrong?” asked Roux.

  “It had a dummy load that resembled the shape and weight of the actual device. It was too heavy.”

  “Really? And they couldn’t have worked that out beforehand?”

  “Apparently not. The weapon weighs more than the glider can carry. It’s that simple.”

  The video came to an end. Lombard paced to the window and opened the blinds. They rattled to the top of the window frame as if angry with him.

  “I thought we were just going to drop the bomb from a jet.”

  “It’s not that simple, Nick.”

  Lombard took a chalk to the blackboard behind his desk. It always made Roux smile. Lombard had brought it himself from Tukkies, as the procurement division refused to put anything as simple in the office of the head of the National Intelligence Service.

  “They can fly high over the target to escape the blast.”

  Lombard was at university again, lecturing to a class, Tukkies’ favourite professor.

  “But then they’d most likely get shot down by Cuban-manned Soviet-built air defence systems.”

  He waved the chalk at Roux.

  “Or they come in low, unseen by air defence radar, pull up quickly, and toss the bomb up and forward like in an underhand throw.”

  Lombard drew wavy lines showing the trajectory of the released weapon and the turn of the hastily departing aircraft.

  “It isn’t easy. The Americans have onboard computers telling the pilot at what range to pitch up, at what speed, what angle, the precise moment to release. Our guys have to do it all by the seat of their pants. The cockpit workload is incredibly high. They can’t do it, not routinely, accurately and with any guarantee of survivability. It’s a suicide mission. Hence the S-O1.”

  “Will they fix it?”

  “Unlikely. They’d have to make the glide bomb bigger or the device smaller. Both technically beyond them.”

  Lombard pushed the Sunday papers off his desk. Headlines all weekend had been of the funeral of a physician in Black hospitals in Soweto, a part-time unpaid union leader. The police had kept him for seventy days in solitary without trial before he hanged himself. Outrage had cut across racial lines, politicians and lawyers, academics and churchmen, all demanding an end to detention. Dr Neil Aggett was white.

  “I met him.”

  “Who?”

  Lombard waved the newspapers at Roux.

  “They blindfolded him, electric shocks, the works.”

  He threw the chalk in the bin.

  “I thought him quite logical.”

  Lombard shook himself.

  “So here we are, more problems.”

  Roux could see two immediate problems, both chilling, both out of his control. Lombard must have known what he was thinking.

  “Firstly, Nick, for the French to get hold of this video from their miner in Moscow, there must be a Soviet agent here, probably near the top of the South African Navy, sending our secrets back to Russia.”

  It wasn’t Roux and Lombard’s responsibility. The Directorate of Military Intelligence would have to find him.

  “The DMI will be crawling all over Simon’s Town,” said Roux.

  “The second is that the French, and therefore the whole world, now knows that we do not have a viable delivery system.”

  Roux understood it was a prerequisite of a deterrent. You had to be able to deliver the weapon or there was no point in having a weapon.

  “No delivery, no deterrent, Nick.”

  Roux could see where Lombard was heading. There was only one possible solution: Overberg, the secret new testing range in the Cape.

  “Until we can convince the world that we have a credible missile, we have nothing to work with. Overberg must deliver.”

  Four

  Koos Snyman’s lavish office in Sandton had been paid for by Blackie Swart. Snyman had represented Blackie at the sale of Wensvolle Farm and since his death had been the executor of his will and trustee of the estate, as well as guardian to Blackie’s daughter Elanza, all of it lucrative.

  Snyman’s grandparents had come to South Africa from Lithuania at the turn of the nineteenth century, attracted by the gold rush of 1886. They settled near the goldfields but outside Johannesburg, so populated by their own kind that people called the town Jewburg. Although faintly Orthodox they became Boerejode, unlike many uitlanders who had been excluded from mainstream South African life. His grandfather, briefly conscripted along with other citizens on to the Afrikaner side in the Second Boer War, fought under their four-coloured flag at Gun Hill. The young Koos Snyman and his parents rode out a period of Afrikaner pro-Nazi persecution from the Greyshirts in the 1930s, only able to relax when the Afrikaner-dominated National Party came to power in 1948 and, against their previous claims, chose not to adopt an anti-Jewish policy. Snyman went to Stellenbosch to study law the following year aged twenty. He finished his LLB in ’54, qualified after articles in ’57 and worked for Pretorius Venter Kruger.

  After Blackie’s death he didn’t need to stay with PVK and left to work for himself in his own office, close to Elanza’s house in Hyde Park. He made a deliberate, and he now thought inspired, decision to have Elanza’s estate buy a property for her close to his own office and, understandably, he had a key. It had been useful on more than one occasion to have somewhere to meet people when he thought that Elanza may be playing away out of town and the house would be vacant – usually girls from the office and other women that he didn’t want his wife Danelle to know about.

  Snyman thought about Elanza, sadly off the rails from the age of twenty. Since her father had died in Johannesburg six years previously he had seen Elanza spend her inheritance on unsavoury men and less than sweet drugs, and now she needed bailing out again.

  Nels had called while on weekend babysitting duty.

  “She’s in a club. It’s appropriately called ‘Tramps’.”

  “Wait for me,” Snyman said.

  He had stayed late in the office with his young assistant Lizette. She had kicked off her shoes and made them both a cocktail, rubbing her foot against his leg as he spoke on the phone. Snyman scowled with irritation that Elanza was taking him from his work, and Lizette.

  *

  Koos Snyman occasionally had need to employ Nels of Research Associates for his irregular and more aggressive assignments, but he did so reluctantly. Cornelius Nels had joined the South African Army in 1965, two years before the introduction of national service, and considered himself fortunate to have had a gratifyingly violent career. He had tracked and fought insurgents in South West Africa, had sadistically instructed paratroopers, and had joined ambitious Special Forces units called Battle Group or Task Force. He had been happy but not complete, and not until he joined Military Intelligence and specialised in interrogation did he find his true vocation. Good at the job, his reward, after a particularly challenging operation in which his innovative technique impressed a general, had been to set up a Military Intelligence cover company for deniable special projects. He called it Research Associates, although he became the only associate and did little research, and gratefully pocketed the proceeds of genuine contracts, like his work for Koos Snyman.

  They met outside Tramps in the basement of The Diplomat, a central Johannesburg hotel. Nels, occasionally useful, threatened the doorman
when he refused access. Elanza had been in there, drunk and drugged. They heard her having sex with a man in a bathroom cubicle and afterwards an acrid smell crept under the door. When Nels burst in she had one foot on the toilet seat and was facing the wall, injecting into a vein on her hand with a shared needle. Nels lifted his elbow into the man’s face. Elanza, confused, screamed at him until he knocked her out with a punch to the side of her head and carried her from the club. Snyman, feeling sick, picked up a part-used packet of pink tablets and followed him.

  *

  The doctor came out of a bedroom in Snyman’s Westcliff house and walked past Nels leaning against the wall, gazing at Snyman’s wife Danelle. Thirteen years younger than Snyman, only just over forty, she still looked good. Nels decided that her only job, to look good for Snyman, got a little harder each year but she could still do it. It was early evening but she had been drinking wine all afternoon and flicked her hair flirtatiously as she noticed Nels looking at her, flattered that she could still be appreciated by someone.

  The doctor glanced at Snyman.

  “What’s Elanza’s age?”

  “Born 1956. She’s twenty-six.”

  “She’s sleeping now. The drug abuse is pretty long-standing.”

  “What is it?” Snyman asked.

  “It’s a prescription drug called Wellconal, a synthetic analgesic as strong as morphine. It’s for oral use and not intended for injection but they crush the tablets, mix it with water in a metal spoon and heat it up with a cigarette lighter to help it dissolve. It gives an intense rush for thirty seconds then a state of euphoria for about an hour. On the street it’s called Pinks.”

  “Nice. Sweet girl,” joked Nels.

  Snyman scowled at him.

  “There’s miosis from the intoxication but I’m worried in general about her vision.”

  “Hey, I didn’t hit her hard,” said Nels.

  The doctor and the lawyer stared at the soldier, and the drunk woman laughed into her wine glass.

  Nels looked at Danelle and speculated what it might take to get her into bed. His conclusion encouraged him.