Shelter Rock

by MP Miles

  “Something like that, sir.”

  Lombard looked at the file.

  “Lots of training.”

  He looked at Angel.

  “It must have been especially tough for you.”

  “They made it tough for everybody, sir.”

  “And then Cassinga.”

  Angel said nothing.

  “Why?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Why? Why do any of it? Why here? Why South Africa?”

  The question had been asked before, often in basic training, every day during the rigours of parachute selection, constantly since Cassinga; a question asked by comrades, demonic instructors, probing personnel officers, students. He’d often asked himself the same question and it troubled him that he didn’t know the answer. It became an untranslatable problem, like Finnish or Hungarian, a language not related to any other. The Army had been school but with slightly stricter masters; had been friendships forged in the dust and heat. The Army had been all he’d known.

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  At one point during selection they’d been given a twenty-four-hour ration pack to last for three days of extreme physical tasks, the strongest of ‘wannabes’ giving up from pain and hunger and exhaustion.

  “It must have been the quality of the food.”

  Lombard looked at him. Angel held his stare.

  “Who is the ‘someone’, sir?”

  Lombard sighed.

  “A soutie kid.”

  Angel laughed to himself. Lombard hated the English. He had used a derogatory term for someone with one foot in England, one foot in South Africa and their salty penis dangling in the Atlantic Ocean.

  “Of course. A kid.”

  Lombard put on his glasses and started to read a blue file.

  “Why?” Angel asked.

  “Does it matter why? It’s a job. Find him. Follow him. Tell us.”

  “So, that’s the job, sir?”

  “That’s the job.”

  Angel looked at Lombard.

  “With respect, there are better people at this. I’m doing important work.”

  Lombard looked out of the window. He was tired and spoke softly, as if to a tutor group rather than a lecture theatre.

  “The kid is going to inherit money. A lot of money. South African money.”

  He looked at Angel and spoke more firmly.

  “I need a linguist and I need someone who can…” he hesitated, “blend in. You blend in.”

  Roux smiled. Angel looked at him, puzzled.

  “Blend in where?”

  Roux made a wide gesture with his arms high.

  “Africa,” he said.

  *

  Lombard knew that he and Rots were academics, neither of them politicians. He understood that was a naive analysis as everyone played political games at work, pursuing promotion and influence and power. Everyone except Rots, and that troubled him.

  “Can you give us a moment, Rots?”

  “Professor,” said Angel, respectfully.

  “Doctor,” said Lombard.

  Lombard threw Angel’s file on the desk.

  “Did you know that our Prime Minister, The Big Crocodile, once joined a group sympathetic to the Nazis?”

  Roux snorted.

  “Yes. I hear he gave it up quickly when they started losing.”

  A demonstration had started in the street outside, police vehicles growling like dogs. Lombard looked at Roux. They had become friends while colleagues and trusted each other’s judgement.

  “Is he really the best you’ve got?”

  “Rots is a fine analyst and an exceptional linguist. I wish I had more like him. We can listen in on the ANC and others in Lusaka and elsewhere, but the enemies of the state rarely do us the courtesy of plotting and scheming in Afrikaans.”

  It was a true but insensitive point to make with Lombard, who hardly even spoke English. Unfamiliar with it he found himself nervous and worried about looking like a fool. As a boy he’d been taught not to speak the language of the conqueror.

  Lombard picked up the file again. Outside, police reinforcements began arriving in smoky black trucks.

  “Is Rots safe? Is counter-intelligence happy with him? I mean, he’s technically a dual national; he must have friends over there. Didn’t he even go to school with the buffoon Cameron, that British Security Service guy responsible for non-proliferation? The vet fokker we met in New York.”

  To Lombard, their opposite numbers in British Intelligence were as much the enemy as the ANC.

  “What do they call him?” Lombard asked.

  “Jumbo.”

  “Jumbo the clown,” Lombard snorted. “Well, the British would love to have Rots working for them on the inside at NIS. He would be priceless.”

  “His service record is exemplary. There’s nothing to prove he’s had contact with anyone in London, and the work I’ve had him doing is totally Africa-based and ANC-focused to make use of his language skills. Nothing overly sensitive.”

  Both Lombard and Roux knew that Britain’s real interest was the state of South Africa’s nuclear capabilities and ambitions.

  “If he’s the best you’ve got, you’re going to need him. But that won’t happen if he beats up police officers on the street.”

  “I have talked to him about that. I’ll remind him.”

  “I don’t think I’ll bother the PM with this now,” said Lombard. “There are more important things going on. Keep an eye on it and we’ll see what develops. It seems rather a waste of Angel’s time.”

  Roux wasn’t so sure. He’d be sorry to lose Angel, his most useful member of staff, but somehow he didn’t consider this to be a waste of anyone’s time.

  “It’ll be good for him to know we can put him on more routine assignments. Let him cool his heels for a bit. Stop him fighting with policemen.”

  “When did all this come to light?” asked Lombard.

  “Yesterday.”

  “A Sunday? You’ve moved quickly.”

  “I know. My wife’s furious.”

  Roux had called the office from the club. He’d given them a name, Ralph Phillips, British, from Gillingham in Dorset, and gone to watch his daughters play tennis. Within an hour they’d called him back with a police surveillance report and talk of a bunch of photographs. He’d given up on his Sunday afternoon with the family and driven to work. Then it had become a bit busy. The duty staff had been expecting a quiet day but instead found themselves disturbing colleagues across the country and overseas. The Cape Town crew had to drive to Worcester to talk to Ralph’s cousin, while Joburg found the hotel where the boy had been working and his digs easily enough but hadn’t got to an Austrian printer called Franz until late at night. Pretoria had sat on top of grumpy police officers, and the London office suffered a three-hour drive down the A303 on a miserably cold and wet Sunday afternoon. The nightshift had pestered them for information every hour until daybreak.

  “This English kid,” Lombard said. “He’s been wandering around the country. Is he working for anyone?”

  “We wondered that. He fits the profile. He had an IQ test aged eleven and subsequently went to a grammar school, a selective system for the top ten per cent, intellectually speaking. Very quiet at school. Didn’t stand out. Just a few close friends. A bit of a loner really; not a big team player. More squash than rugby. Content as a boy to wander on his own through fields with an air gun. Did some time in the Army Cadet Force in his early teens but gave it up when he found motorbikes and cars. He has an unfulfilled ambition to fly aeroplanes.”

  Lombard smiled.

  “He sounds just like me.”

  “The Security Branch of the South African Police have shown some interest in him. There’s a gay bar they monitor in the basement of the hotel he�
��s been working at, illegally they have reminded me. They lifted his camera bag with film rolls from his room at the YMCA looking for pornography. I’ve seen the pictures. There’s nothing much other than normal holiday shots.”

  “I expect the South African Police enjoyed the gay bar.”

  Roux smiled.

  “I think he’s just a lost kid, doesn’t know exactly what to do with his life, wandering around hoping to find inspiration. And there’s no record of the British using untrained youngsters. That’s not to say that he isn’t talking to a handler, maybe without even knowing.”

  “But talking to a handler about what?”

  Roux had asked himself the same question. Ralph Phillips had been in the country for two and a half months. He’d stayed with a cousin in the Cape, walked most of the way to Johannesburg and worked in a hotel. He’d had no access to anything of interest.

  “Exactly my thoughts,” agreed Roux. “Without them being aware of it we’ve spoken to people he’s been in contact with: the cousin, her employer, an Austrian national with whom he travelled from East London, the owner of the hotel in Johannesburg, the manager of the YMCA. The Austrian also told us they’d travelled with a homeless drug dealer and petty thief called Zac, possibly Zimbabwean. Neither us nor the police could trace him.”

  “You said ‘nothing much’ other than holiday shots.”

  Roux looked at Lombard intently.

  “Ralph walked the coast from Cape Town to East London,” Roux said and hesitated. “There were a disproportionate number of photographs of just two places. Over half the pictures were taken at Rooi-Els and Overberg.”

  Lombard remained silent for a long time, his hand on his forehead.

  “So, this is the real reason you want to send Rots,” he asked, finally.

  “One of them,” Roux agreed.

  “The police say anything?”

  “No. They wouldn’t know the significance of what they were looking at.”

  “He walked through Overberg?”

  “Right along the beach by the looks of it.”

  “Christ. You need to get on him.”

  Lombard looked out of the window, deep in thought. Policemen with batons and dogs stood resolute, four deep across the road, preparing to advance.

  “What happened to the Zimbabwean? Zac?”

  “He stole the Austrian’s passport, Franz something, and got on a flight to Frankfurt two weeks ago. We asked the German BND to check. No one entered Germany under that name. They think he may have travelled on to Tel Aviv. I’ve just spoken to Lev at The Institute.”

  “Holy Christ.”

  Lombard never swore.

  “The boy is just a tourist, travelling around,” said Roux.

  “You hope.”

  Lombard and Roux were aware how high the stakes had now become for South Africa, and Lombard frowned as he contemplated their position. For ultimate defence South Africa needed the ultimate deterrent, and their nuclear ambitions had started in 1948. South Africa’s first uranium plant had opened by 1952 and uranium enrichment research continued through the 1960s, aided from clandestine studies by South African and Pakistani engineers at the University of Birmingham, England. By 1977 they had produced a scale model of a ‘gun-type’ device using non-nuclear material, followed by construction of bore holes in the Kalahari Desert in preparation for a full test. The problem of how to deliver such a weapon hadn’t been resolved and became exacerbated by all fifteen members of the Security Council voting for Resolution 418, the 1977 United Nations arms embargo. Lombard knew that it had always been planned to drop the weapon from an Air Force bomber, but the UN embargo meant South Africa’s ageing Canberras and Buccaneers had become unreliable through a lack of spare parts and had become vulnerable to anti-aircraft defences. Missiles would eventually replace the tired aircraft. The small coastal town of Rooi-Els, across False Bay from Cape Town, had a secret rocket engine testing facility hidden in hills behind the beach and, when completed, the restricted Overberg Test Range on the beach east of Arniston would be a new weapons testing and missile launch facility.

  Lombard shook his head and scratched through papers on his desk while he pondered the current state of affairs. Overberg planned to continue the testing of Jericho One, a single-stage five-hundred-kilometre-range Israeli ballistic missile designed in conjunction with the French aerospace giant Dassault back in the early 1970s. More importantly, plans were underway for trials of a new three-stage long-range ballistic missile based on the Israeli Shavit, development of which, as the Jericho Two missile, had started in 1977. South Africa had codenamed it RSA Three. The first stage alone would make a missile called RSA One, which would have a range of 1,100 kilometres and be able to reach Angola from mobile launchers inside South Africa. Adding the second stage to make the RSA Two would extend the range to 1,900 kilometres. It could strike the ANC headquarters in Lusaka. The full rocket should, on paper, be intercontinental after a low earth orbit and deliver a payload to New York or Moscow.

  Lombard worried more about the ANC than imagining South Africa would ever send a rocket to the US or Russia. From Lusaka the ANC had organised a bombing the previous year against a power station in Durban that had paralysed industry in the area, followed by three separate sabotage attacks around the country. Not six months ago they had planned and executed an attack using Soviet rockets against a military base near Pretoria, not seven kilometres from Lombard’s desk.

  But Lombard knew that South Africa couldn’t threaten to destroy the ANC in their Zambian headquarters until the missiles became operational. For now, the payloads, although originally designed to be transported by aircraft, were to be delivered not by bombers but fired like an artillery shell by a howitzer cannon capable of firing ‘special’ rounds to a target just fifty kilometres away. They hadn’t yet acquired the technology to do this and it was becoming increasingly difficult. The previous year the founder and president of Space Research Corporation, a Canadian company that straddled the Canadian and US border in Vermont, had been arrested for illegally exporting arms to South Africa in violation of United Nations’ embargoes. They had been caught with falsified documents while shipping two howitzer cannons and a radar tracking system on board the motor vessel Tugelaland to South Africa via an island in the Caribbean. Lombard remembered the PM had been furious about it and they doubted that the necessary equipment would ever be smuggled into the country.

  Unlike the Air Force bombers, both the Canadian cannon and the Israeli missiles were ‘viable’ nuclear weapons delivery platforms. It was Monday, 1st March, 1982, Armscor just a month away from producing South Africa’s first deliverable atomic bomb. They called it Hobo.

  Roux, aware of what he had been thinking, tried to reassure him.

  “He’s just travelling.”

  “Well, he’s found something while travelling around,” Lombard said. “And I’m not talking about the money. You most definitely need to get on him.”

  Lombard thought for a moment. Outside, the police appeared to have the rioters under control.

  “Do you think he knows about the money?”

  An unanswerable silence filled the room.

  “And if something should happen to him, who gets the money? The estate managed by the lawyer?”

  Still silence.

  “I should give Rots some of the details,” said Roux. “The boy has got days on him but he’s on foot. Rots has just got to find him and keep us informed. Anyway, we’ll have a chance to talk to the boy when he comes back to Johannesburg to fly home.”

  “Say nothing about the photographs,” said Lombard seriously. “To anyone.”

  He then smiled.

  “And tell Rots—”

  Roux interrupted him.

  “I know. I’ll tell him to blend in. I hope this kid blends in too because without knowing it he’s just become a big fat target for
some very unpleasant people.”

  Roux opened the door but hesitated and turned around.

  “There’s something else, Professor.”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s another reason why I think it would be best to use Rots for this.”

  Roux passed a black and white photograph to Lombard.

  “More of the boy’s holiday snaps?”

  “No, these are different. They came from the Heining. A routine counter-intel investigation.”

  Lombard looked at the picture. It had been taken in the countryside, somewhere by farm buildings with rocky hills behind – a black man talking and a white man listening intently.

  “Where did they take this?” he asked.

  “Shelter Rock, out near Harties Dam. Apparently he likes to go hillwalking at weekends. Usually alone.”

  “Pelindaba?”

  “Near there.”

  Lombard studied the photograph. The black man had long hair, the white man as well, but full and wild, like a mane that matched his unkempt beard.

  Roux gave him another photograph, an enlargement showing only the white man.

  Lombard looked at it and waved it at him.

  “We obviously know one of them, but the white guy? Who is he?”

  Roux sighed.

  “I looked hard at the picture and something about him rang a bell. We don’t have a definite ID but we think he’s British, and the Austrian we’ve been talking about confirmed that it’s the man who called himself Zac.”

  Lombard stood at the window. The demonstration had been broken up. White smoke, a gas full of tears, drifted down the street.

  Seven

  Angel found the Pretoria Country Club in Waterkloof and through the main entrance saw Roux with some cheerful friends. Sullen girls dressed as French maids and a thin tired barman gloomily polished glasses.

  A security guard with black peaked cap, black uniform and glossy black boots, but everything else about him very white, put his hand on Angel’s chest as he walked towards the bar.

  “Where do you think you’re going? Side entrance for deliveries.”

  Angel swore at himself for his thoughtlessness. He expected that Roux’s summons to the club was really to discuss his future in the Service after the unfortunate incident with the policemen. He didn’t need any more trouble.