by MP Miles
Orders were given and a sand model of the town constructed in an old cowshed. Maps and photos covered the walls. Specific orders were given about children. They were not to shoot children. Security remained tight at the camp after orders. The next day they loaded on to buses for the airfield to be flown to a staging area in South West Africa.
“We joked as we waited, imitating our Captain, ‘And don’t shoot the children’.”
Angel moved his arm from her shoulder. She lay with her head in his lap, her head turned away. Angel stroked her hair and pushed it behind her ear.
“It was a false alarm. A staff car came to a halt in a cloud of dust beside the lead bus. The operation would be postponed for forty-eight hours. It was all too familiar. Hurry up and wait. Same in any army.”
For two days, they continued with training but it felt more like an effort just to keep them busy. Their peak had been reached and passed. A platoon commander took them to see the model in the cowshed – ‘Political reasons’ was his explanation of the delay. At the end of the forty-eight hours they were informed of a further twenty-four-hour delay. A Canberra had overflown the town and seen a new camp being erected, probably to accommodate people for the May Day Parade.
“My platoon had the specific task of clearing this new camp. They suspected that our reconnaissance flights had been observed and up to five hundred new recruits with Cuban instructors brought in for additional defence.”
While the politicians agonised over the operation, the soldiers waited in the wind and the dust. A rumour started that the Minister of Defence had been the cause of the delay, asking for a more detailed briefing so that he could field questions afterwards. And then they were having to wait until a debate on South West Africa at the UN had ended, to make it easier and less embarrassing for nations favourable to South Africa. And then because of heightened tensions in Angola for May Day. Whatever the reason, on the 3rd of May, the cabinet finally approved the plan. The order, ‘Execute Reindeer’, had been given. D-Day was the 4th of May.
“At 1600 on D minus One we flew 1,300 kilometres over Botswana. We landed after dark and spent the night in a hangar. Few of us slept.”
Elanza moved her head in his lap.
“Were you scared?” she asked.
“We were young and invincible. I’d say we were anxious to get it over but not scared. We were the best; no one could hurt us.”
At 0400 they started fitting equipment. As well as two days of dry rations they had three water bottles and ten magazines with twenty rounds each, the second from last round a tracer so that they knew when to change. They had grenades that fragmented, grenades that made smoke and grenades that just burnt people. The older soldiers called them Willie Petes – white phosphorous. They straightened the pins on the grenades to make them easier to pull out and then taped over the ring to avoid accidental detonation. Their standard rifle was the R1 but with a folding stock to make it less cumbersome during the drop. The R1, identical to the Belgian FN and known to the British Army as the self-loading rifle, was made under licence in South Africa by Armscor. It was a very powerful assault rifle. Its 7.62-millimetre bullet could go through a brick wall and still kill someone on the other side. Some of them had separate bags containing radios, mortars or medical kit attached by a line that could be dropped after the parachute had opened, dangling below.
Two hours before the drop they boarded, and the aircraft headed north. A complex series of air movements had started that they never witnessed but saw the effects of when they hit the ground: five Buccaneers armed with eight one-thousand-pound bombs, another Buccaneer with seventy-two rockets to give support to them on the ground, Canberra B12 bombers fully loaded with three tons of a special type of anti-personnel bomb, their own transport aircraft, and then the first helicopter movements.
“The first of us to be inside Angola arrived on board the helicopters, establishing an area for extraction and refuelling on isolated and deserted bushland twenty-two kilometres east of Cassinga. Ten men went to protect the site, along with the Mobile Air Operations Team, two hundred-litre drums of aviation fuel, and the Chief of the Army, determined to see it all for himself. More men, more fuel and medical teams joined them. And a single Intelligence officer.”
The Air Force also had an aircraft fitted for electronic warfare to jam the Cuban and SWAPO radio transmissions, and a spotter aircraft. They hoped that electronic jamming might delay the arrival of Cuban reinforcements from a camp fifteen kilometres to the south of Cassinga. The Air Force wasn’t keen on risking its valuable fighters as the Cubans had MIGs in the area, but the last-minute intelligence on the new tented camp area persuaded them that they had to use the fighters for ground attack.
The bombers arrived late. Two minutes. Not that it mattered much to the people on the ground.
“It was 0802, the morning muster parade. Almost the whole camp gathered on the parade square. Four thousand people having their usual morning meeting – who went to work in which field, who to make shelters, who to accommodate the flow of refugees. We deliberately timed our attack for that occasion. It was part of our plan. Senior commanders were on parade; almost everyone was in the same location at the same time.”
The four Canberra bombers came in at five hundred feet, textbook RAF and NATO practice. They’d trained to the same standard. Each aircraft carried three hundred bomblets. They only had one use; they were the most effective anti-personnel bombs ever made. Each ten-kilogram finless bomb was a round, black, rubberised container about the size of a football, filled with explosive and steel balls. They hit the ground, primed themselves and bounced back into the air, detonating at thirty feet above the target. They called them Alpha bombs. The effect of 1,200 of them, unexpectedly, in a parade ground of four thousand people was to sow havoc. People were literally shredded to pieces, indiscriminately. Four Buccaneers with thirty-two one-thousand-pound bombs followed, precision bombers. There seemed little point in being precise after the Alpha bombs. One of the jets attacked the new camp using thirty-millimetre-high explosive fragmentation shells against canvas tents.
“The combined effect upon Cassinga was catastrophic, like poking an ant’s nest with a stick. Smoke, flames, dust, bodies, fleeing people, confusion and terror. People alive in the ruined buildings were unsure where to step, the floors covered in blood.”
Elanza gripped his leg.
“Angel, that’s terrible. So indiscriminate.”
“It was war, Elanza. It happens in every war. That’s what we told ourselves afterwards anyway.”
“And you believe that now, Angel?”
Angel shrugged.
“I was just a soldier, Elanza, doing what I was told.”
“I don’t believe you. I think it shocked you. I hope it shocked you.”
Angel said nothing.
“What happened then?” she asked.
Angel felt tired, as he had then. With eyes closed and limp hands he told her everything: of children ripped by cannon fire while sheltering in canvas tents, of corpses littering a trench, of a baby girl alive and unhurt under a grisly pile of bodies, of his own Intelligence officer chopping off a man’s arm and pushing a flailing prisoner from the helicopter.
Elanza rubbed the back of her hand over her eyes.
“And the women and children? You shot them?”
Angel couldn’t lie to her.
“Some of them, Elanza.”
“That is so sad, Angel,” Elanza said, her face wet. He wiped her cheek with his sleeve.
“But the baby girl. You saved her, Angel.”
“Maybe. Who knows.”
“No, Angel. You saved her. I know.”
Angel held her tightly.
“The Intelligence officer. Bastard,” Elanza hissed. “Who was it? You should have reported him to someone.”
Her anger surprised him.
“You kno
w him, Angel,” Elanza said. “It was the instructor who killed the tattooist. The one who fractured a man’s skull with a rock. You told me about him when we met. You know his name.”
“Yes, Elanza, I know his name.”
Her fingernails dug into his arm.
“He chopped that man’s arm off. He pushed another man to his death from the helicopter,” she hesitated, spitting out the words. “You know his name.”
“His name, Elanza, was Nels.”
Elanza bent forward, wilting, her head in both hands. Angel held her tightly.
“Finish it, Angel,” she said quietly. “Tell it all.”
“The next day we flew back to Bloemfontein. After a day to write reports and hand back equipment we were demobilised and sent home. Two days after the raid we were back at home for the weekend and then at work on Monday morning. In the middle of a lecture I looked at my hands, the dirt of Cassinga still engrained in them, the blood from children in the pile outside Dimo’s house still under my fingernails.”
“What happened to Dimo?” Elanza asked.
“He got away. There were two hours after the initial air attack and before we’d recovered from the bad drop and could encircle the town. Plenty of time. We came away with nothing. Not Dimo, not Greenwell, no prisoners. Just a few documents so we could prove to the world that what we had done was justified. In the end the whole thing could have been done by the Air Force. They could have bombed it flat and we might have stayed at work. The result would have been the same. They called it ‘a jewel of military craftsmanship’. It was a game, a stupid game of pride to show ourselves how strong we were. The generals wanted to demonstrate their worth and the Minister of Defence wanted the power and the glory.”
“Who was that?”
“The Minister of Defence? He’s now our Prime Minister. Botha.”
“Did we do those things? Was it all for nothing?”
Angel didn’t answer for a while.
“No one is sure how many we killed. We had three dead, one probably drowned when he dropped into the river, a dozen injured, some seriously, but none of them died. Six more had minor injuries from the actual drop itself. The closest estimate is that 624 Africans died, of whom 167 were women and 298 teenagers and children. A further 611 were wounded, but some may have crawled into the bush and were never found. Maybe 150 Cubans died, mostly in the air strikes on the armoured column of reinforcements. They’ve never admitted the number.”
He moved and sat upright.
“They gave us R1s; 7.62 millimetre. You can shoot it through the wall of a house and it’ll kill. Trouble is, when you do that you can’t see who you’re killing.”
He breathed deeply.
“The worst thing were those damn Alpha bombs.”
Both Elanza and Angel were crying. He’d never talked to anyone about it.
“I saw plenty of women and children. Some of them civilians, a lot of them in uniform,” he said. “You can put a twelve-year-old boy in camouflage. You can give him a gun he can hardly carry. Did he have any choice? Does that make him a soldier? Is it right to kill him, to shred his small body with fragments of hot metal?”
Elanza held him tightly. He’d taken her on the journey with him, to a past he hadn’t wanted to revisit. He’d shared with her things he hadn’t shared with anyone else. He loved her and she would always love him back, no matter what.
*
“Angel, are you a spy?” Elanza asked.
It was a difficult question to answer. He worked for the National Intelligence Service, but in his experience espionage involved writing reports for others to read as Lombard and Roux were both keen on his department delivering intelligence reports daily. Angel was an analyst with language skills, and eighty per cent of the information he analysed came from open sources available to everyone. The remaining twenty per cent of the jigsaw puzzle came from covert sources, spies. Angel’s job meant turning all of this information into intelligence, and he didn’t need to know who had come by the information he had to analyse, or how they had come by it. He just needed to know that it had come from a reliable source.
He’d met some agent handlers in the department, but operational personnel usually had a job outside of NIS that they did openly as a disguise, sometimes for many years or their entire working lives, a ‘living cover’. And they looked like regular people; in fact, the more ordinary the better. If you thought of the person who would be least likely to be a spy, then he or she would be the best one for the job. Their wives, or husbands, and children usually had no idea. Good spies went to their graves without anyone ever knowing.
Real spies lived with the threat of exposure. Their handlers sat with sweaty palms in cafés waiting for an agent who might do what he’d promised or might not, but the agent had most to lose. Agents didn’t know, when they said goodbye to their kids when they left for school, if they would be home in the evening to see them, or never seen again by anyone. Real spies’ marriages broke down thanks to the hundreds of small lies that concealed unexplained absences and whispered phone calls. It often came as a surprise to themselves that they could lie so easily and so convincingly to their loved ones.
“I’m a translator and I write reports. Ralph’s gone. I’m still looking. I have some resources.”
Twenty-one
Nels sauntered along University Way, the Kenyan sun hot on the side of his face. He was in no hurry. He’d eaten breakfast at the Norfolk and it sat heavily in his stomach, slowing him. It was Nairobi’s historic and most expensive hotel but Nels hadn’t cared about the cost. He would include it in his bill to Snyman so ultimately the bitch Elanza was paying. The buffet, an excellent grill of gazelle, giraffe and zebra, cooked on coals, skewered on Maasai swords and served on cast-iron plates, had been excellent. He needed some time to digest and sat for a while in Jevanjee Gardens, wasting time, watching Africans with suspicion.
Nels could smell River Road to his left before he got there. He crossed over Moi Avenue at the end of Biashara Street to the Khoja Mosque, loudly decorated matutu taxis stopping and honking at him, the drivers maniacal and drugged. He stopped and scoffed at comical firemen in plumed hats on parade at an ecclesiastical looking fire station, a radio mast like a church tower on one corner. He glanced at his watch and found he was still a little early. He had planned on ten o’clock, when the bar should be quiet. Few people needed a mid-morning hooker.
The building was painted green at the bottom and pink on top. A large plastic palm tree hung above the entrance and a sign, hand painted, advertised ‘Night Club House’. Mr Business was counting money when Nels entered. He looked up from three piles of soiled notes, the filthy paper his grimy reward from a dirty trade. He recognised the large white man and smiled.
“Ah, my friend. Welcome back.”
Nels scanned the barroom. The large man with the facial burn was missing an ear, a gnarled stub of white cartilage and dried brown blood attracting flies to the side of his face which he didn’t bother to swat away. Another man sat on the couch next to a girl in tall shoes. He had a head wound and an arm roughly plastered with bolts sticking through linked by a metal bridge. Nels peered into the back of the room. There was no one standing against the wall. It was as quiet as he’d hoped. Just the four of them, and now himself.
Mr Business was cheerful.
“Good to see you,” he said, moving to stand in front of his money. “How are you?”
“Well, I guess I’m better than your two friends.”
Nels looked at the four of them, wondering about weapons. He worried about the girl. The large man was stupid enough to believe he didn’t need anything, that he could crush with his hands, his fingers like old wrenches in a tool set. The other man had plaster on his right arm. Nels knew from firearms training that only ten per cent are truly left-handed. He imagined the man could swing a club but it would be unwieldly and weak. Mr
Business could possibly be a shooter, but there was something guttural and classically street-gang-like about his ratty features that suggested a traditionalist, a knife man. He couldn’t decide on the woman and it troubled him.
Nels pointed to the two men.
“Did the boy do this to them?”
Mr Business put his hands in his front trouser pockets.
A knife man, thought Nels. I knew it.
“No, not the boy. You didn’t tell us that someone would be watching his back. I would have charged more money for that.”
Nels didn’t understand. He couldn’t think of anyone who might have an interest in protecting Ralph.
“A white man?” he asked. “Like me?”
“A black guy,” said Mr Business uneasily. “Strong. Very strong. With short hair.”
Nels smiled and out of the corner of his eye watched the man with his arm in plaster stand and casually put his hand on the back of the couch.
And you have the club, he thought, pleased at his own perception.
“So, I guess the boy got away, then.”
Mr Business didn’t speak and twitched his nose.
“Which way?” asked Nels.
“When he came out of the airport he got on a bus.”
“Out of the airport? You didn’t get him before?”
“No. He went in and then came out again and got on a bus.”
“A bus to where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Really?”
“Another three hundred might help me remember.”
Nels stared at him and deliberately spoke as he would to a child.
“It will be easier for you if you tell me now.”
Nels wondered about the big man, concerned he was sidling behind him. Nels looked around, still smiling, flexing his legs, loosening his wrists. He loved this moment, the time before action, the adrenaline building.
“Okay. He got away. Never mind. I’ll just take my money and I’ll be off.”