Shelter Rock

by MP Miles

  Nels wasn’t smiling anymore. He was standing on a springboard ready to jump, tense but confident.

  “What money?” Mr Business asked, edging forward, his hands still in his pockets.

  “The money I gave you. You failed to do the job. I want it back.”

  Nels waited. He was ready now. Nels knew he had to stay on his feet. He had to keep moving and not get put on the floor and stamped on, at least until the odds against him had been reduced.

  “Plus interest,” he added.

  The big man came first. Nels was ready for the sucker punch. Perhaps the big man would imagine that Nels wasn’t aware what was happening.

  He looked at the man’s ear, weeping blood, and knew what he should do. He drove towards the big man with both elbows forward to dig in his chest and forearms up to snap his collarbones, forcing his way into a Muay Thai clinch with the man’s head held tightly between Nels’ arms, pulling the man down and forward into his chest.

  Nels held him, his hands linked behind the man’s head and his forearm grinding painfully against the damaged ear, controlling the man with his head held down and his posture bent, neutralising the man’s short punches and using his own knees on the man’s head and chest.

  The man in plaster was coming now, a short hardwood cudgel in his left hand. Nels locked the clinch and used leverage, gravity and the big man’s own bodyweight to turn him. He moved the big man between himself and the guy in plaster, who was reaching with the cudgel over the back of the big man, trying to reach Nels’ head but unable to get to him over his buddy’s back and tripping over the big man’s feet.

  Nels started knocking the big man backwards when he wanted to move him, always keeping the big man between himself and his other opponent. The big man would then push back towards Nels, making it easier to turn him, changing the clinch from a defensive move into an attacking one.

  Nels started alternating heel kicks to the stomach and knee cap of the man in plaster, with continuing knees to the head and face of the big man in the clinch, constantly moving as in a dance. The big man’s short useless punches were slowing. Nels could feel the effort draining out of him and intensified his own knee action, making good contact to the man’s jaw, knowing it was just a matter of time before he scored a knock-out blow.

  It came sooner than he expected, a lucky strike to the side of the man’s head made him collapse in a dead weight. Nels supported him for a while then dropped him to the ground. Nels quickly stood side-on to the man with the cudgel and used his forward leg to kick his shin, keeping some distance between them. Nels stretched forward underneath the man’s left side, twisting and pinning the arm with the cudgel against Nels’ shoulder as he reached behind the man’s head with his other arm, pushing him away and down and in complete control. The man screamed and let go of the cudgel. Nels grabbed his right arm by the metal bridge between the bolts protruding from the plaster cast. He held it like a handle and swung the man’s already broken bones against the wall. He fell with a whimper and lay still. Nels quickly went to the big man on the floor and kicked him repeatedly in the face with the flat of his foot and his heel. Two down.

  When he turned around Mr Business was very close. Nels had been wrong about the knife. Instead he had a spike for stabbing, matt black, the handle round and ridged like a rifle’s fore-stock for better grip, the spike triangular in cross-section and sharpened to a point. The spike and handle were one piece of painted steel, the whole thing not more than twelve inches in length. Mr Business held it firmly, the spike pointing up at forty-five degrees and level with Nels’ chest.

  Nels had watched real knife fights. An attack with a knife was savage and brutal and scary, the blade seldom used to cut or slash but in a frenzied repeated stabbing action. Mr Business obviously had worthwhile experience and had chosen his weapon with some thought.

  Nels’ rule of thumb was to get close to a gun and keep distance from a knife. Nels didn’t have the luxury of choice on this occasion, the spike now inches from a point underneath his sternum. His barroom discussions about knife attacks always ended with a simple question: trap or strike? Some said trap the hand holding the knife, others said to forget the weapon and strike the man. Nels had further refined his preferred course of action. It depended on distance. If the knife was close, trap the hand, if further away strike the man. In Nels’ extensive studies of the subject one other thing had emerged. Energy and rage can be crippling.

  Nels stared at Mr Business with eyes wide and screamed at him, forcing blood into his red face, his veins pulsing. He punched the hand holding the spike then grabbed it and pulled it against his own body, trapping it, then attacked hard and fast Mr Business’s head with punches, using only the points of his knuckles. Trap and strike, trap and strike.

  Mr Business was wiry and strong for his size, twisting his spike hand to free it and reaching for Nels’ throat with the other. It turned into a frantic furious wrestle, both men screaming and spitting.

  Nels tried pushing him then quickly stepped back, pulling him forward by the hand holding the spike. Mr Business stumbled slightly. It was enough. Nels quickly let go of the hand, stepped backwards and flicked his left foot powerfully into the man’s groin. Mr Business fell on to both knees, still holding the spike.

  Nels talked to him like a friend, as though he wanted to help.

  “Tell me now,” he said gently. “Where did he go?”

  “The aerodrome.”

  “What?” said Nels cheerily. “Are you playing a little game with me?”

  Mr Business vomited and choked.

  “He came out of the airport where the big planes are and got on a bus. Then he got off and walked towards the aerodrome where the little planes go,” he sighed. “Wilson Aerodrome.”

  “Oh, okay. I’ve got it now.”

  Nels took a step backwards and with the opposite foot kicked him hard under the chin. His head twisted away and he lay down, beaten, the spike rolling on the bare concrete floor.

  Nels stood and looked around, exhaling in short gasps, looking for the woman. She’d gone. He turned towards the bar and picked up all the money, stuffing the three piles of notes that Mr Business had been counting into his pocket.

  “For services rendered,” he said to himself. “Pest control.”

  He pulled a chair against the wall next to an exposed joist for the floor above and dragged Mr Business to it, hanging him ceremoniously by the thick gold chain around his neck.

  When he’d finished, the woman was standing in front of him. Nels looked at her curiously, a little impressed. She was quite pretty, with Afro-Indian hair that had been straightened then curled into ringlets at her shoulders. Long clear plastic earrings hung halfway down her neck. She had a very short black and white dress in a close zebra stripe pattern that hung off one shoulder and clung to her body. The panga that she held raised in two hands was broad and blunt on the backside, the blade sharpened on the inside. It looked more like a machete than a cutlass, with a sturdy black plastic hand grip, Nels imagined good for cutting fruit from a tree or felling sugar cane. She was unsteady on high heels that bent her feet grotesquely at the toes.

  Nels put both his hands up, moving them about to distract her, looking in her eyes not at the weapon, talking loudly and quickly. She took a half step backwards. It was what Nels had been waiting for. Perfect range. He did a wide outside kick at her fingers, like a crescent kick but aimed and with some follow through. The panga clattered to the floor. Before she could move he punched her hard in the throat, her larynx compressing with the force of the blow. She bent at the waist, both hands clutching her neck, and rolled onto her side as if asleep.

  Nels turned to the door and checked the time. Midday. He wondered what was for lunch at the Norfolk.

  *

  Roux found Angel retired hurt, nursing wounds in his subterranean office at the Comitia.

  “
Christ. What happened to you?”

  Angel wasn’t sure what to tell him. In Nairobi he’d staggered to the screeching man holding the side of his face and held him by the good ear. He’d talked Swahili. Asked him why? Who? The man could give no name. A man, square with a fat neck, had given them money. Angel had drawn a figure in the dust and pointed to his arm. The man nodded. When Angel had looked around, Ralph had disappeared.

  “I believe Nels recruited some local hitmen. You can get them in the nightclubs on the River Road. He probably gave them a hundred dollars each to get Ralph. They took their job seriously. I had to intervene, and when it was over Ralph had gone.”

  Roux nodded. “It wouldn’t have been too difficult for Nels’ hitmen to find Ralph in Nairobi.”

  “No. They would have found him the same way I would have: asked around. There aren’t too many places a young budget traveller would stay. I mean, he wouldn’t be in the Norfolk.”

  “That was my fault.”

  Angel shrugged.

  “Can we do anything about Cornelius Nels?” he asked.

  Roux and Lombard were fighting to make sure the Service became the leading intelligence provider, but Military Intelligence also had the ear of the Prime Minister. Lombard knew that intelligence was power and that it could be manipulated to provide the Prime Minister with whatever view the proponent wanted to encourage. The Defence Force had the view that all South Africa’s problems were due to communist influence and that revolutionary armies supported by the Soviets should be controlled in the buffer zones of the border countries. The military also had a huge home-grown defence industry, Armscor, to protect and promote. Sometimes it was necessary to exaggerate the threats to justify the development of Armscor’s exceedingly costly defence systems. The National Intelligence Service’s view was that the problem with African National Congress sponsored terrorism had always been an internal one and would only be resolved by a political solution, not a military one. A hard-fought agreement made in Simon’s Town to thrash out which agency provided what intelligence had been annulled by the head of Military Intelligence before the ink had dried. Lombard maintained influence with Botha only through the quality, reliability and impartiality of his Service’s intelligence analysis, thanks to people like Angel. Highlighting the illegalities of a Military Intelligence operative was not going to encourage harmony and cooperation between the two departments, and now was not the time for the National Intelligence Service to be the cause of a return to the turf wars with the Defence Force that had preceded the Simon’s Town agreement. Nels would have to wait.

  “No. There’s a political dimension.”

  Angel scoffed.

  “Isn’t there always?”

  “So, what’s he like?”

  “Ralph?”

  Roux nodded.

  “I like him. He’s a bit like I was at his age, but not so good-looking.”

  He touched the side of his face, put two fingers on a dressing taped above his eye.

  “In what ways is he like you?”

  “Well, like me, he’s modest.”

  “Ha ha. Funny.”

  “He’s a little naive, but not stupid. Laid-back, but not slow. You feel that he’s always thinking, there’s always stuff going on in his head.”

  Angel thought of his own childhood in England, the wet yellow stone of the school building, the way boys did well at exams or in sport without any visible effort having been made, without any preparation. At school you were expected to do well but ideally without trying too hard.

  “Perhaps it’s the education system over there.”

  “Anything else?”

  Angel remembered the trip through Uganda, police all around but Ralph staying calm, monitoring their progress past the hydro-electric plant on the Nile crossing at Jinja.

  “He’s observant of what’s around him – physical things and places.”

  Like the rocket engine test facility at Rooi-Els and the missile site at Overberg? Roux wondered.

  Angel thought about their conversation and Ralph’s parting comments.

  “He’s empathetic about people. Including me.”

  Roux looked at the maps covering the wall, now of the whole of Africa.

  “It sounds like he’d make a good spy.”

  Angel smiled.

  “Is he going to be okay?” asked Roux.

  “Well, he hasn’t much money. He told me he had fifty dollars but I think he lied. I’d say he had some hidden away. At a guess he may have a couple of hundred still. He’s been living and travelling cheaply until now.”

  “That’s not going to last long. He’s over halfway but still has a long way to go,” said Roux.

  He wondered if he should mention Lombard’s concern about the photographs of Rooi-Els and Overberg, the worry that Ralph may have been working for a British agent called Zac, the truthful status of South Africa’s nuclear programme. Of all the secrets he’d kept during his career this one troubled him the most. It was a secret he wanted to throw away, as though he had hold of something that burnt his flesh.

  “The police stole his camera, the bag and all his film,” he said.

  “Which police?”

  “The South African Police. Our police.”

  “Why?”

  “It was before he met Elanza, while he worked at The Diplomat hotel in Joburg. They thought he might be involved with people from the club in the basement. They were hoping he’d have some gay porn.”

  “Ralph’s not gay,” said Angel.

  “If you get the opportunity, slip him some money without his knowledge, just so that South Africa has reimbursed him, so to speak.”

  Angel laughed.

  “I thought South Africa would be giving him lots of money.”

  Roux shrugged.

  “Who knows? That’s in the future. It sounds like he needs a little advance right now.”

  “Why are we helping him?”

  “South Africa is not helping him. I personally still think he’s just a lost kid wandering around. I told the boss that at the beginning.”

  Roux looked at the maps.

  “Any ideas?” Roux asked him.

  “I went to the airline check-in to ask if they remembered Ralph and knew of his plans. They have a small station at Nairobi, just two girls and an English manager. The girl who’d been working at the time was off-duty and the manager didn’t want to talk to me. Piel kop.”

  Roux laughed.

  “My first assumption is that he’ll go north overland, try to get all the way to Cairo and then across Europe. That’s what I’d do.”

  “What if he flies back to Johannesburg from Nairobi and uses his original ticket?” Roux asked.

  “I checked with Zelda at SAA to see if he’d done that. Now it’s too late. The flight he had a ticket for has already gone and he won’t have enough money to buy another one.”

  “What about going to Mombasa and then taking a sea route through Suez?”

  “He knows nothing about the sea or working on a ship. I don’t think that option would even cross his mind. Even if he thought of it I’m not sure that it would be viable. Not many captains would take on crew at a port like Mombasa.”

  Angel moved to the map on the wall.

  “I don’t think he’ll go back into Uganda so his most likely route is out through the top of Kenya, here, to the west of Lake Turkana and then follow the Nile through Sudan and Egypt.”

  “Who are you going to ask to help?”

  Angel thought about their options, about who he could ask.

  His first thought was the British, a small but highly professional service with an incomparable network of agents in North Africa. They set the standard for espionage. There were some problems though between the South Africans and the British. Angel’s agency had a stormy relationship with th
e British due to South Africa misusing diplomatic cover in the 1970s. Their relations with them had been slowly improving but the British focused on providing espionage training to newly independent African states who were developing their own intelligence services. In the process they could recruit the best students to work for them. When these freshly minted intelligence agents went home and found themselves in positions close to the heads of new states, they could report back to their friends in London. The British were very keen to find out more about South Africa’s nuclear ambitions and Angel, London born, would have been an obvious target for them to develop as a source deep within the South African security apparatus. Angel felt sure that if he contacted them his own counter-intelligence team, the Heining, would quickly be all over him.

  In the past the United States had been very active within South Africa, aware of the economic opportunities for investment and, contrary to outward appearances, maintained financial and cultural links with the apartheid government. A tip-off from an American agent had led to Nelson Mandela’s arrest. Everyone knew, however, that the African National Congress had historically maintained close friendships with countries such as Libya, and various Islamic revolutionary and fundamentalist Middle Eastern states, and that these were unstable sponsors of terrorism. The Americans, like the British, were now keen to make sure that the ANC should never get access to South African nuclear weapons and missile technology. Angel’s personal view was that the Americans had an arrogant and decadent way of living, and no matter how much cash they threw around they didn’t make especially good spies, or spy masters, in the gritty places of Africa. The Germans struggled in Africa but the German BND had helped train the old South African Bureau for State Security. In return for information about ANC members being trained by the Stasi in East Germany, NIS helped them where they could.

  NIS had, however, established sometimes very complex liaison channels with other intelligence services in Africa, usually by placing agents operating under cover of private business concerns. Crucial to the success of such liaisons was building strong interpersonal relationships, often over bottles of good Cape wine. NIS concentrated on ‘the big five’: Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Zambia… and Egypt.