Shelter Rock

by MP Miles

  The Egyptian General Intelligence Directorate, more commonly known as the Mukhabarat, had some notable achievements, mostly directed at Israel. In 1970 it crippled an Israeli oil rig in transit from Canada to Sinai with explosives while right under the noses of Mossad and the CIA, and prior to the Yom Kippur war in 1973 the Egyptians concealed massive plans to invade Israeli-occupied Sinai by calculating the trajectories and timings of American spy satellites so that it could move military units into position without them being observed.

  “If my assumption is right he’s probably already out of Kenya.”

  He put his finger on the map. South Africa’s NIS had very little contact with the Sudanese, whose interests were domestic, the internal problems between the Muslim north and Christian south of their own country, and the Arab world. To the Sudanese the Republic of South Africa seemed a long way away.

  “There’s not much we can do in Sudan. It’s too volatile. I think I’ll call Alim in Cairo.”

  “I agree. Do it now.”

  Angel picked up the phone and turned on a desk speaker so that Roux could listen in.

  “Sabah il kheer, Alim. Kayfa halak.”

  “I’m fine thanks, Angel, and your Arabic is rusty.”

  “And how is the export–import business?”

  “We are very busy, Angel. The El-Nasr Company never rests. How can I help, my friend?”

  Roux didn’t speak Arabic. Agents like Angel Rots would be the future of the Intelligence community. Apartheid was unsustainable; everyone knew that even if they didn’t care to admit it. There would come a day when the majority would rule the country, and rule the Intelligence Service. When that time came Roux stood ready as a South African patriot to put the country first and to participate in a smooth transition, reaching out to those who many regarded as an enemy. He would need Angel Rots to contribute to the building of a new intelligence institution, one that served all the people in the country. Angel was more important to the future of South Africa than he might currently imagine.

  Roux walked to the wall and looked at the map. He tried to follow the course of the Nile in southern Sudan with his finger, but it was difficult to trace.

  Angel joined him at the map.

  “What is this town here in Sudan at the bottom of the river?” he asked.

  “Juba.”

  “Looks like the only thing around there.”

  “It is.”

  “Know anything about the place?”

  “It’s a regional administrative centre. About eighty thousand people. A big UN presence, aid workers tripping over each other doing good. Wet from April to October.”

  “Access?”

  “By air.”

  “No land access?”

  “Nothing at all to the east from Ethiopia; to the south there’s a road from Uganda but it’s in an atrocious condition and heavily mined by Amin; a road to the west eventually meets a railhead after about a thousand-kilometre detour; and to the north is the river. Juba is the end of the line for river barges coming south down the Nile from Khartoum.”

  “Or the start of a river barge going north,” Roux corrected him.

  “Exactly. Other than Sudan Airways the river is the only way out of there.”

  Roux scratched the side of his face.

  “You need to go there.”

  “What?”

  “I think you should go to Juba and look around.”

  “Why, Nick? Why is this so important?”

  “We’ve been through this, Angel. We want to know what happens to the money.”

  Angel threw his hands in the air.

  “I don’t get it. The money is a hundred and thirty million dollars. So what? What is our GDP? Eighty billion? Government expenditure must be twelve, fifteen billion. Ralph’s money is just a rounding error.”

  Roux looked at him.

  “Okay. Let’s look at it another way,” Roux said. “How about I’m your boss, that’s the job, and I want you to go? Will that do it?”

  Angel was shocked by his anger.

  “I’ve always had high hopes for you, Angel, but sometimes you should just shut up and do what you’re told.”

  Roux waved a finger at him.

  “You need to be grateful for the opportunities this country has given you.”

  He took a breath and exhaled forcefully.

  “You still have an identity not associated with South Africa and a cover story outside of the Service?”

  Angel nodded.

  “Use them. Go to Juba. Find the boy. Understood?”

  Roux turned back to the map on the wall and put a white shaking finger on southern Sudan.

  “This is just water everywhere,” Roux said.

  Roux had just had an idea. He’d have to run it by Lombard. It was brilliantly simple but solved all their problems. He turned to Angel.

  “Look, I’m sorry I lost my temper. And I’m sorry about Nels. I shouldn’t have told him about Nairobi.”

  “We had no idea he might plan to kill Ralph. And we’ve no real proof he was involved.”

  “I should have guessed though. There’s a lot of money at stake.”

  Roux still had his finger on the map.

  “Is that all wetlands?”

  “In the wet season it’s a swamp covering the same area as England. The name for it is derived from an Arabic word for a barrier or obstruction, something impenetrable.”

  “Really? What’s that?”

  “It’s called the Sudd.”

  North Africa

  5th May to 24th June, 1982

  Twenty-two

  Juba was a river port, the White Nile’s southern terminus in Sudan. The town was a dusty compound, a mixture of traditional circular huts, conical roofs like ice-cream cones thatched in papyrus, and square mud-walled buildings draped in tarpaulin sheets. Wide open gutters full of waste ran around a market area with traders under faded beach umbrellas selling peanuts amid shops roughly built of unfaced concrete block, some proudly displaying an inadequate stock of worn hand tools and black water tanks. A group of boys pushed weary thin cattle with long horns, thick at the head but tapering to fine points that nearly touched where they met above the cow’s head. The cattle raised a red cloud of clay dust as they walked past the Juba Hospital. They stopped and snorted through bulbous bristly black nostrils outside a doorway as a nurse in starched whites swept bloody water from inside onto the street.

  An aid worker, professional and business-like with sensibly styled hair, had given Ralph a lift from the airport. In another setting she might have managed photocopier sales representatives, or been an enthusiastic team builder in human resources. In Juba she had become an expert in local bovine.

  “Eighty per cent of the population is employed in agriculture in Sudan and ten per cent are nomadic. They look after fifty million farm animals. Eighteen million cattle. Most are a breed called Baggara. They are with the Arabs in the north. Down here the cows are Nilotic.”

  A man, deeply scarred, pushed the cattle past the hospital door and then leant on a long stick, staring at Ralph from underneath three straight parallel lines ridged across his forehead.

  “What’s wrong with that man’s face?”

  “It’s scarification. They do it with a red-hot knife when they’re teenagers. Boys and girls. The main thing is that they must not cry.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a sign of coming of age. For boys it shows that they are brave enough to fight and ready to die in battle; for girls that they are ready for the pain of childbirth.”

  There were people by the side of the road so tall that Ralph briefly wondered if he might be hallucinating in his fever.

  “Each tribe has a different pattern of scarification. The tall one, he’s Dinka. I’m not sure which clan though. There are twenty-six. He�
��s probably Malual, not Rek. They are the largest.”

  Her expertise wasn’t restricted to domestic farm animals.

  “Nuer, however, have lots of little dots all over the face, arms and legs. Where are you staying?”

  She spoke quickly, and her conversation jumped like a child.

  “I thought the Hotel Africa.”

  “It’s popular,” she held a finger up to him in warning, “but don’t eat there. Have you registered?”

  “Registered what?”

  “Registered with the police.”

  “No. Do I need to? I just got in.”

  “I’ll take you. You have to register with the police in Malakia.”

  Malakia was a few kilometres out of Juba town, a traditional village with another marketplace where the actual life of Juba took place. It was full of Dinka.

  “You can stay on the floor of the police station at Malakia,” she told him. “But the dawn bugle call is a real pain.”

  Ralph preferred the sound of the popular Hotel Africa.

  “You know, you should visit Gilo. It’s an old British hill station from colonial days up in the Imatong Mountains. It’s high. Really cool. No mosquito or tetse fly. Are you okay?”

  Ralph rested his head against the door pillar.

  “I felt terrible last night.”

  “Flu-like? Fever, sweating, shaking chills? Headache and feeling tired?”

  “All of that.”

  “Probably malaria.”

  “Great.”

  “You have to time the interval between bouts to find out which type. If the fever and chills recur every forty-eight hours it’s plasmodium ovale. If it’s every seventy-two hours it’s malariae.”

  There seemed little that she didn’t know.

  “When would I have got it?”

  “If it’s ovale probably about two weeks ago.”

  Ralph remembered a fitful night fighting mosquitoes while sleeping in the waiting room of a customs post on the border between Burundi and Rwanda. That must have been about two weeks previously.

  “You want lunch? You should eat. We’ll get fool.”

  Ralph didn’t want to eat fool; he felt one.

  “You know, bean stew. I know where to go.”

  Greeks had long been in Juba as merchants, and now apparently as restaurateurs. She took him to one.

  “The town has become busier since Chevron found oil downriver at their Unity Field near Bentiu. They’re taking twelve thousand barrels a day but I heard it’ll last twenty-five years.”

  They found the only spare table for lunch.

  “The question is where to put the refinery. The government insisted on Kosti rather than somewhere local, but now they have to make a 550-kilometre pipeline and the estimate for that is a billion dollars.”

  She had done a master’s in international something at Columbia University and then worked for the UN in Rome. Other jobs for organisations beginning with U had followed in Haiti and Liberia, not so good for shoe shopping but with ‘real people’ at last. The life of a humanitarian aid worker was clearly one of compromises, and although she said it herself the World Women’s Rights Commission had been lucky to have her. She had been tempted by an offer to join the staff of the High-Level Panel on System-wide Coherence with the World Food Programme at a Rome-based agency.

  Ralph was curious and enjoying the acronyms.

  “With the WFP at an RBA?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And now?”

  “I’m a programme officer with the WWRC.”

  “For what?”

  “Safe access to firewood.”

  Ralph looked at the fool.

  “What does a programme officer for safe access to firewood do?”

  “Desk and field research. Analyse data and define findings. Skills building.”

  “In firewood?”

  “It’s challenging.”

  Ralph struggled to concentrate, his head pounding.

  “What does the WWRC do?”

  “Provide sexual and reproductive healthcare, protect women from gender-based violence, encourage economic and social empowerment.”

  “Wow.”

  She looked at him, nodding her head.

  “Quite a job, huh?”

  “Absolutely,” said Ralph.

  “It’s all about raising domestic investments through multi-sectoral initiatives and shared value partnerships.”

  “Wow. Firewood.”

  “I know. But it’s so important. And I’m careful I don’t project my own needs and solutions onto their society and culture by saying anything unacceptable.”

  “Like, ‘it’s only firewood’.”

  Had she been wearing a skirt she would have sat up straight and smoothed it with two hands.

  “You don’t know anything about the aid industry, do you?”

  Ralph looked at her blankly.

  “You British started it all by having public collections for famine in China and India. The first ever NGOs were British, against slavery and for women’s suffrage.”

  Ralph looked around the restaurant. There were over a hundred languages in Sudan, although Arabic was the official primary one. Nationally, only ten per cent spoke Dinka, but that rose to forty per cent in the south. Around him, in the Greek restaurant, Ralph only heard loud United Nations English.

  “Look, aid is given by individuals and private organisations, but mostly by governments.”

  Ralph wondered if it had been the subject of her thesis.

  “Governments provide Official Development Assistance. But it’s not for free. Governments do it to reward or strengthen an ally, or to give diplomatic approval. It can provide infrastructure to enable resource extraction.”

  “Like oil?”

  “Like oil. Or assistance can be given to gain commercial access for their nation’s industries.”

  “Like Chevron?”

  She looked around her at the tables on a hard dirt floor, the ever-present flies. She used to have such lovely working lunches in Rome. But fieldwork was vital, and so useful to have on your résumé when applying for those executive postings back in New York.

  “Like Chevron. Sometimes government ODA is humanitarian,” she conceded. “Government aid is about eighty per cent of the total. The rest is from Non-Government Organisations and development charities, or is faith-based aid. Altogether it adds up to tens of billions of dollars and it won’t be long before it’s a hundred billion.”

  Ralph did the sums. Non-government aid was a huge industry, a corporation with a turnover of twenty billion, probably employing thousands of people.

  “Wow. Is WWRC an NGO?”

  She shook her head.

  “We are a TANGO, a Technical Assistance NGO.”

  “In firewood.”

  They both said it at the same time, and laughed.

  “Listen, let me take you to the Hotel Africa. I have time. There’s an Innovative Finance for INGOs meeting at three that I can’t miss.”

  When she left him looking for the hotel reception, weak with nausea, he wasn’t sure if Virginia had been her name or where she came from. He thought both.

  *

  Snyman had called asking for an update. Nels had waited for him at the bottom of the escalator to Hillbrow Squash Centre on Pretoria Street since six thirty in the morning, trying to wake up. Nels knew of Hillbrow’s vibrant nightlife and open-all-hours culture, the Piccadilly Circus or Times Square of Johannesburg, but only Snyman the crazy Jew would exercise at that time of day.

  “Are you always up so early?” Nels asked him. “Nothing warm and soft to tempt you at home in the morning?”

  “Come on. I need breakfast.”

  He took him to Hatikvah on Catherine Avenue, Hillbrow’s famous Jewish d
eli, and ordered shakshouka. Nels picked without enthusiasm at poached eggs in a spicy runny tomato sauce.

  “What do you know, Nels? What happened?”

  “The little bastard got away.”

  “Great,” Snyman said sarcastically. “Where did he go?”

  Nels had gone to Wilson Aerodrome before leaving Nairobi and found that all the scheduled flights were domestic, small aircraft serving a maze of dirt strip runways within Kenya. Aid agency planes went international but there were hundreds of them, making thousands of flights.

  “He may have gone north to Sudan. Some ground handlers remembered a white boy hanging around but no one saw who he flew out with.”

  “Sudan? Why didn’t you follow him?”

  “I couldn’t go there,” said Nels. “You couldn’t either. Not using our passports. They hate South Africans.”

  “You said he had some help?”

  Nels gave up with the food. He wondered why Jews couldn’t eat meat and dairy together, and fish for breakfast just felt wrong.

  “Yes. A black guy.”

  “Now who would send a black guy to look after him?”

  Nels had been wondering too.

  “Elanza?” he asked.

  “Don’t be stupid. She can’t pay for anything without my consent.”

  Snyman looked at him accusingly.

  “Who have you talked to about this?”

  Nels felt uncomfortable.

  “No one.”

  “No one? Who told you to go to Nairobi?”

  “A guy I know.”

  “Who?”

  “He works for the government.”

  “Doing what?”

  Nels looked away.

  “Intelligence.”

  Snyman dropped an egg, splattering red sauce on his trousers. He scowled at Nels angrily as he cleaned himself with a napkin.

  “I don’t believe it. You asked the National Intelligence Service for help?”

  “They are the only people who could help find someone outside of South Africa.”

  Snyman brushed his hair back with two hands. It still didn’t make any sense to him.