Shelter Rock

by MP Miles

  “I can’t remember all the place names,” said Ralph.

  “Have a try.”

  “I remember the first night was at a place called Jarajus and the second day I had to do a four-kilometre diversion around an industrial complex at Qus. Then I went straight through Al Ashraf something and stopped just before Qena. That would have been the second night. I think the next stop was a Nagaa place, but there were lots of those. Nagaa Samrah I think. And then through Dishna, and I spent a night near a bridge that crossed over to another Nagaa on the west bank, just around the bend where the river started going north again.”

  “Nagaa Hammadi?”

  “Might have been. Day five was interesting as I was still on the eastern side and after ten kilometres the desert came very close to the river. For about six kilometres there were dry sandy hills right to the water.”

  “The Jabal al Tarif.”

  “Was it? Soon after there was some sort of barrier across the river controlling the flow of water.”

  “It’s a barrage. An old one.”

  “Yes, that’s right. I remember the street lights on the road running over it looked like old gas lamps from a Parisian side street. The next two days were big walks. That’s when my toe started hurting. And then early in the morning, it must have been the eighth day, I crossed the river at Sohag.”

  It was the biggest town he’d seen so far and the route led away from the river slightly, through a patchwork of fields, every one lush with growth. He’d walked then on the west side, keeping the big river on his right.

  “I finished up in Tahta for the night and then when I left I was stopped by a policeman on a bicycle. There was a bit of a delay until his boss came. He was all right, good English, but I think I only did twenty-five kilometres yesterday through getting held up by him and my toe hurting me a little.”

  “What’s wrong with your toe?”

  “I’m not sure. I can’t see anything wrong but it’s painful. I’m a bit lame.”

  “And last night you stayed in this place Sidfa?”

  “Yes. I felt worn out this morning for some reason and didn’t get going until nearly nine o’clock.”

  Ralph turned to him.

  “Do you know, I’m glad you stopped. I’d just about had enough.”

  “Quite a walk. Take lots of photographs?”

  “No. I don’t have a camera.”

  “What? Not even a small one?”

  “No. My camera was stolen ages ago.”

  Alim felt relieved. He believed him. He had no idea why the boy might be important to Angel but his own conscience was clear. He could help South Africa without any guilt of not having served his own country first.

  “Did you have any problems with the police?”

  “Here? Not really. I was questioned yesterday morning but there weren’t any problems. Tahta was the first town I’d stayed in. I think that was the hitch. The rest had been small villages off the main roads.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing. I said ‘Ana mis faahim Arabi’ and we stood smiling at each other until the policeman’s lieutenant came. Then I explained in English that I was interested in studying agriculture and that there was much to learn from Egypt in the science of irrigation and double cropping, and he smiled and gave me my passport back and said ‘Hazz sa’eed’. At least he didn’t accuse me of spying.”

  Alim smiled. It had scared the rural police half to death having GID on the phone threatening to come down and talk to them. He would see that the lieutenant was promoted.

  As they got closer to Cairo Ralph noticed more horticulture, a wide array of fruits and vegetables, especially tomatoes and melons, but soon there was no space for farming, Cairo teeming with people.

  “It’s very busy.”

  “Cairo has attracted millions of migrants from the countryside, to come to school for education, or to work as unskilled labourers. Twenty per cent of all Egyptians now live in Cairo.”

  Ralph looked around. Wooden, cardboard and metal huts had been constructed on every flat roof of every apartment building.

  “Where do they all live?”

  Alim shrugged.

  “Who knows? These rooftop shacks – there are two hundred thousand of them. We have half a million people living in the city’s cemeteries, in the mausoleums of the dead.”

  “Who makes sure everything works?”

  “You mean sewerage and public transport? It doesn’t.”

  “Somebody must be in control.”

  “The city is in quarters: the Greek Quarter, Coptic Quarter or the Silversmiths Quarter, segregated on religious or occupational lines. They are self-governing.”

  Alim laughed.

  “They have to be.”

  Twenty-five

  Angel spent the afternoon with Elanza.

  “Angel, I’m tired. Sleep with me.”

  Nervously he lay beside her, both fully clothed. He felt as though he was cheating her and contemplated telling her he was half African, ID code zero seven, ‘other Coloured’.

  She put her hand on his head.

  “You’ve got really wiry hair.”

  “It’s hereditary. On my mother’s side.”

  “Your mother in London?”

  “I’ve only got the one.”

  He changed the subject.

  “Ralph’s in Cairo.”

  “Cairo? What’s he been doing?”

  “Walking up the Nile. Talking to farmers.”

  She held his arm.

  “Save him for me, Angel. Get him home. So he can be with his father.”

  Angel wanted to tell her that that was why he stayed in South Africa, why he was there at all, to find his father.

  “I’m going to be with mine again soon,” she said.

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “Don’t give up on them, Angel.”

  Maybe she knew.

  *

  Snyman sat with both hands flat on his office desk, staring blankly at the wall. A framed cutting from a colourful society magazine showed him next to a glamourous woman at a Sun City investment company freebie, an international actress who had been paid to attend, against her anti-apartheid principles but she took the money anyway, stared back at him, blankly. He picked up the phone and looked at a different picture with fondness for times past – a photograph of Danelle smiling on an Indian Ocean beach.

  “He’s in Cairo,” he said.

  Nels sounded puzzled.

  “How do you know?”

  “I spoke to his parents. He called them from Khartoum. Told them his plans.”

  Some Intelligence Service, he thought. No wonder the country is in the shit.

  “He’ll be staying at the Golden Hotel and flying Egypt Air to Athens.”

  “How am I going to get into Egypt?” Nels asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s like Sudan. They don’t accept our passports.”

  Snyman thought about the arrangement he’d made with Nels. Now he had to do something to earn his twenty per cent.

  “Be creative. Stay away from the airport. Fly to Greece and come back on a boat to Alexandria.”

  Nels wasn’t sure where that was.

  “But you have to do it yourself this time. Finish it.”

  “It’ll be my pleasure,” said Nels.

  Snyman had little doubt that he was telling the truth.

  *

  Angel’s hair was still short but his beard had grown through the itchy stage. He had been to a bazaar and bought a djellaba, a loose-fitting light cotton robe, open at the neck without a collar and with long wide sleeves, wider in Egypt than in Arabia. It had a baggy hood that came to a point at the back, useful protection from sun and sand, or to carry the groceries. It was for labourers, da
rk brown, which he had been told signified among Berbers that he was unmarried. The vendor had winked as he told him. Alim told him that in Cairo he must wear Arab dress. He hoped his Arabic would be as convincing as his disguise.

  “Your boy has been sick,” Alim said. “His eyes are still yellow. And he’s picked up a jigger.”

  Alim had taken Ralph to the Golden Hotel when he’d asked to go there, a cheap dormitory room, just down the road from his office on Talaat Harb.

  “It’s run by old Mr Fez, as he likes to call himself. He’s the life and soul, playing up the Egyptian stereotype for the tourists. But he’ll watch him for me. He’ll lock up Ralph’s gear to keep it safe, and George the moneychanger is giving a respectable black-market exchange rate for the dollar. He works for me. They’ll call me when he moves.”

  “I’m not sure that he’ll have any gear worth keeping safe,” said Angel.

  *

  Khan el-Khalili on the 22nd of June, the day before the start of Ramadan, was quiet. Alim had told Angel to go there.

  “Ralph’s gone to the bazaar,” he’d said, “and Angel, remember, a dog with a bone in his mouth can’t bite.”

  It was an Egyptian metaphor that took Angel some time to translate. Alim helped him.

  “The boy is the bone everyone is concentrating on. No one will be expecting you.”

  Khan el-Khalili was one of the world’s great shopping experiences, a Middle Eastern souk forming a labyrinthine collection of skinny alleyways established as a shopping district in AD 1400 that still rang with the clang of metalworkers and silversmiths. The main streets had long ago given themselves over completely to the tourist trade, selling cheap papyrus pictures and plastic pyramids. Off the main drag in the surrounding alleyways were tiny stores and cluttered workshops, some of the best places to pick up traditional Egyptian products. Here was everything from antiques and metal lampshades to locally woven textiles. Cairo’s most famous coffee shop, Fishawis, sold syrupy Arabic coffee and sweet tea to tourists and local merchants alike at a rapid-fire pace. For shoppers, the main souk road was Shari Gohar el-Qait. The gold and silver workshops congregated mostly just to the north, while the spice market section was to the south.

  In one corner of the bazaar the Neo-Gothic bulk of the Sayyidna el-Husein Mosque, built in 1792 to honour the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, cast a shadow on the tea stands and fortune tellers. Nels waited for Ralph to walk up El-Badestane, a pedestrian route through the middle of the souk.

  Angel followed both of them out of an area specialising in copper and brass ornaments, while Ralph sauntered unaware past Bedouin clothing, carpets and antiques.

  Nels caught up with Ralph at the junction of Nahasin Road as he took a left at the gold area, running roughly south now towards the Sheikh Mutakhar Mosque. Halfway down the alleyway Ralph stopped. Coppersmiths occupied one side of the square and craftsmen the other. The whole area was quiet, the pre-Ramadan rush over. Tomorrow a lot of bazaar traders would be closed and many had already shut up shop.

  Nels kept some distance and fiddled with something in his pocket. Ralph stood at a crossroad, deliberating which way he should go. Nels waited, and then Angel caught a glimpse through the market of Nels with his right hand in a jacket pocket striding determinedly towards Ralph. Angel thought he’d misjudged Nels. He would be too late.

  At the last moment, just as Nels was behind him, Ralph turned left again on Shari Gohar el-Qait, the smell of cosmetics, essences and perfumes from vendors opposite the Ashraf Barsbay Mosque disguising the smell of sweat and urine.

  Ralph slipped off the main road into a densely packed area of haberdashery that led to a food area. There were no people about. Angel dodged quickly through stalls selling fruit juices and Egyptian pancakes and stepped out in front of Nels, blocking his path. They were alone.

  Angel had briefly seen Nels when he’d visited Elanza at home in Hyde Park but this was his first good look at him since the helicopter ride out of Cassinga. He hadn’t aged well. The once powerful body was still large but the muscle that at one time had filled his neck and shoulders had been replaced by fat from too many braais and too many beers. There was a blotchiness to his face, on his cheeks and forehead, from too much sun, or too much rum. He was unmistakably the Parabat instructor who had beaten him, he was the Intelligence officer at Cassinga, but years of bitterness and cruelty since then had shrunk him to a man older than his years. Angel remembered the dead, the massacre of women and children in a small town in Angola, the smile on Nels’ face as he’d pushed a man from the helicopter to fall grasping at the air.

  Angel said his name, quietly.

  “Nels.”

  Nels stopped. There was no fear, just curiosity. He didn’t freeze, no intention of flight. He was going to fight.

  “Who are you? How do you know me?” asked Nels.

  Angel’s hood was up, his face in shadow.

  “Scientia Munit,” said Angel.

  They were the words on the old Bureau of State Security crest: ‘Knowledge Protects’.

  Angel had never been very good at set-piece fighting, two opponents facing each other as if in a boxing ring. It was always so predictable, like sex. You do this to me, and I do that to you. What was he supposed to do? Swing a right and block a left, two three, like a dance move? Run at him? Kick his shin or groin? Or something gymnastic aimed at his head? Angel never knew. Whatever he did the outcome would be the same. It would always end with him locked close with his opponent, like wrestling, never standing apart making precise textbook kicks and punches.

  At one time he’d been forced against his will to be the guinea pig on an innovative Israeli self-defence course, a bruising month in which bald, rabid instructors had advocated threat evaluation followed by pre-emptive strikes of speedy violence before running away. Angel had later summed it up to fascinated but uneasy colleagues as: stay focused, hit first, be furious, and then fuck off. It became known to all from then on as ‘The Four F course’ and reduced on Nick Roux’s order to a less dispiriting and damaging week in duration.

  Angel walked at a fast pace towards Nels and wrapped both arms around him as though giving him a hug but with his lower body twisted to protect his groin from Nels’ knee. Under normal circumstances Nels would have been pushed backwards against a wall, or over onto his back. Nels, however, had been walking towards him at a similar pace and their momentums cancelled each other out. They stood stationary, pushing each other, locked at the head and neck like two prop forwards in a scrum. Angel waited for an arm to free itself from his back, to come up in between them as a punch to the stomach or face. Would it be left or right?

  Nels chose left, which surprised Angel but helped him, as he could catch Nels’ fist in his own more powerful right hand and drop to his knees, pulling Nels down on one side, trying to twist him. Nels leant back as he was pulled down, to stop from falling forward onto his face, and they ended up both kneeling, still facing each other, holding hands.

  Nels’ free hand came forward and clutched Angel’s throat low down, just above the clavicle. He felt Nels squeeze, pinching. Vulnerable points exist all over the body but most of them are from the collarbone up. In the small area of the neck they are the spinal cord, the windpipe, and the carotid arteries taking oxygenated blood to the neck, head and brain. Nels’ hand was roughly below the fourth vertebra, below the point where the common carotid artery split into two branches, trapping both carotid arteries against the trachea. Angel tried to beat Nels’ arm downwards with his free hand, to break his grip, and then, failing, tried to beat it upwards. Nels kept squeezing.

  Angel, feeling lightheaded, leant backwards, bending at the knees and rolling to one side. Nels’ grasp on Angel’s throat was broken but now Angel lay on the ground, Nels above him. With two hands Nels held the hood over Angel’s head and slammed it against the floor. Angel felt the skin split above his eye. He knew that most fights were o
ver very quickly. In only five or six movements, without a single kick or punch having been made, it felt like it was over for Angel. He dragged himself away and tried to stand.

  Nels was quicker, and barged him, shoulder down, pushing him over a shop counter. It was a butcher’s shop, closed early because of Ramadan. Angel fell in a heap on the other side. When he pushed himself up, only his head and shoulders above the counter, Nels was leaning over the table, a gun from his jacket pocket pointed at Angel’s head.

  It was steel grey at the front and brownish at the back, with a black rubber sleeve over the grip. Angel had heard about them but never seen one.

  The British Welrod ‘Assassin’s Pistol’, a bizarre and unusual handgun, its noise muffled by baffles as in a car exhaust, had been designed during World War Two for use by irregular forces and resistance groups. It was a cylindrical, thirty-centimetre-long tube with a simple, reliable and, most importantly, quiet bolt action. The grip was also the magazine. It held, for optimal performance, only five rounds, and it could be removed for easy concealment. With the grip taken off, the integrated barrel and noise suppressor could pass for anything. It looked like a bicycle pump. It was extremely quiet, little louder than the noise level of normal conversation. The end of the silencer was hollowed so that it could be placed tight against someone’s body, a man in a crowd or a boy in a souk, and fired virtually noiselessly. In those circumstances the noise was best described as a snap of the fingers followed by a match striking. Officially it was still a secret weapon, mostly for fear that, due to its simplicity of design, it could be easily reverse-engineered by any terrorist with access to a good farm workshop. Although designed in 1943 it was still available for use in 1982 by British Special Forces, and others.

  Nels was breathing hard, his right hand shaking. The bolt of the Welrod was operated by twisting a knurled nut on the end of the barrel to unlock it and pulling a plunger backwards. It wasn’t cocked until the plunger was pushed back in and the end twisted back to its original position. Although with practice it could be done quite quickly, the Welrod had never been designed to be anything other than a single-shot weapon. It was supposed to be used at point-blank range, quietly assassinating with just one shot fired. Nels was unfamiliar with the weapon. He needed to look for the nut to locate it, and the gun twisted away from its aim on Angel’s head.