Shelter Rock

by MP Miles

  The dessert made a brief appearance. Angel declined and watched Jumbo eat something shockingly pink that wobbled in his spoon as if alive and intent on escape. Jumbo talked of Zac in-between slippery crimson mouthfuls.

  “Zac went as a driver for a rugby team, a match between Harper Adams and Stafford Police, I believe, and chatted him up in the canteen after the game. He wasn’t that keen; in fact, Zac had to remind him in no uncertain terms of his obligations. He fitted perfectly, you see.”

  Ralph, bless his cotton socks, had become a bit of a politician and elected to be President of the Students Union. Roy Grimsay, the Principal, had always been an old friend of Jumbo’s organisation. Ralph just had to keep alert in case someone had witnessed a punch-up with a short-haired bloke, or anything unusual. Vehicles making unexplainable rendezvous in unexpected places, gossip, drugs, money, college kids with the type of girls that real students wouldn’t be able to afford. And weapons, especially weapons. Jumbo worried most about the terrorist threat. If Ralph heard anything he’d just go and see Roy. No one would suspect the SU president for going to see the Principal. He had hundreds of reasons to need to talk to him.

  “Did he deliver?” asked Angel.

  “It turned out to be tremendously successful. I recall one notable triumph. We were very pleased.”

  “Anything since?” Angel asked.

  “Not much then until Ralph ended up farming in Portugal and Zac received a call because he’d tipped off customs about a suspected load of drugs coming to England in a lorry load of his potatoes. A false alarm – the driver had been smuggling a few crates of wine.”

  “And now he’s at this place in Cambridgeshire, Fresh Grown Produce Ltd, near Ely, buying and selling vegetables, travelling the world.”

  “So I believe,” said Jumbo. “Haven’t had a lot to do with him lately.”

  Angel had always known when Jumbo lied.

  “Whatever I can do though, Angel, I’m happy to. If you feel you have something that needs putting on a legal footing, this inheritance, I can certainly recommend someone.”

  Angel rubbed tired eyes with finger and thumb.

  “Joshua.”

  “Yes,” said Jumbo.

  “Joshua was the son of Nun. In the Bible, Joshua sent two men to spy on Jericho.”

  Jumbo was impressed.

  “Very good, Angel. Well done.”

  “You did too,” said Angel. “You sent Zac, and Ralph.”

  The man on Angel’s right asked him to pass the port.

  “Ha. Told you so,” roared Jumbo.

  He picked up the decanter and slammed it down on Angel’s left in front of the old woman.

  “I imagine it will get around to you eventually,” he shouted at the smiling cadaverous lawyer.

  Jumbo and ‘the undertaker’ were the very best of friends.

  *

  The funeral took place in Brixton Cemetery, and Roux had made the arrangements for eleven o’clock. It seemed a suitable time of day to remember the dead.

  Few people were there other than the priest, Angel and Roux to see Elanza buried next to her father. Angel read the headstone and laid a wreath of king protea, South Africa’s national flower. A black car, blacked-out windows, with security and driver in the front, waited patiently beside them.

  “Who’s in the car?” Angel asked.

  “The Professor, and an old friend of Blackie Swart’s,” said Roux.

  Angel stared at it.

  “I’m executor of her will,” he told Roux. “There’s the small matter of the money. She’s split it into three equal parts. I’m told her estate is worth over two hundred and fifty million dollars.”

  “Who inherits?” asked Roux.

  “A range of medical charities gets a third. An AIDS charity based in Brighton England, called AVERT, working globally but with a big project in the Eastern Cape. Another one called mothers2mothers that reaches out specifically to Africa. An important research centre in Melbourne Australia called the Burnet Institute. A host of smaller ones, all based here in South Africa. All seem,” he searched for the word, “appropriate. She didn’t tell me what they were before she died but I don’t believe there’s been any coercion. I think all of them could be said to directly benefit South Africa. And Ralph obviously. He gets a third.”

  “And?”

  “Me,” said Angel. “I get a third as well.”

  “I’m curious,” said Roux. “Shouldn’t she have given more to you? It seems a little unfair. Elanza hadn’t seen Ralph for ages and it was you who cared for her for twenty-one years.”

  “She was very emotional at the end. And stubborn. I think it was a sort of thank-you gift for Ralph. Without him, Elanza and I would never have met.”

  Roux looked around at the flowers.

  “You’ll have to give it up, Angel. I’m sorry. You fell into this through the course of your work as a government official. It was government money in the first place that bought Blackie’s farm. You’ll have to give it back to the state. Lord knows they need it.”

  The black car started its engine.

  “We’ll have to let Ralph keep his third, if she genuinely wished that to be. How much is that? Eighty-three million dollars? Continue to keep an eye on him, just to make sure that South African money isn’t being used against South Africa in any way.”

  “I doubt that. I think he’s likely to spend it all on a boat.”

  Angel looked toward the black car.

  “I guess Mr Botha’s investment wasn’t so bad, then. The government will get two-thirds of the money back at least, in one form or another.”

  Angel did a calculation in his head.

  “That’s 166 million dollars for the sixty-four million dollars that the state spent on Blackie’s farm back in 1974. Twenty-nine years ago. About three and a half per cent per annum. Not a brilliant rate of return but better than losing the lot.”

  “It’s not the government he expected to benefit though. I’m sorry, Angel. About the money,” said Roux.

  “I didn’t want it anyway.”

  “Angel, there’s something I want to tell you. It’s about Ralph.”

  Angel tried to look through the windows of the car at the people inside.

  “We weren’t interested in the boy. Blackie’s money, his inheritance, was irrelevant.”

  “Why did you have me follow him through Africa?”

  “At the time we were worried he may have accidentally taken photographs of our missile facilities in the Cape, photographs that would have been damaging if they’d fallen into the hands of other intelligence agencies.”

  Roux put his hands in his pockets and straightened his back.

  “In the end his photographs showed nothing.”

  “What was it all about, then?”

  “It was all about you, Angel.”

  Roux poked him in the chest.

  “Counter Intelligence caught you talking to a man we knew as Zac, a man we suspected of being a British agent.”

  Angel hung his head.

  “The Heining.”

  Roux put his hand on Angel’s shoulder.

  “I remember being so angry with you, Angel, so disappointed.”

  Angel looked at the grave.

  “We had you follow the boy, just to get you out of the way. I needed some time to decide what to do with you. I even had a thug from Military Intelligence lined up to take you out if I’d given him the word.”

  “Nels,” said Angel.

  Roux nodded.

  “But I had no idea that you two had a history and that Nels would welcome the opportunity to settle old scores.”

  Roux looked at Angel’s face, dark and hard as though chiselled from a shiny rock.

  “And then I had an idea. I felt let down by you, used. I would use you.”
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  “You kept me in play?”

  “Correct, until the very end of apartheid. I used you to help me convince the British that we had the bomb. I gave you a job on the edge of Project Hobo where we could trickle out phoney details of the programme for you to pass on to Jumbo.”

  Angel suddenly realised the significance.

  “We bluffed it all?” he asked.

  “Yes, Angel, we made it all up. When international inspectors were finally allowed access in ’94 they found nothing, because there had been nothing.”

  Angel felt guilty.

  “The effort that must have been involved. I never meant to jeopardise all that. I wanted to prevent a disaster.”

  “You helped, Angel. We wouldn’t have been taken half as seriously if Jumbo had told everyone it was all a hoax. The British and Americans wouldn’t have put nearly as much pressure on the ANC and the new President to control their members who wanted to slaughter all of the whites as soon as they had power.”

  Roux held his arm.

  “Our deception saved a lot of lives. The UK and the US believed we had nuclear weapons and negotiated harder with the new black government to ensure that there was no bloodshed.”

  Jumbo had been right, Roux the cleverest of men. He deserved the medal.

  “I’m sorry, Nick.”

  “Don’t be. Don’t feel bad either. Jumbo wasn’t stupid, even though he came over as an oaf. He knew we didn’t have the bomb.”

  “What? He knew?”

  “I used you, Angel, to make Jumbo think we had the bomb; he knew all along that we didn’t, so he used you as well, to make me think he believed we did.”

  “He played me back?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  “The same reason as me. To prevent bloodshed. It happened to be in everyone’s interests for us to have the deterrent, to have control.”

  Angel looked at his feet, trying to collate new data but labouring like a computer low on memory.

  “Did Jumbo lie to his own government?” he asked. “Did he not tell them?”

  “I doubt he lied. He just didn’t share his suspicions. There was plenty of evidence to say we did have a bomb. You had given it to him.”

  “I don’t understand. Why didn’t he tell them?” Angel asked.

  Roux looked at the black car.

  “The UK is South Africa’s most important trading partner,” he said, “but that’s unimportant compared to their Foreign Direct Investment in this country. UK businesses have hundreds of billions of dollars invested in South Africa. Big name PLCs, like Anglo American, Vodacom, Holiday Inn, BP, Unilever, all have a UK parent and are listed in London, all with UK institutional shareholders. The potential financial loss from an economic collapse due to an unruly transition was enormous.”

  “You mean if South Africa had gone like Zimbabwe at Independence?”

  “That was the British fear. So, they said, ‘Look, ANC, the Boers have the bomb. You’ll get power and we’ll help, but be mindful of their concerns. Keep them happy and do it peacefully, because if you push them into a corner and they drop a few bombs there won’t be anything for your new black government to govern’.”

  Angel understood.

  “And we, the British, will lose a lot of money,” he said.

  Roux felt old and tired. He was starting to think he would enjoy his retirement.

  “The philosophy of politics is about managing economics; everything else is bullshit so that you keep your job.”

  Angel, confused, remembered the documents he’d come across mistakenly filed in his cabinet that he’d smuggled to Jumbo, the photographs he’d occasionally found lying about and sent to the British.

  “How did he know we didn’t have the bomb?”

  Roux made ready to leave, turning wearily from the grave.

  “Have you seen Oak Ridge in Tennessee?” he asked.

  “The US facility?”

  “In the end there was nothing you could have given Jumbo that would have convinced him. We had the uranium, but to enrich it? To produce 235, to make fissile material? No way. The Americans needed one building a mile long for gaseous diffusion. It took twenty-five thousand people just to build it, the biggest building in the world, thirty-seven acres under one roof, part of a 4,500-acre laboratory site. We couldn’t have hidden a facility like Oak Ridge, done something even a fraction of the scale, without everyone knowing. We didn’t have it, and Jumbo knew it.”

  “We had Pelindaba.” Angel couldn’t believe what Roux had said. “We had a vortex separation process – they’re small units; we didn’t need the same area as Oak Ridge.”

  “Ah yes, Pelindaba. Our nuclear research and uranium enrichment centre out at Harties Dam. You know it well, Angel, from your weekend rambles in the countryside.”

  Roux shook his head.

  “The Pelsakon cascade was a very inefficient process, Angel. The uranium was going around and around in that thing for two hundred days before it reached weapons grade. We didn’t produce anything at all for two years because the Teflon filters blocked. There were always production problems. One time, all the small holes in the jet nozzles filled with solid uranium due to some impurity. In addition to all that, the energy consumption proved to be enormous, we couldn’t remove the waste heat, and the level of enrichment and quantity produced remained low. Lots of production records to prove otherwise. All fake. We wildly exaggerated the amount of HEU they actually produced.”

  “But we still have it,” said Angel. “When they dismantled the bombs the uranium-235 was removed and cast into ingots. It’s under guard in the old silver vault at Pelindaba.”

  Roux raised an eyebrow.

  “Really?”

  “Yes. The Americans want us to give it up but the government won’t do it. It’s ours; we made it.”

  “Have you seen it, Angel, a half-ton lump sitting there in the vault? A sinister pile, glowing in the dark maybe?” Roux asked.

  Angel looked at him quizzically.

  “It doesn’t exist, Angel. Our new government is playing the same game that we did. It’s a bargaining tool. You don’t need to have a bomb to get what you want – just demonstrate the ability to make one and the means to deliver it. Ask North Korea.”

  Roux looked at Angel and felt sorry for having deceived him but relieved that they’d remained friends throughout, pleased that his conviction in Angel hadn’t been misplaced. Angel had made a significant contribution to his country. At the end of apartheid Angel had been something of a hero to those in the new Intelligence Service who knew of his betrayal, those to whom Roux had helpfully told of Angel’s leaking of nuclear secrets to the British to guarantee a peaceful transition. His career had prospered under a black African government. He was Deputy Director of Foreign Intelligence in the South African Secret Service, Roux’s old position when he’d recruited Angel twenty-three years previously.

  Roux shook Angel’s hand and then walked past the car nodding his head. The black car followed him out, slowly.

  Angel went back to the grave and looked at the headstones. He thought of a Swazi saying: ‘Ayilahle boNkhosi’. It literally meant ‘Throw it away, people’. People said it when someone had lost a friend. Life went on. He picked up the wreath of protea flowers.

  *

  Angel, stiff and hungry, had missed lunch. It had been 180 kilometres from Pretoria and he’d been sitting for two hours in the back of a government car driven by a young white chauffeur from the office, the wreath of protea beside him. He would have enjoyed going by train but they hadn’t improved.

  Angel had no idea that Treilea would be such a huge town, forty thousand inhabitants, Safoil a massive industrial complex. Huge cooling towers burped steam and noise amid a maze of pipes. A free-standing chimney, high as the Eiffel Tower, stood over conveyor belts a ki
lometre long, bringing coal from neighbouring mines. It had become the world’s largest petrochemical complex, the biggest built at one time on a single site, on Blackie Swart’s farm.

  Angel looked for Roodhuis, Blackie’s old farmhouse, to lay his wreath where Elanza had grown up. He walked aimlessly around town until, in desperation, he laid it at the end of a street – Swart Street.

  It looked toward the guts of the Safoil plant. Angel picked up the wreath again and went back to the car. He couldn’t leave Elanza looking at that.

  At the highway the driver stopped.

  “Back to Pretoria, sir? The office?”

  To the east the N17 led to Swaziland. Angel had seen the road signs. He thought it probably 220 kilometres from Treilea to Mbabane. Two and a half hours. He’d travelled through by train in 1969, nearly thirty-five years previously, and had never been back.

  He thought of the office, the threats.

  The People Against Gangsters and Drugs had attacked Planet Hollywood, a restaurant in Cape Town’s Waterfront tourist area, in 1998, but since then their activities, and those of the Muslims Against Global Oppression, another Islamic-orientated vigilante group, had tailed off. The threat from imported Islamic extremists remained high, and countering radicalised small cells attracted to al-Qaeda, who could move freely along South Africa’s long and porous border, became a daunting task. It wasn’t his job anyway. NIA not SASS had that responsibility. Domestic Intelligence, not foreign.

  There existed, however, a much closer cooperation within the intelligence services, less infighting, fewer power struggles. That proved to be Gabriël Lombard’s greatest legacy from 1980 when he started NIS and Roux had recruited Angel. Today, no one, neither NIA nor SASS, wanted South Africa to become a haven for foreign terrorists. Information directly from Angel’s department had led to the arrest in Cape Town in 1999 of Khalfan Khamis Mohamed after bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Angel had been working recently with the US to pick up within South Africa Saud Memon, a Pakistani with al-Qaeda connections. They had operations planned, work to do. He could be back at the office before five o’clock and get three or four hours’ work done.

  Angel sighed.

  “Arcadia, please. Back to the office.”