The American rk-1

by Andrew Britton

  “The most difficult part of the operation is already accomplished,” Vanderveen said. His Arabic was nearly flawless. Eleven years earlier he had been sent to the excellent Defense Language Institute in Monterey, only to be returned to his unit after three months when his proficiency surpassed that of the program’s director.

  At the time, he had modestly accepted the man’s praise and a syrupy letter of commendation. Now, deep in the hellish caves, he made no effort to hide his arrogance. “The Iranian is my only concern… Can he be trusted?”

  Al-Zawahiri nodded, staring sadly into his empty cup. The thermos had long since run dry, much to his disappointment. “I do not believe Mazaheri would cheat us, especially after what you have already done for him in escorting the container to Arak. He has my confidence.”

  “Is it what I asked for?”

  “Actually, it is somewhat more: 545 bricks of SEMTEX H. The plastique is out of the Czech Republic. Each brick weighs 2,500 grams. The total weight of the shipment, if I am not mistaken, is-”

  “About 1,360 kilos, or a little over 3,000 pounds. I believe that will be enough.”

  Al-Zawahiri was vaguely impressed with the man’s rapid calculations. He would have been stunned to learn that the American could have done the same math in his sleep at five years of age.

  “The challenge comes in creating a kill zone wide enough to encompass the entire convoy,” Vanderveen continued. “Despite Shakib’s contributions, there are things we don’t know.”

  “For instance?”

  “How the recent attacks will affect Brenneman’s security situation, for one thing…”

  As the American explained the numerous factors that might prevent a successful strike, a very different conversation was taking place 750 miles to the southwest.

  The Vanderveen family history, as described by Ambassador Martins, was sketchy at best. There was a fading birth certificate, he explained, a wilted document from the eastern Transvaal dating back to 1964. For their purposes, it was worthless.

  For the time being, the first ten years in the life of William Vanderveen would remain a mystery.

  There was also documentation dating back to 1975. These were medical records held at the Rand University in Johannesburg. They verified that a young man, accompanied by his mother, had visited the psychology department in February of that year. The boy’s scores were astronomical; well beyond the top 1 percent of the population, and yet his family had declined numerous requests for follow-up testing.

  According to the file, the psychologist who had administered the exams, a Dr. Wilhelm D. Klerk, had expressed bitter disappointment that the woman and boy had never returned to his department. This disappointment had been tempered when the doctor discovered that they belonged to Francis Vanderveen, the famed South African general; it was only to be expected that the family would seek privacy in such matters.

  Ryan Kealey made an effort to listen dispassionately, but soon found himself consumed by conflicting emotions; deep down, he wanted nothing more than to kill the man who had betrayed and murdered five of his fellow soldiers. At the same time, he felt a desperate need to understand, as though understanding might erase some of the lingering pain and guilt. Ryan listened to the ambassador intently, but was fast with the questions: “Who was this General Vanderveen?” he asked. “Why was he so important?”

  Martins answered this to the best of his ability. He talked about South Africa’s policies during the apartheid years, and he explained that the military was often the first line of defense against African uprisings in the capital and major cities such as Johannesburg and Cape Town.

  “When Daniel Malan took power in 1948, he immediately dismissed several high-ranking army officers who were known to be unsupportive of his policies. At the time, Francis Vanderveen was a captain in the 11th South African Special Services Battalion. He survived the purging of the ranks, though, mostly because it was widely rumored that he had been collecting damaging evidence for years, files that tied many of the National Party’s most prominent figures to the Nazis during the second World War.”

  “In other words,” Naomi said, “Vanderveen was untouchable.”

  The ambassador nodded. “Precisely. However, that is not to say that he disagreed with Malan’s views. In fact, he had long been noted for his support of the Afrikaner Broederbond.

  “In 1959, Vanderveen established a liaison between the South African Defense Forces and the Bureau of State Security. This position gave him the authority to oversee both military and police matters in South Africa. By that time he was a colonel, and responsible for enforcing the Pass Laws and Section 10 of the Black Urban Areas Act of 1945. I won’t bore you with the details, but this was legislation that served to confine black Africans to demarcated areas in remote parts of the country, thereby providing the illusion, if not the reality, of a white South Africa.”

  “How could one man oversee that kind of operation?” Kealey asked.

  “He didn’t,” was the ambassador’s reply. “He had a huge staff on hand, not to mention the army itself. Nevertheless, there is evidence that Vanderveen led many of the raids himself. In the 1960s alone, it’s estimated that he orchestrated the removal of almost two million black Africans.”

  Naomi considered this piece of information for a moment. “You know, I took a course last year at GWU where we looked pretty closely at apartheid and its role in South African history. I don’t recall seeing this man’s name anywhere.”

  Martins sipped at his coffee and nodded slowly. “You wouldn’t have. You see, Francis Vanderveen was very effective at his work, but his tactics were something of an embarrassment to the government, even a government as ruthless as Malan’s. As he went about enforcing Section 10, the colonel didn’t always wait until the houses were vacated before moving in with the bulldozers. Worse yet, there were rumors that he had a hand in the Sharpeville massacre of 1960.”

  “I did read something about that,” Kharmai interjected. “The security forces opened fire on a group of African protesters outside a police station. The officers later reported hearing shots, but no weapons were ever found on the bodies.”

  “That’s right. Sixty-nine people died in the square, with another hundred or so wounded. Vanderveen had quite a reputation by this time. No one was foolish enough to accuse him outright, but everyone knew who had given the order to fire. Incredibly enough, Vanderveen’s career wasn’t damaged in the slightest by that incident. In fact, he was promoted to brigadier general in 1964. That was the same year of his son’s birth.”

  Ryan settled back a few inches in his chair. Finally, we come to it.

  “William Paulin was the second child of Francis and Julienne Vanderveen. Their first, Madeline Jane, was born in 1961. As the general was gone the majority of the time, the children lived with their mother on the family estate in Piet Retief, a small town in the Assegai Valley. By all accounts, Julienne was a very beautiful woman, and wholly devoted to her children.” Martins hesitated. “What follows is largely conjecture, but as I said, we had a difficult time finding reliable witnesses.

  “You’ve already seen the transcripts. William scored 184 on the Stanford-Binet when he was eleven years old. He also scored off the charts on the Weschler Scales and the Slosson Intelligence Test for Children. His brilliance was undeniable, but his sister was another matter entirely. She was better known for her… well, for her promiscuous behavior. In 1975, it was widely rumored in the village that she was seeing one of the Africans working a nearby farm. A young man in his early twenties.”

  Naomi did the math quickly. “She was fourteen?”

  Martins nodded. “It didn’t last long, though. Madeline died that same year. Apparently, she suffered a fatal fall in the mountains surrounding her home.”

  Kealey thought he saw where this was going. “The general?”

  But Martins shook his head. “No. He would have had ample motive if the rumors were true, of course, but Francis Vanderveen was 100 kilomete
rs away on the day his daughter died, supervising the destruction of an entire village in the Natal. He was not responsible.”

  A brief silence ensued. “Surely you’re not suggesting that William-”

  The ambassador held up a hand to stop Naomi. “I’m just giving you the facts.”

  “But he was so young,” Kharmai protested. “It doesn’t seem… right, somehow.”

  “There’s nothing right about it,” Martins agreed. “But the story doesn’t end there. A month after the girl was buried, the young man she had been seeing went missing from the farm he was working. They found him a week later in the first hills leading out of the Assegai. The body was virtually cut to pieces.”

  “And the girl’s father?” Ryan inquired.

  “Was 1,100 kilometers away at the time, supervising a troop buildup on the Angolan border.”

  Another silence, longer this time. “Needless to say, Julienne was devastated by the loss of her only daughter, but I’ll get back to that in a moment.”

  The ambassador shifted his weight in the seat and flipped through the file he had been given earlier in the day. “Francis Vanderveen was promoted to major general in the spring of 1975, four months before Madeline’s death. Up until this time, South Africa’s white population was protected from hostile African lands by a ring of buffer states that fell under Afrikaner control. Two of those states were Mozambique and Angola, both of which were governed in the early 1970s by Portugal.

  “In 1974, economic instability led to a military coup in Lisbon. This effectively cut off all funds to Portugal’s foreign interests, including the army. When the Portuguese commanders in both colonies realized that they were about to lose control of the coastal territories, they agreed to set dates for independence: June of 1975 for Mozambique and November of that same year for Angola.”

  “Sir, what does this have to do with Francis Vanderveen?” Kealey asked.

  “Hold on, I’m getting to that. Some level of authority over these two states was deemed necessary at the top levels of the South African government. After all, their very vision of a white South Africa was at stake. An agreement was quickly reached between the prime minister, John Vorster, and Samora Machel, the rebel leader in Mozambique. Angola was less receptive to the South African proposals, so the land was up for grabs. There were three main parties vying for control of the territory: the rebel-led MPLA, which was backed by the Soviet Union and the Cubans; the FNLA, headed by Holden Roberto and supported primarily by the United States; and UNITA, a centrist organization under the control of a Swiss-educated lawyer named Savimbi.”

  Naomi was visibly surprised. “I thought the U.S. government was pretty adamant in its criticism of apartheid. Why would Washington intervene?”

  “From our point of view, the South Africans were the lesser of two evils,” the ambassador explained. “The MPLA was well funded by two Communist governments, and there was a good chance they were going to come out on top. We wanted to limit Communist exposure on the African continent, and to do that, we were forced to deal. But it wasn’t actually Washington that stepped in. I’ll explain in a moment.

  “Anyway, once Vorster decided to invade, he was offered support by both the French and the Americans. In late 1974, the French government organized a meeting between Savimbi’s UNITA and the South African Bureau for State Security. Francis Vanderveen was one of the first officials invited. Once in Paris, he accused the French foreign minister of trying to ride his army’s coattails into Cabinda, which is an oil-rich enclave of Angola. He was right, of course, but he ruined any potential alliance with the French.”

  “So he was stuck with us,” Ryan offered.

  “Exactly,” Martins agreed. “And it didn’t seem like such a bad deal at first. The CIA had purchased radio stations and newspapers to run propaganda against the MPLA. The Agency certainly seemed to be doing its part. Vanderveen was selected to lead the invasion force. The prize, of course, was the capital, Luanda. His armored column crossed into Angola on the 23rd of October 1975, and he easily won the first battles at Sa da Bandiera and Namibe, encountering almost no resistance at all. As his forces pushed north toward Benguela, though, things began to change.”

  Ambassador Martins stood up and moved to his desk. Unlocking one of the drawers, he came back to the seating area with a small tin box in his hands. Placing it gently on the coffee table, he took his seat once again.

  “After our meeting this morning, my people began tracking down William Vanderveen’s surviving relatives. Only one could be found on his father’s side: Deborah Poole, nee Vanderveen, the general’s sister. She’s well on in years now, but she was more than willing to talk with the young man who came out to interview her. And she gave him this.”

  The ambassador produced a small silver key and unlocked the box. Then he turned it so that Naomi and Ryan could see the contents.

  Kealey leaned forward and picked up the first document. After unfolding the stained, torn paper, he began to read.

  My Dearest Julienne,

  We are now entrenched in a muddy field outside Novo Redondo. What you would see, if you were here, would not resemble much of an army at all. We have almost no ammunition or fuel due to our waffling politicians. The men are down to one meal a day, and lucky to get that. In all my years as a soldier, I have never felt as unappreciated as I do now.

  A man from the American CIA came to look at our maps and give us his educated opinion. I told him that we needed supplies more than anything else, and he laughed in my face. I was told that it is a lost cause, that reclaiming Angola is no longer “politically expedient.” I said that he would feel differently if he had fought over hundreds of kilometers to protect his country.

  Julie, I would say this only to you, but I think that we must have them if we are to reach Luanda. It is more than physical supplies: Vorster needs the U.S. after the war as well, and he can’t afford for this campaign to go on. If the Americans were to give him their full support, we would have victory and I would be back at home, where I belong.

  That they would abandon us now is unspeakably treacherous to me.

  I miss you and William very much. I’ll see you both soon.

  Love always,

  Francis

  Ryan finished the letter and handed it over to Naomi. Selecting another from the box, he read through it quickly. The content was much the same.

  “My God,” Naomi murmured after a moment. The ambassador cleared his throat gently, causing both his guests to look up.

  “Needless to say, the American support never arrived. It was an Agency operation from the start, black on black. Washington was never involved. Of course, once Congress found out about it, they quickly put an end to things. Officially, the Senate voted to stop all U.S. aid to anti-MPLA forces on the 18th of December 1975. In truth, however, the damage was already done. Once Vanderveen’s column reached Benguela, the MPLA launched a massive counterattack. The rebels had Cuban troop reinforcements and Soviet artillery on their side, whereas Vanderveen was struggling with unreliable supply lines and political indecision in Pretoria. He was forced to pull back his army on the 10th of November. During this time, his letters to Julienne became increasingly bitter, particularly with respect to the Americans.

  “Five days later, the general’s helicopter was hit by small-arms fire as it left a camp just south of Cubal. Francis Vanderveen and twelve other soldiers died in the ensuing crash.”

  “Unbelievable,” Naomi said softly. Ryan said nothing. He could guess what was coming next.

  The ambassador paused for a moment to let the information sink in. Finally, he said, “There were some communication issues that made notification impossible. It wasn’t until two weeks later that the widow was informed. The defense minister broke the news himself, I’m told, in light of Vanderveen’s rank and stature. I suppose it turned out to be too much for Julienne. As I said, she was already devastated over her daughter’s death. Losing her husband must have been the final straw. She
committed suicide that same night. According to Mrs. Poole, it was also the last time anyone saw young William in Piet Retief.”

  Naomi shook her head slowly. Ryan remained silent. He was beginning to put the pieces together in his mind, but he wanted to hear the ambassador say it first.

  Martins studied them each in turn. “Unfortunately, this is where the facts end. Anything else is pure speculation, but I have an opinion, if you’d like to hear it.”

  Naomi nodded once. “Please, Ambassador.”

  “I think there’s a good chance that William Vanderveen saw these letters,” Martins said, gently resting a hand on the small tin box. “I also think that he probably had something to do with his sister’s death, not to mention what happened to the young man she was seeing. I believe William may have taken what he wanted from his father’s words, because doing so would have been a good deal easier than shouldering the blame himself. In my opinion, Will Vanderveen found exactly what he was looking for in the United States: an outlet for his rage. And he’s not going to stop until everyone knows how he feels.”

  CHAPTER 21

  PRETORIA, TAJIKISTAN,LANGLEY

  For Ryan Kealey and Naomi Kharmai, South Africa had yielded its secrets, and had nothing left to offer. As their meeting with the ambassador drew to a close, Gillian Farris began to make the arrangements for their return to Washington. When the embassy car was ready to depart for Johannesburg International late that afternoon, her hand rested in Ryan’s for a very long time. Gillian was sorry to see him go.

  Naomi fell into a deep sleep on the short ride south, leaving Ryan alone with his troubled thoughts. He wasn’t sure how to proceed. As his mind struggled for answers, Naomi’s words came back to him, but with a taunting edge that had been absent in her spoken voice: “What do we really know now that we didn’t know before? His real name? It’s not like that’ll be the one he’s using…”