And, yes, though the place was empty, it was in use: the kitchen was clean, there was water in the taps. Clements went through it slowly, shining a shaded torch. There were a few cans of food in the small pantry and some Cuban rum. The living room was the only suitable place for a meeting: there was a dining table surrounded by eight chairs. The bookshelves were empty, there was no paper anywhere. Upstairs there were three bedrooms holding ten narrow beds, made up with blankets but no sheets. All the cupboards and drawers were bare. There was one used bar of soap in the small bathroom but nothing else. All the floors were made of wood, covered with a scattering of worn mats.
Clements went back downstairs. He began to go through the house again systematically, carefully noting every detail, the position of the furniture, of the mats. Then he let himself out by the kitchen door, and crept back through the woods. At ten o’clock exactly Harker’s headlights appeared down the road. Clements emerged from the darkness, and Harker picked him up.
‘Well?’
‘It’ll be a cinch,’ Clements said. ‘We hit all three entrances as shown on the architect’s drawing. And the place is a tinder-box, everything is wood. A couple of bombs will blow the lot sky-high. It’s obviously just a safe-house for transients. No armour, no communications, not even a phone. So who are these guys we’re hitting?’
‘Sorry, you have no need to know. Is there a good place for the listening device?’
‘Perfect. One just under the floorboards as a back-up, the main just inside the surrounding forest – plenty of undergrowth, but a clean field of fire if the action starts at the wrong time.’
‘Okay, so plant the gear on Thursday night. Rent a car, park it at the hamburger joint and walk to the scene. Rig your listening device in the right place and then make yourself scarce. Take Spicer to cover you. Then we rendezvous on Saturday, with our hardware – the CIA are supplying us with the Russian machine pistols that the Cubans use, and the grenades. The CIA are tailing the targets all day to see what else they get up to. When they arrive here the CIA will radio me. We move into the forest and listen. At the right time we hit ’em, front door, kitchen door and french window. Then we get their documents and blow the place up.’
‘How many of us?’
‘Four. You, me, Spicer and Trengrove.’
Clements said, ‘Wish we could hit them as they arrive, as they’re getting out of the car.’
‘Wish we could too. But the boss wants to hear what they’re talking about.’
‘Well,’ Clements said with a smile, ‘sounds like fun, sir. About time we did something exciting.’
Exciting? Harker felt ill in his guts. He was sick of war. He sighed grimly. ‘Okay, we’ll go back to Harvest and I’ll give you the listening gear Dupont gave me.’
8
Yes, Harker was sick of war, sick of soldiering: he didn’t feel like a soldier any more, he felt like a publisher. He didn’t even feel much like an African: he felt more of an Anglo-American now. But a professional soldier he was. He owed his position as a publisher to his military superiors, and he was at war. And the purpose of warfare, every military scientist agrees, is to kill as many of the enemy as possible as fast as possible in the pursuit of victory: you only stop killing the enemy when he is defeated or makes peace. It is the characteristic of the professional military man that once he has made up his mind on a course of action he carries it out: he only departs from his objective if he has to make a tactical retreat.
Harker’s character and talents fitted him perfectly for a successful military career. Yes, he was sick of war but he regarded it as a just battle against the communist forces of darkness. By the time the train had carried him back to New York from Washington he had made up his mind that the persons meeting at the safe-house in Long Island were legitimate military targets: the CIA said so, the Chairman said so, Dupont said so. The qualms he had about the ANC officials being civilians were groundless – they were plotting sabotage within South Africa which would surely involve innocent civilian casualties. Harker wished he knew more but he had no need to know before accepting his superiors’ word for this. True, his action would be highly illegal under the laws of America, first degree murder, but that did not diminish the moral legitimacy of it under the laws of war.
Nonetheless Harker felt sick in his guts. He did not waver, but the fact that those ANC officials were civilians kept nagging at him. He grimly told himself that his qualms were illogical, attributable to his war-weariness, to being softened. He pushed the point out of his mind but it kept stalking him. It was a very tense week. He did not sleep well.
Before midnight on Thursday Clements telephoned him at home. ‘All systems go,’ he said. ‘The story is written exactly as outlined. It’ll be publishable on schedule.’
‘Good.’
Harker poured himself another drink. Yes it was good, for Christ’s sake, good that five bastards plotting murder were going to be taken out, that innocent civilian lives in South Africa were going to be spared … But he had been secretly hoping that Clements might report that the mission had proved impossible – then the CIA would have had to do their own dirty work.
That wouldn’t bother you one bit, so why the hell are you bothered now? The result would be the same!
The next morning he was about to call Josephine Valentine to postpone their Saturday lunch date when she telephoned him.
‘Well, Major,’ she said cheerfully, ‘it’s all systems go. I’ve polished up those first ten chapters and they’re fit to be read. This is to confirm tomorrow’s date.’
Harker closed his eyes. All systems go. That she had used the same words as Clements made him flinch. ‘I’m terribly sorry, Josie, but I was about to phone you to ask if we can postpone, something very important has come up.’
‘Oh.’ She sounded very disappointed. ‘Of course. Till when?’
He wanted to give himself a week to lie low, to settle down, to get the debriefing over, reports sent, to get over the whole incident. He could almost feel her disappointment – authors want their praise immediately. ‘How about the following Saturday?’
‘Fine!’ Her relief that the postponement was not longer was palpable. ‘I know – let me take you to lunch at the yacht club. It’s my favourite day there – a superb buffet.’
‘Yacht club it is,’ Harker said. ‘We’ll fight about the bill.’
‘I’m paying,’ she said. ‘You’re giving up part of your weekend for me!’
Saturday was tense. Harvest House was deserted, echoing. His instructions were to stay in his command post in the basement to be in secure contact with both the faceless CIA and the ugly face of Dupont in Washington until H-hour, the time for action. It was a long day. He tried to do some publishing work but could not concentrate. He turned to some CCB preparation, reviewing his salesmen’s latest information in readiness for his routine monthly report to Dupont, but he could not settle to it. He tried to catch up on the wads of South African newspapers that arrived twice a week, a task he usually enjoyed, but he could not even keep his mind on the reports about the Angolan war. Most of the news was bullshit anyway – the journalists usually only knew what the army chose to tell them to boost morale, to keep the public supportive. In reality the war was going to be South Africa’s Vietnam if a deal wasn’t made soon – he just wished to God the politicians could learn from America’s mistakes, pull out all the stops, hit the Cubans with everything the army had, drive them into the sea once and for all, get the war over, then settle South Africa’s internal problems – dismantle goddam apartheid and bring moderate blacks into government. But South Africa dared not do that because there would be an international outcry – the West also wanted Russia and Cuba out of the continent but South Africa, which was capable of achieving that, was its own worst enemy with its goddam apartheid, a pariah. So the battles raged on, people dying, taxpayers’ money haemorrhaging into the hot sands of Angola along with the blood.
Harker shoved the newspapers aside in fr
ustration. He held his face. And what he was doing today was part of that process. Another nail in the coffin of communism.
He had to get up and start pacing up and down the basement to ease his nerves.
It was always like this before an action, he reminded himself. Once you knew you were going in at H-hour you were a bundle of tension. You try to rest, to eat, to read, to pray, you know you can’t change anything, the plan is laid, the orders given so all you can do is hope – hope that you come out alive. That’s for an overt action, where it’s more or less each man for himself when the bullets start flying – it was much worse for a covert action where you were sent behind enemy lines and the main hope you had was that they didn’t capture you alive and torture you to death. So what’s new about this fucking tension?
What’s new is that you’ve gone soft in two years in New York – your heart’s not in soldiering any more …
God, he wanted a drink. To ease his nerves, to help his hangover – that was certainly part of his problem, he’d been drinking too much. But he dared not.
To kill the time he pulled out Josephine’s file, and he sat down behind his desk and tried to read again the stories she had written. But he could not concentrate on that either; he flipped through the file, looking for photographs of her.
Oh, she was beautiful. Just then the telephone rang. He snatched up the receiver. ‘Hullo?’
‘Is that Buttons and Bows Night Club?’ Dupont said.
Harker closed his eyes, his heart knocking. ‘Sorry, wrong number.’ He hung up.
Harker slumped, then picked up his cellphone, his hand shaking. He dialled.
‘Buttons and Bows,’ Clements said.
‘I want to speak to Mr Buttons, please.’
‘He’ll call you back in about twenty minutes, sir.’
It was a long twenty minutes waiting for Clements’ next call. ‘Awaiting your pleasure, sir,’ he said.
Harker picked up his holdall and clambered up the narrow staircase into his upper office. He opened the big front door of Harvest House and stepped out into the spring night. The car was parked fifty yards down the road: the driver flashed his headlights once. Harker climbed into the front passenger seat. A man called Parker, one of Clements’ salesmen, was at the wheel. ‘Good evening, sir,’ they all said.
‘Good evening,’ Harker said tensely. ‘Let’s go.’
At nine o’clock that Saturday night they were creeping through the forest, approaching the farmhouse. Now they were all in black tracksuits, wearing balaclavas, carrying the machine-pistols Harker had distributed.
The clapboard house was about fifty years old, the paint peeling off the wood, the yard around it sprinkled with weeds and shrubs. The house was in darkness. The listening gear was in position. Harker gave his instructions and Clements moved to take cover facing the front door, Spicer went off to cover the kitchen door, Trengrove disappeared around the other side of the house to the living room window. Harker remained with the listening device, covering the dining-room French window. They settled down to wait.
It was a very long hour before the headlights came flicking through the forest. The car came up the winding track into the yard, its headlights now blinding. Harker lay beside the listening gear, his heart pounding; the vehicle’s doors opened and one by one five dark figures clambered out. They were hardly talking, only a mutter here and there as they stretched and reached for luggage. Then, while the headlights illuminated the kitchen door, they trooped towards it, carrying their briefcases and baggage. For the first time Harker could distinguish the blacks from the Cubans, but he could not identify anybody. They clustered around while one of the Cubans selected and inserted a key.
Harker snorted to himself. It would have been an ideal moment to hit the whole damn lot of them: no fuss, no risk. But no – goddam Dupont wanted to record what they talked about first. The Cuban unlocked the door and they filed inside. Lights went on. Harker glimpsed them filing through the kitchen into the dining room. They clustered around the table, and one of the Cubans produced a bottle from his briefcase.
Harker put on the headphones of the listening device. He could hear mumbled speech. He turned the tuning knob and the volume. Suddenly he heard a Cuban say, ‘Close the curtains. Sit down, please …’ He heard the scraping of chair legs on the floor. More mumbles. The tinkle of liquor being poured. Then the meeting began.
Harker listened intently, his tape-recorder turning; then he closed his eyes in relief. Thank God … Thank God this murder was not unjust. The bastards were certainly plotting murder. Mass murder. Planning to detonate three car-bombs at twenty-four-hour intervals: the first at the Voortrekker Monument on a Sunday, the second at the Houses of Parliament on Monday, Johannesburg’s international airport on Tuesday. Harker smiled despite himself – the chain of events would be effective: the Voortrekker Monument job would infuriate, the Houses of Parliament job would vastly impress, the Johannesburg airport job would downright terrify. The psychological impact upon the South African public, coming one after the other, boom boom boom, would be enormous. In fact, listening to the muffled indistinct speech, Harker was surprised they settled for only three bombs – why not half a dozen, throw in the Union Buildings in Pretoria where all the top government departments hang out, the Reserve Bank down the road and, say, the City Hall. Harker had always wondered why the ANC hadn’t done all that years ago – they really were, militarily speaking, a milk-and-water bunch. MK, the Spear of the Nation, the ANC’s army, had never waged a battle. The only thing that gave them clout was the moral turpitude of apartheid.
For an hour Harker tried to listen to the plotting going on in the house, over the coughs and mumbles and mutters and occasional laughter, the glug of liquor and the click of cigarette lighters; he could only make out snatches of detail and he hoped the tape-recorder was picking up more. Then suddenly the meeting sounded as if it was over: he heard a burst of song in Spanish, followed by guffaws.
Harker took a deep breath – it was time to hit. He took off his headphones and whispered into his radio transmitter.
‘H-hour coming up. Do you read me? Come in one at a time.’
‘One, copy,’ Clements said.
‘Two, copy,’ Ferdi Spicer said.
‘Three, copy,’ Trengrove said.
‘Okay,’ Harker said, ‘we hit on zero … Five … Four … Three … Two … One … Zero!’
Out of the forest sprang the four dark forms. They ran through the darkness at the house. Harker raced up to the curtained dining-room French window, a stun grenade in his hand: he yanked out the pin with his teeth and hurled it through the window. There was a shattering of glass, then a detonation that seemed to shake the earth. Then there was a crack as Spicer kicked the kitchen door in, another as Clements did the same to the front door. Harker burst through the window and opened fire. And there was nothing in the world but the popping of his machine pistol, then the noise of Spicer’s and Clements’ as they covered the two principal escape routes.
In the cacophony Harker did not hear the shattering of the living room window as a black South African called Looksmart Kumalo dived through it, through Trengrove’s hail of bullets, scrambled up and fled off into the black forest. Trengrove went bounding frantically after him, gun blazing, but in an instant the darkness had swallowed him up. Trengrove went crashing through the black undergrowth, wildly looking for the runaway man, but Looksmart Kumalo, badly wounded, was hiding under some bushes. Trengrove crashed about for several hundred yards, then he turned and went racing back to the farmhouse.
Harker was frantically collecting up all the documents, baggage and briefcases while Clements and Spicer were fixing explosives to the dead bodies. ‘Where’s the other body?’ Clements demanded.
‘Sir!’ Trengrove shouted. ‘He escaped into the forest!’
‘Christ!’ Harker stared. ‘Christ, Christ, Christ!’
‘Go after him, sir?’ Clements rasped.
‘Yes!’ Harker shouted.
‘Spicer stays and finishes the explosives! Rest of you go. Go!’
For twenty minutes Harker, Clements and Trengrove thrashed through the black undergrowth of the forest, trying to flush out the runaway, hoping to stumble across the dead body. It was hopeless – nobody can track in the dark. After twenty minutes Harker barked a halt. If the bastard survived he was unlikely to tell the American police that he was attacked during a murderous conspiracy meeting in an illegal Cuban safe-house.
‘Back!’ Harker rasped. ‘Get the hell out of here!’
Spicer was desperately waiting for them, the explosives emplaced, the listening gear and the seized documents ready to go. Harker spoke into his radio to the getaway car: ‘Venus is rising!’
The men went racing up the dark track towards the tarred road. They were several miles away, speeding towards Manhattan, when the house disintegrated in a massive explosion, the bodies blown to tiny pieces.
9
It was always the same after an action. Before going into battle he was very tense but afterwards, when the dust had settled and the bodies had been counted, he slept as if he had been pole-axed even if he knew the action was to resume at dawn – he felt no remorse about the enemy, only grim satisfaction and relief to have survived. It was only the conscripts, the civilians in uniform, who sometimes felt remorse, but usually that didn’t last long either because few experiences are more antagonizing than having, some bastard trying to shoot the living shit out of you.
Harker woke up that Sunday afternoon rested for the first time in a week, permitting himself no feeling of guilt. The die was cast, nothing could change it. It had been a legitimate military operation and had saved civilian lives. It was front-page news in most of the papers: there were photographs of the area where the safe-house had stood, the earth and shrubbery blackened and blasted. There was one survivor in critical condition: an ‘adult male of African origin now in hospital, with multiple injuries, including loss of one eye and an arm so badly mutilated by gunfire that it had to be amputated below the elbow’. The FBI were investigating: they had no comment yet but the local sheriff, who was first on the scene, was moved to hint that this was ‘probably a gangland slaying, probably to do with drugs’. Investigations were continuing.
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