Vultures in the Wind

by Peter Rimmer

  “My client is not prepared to answer questions, now or in the future. He thanks you for your time.”

  A month later, when the press had finally given up looking for Matthew Gray, Archie received a hand-written letter through his lawyer, dated a month earlier.

  Dear Archie

  The only regret I have is in severing my friendship with you and Lucky, friendships I consider the best thing that happened to me since my father died at Tobruk. There is in place a consortium agreement with Teddie Botha which gives him first refusal on my Security Lion shares, some of which he will be able to afford, but not enough to retain control. I suggest you talk to him, you and Lucky, to join forces to control the company for the benefit of policyholders. He will make a superb CEO in a few years’ time.

  As you read this letter, I am not dead, suicide not being my style. I have decided to go away and live a different life, but I will always remember our friendship. Give my regards to Lucky.

  Your old friend, Matt.

  A week after Archie gave up the hope that Matt would return to his office, he approached Teddie Botha and together they purchased enough of Matt’s shares to keep control of the company. The shares having dropped a third of their value following Matt’s precipitous conference. For Archie, the fun had gone out of business and much of his life. Matthew had been the pivot around which all of them had revolved.

  But there would be life after Matthew Gray, for himself and Security Lion. Ordinary people and life itself, he told himself, always went on. Lucky had gone off on a monumental binge and he, Archibald Fletcher-Wood, ex-Congo mercenary and sometime playboy, had been left to run a multi-million empire. Gratefully, he handed over the responsibility to Teddie Botha. In the same week, Margaret announced her engagement to one of the Inanda set, and Wits Mining shares picked up a little of their losses. The fiancé was an accountant with a legal degree who had been one of the world’s permanent students, finally coming out of varsity at the age of twenty-eight. C B Weeks would groom him well.

  In Lusaka, Luke pondered the hurt of his friend, before throwing the pain on the pile alongside all the other problems of the struggle. He had enough problems of his own trying to kick the white farmers out of Rhodesia.

  In Scotland, where the whin was in full bloom, a rich buttercup-yellow, the earl of Lothianmore cursed his luck and the stupidity of his relations. “He’s thrown away all that money that would have saved the family. If he wanted to give it away, why in hell did he not give it to me instead of a bunch of niggers. I’m his flesh and blood, for God’s sake.”

  He and his family were now living in five rooms, damp, cold, wet rooms built five hundred years earlier for sturdier men of Lothianmore, and the National Trust was doing its best with the rest of the pile of stones. The grounds had shrunk to twenty-one hectares, which they had turned into a fun park for day trippers.

  Sunny Tupper, back in England after a bad marriage to the owner of the 450SLC Mercedes, cried for what should have been and cursed her own stupidity. She was thirty-three, her looks were fading, and she was bored with flitting from man to man. Above all else, she knew how Matt was feeling and for a brief moment of hope thought he would contact her that he was running away to her. The days passed and nothing happened. Nothing ever happened any more.

  Back in America, Ben Munroe finally achieved what he had been aiming for: a staff job at Newsweek, the security he craved along with the chance to travel the world at someone else’s expense. He had arrived, and he rejoiced each day at his success.

  At Jan Smuts airport, Johannesburg, another celebration was taking place. Hector was seeing off his friend and fellow-revolutionary, the Very Reverend Andrew Porterstone, bishop-designate, the two dedicated communists enjoying fully the irony of the situation. Andrew was to become a major force in the anti-apartheid movement from his new base in the slums of north London. The black priests who would take over the Church of the Province of Southern Africa were firmly in place and the people in Moscow considered Andrew more valuable in London, helping to orchestrate the destruction of the South African economy through trade and financial sanctions. The two friends shook hands warmly, looking deeply into each other’s eyes.

  “We’re going to win,” said Hector.

  “I know,” said Andrew, smiling the jovial smile that was becoming so well known around the world. “And may God bless you all,” he said, turning to the press and the television cameras. He had given his well-prepared speech about the horrors of apartheid, so now he could walk out and step aboard his plane. The warm feeling of success coursed through the blood in his veins, and it was better than any artificial stimulant known to man.

  When the revolution came, the world would hold hands in the name of communism, not in the name of God. There would be government by the people, for the people, and he would be among the illustrious few to control the mechanism of the totalitarian, all-embracing world government. At last there would be peace on earth and goodwill to all men, as anyone wanting it any other way would be eliminated.

  In Pretoria, the capital of apartheid South Africa, while Luke was breathing real meaning into his slogan ‘one settler, one bullet’ in the northwest corner of Rhodesia, Minister Kloss was coining another phase that would galvanise the whites of South Africa: “Total onslaught.”

  His bureau of state security understood the minds of those who fermented the black revolution. They knew that without the total onslaught of communism there would be no military threat from Angola to Mozambique, from South West Africa to Rhodesia, and he determined no quarter should be given in order to maintain civilised government. If the West did not know what was being done to it in the name of anti-colonialism and anti-apartheid, then he did, and the surrogate armies of Moscow were not going to be allowed to destroy the calm and order of white-ruled Africa.

  He knew that, without the white man in Africa, without colonisation, there would not be even a vestige of wealth in the subcontinent. That Africa, left to its warring tribes, would reduce itself once again to poverty, famine and anarchy. He also knew that, without apartheid, the separate development of the races, there would not be a white left in Africa. It had never been the whites’ intention, as they trekked through Africa, to adopt the lifestyle of the blacks, to reduce themselves to the lifestyle of savages who had not even invented the wheel. The genes of white and black were as different as a mud hut and an air-conditioned brick house, and the Afrikaner volk had no wish to live in mud huts. The volk would fight for the civilisation they had created. The youth of the country would be called up into the armies. Armscor would be instructed to develop weapons suitable for bush warfare.

  The rest of the world, blinded by their hedonistic lifestyles built on borrowed money, could go to the hell they deserved for bending their knee to the manipulations of communism. The volk had fought the British Empire at the height of its power for three long years, and they would fight whoever now sought to take away their land. Every able-bodied man between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five who had not done his national service would be called up into the defence force. The mailed fist of law and order would prevail. If the world and communism wanted it otherwise, Minister Kloss told his colleagues in the cabinet, they would have to buy every Afrikaner. Once before the British had failed, despite their concentration camps and a million troops fighting twenty thousand Boers. With their bibles and their rifles, they would defeat the powers of evil.

  The last thing Teddie Botha expected when he opened his private mail at the end of the winter, and the last thing he needed, was a request from the state president to attend a training camp at Voortrekker Hoogte. He was twenty-four years old and had previously avoided the draft by being at university. Without thinking much of the problem – he and Archie had as many as they could handle – he dictated a letter to the authorities explaining who he was and thought nothing more of it. He had been surprised that the government letter required him to report in three weeks’ time. He instructed his secretary to regi
ster the letter.

  Five weeks later, two men in uniform, wearing red caps and funereal expressions, pushed past his secretary into his office. Teddie looked up into the cold eyes of a sergeant of the military police.

  “Are you Edward Todd Botha?”

  “Yes,” replied Teddie, the moisture drying in his mouth as quickly as if he had looked up a tree into the eyes of a leopard.

  “You will come with us.”

  “But…”

  “Man, you want me to pick you out of that fancy chair.” The sergeant moved to go round his desk, and Teddie sprang to his feet in alarm.

  “What the hell’s going on here?” demanded Archie, coming into the room at the secretary’s request. “Who the hell are you two?”

  “This man is a deserter.”

  “Don’t be bloody silly. Do you know who he is?”

  “Edward Todd Botha. And he’s under arrest.” He put a hand under Teddie’s elbow, and Archie watched his new CEO being marched out of his office. Appalled, he sat down in Teddie’s chair. The nightmare had returned.

  “Are you now the managing director?” asked Teddie’s secretary with a smile, as she returned to the office. “Can I get you some coffee? Mister Botha has a meeting at two-thirty and another at four. If we start now, I can brief you on the meetings. The sergeant said Mister Botha will be away for two years and three months. Something about Mister Botha being in the stockade for the first three months.” The girl looked ready to burst with suppressed laughter.

  Archie began to laugh, and the secretary joined him. There was nothing else for him to do. Then he sat and waited for his coffee, his mind a blank.

  Finally, he thought carefully about his predicament. He had got Archie and Lucky out of the Congo, even with a gunshot wound in Archie’s leg. He would get them through this one until some sanity returned to life. Where the hell was Matthew, and why did that bitch have to come into Matt’s life?

  He chuckled again for a moment. Teddie in the glass house.

  Then he put a call through to the bureau of state security and spoke to Minister Kloss. They had met each other through Hector and Helena. The man was brief and rather curt. Had his own problems, probably. The minister would see what he could do about the three months detention. Nothing else. Two years would be a long time for both of them. Where the hell was Matt?

  They had made Aldo Calucci a lieutenant and put him in charge of seven men skilled in the ways of the bush. One of them was Mashinga, sergeant Mashinga of the Rhodesian African Rifles. Aldo they had commissioned into the Rhodesian Light Infantry, a white regiment. The rest of his men were from the RAR, all of them Shangaans and none of them friends of the Matabele.

  The rains had broken a week earlier, coming late, at the beginning of November, and the tsetse and mosquito in the Zambezi Valley concentrated on the one white man, despite the dye that made him look as dark as his troopers.

  They all stank, as the smell of soap travelled far in the bush and the men were at war. They had succeeded in finding seven of the ZIPRA arms caches and in each case moved farther down the valley before giving the helicopters the co-ordinates. Silently, the arms had been removed and taken back to base camp at Karoi, one hundred and fifty kilometres away in the heart of the white tobacco-growing area. All the rifles, grenade launchers and land mines were of Russian origin, given to the liberation movements to promote the just and glorious struggle. The older arms dumps were more difficult to find as the bush had grown over to cover the small traces of man’s disturbances, but the arms would last a hundred years, lethal and giving power to their owners.

  Aldo’s men camped without fire and moved with the greatest caution, having many times cut the spoor of the guerrillas sent into the valley to track the trackers who were destroying their work. Every gun had to be carried into the valley through many kilometres of hot, dangerous and fly-infested country. Luke and Aldo with their men, circled each other, laying ambushes and moving on, living off the bush, eating rats and snakes, roots and berries, one day hunter, one day hunted, man hunting beast, lion hunting man, buffalo watching from the thorn thickets, leopard from the tall acacia trees, honey badgers, small and vicious, from the disused holes of ant bears, vultures circling for week-old carrion, eagles high on the wind seeing and telling no one, the valley deadly, beautiful and cruel. For three months they circled each other, never making contact. Chelsea, back in Lusaka, was certain her man was dead. The silent war of the bush.

  Charterhouse School had been like a prison for Jonathan Holland, and he was determined that no son of his would ever be subjected to an English boarding school. The food had been lousy, the heating inadequate, the toilet facilities feudal, and the discipline and traditions something he could well have done without. Whoever it was who said that school days were the best years of a man’s life needed his head read. Leaving England was a way of getting as far as possible from his school days, none of which had been enjoyable, not even the holidays, as these gave way to another term at school and another round of the popularity stakes. If you didn’t curry up to the right people, you were as good as dead.

  Jonathan was an average kind of boy, though Charterhouse led him to believe that he was some kind of a freak for not playing soccer, preferring rugby football, and not thinking that athletics and running round and round a track was the height of a boy’s achievement, instead of a pain in the butt. Jonathan preferred tennis. This was a form of exertion which didn’t include pain. Tennis was a pleasure; house runs and the mile round the track were agony, and Jonathan Holland unwisely said so, thereby receiving the cold shoulder from the boys and masters alike.

  Worse still, he liked the theatre and the annual school play, the Shakespeare the boys were studying for 0-level that year. Jonathan was a romantic, and romantics were thoroughly disliked at public school. His housemaster had even told his mother that he did not think her son was going to amount to much in life, and everyone, including Jonathan with his imposed inferiority complex, had been surprised at his obtaining seven 0-levels and two A- levels. These were good enough to get him into Oxford in those days had he wished to go, but the thought of more of the same way of life gave him the silent screams. If they did not like him, then he did not like them, and he would go away and find another country that did not require a man to be popular to get on. There was one thing Jonathan disliked even more than Charterhouse: arse-creepers. The place had been full of them.

  So, in 1972, Jonathan Holland, eighteen years old and with the dew of youth still wet on his face, arrived at Salisbury airport with the determination to become a tobacco farmer and wear a wide-brimmed hat. Everything about Africa fascinated him, including the whiff of war and fighting a losing cause. Anything, but anything, was better than going up to the city of London every day for the rest of his life and sitting behind a desk.

  His mother had been happy for him that his father’s company was still there to train him for a top position, despite the family’s small percentage of shares. Matthew Gray had kept his word and, if the man had not disappeared into thin air, Jonathan knew he would have been frog-marched into the dull, dreary and depressing world of the insurance industry. But a man took his chances when he saw them and, leaving his mother a note that would break her heart, he bought a return ticket to Rhodesia to prevent them from sending him back at Salisbury airport. With the six hundred dollars left from his savings, he entered the country of his dreams, ostensibly as a visitor.

  Knowing that his money was going to have to last a long time, he took the bus into Salisbury and bought himself a copy of The Rhodesia Herald. There were three rooms to let, and he walked into the foyer of the new Meikles Hotel where he was relieved to see a strong contingent of well-tanned men in shorts and bush shirts who had obviously left their wide brimmed hats in their trucks outside. Explaining to a very nice lady at reception that he had just arrived in the country and did not have enough money to stay in the hotel, he asked to use the phone. Instead of treating him like a lunatic, hav
ing seen plenty of Jonathans in her time, the girl took his newspaper with the rooms marked with a cross and left him standing alone with his one suitcase. In between her job she made three calls and came back to him with a big smile on her face.

  “You’re in luck. Missus Rankin has a room in her flat, and the block’s nice and just up the road. You won’t need a car to come into town and she sounded very nice. Her son is in the army, which is why she’s let the room. The last lodger also got his call-up papers. You English?”

  “Yes, from Surrey. Do you know Surrey?”

  “Born in the Vumba. That’s near Umtali. You can leave your case with me and walk up to Second Street to Missus Rankin. I’ve written down the address. Your first visit to Rhodesia?”

  “My second.”

  “If you like the room, then you can come back for your suitcase. Safe as houses with me. My name’s Jennifer, but they all call me Jen.”

  “Jonathan Holland. Thanks, Jen; you’re a gem.” They both laughed at his weak pun, and Jonathan handed over his suitcase to a complete stranger, keeping his passport and money in his jacket pocket. The tweed jacket felt much too hot for February in Rhodesia. He had forgotten the seasons were about-face in the southern hemisphere. With the jacket over his shoulder, he walked out into the sun. The great adventure of life had begun, and he had never felt happier.

  Mrs Rankin was as nice as Jennifer and equally friendly, taking only a week’s rent in advance and demanding no deposit. “If we like each other, you pay me every week, but I am sure you and I won’t have problems. You remind me of my son. He’s in the valley. You’d better go back and fetch your suitcase. Here’s the key. Have a beer in the Captain’s Cabin. Beers are good in Rhodesia… Welcome to the best country in the world. If you want anything, you ask me. You’ll be all right. There’s a bar lunch in the Captain’s Cabin that’s cheap. You can use my kitchen but don’t make a mess. Don’t do meals, as the ladies like their independence. We’re a very independent lot in Rhodesia.”