Vultures in the Wind

by Peter Rimmer

  Luke Mbeki had been moved from fund-raising to co-ordinating the world press and television to focus on the greatest black leader in the world after Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela. In jail for twenty-three years following the Rivonia treason that broke the leaders of the ANC, the groundswell for his release was rumbling across the world, and it was Luke’s job to orchestrate the ‘Release Mandela Campaign’. To give him a better profile for the mass media, the liberation movement had provided him with sufficient income to lease a one-bedroomed flat in London.

  In yet another effort to bring Chelsea back into his life he had travelled to Lisbon and explained his new job and his belief that victory and a return home for all the exiles was a realistic possibility. He had taken the opportunity of Christmas to make his point hoping the season of goodwill would work in his favour. His son John had turned ten in September.

  “I’m quite happy with my life,” she had told him not even willing to let him stay with her and his son in her small villa. “I am forty, I have a career in insurance, a pension when I need it, and John goes to a school where he will grow up as a middle-class Portuguese with all the benefits of an ancient civilisation. Running around putting bombs in supermarkets has nothing to do with John de La Cruz. If you wish to see the boy, you are welcome. I hope you speak Portuguese. What the great liberation movement has done in Mozambique leaves me cold to your cause. You all talk of making a better life in Africa, and reduce each country to poverty and civil war. You are even strangling the great South African economy in the name of the struggle. I suggest you stay in an hotel, Luke Mbeki. Despite what I once felt, you are not welcome in this home. There is blood on your hands, and there will be a lot more before you have finished destroying Africa.”

  “Apartheid is totally unacceptable to any civilised man,” Luke stated with a degree of indignation.

  “So is your alternative. Look at Mozambique, with a million dead and everyone starving not even ten years after the great liberation. Ask my mother and father. You are a good man Luke, but there are others who are using you. The communist may need you now, but wait until later… And what happened to that other little fellow you brought into the world.”

  “Matt’s looking after him in Port St Johns.”

  “Now I’ve heard everything… We’re Portuguese, Luke. First World. And we wish to stay that way for generations. Please leave us alone.” Her eyes had been cold. It was over. The loneliness had swept over him and left a void in the pit of his stomach. But she was wrong. The struggle was worth the pain. They would get Mandela out of jail, and then he would show this woman what a real liberation struggle had all been about.

  Instead of turning him away from the cause she sent him back with renewed energy and determination to win. They were going to make the difference for the blacks in South Africa, whatever the mistakes to the north. There was just no alternative.

  The heir to David Todd’s empire, his great-granddaughter, had been born in March, and it had not taken Theo Blaze two weeks to move into the mansion her daughter had persuaded Teddie Botha to buy soon after they were married. The penthouse rattled skeletons in her cupboard and made her nervous.

  The house was in Sandhurst, a Johannesburg suburb where it was said no one lived who was not a millionaire, other than the servants. Theo, judging this to be her only chance of finally living in luxury, had chosen the house, as there was a sweet granny flat with its own swimming pool that suited her image of the glamorous grandmother. The technique used by her daughter to move into the old penthouse was used again, Granny claiming the right to baby-sit so the proud parents could dine in the best restaurant in Rivonia, The Fiddler.

  When Teddie went to work the next day to battle with the mounting volume of administration that daily seemed poised to overwhelm him, his mother-in-law was having breakfast, and when he came home at eight o’clock she was sitting at the dinner table ordering the servants around as if she were paying their wages. Teddie was just too tired to argue; he ate his supper and went to bed.

  There were far bigger problems than Theo Blaze on his mind, the biggest problem being his inability to decide which was the biggest problem under the pile of paper that he was never able to diminish. The problems of the administration of Security Lion and its subsidiaries landed on Teddie’s desk and if any of them arrived on Archie Fletcher-Wood’s, he soon moved them across to the CEO. Archie had never liked taking important decisions, though he carried out his CEO directives with enthusiasm.

  All through their lives Archie and Lucky Kuchinski had passed the buck. They were superb number twos, but had never wished to be the boss. They preferred to enjoy their days in business, not worry about them, and most of all not wake in the middle of the night and think about what they had not been able to do during the day. Teddie had employed a flock of accountants and financial advisers, but all of them deferred to the executive chairman and in many ways made more work for Teddie than they solved. They fitted their job descriptions and collected their salaries, but they were employees, people who did what they were told but rarely thought for themselves. For them, the right decision was always the safe decision, which normally meant doing nothing without a written instruction.

  Business was definitely not fun for Teddie Botha and when a good Samaritan let drop that he knew of a man who had slept with Tilda Botha nine weeks before the wedding, the situation in the office almost collapsed. Teddie stopped functioning. The one thing he wished to do most of all was to go away and never think of another insurance company in his life. Teddie sulked for a week, and then told his wife he wanted a blood test.

  “Why, darling?” she asked sweetly, feeling anything but confident inside.

  “Why not? How do I know there was only me? Why not? We were sharing a flat. Not married. You caught me, Tilda, and I have enough problems at work not to worry about this. I want to know and I want to know quickly. I can’t even think straight.”

  As luck would have it, the baby began to cry, and Tilda left the room to find out what was going on. Only then did she tell her mother.

  “Life is full of gambles. Have the test. You’ve a fifty-fifty chance.”

  “One in five mother. Like mother like daughter they say.”

  “Don’t infer things you know nothing about,” retorted Theo, tartly.

  “What do I do?”

  Her mother gave the predicament a search for alternatives and shook her head. “Have the test. What else?” She was a gambler by nature.

  When Tilda told Teddie she would take the baby to the doctor, he said he wanted the man named by his friend to go as well. “And we can all have a test for Aids. It’s my own fault for marrying someone I knew nothing about. Trouble is, I always take people at face value.”

  Two days later, Teddie’s doctor phoned him at the office. “The good news is none of you are HIV-positive.”

  “Who’s the father?” Teddie had a sinking feeling in his stomach.

  “Neither of you. The man was rather relieved when I told him. There is no chance whatsoever of either of you being the biological father of the child.”

  “Poor kid… Poor, bloody kid.”

  “By the way Teddie, do you know your wife is pregnant?”

  Colonel Antonio van Perreira dos Santos Cassero was still the youngest colonel in the Cuban air force, but it did not stop the tsetse flies attacking him at first light every morning. He was stationed at Cuito Cuanavale. The newly built air base in the southern part of Angola, a base which gave the Cuban air force and its MPLA allies command of all the air space in Angola.

  The offensive against the rebel Unita movement had swept out of the Angolan capital of Luanda and crushed everything in its path, the control of the joint forces falling to a senior Russian general and his staff. The rains had been over for two months and the tracks through the bush were able to take the Russian T55 and T54 tanks which massacred Jonas Savimbi’s troops, who had not been supplied with armour by his mentors, the American CIA and the South Afric
an defence force. Heavy machine guns but not TOW anti-tank missiles, which made it clear to Antonio, who flew five strafing missions every day to add to the misery of the Unita troops, that the communists would soon be on the border with Namibia, which the South Africans still called South West Africa and administered under a post-First-World-War mandate from the League of Nations, which the United Nations had revoked without the South Africans taking the slightest bit of notice.

  Another week would see the combined Cuban and Angolan MPLA army sweep Jonas Savimbi out of his bush stronghold at Jamba and Antonio’s MIG 23s posing a lethal threat to South African air space in both South West Africa and South Africa itself, when the Cuban air force moved in behind the advancing SWAPO and ANC troops to conquer what they would then call Namibia. The very sovereignty of South Africa, with its inferior aircraft, would be at stake, bringing a swift collapse of apartheid rule and a communist takeover of the whole of South Africa, with its strategic minerals, the lack of some of which would threaten the Star Wars programme of Ronald Reagan.

  The excitement of the advance with its stupendous possibilities, kept the adrenalin flowing through Antonio’s veins. Soon he would be master of a vast coffee estate and, if he was not too far mistaken, Russia and her allies would rule the world. The victory in Southern Africa would counter all the problems in Afghanistan. The descendant of the third son of the fourth wife of the king of Monomatapa (or so he thought of himself) was coming home for good.

  Minister Kloss, acutely aware of the problems that a Cuban victory in Angola would pose for South Africa, had secretly called up the South African reserve, intending to go to the aid of Jonas Savimbi with tanks and the South African air force. Unknown to the Cubans, they had been equipped with new weaponry developed by Armscor, the erstwhile employer of Hector Fortescue-Smythe, who, had he still been under cover, would have warned his masters in Moscow. He would also have told them that the T55s and T54s were no match for the South African main battle tanks, the Olifants that had been developed by Armscor from the base of the British Centurion tank. He would also have mentioned that G5 howitzer, the best in the world. But Hector had blown his cover.

  In the previous dry season, in 1987, when Teddie was trying to keep his mind from blowing to pieces, the UNITA troops had stopped the MPLA forces without the help of South African troops, but the consequences of the new situation were too terrible to contemplate. Pretoria and its generals were fully aware that a Cuban advance into South West Africa would put their own country at risk. With the tacit nod from the Americans, the South Africans were moving out of the Caprivi Strip and over the Angolan border to the help of their surrogate friend, mortally threatened by the advancing columns of Russian tanks.

  Colonel Edward Botha was a part-time soldier who believed in leading his troops from the front. When the South Africans reached the Lomba River at the beginning of October, he was in the forefront of his tanks which totally destroyed the MPLA’s 47th Brigade. The Cuban/Angola advance was stopped dead in its tracks. For three days, Teddie revelled in the battle not once thinking of Tilda’s second child or the mess he had left behind at the office.

  The rebels advanced behind the tanks and the Mirages gave the ground troops air cover. The controlled discipline of the South African defence force was awesome and, when the G5s came within range of Cuito Cuanavale, Antonio saw his dreams crashing with the finely-tuned direction of the shells. Even when he was up in the air for his last mission out of Cuito, he could not detect the G5s camouflaged in the mopani bush and he could not see the South African commandos with their binoculars calmly trained on his air base, directing the guns in their hideouts scattered through the bush.

  What he did see was a column of South African tanks, and he banked his MIG 23 to attack, hurtling down and releasing a deadly air-to-ground missile at the lead tank, which disintegrated in a gratifying ball of fire and smoke. With just enough fuel, Antonio left the battle zone, returning control of the air to the Mirages based in Caprivi. Without his forward air base, his MIG 23s could no longer influence the ground battle.

  Even though the South Africans won the battle and saved southern Angola for Jonas Savimbi, they had received a fright from which their old illusion of invincibility was never to recover. Minister Kloss had come face to face with the possibility of a Russian aircraft over Pretoria, and it made him acutely nervous. Backing down from strident arrogance, South Africa let it be known to the rest of the world that they would sacrifice South West Africa for a Cuban withdrawal from South Africa.

  The generals, pointing out the consequences of a second confrontation with even more sophisticated Russian weaponry operated by Cubans, had lost their nerve and led the South Africans into four-cornered negotiations with Russia, America and Angola. At the very edge of the precipice, they had seen the light and the Russians, at the end of their financial resources, were willing to withdraw their surrogate Cuban military and claim a victory which they would lead to independence for a communist-inclined Namibia.

  It was to be the last African battle of the Cold War, and Teddie Botha was one of the last tank commanders to die as a direct result of the super-power confrontation. He had been yelling his head off with excitement when the rocket hit the turret, his head and shoulders, out of the tank, directing his armoured column in hot pursuit.

  Within a week, the predators among the insurance companies had sensed there was something wrong. With the chairman dead and the world stock markets taking a sharp dive, the shares of Security Lion dropped thirty per cent in Johannesburg and London, and Archie Fletcher-Wood lost control of the situation. The pile of unfinished business on Teddie’s desk would have daunted the best administrator and, to add to the problem, Lucky Kuchinski was no help at all.

  The company was suddenly coming apart, and the registrar of insurance turned his attention to the solvency rate of the third largest insurer in the country. With all shares on the Johannesburg stock exchange diving twenty-one per cent in one day, the actuarial conversion of assets against future liabilities of policyholders was badly affected, causing the red light to flash at Security Lion. Teddie Botha could not have chosen a worse time to get himself killed.

  A rumour started in the market that the investment manager in charge of the huge funds flowing into the company had been buying and selling shares in the name of seven companies, of which he was the sole shareholder. Before the fraud squad could catch up with him, he drove to the airport and caught the plane to London, leaving his car in the parking lot. Bernard Strover had left the country in his artist’s gear and, when he reached London, he collected every pound owed to him by Isidore Salvadori and kept running. A large amount of the money he had made was safely invested in Asuncion in Paraguay, where there was no extradition agreement with South Africa. He was even smiling when he arrived in the middle of South America, as he considered the way he had made his own money a legitimate part of his position at Security Lion Holdings.

  First he had bought a small parcel of shares for one of his dummy companies, then he had forced up the price by using Security Lion money to buy a large parcel of the same shares, finally buying the shares from the dummy company with Security money at the newly inflated price. The reality was that Security Lion bought shares for its policyholder fund at a three per cent premium overall as, when the heavy-buy signal stopped, the shares sank back to their true market value.

  If Teddie Botha had been on top of the pile of paper in his office, he would have seen the scam. Archie and Lucky, both directors, never looked at the buy-and-sell sheets but, under the Companies Act relating to responsibilities of directors, they could be found negligent in the carrying out of their duties. There was a lot more to being a director of a company than having a name on the letterhead, especially when things started to go wrong.

  Three weeks after the destruction of Teddie’s Olifant tank, both friends wished they had been in the tank with the chairman. As executive directors, they found themselves held fully responsible for the r
unning of the company during their stewardship. There was a good chance of their not only losing the value of their shareholdings in Security Lion, but also of their going to jail. When the savings of the ordinary man in the street was at stake, there had to be a scapegoat, and Bernard Strover was well beyond the reach of the law.

  Even if they had wanted to, it was too late to leave the country. If the mess in Teddie’s office had been decipherable and a clear financial position calculable, the run on the Security Lion shares would have stopped but, when an outside firm of auditors was appointed by the registrar of insurance, they announced it would take them weeks, if not months to ascertain the financial strength of the company.

  From outside the country, the ANC shouted to the world that here was another example of white misrule and that, when they took over the country, they would sort out the problem by nationalising the insurance companies. This resulted in massive off-shore dumping of South African shares by overseas shareholders, which depressed the market further, making the actuarial calculations of the Security Lion companies’ solvency rate even worse.

  Then the Cuban air force struck the dam wall at the Cunene River on the border between South West Africa and Angola, killing a platoon of South African soldiers in the process. Antonio had led his squadron on a long raid behind the South African ground forces, totally outflanking them and proving the sophistication of his MIG 23s and the speed that took them so quickly away from the dam wall of the vast water scheme that fed the parched area of Ovamboland.

  There was panic in more places than the glass tower of the stock exchange. Minister Kloss, as a result of the shock, found himself quite constipated. Frikkie Swart discreetly checked his overseas bank accounts but decided in the panic-induced confusion that even larger amounts of taxpayers’ money could be plundered from the fund for clandestine operations. To make his minister a little happier, he had his men take out four prominent political activists, two of whom were white, one shot to death by a shotgun blast right outside his front door.