An Empty Coast

by Tony Park

  Stirling, who had been managing a lodge in the delta, was a good man, too good for her, and in the end he couldn’t support the plan to destroy the dam as it also involved fomenting an insurrection by separatist rebels in the Caprivi Strip. He’d tried to foil the plan and Sonja, who had despised Stirling’s betrayal at the time, had questioned why she had ever found him attractive. She had ended up with Sam, who’d been caught up in the insurrection while making a wildlife television documentary, and had not given Stirling a second thought.

  Until now.

  Stirling had been right, she had to concede, to oppose the plan Corporate Solutions had hatched. The rebellion against the government of Namibia had failed. She could have blown up a dam without starting a war. Perhaps she was getting maudlin in her advancing years, but she regretted adding to Africa’s long tradition of bloodshed.

  She had actually met Stirling years before the dam episode. They had been teenage sweethearts and he’d wanted her to stay in the bush with him, in Botswana, but Sonja had run off to England and joined the British Army. She wasn’t like Stirling; she couldn’t manage a safari camp because she couldn’t be bothered pandering to the needs of overfed, overpaid guests, and while she loved the outdoors and appreciated the continent’s wildlife, she wasn’t a bunny hugger like Stirling. Her father had taught her to shoot and she’d hunted for the pot when they had lived on the farm in Namibia. Stirling had never killed anything larger than a mosquito, and she knew he abhorred the work she did.

  Sonja made Twee Rivieren, the main camp of the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, just after lunch time. She had been here on a family holiday in the old days, when it was still known as the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park. The newly named park was the first of a series of ‘peace parks’ to be opened in Africa. These transfrontier parks, which were springing up all over southern Africa, dropped fences and streamlined crossings and management where two wildlife reserves adjoined each other, but were in different countries. Here at Twee Rivieren in the east of the Kgalagadi park, one could cross from South Africa to the neighbouring national park in Botswana to the north, while Namibia was just across the western border of the reserve.

  Sonja walked into the impressive new thatch-roofed reception and administration area and presented herself to a woman in a South African National Parks uniform. She had decided to stop here for the night. After exchanging pleasantries the woman consulted her computer and made a clicking noise with her tongue. ‘We’ve nothing here in Twee Rivieren, ma’am, but I can book you into a chalet in Mata Mata for tonight.’

  Sonja cursed silently. It wasn’t the woman’s fault. While the woman processed her booking Sonja read an information sheet on the park and noted it would take her about three hours to get to Mata Mata, and she needed to reach the camp before its gates closed at dusk. ‘Thanks,’ Sonja said when the woman handed her a printout of her booking.

  Mata Mata was on the border between South Africa and Namibia. Sonja was persona non grata in Namibia; the same events that had put a wedge between her and Stirling were also the reason she couldn’t legally go back to her birthplace, but if her daughter was in trouble she would find a way into the country. Nothing would stop her.

  Chapter 8

  Matthew Allchurch had teed off at the eighth hole on the course at the Steenberg Golf Estate when his phone beeped. He usually switched the damn thing off when he played, but he’d forgotten.

  He’d sworn after selling his profitable law practice in Cape Town six months earlier that he would consign the device to the dustbin, but it seemed impossible for anyone, even a retired advocate, to live without a phone.

  He checked the message and felt the beat of his heart quicken. Thought you should know, the body of a flier has been found in northern Namibia. Call me when you can. Andre.

  Matthew immediately abandoned the game, giving brief apologies to the three friends he normally played with, and drove his buggy back to the car park. In the car he took a deep breath and called Andre Horsman, but he was told by the receptionist that Andre was on the other line and would call him back.

  Matthew started the engine of his Range Rover, his retirement present to himself, and drove, too fast, out of the estate and up the hill towards his home on the slopes of Table Mountain, overlooking Tokai. Andre’s office was in Constantia, not far away, and Matthew resolved that if Andre hadn’t called him back within an hour he would drive there.

  He pressed the remote to open the swinging security gates and drove down the driveway, not bothering to open the garage in case he did have to leave again soon.

  The dogs, Fabian and Soda, started barking, and they galloped up the steep lawn from the koi pond at the sight of Matthew walking out onto the balcony. His wife, Helen, was in her broad-brimmed khaki bush hat. She looked up and waved to him, then followed the dogs.

  Matthew was in the study turning the computer on when Helen walked in. ‘Well, this is a surprise. You couldn’t have finished your game already.’

  ‘No, something’s come up, love.’

  She peeled off her gardening gloves. ‘Just as well you weren’t half an hour earlier or you would have caught me with Charles the gardener making passionate love in that illegal marijuana patch he’s growing down past the pool house.’

  Matthew only half heard her joke. He typed ‘flyer found Namibia’ into the search engine.

  ‘What is it, Matthew?’ his wife asked him.

  The search just yielded useless results, so he tried ‘body of pilot found Namibia’.

  ‘Andre sent me an SMS while I was on the golf course.’ He looked up at her. ‘The body of an airman or a pilot has been found in Namibia.’

  Helen put a hand over her mouth and sat down in the chair on the other side of his desk. ‘No. Is it –?’

  Matthew scanned the results on the screen. ‘I don’t know, love, Andre didn’t say anything in his message. Hang on, here’s something.’

  He clicked on a news item dated that morning. It was from a Namibian newspaper called New Era. The headline on a story by Aggie Aikanga said: Mystery body found in desert archaeological dig may be a wartime pilot. As Matthew read the story Helen got up and moved behind him. She scanned the item over his shoulder.

  ‘It’s not him,’ she said, with what sounded to Matthew like a mixture of relief and sadness. ‘It says the man had dog tags identifying him as “H. Brand”.’

  Matthew nodded, then felt himself slump a little in his seat. ‘No, it’s not him. But Andre thought it worth mentioning the article to me. Perhaps there’s some connection to Gareth.’

  Helen straightened and put a hand on his shoulder. She gave him a little squeeze. ‘You know the names of all the crewmen who went missing on that aircraft. “Brand” isn’t one of them.’

  She was right. Matthew knew that also missing on Gareth’s flight were the senior pilot, Captain Danie Bester, and a loadmaster, Jacobus Venter. But all the same there was some reason why Andre had messaged him. Perhaps Andre had seen a different version of the article, one that didn’t carry the name found on the body’s identification disks, but when Matthew tried a variety of combinations of words in the search engine he kept coming back to the same story. He felt as his wife had sounded: a mixture of relief and the annoyance that came when one reopened a healing wound.

  ‘I’ll get Sophia to make us a cup of tea,’ Helen said as she walked out of the office.

  When the air force officer and the padre had come to their home, in the more modest area of Fish Hoek at the time, the news they’d brought had nearly destroyed Helen. She hadn’t wanted to let them into the house, rationalising that if she didn’t hear the words then it wouldn’t be true. They had, both of them, clung to the one word, ‘missing’, for a long time, years, in fact.

  After a while, especially once South Africa’s war in Angola was over and South West Africa had become peaceful Namibia, the fact that their only son,
Gareth, was still listed as ‘missing’ proved more of a cruel taunt than a glimmer of hope. Helen had been an emotional wreck for years, crying every day, but Matthew had turned his attention and his energies to finding out what he could about his son’s disappearance near the end of the war.

  Matthew looked at the framed photo on his desk, the one he said ‘Good morning, my boy,’ and ‘Goodnight’ to every day. Gareth had just earned his wings as a pilot in the South African Air Force when his parents had cajoled him into getting the studio portrait done. He’d been excited, he’d told his father, at being deployed to South West Africa so soon after graduation. He had wanted to fly jet fighter aircraft but had to do his time flying a maritime patrol aircraft, an old Second World War vintage Douglas DC-3 Dakota as it turned out, but Gareth was simply happy to be flying operationally, putting his training into practice.

  The war in Angola had become one of full pitched battles on air and land, with tank battles and aerial dogfights between South Africa on one side and the Angolan military backed by the Cubans on the other. Still, father and son had assured Helen repeatedly that Gareth would be flying patrols over the Atlantic Ocean, not dodging Russian-made surface to air missiles or Cuban-piloted MiG interceptors.

  Again, though, the seemingly random way in which Gareth’s aircraft had simply disappeared made the loss of their son even harder to bear than the ordeal faced by other parents and loved ones whose sons had been killed in action in the border war.

  Andre Horsman had been Gareth’s temporary squadron commander and it had been he who had penned a letter to Matthew and Helen, praising their son’s commitment to the unit and the war effort, and stressing that in the short time Gareth had been with the squadron he had left his mark in a positive manner.

  The National Party government in apartheid South Africa kept as tight a muzzle on the press as it could and released rosy pictures about the war in Angola and the fight against communism. Even though he considered himself politically liberal, Matthew realised that censorship was part of the war effort. However, he had quizzed Andre in a subsequent letter about why there had been no reporting in the South African newspapers, radio or television about the loss of a transport aircraft; surely, Matthew theorised, this would be too big a story to keep quiet.

  Andre had telephoned him from South West Africa and used veiled speech to ask a favour of him.

  ‘Please, Matthew,’ Andre had urged him, ‘don’t talk about the matter we have been discussing in our letters in public. Gareth was doing something of utmost importance for the war effort, and if our enemies knew even vaguely about where he was flying to or from, then it would put many South Africans and many more of our allies at risk.’

  Matthew had toed the party line for a long time after that, but with the change in government in 1994, when Nelson Mandela came to power, Matthew could see no reason why he should not be given access to information about the mission Gareth had been flying. Terrible things had emerged from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission about the crimes and human rights abuses perpetuated in the name of apartheid – and on the ANC side – and Matthew could not imagine his son had been involved in anything as bad as all that. He had discussed the matter with Andre, who had by then left the air force and set up an import-export business, specialising in electronic goods, remote control model aircraft, drones and other gadgets made in China. With sanctions lifted South Africa was now back in the international business community.

  ‘Matthew, not even I know everything that went on with some of the missions we flew,’ Andre had told him, several years earlier. ‘I later found out that sometimes our security forces used our aircraft to commit war crimes; we would be tasked to fly some prisoners back from Angola or Owamboland to another base in South West and the aircraft would be diverted over the Skeleton Coast to the Atlantic Ocean. Sometimes,’ and Andre had pinched the bridge of his nose at this point, ‘sometimes those prisoners were tossed out of our aircraft alive into the ocean, far from shore.’

  ‘My God,’ Matthew had said. A chill of dread and shame had run through his body; had his own son been involved in such missions? If Gareth’s plane had crashed while taking a cargo of men to their deaths then it was no wonder the authorities would want it covered up. Even if the Truth and Reconciliation Commission could help him uncover more information about Gareth’s mission, did he want his son’s name dragged through the press as being complicit in mass murder? Gareth’s death had left Helen desolate and empty for years; news like that might kill her.

  Instead, Matthew had gone through the snail-paced, resistant, frustrating channels of bureaucracy to trace air force records from the new regime. No one seemed particularly interested in helping him, but the replies he did receive were adamant that there were no records of a South African Air Force Dakota being reported as missing in action, crashed or downed by enemy fire on the date of Gareth’s disappearance or for a period of a month on either side of that day.

  Andre had stayed in contact with him. He didn’t discourage Matthew’s attempts to find out more through official channels, but always he would remind Matthew that there were some mysteries that were better left unsolved.

  ‘The government is very clear on this, Andre. There are no records of an SAAF DC-3 Dakota going missing at the time of Gareth’s disappearance. What aren’t you telling me?’ Matthew had demanded one day in the golf club bar, raising his voice.

  ‘Shush, man, shush.’ Andre had run a hand through his thinning hair. ‘Look, they are right and they are wrong. An aircraft did disappear that night, but it wasn’t an air force Dakota. It was a civilian registered Angolan version of the same type.’

  ‘Andre, for God’s sake, what was Gareth doing flying an airliner?’

  Another piece of the puzzle had been revealed but it hadn’t helped much. South Africa, with financial backing from the Reagan administration in the United States, was supplying arms and ammunition to Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA guerrillas. Much of it went by road, via Rundu, but sometimes special consignments of cargo and people went into and out of Angola by air.

  ‘Gareth was working for our State Security people on his final mission, Matthew. I couldn’t have told you this at the time. They were dealing with the CIA – it was all on a need-to-know basis, and even as Gareth’s squadron commander I didn’t need to know. All I knew was when he was going, and when he was due back, and the night he was supposed to return to us he never did.’

  ‘If you didn’t know where he was going, or what he was doing, how did you mount a search for him? Did you search for him, or was that a lie, too?’ Matthew had fumed.

  Andre had told him that he had pieced together the known movements of Gareth’s last flight and he and Gareth’s squadron mates had mounted their own search. Gareth had flown from Ondangwa air force base in South West Africa north, presumably to Angola. He had delivered cargo, or possibly flown there to pick something – or someone – up, and then returned to Ondangwa. His take-offs and landings had been recorded by air traffic controllers at the air force base – there was no hiding that, Andre had said.

  ‘Yes, but where did he go after that?’

  Andre had looked around the bar, as if he still feared someone from the old regime was eavesdropping on him. ‘I spoke to a ground crewman at Ondangwa who had refuelled Gareth’s aircraft. He said Gareth’s last words to him, when the man had remarked how warm the evening was, was that it would be cooler over the Skeleton Coast and the Atlantic.’

  Matthew had been shocked by Andre’s revelation, and the unnamed crewman’s words. The clear implication, based on his earlier conversations with Andre, was that Gareth had been flying a load of live cargo, prisoners of war, who would be dropped to their deaths over the cold grey waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

  Matthew had hidden all this from Helen, and had told himself the best thing he could do was stop searching for answers about Gareth; he didn’t want to find them any mor
e. However, a couple of years earlier Matthew had created a Facebook account and against his better judgement had joined a number of groups online dedicated to veterans of the fighting in Namibia and Angola. On a site for SAAF veterans he posted a simple message asking to connect with anyone who had served with Gareth Allchurch.

  To his surprise, a man had contacted him a month later. His name was Roland Pretorius and he had been a pilot in Gareth’s squadron. Pretorius lived in Darling, a quaint town in the wine lands north of Cape Town, and he’d agreed to meet with Matthew next time he came to the city. They scheduled a time and place, but Roland hadn’t shown up. Matthew found out through posts from relatives on Roland’s Facebook page a few days later that he had been killed in a car accident.

  In a way, as terrible as the news was, Matthew had felt relieved. If Roland Pretorius had been coming to tell him his son had been involved in murder, Matthew didn’t want to hear it. Now he felt the same mix of anticipation and dread as he waited for Andre to call back.

  ‘The hell with it,’ Matthew said out loud. He phoned Andre’s office again.

  ‘Matthew, howzit,’ Andre said.

  ‘Fine, but cut to the chase, Andre, what’s all this about, and who’s this guy “Brand” who they’ve found in the desert?’

  ‘There was something else I didn’t tell you about the night Gareth went missing, Matthew, but I didn’t know until now that this other thing was connected to the missing aircraft.’

  ‘Really?’ Matthew scoffed. ‘I’m hardly surprised you’ve left something out.’

  Andre ignored the barb. ‘Matthew, the night Gareth and the others went missing another oke who used to work out of Ondangwa sometimes also went missing. His name was Hudson Brand.’

  ‘Another of your flight crew?’ Matthew said.

  ‘No. He was a foreigner, a half-Portuguese–Angolan, half-American guy. He was one of the CIA liaison officers to UNITA and he used to organise the supply flights from Ondangwa into Angola. I knew of him, but never met him personally, because I never needed to.’