by Tony Park
It was an all or nothing move and Brand had put every ounce of strength and every scintilla of anger he felt at Venter’s betrayal into the force of that kick. He looked down over his feet, waiting to see if the loadmaster moved. If the blow had only stunned the man temporarily then Brand would be finished. He watched and waited two more seconds. Venter was sprawled on the floor of the aircraft. He felt nothing for his victim; Brand had been abandoned by everyone – the South Africans, the Angolans, and his own people, the CIA.
Awkwardly, he rolled onto his belly and then got to his feet by sliding up the inside of the fuselage next to where the loadmaster’s gear was stowed. Working by touch in the gloom he managed to unhook a strap that stowed the seating. The crewman’s webbing dropped and Brand reached for the knife. He sat down on the canvas sling seat, reversed the knife and began to rub at the rope binding his wrists. He felt pain and wetness as the blade sliced the inside of his forearm; at least the blade was sharp. The man at the front of the aircraft, between the pilots, looked back. Brand lowered his head as he continued to saw his bonds against the knife.
Pain surged into his fingertips as the tight rope finally parted and circulation returned.
Brand then checked the pouches of Venter’s chest webbing and found an emergency signal flare. Next he needed to get to Venter and take the loadmaster’s pistol. He would retake this aircraft, killing the man up the front and holding the two pilots at gunpoint. As Brand reached for Venter’s weapon the explosion of a gunshot filled the cabin with light. A bullet tore at the sleeve of his bush shirt.
‘Shit!’
Brand dropped to his belly and as he grabbed Venter’s gun, the loadmaster started to come to. Brand punched him in his shattered face. With the man down again Brand raised his hand above the nearest crates and fired back, two shots. He angled his aim high, to miss the pilots. The blind shots didn’t work, though, and another bullet zinged dangerously close to him and drilled through the Dakota’s thin metal skin. Brand heard angry shouting from the pilots.
‘You’re dead, Brand. You’ve got nowhere to go!’ the boss man called from the front of the darkened fuselage.
Brand had been suckered. He’d thought he’d won Venter’s trust, after nights of drinking with the man, listening to him brag about the money he made on trading diamonds and how many hookers he’d screwed in Joburg, but all the time Venter and the other man they had taken on board, presumably Venter’s superior, had been setting him up. He didn’t know the identity of the man who was shooting at him, or what the man had told the pilots or how much they knew about this dirty business – they, after all, were late replacements direct from the air force. One thing was for sure: Venter and his boss intended to kill him and dump his body out of the Dakota all along. Brand didn’t want to charge the man with the blazing gun for two reasons; one, he didn’t want to get shot, and two, he didn’t want to kill one or both of the pilots as he would have no chance if the aircraft went into an uncontrolled dive. He’d lost his one advantage, surprise.
Venter came to again and grabbed Brand’s gun hand, around the wrist. Brand knew Venter had been ready to push his unconscious body out of the aircraft without a second thought. Likewise, it was pure instinct that now enabled Brand to plunge Venter’s own knife up and under the other man’s rib cage. Brand twisted, rupturing the lungs and pushing for the heart. Venter’s eyes went wide as he tried to speak. The grip on Brand’s wrist eased and he felt Venter’s blood rush out of him, down over the knife. He pulled the blade out and stabbed Venter again, then rummaged through his vest.
‘Now!’ the man from the front yelled.
Three more shots tore through the metal around him and, from the noise and the impacts, Brand worked out that they were coming from more than one person. One of the pilots, the elder of the pair, had climbed out of his seat and was also shooting at him. Brand’s hand closed around a metal tube, the signal flare. He pulled the cap off one end, reversed it, and slid it onto the other end of the tube.
Brand changed his mind about hurting the pilots. He raised the pistol over a crate and fired a couple more shots, then stuffed the gun down the front of his bush shirt. A bullet splintered the crate he was sheltering behind as he raised his hands again. He slapped the cap at the base of the flare with the palm of his left hand, causing the striker pin inside it to hit the igniter at the base of the tube. Men screamed as the interior of the transport aircraft was filled with smoke and the brilliant red incandescence of the flare. The Dakota lurched. Brand coughed.
Still, though, bullets clanged around him. At least no one forward could see him, thanks to the flare’s choking smoke. However, his cover was being rapidly sucked out the open cargo door. Brand grabbed Venter by the shoulders and dragged the loadmaster to the hatch.
The other man’s body jerked in his arms and Brand felt a hammer blow on his right thigh. He slumped to the floor of the cabin, unable to stand. His brain dimly registered that he’d been shot, but when he looked down he saw the bullet had gone through the crewman’s heart before it had entered his own leg. Clipped to the rear of Brand’s safety harness was a tail-like strap about two metres long, with a snap hook at the end of it. Had he been doing the job he’d been co-opted for he would have secured himself to a point in the aircraft so he could stand in the door and safely help the loadmaster dispatch the crates.
Brand unfastened the snap hook and attached it to a buckle on the harness of the parachute Venter wore, another safety precaution for the man’s job of seeing paratroopers and cargo out of the hatch and on their way.
Acrid black smoke had replaced the red of the flare. Brand looked up and saw the man from the front bathed in the glow of flames. One of the pilots was doing his best to douse the fire the flare had started with an extinguisher, but he seemed to be losing the battle. The mystery man with the gun seemed to care nothing about the fire or his own safety. He was climbing over the crates, heading to the rear of the aircraft. He raised the pistol in his hand and took aim.
Brand wrapped his arms around the dead loadmaster and, holding him in a bear hug, toppled out the open door of the Dakota.
As they plummeted through the freezing night sky Brand clawed at the blood-covered body, frantically trying to find the parachute’s ripcord. He had no idea how high they’d been flying, but he knew he had precious seconds to deploy the parachute. The two of them tumbled, end over end. It had been the desperate move of a man with no options, but he knew he would have died if he’d stayed in the aircraft.
Brand felt metal, then made out the D-shape of the cord’s handle. He slipped his fingers, already numb, through the ring and pulled with all his might. For a second he thought it was too late, or the parachute had malfunctioned, but in an instant the loadmaster’s body was wrenched from his arms as the canopy deployed, separating them in mid-air.
Brand dropped, and only the buckle he’d attached to the loadmaster’s harness stopped him from falling to the ground. He swayed sickeningly, suspended beneath the dead man as the desert below seemed to rush towards him. He’d be lucky if he survived the landing, he thought, especially as there was a good chance the body above him might crush him when they both hit the ground.
He craned his neck and saw a glow in the sky; it was the Dakota, still flying, but it was burning.
*
‘I landed hard, knocked myself out again, and Venter’s body damn nearly killed me when it landed on me,’ Brand said to Allchurch, who sat over his cold cup of coffee on the deck overlooking the river at the Cattle Baron restaurant at Skukuza, his mouth half open.
Allchurch licked his lips and, after a few seconds, seemed to return to the present. ‘My son, Gareth, didn’t shoot at you?’
It had been dark, a mid-air gunfight had been going on, but Brand was sure he’d remembered the facts correctly. There had been a distinct age difference between the pilots and Allchurch had said his son had only just been commiss
ioned. ‘That’s right. He stayed at the controls. The senior pilot had drawn his weapon and was shooting at me while your son flew the Dakota. Hell, I didn’t blame the guy; I was busting caps and trying to set fire to his aircraft. I knew the only way out for me was out the rear hatch.’
‘And Gareth had argued with the man who boarded the plane at Ondangwa?’
Brand nodded. ‘Guess he wasn’t expecting the mystery man to start beating on one of his crewmen – that is, me.’ He saw the conflict crease Allchurch’s face. On the one hand, his son may have been a stand-up guy, but on the other the man who was telling him all this, Hudson Brand, had most likely caused the deaths of Gareth and the other two men. ‘I’m sorry.’
Allchurch let out a long sigh. ‘I don’t know what to make of all this. The more I learn, the more questions there are, it seems. How badly damaged was the Dakota?’
Brand shrugged. ‘There was a fire on board, but the pilot was going at it with the fire extinguisher after he finished shooting at me. Those DC-3s were tough old birds.’
‘How did you make it back to civilisation?’ Allchurch asked.
‘I’d been shot in the leg, but it was a through-and-through, a flesh wound they call it in the movies. I took my dog tags off and put them around Venter’s neck; I figured that if the plane made it back to base they’d cast me as the villain of the piece. I took what I could find from his pockets and survival vest and set off. I walked a few hours through the night using the stars to guide me, but I guess I was still suffering concussion or blood loss because I passed out when I reached a road. I woke up in a military hospital. The last thing I remember was hearing lions calling; guess I was lucky I didn’t get eaten.’
‘The authorities thought you were Venter?’
Brand nodded. ‘Anyhow, I checked myself out before people could start questioning me, and hitchhiked back up north, to the Caprivi Strip. I had friends there I could trust, in 32 Battalion. They were tough dudes, but they were honest, no-nonsense, and I’d shared my suspicions about ivory and rhino horn being smuggled out of Angola with their CO, who was as pissed off about the situation as I was. When I got to their headquarters, Buffalo Base, they put me up, no questions asked. I contacted the CIA field station in South Africa and they told me I was suspended, pending an investigation into improper conduct. I tried to tell them my side of the story, but they said my superior in Angola had a tape, made by Jacobus Venter, in which I said I wanted in on the diamond smuggling business.’
‘You were set up,’ Allchurch said.
‘Royally. I tried to find out what happened to the Dakota, but the word came back that it had disappeared. An aerial search was mounted from Ondangwa, but turned up nothing. Part of the problem was that no one knew or no one was saying where the aircraft was headed. All they had was its last known refuelling spot. I’m guessing one of my bullets or the flare I fired off took out the radio, otherwise there might have been a mayday call.’
‘What happened to you after that?’
‘I threatened to go to the press about the CIA’s involvement in smuggling diamonds, ivory and rhino horns out of Angola, and the agency threatened to terminate me – kill me – if I did. I backed down and 32 Battalion offered me a slot, on account of me speaking Portuguese.’
Allchurch pushed aside his cold coffee. ‘I want you to help me find my son’s aircraft, Brand, and to find him.’
Brand sighed. ‘Namibia’s a big empty country, Mr Allchurch, full of desert. Besides, the Dakota could have crashed into the Atlantic.’
‘The Atlantic? What makes you think they were headed to the coast? They weren’t going to push prisoners of war out to feed the sharks; you said yourself they had cargo on board.’
Brand had made a slip-up; his mind had been wavering between past and present. Maybe he’d done it intentionally, subconsciously; maybe he, too, wanted to put the flight and the fate of the pilots to rest. ‘All of the bundles of boxes that were going to be dropped that night were wrapped in heavy-duty black plastic sheeting, and under that was another layer of waterproof tarpaulin. I had to cut through the two layers with my pocket knife before I got to the boxes. I’d seen cargo dropped out of airplanes in the past, but never wrapped like that. There was no point.’
‘Unless someone wanted those bundles to float.’
Brand nodded. ‘My theory was that whatever was in those boxes was going to be dropped at sea, or maybe on a beach, and the wrapping was designed to keep them afloat.’ He’d given the mission much thought over the years, trying to work out a plausible scenario. ‘Also, there were half a dozen self-inflating containerised life rafts on board that Dakota. That’s way too much capacity for that type of aircraft, even if it was full of passengers, which it wasn’t. I figured that maybe after he’d kicked me out of the airplane, Venter was going to attach those life rafts to each of the loads so that when they hit the water the rafts deployed, helped keep them afloat and made them easier to spot.’
Allchurch took a sip of cold coffee. ‘But who would be operating a ship out there to pick up the cargo?’
‘I don’t know,’ Brand said. ‘But I’ve thought about it. Wouldn’t have been a South African or a Namibian vessel – if the receiver had been from either of those countries, it would have been far easier to land the aircraft at a remote strip or even on a stretch of road in South West Africa. Whatever was in those bundles was destined for somewhere overseas, out of Africa.’
‘Someone who couldn’t land a ship in a South West African or South African port?’
Exactly, Brand thought; with his analytical legal mind, Allchurch was coming to the same conclusion he had reached. ‘It could have been any nationality, but the Russians were operating off the Angolan coast at the time, bringing in supplies for the Angolans and the Cubans, and operating fishing trawlers and fish factory ships.’
Allchurch pieced together more of the puzzle. ‘If the cargo on board the Dakota was destined for a ship, it couldn’t have gone through Luanda Harbour as that was controlled by Angolan government forces, and it probably couldn’t have flown over the coast of Angola.’
Brand nodded. ‘The Cubans had the capital ringed by anti-aircraft missiles and radar sites. A Russian ship, however, could stay in international waters and move to a location south of the Angolan–South West African border, and wait there.’
Allchurch raised his eyebrows. ‘An international smuggling conspiracy?’
‘Could be. Not all the Russians were dedicated servants of the state and the party. In Afghanistan their military set up a sophisticated operation smuggling heroin out of the country to the west. It’s quite possible a Russian sea captain and his crew wanted a slice of what was going on in Angola on dry land.’
‘Come with me to Namibia. Help me find my son’s aircraft, find my son.’
Whether he subconsciously wanted to or not, Brand knew such a quest would uncover nothing but trouble. ‘Namibia’s Atlantic coastline is thousands of kilometres long and there are tens of thousands of square kilometres of desert and nothingness between where I fell out of that bird and the ocean. You wouldn’t even know where to start looking.’
‘No,’ Allchurch agreed, ‘but you would.’
‘What makes you say that?’ Brand knew he was not dealing with a dummy. Allchurch had run a successful legal practice; his mind was sharp and he was driven by a force far stronger than anything else known to man: the love of a parent for a child, and the anguish at losing that child.
‘Because you have a map.’
‘Who says I do?’
‘You did. You told me Venter briefed my son and the other pilot from a map, and, later, that you stripped Venter’s body of useful equipment. You took the map from the loadmaster’s body and you knew that you were going to be set up as the fall guy by the people who were behind the smuggling operation. That map, and whatever Venter had written on it, would corroborate your story
that the crew – at least Venter and the usual pilots – were setting off not to supply some Angolan freedom fighters but to deliver a load of valuable cargo to a Russian ship off the coast of Africa.’
Brand was right, Allchurch was smart. ‘Say you’re right, why would I still have it?’
‘You’ve got that map stored somewhere with anything else that’s of great value to you, either in a safe deposit box or at your home, right now. There’s a flight leaving for Johannesburg in two hours and a connection to Windhoek an hour after we land at OR Tambo airport. I’ve booked your tickets, but first we’re going to get that map.’
Brand mulled over the facts of the case as he knew them. That aircraft had disappeared, and so, too, had the pilots and the man who had boarded in Ondangwa, who was in on the dirty operation. The other fact was that the tape Venter had left behind had killed Brand’s career with the CIA and resulted in his never returning to the country of his birth.
He didn’t regret his life, as it had turned out. He no longer thought, as he had briefly back then, that there was any glory or worth in the war he had fought, but he had served alongside some of the best men, black and white, that he had ever met in his life, and he had made life-long friends with many of them. He loved the new South Africa, his adopted homeland, and seeing the continent’s wildlife up close every day had restored his faith in God, if not in humanity.
If Allchurch could, however remote the odds, find that aircraft, it would bring, Brand firmly believed, nothing but trouble. But that trouble would have a name, a shape and a form. The people behind the mass slaughter of wildlife, and the exploitation of dirt-poor Angolans slaving in illegal diamond mines, might just surface again, after nearly thirty years, to claim their loot. And if they did, Hudson Brand would be there. If he could not bring them to lawful justice, he would kill them.