African Sky

by Tony Park

  ‘You are not the only Afrikaner working for us,’ he began.

  ‘Of course not, sir,’ Reitz said.

  ‘A source in the South African bureaucracy has delivered us some interesting news, Reitz. It seems that Herr Smuts is going to be visiting Rhodesia soon as the reviewing officer for a graduation parade of RAF pilots at a base near the town of Bulawayo.’

  Reitz licked his lips: the admiral’s barely disguised enthusiasm was infectious. It was an effort for him to hold his tongue.

  The admiral leaned forward, his elbows on the desk, and lowered his voice, as if fearful a hidden microphone might pick up his words. ‘The Reich has suffered setbacks in recent months. Our momentum in Russia has slowed and the Italians have let us down.’

  Reitz nodded, imperceptibly. He shared the older man’s paranoia. To voice the obvious publicly could earn one a bullet in Berlin.

  ‘The Ossewa Brandwag has a membership of more than three hundred thousand – you confirmed this for me yourself – but its support will wane, Reitz, unless it sees proof that Germany is far from beaten, that we will win this war.’

  To this, Reitz nodded vigorously. He couldn’t resist pre-empting Germany’s top spy: ‘Sir, if we could assassinate Smuts and—’

  ‘And eliminate scores, perhaps hundreds, of newly qualified RAF terror flyers, think of the message that would send to your Afrikaner brothers and sisters in South Africa.’

  ‘The new National Party does not advocate armed violence against Britain or the South African government, but with Smuts out of the way, the Afrikaners would rise up. No politician could hold them back.’

  ‘Your country is at a turning point, Reitz. We will not have another chance to convince your people to take up arms, as they should have four years ago. Just think Reitz – U-boat bases at the Cape; German bombers operating out of Johannesburg or Pretoria, within striking range of the undefended training bases in Rhodesia; perhaps ten or twelve divisions of Afrikaner soldiers to fight for Germany. We would turn back the tide in Russia, and perhaps even reclaim Italy.’

  Reitz thought about the possible repercussions of South Africa changing sides. ‘The South Africans fighting for Britain would want to return home. There may be civil war.’

  Canaris shrugged. ‘If the South African division leaves Italy, all the better for us. I think, however, by the time the English-speaking soldiers returned home they would find their country ruled by the Afrikaners. Our intelligence suggests that the vast majority of able-bodied men who support England have already enlisted and are serving outside of Africa. There would be little resistance to a coup d’état. You told me yourself that the OB still has men inside the police force and the army within South Africa.’

  Reitz nodded. Despite Jan Smuts banning membership of the OB by anyone serving in the military or civil service, there were many covert supporters still in place.

  ‘Our source also says that high-level talks are planned between Smuts and the Rhodesian Prime Minister, Huggins, during the field marshal’s visit to Bulawayo. This man Huggins, we know, supports the concept of all of the British colonies in southern and central Africa merging to form one entity. If that happens, your people will no longer have the numbers amongst the whites.’

  ‘It would be a nightmare, Herr Admiral, if we were part of a bigger country with white English-speakers in the majority,’ Reitz agreed.

  ‘It would be an even stronger display of Germany’s continued might if we could eliminate two leaders in one attack.’

  ‘A fifth of Rhodesia’s population are all away at war – virtually all of its able-bodied white men and many of its blacks. Militarily the country is poorly defended, despite the large number of Commonwealth airmen in the country,’ Reitz said.

  ‘I like the way you are thinking. And so will the Führer once we present our plan to him. I’m going to see that you get your chance to kill some English flyers, Reitz, but I’m also going to make sure that we deliver a blow far more serious to the allied war effort than the loss of some pilots. We missed Smuts in 1941, Reitz. We will not miss him again.’

  ‘No, Herr Admiral!’

  Reitz pushed these memories of Berlin aside and dismounted as he approached the top of a hill crowned with rounded granite boulders. He tethered the horses and walked, bent at the waist, to just below the crest, then lay down on his stomach. He did not want to be silhouetted against the skyline on the peak in case anyone saw him. He lifted the binoculars slung around his neck and peered through them.

  In the shallow valley below him the bush gave way to a long rectangle of dried yellow grass. At the end of the clearing he saw a large wooden hut – a hangar, he presumed. Two thirds down the length of the open strip he saw the wreckage of a biplane. He swung the glasses off to the right. Beyond a kilometre or so of mopani the native vegetation surrendered to manicured green lawns surrounding a cluster of thatch-roofed buildings. He could just make out the lettering on the carved wooden sign hanging over the gate.

  Isilwane Lodge. He crept back to the horses.

  Paul Bryant pulled back on the stick and the Harvard climbed away from the baking white ground. The clear blue sky and the cool air blowing in through the open cockpit were a pleasant relief from the sweltering stillness and painful glare of the saltpans. He felt the sweat under his arms chill then dry.

  His investigation of the tyre treads on the pan had yielded more questions than answers, but he had a pretty good idea where to start asking them.

  He checked the fuel gauge and did some quick mental calculations. Kumalo and Bulawayo were virtually due east of where he was now, circling one last time over the place where Smythe’s body was discovered. Catherine’s ranch, Isilwane, was north-east, maybe a couple of hundred miles. Fuel shouldn’t be a problem. He checked his map. There was a dirt road along most of the border between Southern Rhodesia and Bechuanaland. All he had to do was follow that road.

  He didn’t expect to find her at home, as she had told him at the funeral that she was leaving for Salisbury today. To make the capital she would have had to leave early in the morning, and it was getting close to noon now. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was looking for, but he thought that if some of her servants were still there, packing or cleaning up, he might ask them some questions about comings and goings at the ranch. He was starting to see the crash of Cavendish’s Harvard at Isilwane Ranch and the disappearance of Smythe’s aircraft as more than just a run of bad luck.

  The bush was a uniform khaki. The rivers he overflew were all dry, just sandy thoroughfares. He spotted a large herd of elephants marching in search of water and dropped a few hundred feet to take a look. A big matriarch lifted her trunk and raised her ears wide at the drone of the oncoming aeroplane. She looked skyward. At this altitude he couldn’t hear what noise the elephant made, but some signal had been passed to the others. The herd closed up and started generating a dust cloud as their leader urged them to hurry. He banked to starboard and gave them a wide berth.

  The border road ran straighter than any river and was easy to pick up. He turned to port and followed it northwards. He knew Catherine’s place was just beyond a fairly substantial river. He glanced at the map on his thigh again and followed the road with a finger, to where it intercepted the watercourse. There it was. The Deka.

  An hour later, staring ahead through the Perspex, he saw a winding sandy serpent and then cross-checked its shape with the map. That was it.

  Below him, Catherine’s ranch came into view as he overflew a granite-studded hill crest. He put the Harvard into a shallow dive and, by the time he was over the main homestead, was so low the tops of the tallest trees in the garden were bending in his prop wash. He looked over his shoulder as he pulled back the stick and climbed again, but saw no one come out of the house to look.

  He banked the aircraft lazily and circled around for another low-level beat-up, this time down the airstrip, in order to scare off any wild animals that might obstruct his landing. He looked left and right o
ut of the cockpit and thought he saw movement amidst the mopani trees. Something dark was galloping, but he didn’t have time to make it out. A wildebeest or one of the many antelope species that flourished in the reserve, he thought.

  The strip was clear, except for the wreckage of the Tiger Moth, so he circled again and readied the Harvard for landing. The drills his instructors had drummed in at his initial service flying training in Rhodesia came back to him. On take-off, the checks a pilot had to complete were summarised by the memory jogger TMPF, which stood for trim, mixture, pitch and fuel. Now, as he readied for landing, he said aloud, ‘UMPFF.’ Undercarriage, mixture, pitch, fuel and flaps. He bounced once, still not completely at home in the Harvard, which was a fraction of the weight of a Lancaster, and then settled her onto the grass. He swung the nose to the left and taxied down the extreme edge of the airstrip before turning back to the wooden hangar at the other end. He didn’t want his tyre marks to be confused with any others on the field. He applied the brakes, stopped by the building and cut the engine.

  It was hot again back on terra firma, and he felt himself start to perspire as he pulled off his leather flying helmet, unstrapped himself and climbed out of the cockpit.

  Before checking the hangar he decided to walk the length of the airstrip. Despite the heat he welcomed the exercise, and the solitude of the bush. The only sounds around him were the calling of various birds, none of which he recognised. He was well aware that the property was also home to all the major predator species – lion, leopard, cheetah and painted hunting dogs, so he kept his eyes peeled and, as an added precaution, unbuckled the flap on the canvas holster at his waist. A Webley revolver might not take down an elephant, but he figured it might be enough to dissuade a curious cat. Since Smythe’s death he had ordered that all pilots on solo flights go armed, in case they had to make a forced landing and encountered a threat on the ground.

  Catherine’s wrecked Tiger Moth was still out on the edge of the airfield. That was odd, he thought. Although it might be a long time before the aircraft could be repaired, he was sure there was enough of it worth salvaging and storing. Out in the elements, the metalwork would rust and the timber framework and fabric skin would eventually rot away.

  He scanned the grass as he walked. He saw again the deep furrows ploughed by Cavendish’s Harvard after its wheel had found the ant bear hole. Also, he could see the faint indentations left by Catherine’s biplane on its last landing. The grass was almost knee-high in places, and it appeared as though it sprang back fairly quickly, otherwise there would have been many more tracks from Catherine’s other landings, before her crash. He couldn’t tell for sure, but it didn’t look to him as though the strip had been used recently by anyone other than himself, Cavendish and Catherine. He turned and walked back to the hangar.

  It was a substantial structure. Most of the farm airstrips he had visited barely had more than an open-sided lean-to to protect the owner’s aircraft. This was a fully enclosed building with a tin sliding door. It was big enough to house Catherine’s Tiger Moth and a workshop. The white-painted metal was hot to touch. He grasped the handle and started to slide it.

  A noise from inside made him start in fright and take a step back. He drew his pistol and thumbed back the hammer. He felt his heart pounding. His mouth was dry. He put a foot on the edge of the sliding door and kicked it along its tracks. At the same time he held up the pistol.

  It was dark inside and he blinked, his eyes momentarily unable to adjust from the brightness to the gloom. A shadow ran along the wall. He raised the pistol but held his fire. A growing wedge of light knifed the darkness as the door rattled on its way. There was a crash to his left and he swung. A figure ran towards him, and Bryant dropped to one knee and took aim. As his finger started to squeeze the trigger, he heard a grunting then a wild cry of ‘Wah-hoo!’

  He lowered his pistol and laughed as a large baboon scuttled out of the darkness and sprinted past him into the light. He holstered the weapon and took a look around.

  The hangar was empty. At least, it did not contain an aircraft. There was a workbench and a cupboard along one wall, presumably full of tools. There were three forty-four gallon petrol drums on the floor, but when he kicked each of them they echoed emptily. Catherine had told him the truth about her desperate fuel shortage. There were no fresh oil stains on the concrete floor, nothing to indicate an aircraft had been parked there for some time. At the rear of the building he found a hole where the baboon had presumably entered. The lower sections of a few timber planks had succumbed to termites, and the primate had been able to snap off sections of wood. There was nothing more for him to see here.

  Bryant holstered his pistol and walked back out into the sunshine. He lit a cigarette and thought about what he should do next.

  Reitz had been surprised and alarmed to see the aeroplane circling the ranch. Pleased with himself that he had decided to take the long route, around the airstrip, rather than crossing it, he had nonetheless had a few anxious moments when the noise of the low-level pass over the landing ground had startled his horses.

  Now he lay at the base of a stout marula tree and watched the aviator through the Mauser’s telescopic sight. He could kill the man easily from this range. No more than two hundred metres, and the fool was standing still, in the open. So easy, but that seemingly simple solution would create many more problems than it would solve. He would have to dispose of the body and he was unsure how soon it would be before the man’s colleagues mounted a search. He couldn’t fly, and the aircraft was too heavy for one man to push into the hangar in order to hide it. As much as he longed to shoot this flyer – who represented everything Reitz hated about the British in this war – he would not pull the trigger.

  The man looked thoughtful as he smoked his cigarette. Reitz hoped he would get in his aircraft and fly away. He wondered what the pilot had been searching for in the hangar.

  Reitz tracked the uniformed man with the barrel of the Mauser. He was not walking to his aircraft. Instead, he turned and walked purposefully away from the hangar and onto the dirt road that led from the airstrip back to the main house. Reitz had seen the road from his earlier vantage point. From his own careful study of the lodge and its servants’ quarters from the hilltop, he had deduced that all of the buildings were empty. He wondered why the pilot was heading that way. Perhaps he was lost, or short of fuel, and was looking for help, or to telephone his base. It didn’t matter. What was important was that disaster had been averted and now, again with a little luck and God’s grace, he might be able to take one more Englishman out of the war.

  He guessed it was about a kilometre from the landing ground to the homestead. It would take the man at least twenty minutes to walk there and back. It would also take some time for the pilot to realise that there was no one home, so Reitz figured he had maybe a half-hour all up. Plenty of time. The pilot was out of sight now.

  Reitz checked the horses’ tethers and then darted across the grassy runway. He stopped at the aircraft and crouched in the shade of a wing. He scanned the bush around him and satisfied himself again he was alone.

  Putting a bullet in the pilot’s brain would have been the quickest way to take him out of the war, but what Reitz had in mind was to put an end to both man and machine. He walked around the Harvard. He climbed up on a wing and looked into the cockpit. He noticed that the pilot’s seat was actually an open-topped squarish metal box. Instead of a cushion, the man flying it sat on his parachute, which he presumably buckled to himself once he took his position. Reitz wondered if he shouldn’t also doctor the man’s chute, just to make sure he killed himself. As a paratrooper, parachutes were no mystery to him. However, if the man did manage to land his aircraft safely, and survive, such tampering might be discovered. He did not want to arouse the suspicion of the air force on the eve of the completion of his mission.

  He considered puncturing the fuel tanks, which he guessed would be in the wings, but this would take time, and there w
as the problem of finding a container big enough to drain the gas into. Besides, the pilot would presumably check his fuel gauges before take-off.

  He stepped down off the wing and started another circuit around the aircraft, stopping at the engine. He looked up at it. How to stop the engine in such a way that the man would crash soon after flight? A breeze behind him chilled the sweat on his back and that gave him an idea. Beneath the engine cowling was a large oval-shaped vent. He reached up and put his hand inside, and felt around. The intake turned upwards, at ninety degrees, towards the lower cylinders. He knew enough about engines to know they got hot and therefore needed to be cooled. If he could find something to block this air inlet, he could push it up the vertical shaft and out of sight to anyone standing on the ground.

  Reitz jogged into the hangar and fetched a wooden box and an old rag spattered with paint. He stood on the box, to give himself extra height, and reached inside the air vent again, stuffing the rag as deep inside as he could reach. The aircraft’s power plant would get very hot soon after take-off. How soon, though, he had no way of knowing.

  There were no smoky lunchtime cooking fires outside the basic whitewashed mud and thatch staff huts behind the big house. No half-naked African children played in the fenced dirt compound, no dogs yapped at him. The house looked similarly bereft of life.

  The front door was unlocked. ‘Hello!’ Bryant called. Anyone home?’ His voice echoed through the empty homestead. The heels of his boots squeaked on the polished floorboards in the hallway.

  In the dining room the long table was covered in a white sheet, likewise the chairs. It was the same in the drawing room. The cream walls were checked with rectangles of bright white here and there where oil paintings and family photographs had been removed. Dust particles danced in a stray ray of sunlight that stabbed the gloom through a gap in the drawn curtains.

  In the kitchen and bedroom he found half-packed tea-chests and the floors littered with strands of dry straw. Evidently there was still some more packing to be done, or perhaps Catherine had simply abandoned some things to the mothballed home. In the bedroom he stooped and looked inside one of the boxes, brushing aside some straw with his hand.