African Sky

by Tony Park

  His first mission, to contact prominent Ossewa Brandwag members in southern Africa and establish a network of agents sympathetic to Nazi Germany’s cause, had taken him as far north as Isilwane Ranch in Rhodesia, to the estate of Hugo De Beers. The millionaire hunter had been a staunch member of the OB in South Africa, before moving north of the border between the wars. Reitz had been told that the old man would surely be supportive of Hitler, and the creation of an independent, Afrikaner-controlled South Africa – perhaps even incorporating Rhodesia after Britain’s defeat.

  The reality, however, was that De Beers had gone soft. ‘I admire old Adolf’s views on racial purity, of course,’ De Beers had told him over dinner at the ranch, ‘but the man’s a megalomaniac. I want a proper democracy here, Hendrick, albeit one where the black man and the Englishman will forever know their places. It’s bad enough being an outpost of the British Empire, I don’t want us simply to swap a king for a führer!’

  Reitz had argued, good-naturedly, with the older man throughout the seven days and nights he had spent at Isilwane, but had been unable to convince him. They had hunted during the trip, bagging sable, lion, elephant and eland. On the last day they had gone after a cape buffalo.

  A hunt of a different kind had also taken place during that week. Catherine De Beers was not only beautiful, strong-willed and intelligent, she was also diametrically opposed to her husband when it came to the question of whether or not to support Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Catherine maintained that Africa needed Hitler, a single leader who could unite a continent, as he would do with Europe. Rumours had come out of Germany about the detention of the Jews, a subject that fascinated Catherine. ‘To have the will, the power and the courage to cleanse a country, a continent, is just unbelievably brilliant,’ she told him on the evening of the first night she came to his room. Reitz represented Germany and the new world order. He was also, he knew, attractive to women. She had circled him over the first two days and nights, like a prowling lioness, then caught him on the third.

  The De Beers, he learned, slept in different rooms. Catherine complained that her husband was impotent.

  Reitz had learned of many different sexual diversions during his years in Berlin. He had once been to a private club with one of the chemists from his firm, where men and women submitted to pain in order to achieve sexual gratification. He’d been intrigued by the concept but had never participated – as a giver or receiver of punishment. Until he met Catherine.

  He wondered if her plan was to seduce him into taking her back to Germany with him. Instead, she asked him to murder her husband.

  The arguments about politics and the Nazis continued during the hunting trips, and Reitz was able to convince himself that Hugo De Beers was not only opposed to Hitler’s totalitarianism, he was an enemy of Germany. De Beers knew Reitz’s real purpose in Africa. All it would take would be a slip of the tongue in the wrong company and Reitz would be arrested and probably hanged as a spy. Reitz had browsed through the Isilwane guest book and noticed the names of prominent politicians and senior military officers who had hunted on his estate. The man was well connected with the colonial government.

  Reitz told Catherine, on the seventh night, that he would carry out her request. The next day, during the buffalo hunt, he murdered Hugo De Beers while the man’s wife watched. After a night of fiercely passionate coupling – lovemaking was never the right word with Catherine – they travelled to Bulawayo to face the inevitable round of police interviews. He briefly met Felicity, who lived in Catherine’s town house, and bedded the pair of them the night before he fled to neutral Portuguese Mozambique.

  *

  ‘What happened to your friend Felicity?’ he asked her as he led her out of the hangar’s gloom. As far as he knew, Catherine had never told Felicity of his true identity or purpose for being in Rhodesia. If Felicity had been aware he had murdered Hugo, she showed no sign of it at the time.

  ‘She’s dead, Hennie.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘It happened the night after I got back from Bechuanaland, with the Harvard.’

  Reitz remembered his anxious wait under the cruel sun, how vulnerable he had felt squatting in the paltry shade cast by his horse’s body, amidst the blinding whiteness of the saltpans, with just the two hired bushmen trackers for company.

  He had scanned the empty sky for hours, searching for the Harvard, fearing it might never come or, worse, that Catherine might have been compromised and the British would instead gun him down.

  As they had planned, when the tiny speck finally appeared, Reitz ordered one of the bushmen to lie down, feigning illness, and he took off his shirt and began waving furiously at the approaching aeroplane.

  He smiled as he saw the trainer circling above him, bleeding off altitude with every circuit. The ruse had succeeded. In the aircraft, Catherine had persuaded the English pilot, Smythe, who was taking her on her second joy-flight, to land his Harvard.

  He carried his Mauser with him to greet them when they landed – there was nothing unusual about a man being armed out in the wilds of Africa – and the pilot’s expression of shock when Reitz levelled the rifle at him and ordered him to step down from the cockpit was almost comical.

  ‘Harm this lady and I’ll see you hang, whoever you are,’ Smythe growled at him.

  The boy looked as though he should still be in school. Reitz mocked him with laughter and ordered him to strip.

  ‘Catherine?’ the man asked in astonishment as she strode towards Reitz and kissed him quickly on the lips.

  ‘Sorry, James. I really am,’ she said sweetly to him. ‘But we’re going to need to borrow your aircraft for a while.’

  Reitz gave the bushmen their orders and the diminutive hunters chased the confused, terrified rooinek out into the salt flats, well away from the telltale marks left by the Harvard’s wheels on landing. Catherine laughed, loud and shrill, clapping her hands at Smythe’s stumbling gait. The last thing the pilot saw before he died was his own aircraft roaring low overhead, the woman he believed he would bed behind the controls waving at him from the cockpit.

  It had been Catherine’s idea to steal a Harvard, a last-minute solution to a seemingly unsolvable problem created by her crash-landing her own Tiger Moth. She had flown to Windhoek, the capital of South-West Africa, to meet with Reitz, soon after his arrival by U-boat on the Skeleton Coast.

  Their plan, hatched through coded messages sent via OB couriers and the German embassy’s diplomatic pouch from neutral Portuguese Mozambique, had involved using Catherine’s aircraft to deliver a deadly payload onto the parade attended by Jan Smuts and Sir Godfrey Huggins. Her Tiger Moth, a familiar sight over Kumalo, would not have attracted any undue attention until it was too late.

  ‘How in God’s name are you going to steal an air force training aircraft,’ Reitz had asked, incredulous, in the hotel room where they had rendezvoused.

  ‘I am a woman, Hennie, in case you had forgotten. It’s all arranged, though it took me a little longer to organise than I imagined. The first man I tried to convince to take me up in a Harvard, an Australian, point-blank refused, even after I’d seduced him and introduced him to my dear friend Felicity.’

  Reitz had shaken his head at her audacity, as well as her use of her body to meet their needs. He remembered clearly how easily she had convinced him to murder her ageing husband. He silently marvelled at the will of the flyer who had resisted her.

  ‘I had a second fish on the hook, a Canadian this time. He resisted my womanly charms – the man was faithful to his little wifey, believe it or not – so I offered to pay him for a couple of joy-flights in a Harvard. He was in debt up to his eyeballs.’

  ‘He agreed?’ Reitz asked.

  ‘Yes, and it damn well cost me a fortune, but the oaf crashed at Isilwane on landing the first time he came up to see me, and ended up getting arrested and charged by the air force.’

  ‘Stop teasing and tell me you have organised an aircraft, Catherine. Thi
s mission cannot fail – the future of my people rests on it.’

  ‘Calm yourself, Hennie dear. It’s all arranged. My third little piggy is a sweet young English boy called Smythe. I’ve played hard to get with him and I do believe he may be a virgin. He’s taken me up once already and he will do so again, at any date and time of our choosing. He’s looking forward to his big reward.’

  Which, Reitz reflected now, the boy had never received.

  After taking off from the saltpans in Bechuanaland, Catherine had flown to a cattle farm not far from the Guinea Fowl training base, near Gwelo, and hidden the aircraft in a disused barn. The farm was owned by the De Beers estate and managed by a Rhodesian named Butler.

  She continued her explanation as he led her behind the hangar to where he had stored the two metal cylinders. ‘I took Butler’s old car back to Bulawayo. I planned on staying the night with Felicity before coming back here to Isilwane. It was the evening that I radioed you, sending you the coded message to say I’d arrived safely and hidden the aeroplane.’

  He nodded.

  ‘As I was packing up my set, rolling up the antenna, Felicity barged in. I’d telephoned her at the air force base to tell her I was coming over to stay, unexpectedly, and that I’d let myself in. However, she wanted to surprise me, so she left the base early. I wasn’t sure what she’d seen, but she must have been suspicious.’

  ‘Did she confront you about it?’ he asked.

  ‘Not straightaway. We had drinks and dinner, and one thing led to another, as it usually did with us. It was halfway through that she asked me what I was doing with a radio transmitter and receiver. She must have snooped in my suitcase while I was in the bathroom or something. I’d tied her up by then – just like how you used to tie me up,’ she smiled. ‘Perhaps she felt truly helpless for the first time since I’d known her. She asked me to undo the bindings, to free her, so we could talk.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘No,’ Catherine said. She stared into his eyes. ‘While I had her tied like that I told her everything.’

  He shook his head. ‘Why, Catherine? Why would you do that?’

  ‘I didn’t want to hide anything from her anymore, Hennie. I wanted her to know who I really was – who I’ve become – and what I stand for. I asked her if she’d help us with the plan.’

  ‘My God, you could have ruined everything,’ he said angrily.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Hennie. I was always in charge. I gave her the option of joining us, but she said she never would. She started crying and begged me to let her go.’

  ‘She could have lied to you, told you she was for us, and then run to the British. What would have become of us then?’

  Catherine shook her head. ‘You didn’t know her like I did, Hennie. She could never lie to me. I’d have seen right through her immediately. I thought that if she wasn’t exactly mad about Hitler, she’d at least be sympathetic to our ideal of a world without so many damn blacks in it. I tried to explain to her that we could control their numbers, in the same way that you’d told me about what was really happening with the Jews.’

  ‘That was secret information I entrusted to you, Catherine,’ he said, his anger unabated.

  ‘I know,’ she shrugged. ‘I thought it would sway her, but I was wrong. I knew she was patriotic – joining the WAAFs and all that but I never knew just how soft she was on the blacks. She told me I was a fool and an evil person if I would even consider killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people. I gave her a chance, Hennie, but she said she’d die before betraying her country. I tried to tell her that her country would be better than in her wildest dreams if Hitler won the war, but then she spat at me.’

  Reitz just shook his head again, then said: ‘So you killed her?’

  Catherine smiled. ‘You’ve killed, many times, haven’t you, Hennie, apart from Hugo?’

  ‘Of course. I’m a soldier.’

  ‘But never with your own hands?’

  ‘No.’

  Her voice was low and thick as she said: ‘I miss her, Hennie, I truly do, but killing her was the most intensely erotic experience of my life.’

  Reitz blinked.

  ‘I had to make it look like a man had done it. It wasn’t hard. We’d played games, she and I, just like you and I played games, Hennie. But this time it was the real thing.’ She opened her eyes and gave a little pout as she saw the shock on his face. ‘Aw, too much for you, Hennie? Do you think that men should do all the killing in this brave new world of ours?’

  ‘There’ll be enough for all of us before we eventually win, Catherine,’ he said. ‘I hope you covered your trail adequately.’

  She smiled again. ‘Oh yes, lover. I certainly have.’ She explained how she had planted some of Felicity’s things in the boot of the car owned by an illegal fuel dealer. ’It all came together perfectly. I’d also organised for Paul Bryant, the Australian pilot I first tried to get a Harvard from, to collect some fuel from the man and bring it to me when he came up to investigate the crash of the Canadian’s Harvard. My fall-back plan, which it turned out I needed, was to point the police towards Bryant.’

  ‘You needed this fall-back plan?’ Reitz asked, still not feeling as though they were completely in the clear.

  ‘The police started checking the black’s alibi. I paid the investigating constable a visit and told her some unsavoury things about Squadron Leader Bryant. The way her eyes lit up, I’d imagine he’s in gaol and charged with Flick’s rape and murder by now.’

  Reitz brought her back to the present. ‘A man came to the farm, by aeroplane, a Harvard, yesterday. At first I thought it was you, arriving early.’

  Now it was her turn to show alarm. ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘Stocky, dark-haired. Hard face. He looked, what’s the word . . . messy, for a military man.’

  ‘Bryant. Damn.’

  ‘You think he was on to us? You just said he should have been arrested by now.’

  ‘I know, I know.’ She chewed a fingernail while she thought it over. ‘He was still looking for the Englishman’s aeroplane when I last saw him. Also, he was suspicious about ammunition.’

  ‘Ammunition?’ Catherine had been up to a lot since their last meeting – too much for his liking.

  ‘Don’t look at me with that disapproving scowl. I’ve got a surprise for you!’

  ‘I can hardly wait,’ he said.

  ‘Spare me your sarcasm, Hennie. You’ll thank me when you see it. It’s the icing on our cake.’ She took his hand and snatched up a shovel which had been leaning against a wall of the hangar.

  Catherine walked through knee-length grass for a minute or two before exclaiming: ‘Here!’ She handed Reitz the shovel and said: ‘Dig. There, under that stick.’

  He brushed aside the twig that had been left in the dirt as a marker and did as ordered. Catherine had carefully removed a patch of long-grassed turf before digging the hole, and he silently commended her thoroughness. The soil beneath the patch was loose and the blade soon clanged on something firm. She dropped to her knees and together they cleared away the last of the dirt from the top of a wooden crate.

  ‘Took me ages to bury this stuff,’ she said as she wiped the perspiration from her forehead with the back of her hand.

  Reitz watched her out of the corner of his eye as he got his fingernails under the lid of the crate and started to lift. A few minutes ago she had sent an injection of ice water down his spine as she coolly related how she’d raped and killed her best friend. Now she was as excited as a little girl on an Easter-egg hunt.

  He couldn’t wait until the operation was over. After Ursula’s death, and on learning he would be returning to Africa, he had started to think more and more about Catherine. She was the complete opposite of his dead German girlfriend. There was a dark side to Catherine which excited him and, if he were honest, scared him a little, though he sensed that was part of her attraction.

  He lifted the lid of the crate clear. ‘Where did you g
et all this?’ Reitz stared in amazement at a pile of .303 bullets, their brass casings glittering like gold in the morning light. What made this cache so special was that each of the rounds was slotted into loops on long canvas belts.

  ‘Your secret weapon will take care of the graduating pilots and Messrs Huggins and Smuts, but I’m going to have some jolly good fun using this on the Empire Air Training Scheme’s aircraft.’

  ‘Catherine has to be the one,’ Paul Bryant said into the intercom in his oxygen mask. Out of habit, he scanned the sky around him for other aircraft. ‘She showed me a collection of wigs when I was at Flick’s place. Said she’d be whatever colour I wanted her to be.’

  ‘I thought it must be something like that,’ Pip said. ’Felicity was a blonde, so I thought it odd that she’d have a wig the same colour and length as her hair. Then I noticed those black strands inside it. It was silly of me to overlook the fact that Nkomo had sold fuel to a blonde woman on the night Felicity was killed. I was thinking that a man must have been responsible for the rape and murder.’

  ‘Logical assumption,’ he said in a conciliatory tone, although he still smarted from the fact that she had been so quick to believe he could have been the killer.

  ‘I’m so sorry that I misjudged you, Paul. I suppose I didn’t trust myself not to fall for the wrong sort of man all over again, and that coloured the way I looked for a culprit.’

  ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘Pip, I’d never treat you the way your ex-husband did.’

  ‘Your turn now,’ Pip said. ‘Tell me what you’ve found out and what makes you so sure Catherine is tied up with this German spy. What’s his name again?’

  ‘Reitz. I’ve got the evidence in my back pocket. I’ll show you later if we get the chance. I found it while I was rummaging through some junk at Catherine’s place yesterday morning – seems like a lifetime ago. I’d worked out that Smythe’s Harvard had landed out on the saltpans and then taken off again. From the air, our search party couldn’t tell the difference between an aircraft’s undercarriage tracks and vehicle tyre marks. I landed out on the pan, paced out the distances between the various wheel tracks, and then followed them. Smythe landed his kite, but someone else took off in it. I didn’t have any firm evidence that Catherine had stolen it, but one thing I did know was that she was prepared to go to any lengths to get her hands on one. The pieces started coming together in my mind, then. There was the crash of Cavendish’s plane on Catherine’s airstrip. He’s a happily married man, and I believe he wouldn’t have let Catherine fly his aircraft on a promise of sex, but he had another weakness.’