by Tony Park
That made her smile. ‘Something like that.’ She closed her eyes as she took another sip. It was a lifetime ago; someone else’s life. A pied kingfisher squeaked nearby. She knew this place, though the campground was better organised than the last time she and Stirling had stayed here. Simply being back in Botswana made her think of him.
‘Stirling, I love you, too, but I want to see the world. I want to do something with my life.’
He’d tried to be cool, busying himself by putting another worm on the end of his hook, then casting it out into the Khwai River with a practised flick of his wrist. ‘Stay,’ he’d quietly pleaded as he reeled in the slack, watching the river’s surface, unable to look her in the eye.
He’d suggested that she become a safari guide, but although she knew the bush almost as well as he, except for trees, which she found boring, she hated pandering to the needs of the tourists. Her dad, Hans, had been the manager of Xakanaxa Camp, until his drinking had become too much for the owners. Her mother had less patience and had gone back to England while Hans still muddled on, but Sonja had lingered, unwilling to abandon the old man, or Africa. In time, she’d become keen to do both. After losing his job at the camp her father had stayed in Maun, lost to his wife and daughter as surely as if he’d died. Perhaps he had.
‘You know I can’t handle the foreigners.’ When she went into the bush she liked to go alone, or with Stirling. It was hard to describe. For her, going to the bush was like going to church was for her mother. She went into a kind of trance sometimes and felt as close as she ever would to believing, not in the existence of a supreme being, but in a sense of order and completeness in this otherwise fragmented world.
‘What about going to ’varsity?’ Stirling had persisted. ‘Your marks were good enough. You could become a zoologist – get a gig as a researcher back here in the Delta. We could be together forever.’
‘Ag, I couldn’t stand another four years of schooling. I’d go crazy. I’ve got to do something, not read about it.’
She had seen the genuine pleading in his eyes. Why couldn’t she love him as much as he loved her? If he truly loved her then he must realise that she needed to do this, to see more of the world. She loved Botswana, and the Okavango swamps and the bush and the wildlife, but if she couldn’t be a researcher, a safari guide, a lodge manager, or a cook – cooking was one thing she was totally useless at – then what would she do with her life in Africa? Become the wife of one of the above? That wasn’t enough for Sonja.
‘You fucking bitch,’ her father had screamed at her when she told him she was leaving. ‘Just like your fucking mother. That stuck-up, cheating English whore has poisoned you!’
‘Papa, no.’ He had abused her verbally a couple of times in recent months when very drunk, and though he had never physically hurt her the words sliced like a panga.
‘Fuck her, and fuck you!’ He’d tossed the empty Jägermeister schnapps bottle at her, but she was sober and easily dodged it.
At eighteen she was as tall as he. She had a swimmer’s build, lithe and with good upper-body strength and a toned tummy from endless crunches. Living in the confines of a safari camp she had learned to exercise when and how she could, so weights and sit-ups were part of her daily routine. At boarding school she had swum five kilometres a day to escape the soul-crushing boredom of being in Cape Town, so far from Botswana and the delta, and had won interschool championships.
‘Stop it, Papa, you’re drunk.’ She had grabbed the arm he raised and turned it, behind his back, pinning him there. Stirling had taught her the move as self-defence.
‘Oww. OK, OK, let me go,’ her father protested.
When she released him he turned, his face crimson with anger, and slapped her, back-handed across the face. She reeled from the blow, which pushed her against the canvas wall of the permanent safari tent in which they lived. Standing, she glared at him, rubbed her jaw, and walked out on him. For good.
‘Sonja! Wait …’
But it was too late. He had crossed the line and while she had tended to take her father’s side in some of the arguments he’d had with her mother, now she would forgive him nothing. Her mother had retained her British citizenship. Sonja had already applied for and been granted right of abode in the United Kingdom.
She scrawled a quick goodbye letter to Stirling, who was out on a game drive working towards his guiding qualification, got in her father’s old Land Rover and drove it to Maun. The old bastard could retrieve it himself, she thought. She caught a bus to Gaborone and her mother wired her the money for a flight to London. England was a shock to her senses but even in the dead of winter the knife-edge chill of the outdoors was still more appealing to her than the overheated fug of a job indoors. To her mother’s horror Sonja joined the British Army.
The British girls who reported to the Women’s Royal Army Corps recruit training barracks at Queen Elizabeth Park at Guildford, in Surrey, were a mixed bunch, but many of them struck Sonja as coarse and foul-mouthed. Sonja may have grown up wild in the African bush, a barefoot kid who knew more about elephants than human beings, but it wasn’t until basic training that she realised how good her manners were and how sheltered her life had been until then.
Unlike most of her fellow recruits she found the physical training a breeze and excelled at weapons handling.
‘Too bad they won’t let you in the infantry,’ said the male sergeant, a former Special Air Service man named Jones, who took her and the other girls in her section for weapons lessons.
Some of the instructors were even more chauvinistic than the hunters and safari guides she’d grown up with, but Sergeant Jones was patient and encouraging around the women, some of whom had never held a firearm before, let alone fired one.
While some of the other girls fell by the wayside Sonja excelled at basic training and was named the student of merit, the top recruit, at the end of her course. From the limited choices available to women at the time she applied for posting to the Royal Corps of Signals. She’d briefly considered military intelligence – even though everyone joked that was an oxymoron – but when she made enquiries she found she might well end up spending her days cooped up indoors staring at aerial photographs through a magnifying glass.
Unlike most of the girls on her course she’d learned to use radios for communication from an early age. She had a confidence born of living in a war zone and growing up in the African bush, and her only regret was that as a trainee signalman she spent too much time in the classroom and not enough out in the field. She passed the course with flying colours and was posted to a signals unit at Aldershot, home of the Parachute Regiment.
With peace talks on again it seemed the conflict in Northern Ireland between the Irish Republican Army and the Protestants loyal to the British Crown was winding down, although the paratroopers Sonja met were about to deploy to the troubled province of Ulster, so things weren’t over yet.
As the months progressed Sonja grew bored of life in barracks. There was precious little travel involved, save for one exercise in Germany where she thought she would die of the cold. She spent much of her time typing signals on a telex machine and making tea for senior NCOs and officers. Her first full winter in England was depressing, her mood matching the dull grey of the skies. She missed Stirling and wrote to him every week. When she telephoned him in Botswana he begged her to come back. It wasn’t, she explained, as if she could just quit with two weeks’ notice, and while she was tempted for a brief moment to pack it in and go AWOL she forced herself to be strong.
‘Kurtz,’ the female lieutenant said, looking up from her desk.
Sonja saluted. ‘Ma’am.’ She’d wondered what she had done wrong when the sergeant major had told her to report to the troop commander’s office.
‘At ease. How are you settling in, Sonja?’
‘Fine, ma’am.’
‘You’re South African?’
It was a common mistake. ‘Born in South-West Africa – Namibia they call
it now – ma’am, and raised mostly in Botswana. British citizen now, though, ma’am.’
‘I see. Your NCOs tell me you’re a fine soldier, Kurtz, with potential to go a long way.’
‘Thank you, ma’am.’ Sonja had no idea where this was heading. ‘Is something wrong, ma’am?’
The officer looked up and smiled. ‘No, not at all, Sonja. A signal has come through seeking females to volunteer for special duties. All very mysterious, but there’s an emphasis in the requirements for physical fitness. If I hadn’t done my knee in last month playing squash I might be tempted to volunteer myself. I’ve also had a signal from a Captain Steele from the Special Air Service Regiment drawing my attention to you in the context of this request. Seems a sergeant …’ the officer rechecked the printout in front of her, ‘Jones spoke highly of you after your recruit course.’
Sonja felt proud, excited and nervous all at once. Her troop commander told her to think carefully before making any rash decision. Bluntly, she told Sonja she did not want to lose her, but the mysterious message offered Sonja the ray of sunshine she had been hoping for during the interminable gloom of the British winter.
‘Here’re the coordinates for the next checkpoint,’ Sergeant Jones said, cupping his hands around the small blue flame of a portable gas cooker as the rain pelted the canvas that sheltered him. Jones, it turned out, had been transferred back to his beloved SAS, but then reassigned to a special forces training role.
Sonja looked at the piece of soggy paper and memorised the grid reference before she handed it back to Jones. From a clear plastic envelope she pulled out her map of this cold and rain-swept part of Wales, the Brecon Beacons mountains, and located the next checkpoint. The smell of the instant soup brewing over the cooker in a tin cup made her stomach rumble. Jones heard it and simply rolled his eyeballs. Sonja was soaked to the skin and her teeth were chattering. Her feet were blistered after walking fifteen miles in wet socks and boots and the skin on her back felt raw from where the pack loaded with bricks and a sandbag had chafed her.
‘Right. Fuck off, Kurtz,’ Sergeant Jones said, stirring his soup.
For two weeks Sonja’s mind, body and soul had been hammered and bent to within an inch of breaking in a series of increasingly gruelling tests of her stamina and basic military skills in the bleak mountain landscape. There had been lessons on unfamiliar weapons, navigation tests – like this one – and mile after mile of walking and running through the wilderness. The recruits were referred to by surname only regardless of rank. The training was a great leveller and already three-quarters of the hundred men and women who volunteered for special duty had been RTU’d – returned to their unit.
Sonja checked the luminous dial on her watch. It was three in the morning and she had been without sleep for more than twenty-four hours. Walking out of the tent, back into the rain, she lifted the compass from its lanyard around her neck and took a bearing.
‘Kurtz?’ Jones called from the comparative luxury of his tent, the canvas walls snapping in the merciless wind.
Sonja looked back at him, blinking away the rain. The man winked at her.
Northern Ireland mirrored her experience so far in the army; an exciting, and at times scary, headlong rush into unending tedium. Sonja had passed her selection course and had been transferred to 16 Intelligence Company, which had started life as an intelligence detachment in Ulster, and since then had been known simply, and obscurely, as the Det.
The Det’s core business was surveillance of IRA personnel and locations. Forward-thinking for its time, in the late eighties and nineties the Det had pioneered the use of women in a special operations role. In staunchly republican villages and neighbourhoods the presence of unknown, hulking single men on surveillance was a giveaway. Female soldiers and officers had been trained in surveillance and photography. Posing as wives or girlfriends they had helped male operatives blend in on the streets of Londonderry and in the rural villages of South Armagh, and had driven vehicles dropping men off at concealed ‘hides’ in the green fields of the county and townhouses of the city’s republican strongholds.
Once more, Sonja found herself frustrated. Women in the Det were barred from the more dangerous missions and the best they could hope to be was ‘handbags’ for male surveillance operatives. Women were banned from spending time in the concealed observation posts or hides, for the bizarre reason that if they were having their period they might give away their position to sniffer dogs. Sonja had seen or heard of no evidence whatsoever of the IRA using canines for this purpose. The Det sailed close to the wind in any case, for while women could be a useful extra layer of cover for the men, females were still technically prohibited from taking part in combat roles. While Sonja carried a nine-millimetre pistol with her, and had a Heckler and Koch machine pistol under the seat of the car she drove when dropping off and collecting male operatives, the weapons were strictly for use as a last-ditch means of self-defence if she was ever compromised.
Things changed the day two schoolteachers, friends from different sides of the religious divide, decided to pioneer a project in which children from their respective communities would come together for joint field trips. Some outspoken parents – Catholic and Protestant – made a show of keeping their eight-year-olds home from school, but the majority of mothers and fathers were happy for the children to mix with each other. There were peace talks on at the time, brokered by the Americans, and the school excursions gained prominence in the press as a sign that things might be slowly changing in the troubled province.
The Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein were quick to deny any involvement in the setting up of the two-hundred-kilogram culvert bomb that exploded as the bus carrying forty boys and girls from warring religions, and their well-meaning teachers, passed over it. Eighteen small bodies were pulled from the twisted wreckage, and the site reduced even paramedics and firemen hardened by years of warfare to tears.
‘Right, people, gloves are off,’ Captain Martin Steele told the packed briefing room of grim-looking soldiers in civilian clothes. Sonja, like many of the men, smoked during the briefing. Smoking was a means of killing time and, though she hated to admit it, a means of finding some common ground with some of the more Neanderthal of the men, who still weren’t convinced of the value of women in undercover work. She, like the two other girls in the Det, June and Mary, a captain and a lance corporal, thought Captain Steele was a dish. June and Sonja had been on the same course and remembered the SAS officer as the senior staff instructor. He had returned to Ireland shortly after them and acted as a liaison between the elite regiment and the intelligence people of the Det.
‘This man,’ Steele pressed a remote connected by cable to a slide projector, ‘Daniel Byrne, is believed to be the so-called True IRA’s quartermaster. We believe he’s the bastard who sourced the Semtex that was used to kill those innocent little children and one of the teachers. We know precious little about the splinter group, but we do know that Byrne was disenchanted with the Provisional IRA and their part in the peace talks. We – that is, you – are going to follow and keep watch on Byrne for every second of his miserable life from now on. He’s going to lead us to the rest of these animals, including their leader. One thing we know about Byrne is that like a lot of these paddies he likes a drink and a party, so be prepared for plenty of pub time.’
Steele’s last remark raised a few half-hearted laughs, but there was no doubting the seriousness of the task at hand.
When Steele paused and looked around the room Sonja felt that the gaze of the blue-eyed man with the wavy jet-black hair rested on her. ‘Be careful. Very careful. Byrne will have been trained in countersurveillance and he’ll be looking for you while you’re looking for him. Byrne and his ilk have been shunned by the Provos. They’re mad dogs, operating on the extreme edge, alone and with no care for life or humanity.’
Sonja had been paired with Sergeant Bruce Jones. The SAS man had been assigned to the Det, supposedly to boost numbers. Sonja w
ondered if the presence of the extra special forces soldiers on the surveillance teams was more about being in position to deliver a killing blow, if the opportunity arose, than manpower.
The world had been outraged by the chillingly casual admission by the True IRA of their actions, and the public and press across the water in the rest of Britain was baying for blood.
‘Lost eyeball,’ Bruce said into the microphone concealed in the sleeve of his bomber jacket. ‘He’s gone into the pub. Following him in.’
Sonja pulled the Ford Escort into the pub’s car park and stopped at the far end of a row of cars, away from Byrne’s battered van. He was a plumber by trade and the stick-on sign advertised satisfaction guaranteed. Tell that to the bereaved families of the children and their pretty young Catholic teacher, Sonja thought, as she switched off the engine.
‘Right, let’s get a drink, shall we?’ Bruce made it sound like they were on a date and she admired his cool.
Sonja’s heart was pounding as she followed him into the smoky pub and she felt like every eye was on them. The pub was not a known republican watering hole – Byrne was too clever to use those – but nonetheless Sonja felt she couldn’t be more conspicuous as a British soldier unless she had a Union Jack tattooed on her forehead.
To Sonja’s horror, Byrne, who had made straight for the bar, looked past Bruce and smiled at her as they moved past him. Sonja looked away as Jones appeared to ignore the Irishman and headed for a booth at the far end of the crowded pub. It was nothing, she told herself. The bar’s clientele was mostly men, although there was a trio of young office girls sitting at one table. Perhaps Byrne just had an eye for anything in tight jeans. Sonja wore a hooded sweat jacket that was baggy enough to conceal the nine mil clipped high on her waist, but when she sat she felt it dig into the small of her back and she wondered if Byrne habitually scanned every person he saw for signs of a weapon.
‘We’ll wait till he’s left the bar and I’ll go get us some drinks,’ Bruce said under his breath as they slid into opposite sides of the booth. ‘Then … bloody hell.’