Allegiance

by Trevor Corbett

  Here it comes, Durant thought. The race issue. He’s thinking I’m a racist. He wanted a white partner. He doesn’t trust me. He’s looking down at me.

  Before Durant could answer, Shabalala went on. ‘Now you think that I’m thinking you’re a racist and would have preferred a white partner, but I’m not thinking that. I’m thinking you’re comparing me to Mike Shezi and I just don’t shape up. I wear a suit, I weigh 137 kilograms, I’m maybe more annoying, don’t laugh at your jokes . . .’

  Durant was starting to like this guy already. ‘Cedric Shabalala?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Durant sighed and shook his head. ‘Sorry, no offence. It’s going to take a while.’

  Shabalala stepped back from the bed, pulled up a chair, wiped it with an alcohol swab he took from a dispenser on the wall, and sat down.

  ‘I hate hospitals. I have a thing with germs and there’re more germs in hospitals than anywhere else. And this is where they put sick people. It doesn’t make sense.’

  Durant smiled. Shabalala was becoming pleasant in an annoying sort of way. He was clearly top-of-the-class material, no question, but to work with him every day . . . Durant wondered how long he could stretch his hospital stay.

  ‘The report on your shooting,’ Shabalala said, disturbing his thoughts. ‘It was interesting reading. Seems like you needed some backup there and there wasn’t any.’

  Durant raised his eyebrows. ‘Are you saying you should have been there?’

  ‘The Standard Operating Procedure is clear: take a convoy . . .’

  ‘The sop isn’t perfect science, Cedric.’ There was a hint of annoyance in Durant’s voice. This guy was still in nappies when Durant was in the field.

  ‘It was written to protect us.’

  ‘It was written to protect the Agency. If you—’

  Durant was interrupted by the ward door opening and Masondo entering. ‘I can see you two’ve met.’

  Shabalala frowned despairingly. ‘Yes, sir, we’ve met.’

  ‘Kevin, you’re in for a long haul, my friend. I’m not a doctor, but I can tell you four bullets tore your insides to hell. You’re not coming back to work for a while.’

  Durant nodded. ‘I can rest in the knowledge that you have Mr Shabalala to do my work.’

  Shabalala scowled. ‘Mr Durant seems to think that operating outside of the rules is okay. The handbook says that potentially dangerous meetings should be covered with counter surveillance and convoys and that the meeting place should be in a populated public place.’

  Masondo smiled disarmingly. ‘I know what the handbook says, Cedric. Hell, I wrote some of it. But I also ditched the handbook a long time ago. It’s called operational reality. It’s not in the handbook. It’s called taking chances for the greater cause. When the agent calls at one in the morning, you don’t consult the manual, you meet the agent. Mr Durant met the agent. Excuse me.’ Masondo answered his phone and walked out of the ward.

  ‘I met the agent. He brought danger to that meeting,’ Durant said. ‘Someone else who was obviously followed.’ Durant was tired. He didn’t want to talk about this any more. ‘I don’t know what more I could’ve done.’

  ‘Mind if I take a few of these?’ Shabalala asked and opened the alcohol cloth dispenser and took the whole roll out. ‘I still have a lot of doors to get through before the car park.’

  Thirty kilometres north of the hospital where Durant lay, construction of the new international airport was progressing on track and there was general optimism it would be fully operational by May 2010. It had been announced that public hearings for the naming of the airport were proceeding well and there was general consensus that King Shaka International was the favoured name. Some argued that the king’s name was inappropriate: Shaka was known for his ruthless and cruel efficiency in using his impis to slaughter with their short-thrusting assegais. This genius at maximising close-quarter combat turned to madness after the death of his mother and some say he ordered the death of over 7 000 of his own. The city fathers believed King Shaka was a good brand to market internationally and the aim was to bring six million visitors into the Zulu kingdom every year. The Zulu warrior king was good for tourism.

  Just south of the airport construction precinct, the land value had increased in proportion to the progress of the new investment in the northern coastal belt. Sheikh U-Haq purchased the land ten years previously for a song. Although there was talk of a new international airport then, there was little more than a short runway and a few small structures to show for it. U-Haq had loved the setting, the green hills and the distant ocean views. The perfect place to inspire students to study Islam. A small mosque and training centre were built, funded by U-Haq’s own deep pockets. He called it the Islam Africa Centre and visualised a centre of excellence for the propagation of Islam into Africa. A year later he built a media centre, which providentially, a cadet journalist from Al Jazeera visited and aired a small feature on. A group of Saudi businessmen saw the feature, liked the concept and started signing cheques. All-terrain vehicles were purchased, which delivered food to the destitute and hungry every day. Besides the Jamaat Khana, the centre also had a madrassa, a small clinic, a substantial cultural centre and accommodation for visiting scholars and student residences. Alumni from around the world visited the IAC to participate in debates and discussions on contemporary religion and politics, and Sheikh U-Haq was considered a leading authority on matters of Islamic education, intellectual development and future perspectives. The sheikh was an imposing figure at over two metres tall, and when he spoke, he always leaned forward, clasping his hands in front of him. A grey beard reached down to his chest, and framed a warm, open smile. The Al Jazeera cadet said he looked like Bin Laden and although he did with a stretch of the imagination, some observers said it was unfair to label him so. Others said the Saudi funding gate had opened wider because of it.

  It was a humid Thursday afternoon but the air con in the Mercedes s600 kept the interior at a comfortable twenty-one degrees. The sheikh never liked the heat. Not in Riyadh and not in Durban. It had been a long month in Saudi, exhausting, with meeting after meeting and one function following the next. He’d hardly had time to visit family and take care of business responsibilities there. There were some exciting developments which he was looking forward to sharing with his senior staff at the centre. The delegation from Qatar had included government ministers who were keen to invest in a programme of bringing a hundred young African Muslims to the centre for theological training every month and then sending them back to their home countries to share their skills with others. People of great influence were taking the centre seriously and its potential for growth was immense. On the flight back he’d even had a vision of Durban as a bright star on a map with resplendent gold beams stretching across the map, north into sub-Saharan Africa. It was good to be back. The Mercedes turned into the neatly trimmed grounds and the sheikh noticed the main building had been freshly painted.

  ‘They have been busy!’ he said to Iqbal, his driver.

  ‘Yes, Sheikh, ah, they are . . . um . . .’

  Iqbal wasn’t making any sense. About twenty staff members gathered at the entrance portal under the elaborate arch, which extended from the reception area across to the library, and most of them were dressed in their traditional Islamic dress out of respect for the sheikh. At the far end of the parking area, tables had been set up and caterers hovered over a buffet of lamb curry, chicken casserole and biryani.

  ‘Slow down, Iqbal, go slow!’ the sheikh said it loudly, but his voice was calm. The car seemed to be accelerating. Something was wrong. ‘Iqbal!’

  The big car sped past the entrance and the sheikh heard a deafening bang and smelt smoke. He tried to lean forward to shake Iqbal’s shoulder, but it was as if a giant hand was pushing him into his seat. Another loud bang and something hit the windscreen, sending lines radiating up just like the sheikh’s map. Further bumping and another loud crash and then silence. Then
a scream from outside the car and shouts. The door pulled open and hands on him, pulling him out. Iqbal was slumped in his seatbelt in the driver’s seat, the white airbag draped over the steering wheel. A group of men crouched over someone lying on the ground behind the car; was it – Mustafa? And there was more shouting. Panic.

  ‘Sheikh! Sheikh!’ Someone was calling, but his ears were still ringing from the bang. Must have been the airbag.

  ‘I’m okay, I’m okay, hamdulillah.’

  ‘Insha ’Allah,’ somebody said.

  ‘Are there people hurt? Mustafa?’

  ‘The doctor is here, Sheikh.’ The centre’s clinic had a locum doctor who came on Thursdays. The sheikh saw Dr Hassan was seeing to Mustafa.

  ‘Iqbal? He didn’t stop.’

  ‘Sheikh, he drove through us. Poor Mustafa didn’t jump out the way in time.’

  ‘Is Iqbal hurt?’

  ‘Sheikh . . . he . . . he—’

  ‘What is it? Speak up.’

  ‘He’s laughing, Sheikh.’

  U-Haq’s eyes seemed to darken. ‘I want Iqbal in my office in five minutes.’

  Iqbal couldn’t stop himself from laughing. He had no control over it. It was the strangest feeling, he couldn’t understand it. The sheikh looked angry. Everyone was angry with him. He’d damaged the car. Yet he wanted to laugh. It was bizarre. The world was swirling around in his head, everything was happening in slow motion for him. Even when he’d wanted to stop the car, it was in slow motion. Then when he drove through the people and he heard the bang, he was floating, outside of his body. Uncanny, he’d never felt this way. He loved his job. He loved the sheikh. What was wrong with him? What had he done? He didn’t drink. He didn’t take drugs. He’d had a Coke at the airport. The thoughts kept swirling. The man at the airport. He came out the toilet and felt the man bump into him. He apologised. Then a prick in the small of his back, a sharp pain for an instant and then it was gone. Perhaps he’d imagined it. The thoughts in his head whirled into a confusing mass of information, then shapes and colours and then just dissolved and then . . .

  Iqbal collapsed.

  The road was quiet and dark as roads in industrial areas often are at two in the morning. Kenneth Sandhurst was 71, but his mind was as sharp as it was thirty years ago. Rhodesian Selous Scouts captains generally had sharp minds, minds receptive to learning new skills. Useful conventional and unconventional war crafts that were necessary in the struggle to protect the Ian Smith administration from an increasingly hostile onslaught from enemy forces. Acknowledged by his superiors as one showing great potential, he was hand-picked in the 1970s to spend six months in a Salisbury laboratory. Interesting times. Here he met a doctor who had broken every oath he had ever made in the name of Hippocrates. The doctor was adept at not only concocting deadly poisons, some from freely available ingredients, but also at delivering these poisons with cruel efficiency during the Rhodesian war. Evil diseases were inflicted on enemy soldiers as poisoned food was introduced into their supply lines. Not only their food. UNHCR supplies were intercepted and anthrax and other disease spores were introduced into the packets of underwear and socks. It was a war, a war they had to win. Now Ian Smith was a forgotten memory; Sandhurst had settled in South Africa and the war was long over. Sandhurst was a career soldier and had no other skills that could be used outside of a war. The small pension he got was all he needed to survive and there was enough to let him buy a few beers for his Rhodesian war mates at the bar once a month and catch up.

  Then the Zimbabwean government took away his pension. The Mugabe regime had a moral issue with paying military pensions to the white oppressors who defended the colony. The money wasn’t much, but it was a psychological blow to Sandhurst. He’d accepted the change of government. He’d even stayed on in Harare after Zanu-PF came to power and he’d paid his taxes as a good citizen should. The watershed year was 2001. He’d had a few beers and perhaps he should have counted his words and the fellows in the pub laughed at first until they realised he was serious. He could kill people. Just like that. He said he had skills very few people had. It was a marketable skill. After the debate died down, he had a feeling there were others who wished they had thought of the idea first. A niche market. And South Africa was the ideal country for it; life was cheap.

  Within six months, Sandhurst had registered ‘Reclamation Resources’ as a security company and started offering risk solutions. His client list was select and discreet and he serviced them personally. Repeat clients. Overseas clients. Some clients he never met. One left a name and address on a piece of paper in an envelope of money and slipped it under his front door. He had a hundred per cent success rate; no unhappy clients. He was, of course, selective about the jobs he took. He wasn’t an assassin without a conscience. No woman or child would ever fall by his hand. A taxi boss would. An abusive husband might. A political leader involved in violence, no question. He would refuse a job if he thought it morally unacceptable. Like the businessman who wanted Sandhurst to kill him and make it seem like a botched hijacking. He had a problem with that. The businessman had cheated hundreds of investors of their life savings. Death was an easy way out for him. He should have the guts to do it himself, or face the music. No, there were definitely parameters and limits.

  After a quiet year, the parameters narrowed somewhat and Sandhurst reasoned that he couldn’t afford to be too fussy, not when the economy was on the down and down. He did the businessman. It was in the newspaper and some investors had written to the editor and said justice had been done. It had been the right thing to do after all. For a few months after that it had got very quiet and Sandhurst was worried that the recession had even slowed down the killing business. Then the quiet-spoken, sincere man came to his house with R10 000. All he wanted was a toxin; Sandhurst wouldn’t even have to do the job. Poison arrow frog toxin, Sandhurst suggested. He could source it from a contact in Brazil – the frog carries enough poison to kill over 2 000 people. But the man was specific about what he wanted. Sandhurst conceded it was a brilliant choice; he’d never thought of using it before and it was relatively cheap and easy to acquire compared to the frog poison. The man had intimated the target was across the border and he was hard to access. Silently, Sandhurst hoped the target was his arch nemesis on the other side of the Limpopo River and that the hit would be a success.

  Sandhurst’s wife, Margie, turned the beige 1992 Toyota into a gravel area beside a mobile tuck shop where there was little lighting, and stalled the car as she brought it to a halt. Sandhurst shook his head, clicked his tongue and opened the car door.

  ‘I’ll be five minutes. Keep your doors locked.’

  The old lady nodded and reached into her handbag for her knitting needles. ‘Be careful, love,’ she told her husband as he climbed out, opened the boot and took out his metal walking stick. Margie Sandhurst watched as he walked briskly up the road and as soon as he was out of sight, returned to her knitting. She’d promised to have her granddaughter’s jersey finished by her birthday at the end of January. As sharp as his mind still was, Sandhurst could feel his body taking strain as he walked the fifty metres down the road and turned a corner. The grey-haired man jogged down a steep driveway towards a one-storey face brick building which a nondescript sign told him was the target. ‘S&D Pharmaceutical Distributors.’ Sandhurst felt a smile curl his lips. It was so easy. This brick building in Westmead held a weapon of mass destruction with the killing power of a ton of dynamite, and there wasn’t even a fence he had to scale. He went straight to the window he was looking for. It took him less than two minutes to bend the bars from the window frame using a crow bar and then dislodge some of the glass louvres. Sandhurst then left the window and went to a side door, which he quickly unlocked and went inside. So far, the storeman had delivered what was expected of him. The three keys had cost him R1 000. The insider had told him that the scheduled medicines were in a separate section of the storeroom and he identified the locked door by the number above it. The s
econd key he’d been given opened this door and the torchlight soon fell on the mandatory steel cabinet which protected the scheduled drugs and kept the distributors compliant in the laws governing the storage of dangerous medicines. The third key unlocked this cabinet and the man’s gloved hands had the small packages he sought within thirty seconds. Less than three minutes later, he was gone.

  THREE

  January 2009

  Kevin Durant held onto the door and eased himself out of the car as Stephanie pushed the wheelchair in so that he could sit down.

  ‘I feel like an old man,’ he wheezed. ‘Geez, this is going to be hard.’

  ‘Well, you can be glad there are no stairs in the house. Oh, my banner’s gone. We put a banner up on the veranda; the wind must’ve blown it away.’ The disdain was clear in her voice. Everything had gone wrong since the shooting. She had always considered herself independent and self-sufficient, but Kevin being at the hospital had changed her perception of herself. She was used to making the decisions in the home because she figured he had enough decisions to make at work. She paid the bills, organised and ran the home and made sure the refrigerator always had food. But without him around, she struggled to make any decisions. The realisation hit her hard: you need two people to put up a banner properly.

  ‘What did the banner say? “Welcome to Shady Palms?”’

  Stephanie laughed, relieved that Kevin hadn’t lost his sense of humour. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘It’s good to be home. A month of hospital food is just about all a man can take.’

  Stephanie pushed open the front door.

  ‘Surprise!’ she said, and Alexis shot out the front door dressed as a bear cub. Durant smiled and gave his daughter the biggest hug he could without hurting himself.

  ‘I’m Mushkie Bear’s cub!’ she said excitedly. ‘Welcome home, daddy bear!’

  Durant didn’t feel like a bear. He felt like a scarecrow that had had all its straw ripped out and then haphazardly stuffed back in again. The doctor had said it would take months for the wounds to heal completely and his life would probably not be the same again. It was starting to feel like Dr Abdul was right.