by Jeremy Duns
Rachel emerged from the stalls, her heart pounding as she scanned the throng of guests milling around the garden. She had lost him again. She saw one of the waiters passing and stepped forward to speak to him, but he wasn’t holding a tray and didn’t appear to understand what she was saying.
She glanced at her watch. They were going to miss the flight. What was the bastard playing at? She was about to return to the house to check there when she thought to look elsewhere in the garden – there was a lower tier to it. And what was that . . . a slash of whiteness glowing in the darkness?
She tumbled down the slope, her legs numb as she reached the bushes bordering the road. Gadlow’s head was bent over his chest, as though he were sleeping. For a moment she thought he was – he had become drunk and taken a nap in the bushes – but then she kneeled down and tilted his chin back and saw his eyes had rolled up into the skull.
Footsteps padded behind her, and she heard Eleanor’s contorted cry as she caught sight of him. Rachel would never forget that sound.
Udah Atnam walked at a brisk but steady pace through the kitchens. In the driveway, the chauffeurs were still smoking and talking among themselves. He passed them and walked through the gates, where he climbed onto a parked Yamaha motorcycle. It was a job well done, he thought, and he had repaid the debt.
He placed his helmet on his head, fastened the strap, and turned the key in the ignition.
1975
Chapter 5
Friday, 20 June 1975, Stockholm, Sweden
A stream of notes travelled through the ventilation shafts of a small nightclub in the city’s old quarter and drifted onto the maze of narrow alleyways. Peter Voers, a stout, crimson-nosed engineering salesman stumbling from a restaurant with colleagues, caught the notes on the air and recognised them at once: the opening bars of ‘Night Time Is the Right Time’. Voers loved Ray Charles, and loved that song in particular. He couldn’t resist.
The others in the delegation were heading back to the hotel: six hours of discussion on international drill-bit standards followed by some heavy Swedish cuisine could make even the liveliest executive drowsy. As they approached the turning that would lead them out of Gamla Stan, Voers announced that he fancied taking a stroll through the area and bid them goodnight. After a few friendly exhortations not to get into too much trouble, he began walking in the direction of the music.
He suddenly felt well disposed to the world, buoyed by the shafts of sunshine still creeping over the tops of the buildings and the melody drifting through the air.
After a few minutes he was sure he had located the source of the trumpet in a small street called Trångsund. About halfway down, he found confirmation in a poster stuck to a seventeenth-century buttress that read ‘Jazz & Blues’. He handed ten kronor to a young man at the door, and with a nod was let past into a narrow hallway. It took a few moments for his ears to adjust to the abrupt rise in volume and his eyes to the enveloping darkness, and then he saw the flight of stairs and started descending. At the foot of it was a baize-covered door, which he pushed open.
The place was a brick-lined cellar packed with punters, most of whom were seated at small tables circling the stage. He made his way to the bar, glancing around to make sure nobody had followed him in from the street – no one had. The bar was staffed by a willowy blonde in skin-tight jeans and a beaded kaftan. Voers ordered a beer, paid the exorbitant sum for it, and found a spare table with a decent view of the stage.
The band had launched into another Charles number, a rendition of ‘Drown in My Own Tears’ played at a slightly faster pace than usual. They were a tight outfit: the lanky trumpeter, whose playing had pulled him in here, was in perfect lock with the drummer and bassist, both young men sporting sprouts of beard beneath their lower lips, while the singer, a silver-haired Swede wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a floppy beret, pounded a baby grand and sang his heart out in a creditable imitation of Charles’ style.
But Voers was drawn most to the two backing singers at the rear of the stage, who were harmonising as well as he remembered from the record: unsurprising, perhaps, as both were munts. He smiled at the way his mind had leaped to the word, which he never used these days: his colleagues wouldn’t understand it.
He had never liked the word himself, but had used it profusely in the old days to allay suspicions he was weak. Voers regarded blacks as inferior, but saw no contradiction in his love of rhythm and blues, nor in his attraction to black women. That they could sing powerfully and were often physically beautiful was undeniable – but that didn’t mean they knew how to run a country, or that he wanted to hand over his to them. He had once made a joke on the subject to a couple of colleagues, but they hadn’t appreciated it and some of the others in the unit had for a time openly questioned his commitment and principles as a result. So he had joined in their little games and used their sad names for the blacks. But he knew that he was above all that: his distaste was political, not personal.
He took a draught of his beer and savoured the coolness as it travelled down his throat, then turned his attention back to the singers. One of them was a little too plump for his taste, and her mouth overly rouged, but the other was stunning, with a perfectly oval face, almond-shaped eyes, and hips moving sinuously in time to the beat. Voers licked his lips as he took her in. He noticed that she had a mole just below her left eye, which reminded him of a young girl long ago, crouching in the darkness of a farm outside Bulawayo, her eyes widening as she realised what he meant to do to her . . . He froze as the realisation seized him. She didn’t simply resemble that girl.
She was her.
He scrabbled around the table for some kind of leaflet or programme, but there was just a small card with the name of the group – ‘Jan Karlssons Orkester’ – and no further information. At the bar, the waitress was serving another customer, and it wouldn’t be a good idea to draw any attention to himself.
He took another swig of his beer and looked at the stage again. Could he be mistaken? A trick of the light? No, it was definitely her. The same high cheekbones, now a little more refined, the same shape of the lips and nose, the long neck. He lifted his hand to his face and felt the small indentation beneath his chin where she had caught him with her kick all those years ago before fleeing into the night. She had been a strikingly attractive seventeen-year-old. That meant she would be twenty-seven now. She had become a beautiful woman.
The next realisation came not as a freezing moment, but as a warm glow that spread through his stomach. There wasn’t simply an opportunity to exact revenge here. If he was careful, and if he was clever, this was a prize. But as soon as the thought had lodged in his mind, a cautionary note sounded. Not too fast. He needed more information than this. His table suddenly seemed far too close to the stage: he couldn’t run the risk of her seeing him. As soon as the song ended, he found one a little further away and ordered another beer. It was a waiting game now.
Claire arrived home at just before two o’clock. Everything was quiet in the building, just the humming of a washing machine in the communal basement below – no doubt there would be a stern note from Fru Wallén on someone’s door tomorrow morning.
She took the lift upstairs and quietly unlocked the front door, then slipped her shoes off and walked into the living room. Erik was asleep on the sofa, the left side of his face lolling on one of the cushions, a reading lamp next to him highlighting the flecks of silver in his beard. She leaned over and kissed him gently on the lips and he woke with a start. For an instant, fear registered in his eyes, and then they softened and he kissed her back.
‘He’s asleep.’
‘What about—’
He placed a finger to her lips. ‘He was an angel. And he ate and drank like a little king.’
She smiled.
‘Let me just check on him.’
She tiptoed across the living room and carefully opened the door to the small bedroom. A glow lamp hung over a wooden cot, inside of which a three-year-old boy
was curled up in the foetal position, a thumb lodged firmly in his mouth.
She remembered how wildly he had been running around the same room a few hours earlier and smiled, relieved. One of Janne’s backing girls had been taken sick at the last minute, and he had asked her to fill in for her. The opportunity had been too good to miss, but she had been stupidly torn about leaving the house for the evening. She hadn’t been away from Ben for more than a few hours since his birth, and it had almost become a superstition for her: she had an irrational and almost paralysing fear that something terrible would happen to him the moment she turned her back, and began imagining all kinds of nightmare scenarios: his falling through a window, or being burned in the kitchen, or stumbling headfirst against a pair of scissors.
But once she was away from the flat, she had managed to hold the panic at bay. She had never told Erik about her singing, and had instinctively felt he wouldn’t understand why she would want to do it again, so she had instead told him she wanted to meet up with an old friend who needed comforting after a messy break-up. A white lie. Not the only one she had told him, either.
Still, it had been worth it. It had been exhilarating to bask in the heat of the stage again, Per’s trumpet blaring beside her, performing for an audience like she had done when she had first arrived in Stockholm, before Erik and before Ben. She had almost forgotten what the city looked like, as her life had been reduced to attending Ben’s every need, especially as Erik worked night shifts twice a week. The two of them and this flat had become her bubble of existence, and when she’d walked into the club for the rehearsal she had momentarily felt like a visitor from another planet.
‘How’s Marta?’
Erik had come into the room and placed his arms around her waist. He rested his chin on her shoulder, staring down at their child.
She snapped out of her thoughts and turned to him. ‘Oh, you know . . . she’s Marta. She’ll be fine.’
Erik was friendly, if a little remote, with her friends, but he had made no secret of the fact he found Marta Österberg insufferably self-absorbed. She worked for a local refugee organisation, which was where Claire had met her, but Erik thought she and her boyfriend were bourgeois playing at being radicals, which was harsh if not entirely untrue. Claire hadn’t thought he was likely to check up on her, but she’d called Marta and warned her of their ‘meeting’ just in case. ‘We went for a drink after dinner,’ she added, suddenly conscious of the need to bolster the story – Janne had insisted on a celebratory round in the green room afterwards.
Erik smiled. ‘Yes, I can smell it on you. Red wine?’
She nodded, and craned her neck up at him. ‘I might even be a little drunk.’
‘Oh, really?’
He leaned in and kissed her on the mouth. She drew away, flushed, and glanced back down at the cot. Ben was still fast asleep, his tiny chest gently rising and falling beneath the woollen blanket. She turned back to Erik.
‘Are you trying to take advantage of me, Herr Johansson?’ she said, her expression deadpan.
He gave her a mock-serious look and stretched out his hand. She followed him into their bedroom and drew the curtains, then stepped over to the bed and placed a hand inside his shirt, feeling the warmth of his chest.
In the street below, Voers considered his next move. Once the Ray Charles set had ended, he had waited outside the club until he had seen the girl – as he still thought of her – emerge from the artists’ entrance.
He had been worried she might drive home or take a taxi, but instead she had walked to the nearby Slussen underground station: the network ran until three o’clock. He had followed at a discreet distance and bought a single ticket. It had been several years since he’d tailed anyone, but there had been a throng of young people making their way home to the suburbs after a night on the town, which had given him a lot of cover. He had stood at the far end of the carriage with his back facing her, watching her through the warped reflection of an advertisement for a modern art exhibition.
She had got off at Vällingby, and he had followed her out of the station and through a paved square surrounded by shops and concrete office and apartment blocks. He had taken up a sheltered position in the shadows outside a women’s clothing store on one side of the square, and watched as she had approached a block of flats directly opposite. The block looked very much like those he had seen at a conference a few years earlier in East Berlin, Plattenbauten, but like many buildings in Stockholm it had been painted a bright shade of yellowy orange to mask the brutalism of the architecture.
Once she had entered the building, he had looked for signs of movement in the upper windows. Sure enough, about thirty seconds later shadows had flitted by on the second floor, and he had caught a glimpse of her at the curtains just before she drew them.
He had lit a cigarette then, savouring the taste of it and letting his pulse return to normal. Then he had started walking back towards the underground: there was nothing more to be done tonight. He would have to delay his flight tomorrow and rearrange his appointments for the next couple of weeks, but that was no great trouble. He knew where she lived now. He would hire a car, buy a decent camera, and stake out her place until he had photographs of her and anyone she was living with. His whole body was tingling with anticipation.
This was his ticket back in.
Chapter 6
Saturday, 12 July 1975, Rhodesia–Mozambique border
The Unimog approached the outskirts of the camp at just after two o’clock in the morning and came to a standstill. A few moments later, the other vehicles in the column drew up behind it.
On a bench in the rear of the Unimog, Captain John Weale smeared a fresh coat of greasepaint on his face and hands. He considered the irony that he was disguised as a black man in order to capture black men. His father certainly wouldn’t have approved, had he lived to see the day.
Weale was in command of a detachment of forty-eight Selous Scouts, the most secretive and deadly of the Rhodesian special forces groups. The regiment was named after the British game-hunter Frederick Selous, a fact of which Weale approved: his grandfather had fought alongside Selous in the Second Matabele War. Weale’s great-grandparents had settled in Britain, but he’d lived all his life in Africa and regarded himself as entirely Rhodesian. He was proud of his grandfather’s legacy, but since his country’s declaration of independence from the Queen a decade before he’d come to hate the British with a fiery intensity that was second only to his hatred of the black terrorists fighting to wrest control from the minority white government.
Weale had joined the Scouts from the regular army within a few weeks of it being formed. The regiment’s ethos was inspired by the British SAS, with whom several of its senior officers had served, either during the Second World War or in the Malayan emergency or both, but the selection process was even more gruelling: it took seventeen days, the first five of which required living entirely off the land at a training camp on the shores of Lake Kariba. On the fifth day, candidates were given the rotten carcass of a baboon as a reward for making it that far. The few who remained after that – usually around 10 per cent – were given the most meagre of rations to survive the rest of the course to supplement their diet of living off the land. A further four weeks’ training followed, during which they were still monitored for suitability. Successful recruits therefore started out with a strong sense of camaraderie and great pride, as each man knew that the others had also gone well beyond the norms of human endurance and behaviour to become a Selous Scout.
Within the Rhodesian military the regiment had adopted the cover role of a reconnaissance and tracking unit, but in reality it was a counter-insurgency force. Its mission was to obtain intelligence on the terrorists, who were divided into two main groups, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, ZANLA, and the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army, ZIPRA. These were the armed wings of the black nationalist movements ZANU and ZAPU. The Scouts had become expert on the differences betwe
en them, as a large part of their job consisted of impersonating them in the field. To accomplish this, most members of the regiment were black: soldiers from the Rhodesian African Rifles whose salaries had been doubled for volunteering, and captured rebels who had been turned, or ‘tamed’.
The black Scouts usually headed up small teams, making contact with rebels in the bush while the whites hung back. White Scouts operating in the field had to be fluent in at least one African language, and usually blacked up with burned cork or greasepaint and wore floppy hats and beards so that from a distance they too could pass as insurgents. Weale was fair-haired and ruddy-complexioned, but unless you were standing within a yard of him, he was now indistinguishable from the rest of the men.
The secrecy around the Scouts was to protect its methods being compromised, but also because impersonating the enemy in such professional ways was arguably against the Geneva Convention, even if the guerrillas rarely used established flags or uniforms. The Scouts’ ‘pseudo’ teams had already captured dozens of rebels, and even when operations had failed had managed to sow confusion and paranoia among the ‘terrs’, as they referred to the guerrillas. In turn the guerrillas called them Skuz’apo, a Shona expression often used of pickpockets that broadly meant ‘Please excuse me for having just slipped a knife between your ribs’.
Weale’s current operation had involved weeks of planning at the Scouts’ headquarters in Inkomo. Multiple reports from captured ZANLA members had led to the identification of a training camp a few miles from the border with Mozambique. Intelligence from another Scout unit indicated that several members of ZANLA’s Central Committee were currently staying there.
The plan was simple: drive into the camp and capture or kill as many terrs as possible. Looking over his men, Weale was confident of their success. All were dressed as ZANLA terrs, down to the tiniest detail, and were armed with AK47s, RPD light machine guns and RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launchers. A Unimog led a column of Ferrets and homemade armoured vehicles known as ‘pigs’, all painted in ZANLA’s camouflage patterns and with a few of their flags flying. Twenty-millimetre Hispano cannons were mounted on the front of the pigs, supported by twin MAGs on swivel mountings on the sides.