Spy Out the Land

by Jeremy Duns

  Weale gave the order for rations to be distributed, and the men ate in silence. After a few minutes, he looked at his watch. It was time. He gave the order and the convoy drove back onto the track. Twenty minutes later, they drew up to the main gates of the camp. Weale looked across at Corporal Sammy Oka, the man he had chosen to trigger the operation. Oka nodded, a gleam in his eye, and Weale nodded back in approval. Oka was quick, clever, athletic – one of the best. He clambered out of the back of the vehicle and Weale watched him run towards the boom, waving his arms wildly, just as they’d rehearsed dozens of times back at headquarters.

  A few seconds passed and then two guards emerged from the hut to see what the fuss was about. Oka gestured frantically at the convoy.

  ‘Let us through,’ he said in Shona. ‘We have casualties and need to get them to the clinic at once!’

  The guards peered at the trucks behind him.

  ‘Which camp are you from?’ one asked. ‘We’ve heard nothing about this.’

  Oka had been expecting the question. ‘We were on our way here but had no time to radio in – we were ambushed on the road. Comrades, open up, our men are going to die if they don’t get medical attention very soon!’

  One of the guards raised his machine-pistol and nodded in the direction of the convoy.

  ‘Show us.’

  Oka ran back to the front truck and parted the tarpaulin. The guard stepped forward and shone his torch. Several men were laid down on the flatbed, all wearing ZANLA uniforms and blood-spattered bandages. A few groaned with pain.

  Convinced by the display, the other guard ran to the boom and raised it. Oka climbed back into the truck and the driver pressed his foot to the pedal. As the truck passed the boom, the bandaged men suddenly all stood, revealing their weapons, and fired through the rear of the truck at the guards, cutting them down. The convoy swept into the camp.

  Chapter 7

  He was walking down a passageway, the walls lit by candles set in sconces, and she was walking in front of him, dancing almost, wearing a white evening gown that clung to her figure, laughing as she looked back at him. White teeth, flowing hair. A beautiful young woman, her eyes only for him. But soon, he knew, she would be kneeling on a small spit of land, a pistol pressed against the back of her head, the hair matted to her scalp, sobbing with desperation and fear. He knew how it ended, because he had seen it before. It was always the same: the man with the gun didn’t even flinch as he pulled the trigger, and then her cranium exploded and the spray of blood stained the water . . .

  He woke, his body soaked with sweat. He opened his eyes. Claire and Ben were walking through the doorway of the bedroom. She was carrying a tray with a cake lit with candles, and both of them were singing:

  ‘Ja, må han leva!

  Ja, må han leva!

  Ja, må han leva uti hundrade år!

  Javisst ska han leva!

  Javisst ska han leva!

  Javisst ska han leva uti hundrade år!

  Hurra! Hurra! Hurra! Hurra!’

  Ben bounded onto the bed and wrapped his arms around him. ‘Happy birthday, Pappa! You’re halfway there.’

  Claire laughed, placed the tray on the sideboard, and kissed him. ‘Happy birthday, darling.’

  He sat up and wiped the sleep from his eyes, banishing the nightmare. His birthday had in fact been six days ago, but he had altered it on his papers: if anyone ever suspected his true identity, keeping the same birthday could confirm it.

  ‘Would you like to see your card, Pappa?’

  ‘Of course I would.’

  Ben took an envelope from the tray and handed it to him triumphantly. Inside was a card he had made himself, with ‘Grattis Pappa!’ scrawled over a stick-man illustration of him.

  ‘It’s lovely.’

  Ben grinned with pride. ‘Would you like your present now? Mamma bought you something expensive.’

  He looked up at her. ‘Really? You needn’t have.’

  ‘It was nothing.’ She handed him a small blue box with a red ribbon around it. On it she had written ‘To Erik – with all my love, Claire’.

  He unwrapped it, to accompanying cries of encouragement from Ben. It was a small black leather wallet, and he recognised it as one he had looked at in a department store a few months earlier when they had been shopping for clothes for Ben. She must have spotted his interest in it and bought it when his back was turned. He opened it up and saw that she had pasted a photograph inside. It had been taken at the hospital when Ben was just a few hours old. They were both looking down at Ben, cradled in Claire’s arms. He leaned over and kissed her.

  ‘I love it. And I love you. Thank you.’

  She beamed and returned his kiss. He blew out the candles and began to carve the cake, watched keenly by Ben.

  Chapter 8

  Sunday, 13 July 1975, Salisbury, Rhodesia

  Major Roy Campbell-Fraser, known to his men as ‘The Commander’, was the first into the room after the security check. He poured himself a cup of tea and looked through the windows down at Jameson Avenue. The jacaranda trees were bare on the street, and he missed their lilac bloom. Cars and bicycles passed by in a gentle flow, metalwork and chrome gleaming in the morning sun.

  An athletic 52-year-old with crew-cut white hair and the stark features of a buzzard, Campbell-Fraser was the commander-in-chief of the Selous Scouts. Once a month, he drove down to Salisbury for a briefing with the prime minister and his counterparts from the Central Intelligence Organisation, Special Branch and the army.

  He glanced around the boardroom. How quickly one tired of the pomp and circumstance, he thought. He remembered how thrilled he had been the first time he’d had an audience with the PM two years earlier. Now it was an irritation. The security measures conducted before each meeting were time-consuming and tedious, and had been made worse since Special Branch had discovered a plot by the guerrillas to blow Smith up with a grenade as he left the building. Campbell-Fraser itched to be back in Inkomo, planning operations against the enemy instead of engaging in bureaucratic nonsense. He was particularly anxious to learn how Johnny Weale was getting on with his team’s raid of the ZANLA training camp near the border with Mozambique. The last he had heard they were just about to go in. He thought of the boys in the operations room manning the radio sets at that very moment, sweat prickling their temples as they listened in wait for the call signs to come through to confirm that all was well. That was where he should be.

  The others had now entered the room, and Campbell-Fraser took his place in a chair at the large leather-topped conference table. On the wall facing him was an oil painting of two Spitfires taking off, a none-too-subtle reminder of the prime minister’s war record for the British, his having flown for their air force. The painting had been a gift to the PM from a group of British supporters a decade or so earlier. A lot had happened since, although there were still a few in Britain who believed in white Rhodesia. The rest of the room was decorated in the usual heavy government style: wall-to-wall red carpet, curlicued lintels over the door and, despite the heat, thick curtains in a hideous floral pattern framing the windows.

  Smith was the last to arrive. He was wearing a dark tailored suit with a white shirt and a maroon tie. Campbell-Fraser thought he looked a very long way from the war. He took his place at the head of the table and nodded at the men seated around it.

  The main item on the agenda was the discovery by the spooks that the South African government was secretly sounding out ZANU and ZAPU about the possibility of a new round of talks on ‘the Rhodesian question’. The men listened intently as Willard Shaw, the chief of the Central Intelligence Organisation, presented the evidence. Shaw was a pudgy sunburned man with wisps of dun-coloured hair parted so severely to the left that it gave his entire face a lopsided look. Campbell-Fraser generally didn’t judge men by their appearances – it could be fatal to underestimate people on such a basis – but he hadn’t trusted Shaw from the moment he had set eyes on him. His instincts had pr
oven correct. In the early days of the Scouts, he’d worked closely with the CIO on operations, but he had soon found Shaw obstructive. Campbell-Fraser’s guess was that it was simply because the other man didn’t like a newcomer infringing on his intelligence-gathering patch, but in his view this attitude was potentially dangerous for the security of the country.

  The animosity between them had reached boiling point three weeks earlier, when Shaw had informed him that in March two of his operatives had assassinated Herbert Chitepo, one of the founders of ZANU and the head of its military high command, with a bomb placed in his car outside his home in Lusaka.

  Campbell-Fraser had been furious that the operation had been carried out without his knowledge, but also that the CIO men – both former British SAS officers – had planted evidence at the scene that had suggested someone in ZANU could have been responsible. Shaw had thought this a brilliant way to sow dissent within ZANU, which had split from ZAPU several years earlier following power struggles within the movement. But Campbell-Fraser felt the manoeuvre had been politically naive: he would have either clearly incriminated specific targets within ZANU or left it open enough to suggest ZAPU might also have been involved, thereby creating a much wider field of suspicion.

  Instead, Shaw had fumbled it with a halfway house, with disastrous results. One of ZANU’s founders, Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole, had left to form a more moderate group, while a firebrand figure within ZANU, Robert Mugabe, had consolidated his power by accusing rivals of collusion in the assassination. Far from fostering divisions, Shaw’s unsanctioned operation had made ZANU stronger, more militant and, worst of all, united behind Mugabe, who Campbell-Fraser felt was much more of a threat than Sithole had ever been, let alone the murdered Chitepo.

  Now Shaw was crowing over his outfit’s latest intelligence haul. Through an asset in Lusaka, they had obtained a copy of a secret memorandum drawn up by the South Africans and Zambians. Grandly titled ‘Towards the Summit: An Approach to Peaceful Change in Southern Africa’, the document proposed ‘a new spirit of co-operation and racial harmony’ across the region, with Zambia, Botswana and Tanzania pledging to use their influence to find ‘a political solution in Rhodesia’. In return, South Africa would withdraw its military assistance from Rhodesia and pressure Smith to release more political prisoners.

  Photostats of the document had been handed around the table, and Smith grunted with barely suppressed anger as he read through it. According to Shaw’s source, the document had been written by a special adviser to Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda in collaboration with the head of the South African spy agency BOSS, Hendrik van den Bergh, who was very close to South Africa’s prime minister, John Vorster.

  In recent years, Vorster had launched a charm offensive on black African leaders in an attempt to ease the international isolation South Africa faced as a result of apartheid. His idea was to rebuild diplomatic and trade links by exploiting Western fears of a Soviet takeover in the region, presenting himself as a statesman who could come to peaceful terms with his black neighbours. This stuck in Smith’s craw, as during the war Vorster had been a general in the Ossewabrandwag, a South African paramilitary group that had been so pro-Nazi it had even adopted their salute. It was there that Vorster had first met and befriended his spy chief van den Bergh. Smith hated the British with an implacable intensity, but they had at least been on the right side together during the war with Hitler.

  Despite his white supremacist past, Vorster had succeeded in persuading some that he had changed his spots. Chief among them was Zambia’s Kaunda, who had referred to one of Vorster’s speeches as ‘the voice of reason for which Africa and the world have waited for many years’. The wider international community had been slower to proclaim Vorster a new messiah of moderation – the United Nations had even suspended South Africa from the General Assembly – but he wasn’t giving up yet. Since the collapse of Portuguese rule in Mozambique, he’d redoubled his efforts, and he had South Africa’s old ally Rhodesia firmly in his sights. Slowly but surely, he had applied pressure on Smith, taking advantage of the fact that Mozambique’s fall meant he now depended much more on South African help. Vorster had already scaled back his military support to Rhodesia and forced Smith into releasing several guerrilla leaders from prison.

  Smith closed the dossier and sighed. The document confirmed his worst fears about Vorster. If he didn’t play by South Africa’s rulebook, they would withdraw more military, weapons and oil shipments, isolating Rhodesia further and making life easier for the guerrillas. Smith felt as if a noose was tightening around his neck, and unconsciously loosened his tie.

  Campbell-Fraser was the first to speak.

  ‘This is sickening reading, Willard, but it seems very broad. Do you have any intel about specific plans for talks?’

  Shaw shook his head. ‘Just whispers at the moment, I’m afraid. But several credible sources have told us they’re discussing it. One asset has told us Vorster offered the Zambians a million rand to host the talks and give them more credibility.’

  Smith gave another snort of anger. He stood abruptly and wandered over to the windows, looking down at the scene Campbell-Fraser had earlier.

  ‘Well done on getting this, Willard,’ he said. ‘I think we can be in no doubt about Vorster’s game here. He wants to set up talks and then go public at the same time as he informs us of them. That way, if we agree to take part he gets the glory of having arranged it, but if we refuse we’ll look like we’re turning our back on negotiations for no good reason in the eyes of the international community. Teaming up with Kaunda would make us look even worse for turning it down, as he would have gone the extra mile to reach out to a black leader. What a devious little bastard.’

  He turned to face the room, and nodded at Shaw. ‘I need you to keep a very close eye on this. Apart from their going behind our backs, I don’t like being blackmailed, especially by an ex-Nazi. And despite all the platitudes about peace and harmony in this –’ he picked the document up from the table and waved it scornfully – ‘I don’t think we’re at a point where another summit would be fruitful. None of the current crop of black leaders is up to the job, as they’re all much more concerned with securing their own positions than any sort of reasonable and mature policy regarding the future of this country. More to the point, none of them is prepared to budge an inch right now. They have too much to lose with their own people, and they know if they concede even the tiniest thing to us they could be deposed, or perhaps worse. And of course we can’t get any agreement on the big sticking points without wider black approval.’

  He pursed his lips in a sour smile, and everyone in the room understood the reason for it. The last serious attempt at talks had been arranged by the British four years earlier, and had ended in farce. All sides had signed up to the idea that anything agreed at the negotiating table would then have to be ratified by a vote from the country at large. An agreement had eventually been reached – majority, i.e. black, rule was postponed for around a century – but unsurprisingly this had fallen apart as soon as it had been put to that same population, who had rejected it virtually en masse. Since then, there had been little appetite for another round of talks.

  Smith turned to Shaw again. ‘You mentioned at our last meeting that new rifts might be emerging in ZANU’s leadership. Perhaps that’s something we should be cultivating, in the hope of forcing a new attitude?’

  Shaw nodded. ‘I’ll consider how we can do that, Prime Minister, and report back at our next meeting.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  They moved to the next point on the agenda. Campbell-Fraser listened in silence. His expression was neutral, but inside he was seething. ZANU’s leadership was now looking more united, not less, and it was largely thanks to Shaw’s own meddling. And he recognised a ball being kicked into the grass when he saw it. Smith was discussing vague long-term possibilities, when what was needed was immediate and concrete action. Familiarity had bred Campbell-Fraser’s contempt for
the empty routines of bureaucracy, but also for the prime minister personally. Outside Rhodesia, Smith was widely viewed as a monster, a cold-blooded racist who was refusing to budge on the matter of majority rule. In international circles, 250,000 whites leading a country with over five million blacks was manifestly unfair and needed to be rectified. But the country’s white minority, naturally, viewed Smith very differently. He was their protector and indeed saviour: ‘Good Old Smithy’, standing up to the wily, hypocritical Brits and the rest of the world.

  Campbell-Fraser didn’t subscribe to either view. There was something twisted about Smith, he thought: in public he came over as all hail-fellow-well-met, the decent, principled chap, but close-up he cut a creepier figure, with skin like sandpaper, a bulbous nose and one glass eye staring out at the world with disdain. Campbell-Fraser had no reason to doubt Smith’s patriotism – he’d seen him at a garden party the previous summer, drunkenly singing along to the rousing pop hit ‘Rhodesians Never Die’ with tears welling in his eyes – but he detested the way the man had painted himself as a war hero for political ends. Through his own research, Campbell-Fraser knew what most didn’t: that Smith’s military career had been unexceptional. He’d simply crashed a couple of planes and been injured as a result.

  Having observed him at close quarters for two years, Campbell-Fraser had concluded that Smith might once have been a half-decent if unlucky pilot, but was now just another ineffective politician. He could certainly be stubborn, but he was also self-important and unimaginative, and far from being intransigent Campbell-Fraser felt he had been far too soft when negotiating with the blacks. He’d kowtowed to Vorster’s demand for him to free terrorist leaders from prison, and was now surprised that they might try to seek concessions through talks. What the hell had he expected? From Campbell-Fraser’s vantage point, Smith’s image as a strong negotiator was a sham, and he was losing the diplomatic battle in imperceptible but nevertheless real increments. If it carried on this way, one day soon they’d all wake up and find the blacks in charge.