Heart of the Hunter

by Deon Meyer

  Mpayipheli was not coming.

  He had taken another road. Or the wounds perhaps No, he was not going to start speculating again— it was irrelevant; his plan had failed and he accepted it. Sometimes you took a chance and you won, and sometimes you lost. He made a decision, he would wait till sunset, relax, watch the day fade to twilight and the twilight to dark, and then he was done.

  When he climbed back in the car they came for him.

  Three police vehicles full of officials in uniform. He saw the three vehicles approaching, but it registered only when they stopped. He realized what was going on only when they poured out of the doors. He sat tight, hands on the steering wheel, until one shouted at him to get out with his hands behind his head.

  He did that slowly and methodically, to prevent misunderstandings.

  What the hell?

  He stood by the Golf, and a pair of them ducked into the car. One emerged triumphant with the Heckler & Koch. Another searched him with busy hands, pulled his hands behind his back, and clamped the handcuffs around his wrists.

  Sold out. He knew it. But how? And by whom?

  4. THE EXECUTION OF OPERATION SAFEGUARD

  After Johnny Kleintjes had visited the U.S. embassy, we set up contact with him and agreed to meet him in Lusaka.

  Inkululeko kept her side of the bargain by duly recording the embassy visit, as well as starting a surveillance program of Kleintjes.

  The operation went perfectly according to plan.

  Because of the controlled nature of Safeguard, this office did not deem it necessary to allocate more than two people for the Zambia leg. And agents Len Fortenso and Peter Blum from the Nairobi office were drafted for the Lusaka “sale” of the data.

  I acted as supervisor from Cape Town and take full responsibility for subsequent events.

  Fortenso and Blum confirmed their arrival in Lusaka after a chartered flight from Nairobi. That was the last contact we had with them. Their bodies were found on the outskirts of Lusaka two days later. The cause of death was gunshot wounds to the back of the head.

  Allison Healy wrote the lead article with great difficulty. Her concentration was divided between anger at Van Heerden and sadness for the lot of Pakamile.

  She had cried when she left him behind, she had hugged him tight, and the ironic part that broke her heart was the way the child had comforted her.

  “don'’t be sad. Thobela is coming back tomorrow.” For the sake of the child, she had called every contact and informant who might possibly know something.

  “It depends who you believe,” Rassie had said from Laings-burg. “One rumor says he’s wounded. The other says they have shot him dead in Botswana, but I don'’t believe either of them.”

  “Shot dead, you say?”

  “It’s a lie, Allison. If the Botswana police had shot him, it would have been headline news.”

  “And what about the wounding story?”

  “Also a load of rubbish. They say a chopper pilot shot him but not with the chopper, you know what I mean. With this kind of thing rumors run wild. All I know is that the RU have gone home, and the whole operation in the Northern Cape has been called off.”

  “That is not good news.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “It could mean that it’s all over. That he is dead.”

  “Or that he is over the border.”

  “That’s true. Thanks, Rassie. Phone me if you hear something.”

  And that was the sum total of information. The other sources knew or said even less, so at last she began with the story, building it paragraph by paragraph, without enthusiasm and with Van Heerden’s betrayal hanging over her like a shadow.

  A member of the Presidential Intelligence Unit’s operational staff is under house arrest and awaiting an internal disciplinary hearing after the tragic accidental death of Mrs. Miriam Nzululwazi last night.

  The rest was more of a review than anything else because they had laid down guidelines for the report, she and the news editor and the editor. The final agreement with the minister was that they would break this news exclusively but sympathetically, sensitive to the nuances of national interest and covert operations. When she was finished she went outside to smoke in the St. George’s Mall and watched the rest of the world on their way home. Streams of people so determined, so serious, so stern, going home just to journey back tomorrow morning, a never-ending cycle to keep body and soul together until the Reaper came. This useless, meaningless life went on with gray efficiency, pitiless: tomorrow there would be other news, the day after, another scandal, another matter dished up to the people in big black sans serif lettering.

  Damn Van Heerden. Damn him for being like all other men, damn him for a shoplifter, a swindler.

  Damn Thobela Mpayipheli, for deserting a woman and child for a pointless chase across this bloody country. All it would leave was yellowing front pages in newspaper archI'ves. didn’'t he know that next month, next year, no one would even remember except Pakamile Nzululwazi living somewhere in a bloody orphanage, staring out the window every evening, hoping, until that too, like other hopes, faded irrevocably and left nothing but the vicious cycle of waking up and going to sleep.

  She crushed the cigarette under her heel.

  Fuck them all.

  And she knew how to do it.

  5. MUSLIM EXTREMIST INVOLVEMENT

  Johnny Kleintjes was found executed in a room in the Republican Hotel in Lusaka, the word “KAATHIEB” slashed with a sharp pointed object into his chest— Arabic for “liar.”

  This obviously indicates Muslim extremist involvement, and the big question is how local or foreign groups gained knowledge of the operation. The most likely explanation is a leak within the Presidential Intelligence Unit itself— and there are several facts that substantiate this suspicion:

  i. The operation was infiltrated at an early stage— the Muslims were in Lusaka, waiting for Kleintjes and the CIA operatI'ves. The PIU was the only agency with knowledge of Kleintjes’s involvement.

  ii. After eliminating Fortenso and Blum, the unknown operatI'ves blackmailed Kleintjes’s daughter in Cape Town to bring a specific hard drive to Lusaka. (She asked one Thobela Mpayipheli, a former friend and colleague of Kleintjes Senior, to do this on her behalf, as she is physically challenged— see below.) The suspected Muslim group, I believe, was not after the fabricated Kleintjes data but the information he had allegedly secreted during the 1994 integration process.

  iii. From this follows the obvious: the extremists have a mole within the PIU and suspected the mole’s identity was going to be compromised by the data.

  iv Kleintjes himself was known for his Middle Eastern sympathies and could have been protecting the Muslim mole.

  v. Furthermore, the PIU member arrested by Botswana police was waiting in ambush to intercept Mpayipheli and the hard drive, close to the Zambian border. We believe the Botswana authorities were tipped off to stop the drive (containing the information about the Muslim mole) from falling into the hands of the PIU. The only people who knew he was waiting in Botswana are part of a small, exclusive group within the PIU.

  The only remaining question, in my opinion, is not if Islamic extremists have an operatI've within the SA Presidential Intelligence Unit, but who it is. From this, it naturally follows that the original data might shed some light on the Muslim mole within the South African intelligence community

  At this time, the hard drive is still missing.

  6. THE MATTER OF UMZINGELI

  In 1984 a top CIA field agent and a decorated, much valued veteran, Marion Dorffling, was eliminated in Paris. The modus operandi of the assassin was similar to at least eleven (11) similar executions of U.S. assets and operatI'ves.

  The CIA had enough intelligence from Russian and Eastern European sources to conclude, or at least strongly suspect, that one Thobela Mpayipheli, code name Umzingeli (a Xhosa word for “hunter”) was responsible for the murder. According to available information, Mpayipheli was an MK soldier on loan from the ANC/SACP allian
ce to the KGB and Stasi as a wet work specialist.

  Coincidently I was a rookie member of the CIA team in Paris at the time.

  When Mpayipheli’s involvement in Operation Safeguard became public knowledge, I filed a request to the field office in Berlin for possible documentation from former Stasi files to confirm the 1984 suspicions.

  Our colleagues in Germany obliged within hours (for which I can only commend them).

  The Stasi records confirmed that Mpayipheli/Umzingeli was Marion Dorffling’s assassin.

  I notified Langley and the response from deputy director’s level was that the Firm was still very much interested in leveling the score. Two specialized field agents from the London office were dispatched to deal with the matter.

  Allison Healy’s fingers danced lightly but intensely across the keyboard. Her passion appeared in the words on the screen.

  fugitive motorcyclist Thobela Mpayipheli was a ruthless assassin for the KGB during the Cold War, responsible for the deaths of at least fifteen people.

  According to his longtime friend and former policeman, Dr. Zatopek van Heerden, Mpayipheli was recruited by the Soviets during MK training in what was then the USSR. Van Heerden is currently a staff member of the UCT Department of Psychology.

  She scanned it quickly before continuing, suppressing with difficulty the impulse to write, “his longtime friend, the world-class asshole Dr. Zatopek van Heerden.”

  In an exclusive and frank interview, Dr. Van Heerden disclosed that

  The phone rang and she grabbed it up angrily and said, “Allison Healy” and Van Heerden asked, “Have you got a passport?” and she said, “What?”

  “Have you got a passport?”

  “You asshole,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You are a total, complete, utter asshole,” she said before realizing her voice was so loud that her colleagues could hear. She took the cell phone and walked toward the bathrooms, speaking in a whisper now, “You think you can fuck me and run off like a like a ”

  “Are you cross because I didn’'t leave a message?”

  “You could have phoned, you bastard. What would it have taken to make one call? What would it have cost to say thank you and good-bye, it was good, but it’s over. You men are all the same, too fucking cowardly—”

  “Allison—”

  “But not last night, oh no, last night you couldn'’t talk enough, all the things that you said, and today not a bloody word. Couldn'’t you lift a finger to press a telephone button?”

  “Allison, are you interested in—”

  “I am interested in nothing to do with you.”

  “Would you like to meet Thobela Mpayipheli?”

  The words were queuing up behind her tongue, but she swallowed them down. He had taken the wind from her sails.

  “Thobela?”

  “If you have a passport, you can come along.”

  “Where to?”

  “Botswana. We are leaving in er seventy minutes.”

  “We?”

  “Do you want to come, or not?”

  44.

  He had to give her the last directions over the cell phone, as it was an obscure route at the Cape Town International Airport behind hangars and office buildings and between small single-propeller airplanes that looked like children’s toys left around in loose rows. Eventually she found the Beechcraft King Air ambulance with its Pratt & Whitney engines already running.

  Van Heerden was standing in the door of the plane, waving to her, and she grabbed the overnight bag from the backseat, locked the car, and ran.

  He stood aside so she could climb the steps and then he pulled the door shut behind her, signaling to the pilot. The Beechcraft began to move.

  He took her bag and showed her where to sit— on one of the three seats at the back. After making sure her seat belt was fastened, he sat down beside her with a sigh. He leaned over and kissed her full on the lips before she could pull away, and then he grinned at her like a naughty schoolboy.

  “I should—,” she began seriously, but he stopped her with a hand.

  “May I explain first?” His voice was loud, to be heard over the engine noise.

  “It’s not about us. It’s about Miriam Nzululwazi.”

  “Miriam,” he said with grim foreboding.

  “She’s dead, Zatopek. Last night.”

  “How?”

  “All they say is that it was an accident. She fell. five stories down.”

  “Good Lord,” he said, and let his head drop back against the cushion of the seat. He sat like that for a long time, staring ahead, and she wondered what his thoughts were. Then just before the Beechcraft sped down the runway, he said something she couldn'’t hear and shook his head.

  * * *

  “You have a terrible temper,” he said as the roar of the engines quieted at cruising altitude and he loosened his safety belt. “Do you want some coffee?”

  “And you are a bastard,” she said without conviction.

  “I was in conference all day.”

  “Without tea or lunch breaks?”

  “I meant to phone you in the afternoon, when it was more quiet.”

  “And so?”

  “Then I had a call from a Dr. Pillay of Kasane, who said he had found my telephone number in the pocket of a badly injured black man who had fallen off his motorbike in northern Botswana.”

  “Oh.”

  “Coffee?”

  She nodded, watching him as he made the same offer to the doctor and pilot in the cockpit. She thought how close she had come to putting the article into the system. She had been at the door of the editorial office when she turned and ran back to delete it. She had a temper. That was true.

  * * *

  “What is his condition?” she asked Van Heerden when he came back.

  “Serious but stable. The doctor said he has lost a lot of blood. They gave him transfusions, but he is going to need more and blood is in short supply up there.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Nobody knows. He has two bullet wounds in the hip, and his left shoulder was badly bruised in the fall. Some locals found him beside the road near the Mpandamatenga turnoff. By the grace of God, no one phoned the authorities; they just loaded him on a bakkie and took him to Kasane.”

  She absorbed the news, and another question arose. “Why are you doing this?”

  “He is my friend.” Before she could respond, he added, “My only friend, to be honest,” and she wondered about him, who he was and what made him this way.

  “And this”— she indicated the medical equipment—“what is all this going to cost?”

  “I don'’t know. Ten or twenty thousand.”

  “Who is going to pay?”

  He shrugged. “I will. Or Thobela.”

  “Just like that?”

  He grinned but without humor.

  “What?”

  “Perception and reality,” he said. “I find it very interesting.”

  “Oh?”

  “Your perception is that he is black— and a laborer, from Guguletu. Therefore, he must be poor. That is the logical view, a reasonable conclusion. But things are not always what we expect.”

  “So he has money? Is that from the drugs or the assassinations?”

  “A valid question. But the answer is ‘not from either of those.’ ”

  He saw her shake her head dubiously, and he said, “I had better tell you the whole story. About me and Orlando and Thobela and more American dollars than most people see in a lifetime. It was two years ago. I was moonlighting as a private investigator, probing a murder case the cops couldn'’t crack. In a nutshell, it came out that the victim was involved in a clandestine army operation, weapons transactions for UNITA in Angola, diamonds and dollars ”

  * * *

  He finished the story by the time they landed in Johannesburg to refuel. When they took off again, she pushed up the armrest between them and leaned against him. “Am I still a bastard?” he asked.

  “Yes. But you are my bastard,” and she pressed her face in his neck and inhaled his smell with her eyes shut.


  That afternoon she had thought she had lost him.

  Before they flew over the N 1 somewhere east of Warmbad, she was asleep.

  * * *

  She stayed in the plane, looking out the oval window of the Beechcraft. The air coming in the open door was hot and rich in exotic scents. Outside the night was lit up by car lights, the moving people casting long deep shadows, and then four appeared from behind a vehicle with a stretcher between them, and she wondered what he looked like, this assassin, drug soldier, the man for whom Miriam Nzululwazi had wept in her arms, the man who had dodged the entire country’s law enforcers for two thousand kilometers to do a friend a favor. What did he look like? Were there marks, recognizable features on his face that would reveal his character?