The Soldier who Said No

by Chris Marnewick

  ‘Don’t laugh, I said!’

  The recruits swallowed their mirth, but slowly.

  ‘As I said, we are going to train you in the use of a bow and arrow before you will be allowed to use a pistol or a rifle. You can laugh, but that’s exactly what your enemy will do: laugh at you. No one takes a bow and arrow seriously. And that’s the strength of a bow and arrow. No one takes it seriously.’

  The recruits were still fidgety. They had signed up for military-style training, not for a game of Cowboys and Indians.

  ‘Look at the men behind you.’

  They turned, each at his own pace. Behind them stood the recruits who had graduated from the course the week before. Like their instructors, they wore balaclavas and carried real weapons, AK47s. They looked like soldiers now, the fat run off their muscles during the course of their training.

  The commander stood a pace or two in front of his team of instructors. He paused for effect and then walked slowly up and down the row of new recruits. He grimaced at the sight of every tattoo and every elaborate hairstyle. When he spoke, he spoke as if on a parade ground.

  ‘The men behind you started with bows and arrows and now they are proficient in their use as well as the use of assault rifles. It takes six months to turn raw recruits like you into soldiers like the men behind you. But we are going to start with bows and arrows.’

  The troops held his gaze. They had learnt the first lesson. Look your enemy in the eye. Start by looking me in the eye at all times when I speak to you. Hold your head up. You’re a soldier now. Their elders had put them in the charge of this man. They were all Tuhoe, carefully chosen for their allegiance by blood to their tribe.

  ‘We start with bows and arrows. A bow and arrow has many advantages over a gun. It is a weapons system as old as mankind. You can make a bow and arrow from things we’ll teach you to find right here in the bush. You don’t need a licence for a bow and arrow. It’s a silent weapon. It can be used for hunting and we are going to hunt pigs and deer with your bows and arrows, once you know how to use them. That will be our cover for being here and carrying bows and arrows. We are going to be pig hunters for a while. Understand?’

  ‘Yes, Captain,’ the recruits shouted.

  ‘Good.’ He dropped his voice. ‘Shortly we’ll be making a statement of intent, on behalf of your people. And we’ll use an arrow.’

  The recruits looked listless, unpersuaded.

  The commander raised his voice to parade ground levels. ‘Look again at the men behind you. I am proud to call them soldiers, as skilled and fit as any in the New Zealand Army.’

  The new recruits half turned a second time to look behind them.

  ‘And in six months,’ he continued, ‘you will stand where they are standing now, ready to serve your people.’

  The commander was ready to give his final orders. ‘Your platoon leaders will take you through the drills every day from now until we are fully prepared and you are fully trained. I’ll be back every Saturday. Each week we’ll improve your skills and fitness step by step, until you are as ready as we are.’ A sweep of the arm included the platoon leaders and his small band of instructors.

  ‘Dismissed!’

  The troops unceremoniously split up into several groups. Several of them dug in their pockets for cigarettes.

  The instructors left in a white minibus with blackened windows. The numberplates would be put back on at the edge of the forest before they reached the main road. When they were out of earshot, the occupants reverted to their mother tongue. It took a few minutes to remove the bodypaint from their hands and eyelids and they were quick to turn their reversible fatigues inside out. No longer dressed in camouflage, they took on the appearance of pig hunters, ordinary men in drab brown or olive green bush wear.

  The instructors set up their targets in a clearing which had once been a Tuhoe pa, a fortified homestead. The bush had been cleared and the ground was level enough for them to set up their targets at thirty and fifty metres. In an elaborate display of their amateur archery skills, they competed in teams of three, with official scorekeepers counting and recording scores, and with much discussion of the merits of different types of equipment, with the argument ranging from the advantages of a combination bow over a self bow to the art of arrow making.

  To the curious onlooker, they would have come across as a bunch of townies dressed in their showy tramping gear, playing at being pig hunters.

  One of their members carefully recorded their targetshooting on video. It would come in handy later as a cover story.

  That is, if they were ever caught.

  During the four-hour drive back to Auckland’s North Shore, only the driver was awake. The others had made themselves comfortable against the seats and sides of the minibus and rested their heads on their backpacks. Like paratroopers returning from a mission, they closed their eyes and slept.

  When the minibus trundled across Harbour Bridge, the commander woke up. Under the bush hat pulled low over his eyes, he reviewed his arrangements with the intermediaries who had come to see him just over six months earlier.

  ‘We need someone with military experience to train some of our young men,’ they had said.

  He had been sceptical and eyed his guests for a long time before he spoke. ‘How did you get to know of me, and why do you want your men trained?’ he had asked.

  ‘We found your name on the website of the South Africa New Zealand Association, SANZA,’ had been the simple answer. They explained anyway. ‘It says that you and many other soldiers from your war in Angola have settled here.’

  ‘That doesn’t explain why your men need military training. If they want to be soldiers, they can join the army or the police.’

  There had been a pause during which the two intermediaries looked at each other. At a nod from the elder of the two, the younger spoke slowly and gave the commander an elaborate history of the Tuhoe. It ended with, ‘So you see, the army and the police are the enemy.’

  ‘They may be your enemy, but it has nothing to do with me,’ the commander had said.

  ‘The Crown has done the same thing to your people. They accused us of wrongdoing and then they took our land. They did the same to you, drawing their maps so that they would have the diamond fields, and when you resisted, they sent their soldiers to fight you. They did the same with the gold in Johannesburg. Soldiers from all over, even from here, were called in to fight you. They burned your lands and raped your women and put them in concentration camps. They killed many of your people.’

  The intermediaries had done their homework; that much was clear.

  ‘They did to you what they had done to us,’ the elder had said. ‘How many of your women and children did they kill?’

  It was a number ingrained in the commander’s psyche and he had answered immediately. ‘Twenty-six thousand.’

  His grandmother had been a sixteen-year-old in one of those camps. We avoided the infirmary like the plague, she had told him as a boy, because no one ever came out of there alive. Once I had flu and had to hide from them in a linen kist. They did inspections every morning and all the sick people were taken away. And we never saw them again until the funeral.

  When he didn’t speak, the senior intermediary spoke again. ‘We thought you would understand. There are fewer than fifty thousand of us left, including those living in Australia. We want our land back and we want our independence.’

  ‘For independence you need a territory. And then you would need an army,’ the commander had responded.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘With only fifty thousand people, you would never have enough soldiers to fight the New Zealand Army.’

  ‘We don’t want to fight them in a war. We want to show them we can run our own police and army. We want territorial independence and for that we’ll need our own army and police, as you’ve said.’

  ‘You’ll be arrested and charged for treason,’ the commander had warned.

  The elder held fi
rm. ‘We’ve thought about this. We never signed the Treaty. We don’t owe allegiance to the Crown. We have a sound defence to a treason charge.’

  ‘I don’t think it is feasible. You’ll never be allowed to become independent. You’ll never get international recognition. Believe me, we’ve been through all of that. It can’t be made to work. We tried to give territorial independence to our own tribes. It didn’t work.’

  The elder had then spoken in the tones of a schoolmaster. ‘Perhaps we haven’t made our position clear. We don’t intend to confront the Crown and we won’t be seeking an independence which will be recognised internationally. We want the right to live on our ancestral lands according to our customs. We want to run our own villages, our own schools and our own police. We don’t want the curses brought to us by the Pakeha who came here and took our land and gave us alcohol, tobacco, drugs. We want to run our lands our way and we want to keep those things out. We want nothing from the Crown except that it should leave us alone.’

  ‘Like the Amish in America,’ the commander had offered.

  ‘No, more like the Afrikaners of Orania,’ the junior intermediary had countered with a smile. ‘We want our own flag, our own language and our own place.’

  When the commander didn’t respond, the junior intermediary had continued. ‘We need to empower our people. We are not pump attendants and waiters and lorry drivers. We don’t collect rubbish. We are not on welfare or drug addicts living in State housing. We need a place where we can teach our people to be who and what we are.

  ‘The forest they have taken from us is such a place. We can start afresh there. It is our sacred place.’

  ‘But why?’ the commander had asked. ‘Life is good here, isn’t it?’

  The two intermediaries explained the history in some detail. The Tuhoe never signed the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 when the other tribes surrendered their sovereignty, nor had they been part of the wars that preceded the Treaty. They had seen white faces for the first time when an expeditionary force landed at Opotiki in 1865. As punishment for the killing of a missionary, the Crown had confiscated the Maori lands, including the lands of the Tuhoe, who had not taken part in the uprising.

  The tribe was now dispersed across the North Island, where most of its members were employed in menial jobs, if employed at all. But underneath the construction worker’s cap, in the gaze of the man mowing the municipality’s lawn, in the slant of the shoulders of the woman at the hairdresser, there lies not only a deep resentment, but also a dream that one day their land will be restored and the tribe will return to it.

  ‘And that’s why we are here. We want our land back,’ the junior had concluded.

  The deal they had struck was simple. In exchange for a small patch of land in the Ureweras, the commander would set up and run a covert programme for Tuhoe youth to train them in the use of small arms and in the tactics of urban policing and guerrilla warfare. The trained men were to become the core of the Tuhoe security forces once territorial independence had been achieved. In exchange, the Tuhoe would allow the instructors to set up their own school in the Ureweras. The methods of instruction would be devised by the commander and his people.

  ‘Maybe we can be neighbours,’ the commander had said. ‘We will train as many men as you want, settle next to you with our families.’

  ‘We will consider your request with favour,’ the elder had promised. ‘But in the meantime, we want a demonstration of your ability and good faith,’ he had added. ‘We want you to shoot the Prime Minister.’

  The commander had laughed. ‘She’s an easy target,’ he had said. ‘A silenced pistol or a crossbow could easily do it. Even a knife, the way she walks around in public.’

  ‘No, no,’ the elder had said. ‘We don’t want you to kill her. All we want is to show that we could, if we wanted to. Then they’ll take us seriously. We are not terrorists.’

  The commander had taken his time to consider the proposition. ‘I think I have just the weapon,’ he had said, ‘and the man to use it. And it will never be traced back to you.’

  After another long pause, the commander had spoken again. ‘If it’s all right with you, I’d like to get the training programme off the ground first. We can take care of the Prime Minister later.’

  The agreement had not been struck at the first meeting, nor was it entered into without debating the details of the project with those with the qualifications and skills to conduct the training. And the commander had to caution his instructors that, while the Tuhoe might have a defence to a treason charge, no such defence would be available to them, all immigrants who had sworn allegiance to the very Crown which had incarcerated their great-grandmothers in the world’s first concentration camps.

  Auckland

  Monday 17 December 2007 3

  The arrow left the string without a sound, no feathers required to steady its flight. Designed for stealth and subtlety, rather than cutting through blood vessels and muscle, this was no ordinary arrow. It could not kill over long distances. Its reach could never be more than twenty or thirty paces.

  The day was still young. The morning rush hour was over, but most office workers would still be nursing their first coffee from their office canteen.

  She was unaware of the man at the gate and equally unaware of the arrow quietly cleaving the air in its path across her front garden towards her. She was pacing up and down on the veranda of her Auckland house, lost in thought. It had not been a good year for her party.

  After her customary early-morning walk through the surrounding suburbs, her mind was as clear as a bell. It was time to get to work. It was the combination of disasters which had befallen the Labour Party which concerned the Prime Minister the most. She had been quite adept at dealing with individual setbacks throughout her political career – that was part of politics – but now she faced a whole raft of them, and this at the beginning of an election year. She worried about what the history books would say about her tenure if she were to lose the next election. She still had so many projects to complete, so much unfinished business.

  The Labour Party had slipped behind the National Party in the polls, in each of the three that mattered: in the poll of New Zealand’s largest daily, the Herald; in the poll of TV One, the State-owned broadcaster; and in the poll of TV 3, the independent television station. But there was even worse news in the other poll. She had also fallen well behind in the contest for the preferred Prime Minister.

  When she had started contemplating the reasons for the reversed polls, the arrow was still concealed from view in a small tube hidden in the backpack of the man at the gate. The arrow consisted of a shaft of ultra-light reed and a head carved from the hard mid-section of a giraffe’s thigh bone. The arrowhead and main shaft were joined by an intermediate part, a short foreshaft of heavier wood. Each part of the arrow looked innocuous on its own. Together they formed a deadly combination.

  What made the arrow distinctive was not its construction or its lack of fletching, but the organic poison coating the shaft of the arrowhead. A length of very fine sinew had been wound around the shaft and coated with a sticky poison. The secret recipe was more than a thousand years old. The poison consisted of a binding agent and at least three different poisons, which had been carefully mixed. The base ingredient was the scraped root of a plant, the Bushman Poison Bush, Acokanthera venenata. The juice extracted from the larva of a rare beetle, Diamphidia, was the second indispensable ingredient and the poison of certain snakes – puffadder or cobra – completed the mixture. Thus plant, insect and reptile joined in a deadly mix. The arrow was merely the mode of delivery; it was too light and flimsy to kill on its own.

  The final product acted on the prey in different ways. It was a haemolytic, attacking the red blood corpuscles by rupturing their cell membranes. It also had a neuromuscular function that caused paralysis.

  But in this arrow, the poison had long lost its potency. Its power to kill had been eroded as the proteins broke down over ti
me.

  Minutes earlier the Prime Minister had ticked off the reasons for her party’s misfortune one by one, extending a finger from a closed fist at each count. Her Minister of Finance, Michael Cullen, who once could do no wrong, was now being described as loopy after an outburst in Parliament over an imagined slight. Rich prick, he had called John Key, the very man the voting public now preferred as Prime Minister, and scumbag. That’s one finger accounted for, but a finger should also be allocated to the pollsters, she thought. She extended a third digit for Trevor Mallard, once the darling of the Labour Party, but now demoted from the front benches after punching another MP, in the foyer of Parliament of all places, when the latter had made an offensive remark about Mallard’s partner. What was of concern was that New Zealand men had applauded Mallard’s reaction, his Zidanesque instant retaliation on a man-to-man basis, something men understood.

  The man at the gate quickly assembled his bow, three pieces fitting together as a combination bow no longer than ninety centimetres. The string was a piece of wound fishing line. He stood astride the bicycle, waiting for the right moment, for the Prime Minister to turn at the end of her veranda so that he would have a clear shot.

  He watched as the Prime Minister extended a fourth finger for the number of kiwis departing permanently for Australia, seven hundred to a thousand every month, their well-publicised flight causing even more to leave and a greater stress on the recruitment of suitably qualified immigrants to fill the vacant posts and do the hard work.

  She raised another finger, a second yellow card for Trevor Mallard. He had mauled and insulted a number of civil servants and had refused to apologise, even after it had been pointed out that he had the facts wrong.