Commissioner Ksole: The truth. Why now, Mister Straker? It was a long time ago.
Witness: Because, sir, it’s killing me.
Commissioner Ksole: Do you wish to apply for amnesty, Mister Straker?
Witness: If that’s possible, yes, sir. I do.
Commissioner Ksole: Can you please tell the commission, are you the same Claymore Straker who is wanted for murder and acts of terrorism in Yemen?
Witness: Those charges have been dropped, sir.
Commissioner Ksole: And, Mister Straker, in Cyprus, also?
Witness: I served time in prison in Cyprus, yes, sir.
Commissioner Ksole: And you provide this testimony of your own free will?
Witness: Yes, sir.
Commissioner Ksole: And you understand, Mister Straker, that any information provided here can, and if necessary will, be used against you in a court of law if the circumstances warrant? That this commission has the power to recommend legal action against a witness if it sees fit?
Witness’s answer is unintelligible.
Commissioner Barbour: Speak up, Mister Straker, please. Do you understand the question?
Witness: Yes sir, I do. Can and will be used against me.
Commissioner Barbour: And this incident – this series of incidents – occurred on the, ah, the border, during the war in Angola. Is that correct?
Witness: Yes, sir. While I was serving with the 1st Parachute Battalion, SADF. It was my third tour, so it would have been 1981.
Commissioner Barbour: And the UNITA Colonel, Mbdele. Did you know him by any other name?
Witness: No, sir. Not then.
Commissioner Barbour: And later?
Witness: Yes, sir. The people called him O Coletor.
Commissioner Barbour: Sorry?
Witness: It’s Portuguese, sir: ‘the Collector’.
Commissioner Barbour: Thank you. Did you ever find out what was in the, ah, the bunker?
Witness: Yes, sir, we did.
Commissioner Barbour: What did you find, son?
Witness does not answer.
Commissioner Barbour: Son?
Witness: The truth, sir. We found the truth.
Commissioner Rotzenburg: It says here, in your service records, Mister Straker, that at the time of your dishonourable discharge from the army you were suffering from mental illness, including extreme instability, episodes of random violent behaviour, complex and consistent delusions, and persistent hallucinations. Do you know what the truth is, Mister Straker?
Witness does not respond.
Commissioner Rotzenburg: Answer the question, please.
Witness. Yes.
Commissioner Rotzenburg: Yes, what?
Witness: Yes, sir.
Commissioner Barbour: That’s not what he meant, son.
Witness: Yes, I … I’ve learned to…
Commissioner Rotzenburg: Learned to what, Mister Straker?
Witness: I’ve learned to distinguish.
2
Death Rhumba Psychosis
The counterattack still hadn’t come.
They found Brigade with Valk 2. He’d just returned from patrol and was reporting his findings to Liutenant de Vries when Clay and Eben arrived with Crowbar’s orders.
‘Lost?’ said Brigade, looking up at Clay from under the peak of his bush hat. He was built like a mopane tree – hard withered core, dark sinewed limbs. He wore a jungle camo uniform and carried an AK-47. He had the darkest skin Clay had ever seen on a human being.
Clay nodded. ‘No one’s seen him since the attack.’
‘It’s my fault,’ said Eben.
‘No blame,’ Brigade said in Afrikaans. ‘Come.’
They searched through the afternoon, moving along the line, the parabats jumpy in their holes, answering in crisped tones: No, we haven’t fokken seen him.
They kept going. A while later, the sound of gunfire from down the line, back from where they’d come: R4s, AKs, sporadic, gone on the breeze a few seconds later, a rumour.
They traversed all the way to the river, found a few UNITA fighters strung out there on the left flank, loose, undisciplined. They eyed Brigade warily, like hyenas, watching him until they were out of sight.
‘What’s their problem?’ said Eben.
Brigade just shrugged.
No one had seen Kruger.
They reported back to Crowbar. He told them to widen their search radius. Find him before nightfall. And take care. The shooting they’d heard earlier was FAPLA scouts probing Valk 3’s lines. No one had been hurt. Yet.
They trudged back out through the browned grass, past the edge of the airfield, the FAPLA poes lounging around the bunkers as if on holiday, and then into the adjacent chana, weapons ready, scanning the bush. Where the hell could Kruger have gone? Had he been taken prisoner? Become separated and got lost? It was so easy to become disoriented out here, one chana so similar to the next, the sun burning in a flawless sky, the bush a brown monotony, no landmarks to guide you.
They walked on through the long dry grass, the breeze rippling the bladed sea around them, shivering through the green and yellow leaves of the mopane trees, dotted like islands. They saw no one.
A couple of hours before dusk they spotted vultures circling about a mile off. Near the edge of a small copse of mopane they found the carcass of a slaughtered elephant. Vultures scattered as they approached. There were more than twenty entry wounds in the thick grey hide. Brass scattered on the ground nearby, 7.62 mm, Russian. The tusks had been hacked off and carried away.
They moved on. A gust of wind brought a whiff of wood smoke, the lingering retch of death. They had just emerged from the copse when all three stopped and stared out across the clearing. Rotting in the sun, thick with flies, dozens of big dirt-covered bodies hulked in the grass.
‘Jesus,’ said Clay.
Eben doubled over, retched.
‘Listen,’ said Brigade.
A low moan drifted on the breeze, a whimpering that sounded almost human.
‘What the hell is that?’ Eben clutched his nose.
They picked their way through the slaughter towards the sound. Thick clouds of flies filled the air. Vultures hopped away as they approached, stood watching them, wings poised ready for take-off, their heads and necks red with blood. After they passed the birds went back to their work.
By the way the bodies of the elephants were grouped, it looked to be an entire extended family. Babies still close to their mothers, the big matriarch to the front where she’d faced up to the attackers, trying to protect her tribe. Her body was riddled with bullet holes. Her face had been cut away. A bloody chainsaw with a twisted blade lay discarded beside her.
When they found the source of the whimpering, Eben turned away and bent over, hands on his knees. It was a baby elephant. It had been trapped under its mother when she was killed, its little hind legs crushed under her enormous bulk. It looked no more than a few months old. Trapped and defenceless, the attackers had removed its tiny milk tusks while it was still alive. The baby elephant looked up at them with big dark eyes, called to them with its thin, end-of-life voice, the gaping bloody holes where the tusks had been hacked out already crawling with flies.
Clay staggered back. It was as if the creature was looking right at him, asking him to explain this abandonment, this end.
Brigade raised his AK47 and put a bullet through the little elephant’s skull.
They kept going. No one spoke. A pair of hyenas circled off in the distance, ambling towards the feast.
‘Maybe he was captured,’ said Brigade some time later, when they’d stopped to drink. They were the first words he’d spoken since they’d started out.
‘Maybe,’ said Clay, wiping his mouth. If so, God help him.
‘You are Angolan?’ said Eben. Bat-32, the Buffalo Battalion, was a special unit of the SADF, based in the Caprivi, on the border. It was comprised largely of black Angolan volunteers. The NCOs and officers were white – South A
frican regulars, Rhodesians, a few American mercenaries.
‘My father is Angolan,’ he said. ‘I lived here as a boy. Then I moved to South Africa with my family.’
‘And now?’
‘My father is a doctor in Soshanguve Township. Near Pretoria.’
Clay nodded. The townships. You are a year out of high school – a private white high school, with uniforms and real-grass playing fields for cricket and rugby, and a swimming pool – and until a few months ago you lived with your parents in a big house with a big garden, and black garden-boys and a black cook and a black housemaid who lives out back in a little shack, and she has been with your family since you were a baby, but the rest of them came in every morning on a bus from somewhere and disappeared again in the evening back to that same place. What do you say to this wizened old man, easily thirty, maybe older, grey attacking his temples, out here with you now, a brother in arms, when he says he’s from that very township?
Brigade looked into Clay’s eyes. ‘One day, I will take you there,’ he said. ‘You can meet my family.’
Clay nodded. What could he say? Sure, broer, anytime. We’ll just waltz into the township and have Sunday dinner with your family, as if it were something that people just did. He stashed his canteen. ‘Let’s find Kruger.’
With the sun low in the sky, they looped back towards the airstrip, moved into the charred ash of the woods, the ground through which they’d advanced earlier in the day. The fire had burned itself out and smoke rose in threads from the dying embers. Ash puffed and spun from their boots and floated about them like snowflakes in the Draakensburg as they threaded their way through the skeleton latticework of blackened limbs, everything here quiet after the savagery of the morning.
When they finally found his trail the sun was half gone on the horizon, big and red so you could see the solar flares dancing on its surface, hot tongues flicking at the blushing sky.
Clay, on point, walked right past. So did Eben. It was Brigade bid them halt. He reached down and, pulling something from the ash, held it up for them to see. An old canvas bag, torn and burned. It had been ripped to shreds by the exploding ammunition it had contained. It was the remains of a Fireforce vest, just like the one Clay wore now, heavy tan canvas, six pouches across the chest for 30-round R4 magazines, the remains of the pouches for M27 fragmentation grenades along the sides. Brigade dropped it to the ground.
‘Could be anyone’s,’ said Clay.
Brigade shook his head.
It was Eben who found the R4, not far away, scorched, rendered. A bit further on, the pack, similarly charred and blistered.
He’d been hit by shrapnel, they surmised, then dragged himself some distance, trying to escape the advancing bushfire. His uniform had been completely burned away, except for one side, where he’d curled up to try to protect himself from the flames. The corpse that was Johan Kruger, 1st Parachute Battalion, SADF, lately of a small town in the Transvaal, was charred beyond recognition, like meat on a brai, the hair and skin gone, a charcoal foetus.
If the wind had been blowing in the other direction, he would have lived.
But it wasn’t and he didn’t.
They wrapped him in a poncho and carried him back to their lines, reported to Crowbar. They shook hands with Brigade, thanked him.
Under a dark continent of stars, Clay and Eben hunched in their foxholes and opened rat packs, Kruger’s corpse on the ground a few metres away. Eben fired up his primus stove and heated water for tea. The line was quiet and they didn’t have to be out in the Listening Post until 0400.
Eben handed Clay a cup of steaming tea.
‘Why do they hack the tusks out?’ Clay said, blowing steam from his dixie. ‘Why not just cut them off? That poor little bugger’s tusks couldn’t have been longer than a few centimetres.’
‘One quarter of the tusk is below the surface,’ said Eben.
They sat for a long time, silent.
After a while, Eben looked in the direction of Kruger’s body. ‘All those people back home, his family, still thinking he’s alive, going about whatever it is they’re doing as if nothing’s changed.’
Clay said nothing.
‘I should have realised he wasn’t there,’ Eben whispered. ‘Gone to find him.’
Clay sipped his tea, rubbed his aching feet. ‘It’s not your fault, Eben.’
Eben’s face was in darkness. Only the whites of his eyes shone out from beneath his bush hat. ‘I thought he was with you.’
Clay said nothing. What was there to say?
‘Poor bastard. Lying there with the fire coming towards him.’
‘Don’t, Eben,’ said Clay.
‘And there’s nothing else, Clay. Do you understand? Nothing.’
Clay reached out for his friend’s shoulder, but he pulled away.
‘This is it,’ whispered Eben. ‘Just this. Twenty-one years. All eternity before, forever after. And I told him it was going to be alright.’
‘Stop, Eben. Just stop talking.’
‘I tried to tell him. I wonder if he understood.’
‘Jesus, Eben. Put it away.’ It was the only recourse.
‘I can’t, Clay. Not anymore. There’s no more space.’
Eben had been in longer than Clay, over two years – more than double Clay’s time. He’d done a couple of semesters at university before joining up – English literature and philosophy. Unlike so many, Eben had volunteered. Told anyone who’d listen that he wanted to be a writer, sat up late at night in camp scribbling in his notebook, playing rock and roll on his tape deck. A warrior poet, he said, in the best tradition of Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves. A veteran. Old at twenty-one. They’d met the first day Clay arrived in camp. Clay had produced a cassette of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, banned in South Africa and hard to come by. They’d been friends ever since.
‘Koevoet’s been out here since seventy-six,’ Eben said, in a monotone. ‘Is it even possible? Where can he put it all?’
‘Comfortably numb, broer,’ said Clay. ‘He believes in what he’s doing.’
Eben looked up so that the starlight bathed his face. ‘Do you, Clay?’
‘Do I what?’
‘Believe.’
Clay finished his tea. ‘Get some sleep, Eben.’
Eben froze. ‘Did you hear that?’ he whispered. Eben’s hearing was legendary in the battalion. He swivelled his head, reached for his R4.
Clay’s senses buzzed. He reached for his weapon, faced their front, stared out into the darkness, strained his ears. All he could hear was the insect roar of the African night. He glanced over at Eben, his eyes wide – a question.
Eben shook his head, turned towards the airstrip. That way, he indicated with his finger. ‘There. Did you hear it?’ he said after a moment.
Clay shook his head.
‘Sounds like someone screaming,’ whispered Eben. ‘There, again.’ He pointed towards the UNITA bunker at the far side of the chana.
Clay twisted in his hole, listened. There it was, a muffled shriek, high pitched. It sounded like a wounded animal. ‘A jackal?’
‘Don’t know.’
They waited, staring into the night.
Again, moments later, the same high pitched wail, clearer now.
Eben clambered from his hole.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Check it out.’
‘Crowbar will be pissed as hell if we abandon our position.’
‘We’re supposed to be sleeping,’ whispered Eben.
‘You know what he always says, Eben. Wandering around at night. Someone could mistake you for FAPLA, shoot at you.’
There it was again, longer this time. And something else too; another sound. Shouting? It was definitely coming from across the airstrip, in the direction of the UNITA bunker complex.
‘What the hell are they doing over there?’ said Eben moving off into the darkness.
‘Shit,’ muttered Clay, scrambling out of his hole and running after his
friend.
They moved quietly through the darkness. They could see lights from the bunker complex now, thin pinpoints of glowing sulphur. The UNITA fighters were sloppy. They might as well have raised a neon sign. Clay and Eben crouched about fifty metres from the bunker’s perimeter trench line. They scanned the dark ground ahead, the ridge of excavated sand. There was no movement.
And then again, the same sound, softer now, as if someone were crying, the sobs coming in a rhythm. Muffled laughter erupted from within the bunker; a group.
‘Looks like they haven’t bothered posting sentries,’ whispered Clay.
‘Surrounded by parabats, why bother?’
The crash of glass. Laughter now, clear.
‘Bastards are having a fokken party,’ said Eben. ‘After Kruger died saving their sorry carcasses.’
And before Clay could answer, Eben was up and sprinting towards the trench line. Clay scrambled to his feet and followed his friend.
‘Eben,’ he called after him, a whispered shout. ‘What are you doing? Stop, bru.’
But Eben was in full flight. Clay saw him slow, jump, and disappear into the trench. Clay sprinted after him and jumped down into the excavation. Eben was up against one side of the slumped sand wall, R4 ready. They were alone.
‘Bru.’ Clay reached for his friend’s shoulder, breathing hard. ‘Crowbar finds out about this, we catch major shit.’
Another scream, louder now, a banshee wail. Sobs. A sharp crack. The pulsing rhythm of Cuban rhumba music.
‘What the hell?’ said Clay.
Then glass breaking. Laughter, more shouting.
Eben twisted away. ‘Bastards,’ he hissed. His face was contorted, covered in sweat, his eyes wild, as if gripped by some strange psychosis. ‘They want to have a party? I’ll give them a fokken jol.’ He chambered a round and started down the trench towards the sound.
Clay started after him. ‘Eben. Leave it bru,’ he called.
But Eben was already out of sight, gone down a zag in the trench. Clay could see the glow of the lights, the noise of the party coming clear now. Then the sound of impact, thunk, a muffled grunt. Clay turned the corner.
Eben was there, a UNITA fighter crumpled at his feet. Eben looked back at Clay, eyes aflame, a lunatic grin spreading across his face. The bunker was a couple of metres away, a tarpaulin draped down over the entrance, strips of kerosene lamplight shining through the edges.
Reconciliation for the Dead Page 3