by Ravi Somaiya
They looked wary. On high alert. The pilot of the mercenary Fouga had hit the airfield often on his daily rounds, screaming over the horizon, his guns rattling. The glass in the terminal had visibly fallen away in crashing sheets.
A hangar door began to drift open, and a splutter and roar echoed across the grassland as four muscular engines sparked to life. The nose of a United Nations DC-6 airliner came into view through the light-filled gap, stubby and a little comical. The name ALBERTINA was painted, carefully but imperfectly, on one side. The body of the plane, a fresh white, was large and inviting. Its wings looked too delicate to lift it.
Its propellers appeared to spin backward momentarily until they found their speed. Then it lurched forward and began to skate along the runway, intermittently lit, and its rumble rose in pitch and fury.
The Albertina lifted into the air. Its wings began to flex as they bore its weight aloft. And the mercenary fired. Perhaps he pictured an explosion that would scatter torn chunks of DC-6. Or a hopeful rise, a panicked drop to earth, and then, after a pause, the first tendrils of flame. Instead, the bullet punched a hole in the aluminum cowling of the engine closest to the body on the right side and lodged harmlessly next to the exhaust.
The plane continued to rise into the night, oblivious, as its blinking lights faded into a blanket of bright stars, headed for Leopoldville to collect Hammarskjöld and transport him to meet Tshombe.
At 7 a.m., the Albertina made radio contact with Leopoldville’s N’djili Airport to request an approach. It reduced its speed to 140 miles an hour, dropped through the morning mist above the city, and banked over the broad, glassy expanse of the Congo River.
It touched down before 8 a.m. on September 17. By the time the sun reached its stifling peak at noon, the Swedish UN ground crew had found the bullet lodged in engine number two, removed it, marveled that it had not done more damage, replaced the parts, and pumped fuel into the plane’s tanks. They felt it was safe to leave the plane unattended for a little while, and to forget the rigors of war.
Harald Noork, a flight attendant, was scheduled to get back on the Albertina for its return journey once Hammarskjöld arrived. While they waited, the crew surprised Noork with a cream cake and forty candles to celebrate his fortieth birthday.
They had sung ja må han leva, the Swedish birthday song.
Yes, may he live!
Yes, may he live!
Yes, may he live for a hundred years!
When Noork blew out the candles, one remained stubbornly lit.
Chapter 11
“Overhead Ndola, descending, confirm”
In Leopoldville, before 4 p.m. that same day, a convoy of white cars, low Ford Galaxies with double headlights and downturned fins, arced into view through the rippling heat haze. They carved a parabola toward the Albertina.
Inside one of them, Hammarskjöld watched the trucks, soldiers, planes, crates of supplies, petty disputes—the banal, infernal chaos of war—scan past through a rear window. It felt aggressively pointless. Like trying to give first aid to a rattlesnake.
He had slept for one sweaty, futile hour. The eyes under his black Wayfarer sunglasses were drawn. And his face threatened, at the merest provocation, to give way to a mass of furrows.
The heat hit him like a physical force as he opened the car door and stepped out onto the airport’s apron, at the edge of the DC-6’s shadow. Behind him, his security detail was already climbing the plane’s metal stairs, their footsteps resonating with efficient purpose, to sweep it for stowaways and bombs.
One of them carried aboard a small, dark-gray metal box with an identity plate that read CRYPTO AG, SWITZERLAND and CX-52. It was used for encoding secret messages before transmitting them over the radio, back to Leopoldville or to New York, where equivalent machines decoded them.
Hammarskjöld’s staff fell into place around him in two broad circles: the outer made up of soldiers and aides who hurried back and forth with bags, and the inner of more senior officials, most of whom were dressed exactly as he was, in light suits, white shirts, and dark ties.
He was handed a printout of a telex, on flimsy rolled paper. An update. Information on Morthor was sparse and imperfect. But he could not deny the scandal, and could not shake the knowledge that hundreds lay dead at the hands of the UN.
A signal broke his reverie. It was time to board. Hammarskjöld climbed the stairs, passed through the thick portal of a door, turned left, settled into a blue cloth seat at the rear of the plane, and buckled himself in. His features, out of public view, settled into a mask of concern, and his foot began to tap.
The shadows of the late-afternoon sun passed across his features as the plane taxied and took off. Through the window Leopoldville, and safety, dwindled first to a series of boxes and lines, then dots, and was finally swallowed by the endless green.
Hammarskjöld was surrounded by his aides, a security detail of five, and the aircrew, fifteen other souls in all. He was also alone. Without allies, and without support. It was a familiar feeling.
In recent weeks, the images he recorded in his diary had turned much darker. In one, he felt that he was drowned, suspended in water, while he searched in vain for the light and respite of the surface. But the last thing he wrote took a different tone.
The seasons have changed
And the light
And the weather
And the hour.
But it is the same land.
And I begin to know the map
And to get my bearings
If he failed to persuade Tshombe to declare a cease-fire, he had decided, he would resign his position, write and hike and let the world take care of itself. But he would not give up without a fight.
Hammarskjöld opened his briefcase and lifted out a pile of books. The New Testament and Psalms. Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duineser Elegien / Die Sonette. Jean Giono’s Noé. He selected the philosopher Martin Buber’s Ich und Du, flicking past the personal inscription by its author, a version of the same book in English, and a notepad.
He wanted to switch off his mind by translating the text, a complex work of theology, into Swedish. He believed the words contained, in their examination of human miscommunication and mistrust, the key to the Cold War.
In the cockpit, a cocoon of instruments, the pilot, Per Hallonqvist, flicked his eyes toward the windows. Hallonqvist was known for his affability and the gap in his front teeth. The latter remained intact.
He knew that this DC-6 had been designed as a transport for oil executives before it was seconded to the UN. It was bloated. Built for comfort, not agility. The bottom of the food chain. His only defense, if a threat rose up out of the night, was to dive, veer sharply, and head for an airfield.
He flew in a long, straight line across the Congo, then turned over Lake Tanganyika and headed south toward Ndola to minimize the time over hostile Congolese territory. At two minutes after 10 p.m. local time, he broke his radio silence to tell air traffic controllers that he would arrive at approximately half past midnight.
An hour later, he dropped to sixteen thousand feet. Forty minutes after that, he asked Ndola for clearance to descend further. He locked the landing gear into position and set the flaps at a conventional thirty-degree angle.
“Your lights in sight,” he told the tower after midnight, “overhead Ndola, descending, confirm.”
Chapter 12
“A light pinkish red”
Ndola was the center of Northern Rhodesia’s mining industry. It was a small town surrounded by stands of miombo forest—thin evergreen trees with leaves like ferns, over a carpet of flowering shrubs and grasses below, that provide shelter for both dormice and lions, bright-yellow weaver birds and black rhinos.
Six miles away, an open-cast copper mine blasted through the night. Refineries processed ores from the region, crushing, grinding, and dissolving twenty-four hours a day. Their workers, and colonial officials, lived near the airport.
Many black African workers wer
e dotted through the woods. They had spent the day cutting down trees, then chopping the wood into small pieces to turn into charcoal that they planned to sell by the side of the road. They had packed the wood into large metal kilns and waited for nightfall so they could make sure that each part of the stack was brought to a controlled smolder. By midnight the kilns were pouring thick columns of smoke into the air as they tended them.
At the airfield, a strip cut into the grass and steamrollered flat, with a clump of buildings to its left and a stubby tower, strange things had been happening. That morning the tower spotted an unidentified plane circling. The air traffic controllers attempted to make contact, but the plane stayed silent.
Now a set of metal stairs waited on the runway, leading surreally up to nowhere. Kenneth Hammond, a senior technician in charge of the ground crew, stood and waited to push them into place under the Albertina’s door. Shortly after midnight, he heard a plane and looked up into the blackness. He saw a steady red light and watched it fly right along the runway for two minutes, then disappear.
Robert Read, a senior superintendent with the Northern Rhodesia Police, also watched the red light track through the night like a tracer bullet. He was certain that he saw a second light behind it. And a third light, either green or white, to the left of it.
Donald Peover, an architect who lived in a nearby building, was on his balcony with his wife, plane-spotting. They saw the red light, too. Peover thought it was coming in faster than usual. The engines sounded like they were running at full power, in fact. Then the plane disappeared.
Adelaide Wright had lived near the airport for seven years. She was a heavy sleeper, and a little deaf, and had never been woken by a plane. The sound of this one washed over her with such a powerful low-frequency rumble that it jarred her out of her bed and set her dogs barking. She had never heard one come in so close to the ground or so powerful.
Yvonne Joubert was reading at home when she heard the distinctive whine of a jet aircraft fly overhead, and then another aircraft that sounded like a piston-engined plane. She fell asleep in her chair shortly after the sound of the engines had died away.
William Chappell, a local resident, heard a double bang, then a single bang. They were sharper sounds than blasting for mining, and louder than a backfire, he thought. He heard two planes, too—one piston-engined and, simultaneously, one jet.
Davidson Simango, a charcoal burner, was under the trees, out of the reach of the moon and starlight, gathering wood. He, too, heard the sound of aircraft engines, at a deafening pitch. He saw two lights. It seemed like two planes, close together.
First the noise faded. But then it returned. He saw a white flash, and heard a crashing sound so loud and so close that he simply lay down where he was in the forest undergrowth, covered his head, and didn’t move for some time.
An airfield oil technician, Ralph Philips, saw two flashes over the pitch-black silhouette of the jungle trees that rose into the sky. The center of the larger was a deep red, which blossomed, with a perverse beauty, to a light pinkish red. A second, less violent, explosion followed, slightly to the right of the first.
Nigel Vaughan, an assistant inspector with the Northern Rhodesia Police, was driving near the airport. To him it looked like a lightbulb, bright white, that had been switched on suddenly and then blown out. It was followed by a smaller light that fell vertically from the first explosion and took about two seconds to move from the top of his windshield to below the tree line.
Ledison Daka, a charcoal burner, was asleep in a nearby village when he was woken by a loud, sudden noise. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes in time to see a plane smashing into the trees. He gathered two of his friends, Moyo and Banda, and the three began to pick their way through the forest toward the scene. Inch-long camel and buffalo thorn branches left itchy welts in the balls of their thumbs and on their wrists as they pushed them aside. A red glow began to grow through the dark silhouettes of the thin trees. It spread until it cast long, moving shadows over their faces.
The forest should have been alive, on the ground and in the trees they set swaying. But it was still and silent. They followed the smoke. It was wispy at first. As it thickened, it began to take on an acrid smell. Through the black cloud, Daka began to notice that the tops of the trees above him had been shredded away, leaving freshly torn trunks. The ground itself was smoldering, covered with a splintery mess of vegetation.
The heat kept them from moving too close. But they saw burned bodies. Banda wanted to run away, but felt he could not move.
Objects were mixed into the litter. Playing cards. China plates, some smashed into tiny pieces, some perfectly intact. Knives. Forks. Books. A revolver, its grip and cylinder smashed or burned away. A pillow, pristine and still slightly indented where someone had lain their head.
A twisted and charred propeller, taller than a man, loomed from the forest floor. Bent metal spars, blackened beyond recognition, lay over fallen trees to form crude lean-to caves.
Daka saw a new cherry-red light and felt an intense, focused heat. It was masses of aluminum, fused and heated to glowing liquefaction. They began to run back, away, through the thorns and the spiderwebs.
If they were listening as they ran, they might have heard in the distance, from what must have been the far edge of the long strip of destruction, a high-pitched scream.
Chapter 13
“The ace of spades”
The Ndola airport tower, a square block with tilted panoramic windows that offered a 360-degree view of the dark airfield and beyond, had gone eerily quiet. At about a quarter past midnight, the air traffic controller on duty, A. Campbell Martin, noted that the Albertina’s radio was dead. He called Leopoldville to find out what had happened, but nobody who spoke English was on duty.
At 2:20 a.m., Martin issued the first of three formal indications of a missing or endangered aircraft, known as Uncertainty Phase. Two more are required before a search begins. Forty minutes later the airport manager, John H. Williams, a gray-haired veteran nicknamed “Red,” and Lord Cuthbert Alport, the British high commissioner to Salisbury, the capital of Rhodesia, who had been due to meet Hammarskjöld’s plane once it landed, conferred to decide what to do. They agree that the secretary-general must simply have decided to fly elsewhere. Alport went to sleep on his own plane. And Williams closed down the runway and killed the lights in the tower, leaving only a duty radio operator.
In New York, UN officials began to worry that they had not heard from Hammarskjöld and mounted an operations room to seek information. Telex messages, on narrow, brittle paper, began to tick through:
I do not know yet
For sure
Stop I simply refuse to believe it until I get everything in black and white.
Stand by please, and prepare for the worse
Stop
We know Park’s colleague Neil Ritchie, SIS’s man in Salisbury and Katanga, was monitoring the situation for the British government. We know, too, that the State Department was receiving classified intelligence reports, from Devlin or one of his colleagues.
But neither Park nor Devlin ever spoke in any detail of the events of that night. Both were aware of a simple tenet of covert work, one that is usually omitted from spy movies: that the most effective way to keep a secret is simply not to tell anyone. If nobody is asking questions, one never has to lie, or evade. In fact the aim of the British secret services is to be as boring as possible. It means that profound silence—a lack of chatter—is often the echo of a seismic secret event. It worked perfectly for decades. But where Park and Devlin were, what they did, and more pressingly what they knew would eventually come to be a key issue.
After 3 a.m., two Rhodesian police officers arrived at the tower. They found the radio operator asleep. They woke him to tell him that one of their colleagues, an assistant inspector named Marius van Wyk, had seen a mysterious deep-red glow spreading upward into the sky while on patrol shortly after midnight.
Van Wyk
didn’t know that Hammarskjöld was expected to land at around that time, so he didn’t think much more of it. But when he returned to the station later that night, he was told of the missing plane and put the events together. The two officers had been dispatched to inform the tower.
The operator blearily told them they should find Williams, the airport manager, who was staying in a nearby hotel. They drove over and dragged him out of bed, but he dismissed their report, saying that there was nothing to be done until daybreak anyway. The officers sent out Land Rovers of their own, defying Williams. But the mission, with such limited resources to search a vast area, would have needed spectacular luck in order to succeed. It did not get it.
At 4:30 a.m., as the sun began to subtly brighten the horizon, the air traffic controller, Martin, returned to the tower and made radio inquiries. He felt there was nothing to the police reports, and he did not act with any great urgency.
At about 9 a.m., three and a half hours after dawn, the airport manager Williams himself returned to the airport. He did not do anything until he received a signal from Salisbury, the Rhodesian capital, at nine forty-two, that search planes should be sent up. They were airborne by about 10 a.m.—ten hours after the Albertina had overflown the runway.
Planes of the Royal Rhodesian Air Force circled in a search pattern, scanning the ground for wreckage. US Air Force surveillance planes that had been on the ground in Ndola, scrambled with an emergency signal from the US ambassador to Leopoldville, soon joined them. They were in full effect by about 10:30 a.m.
At around the same time, in Katanga, O’Brien spotted the mercenary Fouga Magister jet fighter screaming toward UN headquarters, guns blazing, and took cover in a hole with a reporter from Life magazine. It was dramatic, but merely the latest in a series of similar attacks. So O’Brien was perplexed to receive a call from Tshombe shortly afterward telling him, unprompted and out of nowhere, that the Fouga had now been grounded.