Power of the Sword

by Wilbur Smith

  He felt David’s hands on the joystick and the throttle lever, and relinquished both of them. The engine beat quickened and the Hurricane began to roll forward.

  ‘A touch of left rudder,’ David called, his voice broken and rough with fatigue, and Shasa pushed on an inch of left rudder.

  In a gale of sound and dust the Rolls-Royce engine built up to full power, and they were bumping and bouncing over the field, steering an erratic course as Shasa worked the rudders blindly, over-correcting to David’s instructions.

  Shasa could not see ahead. David was crushing him down in the seat and totally obscuring his forward vision. He twisted his head and looked over the edge of the cockpit, watching the ground begin to blur past him as their speed built up, responding quickly to David’s calls for left or right rudder. The dry sorghum stalks whipped against the leading edges of the wings; the sound they made was almost as ugly as the snap and flute of bullets passing close. All the remaining shufta were still firing at them, but the range was opening rapidly.

  The Hurricane hit a hump in the field and it kicked them into the air. The jolting and thudding ceased abruptly and they were airborne, climbing away.

  ‘We made it!’ Shasa shouted, amazed at their achievement, and as the words left his lips something hit him in the face.

  The bullet was a piece of hammered-iron pot-leg, as long and thick as a man’s thumb. It had been fired from a 1779 Tower musket by a handful of black powder. It struck the metal frame of the canopy beside Shasa’s head, and the pot leg mushroomed and tumbled as it ricocheted. Spinning, it smashed into the side of Shasa’s face, its velocity sharply reduced by the impact on the frame. Striking side-on, it did not penetrate to the brain.

  Shasa did not even lose consciousness. It felt as though he had been hit in the outer corner of his left eye with a full swing of a hammer. His head was knocked across so that it struck the opposite side of the canopy.

  He felt the supra-orbital margin of the frontal bone of his skull shatter, and hot blood drenched his eye and tatters of his own skin and flesh hung down over his face like a curtain.

  ‘David!’ he screamed. ‘I’m hit! I can’t see!’

  David twisted around and looked back at Shasa’s face and he cried out in horror. Blood was spurting and dribbling and splashing, blown by the slipstream into pink veils that spattered into David’s face.

  ‘I can’t see,’ Shasa kept repeating. His face was raw meat running red. ‘I can’t see, oh God Davie, I can’t see.’

  David pulled the silk scarf from around his own neck and pushed it into one of Shasa’s groping hands.

  ‘Try and stop the bleeding,’ he shouted above the roar of the engine, and Shasa bundled the scarf and pressed it into the hideously ragged wound, while David gave all his attention to getting them home, keeping low, skimming the wild brown hills.

  It took them fifteen minutes back to the airstrip at Yirga Alem and they came in at treetop level. David slammed the Hurricane onto the dusty strip and taxied tail up to the waiting field ambulance that he had called for from the air.

  They lifted Shasa out of the blood-spattered cockpit. Then David and a medical orderly half-carried, half-led him, stumbling like a blind man to the ambulance. Within fifteen minutes Shasa was anaesthetized and laid out on the operating table in the hospital tent and an airforce doctor was working over him.

  When he came round from the anaesthetic, all was dark.

  He lifted his hand and touched his face. It was swathed in bandages, and panic rose in him.

  ‘David!’ he tried to scream, but it came out in a drunken slur from the chloroform.

  ‘All right, Shasa, I’m here.’ The voice was close by and he groped for him.

  ‘Davie! Davie!’

  ‘It’s all right, Shasa, it’s all going to be just fine.’

  Shasa found his hand and clung to it. ‘I can’t see. I’m blind.’

  ‘The bandages, that’s all,’ David assured him. ‘The doctor is delighted with you.’

  ‘You’re not lying to me, David?’ Shasa pleaded. ‘Tell me I’m not blind.’

  ‘You are not blind,’ David whispered, but mercifully Shasa could not see his face as he said it. Shasa’s desperate grip relaxed slowly, and after a minute the painkillers took effect and he drifted back into unconsciousness.

  David sat beside his cot all that night; even in darkness the tent was hot as an oven. He wiped the glistening sweat from Shasa’s neck and chest, and held his hand when he whimpered in his sleep and muttered, ‘Mater? Are you there, Mater?’

  After midnight the doctor ordered David to leave him and get some rest, but David refused.

  ‘I have to be here when he wakes – I have to be the one to tell him. I owe him that much at least.’

  Outside the tent the jackals yipped at the dawn, and when the first glow struck through the canvas, Shasa woke again, and asked immediately, ‘David?’

  ‘I’m here, Shasa.’

  ‘It hurts like hell, Davie, but you told me it’s going to be all right. I remember that, you did tell me, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I said.’

  ‘We’ll be flying together soon, won’t we, Davie boy? The old team, Courtney and Abrahams back in business?’

  He waited for the reply, but when it did not come Shasa’s tone changed. ‘I’m not blind, am I? We will be flying again?’

  ‘You are not blind,’ David said softly. ‘But you won’t be flying again. You’re going home, Shasa.’

  ‘Tell me!’ Shasa ordered. ‘Don’t try and spare me, that will only make it worse.’

  ‘All right, I’ll tell you straight. The bullet burst your left eyeball. The doctor had to remove it.’

  Shasa lifted his hand and touched the left side of his face disbelievingly.

  ‘You will still have full vision in the right eye, but you won’t be flying Hurricanes again. I’m sorry, Shasa.’

  ‘Yes,’ Shasa whispered. ‘So am I.’

  David came to visit him again that evening. ‘The CO has put you up for the DFC. You’ll get it, for sure.’

  ‘That’s charming of him,’ Shasa said. ‘Bloody charming.’ And they were silent for a while, then David spoke again.

  ‘You saved my life, Shasa.’

  ‘Oh shut up, Davie, don’t be a bore.’

  ‘They are flying you down to the coast tomorrow morning in the transport Dakota. You’ll be in Cape Town for Christmas. Give Matty and the baby a kiss for me, you lucky sod.’

  ‘I’d change places any day,’ Shasa told him. ‘But we’ll give you one hell of a party when you come home.’

  ‘Is there anything I can do for you – anything you need?’ David asked as he stood up.

  ‘As a matter of fact, there is. Do you think you could get your hands on a bottle of whisky for me, Davie?’

  The commander of the submarine straightened up from the eye-piece of the telescope and nodded to Manfred De La Rey.

  ‘Look, please!’ he said, and Manfred took his place at the telescope, pressing his forehead against the rubber pad and staring into the lens.

  They were lying two miles offshore and on the surface it was late evening. The sun was setting behind the land.

  ‘Do you recognize the landmarks?’ the U-boat commander asked in German and Manfred did not answer immediately, for he found it difficult to speak. His emotions were too strong.

  Five years, five long years since he had set eyes on this beloved coast, and his joy was abundant. He knew that he could never be truly happy anywhere but in his Africa.

  However, the intervening years had not been unhappy. There had always been Heidi, and in this last year his son, Lothar, named after his own father. The two of them had formed the pivot of his existence. And there had also been his work – two tasks running side by side, each of them demanding and utterly fulfilling.

  His law studies had culminated in a Master’s degree in Roman Dutch Law and International Law at the University of Berlin.
r />   There had also been his military preparations. Sometimes these had kept him from his new family for months at a time, but now he was a highly trained and dedicated operative of the German Abwehr. He had acquired unusual and diverse skills. He had become a radio operator, and an expert in explosives and small arms; he had made ten parachute jumps, five of these in darkness, and he could pilot a light aircraft; he was versed in cipher and coding, he was a deadly marksman with rifle or sidearms, an exponent of unarmed combat, a trained assassin, both body and mind honed to a razor’s edge of preparedness. He had learned the art of persuasive public speaking and rhetoric, and had studied the political and military structures of South Africa until he knew all the vulnerable areas and how to exploit them. He was now ready in every way that he and his masters could foresee for the task that lay ahead of him. Not one man in a million, he knew, would ever have an opportunity such as he was being given – the opportunity to mould history and to turn the detestable order of the world upon its head. Greatness had been thrust upon him, and he knew himself equal to that challenge.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied in German to the U-boat commander, ‘I recognize the landmarks.’

  He had spent one happy, carefree summer holiday on this sparsely populated stretch of the south-eastern coast of Africa. Here Roelf Stander’s family owned five thousand hectares, and five miles of this foreshore.

  Manfred and Roelf had fished from that rocky headland, pulling the big silver kabeljou from the creaming green surf that broke over the black boulders. They had climbed that low range of hills to hunt the speckled bushbuck amongst the flowering ericas and magnificent blooms of the wild protea shrubs. In that quiet cove with its rind of smooth yellow sand they had swum naked, and afterwards lain on the beach to discuss the future and fantasize about their own particular roles in it. There below the hills, gleaming in the last rays of the sun, stood the whitewashed walls of the small holiday cottage in which they had lived.

  ‘Yes,’ he repeated. ‘This is the rendezvous.’

  ‘We will wait for the agreed time,’ the U-boat commander said, and gave the order to lower the periscope.

  Still two miles offshore, the submarine lay twenty metres below the surface, suspended in the dark waters with its engines stopped, while above it the sun sank below the horizon and night fell over the African mainland. Manfred went down the narrow passageway to the tiny cubicle he shared with two of the U-boat’s junior officers and began his final preparations for landing.

  In the weeks since they had left Bremerhaven, he had come to hate this sinister craft. He hated the cramped quarters and the close intimate proximity of other men, he hated the motion and the ceaseless vibration of the engines. He had never become accustomed to the knowledge that he was locked in an iron box deep under the cold oceanic waters, and he hated the stink of diesel and oil and the reek of the other men trapped down here with him. He longed with all his soul for the clean night air in his lungs and the hot African sun on his face.

  Quickly he stripped off the white rollneck jersey and the navy blue peajacket and dressed instead in the worn and shapeless clothing of a country Afrikaner, a bywoner or poor white squatter. He was still darkly tanned from his training in the mountains and he had allowed his hair to grow out over his collar and his beard to become thick and curly, adding many years to his age. He looked at himself now in the small mirror on the bulkhead above his bunk.

  ‘They will never recognize me,’ he said aloud. ‘Not even my own family.’

  He had dyed his hair and beard black, the same colour as his eyebrows, and his nose was thickened and twisted. It had never set properly after the American Cyrus Lomax had broken it in the Olympic final, and one eyebrow was lumpy and scarred. He looked entirely different from the young, clean-cut, blond athlete who had sailed from Africa five years before. He pulled the stained felt hat low over his eyes and nodded at his image with satisfaction, then turned from the mirror and went down on his knees to reach the equipment that had been stowed beneath his bunk.

  It was packed in rubber waterproofed containers and sealed with tape. He checked off each numbered package on his list, and a German seaman carried them away and stacked them at the foot of the ladder in the submarine’s conning tower.

  Manfred checked his watch. There was just time for a quick meal and then he would be ready. The bosun called him from the galley, and with a mouth still full of bread and sausage, Manfred hurried to the U-boat’s control room.

  ‘There are lights ashore.’ The captain stood up from the periscope and gestured Manfred to take his place.

  It was fully dark on the surface and through the lens Manfred picked out immediately the three beacon fires, one on each horn of the headlands and one on the sheltered beach.

  ‘That is the correct recognition signal, Captain.’ He straightened up and nodded. ‘We should surface now and make the reply.’

  To the thunder and crackle of compressed air purging the diving tanks, the U-boat rose up like Leviathan through the dark depths and burst out through the surface.

  While the submarine still wallowed in her own froth, the captain and Manfred climbed the ladder and went out onto the bridge. The night air was cool and sweet, and Manfred drew deep breaths of it as he peered through his binoculars at the black loom of the shore.

  The captain gave a quiet order to the signals yeoman, and he worked the handle of the Addis lamp, clattering out quick beams of yellow light across the dark silver-flecked ocean, spelling out the Morse letters ‘W S’, the abbreviation of ‘White Sword’. After a short pause one of the beacon fires on the headland was snuffed out, and a few minutes later the second fire was extinguished, leaving only the one on the beach still burning.

  ‘That is the correct response,’ Manfred grunted. ‘Please have my equipment brought on deck, Captain.’

  They waited almost half an hour until out of the darkness close at hand a voice hailed them.

  ‘White Sword?’

  ‘Come alongside,’ Manfred called back in Afrikaans, and a small open fishing-boat crept towards them on its long oars.

  Quickly Manfred shook hands with the U-boat captain and gave him the Nazi salute, ‘Heil Hitler!’

  Then he scrambled down onto the lower deck. The moment the wooden hull of the fishing-boat touched, Manfred leapt lightly across and balanced easily on the central thwart.

  The rower in the forward seat rose to greet him.

  ‘Manie, is that you?’

  ‘Roelf!’ Manfred embraced him briefly. ‘It’s so good to see you! Let’s get my equipment aboard.’

  The rubber canisters were swung across by the U-boat’s deck crew and stowed in the bottom of the fishing-boat, and at once they pushed off. Manfred took the oar beside Roelf and they gave way swiftly, then rested on their oars to watch the black submarine shark below the surface and disappear in a rash of white water.

  Once again they began pulling towards the shore, and Manfred asked softly, ‘Who are the others?’ He indicated the three other oarsmen with his chin.

  ‘All our people – local farmers from the district. I’ve known them since I was a child. They are completely trustworthy.’

  They did not speak again until they had run the boat in through the low surf to the beach, dragged it up the sand and hidden it amongst the salt bush.

  ‘I will fetch the truck,’ Roelf muttered, and a few minutes later the yellow headlights came down the rough track to the beach. Roelf parked the battered green four-tonner beside the fishing-boat.

  The three farmers helped them transfer Manfred’s equipment to the back of the truck and cover the canisters with bales of dried lucerne and a tattered old tarpaulin. Then they climbed up on top of the load while Manfred took the passenger seat in the cab.

  ‘Tell me all the news of my family, first,’ Manfred burst out. ‘We have plenty of time for business later.’

  ‘Uncle Tromp is just the same. What a sermon that man can preach! Sarie and I go every Sunday—’


  ‘How is Sarah?’ Manfred demanded. ‘And the baby?’

  ‘You are out of date,’ Roelf laughed. ‘Three babies now. Two boys and a little girl of three months. You’ll meet them all soon.’

  One at a time they dropped the other men off along the winding dirt road with a word of thanks and a quick handshake, until at last they were alone. A few miles further on they reached the main coastal road near the village of Riversdale, and turned westwards towards Cape Town two hundred miles away, and ran on through the night, stopping only to refuel the truck at the little town of Swellendam and to spell each other at the wheel of the truck.

  Four hours later they crossed the mountains and went down the steep narrow pass to the wide littoral. They stopped again a few miles outside Stellenbosch, at one of the co-operative winery companies. Although it was three o’clock in the morning, the manager was waiting for them and he helped them unload the rubber canisters and carry them down into the cellar.

  ‘This is Sakkie Van Vuuren,’ Roelf introduced the manager. ‘He is a good friend, and he has prepared a safe place for your equipment.’

  He led them to the rear of the cellar, to the last row of wooden casks. These were massive oak containers each holding a thousand gallons of immature red wine, but the manager thumped the palm of his hand against one of them and when it gave out a hollow sound, he smiled.

  ‘I did the work myself,’ he said and opened the front of the cask. It was hinged like a door and the cask beyond was empty. ‘Nobody will ever find the goods here.’

  They packed the rubber canisters into the cask and closed the hinged lid. It was indistinguishable from any other of the massive wine-filled casks in the row.

  ‘We will be ready to move when the time is ripe,’ the winemaker told Manfred. ‘When will it be?’

  ‘Soon, my friend,’ Manfred promised him. ‘Very soon,’ and he and Roelf drove on into the village of Stellenbosch.

  ‘It’s good to be home.’

  ‘You will only stay here tonight, Manie,’ Roelf told him. ‘Even with your new black beard and broken nose, you are too well-known. You will be recognized.’