A Sailor's Honour Read online

  ‘It’s not right,’ he said, and again tried to pull away.

  ‘It’s not wrong either,’ she said and pushed her hand down between them. She held him through his trousers and he felt powerless, unable to retreat. Unwilling to retreat.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said and tugged at his zip. Her hand was inside before he could react.

  ‘I want to hold you,’ she said. ‘There,’ and she squeezed him hard.

  With his arms still around her, he exploded immediately. His legs went lame and he fell back onto the couch.

  ‘Next time it will be better,’ she said.

  She sat down next to him and guided his hand between her legs.

  ‘I’ve got homework to do,’ he pleaded, but she rubbed his hand against her until her breathing became shallow and strained.

  His own breathing quickened in pace with hers and he sighed with her as it finally ended.

  They sat next to each other on the small couch until their breathing had slowed down to normal again.

  ‘I needed that,’ she said, but he had no idea what she meant.

  She stood up suddenly and said, ‘Let me show you what to do.’

  Before Johann could move, she straddled him and pinned him down. When she started opening his fly, he objected. He didn’t know what to say, so he said, ‘I just want to hold you.’

  She cupped his face in her hands. ‘I can’t wait to show you how,’ she said.

  Her thigh muscles were taut and there were little white hairs on the top of her legs. Johann didn’t know where to put his hands or where to look.

  She stood up slowly and rearranged her clothes.

  He knew her name was Alma, but he didn’t know what to call her. Not after what had happened between them.

  ‘Next time it will be better,’ she said.

  It was, infinitely so.

  They met regularly after that, every Tuesday and Thursday when the other boys were at rugby or cricket training and Spokie at his coaching duties. Johann tried to be more considerate on days when Alma had been given a hiding, but for some reason she was more vigorous in her demands on such occasions.

  After a particularly violent beating, her father and brother came and took her away. Johann watched from the window at the end of the upstairs corridor as her brother loaded her belongings into the boot of the car. He knew that under her long-sleeved blouse she had bruises on her arms and under her breasts.

  She looked up from the back seat of the car and she saw him at the window. She mouthed the words, ‘Thank you.’

  Spokie caught him by surprise. Johann was still waving out of the window when he saw Spokie at the first landing of the staircase looking up at him.

  ‘You arsehole!’ Spokie shouted. ‘It was you! You called her parents.’

  He came bounding up the stairs and grabbed Johann by his hair. ‘This time I won’t leave any marks,’ he said. ‘And there’s no one here to see.’ He punched Johann in the ribs and the stomach until he fell down. Then Spokie put his foot on Johann’s throat and held him pinned to the floor. When Johann wrestled free and got up from the floor, Spokie grabbed him by the front of his shirt and pushed him into the corner. He hit Johann once, twice in the ribs with his fists and then rained more blows on him.

  The attack stopped when a junior who shouldn’t have been in his room opened the door to see what was happening. Spokie pounced on him and threw him down the stairs. ‘You know full well you’re not allowed in your room between afternoon study and the 5.30 bell,’ he shouted after the boy. He bounded after the boy and dragged him into the teacher’s flatlet downstairs. Johann could hear the boy screaming with every stroke of the cane. He counted six. He lay where he was, against the wall in the corner.

  Spokie followed the junior back upstairs and prodded Johann with his foot. ‘The day will come that I will hurt you more than you ever thought possible,’ he said. ‘Mark my words. I will get even.’

  Johann told no one, but the other boy told his mother. After an enquiry, Spokie was told to leave.

  Spokie had the last word on the way out. ‘It’s all your doing,’ he hissed at Johann outside the headmaster’s office. ‘And I will get even. You can bet your life on that.’

  Johann finished the year and was called up for national service in the navy. After university, he started as a junior prosecutor in the Department of Justice. He became an advocate and soon found himself involved with other people’s problematic lives, their unhappy marriages, their dysfunctional children, their broken contracts, their recalcitrant employees, their insurers who collected premiums with alacrity but dragged their heels when they had to pay claims. When he had had enough of the criminal cases which, as a junior, he had to do on the pro Deo system, effectively giving free defences to murderers, he took a sabbatical and went to Europe for six months.

  That was where he had looked right instead of left and met Liesl in the emergency ward of the hospital. His broken leg took two months to heal, but he came back to South Africa with his German-speaking wife. His mother was delighted.

  ‘A proper German girl from my home town,’ Anna Weber exulted. ‘I can’t wait to see my grandchildren.’

  It took time, but Johann eventually forgot all about Spokie.

  Operation Virus 20

  In the western world the virus made its entry quietly. At first it had no name. It had been undetected in Africa for a long time before a hint of its existence appeared on 5 June 1981 in the weekly report of Morbidity and Mortality. The report stated that five previously healthy gay men had been diagnosed in Los Angeles with an infectious disease which was usually only seen in patients with severely impaired immune function. Within a month, a further twenty-six gay men from as far apart as Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York showed the same symptoms, Morbidity and Mortality reported. It was determined quickly that the disease spread through sexual intercourse, but the virus that was the engine for its distribution remained undetected. At first contained within the gay community, the virus soon spread to drug users sharing needles and haemophiliacs who received regular blood transfusions. And then it spread to the heterosexual community and to the world at large. The human im-munodeficiency virus, HIV for short, was identified as the culprit in 1984. It would take until 1987 for the first treatment to be licensed: zidovudine, known as AZT.

  By then the virus had spread wildly and its cover was blown.

  Alongside the spread of the virus, resistance against the apartheid system, so keenly supported by the Third Force, grew. Bombs exploding in front of government buildings. Police Casspirs in the streets. Young men in military uniforms facing young men in school uniforms. Assassinations of municipal officials. Work stay-aways. Product boycotts. Intimidation. Military vehicles at intersections. Fires in the townships. Necklaces made of burning rubber. Dissidents disappearing. A country going bankrupt. Talks with the enemy. A president in retreat. Changes in the offing for the short and medium term.

  The Third Force had to devise a long-term plan.

  When the Minister of Health called the meeting, the Third Force was well placed. The senior advisors to the Defence and Foreign Affairs ministers were both members of long-standing and impeccable anonymity. The advisors had risen to the high and influential positions they now held without anyone having any reason to suspect that they were members of the Third Force, dedicated to steering the country in the direction originally proposed by Robey Leibbrandt.

  There would be no agenda for the meeting, no record of its having taken place and no written minutes of the discussion. Report backs to the minsters would be private, in off-the-record whispers on the golf course, or on the balconies of the Union Buildings, out of earshot of the listening devices planted in the ministers’ offices by the CIA and who knows who else. Inside the building, every movement between departments was carefully logged in registers kept by the minnows of the machinery of state.

  They had to venture outside into the sunshine of a fresh Pre
toria winter’s day. They met outside on the steps leading down from the majestic building – designed by an Englishman, Sir Herbert Baker – and went for a long walk.

  It had started in Health where an alert official – another member of the Third Force – had intercepted a medical paper after recognising the ramifications if it were to be published. The paper went up to the ministerial advisor first, skipping several ranks between the interceptor and the advisor, and from there it went to the advisor’s counterparts in Foreign Affairs and Defence. The paper suggested great potential as a weapon of defence against the internal enemy. The country already had its own arsenal of nuclear warheads, but those could only be used as a deterrent or against a distant enemy. Those bombs were of no use in the townships adjoining the major cities.

  The paper had been written by a young doctor named – his parents had no idea of the amount of ribbing their firstborn son would later have to endure in his boys-only high school – Neil Armstrong. Dr Armstrong’s curiosity had been raised towards the end of his third year as a pathology registrar working in the lab at Durban’s King Edward VIII Hospital.

  The pathologist’s daily task involved the analysis of sputum specimens for tuberculosis. It was no longer necessary to peer at each specimen through a microscope. Sophisticated machines now did the work and analysed a hundred or more specimens a day with a computer printout for each, which Dr Armstrong had to process. His first task was to ensure, each time the machine spewed out a positive result, that a suitable notification was addressed to the patient’s primary healthcare worker so that the appropriate treatment and prophylactic regimes could be put into place as soon as possible. Tuberculosis was a highly contagious disease, and a notifiable one to boot, which meant that his second task was to organise the positive results into a statistical report for the consumption of the national health department’s planners in Pretoria. A record of each patient’s details went into the system, such as age, gender, occupation, address and standard of education. And, of course, population group, as race was now euphemistically referred to.

  Each month the department also received a second report detailing the rates of success of the treatments and medications, including full demographic details.

  Dr Armstrong noticed a curious phenomenon amongst this mass of detail, one he did not understand at the time. His meticulous observations and record-keeping were later to provide the foundation for others to build their theories of cause and effect and to draw the proper conclusions.

  Dr Armstrong’s records showed that there was a drug-resistant strain of TB that had taken root in the townships and small settlements along the main road-transport routes from Mozambique through Zululand and Northern Natal to Durban. There it stopped. There were no cases south of the city. When the doctor followed the love of his life – also a doctor in the public sector – to Zeerust in the far Western Transvaal, he noticed the same phenomenon at work there in the small settlements along the road-transport route from Zimbabwe and countries north of it through Botswana to Johannesburg. By this time, Dr Armstrong was a senior registrar about to complete his specialisation and was more certain of his facts. Yet when he tested his theory on his colleagues and the hospital’s administrator, he was met with incredulity or indifference.

  When his girlfriend left him for a local farmer who had recently inherited ten thousand hectares of prime farmland, Dr Armstrong decided to test his theory once more and in a different locality. He was granted a transfer to Elim Hospital in the far Northern Transvaal, along another road-transport route into the country. Here Dr Armstrong found what he had predicted. Malaria had been displaced as the most serious threat to health by the same drug-resistant strain of TB he had encountered before.

  It was, however, his second conclusion which made the disease such a special case: it was not spread by sputum particles but by sexual intercourse. The disease that catalysed these resistant TB infections already had a name: HIV/Aids. When coupled with tuberculosis, it was as deadly a killer as nature could devise.

  Since reporting to his seniors had had no effect, Dr Armstrong wrote a comprehensive medical paper and submitted it to his employers, the Department of Health, for the approval he needed to have it published in the South African Medical Journal. Then he went overseas to go hiking in the Himalayas. Had he stayed in South Africa, he might have become yet another victim of the Third Force, which was quite adept with strange and exotic methods of assassination, some of which were undetectable by medical science, but not averse to sending in a barefooted killer with a silenced pistol for a more immediate intervention. Fate dictated, however, that Dr Armstrong could not be located to arrange a date and place for his elimination.

  Hence the meeting in the gardens of the Union Buildings.

  It was cold. The three men walked with their hands in the pockets of their thick coats, their collars pulled up to their ears. Their words were muffled, but their meaning unmistakable.

  The member from the Department of Health – not a member of the Third Force – was in favour of publication. ‘Dr Armstrong’s research is impeccable. His style is acceptable for a medical paper. The science is undeniable. A massive programme of containment will have to be launched.’

  The member from the Department of Defence retorted, ‘If we do nothing, it will solve our problem with the population explosion in the townships and homelands. They are out-breeding us by a factor of three or four to one. All we have to do is sit back and do nothing. It’s an elegant solution!’

  The decisive vote was cast by the member from the Department of Foreign Affairs.

  ‘Kill it,’ he said. ‘The minister is very concerned about maintaining good relations with our immediate neighbours. It would be embarrassing if they knew we think they are exporting an incurable disease to us. We need to keep them neutral while we fight the enemy within.’

  ‘What about the Department of Mines?’ the man from Health asked. ‘Shouldn’t we involve them in the decision? Every year they bring in tens of thousands of mineworkers from those same countries.’

  The other two objected. They knew the senior man at Mines, but he was not a member of the Third Force.

  The decision was made by a vote of two to one. The man from Health left, perplexed by the intricacies of foreign policy.

  On their way back to their respective offices, the advisor to the Minister of Defence playfully punched his Foreign Affairs counterpart on the arm. ‘So they’ll fuck themselves into oblivion,’ he said. ‘I like that. How poetic!’

  Operation Virus took over where Operation Population Control had failed.

  Operation Longdistance 1985 21

  The success of a single shot at a distance of one thousand and seventy metres focused the attention of the Third Force on Pierre de Villiers in May 1985. When they reviewed his file, they found a professional soldier to their liking. One who was unafraid and could be trusted to carry out his mission under the most trying circumstances. While the contents of the file gave only the names of the missions on which De Villiers had been, the last mission had resulted in the awarding of the Honoris Crux and the documents accompanying the citation told a fuller story. Operation Askari had been special.

  Operation Askari had various elements. The armoured divisions were slowly making their way to the Cuban-reinforced battlements around the provincial capital of Techamutete deep in the Angolan bush. The FAPLA forces in the town were no match for the SA Army and were in easy reach of the Mirage fighter planes and the bombers that rained their deadly ordnance on the town. The top brass in Pretoria knew that their forces would overrun the town very quickly and with minimum loss of life, but they wanted to make a statement and give a lesson that wouldn’t be forgotten for a long time. Lieutenant Pierre de Villiers of the 4th Reconnaissance Unit was tasked with leading the two-man mission. His spotter was Lieutenant Jacques Verster.

  De Villiers and Verster were dropped some sixty kilometres ahead of the column of tanks and armoured cars that slowly made its
way through the bush. It was impossible to hear anything over the noise of the Puma’s blades a few feet above their heads. De Villiers and Verster sat side by side on their steel helmets. In theory, the helmets would protect their nether regions from rifle fire coming in from the ground.

  The goodbye had not been easy for De Villiers. When he received his call-up for the assignment, he had to drive to Stellenbosch to tell his girlfriend. He had met Annelise von Schauroth at university during the freshers’ parade when the new girls and boys had to line up outside their hostels to be inspected by the senior students. The initiation of the freshers had left many of them somewhat subdued, but this particular freshman had seemed unfazed by the activities around her and had fought back when she attracted unwanted attention from one of the seniors.

  Annelise was as beautiful and blonde as only a girl of undiluted German blood could be, but she had the temperament of a Romanian gypsy. She was two years younger than he was.

  When the senior asked, ‘Cookie, are your pyjamas as short as your skirt?’ she’d replied, ‘Fuck off.’

  When the laughter around her had subsided, she added, ‘My pyjamas are as nonexistent as your sex appeal.’

  When De Villiers, who had been watching his roommate’s antics from a few yards away, shook his head, she turned on him. ‘Why are you shaking your head? He’s an arsehole.’

  Others were watching and De Villiers had been forced to answer. ‘It’s because I agree with you.’

  ‘About what?’ she’d said. ‘That he has no sex appeal, or is an arsehole?’

  De Villiers shook his head again. ‘Both, maybe,’ he said. ‘But I was also thinking about the pyjamas.’

  As she made to hit him, he caught her arm above the wrist. When he brushed his teeth that night, he could smell her perfume on his hand. He tracked her down and pestered her until she agreed to meet him for coffee at a street cafe in Dorp Street.