A Sailor's Honour Page 13

  Now he had to return to university to tell her he would be going away on a mission into Angola.

  ‘Don’t get hurt,’ she said.

  ‘When I come back,’ De Villiers said, ‘I’m going to buy you a ring.’

  ‘You do that,’ she said.

  The chopper made a sweep of the area south of the town to pick the best spot to drop De Villiers and Verster. They were escorted to the spot by six recces from a different unit.

  It wasn’t a particularly difficult shot.

  De Villiers knew where the bullet was going to strike on the red tunic the moment he pulled the trigger. The shot went off between heartbeats, exactly as he had visualised in the final moments of preparation. He had known from the outset that the target would be wearing the red tunic of a colonel in the Red Army.

  What De Villiers didn’t know and would never have expected was that the Russian colonel would be a woman. In the slow-motion split second she staggered backwards and a cascade of blonde hair tumbled from under her dislodged cap, he saw that she was beautiful, in her mid-thirties or so, and he realised that she would be dead before she hit the ground. In the telescopic sights he could see the broken fibres of the breast pocket of her uniform where the bullet had entered. He knew that behind that pocket there would be broken bone, distorted muscles and ruptured blood vessels.

  That single shot at Techamutete had signalled the start of the offensive. As the ill-disciplined FAPLA soldiers and their Cuban officers scattered in all directions, away from the Russian woman’s convulsing figure, the bombardment started. Heavy artillery rumbled like distant thunder. Before their shells could land, a flight of Scorpion attack helicopters flew over low and strafed the parade ground and the armoured gunships and troop carriers behind. It felt like minutes before the first bombs landed, but when they did, they threw smoke and dust and body parts into the air.

  De Villiers and Verster immediately started their withdrawal. They were not trained for the conventional infantry or artillery operations that would continue until the town had been taken. What remained for them was their exfiltration.

  In the Puma on their way back across the border, De Villiers looked at his hands. They were clean and steady, but he thought that he could see blood on them.

  When the state president pinned the Honoris Crux alongside the row of ribbons on his chest, De Villiers was secretly pleased that the citation did not give details of the operation. It would be many years before he would learn her name. Colonel Natalya Nankova, the inspiration of the Cuban technical advisors and their Angolan understudies.

  The Third Force called De Villiers and Verster to Pretoria, and then into the bushveld for the special preparations for their next mission.

  This time their target was a man, but they would only learn his identity when they already had him in their sights. That Robert Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe, should be the target ought to have alerted De Villiers to the fact that the operation could not possibly have been one of the regular army, and that he was being controlled by men who did not report along the usual channels. But he had no idea. He had not been taught to question the legality of his orders. When he refused to carry out his orders to shoot Mugabe, relying on his instincts rather than on principle, he became a hunted man, and when he returned to base to report back, he became a prisoner of his own army. He became a soldier without a unit.

  It would be years before the Third Force needed a man like him again. And when they did, the operation would be unlike any they had undertaken before.

  THE ALICIA MAY

  Operation Honeybadger

  1992 22

  It was not all plain sailing for the Third Force. They were very good at assassinations – that could be done by a single man with a gun or a knife – but they were not as successful in suppressing dissent. As the dissent grew in intensity, their operations became more desperate.

  Verwoerd had been easy. The messenger had been sufficiently paranoid to take the bait, and all they had to do was to give him the knife and the prompt. On 6 September 1966, they carried the prime minister’s lifeless body from parliament, on the anniversary of Smuts’ declaration of war against Germany. Verwoerd’s crime had been to suggest that black and white could meet as equals, and within his lifetime at that. Many others followed. On 29 March 1988, their man in Paris shot Dulcie September in the head five times, from behind, with a silenced .22 pistol. Her crime was that she was a communist. Every communist could expect to be shot at any time.

  The political events of 1988 caught the Third Force by surprise. They had expected the belligerently anti-communist state president, PW Botha – previously that member for George, who had asked his electorate to produce more white children and then sent them to war in Angola in 1975 – to remain in power for some time, but he had suffered a minor stroke. Then he made the tactical error of resigning as head of the National Party, the party that had promised continued apartheid to its support base. When he finally retired, things started changing at a rapid pace. His successor, FW de Klerk, ordered that the atomic bombs the Third Force had so assiduously helped build be disassembled under international supervision. Without their Masada weapons, the Third Force had to find other means. When De Klerk announced that he would shortly lift the ban on political parties, including the Communist Party, the Third Force marked him for elimination. And then he fired the generals he didn’t trust and cut off the secret funding for the special operations and units controlled by the Third Force.

  Like Verwoerd before him, De Klerk subscribed to the view that white and black were equals and that the time to meet as equals had arrived. Robey Leibbrandt would have turned in his grave.

  Negotiations for a new constitutional environment had been in progress for some time, and it appeared that a new constitution would be ready within a year. As the resistance to their ideology grew in power, the Third Force reverted to assassinations. This time they used proxies.

  First they shipped large quantities of weapons to Natal for distribution amongst the Zulu loyalists who opposed the ANC on no ground other than traditional tribal rivalries. ‘We’ve never been conquered by the Xhosas,’ they proclaimed, ‘and we are not going to be ruled by them now.’

  One bloodbath followed the other. Hundreds of minor Zulu chiefs were assassinated in retaliation. The Zulus, in turn, went on the march and cleared out whole communities of ANC supporters from selected townships. For a time it looked like the dirty work of eliminating black leaders would be done for the Third Force by the very supporters of those black leaders, but somehow the violence stopped and negotiations continued.

  The high command of the Third Force met on the mountain again. Some of the men were too old to climb up Devil’s Peak, so they took the cable car to the top of Table Mountain. They stood in a small circle on the stonewalled veranda overlooking Table Bay below and spoke openly in the fierce wind.

  ‘Look,’ the major said, ‘we have to accept that there will be a new constitution in less than two years. The communists are taking control of the negotiations and are placing their people in position to take over the presidency before the end of this century. Our intelligence says that they are not quite ready yet. The nationalist Mandela faction is too strong as things stand now.’

  This mountain would be their last stand, the Third Force had resolved many years before.

  ‘We have two operations in the early stages of preparation,’ the major said. ‘The first is aimed at eliminating the top leadership structures of the Communist Party. The second is designed to ensure that group rights will be secured in the new constitution. The two operations will be carried out in tandem. The success of the one will have no impact on the other.’

  There were no dissenters, and they went home.

  Chris Hani had been a thorn in their flesh for a long time. His nom de guerre was Honeybadger; he was as difficult to subdue or kill as that hardy animal. They had pursued him across Europe, but had had to give up when he went to Russia for military
training. They picked up his spoor again when he was in Lusaka, but he left before they could get a man with a silenced pistol in place. They bombed safe houses in Mozambique and Lesotho in an endeavour to bury him under the rubble, but they either bombed the wrong house, or found that Hani had moved on.

  He was the highest-ranking member of the enemy they had identified for elimination. Chief of Staff of Umkhonto we Sizwe and Secretary General of the Communist Party of South Africa, Hani would be the new president, they thought, and that could not be tolerated. They thought that he had given the orders for the bombing of a Durban nightclub during which an MK operative had killed three women and injured countless revellers. He had to go.

  When Hani came out of hiding to participate in the negotiations and to lead his party in the elections everyone expected to follow, the Third Force saw their opportunity. Hani’s death might also produce some short-term benefits if it derailed or delayed the negotiation process. Operation Honeybadger ratcheted up a gear. Their target was in plain sight.

  The assassin with the silenced .22 was again detailed to do the job. When his wife took ill at the last minute, he asked a friend to do the job. The killing was as crude as it was effective. On 10 April 1993, the part-time assassin shot Hani from behind. He had made no plans for exfiltration and was arrested within the hour, betrayed by Hani’s neighbour, an Afrikaner woman Robey Leibbrandt would have whipped for being a traitor to his cause.

  But, at least, the Honeybadger was dead.

  The negotiations at Kempton Park continued regardless. So did the Third Force’s other operation to derail them.

  A phone call had initiated Operation Alicia Mae.

  Pretoria

  1992 23

  ‘Captain de Villiers?’

  The voice on the telephone was a familiar one, but not one Pierre de Villiers wanted to hear. He immediately expected trouble.

  It was the voice of the man he blamed for everything that had gone wrong with his military career. He blamed the major for sending him on an impossible and illegal mission deep into Angola, and for orchestrating the efforts to catch and kill him. De Villiers remembered the smells. First at Voortrekkerhoogte’s detention barracks, where they beat him until he was unconscious. Then in the ward at 1 Military Hospital, where they treated him for the brain injury caused by the beating. And lastly the smells of the room with its padded walls at Weskoppies Psychiatric Hospital, where they had confined him and fed him psychotropic drugs.

  He blamed the major that he had become a soldier without a unit, unfit for the job for which he had been trained. He was a trained Special Forces operator, but was sitting at home without a base or a commander. He couldn’t remember when last he had been sent on a mission. His body, once lean and muscular, was turning to flab. Officially he was on sick leave, but when he was able to face reality, he knew that he had been sidelined. For refusing to execute an illegal order.

  ‘Yes,’ De Villiers said, his voice listless. The medication he had taken earlier that morning after dropping the children at school had made him drowsy.

  ‘We have a mission for you,’ the major said.

  While his first instinct was to refuse, De Villiers listened. The major outranked him by only one notch, but De Villiers knew that he had the authority of a general behind him. De Villiers knew the general’s name, but he had never heard the major’s name mentioned.

  ‘Yes,’ he said again.

  ‘Are you interested?’

  De Villiers didn’t have to think it over. He had been sitting at home for five years. His daily tasks ran to no more than taking his wife to work and his children to school in the morning, fetching them again in the afternoon, and running the odd errand in between. During the day he sat at home watching soap operas and reruns of old movies on television.

  ‘Yes, Major.’ There was enough of the soldier left in him to respect military rank. He was a combat veteran, and like all combat soldiers, he had an inherent disrespect for men and women who did their soldiering from behind the security of their desks in air-conditioned offices. But rank is rank and he maintained a polite facade.

  ‘Don’t you want to know what it is? You don’t sound very interested. If you don’t want it, we can always get someone else,’ the major said.

  ‘I’m interested, sir,’ De Villiers said immediately. He didn’t care what mission they had in mind. Any mission, no matter where or how dangerous, no matter how long it might take, would be better than the zombie life he was living. ‘When and where do you want me to report for duty?’

  De Villiers thought he could hear a chuckle in the background. It sounded vaguely familiar. ‘You’re on active duty as of now, Captain. I’ll let you know in a day or two what we want you to do.’

  ‘That’s alright, sir,’ De Villiers said, but the line had already gone dead.

  When he sat down in front of the television again, De Villiers was unsure that the conversation had even taken place. The drugs they had fed him at Weskoppies tended to do that to his memory. Sometimes reality seemed unreal, and his dreams and nightmares too real. He went to the phone to make a call, but realised that he didn’t have a number. He had never had a number to call, not even for the psychiatrist who saw him once a month at the out-patients clinic of 1 Military Hospital. Once when De Villiers had gone there without an appointment, the hospital didn’t have a file on him. During his next visit, he saw the psychiatrist place his file in his briefcase and drive off. It never crossed his mind that he was still being controlled by the general and the major.

  The major called again two days later. The mission was on.

  De Villiers stopped shaving.

  They were due to meet in the centre of the city at a Wimpy restaurant. De Villiers arrived early, took a table and asked for the morning paper. He read the Beeld without taking any serious notice of its contents. There was talk about the Springboks being allowed to play two international tests, one against the All Blacks and one against Australia. The front page was dominated by news about the negotiations between government officials and representatives of the African National Congress. They had reached a deadlock: the ANC accused the government of trying to maintain apartheid under the guise of the protection of group rights. The government’s negotiators argued the contrary, that the ANC was trying to deny the people the freedom of association.

  A side bar quoted an interview with a senior political commentator, a professor in political science at the University of Stellenbosch, as saying that the ANC’s negotiating team was running rings around the government’s men and women. ‘We need to bring in some serious muscle here,’ he was quoted as saying, ‘otherwise we might as well allow the ANC and their communist allies to create their own government structures and to write their own constitution. And we know what we’ll get if we allow that to happen: A so-called people’s socialist republic. One where every one of those words will be a lie. The people won’t have any say. And it won’t be true to socialist principles, because the governing elite will divert the riches of the country into their own pockets, as they do in Nigeria, Egypt and Libya, for example, while the people starve and have no jobs. And it won’t be a republic, because once they are in power, they won’t give it up when they lose an election, whether at a national, provincial or municipal level. They are communists, and communists operate on the Brezhnev principle. Once in power, that power is never to be given up.

  ‘We must defeat them at the negotiating table,’ the professor suggested. ‘We must do it now or we’ll forever be their serfs. Or we must make another plan.’

  A shadow fell over the page. The major was standing next to De Villiers’s table. De Villiers stood up, but did not salute.

  De Villiers wore the full dress uniform of 4 Reconnaissance Unit, including his beret. His stubby beard was neatly trimmed. The Honoris Crux he had been awarded for his role in an operation at Techamutete in Angola dominated the row of ribbons on his chest. The major wore mufti. They shook hands perfunctorily.

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bsp; ‘You look like a soldier,’ the major said. He didn’t say again, but his meaning was clear.

  ‘I am a soldier,’ De Villiers said, but he had stopped believing that.

  They sat down and the major said, ‘You won’t be wearing uniform on this mission. It’s entirely civilian from beginning to end, although you’ll be taking orders from me and the general, and only from the two of us. The reporting lines are as follows: you report to me, and I report to the general.’

  De Villiers nodded.

  ‘Do you have a passport?’

  ‘No,’ De Villiers said. ‘Never needed one where I was sent.’

  ‘You’ll need one this time,’ the major said. ‘But don’t worry. We’ll take care of that. We need passport photographs and I’ll send someone around with the forms. Just make sure you wear a business suit or at least a jacket and tie for the photos. We can’t have you looking like a soldier when you’re on an undercover operation.’

  The waiter came across and hovered at De Villiers’s elbow. They placed their orders and waited for the waiter to leave.

  De Villiers looked the major in the eye and asked, ‘Can you tell me what the operation is about, where I’ll be going and how long I’ll be away from home? I must start making the necessary arrangements and get fit again.’ He patted his stomach. The muscles were soft. ‘I’ve been letting things slip a bit the last few years. If I’m going to run around in the bush, I’d better get fit very quickly.’

  The major shook his head. ‘Not necessary for this mission.’ He blinked a few times, weighing his words. De Villiers was fascinated by the major’s eyelashes. Long, yellowish-white eyelashes framed the major’s redlined eyes. The major was not an albino, but he had such a light skin and colourless hair that he could easily be mistaken for one. Afraid that the major might catch him staring, De Villiers dropped his eyes to the major’s manicured hands. The fingers of a classical guitarist, De Villiers surmised. Left handed, with the right hand’s fingernails clipped short and square, but long and pointed on the right hand for plucking the strings.