ON OUR NEXT BIRDWATCHING excursion Mzwai came with us. It wasn’t a comfortable drive, with the three of us crammed into the cab of the bakkie. Mzwai sat beside Rachel. She looked pained, and not only because of his physical proximity where his thigh was jammed against hers; I could tell that she was wondering how the presence of a third person would fit into our legend. She and I had become so well known as a team in the area, a third person was not going to be that easy to explain.
Over the course of a few days we met up with some of our activists – a church elder, a couple of township youths, and a trade unionist who came from the town of Ermelo. We discussed the advancing campaign, a set of plans that were being canvassed in the region for a series of consumer and bus boycotts and a three-day strike on the coal mines.
In all of these meetings Mzwai listened impassively. He seemed unengaged. At one stage he even went out in search of a cigarette in the middle of a discussion. I felt a mixture of relief and concern about this apparent lack of interest. Afterwards in the bakkie he remarked, “Very interesting – good recruits. I see potential to widen our networks here.”
“Why do we need to widen them?” asked Rachel. “We have those we need. We should be keeping them tight and small. We can’t afford to be infiltrated.”
He ignored her question. It was as if she hadn’t spoken. “Do you have a list of police stations and military units in the region?” he asked me.
Rachel and I exchanged glances. We did have a list, one that we had drawn up over time, along with the routine of patrols so that we might avoid those areas on our field trips.
“No, we don’t,” said Rachel emphatically before I could open my mouth.
“Strange.” Mzwai frowned. “I would have assumed it would have been a part of your brief. We will have to draw one up.”
I sneaked another look at Rachel, but she had wound down her window and was gazing out at the passing countryside. Her face was expressionless.
“With maps,” Mzwai added.
Later that evening Rachel and I took a walk up the hill behind the house after Mzwai had stumbled off to his room, heavy with whisky.
“He wants targets,” she said bitterly, pulling the folds of her jacket tightly around her against the cool autumn breeze. It was dark. The moon was obscured by cloud. As we walked our boots turned up crisp fallen leaves that had been collected by the wind into small drifts in the potholes of the road. Off to our left an owl hooted. The sound was deep and melancholy. I shuddered. “He is here to plan sabotage,” she continued. “He wants to use our networks. I am convinced of it. He doesn’t care about the political work.”
I could see that Rachel was very worried and I was beginning to agree with her thinking. “I don’t understand – it’s not part of our mission,” I said. “Surely he has been properly briefed.” But I had a sudden apprehension – the way Mzwai had arrived, his new shoes, his lack of a legend, his un-comradely demeanour. “It’s not possible that this is a rogue operation, is it?” I said. “Or that he is an agent? Perhaps we have been discovered and they are trying to play us.”
Rachel reached over and took my hand in hers. Her fingers were cold. “I’ve thought about that. I haven’t slept for nights. And there’s something else I need to tell you. My handler has gone dead. I have dropped off three communications over the last two months and there has been no response. He has been replaced.”
“How do you know he’s been replaced?”
“Mzwai. He told me. We aren’t being played, Mandla. In fact I know the comrade personally who’s replaced him.”
I looked at her and she gave me a small smile but there was little reassurance in it.
“I knew him in the student movement,” she went on. “He was in COSAS. They used our printing press to produce pamphlets. I helped him leave the country five years ago to join the ANC. And when I went for training in Swaziland myself, I met him there again.” She hesitated. “His code name is Silver.”
I searched back through my memory. A man, my age, with that name, had stayed briefly at the safe house in Mbabane on his way to Angola for military training. We had shared beers, ruminated over politics.
“Something is still wrong,” I said. “But I can’t put my finger on it.”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Rachel stomped her foot on the ground. I was taken aback by the force of her invective. She rarely swore. She pushed her hands up through her hair. “This kind of thing happens, Mandla,” she said. “I just didn’t think it would happen to us.”
We turned around and began the stroll back to the house, keeping our voices low as we ran over familiar territory. The movement, with its headquarters in Lusaka, was operationally spread over Southern Africa, the capital cities of Europe and the Soviet bloc. It was a bureaucracy divided into departments, charged with executing different aspects of the struggle, with information exchanged between them limited in order to avoid leaks or to avoid it falling into the hands of agents. Lines of communication were spread over the world but they were fragile and frequently subject to interruption. It had to be face to face, or coded and moved through dead-letter boxes if written. It required cadres to travel across borders, sometimes through hostile territory. Things were bound to break down, units become isolated from each other, and comrades to pursue strategies in a vacuum. Perhaps that was what had happened here? Mzwai. Was he a rogue cadre? I couldn’t get this thought out of my mind. And Silver – could he be trusted?
But Rachel was adamant. “The Swaziland unit has been too disciplined, too bound by comradeship for such breakdowns to have affected our work.” She seemed more resolved. “It’s true what Mzwai told us,” she added.
“What?”
“That there has been a restructuring, a decision to integrate armed operations into the political work.”
“Do we have a problem with that?” I asked.
Suddenly we heard a disturbance in the bush and Rachel pulled me over into a thicket of trees. Below us a herdboy was making his way up the hill, a solitary ox ahead of him snorting in the chill night air. We knelt on the hard ground until they had passed.
“It has a time and place,” Rachel continued as we stood up, brushing dry grass from our clothes. “That’s what we agreed – but build up the networks first. Our plan has got lost somewhere in the shake-up. The people who helped devise it have moved on. It is second-hand to Silver and whoever else is there now. That’s the reality. But as for Mzwai himself …” She sighed. “That I don’t know.”
Rachel was far more experienced in subterfuge than I was and I had no means of countering her perceptions. When we had almost reached the house, she stopped. “This is what we are going to do,” she said. “We are going to limit Mzwai’s access to our networks.”
“We can’t do that!” I protested. “That would be ill-discipline.”
“Or you could see it as taking responsibility,” she said. “At least until we get some sort of clarification from Swaziland. That is my decision. I’m making a drop to Silver tomorrow.”
It was Rachel’s operation. She had crafted it. From what she had told me her knowledge and experience of the movement was deeper than mine. I had spent years in the Soviet Union and the frontline states but this was my first operation. I felt uncomfortable, but stopped short of saying anything. It was Rachel’s operation.