Dawn came. Low cloud misted over a becalmed and leaden sea. Clay doused the sails, started the motor. They chugged along, the coastline materialising in the distance. He wondered about the rhythm of meetings and partings, of the people he’d known for periods shorter and longer, of lives suddenly and brutally ended, as if the savage chemistry of existence was predicated on this eternal cycle of beginnings and endings, with such scant and difficult territory in between.
Crowbar fixed breakfast and handed Clay a mug of coffee. They sat in the cockpit and ate. Clay sipped, holding the tiller in the crook of his left elbow.
After a time he ended the silence of hours. ‘Did Manheim see you, Koevoet, back on Zanzibar?’
‘Ja, definitely. I’d just capped those two black fokkers, and was about to climb aboard. He looked right at me.’
‘That’s when he let Zuz go.’
‘Ja, and tried to shoot me.’ Crowbar raised his hand, pointed forward. ‘Slug’s still there in the fokken mast. You said you were going to take care of him, Straker.’
Clay shrugged.
‘Fokken leave me to do everything.’
Clay said nothing. You just had to let Crowbar go through it.
‘While you were hiding on the bottom of the ocean, Manheim was trying to take off my shoulder.’ Crowbar winced as if to prove the point. ‘Good thing he’d alternated slug and shot, or I’d be a cripple now, just like you, Straker. Or dead. Most of it ended up in the boom and the mast.’
‘Finished?’
Crowbar smiled. ‘What’s your hurry, Straker. I’m enjoying this.’
‘Fok jou, Koevoet.’
‘That’s better, seun. We’ve got a long way to go.’
‘Why is Manheim trying to kill you, oom?’
‘Kill both of us, ja.’
‘Me, I can understand, after what I told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But you? You said you knew him.’
Crowbar did not answer for a long time, sat sipping his coffee, staring out at the brown smudge of the coast. ‘We were friends, once.’
‘Serious?’
‘It was a long time ago. We did some Special Forces ops together in Angola, back in the seventies. But we fell out, years back.’
‘Is he with the Company?’ ‘The Company’ was the independent security firm that Crowbar had started with two ex-SADF colleagues after the election of Nelson Mandela’s ANC in South Africa in 1994. No longer wanted by their country, they were putting their skills and experience to use, fighting other people’s wars across Africa. Angola, ironically, was their latest and most lucrative contract.
Crowbar shook his head. ‘The last time I saw him, back in the eighties, he’d joined the AWB – Afrikaner Weerstands Bewring.’ Crowbar hesitated a moment, thought it through. ‘He’d changed.’
‘Changed how?’
‘He’d gotten meaner. More ideological. Always on about fokken God, People, fatherland, all that kak about an independent Boer homeland.’ Crowbar spat across the lee scupper. ‘After that I lost track of him. Last I heard he was doing contract security work for one of the big mining companies in the Transvaal.’
‘Well, whatever happened to him, he’s working for the Broederbond now.’
‘Looks as.’ Crowbar tossed the dregs of his coffee over the side. ‘Fokken good fighter, though. Once saw him take out a whole SWAPO squad single-handed. Just charged in chucking frags like fokken John Wayne. Never seen anything like it.’
‘So why is the Broederbond after you, Koevoet?’
Crowbar shrugged. ‘Must have given Manheim a hell of shock, seeing me on your boat.’
Clay waited for Crowbar to elaborate, but he didn’t.
‘I hope that slug I put into him is keeping him awake at night, ungrateful bastard.’
‘What aren’t you telling me, oom?’
Crowbar waved this away.
‘Goddam it, Koevoet.’
Crowbar didn’t move.
‘For once, can you just tell me the truth? What the hell is going on?’
Crowbar spun around and faced him, the crags of his face and his pale eyes cast in the grey morning light. ‘Don’t you fokken talk to me like that, soutpiele. Ever. You hear me?’
Clay stared back at him. ‘God damn it, Koevoet. I’m not a fucking rofie anymore. Rania’s in trouble, and I need to know what you know.’
Crowbar sat for a moment, staring back. But the expected counter-attack did not come. Instead, he hung his head. ‘What the fok do you know about anything, Straker?’ His voice sounded far away, resigned. ‘You and all those other cowards. Just fokken upped and ran – left the rest of us to do the fighting.’
Clay breathed in, let it go. ‘I don’t know if you’ve figured it out yet, old man, but the war’s over. We’re not in the army anymore.’
Crowbar rubbed the stubble of his beard. After a while he got to his feet and disappeared below deck.
Clay stood tiller in hand and ran his gaze along the horizon. He’d fled South Africa in 1981 as a twenty-year-old combat veteran and deserter – with Crowbar’s help. He hadn’t returned until 1996, to testify to Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Crowbar had warned him not to go, that it would end badly. He’d been right.
There was a lot Clay had missed. Thirteen years of pain and upheaval, rebellion and useless sacrifice. The death of a system, the rise of a nation. And all that time, Crowbar had stayed, lived it, right until the end.
Sometime later, Crowbar reappeared and clambered into the cockpit. He handed Clay a hip flask. ‘The Broederbond isn’t what you think, seun. It’s changed.’
Clay put the flask to his lips, let the liquid flow into him. He handed it back. You couldn’t push Crowbar, you just had to let him come to things in his own time.
Crowbar sat, lit a smoke. ‘Started back in the eighties. Apartheid was doomed, and they knew it. How do you hold on to power when your system is crumbling?’
‘But the Broederbond was the government,’ said Clay. ‘Controlled it anyway. Apartheid was their idea, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Exactly. But they knew black rule was inevitable. So, in the eighties, they secretly started repositioning. By ninety-three, when it was clear that apartheid was finished, they renamed themselves the AB – the Afrikaner Broederbond. Then they did a deal with the ANC and declared their support for a democratic South Africa.’
‘Jesus. Even while we were fighting…’
‘Ja, even then.’
Clay felt as if he was being swallowed up, as if a huge hole had opened up in the sea. ‘Fuck me,’ he said, trying to steady himself. ‘Eben, Bluey, Cooper, all of them…’
Crowbar closed his eyes, opened them again.
‘For nothing.’
‘Don’t, Straker. You can’t.’
Clay took a deep breath, tried to hold it all back. ‘And what about Manheim?’
‘When the AB did the deal with ANC, the shit flew. About a third of their members – the die-hard white supremacists, including Manheim – quit and joined the AWB. The AWB had fifty thousand SADF troops loyal to the Afrikaner cause ready to crush the ANC. We were a telephone call away from civil war.’
‘So how the hell did Manheim end up working for the AB?’
‘That’s what I don’t understand. The AB doesn’t give a shit about the Boers, or a white African homeland, or any of the things that Manheim believes in, or used to believe in. The AB is a business, Straker, a huge conglomerate of dozens of businesses – everything from agriculture to mining to telecoms, operating across Africa, from the Med to Cape Town. In reality, nothing’s changed. Not a goddam thing. They still run everything. Just in a different way.’
‘So, it was never about the volkstaat.’
‘Not since before you were a rofie, ja.’ Crowbar shifted in the cockpit, burned down his cigarette and flicked the smouldering end overboard.
Mombasa was now a distant smudge on the horizon. Clay checked the compass, judged speed through the water. A sea breeze was coming up. They could put up sail. ‘Should be there in about three hours,’ he said.
Crowbar nodded. ‘The AB did a deal with the ANC because it was a way to make money. A lot more money than they had ever before imagined was possible. Billions.’
‘So the same people who thought up COAST are running food and telephone companies now?’
‘Pharmaceuticals, metals, engineering, oil, lumber, diamonds, water, tourism … everything.’
Clay pondered this for a time, the variables and possibilities, the diverse and cruel motivations. ‘But why come after you now, Koevoet? They’ve had months, years.’
‘Who the fok knows? All I know is that now they’ve started, they’re not going to stop. That’s how they work.’ Crowbar levelled his eyes at Clay, held his gaze, meaning burning in his retinae. ‘The AB is very patient, very methodical.’
‘And Manheim?’
Crowbar shook his head, drank from the flask, secured the cap. ‘I’ve got to talk to him.’
‘And I’ve got to kill him,’ said Clay, looking away. He tried to assimilate it all, piece together the fragments, but there was too much void and far too few pieces.
After a while he said: ‘Did Hope say anything about why Rania’s in Egypt?’
‘Just that her husband and son were murdered back in France, and the cops think she did it.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘And you thought you had problems, Straker.’