They’d been on the road for more than an hour before Captain Wade spoke. Hunched over the steering wheel, a Cuban cigar smouldering between his lips, Wade finally replied to one of the questions Eben had been throwing out at regular intervals since leaving 32-Bat’s Caprivi headquarters.
‘I sent you boys because there was no one else I could trust.’
The Land Rover rattled over the rutted track that served as the main east-west artery paralleling the border. Wade slowed and pulled to the side of the track to let a convoy of four supply trucks rumble past in the other direction. They continued on in a choking plume of dust.
‘And does the Colonel know about this?’ said Clay.
Wade was quiet a long time, staring out at the road. His sandy hair was cut bristle short and frosted with road dust. There were deep lines in his sun-burned face. He was early thirties, but looked forty.
‘Look,’ he said, pulling the cigar from between his teeth. ‘You boys know what you saw out there. So I don’t need to tell you that there is some very bad shit happening. I’m sorry I dragged you boys into this, but I didn’t have a choice.’ He was a native English speaker, a salt-dick, like them. ‘We’ve been watching UNITA for a while now, and when this opportunity came up, we had to act.’
‘Who is “we”, sir?’ said Eben.
‘We is us, Barstow. You, me and Straker, here.
Eben shot that sarcastic grin he used whenever confronted with military doublespeak.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Clay. ‘But who can we trust?’
‘Do not talk about any of this to anyone. Do you hear me? Both of you. I need your word.’
‘You have it, sir,’ said Clay.
‘So the answer is, trust no one,’ said Eben.
‘That’s right.’
‘Who is this Zulaika woman, sir?’ asked Clay. ‘Is she really MPLA?’
Wade nodded. ‘She is. But only as a matter of convenience.’
‘So then why are we working with her, against UNITA, our allies?’
‘Look, Straker, the more I tell you boys, the more dangerous it is for you. You’re just going to have to trust me.’ Wade crushed the butt of his cigar against the top of the steering wheel and dropped it into the breast pocket of his battle tunic. ‘She told me about what you boys did in the bunker. That’s why I picked you. You get it. Most of the people here, they don’t…’ Wade trailed off into silence again.
‘Get what?’ said Eben.
‘What this whole thing is really about.’
‘Not the rool gevdar,’ said Clay. Just what the lady doctor at 1-Mil had said. As he said it, something opened up inside his chest. It felt like treason. And something else: it felt like futility.
‘No, not the fucking rool gevdar,’ said Wade, his composure momentarily gone, his eyes flashing as he turned his head to stare right at them.
Eben was smiling now, broad and wide.
‘And the Colonel, sir?’ said Clay. ‘Is he one of the people that doesn’t get it?’
‘Especially the Colonel.’
Clay swallowed hard, glanced over at Eben. Now he looked scared.
‘What about Liutenant Van Boxmeer, our platoon commander?’ said Clay.
‘God damn it Straker, I said no one. Crowbar knows nothing about this. Keep it that way. He’s just a good soldier who does what he’s told.’
Clay nodded. ‘So who is this Doctor Death?’ said Clay, pressing. ‘He’s one of ours, isn’t he?’
Wade frowned, drove on.
‘You might as well tell us, sir,’ said Eben. ‘By the sounds of it we’re already fucked anyway.’
Wade whipped his head around and glared at Eben. ‘You’re in the middle of a war, son,’ he said, swerving to avoid a pothole. ‘Of course you’re fucked.’
By the time they reached Ondangwa, the sun was low in the sky, and the bush took on that golden, late-afternoon glow that reminded Clay of summer days playing cricket and lounging in the back garden of his family home in Jo’berg. In straight-line time it wasn’t that long ago. But it felt like forever.
Wade had steadfastly refused to speak anymore of the incident and instead fell into the usual superficial conversation an officer has with his men: home, food, sleep. He dropped them five kilometres from the main gate and told them to walk the rest of the way in, and then report directly to Crowbar with the agreed story. They hadn’t seen him and he hadn’t seen them. It was for their own protection, he said.
‘Sometimes it feels wholly as if I’m living inside one, long, interrupted dream,’ said Eben as they walked back alone along the wheel-churned road, watching the sky light up flamingo pink and blood orange. ‘As if my life is not, you know, rational.’
Clay didn’t reply. He reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out the notebook he’d taken from the body of Doctor Death’s assistant out in the dunes. ‘Maybe this will tell us something.’
He opened the notebook to the first page. It was a ledger of some sort: columns of handwritten numbers and a strange shorthand of letters and Greek symbols. He flipped through the pages. The same unintelligible stuff: numbers, symbols, the occasional scrawled chemical or medical term. Inside, towards the back, was a folded sheet, typewritten. He passed Eben the notebook and opened up the paper. It was an official document, under the seal of the South African Army Medical Service, SAMS.
‘Listen to this, bru,’ said Clay, reading from the document. ‘Subjects injected with formulation 13B – muscle relaxants: methylqualone and hydroxyl pheylbenzenacetic acid (60%); anaesthetic: etomidate (20%); central nervous system depressants (sleeping agent): phenobarbital (20%). Subjects exhibited rapid interference with motor function, immediate loss of coordination and muscle control, and confusion and lethargy, followed by seizures and terminal respiratory failure. Reduced dose and potency recommended.’
Clay stared at his friend, the coldest shiver creasing the length of his spine. ‘That’s what those poes were doing out there that night. They were injecting those poor bastards with this shit. Did you hear that: “Immediate loss of muscle control.”’ He shook his head. ‘Can you fucking believe it?’
Eben grabbed the paper. Clay walked on in silence, the weight of his rifle and the ordnance filling his Fireforce vest suddenly an almost intolerable burden.
‘Holy Mother of God,’ said Eben. ‘Listen: “Lower dosage. Formulation 14C. Substitute neuromuscular blockers with MDMA one for two. Subjects display slower onset of paralysis. Respiratory failure delayed or prevented. Total loss of muscle control temporary. Recovery expected within twenty-four hours.”’ He looked up at Clay.
‘Adriano,’ said Clay.
Eben nodded.
‘Lab rats,’ said Clay. ‘That’s what they were using them for. No wonder they wanted to get rid of the evidence.’
‘Moeder van God,’ said Eben. ‘Our own medical corps.’
‘Look at the header,’ said Clay, cold creeping through him now, despite the searing tropical heat. ‘Operation COAST.’
Eben grabbed the paper. ‘Holy shit.’
‘The doctor’s message, from 1-Mil. The doctor’s operation.’
‘Or she suspects. That was why she used a cipher. She must be under surveillance.’
‘BOSS.’
‘It would make sense. Can you imagine if this got out? We’re already an international pariah.’
‘Well deserved,’ said Eben.
‘And what about Cobra?’ said Clay.
Eben threw a questioning look.
Clay pointed to his bicep. ‘On the Flossie.’
Eben nodded. ‘You think he recognised you?’
‘Ja, definitely.’
‘Then we’re in deep shit.’
‘First thing tomorrow we talk to Wade. Tell him the whole story.’ Clay grabbed the paper back, folded it back in the notebook. ‘Show him this.’
‘Everything?’
‘Everything. The way I see it, we don’t have a choice.’
Eben frowned. ‘Admit to killing one of our own? We could be shot, bru. You know that don’t you?’
‘What do you mean, we, Eben? I was the one who shot him.’
‘Don’t even say it. We’re in this together.’
Clay shook his head. ‘Wade isn’t telling us the whole story. He said so himself. He’s trying to protect us, but he doesn’t know how far we’re already into this thing. Cobra knows who I am. And if he does, Doctor Death does, too. It won’t be hard to track us down.’
They walked on in silence as darkness came.
An hour later and they were being waved through the main gates of the airbase. They walked the mile and half to their bivouac area feeling not so much like returning heroes as suspects in a crime. They slung their R4s and marched in step, noticing the glances of the airmen and the other parabats, knowing that the word would have gone around that they were missing, believed killed.
When they reached Valk 5’s bivouac, Bluey and the others were there to meet them with cold cokes and pats on the back, wanting to know all about it. Clay and Eben told them the story they’d rehearsed and agreed with Wade. Long-range recon patrol with 32-Bat into Angola to report on FAPLA movements near Rito. They had become separated after a firefight and had walked back out on their own. No worries.
Later that night, Clay lay on his bunk and opened the box that Crowbar had thrown there almost three days before. Inside, pinned to a black-felt background, was an MMM – Military Merit Medal – the blue, sky-blue and orange striped ribbon rumpled against its brass bar and twelve-pointed brass star. Clay looked at it for a long time in the half-light, wondering what his mother and father would have felt if they were still alive. Proud, he said to himself. They would have been proud. His mother would have told all her friends and neighbours, had everyone round to tea, showed them photographs. My son won the MMM, she would have said. We are so proud. But now they can’t be, because of a stupid, fucking pointless car crash.
He picked up the medal and held it to his chest a moment. There had been no ceremony. The Colonel hadn’t pinned it to his chest in front of the Battalion on parade. It was just tossed onto his bunk like a tin of beer or a spare mag. Here you go, troop. Three kills. Three men dead because of you. And one boy saved. Would one saved cancel out one killed, he wondered, when the final accounting came? Was there to be such a thing? Or was it all, as Eben claimed, just a one-way trip to nothing.
Clay put the medal back in its box and dropped it into his footlocker. He was alone in the tent. He checked the entrance and then got to his knees, reached under his bunk and levered up the floorboard, exposing the Ovamboland sand beneath. Quickly he dug away the earth. The heavy polypropylene bag he’d stashed the diamonds in was still there. He pulled it free and opened it up. The pouch was inside. He took it out and tipped the stones into his palm. Such small things, dull and clear against his skin, the bigger one about the size of a 7.62 mm round, with its pinkish tinge and uncharacteristic sharp edges.
After a while he funnelled the diamonds back into the pouch and dropped it into the bag along with the bloodstained notebook, and then covered it over again with handfuls of sand before replacing the floorboard.
Clay lay back on his bunk, crossed his arms under the back of his head and stared at the canvas above him. Somewhere in the distance: the clatter of gunfire, the fading sound of an outbound chopper. Did these objects change things, he wondered? Could some stones, a few sheaves of paper, change lives, directions? Were they a means to a future, or the end of one? For the first time in a long time he thought about Sara, his fiancée. He hadn’t written to her in weeks, now, not since the hospital. He’d tried a couple of times, but the words he needed were too hard to find, and those he didn’t were too banal. And the more he didn’t tell her, the harder it became to write anything at all, until it seemed simply an irrelevancy, and he knew that he didn’t love her and never had and that he’d only asked her to marry him because it was what she’d wanted, even though they’d only spent two days together and didn’t know anything about each other and never would.
Tomorrow, he’d go to Wade. He’d tell him everything. He’d tell him about the diamonds and about killing Doctor Death’s assistant in the dunes. He’d show him the documents, the notebook. He was now convinced that the 1-Mil lady doctor’s cryptic note was somehow linked to the events he’d witnessed in Angola, the SAMS experiments on unarmed black prisoners, and that UNITA – or at least the element of UNITA that Colonel Mbdele ran – was part of it. What had Zulaika said? Drug war. What he’d seen certainly qualified. She was telling the truth. MPLA or not, Wade trusted her. He trusted Wade. And Operation COAST? He’d mention the word to Wade, see how he reacted.
Clay thought again of the diamonds; Mbdele’s diamonds. He remembered the night in the bunker, Mbdele’s offered handful of pills, and the way the UNITA fighters’ eyes flared and danced – that drugged-up, euphoric, sex-crazed, primal look in each tortured face. He’d heard of people taking pills to get high, but never seen it or experienced it. Not with his background. Not from a proper, white middle-class Johannesburg suburb. Not a boy from a respectable white private school with its own pool, and rugby and cricket pitches, and the compulsory military training after school. Not him.
All of that – home, school, friends, his parents, even Sara – seemed a long way away now. Gone. Obliterated, and never coming back. He was someone different now; or maybe it was just that he had finally become the person he was always supposed to be.
Sleep came. That deep blank born of physical and mental exhaustion, of the exquisite relief of just being alive.
When he awoke it was dark. He walked to the enlisted man’s mess building with Eben to get some dinner. Above them, the sky was clear. Stars covered the night so that there was no black, only shades of starlight, distant and unimaginable. The diesel generator hummed in the distance, barely audible over the insect din. The mess hut was set in a small earth revetment just off the main base track. It was the last sitting of the day and they could hear men’s voices, the clink of cutlery on metal trays. The windows glowed yellow. The officer’s mess was not far – less than a hundred metres down the road, past a small thicket of Mopane trees. They had just turned onto the staked pathway that led to the enlisted men’s mess when Eben stopped dead, grabbed Clay’s shoulder.
‘Look,’ he whispered.
Wade was standing alone on the road near the mopane thicket with his hands on his hips. The light from the officer’s mess shone through the trees and struck Wade in dappled, moving patches.
‘What’s he doing?’ whispered Eben.
Clay was about to answer when Wade took a step forward. Another man emerged from the edge of darkness and stood facing him. Wade took a step back. The sound of raised voices came clear now in the African night – the two men were arguing about something.
‘Do you recognise him?’ asked Eben. People came and went from the big front line airbase on a regular basis, so it was not unusual to see strangers.
‘No,’ said Clay. The man’s back was turned to them, and he was still partially obscured by the fractured mopane shade. But there was something about the way the man stood, about the size of him, that was vaguely familiar.
The man was questioning Wade now, his tone increasingly insistent.
‘Come on,’ said Eben, starting towards the two men.
‘Wait.’ Clay grabbed his friend’s elbow.
Just then, Wade turned away from the man and started walking back along the road, towards the officers’ bivouac area. The other man stood in the road, watching him go, silent now. After a while he stepped out into the floodlit part of the road and started towards the mess. As he did, Clay caught a glimpse of his face.
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Clay.
‘What?’ said Eben. ‘Who is it?’
It was him: the same fleshy dark jowls, the ravaged skin, that same lumbering gait. ‘It’s the poes from the chana, the one I told you about – tallying all those UNITA tusks,’ whispered Clay, the man’s final words that day echoing in his head: You’re all dead men.
Botha.
‘Shit,’ said Eben. ‘Do you think he’s come to report us?’
More like kill us, thought Clay. ‘Didn’t take him long. Let’s get out of here.’
They started back to their tent.
‘We better tell Crowbar,’ said Clay. ‘The bastard threatened him, too.’
‘Who’s he with, anyway? He can’t have any jurisdiction here, can he?’
‘Who the hell knows,’ said Clay. ‘Just stay alert. We’ll take turns keeping watch. Anything moves outside the tent, shoot it. If he’s stupid enough to try to come after us here, we’ll plug him and tell everyone we thought he was a terr.’
Eben nodded, muttering to himself.
Crowbar wasn’t in his tent. Someone said he was up at command for a briefing – something big apparently. Clay and Eben waited around for a while, but he didn’t come back. They went to bed hungry, Eben taking the first watch.
Deep in the night Clay was awoken by a loud explosion, how far off he couldn’t tell, followed by the usual moment of silence before the scurrying reaction of shouting men and grinding vehicles. But to these ragings he was now so inured that he was soon asleep again.
At 0430 he was shocked awake by the screaming of NCOs: Parade in five minutes. Full kit. Draw extra ammo, food and water. We’ll be away a while this time. Get moving.
They stumbled out into the cool half-darkness of morning, formed up by section and platoon. Crowbar stood before them, stern faced, waiting as the NCOs dressed the ranks and called the men to attention.
‘Valk 5 is going back into Angola, men,’ said Crowbar. ‘This time as part of a divisional-scale effort against FAPLA. Operation Protea they’re calling it. We will be putting over four thousand men into Cunene Province. Our orders are to destroy a major concentration of FAPLA and Cuban troops massing around Rito. We will be supported on the ground by elements of 32-Bat, SAAF gunships and Vlammies.’
Crowbar paused for a moment, looked down at his boots, then back up at the men. ‘Last night, we suffered what is believed to have been a mortar attack by SWAPO terrorists. A single mortar round fell inside the compound, destroying one hut. A patrol was sent out in pursuit of the attackers, but no contact was made. I regret to inform you that Captain Wade was killed. There were no other casualties. Liutenant de Vries will be acting CO of the company until further notice.’
Commissioner Ksole: Operation Protea. The SADF’s Provost General’s records show that this is the operation that resulted in the massacre near Rito, in Angola, on 23rd August, 1981. Is that correct?
Witness: (Coughs)
Commissioner Ksole: Mister Straker?
Witness: Yes. Yes, sir.
Commissioner Lacy: The records also show that this was the day that you and your colleague – Lance Corporal Eben Barstow – were seriously wounded. Is that also correct, Mister Straker?
Witness does not answer.
Commissioner Lacy: Mister Straker?
Witness: I, ah. May I have a moment, please, ma’am, I’ve … I need … Ah. Sorry.
Commissioner Barbour: Take your time, son.
Commissioner Ksole: Mister Straker, the question was put to you previously about your wounds. Please can you confirm that this was the date – 23rd August, 1981 – on which you were seriously wounded?
Witness: That is correct. Eben was hit before we reached the village. I was hit not long after.
Commissioner Barbour: Tell us what happened, son.
Witness: It started right after we airlifted into the chana. We started taking fire as soon as we hit the ground. I was leading the section that day. I was on point. We were in pursuit of the enemy. There was contact on our right. I could hear AK47 fire close by. I emerged into a clearing. At the far side of the clearing I saw a flash of movement just inside the tree line. I fired. We crossed the clearing. We found a boy, lying in the long grass. Shot through the stomach.
Commissioner Ksole: You shot a civilian, a boy?
Witness does not answer.
Commissioner Ksole: Mister Straker?
Witness: Yes. I shot him. It was an accident. I thought it was an enemy soldier. I panicked. I didn’t take time to verify the target, I … Oh, Jesus.
Commissioner Barbour: Was he dead?
Witness: He was still alive. I put Eben in charge of the section and carried the boy back to the LZ. I tried to put him on a casevac, but by the time I got there, he was dead.
Commissioner Lacy: And your friend, Lance Corporal Barstow?
Witness: He was hit a few minutes later, before I re-joined the section. A bullet to the head. I helped carry him to the casevac.
Commissioner Lacy: And he survived.
Witness: You could call it that, I guess.
Commissioner Ksole: And all this happened just outside the village?
Witness: Yes, sir. About half a kilometre from the church and the edge of the village. I re-joined the platoon just as we started advancing towards the church. That’s when we started taking heavy fire from a twenty-three.
Commissioner Barbour: A twenty-three? Please can you explain to us what that is, son?
Witness: A 23-millimetre gun. It was designed as an antiaircraft weapon, but the commies learned that it was hugely effective against men on the ground. There was one in the village.
Commissioner Ksole: And then what happened?
Witness: There is something else, sir. Something I need to say.
Commissioner Barbour: Proceed.
Witness: The little boy. The one I … the one I shot. He. He. It was…
Commissioner Barbour: Take your time, son.
Witness: It was Adriano, sir. The boy we saved from the plane. Zulaika’s son.
Commissioner Barbour: Good God.