A Sailor's Honour (16 page)

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 Pretoria 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.

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.

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.