A Sailor's Honour (18 page)

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.

‘This is what I can tell you at this stage,' the major said. ‘And I'll want an answer before we part company today. Alright?'

‘That's fine,' De Villiers said. He sat back to listen.

‘You've seen this morning's paper, I see,' the major said. The paper lay face-up on the table.

De Villiers nodded.

‘We have mission,' the major said. He leaned forward and placed his elbows on the table. He spoke so softly that De Villiers was obliged to follow suit. They sat close together, like conspirators, facing each other across the small table. ‘We have an operation in Europe,' the major said softly. ‘We're going to get a ship for a special operation back here, but we have to go and buy it and make some modifications first. We need a man to captain the ship for us and bring it back here for the mission. You are that man.'

‘Sounds easy,' De Villiers said.

‘On the contrary,' the major said. ‘But before I tell you about the complications, are you still interested?'

‘Yes,' De Villiers said. ‘I'll do it.' He hoped he hadn't sounded too eager. ‘What complications could there be? It sounds quite straightforward.'

‘The complications are in the nature of administrative difficulties,' the major said.

De Villiers waited. ‘First of all,' the major said, ‘you'll have to lay down your commission and resign from the army. We need you to do this mission as a civilian.'

De Villiers nodded, not agreeing, but signifying that he understood.

‘Then we need you to go to Europe to open some bank accounts and eventually to have the ship registered in your name and bring it back here with a small crew.'

‘You can't register it in the name of the
SADF
, then?' De Villiers asked.

‘No, God forbid,' the major said. ‘That's the last thing we can do. We can't have any links with the
SADF
or the government. That's why we need you to resign and do this as a civilian.'

De Villiers stirred his coffee and took his time to consider the ramifications. ‘I'll lose my pension and my medical aid scheme.'

‘Yes,' the major said. ‘But we'll make up for that.'

‘How?'

‘We'll pay you double your current salary for the duration of the operation, tax free, and when the mission is over, we'll pay you one million rand in addition to any military pension you're entitled to after your years of service.'

It was a lot of money. His house was worth one-sixth of that. De Villiers would be able to secure his children's education to tertiary level in the best private schools and at university. He could buy into a pension scheme and join a medical aid society.

‘We think it will take six to nine months. From start to finish,' the major said.

‘It sounds alright,' De Villiers said, but the money worried him. The major was offering a lot, but that was not how the
SADF
operated, De Villiers knew. Their way was to appeal to your loyalty and patriotism while paying you a pittance. ‘Where is the money coming from?' he asked.

The major avoided his eyes. ‘You need to know only this: there's a fund within the army budget allocation which has been set aside for secret operations. We've had it for years. The expenditure is dealt with outside the usual reporting channels and financial accounting controls. There will be no record of this mission and no comeback for any of us.'

‘A ship will need a crew,' De Villiers remembered. ‘What are we doing for a crew?' He didn't notice that he was already speaking of
we
.

‘Don't worry,' the major said. ‘We'll take care of that. In fact, we already have a crew in mind. Some coloured fishermen whose boat was seized by the Mozambican government, and then the insurance company wouldn't pay. They are destitute, but they know how to run a ship. We'll fly them over when the ship is ready.'

De Villiers had many other questions, but didn't want to appear doubtful or unwilling. He badly needed a mission. Any mission. And once the mission had been successfully completed, he would ask to rejoin the army. That's what he would do, he thought.

‘What do I do when I get back here with the ship?' he asked.

‘That part of the operation is still in the planning stage,' the major said. ‘We'll tell you when we know ourselves.'

De Villiers nodded. He could understand the major's reticence to go into detail so early in the operation. ‘So where do we go from here?' he asked.

The major cracked a smile. ‘I don't know about you,' he said, ‘but I'm fucking off to tell the general the good news that you've agreed to come on board. He told me that he thought you were the best man for the job and I agreed with him.'

The major stood up and left De Villiers with the bill.

Within a month of the call, in the northern spring of 1992, De Villiers was standing on the deck of the
Alicia Mae
in Hamburg. He didn't know much about ships and shipping and had to learn fast. To maintain his cover, he enlisted in a naval academy for the skippers of fishing boats operating in the Baltic. His course would take the full three months he needed to refit the ship. He had gained entry with a batch of forged documents the major had said came from Military Intelligence. When he was allowed to visit the
Alicia Mae
in the dockyard where she was being refitted, he saw men crawling over her deck with steel plates and rods and welding equipment. De Villiers was not authorised to go below deck to inspect the works.

Annelise had been only too happy to see De Villiers back on active service and dispatched on a mission. Their goodbyes at the airport had been muted. De Villiers knew what his wife was thinking, because he was thinking the same thing. Would this operation restore him as a man and, once so restored, would he and Annelise be able to pick up the fragments of their marriage? In the airport departure lounge, De Villiers had looked over Annelise's shoulder at their children and had made a secret commitment to himself to make a success of the mission. I'll come back a better man, the man I always was and always wanted to be, he thought.

De Villiers and the major had travelled to Hamburg via Frankfurt on Lufthansa, but on separate flights. For security reasons, the major had explained, but De Villiers suspected that the major had flown business class to avoid mixing with the plebs and their children in economy. There was to be no contact between them in Hamburg. De Villiers would receive his orders through a middleman on board the ship every morning at 8 a.m. sharp.

De Villiers had been booked into a seamen's hostel near the fish market between the red-light district and the docks. When he opened his bags, he found that his toiletry bag and his sunglasses had been stolen. The loss of the glasses and the toiletries were of minor concern to him, but the six months' supply of medication he had received from the army psychiatrist in Pretoria was irreplaceable. He knew neither what the prescription was nor how to contact the psychiatrist. The medication came in unmarked white capsules. He had no choice but to do without them.

Two weeks later the nightmares stopped and his memory started to return in stages. Alone and lonely in his hostel bed at night, De Villiers put the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of his recent past together. The troubles in his career and marriage had started with an operation into Angola, he now remembered clearly.

He was on the outskirts of a small, dusty town in southern Angola. He had the target in the sights of his sniper's rifle. Then his spotter, Lieutenant Jacques Verster, had said, ‘Hold it, Pierre. Hold it. Is that who I think it is?'

It was Robert Mugabe. When they communicated with the major in Pretoria, the order was repeated. ‘You have your orders.'

That was when things had started to go wrong for De Villiers. When he refused to carry out the order to shoot Mugabe, his life and his career as a soldier came off the rails. First Verster was shot at point-blank range by the soldiers who were tasked to be their evacuation support. Then they chased De Villiers until they caught up with him at the army camp at Rundu. There, De Villiers was now convinced, they must have killed the bushman who had accompanied him on his flight.

The final pieces of the puzzle fitted tidily into place. There was physical torture at Voortrekkerhoogte, a short recuperation at 1 Military Hospital, and then a transfer to the psychiatric ward at Weskoppies. That's where De Villiers lost the thread. His memory was fragmented and unreliable. The pills he was given did not help. There, in the seamen's hostel, De Villiers realised that the medication was not to help him remember, but to make him forget.

Hamburg was cold and miserable. Yet he could not help being impressed with the city. Everything seemed so old, so solid, so historical. Compared with the newness of South Africa, Hamburg was ancient. De Villiers felt small and insignificant.

After reporting for duty at the shipyard and being told there was nothing for him to do, he started walking back towards St Pauli. He took the long way round. He passed an open church and entered for no clear reason. Behind him the
Alicia Mae
was open to a final survey. According to the major, De Villiers was not to be on site during the survey. He was not, under any circumstances, to see what was below decks. The church was empty. It was cold inside. De Villiers shivered as he sat in one of the pews. The three-storey-high lead-glass windows directly in front of him let in such light as the grey conditions outside allowed.

‘Are you cold, my brother?' a voice asked behind him. De Villiers had been exposed to German for three months now and was able to follow.

‘Yes,' De Villiers said in English. He looked around. It was the pastor.

‘Are you a sailor?' The pastor spoke in heavily accented English.

De Villiers had to think before he spoke. Until recently, he would have had to answer no. But now, with three months' training behind him, he had been fashioned into a sailor. In a week or less, he would be in command of his own ship and a skeleton crew of five.

‘Yes,' he answered. ‘I'm a sailor.'

‘Do you want me to pray for you?' the pastor asked.

Again, De Villiers had to think hard before he could answer. He thought of himself as a deeply spiritual being, but not a particularly religious one. The men who had chased him through Angola were Christians, acting on the orders of officers who were also Christians, pursuing the wishes, he assumed, of a government which professed to be a Christian one. The torture he had suffered at the hands of the men in charge of the
DB
at Voortrekkerhoogte and the indoctrination he had experienced at the hands of the military doctors visiting him at Weskoppies had also been meted out by Christians. He felt an antipathy towards the church, yet here he was, sitting in the pews of a church. St Katharinenkirche, he had read on a signboard outside the Lutheran Church which practised mass on Thursdays and on Sundays and attracted worshippers from well beyond the city's confines.

‘Yes, please,' he said, not knowing why.

He felt the pastor's hand on his shoulder. ‘Dear God,' the pastor began. De Villiers closed his eyes. ‘Be with this sailor and his ship wherever they should go. Though his voyage may be long and arduous, be with him and his companions. Keep his enemies at bay, whether they be men or the tempest; slow them down to allow this sailor to evade them. Amen.'

‘Amen,' De Villiers said without opening his eyes.

‘Do you want to talk, my son?' the pastor asked. ‘I sense that you are troubled.'

De Villiers found himself nodding against his will.

‘I'll sit behind you so that you may talk freely,' the pastor said. De Villiers heard him settling down in the next pew.

He spoke the words as fast as they came into his head. ‘I've been through fire, Pastor,' he said. ‘Fire, burning and more fire.'

He felt the pastor's hand on his shoulder. ‘You've come to the right place, my son.' The pastor's voice was soothing. ‘St Catherine is the patron saint of fire and firemen. She will be your guide through the fires that threaten to consume you. St Catherine will show you how to become cleansed by fire. Talk to her and she will be your guide.'

De Villiers heard the pastor's footsteps receding behind him. He was alone in the church and spoke softly, as if to himself. Would the statue of St Catherine come to life and answer? He remembered the hardships he had endured with !Xau, whose indomitable spirit was the difference between life and death for both of them. When they had been taken into custody, De Villiers had been sent to Pretoria for what he now saw as re-education, but !Xau had simply disappeared. De Villiers was sure he had been murdered. If he had simply followed the major's orders, !Xau would still be alive.