A Sailor's Honour (31 page)

De Villiers had not expected the major to double-cross him, but his training as a Special Forces operator had made him instinctively careful, hence his own observation of the churchyard from a distance. After completing his reconnaissance, the scout lay down on the front steps of the church and pulled a hoody low over his face. He took on the appearance of a hobo, sleeping off the effects of hunger and alcoholism in the sun.

From a distance, De Villiers could see that the scout had dark hair and a full beard.

The major arrived from the opposite direction half an hour later. He too was early. De Villiers watched from his stakeout. The major stopped at the front steps. He casually – too casually – studied his scout. De Villiers was too far away to hear what was being said. The traffic on Bei den Mühren drowned out all other sound except the screeching of the seagulls patrolling the quay for scraps of food. He saw the bearded man nod twice and knew. It was a trap.

De Villiers watched as the major turned to face the road and looked from side to side. Behind him the bearded man moved his arms in animated movements.

De Villiers had seen enough. He stood up to leave, but sat down immediately when the bearded man suddenly stood up and grabbed the major by the shoulder. Across the Bei den Mühren from De Villiers, a different game played out.

‘You double-crossed me,' the man said in German. ‘You stole my money.'

‘It's not like that,' the major said. He also spoke German, but with the colonial accent of Namibia. ‘We tried …'

He couldn't finish the sentence as the bearded man shook him and interrupted. ‘You never paid me for the ship.'

The major pulled away and adjusted his coat. The scout gestured with his hands as he spoke. Every word seemed to have an equivalent in hand signals. ‘You never paid me for the ship,' he said a second time. ‘I lost money. I had to pay the welders and you just disappeared. You ran away.'

‘Listen to me,' the major said. ‘We tried to pay you, more than once. But the bank froze the account. We tried.'

‘Scheisse,' the man said. ‘Shit, shit, shit.'

‘No, it's true,' the major insisted. He extended his arms in front of him with his palms up. ‘We have the money now. Please give me a chance to explain. It's in the bank account.' He pointed at his watch. ‘We don't have much time.'

‘Much time for what?' the bearded man demanded.

The major explained. ‘The man who can unlock the account is coming soon. We are meeting him here. Then he will come with us to unlock the account and I'll pay you the money. The money is all there, I promise, and much, much more.'

‘Why didn't you get him to unlock the account when you had to pay me?' the man asked. ‘Instead you ran away and I couldn't find you. Until you come to me now and ask me to help you again.'

‘I can explain,' the major said, ‘but we don't have time.'

The bearded man again shook his head.

‘Okay,' the major said. ‘What happened was that the operation was terminated prematurely. The operator – the man we are seeing later – then signed the money over to us, but the bank wouldn't release the money unless he came to the bank himself and closed the account. But he left the country and disappeared and we only found him last year. We had to perform a whole new operation to make sure that he would cooperate with us.'

‘Where is he now?' the man asked.

‘On his way here,' the major said. ‘He is due in fifteen minutes.'

The bearded man contemplated what he had heard. ‘This time you pay me first,' he said. ‘Today.'

The major nodded. ‘Today is fine.'

‘With interest for seventeen years.'

The major tried to make a joke of it. ‘I thought you Muslims didn't believe in taking interest.'

The bearded man froze and stared at the major. His movements were exaggerated as he took the major by the lapels of his coat and pulled him closer. Their faces were a hand's breadth apart. ‘We take interest from infidels like you,' the man said. ‘And for the intifada.'

He let go of the major and stood indifferent to the major's efforts to regain his composure. ‘Today you pay me my money, with interest.'

‘Okay, with interest,' the major said.

‘And the money for the new job,' the man pressed his advantage.

‘Half today, and half when the new job is finished,' the major said.

‘How are you going to do it?' the man asked. ‘Is it just welding and steelwork, like the last time?'

‘No,' the major said. ‘It's a bit more complicated.' He looked at his watch. ‘Look,' he said. ‘We don't have much time and we can work out the details later. But this is how: we supply the explosives and the detonators and the radio transmitters. All you have to do is to weld each device in place at the end of the section inside the service channel. We'll disguise the device so that it looks like a survey beacon for the surveyors to aim at during the construction period to ensure that each section of the arch is perfectly aligned with the next section. It will be easy, you'll see. Half today and half when the new job is finished,' the major confirmed.

‘Ten million, like we agreed, half today and half later. When the final section is fitted to the arch at the stadium.'

The major realised that he would have no security, but he also knew that he had a man placed well enough in the construction and surveying team to be able to check during the manufacturing process whether their devices had been welded in place. ‘I need to make a phone call,' he said. He turned away from the hobo and made the call, but there was no answer. He realised that, as the operative in the field, he would have to make the decision himself.

‘Five million now,' the man said when the major had put the cellphone back in his pocket. ‘When that roof falls down, they will trace the manufacture to me and they will arrest me within days, just like they identified Atta and the others almost immediately. By then I will have to be far away with my family. I am the one taking the risks, not you. I want the money today.'

‘Lie down and pretend you're asleep,' the major said. ‘He'll be here any moment now.'

De Villiers was intrigued by what he had seen. It looked like some altercation followed by an agreement between the two men. He could not guess what it was about, but he knew that they were waiting for him. I could always walk away later, he thought.

There were advantages to meeting on the front steps. The steps were only visible from the road, and there the passing traffic was moving so fast and so noisily that it was unlikely that anyone would take notice of any activities in the churchyard. He got up and carefully placed one of the sharpened bicycle spokes on the inside of his right forearm under the sleeve of his shirt and slipped a thin elastic band over it to hold it in place. Then he fastened the second spoke to his left forearm. He walked slowly towards the church, keeping the two men on the steps in sight at all times.

The best laid plans of mice and men. He thought of George and Lennie in the Steinbeck novel and the choices men of principle have to make from time to time. Allow a feeble-minded friend to be hanged for murder or step in and end his life as painlessly as possible?

The teacher had asked the question. ‘Why did Steinbeck make George kill Lennie?'

‘To avoid a greater evil,' the class had said in unison.

‘What do you think happened to George?' The question was not in the subject materials. No one answered. ‘Come on, what do you think? Anyone?'

‘He walked away,' De Villiers said. A girl in the front sniggered.

‘Yes,' the teacher said. ‘You may snigger, but that's what he did. He walked away, physically and emotionally.'

Walking away physically had never been a problem for De Villiers. His training had seen to that. Exfiltration, his instructors had called it. Exit. Run. Flee. Withdraw. Escape. Exfiltration. It is the first thing you prepare, they had said. We don't go on kamikaze missions. We want to come back home.

The presence of the bearded man would complicate his homecoming, De Villiers knew. Two men instead of one. Walking away would not be so easy. He had to know what was going on.

He started walking towards the church.

It had been easy to walk away when he had Robert Mugabe in the sights of his sniper's rifle at Vila Nova Armada on the banks of the Cuito River. The order to shoot Mugabe had been an unlawful one, and his moral sense had made him dismantle the rifle and walk away. It had cost his spotter's life, De Villiers knew, and remembered, every day. Lieutenant Jacques Verster. A young life lost because De Villiers had made the decision to walk away.

Walking away had not been so easy later, when De Villiers was being held in the detention barracks and tortured until he had suffered such a serious brain injury that he had to be taken to 1 Military Hospital by ambulance. It was impossible to walk away when they locked him in a padded cell and gave him mind-altering drugs. He had tried, he now remembered, to end his own life in order to walk away from them. But they had put him in a straightjacket and had plied him with psychotherapy until his mind and his will had become pliable and subject to their direction.

And then they had let him go. And when they let him go, De Villiers remembered, he tried to walk back to them, to the comfort of their barracks and their men and their operations, but they had shunned him.

Until they had an operation no one else would touch. The
Alicia Mae.
He felt he had to know.

And then they killed his wife and children. But he had walked away even from that.

He looked up and saw the major standing on the steps looking left and right, but De Villiers was coming from the front. De Villiers stopped to wait for an opportunity to cross the road. He too looked left and right, but the danger was in front of him on the steps of the church.

There was the man who had been De Villiers's contact when he had been sent on the mission to shoot Robert Mugabe. This was the man who had directed operations when De Villiers was being pursued for hundreds of kilometres through the Angolan Kalahari by 32 Batallion soldiers. This was the man who had locked him up in the detention barracks and later in a mental institution, the man who had planned the
Alicia Mae
operation and who had had De Villiers thrown off the boat in Durban. This was the man who had sent the killers who murdered Annelise and Marcel and Jeandré, the man who had orchestrated the abduction of Zoë in New Zealand and of Liesl Weber in Durban.

This time, walking away was not an option.

The major turned around and looked up at the sky. De Villiers crossed Bei den Mühren at a run, ducking between the fast-moving trucks. He entered the churchyard from behind the major and took the high ground at the top of the steps behind them. He tapped the major on the shoulder. The major turned, forced to look up at De Villiers.

‘I told you not to send anyone to follow me,' De Villiers said. He spoke Afrikaans. He had not planned what he would say.

‘I didn't,' the major said.

‘What about him?' De Villiers asked. He pointed at the prostrate man on the steps. The bearded man sat up and squinted at De Villiers from under his dark eyebrows.

‘What about him?' the major asked.

‘You sent him.'

The major put his hands on his hips. ‘What makes you think that?'

‘I saw him arriving and I watched as he scouted the area. I saw you arrive and talk to him.'

The major gestured to the man and he stood up. He was as complete an opposite to the albino major as you could find. Heavy-set and swarthy, the man was at least two metres tall and had thick black hair and a neatly trimmed black beard. He joined De Villiers on the top step and towered over him as well.

‘The money is for him,' the major said in English. ‘The money must go into his account. Ten million US in two installments. Five million today, and another five when the operation has been completed.'

The bearded man nodded.

‘What operation?' De Villiers said. ‘This is not what we agreed. We agreed it would be just you and me.'

‘It's an operational necessity,' the major said. ‘There has been a change of plan. He will give us his account number and will come with us to the bank. You will transfer the money to our accounts and that will be the end of it.'

‘There's never an end with you,' De Villiers said. ‘There's always something else, something more you want from me.'

‘This is the last time,' the major said.

‘I won't have anything further to do with you, or any of your operations,' De Villiers said. ‘I don't even want to think of the operation you have planned with him.'

‘He's an engineer,' the major insisted. ‘He's part of an operation.'

De Villiers shook his head and turned to leave. ‘He was part of the
Alicia Mae
operation,' the major said. ‘He was in charge of the steelwork and engineering. We owe him money for the
Alicia Mae
refit.' There was a sense of urgency in the major's tone.

The engineer nodded in agreement.

‘Fuck off,' De Villiers said. ‘I won't be part of any of your operations. Not even in the remotest way.'

The engineer pressed a card against De Villiers's chest. ‘Five million US,' he said in a thick, guttural accent. He pushed with the back of his hand against De Villiers's chest, forcing him to take the card. ‘Today,' he said, knocking on De Villiers's chest with his knuckles. ‘Today.'

‘I need to know about the
Alicia Mae
,' De Villiers said.

The major shook his head, but the engineer bared his teeth in a laugh. ‘Alright,' he said. ‘But five million US, okay?'

De Villiers nodded.

‘No,' the major said and waved a finger under the engineer's nose, but the engineer brushed him off.