The Soldier who Said No (12 page)

‘Is he a suspect?’ the Prime Minister asked, not beating about the bush.

The Deputy Commissioner and Henderson exchanged a glance before the Commissioner answered. ‘We don’t know yet.’

‘I want this thing dealt with and I want it done quickly,’ the Prime Minister said.

‘Yes, Ma’am,’ the Deputy Commissioner nodded.

The Prime Minister tapped on the desk as she considered the facts. ‘Why should we be the target of terrorists?’ she asked.

The policeman spoke as if he had read her mind. ‘Terrorists don’t care about the good that you may have done. They’re interested only in their own agendas. And those could be quite bizarre.’

‘And why would anyone want to kill me, with a bow and arrow of all things?’ she asked.

‘We don’t know,’ the Deputy Commissioner had to admit.

‘We don’t know yet,’ Henderson said next to him, stepping in despite himself.

‘I don’t know what to think any more,’ the Prime Minister said. ‘I have the Diplomatic Protection Squad in the house next door, yet I have someone shoot at me from the front gate, after we gave them a wake-up call just the other day when some vandals sprayed their signs on my wall.’

The Prime Minister looked from the one to the other.

‘Am I going to have to spend the rest of my life hiding behind security people?’

The Deputy Commissioner held his tongue. He had long advocated that the Prime Minister should be less complacent and more careful when she appeared in public.

‘You have work to do,’ the Prime Minister said suddenly, and turned her attention to a sheaf of papers on her desk.

‘You’d better get back to the hospital and speak to him. Do it today,’ the Deputy Commissioner ordered when the three policemen were outside next to their cars. ‘I want to know immediately what he says once you’ve spoken to him.’

‘Yes, Commissioner,’ Henderson said, acknowledging the order.

Kupenga had not said a word the entire time. He was annoyed because his tribe had been described as a bunch of yobs.

Henderson got into the passenger seat and Kupenga drove them to Brightside Hospital, a five-minute drive from the Prime Minister’s residence.

After the policemen had left, the Prime Minister willed herself to think of positives should National indeed win the election next November. Out of habit, she held up a finger. One, they would have to find the money to plug the hole in the budget, and particularly in the
ACC
accounts. It wasn’t something Labour could do without committing political suicide. Two, National would be able to close the book on the outstanding Maori land claims, a process that had dragged on long after its sell-by date as far as the majority of voters were concerned. National, at least, could survive without the support of the Maori vote. And while they were at it, they could force the Foreshore and Seabed Bill through. It was high time that the moral high ground the Maori had claimed with regard to New Zealand’s coastal waters and seashore should be reoccupied by the majority. Ordinary New Zealanders, usually quite sensitive in matters of race, were now openly fractious. Enough is enough, they were saying. It’s time for the Maori to be satisfied with equal treatment. There should be no special programmes, no further reparations, and no more land reform.

But she knew that Labour couldn’t do what needed to be done.

Let National do it, she thought, then we’ll see the end of this and the next time Labour comes into power, we will be able to concentrate on the policies and practices that are the traditional Labour programmes, the projects that really matter to Labour.

She calmed herself with a strong black coffee and spoke aloud in her deep voice. ‘Maybe New Zealand has got too small for me. Maybe it’s time to look to a bigger stage, perhaps something at the
UN
in Geneva or New York.’

Henderson and Kupenga parked in front of the hospital and marched in. They walked straight past the reception desk to Room 6. There was an elderly man in a suit at the foot of the bed, a stocky man with broad hands. The man was speaking to De Villiers.

‘The catheter can come out now, but it’s going to be uncomfortable.’

The surgeon came out of the room, followed by Sister Appollus.

‘He wants to know when he can go home, Doctor.’

Henderson strained to hear, but some workmen on a scaffold outside the main entrance chose the exact moment to start their compressor.

‘Friday, after my rounds,’ the surgeon said.

When Sister Appollus returned to Room 6, she found that Henderson and Kupenga had taken up positions on either side of De Villiers’s bed. The drips had been removed from his arm. A nurse stood at the foot of the bed, a bemused smile on her lips, watching Sister Appollus march into the room.

Florette Appollus elbowed the nurse out of the way. ‘What,’ she said, ‘not you two again! Out! Out! Out!’ She pointed at the door.

‘We’re not leaving until we have spoken to him,’ Henderson said.

‘You’re leaving right now, or I’ll call the police.’

‘We
are
the police,’ Kupenga said.

Sister Appollus trumped Kupenga’s card. ‘Then you should know better,’ she hissed. ‘Now get out before I call Security.’

Henderson and Kupenga stood firm.

‘Nurse, get Security here.’ Sister Appollus knew who held the sword of authority on her watch.

The nurse ran out of the room. A minute later the hospital’s security officers came storming in.

‘What’s the problem, Sister?’

‘Mr Te ’O, we need space to work with our patient, and these two gentlemen need help to find their way out.’

The security men sized up Henderson and Kupenga. ‘Come with us,’ Te ’O said. Henderson strained to read the misaligned nameplate pinned to his chest pocket.
Senior Security Officer Te ’O.

‘We’re police, Bro,’ Kupenga said, holding up his warrant card.

The security man grinned. ‘I’ve always wanted to throw a policeman out on the footpath.’

‘Especially one who calls you Bro, eh Bro,’ the second security officer said. His nameplate read:
Security Officer Leauanae
.

‘Shall we do them one at a time, or one each?’ Te ’O asked. He cracked his knuckles.

‘Okay,’ Henderson said, ‘we’re leaving.’ And then to Sister Appollus, ‘But we’ll be back, sooner than you think.’

‘You’re welcome, Bro,’ Te ’O said as Henderson and Kupenga tried to squeeze through the door side by side.

‘Anytime,’ Leauanae added. ‘We’ll be here. Can we show you the way to your car?’

‘Fuck you, Bro,’ Kupenga said, but Henderson kept his back straight and walked away, trying hard to keep his dignity intact.

They thought they heard Te ’O and Leauanae laughing with Sister Appollus before they had got as far as the reception desk.

Sister Appollus restored order, called a male nurse to remove the catheter and closed the door behind her when she left the room. De Villiers should have anticipated something when the door was shut for the first time during his stay in the hospital, but nothing his imagination could have produced would have prepared him for the nightmare of the next twenty-four hours.

The male nurse – ‘Hello, I am Nurse William and I am going to relieve you of the catheter’ – started by exposing his patient’s lower abdomen.

De Villiers immediately tensed. He let out a groan that went on for the duration of the procedure.

‘Uuuuhhhnnn!’

‘There,’ said Nurse William, holding the offending tube up as if it were a trophy. ‘Well done. That didn’t hurt, did it?’

De Villiers was breathing in shallow gasps. How would he know? De Villiers thought, not irrationally. Of course it hurt.

‘Now let’s get rid of the drain,’ Nurse William said. For five days now the tube inserted next to the operation scar had drained blood from De Villiers’s abdominal cavity in an ever-reducing flow which appeared to have stopped the night before.

De Villiers groaned.

But the drain came out with hardly a sting and Nurse William finished by sticking a small piece of surgical tape over the wound.

The next twenty-four hours De Villiers was in and out of the bathroom.

During her morning rounds, Sister Appollus came to his rescue. She sent the nurses out and fetched a fresh towel from the bathroom.

‘You’ll have to start doing some exercises,’ she said. ‘Lift your bum so I can put the towel under you.’

De Villiers obeyed automatically.

‘Now this is what you do,’ she said. ‘You tighten your pelvic muscles for a few seconds, as if to cut off your pee in midstream. Then you relax the muscles again. Can you do that?’

De Villiers tried his best. It hurt.

‘You have to do it ten times,’ she said. ‘Every time you wake up, you do it ten times. And every day from tomorrow, you add one, so tomorrow you do eleven, and Friday twelve, and so on. You do that until you get to fifty, and then you do fifty at a time three times a day.’

‘Until when?’ De Villiers wanted to know.

‘For the rest of your life.’

De Villiers was surprised at the absence of empathy in her voice.

‘Once you’ve had cancer,’ she added, ‘you must learn to look out for it so that you can fight it. You must learn to fight it every day.’

Three hours later they bivouacked under a sycamore fig, a tree found wherever there is water nearby. It was a good find and it gave them hope. They dug for clean water in a sandbank and took turns to drink from their cupped hands.

Birdlife was abundant along the river banks, and a tree squirrel scuttled around the trunk of a white seringa tree. De Villiers spied a red-billed hornbill. They made good eating, a bit on the fatty side, but fat was what he and !Xau would need to prepare them for the leaner times they could expect once they left the river course.

‘I’m going to look for honey,’ De Villiers said and stood up.

!Xau didn’t look up. He was shaping a sharpened digging stick from a russet willow shoot with slow, measured strokes of his Best. ‘It is over there.’ He pointed over his shoulder with his knife.

De Villiers found the small stingless bees, no larger than gnats, almost immediately. They led him to their comb, where a clay pipe the diameter of a pencil betrayed their entrance.
Gobatsane
, De Villiers remembered from his childhood on his uncle’s farm. Honey made by stingless bees in a clay pot buried in the ground. It is
mokatsane
when it is deposited in a hollow tree trunk,
moka
for short. Another memory nagged at the back of his mind, but De Villiers had to concede that he had forgotten what the honey is called when it is found in the crevice of a rock.

He carefully lifted the pot from the ground and carried it whole back to !Xau. He found the Bushman wearing only the traditional loincloth. !Xau pointed to disturbed soil. ‘I buried the uniform there.’ They took turns to dip their fingers in the honey.

The Bushman heard the helicopters first and they immediately took cover in the shrubbery. !Xau’s skin was the colour of the soil, a khaki brown, and he melted into the earth, virtually invisible unless you should tread on him. De Villiers watched the sky through eyelids reduced to slits. TWO
SADF
Alouette gunships flew over slowly. The pilots manoeuvred their machines side by side, like giant wasps, covering every square foot of ground below. Men with binoculars combed the ground while others sat behind them with rifles pointing down.

When the Alouettes had reached the end of the wooded area a kilometre to the north of their position, they heard them returning for another sweep. When they had completed their second sweep and turned to hover together above where De Villiers estimated Rito to be, he was certain that they were also being hunted on foot. Under normal operational conditions, the helicopters would never have hovered over a village in enemy territory. They could be blown out of the sky by a single soldier with a grenade launcher fixed to his
AK
47. Ground forces had to have taken control of the village and they were not far behind.

After an hour the sounds of the Alouettes moved steadily south and faded. De Villiers and !Xau conferred briefly. Ordinarily they would have preferred to move at dusk, but the sun was still too high at four o’clock. On the other hand, !Xau suggested, those who were tracking them could only do so in daylight and would not reach their position before the sun was down. If they started moving now, they could be very far away by dawn. !Xau pointed east.

De Villiers studied the map again. The decision had been made by the Alouettes that had flown off towards Rundu and the trackers who were now ahead of them.

They would have to take the long route home, away from the river and the food and water it provided, but also away from the risk of detection by the local population.

De Villiers looked at his companion and decided to bet his life on !Xau’s skills. ‘We have to get away from the river before they catch us here.’

!Xau read his mind and pointed east. ‘There is water and food in the veld.’

They set off at a brisk pace in a south-easterly direction. They made good speed but in stealth, wiping their tracks as best they could. The next river on their intended route certain to have water was the Luiana about seventy kilometres to the east, but there were encouraging signs on the map. It showed a succession of dry riverbeds running north to south, each about a day’s forced march from the next. They could go without food for a week, but they would need a fresh supply of water every day for at least the first three days in order to survive.

In the game reserves they were about to traverse, De Villiers and !Xau would face an additional enemy, the poachers who roam all of sub-Saharan Africa, armed with
AK
47s and machetes, killing for gain, seldom to eat, and for whom any white man represents the authority of the law, protectors of the game and spoilers of their trade, a mortal enemy.

!Xau entered the Luengué without a backward glance. It was De Villiers who felt the presence of the pursuers on their spoor and had to look back.

They hurried away from the river to put as much distance between them and the men following them. They quickly found the road to Luengué. It was no more than a track carved out of the soil by fourwheel drives. It initially ran in a north-easterly direction, but De Villiers saw on the map that it would turn east and south of east in due course.