African Sky (36 page)

Pip pondered the words. ‘What else did he say, Roger? What's got him so excited? He must have known that even if we took him in, he'd be able to explain his side of the story.'

‘He told Sergeant Hayes that there was going to be an attack on Kumalo.'

Pip looked at the blood-smeared sergeant. ‘What else did he say?'

‘Don't know,' said Hayes sulkily. ‘He attacked me before I could get more information out of him.'

Pip noticed the way Roger Pembroke rolled his eyes at this comment.
She'd wager that it was Hayes rather than Paul who had initiated the fisticuffs. Bryant, unless he had gone completely off his rocker, must have come across more information. She was prepared to reconsider him as a murder suspect, in the light of her latest investigations, but she'd come across nothing that suggested an attack on the base.

‘There was something else. Rather odd,' Pembroke said.

‘Don't hold back, Roger. What was it?'

‘He said to tell you that he'd found his missing aeroplane.'

Odd indeed, Pip thought. Paul had flown to the saltpans to have another look at the area where the dead pilot had been found. Had he discovered another piece of this increasingly complicated puzzle out in that godforsaken wilderness?

They arrived at the entrance to Kumalo to find two askaris dismantling the remains of the broken boom gate and a third hurriedly sweeping red and white splinters off the roadway. ‘Go straight through, madam,' one of the Africans said to Pip. ‘Flight Sergeant Henderson is expecting you.'

‘Is Mr Bryant here, on base?'

‘Yes, madam. The last I heard, on the telephone, was that he was trying to steal an aeroplane.'

‘Flight line, Tom,' she said to the driver. ‘Straight up the road, then between those big hangars. Hurry!'

The police car raced through the air force base and swung onto the Tarmac. ‘There,' said Tom, pointing through the windscreen.

Bryant had been delayed because of air traffic congestion. It would have been funny, he thought, except for the circumstances.

Henderson and his ragtag posse of would-be captors had piled into a tender truck and trundled down the runway after him like the Keystone Kops as he'd taxied the Harvard to the far end. Every now and then the flight sergeant would raise his revolver and point it at the plane. In answer, Bryant would hold his hand out of the cockpit to show he still carried his own weapon. Henderson did not have the guts
to open fire on him, he thought. It would only be a matter of time, though, before they realised that the best way to stop him was to block the runway with a tanker or a line of smaller vehicles.

‘Come on, come on,' Bryant said as the Oxford touched down at the opposite end of the concrete strip and raced towards him. He knew the twin-engine machine would stop and turn off well before it reached him. The air-traffic controller, a WAAF sergeant, had probably saved his life when she had bellowed at him through the wireless to hold his position. At first he'd thought it was a trick to keep him on the ground so that Henderson could overwhelm him, but then he'd seen the two Oxfords circling.

‘Tower, this is Bryant,' he said. Off to his right, the truck carrying Henderson and his men was edging closer. ‘Tell that other Oxford to hold. I'm taking off now, whether you give the green light or not.'

‘Sir,' the woman's Rhodesian-accented voice was almost pleading, ‘you know I can't give you clearance to take off.'

‘People'll die if you don't, Sarah.'

‘Look down the runway, sir. Near the hangars. Police have arrived.'

‘Too late,' he said. He opened the throttle and released the brakes. The Harvard shot forward. Henderson turned back off the runway and followed the aircraft's progress down the side road.

Bryant looked ahead. The runway was clear. He saw the police car stop, and four figures climb out. One was in a skirt.

Pip took off her hat and waved it in the air, signalling to him.

His speed was nearly thirty-five knots already and he felt the tail wheel start to rise from the concrete. He could be airborne in seconds. The question was, did he trust the policewoman enough to stop now? If she arrested him on the spot and they took him away, the day might end in tragedy. No, he would go it alone.

He could see Pip mouthing something, still waving furiously. Suddenly she dropped her hat and charged out into the middle of the runway.

‘Shit!' Bryant said. The bloody woman was going to kill herself. He wrenched back the throttle and stamped on the brakes. He felt the tail wheel drop with a thud. The Harvard slowed, reluctantly, like a
confused horse after a false start. He swerved, and the violent manoeuvre felt for an instant like it might tear off one of the landing gear struts. Pip was getting closer and closer. At last, he stopped, only a few yards from her. The engine still growled. He tore off his flying helmet and yelled, ‘Jesus Christ, you very nearly got yourself killed!'

‘Get out, Paul! Let's talk about this,' she called back, cupping her hands around her mouth.

He shook his head. ‘No way. You sold me out. Why have you turned on me?'

‘There's too much to explain. Shut down and get out. You won't be arrested, Paul. We have to talk, though.'

‘No dice. You can come with me if you want, but I'm going. This is serious, Pip.'

‘That's a bloody understatement,' she said. She looked back. Hayes and other policemen were standing with the air force men, hanging back.

‘Last chance, Pip. Either you trust me on this or you don't.'

Could she trust him? She'd slept with him on Sunday and been willing to see him charged and hanged for murder yesterday. She'd gone looking for evidence with which to nail that conviction, but all she had turned up was doubt. She looked into his eyes and remembered the tenderness in them as they'd made love. Paul Bryant was a troubled man. Even though he had hidden the truth from her about his relationship with Felicity and Catherine, he had never lied to her about his own feelings, his own weaknesses.

‘Bloody hell,' she swore again as she hitched up her skirt enough for her to get one foot on the Harvard's port wing. She clambered up until she was next to him. He jerked a thumb rearwards, indicating she should climb into the seat behind him. He smiled and winked at her as she nodded her understanding. It was crazy, but she smiled back. She put a foot on the stubby step beneath the rear cockpit, grabbed the rim of the fuselage and heaved herself up and in.

She sat on something uncomfortable and found that the last person in the aircraft had left his flying helmet, which was connected by a lead to the aircraft's radio and intercom, on the rear seat. Pip also noticed that she wasn't sitting on a cushion, but rather a packed parachute. Bryant was pointing to his head and ears with his free hand. She picked up the leather helmet and pulled it on.

‘Hear me?' His voice, tinny and slightly scratchy, filled her ears.

‘Yes,' she said, unaware that he couldn't hear her.

He turned back and showed her how he was holding the dangling oxygen mask over his face. He removed it from his face and mouthed, ‘Talk into this.'

She placed the rubber mask over her face. It smelled of sweat and something worse. She tried not to think about germs – the least of her problems at the moment. ‘OK. Can you hear me now?'

‘No worries,' he said. His voice, his Australian accent, was as laid-back as if he were talking about the weather. ‘Hold tight, Pip. As I taxi, grab those straps behind your shoulders and pull them in front of you. They connect to a belt across your lap. Buckle up. I'm not wasting any more time.'

Before she was able to grab the dangling mask again and say anything, she found herself pushed back into the uncomfortable seat as he accelerated down the airstrip. Bryant slewed the plane around in a turn so tight that she was thrown against the metal wall of the fuselage. Something sharp dug into her ribs. She was still struggling with the restraint buckle when she felt the rear of the Harvard rise and, suddenly, for the first time in her life, she was flying. ‘Oh, my Lord!'

‘Nice feeling, isn't it?' he said, turning and smiling at her over his shoulder. Below them, Henderson's vehicle was slowing to a halt in the middle of the runway. Bryant gave the people on the ground a little wave.

‘So, what happens next?' Pip asked. She tried to sound calm and in control, but all of her senses were overloaded with the excitement and danger of the last few minutes.

‘Next we stop a lot of people, including the leaders of Rhodesia and
South Africa, from getting killed, I hope. If I'm wrong about all this you can arrest me when we get back on the ground. If I'm not, and we get out of this alive, I'm taking you out to dinner tonight.'

‘You are?' she said, but forgot to hold the mask to her face. She still wasn't sure that she could trust him completely or that he wasn't still involved with Catherine De Beers somehow. As much as she wanted him to be innocent, he had a lot of explaining to do first. If she had made the wrong decision, climbing aboard the aircraft, she might never return to Bulawayo alive. She gulped air as the Harvard bounced through some turbulence. Her palms were wet and her heart was racing, and it wasn't because of a fear of flying. She remembered to hold up the oxygen mask this time and said, more businesslike now, ‘Do you want to start talking first, or shall I?'

‘Ladies first,' he said into the intercom. He pushed the throttle forward, nudged the stick and pointed the aircraft north by north-west towards Isilwane Ranch.

T
he Harvard rolled to a stop outside the hangar beside Isilwane Ranch's airstrip. Catherine De Beers killed the engine. She took off her flying helmet, shook her dark curls free and revelled in the feel of the slight breeze. She climbed out of the aircraft and then jumped off the wing onto the grass.

She looked around her. No one. ‘Hello?' she called. No answer. She felt her pulse start to quicken. She savoured the feeling of fear. She liked it.

The hangar door slid open with an ear-jarring screech. It was dark and cool inside. She sniffed the air. The place smelled of oil and fuel, and something else.

There was movement behind her, in the shadows, but she was too slow to turn. A hand was clamped over her mouth and she felt the cold steel point of a knife prick the soft skin of her neck. The other odours she'd caught were from the man who held her – horse, leather and sweat.

‘I thought you'd never come,' Reitz said, dropping his knife hand.

‘Didn't you miss me, Hennie? Don't you want me now? We've got time.'

‘There will be time for that later, God willing. You cut it rather fine,' he said.

She curled her lower lip playfully. ‘You had plenty of time for me on your last trip to Rhodesia, and in Windhoek.'

It had been two years earlier, though the memory was as fresh as if it had happened the night before.

His first mission, to contact prominent Ossewa Brandwag members in southern Africa and establish a network of agents sympathetic to Nazi Germany's cause, had taken him as far north as Isilwane Ranch in Rhodesia, to the estate of Hugo De Beers. The millionaire hunter had been a staunch member of the OB in South Africa, before moving north of the border between the wars. Reitz had been told that the old man would surely be supportive of Hitler, and the creation of an independent, Afrikaner-controlled South Africa – perhaps even incorporating Rhodesia after Britain's defeat.

The reality, however, was that De Beers had gone soft. ‘I admire old Adolf's views on racial purity, of course,' De Beers had told him over dinner at the ranch, ‘but the man's a megalomaniac. I want a proper democracy here, Hendrick, albeit one where the black man and the Englishman will forever know their places. It's bad enough being an outpost of the British Empire, I don't want us simply to swap a king for a führer!'

Reitz had argued, good-naturedly, with the older man throughout the seven days and nights he had spent at Isilwane, but had been unable to convince him. They had hunted during the trip, bagging sable, lion, elephant and eland. On the last day they had gone after a cape buffalo.

A hunt of a different kind had also taken place during that week. Catherine De Beers was not only beautiful, strong-willed and intelligent, she was also diametrically opposed to her husband when it came to the question of whether or not to support Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Catherine maintained that Africa needed Hitler, a single leader who could unite a continent, as he would do with Europe. Rumours had come out of Germany about the detention of the Jews, a subject
that fascinated Catherine. ‘To have the will, the power and the courage to cleanse a country, a continent, is just unbelievably brilliant,' she told him on the evening of the first night she came to his room. Reitz represented Germany and the new world order. He was also, he knew, attractive to women. She had circled him over the first two days and nights, like a prowling lioness, then caught him on the third.

The De Beers, he learned, slept in different rooms. Catherine complained that her husband was impotent.

Reitz had learned of many different sexual diversions during his years in Berlin. He had once been to a private club with one of the chemists from his firm, where men and women submitted to pain in order to achieve sexual gratification. He'd been intrigued by the concept but had never participated – as a giver or receiver of punishment. Until he met Catherine.

He wondered if her plan was to seduce him into taking her back to Germany with him. Instead, she asked him to murder her husband.

The arguments about politics and the Nazis continued during the hunting trips, and Reitz was able to convince himself that Hugo De Beers was not only opposed to Hitler's totalitarianism, he was an enemy of Germany. De Beers knew Reitz's real purpose in Africa. All it would take would be a slip of the tongue in the wrong company and Reitz would be arrested and probably hanged as a spy. Reitz had browsed through the Isilwane guest book and noticed the names of prominent politicians and senior military officers who had hunted on his estate. The man was well connected with the colonial government.

Reitz told Catherine, on the seventh night, that he would carry out her request. The next day, during the buffalo hunt, he murdered Hugo De Beers while the man's wife watched. After a night of fiercely passionate coupling – lovemaking was never the right word with Catherine – they travelled to Bulawayo to face the inevitable round of police interviews. He briefly met Felicity, who lived in Catherine's town house, and bedded the pair of them the night before he fled to neutral Portuguese Mozambique.

*

‘What happened to your friend Felicity?' he asked her as he led her out of the hangar's gloom. As far as he knew, Catherine had never told Felicity of his true identity or purpose for being in Rhodesia. If Felicity had been aware he had murdered Hugo, she showed no sign of it at the time.

‘She's dead, Hennie.'

‘Explain.'

‘It happened the night after I got back from Bechuanaland, with the Harvard.'

Reitz remembered his anxious wait under the cruel sun, how vulnerable he had felt squatting in the paltry shade cast by his horse's body, amidst the blinding whiteness of the saltpans, with just the two hired bushmen trackers for company.

He had scanned the empty sky for hours, searching for the Harvard, fearing it might never come or, worse, that Catherine might have been compromised and the British would instead gun him down.

As they had planned, when the tiny speck finally appeared, Reitz ordered one of the bushmen to lie down, feigning illness, and he took off his shirt and began waving furiously at the approaching aeroplane.

He smiled as he saw the trainer circling above him, bleeding off altitude with every circuit. The ruse had succeeded. In the aircraft, Catherine had persuaded the English pilot, Smythe, who was taking her on her second joy-flight, to land his Harvard.

He carried his Mauser with him to greet them when they landed – there was nothing unusual about a man being armed out in the wilds of Africa – and the pilot's expression of shock when Reitz levelled the rifle at him and ordered him to step down from the cockpit was almost comical.

‘Harm this lady and I'll see you hang, whoever you are,' Smythe growled at him.

The boy looked as though he should still be in school. Reitz mocked him with laughter and ordered him to strip.

‘Catherine?' the man asked in astonishment as she strode towards Reitz and kissed him quickly on the lips.

‘Sorry, James. I really am,' she said sweetly to him. ‘But we're going to need to borrow your aircraft for a while.'

Reitz gave the bushmen their orders and the diminutive hunters chased the confused, terrified
rooinek
out into the salt flats, well away from the telltale marks left by the Harvard's wheels on landing. Catherine laughed, loud and shrill, clapping her hands at Smythe's stumbling gait. The last thing the pilot saw before he died was his own aircraft roaring low overhead, the woman he believed he would bed behind the controls waving at him from the cockpit.

It had been Catherine's idea to steal a Harvard, a last-minute solution to a seemingly unsolvable problem created by her crash-landing her own Tiger Moth. She had flown to Windhoek, the capital of South-West Africa, to meet with Reitz, soon after his arrival by U-boat on the Skeleton Coast.

Their plan, hatched through coded messages sent via OB couriers and the German embassy's diplomatic pouch from neutral Portuguese Mozambique, had involved using Catherine's aircraft to deliver a deadly payload onto the parade attended by Jan Smuts and Sir Godfrey Huggins. Her Tiger Moth, a familiar sight over Kumalo, would not have attracted any undue attention until it was too late.

‘How in God's name are you going to steal an air force training aircraft,' Reitz had asked, incredulous, in the hotel room where they had rendezvoused.

‘I am a woman, Hennie, in case you had forgotten. It's all arranged, though it took me a little longer to organise than I imagined. The first man I tried to convince to take me up in a Harvard, an Australian, point-blank refused, even after I'd seduced him
and
introduced him to my dear friend Felicity.'

Reitz had shaken his head at her audacity, as well as her use of her body to meet their needs. He remembered clearly how easily she had convinced him to murder her ageing husband. He silently marvelled at the will of the flyer who had resisted her.

‘I had a second fish on the hook, a Canadian this time. He resisted my womanly charms – the man was faithful to his little wifey, believe
it or not – so I offered to pay him for a couple of joy-flights in a Harvard. He was in debt up to his eyeballs.'

‘He agreed?' Reitz asked.

‘Yes, and it damn well cost me a fortune, but the oaf crashed at Isilwane on landing the first time he came up to see me, and ended up getting arrested and charged by the air force.'

‘Stop teasing and tell me you have organised an aircraft, Catherine. This mission cannot fail – the future of my people rests on it.'

‘Calm yourself, Hennie dear. It's all arranged. My third little piggy is a sweet young English boy called Smythe. I've played hard to get with him and I do believe he may be a virgin. He's taken me up once already and he will do so again, at any date and time of our choosing. He's looking forward to his big reward.'

Which, Reitz reflected now, the boy had never received.

After taking off from the saltpans in Bechuanaland, Catherine had flown to a cattle farm not far from the Guinea Fowl training base, near Gwelo, and hidden the aircraft in a disused barn. The farm was owned by the De Beers estate and managed by a Rhodesian named Butler.

She continued her explanation as he led her behind the hangar to where he had stored the two metal cylinders. ‘I took Butler's old car back to Bulawayo. I planned on staying the night with Felicity before coming back here to Isilwane. It was the evening that I radioed you, sending you the coded message to say I'd arrived safely and hidden the aeroplane.'

He nodded.

‘As I was packing up my set, rolling up the antenna, Felicity barged in. I'd telephoned her at the air force base to tell her I was coming over to stay, unexpectedly, and that I'd let myself in. However, she wanted to surprise me, so she left the base early. I wasn't sure what she'd seen, but she must have been suspicious.'

‘Did she confront you about it?' he asked.

‘Not straightaway. We had drinks and dinner, and one thing led to another, as it usually did with us. It was halfway through that she asked me what I was doing with a radio transmitter and receiver. She must
have snooped in my suitcase while I was in the bathroom or something. I'd tied her up by then – just like how you used to tie me up,' she smiled. ‘Perhaps she felt truly helpless for the first time since I'd known her. She asked me to undo the bindings, to free her, so we could talk.'

‘Did you?'

‘No,' Catherine said. She stared into his eyes. ‘While I had her tied like that I told her everything.'

He shook his head. ‘Why, Catherine? Why would you do that?'

‘I didn't want to hide anything from her anymore, Hennie. I wanted her to know who I really was – who I've become – and what I stand for. I asked her if she'd help us with the plan.'

‘My God, you could have ruined everything,' he said angrily.

‘Don't be stupid, Hennie. I was always in charge. I gave her the option of joining us, but she said she never would. She started crying and begged me to let her go.'

‘She could have lied to you, told you she was for us, and then run to the British. What would have become of us then?'

Catherine shook her head. ‘You didn't know her like I did, Hennie. She could never lie to me. I'd have seen right through her immediately. I thought that if she wasn't exactly mad about Hitler, she'd at least be sympathetic to our ideal of a world without so many damn blacks in it. I tried to explain to her that we could control their numbers, in the same way that you'd told me about what was really happening with the Jews.'

‘That was secret information I entrusted to you, Catherine,' he said, his anger unabated.

‘I know,' she shrugged. ‘I thought it would sway her, but I was wrong. I knew she was patriotic – joining the WAAFs and all that but I never knew just how soft she was on the blacks. She told me I was a fool and an evil person if I would even consider killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people. I gave her a chance, Hennie, but she said she'd die before betraying her country. I tried to tell her that her country would be better than in her wildest dreams if Hitler won the war, but then she spat at me.'

Reitz just shook his head again, then said: ‘So you killed her?'

Catherine smiled. ‘You've killed, many times, haven't you, Hennie, apart from Hugo?'

‘Of course. I'm a soldier.'

‘But never with your own hands?'

‘No.'

Her voice was low and thick as she said: ‘I miss her, Hennie, I truly do, but killing her was the most intensely erotic experience of my life.'

Reitz blinked.

‘I had to make it look like a man had done it. It wasn't hard. We'd played games, she and I, just like you and I played games, Hennie. But this time it was the real thing.' She opened her eyes and gave a little pout as she saw the shock on his face. ‘Aw, too much for you, Hennie? Do you think that men should do all the killing in this brave new world of ours?'