African Sky (37 page)

‘There'll be enough for all of us before we eventually win, Catherine,' he said. ‘I hope you covered your trail adequately.'

She smiled again. ‘Oh yes, lover. I certainly have.' She explained how she had planted some of Felicity's things in the boot of the car owned by an illegal fuel dealer. 'It all came together perfectly. I'd also organised for Paul Bryant, the Australian pilot I first tried to get a Harvard from, to collect some fuel from the man and bring it to me when he came up to investigate the crash of the Canadian's Harvard. My fall-back plan, which it turned out I needed, was to point the police towards Bryant.'

‘You needed this fall-back plan?' Reitz asked, still not feeling as though they were completely in the clear.

‘The police started checking the black's alibi. I paid the investigating constable a visit and told her some unsavoury things about Squadron Leader Bryant. The way her eyes lit up, I'd imagine he's in gaol and charged with Flick's rape and murder by now.'

Reitz brought her back to the present. ‘A man came to the farm, by aeroplane, a Harvard, yesterday. At first I thought it was you, arriving early.'

Now it was her turn to show alarm. ‘What did he look like?'

‘Stocky, dark-haired. Hard face. He looked, what's the word . . . messy, for a military man.'

‘Bryant. Damn.'

‘You think he was on to us? You just said he should have been arrested by now.'

‘I know, I know.' She chewed a fingernail while she thought it over. ‘He was still looking for the Englishman's aeroplane when I last saw him. Also, he was suspicious about ammunition.'

‘Ammunition?' Catherine had been up to a lot since their last meeting – too much for his liking.

‘Don't look at me with that disapproving scowl. I've got a surprise for you!'

‘I can hardly wait,' he said.

‘Spare me your sarcasm, Hennie. You'll thank me when you see it. It's the icing on our cake.' She took his hand and snatched up a shovel which had been leaning against a wall of the hangar.

Catherine walked through knee-length grass for a minute or two before exclaiming: ‘Here!' She handed Reitz the shovel and said: ‘Dig. There, under that stick.'

He brushed aside the twig that had been left in the dirt as a marker and did as ordered. Catherine had carefully removed a patch of long-grassed turf before digging the hole, and he silently commended her thoroughness. The soil beneath the patch was loose and the blade soon clanged on something firm. She dropped to her knees and together they cleared away the last of the dirt from the top of a wooden crate.

‘Took me ages to bury this stuff,' she said as she wiped the perspiration from her forehead with the back of her hand.

Reitz watched her out of the corner of his eye as he got his fingernails under the lid of the crate and started to lift. A few minutes ago she had sent an injection of ice water down his spine as she coolly related how she'd raped and killed her best friend. Now she was as excited as a little girl on an Easter-egg hunt.

He couldn't wait until the operation was over. After Ursula's death, and on learning he would be returning to Africa, he had started to think more and more about Catherine. She was the complete opposite of his dead German girlfriend. There was a dark side to Catherine
which excited him and, if he were honest, scared him a little, though he sensed that was part of her attraction.

He lifted the lid of the crate clear. ‘Where did you get all this?' Reitz stared in amazement at a pile of .303 bullets, their brass casings glittering like gold in the morning light. What made this cache so special was that each of the rounds was slotted into loops on long canvas belts.

‘Your secret weapon will take care of the graduating pilots and Messrs Huggins and Smuts, but I'm going to have some jolly good fun using this on the Empire Air Training Scheme's aircraft.'

‘Catherine has to be the one,' Paul Bryant said into the intercom in his oxygen mask. Out of habit, he scanned the sky around him for other aircraft. ‘She showed me a collection of wigs when I was at Flick's place. Said she'd be whatever colour I wanted her to be.'

‘I thought it must be something like that,' Pip said. 'Felicity was a blonde, so I thought it odd that she'd have a wig the same colour and length as her hair. Then I noticed those black strands inside it. It was silly of me to overlook the fact that Nkomo had sold fuel to a blonde woman on the night Felicity was killed. I was thinking that a man must have been responsible for the rape and murder.'

‘Logical assumption,' he said in a conciliatory tone, although he still smarted from the fact that she had been so quick to believe he could have been the killer.

‘I'm so sorry that I misjudged you, Paul. I suppose I didn't trust myself not to fall for the wrong sort of man all over again, and that coloured the way I looked for a culprit.'

‘I understand,' he said. ‘Pip, I'd never treat you the way your ex-husband did.'

‘Your turn now,' Pip said. ‘Tell me what you've found out and what makes you so sure Catherine is tied up with this German spy. What's his name again?'

‘Reitz. I've got the evidence in my back pocket. I'll show you later if we get the chance. I found it while I was rummaging through some
junk at Catherine's place yesterday morning – seems like a lifetime ago. I'd worked out that Smythe's Harvard had landed out on the saltpans and then taken off again. From the air, our search party couldn't tell the difference between an aircraft's undercarriage tracks and vehicle tyre marks. I landed out on the pan, paced out the distances between the various wheel tracks, and then followed them. Smythe landed his kite, but someone else took off in it. I didn't have any firm evidence that Catherine had stolen it, but one thing I did know was that she was prepared to go to any lengths to get her hands on one. The pieces started coming together in my mind, then. There was the crash of Cavendish's plane on Catherine's airstrip. He's a happily married man, and I believe he wouldn't have let Catherine fly his aircraft on a promise of sex, but he had another weakness.'

‘What?' she asked. ‘No, let me guess – money?'

‘Right again. Cavendish is a gambler. Catherine's rich. He wouldn't confirm it, but I'll wager Catherine offered to pay him to let her fly his Harvard.'

‘Lucky for him he crashed, otherwise it'd be his body in the morgue instead of Smythe's.'

‘Yeah, well, Smythe must have fallen for her. I flew to her place to try to find some evidence that Smythe or his aircraft had been there, though I still had no idea what her plan or motivation might have been for stealing his kite or doing away with him.'

‘So what is this evidence that you found at her place?' Pip asked.

‘A newspaper cutting – the story about the death of her husband.'

‘I found the same story, from the
Chronicle
. I used it to show Nkomo a picture of Catherine.'

‘“The grieving widow”
, right?'

‘That's the one,' she said.

‘Well, you should have checked out the next page. On it there's a picture of the South African hunter who
accidentally
shot old Hugo De Beers in the back.'

‘Don't tell me . . .'

‘Hendrick Reitz. Ossewa Brandwag
stormjaer
and Nazi spy. You've
probably got a picture of him on your most-wanted board. I recognised him from a picture circulated to us by the intelligence people. They've been concerned for some time about a possible OB attack on one of our air bases.'

‘I'm sorry I wasted so much time trying to get you arrested, Paul,' she said, and he could tell she meant it.

‘Don't worry about it. I was set up by an expert. We both were. I don't think my crash yesterday was an accident, either. I think someone – maybe Reitz – sabotaged my kite while I was searching for Catherine. If that's right, it means he's in position at Isilwane and the next phase of whatever the two of them have cooked up is coming right up.'

‘How much damage can they do with one aircraft?' Pip asked.

‘Plenty,' Bryant said. ‘The final piece of the puzzle was the belts.'

‘Not trouser belts, I assume?'

‘No,' he said, ‘machine-gun ammunition belts. The rounds are slotted into long canvas belts, which feed the guns in the Harvard's wing and nose. Cavendish had been on his way to gunnery practice when he stopped by Catherine's ranch. He had a full load of ammo on board, but when we went to fetch the wreckage there were hardly any rounds in the guns. At first I thought that someone – some African poachers, maybe – had stripped the wreck. But that seemed odd, because if it was the work of thieves, why would they leave some rounds still in the guns?'

‘So it would seem, to the casual observer, that the guns hadn't been tampered with?' Pip said.

‘Correct. You should be a copper. Cavendish couldn't account for the missing rounds, although he had personally checked the guns before taking off. Catherine fobbed me off when I asked her, by saying she had a storeroom full of .303 bullets and that some poachers probably took them. I took her at face value, which was a mistake. True, she had no need of bullets, but what she didn't have was ammunition belts. Smythe had been on a navigation training solo flight, so his guns were empty. Now Catherine's not only got an air force trainer,
she's got several hundred rounds of ammunition. With the way Rogers has got the runway lined with aircraft, she could take out a dozen of them with one pass, if she knows what she's doing. If she strafed the parade . . .'

‘Horrible,' Pip agreed. 'But even so, it seems that two people with one aircraft and a couple of machine-guns can only do so much damage. I'm worried, Paul, that there may be more to this. What else do you know about this Reitz character?'

‘We got a rundown on him at the base as part of an intelligence update. He's a soldier – fought with the Jerries in Spain before the war, then joined the paratroops. Also, he's a chemist. Worked in pesticides, I think.'

‘Poisons? Do you think the Germans would use something like poison gas on the base?' Pip asked.

‘Dunno,' Bryant said. ‘They did during the last war – and so did our lot. Anything's possible. Wiping out today's parade of trainees and graduates would be the same as shooting down about eight hundred aircraft, in terms of pilot losses. It'd be a devastating blow and a big morale boost for the Germans.'

‘Smuts and Huggins are going to be there as well – perhaps they're the main target. It wouldn't take much for the Afrikaners in South Africa to rise up against their government if Smuts were assassinated. The Germans have already tried it once.'

‘This is getting bigger by the minute,' Bryant agreed.

‘How do we stop the parade?' Pip asked.

‘Search me. Wing Commander Rogers thinks I'm a lunatic, and your police friends still think I'm public enemy number one. We can't stop the parade, so —'

‘We have to stop Catherine and Reitz,' Pip concluded.

Bryant glanced at his watch. ‘If they're using Isilwane as their base for an attack, they'll have to be airborne soon. Catherine knows the timings for the parade, as she was on the guest list. Keep your eyes peeled for an aeroplane like this one.' Bloody near impossible, he thought. He looked ahead and out each side of the cockpit. For miles and miles in every direction there was nothing but scrubby brown bush.

The aircraft shuddered and Pip let out an involuntary squeal. ‘What was that?' she said, alarmed.

‘Relax. Just testing our guns. Should have warned you.'

Catherine and Reitz knelt on the wing of the Harvard. ‘There, that's the last of it,' she said as she folded the ammunition belt into the bin next to the machine-gun. Reitz had been able to figure out how to chamber the first round in each belt into the guns, but it had taken them a couple of gos to lay the belts of bullets in their bins. ‘Now, what do we do with the bombs?'

‘Nothing very scientific there,' Reitz said as he screwed the gun compartment panel shut. ‘When I thought we were going to be using your biplane, I looked back to the First World War for a delivery system for the gas. Come, I'll show you.'

When they had finished at the Harvard he led her back to where the two metal cylinders lay in the grass, beside the hangar.

He stood one of the tubes on its end and began unscrewing a cap. Catherine took a wary step backwards.

‘Don't worry,' he said, smiling. ‘I checked them this morning, while wearing my gasmask. Both cylinders have weathered the journey well, and the contents are in perfect order. There are no leaks, I can assure you.'

‘All the same, the sooner we're rid of the stuff, the better,' she said, not moving any closer.

‘I agree with you there,' he said.

As he spoke, he reached into the cylinder and slowly slid out what appeared to be a bomb. It had tail fins, like a normal aerial bomb, but the other end was bulbous rather than pointed.

‘The fins stabilise it in flight. This,' he added, pointing to a metal ring attached to a pin in the tail assembly, ‘arms it. On the outside, it's the same type of crude device both sides used to drop during the first war. The observer in an aircraft simply leaned out the rear cockpit, pulled the pin, which activated a timed fuse, and then dropped it'.

‘I'll have to fly low and slow, I suppose,' she said, looking at the bomb but not touching it.

‘Correct,' he said. ‘As I explained when we met in South West, if you drop it from more than two hundred feet it will arm while still in midair, too high up and, if there is a strong breeze, the gas may drift away before it reaches its target. Ideally we want to drop at a hundred and fifty feet. At that height, the small charge inside the body of the bomb will detonate after four seconds, just before it hits the Tarmac. It will disperse the nerve agent but not allow it to dissipate too much.'