The Soldier who Said No (11 page)

‘I smell you,’ a voice said in Afrikaans. It was weak and came from somewhere to the front and left, near a clump of tall trees.

‘Who are you?’ De Villiers asked cautiously.

‘They killed me.’ The voice was weak.

‘But you’re speaking to me,’ De Villiers said as he edged closer.

‘I’m hungry.’

By now De Villiers had closed in on the man. ‘I greet you,’ he said.

It was a Bushman. He was hanging upside down from the branches of a mopane tree, a carpet of bronze leaves under his head. He was wearing army fatigues, the khaki brown trousers and shirt, but was barefoot and hatless.

De Villiers studied the scene from a distance. He skirted the tree carefully, looking for a trap. There was none. Whoever had done this had not expected anyone to come looking for the Bushman. The man had been beaten severely and there was a pool of dried blood directly under his head amongst the dead leaves and twigs.

‘Are you alright?’ De Villiers asked, approaching the Bushman. He angled his head to examine the man’s face more closely. There was blood in every crease of the wrinkled face.

‘I’m alive again, friend.’ The voice was weary but firm.

‘I’ll help you get down.’

The man’s hands had been tied behind his back. De Villiers stooped to remove the Leatherman from its sheath and quickly cut through the polyester chord. The Bushman rubbed his wrists as De Villiers contemplated ways to cut the rope to free his legs. The Bushman was suspended so that his head was nearly two metres above the ground, just high enough for a lion or leopard to get hold of this unexpected bounty, but too high for De Villiers to cut through the rope without having to climb the tree. The trunk was rough and straight, with the first bifurcation at least four metres off the ground.

He contemplated giving the man the knife, but the Bushman’s hands appeared to be lifeless and clumsy.

‘I’m going to jump and cut the rope and you’re going to fall down.’

‘Please cut me,’ he pleaded.

De Villiers sat down and untied his shoes and put them on properly, lacing the bootstraps up tightly. When he raised his arm holding the knife as high as he could, the knife reached only as high as the Bushman’s thighs. De Villiers thought he would have to make a jump of about a metre to be able to cut the rope. He made a practice jump, reaching as high as the ankles. A second jump brought a grunt from his throat, but reached no higher. He improvised by cutting a length of sapling from a shrub and tied the Leatherman to its end, extending his reach. The rope parted quickly under the blade and the Bushman fell to the ground in a heap of dust and mopane leaves.

The Bushman coughed before he spoke, ‘Eh, the lion has to send his women to find his meat. He’s not going to dine on !Xau tonight!’ His name sounded like Teekau. It started with a click of the tongue at the back of throat, like a cork popping out of a champagne bottle.

De Villiers studied the Bushman. He was small, with a wrinkled face and yellowish-brown skin. His eyes were drawn to slits, his teeth yellow, and his hair caked with dust. It was impossible to gauge his age, but De Villiers guessed that !Xau was somewhere between forty and fifty years old, perhaps older.

‘Who did this?’ he asked.

‘Soldiers,’ the Bushman said. He rolled over and tried to get to his feet, but his hands and feet would not cooperate. He ended up on his knees and elbows.

When De Villiers bent over him, the Bushman touched his camouflage shirt, rubbing the cotton material between his fingers. ‘Soldiers,’ !Xau said a second time.

De Villiers took the Bushman’s small yellow-brown hands, scarred by hard living, into his own. The hands were cold. He rubbed some warmth into them. Then he started on the feet. Starved of blood during the ordeal, the feet were slow to recover.

‘Were you tracking for them?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why did they do this to you?’ De Villiers pointed at the remnants of the rope hanging from the tree.

‘I wanted to go back to 31.’ De Villiers knew that the Bushmen trackers were attached to 31 Battalion, not 32, and concluded that they must have brought !Xau in for a special operation.

‘What did they say?’ he asked.

‘They said we had to find you quickly.’

‘Why?’

The Bushman swallowed. ‘They said you were
SWAPO
. And they showed us the body of another one there at the river.’ The Bushman pointed in the direction of the river behind him.

‘Was he dead?’

‘Yes. They threw the body in the river.’

The Bushman was slow to recover and unsteady on his feet. De Villiers knew they had to get going.

‘Are you well enough to go?’ he asked.

!Xau took a few steps, holding on to De Villiers’s arm.

‘Why do white men smell so bad?’ he asked with no trace of shame or humour in his voice.

De Villiers sniffed at his shirt. There was no trace of deodorant or aftershave. ‘I don’t smell bad,’ he said. ‘It’s you who smells bad.’

‘No, it is you.’

‘What do I smell like?’ De Villiers had to ask.

‘Like the rancid fat of an eland,’ !Xau said without hesitation.

‘We have to go,’ De Villiers said, at a loss for a suitable response. He had expected something kinder, like sweat, or work. ‘I need water. And you can be glad I smell bad,’ he said. ‘Otherwise I’d have walked right past you and you would still be hanging in the tree.’

‘He-he-he.’

‘Where are your things?’ De Villiers asked.

‘I have a knife,’ !Xau said. He dug in the back pocket of his trousers and produced a black-handled clasp knife.

The knife was a Best, a tin-handled folding knife sold in trading stores all across the rural areas of South Africa in the sixties. This one had seen years of use, its blade reduced to little more than an awl. Countless schoolboys had chanted the praises of the Best. Baas Ek Sny Treurig.
BEST
. And in reverse: Tog Sny Ek Blik.

De Villiers remembered when he had his own Best as a boy, a cheap knife, and how jealous he had been of a friend who had a Joseph Rodgers. Try as he might, he could not recall what had become of his Best.

‘The water is near,’ !Xau said, interrupting his thoughts.

De Villiers nodded. He knew where the river was, but that was where the greatest danger lay. He again took time to study his map. His pursuers would still be far away. South of south-east along the Cuito River looked like the quickest and shortest route, skirting the towns of Rito, Maué and Mavengue, then directly south from Mavengue to Rundu. But it was a dangerous route, landmined and heavily patrolled by all sides by foot patrols and helicopter. There were civilians in and around the towns, eking out a living from subsistence agriculture, farming with goats and a few head of cattle. There was a dirt road all the way from Cuito Cuanavale in the north to Dirico in the south, but that road was closed to all but military traffic, and the military vehicles that used it were heavily fortified against the giant antitank mines, which could blow a troop carrier twenty metres into the air. Angolan forces fought South African forces daily for control of the route, and soon a major battle would be fought at Cuito Cuanavale. Everyone expected that. In the meantime the combatants tested each other’s strength and support systems in regular skirmishes in and around the smaller towns on the main access and supply routes.

De Villiers tapped his finger on a point on the map. The direct route to Rundu would also require a river crossing at Calai, a small town on the Angolan side of the Cubango River, within a sniper’s range from Rundu. Under normal circumstances, De Villiers might have taken the direct route, entitled to expect protection and even air cover for his retreat, but now he had to factor in the presence of the platoon pursuing him.

‘How long were you in the tree?’ he asked.

‘From the time the sun was there.’ !Xau pointed directly at the sun. Twenty-four hours. ‘Why did you come back for me?’ he asked.

‘I didn’t come back for you. I came for food and water,’ De Villiers said. It wasn’t the whole truth. He had come back to find Verster.

!Xau smiled politely behind his hand. They set off at a brisk pace towards the river and followed its course south. There were tracks in the soft sand where the Pumas had landed, but no sign of Verster and no sign that anyone had been killed near the spot where they had emerged from the river.

The land was flat and the river ran away from oceans on either side of the continent, southwards instead of east or west, into the Okavango Delta, that vast inland lake which filled up every year at the beginning of the rainy season. But this was the dry season.

The map covered an area of about a million square kilometres, from Kuvango in central South Angola, cutting through the Etosha Pan down to Otjiwarongo in South West Africa, and from the Kuvango-Otjiwarongo line to the Zambian border and the Okavango in the east. The map gave De Villiers the idea of changing his plan. The route south was too dangerous and he was uncertain of the welcome he would receive at the base at Rundu. What would his chances be if he took a roundabout route, east first and then south, to Botswana, instead of South West Africa, and from there to Pretoria, where he could report what he had witnessed? Surely 32 Battalion would not expect such a circuitous route? The map indicated that there was a game reserve on the eastern bank of the Cuito River,
Coutada Pública do Luengué,
which De Villiers translated as Public Game Reserve of Luengué. South of the reserve was a second public game reserve, the
Coutada Pública do Mucusso
. The Mucusso covered the area between the Luiana and the Cubango Rivers. There were game parks on the other side of the border too. He considered that a trek through the game parks would have a greater chance of success than the direct route to Rundu with all its foot patrols, landmines and air sorties. The map showed no roads in the game reserves.

After weighing the pros and cons of the various options, De Villiers resolved to go south along the Cuito for another day before making a final decision. If the route south proved too risky, he would proceed in a wide arc towards the east first, for a week at least, and then south to Dirico and along the Caprivi to Rundu.

The attraction of another day’s trek south was twofold: the map showed a large afforested area immediately south of Rito. There would be food and water there.

De Villiers eyed his companion a few feet away. At rest, the Bushman sat in a squat, elbows on his knees.

Detective Inspector Henderson and Detective Sergeant Kupenga sat uneasily in the waiting room of the Prime Minister’s Mt Eden residence. They were not nearly as nervous as their boss, the Deputy Commissioner of Police, who sat opposite them. They had been summoned by the Prime Minister’s private secretary for a briefing. They had not been told on what subject. Their political head, the Minister of Police, was not there to front for them.

It was Boxing Day and the Prime Minister was in a foul mood. Word had reached her that members of her party were canvassing support to roll her for Phil Goff, an insipid little man who didn’t have the gall to object when she had given Winston Peters the prestigious Foreign Affairs portfolio Goff had held prior to the last elections. She wanted to go on her annual holiday, but dared not turn her back for fear of being knifed by her own. Now she knew how Julius Caesar must have felt: the surprise, the anger, the disappointment. She thought of Phil Goff. He had no idea what would be in store for him if he were to succeed her as leader of the Party. He was too soft, too trusting. National would eat him for breakfast, turning his best efforts into gaffes, one after the other. And every time he’d come up with a new idea, they’d ask him why Labour hadn’t thought of it while it was in power.

The Prime Minister went on the attack as soon as the three policemen were ushered into her office. She didn’t invite them to sit and they stood in front of her desk like naughty schoolboys in the headmistress’s office.

An Israeli security woman in mufti stood in the corner holding an Uzi across her chest.

‘I want to know why someone has tried to kill me.’

Henderson decided not to speak unless absolutely required.

The Deputy Commissioner took a soft line. ‘The investigations are ongoing, Prime Minister. We’re following up several leads. The main offenders are on bail and we are monitoring their actions very closely.’

‘Don’t give me all that bollocks,’ she said. ‘It would be obvious to a blind man that there’s no evidence suggesting terrorist activities. These yobs were just playing soldiers in the bush, hunting pig in the valleys and getting drunk around the cabins every weekend. How is that terrorism?’

The change of subject shouldn’t have caught Henderson by surprise, but did.

‘And what about the man who tried to kill me?’ the Prime Minister asked. ‘How is that investigation going?’

The Deputy Commissioner fudged the issue. ‘Our information is that the arrow is from the Tokelauan Islands. It is used for ceremonial purposes only. It’s a warning, not something that could be used for an assassination.’

The Prime Minister looked at Henderson and Kupenga. Neither was prepared to meet her eye. ‘Bollocks,’ she said a second time. ‘It was a poisoned arrow, I’ve been told. There’s no antidote for the poison.’

The Deputy Commissioner shifted his weight to his other foot and inclined his head towards Henderson. ‘Perhaps DI Henderson could fill you in on the details of that investigation,’ he said.

The Prime Minister looked up at Henderson, whose reddening face betrayed his discomfort.

‘Well?’

Henderson spoke quickly. ‘We’re following leads. We’re having the arrow analysed, but the exhibit is trapped in the backlog at the laboratory in Christchurch with the staff shortages at this time of year. We expect the results early in the New Year.’

Henderson pondered how much he should tell the Prime Minister about how little progress they had made.

‘Is that it? Is that the sum total of the investigation?’

‘We’re following another lead, Prime Minister, but a vital witness is in hospital and we’ve thus far been unable to interview him.’