The Soldier who Said No (2 page)

De Villiers thought for a moment. ‘Only the parrot eggs had an international connection, Sir. We’ve investigated it fully. We’re liaising with Interpol. You signed the forms yourself.’

Henderson raised his voice. ‘You know very well what I mean. What the hell is happening that the South Africans are suddenly committing all these offences when they’ve been so quiet? That’s what I want to know.’

In the squad room outside Henderson’s office, the detectives were straining to hear what was being said.

‘I’m a New Zealand citizen, Sir. I’m not a South African any more.’

‘Don’t give me that!’ Henderson said. This time the men outside could hear him clearly.

De Villiers dropped his voice. ‘Sir, the woman on the plane with the knife just made a mistake. It happens regularly. People take things onto aeroplanes without realising that it’s forbidden. Usually they pay a fine, but this one went to court because the knives are banned in New Zealand. She collects them and had no clue.’

‘She might have been a terrorist,’ Henderson insisted.

De Villiers held his tongue. How could he tell his commanding officer that New Zealand was fortunate not to know terrorism? ‘We don’t have terrorists here, Sir,’ he ventured when it became clear that Henderson expected an answer.

‘Oh, nonsense!’ Henderson exclaimed. ‘Or have you forgotten about the
Rainbow Warrior
?’

The incident had occurred long before De Villiers had settled in Auckland, but he was well versed in the facts. French government agents had sabotaged the Greenpeace ship while it was moored in Waitemata Harbour. The ship was in port for the replenishment of its provisions prior to sailing to the Pacific to protest French nuclear tests in the region. One sailor was killed in the explosion and two members of the French secret service were apprehended and sent to jail. De Villiers shook his head. That was not terrorism. The bombing of the ship had been ordered by France. But he kept his opinion to himself.

‘What about the boys in Howick?’ Henderson asked. ‘Surely you must know something? Didn’t it happen just around the corner from your house?’

De Villiers compromised. ‘I can phone Howick, Sir, and tell them what I think.’

‘Tell me what you think. I asked you, but you’re hedging.’

‘The South African boys here don’t carry knives, Sir, and they don’t join the gangs.’

Henderson was quiet for a moment.

‘That is so arrogant,’ he said at last. ‘How can you say that?’

‘That’s just how it is, Sir. We know who usually joins the gangs here.’

The arteries pulsed in Henderson’s neck. ‘The gangs are a menace,’ he said, ‘but you, De Villiers, your arrogance pisses me off.’

De Villiers kept quiet.

‘Isn’t that it? You think you’re better than everybody else,’ Henderson insisted.

‘No, Sir,’ De Villiers was forced to reply.

‘Yes,’ Henderson retorted, ‘you may be a New Zealander on paper, but your attitude is still South African.’

There was no immediate response from De Villiers. Henderson dismissed him with a curt, ‘Get back to your desk.’

De Villiers turned to leave. ‘The killing was gang related, Sir.’

‘Crap,’ Henderson said.

De Villiers held his ground. ‘The photograph in the paper shows a boy with a blue bandanna around his wrist. That’s strong evidence of gang affiliation.’

Henderson was unmoved. ‘I’m not going to debate the issue with you. Get out of my office.’

De Villiers was about to sneeze but hesitated, anticipating the sharp jolt in his groin. He half turned and stopped with his hand on the door handle.

‘Do you have a problem following orders? Get out!’ Henderson shouted.

The Urewera National Park is the largest national park on the North Island of New Zealand. Twelve hundred years ago, when the first Maori waka arrived on the beach, the Tuhoe tribe settled in these misty forests with their lakes and mountain ranges and valleys which are so remote and inaccessible that many parts have remained unexplored to this day. They took their tribal name from their ancestral figure, Tuhoe-potiki.

To the other Maori iwi the Tuhoe were Nga Tamariki o te Kohu, the Children of the Mist, a pacifist tribe bent from the outset on forging its own destiny without any interference from the outside world. Their steep, heavily forested land with its lakes gave them everything they wanted, and they wanted especially to be left alone.

Then white men came in their sailing ships, bringing their women and children and exotic animals and plants. Pakeha, they were called in Maori, an unflattering term which would soon be applied to all whites in New Zealand.

It was a Pakeha who addressed the recruits. They were deep in one of the bush-clad valleys.

‘Don’t laugh!’

The small commando of men was assembled for a final briefing after the day’s training. Their commanders and instructors spoke to them in the clipped sentences of men used to commanding others, men well acquainted with war. The foreigners spoke in a harsh and throaty brand of English.

The commanders wore camouflage fatigues. Black balaclavas and black bodypaint covered their exposed skin, even the eyelids. Their body-shapes suggested they were middle aged, but their movements were those of battle-trained soldiers. Stern eyes stared from the slits in the balaclavas and there were hard muscles under the drab olive green and khaki cloth.

The twenty-four new recruits, on the other hand, were of a different hue and build, darker skinned and generally larger in stature, heavy men even in their late teens, of a stock that produces good rugby players. They were unfit but eager, driven by a century and a half of smouldering hatred inculcated in the members of their tribe from birth. They now stood in an uneven row, facing their commander, the man who spoke with the foreign accent. Most of the trainees were still panting from the last drill, a tumble-and-roll exercise with a dummy rifle in their hands.
Your rifle is never to touch the ground, understand?

‘Don’t laugh, I said!’

The recruits swallowed their mirth, but slowly.

‘As I said, we are going to train you in the use of a bow and arrow before you will be allowed to use a pistol or a rifle. You can laugh, but that’s exactly what your enemy will do: laugh at you. No one takes a bow and arrow seriously. And that’s the strength of a bow and arrow. No one takes it seriously.’

The recruits were still fidgety. They had signed up for military-style training, not for a game of Cowboys and Indians.

‘Look at the men behind you.’

They turned, each at his own pace. Behind them stood the recruits who had graduated from the course the week before. Like their instructors, they wore balaclavas and carried real weapons,
AK
47s. They looked like soldiers now, the fat run off their muscles during the course of their training.

The commander stood a pace or two in front of his team of instructors. He paused for effect and then walked slowly up and down the row of new recruits. He grimaced at the sight of every tattoo and every elaborate hairstyle. When he spoke, he spoke as if on a parade ground.

‘The men behind you started with bows and arrows and now they are proficient in their use as well as the use of assault rifles. It takes six months to turn raw recruits like you into soldiers like the men behind you. But we are going to start with bows and arrows.’

The troops held his gaze. They had learnt the first lesson.
Look your enemy in the eye. Start by looking me in the eye at all times when I speak to you. Hold your head up. You’re a soldier now.
Their elders had put them in the charge of this man. They were all Tuhoe, carefully chosen for their allegiance by blood to their tribe.

‘We start with bows and arrows. A bow and arrow has many advantages over a gun. It is a weapons system as old as mankind. You can make a bow and arrow from things we’ll teach you to find right here in the bush. You don’t need a licence for a bow and arrow. It’s a silent weapon. It can be used for hunting and we are going to hunt pigs and deer with your bows and arrows, once you know how to use them. That will be our cover for being here and carrying bows and arrows. We are going to be pig hunters for a while. Understand?’

‘Yes, Captain,’ the recruits shouted.

‘Good.’ He dropped his voice. ‘Shortly we’ll be making a statement of intent, on behalf of your people. And we’ll use an arrow.’

The recruits looked listless, unpersuaded.

The commander raised his voice to parade ground levels. ‘Look again at the men behind you. I am proud to call them soldiers, as skilled and fit as any in the New Zealand Army.’

The new recruits half turned a second time to look behind them.

‘And in six months,’ he continued, ‘you will stand where they are standing now, ready to serve your people.’

The commander was ready to give his final orders. ‘Your platoon leaders will take you through the drills every day from now until we are fully prepared and you are fully trained. I’ll be back every Saturday. Each week we’ll improve your skills and fitness step by step, until you are as ready as we are.’ A sweep of the arm included the platoon leaders and his small band of instructors.

‘Dismissed!’

The troops unceremoniously split up into several groups. Several of them dug in their pockets for cigarettes.

The instructors left in a white minibus with blackened windows. The numberplates would be put back on at the edge of the forest before they reached the main road. When they were out of earshot, the occupants reverted to their mother tongue. It took a few minutes to remove the bodypaint from their hands and eyelids and they were quick to turn their reversible fatigues inside out. No longer dressed in camouflage, they took on the appearance of pig hunters, ordinary men in drab brown or olive green bush wear.

The instructors set up their targets in a clearing which had once been a Tuhoe pa, a fortified homestead. The bush had been cleared and the ground was level enough for them to set up their targets at thirty and fifty metres. In an elaborate display of their amateur archery skills, they competed in teams of three, with official scorekeepers counting and recording scores, and with much discussion of the merits of different types of equipment, with the argument ranging from the advantages of a combination bow over a self bow to the art of arrow making.

To the curious onlooker, they would have come across as a bunch of townies dressed in their showy tramping gear, playing at being pig hunters.

One of their members carefully recorded their targetshooting on video. It would come in handy later as a cover story.

That is, if they were ever caught.

During the four-hour drive back to Auckland’s North Shore, only the driver was awake. The others had made themselves comfortable against the seats and sides of the minibus and rested their heads on their backpacks. Like paratroopers returning from a mission, they closed their eyes and slept.

When the minibus trundled across Harbour Bridge, the commander woke up. Under the bush hat pulled low over his eyes, he reviewed his arrangements with the intermediaries who had come to see him just over six months earlier.

‘We need someone with military experience to train some of our young men,’ they had said.

He had been sceptical and eyed his guests for a long time before he spoke. ‘How did you get to know of me, and why do you want your men trained?’ he had asked.

‘We found your name on the website of the South Africa New Zealand Association,
SANZA
,’ had been the simple answer. They explained anyway. ‘It says that you and many other soldiers from your war in Angola have settled here.’

‘That doesn’t explain why your men need military training. If they want to be soldiers, they can join the army or the police.’

There had been a pause during which the two intermediaries looked at each other. At a nod from the elder of the two, the younger spoke slowly and gave the commander an elaborate history of the Tuhoe. It ended with, ‘So you see, the army and the police are the enemy.’

‘They may be your enemy, but it has nothing to do with me,’ the commander had said.

‘The Crown has done the same thing to your people. They accused us of wrongdoing and then they took our land. They did the same to you, drawing their maps so that they would have the diamond fields, and when you resisted, they sent their soldiers to fight you. They did the same with the gold in Johannesburg. Soldiers from all over, even from here, were called in to fight you. They burned your lands and raped your women and put them in concentration camps. They killed many of your people.’

The intermediaries had done their homework; that much was clear.

‘They did to you what they had done to us,’ the elder had said. ‘How many of your women and children did they kill?’

It was a number ingrained in the commander’s psyche and he had answered immediately. ‘Twenty-six thousand.’

His grandmother had been a sixteen-year-old in one of those camps.
We avoided the infirmary like the plague
, she had told him as a boy,
because no one ever came out of there alive. Once I had flu and had to hide from them in a linen kist. They did inspections every morning and all the sick people were taken away. And we never saw them again until the funeral.

When he didn’t speak, the senior intermediary spoke again. ‘We thought you would understand. There are fewer than fifty thousand of us left, including those living in Australia. We want our land back and we want our independence.’

‘For independence you need a territory. And then you would need an army,’ the commander had responded.

‘Exactly.’

‘With only fifty thousand people, you would never have enough soldiers to fight the New Zealand Army.’

‘We don’t want to fight them in a war. We want to show them we can run our own police and army. We want territorial independence and for that we’ll need our own army and police, as you’ve said.’

‘You’ll be arrested and charged for treason,’ the commander had warned.

The elder held firm. ‘We’ve thought about this. We never signed the Treaty. We don’t owe allegiance to the Crown. We have a sound defence to a treason charge.’