by Dick Couch
“I’ll be there,” AKR replied.
Garrett bowed slightly and backed away as Turkana custom dictated, and headed for his quarters. He glanced back over his shoulder to see AKR and the tall African back in their stooped conversation.
The African’s name was Tomba. Tomba and the others AKR had recruited had been in camp for about three months. Most of the new men were shy and polite, and they worked very hard. They were all warriors and immensely proud, but there was something very special about Tomba. Garrett had felt it in his presence and demeanor from the very first time they met. The Turkana were from northern Kenya and, like the Masai, had been influenced little by Western culture until quite recently. They had a well-earned reputation as fierce fighters. Tomba’s father was a laibon, a ritual leader of the Turkana, and Tomba would have followed in his father’s footsteps. But as with many young men in postcolonial Africa, drought, famine, and border wars had driven Tomba from his tribal lands. AKR had met him when his father was posted to Nairobi, and Tomba was a young park ranger at the Masai Mara National Park. In his early teens, he fought in the colonial wars, including a tour in the Rhodesian Army. Following the demobilization of the army, he served in the forces of Bantustan and sometimes worked as a safari guide, his employment usually determined by the fortunes of war. But he and AKR had remained in contact. IFOR had hired Akheem Kelly-Rogers to recruit and supervise the training of an IFOR contingent that could operate in Africa, much as IFOR’s Gurkhas could move easily in many parts of Southwest Asia. He found Tomba in Kenya, working the national game parks in search of poachers.
An hour later Steven, Garrett, and AKR were seated at a small, circular conference table in Steven’s office. The fourth member at the table was a face on a large flat-screen monitor. What she might have lacked in physical presence was more than made up for in the rich and authoritative voice that came across the speakers.
“Good evening, gentlemen. Can everyone hear me okay?”
Steven answered for them. “We hear you fine, Janet. How’s the picture and audio on your end?”
Janet Brisco was the senior operational planner and controller for IFOR. When members of the intervention force were sent into the field, she would do most of the planning and serve as the focal point for command and control while they were on a mission. While on active duty in the Air Force, she had been the go-to ops planner of the U.S. Special Operations Command. She was recognized as the best in the business in the male-dominated special operations community. Steven had hired her with the understanding that she could do much of her work from her home in East St. Louis, where she nurtured and managed a large extended family. That is where she now sat at a console in her home office. On the split screen in front of her were the three familiar faces of Steven, Garrett, and Akheem Kelly-Rogers.
“I have your smiling, handsome faces in front of me, and hear you five-by.”
“Excellent,” Steven continued. “Gentlemen, I’ve had Janet working on this for the last day and a half. I’ll let her give us some background before we get into the specifics. Janet?”
“Okay, here goes,” Janet responded. She had notes in front of her, but she didn’t need to refer to them. “Zimbabwe. British colony of Rhodesia turned African basket case when in 1978 white rule came to an end. Like most colonial turnovers, this one was very bloody. The first black prime minister elected to the new nation was Bishop Abel Muzorewa. The country name was then changed to Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. A decade-long guerilla war that preceded independence continued through Muzorewa’s short tenure until new elections were forced by civil unrest, and the Marxist Robert Mugabe was elected prime minister. The British supervised the election, but it was thought that Mugabe had rigged the outcome right under their noses. In retrospect, the British made a real mess of it. They wanted out quickly so basically they cut and ran, handing the country over to the Communists. No offense, Akheem.”
“None taken,” AKR replied to the screen.
“Mugabe brought a lot of changes to Zimbabwe. He essentially ended democracy and any future for whites in the country. For over a decade, Mugabe continued to let the whites farm the large tracts of land they inherited from colonial rule. But then, about five years ago, he started appropriating the white-owned farms and distributing the land. With the seizures, farm productivity fell dramatically. Rhodesia and even Zimbabwe, in the early days, had a great deal of land under cultivation and were running modern, Western-style agribusinesses. Then things began to slip. Farming does not do well in a centrally managed economy. In a bid to build popular support for his embattled regime, Mugabe began a massive redistribution of the large farms. There is now only a handful of white farmers left in the country. People are starving, and the infrastructure is rapidly running to ruin. Mugabe, like Idi Amin Dada and Mobutu Sese Seko, has ruled only for his own personal gain. He has the nation in a state of economic collapse. The country is literally at the mercy of relief organizations and NGOs. The army, as in most failed Marxist states, is part of the problem. Extortion is becoming more widespread, and the Zimbabwe Republic Police are only capable of keeping order in the capital and some of the resort areas.” Janet Brisco paused, looking at each of the faces on the screen. “With me, so far?” The three heads nodded. “Let me know if I’m going too fast for those of you who are taking notes.
“Now we come to this business in the province of Tonga.” Janet continued. “We know something’s going on there, but we’re not sure just what. From the information that’s coming in, we know that there are widespread kidnappings and that people have died under strange circumstances. And that the people seem to be terrorized. We also know that the government in Harare, which means Mugabe and his cronies, show no interest in what’s going on there, nor are they disposed to help any of the NGOs who are concerned about the welfare of the people in that region. One can only assume that they are being paid to look the other way.
“The problem seems to be isolated within the boundaries of Tonga. Its population within the province is somewhere between a hundred and thirty and a hundred and fifty thousand. The largest city is Kariba, with some forty thousand. The people refer to themselves as Batonka or Tonga, but they are mostly Bantu. They were first discovered by Dr. Livingstone when he came down the Zambezi River in 1860. No white man came back until much later in the 1900s. In many ways, the Tonga consider themselves separate from the rest of Zimbabwe. There are really two Tongas. One is the city of Kariba and the area immediately surrounding Kariba along the shores of Lake Kariba. This region caters to the tourist trade that’s grown up around the lake and provides workers and services for the Matusadona and Mana Pools National Parks. While the Shona is the dominant tribe in Zimbabwe, there is both Shona and Ndebele influence in Tonga. As for what is considered the other Tonga, it is the countryside in and around the national parks, and in the valleys that reach up from the lake. Its countryside ranges from inhospitable to unbearable. When the dam was built that created Lake Kariba, the Tongans were split into the Zambia Tonga and the Zimbabwe Tonga. The Zimbabwe Tongans are much more isolated than the Zambian members of the tribe. This only stands to reason, as the Zambian capital of Lusaka is closer to the lake than Harare. The Zimbabwean Tongans are also much worse off economically. They are and have always been a very superstitious people, and witchcraft is still a significant influence, especially in the rural areas.
“And finally, there is the lake. Lake Kariba is the biggest man-made lake in the world. It’s some twenty-five miles wide and over a hundred miles long. It was formed when a huge dam was built on the Zambezi River in 1960. The creation of the lake displaced people and animals on both the Zambian and Zimbabwean sides of the river. The disruption caused by the creation of a lake this size was, as you could imagine, substantial. But it eventually spawned a lively tourist industry. Tourism is a financial sacred cow of southern Africa. In Zambia, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe, tourism brings in valuable foreign currency. It is also a barometer of the political climate and regional p
roblems. Tours are still going to the Zambian side of the lake and into the Victoria Falls area, but not to the Zimbabwean side of the lake. Without tourism, the people in that area are back to substance living at best. The other sacred cow in the region is the power generated by two power stations just downstream of the dam. Electricity is shared equally between Zambia and Zimbabwe and managed by the Central African Power Corporation, or the CAPC, which is owned jointly by the two countries. The CAPC has an output of about fifteen hundred megawatts, and the revenues tend to find their way into the pockets of officials in Harare and Lusaka. So whatever it is that is going on in Tonga has affected the tourist industry. So far, it seems to have had no impact on the CAPC. My guess is that the people responsible for these deaths are paying off the government and scaring off the tourists, but they are not disturbing the power generation facilities. I went online this morning and tried to book a hotel room in Kariba or along Lake Kariba in Tonga and didn’t have much luck. Many of them said there were no vacancies, which we know is not the case, or that they were closed for repairs.
“Also, one interesting note about the dam that made the lake. Just after construction began, a suspension bridge across the river collapsed and killed eighty-six Italian workers. Then the area experienced a once-in-a-thousand-year flood. Eighteen workers were swept away, many of them entombed in wet cement. The locals felt that the damming of the river offended the river god, a fish-headed, serpent-tailed creature called Nyaminyami. The tribes in the area say that Nyaminyami is still unhappy with the dam and the lake it created. As I said, the locals there can be very superstitious.
“As for access into the area, I’ve been looking for contacts within the tourist industry that are still active. I’m also checking for anyone within the CAPC who could help if we have to operate in the area. I’ve got some feelers out, but it may take a while to develop some dependable contacts. That’s about it, unless you want a cultural lecture on the fauna and flora of the area, which are really rather spectacular.”
“Thanks, Janet, for your report. Perhaps later on the fauna and flora.” Steven turned his attention to Garrett. “Garrett, let’s hear what you’ve got for us regarding the military aspects of what is happening there.”
“As you all know, there is very little information coming out of the area. We have no reporting assets there on which we can rely for conclusive intelligence, but there is no doubt that there are some strange things going on in Tonga. We know that a nongovernmental armed force is moving in the area and, to some extent, terrorizing the locals. This paramilitary activity reaches throughout the province, but the focus seems to be the remote valley drainage leading up from the northeastern boundary of the lake into the foothills of the Mavuradonha Mountains. It’s an unpopulated area, with a single road leading in and out. The road was built to serve a small resort hotel that was only marginally successful. It’s very rugged country, with thick vegetation and hardwood forests. We don’t have much satellite coverage in that part of the world, and the only mapping that’s been done was by the Rhodesian Army when they operated there some thirty years ago. There are, or were, only a few bush camps there that catered to photographic safaris. What I’ve learned from the few available reports, and my recent briefing by Jim Watson, is that this new force in the Kariba area and east of the Zambezi River looks a lot like the old Selous Scouts. I know that sounds a little far-fetched, but the memory of Selous Scouts seems to be very much a part of this region. They are not so mythical as the serpent-tailed Nyaminyami, but the people in the area all have very strong recollections of them. When the Communist guerillas went into the Mavuradonhas to hide, the Selous Scouts went in after them. Most families in the area have at least one member who fought with the Scouts or against them, or had a family member killed by the Scouts. They left quite an impact on the area.”
“You mean the Selous Scouts are back?” AKR exclaimed.
“That may be the case,” Garrett continued, “or more probably, a force that patterns itself after the Selous Scouts. As a quick overview, the Selous Scouts were a group of trackers and bushmen culled from the Rhodesian Army. They were formed in the last days of white rule in Zimbabwe, when a decision was made to fight fire with fire. A Rhodesian Army captain named Ron Reid Daily, who was also a British SAS veteran, was tasked with developing a battalion-sized force that could track the Communist-backed terrorists to their bases and deal with them. Daily set up a training camp near Lake Kariba. The training is variously described as some of the most difficult and dangerous in the world. Men were killed in training. Captain Daily was looking for men who could live off the land and track their quarry for as long as it took to run them to ground. The force was mostly black; only two in ten were white. Volunteers came from all elements in the Rhodesian Army, but mostly the Rhodesian African Rifles. Perhaps only about one in ten of the volunteers made it through the training and qualified as a Selous Scout.”
“Sounds like Navy SEAL training,” Steven said.
“From what I’ve learned, this training was much shorter and much more brutal than SEAL training. The Communists under Mugabe were a pretty savage bunch. Villages that refused to support the insurgents could count on murder and rape at the hands of the rebels. But they met their match with the Scouts. For about eight years, they waged one of the most intense and bloody guerrilla counter-guerrilla campaigns of the colonial wars. Independence came to Rhodesia in 1978. Mugabe came to power in 1980, and the Selous Scouts were summarily disbanded. A few of the blacks stayed on, but not the whites. Many of the whites joined the South African Army, and moved on from there. A lot of the blacks found work in Bantustan and the Transkei Defense Force. But for eight bloody years, they were probably one of the most capable group of fighters on the continent. Their reputation over the years has grown and been exaggerated to some degree, but there’s no doubt that they were good—probably very good.”
“Akheem?” Steven asked.
“Garrett has it about right. Ron Reid Daily is still talked about in the SAS, but he was more a soldier of fortune and professional African hand than a career military officer.” Then, turning to Garrett, “So what makes you think that there has been some sort of rebirth of the Selous Scouts?”
“As I understand it, we don’t have much of an intelligence-gathering presence in Zimbabwe. Most of the reporting comes from State Department officers, and their activity has been restricted to interviewing people coming out of the area. So far, it’s been mostly hunters and a few who were on walking safaris in the Matusadona National Park. These people reported seeing paramilitary units moving about the area in squad-sized units. One person, an American on shooting safari, was close enough to observe one of these units through his rifle scope. When he called it to the attention of his native guide, the guide said they were probably poachers. The American who reported this was little more than a trophy hunter. As it turns out, he had served a tour in the 101st Airborne, so he felt confident about what he observed. This guy said there were blacks and whites in the squad file. This alone marked the group as a non-Zimbabwe military unit. The whites wore bush shirts and hats and cargo shorts, and the two in this particular group had beards. He was pretty specific; some of them were carrying Belgian FAL rifles and others AK-47s. The blacks had a professional military look to them; they moved like soldiers. There have also been reports of terrorist-like activity in the Kariba area. Along the lake there are a few upscale hotels and marinas, but the town of Kariba lies some fifteen miles from the lake. It is spread out and very poor. One of the embassy officers talked with a Harare resident who has relatives in Kariba. The report said that this relative was very worried about his family there. He said people have been disappearing from their homes, both in Kariba and in some of the outlying small villages. Men come in the night and rob and kidnap people, and this activity seems to be happening throughout the northern part of the province of Tonga, mostly in the foothills that border the lake and along the Zambezi River.
“At fir
st, they wrote it off to bandits or antigovernment activity. But with the hassling of NGO personnel and the exotic diseases that are popping up, Langley thinks it might all be connected. The Agency has asked the National Reconnaissance Office to step up their coverage, but they’ve yet to get anything specific from satellite imagery.” Garrett paused a moment before continuing. “It’s almost as if someone were trying to seal off the area and put a good scare into those who remain.”
“What is the State Department’s official position?” Janet asked.
“According to Watson, State and our embassy there have both written it off to banditry,” Garrett replied. “And Langley doesn’t dismiss that theory. The final stages of a failed Communist state are not pretty. A lot of things break down, and it’s usually worse when it comes to Africa.”
They were all quiet a moment, until Steven spoke. “I’ve traded a few e-mails with Jim Watson since Garrett met with him in Washington. The doctor who was just killed was an expert in epidemiology. His death was made to look like a random robbery, but some of our embassy people in Harare are not so sure. The matter is now before the National Security Council. This situation has some of the earmarks of biological terror, and these days, that gets a lot of people’s attention. The question now is what to do about it. By charter, this is CIA territory, but they don’t have a lot of options on this one. Langley recently sent one of their experienced officers there. As a visiting embassy staffer, he tried to arrange some official travel into the area, but was denied access by the Zimbabwe Ministry of Tourism. Langley talked about putting a few SA men in there under big-game-hunting cover, but neither the shooting nor the photo safari concessions are taking any new bookings. And even then, they would be restricted to the game preserves. When it comes down to it, white men just don’t move too well in rural Africa. And for that matter, neither do American or Western blacks.”
