Covert Action

by Dick Couch

  Zelinkow considered this for a long moment. The old fox obviously knew more than he was saying. It was hard to know whether he carried an official or semi-official portfolio, or none at all. There is only one thing of which Zelinkow could be certain. Boris Zhirinon loved his country and would do all he could in its defense.

  “What do we fear most, Boris? What is Mother Russia’s enduring concern?”

  They both knew the answer: China. With an economy three times as strong as Russia’s and five times the population, how much longer would it be content to sit on its own side of the Siberian border? The undeveloped resources and land China so desperately needed were simply too tempting. Only force of arms could ensure that those resources remained under Russian control, and those resources alone were the motherland’s only path back to her former greatness.

  “What if,” Zelinkow continued, “the Islamists were so foolish as to attack America in such a way as to bring about a massive retaliation? I am speaking of an attack so heinous that the moderates and the fundamentalists in all of Islam would come under siege. Would not such an attack allow us to then secure our southern borders and free us to turn our attention to the East?”

  What Zelinkow now implied was that this would allow Russia to repatriate Georgia and Ukraine back into greater Russia, and permit them to once and for all deal with the Chechens. Russia had finite military resources. Chechnya and the “Stans” along their southern border tied up far too much of those resources. If the Muslim nations on Russia’s border were forced to look south, not north, then those resources could be deployed to better advantage along the Sino-Russian border.

  “Just what kind of foolish attack are we talking about?”

  They talked for another hour. They spoke guardedly, often obliquely, but were honest in the way of spies who have slightly differing agendas. Neither told the other exactly everything, but they did agree that a deepening rift between the Muslim world and America would benefit Russia. And this would not be their last conversation on the matter. They were also forced to agree, with much reluctance, that the Western vodka they were drinking was superior to that distilled in the motherland. When their flights were called, they again embraced and parted for different concourses. Zhirinon caught an Aeroflot flight to St. Petersburg, continuing on to Moscow. Zelinkow flew KLM to Berlin and on to Rome. Neither traveled under his own name, nor with a Russian passport.

  The small cocktail lounge of the Makondo Hotel was intimate, well appointed, and well stocked, but there was no one behind the bar. At the Makondo, which meant “eagle” in Shona, services were kept to a minimum by a reduced contract staff from neighboring Mozambique. They were paid in cash, treated well, and totally intimidated by Claude Renaud and his men. They occupied separate quarters and came to the hotel in shifts to prepare food, clean rooms, and keep the premises in order. They tended to everything on the upper floors, but were forbidden to go into the basement on penalty of death. If the rumors circulating among this captive, resident staff were accurate, it was a penalty worse than death. The patrons in the bar might have to serve themselves, but the absence of a bartender allowed them to speak more freely. The lounge was the exclusive province of the hotel’s clinical personnel.

  The Mozambicans and Renaud’s security contingent had been told that this was a private research effort to develop cures for AIDS, Ebola, and other Africa-centric diseases. At the top of the agenda was AIDS, and many of those brought to the hotel-turned-clinic were already infected with the AIDS virus. It was further explained that the families of these unfortunates were paid a fee for their loved ones volunteering for this research, with the added bonus that they might in fact be cured of the disease. Neither the small housekeeping staff nor the soldiers really believed this story, but it kept them out of the off-limits areas.

  Helmut Klan helped himself to a generous dollop of schnapps and found a table in the corner. He was soon joined by a man in a white lab coat. Klan had always wondered why laboratory personnel were so fond of lab coats when off duty. Most evenings the bar looked like a Good Humor convention. There were perhaps fifteen of them altogether, but they all seemed to need a drink at the end of the day. Perhaps, Klan reflected, it was the work that they did. He rose to meet his guest.

  “Hans, my friend, how goes the battle?”

  “We are close, Helmut, very close. I want to set up another series of tests to confirm the incubation period. Then we can move to manufacturing and packaging. If all goes well, perhaps another few weeks—three at the outside.” English was spoken in the lab, as its personnel represented a half dozen nationalities, but when these two spoke in hushed tones, they naturally reverted to their native German. “I hate to ask this of you, but I will need another group of hosts.”

  “How many?” Klan asked.

  “Ten, but preferably a dozen.” In reality, he needed only six, but with the prevalence of AIDS in Zimbabwe, that many were needed to find at least six free of the virus.

  Klan nodded. He had no choice. “But you think this will be it; this will be the last of the testing?”

  “There are no givens in this venture, Helmut, you know that. But I see nothing further after this.” He held up a tumbler half filled with whiskey. “We need to wrap this up; my liver can’t take much more.” He took a large swallow from his glass, drawing his lips back along his teeth. “I need to get back to a cooler climate and some good Munich beer.”

  Dr. Hans Lauda was the head of the medical team. He had been a top geneticist at the University of Bonn when he had a falling out with the dean of the medical faculty over stem-cell research. Once you were sacked at a German university, there was little else to do but look for work in the private sector. He worked for several small pharmaceuticals, one of which asked if he’d like to work abroad on a classified project. Lauda’s wife, who missed the trappings of the academic life, had long since run off with an economics professor, so he took the job. For four years he had lived well in a villa just outside Baghdad, engaged in biological weapons research for Saddam Hussein. In late 2002, with the threat of the American invasion on the horizion, he had been paid off and asked to leave. His laboratory and the results of his work had been packed up and shipped off to Damascus.

  With a nice stash of euros in the bank, Lauda had gone to the south of France to, in his words, de-Arab himself. After a year of good wine, plump women, and a thorough cleaning at the tables in Monaco, he returned to Berlin to look for work. But there he found that the pharmaceuticals were offering only journeyman clinical wages. Lauda’s appetites had grown well beyond that kind of pay. He was then contacted by Helmut Klan and asked if he would like to go back overseas. Klan seemed to know a great deal about his work in Iraq. He didn’t say exactly where overseas, but the job would only be for about six months, and the money was good—very good, even by Baghdad or Berlin standards. Lauda was paid a retainer and told to wait until the rest of the “research team” was assembled. Dr. Lauda fully anticipated that this research would be highly illegal, judging by the money offered, but then he was accustomed to that. He had worked for four years in Iraq for General Ali Hassan al-Majid, better known as Chemical Ali. There were no illusions about the research he would be doing or what that research product might be used for.

  “Keep me posted on your progress, Hans. We all want out of here as soon as possible. I’ll see about the hosts.”

  Klan knocked back the schnapps and took his leave, glancing around the empty lobby as he crossed the foyer to the front door of the hotel. Some hotel, Klan mused. In reality the place was a little shop of horrors. He could easily have put this off until the following morning, but he wanted to get it over with. It was a pleasant enough evening, so he set out to complete his mission. He was anxious to return to his suite for another schnapps and a good book. The Makondo Hotel had an elaborate spa, massage room, and juice bar in a separate building from the main hotel complex. Klan suspected that the Japanese and then the Saudis had used it for a whole host of carnal
pleasures, but Claude Renaud had turned it into something of a noncommissioned officers’ club. They had set up a few dart boards and carried in a billiard table. Instead of juice they had an ample supply of the local sweet African beer. It was quite different from the Munich brew that Hans Lauda longed for.

  On his way to the spa complex, Helmut Klan considered the leader of his security force. He could understand Hans Lauda and the other members of the clinical staff, but Renaud was an entirely different species. He stepped through the screen door and closed it quietly behind him. From the entranceway he paused to watch Renaud. The big mercenary was commanding attention over a group of his men, who were mostly white. All were dressed in veld patrol attire—shorts, short-sleeved bush shirts, and rough-out boots. His voice boomed above the others; he clearly enjoyed the limelight.

  Men like Claude Renaud, who have served in special military units at a very young age, tend to mature very quickly. They soon acquire a confidence and self-assurance well beyond their years. They can find themselves the object of respect, even envy, to civilians and conventional military units. All this is a powerful cocktail for a young warrior. For most, it becomes a personal yardstick by which they take measure of themselves, and it drives them to improve and extend their warrior skills. Knowledge of self becomes an engine for growth that allows them to succeed in any number of personal endeavors. But occasionally, it freezes a man in place, at a single point in time; he never moves beyond it, nor has any desire to. Claude Renaud was such a man.

  Renaud grew up in Durban, South Africa, at a time when being white conferred a great many advantages. Yet as a young man he failed at many things. His father was a mining engineer, his mother a heavy drinker. An only child, he attended a private school, as did most white children in Durban, but struggled with his studies. Renaud was not dull, but tended to be more cunning than intellectually curious. Since he was bigger than most of his classmates, he easily assumed the role of bully. Before he was expelled from school at the age of fifteen, he had a taste of what it was to have others fear him and to curry his favor to stave off his wrath. No other experience gave him such pleasure or sense of self-worth as the physical domination of others. His father managed to get him a job at a mining concession, and since he was white, he was given a junior overseer’s position. He immediately became abusive to his crew, physically and verbally. But these black men were very stoic about his excesses, denying Renaud the ability to intimidate them. This only encouraged him to further denigrate them. Most mine owners worked their blacks unmercifully, but in their own fashion they did take care of them, much as a hunter cares for his gun dogs. Few mine owners tolerated mindless abuse of their workers. It wasn’t even a racist issue for Renaud; he simply had a need for others to fear him. After repeated warnings, he was fired, and personally escorted from the concession by the mine foreman.

  “You’re not capable of working with other men,” the foreman told Renaud, “let alone being in charge of them. Now beat it, and don’t come back.”

  Renaud’s next move was the wrong one. In his rage and humiliation, he swung on the foreman. The big Afrikaner, like Renaud, had been a bully in his youth, but he had grown out of it and was now a tough but responsible mining foreman. He easily slipped Renaud’s punch and then proceeded to beat him within an inch of his life. The beating was not personal, but it was physical and emotional, as the foreman knew it would be for a young man like Renaud. The foreman hoped that perhaps this might cause him to reflect on why it had come to this, and perhaps help him to see things differently. The effect was just the opposite. It convinced Renaud that he was not tough enough, or perhaps not brutal enough. He returned to Durban in complete humiliation, his face swollen and distorted from the pounding he had taken. People stared, and their looks of pity, along with a few smirks, seared his soul. That night he met a middle-aged black man on a side street, a minor municipal employee on his way home from work. Renaud dragged him into an alley and beat and kicked him to death. It was the only tonic for the rage that burned inside him.

  Renaud immediately left South Africa and made his way north to Salisbury. He was only sixteen, but he lied about his age and joined the Rhodesian Army. During basic training, he worked hard, for he was someone who, when motivated, could focus his energies on a specific goal. He graduated at the top of his recruit class and found himself in Rhodesian African Rifles. At last, Claude Renaud felt he was where he belonged. The struggles for succession to the colonial powers was just beginning to heat up, and that meant the Communist-backed guerillas were moving against the European rulers still in power, as well as the fledgling black democracies. The white men were leaving, and power would evolve to the strongest, which in Africa meant the most brutally persistent. Government by consent of the governed was an idea with little traction on the continent. Rhodesia held on longer than most because of its superb army. This holding action was a little more vigorous because the Rhodesians, whites and blacks alike, were highly professional. They also could be almost as ruthless in the field as the Communist-backed insurgent forces vying for control of the country. But even during the brutal counter-guerrilla sweeps, where the killing and burning could often be indiscriminate, Corporal Claude Renaud had to be repeatedly cautioned by his sergeant and lieutenant. One day, after he shot some guerillas who were trying to surrender, the battalion sergeant major took him aside and said, “I’ll give you a choice, Renaud. I’ll see you up for court-martial, or you can join the Scouts.”

  The Selous Scouts ran their own training facility at a bush camp called Wafa Wafa, some forty miles from the town of Kariba. The name came from the Shona phrase Wafa wasara, “If you die, you die.” It was a good name for the facility. The training itself lasted only three weeks. It was more a testing than training, designed to summarily weed out those who hadn’t the heart or the temperament to fight in the bush. Claude Renaud, who could on occasion summon within himself a tenacity and vitality, managed to complete this grueling entrance exam. The proudest day of his life was when he was allowed to wear the coveted chocolate beret with the silver osprey badge. Like most elite forces, the Scouts kept pretty much to themselves, but Renaud loved nothing better than going into a bar in Kariba wearing military bush attire and his beret. He was a Selous Scout, and no one could ever take that away from him.

  But the Selous Scouts were not parade-ground soldiers. They spent long periods of time in the bush, living off the land and tracking insurgents to their base camps. They often fought vicious, bloody engagements where they were heavily outnumbered. It was a difficult and dangerous business, one that required skill, patience, and a great deal of courage. A man, black or white, was treated with the respect he earned in the field. The Selous Scouts were one of the few fully integrated elite military units where whites served in the minority. The backbone of the Scouts were the warrant or noncommissioned officers, men who had spent years in the bush and had earned their leadership positions on the battlefield. Most of these hard, capable men were black. Following a raid into a ZANLA base camp area where the resistance had been particularly stiff, Renaud shot and killed several bound prisoners—executed them, in fact. Not only was this brutal, it was tactically unsound. Many of those they captured were “turned” by the Scouts and served the government cause, often with great distinction. When Renaud’s warrant officer called him on this, he said something to the effect that the only good kaffir was a dead kaffir. After the company returned from the raid, the warrant asked Renaud to step out onto the dirt parade ground in front of the barracks. For the second time in his life he was beaten half to death, only this time it was by a black man in front of his company mates. The black warrant officer was as tall as Renaud, but just a fraction of his bulk and very fast. Following the thrashing, Renaud was dragged before his company commander and summarily dismissed from the Selous Scouts. This beating and abasement became a burning coal in the pit of his stomach that could never be extinguished. Every few years someone, somewhere, would bring it up, and
he was forced to relive the humiliation. He never forgot the beating, nor the man who had given it to him.

  From there, Renaud made his way back to South Africa, where a former Selous Scout, under any circumstances, was welcome in the South African Defense Force. After four years of undistinguished service in the SADF, mostly in Namibia fighting UNITA guerillas, he took a job with a Johannesburg security firm. He was assigned to guard the homes of wealthy white South Africans, a line of work that suited him; his size and presence was enough to discourage most casual thieves and burglars. It all ended when Nelson Mandela and his African National Congress came to power in 1994. It wasn’t that whites were persecuted in postapartheid South Africa, but the traditional advantages afforded whites were rapidly disappearing. Renaud and any number of ex-military security guards found themselves out of work when their patrons took what was left of their personal wealth and headed for Europe, Australia, or America. With the South Africa he knew disappearing around him, Renaud learned that an organization for former SADF personnel with experience in the colonial wars was hiring—a private military force called Executive Outcomes. They payed well, and between jobs he could hang out in Johannesburg with other white mercenaries while they waited for work.

  Something in Renaud sensed that the sporadic mercenary contracts were his last chance to remain in some kind of uniform—and the only work he knew. So when he was on the job, he did what he was told and no more. He was capable enough, and few whites in the mercenary trade were model soldiers. Most had something in their past they preferred not to talk about. Renaud still wore the silver osprey badge of the Selous Scouts on his beret. The reputation of the Selous Scouts and the Rhodesian Army still inspires fear and awe in central and southern Africa, and Renaud traded heavily on that reputation. He could always find work as a hired gun, but no more than that. Any chance at something more than journeyman’s mercenary wages was quickly extinguished when someone mentioned his exile from the Selous Scouts. Like honor among whores, those who paid for mercenary services wanted only to deal with those they could trust—military leaders who had a reputation for honesty and discretion. Leadership skills and integrity were essential in riding herd on a group of mercenary soldiers. Renaud had long wanted to contract for his own force, but while his spotty reputation was good enough for an occasional hiring and tall talk in the bars where expatriate mercs hung out, no one wanted him as a principal. No responsible government or mining consortium would contract for an unreliable mercenary leader. Mercenary intervention was dicey business at best, without the risk of an overzealous or excessive force. The contracting sources looked for reliability and integrity, and for those who managed mercenary undertakings, reputation was everything. If they found themselves on the wrong side of an issue, or if the forces under their direction used excessive means, it could spell disaster, financially and in the court of world opinion. As they said in the trade, it would “ruin the brand,” and they would not see another contract. Most mercenary contracts in Africa involved securing and guarding mining properties; it was about the ore—that and attracting as little attention as possible.