by MP Miles
Copyright © 2019 M P Miles
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
Although based on true events the characters in this novel are fictitious. Certain long-standing institutions, agencies and public offices are mentioned, but the characters involved are wholly imaginary and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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For my father,
Mervyn Philip Ralph Miles (1930–2016)
And Joshua the son of Nun sent out two men to spy secretly, saying, ‘Go view the land’
Joshua 2:1 (KJV)
Contents
South Africa
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Southern Africa
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Central Africa
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
North Africa
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Southern England
Twenty-six
South Africa and England
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
The British Virgin Islands
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the author
South Africa
6th December, 1981 to 4th March, 1982
One
Angel travelled on the train every morning from his home near fields and a stream to the Comitia building, a grey inhospitable office block with an obscure unmarked entrance beside a small travel agency.
His braided hair, unfashionably long and tied in a ponytail to keep it manageable during the day, the butt of endless jokes, fell in his eyes as he stepped down to the platform. He shook his head to clear it and saw that the carriage had a needless sign on it; they all did. Suddenly and unexpectedly angry, he scowled and looked crossly for someone to blame for his irritation. It incensed him. Most of the signs had been taken down; everyone knew the rules. People knew who the carriage was for without it requiring a pointless notice declaring ‘non-whites’.
Angel noticed a scuffle on the sidewalk outside of the station – two policemen trying to lift a man from the pavement, batons drawn. A police vehicle drifted around the corner like a shark circling a kill. A woman screamed, her hands pulling at her own hair. Loud shouting policemen asked the man for something. He cowered on his knees, arms up to protect his face in case the batons should fall.
Angel stepped into the road to walk past them, muttering, giving himself instructions. The woman, distraught, started shrieking at the policeman. He walked quicker to get past them but then slowed, listening to the woman, intrigued by her accent. Angel made a guess that she was speaking Setswana, officially the language of Botswana, but most Africans in Pretoria spoke a Tswana-based creole. He listened to the stress sounds and the tones, more high than low, different to the Setswana he was used to.
“Hey, what are you looking at?”
The policeman who shouted at him had long socks, and shorts held by a wide black belt that glistened as brightly as his truncheon.
Angel spoke Afrikaans, but his pronunciation made it obvious it wasn’t his first language.
“I can help.”
“What?”
“She’s trying to explain,” Angel said, pointing to the man shaking in fear on his knees. “He had an accident in the mine and can’t work. She was taking him to a doctor.”
The policeman put his face very close to Angel’s.
“You had better shut up. I don’t need any help from you understanding the Population Registration Act. He’s Black like you and needs a pass to be here. Move on or I’ll put you in the van with him.”
Angel stroked the braids on the back of his head. His father, a white Afrikaner civil engineer based in Mbabane, Swaziland, had worked on the Pretoria to Maputo, Mozambique railway in the late 1940s, a time when engineering projects were completed as much with hard fists as theodolites. Angel had never met him.
Angel’s mother was Black Swazi with pretensions to royalty. She came from the House of Dlamini, her father the virile King Sobhuza II of Swaziland. She took the first name of the King’s mother, Lomawa, one of Sobhuza’s 210 children from one of his seventy wives. When Lomawa started feeling ill, the inyanga, the most important of the three types of traditional healers, threw his collection of bones on the ground and puzzled over the pattern they took. The diagnosis seemed uncertain. He prescribed a kuhlanta, a vomiting treatment using water and an extract of herbs. She didn’t need it. She vomited regularly, every morning. In desperation, and because of her royal status, he recommended a luhhemane in the presence of the King. In a mental state influenced by mind-changing drugs Lomawa talked freely about the sickness and could name the umtsakatsi, the witch that caused it. She named a wizard not a witch – a white wizard working on the railway. King Sobhuza had the final word. She had a choice: back to the inyanga for stronger herb extract to expel her evil and then banishment overseas, or just banishment overseas. Already feeling ill and fearful of the inyanga’s medicine she chose the latter, left Angel’s father in Mbabane with his railway and never returned. She spent her life in the damp small rooms of London’s SW1 hinterland and refused to give her baby a name.
Angel smiled at the policeman.
“Well, interestingly, and I have thought about this, the admixture appears to be gender-biased.”
“What?”
“You would probably expect my maternal genetic material to be predominately Khoisan,” Angel waved a finger at him, “but in fact it is autochthonous Bantu, which may explain your original observation.”
The policeman put his hand around his baton, his pink fingers turning white.
“What the fok are you talking about?”
“I’m Coloured,” said Angel, “not Black.” Angel laughed and shook his head. “But I do sometimes wonder. You know…”
“Shut up!” the policeman shouted, spittle dribbling on his chin.
His partner turned, his hand on the shoulder of the kneeling man
.
“He looks more Black than Coloured to me,” he said. “Only nine per cent are Coloureds. Ask him to show you his fingernails.”
Angel knew the drill. Under South Africa’s arbitrary and confusing rules of racial differentiation, if the moons of the fingernails showed a mauve tinge then he would be Black not Coloured, a distinction that would affect every aspect of his life.
“Oh please,” pleaded Angel, still smiling, “you’ll be putting a pencil in my curly hair next and seeing if it stays there when I shake my head.”
The woman, still shrieking, scratched at the policeman’s face. Don’t hit her. Please don’t hit her, Angel mumbled to himself.
Angel could picture in his head how it would unfold before it happened. He knew with certainty who would move where, how they would smell, what vehicle would pass when it had ended.
The policeman clenched his left hand into a fist to punch the woman in the centre of her trunk, swinging up quickly from low down. He delivered a strong blow under the sternum with a lot of momentum, an unwarranted and excessive martial arts move to the solar plexus to knock the air out of an opponent and cause them to lose balance. The blow compressed the nerves that radiate outward from the coeliac underneath the heart, her diaphragm contracting into spasm. She fell to the pavement, winded, struggling for breath. He lifted his baton to strike the woman he had just punched to the ground.
Angel’s hand came from behind the policeman, grabbed his raised forearm and pulled it up, over and down behind the policeman’s back, using the acceleration of the arm coming down and its own mass to force the dislocation of the shoulder. Angel turned. The other policeman reached down his leg, looking for his sidearm. Angel stepped backwards, lined himself up and kicked him hard on the side of the knee, like a long punt deep into the opposition’s twenty-two at a rugby match. The policeman’s leg buckled instantly and he fell, screaming.
Angel lifted the woman into a crouching position, with her upper body brought forward and down over her knees. There wasn’t time for the spasm to settle and the breathing to return to normal. They had to move quickly. The man who now stood beside her had a thin fine face with a hooked nose and looked out of place in urban Pretoria. Angel, currently working on a project with the Egyptian General Intelligence Directorate, wondered if he might be Arab. Employees of GID, an incredibly secretive and powerful body with agents throughout the Middle East and North Africa, had immunity from prosecution for all crimes committed while at work. Some in the intelligence world, and in Angel’s own organisation, thought this enviable.
“Get away from here,” Angel said. Neither the woman nor the man moved. Angel spoke quietly to them. “Batswana?”
The man nodded. He’s San, thought Angel, from the Kalahari. He probably came through Gaborone to dig gold on the Witwatersrand. South Africa hasn’t been good to him. He was nearly killed by an accident underground, nearly killed today by a policeman on the surface.
“Go home.”
Angel picked the woman up and helped her to the side of the road, waving at an approaching bus. He thought of a Swazi saying: ‘long hair’, have a long life.
The two policemen from the circling vehicle appeared, one with a shotgun raised and pointing at Angel, barking instructions to his partner. Angel stood very still. He held his arms out straight, palms forward, in the shape of a man tied to a cross, a crucifixion.
“Top pocket! Top pocket!” Angel shouted as well. He needed to make himself heard, to get the policeman’s attention.
Covered by the policeman with the shotgun, the other one stepped cautiously towards Angel, nervous and sweating hard. He reached for Angel’s pocket and pulled out a wallet.
The detested passbook that Angel abhorred but was made to carry had a thirteen-figure number, the last figure just a control digit.
The first six numbers told his date of birth. Angel was born in 1951 in London, not far from the Swazi Embassy at 20 Buckingham Gate where his mother spent her imprisoned life. St Thomas’ Hospital on Lambeth Palace Road was across the City from Cheapside but on a very quiet night, and with a gentle wind from the east, Lomawa from Swaziland might have heard St Mary-le-Bow, and her African son have been born a distinctive Bow-bell Cockney. Isabel, a Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican nanny who brought him up, named him Ángel. He used his father’s South African surname, Rots. He often asked Isabel but no one, including his mother, could tell him his father’s first name. He was thirty years old.
The next four numbers showed his sex. Over five thousand: male.
And then two numbers, the most important. Two numbers to control people’s lives. Two numbers to tell them where to live, what to do for work, what cinema to go in, where to sit, what carriage on the train, what they could be arrested for. Two numbers: citizenship and racial group.
The policeman looked at it and found the important part of the long number, reading it out loud to himself.
“Zero seven?” He looked baffled. “This must be wrong. A zero seven code is for a South African citizen, Coloured.”
Angel held out his arms.
“That’s me,” he said.
Angel didn’t sound like any Coloured South African citizen he’d ever met. He tensed and apprehensively thumbed the identity book in his hand.
“How can you be South African?”
“The Army,” said Angel.
“The Army? Which bit of the Army?” he asked.
“The busy bit.”
In 1969, age eighteen and keen to see the land of his father, Angel had travelled by ship to Swaziland and South Africa by way of Malta, Suez, Mombasa and Maputo, relieved after the sea time to travel the last leg of his journey to Johannesburg on his father’s railway over the high country along the south bank of the Komati and Crocodile Rivers.
For want of somewhere to stay he had walked into a recruiting office and joined the South African Defence Force, which was never that fussy about the nationality of volunteers or their absurd English accents. He initially served with the South African Cape Corps, a non-combatant Coloured service corps, the sixteen weeks of basic training identical to young white national servicemen who had been called up. His English boarding school had been entirely relevant preparation. Volunteering again in 1970 for training with 1 Parachute Battalion, the Parabats, he had to repeat basic: another forty-two weeks’ training. He became a soldier without politics, a foreigner in the South African Defence Force. A wretched ten months on the Angolan border of South West Africa followed hunting SWAPO terrorists, making good use of the Spanish from his Puerto Rican nanny with captured Cuban advisors. He left after two years, even though national service had at that time only lasted nine months, his South African citizenship confirmed.
“The other side,” said Angel calmly, non-threatening. “Sir, please.”
The policeman turned it over and puzzled over the South African governmental identification card.
“BOSS?”
Angel spoke low and slow, melodic, to reassure.
“It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s not called the Bureau for State Security anymore. It’s NIS, National Intelligence Service. It’s okay.”
The policeman relaxed a little. He could hear an ambulance.
“You work for National Intelligence?”
Angel smiled at him.
“Knowledge protects. Sir.”
The policeman took another look at the name on the identification document, talking to himself again.
“Angel Rots.”
“And there’s this,” said Angel.
He slowly removed a small thin hard-backed book from his back pocket, creased and stained. It was blue with a crest that was once embossed in gold but had faded and worn. Angel made it a matter of principle to take it out as infrequently as possible.
“It’s a British passport,” he said in English, with as much Cockney as he could lace into his ac
cent.
The policeman knew what that meant: a ‘get out of jail’ card.
“That’s right,” Angel said. “I was Coloured, or possibly Black, but now I’m an honorary White.” Angel laughed at the ludicrous inanity, but the policeman didn’t smile.
*
Director General Lombard and his deputy Nick Roux stood alone in a vault at The Circle. It had surprised them that despite it being a Friday afternoon two weeks before Christmas, the holiday season starting and the roads busy, it had taken only fifteen minutes to drive from the office in central Pretoria. They had then spent four hours being passed through successive layers of dogs and wire and grim unsmiling faces, delighted to witness such thoroughness, aware that few people were ever allowed to get so far.
“Is that it?”
“You don’t need to whisper, Nick.”
“It doesn’t look like a bomb.”
“It’s the guts of a bomb, without the bomb casing.”
Roux examined the two wheeled tables, separated to opposite ends of the room. Each held a metre-long yellow tube, similar to wide drainage pipe. One tube was fatter, the steel wall of the pipe six centimetres thick, while the other tube had something attached to it that resembled the copper windings of a coil in an electric motor. It looked dull and poorly made, like a prop at his daughters’ school nativity play.
“They haven’t even joined it together.”
“The two uranium sections, the bullet and the target, are always kept separate. They don’t ever work on both sections at the same time. It wouldn’t be joined together until deployment.”
Roux looked around, the building lit bright white by fluorescent tubes. They had entered a giant safe, to be met by a wall of smaller safes. Each heavy safe door had a numeric keypad and a four-handled wheel above a big shiny combination dial. The walls had wine bottle-shaped vents at the top and were lined from floor to ceiling with a mesh like fine chicken wire.
