by Paul Eksteen
And last week he finally made contact with someone who might be able to assist him.
He was introduced to a couple. The wife was a Cuban lady who came to Southern Africa in the 1980s to assist in the freedom struggle as an attaché to one of the Cuban Officers in Angola. After the war ended in the 1990s and the ANC became the ruling party, she was employed by the South African government and was still working for them in Pretoria.
She was married to a white South African professor who lectured at UNISA’s campus in Pretoria. They lived a happy, childless life together and were very sympathetic to the old freedom fighters and ANC cadres in the struggle for freedom.
The Cuban lady listened to his story and, although she could not promise him immediate results, she said that she would definitely have some information for him in the near future.
She seemed to be very excited to meet him. Something felt odd, but she was willing to assist with his mission, and he was desperate for help.
Finally. And with her help, he could finalise another chapter in his life.
However, something was gnawing at the back of his mind. It was almost as if she was looking for him. Not the other way around.
A list of Honoris Crux decorations from 1987 and 1988 was his only lead. But at least he had a starting point. His target was between the twenty-odd candidates. And his new contact could help him.
The Honoris Crux (Cross of Honour) was a military decoration for bravery which was awarded to members of the South African Defence Force for bravery in dangerous circumstances since 1 July 1975.
Altogether, two hundred and one Honoris Crux medals were awarded between 1976 and 2003, after which it was discontinued. The operators of the South African Special Forces were awarded most of the decorations, a total of forty-six, for deeds of bravery during action in the Border War.
A bunch of thoughts kept milling through his head. He couldn’t sleep on Friday night and last night he was kept awake as well.
At some stage he would have to lie down and get some rest.
The Doctor decided to take some sleeping pills which he took from the hospital’s dispensary and to lie down after breakfast.
His only hope was with the Cuban lady. It was the first contact that could bring in some results.
CHAPTER 4
Irene Mall, Pretoria — Friday noon, 20 February
1320024.
In the code script, this means a meeting at thirteen hundred hours on the 20 of February at locality number four.
I was having a trinchado starter and a Windhoek Draft at the Braza restaurant in Irene Mall. I was seated upstairs and was admiring the family memoirs of the franchise owners against the walls of the restaurant.
There were four more couples seated upstairs with me as well as three other lone diners, eating on their own or waiting for partners like I was.
It was half past one and Nic Badenhorst was late as usual.
Not that I was very eager to sit face to face with Nic. My last mission for the South African State Security Agency turned out disastrously with the SSA having to cover up a messy ‘gang shootout’ in one of the coloured suburbs in the Cape Flats.
***
The day after I was shot, Dog was arrested and sent back to Goodwood prison.
Not exactly what SSA had planned for him, as he was the Lord of the Hollanders, the Twenty-Sevens gang in prison. SSA wanted him eliminated, not back on home ground.
I was taken to a private practice in Durbanville after Matt found me passed out in my hotel’s parking lot. I had spent two days at the private practice and another two at the Blue Peter Hotel, before I flew back to Pretoria.
Two weeks later I was summoned by Nic and here I was. I had the stitches from my right bicep removed earlier that day, by a doctor recommended by Nic. My right arm was feeling good, with my fingers working well. I could only feel slight pain when trying to lift something heavier than a shopping bag. My rib still hurt when coughing or laughing and, therefore, I kept that to a minimum. The laughing part, that is.
***
I travelled from Polokwane to Pretoria early in the morning and went to a Doctor Kruger in Suid Street in Hatfield for my eleven o’clock appointment. The house I was looking for was on the right-hand side of the street as you drive towards the University of Pretoria’s sport grounds.
I found the house and stopped outside a palisade fence, gaining access to the house through a gate in the palisade with an intercom. Inside the house, I introduced myself as Mr Botha and asked for Liesl, as per Nic’s instructions.
Liesl didn’t keep me waiting, and immediately took me through to a back room, which earned me glares from the other patients in the waiting room. She made me sit on an examination table, took my blood pressure and, without any feedback, turned around and left the room. Five minutes later, someone, who I presumed must be Dr Kruger, walked into the room. He was a kindly old gentleman in his early sixties, white hair, erudite, wise, and sympathetic.
“Good day, Mr Botha. Please remove your shirt.” He inspected the bruising on my chest and then removed the stitches from my arm. “You are lucky that the wound is free of bone, tendon or significant muscle damage. Any pain, headaches, muscular contractions or muscle rigidity?”
I replied in the negative.
“Here is a container of Betadine. Use it often. Doctor Patel in Cape Town is an old acquaintance of mine and he told me that he injected you with a tetanus booster. He also mentioned giving you some oral antibiotics with instructions to finish the course. I presume you did what you were instructed?”
He didn’t wait for an answer and carried on. “No need for another booster for the next five years, so I will have to settle by giving you a vitamin B12 booster. Please pull down your pants and turn around.”
He injected me, and as I was getting dressed, he said, “That will be six hundred rand.” Nic warned me to have the cash ready so I paid the doctor and left.
***
As I finished my starter, Nic limped in. His limp wasn’t bad; it sort of made his walk just a little bit lopsided. He had been limping since the day I met him, and I still don’t know what happened to his leg.
Nic was the stereotypical high rolling government official. He was dressed in khaki chinos, a black long-sleeved collarless shirt and some fancy black pointed shoes and a broad black leather belt with a shiny buckle. He was carrying a black jacket over his left shoulder and a shiny black briefcase in his right hand. His dark hair was close cropped, and he had grown one of those silly, dirty, trendy, chin beards since I last saw him.
He had turned into a real city slicker since the day I met him almost fifteen years ago. At that stage he was still being used in the field, and was fit and in shape, and at least ten kilograms lighter. I guess him to be in his late fifties, of medium height and bulky. A doctor would call him overweight, but I see a fit man some way down the wrong side of the hill.
When I met him, he wore his black and unruly curly hair almost to his shoulders and he looked like he needed a shave. His close-cropped hair now showed streaks of silver, and he should definitely shave off the silly beard.
Badenhorst was a German surname, and these German cross breeds made excellent soldiers. Many of them became officers in the SA military years ago, with a lot of them still around. The army was lucky to have them, the people who had to work with them, were not so lucky.
I waved at Nic who was looking around seemingly irritated. He took a seat across from me and, in the same motion, signalled for the waiter. “A rock shandy, please.”
To me he opened with, “Tom, your last job was a royal fuck-up.” He looked at me with a frown on his face and leaned back in his chair.
“And hallo to you too, Nic,” I replied.
“Fuck you, Tom.”
Okay, now this conversation was not going anywhere. What does he want me to do? Burst into tears or kick him in the nuts?
These desk-jockeys specialised in flogging dead horses to make you feel bad to such
a point as to do something that you would never under normal circumstances even consider. Just to please them.
I was not far from wrong.
“Tom, you’re in the shit over the last job, and that’s just tough. You can make it up though, by doing this next one pro bono. You were paid a deposit for the Atlantis job which you never finished. You actually cost the department a heap of extra bucks and had me running around covering up your balls-up. You owe me big time, but I am willing to settle the bill after you’ve completed this next job.”
“I’ll do it.”
This caught him by surprise. It was too easy. He didn’t even get to flogging the dead horse yet. He took a sip from his shandy, leaned back in his chair, and looked at me with a frown on his face. “Cheers?”
What I really wanted to tell him was that I was getting too old for this job. I was in my forties now and had grown a conscience since the time he enlisted me. Maybe the Atlantis job would have had a different ending if I was fifteen years younger.
One of my uncle’s favourite jokes was that when he was a youngster, he could hang a fire bucket filled with sand on his erection and walk across a rugby field. When he tried to do it now, his knees would give in halfway!
I was not completely there yet, but I am starting to have sympathy with him now.
I tried not to smile when Nic reached down into his briefcase; he’d known what I was going to say all the time. He handed me a brown A4 envelope, finished his drink in one gulp and stood up. “Good luck,” he said and walked away, not meaning it at all. “Ja, Tom,” I said to myself. “Did you really have an option?”
***
I had been working for the SSA on a contractual basis since I left the military. The pay was good, and the added bonus was that they paid my money into my Central Bank of Malta account.
I subsequently bought an apartment in St Julian’s in Malta, and the payments from the SSA were enough to cover my instalments, plus some pocket money for when I took a European vacation. An added bonus was when Malta adopted the Euro as their national currency the previous year.
I could clearly remember the day years ago when I met with my commanding officer at Speskop in Pretoria. I told him a week earlier that I was resigning from the military, and he secretly arranged for a meeting with Nic of the National Intelligence Agency (NIA).
I had returned with my company from Angola a few weeks earlier. We were deployed and were lying idle. The war was over. I had performed so heroically in one of our earlier operations that I was awarded the Honoris Crux Medal.
There were different ways of ending an army career. With the war in Angola being something of the past, I could see myself lying idle and eventually fading away into oblivion. I knew that I had to pull out. Resign and start afresh somewhere else, before I was asked to leave quietly.
So, the man in the suit had come. He made a proposal. Come join another agency. Another unit dedicated to fighting your country’s enemies. That was how he phrased it: “Your country’s enemies.” I was told little else.
I looked up at my commander for advice, but it was clear that the decision had already been made.
I, Sergeant Tom Allen Coetzee, in my early twenties and covered in medals and commendations for my exemplary service in Angola, was mustered out of the army with breathtaking speed.
I got married six months before I joined the NIA, to the love of my life, Antoinette. I met her during my time in South West Africa when on a long weekend pass. A bunch of us went to the Windhoek Show, and she was a friend of a friend.
We clicked right from the start and stayed in contact. She was in her final year at school and went to Pretoria to study the following year.
Antoinette studied to become a teacher at the University of Pretoria, and we got married the same weekend as her graduation day. She was teaching mathematics at a decent secondary school in Pretoria and waited patiently for me to return from the Bush War.
The war was over, and we were looking to settle down somewhere. The offer from the NIA came just at the right time and fitted in nicely with my plans for the future.
Nic offered me a position as a contractor for NIA with one mission minimum, and three missions maximum per year. The salary of one mission was more than a year’s salary in the force.
And as an added bonus, I received a retirement package from the SADF, which I used to start a panel beating shop in Polokwane. Kwinzee and I.
Antoinette didn’t have difficulty in getting a position at the Pietersburg High School in Polokwane. Pietersburg and Polokwane being the same place. Pietersburg had been renamed to Polokwane in the 1990s in a frenzy of Orwellian name changing, after the ANC political party took charge of the country.
I had to attend and successfully complete a six-month training school, hosted by the SA National Academy of Intelligence, before I was accepted as an employee at the NIA.
I thought back on the training modules. It started with shooting training first, where I had fired off tens of thousands of rounds. During these training sessions, the instructors would throw every imaginable distraction at you while you were aiming at the targets.
It had been good training, because out in the real world a perfect field of fire with accompanying idyllic conditions was impossible to find.
After the shooting range was the lab. It was there where the psychological testing took place — really glorified torture to determine what your breaking point was. Here I had seen how hard-as-steel men weep in that room, as the technicians played numbing games with our minds.
I also saw men get up and disappear from the facility. Men whose minds would never be as strong as their physical side, no matter how hard they trained.
And after that, a heap of other basic studies such as crime simulation, physical education, legal classes, defensive tactics, public affairs, and all sorts of other boring subjects to fill each and every minute of a fourteen-hour day.
I completed the course as one of the top students in the class, and informed Kwinzee of my immediate plans. He resigned from the army and joined me in Polokwane.
His thoughts were always to go back to the Venda Defence Force and join ranks with his father, but he was not so eager when he learned that the Venda Defence Force was disbanded and incorporated in the new SANDF the same year.
We were both young, happily married men and wanted the best for our families. And starting our own company would enable us to achieve this.
***
As a farm kid from Vivo in the far northern part of South Africa, I never grew up worrying about my future. I would either farm or do something else. I never really studied very hard to achieve spectacular grades. My average was a B, and that kept my parents happy. My parents worked hard and loved me unconditionally.
I had decent extracurricular activities, including being captain of the school’s shooting team. I wasn’t a wise ass like many of the other boys but was naturally charming. In terms of popularity, I hovered right below the top echelon. I wasn’t good enough to play in the first rugby or cricket teams but made the second teams.
After school I had to do my two years of compulsory military service, and once I decided on a career in the military, things changed.
My motto in life used to be ‘que sera, sera’, but all of a sudden something inside me switched on. I wanted to be the best. And I was. I joined the SADF as a Permanent Force member and became a professional soldier.
I had gone to the border more or less completely unaware of my capabilities. More or less completely unaware of everything, because I was only eighteen years old. I was not only very young, but also straight out of a background that was repressed and conducted in a quiet rural charm.
The Border changed me. It could have broken me. It broke plenty of other guys. All around me, there were guys going to pieces. Not just the kids like me, but the older guys too, the long service professionals who had been in the army for years. The Border fell on people like a dead weight, and some of them turned bosbefok, an
d some of them didn’t.
I didn’t. I just looked around, and changed, and adapted. Listened and learned. The way I grew up. The killing part was no big deal. I was a guy who had to cut the throat of a sheep, decapitate a chicken, or had to kill an impala with a rifle. All of these at an early age, when still in primary school.
My first day in Angola I saw three South African corpses. It was a foot patrol who triggered an anti-personnel mine. Three men, fifteen pieces, a defining moment. My buddies were going quiet and throwing up, and groaning in sheer abject miserable disbelief. I looked and learned. I went quiet and did my share.
I was the ideal candidate for the NIA.
The NIA changed its name to the State Security Agency (SSA) four years ago, but the relationship between Nic and me stayed the same.
***
When I got to my bakkie, I inserted the SIM card into my mobile phone and switched it on. It was standard operating procedures when meeting with any SSA personnel, to remove the SIM card of your phone to avoid tracking.
As soon as the phone connected to the network, it started vibrating and flashing like disco lights. The phone ID showed that it was my partner, Kwinzee.
“Hi Kwinz, what’s up?”
“There’s a balls-up with the payment on the last tender, DC.”
“What do you mean, a balls-up? I paid the money over on Monday.”
“I know DC, but the money is not in the right account. It seems like a scam.”
Shit! I don’t need this.
“I am leaving Pretoria now, Kwinz. I will see you at the office at five. Did you report anything yet?”
“I contacted Lebo at the bank, DC. She confirmed that the money is out of our account. I haven’t reported anything to the cops yet. Lebo wants me to open a docket with the SAPS, and then report it to their fraud department in Pretoria. Should I go ahead?”
