Vultures in the Wind

by Peter Rimmer

  “Oudemeester.”

  “You never change. Felix, an odie for Matt. Where’ve you been, Matt? Haven’t seen you for a while. You see those two birds down the bar,” his old bar acquaintance said, dropping his voice to a whisper. “That’s real talent, and it’s Friday night.” Outside in the tall trees, pigeons were calling to each other as the cars arrived and the young single set of Johannesburg came to their watering hole.

  It was as though he had never been away.

  3

  Teddie Botha found Security Holdings to be a lot less secure than his grandfather had led him to believe. Very simply, the old man had lost control of management and the capital growth figures, published with the authentication of the auditors, were dubious, if not an outright lie. Large sums of policyholders’ money had been badly invested and there were assets shown in the balance sheet that Teddie knew should have been written off years earlier. American banks lending to Third World governments were aware of the same cold shadow of bad debt.

  The main problem was that the buildings put up in the boom of the sixties were less than fully occupied and the loans made by Security Life were no longer covered by the resale value of the properties. A pessimist would even have said that the solvency rate of the company was in jeopardy and that actuarially, Security Life was unable to fulfil its future commitments when guaranteed policies and death sums insured were taken into account. The best thing for Security Life policyholders was a Lion Life takeover, but the company was not a mutual office and policyholders had no say in accepting the offer.

  Teddie’s first task as chief executive was to fire some of the senior staff, cut overheads and strengthen his balance sheet. But to do any of these things while under attack would have been suicidal. Security Holdings shares would have tumbled, making the offer irresistible. Teddie Botha needed a white knight, someone who would buy a parcel of his own trust shares so that he could use the money to follow a rights issue and increase the company’s capital. The alternative was to sell the short-term company, which included Gray Associates, an asset that had been in decline ever since his grandfather had bought the company. Brokers had been disinclined to support Security Fire and Accident when it owned a firm of insurance brokers who competed for their business.

  Hector Fortescue-Smythe spent half an hour on the phone to his mother in England. His father had contracted Parkinson’s disease and his mother now ran the company with the lawyer Hector had appointed as trustee. Only when the South African interests were concerned did Hector have anything to do with the family company. He was very concerned with the impending world revolution and the role that this would have him play in South Africa. He and the Reverend Andrew Porterstone had placed seven black priests in strategic positions within the Church of England in Southern Africa, and all seven were successfully preaching liberation theology to the black congregations, placing the horrors of apartheid in the perspective they deserved and drawing from the world community funds that would further the revolution. Carefully the men were drawing Caesar and God into the same camp. In public and in private, the black clergy sided with the black nationalist cause, which was firmly controlled by the communists. When the time came, the black nationalist movement would hand over South Africa into the Soviet camp.

  The idea of controlling a major life insurance company with its vast investment assets appealed to Hector’s real desire in life. Revolutions needed money. With care, through a controlling shareholding, he would be able to direct funds from policyholders’ pension funds into the cause of world revolution. By the time the policyholders asked for their pensions, capitalism would have been abolished in South Africa and the assets of all life insurance companies, banks and mining houses nationalised. His mother’s suggestion on the telephone had been made to benefit Smythe-Wilberforce. Hector saw a better use for the funds.

  Security Life’s problems had been brought to his attention by his father-in-law, who had no wish to see a South African asset fall into British hands. The subject had been mentioned to a colleague over dinner, neither of them considering Hector to be of any consequence in the discussion. ‘Inconsequential Hector’ was how Hector liked to be seen. Teddie Botha’s father, the man who had married David Todd’s youngest daughter and was a member of the Broederbond that Hector was still waiting to be asked to join, had approached the Afrikaner establishment on behalf of his son. Hector said nothing, not even smiling in the knowledge that his family owned sixteen per cent of Lion Life, purchased on his mother’s recommendation following her earlier good impressions of Matthew Gray.

  The day after his phone call with his mother, Hector took a day’s leave from Armscor and went to see Edward Botha, having told him over the phone that his mother controlled sixteen per cent of Lion Life, something of which Matthew Gray was blissfully unaware, the shares being held by nominees. Hector had asked that the meeting take place in the strictest confidence. He would introduce himself as Mr Smythe at reception. Teddie would understand when he heard what Hector had in mind. Seven weeks after Hector concluded his business with Teddie Botha, by which time his mother had bought another four per cent of Lion Life on the London stock exchange, Hector called on Matthew in his new flat next to the Balalaika Hotel. Matthew thought the visit was purely a social one, and was happy to see his friend. Matt’s visit to conduct an investigation at Cambridge still gave him the cold shivers for having made a fool of himself.

  “How’s Helena?” he asked, handing Hector a glass of beer.

  “Oh, she hasn’t changed. The latest is the tennis pro at the Inanda Club.”

  “Didn’t know Inanda had a tennis pro.”

  “Neither did I. One of these days she’ll get her name in the newspapers and then her daddy will not be pleased.”

  “And how is your esteemed father-in-law?”

  “As bigoted as ever. I can talk to you, Matt. These bloody Dutchmen think they can herd the black man like so many cattle. Their policy of forced removal to tidy up the tribes is going to backfire. I believe firmly in white-man rule, but they keep shooting themselves in the foot.”

  “You tell that to your father-in-law?”

  “You must be joking.”

  “You lead a strange life, Hector.”

  “Most people have unfaithful wives, and most people have jobs they’d rather not have. At least I have a job I enjoy.”

  “You still turned on by Helena’s habits?”

  “Funnily enough Matt, not anymore. I’d get a divorce if the honourable minister would refrain from putting me through the mincer and kicking me out of the country.”

  “You could always run Smythe-Wilberforce!”

  “That’s why I came to see you, Matt. We own twenty-one per cent of Security Holdings direct and another seven per cent through nominees, bought on the open market.”

  “I thought someone was bidding up the shares… Are you here to buy my Security shares or to offer yours?”

  “Neither. Smythe-Wilberforce wants joint ownership of the company, with you as chief executive. You control the running of the business and we handle investment. Their expertise and experience exceeds your own, Matt. We own a unit trust in England through our merchant bank. They’ll give you an even greater edge over your competitors. Your market techniques and their investment skills will make Security and Lion a world player.”

  “What has this to do with Lion?”

  “Mother says we own twenty per cent of Lion. She was impressed with you, Matt. I told you so at the time. She thinks Security and Lion should merge to strengthen the Security balance sheet. You are aware of some potentially bad debts in their property portfolio?”

  “Hector, how did you buy twenty-one per cent of Security away from the market?”

  “Told Teddie I was a white knight. What I did not tell him was whose white knight. The lad wants to make a rights issue. Very commendable. Bright but young.”

  “And you tell me you’re a socialist!” Matt was chuckling. The man was now a total enigma.r />
  “Not me, Matt – mother. She’s the brains. I just do what my mother tells me to do… Do you have any more beer?”

  Teddie Botha controlled his breathing and tried to see straight. His adrenalin was pumping harder than it had at the Oxford versus Cambridge game at Twickenham. With a conscious effort he brought his temper under control. It was not the first time he had been swindled, he told himself and, most likely, it would not be the last. He processed different thought lines for half an hour and then put a call through to Matthew Gray at his office.

  “Mister Gray, you and I have never met each other but my mother speaks fondly of you when she knew you as a small boy. I believe you owe the Todd family a favour.”

  “That was before your grandfather orchestrated my eviction from the insurance industry.”

  “But he bought your company.”

  “After he threatened to ruin me. I was upsetting the market, according to your grandfather.”

  “May I come and see you?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll be right across. They tell me you’re back in your old office in Rissik Street.”

  “I try not to be over-confident, Teddie. If my takeover fails, I will launch Lion into the South African market.”

  “But you don’t have a trading licence and government refuses to issue any more.”

  It was obvious to Matt that the boy had played rugby on the wing. Short, stocky and very fast. He stood up to shake hands, towering over Teddie Botha, who showed no reaction to Matt’s size.

  “You set him up, of course.” Teddie’s temper was beginning to rise, despite his breathing exercises outside the door.

  “No, I did not.”

  “You’re a liar, Gray.”

  “Either Matt or Mister Gray. That English habit of surnames I find rude. They must have anglicised you at Oxford.”

  “They did not.”

  Matt sat back behind his desk. “You want to sit down. The one mistake a lot of people make in this world is underestimating the Brits.” Matt deliberately chose the word used by the Afrikaner when referring to the English.

  “You’re a Brit.”

  “Now there you are very wrong. I’m South African, born and bred. Your mother also had a British surname. Teddie, Edward, Mister Botha— whatever you prefer. Please sit down. I don’t yet have a secretary but I do make a good cup of coffee… There is always a way out of a problem that is satisfactory to all, and the compromise is often better than you think.

  “First, we should both know never to trust Hector Fortescue-Smythe. Not only did he buy your shares under false pretences, but his mother bought twenty per cent of Lion Life on the open market, registered in nominees so I was unable to see who really owned a fifth of my company. Smythe-Wilberforce want a Security-Lion merger, which has its attractions for your policyholders and saves me from opening offices throughout this country. They will have joint control with me, unless you and I enter into a private consortium agreement very much unbeknown to our friend Hector… You have a great future. The education I never had. I have the experience. Together we can become a major force in the world insurance industry.

  “What I have in mind is a conservative agreement which ensures that you and I are obliged to offer our shares to each other first if we wish to sell. There will be equal voting rights in the consortium, with the committee chairman having a casting vote. For the first five years I will be chairman, then we will rotate control of the consortium annually. I am a lot older than you are so, if you are patient, your time will come. I do not have children, nor a woman I would like to be their mother. If we fight each other, the public will be made aware of the weaknesses in your balance sheet before the problem can be corrected. A merger is the right thing for your policyholders, and in my business they always come first. Now will you sit down and let me make us a cup of coffee.”

  When the placated young man left his office with an earnest handshake, Matt sat back in his swivel chair, picking at a loose button in the arm. He had tracked down his old chair and desk and bought them back, giving in their place to the astonished owners a brand new chair and a brand new desk. They were the first furniture he had bought for Gray Associates, and Matt was sentimental.

  He was nearly thirty-nine and, in the calm of not running a company, only speaking to Archie on the phone every day, he had had time to appraise his private life, his lack of wife and children. What he was, rather than who he was, got him dates. Girls went for his money and power, and they were more often the wrong type, young ladies on the way up or looking for the wine and roses for the rest of their lives. They were pretty, accommodating ladies after his money.

  Sunny had said she loved him and bedded another man when his back was turned. Sandy de Freitas had never been one to wait for potential to mature. Chelsea had been a question of convenience for both of them. She had the body and he had the job. Idly, he started analysing some of the others, coming to the same conclusion. Good looking, easy women after his money, or what rubbing shoulders with his money would bring to them materially.

  He looked at his watch. It was too early to go to the Balalaika and there was no one he wanted to take out to dinner. He missed Archie and Lucky.

  On the banks of the Zambezi River, while Matt was contemplating the emptiness of his social life, Aldo Calucci had found tracks that were not made by animals. The client had been left at the Land Rover while Aldo ranged out looking for the spoor of the kudu that was all that was left on the American’s licence.

  Mashinga had been right. The reputed army of Joshua Nkomo, said to be training in Zambia under Russian command, had crossed the river. The spoor he was looking at, six distinct prints of army boots had been moulded in Soviet Russia.

  Glancing across the two hundred metres to his Land Rover where the American was sitting comfortably, waiting to be taken to his kill, Aldo followed the spoor towards the river. Within ten metres the tracks petered out suddenly, replaced by skilful brushwork from a broom made of acacia thorn. Someone had been careless, though the brushwork told Aldo without doubt that he had crossed the tracks of a terrorist incursion.

  It had been a little over five years since Ian Smith had declared the colony independent of British rule. With his .375 hunting rifle wrapped over his shoulder, hanging comfortably, Aldo skilfully followed the brushwork to its source. Very carefully he dug with his hands in the soft river sand. It was not necessary for Aldo to open the long box wrapped professionally in oilskin to know that inside were Russian-made automatic rifles. The long arm of the communists had finally reached into his valley and the peace of his life was shattered.

  “You found something?” called the American, making Aldo flinch. He was one of those more unpleasant clients: rude, loud-mouthed and a lousy shot. All his trophies had been fired at simultaneously by Aldo.

  “Nothing.”

  “Then what are you digging?” The man had damn good eyes.

  “Thought I find crocodile eggs.”

  “Let’s get a move on. Just sitting here’s costing me three hundred dollars an hour. I want that kudu by lunch.”

  From a hill a kilometre away on the Zambian side of the big river, Luke Mbeki watched the hunter uncover the seventeenth cache he had placed in the Zambezi Valley.

  “He’s found the bloody guns,” he said, in a mixture of Xhosa and English. “Now we’ll have to take him out with his tracker. When the client leaves, we’ll attack with knives and leave the bodies to the jackals. By the time someone makes a noise, the bodies will be bones and our tracks washed clean by the rains.”

  “And when he takes the client back to Salisbury, he will tell the police.” The ZIPRA commissar was smug. He resented a Xhosa being in command of a company of Matabele. The Matabele were Zulu and hated the Xhosa, Mzilikazi, the founder of their nation, having deserted Shaka with his regiment and fought his way north, over the Limpopo River, to the land they now called Rhodesia.

  Luke watched Aldo return to the Land Rover and continu
e the hunt. They heard the almost simultaneous crack of two rifles three hours later.

  Leaving his client by the kill to admire his handiwork, Aldo went back to his vehicle and called up Mashinga on the field radio. It was the first time he had been able to get away from the American. They spoke briefly and, when the Land Rover returned to camp, Mashinga was ready to leave.

  “We leaving for Salisbury now,” Aldo told his client. “There’s a big rain coming. You have plane to catch tomorrow night; we going out now before the road floods. You finished licence. Good hunt, hey. You very good shot. Not many clients shoot so good.”

  “Where do I stay tonight?”

  “At Meikles Hotel. My expense. Now we go.”

  “What’s the hurry?”

  “The rains, my friend; they come quick, we go quick.” As he drove down the track away from the river, a small patch in his back was burning, even with Mashinga sitting over the tailboard scanning the bush. Aldo wished the American would stop talking. Only when they reached the tarred road to Makuti did he relax. At Sinoia, he reported his find to the BSAP.

  Well before dark, Luke heard the chopper and moved his men further back into Zambian territory. It took a stick of the Rhodesian Light Infantry half an hour to find the cache. Aldo’s directions had been specific.

  The following Monday, with his client safely back in the States and blissfully unaware that he himself had become the hunted, and at the same time that Matthew was moving into David Todd’s old office as a result of his successful takeover bid, Aldo Calucci and Mashinga joined the Rhodesian army and returned to their valley. The bush war had begun on the Sunday night with sporadic attacks on isolated farmhouses throughout the rebel colony. Now he would hunt men, the most exciting of all-the game.

  1971 was a boom year for South Africa and the economy grew at a faster rate than that of either Japan or America. The prices of gold and strategic minerals were high and the rains were good. New businesses were starting every day in Johannesburg, and skills poured into the country from an England trying to recover from a socialist government. This was a golden age of full employment with the economy dragging the blacks into the main-stream as the white population was not large enough to service the boom.