Vultures in the Wind

by Peter Rimmer

  And if Chelsea wanted to run away from the struggle, that was her business. Later he would find his son and bring him back to a South Africa free of apartheid, free of the white man’s rule. They would return to the old ways and live like men. Amandla! Power to the people! Rule by the people for the people.

  When Luke drove back from the river, he was singing.

  On the day that Luke was posted to southern Angola to be the ANC liaison officer to Swapo in their fight to free the mandated territory of South West Africa they called Namibia, his son was born in a clinic in Lisbon, Portugal. Chelsea called the lusty, perfect child John. John de La Cruz. Her son was Portuguese. The motherland had not forgotten the children of its colonies. The whole of Europe was open to both of them, with Portugal applying to become a member of the common market. Chelsea took a job as a receptionist for an insurance company. Even in Lisbon they had heard of Security Lion.

  The wedding of Mark and Lorna took place when the sun came up from the sea and spread its light on the hut above the cove. Garlands of flowers hung from the beams of the hut, the front door, the open windows, the trees, and the wooden, home-made furniture out in the sun around the big fire that had burned and cooked all night.

  Bride and groom were in white robes, feet bare, the only colour being their red headbands and the garlands of flowers around their necks. Mark’s beard had been washed, combed and cut neatly for the first time. Lorna’s hair was long and smooth, and hung around her face and down the back and front of her robe. They spoke into the silence of the morning.

  “Before you people and the memory of my mother and father, do I, Mark, take Lorna to be my wife, a wife I will cherish all the years of my life.”

  “Before you people and the love I have for this man and the child within me, I, Lorna, take Mark to be my husband for all the years of my life.”

  The groom bent low to kiss the bride, and the drifters and artists, painters and potters, musicians and craftsmen, women and men, white and black in harmony for the day of celebration, the children running riot, the dogs barking, and monkeys chattering from the trees united to join the noise of joy and wish them happiness for all the years of their lives. The ox, spitted and roasted over the pit in front of the hut, was shown to the guests for the first time as if it had not been turned over the fire for a day and a half; the ox was a gift from the groom to his bride and to all the people of the colony and surrounds. Only Carel van Tonder wondered where the money had come from for the ox.

  Beer, brewed by Mark with the help of the featherman and the driftwood carver, was served with the white, fire-liquid distilled to perfection from peaches and pears by the painter who only painted naked, pregnant women on outsize bulls. The balladeer sang a song he had written, for once remembering his words. The lady painter who painted big, wonderful jungle pictures, full of hiding monkeys and deer, sang along with the balladeer in a sweet, gentle voice that was heard far away in the hills. The sculptor, who had acquired a vast piece of local marble that had taken a month to shift to the colony from the quarry upriver of Port St Johns, drank a quart of beer in ten seconds and presented the bride and groom with a large chip off the block carved into the shape of a dove.

  It was a day of joy that none of them would ever forget and, when the paramount chief came to give his official approval, the party grew and spread to the beach. When the sun went down, the celebrations were building to their climax: fires burned on the beach, great driftwood fires, and fish were cooked in the coals; great pots of mussels and oysters, rich in crayfish stock, and vegetables bubbled over the fires, hung from tripods well above the flames.

  The people smoked, and the smell of pot drifted in the still night air. They danced in rings, round and round, singing, the cultures of black and white mingling in the summer air of an African night. Some of the guests, exhausted, slept under the trees, only to wake and start again. The night sky was free of cloud and clear to the third layer of the stars, and the heaven sparkled with a billion jewels, twinkling with the joy of eternal life. There was peace and goodwill to all men on earth and in the heavens. It was the reason for all life.

  2

  While Mark and Lorna were enjoying the exquisite optimism of new life with all its beauty and potential, Africa was seething in the aftermath of the post-natal depression. Generally speaking, the new nations were monsters of personal greed, broken promises and repression. The rulers cared nothing for the people, using whichever rhetoric, communism or capitalism, brought them the most in aid and military hardware. Instead of feeding the people, they crowned themselves emperors, presidents for life, fathers of the nation, destroyers of colonialism.

  Two of the more imaginative dictators, one who crowned himself in the likeness and pomp of Napoleon Bonaparte and the other the product of a military coup in the aftermath of the British rush from Africa, dined on their opponents, keeping the choicer parts of thigh and buttock in the fridge to be enjoyed more slowly. They literally ate their opposition.

  The misery in new Africa, primed by Russian and American rivalry, made Shaka Zulu look like a philanthropist. Wars spawned wars and the tribes of Africa were set against each other’s throats. The flames of anarchy burned bright. In Angola, Castro, at the request of his Russian masters, sent troops to support the Marxist-oriented MPLA against the American-backed Unita. In Mozambique the Rhodesians created the Renamo monster to be at the throat of the Marxist Frelimo. In Rhodesia, a few whites, modern-day Canutes, stood in the way of Russian-backed ZAPU and Chinese-backed ZANU. In South West Africa, a country ruled by South Africa following a mandate received in the aftermath of World War I, Cuba and Russia backed Swapo against the Pretoria regime.

  In South Africa, itself, Russia supported the ANC against the Pretoria regime and forced the Americans, prompted by their own civil rights movement, to back a programme of sanctions to impoverish the only wealth still left in Africa. The Russians and Americans shared the frenzied desire to control the world, destroying the last outposts of colonialism, and Attila the Hun would have been proud of them.

  Luke Mbeki, stoking his part of the fire, began seriously to consider whether he and his friends were not being used. And for Luke the comprehension was too ghastly to contemplate. To keep from his mind a child he had not seen, a child he had exchanged for an ideal that was showing the seams of another agenda, one that had nothing to do with Luke Mbeki, he asked to be reattached to ZIPRA, the military wing of ZAPU, where he would fight the monster he truly hated, the South African police. To bolster a deteriorating military situation in Rhodesia, the Pretoria regime had sent in troops and paramilitary police, and at the same time the Smith government had called up all white residents who had been in the country for more than three years. Jonathan Holland and James Bell fell swiftly into the net.

  For Madge Holland, otherwise happy in her new country, it was all happening again. She could hear the air-raid sirens, the German bombers, the ack-ack, the fearful drone of the V1 flying bombs. She prayed to her God and, while she prayed, the World Council of Churches in Geneva allocated funds to the forces of communism, to ZANU and ZAPU, in the name of Jesus Christ. Liberation theology had finally gone to war.

  Three weeks after, a baby girl named Peace was born in the tranquillity of Port St Johns, to which the black car had not returned, Jonathan Holland received his commission in the Rhodesian Light Infantry. James Bell had refused a commission, and the partners requested a posting that would keep them together. As their business increased, the roles had reversed, with Jonathan taking the lead and making most of the decisions.

  The bush, once so alien, had become his second home. The night sky of Africa, seen for the first time four years earlier, was a map he read as easily as the streets of London. Establishing due south from the four stars of the Southern Cross and the two pointers was to him no more than a glance at the heavens. The change in the cricket song was equal to a stop in the London traffic. Lean, tanned, confident, he led his men into the bush. Jonathan had finally c
ome home. Africa, his Africa, was worth every ounce of his energy.

  With the Patriotic Front now established and ZIPRA and ZANLA warfare directed against the whites and not themselves, Luke walked into the compound of a farm on the northeast border of Rhodesia, the soft underbelly that enabled the guerrillas to attack a white farmhouse and slip back into the protection of Frelimo’s Mozambique before the night gave way to daylight.

  As regional commander, Luke wished to visit the area in which his troops were having so much difficulty. He was dressed in old clothes, the cast-offs of a white farmer, and he looked like any of the farm labourers. There were three hundred blacks in the compound, mud huts clustered together next to a river that served as bath and drinking water. The white farmer never went into his compound, preferring to hit a plough disc to summon his gang to work. Life on the farm was regulated by the sound of the clanging simbi.

  To overcome the problem of language, Luke spoke in Fanagalo, the language of the farms and mines where different tribes joined from all over central Africa. Luke spent a night and a day in the compound before walking back over the border, a distance of twenty kilometres, back into the sanctuary of Mozambique. As he travelled in the night, he passed across the gun-sight of Jonathan Holland, lying in ambush across the path known to the security forces as the terrorist route out of the area.

  “Let him go,” whispered Jonathan. “There’s only one, and he’s old. That one’s a farm labourer, even if he’s breaking curfew.” Jonathan had not yet reached the stage where he could fire on civilians without provocation.

  The ambush waited in place until dawn washed the sky in the east, and then they picked themselves up from their cramped positions to begin the long slog back to base camp at Sipolilo. There were seven men in the stick, and all but Jonathan had seen action.

  “You should have shot ’im,” said Major Calucci.

  “He was old and bent. Sort of dejected. How could I?…”

  “He broke curfew. Anyone break curfew, you shoot. Terrs look like old men when they want. You watch careful, Jonathan. No gentlemen in war. They kill you quick, too. You tell me next man go past in curfew and I kick your arse.”

  “I’m sorry, major.”

  “Now you bugger off, Jonathan. Maybe it better you stay in England with that insurance company. Go up to London on train. You too soft.”

  “Next time I’ll shoot.”

  “Good. You ’ave lunch and go right back. They hit three farmhouses last night.”

  “Anyone killed?”

  “What you think? Eleven terrorists. Soon we go hot pursuit. Politicians! The UNO, it say all right for terrs to come over our border, but international border violation if we chase them home. Bull bloody shit.”

  Luke reached his base camp about the time Jonathan was preparing his ambush, determined to let nothing move in the night. Luke was bone-weary tired, and the last thing he needed was the commissar asking questions. He hated the commissar, who had not once put his foot over the Rhodesian border. The fact was, he hated communists, but without them there would be no guns and no war of liberation.

  “You’ll not go over without asking me,” the commissar instructed Luke. They spoke in Xhosa, as both of them were ANC and had been born in the Transkei.

  “Look, you little rat. I am regional commander.”

  “And I am political commissar, and if you go again, I tell them to send you to a training camp. You go against me again and maybe I send you to a different camp. I know a good one outside Dar-es-Salaam, comrade.”

  “I’m not your bloody comrade!” snapped Luke, in English. The man did not speak English, having spent only three years at primary school.

  “What you say?”

  “Fuck off! I’m tired and hungry, and those farms are like fortresses. Big wire fences all round, with claymore mines on top of the fence poles. Lights, big lights, on the corners of the houses. Dogs inside the wire and men in those houses who know how to shoot straight. Eleven minutes after our attack and the bloody police arrive on motorcycles. How many did we lose last night?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You do, but you won’t admit it’s a bloody fiasco. You tell those kids the whites are all running away. Well, I’ve got some news for you. Not only haven’t they run away, but they’re still ploughing at night with big bloody headlights on the tractors.”

  Luke strode off to call a meeting of his commanders. First he would eat, and then he would tell them what they were going to do. Next time, when the police came roaring up the driveways, they’d blow themselves to pieces on a land mine. First job before an attack was to mine the farmer’s bloody road. If the police missed it going in, the farmer would hit it going out. And they needed grenade launchers, rockets to hit the homes from a distance, to give his men a chance of living through the night.

  Hector Fortescue-Smythe was at last doing the work he wanted to do: directing the surge of communism. They controlled North Africa after ejecting the French from Algeria and Morocco. The horn of Africa was theirs after the old emperor had been thrown out of Ethiopia. West Africa with its oil owed allegiance to Moscow and, with the bases in Zambia, Mozambique and Angola, all of Central and Southern Africa with its minerals and sea route would shortly fall to the power of Russia. And now he was at the heart of it, out in the open, no longer wearing the horns Helena gave to him three times a week, no longer doing what he was told by a man he hated.

  Minister Kloss was going to pay for his arrogance. A tribunal. A quick, public trial, and execution by ’necklace’. A big, lovely Dunlop tyre shoved over his arrogant head to pin down his arms. Covered in petrol. Touched off by a match. Flames of agony. The necklace. For pigs and traitors. For the right-wing fascist bastards who stood in the way of the world hegemony. Russian hegemony. World communism. Peace and order for a thousand years. Total world empire. Total control. Discipline. The end of war and opposition. The world’s resources channelled into an upsurge of living standards for all the peoples of the earth.

  Hector drummed his fingers on the old desk in his sweaty office in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique. It was hot even in April, with the humidity drenching his clothing. But he was happy, co-ordinating the flood of Russian arms to the liberation movements, giving them the tools to do the job. He had been back in Africa for a month, gone to war with his mother’s blessing to fulfil the dream she had dreamt for fifty years. To fulfil his destiny.

  The light bulb over his desk dimmed, and for a moment left him in darkness. Then the power surged again, and he was sitting in a pool of light and able to carry on checking the inventory of the boat in the harbour, ostensibly bringing machinery to power the new, free Mozambique. The guns were still coming in from the end of the Vietnam War, and the result of which had convinced Hector that guerrilla warfare was unstoppable.

  The door to his office began to move. When it opened Luke Mbeki stepped round to find himself looking at a British service revolver pointed at his belly. He was dressed in his old clothes, had not had a bath for a month and stank, a stench he had not noticed after the first week. Travelling like the rest of the peasants made it easier and much less conspicuous, especially in Maputo, where the Pretoria regime had eyes all over the place.

  “Evening, Hector,” Luke greeted him, as Hector put the revolver away. “They told me you were running supplies. You need to watch security. That little thing won’t help you against South African automatics, and when your father-in-law finds out how close you are to his guns it will give him pleasure.”

  “Ex-father-in-law. She can screw who she likes without bothering me anymore.”

  “White men stick out in Mozambique. Me, nobody notices. You got any whisky?”

  “Of course, Luke; it comes with the job. How are you? Those meetings in London seem a long time ago.”

  “They were, and we’ve come a long way.… The Rhodesians are proving far more of a problem than we imagined.”

  “Sit down and tell me,” invited Hector. “Maybe I ca
n help. Drink it neat. The water’s full of shit. Seems the waterworks don’t purify any more. You should ask your fellow blacks to be more efficient. Quite frankly, they’re making a bit of a mess of things. We’re sending in East German advisors that’ll sort it out. The Germans are always most efficient.”

  “I want to put land mines up every farmer’s driveway. I want mines under all the roads. RPG rockets to fire a kilometre into the farm houses, penetrate the walls and then explode. I want to burn their tractors in the sheds and chase them out.”

  “Cheers, Luke. You’re in luck. The boat in the harbour is from Indo-China with forty-seven thousand land mines, limpet mines and personnel mines. How many do you want?”

  “All of them!” exclaimed Luke, looking suddenly hopeful.

  “I don’t know about all of them, but I’ll make sure you have a real pile of them, Luke. Please sit down. You seem tired and nervous. How’s Chelsea?”

  “She ran away.”

  “Oh, Luke. I’m sorry.”

  “We were going to have a baby. She must have had my son by now.”

  “Where is she?”

  “I wish I knew.” Luke spread out his hands in a gesture of despair.

  “Maybe I can help.”

  “Please Hector. I want to know where she is. I miss Chelsea. Didn’t know how much I relied on her being there.”

  “Do you know, it’s five years since your friend Matthew Gray disappeared? Now that was a victory for communism. Chased the capitalist right out of business.” The light dimmed again.

  Luke looked up at the fading light before making comment. “Like they did here. Where do you think Matt went?”

  “South America. People always go to South America when they want to get away from things. The Great Train robbers went to Brazil.”