African Sky

by Tony Park

  ‘There was no woman involved, sir,’ Cavendish said, looking straight ahead, unable to maintain eye contact with Bryant.

  ‘Catherine De Beers is an attractive woman, Andy. Yes or no?’

  ‘I’m a married man, sir. I married my high-school sweetheart just before I left Vancouver. I haven’t looked at another woman since, and don’t intend to.’

  ‘Yeah, right, mate. Look, Andy, we’re both men . . .’ Bryant began.

  This time Cavendish stared at him, eyes ablaze: ‘Believe one thing I say, sir. I would never be unfaithful to my wife. That is the God’s honest truth.’

  Bryant extinguished his cigarette and puffed out his cheeks. ‘You’re not helping me here, Andy.’ He consulted the file in front of him and flicked through some pages until he found the one he was looking for. ‘This is the charge form, filled out when you were first locked up.’ Cavendish had been under detention for the past week and was dressed in plain but highly starched blue overalls and spit-polished boots.

  Cavendish looked across the desk, trying to read upside down.

  ‘Bootlaces, tie, belt, all that stuff they normally take off you when you’re arrested. But here’s the thing that caught my attention, Andy. Says here you had two hundred pounds in your wallet.’

  Cavendish shrugged.

  ‘Bloody hell. Two hundred quid? I haven’t seen that much cash at one time in my life. Where did you get it? Not from air force pay. You haven’t earned that much since you’ve been here.’

  ‘My wife sent it to me.’

  ‘Rhodesian pounds?’

  ‘I changed the Canadian money she sent me into local currency.’

  ‘And what were you going to buy? A car, a bloody house?’

  ‘Sir, with respect, my financial affairs are my own business.’

  ‘Like hell they are. Now you’re in the air force, they’re my business as well. You put up a black last month, didn’t you? Had to front the Wingco while I was over at Salisbury for a conference. Think I wouldn’t find out?’ Bryant watched the Canadian’s eyes roam across the ceiling. Putting up a black – committing a dangerous mistake during training, a breach of air force protocol, or any other misdemeanour on the ground or in the air, counted against a trainee and could affect his overall assessment.

  ‘I’m not sure what you’re talking about.’

  ‘You were two months behind on your mess bill, weren’t you?’

  ‘I was a little short.’

  ‘We feed you, we clothe you, we give you cheap grog on base. What did you do with your money, Andy? Why couldn’t you even afford to pay your paltry mess bill?’

  ‘I’ve been sending money home to my wife. I lost track and sent her too much. I didn’t have enough to cover my mess bill. I apologised to the mess and to the Wingco.’

  ‘Hang on, hasn’t your wife just sent you the equivalent of two hundred pounds?’

  Cavendish swallowed hard.

  ‘Broke one month, rolling in loot the next. Since I left Australia at the start of the war and travelled to Africa via Egypt and then on to dear old England, I reckon I’ve seen every kind of vice known to man, and you know what, Andy?’

  ‘What, sir?’

  ‘I reckon you’re a gambler.’

  ‘There’s no law against it, sir.’

  ‘Oh, there is, if you do it on base. If you can’t afford to pay your debts because of it. If you leave your wife in the poorhouse because you can’t control your urges.’

  ‘I’ve never gambled on base, sir.’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck where you do it, mate. All I want you to tell me is how you got that money.’

  ‘I told you, sir, my wife –’

  ‘Give that one up, mate. You’re flogging a dead horse there. You sending her money . . . she sending you loot. That’s all bullshit. How did you get the two hundred? You’re a worse liar than you were a flyer.’

  ‘All right, sir. You got me,’ he said, leaning forward, eyes down. ‘I won it in a card game in Bulawayo last week. If I’ve broken King’s regulations on that count, then I’ll face the music. You’re probably going to kick me out of flight school anyway, so how bad can a gambling charge be?’

  ‘That’s better, Andy. As I said, the Wingco likes a man who tells the truth. You’ll know your verdict soon enough. In the meantime, I’m going to do you a favour.’

  ‘You are, sir?’

  ‘Yes, Andy, I am. I’m going to talk to the Wingco and suggest that we confiscate a hundred and ninety of that two hundred and lock it in the safe here in the office for the next month. That’ll leave you a tenner to get by with. It’ll give you time to think about your gambling problem, and maybe change your ways. Assuming you’re on top of your mess bill at the end of the month, I’ll give you the rest of your ill-gotten gains back.’

  ‘Sir . . . I appreciate the offer, but –’

  ‘It’s not an offer, Andy.’ Bryant studied the Canadian’s face. It was ashen. He looked like he’d just been told he was going to be hanged by the neck until dead. ‘It’s going to be part of your punishment.’

  ‘Sir, you can’t do this to me, I’ll . . .’

  ‘You’ll what, Andy? The sooner you bloody well wake up to yourself and realise I can do anything I want to, the better off you’ll be.’

  ‘Sir, you don’t understand . . .’ He looked up at the ceiling and then at Bryant, who thought the kid might cry.

  Bryant had read the pilot’s service record. He was a farm boy who’d been shown too much of the big wide world too soon. He was a hopeless liar as well. He looked at the ceiling when he was telling an untruth, and straight into Bryant’s eyes when he wanted to convey honesty. ‘Do you owe other people money, Andy?’

  Cavendish looked up and said, ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Look at me when I ask you a question.’ His tone was hard, unforgiving now. ‘Did you owe someone two hundred pounds?’

  Cavendish looked up, his reddened eyes fixed on Bryant. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Where did you get the two hundred?’

  Cavendish looked at the floor and mumbled. ‘What?’ Bryant demanded.

  ‘I can’t say, sir.’

  Bryant knew the answer anyway. If Cavendish wasn’t smart enough to see he was offering him a break, then so be it. There was one other question he had to ask, though.

  ‘Why was there ammunition missing from the guns in your kite, Cavendish?’ He had dropped all pretensions of friendliness now.

  ‘Sir? I don’t know what you mean.’ Cavendish fixed him again with his honest stare.

  ‘There were several hundred rounds missing from the guns in your Harvard.’

  ‘Sir, there was a full load for each gun when I picked up the kite. I personally checked them. I was supposed to be on a gunnery practice.’

  ‘I know where you were supposed to be, Cavendish.’

  ‘I wanted to make every round count, to get the best score I could.’

  Bryant had read the instructors’ assessments. Not only was Cavendish a good flyer, he was an excellent shot. He would have made a fine fighter pilot. ‘Yes, and you wanted to clear your gambling debts. If you sold your ammunition to someone, I will personally put the last bullet we recover into your brain, right after the firing squad has filled you with holes.’

  He could see Cavendish realised the threat was anything but empty. ‘Sir, I would shoot myself rather than sell air force property to someone. You might think me weak, sir, but I’m a patriot. All I want is a chance to fight in this war.’

  ‘Well, you’ve fucked that up, royally, Andy.’

  ‘I know, sir,’ he said, his head in his hands. ‘I know.’

  10

  Hendrick Reitz’s journey had been a long one. Behind him, the setting sun was a red disk lingering in the dust as he crossed the rutted dirt track that told him he had finally entered Southern Rhodesia from Bechuanaland. To his left was the Deka River, more sand than water at this time of the year, though here and there springs and puddles along its course
still drew game. He reined in his horse, stopping to watch a mixed herd of impala and kudu grazing. The kudu, the taller of the two antelope species, spotted him first, their big ears turning like antennae, straining to determine whether he was friend or foe. The little impala continued their grazing. He would have been tempted to shoot one or the other, but his saddlebag was still half full of biltong, enough dried gemsbok to keep him going for a few more days, which was all he needed. He’d found and shot the long-horned beast on the saltpan not long after he’d dispatched the two bushmen. It had been a good omen. God was looking after him and had seen him safely out of the desert.

  His thighs ached after many days of riding. It had been too long since he’d been in a saddle. How his father, old Andries, would have laughed at his weakness. He smiled. He wished his father were still alive, to know of the strength Hendrick had shown in battle, of the blow he would deal to the hated Englishmen in a very short time.

  A long trek. Nothing new for his people. They had been forced into the wilderness in the last century to carve out a new civilisation in the African bush. Hendrick, too, was at the vanguard of a new movement in Africa. The continent would be a better place to live once he and others like him were calling the shots again. This journey had taken him weeks, but it was merely the next-to-last step in the fulfilment of a destiny determined forty-two years earlier in that stinking, disease-ridden place of death.

  ‘It was in the summer, when the rains came,’ his father had told the story so many times he remembered it in the older man’s voice. His father was fighting the British and their colonial allies in what they called the Boer War. Andries Reitz was serving in a Boer commando – one of the lightly armed mounted guerrilla groups that had proved a deep-lodged thorn in the British side for so long. He was what they called a bitter-ender, one of the diehards who refused to surrender.

  ‘They could not beat us, Hennie,’ Andries had told his son time and again. ‘They could not defeat us like men, on the battlefield, because we were too good for them. We travelled light and we lived off the land. God provided for us, and the British, with their wagon trains and their heavy guns, could never catch us out on the veldt.’

  ‘So why did we lose, Father?’ Hendrick had once had the temerity to ask, at the age of seven.

  ‘They beat us by destroying the one thing that was more precious to us than our cause, Hennie. It is time you learned exactly what happened to your mother.’

  ‘She is with God, you told me,’ he’d said, still innocent.

  ‘She was murdered, Hennie, murdered by the rooineks.’

  He’d been shocked, of course. He knew that there were some whites in his country who were of English descent, and others, like himself, who were Afrikaners – Dutchmen, the other boys called Hennie and his friends. The term rooinek, he had already learned, referred to the red uniforms and sunburned necks of the pasty Englishmen who had come to his country. ‘They killed her?’

  He’d learned the whole painful story. His father, a senior figure amongst the Boer forces even before his twenty-fifth birthday, had met his mother early on in the war. She was German. Ingrid Prochnow was a nurse, who had come to South Africa as a volunteer. There were many foreigners, his father had explained, who were sympathetic to the Boer cause, and who had cause to dislike the English and their allies. The Boers had the support of freedom-loving people from countries such as America, Ireland, Holland and Germany.

  Ingrid Prochnow had ceased being a third-country noncombatant, though, when she married Andries Reitz, farmer, late of Nelspruit in the Eastern Transvaal. She became a farmer’s wife and, in the process, an enemy of the British Empire.

  ‘Lord Kitchener, Hennie, you know, the Englishman with the big moustache, like a walrus?’

  Even now the sight of one of the old recruiting posters from the first war, a finger-pointing Kitchener telling Britons that the Empire needed ‘you’, turned his blood cold.

  ‘It was Kitchener who knew how to beat us,’ his father had scowled, mouth set, his eyes watery after a few drinks. ‘They rounded up our wives and children – your mother was one of them – and put them into those filthy concentration camps, where they died by the thousands. Twenty-seven thousand Boer women and children, in two years, Hennie. Dead.’

  The story had given him nightmares for years. But his father had spared no detail, no matter how distressing, so that his suffering could be shared by the boy, so that his lifelong quest for revenge could be poured into his heir, like a transfusion of new blood, to make him harder, stronger.

  ‘We had married and, soon after, she was carrying you in her tummy, Hennie, like a little lamb, you understand?’

  He had nodded.

  ‘She was weak, Hennie, because the English did not feed our women and children enough to survive. She was sick, Hennie, because the English made them go to the toilet in the open, like Kaffirs, and did not give them clean water to drink. She had the cholera, Hennie, when she gave birth to you.’

  Reitz followed the Deka for another half-hour, until he found a reasonably open grassy area to make his camp for the night. He dismounted, tethered the horses and started a small fire. As he unrolled his bedding he remembered the tears in his father’s eyes every time the old man told the story. Andries was a giant of a man, with a foul temper when his son disobeyed him. He could ride all day and drink all night. Hennie had seen him knock another man out cold with his bare fists. But when he spoke of his wife, he always ended up in tears.

  ‘It wasn’t you, Hennie. It was the cholera, the sickness, that made her weak. She gave birth to you, saw you, kissed you, then she died. My sister, Henriette, your aunty, saw it all, told me all about it. They murdered her, Hennie, as sure as if they had put a bullet in her heart.’

  Reitz chewed on a slice of biltong, savouring the saltiness of the dried beef, then took a swig from a metal flask of brandy. He lay back, his head on his saddle, his rifle by his side, and looked at the stars. As a child he had believed what his father had said, that each of those stars was a loving mother, or a tiny baby killed by the English, and that one day, when God saw fit, they would all be together, in heaven.

  He took another swig of brandy and thought about the war. As a soldier he could understand the strategy that Kitchener had employed and, if he thought about it rationally, coldly, even admire the thinking behind it. Isolate the rebels from their kinfolk, their source of food, news, moral support, and they would, inevitably, wither on the vine. Containment of noncombatants sympathetic to partisans and denial of the bandits’ succour and shelter made perfect sense. What galled Hendrick Reitz most of all, what steeled his nerve even at the age of forty-two, what had driven him into the arms of his mother’s people, were two things.

  The first was the fact that the English had not been content merely to contain the Boer women and children. Through a deliberate policy of neglect they had created the unsanitary conditions that allowed diseases such as cholera to thrive. They had exacerbated the problems of disease through overcrowding and underrationing in the camps. When the Afrikaner women and children had become sick they had been too weak to fight off the illness. It was a slow way to kill off a race. There was an unmistakable cruelty in Kitchener’s methods, and that sickened him.

  The other thing that undermined Kitchener, and the English, in Hendrick Reitz’s opinion, was that they had done this to people of the same race.

  The Fuhrer was waging a war against communism, and against racial pollution in Europe. For some races, such as the Jews, the gypsies, and the Slavs, it was time to pay. The Aryan race was superior to others, there was no doubt in his mind about it. Hitler had even tried to bring the stubborn, stupid English into the Aryan fold, but they had rejected him. So typically intolerant and narrow-minded of the rooineks.

  It had been natural for Hennie to enter the Ossewa Brandwag when he came of age. It was during the First World War, in 1917, that he had joined the brotherhood. His father was serving a prison sentence for his part in th
e aborted Boer Rebellion of 1914, when troops in the north-west of the country had aligned themselves with the Germans across the border in South West Africa and tried to seize government. Hendrick had been cared for by his Aunt Henriette and she had done nothing to stop him pledging allegiance to the cause.

  On a rainy night on a farm outside Barberton, near the concentration camp where he had been born, he met with a group of six men from the OB and told them he was ready to swear his allegiance. In accordance with the movement’s traditions, he stood before them, with his hand on the Holy Bible. Two Stormjaers also stood with him, one in front, the other behind him, each with a loaded revolver pointed at his heart.

  In the candle-lit room, he read aloud from a sheet of paper. ‘I promise solemnly before Almighty God, of my own free will, that I will implicitly subject myself to the demands which my people’s God-given calling requires of me. A higher-placed authority will find me obediently faithful. All commands which I receive will be carried out promptly, and kept secret. May the Almighty grant that I shall be prepared to sacrifice my life for the freedom of my people. May the thought of treason never occur to me, realising that I will voluntarily become a prey to the vengeance of a Stormjaer. May God grant that I will be able to exclaim with my comrades: If I advance, follow me! If I retreat, shoot me! If I die, avenge me! So help me God.’

  Hendrick had inherited his father’s height and build – which made him an ideal choice as a rugby forward – and, thankfully, his mother’s brains, fair hair and blue eyes. His father had told him that Ingrid had been planning on studying to be a doctor when the war in South Africa had broken out. Already qualified as a nurse, she had abandoned thoughts of further study to help the outnumbered Boers in their cause. This simple fact, when he thought about it, was almost enough to bring Hendrick Reitz to tears.

  He had excelled at university and, at his father’s insistence, had not publicly advertised his hatred of the English or his ties to the OB. ‘You must gain their trust, Hennie. The English run our country now, whether we like it or not. You will have an opportunity to hurt them one day, but you cannot do that from a gaol cell at the age of eighteen.’