by Tony Park
Catherine shook her head, still looking down.
‘Did you buy it at Victoria Falls? Your maid told me you’d driven there sometime last week.’
‘Cheeky little bitch,’ Catherine muttered. ‘No, in answer to your question, I did not buy petrol at Victoria Falls. Although I tried to! How’s that for honesty?’
‘Very admirable. So, how did you get the extra fuel?’
Catherine looked up at her, licked her lips and said, ‘Someone brought me some.’
‘A friend?’
She looked away, pouting. ‘Not any more.’
‘Was it Paul Bryant? Did he bring you some fuel, Catherine?’
‘I didn’t come here to get anyone arrested for black marketeering, Philippa.’
‘I give you my word, no one is going to be arrested for buying or selling fuel. Where did he get it from, did he tell you? Was it from air force stocks?’
‘Good God, no! He’d die before breaking one of his precious air force regulations. He’s such a stickler for that. Wouldn’t even take Flick and me up for a joy-ride in a Harvard. No, he didn’t get it from the air force, I’m sure of that.’
‘Ah, so it was Paul.’
‘Damn,’ Catherine said. ‘Caught me with my guard down. Oh, all right, damn it! Yes, it was Paul, he brought me some black market fuel, from some spiv in town. There, I’ve said it. Why is this so important? Am I to be hanged for receiving illegal fuel?’
‘No,’ said Pip. Her heart started to race. ‘Do you know when he bought it by any chance?’
‘He brought it to me the day you and he came to my place to . . . to tell me about Flick,’ Catherine closed her eyes at the painful memory.
‘But when did he buy it?’
Catherine opened her eyes and said: ‘The day before, I believe. I imagine these black marketeers work at night, so it must have been . . . um, the night Flick was killed, I suppose. Is something the matter, Pip?’
Pip put her hands on the desk to stop them from shaking. She felt like she needed to be sick.
14
Hendrick Reitz had followed the Deka River into the northern part of Wankie Game Reserve for as long as he dared. When he’d finally seen the dirt road running through the protected area, which crossed the river at a low-level drift, he had turned left, towards the safari lands beyond the northern border of the protected area. He’d kept the road in sight, but had not used it in case a game ranger stumbled across his tracks.
A pride of lions had circled his encampment the previous night. They’d spooked his horses but not him. He’d kept a fire burning through the night and, with his Mauser beside his sleeping bag for company, had listened to the low growls of lionesses on the hunt. A tawny shadow had darted through the flickering light cast by the flames. Reitz had sat up, sleepily, and grabbed the cool end of a burning log and waved it in an arc around his sleeping bag. He’d smiled as the lioness retreated into the darkness, then gone back to sleep.
The next day he had seen vultures circling in the clear blue sky and diverted a little north-west of his intended route to investigate. Lions, probably the ones who had invaded his camp, had taken down a zebra. He watched them, through binoculars, as they fed, their greedy faces dark and sticky with blood. He was pleased they had found an easier kill, probably a lame animal, than his mount or packhorse. With their bellies full they would not be following him.
Reitz was in the Matetsi safari area now, and he was starting to recognise familiar kopjes and dry riverbeds. He had enjoyed good hunting in the concession when he worked in Rhodesia before the war. He stopped the horses at the confluence of two almost dry streams, dismounted and let the beasts drink from a small pool. He took the compass from the breast pocket of his khaki bush shirt and flipped open its leather pouch. He double-checked his bearing, but he knew he was heading in the right direction.
For the tenth time that day he checked the straps holding the canvas-wrapped cylinders to the saddle of the packhorse. Each tube was four feet in length, and about a foot in diameter. All was still in order. To have come this far, from Germany, under the seas, to South West Africa and across the deserts of Bechuanaland to Rhodesia, only to lose his cargo in the bush because of a faulty buckle would be an unpardonable failure. He would not have cared if the lions had taken his mount the night before, but he would have shot each and every one of the cats if they’d tried to drag away the packhorse and its precious cargo. Countless thousands of hours worth of effort by some of Germany’s top chemists – he was vain enough to count himself in their ranks – and weapons-development scientists had gone into the construction and filling of those cylinders. A new weapon for a new phase of the war. Lightweight, effective and economical. He would take many lives with the contents of those cylinders and, in the process, he would save the lives of many more innocent German civilians.
On his return from his first spying mission in Africa he had begun seeing more of the attractive Ursula. She was not as adventurous in the bedroom as some women he had bedded, but he had, in time, educated her about his likes and dislikes. She’d been a willing student. While his heart would forever be in Africa, Ursula satisfied his physical needs and helped ward off the cold northern winter. Had he loved her? Probably not. However, he had become very attached to her. Certainly he had enjoyed her company, as well as her creamy-skinned, athletic body, and her cooking. She would have made an excellent wife, he thought, if he had intended on staying in Germany and making a home there.
He mounted his horse and tugged on the other’s reins, setting them on the final leg of their long trek. He crested a low hill and took in a breathtaking view. Spread out before him, dotting a grassy vlei that stretched to the horizon, were a breeding herd of thirty or more elephant and scores of antelope, a half-dozen different species at least. God’s bounty, a gift to his people and those worthy of sharing it with them. Many times he’d tried to describe such scenes to Ursula.
‘You will take me one day, won’t you, Hennie,’ she’d asked him as they’d shared a deep, steaming bath in his Berlin apartment. The room was lit by candles, not for romantic reasons but because a daylight bombing raid by American B-17 Flying Fortresses had knocked out their electricity.
He remembered the night well. His body was still tanned and lean from his time in Africa, and she held her arm against his, teasing him about his colour. ‘You don’t look very Aryan now,’ she laughed.
‘So why are you sharing your bath with a black man? What would the other girls in the party say about that?’ he asked, enjoying the weight of her body pressing down on his. Her back rested on his chest. He reached around her and soaped a breast the colour of snow, teasing the dark nipple to life with his slippery fingers.
‘They’d probably ask me if you had a brother.’
‘I don’t,’ he said, feeling suddenly morose at the thought of his German mother dying as she brought him into the world.
‘I’m sorry, Hennie. I didn’t mean anything by that,’ she said, reading his mind. He’d told her his family’s tragic story.
‘It’s all right,’ he said.
‘What’s to become of us, Hennie?’
He really had no answer to that question, none that would please the girl, anyway. ‘I don’t know, but I would love to show you Africa one day, when this is all over. When we’ve won.’
‘So you will take me.’
‘Yes, I suppose I will. I’ll take you right now, in fact,’ he added playfully, feeling the effect her slick flesh was having on his.
‘You cheeky sod,’ she chided, splashing water backwards into his face. ‘Oh no!’
He cocked his head: both of them were silent now as they listened to the all-too-familiar drone of an air-raid siren winding up to full pitch. ‘The flak has started. I hope they nail some of the bastards tonight.’
Ursula stood in the tub, soapy water cascading down over her body onto his. He reached for her. ‘Stay.’
‘The RAF has a terrible sense of timing. I can see they h
aven’t knocked the wind out of your sails, though,’ she added, looking down at him, ‘but don’t expect me to be able to concentrate on lovemaking while there are bombs going off around us. I’m going to the shelter.’
‘I’m staying,’ he said. ‘No bloody Englishman is going to stop me from enjoying a hot bath.’
She shimmied into her dress and fetched a bulky overcoat, head-scarf, muffler and hiking boots from the closet. ‘I can hear them now,’ she said.
‘Lancasters, by the sound of them,’ he said, soaping under his arms.
‘Come with me, please, Hennie. You know I hate how you stay here just for the hell of it. What are you trying to prove?’
He smiled at her. ‘Prove? Nothing. I’m not going to be killed by a bomb in a bathtub, Ursula. If I am going to meet my maker in this war, it will be in battle, or serving my country in some other way.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘God’s put me on this earth for a purpose.’
She laughed as she wrapped the muffler around her neck, then looked down and saw he wasn’t smiling. ‘You seriously believe that?’
‘I do.’
‘I’ve seen the bodies of tiny children killed by British bombs, Hennie. While you were away, the little twins who lived in my block were blown apart. Why didn’t God have something in mind for them?’
He shrugged. ‘I just know that my life has been a journey and that it will not end here, in a Berlin bathtub. Perhaps my purpose is to avenge the deaths of those two little girls.’
‘Revenge,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I’m as committed as you are, to the Fuhrer, to the party, to the firm, Hennie, but revenge solves nothing. Now, get your clothes on and come and cuddle with me in the air-raid shelter.’
‘Be careful,’ he simply said to her, dismissing her with a wave. In any case, he no longer felt aroused, just disappointed she didn’t share his confidence.
‘Bye, lover. Ask your God to watch over me and the hausfraus in the shelter,’ she said. With a wave, she was gone.
He closed his eyes and slid down deep in the bath, letting the water wash over his face. He needed someone whose will was as strong as his, someone who would not doubt him, who would stand side by side with him as his journey continued. After the war he would need the support of a good woman, someone to raise their children in a free, independent Afrikaner nation.
The last thing he remembered before the blast was finishing washing himself and putting his hands on the side of the tub, preparing to push himself up. When he awoke he was lying cold and naked on the tiled floor, the heavy cast-iron bath on its side. Plaster dust and grit coated him, sticking to his wet skin. His ears rang but, after running his hands quickly over his skin, he realised he had suffered no injury. ‘Thank God,’ he croaked, his throat and nose full of dust.
Staggering to his feet he walked through the bathroom doorway and, in a moment that might have been comical if viewed through someone else’s eyes, nearly fell two storeys. Half of the building had simply vanished. He stood there, on a precipice, nude and freezing. He crawled back inside, wary of the creaking floor beneath him. He found his clothes and pulled them on, then felt his way blindly through the remains of his apartment block. Fortunately, the main stairwell was intact and he, along with four other survivors who had not left for the shelters, made his way out into the street. Just in time, too, as another long slice of the building collapsed in a cloud of dust. Fire-engine bells clanged nearby and the street was lit by a hissing flame from a broken gas pipe. People staggered like drunkards in the roadway, shocked or injured, others either insane or numbed with grief. The shelter! He ran along the buckled footpath and turned the corner. The air-raid shelter was little more than the basement of the block three down from his. The cellar of his building had been flooded for some time and, as such, was no use as a refuge. It took him a couple of seconds to realise that he had, in fact, taken the correct turn.
The apartment block beneath which Ursula and dozens of other civilians had sought sanctuary no longer existed. In its place was a mound of broken bricks, burning timbers and shattered furniture. A nearby woman wailed. An air-raid warden swore and stared skywards. Flak batteries still boomed up the street, their empty brass shell casings tolling like bells on the sidewalk.
‘Come on! Let’s get this cleared!’ Reitz yelled at no one in particular.
An old man climbed over the rubble and joined him. Soon others rallied to them and Reitz organised a chain of people to shift the debris in order to reach the cellar below. Brick by brick, timber by timber, they slowly started clearing the rubble. Every few minutes, Reitz ordered them to stand still and shut their mouths so he could listen.
‘Quiet, I said! Listen.’ He’d heard the sound of a child crying, and of someone banging metal on metal – perhaps two pieces of broken water pipe. ‘There are people alive down there! Quickly now, put your backs into it!’
Urged on by the noises made by survivors, and by Reitz’s continual chivvying, the volunteers redoubled their efforts. After an hour’s toil that left him sweating despite the night’s chill, Reitz was finally able to reach between two clumps of fallen masonry and feel hope.
It was a hand. A woman’s, he thought. Slender and smooth, though sticky with blood. ‘Can you move?’
‘My leg,’ she sobbed. ‘I think it may be broken.’
The voice was not Ursula’s. He’d not allowed himself the luxury of emotion – of hope or fear or worry. He’d been too busy organising the rescue. Now he started to imagine the worst. ‘Hold on, stay still. We’ll get you out.’
The woman was the first. She might have been pretty but her face was now a mask of blood and the bone shone white through her thigh. Fortunately for her she had passed out and no longer cried from the pain. There were more. Two little girls, not more than nine years old, he guessed; a wailing baby followed by its mother. ‘Praise God,’ an elderly man in shabby clothes said as Reitz handed him the infant. ‘My grandson.’
When there were no more survivors emerging from the hole, it was time to start looking for those who had died. Most of the people who had accounted for lost loved ones drifted away, but a small force of volunteers and firemen stayed around to continue the grim job of disinterring the dead – or what was left of them. Reitz’s hands were slick with blood and his shirt and trousers stained a deep red. He was no stranger to death, but the grim work reminded him again of the bombed villages of Spain.
‘Here’s another woman, Hendrick,’ cried old Hans. The man, sixty if he was a day, whom he’d never met but was now on first-name terms with as a result of their shared labours, had climbed into the remains of the shelter with a flashlight. Reitz was close behind him.
Hans shone the light on her face. Reitz sat back on a pile of bricks, oblivious to water running down his face from a broken pipe above him. He ran a hand through his wet fair hair. He said nothing.
‘Hendrick? Give me a hand, please.’
He sat, motionless, staring at that beautiful, pure, young German woman. A little more than an hour ago her body had been pressed against his, the two of them melding into one warm form in the deep steaming bath. He’d been able to feel her heart beat as she’d lain on him. She’d smiled and joked with him and, before the bath, he’d been as close to her as two people could be. Now Ursula was dead.
‘Hendrick? My God. You know her?’
He’d nodded. ‘Yes. She was . . . she and I were . . .’
‘Those bastards,’ Hans said, rolling his eyes skywards as he clapped a bony hand on the South African’s shoulder. ‘I’ll get one of the other firemen to help me.’
‘No, thank you, Hans. I will do it.’
They removed the heavy timber beam that had fallen across her belly and nearly cut her in two in the process. He hoped she’d died immediately. Her face seemed peaceful.
He lifted her in his arms and shuffled to the access hole he had created. They had saved some of the civilians, but there was nothing he could h
ave done sooner to rescue Ursula. As he emerged he smelled the smoke of a hundred fires, the fading scent of cordite drifting down the street from the now-silent eighty-eights. He didn’t know where to take her, so he simply laid her in the street, sat down in the gutter next to her and lit a cigarette. A child cried nearby. An old man retched dust from his lungs.
She’d mocked him before she’d left for the shelter. ‘Revenge solves nothing,’ she’d told him. As he smoked he wondered if she would feel the same now, say the same words if it were she staring down at his broken body.
Revenge. He might have learned to love Ursula, if they’d had the time. She might have borne him children in a new South Africa, ruled by his people. The British had taken his past – his mother – and now part of his future.
He’d been brazen enough to tell Canaris what he thought could be done in Africa, how a mighty blow could be struck against the RAF if the high command had the guts to take the fight to a new, unconventional front – to go around the normal rules of war.
‘I’m not convinced, Reitz,’ the old Admiral had confessed when Hendrick had first floated the idea. ‘I don’t want another failure like Operation Weissdorn. We put our faith in another one of you Afrikaners, but Leibbrandt was a disaster!’
Operation Weissdorn was the German code name for a botched plan in 1941 to assassinate the South African Prime Minister, Field Marshal Jan Smuts, and seize power in an OB-led coup d’état. Its leader, the former South African heavyweight boxing champion Robey Leibbrandt, was betrayed to the police and arrested. Leibbrandt was languishing in gaol, his death sentence having been commuted to life in prison.
The main reason Canaris had initially been wary of the type of attack Reitz favoured was that it would take the war against the allies to a new level. He’d half suspected the admiral was too scared to take such a bold step.
Ironically, the deciding factor in giving the go-ahead for Reitz’s bold scheme was Jan Smuts. Reitz had been summoned to a second meeting by Canaris, and the wily old admiral’s eyes glowed with barely concealed enthusiasm.
