Iron Gate

by Richard Herman

  *

  Lydia Kowalski came out of Pontowski’s office and took a deep breath. What the hell, she told herself. The fucking Air Force strikes again. What did I expect? How far can trash haulers, and women, go in this man’s Air Force? I should have taken a headquarters assignment and not stayed in operations. You’ve got to shove paper to get promoted these days.

  She walked out of the headquarters mansion determined to take the rest of the day off and find a quiet and remote place to drink. She didn’t recognize Sam Darnell who had arrived for the lunch date at the van der Roos winery with Pontowski and Piet. It might help if I looked like her, Kowalski groused to herself.

  Sam was dressed in a white jump suit and stylish low-heeled shoes. She had rolled up her sleeves and exposed a fair amount of cleavage. Her hair was pulled back and carefully arranged, the work of a beauty salon. Unconsciously, she had entered into a competition with Elena Martine.

  *

  Van der Roos kept glancing in the rear view mirror as he drove, trying to gauge what was going on in the backseat of his Mercedes. Nothing, he decided. Pontowski and Sam were acting totally correct and had said little during the drive to Paarl. Even the black South African private riding shotgun had been more communicative. Van der Roos waited, wondering who would see it first.

  Sam was the first. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘What’s that?’ She pointed at the impressive, three-spired monument on the side of the mountain overlooking the Paarl valley.

  ‘This,’ van der Roos said, turning up the road to the monument, ‘is the Afrikaanse Taal. It is a monument to our language, Afrikaans. The two smaller pinnacles represent English and Bantu and are designed to lead into the much taller obelisk.’

  ‘It reminds me of a catapult,’ Sam said, ‘aiming skyward.’

  ‘Exactly,’ van der Roos said. ‘Afrikaans is the catapult.’ He parked the car and they walked into the monument while the guard remained behind. ‘The words embedded in the walkway,’ van der Roos explained, ‘mean “we are serious”.’ He fell back, letting the two Americans walk ahead.

  Sam stood at the overlook, taking in the magnificent view and the cloud-studded sky. Pontowski joined her, standing a few feet away. The wind whipped at Sam’s hair. In her own way, Samantha Darnell was stunning. She wasn’t a classic, sophisticated beauty like Elena Martine, but wholesome and athletic. ‘I wish I had brought my camera,’ she said. ‘It’s beautiful up here.’

  ‘That’s probably why they chose this site,’ he allowed.

  ‘I’m impressed,’ she said.

  ‘It is a lesson.’

  Sam turned and looked at him, surprised by his reaction. ‘Really? In what way?’

  ‘It shows how Afrikaners think. Ask yourself, Why a monument to a language? Language is the bedrock of any culture, a growing, living thing. But you celebrate it by building libraries or theaters for the performing arts, not monuments on hillsides.’

  She looked away, reevaluating the man beside her. Much to her surprise, he could think. She hadn’t expected that. The military were supposed to be rigid robots, blindly reacting to orders, never questioning. ‘So what do you see here?’

  ‘The Afrikaners giving the finger to the world.’

  A surprised ‘Oh’ slipped out and she was angry at herself for squeaking. At least his last response was true to stereotype.

  *

  Piet van der Roos leaned back from the lunch table on the patio of the van der Rooses’ Cape Dutch homestead. He listened to the talk and was pleased that his father and Pontowski were getting along. Jan van der Roos was a big, burly man with a full head of white hair and bright blue eyes. His huge hands, worn and calloused, showed the ravages of a lifetime of hard work and he spoke a heavily accented English with the confidence of a man who knows his place in life. Like most Afrikaners, he had a quick temper, but he was a warm and hospitable host, genuinely glad to have Pontowski and Sam as his guests.

  ‘The lunch was superb,’ Sam said. ‘Thank you.’

  The elder van der Roos raised his wine glass. ‘A pretty woman and a good wine make any meal a success.’ Sam blushed at the old-fashioned compliment.

  ‘And this is excellent,’ Pontowski said, holding his glass to the light and swirling the dark red wine. ‘It’s a shame you don’t export it to the States.’

  ‘But we do!’ Jan boomed. ‘We have been exporting more and more since the elections in 1994, when the trade sanctions were lifted. I can’t meet the demand.’ He pushed back from the table and stood up. ‘Come, I’ll show you my vineyards.’ He turned to Sam. ‘Please come too. I hope it will not bore you.’

  Sam smiled. ‘Your gardens and house are so lovely ... may I look around here?’

  Sam’s reply pleased the old man. ‘Of course, of course. My daughter will show you around. Aly has been busy with some tourists in the wine tasting cellar.’ He turned Sam over to a young black girl and led Pontowski and Piet to his new Land Rover. ‘Business has been very good since the elections,’ he said. ‘Very good.’

  ‘My father is planting more vineyards,’ Piet explained as they drove through the fields.

  ‘And hiring more boys,’ the elder van der Roos added. He stopped the Land Rover and they got out. A black foreman and six workers hurried over to meet them. Pontowski listened as Jan spoke in an unfamiliar patois with the workers.

  ‘Ja baas’ the grinning foreman said, ‘it goes well with the vines. Next year, even better.’ A repeated chorus of ‘Ja baas’ rained down. The workers obviously liked and respected the old man.

  After a few minutes, they were back in the Land Rover, heading for a new field. ‘They want raises,’ Jan said.

  ‘Inflation is very bad,’ Piet said.

  ‘Ja, it is. I will give them all a raise, but not too much money. Better I pay them in food and clothes for their families.’

  ‘It is a problem if we pay them too much, too soon,’ Piet explained to Pontowski. ‘They want to gamble, get drunk, and won’t come to work. Then our production drops.’

  ‘Why don’t you fire them and hire someone who will come to work when they should?’ Pontowski asked.

  The elder van der Roos snorted, a bit of his temper showing at the American’s lack of understanding. ‘They are my boys. I can’t fire them because of what they are. The young ones are learning and will do much better. Until then, we must go slow and take care of them.’

  *

  Aly van der Roos was a very pretty, very big, fair-haired young woman. She shared the good-natured temperament of her father, and like him, her hands were hard and calloused from work. She showed Sam around the wine cellars, proud of what her family had accomplished over the years. ‘We don’t get many tourists these days,’ she said. ‘Many came right after the elections, but they stopped coming when the troubles started.’

  They walked outside and into the shade of the oak trees that had been planted over a century before. Most of the tables were deserted except for a small group of German tourists who were working on their tenth bottle of wine and one lone woman sitting off to the side. ‘She’s an American,’ Aly said. ‘She’s very quiet but is getting very drunk. I’m worried about her.’

  Sam recognized Lydia Kowalski from earlier that day when they had passed at the UN headquarters. ‘I know her,’ she said, ‘I’ll talk to her.’ She walked over and asked if she could sit down. Kowalski looked up, recognized her, and gestured at a chair. She took another drink.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Just getting drunk,’ Kowalski said, carefully pronouncing each word.

  ‘It doesn’t help,’ Sam replied.

  Kowalski fixed her with an odd look. ‘Have you ever been drunk?’ Before Sam could answer, she changed the subject. ‘You’re here with Pontowski?’ Sam nodded. ‘I saw you arrive but he hasn’t seen me. I’m one of the nobodies, you see. We’re invisible. Especially to promotion boards.’ Sam realized Kowalski was very intoxicated and it was best to let her talk. ‘I’m a trash hauler. Fly C-130s
. Haul cargo. Trash haulers don’t get promoted.’ She waved her glass in front of Sam. ‘Zoomies get promoted, jet jockeys get promoted, golden boys get promoted, not us trash haulers.’

  ‘Is Pontowski a golden boy?’ Sam asked.

  Kowalski nodded, thought about it, then nodded again. ‘He has sponsors.’ She started to babble and Sam had trouble following her disjointed sentences. Then she understood. Lydia Kowalski had been passed over for promotion to colonel. She had given everything she had to the Air Force, had risked her life numerous times, and had given up any hope of raising a family. ‘My marriage was a disaster,’ she told Sam. ‘I needed a house husband and he wanted to pursue his own career. So I chose the Air Force ... just like the men do when they have to make the choice.’

  ‘Is it Pontowski’s fault you were passed over?’ Sam asked.

  Kowalski’s answer surprised her. ‘No. It’s not.’ The pilot pulled herself up straight. ‘Don’t tell him I’m here. I need to sober up.’

  Sam motioned for Aly to come over. ‘We need some coffee,’ she said. ‘Everything will be fine.’ Aly smiled and left. ‘Lydia, please tell me about Pontowski. What’s he really like?’

  ‘He can be a real bastard. But sometimes, I feel sorry for him. His wife was killed ... terrorists.’

  ‘I heard,’ Sam said.

  ‘It was a hit contract on him.’ Kowalski said. ‘They got his wife instead. He’s trying to raise his son alone.’

  Sam probed deeper. ‘Wasn’t he involved in a midair collision?’

  ‘Yeah. Jack Locke was killed. Locke was the best damn’ pilot who ever strapped on a jet. I was with him on Operation Warlord. That son of a bitch could really fly. So can Pontowski. They were flying a mission during an Operational Readiness Inspection and Locke had a puke from the IG team in his back seat ... a real shithead named Raider. Anyway, Locke and Pontowski were going one-on-one and really mixing it up. Raider couldn’t take the pressure and panicked. He tried to take control of Locke’s jet and crashed into Pontowski’s wing. It’s all in the accident report. But Pontowski took a lot of heat for it because he survived.’

  Sam’s voice was gentle. ‘Lydia, I think you like him.’

  ‘You either like him or hate his guts. The Warthog drivers will follow him anywhere.’ She paused. ‘I’ll follow him anywhere too. And I just met the son of a bitch.’

  *

  Sam rode in silence during the trip back to Cape Town, thinking about the man beside her. She looked out and saw heavily armed black soldiers, one about every hundred feet, standing beside the road. ‘Why the soldiers?’ she asked.

  ‘They are here to guard the motorway,’ van der Roos replied. ‘That shantytown over there’ — he pointed to his left — ‘is Khayelitsha. Over half the people who live there are under sixteen. There is no work and many of the boys have joined gangs. They steal, attack cars, and kill people. They have a saying, “One settler, one bullet”. When they say “settler”, they mean anyone who is white.’

  The black soldier riding shotgun next to van der Roos turned around. ‘They always chant it in English. When you hear it, run.’

  ‘But we’re Americans,’ Sam protested.

  ‘It makes no difference,’ the soldier replied. ‘You are white.’

  The words stunned Sam. ‘Do all Africans hate the whites?’ she asked.

  The guard gave her a big smile. ‘No, lady. We like the whites. For most of us, the white man is the source of a job. That’s all we want.’ After they had passed Khayelitsha, the guard tensed, his hands clamped around his R-4 assault rifle. ‘No black will stop here or go to that side of the road.’

  Van der Roos pointed to the right side of the road, to what looked like a huge campground of tents, trailers, and RVs. ‘This is our newest settlement. We call it Trektown.’

  Pontowski saw the difference at once. ‘But they’re white,’ he said.

  ‘Ja,’ van der Roos replied. ‘They are our new trekboers.’

  ‘Trekboers?’ Sam asked. She had never heard the name before.

  ‘Boer,’ van der Roos explained, ‘is the Dutch word for farmer. Trekboers were itinerant farmers who followed their livestock. The trekboers left the Cape in the 1830s on a great trek, a journey or migration, into the interior and were called voortrekkers. They fought many battles with the tribes they met. They circled their wagons into a defensive laager to fight. We built a monument to the voortrekkers on a hill outside Pretoria. It is a big square granite structure surrounded by a laager of granite wagons and is a shrine to the Afrikaner spirit.’

  ‘Afrikaners do like building monuments,’ Pontowski said.

  ‘That is true,’ van der Roos replied. ‘We want to leave our mark on the land for all to see.’

  ‘Why did the trekboers leave the Cape in the first place?’ Sam asked.

  ‘To be free of the British who had taken over the Cape,’ van der Roos replied.

  ‘Were your family voortrekkers?’

  ‘No. We were boers, not trekboers.’

  ‘Why are the Afrikaners coming back now?’ Pontowski asked.

  ‘For two reasons,’ van der Roos replied. ‘To be free of the black governments that are ruling their provinces and for protection. They have heard the chant “One settler, one bullet”.’

  ‘Trektown,’ their guard said, ‘is a laager.’

  *

  Monday, January 12

  Cape Town, South Africa

  *

  MacKay made his way down the crowded sidewalk toward the Broadway Industries Centre. After the madness of Johannesburg, the streets of Cape Town were an oasis of calm with people going about their business. Occasionally, some passerby, always white, would glance at him. But it was never with the hostility he had experienced in Johannesburg.

  He entered the main foyer where a middle-aged white security guard stopped him. ‘What’s your business?’ the guard demanded.

  ‘I’ve an appointment with the business attaché,’ MacKay replied. He was maintaining his cover and acting like a businessman, getting lost in the daily shuffle of commerce. It was all part of his tradecraft as he reestablished contact with his control. It was straightforward and did not require the cosmic gadgets loved by TV and the movies. The hard part was to establish a legitimate cover and then make sure no one penetrated it.

  A few minutes later, MacKay was talking to Richard Davis Standard, ostensibly the business and economic attaché. ‘Where the hell you been?’ he demanded.

  ‘It’s tough out there,’ MacKay answered. ‘I was lucky to get out of Jo’burg.’

  Standard conceded the point. ‘I heard. Bad business there with Robby and Grawley. That was a nice touch with the shoes on the other body. It even fooled us at first. By the way, who was he?’

  ‘The asshole who shot them,’ MacKay told him. ‘I took this off his body.’ He handed Standard the hit man’s ID card and gun. That ID opens a lot of doors with the AWB. I staked out the office and Hans Beckmann showed up.’ He let Standard draw the obvious conclusions.

  He did. ‘I’m not surprised. Agents have a habit of turning up dead around Beckmann.’ Standard drummed the table with his blunt fingers. He didn’t mention the mangled body of the Japanese agent which the Boys had found. ‘Beckmann and trouble go together like stink on shit. He showed up here along with his brother, Erik. Now there’s another nasty piece of work.’ He examined the ID card. ‘We can use this.’ He dropped it in his desk drawer. ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘Through Bloemfontein,’ MacKay answered. ‘I dropped Ziba off at the Slavins.’

  ‘So the Israeli is at Bloemfontein. We lost track of him in all the confusion and rioting.’

  ‘Ziba mentioned something about the Boyden Observatory,’ MacKay said. ‘She had a phone number to call.’ He gave Standard the number.

  Standard grunted and placed a phone call to verify the number. ‘That’s not a Bloemfontein number,’ he told MacKay. ‘It’s at Iron Gate, Beckmann’s base, about fifteen miles north of Bloemf
ontein.’

  ‘Damn,’ MacKay muttered. Ziba was back in the thick of it.

  Standard caught MacKay’s reaction and again drummed the table. Was MacKay fit to go back into the field? Was he compromised beyond recovery? But MacKay had an agent in place and that was too good an opportunity to ignore. What the hell? Standard thought. Intelligence is like a pool game — it’s all recovery and position. The wires to Langley would buzz with the news that they were still on the track of Prime. ‘Can you reestablish contact with Ziba?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s already arranged,’ MacKay told him.

  Standard relaxed. Gengha Dung, the CIA’s Division Chief for Sub-Saharan Africa, was going to be one happy lady. She had been nicknamed after Genghis Khan for her dictatorial ways and Standard’s head would not be served up as a sacrificial offering to the DCI, the Director of Central Intelligence, to atone for the failures of her division. ‘We’ll set you up with a new ID and cover,’ Standard told him. ‘We’ll go full throttle but it will still take a couple of weeks.’

  MacKay walked to the window. ‘It seems so normal here.’

  Standard joined him. ‘There are problems, especially in the townships. But the situation is different here. Half the population is Cape Colored and the other half split between whites and blacks. The Coloreds have a different attitude than the blacks. They’re like cockneys ... cheerful, witty, with a strong survivalist spirit.

  ‘The government is still very much in control in the Western Cape. The South African Air Force and Navy have a strong presence here and are still loyal. The betting is they will stay that way unless they are ordered to fight the AWB. It’s a different story with the Army. About a third have gone over to the AWB. Luckily, they took little with them.’ Except for a few nukes, he mentally added.

  He walked over to a map. ‘But the government cannot control the violence and famine that’s breaking out in the interior. That’s why they called in the UN peacekeepers and relief agencies.’ He slapped MacKay on a shoulder and walked him to the elevator. ‘Stay in the Ritz Protea at Sea Point. We’ll contact you there.’