Spy Out the Land

by Jeremy Duns

  Campbell-Fraser continued to examine the photographs. Then he gathered them together into a tidy bundle and placed them on a side table.

  ‘Thank you for this, Peter. I’ll have to look into it more closely, of course, but it certainly seems interesting. We know how to reach you if need be. That will be all.’

  ‘Sir.’

  Voers saluted curtly and left the room. Campbell-Fraser picked the photographs up and lowered himself into an armchair near the window to look through them again. He was excited by the possible ramifications of them. He hadn’t indicated this to Voers, partly for security reasons and partly because he was unsure what to do about the man. He’d dismissed him from the regiment a year earlier when he had discovered he’d raped a guerrilla’s wife in a raid on one of the villages across the border with Mozambique, and as a result had been in two minds about whether to meet him when he had called his office that morning claiming he had valuable intelligence. But if the information was correct – if – it was undeniably a breakthrough.

  After a few more minutes of contemplation, Campbell-Fraser packed the photographs into his briefcase and left the room, switching off the lights. He took the stairs down to the lobby, paid for the room, and walked out into Cecil Square to find his car.

  Chapter 11

  Joshua Ephibe grasped his ribs under the thin sheet and shivered at the sight of the man who had just walked into the ward. It was Sammy Oka, whom he had last seen four years earlier at the training camp in Mgagao. Oka had been one of the more impressive recruits, and Ephibe had earmarked him for fast promotion in his passing-out report. Now he was one of his gaolers. He looked in good shape, too, his muscular physique encased in a camouflaged T-shirt, faded khaki shorts and plimsolls, all of which presented an accurate impersonation of their own haphazard ‘uniform’.

  Oka approached the bed and smiled – for all the world as though they were meeting on the street on a Sunday morning in the marketplace, Ephibe thought.

  ‘Hello, Joshua. It’s been a long time.’

  Ephibe didn’t respond, but under the sheet his hands were trembling. How dare this man pose as a friend? How many operations had he destroyed?

  Appearing oblivious to the snub, Oka looked around the room until he caught sight of a wooden stool beside one of the basins. He carried it over to the bed, set it down, seated himself on it, and faced Ephibe again. ‘How are you feeling? Have they mistreated you at all?’

  ‘They’ had treated him remarkably well, but Ephibe wasn’t about to admit it.

  ‘Where were you injured – your kidneys, wasn’t it?’

  Silence again. Oka took a pack of cigarettes from a pocket and shook two into his hand. He offered one to Ephibe, who finally erupted in anger.

  ‘Why the hell are you here? Did they send you to try to persuade me to turn traitor like you?’

  Oka replaced the proffered cigarette in the pack, then lit the other one, rocking back on the stool as he took the first draught. His face had assumed a puzzled expression.

  ‘A traitor? But who have I betrayed?’

  Ephibe looked at him in disgust. ‘The movement, of course. Chimurenga! Zimbabwe!’

  ‘Ah yes. “Zimbabwe”.’ Oka said the word as if it were the name of a land in a children’s fairy tale. ‘Well, my family sees things a little differently. Yes, I’m married now, with a little boy: David. You must come and meet my family. If you want to, of course.’

  ‘I’m not a traitor.’

  Oka ignored him. ‘Clarissa and David live here while I’m out in the field. Her parents, too. Nobody can touch them, and my boy gets to be with his family, safe, secure, warm and well fed. There is a very good school here and, as you can see, the best medical facilities.’ He indicated the state-of-the-art intensive care unit next to the bed.

  ‘And who pays for all this?’

  ‘The Scouts. I realise it is a blow to your pride to be captured, Joshua, but there’s nothing to be ashamed of. We aren’t the devils you make us out to be, you know. We’re just soldiers. Many of the whites have become like brothers to me.’ He ignored the expression on Ephibe’s face. ‘Yes, we’re brothers fighting together, black and white alongside each other, for a common cause. There is no discrimination whatsoever – we eat and drink together every day, every night. And we get proper equipment, not like the crap you’re using. You’ve already seen some of what we have: machine-pistols, grenades . . . whatever we need. And our leaders fight beside us. They don’t sneak off to Botswana or Zambia to spend the money their supporters have raised for weapons on champagne and whores. My family is safe and looked after, I’m paid well—’

  Ephibe looked up sharply. ‘They pay you, too, to murder your own people?’

  Oka slowly blew smoke from his mouth, watching as the cloud circled above the bed. The doctor had confirmed that Ephibe was still a smoker. Oka’s pleasure in the cigarette was genuine, as Weale forbade any of the team from smoking on operations – the scent travelled easily.

  ‘Listen, Joshua, I asked if I could come and visit you, because I saw your name on the list of captured men. For old times’ sake, you know? And because you were one of the better instructors. Of course I am paid. We are all paid. We’re soldiers.’ He clicked his teeth as though in thought. ‘You know, this “Zimbabwe” you still believe in. It’s just a dream, my friend – or rather a nightmare. You think those fools can run a country? Not a chance. They’re at each other’s throats already, and they’ll be worse if their revolution succeeds. They’re bloodthirsty, the lot of them.’

  ‘So they’re savages? Murungu trained you well.’

  Oka shook his head. ‘No, not savages. Ordinary men corrupted by power, leading others who have turned bloodthirsty through a lack of discipline. Through fatigue and desperation from fighting a war they cannot win. You know this as well as I do. What do you think would have happened to me if I had been captured by your men?’

  ‘You would have been killed, of course.’

  ‘Yes. At last we are being honest with each other. I would have been shot in the back without a trial, then left to rot where I fell. Compare that to your situation at the moment, Joshua. You were captured at a terrorist camp in possession of illegal weapons, in the very act of training terrorists to attack this country. You’ve committed treason by the laws of this land, and yet here you are talking to me. Why are you not dead?’

  It was a question Joshua Ephibe had already asked himself many times.

  ‘Not only are you not dead in a ditch,’ Oka continued, ‘but you are lying here in this bed, with doctors and nurses waiting on you day and night, and with your own family on their way to see you.’

  Ephibe’s head jerked up. ‘My family?’

  ‘Didn’t they tell you? They’re sending a team to Caponda to get them. Your sister and your parents will be here in a couple of days, and after you’ve spent some time together they will stay in some very nice accommodation here while you are out in the field. That is, if you want to, and can pass the training.’

  Ephibe sighed. ‘I told you – I’m no traitor.’

  ‘I see.’ Oka pushed back the stool, retied the laces of his plimsolls in a few swift gestures, and stood. ‘Well, it’s a shame you see it that way. Of course, you will be hanged under the Law and Order Maintenance Act. I’m disappointed, Joshua: I told my comrades you were precisely the calibre of soldier we were looking for. It seems I was mistaken. If you’re determined to die for a hopeless cause, I can’t stop you. I’ll let them know your decision. I don’t think the team has set out for Caponda yet.’

  He replaced the stool by the basin and walked out of the room, leaving Joshua Ephibe alone with his thoughts.

  Chapter 12

  Captain John Weale spent as little time in his office as he could, but was pleased with its setup. When he had first taken the job he’d made the mistake of not decorating it at all, but he had soon realised that the captured terrs had felt like they were being interrogated in a cell, so he’d persuaded
the Commander to ship in a comfortable armchair, a few rugs and some soft lighting. He felt he now had the right balance: enough warmth to loosen them up, but not so much as to obscure the importance of his questions.

  He walked to the filing cabinet in the corner of the room. It was filled with captured documents, photographs, and other snippets of information, all of which could be cross-checked. These question-and-answer sessions rarely elicited any useful intelligence, but they were often a helpful gauge of the current state of the terr’s loyalty. Would he be prepared to identify his former commander? How about his best friend? So far, Joshua Ephibe seemed willing to help, having identified many of the other men they had captured and given their ranks and roles in the ZANLA structure.

  Weale took a new dossier from the cabinet. ‘Might be nothing,’ the Commander had said when he’d handed it to him a couple of weeks earlier, ‘but Pete Voers thinks he’s spotted Charamba’s daughter in hiding in Sweden. We need confirmation. Show it around.’

  Weale was wary of using intelligence from Voers, who had left the regiment under a cloud, and didn’t understand why Campbell-Fraser was interested in Charamba anyway – they knew where the man lived in Lusaka, but he was a thorn in the side of ZANLA and ZIPRA alike so they’d deliberately left him alone. But it wasn’t his job to question the Commander’s orders.

  He walked back to his desk and removed a sheaf of photographs from the dossier, spreading them in front of Ephibe. All of them showed a park on a sunny day, with most of the people in them rather glamorous-looking whites. But every photograph also featured a striking young black woman with a pair of sunglasses on her head.

  ‘Recognise her?’

  Ephibe leaned forward to examine the image more closely, and let out a small gasp.

  ‘Yes, that’s Hope Charamba. She’s older, but it’s her.’ He looked up at Weale. ‘Where did you get this photograph?’

  ‘Never mind that. Are you sure it’s her?’

  ‘Yes, I’m certain. I grew up with her. I was her first boyfriend, back in secondary school. We were inseparable.’

  Weale nodded, and lifted his pen.

  ‘Tell me more.’

  Chapter 13

  Friday, 22 August 1975, Stockholm, Sweden

  Paul Dark stood perfectly still. With his index finger, he drew the curtain by a fraction of an inch.

  The car was parked on a street east of the square, just beyond the children’s playground and largely obscured by a row of elm trees. But it was definitely the same car.

  He had spotted it three days earlier, when he had driven Ben and Claire in their VW Beetle, Ben to the kindergarten and Claire into town to the offices of Aftonbladet, where she worked as a picture researcher. He had caught it only by chance – on stopping at a traffic light he had glanced in the rear-view mirror and seen a muddy green late-model Opel Kapitän. For no particular reason, it had brought to mind one he’d seen several years earlier, in a traffic jam in Nigeria. And now here it was again, parked fewer than a hundred yards from his flat.

  He walked to the other side of the room. It could mean only one thing, he decided: he’d been spotted. Some time ago, too, probably – he remembered with a flush of self-recrimination the ‘bird-watcher’ in Haga Park a few weekends ago. What a bloody fool he’d been to ignore the signs. Not that he could have done much anyway: once you’d been spotted, you stayed that way. Was it the Russians, he wondered, or the Brits? Well, it hardly mattered. Either way, the game was up.

  The question was what to do about it. He lowered himself into the armchair to think it through. Yes, someone had spotted him – but he had been very careful with that curtain. Even if binoculars had been trained on it at that very moment, they wouldn’t have been sure that he hadn’t simply been drawing them closer. And other than that, he hadn’t reacted at all to the car. Conclusion: they didn’t yet know that he had realised he was under surveillance. Could he use that?

  The problem was he had no idea what they had planned. Was it a snatch team? A hit squad? And what was their time-scale? He’d spent fifteen days tracking Cheng before he had made a move on him in Hong Kong all those years ago. How long had they been watching him for – before the park, even? And how long did they plan to continue to do so before they made their move?

  These were unanswerable right now. At best, they were in a stage of provisional surveillance, perhaps even still uncertain whether he was who they suspected. At worst, they’d break into the flat in the next thirty seconds while he was sitting here thinking about it.

  No, he decided, that was unlikely. It was only five o’clock and the shops were still open – people were milling around in the square and on the surrounding streets, and the underground station was starting to spill out commuters arriving home. Far too crowded for either a snatch or a kill. If they were planning to move on him today, they would at least wait until dusk.

  What were his options? He could run, of course, but the same disadvantage they had also worked against him. The whole area was too exposed: even if he took the fire escape they’d see him the moment he landed. There was no way out of the building without them seeing him. He was like a rat in a trap.

  Even if he could get out of the building, what about Claire and Ben? Ben was asleep in his bedroom, and Claire would be home from work soon. He couldn’t leave them behind. Who knew what the men in that car might be capable of? Taking his family would be the obvious way to stop him running, and he didn’t think they would hesitate to use it.

  He would stay in the flat, he decided. They might not come tonight, and they might not come tomorrow. But sooner or later they would come, and he’d be ready for them.

  But first he had to get Claire and Ben to safety.

  He carried out a rapid but thorough search of the flat, looking for any sign of disturbance. He checked above and below every surface, and detached the telephone receiver to check for bugs. When he was satisfied that everything was clean, he went down to the basement and prised the holdall from the space beneath the floorboards. He unzipped it, and the blued finish of the ridges on the butt of the M57 gleamed in the dim light. Beneath it lay the reassuring shape of the Husqvarna, and next to that were the passports and several thousand kronor wrapped in rubber bands.

  He closed the bag and carried it upstairs, then went back to the telephone and called a number he had long since committed to memory. Perhaps someone else would pick up, he thought. Perhaps they had moved, or died.

  ‘Hello?’

  Dark exhaled, and felt his shoulders relaxing marginally at the familiar voice.

  ‘Gunnar. It’s the Englishman.’

  ‘Is it her?’

  ‘I think so. It’s hard to tell from here. Can’t we move any closer?’

  ‘No.’

  Sammy Oka glared at Joshua Ephibe, fidgeting in the passenger seat next to him, and cursed himself for having persuaded him to switch sides.

  For his part, Ephibe was equally ambivalent about having been ‘tamed’. Thanks to the Selous Scouts’ medical facilities and the food in the mess his ribs had fully healed and he felt physically fitter than he had in years, since his first days as an instructor. Oka had also delivered on the promise that he would see his parents again. But while it had been wonderful to reunite with them after so long in the field, the hurt of leaving again so soon afterwards had been almost more painful than if he hadn’t seen them at all. But he knew it was too late to back out. Although Oka and the others had given him several loyalty tests, including sentry duty at the barracks in which he’d been given what he had correctly guessed was an unloaded rifle, he had no weapon now. Oka clutched a nine-millimetre Makarov pistol in his right hand, and although it wasn’t aimed at him Ephibe had no doubt it would be if he tried to escape or hinder the mission in any way. And, of course, his parents were being looked after only so long as he co-operated. In effect, they were now hostages. And after the operation was over, he would have been drawn even deeper in by having taken part in it – even if he des
erted, his old comrades would shoot him on sight. He had nowhere to call home now but the Selous Scouts, and the sooner he got used to the idea the better.

  He lifted the binoculars to his eyes again, and at that moment the woman turned towards the street and he saw her face straight on. His stomach coiled in on itself.

  ‘It’s her.’

  Oka looked at him.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Oka whistled to himself. He picked up the Pye Pocketfone and held down the button.

  ‘Leopard One, this is Leopard Two. We have visual confirmation of Target One entering the building. Over.’

  She knew something was wrong the moment she entered the flat. Then she saw the drawers askew in the bureau and the holdall on the floor and her pulse started racing. Erik was standing by the window. He walked to her and they kissed, but he drew apart abruptly and she saw his face was stark and drawn.

  ‘Darling, what is it? Tell me!’

  He took her hands in his, then breathed in deeply.

  ‘Everything’s fine. Ben’s asleep. But something’s come up – something urgent. It’s going to be a little difficult and confusing, but I need you to trust me completely. Can you please do that?’

  She nodded. ‘Of course. But what—’

  ‘I’ll explain everything later, I promise. But we don’t have the time now. I’ve packed some clothes for you and Ben. In a few minutes, you’re going to go downstairs with him and get in the car. You’re going to drive to Värtahamnen, as fast as you can without drawing the attention of the police. It’s a short drive, just twenty kilometres away. As soon as you get there you’re going to go to the port and find someone with a motorboat – look for a sturdy one with a lower deck – and pay them to take the two of you to the Finnish archipelago, to a small island called Utö. I’ve marked it for you.’ He took a tourist map from the coffee table and placed it in her hands.

  She made to speak again, but he put a finger to her lips. ‘This will be more than enough for the journey and anything else you might need on the way.’ He peeled off the notes and held them out. She took them, staring at him with incomprehension.