Heart of the Hunter

by Deon Meyer

  He had waited thirty-eight months for this. More than three years since Janina Mentz, dossier in hand, had come to fetch him, a one-pip lieutenant, out of the Recces.

  “You’re a hard man, Mazibuko. But are you hard enough?”

  Fuck, it was hard to take her seriously. A chick. A white woman who marched into the Recces and sent everyone back and forth with that soft voice and way too much self-assurance. And a way of playing with his head. “Isn'’t it time to move out from your father’s shadow?” Mazibuko had been ready to go from the first question. The follow-up was just Mentz showing that she could read between the lines in those official files.

  “Why me?” he had asked anyway, on the plane to Cape Town.

  Mentz had looked at him with those piercing eyes and said, “Mazibuko, you know.”

  He hadn'’t answered, but still he had wondered. Was it because of his talents? Or because of his father? He found the answer progressively in the stack of files (forty-four of them) he had to go through to choose the twenty-four members of the Reaction Unit. He began to see what Mentz must have known from the start. When he read the reports and interviewed the guys, looked into their eyes and saw the ruthlessness. And the hunger.

  The ties that bound them.

  The self-hatred that was always there had found a form, become a

  thing.

  “We’re ready, Captain,” said Da Costa.

  Mazibuko came out from under the wing. “Get up. Let’s go to work.”

  Yes, they were ready. As ready as nearly three years of tempering could make them. Four months to put the team together, to handpick them one by one. Winnowing the chaff from the grain, over and over, till there were only twenty-four, two teams of a dozen each, the perfect number for “my RU,” as the director referred to them possessively, Aar-you, the hunchback’s English abbreviation for Reaction Unit. Only then did the real honing begin.

  Now he pulled the door of the Falcon shut behind this half of the Dirty Double Dozen. The Twenty-Four Blackbirds, the Ama-killa-killa, and other names they had made up for themselves in the twenty-six months since the best instructors that money and diplomatic goodwill could buy had taken them in hand and remodeled them. driven them to extremes that they physically and psychologically were not supposed to withstand. Half of them, because of the two teams of twelve, were continuously on standby for two weeks as Team Alpha, while the other as Team Bravo worked on refining their skills. Then Team Alpha would become Team Bravo, the members shuffled around, but they were a unit. A un-it. The ties that bind. The blood and sweat, the intensity of physical hardship. And that extra dimension— a psychological itch, a communal psychosis, that shared curse.

  They sat in the plane, watching him— their faces bright with expectation, absolute trust, and total admiration.

  “Time to kick butt!” he said.

  In unison, they roared.

  4.

  CIA

  SITUATION BRIEF

  FOR ATTENTION:

  Assistant Deputy Director (Middle East and Africa) CIA HQ, Langley, Virginia

  PREPARED BY:

  Luke John Powell (Senior Agent in Charge— Southern Africa), Cape Town, South Africa

  SUBJECT:

  South Africa— ten years after

  I. INTRODUCTION

  It has been ten years since the then president of South Africa, F. W. de Klerk, made his famous February speech in which he unbanned the black resistance movement the African National Congress (ANC), released Nelson Mandela from jail, and negotiated a transition to black majority rule.

  After a landslide victory at the polls in the country’s first-ever truly democratic elections eight years ago, the ANC, with Mandela as president, became the ruling party Mandela (or Madiba, as he is affectionately called) served a five-year term until 1999 and was succeeded by current president Thabo Mbeki, after another huge election victory for the ANC.

  Despite the major problems of high unemployment and crime rates and a fluctuating local currency (the rand), South Africa is politically and economically stable— extremely so, if viewed in the African context. This, despite the eleven official languages and culture groups (including Xhosa, Zulu, Tswana, Sotho, Ndebele, and Afrikaners), the nine provinces and separate capitals for the judiciary, the legislatI've, and the executI've government.

  2. INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES

  After the 1994 elections, the ANC government faced the mammoth task of integrating three major military and intelligence forces:

  •

  Military structures:

  The following military structures were forged into the new South African National Defence Force during a prolonged, often difficult, but ultimately reasonably successful process: the white regime’s South African Defence Force (SADF); the ANC’s own military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (translated from Xhosa, it means “the spear of the nation”); and the military wing of the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC— the other, more extreme black faction that opposed the apartheid regime), the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA).

  •

  Intelligence structures:

  The far less public and much speedier integration was between the former white government’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) and both the separate ANC and PAC intelligence arms into the new National Intelligence Agency (NIA)— often simply referred to as “the Agency” and responsible for homeland security.

  The old Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), a.k.a. State Security Service, was transformed into the SA Secret Service and takes responsibility for foreign intelligence.

  In addition, the former South African Police was transformed into the SA Police Service, integrating the old Security Police.

  Internal bickering and old loyalties forced the ANC government to create a new service, the Presidential Intelligence Unit (PIU), in the late nineties. The main aim of the PIU is to keep an eye on other intelligence structures, in addition to both internal and external intelligence gathering.

  Through the kitchen window they could see the child standing in the vegetable garden. “I never told him that men go away. Now he will learn for himself.”

  “I am coming back,” Mpayipheli said.

  She just shook her head.

  “Miriam, I swear ”

  “don'’t,” she said.

  “I it’s I owe Johnny Kleintjes, Miriam .”

  Her voice was soft. It always was when she was angry. “Remember what you said?”

  “I remember.”

  “What did you say, Thobela?”

  “I said I am not a deserter.”

  “And now?”

  “It’s only for one or two days. Then I’ll be back.”

  She shook her head again, filled with foreboding.

  “I have to do this.”

  “You have to do this? You don'’t have to. Just say no. Let them sort out their own trouble. You owe them nothing.”

  “I owe Johnny Kleintjes.”

  “You told me you can’t live that life anymore. You said you had finished with it.”

  He sighed deeply. He turned around in the kitchen, turned back to her, his hands and voice pleading. “It’s true. I did say that. And I meant it. Nothing has changed. You’re right— I can say no. It’s a choice, my choice. I have to choose the right way. I must do the right thing, Miriam, the thing that makes me an honorable man. Those are the difficult choices. They are always the most difficult choices.”

  He saw she was listening and he hoped for understanding. “My debt to Johnny Kleintjes is a man’s debt; a debt of honor. Honor is not only caring for you and Pakamile, coming home every afternoon, doing a job that is within the law and nonviolent. Honor also means that I must pay my debts.”

  She said nothing.

  “Can you understand?”

  “I don'’t want to lose you.” Almost too soft to hear. “And I don'’t think he can afford to lose you.” Her gaze indicated the boy outdoors.

  “You won’t lose me. I promise you. I will come back. Sooner than you think.”

  She turned to him, her arms around his waist, and
held him with a fierce desperation.

  “Sooner than you think,” he said.

  3. “OLD LOYALTIES”

  To understand the intelligence situation in South Africa today one has to keep in mind which alliances existed before the creation of the “New South Africa” in 1992-94:

  • The white minority National Party government of the eighties was closely aligned with both the British MI5 and MI6 and American intelligence services, specifically the CIA.

  The latter was involved in a number of joint anticommunist African operations with the former Military Intelligence forces of the SADF in Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, and Mozambique. The CIA also furnished Pretoria with intelligence during the white regime’s war against Cuba and USSR-sponsored communist forces in Angola in the late seventies.

  • The ANC, as a banned and suppressed antigovernment movement in exile, had very close ties with, and received strong monetary and military support from, the former USSR, East Germany (specifically the KGB and Stasi), Cuba, Libya, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and, to a lesser extent, Iraq and other Muslim countries.

  • The PAC has stronger ties with Muslim extremists (such as Iran) and the PLO.

  4. MUSLIM EXTREMISTS IN SOUTH AFRICA

  Khalfan Khamis Mohammed, the al Qaeda agent hunted by the FBI and CIA after the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Tanzania, was found hiding in plain sight in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1999.

  South Africa is not a Muslim country by any means, but among the followers of Mohammed in the Western Cape province is a small minority of extremists, divided into several splinter groups, all sympathetic to al Qaeda:

  • Muslims Against Illegal Leaders (MAIL).

  • Qibla (the word means “the direction in which the believer orients himself or herself for salat, the prayer of Islam”), far left, aggressive, and secretive.

  • People Against Drugs and Gangsterism (Pagad): a vigilante group known for violent action against drug lords on the Cape Flats, perhaps the most public of these groups and the least of a threat.

  The biggest room on the sixth floor of Wale Street Chambers was known as the Ops Room and had been used only eight times in twenty-four months— for “readiness testing,” the term Mentz used for the quarterly trials to test the systems and the standard of her team. The bank of twelve television screens against the east wall was connected to digital and analog satellite TV closed-circuit TV, and videoconferencing equipment. The six desktop PCs against the north wall were connected by optic fiber to the local network and the Internet backbone. Next to the double doors on the west side were the digital tuner and receiver for the radio network and the cellular and landline exchange with eighteen secure lines and teleconferencing facilities. On the south wall was the big white screen for the video projector, which was suspended from the ceiling. The oval table with seating for twenty people occupied the center of the room.

  The sixteen now seated around the table had a strong feeling that this late-afternoon call to the Ops Room was not a practice run. The atmosphere in the room was electric when Janina Mentz walked in; their eyes followed her with restrained anticipation. There would have been rumors already. The phone tappers would have hinted at superior knowledge, acceding with vague nods that something was developing, while their envious colleagues could only make guesses and use old favors as leverage to try and get information.

  That is why the sixteen pairs of eyes rested on her. In the past there had been different kinds of unspoken questions. At first, when she was assembling the team for the director, they were gauging her skills, her ability to wield authority, because they were predominantly male and came from positions where their gender reigned supreme. They put her to the test and they learned that crude language and boorish behavior wouldn'’t put her off her stride; aggression left her calm and cold, thinly disguised anti-feminism would not provoke her. Piece by piece they reconstructed her history so they could know their new master: the rural upbringing, the brilliant academic career, the political activity, the slow climb through the party ranks, because she was white and Afrikaans and somewhere along the way married and divorced. Until the director had sought her out.

  Really they respected her for what she had accomplished and the way in which she had done it.

  That is why she could enter the room with muted confidence. She checked her watch before she said, “Evening, everyone.”

  “Good evening, Mrs. Mentz.” It was a jovial chorus obedient to the director’s wishes for formal address. She was relaxed, unobtrusively in control.

  She tucked the gray skirt under her with deft hands as she took the seat at the head of the long table, next to the laptop plugged into the port of the video projector. She switched it on.

  “Let us begin with one sure thing: from this moment the Ops Room is officially operational. This is not a test.” There was a tingling in the room.

  “Let there be no doubt that this is the real thing. We have worked hard to get here, and now our skills and abilities will be put to the test. I am depending on you.”

  Heads nodded eagerly.

  She turned on the laptop and opened Microsoft PowerPoint. “This photo was taken nineteen days ago at the entrance to the American embassy as part of our routine surveillance. The man exiting the door is Johnny Kleintjes, a former leader in the intelligence services of the Struggle. He studied mathematics and applied mathematics at the University of the Western Cape, but due to political activity, restrictions, and extreme pressure from the Security Police of the previous regime, he never obtained his degree. He was an exile from 1972, too late to be one of the trail-blazers, the mgwenya of the sixties. He quickly made a name for himself at the ANC and MK offices in London. Married in 1973. He was East German-trained at Odessa from 1976 and specialized in intelligence, where he earned the nickname Umthakathi, meaning ‘wizard,’ thanks to his skill with computers. Kleintjes was responsible for establishing the ANC’s computer systems in London, Lusaka, and Quibaxe in Angola in the eighties, and, more important, was the project leader for the integration of Struggle and regime computer systems and databases since 1995. He retired at age sixty-two in 1997, after his wife died of cancer, and shares a house with their only daughter, Monica.”

  She looked up. She had their attention still.

  “The question is: What was Johnny Kleintjes doing at the American embassy? And the answer is that we don'’t know. Telephone monitoring of the Kleintjes household was initiated the same evening.”

  She clicked the mouse. Another photo, black-and-white, of a woman, slightly plump, at the open door of a car, the coarse grain of the photo indicating that it had been taken at a distance with a telephoto lens.

  “This is Monica Kleintjes, daughter of Johnny Kleintjes. A typical child of exiles. Born in London 1974, went to school there, and stayed on to complete her studies in computer science in 1995. In 1980 she was the victim of a car accident outside Manchester that cost her both legs. She gets around with prosthetic limbs and refuses to use crutches or any other aids. She is any personnel manager’s affirmatI've action dream and currently works for the technology division of Sanlam as senior manager.”

  Mentz manipulated the keys on the keyboard. “These are the major players that we have pictures of. The following conversations were recorded by our voice-monitoring team this afternoon.”

  * * *

  He sat with Pakamile at the kitchen table with the big blue atlas and the National Geographic, just as they did every evening. Miriam’s chair as always a little farther back, her needlework on her lap. Tonight they were reading about Chile, about an island on the west coast of South America where wind and rain had eroded fantastical shapes out of the rock, where unique plants had created a false paradise and animal life was almost nonexistent. He read in English as it was written, for the child would learn the language better, but translated paragraph by paragraph into Xhosa. Then they would open the atlas and look for Chile on the world map before turning the pages to a smaller-scale map of the country itsel
f.

  They never read more than two pages, because Pakamile’s attention faded quickly, unless the article dealt with a terrifying snake or other predator. But tonight it was more difficult than usual to keep his attention. The boy’s eyes kept darting to the blue sports bag resting by the door. Eventually Mpayipheli gave up.

  “I’'ve got to go away for a day or two, Pakamile. I have some work to do. I have to help an old friend.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “First, you must promise to tell nobody.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to give my friend a surprise.”

  “Is it his birthday?”

  “Something like that.”