Heart of the Hunter

by Deon Meyer

  42.

  B

  y quarter past two, sleep began to overcome Tiger Mazibuko, so he put the machine pistol under the rubber mat at his feet and climbed out of the car for the umpteenth time. Where was the fucker, why wasn'’t he here yet?

  He stretched and yawned and walked around the car, once, twice, three times, and sat on the edge of the hood, wiping the sweat from his face with a sleeve, folded his arms, and stared down the road. He did the calculations again. Maybe Mpayipheli had stopped for lunch or to have his wounds tended to by a quack in Francistown. He looked again at his wristwatch— any minute now things should start happening. He wondered if the dog was riding with his headlight on, as bikers do. Probably not.

  Sweat ran down his back.

  He did not pay the Land Rover Discovery much heed, as other luxury four-wheel-drive vehicles had passed. This was tourist country, Chobe and Okavango to the west, Makgadikgadi south, Hwange and Vic Falls to the east. The Germans and Americans and the Boers came to do their Livingstone thing here with air-conditioned 4x4s and khaki outfits and safari hats, and they thought the suspect drinking water and a few malaria mosquitoes were a hang of an adventure and went home to show their videos— look, we saw the big five, look how clever, look how brave.

  It approached from the direction of Kazungula, and he tried to stare past it to keep watch on the road. Only when it pulled off the road opposite him did he look, half angry because he did not want to be distracted. Two whites in the front of the green vehicle, the thick arm of the passenger hanging over the open window. They looked at him.

  “Fuck off,” he called across the road.

  The small eyes of the passenger were on him, the face expressionless on the thick neck. He could not see the driver.

  “What the fuck are you staring at?” he called again, but they did not answer.

  Jissis,

  he thought,

  what the fuck?

  And he raised himself from the hood and looked left and right before he began to cross. He would quickly find out what their story was, but then the vehicle began to move, the big fellow’s eyes still on Mazibuko, and they pulled away and he stood in the middle of the road watching them drive away. What the fuck?

  3. THE NATURE OF OPERATION SAFEGUARD

  The plan devised by Inkululeko was essentially a disinformation initiative, primarily aimed at directing suspicion away from her.

  Although the transcript of the Mohammed interview was in her sole possession, Inkululeko knew suppression thereof would be potentially dangerous and incriminating, due to the fact that both the police (to a lesser extent) and interviewer had some degree of knowledge, which was bound to surface at some time or other.

  She approached this office with suggestions that were developed into Safeguard in conjunction with us.

  The core of the operation plan was to “hunt down” Inkululeko, to “flush him out.”

  Our source recruited the services of a retired intelligence officer from the former military arm of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), one Jonathan (“Johnny”) Kleintjes. This was a particularly brilliant move, for the following reasons:

  i. Kleintjes was in charge of MK/ANC intelligence computer systems during the so-called Struggle in the period before 1992.

  ii. He was the leader of the project to integrate those systems of the former apartheid government’s intelligence agencies almost a decade ago.

  iii. He was suspected of having secured sensitive and valuable information during the process. Like so many of these intelligence rumors, there were different versions. The most persistent was that Kleintjes had found evidence within the mass of electronic information that both the ANC/SACP alliance and the apartheid government had been up to some dirty tricks in the eighties. In addition, a very surprising list of double agents and traitors on both sides, some of them very prominent people, was contained in the data.

  iv Kleintjes had apparently deleted these files, but only after making backups and securing it somewhere for possible future use and reference.

  Inkululeko’s aim was to use Kleintjes as a credible operatI've (both from a South African and U.S. perspective) for the disinformation project to protect her cover and win his trust at the same time, the latter pertinent to acquiring the missing data at a later stage.

  The operation plan was fairly simple: Under her orders, Kleintjes would prepare a hard drive with fabricated intelligence about the “true identity of Inkululeko.” He would then approach the U.S. embassy directly and ask to speak to someone from the CIA about “valuable information.”

  We, in turn, would act predictably and tell him never to come to the embassy again but to leave his contact details, as we would be in touch.

  A meeting would be set up in Lusaka, Zambia, away from prying eyes, during which the data could be examined by the CIA and, if credible, be bought for the price of $50,000 (about R.575,000).

  Obviously, our side of the bargain was to accept the data as the real thing, thereby casting suspicion on the persons mentioned therein and drawing away any possible attention to her as a candidate for the identity of Inkululeko.

  She would then write a full report on the operation and present it to the minister of intelligence for further action, bypassing her immediate superior, a man of Zulu extraction whose name would be among the strongest “candidates” for the identity of Inkululeko.

  Again, this was a shrewd move, as she was next in line for his position, and the minister would have little choice but to suspend him from duties until the matter had been resolved. Which would have placed her in the top echelon: the National Intelligence Coordinating Committee, chaired by an intelligence coordinator, which brings together the heads of the different services and reports to the cabinet or president.

  Unfortunately, Operation Safeguard did not go as planned.

  The Ops Room was almost empty.

  Janina Mentz sat at the big table and watched one of Rajku-mar’s assistants disconnect the last computer and carry it off piece by piece. The television monitors were off, the radio and telephone equipment’s red and white lights were out, the soul of the place was dead.

  A fax lay in front of her, but she had not yet read it.

  She thought back over the past two days, trying hard to see the positI've in the whole mess, trying to identify the moment when it all went wrong.

  KAATHIEB.

  The team leader in Lusaka had sent digital photos via e-mail. The letters in Johnny Kleintjes’s chest were carved in deep red cuts, as if by a raging devil.

  LIAR.

  “It’s Arabic,” said Rajkumar, once he had completed his search.

  How?

  How had the Muslims known about Kleintjes?

  There were possibilities she dared not even think about.

  Had Johnny dropped a word to someone, somewhere? Deliberately? The director had his suspicions that Kleintjes had Islamic connections. But why then would they kill him? It made no sense.

  Had she been sold out by the Americans?

  No.

  Mpayipheli?

  Had he made a call for help somewhere along the road? Did he have links with the extremists? Had he, like some of his KGB masters since the fall of the USSR, gone in search of Middle Eastern pastures? Had he built up contacts on the Cape Flats while he worked for Orlando Arendse?

  But Kleintjes was supposed to be his friend. That didn’'t fit.

  The treachery lay elsewhere.

  The treachery lay here. In their midst.

  Would it not be ironic to have two traitors in one intelligence unit? But that was the scenario that fitted best.

  Luke Powell had said he had lost his two agents yesterday time of death not yet determined, but if the Muslims had left yesterday evening as the news broke here in the Ops Room, then the timetable fitted well.

  She dropped her head into her hands, massaging her temples with her fingertips.

  Who?

  Vincent? The reluctant Radebe?

  Quinn, the colored man
with Cape Flats roots? Rajkumar? Or one of their assistants? The variables grew too many, and she sighed and sank back into her chair.

  The plan was so good. The operation was so clever, so demonically brilliant, her creation. So many flies with one stroke of genius. She was so self-satisfied that she found secret pleasure in it, but it was born of need and panic.

  Lord, how that transcript of Ismail Mohammed had shaken her.

  All she could think of was her children.

  Williams had called her from the police cells and said he had a bomb; he had better meet her at the office. He had played the tape for her and she had to keep cool because he was sitting opposite her and a part of her wondered if the shock was visible on her face. Could he see the paleness that came over her face? The other part was with her children. How was she going to explain to her girls that their mother was a traitor? How would she ever make them understand? How do you explain to someone that there was no big reason, no great ideological motivation, just an evening of succumbing, that strange night in the American embassy, but it had to be held in the light of a lifetime of disappointment, of disillusion, of fruitless struggle and frustration, decades of pointless aspiration that had prepared her for that moment.

  Would anyone believe that she had not planned it? It had just happened like an impulse buy at the supermarket. She and Luke Powell were in conversation among forty or fifty people. He had asked her opinion on weighty matters, politics and economics; he had fucking respected her, deferred to her as if she were more than an invisible gear in the great engine room of government. Because the PIU belonged to the director, despite his promises, despite the initial sales talk to recruit her. She made no difference, she had no real power, she was just another civil servant in just another African intelligence agency.

  So, in that moment when Luke Powell made his move, all the flotsam and jetsam of her life pressed on her with unbearable weight and she had thrown it off.

  Who would ever understand?

  Powell made her a player, gave her significance; for the first time in her life her acts were making a difference. Of course, it became easier, after September 11, nobler, but that did not change the fact that it simply just happened.

  When Williams turned off the tape recorder she did not trust her voice, but it came out right, soft and easy just as she wished.

  “You had better transcribe that personally,” she said to him. Once he had left, she remained sitting in her chair, crushed by the weight, her brain darting this way and that like a cornered rat. Strange how quick the mind was when there was danger, how creative you could be when your existence was threatened. How to draw attention away from yourself? The cells in her brain had dreamed up the Johnny Kleintjes plan out of what had long lain stored away— the rumors that Kleintjes had forbidden data. That had not been a priority with her, just something to store in the files in the back of her head. When the need was greatest, it had come springing out into her consciousness, a germinating seed that would grow diabolically.

  So brilliant. Those were Luke Powell’s words.

  You are brilliant.

  He had appreciated her from the beginning. Sincerely. With each piece of intelligence that she sent to him through the secret channels, the message came back.

  You are-priceless. You are wonderful. You are brilliant. You are making a real difference.

  And here she sat. Eight months later. Priceless and wonderful and brilliant, with a traitor’s identity that was probably secured, but heads would roll and chances were good that one would be hers.

  And that could not happen.

  There must be a scapegoat. And there was one.

  Ready to sacrifice.

  She was not finished. She was not nearly finished.

  She smoothed her hair down and pulled the fax nearer.

  This was the story the minister was talking about. The one that had appeared in the

  Sowetan.

  She did not want to read it. She wanted to move on; in her mind this chapter was closed.

  MPAYIPHELI— THE PRINCE FROM THE PAST

  By Matthew Mtimkulu, assistant editor

  isn'’t it strange how much power two words can have? Just two random words, sixteen simple letters, and when I heard them over the radio in my car, it opened the floodgates of the past, and the memories came rushing back like rippling white water.

  Thobela Mpayipheli.

  I did not think about the meaning of the words— that came later, as I sat down to write this piece: Thobela means “mannered” or “respectful.” Mpayipheli is Xhosa for “one who does not stop fighting”— a warrior, if you will.

  My people like to give our children names with a positI've meaning, a sort of head start to life, a potential self-fulfilling prophecy. (Our white fellow-citizens attempt the same sort of thing— only opting not for meaning but for sophistication, the exotic or cool to do the job. And my colored brothers seem to choose names that sound as much uncolored as possible.)

  What really matters, I suppose, is the meaning the person gives to the name in the course of his life.

  So, what I remembered as I negotiated early-morning rush hour was the man. Or the boy, as I knew him, for Thobela and I are children of the Ciskei; we briefly shared one of the most beautiful places on earth: the Kat river valley, described by historian Noël Mostert in his heartbreaking book Frontiers as “a narrow, beautiful stream that descended from the mountainous heights of the Great Escarpment and flowed through a broad, fertile valley towards the Fish river.”

  We were teenagers and it was the blackest decade of the century, the tumultuous seventies: Soweto was burning, and the heat of the flames could be felt in our little hidden hamlet, our forgotten valley. There was something in the air in the spring of 1976, an anticipation of change, of things to come.

  Thobela Mpayipheli, like me, was fourteen. A natural athlete, the son of the Muruti of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church, and it was well known that his father was a descendant of Phalo along the Maqoma lineage. Xhosa royalty, if you will.

  And there was something princely about him, perhaps in his bearing, most definitely in the fact that he was a bit of a loner, a brooding, handsome outsider of a boy One day in late September, I was witness to a rare event. I saw Mpayipheli beat Mtetwa, a huge, mean, scowling kid two years his senior. It was a long time coming between the two of them, and when it happened, it was a thing of beauty. On a sliver of river sand in a bend of the Kat, Thobela was a matador, calm and cool and elegant and quick. He took some shuddering punches, because Mtetwa was no slouch, but Thobela absorbed it and kept on coming. The thing that fascinated me most was not his awesome deftness, his speed or agility, but his detachment. As if he were measuring himself. As if he had to know if he was ready, confirmation of some inner belief.

  Just three years later he was gone, and the whispers up and down the valley said he had joined the Struggle, he had left for the front, he was to be a soldier, a carrier of the Spear of the Nation.

  And here his name was on the radio, a man on a motorcycle, a fugitive, a common laborer, and I wondered what had happened in the past twenty years. What had gone wrong? The prince should have been a king— of industry, or the military, perhaps a member of Parliament, although, for all his presence, he lacked the gift of the gab, the oily slick-ness of a politician.

  So I called his mother. It took some time to track them down, a retired couple in a town called Alice.

  She didn’'t know. She had not seen her son in more than two decades. His journey was as much a mystery to her as it was to me. She cried, of course. For all that was lost— the expectations, the possibilities, the potential. The longing, the void in a mother’s heart.

  But she also cried for our country and our history that so cruelly conspired to reduce the prince to a pauper.

  43.

  The late afternoon brought a turning point. With every hour his frustration and impatience grew. He no longer wished to wait there; he wanted to know where the dog was, how far off,
how long to wait. His eyes were tired from staring down the road, his body stiff from sitting and standing and leaning against the car. His head was dulled by continually running through his calculations, from speculation and guesswork.

  But above all it was the anger that exhausted him; the stoking of the raging flames consumed his energy.

  Eventually when the shadows began to lengthen, Captain Tiger Mazibuko leaped from the Golf and picked up a rock and hurled it at the thorn trees where the finches were chittering irritably and he roared something unintelligible and turned and kicked the wheel of the car, threw another stone at the tree, another and another and another, until he was out of breath. He blew down with a hiss of air through his teeth and calm returned.