by Wilbur Smith
Seconds later, Kabaya was scurrying to his second in command, followed by three other men. All of them had empty army backpacks hanging from their shoulders.
One after another they crawled through the gap in the fence, then ran up to the bare concrete wall of the blockhouse. They were confronted by the only way in or out: a thick steel door as impervious to gunfire or hand grenades as the concrete around it.
It would take an artillery shell or a bomb to smash into the building. Kungu Kabaya had neither. Yet he believed that he could get in. He looked at his watch and muttered under his breath.
‘Come on . . . Come on . . .’
Maina Mwangi was the police constable on duty. The night watch had never traditionally been a particularly arduous task. The country around the police station was white-owned. The colonists drank too much. They committed too many acts of adultery for the tastes of the pious men and women who cooked their food, cleaned their houses, washed their clothes and worked their farms. But they were seldom guilty of criminal offences. And if any African stole anything from them, their white masters almost always administered their own rough justice without recourse to the police.
For years, Mwangi and his fellow constables had been able to doze through their night duty without any fear of disturbance. In recent months, however, the white farmers and their families had seen the Mau Mau in every shadowy movement in the night and had heard their approach in every unexpected noise. Barely an hour earlier, he had answered the phone to hear a terrified white woman pleading with him to come to her aid.
‘They’re out there, the rebels – I know they are, the murderous swine. I can hear them and I’m all alone, my husband’s away in Nairobi. Come here now, boy, now!’
Mwangi had driven out to her farm, a couple of miles from the police station, to find a loose tool shed door being tapped against its frame by the gentle breeze, and an empty oilcan rolling across a patch of stony ground.
Mwangi had taken the woman’s hands in his, looked into her eyes and said, ‘There are no bad men out there, memsahib. I promise you this. I have checked for myself and I know it to be true.’
Back at the station, Mwangi had another duty to perform. Every two hours, he was required to leave the station and patrol the blockhouse perimeter. He looked up at the clock on the wall opposite his desk. It was time for his patrol.
He put on his cap, picked up his torch and walked out of the police station and across the bare earth towards the gate. In the bright light from his torch he could see that it was closed and the chain was locked in place.
Mwangi continued for a further twenty paces or so. The torch beam played back and forth casually, the sign of a sentry who does not expect to see anything out of the ordinary. Then he stopped. Something was wrong.
He examined the fence again, more carefully. The beam illuminated a void: the empty space where wire no longer ran. Someone had cut their way in.
The police in Kenya, like those in Britain, were not routinely equipped with firearms. Mwangi had only a truncheon to defend himself as he ducked through the hole.
He stood up. Now his torch was shining on solid concrete walls.
Mwangi began a circuit of the blockhouse.
He was halfway round when he saw them: five men crouched beside the steel door.
Every one held a panga in his hand. They looked at him with cruel, merciless eyes.
Kabaya stood up, pointed to Mwangi and said, ‘You’re late.’
Maina Mwangi was another war veteran. His application to become a policeman in 1946 had been accompanied by an exemplary record of military service and a glowing testimonial from his former CO. But he, like Kabaya, bore a deep and abiding grudge against the British Empire that had been so willing to use his people in war, yet reluctant to respect them in times of peace.
Mwangi grinned as he handed over the key to the blockhouse.
‘I was delayed. A white woman feared there were rebels around her house.’
‘Not tonight,’ muttered Kabaya. He opened the door and they entered the building.
The treasure they were seeking was piled around the three walls of the interior space: wooden crates, each filled with ten Lee–Enfield rifles, and metal boxes of ammunition. They were intended for the white authorities’ latest response to the Mau Mau threat: an armed militia called the Special Constabulary, comprised of native Kenyans from tribes hostile to the Kikuyu, commanded by settlers who had military or police experience. Kabaya would have loved to have taken all the weaponry. But his time and manpower were limited; he had to be selective.
He picked out four crates, at the top of a pile and easy to get hold of. They were lifted to the ground and laid on the concrete floor. Using a short crowbar, Kabaya jemmied open the locks on a number of ammo boxes.
He and the four men shovelled five-round clips of .303 cartridges into their rucksacks. Mwangi stood by two unopened boxes while they worked. Each had a single metal handle running along its top face, like a suitcase. The gun crates bore simple rope handles at either end.
Less than a minute had passed before all five men’s packs were full and loaded onto their backs. They formed a human chain, linked by the gun crates: five men, four crates between them, holding the handles in front and behind them. Mwangi brought up the rear.
As Kabaya stepped into the open air he cupped his hands over his mouth and emitted a strikingly accurate imitation of the call of a Verreaux’s eagle owl: a low, growling, almost coughing sound that bore more resemblance to a grumbling panther than the hoot of a normal owl. It was answered by the noise of a diesel engine starting up.
Kabaya led his men in a steady jog to the fence. One after another they bent low through the hole in the wire, taking care to maintain their grip on the crate handles. Mwangi followed the others across the open ground to the road. A van bearing the name ‘Kishanda Valley Dairy’ painted across its sides was waiting there.
The men loaded their cargo. Kabaya moved towards the cab, while the others walked round to the rear, ready to jump in. Mwangi grabbed Kabaya’s sleeve.
‘I want to go back.’
‘No time,’ Kabaya replied, glaring at him.
Mwangi let go. ‘There are Stens, I’m sure. Give me two men. I can find them.’
‘Two men . . . and two minutes. One second more and we go without you.’
Mwangi nodded. The strongest man in the squad, able to carry the heaviest loads, was undoubtedly Gitiri. But Mwangi found his presence so unnerving that he dared not ask him for help. He chose two less powerful companions and led them at a sprint across the road, under the fence and into the blockhouse. Inside, he flashed his torch around the piled crates. The beam darted impatiently up and down and from side to side, Mwangi muttering exhortations to himself, until it came to rest on the black capital letters: STEN MK VI × 10, at the bottom of a pile.
He closed the heavy steel door behind him, said, ‘Only God can hear us now,’ and yanked the top crate in the pile, crashing it to the floor.
The other two men pulled away the heavy wooden boxes until they reached the crate that Mwangi had picked out.
‘Take it back to the truck,’ he ordered them. ‘I will follow. Go!’
He began another frantic search for ammunition. In his head he was counting down the seconds from one hundred and twenty. He had reached fifteen and was about to give up and run for it when he found what he wanted: a box of the 9 mm ammunition that the Sten guns fired, and beside it another identical container.
Mwangi grabbed hold of the two boxes’ handles and headed out of the blockhouse. As he ran towards the fence he could hear the sound of the van starting up its engine again. By the time he had scrambled through the hole, ignoring the barbed spikes tearing at his scalp and back, the driver had shoved the gear lever into first.
The van was already moving as Mwangi crossed the road. He ran up behind it, hurled the two cans through the open rear doors and dived forward, head first.
Two of t
he other men caught hold of Mwangi’s torso. For a few seconds he was dragged behind the vehicle, the toes of his boots ploughing furrows in the damp earth. Then his comrades gave a heave and he tumbled into the cargo bay.
The men reached for the van’s flapping, clattering rear doors. They pulled them to, then hammered on the steel partition of the driver’s cab.
The driver put his foot down and the van sped away, bumping and jolting on the rough road surface. And as he thought of the cargo that the vehicle now carried, Kungu Kabaya’s heart was filled with a malevolent ambition. There had been years of oppression and anger, months of planning and preparation. Now, at last, he was ready to go to war.
‘Here it is,’ said Gerhard, tapping the heavy oak of the boardroom table. ‘The place where I was sitting when a sycophantic little rat called Paust boasted to Konrad about how he and his underlings had removed all the Jews from the company workforce. Then the chief accountant, Lange, said that stuff Mother mentioned about how disgustingly rich we all were.’
‘Was that the same day you asked your brother for the five thousand marks?’ Saffron asked.
‘Pretending that I wanted to buy myself a fancy sports car? Yes, that was the day.’
‘And you gave it to Izzy.’
Gerhard nodded.
‘Little did you know you were making sure that a girl who had no idea you even existed would one day fall in love with you.’
‘If I’d known that I’d have asked for ten thousand!’ Gerhard laughed. ‘Come on, let me show you the factory – while we still own it.’
It was the day after the family meeting and Gerhard had taken Saffron to the Meerbach Motor Works. She had imagined a single factory, a large one no doubt, but a single building. In fact, the works sprawled across a site that covered a number of square kilometres. At the company’s height there been not one giant workshop but eight, churning out aero-engines to power the Luftwaffe. Of these, two had survived the Allied bombing raids in good enough condition to be brought back into service, producing power units for civilian aircraft manufacturers. A third was in the process of being rebuilt. The other five were little more than husks of rubble, bent metal and broken glass, overgrown by brambles and bindweed.
As they made their inspection, stopping to talk to the workers, Saffron was struck by the extraordinary contrast between England and the new West Germany. The country that had won the war seemed exhausted by the effort. Everyone was poorly fed and penny-pinching, ruled by a brave but sickly king whose decline seemed emblematic of a country whose empire was falling to pieces, with no sense of what might replace it.
But the German workers that she and Gerhard met were fired with determination to rebuild their nation from scratch. They looked healthier and less shabbily dressed than their British counterparts. They were certainly better fed. When she and Gerhard took lunch in the workers’ canteen, she was amazed to be served with thick, juicy pork chops, swathed in fat. No one in Britain had eaten anything so indulgent since before the war began.
Gerhard noticed the contrast, but his impressions were more personal. His name ensured that everyone he spoke to was unfailingly polite and respectful, but there were undercurrents that spoke of unhealed wounds and unrepaired divisions among the men and women in the company’s offices and workshops. Some made a point of saying how proud they were of him as a fighter ace who had stood by his principles. But others conveyed a different message in the lack of enthusiasm with which they greeted him.
‘What a bolshie man that was,’ Saffron said after one such encounter.
‘Bolshie?’ Gerhard looked at her quizzically, unfamiliar with the slang.
‘Oh, you know, rude, uncooperative, generally disagreeable. Short for “Bolshevik”, I suppose.’
‘Ah, well, I imagine that man was the opposite of Bolshevik,’ Gerhard replied. ‘Konrad wasn’t the only Nazi fanatic in the company. My guess is maybe one worker in three here voted for Hitler in ’32 and one in ten was a Party member. Some of those did it to get ahead at work, but many would have been like Konrad. You know – true believers. I’m sure some still are. To them, I’m the man who betrayed his Führer and his country.’
‘But most people don’t think that, surely?’
‘Great God, no . . . but how many does it take?’
*
‘Lock the door,’ ordered Heinrich Stark, as a sixth man joined the five already gathered in the janitor’s storeroom.
Stark reached into his jacket pocket and took out the golden party badge that signified his status as one of the first 100,000 members of the National Socialist German Workers Party. Of all the thousands of workers who had once toiled at the Motor Works, only one other – Konrad von Meerbach himself – had been entitled to wear such a badge, a fact that both men regarded as a shared honour. Though one was the company president and the other a shop floor foreman, they saw one another as equals in their devotion to Adolf Hitler.
Stark knew that von Meerbach was still alive and he believed, as an article of faith, that Hitler was not really dead. He would one day return, like a resurrected Messiah, to reclaim his Reich. The others agreed with him. And they were as offended as Stark to see Gerhard, the turncoat, strutting around the factory.
‘A man who’s so ashamed of his family name that he tries to change it,’ one of them had sneered.
‘With a stinking English bitch of a wife!’ exclaimed another.
‘We must keep a constant watch on von Meerbach.’ Stark emphasised the ‘von’ to show that he was not prepared to accept its removal. ‘Who knows what trickery he is up to?’
‘He’s already put that filthy Yid in the boss’s old office,’ another said. ‘I bet he’s planning to sell us to his Zionist friends.’
‘You’re not wrong,’ Stark confirmed. ‘One of our brothers works at the castle. There was a family meeting yesterday. The Yid sat with the traitor at the head of the table. He was overheard by one of the maids making plans to sell the family’s holdings.’
‘This is how they behave when the count’s back is turned.’
‘Well, you know what kind of a worm the traitor is. He always resented the count for his power and strong principles. He would do anything to ruin everything his father and brother built here.’
As the other men nodded, with murmurs of agreement, Stark continued. ‘That is why we have to keep track of what he is up to. Where he goes. Who he sees. If there is the slightest reason for suspicion, believe me, men, I will make sure the information reaches the right ears.’
There was a frantic knocking on the door.
‘Who’s there?’ snapped Stark.
‘It’s me,’ a muffled voice cried. ‘Werner. For God’s sake let me in.’
The door was opened. A tall, heavily built man came in. He was breathing heavily, pushing his fair hair from a red, perspiring forehead.
‘They just got a message at the motor pool. Herr Meerbach wants a Jeep for himself and his wife. He wants to show her the site.’
Stark told Werner, ‘I want you to follow him.’ He threw him a Volkswagen key. ‘Here, take my car, it’s in my usual parking place. Follow them. Make sure they don’t see you.’
Werner grinned. He’d done his share of dirty work. He knew the dark arts of tracking and surveillance.
‘Don’t worry. It’ll be like old times.’
‘Then go. There’s no time to lose.’
Werner left as quickly as he’d arrived. The other men grinned at one another. Maybe that bastard would sell their business out from under his brother. But they, and the men who controlled them, would make him pay a heavy price for his betrayal.
Gerhard slowed the US Army surplus Jeep to a halt at the edge of an expanse of cracked concrete and crumbling asphalt, pockmarked by craters left by Allied bombs, still waiting to be filled in. Summer sunshine had given way to heavy cloud, blown in by a chilly north-east wind. Saffron had spent the past month in sleeveless dresses and sandals, but today she was glad of her cotto
n jumper, flannel trousers and flat brogues: ‘sensible shoes’, as her stepmother Harriet would have called them. The Jeep was open. The wind that buffeted them as they drove only made everything colder. Saffron had been grateful for the pair of fine leather gloves she’d tucked away in the tan-coloured Hermès shoulder bag she wore slung across her body.
‘Welcome to the Motor Works’ private airfield,’ said Gerhard, climbing down from the Jeep.
Once he’d helped her alight from the vehicle, Saffron looked across a flat landscape, featureless except for the dominant, rusting iron skeleton of what must have been an enormous building, about half a mile away. It was hundreds of metres long and as tall as the nave of a cathedral.
‘What’s that?’ she asked, pointing towards the black ruin, etched against the slate grey sky.
‘That’s the old Zeppelin shed,’ Gerhard replied. ‘Where they kept the airship that my father flew to Africa at the start of the first war.’
‘With my mother aboard?’
‘Absolutely . . . And thirty-seven years later, almost to the day, here we are. But that isn’t the reason I brought you here.’
‘So what is?’ Saffron asked, wrapping her arms around Gerhard’s waist and pulling their bodies together.
She loved being close enough to smell him. She had bought him a bottle of Floris No. 89 cologne a few Christmases ago, knowing how well its classically masculine wood-and-citrus perfume would suit him. Gerhard had taken the hint and worn it ever since, and the way it combined with his natural male musk was intoxicating. Above all though, it was the scent of her man that reassured Saffron that, having once been parted from him for so long, he was completely with her now.
‘Well,’ he murmured, looking deep into her eyes in a way that only added more spice to the warm feelings simmering inside her. ‘I have a confession to make. I have had two great loves in my life—’
