Power of the Sword

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘Can you tell me who is doing this, please? Do you know who is responsible?’

  ‘I don’t know the people in the workshop, but the one who is in charge. I know who he is.’

  ‘We must know his name,’ Shasa told her persuasively, but she was silent. He could sense that she was struggling with herself, and that if he pushed her now he would lose her.

  ‘Do you want to tell me who he is?’ he asked. ‘Just take your time.’

  ‘His name—’ the woman hesitated, was silent a moment longer, and then she blurted out, ‘they call him Wit Swaard – White Sword.’

  Shasa felt his skin crawl as though it were infested with vermin, and his heart seemed to check, miss a beat, then race away wildly.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘White Sword – his name is White Sword,’ the woman repeated and there was a crackle and click as the connection was broken.

  ‘Hello! Hello!’ Shasa shouted into the receiver. ‘Are you there? Don’t hang up!’ But the hiss of static on the empty line mocked him.

  Shasa stood beside Blaine Malcomess’ desk while he made the call to the commissioner of police at Marshall Square in Johannesburg.

  ‘As soon as you have the search warrant you are to close the workshops. No one allowed to enter or leave. I have already spoken to the military commander of the Transvaal. He and his quartermaster-general will give you full co-operation. I want you to begin the search right away, open all the weapons cases in the stores and check every item against the factory production sheets. I will be flying up, leaving immediately. Please have a police car meet me at Roberts Heights airfield at—’ he glanced at Shasa for a time, ‘ – five o’clock this evening. In the meantime, I want you to impress utter secrecy on all your men involved in the search. One other thing, Commissioner, please select only men who you are satisfied are not members of any subversive organizations, particularly the Ossewa Brandwag.’

  Shasa drove them out to Youngsfield in the Jaguar and as they parked behind the hangar Blaine unfolded his long legs and climbed out of the sportscar.

  ‘Well, at least the most gruelling part of the journey is over with,’ he remarked.

  There was a police inspector waiting for them on the hard stand below the Roberts Heights control tower as Shasa taxied the Rapide in and cut the engines. He came forward to meet them as Blaine and Shasa came down the landing steps.

  ‘How is the investigation going?’ Blaine demanded immediately after they had shaken hands. ‘What have you found so far?’

  ‘Nothing, Minister.’ The inspector shook his head. ‘We have checked over six hundred cases of rifles. It’s a time-consuming job. But so far everything seems to be in order.’

  ‘How many cases in the stores?’

  ‘Nine hundred and eighty.’

  ‘So you have checked over half.’ Blaine shook his head. ‘Let’s go and have a look anyway.’

  He settled his hat on his head and buttoned his overcoat to the neck for there was a cold wind sweeping across the airstrip, bringing memories of the snows of the Drakensberg mountains, and the highveld grass was bleached silvery by the frosts of late winter. He and Shasa climbed into the back seat of the black police Packard and neither of them spoke on the short journey into the centre of Pretoria.

  At the gates to the railway workshops there was a double guard of police and military personnel. They checked the occupants of the Packard carefully, not visibly impressed by Blaine’s status.

  The chief inspector in charge of the investigation was in the office of the workshop manager and his report had little to add to what they already knew. They had so far been unable to find any irregularity in the production or packaging of weapons.

  ‘Give me the tour,’ Blaine ordered grimly, and the entire party – Blaine, Shasa, the chief inspector and the workshop manager – went out on to the main production floor.

  ‘Workshop’ was hardly a correct description of the large factory that they entered. Originally built to service and repair the rolling stock of the state-owned railway, it had been expanded and modernized until it was capable of building its own locomotives from scratch. Now the long production line along which they picked their way was turning out armoured cars for the desert war in North Africa.

  The working of the factory had not been halted by the police investigation and the cavernous sheds roofed with corrugated iron echoed to the thunder of the steam presses and the cacophony of the lathes and turret head drills.

  ‘How many men do you employ?’ Blaine had to shout to make himself heard in the uproar.

  ‘Almost three thousand altogether – we are working three shifts now. Wartime production.’

  The manager took them through to the furthest building.

  ‘This is where we turn out the small arms,’ he shouted. ‘Or rather the metal parts. Barrel and blocks. The woodwork is manufactured by outside contractors.’

  ‘Show us the finished articles and the packing,’ Blaine ordered. ‘That’s where the trouble is, if there is trouble.’

  After assembly and checking, the completed rifles, British Long Service No 4 Mark 1 in .303 calibre, were greased and wrapped in yellow grease-proof paper, then packed in the long WD green wooden cases, ten rifles to a case. Finally the cases were loaded onto steel pallets and trundled through to the despatch stores.

  When they entered the despatch stores, there were a dozen uniformed police constables working with at least fifty factory employees in blue overalls. Each case was being taken down from the tall stacks and opened by one of the constables, then the wrapped rifles were taken out and counted, repacked and the case lids relocked. The checked cases were being stacked at the far end of the storehouse, and Shasa saw immediately that only about fifty cases remained to be opened and inspected.

  The chief storekeeper hurried across from his desk and challenged Blaine indignantly. ‘I don’t know who you are – but if you are the bloody fool who ordered this, you need your arse kicked. We have lost a day’s production. There is a goods train at the siding and a convoy waiting in Durban harbour to take these weapons to our boys up north.’

  Shasa left the group and went across to watch the working constables. ‘No luck?’ he asked one of them.

  ‘We’re wasting our time,’ the man grunted without looking up, and Shasa silently reviled himself. A day’s war production lost because of him, it was a dire responsibility and his sense of despondency increased as he stood and watched the remaining cases opened, checked and resealed.

  The constables assembled at the door of the stores and the overalled factory employees went out through the tall sliding doors to resume their posts on the production line. The police inspector came back to where they stood in a small disconsolate group.

  ‘Nothing, Minister. I’m sorry.’

  ‘We had to do it,’ Blaine said, glancing at Shasa. ‘Nobody is to blame.’

  ‘Too bloody true somebody is to blame,’ the chief storeman broke in truculently. ‘Now that you’ve had your fun, can I get on with loading the rest of the shipment?’

  Shasa stared at him. There was something about the man’s behaviour that set off a little warning tingle down his spine – the blustering defensive manner, the shiftiness of his gaze.

  ‘Of course,’ he thought. ‘If there was a switch, this is where it would take place, and this fellow would be in it to his neck.’ His mind was starting to slough off the inertia of disappointment and anticlimax.

  ‘All right,’ Blaine agreed. ‘It was a wild-goose chase. You can get on with your work.’

  ‘Hold on, sir,’ Shasa intervened quietly, and he turned back to the storeman. ‘How many railway trucks have you loaded already?’

  There it was again – the shift of the man’s eyes, the slight hesitation. He was going to lie. Then he glanced involuntarily at the sheaf of papers in the clipboard that lay on his desk beside the doors that led out onto the loading bays.

  Shasa crossed quickly to the desk and picked up th
e sheaf of loading manifests. ‘Three trucks have already been loaded,’ he read from the manifest. ‘Which are they?’

  ‘They have been shunted away,’ the storeman muttered sulkily.

  ‘Then let’s have them shunted back here right away,’ Blaine intervened briskly.

  Blaine and Shasa stood together under the arc lamps on the concrete loading quay while the first of the closed railway goods trucks was unlocked and the sliding door opened. The interior of the truck was loaded to the roof with green rifle cases.

  ‘If they are here, they will be at the bottom of the load,’ Shasa suggested. ‘Whoever is responsible would get rid of the evidence as soon as possible. He’d make damned sure they were the first cases loaded.’

  ‘Get down to the bottom cases,’ Blaine ordered sharply, and the top cases were carried out and stacked on the quay.

  ‘Right!’ Blaine pointed to the back of the truck. ‘Get that case out and open it.’

  The lid came up and the constable let it fall to the concrete floor with a clatter.

  ‘Sir!’ he exclaimed. ‘Look at this.’

  Blaine stepped up beside him and stared down into the open box, and then he looked up again quickly.

  The chief storekeeper was hurrying across the floor of the shed towards the doors at the far end.

  ‘Arrest that man!’ Blaine shouted urgently, and two constables ran forward and seized him. He was struggling angrily as they dragged him out onto the loading quay.

  Blaine turned to Shasa, his expression grim and his eyes flinty. ‘Well, my boy, I hope you are satisfied. You’ve given us a mountain of work and a lot of sleepless nights ahead,’ he said.

  Fifteen grave men sat around the long polished stinkwood table in the panelled cabinet office and listened silently as Blaine Malcomess made his report.

  ‘There is no way of establishing with any certainty exactly how many weapons are missing. Two other large shipments have been sent out since the first of the month and as yet neither of these has reached its destination in Cairo. They are still in transit, but we must expect that weapons are missing from both shipments. I estimate some two thousand rifles together with a million and a half rounds of ammunition.’

  The men around the table stirred uneasily, but nobody spoke.

  ‘This is alarming, of course. However, the truly disturbing aspect of the business is the theft of some thirty to fifty Vickers machine-guns from the same source.’

  ‘This is incredible,’ Deneys Reitz muttered. ‘That is enough to launch a nationwide rebellion. It could be 1914 all over again. We must make sure no word of this gets out. It will cause panic.’

  ‘We should also consider,’ Blaine went on, ‘the tons of explosives hijacked in the karoo. Those would almost certainly be used to disrupt communications and prevent deployment of our limited military strength. If there was to be a rebellion—’

  ‘Please tell us, Blaine,’ the prime minister held up a finger. ‘Firstly, do we have any indication of when we can expect them to come out into the open and attempt their coup d’état?’

  ‘No, Prime Minister. The best I can do is an estimate based on our probable discovery of the weapons theft. They must have realized that the theft would be discovered as soon as the first consignment reached Cairo, and almost certainly they plan to move before that time.’

  ‘When would the shipment have reached Cairo?’

  ‘Two weeks from now approximately.’

  ‘So we must expect that they will make the attempt within days, rather than weeks?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, Prime Minister.’

  ‘My next question, Blaine. How complete is your investigation? Do you have a full list of the ringleaders of the OB and the stormjagters?’

  ‘Not a full list, we have only about six hundred names so far. I think it includes almost all their key men – but, of course, we can’t have any way of being sure of that.’

  ‘Thank you, Blaine.’ The prime minister tugged thoughtfully at his small silver goatee beard. His expression was almost serene, his blue eyes calm and unworried. They all waited for him to speak again.

  ‘How sensitive are the names on the list?’ he asked.

  ‘There is the administrator of the Orange Free State.’

  ‘Yes, we know about him.’

  ‘Twelve members of Parliament, including one former cabinet minister.’

  ‘Parliamentary privilege,’ Field-Marshal Smuts murmured. ‘We can’t touch them.’

  ‘Then there are church leaders, at least four high-ranking army officers, top civil servants, one assistant police commissioner.’ Blaine read the list through, and by the time he had finished, the prime minister had already made up his mind.

  ‘We can’t afford to wait,’ he said. ‘With the exception of the members of parliament, I want detention and internment orders prepared for all the others on the list of suspects. I’ll sign them as soon as they are drafted. In the meantime I want you to plan the simultaneous arrests of all of them, and make provision for their incarceration.’

  ‘There are the concentration camps built for Italian prisoners of war at Baviaanspoort and Pietermaritzburg,’ Blaine pointed out.

  ‘Good,’ Field-Marshal Smuts agreed. ‘I want these men all safely behind barbed-wire as soon as possible. And I want the missing weapons and explosives found, and found quickly.’

  ‘We cannot afford to wait,’ Manfred De La Rey said carefully. ‘Every hour is dangerous, every day brings us closer to the brink, a week could spell disaster.’

  ‘We are not ready. We need time,’ one of the other men in the first-class railway compartment cut in. There were eight men, including Manfred, in the compartment. They had boarded the southbound express separately at different stops over the last two hundred miles. The conductor of the train was a sympathizer, and there were stormjagters in the corridors outside the compartment, acting as sentries. Nobody could reach them or eavesdrop on their conversation.

  ‘You promised us another ten days in which to complete the final preparations.’

  ‘We haven’t got ten days, man. Haven’t you listened to what I am telling you?’

  ‘It can’t be done,’ the man repeated stubbornly.

  ‘It can be done,’ Manfred raised his voice. ‘It has to be done!’

  The administrator intervened sternly. ‘Enough of that, gentlemen. Let’s keep the fighting for our enemies.’

  With an obvious effort Manfred moderated his tone. ‘I apologize for my outburst. However, I repeat that we have no time to spare. The removal of the weapons from the railway workshops has been discovered, ten of our men there have been arrested. One of our men at Marshall Square has told us that they have received detention orders for over two hundred of our senior members and that these are to be served on Sunday – that is four days from now.’

  ‘We are aware of all that,’ the administrator intervened again. ‘What we must do now is decide whether we can afford to put the entire plan forward – or if it should be abandoned. I will listen to each of your opinions and then we will vote. We shall stand by the majority decision. Let us hear first from Brigadier Koopman.’

  They all looked to the army general. He was in civilian clothing but his military bearing was unmistakable. He spread a large-scale map on the fold-down table, and used it to illustrate his report in a professionally dispassionate voice. First he set out the order of battle of the army, and the dispositions of the troops, aircraft and armoured cars that remained in the country and then went on, ‘So you see that the two main troop concentrations are at the infantry training barracks at Roberts Heights and at Durban awaiting shipment for overseas duty. With almost one hundred and sixty thousand outside the country, these do not amount to more than five thousand men. There are no modern aircraft, other than the fifty Harvard trainers. This makes it feasible to immobilize the troops at their present positions at least for the first few crucial days that it will take to seize control. This can be achieved by destroying all major
road and railway bridges, particularly those over the Vaal river, the Orange river and the Umzindusi river.’

  He went on talking for another ten minutes, and then summed up, ‘We have our men placed in positions of command, right up to the general staff, and they will be able to cushion us from any forthright action by the army. After that they will arrest and hold the Smuts men on the general staff and bring the army in on our side to support the new republican government.’

  One after another the other men present made their reports. Manfred was last to speak.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he began. ‘Within the last twelve hours I have been in direct radio contact with the German Abwehr through their representative in Portuguese Angola. He has relayed to us the assurances of the German High Command and of the Führer himself. The German submarine supply vessel Altmark is at present within three hundred nautical miles of Cape Town carrying over five hundred tons of armaments. She awaits only the signal to steam to our aid.’ He spoke quietly but persuasively, and he sensed the mood swing in his favour.

  When he finished there was a short but profound silence and then the administrator said, ‘We have all the facts before us now. We must make the decision. It is this. Before the government can arrest and imprison us and the other legitimate leaders of the Volk, we put into effect the plan. We rise and depose the present government and take the power into our own hands to put our nation back on the course to freedom and justice. I will ask each of you in turn – do you say “Yes” or do you say “No”?’

  ‘Ja,’ said the first man.

  ‘Ek stem ja. I say yes.’

  ‘Ek stem ook ja, I also say yes.’

  At the end the administrator summed up for them. ‘We are all agreed – there is not one of us against the enterprise.’ He paused and looked at Manfred De La Rey. ‘You have told us of a signal to launch the rising. Something that will turn the country on its head. Can you tell us now what that signal will be?’

  ‘The signal will be the assassination of the traitor Jan Christian Smuts,’ Manfred said.

  They stared at him in silence. It was clear that even though they had anticipated something momentous, none of them had expected this.