‘And that’s really when we decided,’ Morgan told me. ‘We set up an operation – or an operation was set up – deliberately to get them. You know, it is not a nice game, but mercenaries are, on the whole, not particularly nice people. They go around killing other people, and they do it for a living like hired assassins, but on a slightly larger scale.’
It looked as though Harry Carlse had been right: Morgan had sold them out. Winning Simon’s confidence by posing as a willing conspirator, he said he placed his own employee, James Kershaw, in pole position as Simon’s personal assistant and unwitting inside man. Morgan also admitted that he had accepted $10,000 from Simon – with which he agreed to travel to Nigeria and lobby oil interests on behalf of Simon and Calil. Of course, he said, he had no intention of making the trip. Given that Simon knew how closely Morgan was connected to the South African Intelligence services, it was easy to see how Simon could have concluded the plot had their tacit support.
In fact, there were so many informers planted in the operation that it was beginning to look like the tail might have started to wag the dog. Morgan confirmed what Billy Maseltha had told me, that other agents and assets penetrated the plot, root and branch – including, Morgan suggested, Harry Carlse and Lourens ‘Louwtjie’ Horn – an accusation that both men deny. Everything Morgan unearthed was fed back to the South African Secret Service. Even so, Morgan believed that the operation had nearly succeeded in February: apparently, no one in SASS had seen Kolwezi coming. ‘We were bloody incompetent,’ he admitted. ‘We thought we had them properly infiltrated at every level, and then we missed the fucking trick. After that they were dead men.’
I asked Morgan if he was not sad to have been responsible for the arrest of his erstwhile friend. Emotion, he said, had no part to play.
‘If the guy’s a cunt, he’s a cunt,’ he said, emphatically. ‘If the guy’s a crook, he’s a crook. And the trouble with Simon was he’d gone crooked.’
Also, on the phone from Pretoria, I asked Piet van der Merwe, the Scorpion’s senior special investigator who had run the case against Thatcher and interviewed Abu Baker, if it was plausible that the NIA had placed people inside the operation – enlisted as foot-soldiers – from the beginning.
‘Well,’ he replied, after re-confirming that Abu had become an informer for the NIA, ‘I mean, it depends on what names you were given.’
I suggested that many people, including Nigel Morgan and, obliquely, Billy Masetlha, had posited Horn and Carlse as agents. Van der Merwe dismissed the accusations against Carlse, but not against his friend.
‘I would go with a name of Louwtjie Horn,’ he said. ‘Taking Louwtjie’s background … being an ex-policeman … I would have said Louwtjie Horn was an NIA agent.’
Horn was arrested with Simon and Harry Carlse in Harare as the three men inspected the weapons purchased from ZDI. Van der Merwe was keen to point out, though, that whatever Horn’s connection to the NIA might have been, he’d seen nothing to suggest that Horn had actually compromised the operation. It was Nigel Morgan and SASS who had commanded centre stage.
‘They played a major role in this. They knew exactly from day one.’ Van der Merwe went on to recount the extraordinary testimony given by Tim Dennis, the former director-general of SASS, at the trial of the eight men, including Nick’s brother-in-law, in 2007. Van der Merwe claimed that SASS had been in touch with Severo Moto in exile in Spain ‘to basically pave the relationship for South Africa if he does get into power’, because South Africa needed Equatorial Guinea’s ‘black gold’. According to van der Merwe, it appeared that SASS had played both sides, before deciding which way to jump. Despite denials from Masetlha, Morgan and Dennis, it could possibly have been the case that the first, Kolwezi, operation got off the ground owing to official indecision, not a failure of intelligence.
On the other side, I also pressed van der Merwe about allegations of CIA involvement.
‘That’s a fact,’ he declared emphatically. ‘That’s a given. There was a CIA agent that escorted the plane to South Africa, stayed behind, then was booked in at the Lake Hotel in Centurion.’
According to van der Merwe, it was Ivan Pienaar who had met the CIA agent off the plane, arranged his accommodation and put him onto a flight home the following day. Pienaar had given a sworn statement to the Scorpions, confirming the exact details.
‘That’s a fact,’ van der Merwe repeated, ‘that’s a given.’
No one interviewed Nick; the few that tried, he sent away disappointed. Direct contact with his wife and South African diplomats slowed down, and then ended abruptly. News only filtered back erratically: he had malnutrition; he was stricken by cerebral malaria; he was close to death. And then there was nothing at all. The letters that had trickled out stopped, and even the rumours about his condition dried up. Worn with guilt, I found that by degrees I was letting him go; I had nothing to hold onto but the recollection of those days in Tubmanburg when he’d dragged me clear of the shrapnel and steered me through the charnel house.
Sometimes at night my daughter calls for me. Her cries of ‘Daddy’ rise in the short time it takes me to reach her bedroom. Her way of asking for me is half-statement – as if by saying my name I must appear; and half-question – the slight lift in her voice at the end questioning when, if, I will come at all.
Her room is a warm, rich funk of milk and biscuits; my hand on her tangled hair guides her back to bed, collecting a film of sweat shed over her night-terrors. Sometimes I think of Rocket, and the other children we saw laid to waste, and of how fragile our assumptions of safety are. I decided months ago that I would not tell her about the war; about what happens in war; about what happened to me in that war and everything that came out of it – until she knows that nothing can shake the walls around us; until she is no longer a child.
Once, when she was barely two years old, she found me crying in our living room as I struggled to swallow the stone that rises up sometimes and catches me when I least expect it. She stopped playing and put her hand on my knee.
‘It’s okay, Daddy. Everything’s okay,’ she told me, her eyes searching out the reason for my tears. I knew then why my grandfather, Don, had drip-fed his war to me in careful, deliberate doses. He never mentioned the screams – his screams – that tore through his sleep. He never demanded that I share the burden of his memories, not even at the end.
Bella is asleep again before the door closes. Outside I listen and wait for the wet click-click-click of her dummy to stop. Her jaw slackens into silence, and I am left alone on the landing. During nights like this I have found myself standing in the unlit bathroom next door, chasing my reflection among the confusion of shadows thrown by the trees outside. I think of the afternoon when I undressed in front of the cracked hotel mirror in Conakry and saw for the first time the damage my body had absorbed after two months in the jungle with Nick.
I ask who I am, who I was, and what change I might be owed from the cost of all the hubris and bloodletting that became my career. Out of the darkness I try to conjure the dreams that will not come, and face the memories that will not go. Nick in his cell, me in my sanctuary.
And I ask this, too: who is the mercenary?
EPILOGUE
ILLUMINATION ROUNDS
On 3 November 2009, Nick was officially pardoned. He had been incarcerated in Black Beach prison for five years and eight months. His wife was the first to call. The news had just broken on the wires. I was at home in London.
The Equatoguinean attorney-general confirmed that Nick, Simon, and the other South African prisoners, would be freed that day. Nick was given twenty-four hours to leave the country. His release was timed exactly to coincide with the state visit to Equatorial Guinea by South African president Jacob Zuma.
Simon Mann flew home smiling on a private jet. Before being whisked away to his family, and his country house in Hampshire, he made a short statement to the press.
‘As far as I’m concerned,’ he declared in his p
osh half-lisp, ‘I am very anxious that Calil, Thatcher, and one or two of the others, should face justice.’
He was very happy, he said, to appear in court in the UK ‘as a witness for the prosecution’. Grey and gaunt, he was almost unrecognisable as the man I had met in Paris more than six and a half years earlier.
It took three days for Nick to get home. The South African Government eventually flew him to Johannesburg and debriefed him. That evening, I spoke to him on the phone.
‘Mr Brabazon, how are you?’
It was as if the room filled with his voice. Six years dissolved immediately.
‘It’s so great to hear your voice. It’s amazing. I can’t quite believe it.’ It was a conversation impossible to prepare for. I had no idea where to start. ‘How do you feel in yourself?’ I asked.
‘Ag, not so bad. Physically, I’m underweight. I’m going for a medical test. But on the mental side, mentally, I don’t feel disturbed.’ He was laughing now.
‘That’s your story, mate! I’d let other people be the judge of that.’ I was laughing, too. ‘What about the release? How much warning did they give you? We were all bloody surprised here.’
‘It was very casual, as if it was something that they did every day,’ he told me. ‘They came into my cell and said, “Just sign these papers.” I asked what they were and the attorney-general said, “Oh, you’ve been pardoned.”’
He sounded as if he still couldn’t quite believe his luck.
‘I’m getting on a plane tomorrow,’ I told him. ‘Is that okay?’
‘Ja, man, one hundred per cent. That will be great.’
Despite intense media interest, Nick had decided not to talk to the press. Only close family and the men he was in jail with even knew where he was. As Nick said, it was back to cloak and dagger again.
I was in Pretoria for two days before Nick and I were able to start talking properly. Nick had spent his first forty-eight hours of freedom alone with his wife. I waited at their new home with the rest of the family – his sons, stepdaughters, daughters and his future son-in-law – tending the braai, blowing up balloons and stringing out bright, plastic ‘Welcome Home’ bunting.
Then the slatted side-gate opened, and Nick came home. Head down, he followed his wife, said hello to the son-in-law he’d never met, and moved indoors at a stoop. In an instant he stepped out again from the shade of the house and I saw him clearly. His eyes were dark, and sank back into his head. He was a shadow of the man I said goodbye to in Paris, his arms were skin and bone, his head massive on wasted, narrow shoulders. He was wearing long blue shorts and a blue checked shirt – in his top pocket were tucked a notepad and pen. I was sweating.
‘It’s great to see you, James.’
We shook hands, and then hugged each other. The muscles that had dragged us through the jungle were gone. He looked and felt like what he was: a prison-camp survivor.
‘I feel quite normal. We’ll have to see.’ He looked around him. ‘It’s great, just great.’
He was smiling. We stood and chatted slightly apart from the others, and then we went inside so I could give him a bottle of malt whisky I’d been saving for a special occasion since university. I realised I was nervous. The harder I tried, the more difficult it was to be casual and relaxed. His eyes lit up at the sight of the scotch, and he thanked me.
‘We’ll have to save this for when you have grandchildren,’ he laughed, and tucked it away in the cupboard.
I asked him how ‘it’ had been.
‘Well, it was a very interesting five-year bush trip,’ he joked, trying to put me at ease, ‘but those trips are over now. There’ll be no more bush trips, no more adventures in Africa.’
His smile faded, and he cut to the chase without pausing.
‘What we did, what we tried to do, was wrong.’ And then he smiled again and looked at his daughter. ‘Marzaan says she’s going to take away my passport.’
He was evidently still in shock at the speed of his release. His daughter, now seventeen, watched him intently. So did her new boyfriend. It was hard not to feel sympathy for the young man.
‘I mean, of all the fathers to pop up when you were least expecting it ...’ I turned to the slightly stunned teenager on Marzaan’s arm. ‘Man, you aren’t going to know what’s hit you.’
Marzaan and Nick had spoken, by phone, for the first time since his arrest only as recently as September 2009. Eleven years old the last time she’d seen him, she now re-encountered him as if for the first time.
‘It’s strange to come back to a grown-up family. Now I have to get to know them all again from the start.’ And then, smiling again, he said to the boyfriend: ‘But remember, she’s still my daughter!’ They blushed.
In between mouthfuls of steak and gulps of beer, Nick joined in with the family banter around him. Incredibly well informed about apparently all aspects of international current affairs, he wanted to talk about the Hubble Telescope and exploding stars; global warming and the drought in Kenya; and the trials and tribulations of the Government in Britain. I asked him how come he seemed to know more about what was happening in London than I did. In fact, he said, he’d managed to get hold of a shortwave radio, which he rigged up to a wire that ran off the light in his cell. For years he had survived by listening to the World Service and reading the Bible. Peppered with references to mercy and repentance, his speech was not just that of a news-junkie and a survivor, but of a convert. He said he’d seen both the error of his ways, and the Light.
‘Now I have God in my life,’ he said, ‘nothing is impossible. Not even being released from Black Beach.’
Before long Nick was reminiscing about the men he served with in the army, and recounted again the time he’d visited the house in Liberia where Deku had been killed – his brains blasted all over the walls, the hastily dug grave out the back. I told him about the films I’d made in Africa – about filming under fire with South African United Nations peacekeepers in Congo, and the expedition I had undertaken deep into the forests of eastern India to film with Maoist guerrillas.
‘Tell me,’ he asked finally, putting his half-empty beer bottle to one side, ‘we never did finish that story about your grandfather. What happened in the end?’
In the days that followed, Nick and I accumulated a catalogue of firsts: the first meal he’d cooked since being arrested (breakfast for me, the following day); the longest walk he’d had for six years (a mile down to the local shops together); the first cup of coffee he’d bought in a café (at the local shops, tired from the walk).
‘It’s funny walking next to you,’ he said, as we strode out to the shops again a day later, this time cloaked in drizzle. ‘It’s just like in Liberia. Your legs haven’t got any shorter, either.’
I slowed my pace, and we ambled to a covered table at the café. We ordered cheese and bacon quiche, milky coffees and sweet biscuits.
There was so much that I wanted to ask Nick – so many gaps in my knowledge – that it was hard to know where to begin. I wanted to find out what had really happened in Kolwezi; if he had tried to back out at the last moment; and why he had gone ahead at all. For six years, I had wondered what it had really been like in jail for him.
I began by asking him how the plot was supposed to have unfolded.
‘My job’, he explained, ‘was to seize control of Malabo Airport – by taking over the air traffic control tower. The two guards would have been immobilised, not killed.’
There was no need for violence yet. Far away from the other airport buildings, where a small contingent of drunken soldiers dozed, the alarm would not have been raised until it was too late. At two o’clock in the morning on 8 March 2004, Nick was to have changed the tower’s radio frequency to that of the incoming mercenary flight. Once it had landed, the airport would have been secured; the four-by-four vehicles that Nick would have driven there serving as transport for the newly arrived Fire Force. Nick’s role thereafter was to provide intelligence support. He’d tol
d Simon that he didn’t want to be openly identified as an attacker in case that undermined later business deals in the new republic.
Under Harry Carlse’s command, the mercenaries would have gone into action immediately. Two or three five-man teams would have been dispatched to the presidential palace, another to the police station; the main force would have cut and defended the central arterial route that ran between the army barracks and the palace. The radio station would have been commandeered as soon as possible. Simon was to have remained at the airport, waiting for Greg Wales, David Tremain, Karim Fallaha and Severo Moto – all of whom were due to be flown in from the Canary Islands via Bamako in Mali by former Executive Outcomes pilot Crause Steyl.
We continued our conversation back at Nick’s home, gradually slipping back into old habits. It reminded me of the weeks we’d spent on that balcony in Tubmanburg – but instead of the stench of dead bodies, our conversation was now wrapped in the scent of freshly cut grass that wafted through the open windows. On the first day alone we talked for over fifteen hours. It felt as if we had a lifetime to recap: photos of children, details of escapades, and a careful autopsy of the coup plot to complete.
‘In the beginning,’ he said, ‘it was Simon who approached me’ – in May 2003. They’d renewed their acquaintance in January that year, over an unrelated aircraft purchase. Despite the fact that Nick was sure the idea was not Simon’s own – that he’d been approached by a third party – Simon funded the operation personally, out of his own pocket. ‘At first it was quite cheap,’ Nick remembered.
Then Nick produced his own copies of the emails between Simon and Ely Calil that I’d found years previously in his office – the correspondence that referred to ‘Fisheries Protection’ and Simon’s forthcoming meeting with Calil on Sunday 18 May. These copies had been stamped and certified by the South African National Prosecuting Authority.
My Friend The Mercenary Page 40
