Game of Stones

by David Maughan Brown

  ‘So who was the Hitler figure whose assassination was going to make the difference in South Africa?’ Brian asked. ‘P.W. Botha I suppose? But before you go on would you mind telling me how the hell we got onto talking about selective assassination. How did we get onto this?’

  ‘You asked if I had ever gone back to South Africa,’ Cameron replied. ‘Yes, I did. I wanted to play a part in the armed struggle. I hadn’t even felt particularly murderous before, but I sure as hell was feeling murderous after Jules and the children had been killed. If I was going to have to act alone, assassinating one of apartheid’s kingpins seemed the best way to make a significant impact.’

  ‘So who was the Hitler figure you decided to go after?’ Brian asked. ‘Sorry to repeat myself, but you didn’t answer my question.’

  ‘There wasn’t a Hitler figure,’ Cameron said. ‘You are right. If you kill the queen bee another one very quickly replaces it. There were plenty of hard-line apartheid ideologues who could have replaced P.W. Botha as President, in fact the man who did eventually replace him, De Klerk, was just as hard-line at that stage – not that the Nobel Peace Prize committee took a blind bit of notice of that minor detail a few years later. When Verwoerd was assassinated in 1966 all that happened was that the even more sinister John Vorster became the queen bee – he was a lot less intelligent and a whole lot more brutal. Even if Botha hadn’t been easily replaceable, he would have been too closely guarded. I wanted to take out someone whose departure would cause the same kind of stir in the hive as removing the queen bee does. I knew from my own experience….’

  ‘That’s something of a euphemism, isn’t it?’ Brian interrupted.

  ‘What is?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘’Departure,’ Brian answered. ‘Don’t you rather mean “murder” or “assassination”?’

  ‘You ply me with alcohol to get me to talk, and then keep stopping me talking by interrupting,’ Cameron said. ‘Do you want me to tell the story or would you rather we spent our time discussing euphemisms?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Brian said, ‘go on.’

  ‘I knew from my own experience just how volatile the morale of those involved in the struggle could be. I wanted to take out someone whose death would have huge symbolic significance – if it could also make a practical difference to the struggle that would be a bonus. The best target seemed to be Magnus Malan.’

  Cameron saw Brian opening his mouth to ask who Magnus Malan was, and then closing it again – presumably to avoid having his head bitten off again for interrupting.

  ‘Magnus Malan was Chief of the Defence Force,’ Cameron said. ‘He was the kingpin responsible for the raids into Botswana and Lesotho which murdered South African activists who had escaped across the border. It was Malan who was primarily responsible for fanning the flames of the internecine warfare between the Inkatha Freedom Party and the ANC in the 1980s, and it was Malan who was ultimately behind the setting up of the CCB.’

  ‘CCB?’ Brian ventured.

  ‘The Civil Cooperation Bureau,’ Cameron elaborated. ‘Now, there’s a euphemism if you ever want one. The CCB was set up for the specific purpose of assassinating opponents of apartheid – inside or outside South Africa. “Civil” it certainly wasn’t, and it didn’t bother too much about bureaucracy either. There would obviously be huge symbolic mileage if anyone managed to assassinate the architect of South Africa’s selective assassination programme. There’s nothing like seeing the biter bitten to raise the spirits of all those who think they might have been next in line for the attentions of the biter.’

  ‘But, if he was such a kingpin, wouldn’t you have expected him to be particularly closely guarded?’ Brian asked. ‘How did you imagine you could get close enough to him?’

  ‘Give me a chance Brian, I’m getting there – or trying to,’ Cameron replied. ‘Malan was a bully. In my experience, bullies tend to be very self-confident, generally over-confident. I assumed Malan would probably be much less well protected than the P.W. Bothas of the world. The best occasion symbolically seemed likely to be the opening of Parliament. I assume you have read The Day of the Jackal?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Brian replied. ‘But you can bet your life every person in the English-speaking world who has responsibility for preventing the assassination of any VIP has also read it. Anyone approaching the opening of Parliament on crutches would be likely to be taken out by a roof-top sniper before he could get anywhere near.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Cameron said, ‘but I couldn’t have converted a pair of crutches into a sniper’s rifle anyway. I have no expertise whatever when it comes to technology, and the chances are that somebody might notice if one wandered into a gunsmith’s in England and asked how much it would cost to convert a pair of crutches into a sniper’s rifle. I needed something ready-made that didn’t have to be adapted in any way. So how does one get hold of something that fires bullets but doesn’t look like a gun?’

  Cameron paused to drain what was left of the whisky in his glass.

  ‘Is there a prize for getting the answer right?’ Brian asked.

  ‘No. Stupid question,’ Cameron said. ‘You probably don’t spend much time thinking about how to assassinate people. I discovered that you can buy antique guns without having a licence.’

  ‘But antique guns have a bad habit of looking rather like guns, don’t they?’

  ‘Not if they are sticks,’ Cameron replied. ‘I used to collect walking sticks – the term covers a multitude of sins. You can get smoking sticks, drinking sticks and sword sticks – as well as sticks with compasses, telescopes, torches, watches, cigarette-lighters, corkscrews and probably lots of other things. Much more to the point for my particular purposes, you can also get gun-sticks or, more properly, “cane guns” that don’t look remotely like guns. The trigger on the better ones folds down so that you have to look at them very closely before you can spot it. Usually made to fire .410 shotgun cartridges, it is possible to find ones that fire 12 bore cartridges. You can do a lot of damage with buck-shot fired from a 12 bore at relatively close range.’

  ‘It is also perfectly possible to buy umbrella guns,’ Cameron went on. ‘But anyone wandering around Cape Town at the end of January trying to look inconspicuous carrying an umbrella might as well be toting an AK 47. In the extremely unlikely event of its starting to rain, the chances of the umbrella not being blown inside out by the wind within ten seconds would be as close to zero as makes no difference.’

  ‘So let me get this master plan straight,’ Brian replied. ‘In your capacity as a terrorist, you manage to get to Cape Town for the opening of Parliament. Having established somehow that your target is not only going to attend the opening but will enter the building by an entrance that is accessible to the public, you head off with your loaded walking stick to intercept him. When you get to your chosen vantage point he walks past, you raise your walking stick to point it at him – assuming that there isn’t such a crush that pointing it at him is a non-starter – and pull the trigger. Loud bang, target falls down – you’d better be accurate as you only have one shot – and then what? You vanish in a cloud of smoke and are magically transported back to this green and pleasant land? How on earth did you imagine you were going to get away with it?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Cameron replied. ‘It didn’t matter. I didn’t care. I had lost everything – my wife, my children, my house, my job, my country, my reputation. What was there to live for? That had all happened because I was trying to make a contribution to the struggle against apartheid. I might as well make a really significant contribution and have done with it. You are right – I would only have the one shot. If the best you can aspire to is to be a worker bee rather than the queen bee, you just have the one sting – and then you die. You had better make it count.’

  ‘But,’ Brian said, ‘if you had assassinated Malan – and you obviously didn’t – and they had caught you, which they obviously w
ould have, they would have made the dying part of the process extremely unpleasant.’

  ‘Yes, I realised that,’ Cameron replied. ‘That scared me, but in a perverse kind of way I felt I deserved it. Jules and Hilton and Nicky had died because of my involvement, which hadn’t made any significant contribution to the struggle anyway. I had lied to Jules and effectively driven her and my children away. As if it wasn’t bad enough for me to have stuffed up my own life, I had succeeded in stuffing up the lives of the people I loved, and that included Lynn.’

  ‘If I might say so,’ Brian commented, ‘for an avowed atheist that sounds suspiciously like the Christian view that anything perceived as sin should necessarily be followed by eternal damnation. Who, incidentally, was Lynn? I haven’t heard you mention her before.’

  ‘I suppose the idea of transgression having to be followed by punishment was somewhere at the back of my mind,’ Cameron conceded. ‘But it had nothing to do with eternity – in fact, quite the opposite. There isn’t an afterlife – death ends everything. If there is going to be punishment for transgression it has to happen before one dies. So whatever the Special Branch chose to do to me before they hanged me, or made sure that I slipped on a piece of soap in the shower or fell down the stairs, would be the punishment. Death would end the pain and extinguish the regrets.’

  ‘Now you are sounding like a prime candidate for recruitment as a suicide bomber,’ Brian said. ‘I wonder how many of the hijackers were thinking along those lines as they saw the Twin Towers looming in the cockpit windscreens.’

  ‘You are missing the point, Brian,’ Cameron said. ‘If the bombing is the transgression, a suicide bomber isn’t leaving any time for the punishment of the transgression before he dies.’

  ‘I suppose I am,’ Brian acknowledged. ‘But you still aren’t saying anything about Lynn, whoever she was or is.’

  Cameron’s head was pounding. Either the central heating hadn’t been turned off with the arrival of spring, or the numerous people in the room were doing a very good job of replacing it. Most indoor public spaces in England were overheated. The light-headedness hadn’t gone away and he suddenly felt a yearning for fresh air.

  ‘I don’t know if I am ready to talk about Lynn yet,’ Cameron said. ‘I need some fresh air. I’m going to go outside for a few minutes. Don’t get me any more whisky – I’ve had more than enough – but I could do with a cup of coffee, if they run to anything so exotic, and a large glass of water.’

  ‘Sure thing,’ Brian said. ‘But don’t get lost and don’t disappear into the darkness, never to be seen again. You are over the worst part – you have started to tell the story – you might as well finish it.’

  ‘Don’t disappear into the darkness, never to be seen again.’ Someone disappearing into the darkness was what had triggered off the whole sorry saga with Jules in the first place, Cameron thought as he made his painstakingly slow way between the tables towards the front door. He didn’t feel confident of his balance and didn’t want to set the trail of mutterings off again. Brian was probably right, now he’d finally begun to tell somebody what had happened he might as well carry on. But he needed to get outside into the fresh air for a breather first. It wasn’t just the heat, he had also begun to feel very claustrophobic – too many tables, too many people, too much noise. A couple of hundred yards down the pavement towards Hillsborough before turning back would help to clear his head.

  Absorbed as he was in thinking about how much he could say about Lynn without getting embarrassingly upset, Cameron only noticed the white Volvo when he drew level with it. Mr Sari was sitting in the driver’s seat, facing the pub. His attention appeared to be focused on the screen of his smart-phone, but he would certainly have seen Cameron coming towards him.

  Cameron walked on past the car without stopping. So what was going on? If it was Mutoni they were looking for, what was Mr Sari doing sitting outside this particular pub on the one night Cameron happened to be here? Could they be thinking that she might try to meet Cameron here? Why might they think that? Was it possible that they, whoever ‘they’ were, weren’t looking for Mutoni after all, but were actually watching him? Why on earth would they want to do that?

  Cameron’s ponderings took him further down the pavement than he intended. He stopped and turned round but, suddenly feeling anxious, he was reluctant to walk back past the Volvo. He didn’t know why Mr Sari’s presence seemed like a bad omen, but if he didn’t go back soon Brian would assume he had opted out of telling the rest of the story and head for home himself. The only thing for it was to walk back past the car as if nothing had happened.

  Nothing had happened, and nothing did happen, at least where Mr Sari was concerned. But, from the moment he passed the Volvo on his way back, Cameron felt nakedly exposed. The knowledge that Mr Sari was watching him as he walked away vividly recalled the feeling he had as he walked back across the road after accosting Venter all those years ago. On this occasion he knew it couldn’t be a South African Police issue service automatic that was pointing at the back of his head, but that didn’t make his retreating back feel any less of a potential target.

  Cameron knew it had to be him and not Mutoni that Mr Sari was tailing. There might be other watchers keeping an eye out for Mutoni, but someone had clearly decided that, for whatever reason, it was Cameron himself who needed to be kept under surveillance.

  Chapter 7

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ Brian asked as Cameron sat down. ‘I was beginning to get worried about you. Your coffee will be getting cold.’

  ‘The man I tried to accost earlier is sitting in a car just down the road watching the pub,’ Cameron replied. ‘Someone must have given him instructions to tail me. It’s too much of a coincidence that he was outside my house last night as well.’

  ‘I hope your suspicion didn’t result in your smashing his face in with your forehead,’ Brian said. ‘But let’s just forget about him while you tell me the rest of the story – he can’t do any damage sitting out there in his car. I hope he had some form of entertainment. I would hate to think of anyone getting bored sitting in a car on the side of a main road in Sheffield on a spring night in April.’

  ‘How lyrical can you get?’ Cameron responded. ‘As it happens, he has a smart-phone which he was pretending to look at as I walked past. In my experience boredom is the very least people deserve if they are going to spend their time sitting in cars watching other people’s houses.’

  ‘OK. Forget him for the moment,’ Brian said. ‘Tell me what happened when you set out on your lone crusade to nail the nasty Mr Malan.’

  ‘General Magnus André de Merindol Malan to you,’ Cameron said, ‘not a mere Mr Malan, however nasty. After I left South Africa I spent a year or so sporadically working as an itinerant History buff on a cruise ship, the improbably named S.S. Enlightenment. Between times, I spent a short while in Holland, just enough to claim asylum and acquire a Dutch passport and bank account. Holland was one of the main destinations for white South African men who had to leave the country because they were not prepared to be drafted into the South African Defence Force to fight for apartheid. I made sure the passport was in the name of Christopher Barratt, not my own name, as I thought that might be helpful when I went back.’

  ‘So I’m having a drink with a dodgy character who has passports in two different names am I?’ Brian commented. ‘Didn’t the ship’s regular itinerary take you back to South Africa?’

  ‘Only twice before that last time,’ Cameron replied. ‘I stayed very firmly in my cabin whenever we were in South African waters – as I had to when I first went on board. I obviously wasn’t going to go ashore, but I also didn’t want to risk being recognised by anyone who might come on board, particularly in Cape Town or Durban. But then I very seldom went ashore when we were in any of the other ports we docked in around the world anyway. I didn’t have either the desire or the enthusiasm. It was as mu
ch as I could do to summon up the energy to put together the low-level history lectures that provided my friend Mark Redfern, who was responsible for organising the lecture programme on the ship, with the justification for having me on board. I was getting very little sleep – thanks, in large part, to the nightmares. I didn’t see a whole lot of point to existence.’

  ‘The only times I ever felt the inclination to go ashore were in Cape Town,’ Cameron went on. ‘I can’t tell you how strong the temptation was – particularly after Jules and the children had been killed. I hadn’t even been able to visit their gave. Instead I had to sit in my cabin looking out at Table Mountain. If it is possible to love a mountain, I have loved that one all my life. What wouldn’t I have given to be able to walk up Platteklip Gorge and stand on the table top in the wind, looking out to Robben Island for inspiration.’

  Cameron paused for a few seconds before continuing.

  ‘As luck would have it, the ship was due to spend the last week of January in Cape Town. The opening of Parliament that year, 1987, was scheduled for the 30th and the ship docked on 25th, so I had several days to sit and stew before trying to carry out my plan. I was pretty sure those few days would offer the last opportunity for me to visit the grave, so I managed to persuade Mark, much against his better judgement, to hire a car for me for the week. We arrived on the Sunday, the car was dropped off at the harbour on the Monday morning, and that afternoon I drove out to the cemetery at Pinelands. Jules and the children had been buried there because Jules’ mother lived in Pinelands. I didn’t have a South African ID book or driving licence so decided to take my passport in case I encountered a road-block.’

  ‘I parked the car a few hundred yards up the road and, having no idea where I would find the grave, started looking in the section with what seemed the freshest graves. A very depressing process, and one that made me feel very exposed, even though there wasn’t anybody around to see me. I don’t suppose many people wander round graveyards browsing the recently erected gravestones. I caught a sudden movement about 50 yards away out of the corner of my eye and turned in time to see Jules’ mother standing up looking in my direction – she must have been kneeling beside the grave, which was why I hadn’t seen her. I turned away immediately and walked back towards the car, but I didn’t think she could have recognised me. I had grown a full beard, swapped my contact lenses for heavy horn-rimmed spectacles and shaved much of what was left of my hair off the top of my head.’