A Sailor's Honour (32 page)

‘I did the steelworks below deck,' the engineer said. ‘We took the fish holds out and put new rooms in. Steel cells. Two metres by one-point-eight. Two rows of eight, and two decks.'

De Villiers made a quick calculation. ‘Thirty-two cells,' he said.

‘Thirty-two,' the engineer confirmed.

‘What for?' De Villiers asked.

‘Ask him,' the engineer said. He pointed at the major.

The major shook his head again.

De Villiers glanced at the engineer's card. It gave the details of a numbered account in the Cayman Islands. Two untraceable accounts. A lot of money. An unknown operation involving the same man who had turned the
Alicia Mae
into a prison ship. Prior illegal operations of the major and General van den Bergh. For ten million US dollars, one could execute a spectacular operation and do a lot of harm. In Afghanistan and Pakistan the Taliban were killing scores of local and foreign soldiers with hardly any funding at all. There were conflicts in various places in the East, from Palestine to Pakistan, and also further down to Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Indonesia, but he could see no reason for a ten-million-dollar operation in South Africa. He made up his mind.

‘Fuck off,' he said. ‘I'm not having any part of this.'

‘Not so fast,' the major said.

It came to De Villiers suddenly, in a flash, that his wife and children had been killed as a result of his involvement with the
Alicia Mae
. ‘I need to know about the
Alicia Mae
,' he said again.

‘No,' the major said. ‘That operation was terminated prematurely, as you know. You don't need to know.'

‘Tell me,' De Villiers said in Afrikaans. ‘Otherwise I leave right now.'

The major considered his position. De Villiers would be dead before dark, if everything went according to plan. He had done the planning himself and he knew that he could trust the engineer to do it. De Villiers's body would be found among the rubbish in an alley behind the bank, stripped of all identification. By then he would be on the flight to Frankfurt with the money in the bank and the engineer paid his overdue fee and also paid in advance for his part in Operation Samson. ‘All right, then,' he said, also in Afrikaans.

‘Make it short,' De Villiers said. ‘I know now that it was a prison ship. Now tell me who the prisoners were going to be and why.'

The major looked at his watch. ‘We don't have much time before the bank closes.'

‘I said make it short.'

‘Alright,' the major said. ‘Alright. It had to do with Codesa and Vula.'

De Villiers trained his memory. Codesa was the acronym for the negotiations which preceded the 1993 Constitution. He had never heard of Vula. ‘What is Vula?'

‘Vula was an operation of the
ANC
which they conducted parallel to the Codesa negotiations. The same people who were negotiating with De Klerk during the day were plotting the violent overthrow of the government by military means by night. And the De Klerk lot were too chicken to take them on. So we decided to round them up and take them out to sea.'

‘On the
Alicia Mae
,' De Villiers stated the obvious.

‘Yes, on the
Alicia Mae
.'

‘And you were going to kill them, weren't you?' he said. ‘Like you took
SWAPO
prisoners out to sea in helicopters and threw them into the water off the coast of Namibia.'

‘No,' the major said with a smile. ‘I wasn't going to kill them. You were.'

‘Fuck you,' De Villiers said. ‘I would never have done it.'

The major scratched his chin. ‘You would never have known.'

‘So the
Alicia Mae
was an illegal operation?' De Villiers said.

‘Let's put it this way,' the major said. ‘While the funding came from a secret fund within the
SADF
budget, there was no way it could be traced. And the organisation behind the operation consisted of men and women who had been dismissed from the regular army by De Klerk. But we were serving our people.'

‘How can you serve your people by committing a crime?' De Villiers asked. ‘Especially murder. And how could you involve me in such an operation without telling me the nature and purpose of the operation?'

‘The
Alicia Mae
was a special operation. You didn't need to know.'

‘You did the same thing with Mugabe,' De Villiers said. ‘You didn't tell me.'

‘Mugabe was also a special operation.'

‘But you concealed the purpose of both those operations from me, when I was the one who was going to have to do the killing for you.' De Villiers shook his head and resolved to leave.

‘You could have prevented a lot of suffering if you had followed orders and shot him,' the major said. ‘Just imagine how much better off the Zimbabweans would be now, and how many fewer of them we would now have in South Africa.'

‘And your new operation is an illegal operation too, I have to assume,' De Villiers said. ‘Just like the
Alicia Mae
and Mugabe before it. And you're not going to tell me what it is, are you?'

‘It will make the
Alicia Mae
look like a Sunday-school picnic,' the major said, before realising he'd said too much.

At the repeated mention of the
Alicia Mae
, albeit in Afrikaans, the engineer became restless. ‘There was a bomb on the
Alicia Mae
,' he said. ‘I made it.' He tapped with a finger on his own chest. ‘I made it,' he said with pride.

De Villiers looked at the major. ‘You were going to blow up the ship with everyone on board. Me included.'

The major didn't answer.

‘Have you no honour?' De Villiers asked. ‘No honour at all?'

‘It was deemed an operational necessity,' the major said.

‘And was it an operational necessity for you to send those men to kill my wife and children?' De Villiers asked. His voice rose an octave. ‘You kill women and children because it is an operational necessity? Have you no honour at all?'

‘It was not supposed to happen that way,' the major said. ‘All I was trying to do was to teach you a lesson.'

De Villiers felt the anger boiling inside him. ‘A lesson, you say. What lesson? And why?'

He took a deep breath. I could kill them here, he said to himself, no problem, and walk away. I need to calm down, he cautioned himself. He closed his eyes and waited for his breathing to return to normal. The roar of the traffic on Bei den Mühren combined with the rushing blood in his veins to drown out the major's response.

I'm going to turn around and walk away, De Villiers said to himself. Put one foot in front of the other and repeat the exercise until I'm far away from here.

He turned and put his resolve into action. He put one foot in front of the other. It was as if in slow motion. I'm walking away, he said to himself. I'm walking away.

De Villiers descended the first of the church steps. The engineer grabbed him from behind by his collar. ‘Five million dollars,' the engineer said into his neck. ‘Today.'

De Villiers tensed his muscles as a prelude to a judo move that would throw the engineer over his hip onto the lower steps but felt the sharp point of a knife under his ear. He forced his muscles to relax.

The man was strong and hauled De Villiers back to the top. De Villiers struggled for breath, but the engineer held him fast and turned him so that he had no option but to face the major.

‘You don't have any choice,' the major said, centimetres away from his face. De Villiers could see the red veins in the major's eyes. ‘We have your daughter. I know where you live. I could tell you the registration number of your wife's car and the colour of her eyes. I know what brand of underwear she wears. You think you can get away from me? Think again. I have you in my pocket, now and forever. I can reach you anywhere any time I want.'

Each word struck home with the metronomic beat of an army of jackboots marching on cobblestones. The words grated on his eardrums and De Villiers felt the rage rising within him, in every muscle, in pace with the major's words. The engineer pulled him closer and the top button of his shirt flew off, releasing the pressure on his windpipe immediately. De Villiers gulped down deep breaths of air.

‘No,' he heard himself say. ‘No.'

‘Yes, yes,' the major said. ‘I own you and everything you have.'

De Villiers struggled in the grip of the engineer. ‘No,' he croaked. ‘I won't do it.'

‘Think of your daughter,' De Villiers heard the major say. ‘Zoë, is it?'

At the mention of his daughter's name, the suppressed rage inside De Villiers burst open like a pus-filled boil. In the millisecond it took his muscles to react, a raft of past events flashed through his mind and overwhelmed his senses. The president of Zimbabwe in the sights of his sniper's rifle. The gunshot when Jacques Verster was killed. The hunger that marched with him and his bushman companion through the Angolan Kalahari. The taste of the tsama melons he and !Xau had to eat to survive. The smell of the medication forced down his throat at Weskoppies Psychiatric Hospital. The straightjacket wrapping him up like a baby. The smell of cordite mixed with his own blood when the men sent by the major had shot him in the chest and leg. The screams of his children as the bullets smashed into them. His wife's bloody palm print on the window of his car. But most of all, he felt trapped in the past, unable to move, with the present, the here and now, fading from his conscious mind.

‘Think of your daughter,' was the last thing he heard. ‘Zoë, is it?'

It was, indeed.

His muscles relaxed completely and he felt his knees and hips buckling under the weight of his torso. The engineer was forced to use both hands to support De Villiers in an upright position. De Villiers straightened up and turned at the same time. His hands came together for the briefest of moments and the spoke slipped naturally into his right hand in a practised move. The head of the spoke sat flush in the groove of his palm and formed an extension of the long bones of his forearm. Without having to think, he drove it deep into the engineer's chest, right over the heart, in what looked like no more than an open-handed shove. The engineer's eyes registered the shock. His knife clattered to the ground. He looked down, but there was nothing to see, nothing alarming, yet the excruciating pain at the core of his being told him otherwise. His heart muscles convulsed once or twice and then froze in a permanent cramp and stopped functioning. His brain registered nothing except that a vital organ had suffered a major malfunction signalled by excruciating pain. The engineer let go of De Villiers and sat down hard. Only the head of the spoke protruded from his jacket pocket; its full length was embedded in his chest with the sharp point touching a rib at the back. Its track had been pure, clean through the heart.

The major saw the engineer stumble on the steps and lose his balance, but had no idea what could have caused the big man's sudden collapse. He stepped forward and reached out towards the man.

De Villiers's hands came together a second time and he drove the spoke into the major's heart, from behind, left-handed. He caught the major and held him upright and then turned him around. He slowly eased the major into a sitting position next to the engineer and draped his arm over the engineer's shoulders.

Their death rattles sounded like laughter as they sat like old friends enjoying a joke together. The past faded into the background as De Villiers's own breathing returned to normal and he once more became aware of his surroundings. On Bei den Mühren, the traffic flow continued as before. In the canal beyond, a tug slowly guided a barge into position on the quay. Seagulls flew above, spying for scraps of food.

On the steps of the church, De Villiers sat next to the major and the engineer with his arm around the major's shoulders, gripping the engineer's coat by the shoulder pad, holding them steady while their convulsions slowed. He kept them upright and still in their death throes. All the while he scanned the traffic on Bei den Mühren from left to right. A cyclist stopped right in front of the church and alighted. De Villiers stiffened, but the man left quickly after adjusting his chain.

They stopped breathing, the one soon after the other. The major's redlined eyes were wide open. De Villiers leaned his body against the bulk of the engineer.

It was time to wrap up, to leave.

De Villiers pulled at the spoke in the major's back, but it was stuck fast. It must have gone through a rib, he thought, but he had come prepared for that. With his free hand, he removed the Leatherman from its scabbard on his ankle and opened its pliers. He had to lever the spoke out, changing his grip higher on the spoke as it came out a few centimetres at a time.

The second spoke came out at the first pull.

Their passports were in the inside pockets of their coats. De Villiers pocketed those. The major's wallet contained a thick wad of euros. De Villiers put half under the major's shoe and spread the rest around on the steps behind the bodies. He wiped the engineer's knife, put it in the man's inside pocket, and removed the family photographs from his wallet.

Now there were no items left which could assist with the identification of the engineer or the major and De Villiers left without a backward glance.

Once on the far side of Bei den Mühren, he threw the spokes into the water of the canal. The Leatherman, his companion on numerous missions, followed a few minutes later. He walked past the fish market and the seamen's hostel where he had stayed in 1992 while the engineer, he now knew, was working below deck on the
Alicia Mae
building cells for prisoners. The area looked cleaner than he remembered it. There was a lot of greenery in the red-light district.