Unofficial and Deniable. John Davis Gordon

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СКАЧАТЬ around it sprinkled with weeds and shrubs. The house was in darkness. The listening gear was in position. Harker gave his instructions and Clements moved to take cover facing the front door, Spicer went off to cover the kitchen door, Trengrove disappeared around the other side of the house to the living room window. Harker remained with the listening device, covering the dining-room French window. They settled down to wait.

      It was a very long hour before the headlights came flicking through the forest. The car came up the winding track into the yard, its headlights now blinding. Harker lay beside the listening gear, his heart pounding; the vehicle’s doors opened and one by one five dark figures clambered out. They were hardly talking, only a mutter here and there as they stretched and reached for luggage. Then, while the headlights illuminated the kitchen door, they trooped towards it, carrying their briefcases and baggage. For the first time Harker could distinguish the blacks from the Cubans, but he could not identify anybody. They clustered around while one of the Cubans selected and inserted a key.

      Harker snorted to himself. It would have been an ideal moment to hit the whole damn lot of them: no fuss, no risk. But no – goddam Dupont wanted to record what they talked about first. The Cuban unlocked the door and they filed inside. Lights went on. Harker glimpsed them filing through the kitchen into the dining room. They clustered around the table, and one of the Cubans produced a bottle from his briefcase.

      Harker put on the headphones of the listening device. He could hear mumbled speech. He turned the tuning knob and the volume. Suddenly he heard a Cuban say, ‘Close the curtains. Sit down, please …’ He heard the scraping of chair legs on the floor. More mumbles. The tinkle of liquor being poured. Then the meeting began.

      Harker listened intently, his tape-recorder turning; then he closed his eyes in relief. Thank God … Thank God this murder was not unjust. The bastards were certainly plotting murder. Mass murder. Planning to detonate three car-bombs at twenty-four-hour intervals: the first at the Voortrekker Monument on a Sunday, the second at the Houses of Parliament on Monday, Johannesburg’s international airport on Tuesday. Harker smiled despite himself – the chain of events would be effective: the Voortrekker Monument job would infuriate, the Houses of Parliament job would vastly impress, the Johannesburg airport job would downright terrify. The psychological impact upon the South African public, coming one after the other, boom boom boom, would be enormous. In fact, listening to the muffled indistinct speech, Harker was surprised they settled for only three bombs – why not half a dozen, throw in the Union Buildings in Pretoria where all the top government departments hang out, the Reserve Bank down the road and, say, the City Hall. Harker had always wondered why the ANC hadn’t done all that years ago – they really were, militarily speaking, a milk-and-water bunch. MK, the Spear of the Nation, the ANC’s army, had never waged a battle. The only thing that gave them clout was the moral turpitude of apartheid.

      For an hour Harker tried to listen to the plotting going on in the house, over the coughs and mumbles and mutters and occasional laughter, the glug of liquor and the click of cigarette lighters; he could only make out snatches of detail and he hoped the tape-recorder was picking up more. Then suddenly the meeting sounded as if it was over: he heard a burst of song in Spanish, followed by guffaws.

      Harker took a deep breath – it was time to hit. He took off his headphones and whispered into his radio transmitter.

      ‘H-hour coming up. Do you read me? Come in one at a time.’

      ‘One, copy,’ Clements said.

      ‘Two, copy,’ Ferdi Spicer said.

      ‘Three, copy,’ Trengrove said.

      ‘Okay,’ Harker said, ‘we hit on zero … Five … Four … Three … Two … One … Zero!’

      Out of the forest sprang the four dark forms. They ran through the darkness at the house. Harker raced up to the curtained dining-room French window, a stun grenade in his hand: he yanked out the pin with his teeth and hurled it through the window. There was a shattering of glass, then a detonation that seemed to shake the earth. Then there was a crack as Spicer kicked the kitchen door in, another as Clements did the same to the front door. Harker burst through the window and opened fire. And there was nothing in the world but the popping of his machine pistol, then the noise of Spicer’s and Clements’ as they covered the two principal escape routes.

      In the cacophony Harker did not hear the shattering of the living room window as a black South African called Looksmart Kumalo dived through it, through Trengrove’s hail of bullets, scrambled up and fled off into the black forest. Trengrove went bounding frantically after him, gun blazing, but in an instant the darkness had swallowed him up. Trengrove went crashing through the black undergrowth, wildly looking for the runaway man, but Looksmart Kumalo, badly wounded, was hiding under some bushes. Trengrove crashed about for several hundred yards, then he turned and went racing back to the farmhouse.

      Harker was frantically collecting up all the documents, baggage and briefcases while Clements and Spicer were fixing explosives to the dead bodies. ‘Where’s the other body?’ Clements demanded.

      ‘Sir!’ Trengrove shouted. ‘He escaped into the forest!’

      ‘Christ!’ Harker stared. ‘Christ, Christ, Christ!’

      ‘Go after him, sir?’ Clements rasped.

      ‘Yes!’ Harker shouted. ‘Spicer stays and finishes the explosives! Rest of you go. Go!’

      For twenty minutes Harker, Clements and Trengrove thrashed through the black undergrowth of the forest, trying to flush out the runaway, hoping to stumble across the dead body. It was hopeless – nobody can track in the dark. After twenty minutes Harker barked a halt. If the bastard survived he was unlikely to tell the American police that he was attacked during a murderous conspiracy meeting in an illegal Cuban safe-house.

      ‘Back!’ Harker rasped. ‘Get the hell out of here!’

      Spicer was desperately waiting for them, the explosives emplaced, the listening gear and the seized documents ready to go. Harker spoke into his radio to the getaway car: ‘Venus is rising!’

      The men went racing up the dark track towards the tarred road. They were several miles away, speeding towards Manhattan, when the house disintegrated in a massive explosion, the bodies blown to tiny pieces.

9

      It was always the same after an action. Before going into battle he was very tense but afterwards, when the dust had settled and the bodies had been counted, he slept as if he had been pole-axed even if he knew the action was to resume at dawn – he felt no remorse about the enemy, only grim satisfaction and relief to have survived. It was only the conscripts, the civilians in uniform, who sometimes felt remorse, but usually that didn’t last long either because few experiences are more antagonizing than having, some bastard trying to shoot the living shit out of you.

      Harker woke up that Sunday afternoon rested for the first time in a week, permitting himself no feeling of guilt. The die was cast, nothing could change it. It had been a legitimate military operation and had saved civilian lives. It was front-page news in most of the papers: there were photographs of the area where the safe-house had stood, the earth and shrubbery blackened and blasted. There was one survivor in critical condition: an ‘adult male of African origin now in hospital, with multiple injuries, including loss of one eye and an arm so badly mutilated by gunfire that it had to be amputated below the elbow’. The FBI were investigating: they had no comment yet but the local sheriff, who was first on the scene, was moved to hint that this was ‘probably a gangland СКАЧАТЬ