Unofficial and Deniable. John Davis Gordon

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      The Back-story

1

      In those days of apartheid many accidental deaths occurred in police custody – black suspects fell down stairs and cracked their skulls, or slipped on soap in the showers, or sometimes even threw themselves out of upper windows in a reckless attempt to escape. There was always an official inquest, as the law required, but the magistrate very seldom found anything suspicious, anything indicating reprehensible interrogation techniques by the police. The inquest into the death of Steve Biko, for example, evoked no judicial censure even though Biko was driven naked through the night, a thousand miles, in the back of an open truck, to a police hospital after he had sustained a fractured skull when he fell against a wall whilst irrationally attacking his police interrogators. In those days these accidental deaths were attributed by most of the white public to a few ‘bad apples’ in the police, though the frequency suggested that there must be a lot of them, but not too many questions were asked and there were no hard facts to gainsay police explanations.

      Then deaths began to befall the apartheid government’s enemies outside the country, which were clearly not accidental: Professor Ruth First, wife of the leader of the South African Communist Party, was killed by a parcel bomb in Mozambique; Jeanette Schoon, wife of an anti-apartheid activist, was blown to bits, together with her little daughter, by another parcel bomb in Angola; Dulcie September died in a hail of bullets in Paris as she opened the offices of the African National Congress; Dr Albie Sachs, anti-apartheid activist, had his arm blown off by a car-bomb in Mozambique; Advocate Anton Lubowski, another anti-apartheid politician, was gunned down outside his home in Namibia on the eve of his country’s independence from South Africa. The press, particularly the international press, argued that the pattern of these murders suggested they were the work of the South African government, but this was hotly denied. But then there were a number of explosions: at the London headquarters of the African National Congress, and at Cosatu House in Johannesburg, headquarters of the Congress of South African Trade Unions. Khotso House, also in Johannesburg, the headquarters of the South African Council of Churches, was bombed; Khanya House, headquarters of the South African Bishops’ Conference in Pretoria, was set on fire. Who were the people committing all these crimes? The government blamed it all on black political rivalry and ‘Godless communists’; others blamed it on those bad apples in the police; only a few believed it was government policy to murder and destroy its enemies and their property, and they largely kept their mouths shut because of the security police. For those were the days of the Brezhnev Doctrine, the Cold War in which Africa was the major battleground, most of Africa being communist-sponsored one-party dictatorships, the era of the Total Onslaught Total Strategy, the total strategy to combat the total onslaught of the ungodly communist forces of darkness bent on overthrowing Western democracy and the Godly principles of apartheid. The security police could detain anyone for 180 days without trial, and then another 180 days immediately afterwards, and then another, and so on until, in the words of the Minister of Justice, ‘the far side of eternity’. There was freedom of speech in parliament but precious little outside; radio and television were government-controlled, the press had to watch its step and foreign journalists who wrote unkindly about apartheid were unceremoniously deported.

      And one of those deported was the beautiful Josephine Valentine.

      Major Jack Harker had heard of her for years – the legendary heart-throb Josephine Valentine, the long-legged American blonde with the dazzling smile who collected wars and war heroes, the beautiful busty photo-journalist in sweat-stained khaki who always managed to wangle a helicopter ride into battle-zones denied to others by using charms pressmen don’t possess. She had a formidable and exotic reputation which lost nothing in the telling: while it was not true that she had been a high-priced hooker in New York, as alleged by certain members of the press, it was probably true that she always managed to be in the right place at the right time to get her spectacular pictures by screwing the right officer. It was said of her that she collected war heroes – but ‘warriors’ would have been a better word. She never had a lengthy relationship with her conquests: she used them, thanked them and left them with a broken heart.

      Her war photographs made her famous: Harker had seen her name in many magazines over the years, read many a piece by her, seen many of her hair-raising pictures. Ms Valentine had shown up in Rhodesia during the long bush war, leaping out of helicopters with her cameras into operational zones, ‘screwing her way into the front lines’ to get her photographs; then she had been seen on the other side of the Zambezi amongst the black terrorists; and she was always popping up in the Middle East in the Arab–Israeli conflict. It seemed that wherever there was a war Josephine Valentine was there, charming her way into more stories; she was big buddies with the heavyweights of both sides. Military men all over the world knew about her, particularly in Africa; many had seen her, met her, entertained her, fantasized about her. Jack Harker was intrigued by what he knew of her and not a little frustrated that he seemed to be one of the few military men who had never set eyes on her. A dozen times she had left the bar, mess, bunker, trench, helicopter moments before he arrived.

      And then, in 1986, when he finally encountered her in the Battle of Bassinga she was covered in blood, half naked, her teeth bared as she furiously tried to fire an AK47 automatic rifle at him.

      The Battle of Bassinga in Angola was Jack Harker’s ‘century’, the hundredth battle of his military career, the hundredth time he had leapt into action, heart pounding, to do or die. It was also one of the worst battles: a parachute jump at a dangerously low level, at night, right over the target area, which was a camp holding thousands of terrorists and their Cuban advisors, all armed with billions of dollars worth of the latest Russian military hardware with which to liberate southern Africa from the capitalist yoke. The aircraft came in low in the hopes of avoiding the terrorists’ radar but the groundfire started up before they were over the drop-zone. Harker led from the front and he was first out of the aircraft, plummeting through thin air with his heart in his mouth, and he was the first casualty of the operation – a bullet got him through the shoulder as he pulled his parachute’s rip-cord: he was covered in blood by the time he crash-landed in a tree on the wrong side of the river. He extricated himself with great difficulty and strong language, stuffed a wad of emergency dressing deep into the wound and forded the river with more strong language.

      All battles are bad but this seemed Jack Harker’s worst ever. He was awarded a medal for it, but he did not have coherent memories of it. He remembered the cacophony, the screams and the gunfire, the flames leaping, the shadows racing, remembered stumbling, lurching, the bullets whistling about him, blood flooding down his chest into his trousers no matter how deep into the wound he rammed the wad of cotton wool with his finger; he remembered storming the water tower, staggering up the ladder to destroy the machine-gun nest that was causing so much havoc, storming a Russian tank and throwing a hand-grenade down the hatch, he remembered the sun coming up on the cacophony of gunfire and smoke and flames and the stink of blood and cordite; he remembered being pinned down for a long time by a barrage of automatic fire coming from a concrete building on the edge of the parade ground, two of his men being mowed down as they tried to storm the building; he remembered scrambling up and running at the doorway.

      The battle had been going on for an hour, the sun was up now, the camp strewn with bodies, the earth muddy with blood. Harker lurched across the parade ground, doubled up, rasping, trying to run flat out but finding he could only stagger, and he crashed against the wall beside the door. He leant there a moment, gasping, trying to get his breath, to clear his head, and he was about to burst through the doorway, gun blazing, when he heard a woman cry in English, ‘You bastards …’ Harker lurched into the room, his rifle at his hip – and stared.

      Josephine Valentine was clad only in white panties; she had her back to him, her blonde hair in a ponytail, crouched СКАЧАТЬ