A Sailor's Honour (2 page)

In the affluent Bucklands Beach it is not unusual for a luxury vehicle to stop to pick up a child.

Inside the speeding Range Rover, one of the operatives pulled a beanie over Zoë's eyes while the other silenced the captive child with duct tape.

The operation was completed in a minute.

When the field commander at the steering wheel looked at his watch, it was 05:00
GMT
and 17:00 local time. He made the phone call as he drove.

Ten time zones away in Durban, a similar scene played itself out, but in better weather. The sun had risen to a clear winter's day when the men and women of the Third Force executed their orders. This time they needed no women to complete their subterfuge. The uniforms they wore ensured that no one would question them or oppose them.

At the entrance to the KwaMashu Aids Clinic outside Durban, two men in the heavy riot gear of the South African Police Services stood waiting for the white Mercedes they knew would arrive dead on time. Their white
BMW
330i had police markings on its sides and a blue light on its roof. They carried their automatic rifles with casual but professional ease; their trigger fingers were extended on the trigger guards. To the onlookers' eyes there was nothing unusual in the scene. Heavily armed police patrol every corner of the townships at night to engage equally heavily armed robbers and drug lords. The antiretroviral medication that arrived daily by the truckload was an attractive target for drug dealers. It could be smoked with dagga, and enhanced its kick, they claimed.

The patients outside the clinic watched passively, used to police and robberies at their clinic. They watched as the Mercedes arrived and the taller of the armed policemen stepped over to the driver's window. He spoke softly but firmly to Liesl Weber in Afrikaans. ‘Get in the car, madam. We need to speak to you.' He gestured with his automatic.

‘Kill the motor and bring your handbag with you,' he said when she made to get out of the Mercedes without it.

‘What's going on?' she demanded. ‘I'm not going anywhere with you.'

‘You have no choice, madam. Now get in the car or we'll carry you to it.'

Liesl Weber nodded slowly and looked at the line of patients outside the main door of the clinic. Her car was still in drive and she slowly and deliberately unclipped her seat belt before she leaned over to lift her handbag from the passenger seat. She caught everyone by surprise when she stepped out of the car and slammed the door behind her. The Mercedes quickly picked up speed and veered towards the front door of the clinic. In their haste to get out of the way, several of the elderly patients fell over in the dust. The car slammed into the glass doors of the clinic and ploughed its way through several pieces of furniture before it crashed into the far wall. The airbags opened and filled the front of the car.

The operatives had been trained to ignore such distractions, and the man nearest to Liesl Weber grabbed her by her shoulder with a gloved hand and turned her around. He whipped the rifle around her and, with one hand on the barrel and the other on the stock, pulled it sharply into her ribcage. He picked her up and shook her as a hunting dog might shake a rabbit in its jaws. She went limp. He lifted her off her feet and carried her lifeless figure, now folded double over the rifle, to the car. He threw her in headfirst. She landed in the footwell in front of the back seats.

By the time the patients had regained their composure, Liesl Weber was restrained in the back seat of the
BM
with a balaclava pulled low over her face and duct tape covering her mouth. The patients watched in silence. This was a most unusual arrest, some of them might have thought. The police are usually not that rough with white people, especially women, and especially white policemen. No one intervened. What could they do? In their township they had seen much worse from the police during the eighties, when large numbers of protesters and innocent bystanders alike had been shot by the combatants.

‘You're not going to give us any trouble, are you?' the driver of the
BM
asked over his shoulder when he reached the gate.

None of the patients thought of phoning the police. They stood and waited, wondering whether they would have to return later in the week, incurring the expense of another taxi ride for the
ARVS
that kept the virus in their blood at bay.

They might have wondered how the virus had made its way to them in the first place.

The field commander looked at his watch when the
BMW
left the clinic grounds: 05:00
GMT
; 07:00 local time. He made the phone call.

The operation had been successful, carried out with military precision. But then, they were of military persuasion and that is what the military do. They execute the orders they are given.

In the lounge which served as his Ops Centre, the major lit a cigar to celebrate. He held a mug of coffee and looked out over the wa-terhole from the veranda of the game lodge, an hour's drive north of Phalaborwa. From where he stood, he could see the fence of the Kruger National Park. He could hear a pride of lion feed on the night's kill.

He stood very still in the early morning breeze. Since the general had broken his hip and had been confined to a wheelchair, the major had taken over the day-to-day operations of their movement. But the major knew that he would have to report to the general soon. The general might be old and confined to his wheelchair, but he remained the spiritual force behind their movement.

It was time to launch the next operation of the Third Force.

The general had chosen the name: Operation Samson. ‘It's time to bring the house down,' he had said the night before. ‘And this time you are in charge of the operation, from beginning to end.'

Yet the major had lain awake most of the night, wondering whether he was being asked to bring the house down on the Third Force itself after their successes of the past sixty years. He thought of the virus which was killing in droves as he lay in his bed. That had been their most successful operation thus far, along with the misinformation they continued to spread about it. They were still managing to undermine the efforts of those trying to effect a cure, or even a delay of its most debilitating effects.

But now they needed something more spectacular. The country had become too secure, too prominent, too cocky. It was time to bring the house down, just as the general had said.

The major turned his ear to the crunching of bones at the lion kill and smiled. He knew the general would be pleased. The first phase of an operation that had been in preparation for months had been completed without a hitch.

It had been a good day for Pierre de Villiers.

Until the phone rang.

Auckland 2009 did not look like Auckland 2008. Not at all. The National Party had won the elections the previous November, as predicted by the polls, and John Key was the new prime minister. Helen Clark was all but forgotten and the man she had once called insipid was now at the helm of Labour. Labour's sins while in power were being exposed one after the other, often by Labourites who were not only dissatisfied with the new order, but also with the new regime within their party. Failure to manage the economy, proliferating and overlapping government agencies staffed by party apparatchiks,
MPS
living high on the hog while admonishing their constituents to tighten their belts, some even renting porn videos for the public account while on government business.

Pierre de Villiers 2009 was also not the Pierre de Villiers of 2008. Not at all. His cancer had been cured, as far as cancer can ever be completely cured, by the combination of the surgery in Auckland and the radiation therapy in Durban. The last blood test had failed to detect any
PSA
– prostatic specific antigen. All he now needed was treatment for the side effects of treatment he wouldn't have required if the original treatment – the surgery – had been carried out competently. But the fact that there was no detectable
PSA
did not mean that the cancer had been defeated.

The successful resolution of the prime minister's case and the arrest and conviction of the Urewera plotters had resulted in De Villiers's rapid promotion to Detective Inspector. He now headed the International Crimes Unit where – after working there for nearly ten years – he had previously felt unwanted and an outsider. But after tracing the Bushman arrow which had been used in the attempted assassination – that's how the papers still referred to it – of the prime minister and connecting it to a man in Auckland, the very man engaged in training the Tuhoe tribe for an uprising, De Villiers had become the golden boy of the New Zealand Police and had been promoted to his current rank. In the process, he had leapfrogged several colleagues who now worked, without any grudge, under his command. De Villiers commanded with a light hand, preferring to let his men and women use their own judgment, to follow their instincts. What use was a team of twelve if only one did the thinking? He was content to leave the footslogging and stalking to them too, directing operations from his desk. His days of running after criminals were all but over; the side effects of his treatment made it difficult in any event.

Yet, on this occasion, De Villiers was in the field, watching a house on the golf estate in Beachlands, east of metropolitan Auckland. It was not the kind of place one would expect a long-haired and tattooed gangster riding a Harley-Davidson to live, but there he was on the sixteenth green, taking his time over a three-foot putt. The New Zealand market for the product of the local criminals was too small to generate the kind of profits necessary to sustain the lifestyle the biker enjoyed. The other three members of the foursome, now watching in silence as the biker lined up the putt, gave the game away. De Villiers knew their details, courtesy of the Immigration Service. They were Chinese who had arrived from Hong Kong via Mexico. That meant drugs, and that meant international trafficking and money laundering. Work for the International Crimes Unit which ended on De Villiers's desk.

When he had seen enough, De Villiers started his unmarked Holden and drove home. It was too late to drive all the way back to his office only to have to drive home again when he arrived, so he went home early. The rain arrived before he did, a sudden downpour. Auckland weather: clear one moment, foul the next.

He found his wife in the kitchen. She had her back to him and was busy stacking plates in the dishwasher.

‘Where is Zoë?' he asked and hugged her from behind.

‘Hello,' Emma said. ‘And I love you too.'

He pushed his hands into the front of her jeans. ‘Hello,' he said. ‘Where is Zoë?'

Her breathing quickened. ‘It's Monday and they stay late at school on Mondays and don't pretend that you don't know that.'

Kiwi kids are bred tough and play their sport in all weather. Zoë would come home soaked but happy, they knew.

‘Let's make love,' he said.

‘What, here?' she teased. ‘In front of the dishwasher?'

He led her upstairs. Outside, the rain pelted down on the pressed aluminium roof tiles and gushed out of the downpipes into the drains. The passing cars threw up sheets of spray. Scholars walked past the house, bent over into the wind, hugging their bags in front of them to protect their books. Upstairs, above their heads, De Villiers and his wife made love.

Sex on a weekday afternoon. It lifts the gloom.

They lay close together, all arms and legs.

‘I have to go back to South Africa for a check-up,' he said. De Villiers wondered whether he should tell her that the incontinence the oncologist had predicted would arrive in eleven months had already started. Perhaps she noticed his more frequent visits to the bathroom, or that he stayed there longer.

Emma stirred against his chest. ‘As long as you don't stay there for three months, like you did last year.'

She stroked the wound where the surgeon had cut De Villiers. De Villiers suspected – no, he knew – that she had been more gentle in their lovemaking since the surgery, as if afraid of his fragility. She and Zoë treated him as if he were sick, and there was no way he could prove to them that he was still the man he had always been before his cancer.

The radiation therapy a year earlier had taken nearly seven weeks, but on that occasion De Villiers also had a major investigation to complete, and a personal mission. In the three months he had spent in South Africa, he had finally put together the links that ultimately solved the prime minister's case, but his personal mission was still incomplete. He waited for the opportunity that would provide closure. Last year, he had torn up his South African passport, more in anger than premeditation, but he had known in the back of his mind even then that he would have to return.

And then there was the bleeding the oncologist had warned him about. It started dead on time, eleven months after the completion of the radiation therapy.

But he didn't tell Emma that. Better that she didn't know. Instead he said, ‘No, this time I want you and Zoë to come with me. We can have a proper holiday and you can meet my family.'

Emma lay still. He could feel the flutter of her eyelashes against his chest. It tickled and he shifted slightly. ‘Come on, let's have a decent holiday for a change. I don't know how often we will be able to go back there and do that.'

‘My father's not well,' Emma said. ‘I would rather go home and spend some time with him now, before it's too late.'

De Villiers noted that, after twenty years away, Emma still spoke of Indonesia as home. He spoke of South Africa as home only in unguarded moments.

‘Why don't you and Zoë go?' Emma suggested. ‘You can show her to your family and take her to the game parks and show her all those animals you always talk about.'