The Soldier who Said No (3 page)

‘I don’t think it is feasible. You’ll never be allowed to become independent. You’ll never get international recognition. Believe me, we’ve been through all of that. It can’t be made to work. We tried to give territorial independence to our own tribes. It didn’t work.’

The elder had then spoken in the tones of a schoolmaster. ‘Perhaps we haven’t made our position clear. We don’t intend to confront the Crown and we won’t be seeking an independence which will be recognised internationally. We want the right to live on our ancestral lands according to our customs. We want to run our own villages, our own schools and our own police. We don’t want the curses brought to us by the Pakeha who came here and took our land and gave us alcohol, tobacco, drugs. We want to run our lands our way and we want to keep those things out. We want nothing from the Crown except that it should leave us alone.’

‘Like the Amish in America,’ the commander had offered.

‘No, more like the Afrikaners of Orania,’ the junior intermediary had countered with a smile. ‘We want our own flag, our own language and our own place.’

When the commander didn’t respond, the junior intermediary had continued. ‘We need to empower our people. We are not pump attendants and waiters and lorry drivers. We don’t collect rubbish. We are not on welfare or drug addicts living in State housing. We need a place where we can teach our people to be who and what we are.

‘The forest they have taken from us is such a place. We can start afresh there. It is our sacred place.’

‘But why?’ the commander had asked. ‘Life is good here, isn’t it?’

The two intermediaries explained the history in some detail. The Tuhoe never signed the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 when the other tribes surrendered their sovereignty, nor had they been part of the wars that preceded the Treaty. They had seen white faces for the first time when an expeditionary force landed at Opotiki in 1865. As punishment for the killing of a missionary, the Crown had confiscated the Maori lands, including the lands of the Tuhoe, who had not taken part in the uprising.

The tribe was now dispersed across the North Island, where most of its members were employed in menial jobs, if employed at all. But underneath the construction worker’s cap, in the gaze of the man mowing the municipality’s lawn, in the slant of the shoulders of the woman at the hairdresser, there lies not only a deep resentment, but also a dream that one day their land will be restored and the tribe will return to it.

‘And that’s why we are here. We want our land back,’ the junior had concluded.

The deal they had struck was simple. In exchange for a small patch of land in the Ureweras, the commander would set up and run a covert programme for Tuhoe youth to train them in the use of small arms and in the tactics of urban policing and guerrilla warfare. The trained men were to become the core of the Tuhoe security forces once territorial independence had been achieved. In exchange, the Tuhoe would allow the instructors to set up their own school in the Ureweras. The methods of instruction would be devised by the commander and his people.

‘Maybe we can be neighbours,’ the commander had said. ‘We will train as many men as you want, settle next to you with our families.’

‘We will consider your request with favour,’ the elder had promised. ‘But in the meantime, we want a demonstration of your ability and good faith,’ he had added. ‘We want you to shoot the Prime Minister.’

The commander had laughed. ‘She’s an easy target,’ he had said. ‘A silenced pistol or a crossbow could easily do it. Even a knife, the way she walks around in public.’

‘No, no,’ the elder had said. ‘We don’t want you to kill her. All we want is to show that we could, if we wanted to. Then they’ll take us seriously. We are not terrorists.’

The commander had taken his time to consider the proposition. ‘I think I have just the weapon,’ he had said, ‘and the man to use it. And it will never be traced back to you.’

After another long pause, the commander had spoken again. ‘If it’s all right with you, I’d like to get the training programme off the ground first. We can take care of the Prime Minister later.’

The agreement had not been struck at the first meeting, nor was it entered into without debating the details of the project with those with the qualifications and skills to conduct the training. And the commander had to caution his instructors that, while the Tuhoe might have a defence to a treason charge, no such defence would be available to them, all immigrants who had sworn allegiance to the very Crown which had incarcerated their great-grandmothers in the world’s first concentration camps.

The arrow left the string without a sound, no feathers required to steady its flight. Designed for stealth and subtlety, rather than cutting through blood vessels and muscle, this was no ordinary arrow. It could not kill over long distances. Its reach could never be more than twenty or thirty paces.

The day was still young. The morning rush hour was over, but most office workers would still be nursing their first coffee from their office canteen.

She was unaware of the man at the gate and equally unaware of the arrow quietly cleaving the air in its path across her front garden towards her. She was pacing up and down on the veranda of her Auckland house, lost in thought. It had not been a good year for her party.

After her customary early-morning walk through the surrounding suburbs, her mind was as clear as a bell. It was time to get to work. It was the combination of disasters which had befallen the Labour Party which concerned the Prime Minister the most. She had been quite adept at dealing with individual setbacks throughout her political career – that was part of politics – but now she faced a whole raft of them, and this at the beginning of an election year. She worried about what the history books would say about her tenure if she were to lose the next election. She still had so many projects to complete, so much unfinished business.

The Labour Party had slipped behind the National Party in the polls, in each of the three that mattered: in the poll of New Zealand’s largest daily, the
Herald
; in the poll of
TV
One, the State-owned broadcaster; and in the poll of
TV
3, the independent television station. But there was even worse news in the other poll. She had also fallen well behind in the contest for the preferred Prime Minister.

When she had started contemplating the reasons for the reversed polls, the arrow was still concealed from view in a small tube hidden in the backpack of the man at the gate. The arrow consisted of a shaft of ultra-light reed and a head carved from the hard mid-section of a giraffe’s thigh bone. The arrowhead and main shaft were joined by an intermediate part, a short foreshaft of heavier wood. Each part of the arrow looked innocuous on its own. Together they formed a deadly combination.

What made the arrow distinctive was not its construction or its lack of fletching, but the organic poison coating the shaft of the arrowhead. A length of very fine sinew had been wound around the shaft and coated with a sticky poison. The secret recipe was more than a thousand years old. The poison consisted of a binding agent and at least three different poisons, which had been carefully mixed. The base ingredient was the scraped root of a plant, the Bushman Poison Bush,
Acokanthera venenata.
The juice extracted from the larva of a rare beetle,
Diamphidia,
was the second indispensable ingredient and the poison of certain snakes – puffadder or cobra – completed the mixture. Thus plant, insect and reptile joined in a deadly mix. The arrow was merely the mode of delivery; it was too light and flimsy to kill on its own.

The final product acted on the prey in different ways. It was a haemolytic, attacking the red blood corpuscles by rupturing their cell membranes. It also had a neuromuscular function that caused paralysis.

But in this arrow, the poison had long lost its potency. Its power to kill had been eroded as the proteins broke down over time.

Minutes earlier the Prime Minister had ticked off the reasons for her party’s misfortune one by one, extending a finger from a closed fist at each count. Her Minister of Finance, Michael Cullen, who once could do no wrong, was now being described as
loopy
after an outburst in Parliament over an imagined slight.
Rich prick
, he had called John Key, the very man the voting public now preferred as Prime Minister, and
scumbag
. That’s one finger accounted for, but a finger should also be allocated to the pollsters, she thought. She extended a third digit for Trevor Mallard, once the darling of the Labour Party, but now demoted from the front benches after punching another
MP
, in the foyer of Parliament of all places, when the latter had made an offensive remark about Mallard’s partner. What was of concern was that New Zealand men had applauded Mallard’s reaction, his Zidanesque instant retaliation on a man-to-man basis, something men understood.

The man at the gate quickly assembled his bow, three pieces fitting together as a combination bow no longer than ninety centimetres. The string was a piece of wound fishing line. He stood astride the bicycle, waiting for the right moment, for the Prime Minister to turn at the end of her veranda so that he would have a clear shot.

He watched as the Prime Minister extended a fourth finger for the number of kiwis departing permanently for Australia, seven hundred to a thousand every month, their well-publicised flight causing even more to leave and a greater stress on the recruitment of suitably qualified immigrants to fill the vacant posts and do the hard work.

She raised another finger, a second yellow card for Trevor Mallard. He had mauled and insulted a number of civil servants and had refused to apologise, even after it had been pointed out that he had the facts wrong.

The Prime Minister had her left hand up, with all the fingers extended, while the arrow was being positioned on the string. The archer held the bow loosely across the handlebars. To the curious onlooker, if there had been any, it would have looked like a short stick. The eye sees what it wants to see. Who would expect a bow and arrow at the Prime Minister’s gate?

The archer released the arrow and watched its flight.

Who else has let me down? the Prime Minister asked herself and stopped, a move not anticipated by the archer. The arrow narrowed the gap, slowly turning on its axis. It entered the folds of the Prime Minister’s anorak an inch or two behind the soft flesh of her neck below the ear. The archer left the gate in a hurry, merging into the traffic as just another man on a bicycle, his cycle helmet pulled down low over his face, his eyes hidden behind reflective sunglasses.

It was at this point, as she was about to turn around again, that the Prime Minister saw her shadow against her front door, an odd appendage to her anorak. When she pulled on the shaft, it came away in her hand, the arrowhead stuck in the polyester fabric. She took the garment off and gingerly extracted the arrow. It was while she was testing the sharpness of the finely carved point on her finger that the thought crossed her mind that someone might have tried to kill her, but when she looked around for the culprit, the archer had disappeared.

She went inside and called her Chief of Security at the Diplomatic Protection Unit a few houses away.

The archer was by now a few kilometres down the road, pedalling furiously. It didn’t matter that the arrow had missed its target. He had kept his side of the bargain.

The Prime Minister’s mood soured further as she waited for her Chief of Security to arrive. The country was in a downward spiral of despair after the national sports teams had failed so badly on the public stages of international competition. Team New Zealand had lost in the finals of the America’s Cup, its best sailors having deserted to foreign money. And then there had been that terrible day, that indescribably awful day at Cardiff Arms when she had been forced to watch the All Blacks being humiliated and beaten by an inferior French team whose members played their rugby with the passionate abandon of Legionnaires. The thought crossed her mind that the All Blacks’ early departure from the Rugby World Cup might be an ominous portent. Hadn’t her party swept into power on the back of the public dismay after the 1999 World Cup when the All Blacks had succumbed to France in the semifinals?

And now this arrow – she turned it over and over in her hand – how was she going to explain this arrow to the public? Some may even think it’s a publicity stunt, a cheap shot to regain the voters’ sympathy, to climb back to the top of the polls.

She sighed deeply as she listened to the approaching sirens and hard-revving engines. Damn, she thought, I should have told them to come quietly.

De Villiers crossed at the intersection above the Civic Administration Building. He descended gingerly down the spiral path towards Aotea Square. Hundreds of shoppers were sauntering between the numerous fleamarket stalls in the square. De Villiers skirted the crowd, making his way down the covered walkway behind the Metro Cinemas to Wellesley and from there to Queen Street. He waited in front of the entrance to the Civic Theatre for the light to change. The bar across the street claimed that it had a hundred kinds of beer in stock.

Auckland had become a wealth of immigrants. The corners of the intersection were occupied by people from all of Asia, Polynesia and the Caucasus waiting for the light to change so they could cross. When it did, white and brown and many shades between crossed the intersection, every man and woman a ship on its own voyage, many on the diagonal. The city had changed considerably since De Villiers had arrived nearly a decade earlier. In the centre of the city the Europeans were now outnumbered by the Chinese, the Japanese and Koreans and Indians and, of course, the Samoans, Tongans and Fijians, who in turn outnumbered the indigenous Maori three to one. In the ten-minute walk to the Ferry Building from his office – his former office – De Villiers could easily encounter, and regularly did, as many as ten different languages. English would be heard, spoken with various accents, American, Canadian, shades of the English Second Language taught in the ubiquitous language schools, punctuated now and then by the guttural English of an Afrikaner from Pretoria. Then, if one were to listen in on the conversations of pedestrians passing by, one would also be able to list Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, at least three Pacific Island languages, a smattering of Maori, and Afrikaans, and all of that without counting the tourists.