The Soldier who Said No (36 page)

The significance of the name on the screen coupled with !Xau’s existence might have emboldened De Villiers and Liesl, but Weber poured cold water on their hope. ‘They’ll pooh-pooh this too,’ he said. ‘It’s a significant piece of evidence for Pierre’s peace of mind, but it doesn’t prove that he’s ever been there on a secret mission, as he claims,’ he told Liesl. ‘There has to be more, something which is compatible only with the truth of his version.

‘What was the most secret part of your operation?’ he asked De Villiers. ‘What was the most unique aspect of the operation?’

‘Trying to shoot Mugabe,’ De Villiers ventured.

‘No,’ Liesl said, ‘that can’t be. You said that there had been at least three prior attempts and there must have been many since, the way he has made a mess of his country.’

‘And what a blessing it would have been to the people of Zimbabwe if any one of them had been successful.’ Johann Weber blew smoke rings towards Liesl and she pulled a face. ‘No, we need something unique to that operation,’ Weber said as he returned to the subject at hand.

‘What about !Xau, wasn’t that unique? The Recce’s making use of a Bushman tracker?’ Liesl suggested.

‘No, we used them all the time.’

‘The distance of the shot must be unique, one thousand four hundred and sixty-eight metres.’ Johann Weber said. ‘Surely.’

It was De Villiers’s turn to play devil’s advocate. ‘But they will say it never happened, so it’s of no use to us.’

‘Oh you men!’ Liesl exclaimed. ‘It’s right in front of your eyes.’

The two men looked at each other. Liesl waved away the cigar smoke in front of her. ‘It’s got to be the weapon. What other weapon could ever be accurate at that distance?’

‘Seach Wikipedia,’ Weber directed. ‘Look for sniper rifles.’

Wikipedia listed the details of a large number of sniper rifles, by name, country of origin, calibre, action, year of first manufacture and a host of other details. They found what they were looking for under
Denel NTW 14.5
with the South African flag in the country of origin column.

Weight 29 kg
Length 2.015 mm
Bolt action
3-round detachable magazine
Magazine protrudes from the left side of the receiver
Disassembled, carried in two backpacks of 15kg each
Cartridge 14.5×114 mm Russian
Interchangeable barrels
Range 2300 metres
Year of manufacture mid-1990s

‘It fits,’ De Villiers said. ‘The one we had in 1985 was the first prototype
ARMSCOR
had made from the original. They would have started manufacturing their own. We still had sanctions, so they could only bring them out into the open after 1994 and by then Denel had taken over from
ARMSCOR
. The one Verster and I had was the first copy. It really does fit.’

‘So we have three significant pieces of circumstantial evidence. !Xau, the name of the town and the details of the rifle. That should be enough,’ Liesl said.

‘We have four pieces,’ Johann Weber said. ‘We also have Pierre’s memory. That’s the most significant piece of evidence in all of this. And it’s all the more valuable because he’s given the same version of events from the beginning, in the face of torture and mind-altering drugs and procedures.

‘You’re computer literate,’ Weber said to De Villiers. ‘I’m a little surprised that you haven’t found this out yourself.’

Liesl Weber leaned across her husband and moved the ashtray closer to him. ‘Johann, work it out for yourself.’

‘What do you mean?’ Weber asked, but she ignored him and walked out of his study.

‘I’m going to bed.’

‘Women,’ Weber said, shaking his head.

De Villiers came to her defence. ‘She means I’ve been too afraid to look. All these years I’ve been too afraid.’

De Villiers drove up to Pretoria with Marissa.

She was waiting in the front reception room and came out when she heard the Porsche. As promised, she only had a small weekend bag and it fitted into the small boot space in the front. De Villiers’s canvas bag filled the whole of the back seat, large enough to fit only two small children at best. The temperature was in the mid-twenties and they started with the top down. Halfway to Pietermaritzburg the vegetation turned from green to various shades of khaki and brown. De Villiers stopped under an overpass and pressed the button to bring the top back up.

‘So much for having fun driving a Porsche,’ he said.

Weber had
REM
in the glove box and Marissa put some music on.

At the top of Town Hill Marissa interrupted ‘Everybody Hurts’. ‘If we take the old road we won’t have the noise and fumes of the trucks and the heavy traffic. We’ll have to go slower and we can take the top down again. That would be fun.’

De Villiers looked sideways at Marissa. That was a lot of argument, he thought. ‘And we won’t have to pay the tolls at all the toll plazas,’ Marissa added, rounding off the argument.

De Villiers could see other advantages. There were closed circuit television cameras at all the toll booths. And the traffic police patrolled the main route. The chances of the Porsche being traced to and from the operation he had planned for Loftus increased if he took the main road and diminished to almost zero if they were to take the lesser roads.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s a really good idea.’

‘We can leave the highway at Midmar Dam and take the Midlands Meander route from there,’ Marissa pointed out.

Once the decision had been made and the ops site chosen, the strategic planning had been uneventful. De Villiers had found himself in familiar territory, in his element, and strangely calm and content, despite the risks. The final details of the operation could only be determined once he had completed the infiltration and had the killers in the sights. That he knew from his training and experience. But in broad outline his plans were made well in advance.

After he had learnt that Sibusiso Stars were to play at Loftus, it had been easy to bluff his way into the corporate suite owned by Sibisi’s company.

‘Good morning, Madam, my name is Dawie Botha and I’m a journalist at
SA Rugby
. My boss wants me to do an interview with Mr Sibisi at Loftus this weekend,’ he had begun the conversation with Sibisi’s assistant.

The girl had laughed. ‘Mr Sibisi is not interested in rugby,’ the young voice had said. An exile, probably, De Villiers had thought. She sounded English.

‘No, no, no,’ he had backtracked quickly. ‘I know that. But that is why I want to do an interview. I want to give Mr Sibisi the opportunity to tell the rugby public how it feels to own a corporate suite at Loftus and watch his team play football when, during the apartheid years, he was a cleaner and an ice cream vendor there.’

The PA had chuckled. ‘I think he might like that. Yes,’ she had said, ‘I think he might just like that.’ After a pause during which De Villiers could hear the pages of a book being turned, she had spoken again. ‘Give me your cellphone number and I’ll come back to you.’

When she later phoned De Villiers on his new cellphone, she told him that if the interview could be conducted during the game on Saturday, there would be a photo opportunity and Mr Sibisi would be prepared to give De Villiers fifteen minutes during the half-time break for his interview. ‘He’s a very busy man, you know,’ she had added. ‘Are you bringing your own photographer or should we arrange for one?’ she asked.

‘I’ll bring my own camera,’ De Villiers hastily improvised. ‘I work alone.’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘What’s your name again?’

‘Danie Botha,’ he said.

‘Spell that please. I know the Botha bit, but not the first name.’

De Villiers decided to stick to Danie.

‘You can pick up the pass at the security office behind the main stand.’

De Villiers thanked her and finalised his plans.

He would have to buy his own ticket to get into the grounds, but a visitor’s pass for the corporate suites would be waiting for him at the stadium. He had the equipment needed for the operation. In his mind he ticked it off one by one: wrap-around sunglasses, untraceable cellphone, journalist’s notebook, the spokes concealed in the wire-bound spine of the notebook, and his Olympus
SP
-55 digital camera with image stabilisation and eighteen times optical zoom.

They took the Midmar turn-off and stopped to take the roof down again. De Villiers glanced at himself in the rear-view mirror. With the beard he had been cultivating for the last eight weeks and the sunglasses, he hardly recognised himself. It had been easier to make the arrangements than he had anticipated.

They headed into a sun dropping towards the horizon, travelling much slower now along the winding roads that used to be the main road between the Reef and Durban, through small towns, now in deep decay with abandoned houses in varying degrees of dilapidation and potholed streets no one cared to repair. The roadside near the towns was strewn with litter. Plastic bags clung to fences and shrubs. Further away from the towns the degree of littering decreased, but the landscape was bleak. In mid-winter, there were no crops on the lands. The sky was a hazy grey rather than blue, and the earth brown and covered in khaki vegetation burnt black in large patches. The evergreens were covered in brown dust.

He decided that it was time for Marissa to get used to driving the car.

The gearbox objected a few times, but she quickly got the hang of it. She had to be reminded that there were an extra two gears to use, fifth and sixth, but De Villiers was soon sufficiently at ease to pull his cap over his eyes and drift off to sleep. The small towns of the Midlands came and went – Mooi River, Estcourt, Colenso, Ladysmith – all with the blue of the Drakensberg dominating the western horizon. This is the Africa I used to love, De Villiers said to himself. Africa is like the Hotel California, you can check out but you can never leave.

They were trapped in the late afternoon traffic at the Gillooly’s Interchange. The road to the airport had four lanes, two moving at a snail’s pace and the far right lane at a hundred and forty or more. The only drivers keen to overtake the Porsche were the minibus taxi drivers.

Marissa’s grandmother had a small unit in a retirement home near Menlo Park High School. De Villiers had to have tea and cake before he was allowed to leave. He stopped at the cemetery before he drove to his mother’s three-roomed unit in the frail-care centre near the cemetery. The evening with his mother passed uneventfully. They talked about De Villiers’s childhood and his father. His mother’s memory was as clear as a bell about those events, but when the talk shifted to more recent events, she became confused. She called him by his brother’s name and asked him why he hadn’t been to visit more regularly.

De Villiers slept on the couch in the lounge. He had to leave Pretoria at 05:30 to be at the Porsche Centre in Randburg by eight. The Porsche had been booked for a big service and it took time, but the time passed quickly. De Villiers was engrossed in his plans for Loftus, and even his cancer and the uncertain future he faced as a result could not penetrate his conscious thoughts.

On the way to the stadium, De Villiers phoned Marissa and arranged to fetch her at noon the next day. He left the car in the parking lot of a shopping centre and walked to the stadium. The street was crowded with spectators rushing to the gates. He ran his fingers over the sharpened spokes in the spine of his notebook. All six were accounted for. Security stopped him at the gate and insisted on phoning through to the suite before they let him in. They even detailed a guard to escort him to the entrance to the corporate lounges. ‘You will find Mr Sibisi’s box on the left, Sir, the seventh door, near the halfway line. You can’t miss it.’ De Villiers made a mental note to leave via one of the other gates.

Once inside the stadium, he moved the spokes to his top pocket.

One of the killers opened the door to the corporate suite. It was a face De Villiers could never forget, the face of the man who had held the
AK
47 against his head and had shot Annelise.

The killer escorted De Villiers to a man standing with his back to the game. It was Sibusiso Sibisi. He was holding a champagne glass and was talking to another man in a suit. ‘Welcome, Mr Botha,’ he said when De Villiers introduced himself. Sibisi pointed at the camera. ‘There will be an opportunity to take more formal photographs later, but in the meantime feel free to do what you journalists do, sniff around and take pictures. And the drinks are on me!’ He pointed towards the bar with his glass and laughed at his own joke.

There were about two dozen people in the seats immediately in front of the hospitality area of the suite. De Villiers found a seat in the back row, a good position from which to study the crowd and plan his next move. He took photographs of the pitch. There were faint marks where the lines for the previous week’s rugby match had been. He pretended to study the spectators in the packed stands and made notes. Under the pretext of taking photographs, he evaluated the potential escape routes, taking in the finest details of the exits from the stands and creating a mental map for his exfiltration. When he was certain that he knew the layout of the stadium, he turned the camera on the killers and zoomed in on them. He took his time to study them one by one, the zoom, extended to maximum focal length, etching their faces on his memory forever. They smiled when he asked them if he could take their photo. De Villiers squeezed the camera’s shutter carefully, as he had been taught to do with the trigger of his sniper’s rifle, and was pleased to note that his finger was still steady, the shutter closing exactly between heartbeats.

Click. Click. Click. One after the other.

He settled down in his seat when the game started and took his time before he lured the first of the killers into the men’s cloakroom.

He tapped on the killer’s shoulder. ‘Would you mind showing me where the toilets are?’ he asked.

‘No problem,’ the man said. ‘I have to go myself.’

It was still well before half-time and the cloakroom was deserted. De Villiers slipped one of the spokes into his hand.