Dictator (6 page)

‘I knew Miss Zalika too, when she was just a little baby girl. When the war ended, before he started his own businesses, Mr Klerk got me a job as a game warden on the Stratten Reserve. I was only there for three years, but I remember Miss Zalika being born. We were all given the day off and plenty of beer to drink!’ Justus laughed at the memory. ‘Sometimes Mrs Stratten took her children for picnics and one of us drove them out on to the reserve and watched over them in case any lions or other dangerous animals came, but they never did. Those were good days. No more war, everyone with so much hope for the future …’

His voice trailed away, and for a while the only noise came from the VW as it lurched and rattled along the potholed track. Justus looked around, then nodded as he spotted a familiar landmark. ‘Just thirty minutes and we will be in Chitongo.’

‘Has Morrison briefed you on the plan of action for tonight?’ Carver asked.

‘Of course. The captain is a very thorough man. He always told us about the importance of proper preparations. He does not like to leave anything to chance.’

Five minutes’ worth of intensive questioning proved that Justus was right. Morrison might have his problems, to put it mildly, but he still retained the organizational skills that had made him a company commander whose men trusted him to lead them into action and out the other side. Meanwhile, Justus was evidently the kind of reliable, level-headed fighting man who made any officer’s life a lot simpler. That didn’t make tonight’s mission any less difficult, but at least it tilted the chances of success marginally in their favour.

Once he had satisfied himself that he was in good hands, Carver leaned back in his chair and looked around. Hanging from the rearview mirror were a string of beads, a St Christopher medal and a photograph of a laughing woman with her arms round two small children, a boy and a girl, both in their neat white school shirts.

‘Your family?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Justus, the warmth of his smile conveying the love, pride and happiness he felt. ‘That is my wife Nyasha, who has blessed me with her affection for twelve years now, and my son Canaan – he is eight – and my daughter Farayi, who is six.’

‘They look like great kids. You’re a lucky man.’

‘Yes, I am very, very lucky. Do you have a family, Mr Carver?’

‘No, not yet.’

‘So you have never found the right woman to take as your wife?’

Carver grimaced. ‘A couple of times I thought I had. Never quite worked out.’

‘That is sad,’ said Justus, shaking his head. ‘To have a good woman who gives him strong, healthy children is the greatest satisfaction a man can have. You know, sometimes when I am tired from working too long, or the jobs I must undertake do not please me, I ask myself, “Why do I do this?” Then I look at that picture and I know. I do it for them.’

‘So where do you live?’

‘I have a small farm, about twenty miles from Buweku. The country there is very beautiful: rolling hills, so green that my cattle grow as fat as hippos, and with earth so rich that all you have to do is throw seed upon the ground and any crop will grow. I am building a house there. Soon it will be finished. Then I will go to my wife and say, “I have given you many rooms. Now you give me more children to fill them all!” ’

Carver laughed along with Justus, admiring but also envying the straightforward convictions by which he seemed to lead his life. Carver would probably earn more from this one night’s work than Justus could hope to make in his entire life. But that didn’t make him richer in the things that really mattered.

He brushed the thought from his mind as if swatting an irritating fly. He had more immediate problems to worry about than his lack of women or kids.

Justus, too, was getting back to business. He pulled the car up by the side of the road and said, ‘We are getting close to Chitongo and it is most important that no one sees you arrive.’ He turned in his seat and looked towards the rear of the vehicle. ‘Please lie on the floor at the back, Mr Carver. I have provided a blanket to cover you.’

‘OK.’

A minute later they were on the move again, Samuel Carver huddling under an ancient tartan picnic blanket as he was driven into battle.

12

Zalika Stratten had long since lost track of where she was. She thought she’d heard voices a couple of days ago talking in Portuguese. That suggested she might be somewhere in Mozambique. Beyond that, though, this was just another bare mattress shoved into the corner of another room, with another uncovered bucket to squat over. The windows were boarded over and the door in the centre of the wall opposite her mattress was locked, with a guard permanently stationed outside. There was no bulb at the end of the wire that hung from the ceiling. The only light came from the cracks between the planks nailed to the window frame.

Zalika’s feet were chained together, just far enough apart that she could shuffle across her room, but too close to allow her to walk properly, let alone run. Her jeans and shoes had been taken away and all she had to wear now were the T-shirt and underwear she’d been wearing when she was captured.

They gave her two meals a day, feeding her on a basic diet of maize-meal porridge, with an occasional treat of salty, bony fried fish, or a meat stew that consisted of a couple of lumps of indeterminate gristle adrift in a plateful of grease. From time to time she’d be handed a small plastic basin filled with cold water and a bar of gritty pale-grey soap with which to wash herself. She did her best but her hair was matted and greasy, there were black rings of dirt beneath her fingernails and she was permanently damp and prickly with sweat.

Just as airline passengers getting off a long-distance flight have no idea how disgusting the air onboard smells to ground-crew getting on, so Zalika’s senses had long since become accustomed to the rank odours of sweat, urine, excrement and stale food that hung in the airless atmosphere of her solitary cell.

Yet Mabeki himself seemed not to care about her plight. She barely recognized her brother’s smiling, impeccably mannered friend in the fierce, embittered ideologue who from time to time came into her room. He paced up and down, his voice ranging from a sinister, low-pitched calm to rabid fury while she huddled on her mattress, as defensive as a curled hedgehog, her knees pulled up to her chest and her arms wrapped round them.

This was virtually the only human contact left in Zalika Stratten’s life: her meals and bucket were delivered and removed in total silence by guards who ignored any attempt of hers to make conversation.

In the near-darkness, Mabeki was as insubstantial as a wraith. Only his words seemed real. Again and again he repeated the arguments that justified his actions, building up a portrait of her father and family, layer by layer, that flatly contradicted everything she had ever believed.

‘Richard Stratten was an oppressor, an imperialist. How can it be right for one man to have so much land, so much money, so much power when countless millions have so little? How can it be right for the white man to give the orders, while the black man can only say, “Yes, boss! No, boss!” and do his bidding?’

‘But my father was a good boss,’ she argued. ‘All our workers had running water and electric power.’

‘There is no such thing as a good boss,’ Mabeki spat back. ‘There are only the rulers and the oppressed. You talk about running water and power as though they were luxuries for which the workers should be grateful. They are basic human rights. And running water means more than a tap in every village. Power means more than a few bare lightbulbs.’

‘What about your father? Isaac did not think Dad was a bad man. He was devoted to him.’

‘Is that what you think? Then you are a fool. Your eyes have been closed all your life. Do you imagine that my father came back to our meagre hovel, with its four bare walls of breezeblock and its corrugated iron roof, and felt affection for a man who lived in mansions built on land that our ancestors ruled as kings? Do you think he was grateful when your father declared that he would pay for my education? That money was made from land stolen from its rightful owners – stolen by the white man from the black!

‘And tell me, Zalika, since your father was such a fine man: what did he do for all the workers on his farms and his game reserves who suffered from HIV? Did he get them treatment, the latest drugs? No, they were worked until the disease became so bad that they could not work any more. Then they were dismissed and left to die, while new workers were hired in their place.’

Some days Mabeki updated her on the latest development in the negotiations he was conducting from his satellite phone with the hostage rescue consultants brought in by Wendell Klerk. ‘Your uncle does not wish to spend any of his money to free you,’ he said one time. ‘You could be at his house in Cape Town right now, or in London, or on his country estate, or even sunbathing at his place in the Bahamas if he had simply paid what I asked. Do you want to know what price I put on your head?’

‘No,’ said Zalika, trying to sound as though she meant it.

‘It was five million dollars, US. That is roughly one-tenth of one per cent of Mr Klerk’s estimated personal assets. It is a fraction of what he paid to get rid of his last wife, the beauty queen, after just three years of marriage. What was she, Miss Austria?’

‘Czech Republic,’ said Zalika, before she could stop herself.

‘Thirty million he gave her to go away, or so the newspapers said. And all I want is five. Not for myself, but for my people. This money will be used to dig wells and buy tractors, medicines, solar electricity panels, schoolbooks, pencils. It will do far more good working for Africa than it ever could in Mr Klerk’s bank account, and yet … and yet, he will not pay it. He tells his people to bargain with me, to drive the price down. He threatens to walk away and leave you to your fate. I am sorry, Zalika, but he does not think you are worth saving.’

For his part, Moses Mabeki looked forward to his conversations with Zalika Stratten with keen anticipation. He derived great pleasure from seeing her humbled, stripped of all comforts, breathing the stench of her own filth. He enjoyed this daily proof of his newfound power almost as much as he had enjoyed giving the order to shoot Zalika’s brother dead; or pouring diesel fuel down a funnel into her father’s throat until it drowned him; or giving her mother to his men to do with as they pleased; or even the exultant moment when he faced his feeble, lickspittle father and took a machete to the treacherous body with which he had so willingly served the Stratten family. Hearing the pain and bafflement in Zalika’s voice when he had told her those lies about his father – that, too, had been something to relish. But what he was planning to do later this very night … well, that, he thought, he might enjoy even more.

13

They were keeping Zalika Stratten on the top floor of a two-storey building – one of the few in the village – that occupied the northeast corner of a crossing where two dirt roads intersected. In the classic fashion of a colonial African building, a ground-floor colonnade ran along the main facade and round the corner facing the road, providing shelter for passers-by. Above it on the first floor ran a covered open-air walkway, with a waist-high balustrade for the building’s occupants. The ground floor was occupied at one end by a shebeen – an illegal bar, whose clientele neither asked nor answered questions about one another’s business – and a half-empty excuse for a local store at the other. Upstairs there were three very basic apartments, all now occupied by Mabeki and his men. A stairway bisected the front of the building, connecting one walkway with the other.

Justus had installed himself in a derelict building directly across the street, having given the family who occupied it ten US dollars – almost certainly more than they could expect to earn in a month – to let him use it as an observation post.

Shortly after midnight, three hours before the operation was due to begin, Justus was scanning the target building’s facade with a pair of military-specification thermal-imaging binoculars. They reacted to temperature rather than light so that hot-spots showed up in colours that ranged from a warm red through orange and yellow to white-hot. A human body glowed white on a cold night at close range. If the line of sight was clear, visual identification of individuals was possible at ranges of a mile or more. But through the walls of the room in which Zalika was being held, people showed up as little more than vague orange blurs. That was enough, though, to allow Justus to discern Zalika’s body, lying on her mattress, just as it had enabled him to detect the man who had brought her evening meal. When, shortly afterwards, she had got up to use the bucket, he had turned his imager away to check the other apartments.

Now Justus was checking in with Carver, who was lying flat on the roof of a garage directly behind the target building. He was dressed in black, with a black balaclava hiding his face, and had melted into the shadows beneath the second-storey wall behind which Zalika was being held. It rose windowless for ten feet above him, its surface covered with a faded, crumbling painting of a giant Coca-Cola bottle.

The night air was filled with music, the raucous voices of hard-drinking men and the shrieks and laughter of the working girls coming from the shebeen. Carver had to put his finger to his earpiece as Justus spoke to hear his words distinctly.

‘Mabeki brought five of his men with him into Mozambique,’ Justus said. ‘Three of them are downstairs in the shebeen right now. One of the other two is in the inner hallway of the apartment, outside Miss Stratten’s room. The other is on duty as a sentry on the walkway. There is one figure in the adjacent apartment. I believe this is Mabeki. He … wait, he is moving. He is leaving the apartment and I think he is going to the room where Miss Stratten is held. Yes, he is entering it. Now he is going to the bed. Miss Stratten must have woken. She is sitting up. Mabeki is doing something down at her feet. Oh, I see, he is loosening her chain. Maybe he is about to move her.’