Spy Out the Land (6 page)

She had got off at Vällingby, and he had followed her out of the station and through a paved square surrounded by shops and concrete office and apartment blocks. He had taken up a sheltered
position in the shadows outside a women’s clothing store on one side of the square, and watched as she had approached a block of flats directly opposite. The block looked very much like those
he had seen at a conference a few years earlier in East Berlin,
Plattenbauten
, but like many buildings in Stockholm it had been painted a bright shade of yellowy orange to mask the
brutalism of the architecture.

Once she had entered the building, he had looked for signs of movement in the upper windows. Sure enough, about thirty seconds later shadows had flitted by on the second floor, and he had caught
a glimpse of her at the curtains just before she drew them.

He had lit a cigarette then, savouring the taste of it and letting his pulse return to normal. Then he had started walking back towards the underground: there was nothing more to be done
tonight. He would have to delay his flight tomorrow and rearrange his appointments for the next couple of weeks, but that was no great trouble. He knew where she lived now. He would hire a car, buy
a decent camera, and stake out her place until he had photographs of her and anyone she was living with. His whole body was tingling with anticipation.

This was his ticket back in.

Saturday, 12 July 1975, Rhodesia–Mozambique border

The Unimog approached the outskirts of the camp at just after two o’clock in the morning and came to a standstill. A few moments later, the other vehicles in the column
drew up behind it.

On a bench in the rear of the Unimog, Captain John Weale smeared a fresh coat of greasepaint on his face and hands. He considered the irony that he was disguised as a black man in order to
capture black men. His father certainly wouldn’t have approved, had he lived to see the day.

Weale was in command of a detachment of forty-eight Selous Scouts, the most secretive and deadly of the Rhodesian special forces groups. The regiment was named after the British game-hunter
Frederick Selous, a fact of which Weale approved: his grandfather had fought alongside Selous in the Second Matabele War. Weale’s great-grandparents had settled in Britain, but he’d
lived all his life in Africa and regarded himself as entirely Rhodesian. He was proud of his grandfather’s legacy, but since his country’s declaration of independence from the Queen a
decade before he’d come to hate the British with a fiery intensity that was second only to his hatred of the black terrorists fighting to wrest control from the minority white government.

Weale had joined the Scouts from the regular army within a few weeks of it being formed. The regiment’s ethos was inspired by the British SAS, with whom several of its senior officers had
served, either during the Second World War or in the Malayan emergency or both, but the selection process was even more gruelling: it took seventeen days, the first five of which required living
entirely off the land at a training camp on the shores of Lake Kariba. On the fifth day, candidates were given the rotten carcass of a baboon as a reward for making it that far. The few who
remained after that – usually around 10 per cent – were given the most meagre of rations to survive the rest of the course to supplement their diet of living off the land. A further
four weeks’ training followed, during which they were still monitored for suitability. Successful recruits therefore started out with a strong sense of camaraderie and great pride, as each
man knew that the others had also gone well beyond the norms of human endurance and behaviour to become a Selous Scout.

Within the Rhodesian military the regiment had adopted the cover role of a reconnaissance and tracking unit, but in reality it was a counter-insurgency force. Its mission was to obtain
intelligence on the terrorists, who were divided into two main groups, the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, ZANLA, and the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army, ZIPRA. These were
the armed wings of the black nationalist movements ZANU and ZAPU. The Scouts had become expert on the differences between them, as a large part of their job consisted of impersonating them in the
field. To accomplish this, most members of the regiment were black: soldiers from the Rhodesian African Rifles whose salaries had been doubled for volunteering, and captured rebels who had been
turned, or ‘tamed’.

The black Scouts usually headed up small teams, making contact with rebels in the bush while the whites hung back. White Scouts operating in the field had to be fluent in at least one African
language, and usually blacked up with burned cork or greasepaint and wore floppy hats and beards so that from a distance they too could pass as insurgents. Weale was fair-haired and
ruddy-complexioned, but unless you were standing within a yard of him, he was now indistinguishable from the rest of the men.

The secrecy around the Scouts was to protect its methods being compromised, but also because impersonating the enemy in such professional ways was arguably against the Geneva Convention, even if
the guerrillas rarely used established flags or uniforms. The Scouts’ ‘pseudo’ teams had already captured dozens of rebels, and even when operations had failed had managed to sow
confusion and paranoia among the ‘terrs’, as they referred to the guerrillas. In turn the guerrillas called them
Skuz’apo
, a Shona expression often used of pickpockets
that broadly meant ‘Please excuse me for having just slipped a knife between your ribs’.

Weale’s current operation had involved weeks of planning at the Scouts’ headquarters in Inkomo. Multiple reports from captured ZANLA members had led to the identification of a
training camp a few miles from the border with Mozambique. Intelligence from another Scout unit indicated that several members of ZANLA’s Central Committee were currently staying there.

The plan was simple: drive into the camp and capture or kill as many terrs as possible. Looking over his men, Weale was confident of their success. All were dressed as ZANLA terrs, down to the
tiniest detail, and were armed with AK47s, RPD light machine guns and RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenade launchers. A Unimog led a column of Ferrets and homemade armoured vehicles known as
‘pigs’, all painted in ZANLA’s camouflage patterns and with a few of their flags flying. Twenty-millimetre Hispano cannons were mounted on the front of the pigs, supported by twin
MAGs on swivel mountings on the sides.

Weale gave the order for rations to be distributed, and the men ate in silence. After a few minutes, he looked at his watch. It was time. He gave the order and the convoy drove back onto the
track. Twenty minutes later, they drew up to the main gates of the camp. Weale looked across at Corporal Sammy Oka, the man he had chosen to trigger the operation. Oka nodded, a gleam in his eye,
and Weale nodded back in approval. Oka was quick, clever, athletic – one of the best. He clambered out of the back of the vehicle and Weale watched him run towards the boom, waving his arms
wildly, just as they’d rehearsed dozens of times back at headquarters.

A few seconds passed and then two guards emerged from the hut to see what the fuss was about. Oka gestured frantically at the convoy.

‘Let us through,’ he said in Shona. ‘We have casualties and need to get them to the clinic at once!’

The guards peered at the trucks behind him.

‘Which camp are you from?’ one asked. ‘We’ve heard nothing about this.’

Oka had been expecting the question. ‘We were on our way here but had no time to radio in – we were ambushed on the road. Comrades, open up, our men are going to die if they
don’t get medical attention very soon!’

One of the guards raised his machine-pistol and nodded in the direction of the convoy.

‘Show us.’

Oka ran back to the front truck and parted the tarpaulin. The guard stepped forward and shone his torch. Several men were laid down on the flatbed, all wearing ZANLA uniforms and blood-spattered
bandages. A few groaned with pain.

Convinced by the display, the other guard ran to the boom and raised it. Oka climbed back into the truck and the driver pressed his foot to the pedal. As the truck passed the boom, the bandaged
men suddenly all stood, revealing their weapons, and fired through the rear of the truck at the guards, cutting them down. The convoy swept into the camp.

He was walking down a passageway, the walls lit by candles set in sconces, and she was walking in front of him, dancing almost, wearing a white evening gown that clung to her
figure, laughing as she looked back at him. White teeth, flowing hair. A beautiful young woman, her eyes only for him. But soon, he knew, she would be kneeling on a small spit of land, a pistol
pressed against the back of her head, the hair matted to her scalp, sobbing with desperation and fear. He knew how it ended, because he had seen it before. It was always the same: the man with the
gun didn’t even flinch as he pulled the trigger, and then her cranium exploded and the spray of blood stained the water . . .

He woke, his body soaked with sweat. He opened his eyes. Claire and Ben were walking through the doorway of the bedroom. She was carrying a tray with a cake lit with candles, and both of them
were singing:

Ben bounded onto the bed and wrapped his arms around him. ‘Happy birthday, Pappa! You’re halfway there.’

Claire laughed, placed the tray on the sideboard, and kissed him. ‘Happy birthday, darling.’

He sat up and wiped the sleep from his eyes, banishing the nightmare. His birthday had in fact been six days ago, but he had altered it on his papers: if anyone ever suspected his true identity,
keeping the same birthday could confirm it.

‘Would you like to see your card, Pappa?’

‘Of course I would.’

Ben took an envelope from the tray and handed it to him triumphantly. Inside was a card he had made himself, with ‘
Grattis Pappa!
’ scrawled over a stick-man illustration of
him.

‘It’s lovely.’

Ben grinned with pride. ‘Would you like your present now? Mamma bought you something expensive.’

He looked up at her. ‘Really? You needn’t have.’

‘It was nothing.’ She handed him a small blue box with a red ribbon around it. On it she had written ‘To Erik – with all my love, Claire’.

He unwrapped it, to accompanying cries of encouragement from Ben. It was a small black leather wallet, and he recognised it as one he had looked at in a department store a few months earlier
when they had been shopping for clothes for Ben. She must have spotted his interest in it and bought it when his back was turned. He opened it up and saw that she had pasted a photograph inside. It
had been taken at the hospital when Ben was just a few hours old. They were both looking down at Ben, cradled in Claire’s arms. He leaned over and kissed her.

‘I love it. And I love you. Thank you.’

She beamed and returned his kiss. He blew out the candles and began to carve the cake, watched keenly by Ben.

Sunday, 13 July 1975, Salisbury, Rhodesia

Major Roy Campbell-Fraser, known to his men as ‘The Commander’, was the first into the room after the security check. He poured himself a cup of tea and looked
through the windows down at Jameson Avenue. The jacaranda trees were bare on the street, and he missed their lilac bloom. Cars and bicycles passed by in a gentle flow, metalwork and chrome gleaming
in the morning sun.

An athletic 52-year-old with crew-cut white hair and the stark features of a buzzard, Campbell-Fraser was the commander-in-chief of the Selous Scouts. Once a month, he drove down to Salisbury
for a briefing with the prime minister and his counterparts from the Central Intelligence Organisation, Special Branch and the army.

He glanced around the boardroom. How quickly one tired of the pomp and circumstance, he thought. He remembered how thrilled he had been the first time he’d had an audience with the PM two
years earlier. Now it was an irritation. The security measures conducted before each meeting were time-consuming and tedious, and had been made worse since Special Branch had discovered a plot by
the guerrillas to blow Smith up with a grenade as he left the building. Campbell-Fraser itched to be back in Inkomo, planning operations against the enemy instead of engaging in bureaucratic
nonsense. He was particularly anxious to learn how Johnny Weale was getting on with his team’s raid of the ZANLA training camp near the border with Mozambique. The last he had heard they were
just about to go in. He thought of the boys in the operations room manning the radio sets at that very moment, sweat prickling their temples as they listened in wait for the call signs to come
through to confirm that all was well. That was where he should be.

The others had now entered the room, and Campbell-Fraser took his place in a chair at the large leather-topped conference table. On the wall facing him was an oil painting of two Spitfires
taking off, a none-too-subtle reminder of the prime minister’s war record for the British, his having flown for their air force. The painting had been a gift to the PM from a group of British
supporters a decade or so earlier. A lot had happened since, although there were still a few in Britain who believed in white Rhodesia. The rest of the room was decorated in the usual heavy
government style: wall-to-wall red carpet, curlicued lintels over the door and, despite the heat, thick curtains in a hideous floral pattern framing the windows.

Smith was the last to arrive. He was wearing a dark tailored suit with a white shirt and a maroon tie. Campbell-Fraser thought he looked a very long way from the war. He took his place at the
head of the table and nodded at the men seated around it.