Spy Out the Land (9 page)

‘What about the boy’s father?’ he asked when Voers had finished. ‘Still in the picture? Another
munt
?’

‘No, a Swede. I got some of him as well.’ Voers removed several glossy black-and-white photographs from the briefcase on his lap and handed them to Campbell-Fraser, who held each up
to the light in turn.

‘Looks like a hippy.’

‘An old one. He’s fifty. Name of Erik Johansson.’ Campbell-Fraser looked surprised and Voers gave a ferrety grin. ‘I made some enquiries about him through the tax office,
posing as an accountant. It’s all public there, no questions asked. He works for a haulage firm in the centre of the city, and volunteers for a charity a few nights a week.’

‘Do you know which nights?’

Voers took a small notebook from his trouser pocket and flicked through the pages.

‘Tuesdays and Fridays. He usually starts at five and comes home at around midnight.’

Campbell-Fraser continued to examine the photographs. Then he gathered them together into a tidy bundle and placed them on a side table.

‘Thank you for this, Peter. I’ll have to look into it more closely, of course, but it certainly seems interesting. We know how to reach you if need be. That will be all.’

‘Sir.’

Voers saluted curtly and left the room. Campbell-Fraser picked the photographs up and lowered himself into an armchair near the window to look through them again. He was excited by the possible
ramifications of them. He hadn’t indicated this to Voers, partly for security reasons and partly because he was unsure what to do about the man. He’d dismissed him from the regiment a
year earlier when he had discovered he’d raped a guerrilla’s wife in a raid on one of the villages across the border with Mozambique, and as a result had been in two minds about whether
to meet him when he had called his office that morning claiming he had valuable intelligence. But if the information was correct –
if
– it was undeniably a breakthrough.

After a few more minutes of contemplation, Campbell-Fraser packed the photographs into his briefcase and left the room, switching off the lights. He took the stairs down to the lobby, paid for
the room, and walked out into Cecil Square to find his car.

Joshua Ephibe grasped his ribs under the thin sheet and shivered at the sight of the man who had just walked into the ward. It was Sammy Oka, whom he had last seen four years
earlier at the training camp in Mgagao. Oka had been one of the more impressive recruits, and Ephibe had earmarked him for fast promotion in his passing-out report. Now he was one of his gaolers.
He looked in good shape, too, his muscular physique encased in a camouflaged T-shirt, faded khaki shorts and plimsolls, all of which presented an accurate impersonation of their own haphazard
‘uniform’.

Oka approached the bed and smiled – for all the world as though they were meeting on the street on a Sunday morning in the marketplace, Ephibe thought.

‘Hello, Joshua. It’s been a long time.’

Ephibe didn’t respond, but under the sheet his hands were trembling. How dare this man pose as a friend? How many operations had he destroyed?

Appearing oblivious to the snub, Oka looked around the room until he caught sight of a wooden stool beside one of the basins. He carried it over to the bed, set it down, seated himself on it,
and faced Ephibe again. ‘How are you feeling? Have they mistreated you at all?’

‘They’ had treated him remarkably well, but Ephibe wasn’t about to admit it.

‘Where were you injured – your kidneys, wasn’t it?’

Silence again. Oka took a pack of cigarettes from a pocket and shook two into his hand. He offered one to Ephibe, who finally erupted in anger.

‘Why the hell are you here? Did they send you to try to persuade me to turn traitor like you?’

Oka replaced the proffered cigarette in the pack, then lit the other one, rocking back on the stool as he took the first draught. His face had assumed a puzzled expression.

‘A traitor? But who have I betrayed?’

Ephibe looked at him in disgust. ‘The movement, of course.
Chimurenga!
Zimbabwe!’

‘Ah yes. “Zimbabwe”.’ Oka said the word as if it were the name of a land in a children’s fairy tale. ‘Well, my family sees things a little differently. Yes,
I’m married now, with a little boy: David. You must come and meet my family. If you want to, of course.’

‘I’m not a traitor.’

Oka ignored him. ‘Clarissa and David live here while I’m out in the field. Her parents, too. Nobody can touch them, and my boy gets to be with his family, safe, secure, warm and well
fed. There is a very good school here and, as you can see, the best medical facilities.’ He indicated the state-of-the-art intensive care unit next to the bed.

‘And who pays for all this?’

‘The Scouts. I realise it is a blow to your pride to be captured, Joshua, but there’s nothing to be ashamed of. We aren’t the devils you make us out to be, you know.
We’re just soldiers. Many of the whites have become like brothers to me.’ He ignored the expression on Ephibe’s face. ‘Yes, we’re brothers fighting together, black and
white alongside each other, for a common cause. There is no discrimination whatsoever – we eat and drink together every day, every night. And we get proper equipment, not like the crap
you’re using. You’ve already seen some of what we have: machine-pistols, grenades . . . whatever we need. And our leaders fight beside us. They don’t sneak off to Botswana or
Zambia to spend the money their supporters have raised for weapons on champagne and whores. My family is safe and looked after, I’m paid well—’

Ephibe looked up sharply. ‘They pay you, too, to murder your own people?’

Oka slowly blew smoke from his mouth, watching as the cloud circled above the bed. The doctor had confirmed that Ephibe was still a smoker. Oka’s pleasure in the cigarette was genuine, as
Weale forbade any of the team from smoking on operations – the scent travelled easily.

‘Listen, Joshua, I asked if I could come and visit you, because I saw your name on the list of captured men. For old times’ sake, you know? And because you were one of the better
instructors. Of course I am paid. We are all paid. We’re soldiers.’ He clicked his teeth as though in thought. ‘You know, this “Zimbabwe” you still believe in.
It’s just a dream, my friend – or rather a nightmare. You think those fools can run a country? Not a chance. They’re at each other’s throats already, and they’ll be
worse if their revolution succeeds. They’re bloodthirsty, the lot of them.’

‘So they’re savages?
Murungu
trained you well.’

Oka shook his head. ‘No, not savages. Ordinary men corrupted by power, leading others who have turned bloodthirsty through a lack of discipline. Through fatigue and desperation from
fighting a war they cannot win. You know this as well as I do. What do you think would have happened to me if I had been captured by your men?’

‘You would have been killed, of course.’

‘Yes. At last we are being honest with each other. I would have been shot in the back without a trial, then left to rot where I fell. Compare that to your situation at the moment, Joshua.
You were captured at a terrorist camp in possession of illegal weapons, in the very act of training terrorists to attack this country. You’ve committed treason by the laws of this land, and
yet here you are talking to me. Why are you not dead?’

It was a question Joshua Ephibe had already asked himself many times.

‘Not only are you not dead in a ditch,’ Oka continued, ‘but you are lying here in this bed, with doctors and nurses waiting on you day and night, and with your own family on
their way to see you.’

Ephibe’s head jerked up. ‘My family?’

‘Didn’t they tell you? They’re sending a team to Caponda to get them. Your sister and your parents will be here in a couple of days, and after you’ve spent some time
together they will stay in some very nice accommodation here while you are out in the field. That is, if you want to, and can pass the training.’

Ephibe sighed. ‘I told you – I’m no traitor.’

‘I see.’ Oka pushed back the stool, retied the laces of his plimsolls in a few swift gestures, and stood. ‘Well, it’s a shame you see it that way. Of course, you will be
hanged under the Law and Order Maintenance Act. I’m disappointed, Joshua: I told my comrades you were precisely the calibre of soldier we were looking for. It seems I was mistaken. If
you’re determined to die for a hopeless cause, I can’t stop you. I’ll let them know your decision. I don’t think the team has set out for Caponda yet.’

He replaced the stool by the basin and walked out of the room, leaving Joshua Ephibe alone with his thoughts.

Captain John Weale spent as little time in his office as he could, but was pleased with its setup. When he had first taken the job he’d made the mistake of not decorating
it at all, but he had soon realised that the captured terrs had felt like they were being interrogated in a cell, so he’d persuaded the Commander to ship in a comfortable armchair, a few rugs
and some soft lighting. He felt he now had the right balance: enough warmth to loosen them up, but not so much as to obscure the importance of his questions.

He walked to the filing cabinet in the corner of the room. It was filled with captured documents, photographs, and other snippets of information, all of which could be cross-checked. These
question-and-answer sessions rarely elicited any useful intelligence, but they were often a helpful gauge of the current state of the terr’s loyalty. Would he be prepared to identify his
former commander? How about his best friend? So far, Joshua Ephibe seemed willing to help, having identified many of the other men they had captured and given their ranks and roles in the ZANLA
structure.

Weale took a new dossier from the cabinet. ‘Might be nothing,’ the Commander had said when he’d handed it to him a couple of weeks earlier, ‘but Pete Voers thinks
he’s spotted Charamba’s daughter in hiding in Sweden. We need confirmation. Show it around.’

Weale was wary of using intelligence from Voers, who had left the regiment under a cloud, and didn’t understand why Campbell-Fraser was interested in Charamba anyway – they knew
where the man lived in Lusaka, but he was a thorn in the side of ZANLA and ZIPRA alike so they’d deliberately left him alone. But it wasn’t his job to question the Commander’s
orders.

He walked back to his desk and removed a sheaf of photographs from the dossier, spreading them in front of Ephibe. All of them showed a park on a sunny day, with most of the people in them
rather glamorous-looking whites. But every photograph also featured a striking young black woman with a pair of sunglasses on her head.

‘Recognise her?’

Ephibe leaned forward to examine the image more closely, and let out a small gasp.

‘Yes, that’s Hope Charamba. She’s older, but it’s her.’ He looked up at Weale. ‘Where did you get this photograph?’

‘Never mind that. Are you sure it’s her?’

‘Yes, I’m certain. I grew up with her. I was her first boyfriend, back in secondary school. We were inseparable.’

Weale nodded, and lifted his pen.

‘Tell me more.’

Friday, 22 August 1975, Stockholm, Sweden

Paul Dark stood perfectly still. With his index finger, he drew the curtain by a fraction of an inch.

The car was parked on a street east of the square, just beyond the children’s playground and largely obscured by a row of elm trees. But it was definitely the same car.

He had spotted it three days earlier, when he had driven Ben and Claire in their VW Beetle, Ben to the kindergarten and Claire into town to the offices of
Aftonbladet
, where she worked
as a picture researcher. He had caught it only by chance – on stopping at a traffic light he had glanced in the rear-view mirror and seen a muddy green late-model Opel Kapitän. For no
particular reason, it had brought to mind one he’d seen several years earlier, in a traffic jam in Nigeria. And now here it was again, parked fewer than a hundred yards from his flat.

He walked to the other side of the room. It could mean only one thing, he decided: he’d been spotted. Some time ago, too, probably – he remembered with a flush of self-recrimination
the ‘bird-watcher’ in Haga Park a few weekends ago. What a bloody fool he’d been to ignore the signs. Not that he could have done much anyway: once you’d been spotted, you
stayed that way. Was it the Russians, he wondered, or the Brits? Well, it hardly mattered. Either way, the game was up.

The question was what to do about it. He lowered himself into the armchair to think it through. Yes, someone had spotted him – but he had been very careful with that curtain. Even if
binoculars had been trained on it at that very moment, they wouldn’t have been sure that he hadn’t simply been drawing them closer. And other than that, he hadn’t reacted at all
to the car. Conclusion: they didn’t yet know that he had realised he was under surveillance. Could he use that?

The problem was he had no idea what they had planned. Was it a snatch team? A hit squad? And what was their time-scale? He’d spent fifteen days tracking Cheng before he had made a move on
him in Hong Kong all those years ago. How long had they been watching him for – before the park, even? And how long did they plan to continue to do so before they made their move?

These were unanswerable right now. At best, they were in a stage of provisional surveillance, perhaps even still uncertain whether he was who they suspected. At worst, they’d break into
the flat in the next thirty seconds while he was sitting here thinking about it.

No, he decided, that was unlikely. It was only five o’clock and the shops were still open – people were milling around in the square and on the surrounding streets, and the
underground station was starting to spill out commuters arriving home. Far too crowded for either a snatch or a kill. If they were planning to move on him today, they would at least wait until
dusk.

What were his options? He could run, of course, but the same disadvantage they had also worked against him. The whole area was too exposed: even if he took the fire escape they’d see him
the moment he landed. There was no way out of the building without them seeing him. He was like a rat in a trap.