Reconciliation for the Dead Read online

  Reconciliation for the Dead

  PAUL E. HARDISTY

  Contents

  Title Page

  Glossary

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  Map

  Prologue

  Part I

  1. No Longer Knowing

  2. Death Rhumba Psychosis

  3. Won’t Get Out of Here Alive

  4. Damaged Neurochemistry

  5. Toronto Maple Leafs

  Part II

  6. 1-Mil

  7. Life Set to Music

  8. So Much He Could Not See

  9. Men and Boys

  10. The Way He’d Remember It

  11. Enemies and Friends Alike

  12. Looking Straight into Him

  13. Benguela Sky

  Part III

  14. Even Up the Scorecard

  15. Mathematics

  16. No Illusion Come

  17. Survive This

  18. The Final Accounting

  19. And Quiet Came

  20. Easier Than Living

  21. All You Can Do

  22. Drowning

  Part IV

  23. Straight to the Heart

  24. Animals

  25. A Part of Who He Was

  26. Presumption of Superiority

  27. The Vast Improbability of Life

  28. This Forgotten History

  29. Structure and Function

  30. Going To Die Anyway

  31. Just Like You

  32.

  33. A Distant Port

  Part V

  34. Suicide Continent

  35. Anything Other Than a Human Being

  36. That Periphery of Darkness

  37. Heavenward

  38. Nothing Here Is Yours

  39. You Could Show Me How

  40. 117 Days

  41. Orders

  42. Live Your Life

  Epilogue

  Historical Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Glossary

  B&C gear – biological and chemical protection suits.

  BOSS – South African secret police, the Bureau of State Security.

  Boy – South African army slang for terrorist members of SWAPO, the South West Africa People’s Organisation.

  Casevac – evacuation of casualties by helicopter.

  Chana – a Portuguese word for an elongated, grass-covered, natural clearing in the bush, ubiquitous throughout Southern Angola.

  Doffs – Afrikaans slang: idiots.

  FAPLA – Forças Armadas Populares de Libertação de Angola, military wing of the MPLA, the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Portugal), supported by the Soviet Union and its allies.

  Flossie – Army slang for C-130 Hercules four-engine military transport plane.

  FRELIMO – Frente de Libertação de Moçambique, the major political party in Mozambique. Formed in 1962 to fight for the liberation of Mozambique from Portugal.

  Lekker – Afrikaans slang: nice, sweet.

  LZ – Landing Zone.

  MAG – General purpose machine gun used by South African paratroopers in the border war; fired 7.62 mm rounds from belts of two hundred.

  Okes – Afrikaans slang: guy.

  OP – Observation Post.

  Parabat – Army slang for South African paratrooper, also vliesbom (meat bomb).

  Poppie – Afrikaans slang for doll.

  R4 – Standard issue 5.56 mm calibre assault rifle of South African Army; the South African-made version of the Israeli Galil rifle; semi-automatic.

  Rat packs – Army slang for ration packs.

  RENAMO – Resistência Nacional Moçambicana, militant organisation in Mozambique. Sponsored by the Rhodesian Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO), founded in 1975 to counter the country’s ruling communist FRELIMO party.

  Rofie – Afrikaans slang: new guy.

  Rondfok – Afrikaans slang: literally ‘circle fuck’.

  RV – Rendezvous point.

  SAAF – South African Air Force.

  SADF – South African Defence Forces.

  SAMS – South African Army Medical Services.

  Seun – Afrikaans: son.

  Sitrep – Situation report.

  SWAPO – South West African People’s Organisation, national liberation movement of Namibia.

  UNITA – União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola, South Africa’s ally in the struggle against communism in Angola.

  Valk – Afrikaans for hawk, the designation for a platoon of South African Army paratroopers, approximately thirty men.

  Vlammies – Afrikaans, short for Vlamgat, meaning ‘flaming hole,’ slang for French-made Mirage jets used by the South African Air Force (SAAF) during the war.

  Vrot – Afrikaans slang: wasted, intoxicated.

  1911 – Type of handgun, originally developed in the USA as the M1911; single-action, magazine-fed weapon whose design has been adopted by numerous manufacturers worldwide.

  ‘The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible’

  A. Einstein

  ‘In times of war, the law falls silent’

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  For my father

  Prologue

  12th October 1996

  Maputo, Mozambique

  Claymore Straker stood in the long bar of the Polana Hotel, drained the whisky from his glass and looked out across gardens and swaying palms to the drowning mid-afternoon chop of the Indian Ocean. For the second time in his life, he’d been forced to flee the country of his birth. Two weeks ago he’d crossed the border, made his way to the ocean, and arrived here. Back again in the land of spirits, he’d determined that, this time, he would disappear forever.

  And then Crowbar had showed up.

  Just how his old platoon commander had managed to find him, he still had no idea. Crowbar had simply lumbered into the little café near the Parque de Continuadores and sat opposite him as if meeting for coffee in Mozambique was something they did every day.

  They didn’t talk long. Ten minutes later he was gone, vanished into the braying confusion of the city.

  And Crowbar had been right, of course. About the things you couldn’t change. About the apportionment of blame. About every-thing. But the relics Crowbar had left on the table that day – the canister of 35 mm film now clutched hard in Clay’s right fist, still undeveloped after all these years; the blood-stained notebook now thrust deep in his jacket pocket – had changed everything. History has a way of orbiting back at you; and promises, he now knew, while they may be broken, never die.

  After he’d made the decision, it had taken the better part of a week to track her down. Time he didn’t have. In the end it had been Hamour, a one-time colleague of hers from Agence France Presse in Istanbul, who had provided the breakthrough. Although Hamour hadn’t spoken to her for more than six months, he’d heard that she’d gone to Paris. He’d given Clay the name of an associate on the foreign desk there. It was enough. Clay had been able to convince the guy that he had a story worth telling, and that only she could tell it.

  He’d had her number for over twenty-four hours now, but each time he’d picked up the phone, he’d stopped mid-dial, overcome. He wasn’t sure why, exactly. Perhaps it was because of the burden he’d asked to her carry once before, the guilt he still felt. Maybe it was because of what they’d almost shared – and then lost. Memory is a strange, malleable, and, he had come to realise, wholly undependable quantity. And nothing, it seemed, was immune from time’s inexorable winnowing, that hollowing erosion that, eventually, pulled the l
ife from everything.

  ‘Mais um,’ Clay said, pointing to his glass. One more.

  The barman poured. Clay drank.

  It hadn’t been that long ago, really. Thirteen years. He’d arrived here in late ’81, in the middle of a civil war; left in early ’83. And now he was back. The place looked different, the whole city built up now – all the new peace-time buildings. Even this hotel, the grand old lady of Maputo, had undergone a facelift. The old, caged, rosewood elevator was still here; the bar with its marble tiles and teak counters; the same palm trees outside, that much older. But so much of the past had been shaken off like dust, the dead skin of years peeled away in layers. And now that he was back in Africa, it was as if he’d never left.

  A uniformed bellhop approached and glanced at Clay’s stump, the place where his left hand should be. ‘Senhor?’ That look on the guy’s face.

  Clay nodded, reached under his jacket, ran the fingers of his right hand across the rough meshed surface of the pistol’s grip.

  ‘Your call is through, Senhor.’

  Clay finished his drink and followed the bellhop to the telephone cabinets near the front desk. He scanned the lobby, closed the door behind him and picked up the phone.

  ‘Allo? Who is this?’ Her voice. Her, there, on the other end of the line.

  He could hear her breathing, her lips so close to the mouthpiece, so far away.

  ‘Rania, it’s me.’

  A pause, silence. And then: ‘Claymore?’

  ‘Yes, Ra. It’s me.’

  ‘Mon Dieu,’ she gasped. ‘Where are you, Claymore?’

  ‘Africa. I came back. Like you told me to.’

  ‘Claymore, I didn’t…’ She stopped, breathless.

  ‘I need your help, Rania.’

  ‘Are you alright, Claymore?’ The concern in her voice sent a bloom of warmth pulsing through his chest.

  ‘I’m … I’m okay, Rania.’

  ‘C’est bon, chéri. That is good.’ And then in a whisper. ‘I’m sorry for what happened between us, Clay.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Thank you so much for the money. It has made a big difference.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘I never thanked you.’

  He wasn’t going to ask her.

  ‘Are you going to testify, Claymore? Is that why you are there?’

  ‘I’ve already done it.’

  ‘That is good, chéri. I am proud of you. How was it?’

  As he’d left the Central Methodist Mission after the first day, the spectators had lined both sides of the corridor, three and four deep. At first, they stood in shocked silence as he walked past. But soon the curses came. And then they spat on him.

  Clay cradled the handpiece between his right shoulder and chin, covered his eyes with his hand a moment, drew his fingers down over the topography his face, the ridgeline of scar tissue across his right cheek, the coarse stubble of his jaw. He breathed, felt the tropical air flow into his lungs.

  ‘I need your help, Rania. It’s important.’

  A long pause, and then: ‘What can I do?’

  ‘I need you to come to Maputo.’

  ‘Mozambique? Is that where you are?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘As soon as you can.’

  Voices in the background, the screams of children, a playground. ‘Rania?’

  ‘Clay, cheri, please understand, it is not so easy. I have obligations.’

  ‘I have a story for you, Rania, one the world needs to know.’

  ‘Clay, I … I cannot. I am sorry. Things have changed. I am very busy.’

  ‘A lot of people have died for this, Rania.’

  A sharp intake of breath.

  ‘And it’s still going on. The guy is still in his post. After all this time. It’s fucking outrageous.’

  ‘Slow down, Claymore.’

  ‘I tried to find him, Rania. They said he was in Libya, but I know he’s still here.’

  ‘Who, Claymore? Who are you speaking of?’

  ‘O Médico de Morte.’

  ‘Claymore, please. You are not making sense. Is that Portuguese? “The Doctor of Death”?’

  ‘That’s what they called him in Angola, during the war. I never told you about it. It was too … too hard.’ There were a lot of things he hadn’t told her.

  ‘What does this have to do with you, Claymore?’

  ‘I don’t have time to explain now, Rania. You have to come.’

  ‘Let me think about it, Claymore. I need some time, please. Can I call you back?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘At least a few days. A week.’

  ‘I don’t have that long, Rania. They’re after me.’

  ‘Mon Dieu, Claymore. What is happening?’

  ‘I can’t tell you over the phone, Rania.’

  ‘Who is after you? What is going on, Claymore?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when you get here.’

  ‘Alright, Claymore. Call me in two days. I will see what I can arrange.’

  ‘Thanks, Rania. Two days. This time. This number.’

  Clay was about to hang up when he heard her call out.

  ‘Claymore.’

  ‘What is it Rania?’

  ‘Clay, I—’

  ‘Not now, Rania. Please, not now.’

  Before she could answer, Clay killed the line. He cradled the handpiece and walked across the polished marble of the lobby to the hotel’s front entrance. A porter held the door open for him. He stood on the front steps and looked out across the Indian Ocean. The sea breeze caressed his face. He closed his eyes and felt time fold back on itself.

  Part I

  1

  No Longer Knowing

  Fifteen Years Earlier: 22nd June 1981,

  Latitude 16° 53’S; Longitude 18° 27’E,

  Southern Angola

  Claymore Straker looked down the sight of his South African Armscor-made R4 assault rifle at the target and waited for the signal to open fire.

  For almost a year after leaving school to enlist, the targets had been paper. The silhouette of a black man, head and torso, but lacking dimension. Or rather, as he had now started to understand, lacking many dimensions. Blood and pain – surely. Hope and fear – always. But more specifically, the 5.56 mm perforations now wept blood rather than sunlight. The hollow-point rounds flowered not into wood, but through the exquisite machinery of life, a whole universe of pain exploding inside a single body – infinity contained within something perilously finite.

  Just into his twenty-first year, Claymore Straker lay prone in the short, dry grass and listened to the sound of his own heart. Just beyond the tree line, framed in the pulsing pin and wedge of his gunsight, the silhouette of a man’s head moved through the underbrush. He could see the distinctive FAPLA cap, the man’s shoulders patched with sweat, the barrel of his rifle catching the sunlight. The enemy soldier slowed, turned, stopped, sniffed the air. Opal eyes set in skin black as fresh-blasted anthracite. At a hundred metres – less – it was an easy shot.

  Sweat tracked across Clay’s forehead, bit his eyes. The target blurred. He blinked away the tears and brought the man’s chest back into focus. And for those few moments they shared the world, killer and victim tethered by all that was yet to be realised, the rehearsed choreography of aim and fire, the elegant ballistics of destruction. The morning air was kinetic with the hum of a trillion insects. Airbursts of cumulus drifted over the land like a year of promised tomorrows, each instant coming hard and relentless like a heartbeat. Now. And now. And above it all, the African sky spread whole and perfect and blue, an eternal witness.

  A mosquito settled on the stretched thenar of Clay’s trigger hand, that web of flesh between thumb and forefinger. The insect paused, raised its thorax, perched a moment amidst a forest of hairs. It looked so fragile, transparent there in the sun, its inner structure revealed in x-ray complexity. He watched it flex its body then raise its proboscis. For a half-stalled
moment it hovered there, above the surface of his skin, and then lanced into his hand. He felt the prick, the penetration, the pulsing injection of anaesthetic and anti-coagulant, and then the simultaneous reversal of flow, the hungry sucking as the insect started to fill itself with his blood. Clay filled his sights with his target’s torso, caressed the trigger with the palp of his finger as the insect completed its violation.

  Come on.

  Blood pumping. Here. There.

  Come on.

  The mosquito, heavy with blood, thorax swollen crimson, pulled out.

  What are we waiting for?

  He is twenty, with a bullet. Too young to know that this might be the moment he takes his final breath. To know that today’s date might be the one they print in his one-line obituary in the local paper. To understand that the last time he had done something – walked in the mountains, kissed a girl, swam or sang or dreamed or loved – could be the last time he ever would. Unable yet to comprehend that, after he was gone, the world would go on exactly as if he had never existed.

  It was a hell of a thing.

  The signal. Open fire.

  Clay exhaled as he’d been taught and squeezed the trigger. The detonation slamming through his body. The lurch of the rifle in his hands. The bullet hurtling to its target. Ejected brass spinning away. Bullets shredding the tree line, scything the grass. Hell unleashed. Hades, here. Right here.

  The target was gone. He had no idea if he’d hit it. Shouting coming from his right, a glimpse of someone moving forwards at a crouch. His platoon commander. Muzzle flashes, off to the left. Rounds coming in. That sound of mortality shooting into the base of his skull, little mouthfuls of the sound barrier snapping shut all around him.

  Clay aimed at one of the muzzle flashes, squeezed off five quick rounds, rolled left, tried to steady himself, fired again. His heart hammered in his chest, adrenaline punching through him, wild as a teenage drunk. A round whipped past his head, so close he could feel it on his cheek. A lover’s caress. Jesus in Heaven.

  He looked left. A face gleaming with sweat, streaked with dirt. Blue eyes wide, staring at him; perfect white teeth, huge grin. Kruger, the new kid, two weeks in, changing mags. A little older than Clay, just twenty-one, but so inestimably younger. As if a decade had been crammed into six months. A lifetime.