Atom Bomb Angel

  ‘Stun me,’ I said.

  ‘Patrick Cleary.’

  He stunned me.

  ‘On 10 August Lukas Ogomo sends a telegram to Ben Tsenong in Oxford saying, “All has been agreed.” The telegram was sent from Marzoc, which happens to be where Quadhafi’s top guerrilla-warfare training establishment is based.

  ‘Tsenong gets a telegram from his mother on the same day telling him his father has died. Wotan has been able to discover that someone called Tsenong was buried in Otjitambi around that date, so the cable appears to be genuine – probably just coincidence that the two were sent on the same day. But not coincidence in my opinion that Cleary, Ogomo, Wajara and Dusab were in Libya that day – what do you think?’

  ‘No, no way. But why Libya?’

  ‘Quadhafi gives a considerable amount of assistance to terrorist organizations purely on ideological grounds. He also gives assistance for other reasons, and Namibia has something that Quadhafi can’t get enough of at the moment.’

  ‘Uranium?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So that gives Libya’s motive, but what about Namibia? What do the Namibians want with nuclear power stations in Britain?’

  ‘Might not be just Britain,’ said Arthur. ‘On those same two days Jose Reythal, a key ETA man, Gunther Keller-Blaus, who runs Baader-Meinhof from a French hideout, Joel Ballard, an ex-CIA officer who is now a professional mercenary-terrorist, Mossif Kalib, who I am sure you have heard of – a key PLO man, and one of the most dangerous terrorists in the world – and a Russian, Leonid Posgnyet, a senior KGB officer – this entire bunch of charming individuals all arrived in Tripoli. Of course, terrorists are coming and going the whole time through Tripoli Airport, but this lot are a team of heavyweights, and it would be as well to bear in mind that their arrival might not be coincidence.

  ‘The Namibians are trying hard right now to shake off South African control of their country. United Nations ordered the South Africans to give the Namibians full independence twenty years ago, and they still have not done so. There are plenty of Namibian political prisoners languishing in South African jails, and the country is under complete South African domination. Namibia is rich in a number of minerals, including diamonds, platinum and uranium, and it also has the only safe anchorage along fifteen hundred miles of coast: Walvis Bay, an important strategic port to the South Africans. It’s not surprising they don’t want to let go. The United Nations have made Britain, Canada, the United States, France and Germany what they term the “contact states” – that is to say, the United Nations have made those countries responsible for putting the pressure on South Africa to free Namibia; but other than token actions every now and then, the contact states aren’t doing anything at all, because it’s not in their interest. They want to keep communism out of Africa wherever they can, and they know that as soon as Namibia gets her independence, she may well go to the left.

  ‘The map you photographed in Tsenong’s room is very interesting – four of the five countries are contact states: Britain, Canada, the United States and France. The only exception is Spain.

  ‘The Namibians are bound to feel that by really piling the pressure on South Africa, they might eventually get somewhere, and they might have come to the conclusion that a major outrage in one, perhaps in more than one, of the contact states might be the best way of furthering their aims. Nuclear power stations would of course be highly relevant targets, since one of Namibia’s principal exports is uranium.’

  ‘Hence Ben Tsenong’s presence over here under the cover of studying nuclear energy: as an innocent student, he probably has easy access to nuclear power stations.’

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ said Arthur.

  I thought hard for some moments. ‘If we are right about Tsenong, then he’s a major find, and he could lead us straight to the lion’s den. But if he gets the slightest bit of wind up, you can be sure he’ll just lead us up blind alleys. He’s evidently working with a substantial team of accomplices and we don’t know who they are beyond Horace Whalley and a man called Cleary who doesn’t appear to exist. They could be anyone in the nuclear energy industry, at any level. If we start asking questions about where Tsenong has visited, word undoubtedly will get back to him. For the time being, we can trust no one in the nuclear energy industry. We can’t tap Tsenong’s phone, because he hasn’t got one. We’ll bug his room with a micro-video camera, and put a twenty-four-hour surveillance on him, but they will have to keep their distance – which won’t make their task easy. We cannot risk his blowing us.’

  Arthur nodded in agreement. ‘Someone ought to go to Africa and have a chat with a Namibian or two.’

  ‘I have a source through which I might be able to get some introductions out there,’ I said.

  ‘Oh really?’ He smiled. ‘Not unconnected with a certain lady friend?’

  ‘Possibly not,’ I grinned.

  ‘Well, why not?’ said Arthur. ‘At least you’ll get some warm weather.’

  18

  Arthur wasn’t wrong about the warm weather; I could feel it through the walls of the Trident as we taxied along the runway at Windhoek, the capital of Namibia. With the country sandwiched between two deserts and straddling the Tropic of Capricorn, it wasn’t surprising that it was hot.

  Namibia, or South West Africa, is approximately the size of England and France combined, and has a population of between 900,000 and 1,500,000 depending on whom you talk to. It is bounded, on the north, east and south by Angola, Zambia, Botswana and South Africa, and on the west by eight hundred miles of shipwrecks, shifting sands and buried diamonds.

  Like a great many other countries in the world, it had got along quite happily since time began without the assistance of the white man. When white men finally got there, in the late nineteenth century, they consisted not of wise people bearing gifts of frankincense and myrrh but of Trek-Boers who were tired, hot and extremely smelly. In 1885, by the Treaty of Berlin, Germany annexed South West Africa, and treated it to its first Governor, one Heinrich Göring. During the next twenty-five years, Göring proceeded to butcher seventy-five per cent of the black population, and produced a son, Hermann, who inherited his talent for genocide, and was given plenty of opportunity to exercise this talent a few decades later in the guise of Air Minister to Hitler.

  In 1915, South Africa took over control of the country from Germany, and at the end of the First World War, South West Africa was formally declared a protectorate of South Africa, a state of affairs that a substantial percentage of the population has been attempting to change ever since.

  I mulled over the lengthy briefing I had been given on the country by Roger Brandywine, the Foreign Office resident expert on South West African affairs, as I stepped out to the top of the gangway steps. In the blinding sunlight it was hard to see anything for a few moments, and I trod on the heel of a large man in front of me, who wore long khakicoloured trousers, a loose shirt with an orange goldfish pattern, and a straw pork pie hat on top of a very large head with a fat white face; he swivelled round, and in a strong German accent laced with an even stronger stench of garlic, spat out, ‘Votch your step, you fucking man,’ then proceeded to miss his own and fell headlong the entire length of the gangway. I didn’t see any great banners saying Welcome to Namibia. Reckoned I didn’t need to.

  It was unlikely that anyone was keeping watch on Wind-heok Airport, waiting for me to turn up, and even more unlikely still that, if they had been, they would have recognized me when I did. I handed a German passport to the white immigration officer and he studied it closely for some moments. The photograph he looked at showed a man with a Zapato moustache, thick tortoiseshell glasses and hair lacquered down and brushed straight back. When he looked up at me, he saw exactly the same man. The name on the passport was Josef Shwartzenegger, and under the heading for occupation it said: Geologist. He closed the passport, handed it back to me and nodded. Geologists were a dime a dozen through this airport.

  I took a cab the thirt
y-eight kilometres up into the centre of Windhoek, and checked into the Kalahari Sands Hotel in Kaiser Strasse. I put my bags in my room, and went out of the hotel into the street in search of a public call box. There was a possibility that the hotel’s phones were bugged by the South African secret police, BOSS, and as I was going to have to use my real name to the person I was going to call, in spite of having checked into the country and into the hotel under the name of Shwartzenegger, I didn’t want to arouse anyone’s suspicions.

  When the telephone rang at the Westondam Corporation’s Dambe Mine, about fifty miles north-west of Windhoek, it was answered immediately. The Dambe Mine was one of Westondam’s many worldwide interests. The chairman and chief executive of Westondam was one Sir Donald Loewe-Congleton, better known to readers of Private Eye as King Kongaroo, and better known to me as father of Gelignite.

  The girl on the switchboard put me through to the foreman-manager right away.

  ‘Smed here,’ said a curt, thick South African accent.

  ‘Pieter Smed?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘My name is Flynn – I’m a friend of Sir Donald—’

  ‘Welcome to South West Africa – you have a good journey?’ His tone had changed from the curt, defensive, to the welcoming.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Sir Donald telexed that you would be coming.’

  ‘Grand. When could we meet?’

  ‘I am at your disposal. I could come into town – or I could send a car for you to bring you out here to see the mine?’

  ‘I’d like to see the mine.’

  ‘I am sure you want to rest this afternoon after your journey. I’ll send a car for you at nine o’clock tomorrow – it’s only half an hour’s drive out here.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘The Kalahari Sands. Describe the car and I’ll be waiting outside.’

  ‘It’ll be a white Peugeot 505.’

  ‘I look forward to meeting you tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Me too, Mr Flynn. Goodbye.’

  The car arrived ten minutes early, and luckily I was already outside waiting; it could have been embarrassing if they had paged me. The car was driven by a black in a white, open shirt and white shorts, and either he wasn’t much of a conversationalist or he didn’t like white people, or, most probably, both. He also appeared to be under the impression that the maximum speed in each gear was the speed one had to reach before charging up, and I wondered, as the engine howled flat out – the worst thing for it in this searing heat – how many gearboxes and engines he got through in a year. As we left the main road and started to climb what was little more than a pot-holed mountain cart-track, with the speedometer gyrating between seventy and ninety, I wondered also how many cars and passengers he got through in a year.

  The scenery that jerked up and down outside the Peugeot’s windows was dramatic; it was rocky terrain, with low hills, steep cliffs, massive boulders, and little shrubbery. We passed three wrecked cars in as many kilometres. I wondered why he didn’t take the hint, and decided it was because they were all his.

  He swept right across the road, taking a racing driver’s line into a blind corner, and I gritted my teeth so tightly I thought my gums were going to collapse. ‘Do you get much traffic on these roads?’ I shouted, in the hope that getting him to talk might slow him down.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ was the reply he shouted, and the next moment he was fighting for dear life with the steering wheel, brakes and gear-lever, as he struggled to fit the car into a gap between the rock side of the road and an articulated fuel-tanker that was also playing boy-racer through the corner in the oncoming direction. There was a bang, followed by the sound of rock ripping open metal as the near-side of the car rubbed itself against a piece of protruding cliff-face, but the driver didn’t even bother to slow down.

  It was to my great relief that we finally rounded a corner and could see a large valley a short way to the right, with buildings and machinery. ‘Dambe Mine,’ said the driver, sweeping off the road and stopping what remained of the Peugeot at a perimeter gate. Two men in white uniforms, with white blancoed webbing, and machine-guns hanging from their shoulders, looked in through the car windows and then waved us on. Just beyond the guards was a huge notice-board, at the top of which was the round, three-bladed, black-and-yellow, international radiation warning symbol, and underneath the words in red: Danger. Radioactive materials mined here. No unauthorized persons permitted. Protective clothing must be worn at all times in controlled areas. The message was repeated underneath in Afrikaans and in German.

  We drove over to a large prefabricated but permanent-looking two-storey building, and the driver leaned back to me. ‘You go through there.’ He pointed to a doorway.

  I got out, very relieved to be standing once again on terra firma, and looked around for a moment. We were in a huge bowl that appeared to have been hewn out of the rock. Apart from the fact there was no music and no jolly lights, the place had the atmosphere of a fairground. It was a massive complex of pipes, cranes, wires, overhead conveyors, pylons, vehicles and buildings, and the noise was deafening. I went in through the doorway, and gave my name. A few minutes later a blond-haired man with a thin, wrinkled face and clear blue eyes strode in. He was very tall, standing a good six inches above me, and he stretched out a hand the size of a boxing glove. I took a good look at my own hand, in case it was the last time I ever saw it, and offered it up like a sacrificial lamb. As he crushed it, I attempted to crush his back, but there was nothing to grip on at all; it was like trying to crush a block of polished granite.

  ‘Nice to meet you, Mr Flynn. You had a good drive out here?’

  ‘I got here in one piece – but I’m not quite sure how.’

  ‘Niggers can’t fucking drive,’ he said. ‘Lost three people this year on that road, but the management won’t accept what I tell them. Come on up to my office. We’ll get white drivers one day – but only when they make them pay nigger drivers the same.’ He grinned. ‘You got many niggers in England?’

  ‘One or two,’ I said, following him up the stairs to a small office with a large fan.

  ‘You’re lucky; they’re all over the fucking place out here.’ He pointed me into a chair, and sat down himself.

  ‘I guess it was their land once.’

  ‘And America belonged to the Indians. So what are they going to do – kick everyone out of New York, paint the Empire State Building up like a fucking totem pole, and fill the place with Indians? Everyone wants to go back, no one wants to go fucking forwards. Let the whites bust their guts to develop this country, get it all going well, then give it back to the fucking niggers. Smoke?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  He handed me a Chesterfield, shoved one in his mouth and produced a flame from somewhere within his hand. ‘So your company is interested in buying some mining rights out here?’

  ‘Well, this is a very exploratory visit.’

  ‘Take my advice and go someplace else. Going to be a lot of problems here soon, lots of fucking problems.’

  If there were many more like him around, I wasn’t surprised. Although, judging from what was reported in the press from time to time about the strong-arm business tactics of Sir Donald Loewe-Congleton’s empire, this particular example was probably one of the more kind-hearted employees.

  ‘What problems do you get at the moment?’

  ‘All sorts of problems, Rates of Pay in the mines; conditions in the mines; land ownership. There’s a lot of change in the wind, and it’s not blowing any good for the white man.’

  ‘What exactly do you mean by conditions in the mines?’

  ‘Health and safety; hours of work; length of years a man is permitted to work; monitoring it all, checking it all – we got ten miles of files out the back, it’s a pain in the ass and it costs a lot of money.’

  ‘Do you get many health problems?’

  Smed looked at me slightly curiously. ‘Sure
you do. We don’t get so much now they’re wearing the masks and we’re monitoring the air-dust levels – but then we don’t get so much work done, either. We even have a full-time doctor now.’

  ‘What kind of health problems do you get?’

  ‘The normal ones for uranium miners – respiratory, mainly.’

  ‘Lung cancer?’

  ‘Pretty high rate in the past; it should come down now.’

  ‘Have SWAPO put much pressure on you?’

  ‘Not directly, but indirectly they have, through the bloody South African government – they’re scared of the rest of the world. They’ve got the West telling them to pull out of here; the Russians are right behind SWAPO – they’re treading very carefully. So now we have to look after our niggers and keep them fat and well.’ Smed spat on the floor. ‘I’m paid to run this mine at a profit for Westondam – if I don’t, I’m out on my ass, and I got four kids at school. Every day that I work here, I’m meant to lead them to the bathroom and wipe their asses; but I don’t. Because I’m not putting my neck on the block for any fucking niggers.’

  I nodded, and stubbed out my cigarette. ‘Did you ever have anyone by the name of Tsenong working for you?’

  ‘Tsenong? Down on the face?’

  ‘I don’t know; he died in August.’

  ‘Daniel Tsenong?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I remember the name all right. His son caused us one hell of a lot of problems. Came sniffing round here – we had to throw him out. Said we’d been covering up his father’s medical records – he put the chief medical officer from Windhoek onto us.’

  ‘What was his son’s name?’

  ‘Ben.’

  ‘Can you tell me a bit more about his father?’

  ‘I’ll get his file – I still have it.’ Smed went to a filing cabinet and pulled out a drawer, then rummaged through several files. He pulled one out and opened it up. ‘Not much, I’m afraid. He joined us thirty-three years ago: started at twelve; lived with his family in a shanty village about twenty miles west of here. Lot of our workers come from there and a few other villages in the same region; we bus them in each day. Got a wife, and two sons. Left us in May – or rather, we got rid of him. He couldn’t get through a day’s work; he had lung cancer.’