Unofficial and Deniable
And one of those deported was the beautiful Josephine Valentine.
Major Jack Harker had heard of her for years – the legendary heart-throb Josephine Valentine, the long-legged American blonde with the dazzling smile who collected wars and war heroes, the beautiful busty photo-journalist in sweat-stained khaki who always managed to wangle a helicopter ride into battle-zones denied to others by using charms pressmen don’t possess. She had a formidable and exotic reputation which lost nothing in the telling: while it was not true that she had been a high-priced hooker in New York, as alleged by certain members of the press, it was probably true that she always managed to be in the right place at the right time to get her spectacular pictures by screwing the right officer. It was said of her that she collected war heroes – but ‘warriors’ would have been a better word. She never had a lengthy relationship with her conquests: she used them, thanked them and left them with a broken heart.
Her war photographs made her famous: Harker had seen her name in many magazines over the years, read many a piece by her, seen many of her hair-raising pictures. Ms Valentine had shown up in Rhodesia during the long bush war, leaping out of helicopters with her cameras into operational zones, ‘screwing her way into the front lines’ to get her photographs; then she had been seen on the other side of the Zambezi amongst the black terrorists; and she was always popping up in the Middle East in the Arab–Israeli conflict. It seemed that wherever there was a war Josephine Valentine was there, charming her way into more stories; she was big buddies with the heavyweights of both sides. Military men all over the world knew about her, particularly in Africa; many had seen her, met her, entertained her, fantasized about her. Jack Harker was intrigued by what he knew of her and not a little frustrated that he seemed to be one of the few military men who had never set eyes on her. A dozen times she had left the bar, mess, bunker, trench, helicopter moments before he arrived.
And then, in 1986, when he finally encountered her in the Battle of Bassinga she was covered in blood, half naked, her teeth bared as she furiously tried to fire an AK47 automatic rifle at him.
The Battle of Bassinga in Angola was Jack Harker’s ‘century’, the hundredth battle of his military career, the hundredth time he had leapt into action, heart pounding, to do or die. It was also one of the worst battles: a parachute jump at a dangerously low level, at night, right over the target area, which was a camp holding thousands of terrorists and their Cuban advisors, all armed with billions of dollars worth of the latest Russian military hardware with which to liberate southern Africa from the capitalist yoke. The aircraft came in low in the hopes of avoiding the terrorists’ radar but the groundfire started up before they were over the drop-zone. Harker led from the front and he was first out of the aircraft, plummeting through thin air with his heart in his mouth, and he was the first casualty of the operation – a bullet got him through the shoulder as he pulled his parachute’s rip-cord: he was covered in blood by the time he crash-landed in a tree on the wrong side of the river. He extricated himself with great difficulty and strong language, stuffed a wad of emergency dressing deep into the wound and forded the river with more strong language.
All battles are bad but this seemed Jack Harker’s worst ever. He was awarded a medal for it, but he did not have coherent memories of it. He remembered the cacophony, the screams and the gunfire, the flames leaping, the shadows racing, remembered stumbling, lurching, the bullets whistling about him, blood flooding down his chest into his trousers no matter how deep into the wound he rammed the wad of cotton wool with his finger; he remembered storming the water tower, staggering up the ladder to destroy the machine-gun nest that was causing so much havoc, storming a Russian tank and throwing a hand-grenade down the hatch, he remembered the sun coming up on the cacophony of gunfire and smoke and flames and the stink of blood and cordite; he remembered being pinned down for a long time by a barrage of automatic fire coming from a concrete building on the edge of the parade ground, two of his men being mowed down as they tried to storm the building; he remembered scrambling up and running at the doorway.
The battle had been going on for an hour, the sun was up now, the camp strewn with bodies, the earth muddy with blood. Harker lurched across the parade ground, doubled up, rasping, trying to run flat out but finding he could only stagger, and he crashed against the wall beside the door. He leant there a moment, gasping, trying to get his breath, to clear his head, and he was about to burst through the doorway, gun blazing, when he heard a woman cry in English, ‘You bastards …’ Harker lurched into the room, his rifle at his hip – and stared.
Josephine Valentine was clad only in white panties; she had her back to him, her blonde hair in a ponytail, crouched at the window, wrestling with the jammed mechanism of an AK47, sobbing, ‘You bastards …’ On the floor behind her sprawled the half naked body of a Cuban officer, blood flooding from his back. Beside him crouched a black soldier, holding a rifle in one hand, shaking the body with the other; then he saw Harker, his eyes widened in terror, he raised his gun and Harker shot him. The soldier crashed against the wall, dead, and Josephine turned wildly and saw Harker. Her beautiful face was creased in anguish, her wild blue eyes widened in terror at seeing him; she flung the useless rifle aside, collapsed on to her knees beside the dead black soldier and screamed: ‘He’s only a boy!’ She snatched up his weapon, ‘Only a toy gun, he carved it!’ She flung it at Harker, then she scrambled frantically to the dead Cuban and grabbed at his pistol holster.
‘Leave that gun!’ Harker shouted.
‘You killed my man!’ she shrieked and swung the big pistol on Harker and pulled the trigger. There was a deafening bang and the force of the bullet knocked him backwards across the room, his thigh shattered. He crashed into the wall, shocked, and then saw her turn the pistol on herself. In a wild dramatic movement she thrust the muzzle against her naked left breast, her mouth contorted in anguish as she howled, ‘You killed him …’ She pulled the trigger and the blow of it knocked her off her knees, on to her back.
2
‘Publishing,’ said General Tanner, head of Military Intelligence, when he visited Harker in hospital on the South West African border, ‘is excellent cover for an espionage agent.’
Harker frowned. ‘Are you saying she was a spy?’
The general smiled. ‘I’ve changed the subject, I’m talking about you now. But yes, Josephine Valentine is a spy of a kind, fraternizing with the enemy. All photo-journalists are spies because they sneak up on you, take their forbidden pictures and flog them to the highest bidder.’
‘You’re talking about me? Sorry, General, you’ll have to explain – we were talking about Josephine Valentine. The bullet missed her heart, then?’
‘Made a bit of a mess of some ribs but the doc says it’ll hardly leave a scar. Pity, she’s been a pain in the arse for years. Like her to have a nice scar to remind her to stay out of our business, goddam drama queen. Pity we didn’t catch her boyfriend alive, he could have given us some useful information.’
‘She didn’t talk at all?’
‘Wouldn’t tell us a damn thing, just demanded to see the American consul. But we developed eighteen rolls of her film and we got some good intelligence on enemy hardware – and saw a few familiar faces. She’s threatened to sue us, of course.’ He smiled.
‘Where is she now?’
‘In Pretoria; we’re getting rid of her next week when she’s fit enough to travel. Daddy is coming out to take care of his darling wayward daughter. Anyway …’ the general plucked a grape off the bunch he had brought Harker, ‘… as I was saying: publishing is ideal cover for an espionage agent.’ He looked solemn.
Harker smiled. ‘As you were saying. But I’m afraid you’re going to have to explain that too.’
Tanner smiled. ‘Or there’s the import-export business – but it’s rather dull. Running a restaurant or a small hotel might be okay but it can be hard work – and putting you in charge of a bar would be like putting a rabbit in charge of a lettuce patch, aha-ha-ha!’ The general popped the grape into his mouth. ‘Whereas publishing,’ he chewed, ‘would be fun, particularly in an exciting place like New York. Respectability, lots of long lunches and cocktail parties, plenty of intellectual people to stimulate you.’ He shrugged. ‘However, if you don’t fancy that, I can offer you a whole range of jobs. Running a clothing store in Brussels, for example.’
Harker grinned. ‘I’m afraid you’ll still have to explain.’
The general picked another grape off the bunch. ‘You’re finished, Jack. You’ll never fight another battle. Half of one lung gone, one thigh-bone fucked. It’s HQ for you now, old man, fighting a desk. Or you can work for me in Military Intelligence. So I’m offering you a job as a publisher.’
‘You own a publishing house, General? In New York?’
The general smiled. ‘The only house I own is in Pretoria where my wife and children live. And that’s mortgaged.’ He looked at Harker. ‘But I control businesses all over the world, Jack.’ He smiled. ‘Ever heard of the CCB? The Civil Cooperation Bureau?’
Harker was mystified. ‘No.’
‘Good. And if you repeat this conversation to anybody you’ll be in breach of the Defence Act, the Official Secrets Act, and Christ knows what else. You’ll be court-martialled.’ He smiled again. ‘Got that, Jack?’
Jesus. ‘Yes.’
The general sat back. ‘Well, the CCB is the new covert arm of Military Intelligence. The new civilian espionage arm of our army. Very new. In short, the top brass has made a study of the CIA, the KGB, Mossad and MI6, and the Civil Cooperation Bureau is the result. Emphasis on the civil. Our civilian agents operate all over the world, in particular in those countries where South Africa is not allowed to have embassies or consulates or trade offices because of apartheid. As you know, every embassy of every country has an intelligence officer who works in the guise of “cultural attaché” or something like that. Well, because we have so few embassies, we have created the CCB instead. Our CCB agent is set up in a suitable business to make him look kosher. He recruits suitable local sub-agents, spies, to gather information about our enemies – just like every government does. Our agent sends the information back to me. I then do whatever is necessary to spike our enemies’ guns – just like I do when I get information from our attachés in our official embassies.’ He paused. ‘I must add that our CCB businesses are usually profitable. Our agents make good money.’ He smiled. ‘Much better than a major’s pay.’ He paused again. ‘I’m offering you a job in the CCB, Jack. I suggest publishing because of your English name, and accent – and you’re an intellectual sort of chap. You will draw a good salary – and, of course, you will be pensionable when you eventually retire. You’ll have a share of the publishing profits. We’ll provide you with an apartment in New York, as well as the actual offices – and a cost-of-living allowance, a car and an entertainment allowance. And we’ll pay your membership fees of all the necessary clubs – the yacht club; and so forth.’ General Tanner looked at him. ‘Sounds pretty good to me, Jack. Bit of a sinecure. Much better than selling life insurance, which is about all an ex-soldier can do.’
It sounded pretty good to Harker, too. ‘But what do I know about publishing?’
‘You’re smart. You’re one of the few intellectuals this army’s got – apart from me, of course.’ He grinned. ‘We’ve got another small publishing house in London. We’ll send you there for a few months for some high-density, high-tech literary training. But it really doesn’t matter because the editors you hire will know the ropes and you’ll learn on the job.’
‘But espionage? What do I know about that? And how do I recruit my agents?’
‘All will be explained. You’ll recruit men yourself when necessary, but your immediate boss, the guy you’ll report to, is stationed in Washington and he has already set up the network which you will inherit. He ran the whole show from Washington but it’s too much work now, so you’ll be responsible for New York and Florida via your publishing house.’
Harker was bemused. ‘It’s just information you want?’
General Tanner said: ‘New York is an important listening post. The United Nations is there – all those black communist countries shouting about us, plotting mayhem, harbouring ANC and SWAPO terrorists. And down in Florida there are all those Cuban exiles with all kinds of information about Castro’s army. You’ll be responsible for all that intelligence.’
Harker looked at the older man. He really liked him. That was mutual. ‘But I’m a soldier, not a spy.’
‘Military intelligence is a very important part of soldiering.’
‘Of course. But I mean I’m a soldier, not a hit-man. I don’t want to have to kill anybody.’
‘You won’t have to get your hands bloody, Jack.’ General Tanner smiled. ‘You’ll be told all you need to know when you have agreed and signed up. But let me say this much: any actions will be military ones – against the sort of people you’ve killed plenty of on the battlefield, and who’ve tried to kill you. That’s a soldier’s job, to kill as many of the enemy as possible, isn’t it? But the responsibility will be entirely mine as head of Military Intelligence.’ He ended: ‘We are fighting a total onslaught by the communist forces of darkness, Jack. That’s why America is helping us. Openly. And Britain, secretly. To fight this total onslaught we need a total strategy. And the CCB is an important part of that total strategy …’
3
Harvest House was a nice old brownstone overlooking Gramercy Park on New York’s East Side. Harker bought it for the CCB in his first month in town, having found out how expensive conventional office space is. It was easily big enough for the staff he hired: one editor, two personal assistants, a sales director who doubled as publicity director, and a general clerk. He found these people, all experienced in publishing, quickly because he advertised salaries above the average. The building was a big old nineteenth-century house: the numerous bedrooms became offices, the dining room became the conference room – there was space to spare. Harker, as managing director, had the best office: the large living room with its old marble fireplace and bay window overlooking the park.
When the building was remodelled, his staff in place, he hired a few of the catering trade’s leggiest waitresses and threw a large cocktail party for all the literary agents in New York to announce his start in business. ‘Why have we called ourselves Harvest?’ he said in his welcoming speech. ‘Because we want to gather up the bountiful talent that lies neglected by the other brainier-than-thou publishing houses …’ The literary agents responded: in the first year of business Harvest published eleven books, all by first-time authors, and made a respectable profit – partly because the production was done economically by another CCB enterprise, a printing works in Ottawa – enough to pay all salaries and overheads with some left over for reinvestment. Harker had a flair for publishing, a nose for a profitable book. And it was fun: there were boozy lunches with agents and authors, lots of interesting, intelligent people to meet. It seemed an easy living, the authors, agents and editors doing most of the work. It sure beat getting the shit shot out of you on the battlefields of Angola.
And his covert work for the Civil Cooperation Bureau was not difficult either.
‘The CCB divides the world into regions,’ General Tanner had explained. ‘America is Region One, England Region Two, and so on. America itself is divided: Head Office is in Washington, Region One A, where Felix Dupont is the overall Regional Director – he’s your boss. New York, where you’ll be, is Region One B – your title is Regional Manager. You will also be responsible for our CCB business in Miami, Region One C, where a guy called Ricardo Diego is the Regional Sub-manager – he’s a South African Spaniard. His front-business is a bar in the Cuban exile community, which is very valuable to us. He has agents planted in Cuba itself, who give us a lot of information on military matters. You’ll remember a number of occasions in Angola where we suddenly knew exactly about Cuban reinforcements?’
Harker nodded.
‘A lot of that was thanks to the CIA, of course, but also to Ricardo’s agents in Havana – who have agents in Luanda. Ricardo is very valuable. Trouble is, he’s not real management material. You’ll have to keep a close eye on him – Felix Dupont is too busy now, monitoring the Capitol scene and the rest of America. So Ricardo will report to you, and you report to Dupont. My orders will come to you through Dupont. As I said before, Dupont has a network of agents in place in New York, so you’ll inherit a going concern. Most of them don’t know each other, and only the “senior salesmen” will know you; you’ll probably never see the “juniors” – most of them don’t even know they’re working for us. Some think they’re working for the CIA, or for a European government, or for a firm of detectives. In fact, one of our senior salesmen is a private investigator, chap called Trengrove. We need all kinds of information about those United Nations nincompoops, not just hard military facts – who’s sleeping with who, who’s a homosexual, who’s got gambling debts, et cetera, so we can squeeze them. Another salesman has a very good whorehouse – one of the best in New York, I’m told. Anyway, as soon as you leave hospital you go to training school to learn all the general principles, then to London to get the hang of the publishing business, then you fly to Washington to stay with Felix Dupont for a few weeks, getting the nitty-gritty – he’s got a nice hotel. Did you ever meet Felix in the army?’
‘No.’
‘Remarkable man in martial arts. Took a bullet through the knee. However, after a few weeks with Felix you’ll spend a week in Miami with Ricardo, getting his picture. Nice bar he’s got – and lovely strippers, those Cuban girls sure are well-nourished. And Ricardo serves the best steaks in town.’
‘What about weapons?’ Harker said. ‘I presume I can’t take my own.’
‘Certainly not. No, Felix will supply all the hardware. You’ll have one or two licensed firearms, but most of the hardware will be unlicensed and untraceable. If you ever have to use a gun, dump it in the river straight afterwards. And if anybody ever shoots you, you tell the cops it was just another robbery. But you’ll learn all this at training school.’
‘Shoot me? I thought I was through with all that strong-arm stuff.’
‘You are, you’re a Regional Manager, not a salesman.’ The general hurried over that one. ‘Anyway, after a week with Ricardo you go to New York, move into the apartment Felix’s got for you, and set up Harvest House, get yourself a girlfriend, and settle into the role of the shit-hot, wing-ding new publisher in town.’ He smiled. ‘Easy. Wish I were you.’ He added: ‘I’ve never seen so many beautiful girls as in New York. And they outnumber the men six to one.’ He grinned. ‘You’re going to have a good time, Jack …’
Yes, the CCB work was easy enough. The reports trickled in from his senior salesmen, by telephone, encoded fax, scrambled e-mail, dead-letter box, undercover meetings: Harker digested it, collated it, gave any instructions, re-encoded it and sent it on to Felix Dupont in Washington. The information was a mish-mash of facts and conjecture, but Dupont made sense of it all in his jigsaw of espionage – and so too, after a while, did Harker: the pieces fell into place, the gaps becoming clear, the necessary instructions to the salesmen becoming self-evident. Once a month, sometimes twice, he went to Washington for a conference with Dupont. He usually combined these trips with an onward journey to Miami to check on Ricardo. This was always fun: whereas Dupont was a self-satisfied, detribalized Englishman with a painful body who thoroughly detested his enemies, Ricardo exuberantly enjoyed life and only really hated Fidel Castro. He loved South Africans and Americans who were giving the bastard a hard time in Angola. The clientele of his bar-ristorante felt the same way: anybody who took a swipe at Castro, the robber of their plantations and businesses, was okay with Ricardo and his customers at Bar Casa Blanca in Little Havana. None of Ricardo’s noisy patrons, nor his silent salesmen, knew who Harker was, but there was never a shortage of the senoritas in his hotel bedroom at the end of the day spent debriefing Ricardo, trying to make sure he had understood all his communications in Spanglish.
‘Ricardo, do us all a favour – buy a good Spanish-English dictionary, to check your spelling, we’ll pay for it. And take some English lessons, because when encoded your information can be misleading if you misspell or get the idiom wrong.’
‘So we confuse the enemy too, huh, compadre! But enough of work now –’ he waggled his dark eyebrows – ‘we go back to Casa Blanca to las senoritas? Or maybe I send one up here to you, jefe?’ He thumped his hand on his chest: ‘Clean! Garantizada …’
Yes, as General Tanner had promised, it was an easy job, and even satisfying once the jigsaw began to make sense. However, Harker’s jigsaw was usually incomplete because Dupont received information from the CIA direct and he only told Harker as much as he needed to know. Equally valuable was the detail coming out of the United Nations. Several of the delegations from African countries leaked information copiously to Harker’s salesmen, as a result of either blackmail or greed, but it was often only gossip about other delegates’ weaknesses or bad behaviour. Nonetheless, from time to time, important intelligence emerged about ANC bases in Angola, Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, about scandals and rivalries within the exiled hierarchy. Dupont and General Tanner – the ‘Chairman’ – prized these snippets highly. And it was Harker’s United Nations salesman who first learned about atrocities committed in the ANC’s military camps in Angola, torture of their own soldiers by Mbokodo, the ANC’s security police, apparently condoned by the top leadership, which resulted in two full-blown mutinies: Dupont and the Chairman were cock-a-hoop about that intelligence. When the story was broken in the international press it did the ANC considerable harm.
It was interesting, if often frustrating, and it certainly beat working in Military Intelligence headquarters in Pretoria. But Harker did not enjoy his work involving the anti-apartheid movement: keeping track of their plans, compiling dossiers on their activists, looking for ways to discredit them or minimize their impact. During the time Harker spent in Washington learning the ropes, Dupont ordered him to organize a burglary of the Anti-Apartheid League’s offices in New York, as a training exercise. The salesmen copied every computer disk, thus getting a mountain of information, then wiped the original disks clean, leaving the League’s administration and financial affairs in a shambles. Dupont and the Chairman were delighted with the information they got, but Harker studied it and couldn’t see what the excitement was about: sure, the burglary produced thousands of names of members, their addresses and telephone numbers, much correspondence between branches about fund-raising plans, proposed protest marches, lobbying of congressmen, reams of bank statements – but so what? There wasn’t mention of one spy, one arms cache, one target, one battle, let alone one revolution. Harker considered the Anti-Apartheid Leaguers a harmless bunch: they made a lot of noise but it was mostly a case of thundering to the converted. Indeed Harker sympathized with them – he didn’t approve of apartheid either. However, when he settled down in New York he studied the many dossiers on activists that Felix Dupont had compiled, updated them with new information received from his salesmen and passed it all back to Washington. He considered it a waste of effort, and found it distasteful to be prying into people’s private lives looking for peccadilloes with which to haunt them; but Dupont was very strict about keeping the files up to date. Dupont supported apartheid as vehemently as he hated communism and scorned blacks.