A song in the morning

He owed it to Carew that he should meet his son.

He watched Arkwright settle onto a bench close to the net ball pitch. He disliked the foreign Whites who lionised the Movement from t h e comfort of their European cities.

He watched to satisfy himself that there was no tail on the young man. The young man saw him, and Thiroko recognised the relief on Jack's face. The relief told him of the strain. The strain told him of the genuineness of Carew's boy. He presumed he was to be offered explosives, that he would have to explain gently that the Movement had all the explosives it could h a n d l e . He would do it in a kindly fashion.

• * *
"I am sympathetic to you, as I am sympathetic to the families of Happy Zikala and Charlie Schoba and Percy Ngoye and Tom Mweshtu. To all of the families goes the very sincere sympathy of the Movement.. "And what should those families do about it?" A harshness in Jack's voice.

"They will pray, they will attend protest meetings, in South Africa they are going to make video cassettes that will be sent to every head of state represented at the General Assembly of the United Nations . . . "

"Prayers and protests and petitions, Mr Thiroko, are a great waste of time."

"Tell me what is not a waste of time."

"I am going to go to South Africa. To the gaol where my father is held. I am going to blow a hole in the wall, and I am going to take my father out."

"Should I laugh because you are so stupid, should I cry because you are so sincere?"

"It's not a joke to me."

Thiroko was hissing back at him. "You know what the gaol is, boy? The gaol is the peak of a security system. From every other gaol in the country men are escaping, and no man has escaped from that gaol for ten years. They are desperate men, they are going to hang, they are sitting in their cells for more than a year, most of them. They are thinking of escape, and for more than ten years none of them has managed it."

Jack on the offensive. He had the man arguing, not laughing. That was good.

"Anywhere that's maximum security is vulnerable.

Maximum security breeds complacency."

"The gaol isn't up against the street. The gaol is in the middle of a complex. You would be shot hundreds of yards short of the walls. If you are shot dead, how does that help your father?"

"How does it help him if I sit on my arse, and pray and shout outside their embassy and ask politicians to watch a video? That's doing fuck all to help him."

"You would be killed."

"He's my father," Jack said flatly. "So be it."

Thiroko leaned back against the arm of the bench. He was trying to read Jack.

"You are a good boy. You work here, you have a family.

You have to exist through the next weeks, then you have to resume your life. After it has happened you have to forget your father."

"I'm going to South Africa."

"Do you listen to anybody?"

Jack couldn't help himself, a snap grin. "Hardly ever."

"It is not my intention to help you to kill yourself."

''I'm going to bring my father home."

''Impossible, you understand that word?"

''Give me the chance."

"Your failure would hurt us, and it is impossible that you could succeed."

"Not if you helped me."

Thioko shook his head, as if he did not believe what he learned in the slate grey eyes of Jack Curwen.

"I can't do it."

Jack's hand covered Thiroko's fist, a hard unyielding grip.

Where were you when the Court bomb went off? Where will you be when five men hang? Sitting on your arse and comfortable?"

"You take a chance with me, young man." The anger was brilliant on Thiroko's face.

"Lying in your pit and snoring?"

"I care about my men," Thiroko spat the answer.

"Your Movement took a chance with the lives of five men.

You owe it to them to help me."

"No one tells me my duty."

"Your duty is to help them, not to sit on your bloody hands."

Thiroko softened. He had never been in combat in South Africa. He had never fired a Kalashnikov assault rifle at the Boer police or the Boer troops. He had never carried a bomb to a target and known the fear sweat in the fold of his stomach. He thought of what the physician had told him.

"What do you want?"

Jack felt the glow of success. "I can't take explosives with me, I can't get them through the airport. I want access to explosives in South Africa - and I want a team."

"Why should I trust you with a team?"

"When I get to Johannesburg, give me explosives, that's all. Sit on your hands, on your arse, and wait, and listen to the radio. You'll hear what your explosives have done, the radio'll tell you, what I've done on my own, and when you're satisfied then you'll give me a team."

"What is it you want exactly?"

"When I arrive I want a minimum of twenty pounds of explosive. I want detonators and Cordtex and safety fuse. I will hit the target of my choice. Then you'll know I'm worth the team."

"All for your father."

"To bring him back."

Thiroko took a notepad from his pocket. He wrote out an address. He showed the address to Jack, told him to memorise it, let his eyes linger on it, then folded the paper and tore it into a hundred pieces that he threw to float away and disperse over the grass. He told Jack to meet him at the address the following morning.

"You're going to help me?"

"I am going to think about helping you."

"Time's very short."

"I too learned to count. I know how many days are available."

Thiroko walked away from the bench. He was soon gone from sight. Jack was trembling. God, the assurance and the bombast had fled him. God, and was he frightened.

• * •
He was an age finding a phone box that worked. He rang Jimmy Sandham at work. He wanted to meet with him, had to talk to someone.

A brisk voice answering, stating that he was through to the Foreign Office. Jack gave the extension number. Sandham had started him on his road. Jack wanted to meet him for a drink, to listen to his quiet control.

"Could I speak to Mr Sandham, please - a personal call."

A woman's voice, "Not here I'm afraid."

"Will I get him later, this afternoon?"

"He's taken a few days' leave."

"Since when?"

"He left yesterday."

''How long is he away?"

" Who is it asking for him, please?"

lack put the phone down. He tried the home number. No reply.

He rang George Hawkins and invited himself over. He rang D & C and said he wouldn't be back that day.

It hit him. He had forgotten Duggie Arkwright. After leaving Lincoln's Inn Fields, he had walked into the West End, and then he had spent another ten minutes looking for a phone that wasn't broken or occupied. Duggie had sat down at the entrance to the square when Jack had gone forward to meet Thiroko. He hadn't been there when Jack had left. Duggie had done the introduction and had himself a tail, and Jack had put him out of his mind. He'd ring him when he could. He'd ring him when he came back.

He looked into a shop window. There were three layers of television sets: cash, sale, and credit. They all carried the same picture. Of high armoured personnel carriers driving through a South African township of tin roofs and brick walls, and of gas plumes, and of the blue uniforms blasting with their shot guns, of running crowds, of police chasing with the long whips held back to strike in anger. The caption said they were old pictures, had to be because the camera crews were banned from the riot areas.

He wasn't going there to take a side in a civil war. He was going there to bring his father home. And it wasn't real. It was only old pictures on a bank of television screens. He knew what was bloody real. It was that his father was going to hang in three weeks, that Duggie had a tail that morning, that a woman had said Sandham had gone on leave.

He went to find his car, then to George's to talk about explosives.

* * *
He was the moth, the file was the lamp. The Director General had read, word by word, every page in the Curwen/Carew file. He had started to imagine that he knew the man.

There was a photograph in uniform, early twenties from its date. There was a portrait shot before the fiasco in Albania. There was another shot taken during the debrief and after the hospital check-up. There was a blow-up of a Johannesburg newspaper photograph of Carew being brought out of court. The change was Albania. The flesh had been stripped off the man. But he couldn't mistake the defiance in the features, especially in those taken after the decade in Spac.

He had read Carew's South African reports. They were poorly written, but they were dense with names and gossip.

There was no analysis, no interpretation, all as raw as sewage in a down flow. It crossed his mind to wonder whether the security police in Pretoria often had access to such quality information.

In the Alexandra township, three doors down Fifteenth Avenue from the north side junction with Hofmeyer there were stored under the back room floor boards, two R.P.G.-7

anti-tank rocket launchers, and eight missiles for the launchers were in waste ground beside the church wall on Second Avenue.

A 49-year-old street cleaner, who lived on Key in the Jabulani district of Soweto, had for two years been Umkonto we Sizwe commander of the whole township.

Seven Kalashnikov rifles were buried in protective grease wrapping in Dobsonville in the park that was bordered by Mahlangati and Matomela.

At a house, number given, on Mhlaba in the Chiawelo district, military planning meetings were held, when security conditions allowed movement in the night of the first Tuesday of each month. The fall back rendezvous was on Pilane in the Molapo district.

There was the house number in the Mamelodi township of Pretoria where a press printed A.N.C. literature. There was the name of the school from which that literature was dispersed, the identity of the schoolmaster who wrote the broadsheets.

Lists of officials in South African Laundry, Dry Cleaning and Dyeing Workers Union, and in Textile Workers Union (Transvaal), and in South African Chemical Workers Union, who were either politically or militarily active in A.N.C.

The names of couriers, African names, who carried low-level messages around the townships. One White named.

| van Niekerk, aged 19, disabled, student. And a White girl, named. Both addresses.

Careful maps showing infiltration routes into South Africa from Botswana.

The numbers of bank accounts, and the addresses of those hanks. Accounts and banks where the A.N.C's money was lodged.

The Director General read through lists of intended targets. Police stations, power lines, railway track, a sewage filtration plant, a military recruiting office. A long list • • • There was a sketch plan of the approach route to be used for the rocket attack on the Sasolburg fuel storage tanks. There were the operational orders for the strike on the Voortrekkerhoogte army base. There were verbatim arguments between cadre cells on the priorities of attacks. Damned hard material to come by, no mistake.

The reports from years back had been worked over, he could see the pencil and ink ticks and underlinings that showed him that once these reports had been valued. Not the reports of the year before Carew's arrest. They were unmarked, and he thought they had gone unread into the file.

He was fitting together his picture of his man. He read that the S.I.S. officer attached to the British embassy in Pretoria used to come once a month to Johannesburg and go to a certain taxi rank at the South African Airways terminal and take a certain licensed taxi and pay for his fare and receive the latest Carew report with his change. All as amateurish as if his service had been playing boy scout pranks.

Carew had never come home. An addendum note stated

"Gone native". A note in Fordham's handwriting to the effect that Curwen wouldn't trust himself too close to his former wife and his grown-up son should he ever return to London.

All the time the poor devil was being paid. Last Friday of every month a pay cheque rolling into a bank account in Liechtenstein. Signatories to the account: James Curwen, Col. B. Fordham. Statements from accounts at Century concerning the amounts deducted from his salary to make allowance for monies earned from his taxi driving.

He had misjudged his man, but he still believed he was past saving. He rose from his desk.

Silently he paced his carpet.

Past saving?

He pondered the options.

He extended the forefinger of his right hand. They could come clean to the South African government and make an apology and plead for clemency. Second finger. They could scuffle around for sufficient leverage to ensure that Pretoria would respond to negotiation and spare his man and hold silence. Third finger. They could break the legman out from the hanging gaol.

He snapped his fist shut. Absolutely not on. Inconceivable in the time, and fantasy.

Past saving.

He had a meeting scheduled with the Permanent Under Secretary for the late afternoon. The P.U.S. outranked the Director General for all that the Director General was in a position to control the flow of information available to the P.U.S. In the matter of James Sandham, the flow would be dammed at once. He had set aside 45 minutes directly after lunch, for himself and his principal officials to discuss the Carew case. It was a gesture, the setting aside of senior men's time, and unless someone came up with something right out of the ordinary it was the last gesture the Service would and could make.

• * •
Major Swart had fretted through the morning. He had sat in his office at the end of a corridor behind an automatic locking steel-barred door, willing the telephone to shout for him. The two warrant officers who did most of the footwork in his small empire had called earlier to report that they had lost Arkwright, been tricked by him on the underground.

Their second call had told Swart that they had picked him up again when he returned to his flat. Swart wanted badly to know the identity of the young man in the well-cut suit who had been huddled at the meeting with Thiroko. That young man was probably worth opening up, and Arkwright should have been the way to him.

There was a third call. Arkwright had just drawn the curtains to his room. From his state of undress it was to be assumed he was taking his slut to bed.

* • •
They sat in the kitchen. The sink and the stove needed three hours' work from a strong-willed woman. Jack doubted there had ever been a woman in George Hawkins' life, certainly no kids. The blaster never talked about a woman, talked mostly about his three cats. Big, confident brutes they seemed to Jack, sleeping on the kitchen table or striding over the stove or licking at used plates in the sink bowl. Jack sat on an old explosive box, upturned and covered by a grimed cushion. George was scooping cat food from a tin. Jack thought the cats ate better than the old blaster.

"Was it just kiddie's bullshit?"

Jack said, "I've found the right man, probably."

"For trusting?"

"I have to."

"Genuine guy?"

"He's on the military side."

The cats were chewing fiercely. George put a page of newspaper over the tin, left it on the window ledge above the sink.

"The targets are in South Africa?"

"Yes."

"Do you have a bloody conscience?"

"I don't."

"It's explosives, lad. It's not just a firework show where everyone has a good laugh and hears a big bang. Explosives get to hurt people."

"I don't want to hurt people. I just want to get my father out of that place."

"That's a piss poor answer."

"I don't know where yet, the first target will be in Johannesburg."

"Good and big, where the whole city sees it. I'll rot in hell, certain. You're talking about an act of war. It's bloody Harrods, lad; it's the Grand Hotel, it's the bandstand in Regent's Park, it's the Household effing Cavalry you're talking about. Have you got the guts for that?"

"I have to, or he's going to hang."

"There was a bomb in Northern Ireland, the La Mon House hotel . . . "

George went to a drawer. He excavated among cartridge boxes and pamphlets and books and old newspapers and older bills. He took out a nearly clean sheet of blank paper.

He flicked his fingers for Jack to pass him a pen. He started to draw the diagram.

Firm and bold strokes of the pen.

"If they ever knew George Hawkins drew this for you then I'd be bloody lucky, Jack boy, if they just shot me."

"My father hasn't told them anything, I'm not intending to start."

"You take that away with you, and you learn it by heart, and you flush it away. Don't take that on your bloody aeroplane . . . What's the gaol?"

The marmalade cat had eaten too fast. It vomited on the linoleum. George seemed not to notice. Jack told him that Pretoria Central was a complex of five gaols. In the centre was the hanging gaol. He didn't know the lay out, didn't know where his father's cell was, didn't know the guard patterns. He didn't know any bloody thing.

"If I told you it was just daft."

"I'd say you should mind your own business, Mr Hawkins."

"By helping you, am I just getting you killed?"

"Without you, I'd help myself."

George turned over the sheet of paper.

"Is it an old gaol or a new one?"

"I think it's newish."

"It'll have a wall round it. If it were old it would be brick or stone. If it's less than twenty years then it'll be reinforced concrete . . . You'd be better off just getting pissed every night 'til they hang him . . . "

"How do I knock a hole in reinforced concrete?"

"We're not even talking about how you're going to get into a security area, up against the bloody wall . . . You're not going to be able to drill holes and use cartridges. You're not going to be able to use lay-on charges, because you'd need a dumper load of earth to cover them or you'd have to shift a ton of sandbags."

"Don't tell me what I can't do."

"Easy, lad . . . Professor Charles Monroe, Columbia University, way back before we were born. It's what's called the Monroe Effect. It's the principle of armour piercing, what they use against tanks. Shaped or hollow charge, it's what it's called. Jack, they'll shoot you dead . . . "

"Draw me the shaped charge."

It was dusk when Jack left. He was in his car, the window wound down. George was bent to talk to him.

"I'll miss you, lad."

Jack grinned. "I won't be gone more than three weeks."

"I'm a bloody fool to have talked to you."

"Could it work, Mr Hawkins?"

" 'Course it can work. If you remember everything I've told you, and if you remember everything you've seen over the last two years, and if you do everything like you've seen me do it, then it'll work. Forget one thing, a little small thing, and you're gone."

"I'll come on down and tell you how it worked."

George snorted. He turned away quickly, so Jack shouldn't see his face. He went back through his front door.

He didn't look over his shoulder as Jack drove away.

When he was clear of the lane, out of sight of the bungalow, he stabbed the engine into life. The excitement gripped him. The same excitement as when his final school exam results had come through, and his university admission, and his first girl, and his winning of the job at D & C Ltd.

Brilliant flowing excitement, like the first time George had let him do a blast. If he remembered every last little thing, then he could do it. He could take his father out.

* • •
"We're to meet tomorrow with the Prime Minister to talk damage limitation." "I don't think there'll be damage," the Director General said. "I have learnt many things from our man's records.

One of them is his tried and tested loyalty to the Service.

He won't talk."

"Then he'll hang with his secrets." The P.U.S. rocked his glass slowly, willing the juice from the slice of lemon into further circulation.

"Our secrets."

"The Prime Minister would look unkindly on the least embarrassment."

"It won't come to that. I'd bet money on Carew's silence."

He paused. "The fact is, I should like very much to save this man. I quite accept that it is politically unacceptable to go cap in hand and ask for his freedom, tell them who he is. We have looked at the odds against a team of men lifting him out of this gaol, and they are high."

"Too high, I don't doubt, and the Prime Minister wouldn't countenance the risk of failure. For heaven's sake don't let's have any old-fashioned stunts. The saving of Mr Carew's life just doesn't warrant the risking of anyone else's, not when you add the political risk."

* * *
Neither in London nor Lusaka did Jacob Thiroko have to consult with colleagues. That night, alone, he would take the decision on whether the military wing of the African National Congress would back the venture proposed by Jack Curwen.

Amongst the senior officers of the Umkonto we Sizwe there were some who saw Whites, even if they were prepared to make the same sacrifices, as having no place in the Movement. Those Blacks of the military wing treated all Whites associating themselves with the A.N.C. with suspicion. They believed all of those Whites were communists first, true to the South African Communist Party, and loyal to the African National Congress, second.

Thiroko was not a communist. He had been to Moscow.

He believed the Soviets, for all their aid in weapons and money, to be more racist than the Italians or the English or the Dutch or the Swedes.

If he were to have admitted to those senior officers of the military wing that a White had come to him with a plan of action and that he had supported him without consulting them then there would be questions circulated about his fitness to lead. Nevertheless, it would be his decision alone.

He sat in his room in the "safe house" in a quiet road in North Finchley. He drank coffee.

Better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all.

Sentimental rubbish.

Revolutionary warfare was about victory. He was no advo-cate of glorious failure martyrdom. If a cadre of the Umkonto we Sizwe were to attack the maximum security section of Pretoria Central then they must succeed, they must free their condemned comrades. The agony of the decision lay in a particular area. It was the area that had stuck with him, caused him to drink his fourth and fifth and sixth cups of coffee, stayed with him through half a packet of cigarettes.

The physician had told him to smoke as much as pleased him. The pain was more frequent. Was the Movement better served by saving Happy Zikala and Charlie Schoba and Percy Ngoye and Tom Mweshtu and James Carew from the gallows? Did the Movement gain more from the martyrdom of the Pritchard Five?

Which?

Better for the Movement to have at freedom five men who had bungled an attack, or better to have five heroes buried while the world screamed anger at Pretoria?

Which?

8

"Have you made your decision?"

Jack had come early to the "safe house". When the door had been opened to his ring he had smelled the aroma of sweet spices from the kitchen. She had been a tall woman with the dark skin of the Bengali and had two children clinging to her sari. She had shown no surprise, only taken him to the foot of the stairs and pointed upwards to the closed door.