MiG-23 Broke my Heart Read online

  The Lieutenant tossed an envelope to the counter and said, ‘Worth at least ten that letter.’

  The envelope was bright pink, the first pink thing Thomas had seen in all these months of brown, grey and green. And everyone knew what a pink letter meant. ‘Fine,’ he said, too quickly, ‘I’ll give you ten.’

  ‘I said, at least ten.’ The fat Lieutenant licked his thin lips. ‘I was thinking more like one hundred.’

  Thomas aimed for nonchalance, but his voice came out high-pitched and desperate: ‘It’s just a letter from my mom. I swear.’

  ‘Your mother sprays her correspondence with cheap perfume?’ The lips curled into a sneer. ‘What kind of sick family are you from?’

  Thomas looked down at the letter. It was postmarked 25-03-1988, a good three months ago, but from it he could still detect a promising floral scent. ‘Did you say one hundred, sir?’

  ‘I distinctly remember saying two hundred.’

  There was nothing left for Thomas to do but pay the price. He rested his rifle against the table and lay face-down on the cool linoleum floor.

  ‘In your own time, troopie.’ The Lieutenant’s voice was ripe with the expectation of pleasure.

  Thomas counted, ‘One.’ The first push-up was agony. ‘Two.’ So was the next. ‘Three.’ But as his joints loosened up and the pain subsided, he began to wonder who the letter was from. ‘Four.’ It wasn’t as if he had a girlfriend or even any girls he could call friends. ‘Five.’ His last two schools had been boys-only affairs. ‘Six.’ Then he had gone straight into the army. ‘Seven.’ But there was someone. ‘Eight!’ A girl he had met in the short holiday between. ‘Nine!’ It was from her. ‘Ten!’ It had to be.

  ‘Stand up,’ a voice said.

  ‘Eleven!’ Thomas kept counting, blocking out everything but the push-ups and the promise that waited at the end. ‘Twelve!’ Only one hundred and eighty-eight to go. ‘Thirteen!’ Pain splintered through his body and he crumpled to his side, clutching his ribs.

  ‘Get off the floor.’ Skeletor’s boot was poised to deliver another blow. ‘Major De Kock wants to see us.’

  Back on his feet, Thomas felt dizzy and disorientated. He rubbed his rib cage, doing his best to massage the pain away.

  ‘Hurry up.’ Skeletor scurried out of the office, no doubt expecting to be followed at once.

  But Thomas hesitated. He looked down at the envelope glowing pink with possibility on the counter. Then he glanced at the Lieutenant, who was scowling from his chair, his entertainment so rudely interrupted.

  Without a thought for the consequences, Thomas snatched the letter from the counter and ran after Skeletor.

  ‘You the killers?’ Major De Kock got up from his desk and fixed his good eye on Thomas and Skeletor.

  Thomas had only ever seen him waddling around the parade ground, but here, up close in his office, he was a formidable beast: big, bald-headed and sleek, with a hungry look in one of his eyes. The other eye was red and weepy, bisected by a pink scar that had been earned, according to base legend, in one of the brutal skirmishes fought to stop Southern Rhodesia from becoming Zimbabwe.

  Thomas and Skeletor saluted in tandem.

  This was all the confirmation the Major needed. ‘On behalf of State President PW Botha I would like to thank you men for your actions today.’

  He was being sarcastic, Thomas thought. News travelled fast in Moon Base Alpha and the story of the unarmed corpse must have shot quickly to the map-covered walls of this office. He gritted his teeth and prepared for the worst, his mind racing through the potential punishments for shooting and looting an unarmed man.

  A smile, incongruous with the scar, formed on the Major’s face. ‘Keep this up, boys, and you’ll return to South Africa with medals.’

  Medals? He was definitely treating them to some good, old-fashioned army sarcasm.

  The Major stiffened and his fingers touched his polished head.

  This was such an unfamiliar sight that it took a moment for Thomas to realise what was happening: he was being saluted. It was the first time he had ever been personally saluted by an officer. In response, he and Skeletor snapped out salutes of their own. Maybe they weren’t in trouble after all.

  Turning to the maps on his wall, the Major said, ‘Just out of interest, was the terrorist armed?’

  ‘No,’ Thomas replied at the same time that Skeletor said, ‘Yes.’

  The Major spun around, his good eye closed to a slant. ‘Well, which was it?’

  Thomas wanted to tell the truth. He really did. But he didn’t want to make his remaining year and a half any more difficult than it had to be. And besides, he could feel the frown directed at him from the troopie at his side, a non-verbal warning not to divulge what happened – unless he wanted a kicking.

  Skeletor answered for both of them: ‘He was unarmed when I shot him, sir. But I suspect he dropped his weapon before he reached us.’

  ‘You suspect?’ The Major’s bad eye twitched.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Were there any explosives on his body? Grenades, limpet mines, mortar rounds, anything to link this man with terrorist activity?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Not even a firecracker?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘So am I to understand that you just saw black skin and fired?’

  It took a few moments for Skeletor to answer. ‘Yes, sir.’

  Thomas, who had been silent throughout this exchange, shifted a little to the side, to dissociate himself from the killer.

  But the Major smiled. He opened his arms and bear-hugged Skeletor as if he had found a long-lost child. When he was finished he stepped back and said, ‘You did the right thing, son. You trusted your heart.’

  Skeletor gave Thomas a self-satisfied glance.

  ‘This particular terrorist was a dangerous customer,’ the Major explained. ‘Our Bushmen trackers have been on to him since he slipped over the border. We believe – as you do – that he dropped his weapons to lighten the load. But these communist infiltrators, they’re trained to kill with their bare hands. Give him half a chance and he’ll snap off your neck and use your spine for a toothpick.’ The Major held his chunky fists together and made a snapping movement. ‘Not the kind of person we want arriving unannounced in Pretoria, now is he?’

  ‘No, sir!’ Skeletor shouted back.

  Thomas stood mute. It was hard to believe that the young man in the Bob Marley T-shirt had been a highly-trained terrorist. But it had to be true. There was no other explanation.

  ‘Boys of your calibre don’t deserve to be stuck here in the middle of nowhere.’ The Major moved back to his giant wall map of Southern Africa. ‘That’s why I’m sending you on a little trip.’

  ‘Where to?’ Thomas asked, pushing the dead terrorist from his mind and jogging his eyes along the bottom of the map, visiting peaceful seaside towns like Scarborough, East London and Port Elizabeth, trying to guess which one they would be sent to as their reward.

  The Major stubbed a finger on a great swath of land above the green pin marking their base. ‘Angola.’

  That didn’t sound like a reward to Thomas. Angola was the place the terrorists came from and where the base’s old hands, the ou manne in the faded uniforms, had done their fighting. But a truce had been declared, South Africa leaving the country to wage its civil war in peace. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘we’re not allowed into Angola.’

  ‘Not officially, no. But all those convoys that stop here to refuel, where do you think they’re going, boy? Disneyland?’ Major De Kock ran a finger in a north-easterly direction along the blue vein of a river just over the border. ‘I want you to find an old friend of mine.’ The finger stopped at a small mark, a pen-made scratch across the river. ‘He’s camped here, at this bridge.’

  ‘You can rely on us, sir,’ Skeletor said.

  ‘Good. His name is Colonel Stebbing.’ The Major strode over to sit behind his desk, the chair creaking from the strain. A drawer was opened, and a folded piece of paper withdrawn and slid across the desk. ‘Give this to him. It’s a message too sensitive to pass over radio.’

  Skeletor lunged forward and claimed the paper.

  ‘You are to travel in civvies.’ The Major went back to rooting around in the desk drawer. ‘Take nothing that will incriminate you as South African soldiers. The UN is already whining about our nuclear weapons programme. The last thing we need is for them to find out we’ve sent more troops into Angola. So if you’re captured, I don’t know you.’ He found what he was looking for, a set of car keys that he tossed over the table.

  With a metallic jingle, the keys landed on the floor.

  ‘I can’t drive, sir.’ Skeletor scooped up the keys and held them out to Thomas.

  ‘Me neither.’ Thomas kept his hands away, refusing the responsibility. ‘I’ve only just turned eighteen.’

  The Major sighed deeply. He got up and reached over, snatching back the keys, his belly pressing down on the desk as he did so. ‘I’ll arrange for a driver to pick you up first thing in the morning, someone who knows the territory. Good luck, may God be with you, and whatever you do, don’t get caught.’ He stamped down hard, sending tears flying from his weepy eye, and treated them to another salute. Then he settled back into his chair. ‘Now get out. I’ve got work to do.’

  Outside, Thomas muttered, ‘I don’t like this.’

  ‘You don’t like anything, surfer boy.’

  Chapter 3

  After a sleepless night, Thomas stumbled bleary-eyed to the vehicle depot in a pair of jeans and a hibiscus-covered Hawaiian shirt. The jeans were his own but the shirt had been issued to him by the quartermaster with the assurance that it was the next best thing to camouflage – though Thomas couldn’t help feeling it
was some kind of joke at his expense, a surf-style shirt for the kid from surf city.

  Skeletor was already there, standing at attention in the semi-dark with his bedroll beside him on the tarmac. He was also in civvies, in worn jeans and a black shirt that hung loose over his gangly frame and didn’t quite reach his belt, and it was only when Thomas came closer that he saw what it was: the Bob Marley T-shirt.

  Too tired even to be disgusted, Thomas lay down. He rested his head on his own bedroll and tried to squeeze some sleep out of the morning.

  ‘Up!’ Skeletor shouted.

  Thomas rolled away from the impending boot and opened his eyes to take in the vehicle puttering out of the pre-dawn fog, a set of dim headlights doing little to illuminate the road. As it pulled up beside them, its engine suddenly cutting out, Thomas stood, gathered up his bedroll, and saw that the thing wasn’t exactly military issue. It didn’t even look roadworthy. It was a white Datsun bakkie, the pickup truck beloved of farmers on a budget and found on every South African road. This one was outlined in rust, bald around the edges of the tyres and minus a set of number plates. Worse, Thomas knew, was that it didn’t have four-wheel drive.

  ‘Great.’ Thomas pictured them stuck in a donga while those little wheels spun uselessly and vultures circled overhead, licking their beaks.

  ‘You get in first.’ Skeletor took both their bedrolls and hoisted them in amongst the jerry cans and boxes weighing down the back of the truck. ‘I’m not sitting next to the black. He probably stinks.’

  ‘Skeletor, bru. You’re wearing a dead man’s shirt and you’re worried about how someone smells.’

  ‘You think I’m some kind of animal?’ Skeletor looked hurt. ‘Feel.’ He grabbed Thomas’s hand and pressed it against the damp fabric of the shirt. ‘I washed it first.’

  Thomas recoiled and rushed to get into the cab. Offering a friendly ‘Howzit’, he slid into the middle of the mock-leather bench seat and arranged his legs around the gear lever.

  From the driver’s side came a heavy silence.

  Thomas turned and said, ‘I’m Thomas.’

  The man didn’t so much as blink. It was hard to get a decent look in the dim light, but he was old, possibly even in his mid-twenties, his cheeks lined with initiation scars and mouth surrounded by patchy, non-regulation stubble.

  Slowly, in the manner of a Victorian explorer first encountering a native, Thomas repeated his name: ‘Tho-mas.’

  ‘I heard you the first time.’

  Thomas kept smiling, eager to make a good first impression on his travelling companion. ‘Um, what’s your name?’

  ‘Maxwell.’ His hair was defiantly long, each frizzed strand maybe a full centimetre in length, almost forming an afro.

  ‘And where are you from, Maxwell?’

  ‘Durban.’

  ‘Hey, me too! That must mean you’re a Zulu. Sawubona. Unjani?’

  ‘I speak English,’ Maxwell said, which was probably for the best because Thomas had just exhausted all of his Zulu.

  ‘Is it all right if I call you Max?’

  ‘No.’

  Thomas accepted this with a nod. He could understand why Maxwell sounded a little bit cranky. After all, no-one in their right mind likes to wake up before the crack of dawn to do anything, let alone venture into terrorist country. But he had a feeling that once they were underway the guy would lighten up and become a friend, maybe even a smoking buddy. Before leaving, Thomas had transferred the rest of his weed into a plastic bag and tucked it into his right sock. He could feel it now, the bulge against his ankle: his escape plan for if things got too heavy.

  Skeletor slid in and slammed the door.

  ‘This is Maxwell.’ Thomas threw a thumb to his right. ‘Maxwell, meet Skeletor.’

  Skeletor kicked the underside of the dashboard, making the whole truck rattle. ‘Will this skedonk get us to Angola?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Maxwell answered. ‘I came in last night from the main base, to bring the mail. When I got here they took away my truck. They told me to pick up an unmarked white bakkie in the morning, take two men over the border. And here I am.’

  ‘Do you know how to get there?’

  ‘I’ve been to the operational area many times. Too many times.’ He shook his head in exasperation. ‘But never from this direction. They told me there’s a map and compass in the cubby hole.’

  ‘Well? Then what are you waiting for, boy?’ Skeletor slammed his palms on the top of the dashboard. ‘Drive!’

  Maxwell, his face expressionless, stared across at Skeletor.

  Skeletor stared back.

  Thomas, caught in the middle, tried to defuse the sudden build up of tension: ‘Skeletor, you forgot the magic word.’

  ‘Now!’ Skeletor screamed.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Maxwell spoke evenly, betraying nothing as he turned the key in the ignition.

  Like a chain smoker getting out of bed, the truck wheezed and spluttered to life. Then it coughed, shuddered and died.

  ‘Engine’s still cold.’ Maxwell tried the key again, this time revving repeatedly to keep the engine going, and jammed the gear stick into first.

  They were off, crackling over gravel.

  Skeletor settled back into his seat, pushing Thomas’s arm out of the way to get more comfortable.

  Thomas made no comment. He hadn’t joined the army to fight with anyone.

  They puttered past rows of bungalows where troopies were only now emerging for another day of patrols, boot polishing and 2.4-kilometre runs. A guard gave a half-hearted salute as they passed through the gates.

  Then they were in the desert, rocks and sand speeding by.

  As the sun rose, gently warming the cab, Thomas felt his tiredness begin to thaw. Maybe things weren’t so bad after all. Here they were, three guys with a full tank of petrol, heading far away from Moon Base Alpha. He had weed. In his pocket was the mysterious pink envelope, a treat he was saving for when he had a moment to himself. With a little luck, he might even have time to do some drawing.

  Skeletor may not have been the most sensitive soul in the world, but he must also have been touched by the significance of the occasion. He looked back over his shoulder and gave a wistful sigh. ‘I’m going to miss that place.’

  ‘Me too,’ Thomas murmured, ‘like I’d miss a hole in my head.’

  It didn’t take long for the rising sun to make a sauna of the truck as they headed east, following the straight line of sand that was their road.

  Thomas, stuck between Skeletor and Maxwell, was already sweating heavily, but at least he wasn’t out on patrol. To liven things up, he said, ‘Hey, do you guys want to play I Spy?’

  Skeletor sneered. ‘No.’

  ‘How about we tell jokes to pass the time?’ Thomas launched into one: ‘An Englishman, an Afrikaner and a Zulu are driving in the desert. All of a sudden their truck breaks down.’

  The cab was silent, an invitation, in army terms, for the story to go on.

  ‘They’re miles from anywhere,’ Thomas continued, ‘with no food, no water, nothing. So they get out and walk – it’s the only thing they can do. They walk for hours and as they’re about to collapse, the Zulu discovers a gold lamp in the sand. He rubs it and a genie appears. The genie tells him the lamp is good for three wishes. So the Zulu says, “I wish I was back home in Durban, drinking a cold beer and surrounded by beautiful women,” and, kazam!, he disappears. Then the Englishman rubs the lamp, wishing that he too was having a drink in Durban, surrounded by beautiful women, and, kazam!, he disappears. Finally, the Afrikaner is left on his own in the desert. He gets hold of the lamp and gives it a rub. He thinks hard before he says, “Ag, I miss my friends so much, I wish they were back here with me.”’

  ‘Very funny, surfer boy.’ Skeletor wasn’t laughing, and neither was Maxwell.

  There was nothing left for Thomas to do but stare blankly at the scenery of scraggly farms and broken fences, and wait. He spent the time wondering about his letter, hoping that soon, maybe when they stopped for a toilet break, he would have enough privacy to read it. He should have read it last night, even if its bright pink presence provoked jeers from the barracks crowd. Growing impatient, he started tapping out a rhythm on the dashboard.