Exodus of Spies

Brian Landers

Description

In Angola the largest tank battle since WWII is taking place. South African troops are battling to preserve apartheid.Ministers want MI6 to provide support, discreetly. Thomas Dylan is sent to the front line, but death is soon much closer to home. After thirty years in British Intelligence, Adam Joseff has retired to his stamp collection. His loyalty is beyond question... until he is murdered in the Caribbean. Then the questions start.Has Joseff betrayed his country? Or has he been betrayed? And why was he so interested in an Angolan student young enough to be his granddaughter? As the Dylans start pulling the clues together they must confront death, betrayal and their own conscience.Then the politicians take over.

Sujets

• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: RedDoor Press
• Date de parution: 22 avril 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781839782183
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Also by Brian Landers
Empires Apart: The Story of the American and Russian Empires
The Dylan Series:
Awakening of Spies Coincidence of Spies Families of Spies
EXODUS of Spies
Brian Landers

Published by RedDoor www.reddoorpress.co.uk
© 2021 Brian Landers
The right of Brian Landers to be identified as the author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the author
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover design: Rawshock Design
Typesetting: Jen Parker, Fuzzy Flamingo www.fuzzyflamingo.co.uk
Contents
Author’s Note
Prologue
Part 1
Luanda, Angola, 21 May 1985
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
Part 2
Jamba, Angola, 21 November 1987
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
Part 3
Nonsuch Bay, Antigua 17 th April 1988
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
Afterword
Acknowledgements
About the Author
AWAKENING of Spies
FAMILIES of Spies
COINCIDENCE of Spies
Author’s Note
Operation Argon and the Democratic International are both real events from the twenty-seven-year-long Angolan civil war. They are depicted here as accurately as possible. Some of those involved – Captain Wynand Du Toit, Jonas Savimbi and Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North – are real people.
Most other characters are fictional and any similarity to real people and events is largely, but not entirely, coincidental.
Prologue
The killing of Adam Joseff stunned his friends and former colleagues.
Even after all these years I can still remember the shock and disbelief when my wife Julia phoned.
‘Adam’s dead. He’s been shot. In Antigua.’
He had been killed by two shots to the back of the head fired at close range. There were signs of a struggle but his wallet had been found untouched. The house itself had not been ransacked and nothing appeared to be missing. To many of us that made the initial police assumption of a bungled robbery seem very wide of the mark. Adam had been around long enough to know that if someone is pointing a gun at you the only sensible response is to put your hands up. Adam Joseff had been executed.
Because he had been a pillar of the Intelligence Establishment for so long there were inevitably calls for the Security Services to use their resources to investigate his death. But the reality was that he had retired nearly eight years earlier and his death seemed to have no current security implications. My own Service could not get involved.
Why, we all asked ourselves, would anyone want to kill Adam? Collecting early postage stamps, rather than anything in his no doubt murky past, was what obsessed him now. And what was he doing in Antigua? Adam’s only known connection with the Caribbean had been a best-forgotten operation in Trinidad many years ago.
The local police did ask for assistance and two Metropolitan Police detectives flew out to the Caribbean. They spent a week in Antigua but nothing new emerged. I was told they had produced a voluminous report but it was not until later that I had a chance to read it. The case remained unsolved. Back in London interest waned.
‘Joseff was one of the best,’ I heard Colin Asperton remark to one of his team. ‘But very much old school. Put out to grass long ago.’
I wouldn’t have described Adam as ‘old school’ myself. I remembered him poring over computer printouts when I joined the Defence Intelligence Staff, at a time when most of our colleagues were still coming to terms with electric typewriters. And I certainly didn’t like the expression ‘put out to grass’. I had transferred from the Defence Intelligence Staff to MI6 before Adam retired but I knew his contrarian thinking was sorely missed.
Not that Adam had cut himself off entirely from our world. He and a couple of others had set up what he called a ‘strategy consultancy’, which seemed to be moderately successful. My wife had joined him for what she expected to be a part-time role; it had proved to be far more than that. He remained in touch with an astonishing network of contacts like a one-man LinkedIn app. Many of them speculated at length about his murder but to no avail.
Adam’s death would have remained one more mystery to be filed away and then forgotten but for the discovery of the second body.
Only then did we realise that the killing of Adam Joseff had everything to do with the Security Services. His death, it became clear, was the result of a long chain of apparently unconnected events that went right back to a commando raid in Angola nearly three years earlier, Operation Argon.
Part 1
Luanda, Angola, 21 May 1985
Salvador da Silva Pinheiro, head of the Angolan security police, was expecting the raid that the South Africans had named Operation Argon. He cursed only that he had received the details too late to do more than send a warning to the army commander in Cabinda on the very evening that Captain Wynand Du Toit and his men were going ashore. His mood was not improved when he heard that most of the South African raiding party had escaped.
‘Have you heard the news from Cabinda?’ demanded the Russian colonel who barged into Pinheiro’s office the next morning.
Pinheiro turned. ‘Please knock before you enter.’
The Russian merely nodded to acknowledge he had heard the reprimand. He wasn’t about to apologise.
‘The South Africans have attacked the storage tanks in Cabinda,’ said the Russian.
‘Tried to attack. They were intercepted. Our forces captured one and killed two.’
‘And the rest escaped.’
‘The rest? You think there were more?’
‘Of course. They will be back inside Zaire by now.’
Pinheiro said nothing. Why should he tell this arrogant pig that he knew for a fact that the raiding party had indeed been larger and that some did unfortunately seem to have escaped? And if the Russian wanted to believe they had crossed the frontier from Zaire let him. There was no point in telling him that he was wrong. The commandos had come by sea all the way from Saldanha Bay in South Africa’s Cape Province.
The Angolan turned away. The Russians seemed to think that he should gratefully accept the crumbs of information that they were willing to pass him. But he no longer needed to rely on them. Now he had his own man in the enemy camp and he was not about to share him with anyone: not with his subordinates, not with the Russians, not even with his party comrades here in Luanda. Only one other person needed to know, and she could be trusted.
I
The European powers carving up Africa at the Conference of Berlin in 1885 had done so by simply drawing lines on maps. Cabinda was a leftover that had to be tidied up, an enclave of less than 3,000 square miles jammed between the bits of the Congo delta given to France and Belgium. The Conference decided to give Cabinda to Portugal. Eventually the Portuguese lumped it into their colony of Angola despite the fact that the two territories shared no common border. Cabinda was separated from the rest of Angola by a strip of what, at the time of Operation Argon, was called Zaire and is now, with a fine sense of irony, called the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
There was no way the nineteenth-century map makers could have guessed that their casual creation would achieve the importance it eventually achieved. The discovery of the world’s largest offshore oilfields changed Cabinda for ever.
Cabinda’s oil storage facilities, owned by Gulf Oil, were the intended target for the nine South African Special Forces commandos who approached the Cabinda coast on the night of 20 May 1985.
The moon was hidden by heavy cloud and a gentle swell was all that stirred the sea. ‘Ideal conditions,’ commented one of the commandos but already the mission was not going entirely to plan. The boats had been launched further out than the mission commander, Captain Wynand Du Toit, had hoped. There were further delays when a fishing boat appeared close to the planned landing site.
Nevertheless the initial landing went well and Du Toit was confident they could make up lost time. After hurriedly hiding their boats the South Africans set off inland. The familiar smells of Africa were a welcoming comfort after long days at sea. They successfully skirted around a small village but after that soon got lost. Operation Argon was running well behind schedule when the raiders reached the heavily wooded lying-up position that had been identified for them by South African Intelligence.
The aerial photographs used in the planning sessions back at the South African Military Academy in Saldanha appeared to show that the surrounding area was uninhabited. They were wrong. When daylight broke, the commandos discovered that their hiding place was surrounded by camouflaged encampments of Angolan troops. It seemed that a major Angolan Army base was hidden in the jungle little more than half a mile away.
From their hiding place the commandos watched in alarm as an Angolan Army patrol appeared, apparently following the tracks they had left during the night.