Shelter Rock

MP Miles

Description

South Africa is under attack from all sides when Elanza, a politically connected heiress blinded by disease and looking for love before it is too late, meets a naive English boy. Ralph, eighteen and innocent, has accidentally stumbled upon Elanza - and South Africa's biggest secret.When Ralph disappears into the darkest part of the Continent to walk home overland, a Swazi spy, the only black African agent working for the apartheid era NationalIntelligence Service, comes into both of their lives. Angel Rots is uniquely qualified for his official mission to find Ralph and a private mission to settle an old score, butin a pursuit from Cape Town to Cairo, Ralph is always one step ahead and Angel starts to ask questions. Why is this kid so important? What has he found? Looking foranswers, Angel discovers a secret that challenges his own loyalties - and could change the course of history.From illegal nightclubs in South Africa to poachers in Zimbabwe and the Batwa pygmies of Burundi, from arrests in Uganda and drugged hit men in Kenya to thievingSudanese nuns and a final confrontation in the bazaars of Old Cairo, no one would make it home without an angel watching over them. This pulse-pounding thrillerwill delight fans of espionage fiction as well as keen readers who see the parallels of the nuclear weapons threat in the book and modern day politics.

Sujets

• Southern Africa

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 février 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789019421
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2019 M P Miles

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

Although based on true events the characters in this novel are fictitious. Certain long-standing institutions, agencies and public offices are mentioned, but the characters involved are wholly imaginary and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.


Matador
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PAPERBACK ISBN 978 1789016 390
EBOOK ISBN 978 1789019 421
AUDIOBOOK ISBN 978 1789019 438

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.


Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd


For my father,
Mervyn Philip Ralph Miles (1930–2016)


And Joshua the son of Nun sent out two men to spy secretly, saying, ‘Go view the land’

Joshua 2:1 (KJV)


Contents
South Africa
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight

Southern Africa
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve

Central Africa
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one

North Africa
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five

Southern England
Twenty-six

South Africa and England
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight

The British Virgin Islands
Epilogue

Acknowledgements
About the author

South Africa
6th December, 1981 to 4th March, 1982


One
Angel travelled on the train every morning from his home near fields and a stream to the Comitia building, a grey inhospitable office block with an obscure unmarked entrance beside a small travel agency.
His braided hair, unfashionably long and tied in a ponytail to keep it manageable during the day, the butt of endless jokes, fell in his eyes as he stepped down to the platform. He shook his head to clear it and saw that the carriage had a needless sign on it; they all did. Suddenly and unexpectedly angry, he scowled and looked crossly for someone to blame for his irritation. It incensed him. Most of the signs had been taken down; everyone knew the rules. People knew who the carriage was for without it requiring a pointless notice declaring ‘non-whites’.
Angel noticed a scuffle on the sidewalk outside of the station – two policemen trying to lift a man from the pavement, batons drawn. A police vehicle drifted around the corner like a shark circling a kill. A woman screamed, her hands pulling at her own hair. Loud shouting policemen asked the man for something. He cowered on his knees, arms up to protect his face in case the batons should fall.
Angel stepped into the road to walk past them, muttering, giving himself instructions. The woman, distraught, started shrieking at the policeman. He walked quicker to get past them but then slowed, listening to the woman, intrigued by her accent. Angel made a guess that she was speaking Setswana, officially the language of Botswana, but most Africans in Pretoria spoke a Tswana-based creole. He listened to the stress sounds and the tones, more high than low, different to the Setswana he was used to.
“Hey, what are you looking at?”
The policeman who shouted at him had long socks, and shorts held by a wide black belt that glistened as brightly as his truncheon.
Angel spoke Afrikaans, but his pronunciation made it obvious it wasn’t his first language.
“I can help.”
“What?”
“She’s trying to explain,” Angel said, pointing to the man shaking in fear on his knees. “He had an accident in the mine and can’t work. She was taking him to a doctor.”
The policeman put his face very close to Angel’s.
“You had better shut up. I don’t need any help from you understanding the Population Registration Act. He’s Black like you and needs a pass to be here. Move on or I’ll put you in the van with him.”
Angel stroked the braids on the back of his head. His father, a white Afrikaner civil engineer based in Mbabane, Swaziland, had worked on the Pretoria to Maputo, Mozambique railway in the late 1940s, a time when engineering projects were completed as much with hard fists as theodolites. Angel had never met him.
Angel’s mother was Black Swazi with pretensions to royalty. She came from the House of Dlamini, her father the virile King Sobhuza II of Swaziland. She took the first name of the King’s mother, Lomawa, one of Sobhuza’s 210 children from one of his seventy wives. When Lomawa started feeling ill, the inyanga , the most important of the three types of traditional healers, threw his collection of bones on the ground and puzzled over the pattern they took. The diagnosis seemed uncertain. He prescribed a kuhlanta , a vomiting treatment using water and an extract of herbs. She didn’t need it. She vomited regularly, every morning. In desperation, and because of her royal status, he recommended a luhhemane in the presence of the King. In a mental state influenced by mind-changing drugs Lomawa talked freely about the sickness and could name the umtsakatsi , the witch that caused it. She named a wizard not a witch – a white wizard working on the railway. King Sobhuza had the final word. She had a choice: back to the inyanga for stronger herb extract to expel her evil and then banishment overseas, or just banishment overseas. Already feeling ill and fearful of the inyanga’s medicine she chose the latter, left Angel’s father in Mbabane with his railway and never returned. She spent her life in the damp small rooms of London’s SW1 hinterland and refused to give her baby a name.
Angel smiled at the policeman.
“Well, interestingly, and I have thought about this, the admixture appears to be gender-biased.”
“What?”
“You would probably expect my maternal genetic material to be predominately Khoisan,” Angel waved a finger at him, “but in fact it is autochthonous Bantu, which may explain your original observation.”
The policeman put his hand around his baton, his pink fingers turning white.
“What the fok are you talking about?”
“I’m Coloured,” said Angel, “not Black.” Angel laughed and shook his head. “But I do sometimes wonder. You know…”
“Shut up!” the policeman shouted, spittle dribbling on his chin.
His partner turned, his hand on the shoulder of the kneeling man.
“He looks more Black than Coloured to me,” he said. “Only nine per cent are Coloureds. Ask him to show you his fingernails.”
Angel knew the drill. Under South Africa’s arbitrary and confusing rules of racial differentiation, if the moons of the fingernails showed a mauve tinge then he would be Black not Coloured, a distinction that would affect every aspect of his life.
“Oh please,” pleaded Angel, still smiling, “you’ll be putting a pencil in my curly hair next and seeing if it stays there when I shake my head.”
The woman, still shrieking, scratched at the policeman’s face. Don’t hit her. Please don’t hit her , Angel mumbled to himself.
Angel could picture in his head how it would unfold before it happened. He knew with certainty who would move where, how they would smell, what vehicle would pass when it had ended.
The policeman clenched his left hand into a fist to punch the woman in the centre of her trunk, swinging up quickly from low down. He delivered a strong blow under the sternum with a lot of momentum, an unwarranted and excessive martial arts move to the solar plexus to knock the air out of an opponent and cause them to lose balance. The blow compressed the nerves that radiate outward from the coeliac underneath the heart, her diaphragm contracting into spasm. She fell to the pavement, winded, struggling for breath. He lifted his baton to strike the woman he had just punched to the ground.
Angel’s hand came from behind the policeman, grabbed his raised forearm and pulled it up, over and down behind the policeman’s back, using the acceleration of the arm coming down and its own mass to force the dislocation of the shoulder. Angel turned. The other policeman reached down his leg, looking for his sidearm. Angel stepped backwards, lined himself up and kicked him hard on the side of the knee, like a long punt deep into the opposition’s twenty-two at a rugby match. The policeman’s leg buckled instantly and he fell, screaming.
Angel lifted the woman into a crouching position, with her upper body brought forward and down over her knees. There wasn’t time for the spasm to settle and the breathing to return to normal. They had to move quickly. The man who now stood beside her had a thin fine face with a hooked nose and looked out of place in urban Pretoria. Angel, currently working on a project with the Egyptian General Intelligence Directorate, wondered if he might be Arab. Employees of GID, an incredibly secretive and powerful body with agents throughout the Middle East and North Africa, had immunity from prosecution for all crimes committed while at work. Some in the intelligence world, and in Angel’s own organisation, thought this enviable.