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  Rourke had started by slapping Gallagher around and then giving him a kick in the groin. That was usually when it stopped; by that time Rourke would have earned the grudging respect of all the new recruits. Except that Gallagher was different. He got up and came back for more.

  Rourke then started to hit Gallagher hard. He wanted to hurt him, to teach him a lesson. Gallagher came in close and brought his skull crashing into Rourke’s face. Rourke staggered back and Gallagher hit him in the centre of the face with a hard left, then a right.

  Rourke put the boot in. Gallagher gripped his outstretched leg and snapped it savagely upwards. There was a splintering sound, and Rourke keeled over as Gallagher kicked him in the side of the skull.

  Gallagher was given a warning. Six weeks later Rourke was still in hospital and Gallagher was one of the twenty-three men who passed the selection committee out of the original one hundred and sixty-seven who had started the course. No one ever picked a fight with him after that.

  Nurse Maureen Thrush was glad that Captain Rayne Gallagher was well again. This young man did not deserve to go to the institution. She had seen it so many times before - soldiers who had gone over the edge, driven beyond the limit of endurance.

  Rayne had told the doctor that there was no need for him to be strapped down, but the doctor had just smiled and said it was good that his limbs should stay in one place for a time. Rayne respected the doctor’s opinion but couldn’t quite fathom the inscrutable look on his face when the latter talked to him.

  Samantha came across the hospital lawn. He was pleased to see her. Her neck was covered by an enormous plaster cast - her luck in escaping injury in combat must have run out just as his had done.

  ‘So the terrs finally got you, Sam.’

  ‘I suppose they did, honey.’

  Her soft American accent was as sensual as ever. But why was she looking at him in that strange way, just as the doctor had? He said, ‘I don’t understand why they’re keeping me in here for so long. I’m sure I could easily get around on a pair of crutches. There are plenty of men who need to be in this place more than I do.’

  ‘Honey, you must give your leg a chance.’

  He could always see when she was irritated, but then she must be in a lot of pain. He said gently, ‘It’s good to see you, Sam. I’m so glad you came with them in the K-car to get me. I needed to see someone I knew after what I’d been through out there.’ She bent over him and said quietly, ‘They want to know if you can shed any light on where the rest of your men are, honey.’ ‘They want to know? I suppose they have a bloody right to know, but not right now.’

  The tight, closed expression on his face made her do something she normally never did - she began to cry. He tried to lift his arm to comfort her but the straps held it down.

  ‘How did you hurt your neck, Sam?’

  She told him, told him how he’d tried to kill her. Then it was his turn to go silent.

  ‘I’ve seen it before,’ she said at last. ‘It comes with the combination of the drugs, the shock and the strain.’ She paused. ‘Rayne, I still don’t completely understand what happened to you out there.’

  He was quiet. What more could he tell her? Sam lit him a cigarette, placed it in his mouth and watched him take a long, deep drag. Beneath his pyjamas, the muscled outline of his body was evident. Even though he was strapped down and still sedated, he sat erect in the wheelchair, and his sapphire-blue eyes were very bright below the blond fringe that needed cutting. He could have been a movie star.

  ‘War is savage,’ he said. ‘There are no rules.’

  ‘You’re an undercover killer.’ Sam never minced words. It wasn’t her way to avoid an issue.

  ‘By becoming the enemy you destroy their soul, sap their morale. The hunter and the hunted become blurred.’

  ‘And if you fluff your lines you get your brains blown out.’

  Rayne stared out of the door and through into another room. A soldier lay on a bed, bandages over both his eyes. He’d lost them in an ambush. His girlfriend was with him. Rayne wondered how long it would be before the real resentment would set in.

  Then he told Samantha how he’d killed his own men. This time she understood the closed expression.

  Rayne stared up at the old-fashioned fan on the ceiling as it rotated above his head in hypnotic circles. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘I became the enemy.’

  Outside the Livingstone Hospital the air was warm and sweet with the smell of summer flowers. Everywhere in Salisbury, trees and shrubs were in full bloom; scarlet trees lined the streets, their vivid red leaves sprouting from long black trunks into the blue sky; in every garden, hazy mauve jacarandas and the beautiful bauhinias in pink and white, white and purple, created a stunning display of natural colour. The air was full of birdsong and the hum of bees. Not for nothing was Salisbury known as the city of flowering trees.

  The atmosphere was calm and relaxing in the way it can be only in Africa. Peace and war, she took them both in her stride. And war, now, was gathering apace all round Rhodesia. With ZANLA to the east and ZIPRA to the west she was virtually at war on every front. In the east particularly, with the withdrawal of all Portuguese forces from Mozambique in 1974, hostilities had taken on a new ferocity. And though Ian Smith had had to agree to the formation of a transitional government that would gradually transfer power to the black majority, both Joshua Nkomo, leader of ZIPRA, and Robert Mugabe, leader of ZANU, had vowed to destroy such a government.

  The gruesome terror tactics of the black freedom fighters were accelerating. In June 1978 a massacre at the Elim Mission horrified the Rhodesian public in its barbaric intensity. The butchery of eight white missionaries and their children, and the rape of the women, achieved its goal of shocking a war-weary nation.

  In September 1978, ZIPRA shot down an Air Rhodesia passenger plane, the Viscount Hunyani, just after it had taken off on a scheduled flight from Kariba to Salisbury. The plane was hit by a Soviet Sam-7 ground-to-air missile fired from the Matusadona mountain range on the Zambesi Escarpment. Thirty of the fifty-eight passengers died as the plane crashed to the ground. Another ten, women, men and children, were rounded up by ZIPRA ground forces and bayonetted to death. The rest of the world officially condemned the raid, but most people seemed to feel that the Rhodesians had it coming to them.

  Then, that evening, late in the summer months of 1978, as Rayne lay asleep in the Livingstone Hospital, Rhodesia’s largest fuel depot exploded in a mountain of flame. Millions of dollars- worth of fuel lit up the Salisbury evening sky in a danse macabre of light and explosions - fuel that was beleagured Rhodesia’s most precious resource, paid for with hard-earned foreign currency.

  Looking at the newspaper the next morning, Rayne itched to be in action again. Whatever happened, the country could not be allowed to fall into a state of anarchy. Most Rhodesians had already reaped a bitter harvest from the conflict. Sons, fathers, brothers, lovers, husbands killed in action or maimed by land­mines. The women were sick of a war that never seemed to end.

  Rayne was sure Ian Smith had realised that a negotiated settlement was the only answer to the problem. The objective must now be no longer to preserve white majority rule but rather to find a way to protect white rights in a black democracy. Rayne wondered how the soldiers on both sides would manage to make the difficult transition from war to peace.

  He turned round to see Major Martin Long walking towards him. A military man in his late thirties, Long had made his name in the SAS and then the Selous Scouts. He was a front-line man. The black hair, hard face and Scots accent caused many people to mistake him for the film actor Sean Connery. He had a magnetic quality, an intensity that radiated from his probing dark eyes.

  ‘Good to see you, sir.’ Rayne extended his right hand, relishing the freedom of movement now that the straps had been removed. Long’s iron-hard grip matched his own.

  ‘Cut the regimental crap, Rayne. How the hell are you, you desperate bugger?’

  ‘We
ll, they’ve cut me loose.’

  ‘Yes, I heard you were a wee bother at the start. You’re well, though?’

  Long was sizing him up for something, he was sure of it.

  ‘Well as a man can be who’s been kept in hospital against his will. I’ll be out next week, even if I have to take on Nurse Thrash hand-to-hand. But enough of that. The fuel depot going up, that must have hit us pretty badly?’

  ‘The crafty sons of bitches. It was a masterstroke, a Soviet- backed operation. Excellent penetration of security. Minimum loss of life, maximum effect on our morale. Yes, it’s bad, laddie.

  We keep telling everyone we can keep them out of Salisbury, but the terrs have shown us up. We are the guerillas now in our own guerilla war.’ He sighed. ‘The average bloke isn’t looking for anarchy. He’s looking to win this war, and from where I sit that looks pretty bloody impossible.’

  Rayne could sense the tiredness in Long’s voice. Only someone who knew him well would have noticed it. The words etched themselves into Rayne’s brain: ‘We are the guerillas in our own guerilla war’. It echoed his own thoughts. He had become the enemy.

  ‘Och, Rayne. Don’t look at me like that. I’m sorry about what happened to you, but it proves I was right to believe in you. You’d never have got the captain’s rank unless they thought you could handle a situation like that. Death is something you deal with personally. Each of us will walk away from this with something we didn’t want, and we’ll have to live with it.

  ‘My father’s an army man, a good Scot. He was in the infantry in the Second World War. He once told me that the saddest part of the war was coming home victorious. He saw the jubilation in the eyes of my mother, the looks of adulation from the women who knew he’d been decorated for bravery - and who could blame them? But he and his men carried a sadness in their souls; the thought of their friends who wouldn’t be coming back. The paradox is, they’d have gone back to fight for the same cause again. That’s what being a good soldier is all about.’

  ‘This is a bit different from the Second World War, though, sir.’

  ‘Hear me out, you impetuous bastard. You survived against the most incredible odds. A lot of these doctors say you’re off your rocker, but that’s a load of crap. Certainly you’ve got a basic level of survival brutality that most men couldn’t muster, but there’s nothing wrong with that. What you did to Sam the other day was a result of all the drugs they pumped into you. Forget that business.’

  ‘I already have.’

  ‘Back to the army, then. There’s a lot to be done.’

  ‘I’m not a peacemaker, sir - whatever peace there ever will be between the Matabele and the Mashona.’

  ‘This isn’t about peace, laddie, it’s about war. I’m asking you if you want to take part in perhaps the most important action of the whole war. A secret project. Something you’ll never get public recognition for. A project so dangerous that no man in his right mind would have anything to do with it. In the long run it’ll make a negotiated peace possible and stop Rhodesia heading into a bloodbath. And I need your decision now. No one else knows about this except a few men in high command. The whole operation is top secret.’

  ‘Equipment?’ Rayne could feel his pulse racing already.

  ‘You’ll get everything available — legally and illegally. And Rayne, you’ll be in command.’

  ‘You bastard, sir.’

  ‘My pleasure, Captain Gallagher. I knew you couldn’t resist it.’

  Major Martin Long walked down the long gravel drive that led from the hospital buildings to the road. He hated himself. He shouldn’t have done it, but then who the hell else was there that he could have used? If Sam found out, she’d never forgive him.

  The approaches made to him had been subtle. The Americans had obviously been looking for the right man for a long time, and then the CIA must have seen the intelligence reports on Gallagher. Rayne was an incredible fighter; he was also the only white man Long knew who could disguise himself as a black man and convince another black - his mastery of black languages was that good.

  Who could really know what had gone on, out there in Mozambique? Rayne had started operating on his own a month before. Sheer suicide, they’d all thought, but he’d survived, and he had led the army into some of the biggest terrorist camps they’d found for a long time.

  Now the Americans wanted to use him for their crazy mission. It had to be done, of course, the Russians had to be stopped. The timing was perfect: mentally speaking, Rayne was a total mess.

  The door of the car was opened for Long by his army driver. He paused for a moment before getting in, and looked back at the hospital. There was still time. He could go back and tell Rayne they felt he wasn’t well enough to do the job.

  The car door slammed as he got in. The driver jumped in the front and pulled away. Sometimes, Major Martin Long thought, it was better not to think at all.

  Rayne lay back in the wheelchair, thinking about the rollercoas­ter of events that had got him where he was. It had all started four and a half years ago, in May 1974. His mind drifted back to that time, helped by the effects of the drugs. He had been a different person then, with different goals. He had just turned twenty-one. He already had his BA in law, passed with straight As, and was in his final year of the LLB degree. He wanted to become a civil rights lawyer, like his father. Like Bruce Gallagher too, he wanted to win the coveted Rhodes scholarship and go on to Oxford University.

  At school Rayne had been a victor ludorum, gaining colours in rugby, athletics and cricket. Now at university he had concen­trated single-mindedly on rugby. He knew it was only a matter of time before he was selected for the Transvaal provincial team. More importantly, sport was a major part of the selection process for the Rhodes scholarship.

  The match was an inter-varsity one between his own side, ‘Wits’, which he captained, and Stellenbosch, the ‘Maties’. Stellenbosch was the home of the Afrikaner rugby elite, schooled by the legendary Dr Danie Craven. It was the best side in the country and unbeaten that year. Rayne was determined to change all that.

  The match was referred to as a friendly. Really, he thought, that was a stupid description of any event that held up a challenge. You won or you lost, and there was nothing nice about losing.

  It was the second half, and his team was losing by three points because of an unfair decision that had awarded the Maties a penalty in the first half.

  The ball came into the Maties’ hands after a rough scrum, and they passed the ball easily from one back to another as they shot down the sunburnt grass of the playing field. It was a try in the making. Rayne’s mind had raced into overdrive. There was no way they were going to score a try if he could help it.

  His legs forced their way into the dry, brown turf as he sprinted at electrifying speed down the pitch, his whole body focused on the Matie back who was dangerously close to the line. Almost upon him, Rayne saw the back grab the ball. He launched himself into the air and crashed down against the back’s thighs in an expert flying tackle.

  The man crashed to the ground and Rayne heard a muffled crack. The crowd roared with approval and his own team-mates rushed to congratulate him on a brilliant tackle. The back was on the ground and still not moving. ‘Still stunned,’ Rayne had thought to himself.

  The referee ran over to the slumped body and eased it over. A deathly hush came over the ground. The ref looked up into Rayne’s steel-blue eyes and shivered.

  ‘You’ve killed him,’ he said very quietly.

  Rayne went completely cold. The people, the ground, seemed to recede into the distance. He felt himself speaking. ‘I didn’t kill him. It was a fair tackle.’ The words that came out of his mouth were without emotion.

  Next day in the Rand Daily Mail the headline spelt out the words that were to haunt him for the rest of his life. Death tackle kills mine magnate’s son. Gallagher on the line. The article continued in the same sensationalist style:

  Yesterday, in a so-called ‘frie
ndly’ intervarsity match, Rayne Gallagher, Wits’ star player and the captain of the team, killed Tom Rudd, son of Tony Rudd the mine magnate, in a flying tackle. Gallagher is said to have reacted to the news calmly.

  Rudd was rushed to the Johannesburg General Hospital for a full autopsy. Distinguished pathologist Dr Max Scheider made a short statement to this reporter later. He said that Rudd’s neck had broken after being tackled by Gallagher.

  Tony Rudd said he would demand a full inquest into his son’s untimely death and Gallagher’s rough standard of play. Mrs Rudd is currently under sedation in a Pretoria hospital.

  This incident confirms criticism of the rough standard of play by the Wits team. It is believed that Gallagher had already been previously suspended from the Wits team for rough play.

  Neither Gallagher nor his father, the distinguished advocate Mr Bruce Gallagher SC, were available for comment. The Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand, Dr Bozzoli, said that he regarded the death as a tragic incident, and the matter would be fully investigated.

  The spectacular picture of the death tackle, exclusive to the Rand Daily Mail, was taken by Wits photographer Aaron Golding.

  Rayne remembered the interview with his father that had followed. He remembered Bruce Gallagher’s deep voice bellow­ing through the many rooms of the family’s exclusive home on Johannesburg’s prestigious Westcliff Ridge. Rayne had always known who he’d inherited his hot temper from. They were in the study. Through its large windows you could see as far as Pretoria.

  ‘It was an accident, and they’ve branded you a murderer! And now this talk of a university inquest! It’s farcical. That photo­graph should never have seen the light of day.’

  ‘Forget it, Dad. You’re wasting your breath, save it for the courtroom. The damage is done. I’m not going to get the Rhodes scholarship after that.’