John Davis - Unofficial and Deniable

‘No, I don’t hate blacks,’ he once said, ‘I just have contempt for their politics and government. They cannot govern – look at the mess the rest of Africa is. Why? Three reasons. One, their culture – it’s totally different to ours, they see the civil service as an opportunity for power and enriching themselves – an opportunity for corruption. Two, Affirmative Action – they want to put black faces behind every desk to give jobs to their own race, so corporals become colonels overnight, constables become commissioners, clerks become magistrates. Stupid black pride makes them insist that black upstarts can do any job as well as any experienced white man. The result – shambles and corruption. And three: they then fuck up the entire economy by turning the country into a Marxist one-party dictatorship.’ Dupont snorted. ‘No black is ever going to rule me. And that’s what makes the anti-apartheid activists so important to us – they want the blacks to rule South Africa, which means that they are supporting the communists who want to ride to power on the backs of the blacks. Over my dead body! So keep those files strictly up to date, please.’

So Harker did. And it was through this diligence that he again encounered Josephine Valentine.

Security is always a problem for the spymaster: where does he keep the secret files so that nobody will find them or even suspect they exist? In his own country his office is in some government building, in foreign lands it is deep in the innards of his country’s embassy or consular office; but in the case of the Civil Cooperation Bureau no South African ambassador, consul or clerk even knew of its existence. So Harker’s spymaster office was off the basement boiler-room of Harvest House in Gramercy Park. On Dupont’s instructions Harker had installed a brand-new boiler that would not require attention for years and he hired a different company to install a steel door leading off it to a ‘storage room’. From that room another steel door, behind shelves of odds and ends, led to the Civil Cooperation Bureau’s New York espionage centre. Here Harker had a desk, a computer, filing cabinets, a telephone and fax line in the name of a fictitious insurance broker, and a shredding machine. There was no window: the walls were raw stone, the floor plain concrete. Standing orders required Harker to be in this neon-lit subterranean cell at seven o’clock every morning, before Harvest opened for business, to receive NTKs (Need-to-know Situation reports), to transmit SEEMs (Scrambled Encoded E-Mail reports), and to make any RTCs (Restricted Telephonic Communications) using codes or a litany of ENAVs (encoded nouns, adjectives and verbs) to report what the dark world of espionage had come up with in the last twenty-four hours.

Harker found this regime no hardship: his military training caused him to wake naturally at five a.m. no matter how late he went to bed; he pulled on a tracksuit and for the next hour he jogged through the dark concrete canyons of Manhattan, taking it gently so as not to strain his damaged leg; six o’clock saw him having breakfast at his favourite ‘all-nite dinette’ off Union Square, seven saw him showered and besuited at his desk in his bleak cell ready to put in a couple of hours’ work for the South African Defence Force, even if it only meant ploughing through reams of boring and insignificant detail about the private lives of members of the devilish Anti-Apartheid League.

But Harker did not find the fat dossier that Dupont had compiled over the years on Josephine Franklin Valentine boring. On the contrary, he found it fascinating, exotic. He felt as if he knew her personally. And hadn’t he saved her life? He had survived her furious attempted murder of him, had seen her thrust the pistol at her beautiful breast, seen the shocking splotch of blood, seen her blown backwards, arms outflung as if crucified. He had dragged himself over to her, blood pumping from his shoulder and thigh, put his ear to her bloody breast, heard her heart still beating; he had stuffed his field emergency dressing into her shocking wound, then plunged his mouth on to hers to force some air into her lungs – it was he who had yelled for the medics and ordered them to evacuate her on the first helicopter. Jack Harker felt he had saved her life even if in truth it was the medics who had done that. And what South African soldier would have let a white woman bleed to death on a black battlefield when medics were swarming around – particularly a beautiful half-naked, English-speaking woman who could obviously give her captors a lot of military intelligence about the Cuban enemy?

But Josephine Valentine had not told anybody anything. Harker had tried to question her while the medics were loading her on to the stretcher, tried to find out how many tanks and armoured cars the Cubans had down the road, to discover the name of the dead Cuban officer she was so upset about, and she had repeatedly told him to ‘fuck off’ – even when he asked her for the name of her next of kin in case she died. She had even refused to tell him her blood group. ‘ I don’t want you to save my fucking life, asshole, haven’t you noticed?’

Nor did the Military Intelligence boys back at base camp in South West Africa have any success with her when she recovered consciousness after surgery, though her language improved. ‘Get lost,’ she said, ‘I demand to see the American Ambassador,’ and when the Intelligence boys had developed her numerous rolls of film and tried to question her about faces and equipment depicted therein she had demanded a lawyer, and told them she and her numerous high-powered publishers were going to sue the South African government to Kingdom Come. In short, Military Intelligence didn’t know how to squeeze information from a furious, beautiful American journalist with a wound in her breast – Military Intelligence was accustomed to black terrorist captives who quickly spilt the beans under a bit of robust interrogation and they didn’t have the nerve to third-degree information from a well-known American photo-journalist. General Tanner himself had flown out from Pretoria to try to deal with her; he had eventually called in the most senior CIA operative of the Angolan desk all the way from Lusaka, but even their formidable combined expertise failed to extract information and they had finally thankfully delivered her into the custody of the American Ambassador and her father, a big-wheel lawyer from Boston who arrived with a crack of thunder and placed her in a private clinic in Pretoria pending her deportation as an Undesirable Alien. She had refused even to divulge the identity of .her dead Cuban lover. Harker had felt almost proud of her when General Tanner had told him what a load of trouble she was. A very desirable Undesirable.

That was over two years ago, and now here she was back in his life as he sat in his dungeon in Harvest House reading her thick file. The beautiful Josephine Franklin Valentine smiled at him ravishingly from the pages of many magazine and newspaper cuttings containing her war photographs and stories – wars in Israel, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Mozambique, Rhodesia, Angola: wherever men made war Ms Josephine Valentine went in with her cameras blazing, her typewriter pounding out the staccato Hemingwayesque prose. Very good, lean, evocative writing – you could almost smell the blood and dust and cordite. She evidently loved the high drama of war, the strange business of going into battle, the extraordinary courage it required; she obviously deeply admired the men who did all this for a living when they could be making lots more money in a nice air-conditioned office. Yet she was very liberal, and a strict political analyst. She bitterly condemned the South African government but she was also condemnatory of the Russians for invading Afghanistan; she sympathized with the Israelis, admired their fighting men; she was dismissive of the Arabs as soldiers while very sympathetic to the Palestinians’ cause. She had a high opinion of the Egyptians for making peace with the Jews, and there was a splendid photograph of her sitting in Gaddafi’s ceremonial tent drinking camel’s milk, earnestly discussing his holy Jihad against the West, but in her story she blasted him as an enemy of mankind, particularly for the Lockerbie Disaster bomb. She had great admiration for the Rhodesians as soldiers, as Davids taking on the Goliaths of Russia and China, but she condemned most of their politicians as constituting a ‘cowboy government’. She applauded the Cuban army for fighting the South Africans in Angola – indeed it was she who had deeply embarrassed the President of the United States by revealing to the world that America was waging a secret war on the side of pariah South Africa against the communists, thus causing both countries to pull out of Angola for several years. But now the whole Western world was covertly on the side of the South Africans to drive the Cubans out of Africa, the war was at full blast again and Josephine Valentine was there, boots and all, sweat-stains on her khaki outfit, dust sticking to her face, blonde hair awry, stealing the show with her photographs and stories – until the Bassinga raid that Harker had led.