disappointment. “I do not believe Mazaheri would cheat us, especially after what you have already done for him in escorting the container to Arak. He has my confidence.”
“Is it what I asked for?”
“Actually, it is somewhat more: 545 bricks of SEMTEX H. The plastique is out of the Czech Republic. Each brick weighs 2,500 grams. The total weight of the shipment, if I am not mistaken, is-”
“About 1,360 kilos, or a little over 3,000 pounds. I believe that will be enough.”
Al-Zawahiri was vaguely impressed with the man’s rapid calculations. He would have been stunned to learn that the American could have done the same math in his sleep at five years of age.
“The challenge comes in creating a kill zone wide enough to encompass the entire convoy,” Vanderveen continued. “Despite Shakib’s contributions, there are things we don’t know.”
“For instance?”
“How the recent attacks will affect Brenneman’s security situation, for one thing…”
As the American explained the numerous factors that might prevent a successful strike, a very different conversation was taking place 750 miles to the southwest.
The Vanderveen family history, as described by Ambassador Martins, was sketchy at best. There was a fading birth certificate, he explained, a wilted document from the eastern Transvaal dating back to 1964. For their purposes, it was worthless.
For the time being, the first ten years in the life of William Vanderveen would remain a mystery.
There was also documentation dating back to 1975. These were medical records held at the Rand University in Johannesburg. They verified that a young man, accompanied by his mother, had visited the psychology department in February of that year. The boy’s scores were astronomical; well beyond the top 1 percent of the population, and yet his family had declined numerous requests for follow-up testing.
According to the file, the psychologist who had administered the exams, a Dr. Wilhelm D. Klerk, had expressed bitter disappointment that the woman and boy had never returned to his department. This disappointment had been tempered when the doctor discovered that they belonged to Francis Vanderveen, the famed South African general; it was only to be expected that the family would seek privacy in such matters.
Ryan Kealey made an effort to listen dispassionately, but soon found himself consumed by conflicting emotions; deep down, he wanted nothing more than to kill the man who had betrayed and murdered five of his fellow soldiers. At the same time, he felt a desperate need to understand, as though understanding might erase some of the lingering pain and guilt. Ryan listened to the ambassador intently, but was fast with the questions: “Who was this General Vanderveen?” he asked. “Why was he so important?”
Martins answered this to the best of his ability. He talked about South Africa’s policies during the apartheid years, and he explained that the military was often the first line of defense against African uprisings in the capital and major cities such as Johannesburg and Cape Town.
“When Daniel Malan took power in 1948, he immediately dismissed several high-ranking army officers who were known to be unsupportive of his policies. At the time, Francis Vanderveen was a captain in the 11th South African Special Services Battalion. He survived the purging of the ranks, though, mostly because it was widely rumored that he had been collecting damaging evidence for years, files that tied many of the National Party’s most prominent figures to the Nazis during the second World War.”
“In other words,” Naomi said, “Vanderveen was untouchable.”
The ambassador nodded. “Precisely. However, that is not to say that he disagreed with Malan’s views. In fact, he had long been noted for his support of the Afrikaner Broederbond.
“In 1959, Vanderveen established a liaison between the South African Defense Forces and the Bureau of State Security. This position gave him the authority to oversee both military and police matters in South Africa. By that time he was a colonel, and responsible for enforcing the Pass Laws and Section 10 of the Black Urban Areas Act of 1945. I won’t bore you with the details, but this was legislation that served to confine black Africans to demarcated areas in remote parts of the country, thereby providing the illusion, if not the reality, of a white South Africa.”
“How could one man oversee that kind of operation?” Kealey asked.
“He didn’t,” was the ambassador’s reply. “He had a huge staff on hand, not to mention the army itself. Nevertheless, there is evidence that Vanderveen led many of the raids himself. In the 1960s alone, it’s estimated that he orchestrated the removal of almost two million black Africans.”
Naomi considered this piece of information for a moment. “You know, I took a course last year at GWU where we looked pretty closely at apartheid and its role in South African history. I don’t recall seeing this man’s name anywhere.”
Martins sipped at his coffee and nodded slowly. “You wouldn’t have. You see, Francis Vanderveen was very effective at his work, but his tactics were something of an embarrassment to the government, even a government as ruthless as Malan’s. As he went about enforcing Section 10, the colonel didn’t always wait until the houses were vacated before moving in with the bulldozers. Worse yet, there were rumors that he had a hand in the Sharpeville massacre of 1960.”
“I did read something about that,” Kharmai interjected. “The security forces opened fire on a group of African protesters outside a police station. The officers later reported hearing shots, but no weapons were ever found on the bodies.”
“That’s right. Sixty-nine people died in the square, with another hundred or so wounded. Vanderveen had quite a reputation by this time. No one was foolish enough to accuse him outright, but everyone knew who had given the order to fire. Incredibly enough, Vanderveen’s career wasn’t damaged in the slightest by that incident. In fact, he was promoted to brigadier general in 1964. That was the same year of his son’s birth.”
Ryan settled back a few inches in his chair. Finally, we come to it.
“William Paulin was the second child of Francis and Julienne Vanderveen. Their first, Madeline Jane, was born in 1961. As the general was gone the majority of the time, the children lived with their mother on the family estate in Piet Retief, a small town in the Assegai Valley. By all accounts, Julienne was a very beautiful woman, and wholly devoted to her children.” Martins hesitated. “What follows is largely conjecture, but as I said, we had a difficult time finding reliable witnesses.
“You’ve already seen the transcripts. William scored 184 on the Stanford-Binet when he was eleven years old. He also scored off the charts on the Weschler Scales and the Slosson Intelligence Test for Children. His brilliance was undeniable, but his sister was another matter entirely. She was better known for her… well, for her promiscuous behavior. In 1975, it was widely rumored in the village that she was seeing one of the Africans working a nearby farm. A young man in his early twenties.”
Naomi did the math quickly. “She was fourteen?”
Martins nodded. “It didn’t last long, though. Madeline died that same year. Apparently, she suffered a fatal fall in the mountains surrounding her home.”
Kealey thought he saw where this was going. “The general?”
But Martins shook his head. “No. He would have had ample motive if the rumors were true, of course, but Francis Vanderveen was 100 kilometers away on the day his daughter died, supervising the destruction of an entire village in the Natal. He was not responsible.”
A brief silence ensued. “Surely you’re not suggesting that William-”
The ambassador held up a hand to stop Naomi. “I’m just giving you the facts.”
“But he was so young,” Kharmai protested. “It doesn’t seem… right, somehow.”
“There’s nothing right about it,” Martins agreed. “But the story doesn’t end there. A month after the girl was buried, the young man she had been seeing went missing from the farm he was working. They found him a week later in the first hills leading out of the Assegai. The body was virtually cut to pieces.”
“And the girl’s father?” Ryan inquired.
“Was 1,100 kilometers away at the time, supervising a troop buildup on the Angolan border.”
Another silence, longer this time. “Needless to say, Julienne was devastated by the loss of her only daughter, but I’ll get back to that in a moment.”
The ambassador shifted his weight in the seat and flipped through the file he had been given earlier in the day. “Francis Vanderveen was promoted to major general in the spring of 1975, four months before Madeline’s death. Up until this time, South Africa’s white population was protected from hostile African lands by a ring of buffer states that fell under Afrikaner control. Two of those states were Mozambique and Angola, both of which were
