white men?s newspapers. This man who played such a major role in the Struggle, pushed aside now. This man who was once a player. He was respected, in Europe. He was somebody and now he is nothing. Maybe he wanted, just one more time, to be a player again. I was aware of his bitterness. And weariness. But I didn?'t think ? Perhaps ? to be noticed? I don'?t know. I just don'?t know.?
?The information. Did he say what was so upsetting??
She shifted uneasily in the chair; her eyes slid away from his. ?No. Just that there were terrible things? .?
?How terrible??
She just looked at him.
?Now what?? he asked.
?They phoned. From Lusaka, I think. They have some hard drives, but that is not what they want. I had to get another drive from my father?s safe.?
He looked her in the eye. This was it.
?In seventy-two hours I must deliver another hard drive in Lusaka. That?s all the time they gave me.?
?Not a lot of time.?
?No.?
?Why are you wasting time sitting here??
?I need your help. To deliver the data. To save my father because they will kill him anyway. And I?? she raised the hem of her long, wide skirt??am a little slow.? He saw the wood and metal, the artificial legs. ?And not very effective.?
Tiger Mazibuko stood under the wing of the Falcon 900 in his camouflage uniform and black beret, feet planted wide, hands behind his back, his eyes on the twelve men loading ammunition boxes.
He had waited thirty-eight months for this. More than three years since Janina Mentz, dossier in hand, had come to fetch him, a one-pip lieutenant, out of the Recces.
?You?re a hard man, Mazibuko. But are you hard enough??
Fuck, it was hard to take her seriously. A chick. A white woman who marched into the Recces and sent everyone back and forth with that soft voice and way too much self-assurance. And a way of playing with his head. ?Isn'?t it time to move out from your father?s shadow?? Mazibuko had been ready to go from the first question. The follow-up was just Mentz showing that she could read between the lines in those official files.
?Why me?? he had asked anyway, on the plane to Cape Town.
Mentz had looked at him with those piercing eyes and said, ?Mazibuko, you know.?
He hadn'?t answered, but still he had wondered. Was it because of his ? talents? Or because of his father? He found the answer progressively in the stack of files (forty-four of them) he had to go through to choose the twenty- four members of the Reaction Unit. He began to see what Mentz must have known from the start. When he read the reports and interviewed the guys, looked into their eyes and saw the ruthlessness. And the hunger.
The ties that bound them.
The self-hatred that was always there had found a form, become a
?We?re ready, Captain,? said Da Costa.
Mazibuko came out from under the wing. ?Get up. Let?s go to work.?
Yes, they were ready. As ready as nearly three years of tempering could make them. Four months to put the team together, to handpick them one by one. Winnowing the chaff from the grain, over and over, till there were only twenty-four, two teams of a dozen each, the perfect number for ?my RU,? as the director referred to them possessively,
Now he pulled the door of the Falcon shut behind this half of the Dirty Double Dozen. The Twenty-Four Blackbirds, the Ama-killa-killa, and other names they had made up for themselves in the twenty-six months since the best instructors that money and diplomatic goodwill could buy had taken them in hand and remodeled them. driven them to extremes that they physically and psychologically were not supposed to withstand. Half of them, because of the two teams of twelve, were continuously on standby for two weeks as Team Alpha, while the other as Team Bravo worked on refining their skills. Then Team Alpha would become Team Bravo, the members shuffled around, but they were a unit. A un-it. The ties that bind. The blood and sweat, the intensity of physical hardship. And that extra dimension? a psychological itch, a communal psychosis, that shared curse.
They sat in the plane, watching him? their faces bright with expectation, absolute trust, and total admiration.
?Time to kick butt!? he said.
In unison, they roared.
4.
CIA
SITUATION BRIEF
FOR ATTENTION:
Assistant Deputy Director (Middle East and Africa) CIA HQ, Langley, Virginia
PREPARED BY:
Luke John Powell (Senior Agent in Charge? Southern Africa), Cape Town, South Africa
