Soon after midnight there were rumours that P. K. might show up; then came sniggers that he was ‘otherwise engaged’. And about two o’clock everyone came to attention while the National Anthem was played on a gramophone. The older guests stood rigid, with heads high, but several of the younger ones chattered and giggled. Philby took his leave soon afterwards. He was modestly satisfied with the evening. He had established himself without ostentation, had made a few contacts, and one friend.
He drove home carefully, watching out for the numerous police patrols who were quick to catch drunken drivers; and before going to bed he made sure that all the doors and windows were secured, and the alarm system switched on.
CHAPTER 25
Three days later, at 11.17 in the morning, a bomb exploded in Salisbury’s largest supermarket in the city centre. There were over two hundred people in the building at the time, most of them European women. Fourteen were killed instantly, five died in hospital, and a total of fifty-eight were injured, of whom seven were permanently maimed.
The explosion took place near the entrance, the windows of the surrounding buildings were blown in, and a number of people treated for cuts and shock, including a young woman who found a high-heeled shoe lying on the pavement with a foot inside it.
The bomb was believed to have been left in a carrier-bag, and to have consisted of about thirty pounds of gelignite, detonated by a sophisticated time-fuse. The police had cordoned off the area within minutes and questioned every shopper in the building, particularly the non-white staff. Nobody could remember anyone coming in with a carrier-bag, and there had been no suspicious Africans lurking about just before the explosion. But one woman in hospital was able to describe a short swarthy man, whom she’d taken to be an Italian or Greek immigrant, carrying two bags and making a number of random purchases, picking items off the shelves and tossing them into the bags as though he were on a shopping-spree.
One of the woman-cashiers thought she remembered him too, because he had paid with a Rhodesian twenty-dollar bill and seemed in a great hurry to get his change. She also thought he’d left only a few minutes before the explosion. It was the one lead the police had.
By noon the news had paralysed the city with a dull rage. African terrorists were the obvious suspects, though the police were disturbed by the ease and efficiency with which the outrage had been carried out. The possibility of it having been the work of European terrorists was not yet being even rumoured in the bars and drawing-rooms of Salisbury. The nightmare of all Whites in southern Africa — the appearance of a well-trained European terrorist movement — was still too awful to be openly entertained.
Kim Philby had no such doubts, however. He saw both the appalling reason and virtue behind this latest of Pol’s atrocities. For the moment Rhodesia seemed deceptively impregnable, enjoying the protection of her powerful neighbour to the south, and of the more doubtful Portuguese empire to the north and east. She remained a kind of nature reserve, where instead of wild life one saw the last of a tame but moribund species — the gin-and-tonic descendants of the Memsahibs, acting out the splendours of the British Raj in an affluent society that fed on Japanese cars and TV sets showing Portuguese programmes; on German cookers and Italian fridges; Portuguese wine, South African beer, and Chinese clothes from Hong Kong. It was a becalmed society, a false society. In his heart every White Rhodesian knew that he was dreadfully vulnerable.
Their greatest danger was a simple but insidious one. Most of them were recent European immigrants who enjoyed a safe prosperity in a pleasant climate. But once that safety ceased, and the prosperity began to wane, most of them would cut their losses and run — forsake their outlying farms and comfortable town houses, and seek the gilt-edged security of South Africa. Rhodesia would quickly become an embattled enclave where a handful of Poor Whites struggled stoically against hordes of mutinous Blacks — a miniature Congo, a second Algeria, another dismal monument to Colonialism, sliding into the same lethargic chaos as the rest of Black Africa.
Kim Philby now saw his main objective as not so much to infiltrate Rhodesian society and unmask the prominent Sanction-Busters, as to stake out strategic nerve-centres for targets of terrorism: restaurants, bars, clubs, hotels, shops, banks, big commercial buildings; factories and industrial complexes; railway junctions and airports. The odd well-placed bomb, the random ‘necessary killing’, would be enough to instil panic and despondency, and the rot would soon spread. Rhodesian morale would be sapped, and the bumptious Rhodesian Front would have to answer for the growing wave of terror. Mass emigrations would follow, and the White Rhodesian State would begin to crumble.
These were the dreams and aspirations that Philby enjoyed during his first few weeks in the country. He had little else to sustain him. No word came from Pol, though this did not worry him, since Pol had said he preferred to let Philby lie low and establish himself. Nor had London made contact. They usually ordered their regular local agents to make contact first — sometimes waiting months before identifying themselves. There were times when Philby wondered whether James Fielding was London’s man, and was biding his time, as well as keeping a wary eye on him. There was nothing in the man’s demeanour to arouse any direct suspicion — but from his own training Philby knew this was nothing to go by.
He continued to see Fielding several times a week, usually for their lunchtime drink at Meikle’s. These were not joyous
