A Sailor's Honour by Chris Marnewick

Author:Chris Marnewick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: A Sailor’s Honour
ISBN: 9781415203521
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Published: 2011-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

Hamburg

1992 24

Within a month of the call, in the northern spring of 1992, De Villiers was standing on the deck of the Alicia Mae in Hamburg. He didn’t know much about ships and shipping and had to learn fast. To maintain his cover, he enlisted in a naval academy for the skippers of fishing boats operating in the Baltic. His course would take the full three months he needed to refit the ship. He had gained entry with a batch of forged documents the major had said came from Military Intelligence. When he was allowed to visit the Alicia Mae in the dockyard where she was being refitted, he saw men crawling over her deck with steel plates and rods and welding equipment. De Villiers was not authorised to go below deck to inspect the works.

Annelise had been only too happy to see De Villiers back on active service and dispatched on a mission. Their goodbyes at the airport had been muted. De Villiers knew what his wife was thinking, because he was thinking the same thing. Would this operation restore him as a man and, once so restored, would he and Annelise be able to pick up the fragments of their marriage? In the airport departure lounge, De Villiers had looked over Annelise’s shoulder at their children and had made a secret commitment to himself to make a success of the mission. I’ll come back a better man, the man I always was and always wanted to be, he thought.

De Villiers and the major had travelled to Hamburg via Frankfurt on Lufthansa, but on separate flights. For security reasons, the major had explained, but De Villiers suspected that the major had flown business class to avoid mixing with the plebs and their children in economy. There was to be no contact between them in Hamburg. De Villiers would receive his orders through a middleman on board the ship every morning at 8 a.m. sharp.

De Villiers had been booked into a seamen’s hostel near the fish market between the red-light district and the docks. When he opened his bags, he found that his toiletry bag and his sunglasses had been stolen. The loss of the glasses and the toiletries were of minor concern to him, but the six months’ supply of medication he had received from the army psychiatrist in Pretoria was irreplaceable. He knew neither what the prescription was nor how to contact the psychiatrist. The medication came in unmarked white capsules. He had no choice but to do without them.

Two weeks later the nightmares stopped and his memory started to return in stages. Alone and lonely in his hostel bed at night, De Villiers put the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of his recent past together. The troubles in his career and marriage had started with an operation into Angola, he now remembered clearly.

He was on the outskirts of a small, dusty town in southern Angola. He had the target in the sights of his sniper’s rifle. Then his spotter, Lieutenant Jacques Verster, had said, ‘Hold it, Pierre.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.