"We're to meet tomorrow with the Prime Minister to talk damage limitation."
"I don't think there'll be damage," the Director General said. "I have learnt many things from our man's records.
One of them is his tried and tested loyalty to the Service.
He won't talk."
"Then he'll hang with his secrets." The P.U.S. rocked his glass slowly, willing the juice from the slice of lemon into further circulation.
"Our secrets."
"The Prime Minister would look unkindly on the least embarrassment."
"It won't come to that. I'd bet money on Carew's silence."
He paused. "The fact is, I should like very much to save this man. I quite accept that it is politically unacceptable to go cap in hand and ask for his freedom, tell them who he is. We have looked at the odds against a team of men lifting him out of this gaol, and they are high."
"Too high, I don't doubt, and the Prime Minister wouldn't countenance the risk of failure. For heaven's sake don't let's have any old-fashioned stunts. The saving of Mr Carew's life just doesn't warrant the risking of anyone else's, not when you add the political risk."
Neither in London nor Lusaka did Jacob Thiroko have to consult with colleagues.
That night, alone, he would take the decision on whether the military wing of the African National Congress would back the venture proposed by Jack Curwen.
Amongst the senior officers of the Umkonto we Sizwe there were some who saw Whites, even if they were prepared to make the same sacrifices, as having no place in the Movement. Those Blacks of the military wing treated all Whites associating themselves with the A.N.C. with suspicion. They believed all of those Whites were communists first, true to the South African Communist Party, and loyal to the African National Congress, second.
Thiroko was not a communist. He had been to Moscow.
He believed the Soviets, for all their aid in weapons and money, to be more racist than the Italians or the English or the Dutch or the Swedes.
If he were to have admitted to those senior officers of the military wing that a White had come to him with a plan of action and that he had supported him without consulting them then there would be questions circulated about his fitness to lead. Nevertheless, it would be his decision alone.
He sat in his room in the "safe house" in a quiet road in North Finchley. He drank coffee.
Better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all.
Sentimental rubbish.
Revolutionary warfare was about victory. He was no advo-cate of glorious failure martyrdom. If a cadre of the Umkonto we Sizwe were to attack the maximum security section of Pretoria Central then they must succeed, they must free their condemned comrades. The agony of the decision lay in a particular area. It was the area that had stuck with him, caused him to drink his fourth and fifth and sixth cups of coffee, stayed with him through half a packet of cigarettes.
The physician had told him to smoke as much as pleased him. The pain was more frequent. Was the Movement better served by saving Happy Zikala and Charlie Schoba and Percy Ngoye and Tom Mweshtu and James Carew from the gallows? Did the Movement gain more from the martyrdom of the Pritchard Five?
Which?
Better for the Movement to have at freedom five men who had bungled an attack, or better to have five heroes buried while the world screamed anger at Pretoria?
Which?