Pinnacle Event

10

The Augusta 129 lifted off from the Special Services compound and took a tourist ride over Table Mountain for Ray Bowman’s benefit. The long, flat-topped mountain stood at the edge of the city like a theater prop placed to provide a setting. Cape Town was a city like none other he had ever seen, a gem by the sea. Mbali asked the pilot to swoop over Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela had spent two decades in a cold cell. Once the aircraft set a westerly course for the wine country, they were there in less than fifteen minutes.

The pilot circled the winery, confirming the landing area on radio to an advance team that had checked out the winery. He then gently placed the aircraft down in the cleared space, kicking up walls of dust and dirt. They sat in the cabin with the doors closed, while the engine spun down and the dust storm settled. The copilot then exited the aircraft and pulled open the cabin door from the outside. Hendrik and Pieter Roosmeer were waiting for them, still brushing off the dust. The brothers looked to be in their forties, dressed alike in green polo shirts bearing the logo of the winery and jeans. They courteously introduced themselves, shaking hands first with Mbali and then Ray.

“Our father is waiting inside the winery, in the Library Reserve Room. He’s anxious to meet you. Please, follow me,” Hendrik Roosmeer said.

Bowman looked out across the rolling hills, covered in vines. Whitewashed stucco buildings were scattered across the valley. Another mountain sat in the near distance, almost as perfectly placed as Table Mountain was to Cape Town. Aside from the mountain, it reminded him of Sonoma, but maybe the way it might have been fifty years ago. The sun was casting a yellow light across the scene. After the beauty of Cape Town from the air and now this magnificent valley, Bowman had to remind himself that the day had begun with men who had kidnapped him and then been shot to death a few feet from him.

Inside, the man at the head of the heavy, wooden table was clearly the laird of the manor. Slightly stooped, but still tall and thin, he had a regal mane of thick white hair. Looking at him, Ray thought this is what Hendrik and Pieter would look like in three decades. The older man was pouring from a crystal decanter into one of the dozen or more wineglasses before him. The afternoon sun was slanting through one of the narrow strips of stained glass that topped off the wood-paneled walls. It seemed like another incongruity to Bowman. This appeared to be a setting for a sommeliers’ retreat, not for an interrogation about nuclear bombs.

“Johann Roosmeer, the winemakers’ assistant,” the old man said, offering his hand to Mbali. “They are the winemakers, the new wave,” he said, pointing at his sons. “How familiar are you with our wines?”

Mbali set herself on one of the stools around the tasting table. “I like to think I know something about Pinotage, but I have to admit that I have not had the pleasure of tasting yours, and certainly not the Library Reserve.”

“That’s because there hasn’t been any of our Pinotage. It’s been off the market for seven years while we grew new vines, clones, on the hillside, much better terroir for that grape than down in the valley. Here, try.” He handed her a tall stemmed glass. “It’s the 2014. Very young, a barrel tasting. We have not yet bottled it. The older vintages here in the Library are awful.”

She went to taste and then stopped, held her head back and sniffed, rolling the red-purple liquid in the glass. “It has bouquet,” she sounded surprised. “Normally the better Pinotage have none. The regular Pinotage can smell like paint or rubbing alcohol. This smells like berries.”

Johann Roosmeer smiled in appreciation. “You do know Pinotage. Yes, the good ones have no bouquet and that is because they vent it to get rid of the acetone odor. This clone has no acetone odor and I mix it with twenty-five percent Shiraz and Cab Sav, as is allowed under South African law.”

Mbali finished sniffing and tasted, with her head back and her eyes closed. “Wonderful,” she said, “truly marvelous. When will it be bottled?”

“Hendrik, can we fill a bottle for our guest? It will be the first bottle of the vintage.”

The two brothers took that as their cue to leave their guests in the hands of their father. When they left, he poured three glasses of Shiraz from another decanter. “Hendrik went to the University of California at Davis. So did his sister, but she stayed there. Married an American. So, you see, I have three American grandchildren. But then you know that, don’t you? Pieter studied here at Stellenbosch’s OVRI. As I said, Hendrik and Pieter are the winemakers. I just assist.”

“OVRI?” Ray asked, feeling left out of the discussion to this point.

“Sorry. You are the American, of course you would not know. Our Institute of Oeneological and Vintacultural Research. It’s modeled on your UC Davis, bringing us into the twenty-first century of global winemaking.”

Mbali tasted the Shiraz. “This has the Boekenhoutskloof beat hands down. This will get the medal this year.”

“You flatter an old man,” Roosmeer beamed, sitting himself down on a stool. “You butter me up so I will talk? Pieter said you wanted to bring an important American here to talk about the old days. Can’t we let them die, the old days? We had the Truth Commission to put all of this behind us.”

Mbali put down her glass. “Some things from the old days have come back. The Trustees have all been killed. You were once one of them. Your life may be in danger.”

Johann Roosmeer nodded, while looking at his shoes. “I heard about the deaths. Something is obviously going on, but you are wrong about one thing, I was never, what did you call them, a Trustee? They wanted me to go with them, but I could not leave this country. This is home. My people have been here for centuries.”

Ray moved around Mbali and sat on the stool closest to the old man. “We have to dig up the past. Because what they worked on here before they left, they may have later worked on abroad. That may be why they were killed. That’s why I have come from Washington. We need your help, sir.”

Roosmeer took a mouthful of the Shiraz. After a moment, he opened up, as he had apparently always intended to do. “We all saw it coming. Apartheid was a huge mistake. It had to end. The blacks, the coloreds, the Indians all would get the vote in the end, peacefully or violently. We would be the minority.

“In a way, we were like the KGB. They saw the end of Communism, of the Soviet Union, coming at about the same time. Odd coincidence really. The KGB mid-level leadership stashed gold abroad. They got ready to be the new wealthy Russians. Putin was part of that group, I’m told.”

Ray nodded his agreement.

Roosmeer continued. “My colleagues planned for years. We sold arms technology abroad, secretly, despite the UN embargo, to Israel, Singapore, Taiwan, Chile, Korea. ARMSCOR was very good in those days, we made the best field artillery in the world, good antitank missiles, antiship missiles, all sorts of things. We did not repatriate the money, the hard currencies, couldn’t really. So we grew into having these huge offshore accounts.

“Then the men you call the Trustees hit up the mining interests for diamonds and gold from the reserves, smuggled them out of the country for the future when the blacks would take over. It was worth billions of U.S. dollars, the cash, the stones, the gold. No one wanted just to hand that over to Mandela and his lot.”

Ray knew all of that, but he kept the conversation going.

“And the purpose of the money was to rearm and come back, grab a piece of South Africa for a new, smaller white lager?”

“No, no, that was just the talk,” Roosmeer said. “The money was to set us all up abroad in nice new homes, new companies, new lives. It was capital for the diaspora to start new businesses, to buy land so our children could still inherit some great plots from us when we die. Money for emergencies, maybe to get the rest of us out of the country if the race war started. It didn’t start, of course.”

“And you didn’t go,” Mbali said. “You were the Deputy Director of the ballistic missile program, just as high up as the others.”

“They gave me some money to buy the winery, in case you had not guessed that part. They thought I was crazy to stay. They were wrong,” Roosmeer replied.

Ray pressed on. “As a head of the ballistic missile program, you worked closely with the nuclear weapons team. Did you know that they lied to the UN, to the IAEA?”

“I could see that. They told the UN people that the only weapons we had were the six devices, not made at Pelindaba as people thought but a little ways away at an ARMSCOR place called the Circle Building. Each of them weighed a metric ton. They were 1.8 meters long. They were the devices we planned for the testing program. You could not really deliver a weapon like that, although they pretended they would put them in the old Buccaneer bomber. Those bombs we admitted to the UN, they were devices designed to go off in the test shafts, to scare the Cubans and the Communists, to prevent them from invading from their bases in Angola and Mozambique.”

Ray filled in the blanks in the story. “So the test weapons from the Circle Building were dismantled and the HEU went back from ARMSCOR to the Atomic Energy Commission at Pelindaba. That was the highly enriched uranium, the weapons-grade stuff, they showed the IAEA. Then they told the UN that was all that they had ever made, when in fact they had more.”

Roosmeer poured more of the Shiraz for himself and Mbali. “So you know the story? Why do you need me?”

“What did they do with the rest of the HEU?” Ray asked.

The older man chuckled. “Pretty obvious, no? They made missile warheads for the Jericho-II rockets that I was building from the Israeli designs. Smaller warheads, less HEU than the test devices, about half as much, but higher yields because they were boosted with tritium gas in little bottles. Instead of the eighteen-kiloton explosions of the test devices, they would have a yield of fifty kilotons.”

Mbali looked at Bowman. “Sounds like a much bigger bomb?”

“Three times bigger than Hiroshima,” Roosmeer answered before Ray could. “We had six of them finished when it all ended in ’91. They fit perfectly on my missiles.”

“And they were not dismantled?” Ray asked.

Roosmeer rose and went to another decanter. “This one is a blend of Cab Sav, Petit Verdot, and Cab Franc. Like what the Americans call meritage.”

Ray stood and walked toward Roosmeer and accepted the glass of the red blend. “One of them went off in the Indian Ocean in August, Mr. Roosmeer. Where are the others?”

“If you know that one went off, I don’t. Where did they go from here? Israel, that’s what I was told, but I don’t know. That was not my job. I made the missiles. Then an American came, young hotshot from the State Department, and got de Klerk to close my missile program, too. We could have used my missiles to send up satellites, but no, they were destroyed, the rocket engines, the missiles, everything I had built.” His tone had changed. “That is why I hated de Klerk, Mr. Radford. You want to know where the missile warheads went. Ask the Israelis. Don’t you Americans pay for them to have their own country, surrounded by the Arabs? You haven’t decided yet that their apartheid is bad, too, have you?”

Mbali moved to cut the tension between the two men.

“Mr. Roosmeer, if those missile warheads are on the loose now as we think they might be, if that is why the Trustees were killed, if that is why something went off in the Indian Ocean last year, we are all at risk. The Pinotage won’t be drinkable with strontium-ninety in it.”

Johann Roosmeer took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

“Avraham Reuven is still alive in Israel. He worked with me and with Potgeiter and Steyn. He was from their Defense Ministry. He might know what happened to the warheads. He lives outside of Tel Aviv, up in the hills.” Roosmeer poured the rest of the wine in his glass into the sink. “But be careful. They killed one of the Trustees outside of Tel Aviv, whoever they may be.”

As Mbali and Ray walked out of the old winery building, they heard and then saw the Augusta taking off, without them. “Did you only pay them to wait for an hour?” Ray asked over the noise of the helicopter and smiling at his host.

“No, Mr. Bowman, I pay them sometimes to be a diversion, especially when someone is trying to kill my guest. We are driving back to Cape Town.”

Two Range Rovers sat at the end of the path, doors open, guarded by men who looked like they had once been on a rugby team. But while rugby teams in South Africa were still largely whites only, Mbali’s security team was multiracial. Ray wondered how often she had used white agents when blacks would stand out too much. He tried to guess how many white agents she had, men like Marcus Stroh, the man who had saved his life.

“You said this morning that you knew I had met with Johann Potgeiter in Vienna,” Ray noted as they got seated in the Range Rover. “However did you know that?”

“I am not without my ways, Raymond,” she smiled as she read a text message. “Now we can take you back to the safety of the guesthouse at our training facility.” She paused, buckling herself into the seat. “Or we can go watch Special Branch pick up the Nigerian who runs Black Eagle. See why he wanted to kidnap you. Which will it be?”