Read The Soldier who Said No for Free Online

indifferent to the summer, but the intrepid kiwis were going about their business as if the rain was but a minor irritation, not an impediment to their recreational activities.
    At the top of the park an elderly Chinese couple were slowly going through their t’ai chi moves. Further down at Eastern Beach members of the boating fraternity were launching their dinghies and boats and children were splashing about in the shallows under the watchful eyes of their minders. In the lee of one of the islands in the distance, small triangles of sails fluttered in the light breeze, while luxury motor yachts left long tails of white wash behind them.
    De Villiers had always been a man of action, but here action had to be sought in the form of recreation: fishing, boating, skiing. Even the most hardened criminals didn’t own guns and seldom resorted to violence. There was no external threat to the country and the armed forces had long been reduced to a corps trained to serve as peacekeepers on foreign soil. And the police were desk-bound most of the time.
    He decided to brave the weather and went downstairs. He left the house, locking the front door behind him. Deep in thought, he followed the path towards the stream separating the school from the Macleans Reserve. At the small wooden bridge below the first set of classrooms, he encountered a troop of schoolchildren wearing Macleans College sports shorts. They were cleaning the stream, picking up the rubbish that had washed up on the banks or had got stuck in the vegetation: crushed cigarette packets, plastic bags, chips and chocolate wrappers, empty bottles, even a tyre. They chattered as they proceeded downstream at a pace that matched De Villiers’s. At the beach he watched as they dropped the litter bags into the bins in the picnic area.
    De Villiers headed for the shallows where the Pacific meets the coarse volcanic sand of Eastern Beach. He removed his shoes and tied the laces together to carry them slung around his neck. He entered the water and started walking north. In the distance, the regatta was under way now, with small boats rushing from one brightly coloured marker buoy to the next. Anxious parents watched from the shore as their offspring struggled with the subtleties of competitive yachting. Race marshals in the regatta’s small motorboats followed the tiny sailors.
    Copious quantities of broken shells had washed up on the beach, leaving a ridge that marked the high tide. Further out in the bay, De Villiers could see one of the Eastern Beach regulars on his kayak, the small vessel tied to a navigation post about four hundred metres into the ocean. De Villiers had seen the man on the beach. On one occasion he had been offered a snapper fresh from the sea. While there was, to De Villiers’s eye, a shortage of wildlife on land, there appeared to be an abundance of fish. In the sand under his feet there were edible shellfish, tuatua, tuangi and teheroa, not to mention the ubiquitous periwinkle. At the rocky northern end of the beach there were mussels, not the green-lipped mussels for which New Zealand was famous, but ordinary brown mussels. He had on many occasions collected these for paella.
    The sea sand was rough but somehow soothing under his feet and between his toes. In the back of his mind was a memory of a time, long ago, when he had walked more than four hundred kilometres barefoot through the softer sands of the Kalahari.
    He turned at the northern end of the beach and slowly made his way back to the house.

Southern Angola
May 1985
5
    The soldier was a young man, but battle-hardened, a veteran of three years’ combat. Captain Pierre de Villiers checked his watch. It was exactly 04:00. His aching muscles and headache had not affected the accuracy of his body clock or the instinctive awareness of his circumstances. He could not hope to outpace his pursuers, so he would have to lay a false trail first and then double back to get behind them. Once behind them, he