The Danse of the Blu Wildebeest

By Till Hansen

Iain Burns, pilot, safari guide, and arm-chair philosopher, is watching Zimbabwe crumble and his bank accounts dwindle. His future is uncertain and a tad bleak. So, when he gets the call from his former commander to avenge the honor of a famous journalist, he sees a chance for a well-deserved pay-off, even if it means making a risky return to coup-ridden Comoros.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Till Hansen
• Release date: Dec 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223839842

Till Hansen

Dr. Till Hansen is double Board Certified in Internal Medicine and in Endocrinology, Diabetes, and Metabolism. He graduated Cum Laude from Chadwick School in Southern California and Phi Beta Kappa with a Bachelor of Arts from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. He has been educating other physicians about new diabetes medications for the last decade all over the United States and internationally. He recently retired from private practice after 20 years to write full-time. He has a wide range of non-medical interests. In 2001, he flew as a first officer for Pacific Wings, which was a regional, scheduled part 135 carrier based in Maui, Hawaii. He has one thousand hours of flight time and a commercial pilot license, with single and multi-engine, land and sea ratings. He received his Black Belt in Tae Kwon Do in 1997 and is currently a student of Wing Chun. He was born in Germany and has lived in South Africa, Colombia, and throughout the United States. He is fluent in German, Spanish, and English. He obtained his certificate as a Certified Financial Planner in 1998 and his charter as a Chartered Financial Analyst in 2004. He taught financial literacy to high school seniors for 4 years. He is married to Sonya Hansen MD who is a Board-Certified Specialist in Obesity Medicine. He and his wife have a home near Cape Town, South Africa, and travel extensively. His second novel is set in the Basque Region of France during World War Two. 

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Foreword

Prior to 1995, when triple anti-retroviral therapy (ART) became the standard treatment for AIDS, death from the HIV virus was inevitable. In developed countries, patients died of rare infections, like Pneumocystis carinii or toxoplasmosis. In developing countries, they died from common diseases like tuberculosis and malaria. ART is expensive, so many poor countries do not have access. On ART, someone with HIV can have a normal life expectancy. Many Africans do not believe that AIDS is caused by a virus and shun condom use. Thabo Mbeki, who served as president of South Africa between 1999 and 2008, questioned the link between the HIV virus and AIDS and instituted a ban on the distribution of antiretroviral (ARV) drugs for treating the virus in public hospitals.

To get lost is to learn the way

African proverb

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank my wife for her critical eye and her encouragement at every downturn.

Abridged Glossary

Full Glossary available on-line at www.drtillhansen.com.

AFU. All Fucked Up, usually referring to Africa.

Babalass. (Zim.) Hangover.

Bantu. Southern African Black.

Bhundu. (Zim.) Wilderness, bush.

Boetie. (Afrik.) Little brother.

Bop. (S. Afr.) Abbr. Bophuthatswana, a Bantustan or Homeland in South Africa during apartheid.

Chef. (Port.) Chief, leader, commander.

Corsaire. (Fr.) During the French Monarchy, corsaires were privateers working for the King of France attacking the merchant ships of France’s enemies. In France, they did not need to fear punishment for piracy (hanging) as they were granted a licence as combatants, the Lettre de Course.

Djinn. (Arab.) Jinni, genie.

Dorp, dorpie. (Afrik.)Village.

Floppie. Old way of storing data on a disk, before CDs.

FRELIMO. (Port.) Frente de Libertação de Moçambique, Liberation Front of Moçambique, the political party which was founded in 1962 to fight for the independence of the Portuguese Overseas Province of Mozambique and which after 1975 ruled the newly independent Moçambique. Opposed by RENAMO. Aligned with ZANLA in Zimbabwe.

Gatvol. (Afrik.) Fed up (lit. gut-full).

Hunhu. (Zim.) Unhu, Ubuntu. A Southern African philosophy of Charity, Respect for Others, Selflessness and Life over Luxury, popularized by Nelson Mandela.

Karibu. (Com.) Welcome.

Kopje. (S. Afr.) Small hill or granite outcropping that rises abruptly from the surrounding plain. As a proper noun, a neighbourhood in Harare. Pronounced Koppie.

Meneer. (Afrik.) Mr. or Sir.

M’zungu. (Swah.) White person. Literally, Aimless wanderer in reference to Europeans throughout the centuries (slave traders, missionaries or colonialists).

Naff. (S. Afr.) Wimp.

Papamadit. (Fr.) The nickname for Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, son of French President François Mitterrand. Literally means Papa told me. He was an advisor to his father for African Affairs and was implicated and ultimately imprisoned for receiving payments for facilitating the sale of Russian arms to the Angolan government (Angola-gate).

Povos. (Port.) The poor.

SAAF. South African Air Force.

SAMID. South African Military Intelligence Division.

Skokiaan. (Zim.) Illegal self-brewed alcoholic beverage typically brewed over one day in large barrels left in the sun for faster fermentation, may contain methylated spirits (methanol), which can lead to blindness.

Virga.  Wisps of precipitation streaming from a cloud but evaporating before reaching the ground.

Veld. (S. Afr.) The wild or wilderness, open grassland.

Kamar, Earlier

November 26-27, 1989

Grande Comore, Comoros

The dirty windscreen filtered the fading light of the setting sun. I sweat as the air temperature in the cockpit rose a few degrees with every thousand metres of elevation lost in the descent. In the distance, Grande Comore came into view. Landfall was Mont Karthala, the active volcano at the heart of the island. Dark grey tongues of dead lava rolled down from the clouds, which obscured the mouth of the crater. On the northern face, a pale rainbow formed from virga.

I was inbound for landing, but, unbeknownst to me, all manner of shit was flowing on La Grande Île. Had I known, I’d have preferred diverting to Antananarivo or turning back to Moçambique. The chaos that inevitably follows a typical African coup usually involves random death and beer shortages.

At altitude, the Comoros has all the promise of tropical paradise, blue water, white sand, and green palms. Nothing immediately suggests this island nation is one of Africa’s poorest and most densely populated cockups, a steaming archipelago of volcanic rubble, human debris, and little else.

I intercepted the final approach path. White surf crashed upon a stark black jagged shoreline. There were no practicable beaches on this part of the island. An untrafficked, unpaved, one-lane track wound along the water’s edge. Inland, toward the east, a few groves of palms stood in isolation, sprouting out of the barren lava fields.

I pride myself on smooth landings, but this time, the perfect touchdown eluded me. The sun was right down the numbers, making it difficult to judge my precise altitude. I flared too late. The tyres kissed the tarmac aggressively, like an adolescent boy on a first date. The whole fuselage groaned. My beer spilled in and around the cup holder behind the throttle. The compass ball fell off its precarious bungee-cord-and-duct-tape mount on the dash and rolled beneath the right rudder pedal. A subtle omen that went unnoticed.

Before the props had completely wound down, the duty officer, a rotund Belgian by the name of Seppe, came knocking on my side window, more agitated than usual. I cracked my side window open. Seppe had been with Denard from the beginning, which conferred a certain amount of status in the pack, but, generally, he was just a mean, useless drunk.

News of the world?

Chef needs you, maintenant, up at the palace. He declined eye contact as he turned away to resume the task at hand, which was presumably more important than basic human courtesy.

Nice to see you too, bra, I said to his back. He was already directing his team to load the plane up with weapons and fuel. He yelled at them they needed to finish the job before dark. Something was amiss. Normally, they’d load the plane up early the next morning.

My business, Burns Air Cargo, had the contract to transport South African armaments from Grande Comore to a RENAMO rebel base near Agonia in northern Moçambique. Twice a week, like clockwork, the South Africans flew the stuff in from Swartkop in an unmarked Dakota. I was tasked with flying the hot load into hostile airspace, since the Boers could ill afford, politically, to have a plane of theirs go down over Moçambican territory. I got paid to be plausibly deniable and, of course, completely expendable.

After finishing the shut-down checklist, I caught up with Seppe in the hangar. Hey, where’s the fire?

Abdallah just been shot, dead.

By whom?

He scrunched up his sweaty, ruddy face into a snarl and rolled his little black eyes all in one go. The DO was so dislikeable you had to pity him. You know who, you stupid gnu.

Everyone knew Abdallah was running for re-election on the campaign promise he would finally force Denard and his band of white mercenaries to leave. After eleven years, the people of Comoros and the rest of black Africa had had enough. Chef is in it this time. Rumour is, Paris didn’t sanction it. Paras land within 24 hours. C’est la zone maintenant.

The telly in the hangar was running a clip from TV5 of the pandemonium following Abdallah’s death, riots in Moroni, a general strike, and the obligatory burning of tyres. Denard was—we all were—in real trouble, and the clock was ticking. We went from the islands’ masters to wanted criminals in a single shot.

What does Denard want? The DO gave a don’t know/don’t care shrug. He left me standing there. He had worries of his own.

I made the trip out to Denard’s palace on the northern tip of the island on my moped in the warm twilight. There was little rioting to be witnessed, though I passed by a substantial crowd milling about the American Embassy in Ntsaouéni. Further up, acrid smoke from burning plastic streamed across an otherwise deserted section of the motorway, burned my eyes, and triggered an asthma attack. Tightening chest aside, the trip was uneventful.

I pondered on the why. Why would the legendary mercenary, Colonel Bob Denard, the Caliph of Comoros, my boss for the last decade, need me? He had barely spoken a word to me in the last year. What did his highness want? To remind me about loyalty and the code of silence? Severance pay? A friendly goodbye to his favourite pilot? Unlikely.

A more plausible explanation was that Denard feared arrest and perpetual incarceration by the French for murder and other misadventures and wanted to be flown off this volcanic rock in the middle of nowhere. As the only pilot around, I would play a pivotal and hopefully well-rewarded role in his exit strategy.

I never got along with the Caliph, as Denard liked to imagine himself. He had given me a job, passport, and purpose. He owned me but was one of those ungenerous people in life who need to remind you about the burden of debt you carry. He told me when I signed up how he could cancel my passport at a whim. I was, truth be told, little more than his indentured servant. He could impound the aeroplane and cancel the contract, and I would have no recourse. It was the last time I would take a fully functional passport for granted.

Everyone knew that the end for Denard and his Caliphate would come one day, but when that day finally came, it was still a shock. I had spent over a decade in the Comoros and felt the pang of loss, as this phase of my life drew to a close. I remained cautiously optimistic, even though how to muddle through wasn’t immediately clear. Hopefully, there was more to life than shuttling weapons around.

The palace’s official name in the land registry was La Maison de Maxine. The design elements of the Colonel’s mansion were lifted from Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, starring Patrick Wayne, and therefore more Spanish Moor than Shirazi Arab. Close enough for Denard, never the detail man.

White marble parapets jutted out of the soaring black sea cliffs. All ten bedrooms overlooked the azure waters of the Indian Ocean. A three-metre-tall bulwark laced with razor wire kept the encroaching jungle at bay on the land side. The arched entrance was decorated with cobalt blue tiles inscribed with verses of the Qur’an. In the central courtyard, fountains bubbled away in basins green with algae. The tower of the main mosque in downtown Moroni was taller, but Denard’s had the better sound system.

I arrived to find the fat pirate humbled, a corsaire redux. Not a pretty sight in a tattered, sweat-stained guayabera that could not contain his hairy belly. He had not waxed his dirty grey handle-bar moustache recently, so it splayed out like a stray cat’s whiskers. He had been drinking more than usual, and, if his bloodshot eyes were any indication, crying. These monkeys will destroy Maxine.... Squatters will move in on what remains .... Orsay is going to throw away the key to my cell, dungeon cell. I only caught bits of the undignified spectacle. He vacillated between French and English as he whimpered and cursed about the inequities of life. Self-pity from a gangster is nauseating.

His plan, as I expected, was for me to fly him out, taking my usual route to Agonia. You will fly me out of here tonight. The Ministry has made it clear they no longer recognise my authority here. I will be arrested and extradited. Prison is unacceptable. I am a free spirit.

Free indeed. But my services would not be. Struggling to contain my excitement at the possibility of über-exploiting this idiot, I contorted my face into what I thought was a genuine look of compassion and nodded in agreement. He muttered a shallow Merci and, wheelbarrow in hand, asked me to follow him to where he kept his emergency stash.

Every Chef had a secret hoard somewhere, important papers, perhaps a bank passbook or some drugs, certainly bundles of cash, French Franc notes, and possibly Pounds and Dollars thrown in for the sake of portfolio diversification. In Denard’s case, there was reason to believe he had amassed a fortune. The wheelbarrow was an encouraging sign his stash would indeed be a cache worthy of Black Caesar.

I assumed this would be an in-and-out job. We would bag up the bundles of cash and exit stage left. Unfortunately, this pirate was not a forward thinker. What he showed me was not cash or diamonds but lead, Pb, slabs of lead the size of a café table-top and the weight of the table and the customer sipping his espresso. Sixteen slabs were neatly arranged side-by-side in a priest hole hidden in the floor of the master bath.

I’m going to need some cash just now, before we go any further.

I don’t have any cash.

Your plan to pay me...?

With one of these, bien sûr. He pointed into the hole.

Denard ran several state-run enterprises and collected generous salaries from each, but more importantly, had access to the State Treasury and regularly siphoned off funds. In Comoros, tax payments were in gold, the preferred savings vehicle of the masses, usually ingots of various sizes and some coins. Denard was old school and dead set against filling a bank account in Zürich with ones and zeros. His hoard was probably over 500 kilos of physical gold.

Our pirate had served in the French Navy and had apparently envisioned his retirement would start with a leisurely nautical departure, for which weight would not be an issue. He had melted down the ingots and coins and formed them into rectangular sheets, which were then encased in a centimetre of lead: 900 kilos, an excellent ballast for a boat but enough to doom our flight. I told him so. He said no problem and offered me a second slab for my continued cooperation. Each valued at over a million, he assured me.

I was sKeptical, with a capital K, but a million rand is a lot of money.

After noting my continued hesitation, he started trying to lift the first lead slab out of the hole. Within moments of his first grunts of exertion, beads of sweat formed on his bald head and then streamed down his face and dripped off his dimpled chin. His glasses slipped down his nose every time he looked down. Within three minutes, he was panting so hard I thought he would have a coronary.

Pity, or greed, got the better of me. I could have flown out on my own with little effort. I might have even sold seats on board to some of Denard’s men who could not risk French prison. But I felt sure the slabs were the real thing, which meant this was the opportunity of a lifetime.

I took over and by midnight, with a herculean effort, we had loaded the slabs into his escape vehicle, a dishevelled Renault Fourgonnette that had once been a pastry delivery van. Denard, worried the holes in the motorway would make short work of the Renault’s over-loaded suspension, drove painfully slowly. The usual forty-five-minute journey from his mansion at the northern tip of Grande Comore to Halaya International Airport became a two-hour ordeal.

Complete silence had enveloped the island, no riots, no gunfire, not one battery-powered megaphone. Tropical anarchy Comorian-style was apparently a daytime affair. At one point, a shadowy figure stopped us to ask for a croissant, but we didn’t feel threatened and arrived at the airstrip unmolested.

While the Colonel rested, I busied myself with flight preparations. Burns Air Cargo comprised a single, a Norman-Britten Islander, a high-wing, twin engine workhorse built in 1968. She had already flown thousands of hard hours across Africa by the time Denard acquired her for me in 1980. Back then, she was already well past her sell-by date, completely uninsurable. But now....

She sagged from heavy loads and rough landings on dirt strips in remote areas and coughed frequently from watered-down petrol. Stray bullets had marred her skin like the pox. Engine oil streaked the underside of the wings, creating a different Rorschach pattern every flight. And the paint may have been baby blue before but now had gone a greasy grey, like the skin of a hard case smoker. Though, like any working Olga, all her inside parts functioned, and that’s what really matters, isn’t it?

I removed the interior side panels, placed the lead sheets in the fuselage walls, and then re-secured the panels. As I unloaded the first of the 750 kilos of weapons Seppe’s men had loaded on board the Islander less than ten hours ago, Denard ordered me to stop. Seeing the perplexed expression on my face, he explained he did not want to ditch a single shell. He was in trouble enough with the French and didn’t want to be black-listed by the South Africans also for leaving behind evidence of their cross-border shenanigans.

I told him apologetically, Hmmm, sir, it’s completely a no-go, then, sir. The weapons must be unloaded for the aeroplane to take off the ground. The weight of the armaments and the lead is simply too much for this old girl.

Denard did not seem to understand the physics of impossibility, perhaps because the cargo was so dense the plane appeared relatively empty, perhaps because he had once been a Caliph, whose whims and desires were never denied. He pulled out his Browning, unlatched the safety, pointed the barrel at my left foot, and gave the order to start her up.

I had no doubt he would blow my foot apart. He was a desperate, unstable, and unsubtle man, who routinely used force to extricate himself from difficult situations. Had I been more ruthless and reckless, I would have risked the bullet to disarm the old man, forced him to unload the weapons until his ticker gave out, and then flown away into a golden sunrise. Alas, I was not that version of myself. Yet.

I proceeded down the pre-taxi checklist and started in on the well-practised process of convincing myself of an inevitable good outcome by humming Bob Marley’s Everything’s Gonna Be Alright. Perhaps, Denard would come to his senses and notice how difficult taxiing or the take-off roll was. Or perhaps, we could make it. If the early morning fog, which typically enveloped Agonia this time of year, lifted on time, and if the headwinds were light, I convinced myself we had a chance. I dumped all the extra fuel including the forty-five minutes reserve on the Tarmac, like an incontinent dog piddling without first sniffing about for a suitable spot.

The engines reluctantly sputtered to life, as if they knew what lay ahead. By the light of the false dawn, we started our take-off roll at the 20-end of the runway. The tyres, nearly flattened out by our weight, rolled along like three fat Mopane worms. I pointed it out to Denard, who grunted a Oui but didn’t look out the window.

After two kilometres of pathetic lumbering, the Islander lugged itself aloft, though only in ground effect. Inching the yoke back a fingerbreadth caused the stall warning horn to screech like an electrified baboon. At the 02-end of the runway, the tarmac melded into the surrounding lava fields for another two hundred metres or so and then ended abruptly in an impenetrable mangrove forest. At that point, it was clear, even to Denard, we would not make it above the tree line. He calmly latched the safety, holstered his weapon, sat back in his chair, and closed his eyes without bothering to brace for impact. His last words to me were spoken from his soul with tearful and utter resignation, You stupid gnu.

Still two metres in the air, I yanked the yoke back into a full stall and slammed the engines into reverse. She screamed at the abuse. We hammered into the uneven lava surface. The right main gear collapsed from the impact. We spun off to the right and careened to a halt on jagged rocks which shredded the metal skin of the Islander’s right underwing like the claws of a lioness ripping into a fleeing antelope’s hindquarters. When Denard’s frayed seat belt snapped, his head whacked hard into the dash, and he lost consciousness. I smelled fuel and jumped ship, snapping my ankle in the process. When she didn’t blow, I hobbled back for Denard, who had regained consciousness and was moaning curses in French.

It’s not every day you can crash an aeroplane full of small arms, ammo, mortars, claymores, and other sundry explosives and walk away in one piece. Rivulets of blood flowed from Denard’s head wound into his eyes and down his cheeks, hiding the tears for his lost gold, which would now have to remain behind. He faced financial ruin, and a lifetime of risk as a mercenary with little to show for it. Karma. He would hate me forever.

We made our way back to the smooth tarmac of the runway, where Denard passed out again. I waited calmly as the rising sun heated everything it touched to an uncomfortable temperature. There was no point in trying to walk about or run away. There was little point in anything anymore.

The French paras arrived earlier than expected. The arresting officers were polite and professional. They shuttled us to a make-shift HQ, an enormous bright white tent at the base of the control tower. They cleaned and stitched up Denard. The doctor splinted my ankle and generously dispensed a shot of morphine and a bottle of fun pills.

Denard gave a press conference to a French military press corps of one plus the photographer. His neat head bandage was at the centre of the photo-op. In fewer than one hundred words and reading from an off-camera script, he explained how an unidentified Comorian officer shot Abdallah for unknown reasons. Denard further explained he had sustained a head wound while valiantly but unsuccessfully defending the President. He had, however, killed the assailant, in self-defence, during the ensuing gun battle. He mourned the loss of Abdallah, a great man, and a great friend.

The French Foreign Ministry did not officially arrest Denard. He was instead remanded into the custody of the South Africans. The French Foreign Ministry apparently preferred exile to arrest and the possibility of a public trial, which in France would have included access to a solicitor and inconvenient leverage. The South Africans blacklisted him, as he had feared, though they granted him permanent residence. He was virtually penniless and in exile but had essentially gotten away with murder.

We flew to Pretoria, special delivery in a small business jet, a French Dassault Falcon 50 with VIP military configuration. All the seats were first class. No one guarded us on board. We sat in silence, sipping cocktails served by a friendly twiggy blond. I tried to mourn the loss of the Islander and to come to terms with my own financial ruin, but the morphine and whiskey rendered authentic emotion difficult.

In the holding block at Swartkop Air Force Base outside of Pretoria, my slightly slurred explanation to the official from the SAMID echoed my response to his French homolog back at Halaya prior to deportation: I’m just a pilot on contract. Having committed no crimes, except against an aged but perfectly innocent Islander, I was properly outfitted with crutches and a fancier cast in the infirmary and released upon my recognizance.

Denard and I never crossed paths again.

Months later, I learned the French authorities relieved the Islander of her deadly cargo and towed her carcass off to the far side of the runway. No mention, of course, of the unmarked lead ballast, which might have been easily mistaken for amateurish armour plating and therefore not worth hauling out the wreck. The locals would regard the aeroplane’s crumpled skeleton as Tabu and would never strip her for scrap. For years, I wondered about the over twenty million rand in gold, abandoned and basking in the Comorian sun in its lead overcoat. How and when would Denard go back for it?

The Gnu in ZIM Noir

April 16-17, 1994

Harare (formerly Salisbury), Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia)

A few years back, I had this strange