According to Standard Bank of South Africa's credit card application process, it takes at least five working days for review. Therefore, they decided to stay in Durban for a week to prepare for recruitment.
The next morning, Deng Shiyang slept until after nine o'clock. Unbelievably, Keith, a former SAS reservist, was quite a cooking expert. In just over half an hour, he prepared a lavish English breakfast that included grilled tomatoes, scrambled eggs, bacon, boerewors sausage, fried mushrooms, and chips, with butter-fried bread slices as the main dish, accompanied by orange juice and Kilimanjaro coffee.
Du Preez was punctual, arriving at the villa right on time for breakfast. He unceremoniously piled a plate high with scrambled eggs, then filled another plate with bacon, sausage, and chips. Settling himself on the kitchen bar, he began eating heartily.
Halfway through breakfast, Keith said to Du Preez, "There are six core members for this job: JD and me, plus four deputies. Besides you, we've already decided on two, both of whom you know." He paused before continuing, "One of them is Mark Vlaeminck. After the Bolivia operation, he hasn't taken any work and has been staying in Ostend. The other is Per Jansen, who's currently working on a short-term contract in Kenya."
"Oh, right," Keith added as if he remembered something, "I recently heard that the 'Frenchman' found a job with Canal+ as a military advisor for a movie."
Du Preez sneered, joking, "I just hope he doesn't rat us out if ELN catches him for interrogation."
Keith smiled and continued seriously, "This job requires recruiting a lot of cheap manpower, but we don't have those kinds of contacts."
Du Preez perked up and asked, "How many people do you need?"
Keith glanced at him and answered, "A hundred soldiers, to be trained in Botswana."
"How long will the training be?"
"Three weeks. It could be slightly extended, but it won't exceed a month."
"With just three weeks, it looks like we can't use civilians." Du Preez thought for a moment and asked, "What do you need me to do?"
"We need someone to recruit these soldiers and train them." Keith paused before continuing, "We can provide training grounds and other resources, but we need someone with existing relationships to take charge of recruiting and training these one hundred soldiers. Do you know anyone who can handle this?"
Du Preez thought for a long time before replying, "I know a guy from my time at EO, a German who served in the '32 Battalion.' He speaks four languages and has worked as a military advisor in Angola and Sierra Leone. He's also trained troops in Congo."
In a shabby tavern near Wesmore, Pietermaritzburg, Kruger Semler was sitting at an uncleaned table. In front of him was a serving of roast beef and green beans, along with a large mug of beer.
This tavern was a typical gathering place for the lower-middle class: dirty, small, and with poor-quality food. The green beans were overcooked, and the roast beef was dry and lacked any juice. However, his alcohol-numbed taste buds couldn't distinguish between "delicious" and "awful" anymore. Mechanically, he stuffed the rough, bark-like beef into his mouth, chewed quickly, and washed it down with beer.
Semler was born in 1963 in a middle-class intellectual family in Leipzig. His father, Josef Semler, was a journalist with right-wing inclinations, and his mother, Caroline, belonged to a declining Prussian Junker family in Brandenburg and worked as a teacher at a local high school.
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In 1971, Josef was arrested by the Stasi for writing articles critical of the Soviet Communist Party and the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) for funding left-wing extremist groups such as the Red Army Faction. From then on, he was never heard from again. The following year, Semler fled with his mother through Hungary, crossing into Austria near Körmend, and eventually sought refuge in South Africa when he was only nine years old.
He lived in Windhoek, the capital of South West Africa, for ten years until 1983 when his mother passed away from cancer. That same year, he joined the South African Defence Force's "32 Battalion," assisting UNITA in its anti-guerrilla warfare against the Soviet- and Cuban-supported MPLA. In 1988, he participated in the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale. In February's "Operation Packer," he led a platoon of South African soldiers to raid an FAPLA encampment, killing twenty Angolan soldiers and one Cuban military advisor.
In 1992, Kruger, who had been promoted to lieutenant, left the SADF and joined EO at the invitation of Eeben Barlow. During the Angolan Civil War, he was sent to the northern Lunda province as a military advisor, training both the Angolan Armed Forces and UNITA. In 1995, he was sent to Sierra Leone to train the government army in Freetown to fend off attacks from the Revolutionary United Front (RUF).
After EO disbanded in 1999, Kruger remained quiet for a while, surviving off his contacts in Windhoek by smuggling cigarettes and alcohol into Namibia's Tuli region.
With the outbreak of 9/11 and the Iraq War, the private security business boomed, and he returned to his old profession. In 2004, he was hired by the newly formed Aegis Defence Services, which sent him to the Ituri district of the Orientale province in the DRC to form a small security team to protect a JFPI-owned diamond mine from harassment by anti-government militias.
In March of that same year, four Blackwater employees were ambushed and killed in Fallujah. Their bodies were burned, dismembered, and hung from a bridge for display. This incident shocked the world and brought the relatively unknown industry of "private military contractors" into the spotlight.
The "Fallujah incident" garnered widespread media coverage, but most people could not differentiate between the heavily armed "security contractors" appearing in the streets of Baghdad and mercenaries, so they were seen as synonymous with "profit-driven individuals."
In 2007, independent American journalist Jeremy Scahill published a book titled "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," exposing many negative stories about the industry. It included claims that contractors in Iraq acted violently and indiscriminately shot civilians; it even specifically mentioned former soldiers flocking to make money, including some notorious "Koevoet" members from apartheid-era South Africa, further tarnishing the industry's already poor reputation.
Because of "32 Battalion's" already controversial reputation, Kruger had not received new work since the Congo contract ended in 2005 and had been surviving on meager savings. He registered with a few agencies in Pretoria and Cape Town but received no response.
Life now was even worse than his smuggling days. Though the risks and rewards of smuggling were not high, at least there was something to do. Planning and executing smuggling runs brought a sense of adventure, reminding him of his survival battles in Angola. But all of that was gone now; he spent his days drowning in alcohol and tobacco, completely dispirited.
That day, he was once again drunk and left the tavern at noon. Unbeknownst to him, as he staggered back to his small, filthy apartment in Prestbury, Du Preez was speeding down the N3 highway in a Land Cruiser, heading for Pietermaritzburg.
Notes:
Canal+ (Canal Plus): A major French pay-TV channel.
Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische_Einheitspartei_Deutschlands, SED): The ruling party of East Germany.
Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion, RAF): A left-wing terrorist group active in Germany during the 1970s.
Stasi: The Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit), the secret police and intelligence agency of the German Democratic Republic.
South West Africa (Suidwes-Afrika): The former name of Namibia before gaining independence.
People's Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola (Foras Armadas Populares de Libertao de Angola, FAPLA): The armed forces established by the MPLA after taking control of the government.
Eeben Barlow: Former SADF lieutenant colonel and founder of EO.
Aegis Defence Services: A private military company based in London, United Kingdom.
JFPI Corporation: An African mining company headquartered in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, primarily involved in the extraction of copper and diamonds.
"Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army" by Jeremy Scahill: A book revealing many negative aspects of the private military contractor industry.
Koevoet: Also known as "Operation K," the formal name was the "South West Africa Police Counter-Insurgency Unit." It was part of the South West Africa Police and focused on suppressing the SWAPO insurgency.