Undercover with Mandela’s spies

1988 South Africa teeters on the edge of a state of emergency. Seventeen-year-old Bradley Steyn crosses Pretoria’s Strijdom Square and walks straight into a massacre. Barend Strydom, the notorious white supremacist ‘Wit Wolf’, is mowing down black bystanders relaxing in the square during their lunch break. Bradley cradles a dying man in his arms and, later, with reports of eight dead and sixteen seriously injured, he is brought face to face with the insanity of the nation. Suffering from acute PTSD, unable to cope with dayto- day life and consumed by rage, Bradley spirals out of control. His parents unwittingly initiate the next chapter in the story of the boy who crossed the square when they arrange for him to join the SA Navy. Here, angry and unable to work though his trauma, he is called upon by the apartheid regime’s Security Branch to ‘confront the threat of Communism’, and the navy serviceman joins the dreaded D Section of the Security Branch as a classified government enforcer, but not for long as the underground ANC’s Department of Intelligence and Security (DIS) soon recruits him. On the political stage events are changing fast: FW de Klerk becomes president, the ANC is unbanned and Nelson Mandela walks to freedom. However, undermining this progress, a sinister Third Force has formed an alliance between the deep state militaryintelligence complex, the neo-Nazis and the white supremacists. With these forces edging the nation toward a bloody race war, President FW de Klerk is forced to make a deal with Nelson Mandela. Bradley is part of the DIS’s plan to infiltrate this Third Force network before all hope for a free future is destroyed. He goes undercover to help unravel the extremists’ masterplan – but will his time run out before they discover he is working for Mandela’s Spies? This astonishing true-life thriller reveals for the first time some of the dirty secrets of a dirty war.

Mark Fine is a South African born novelist specialing in historical fiction, social injustice and wildlife conservation. A story worth telling is the inspiration for his work, usually based on moments in history that both entertain and inform the reader. Bradley Steyn is a former government contractor, specialising in risk mitigation, operational support, B2B and B2C within the US national security and defense arenas. In his late teens, Bradley found himself in the middle of the Strijdom Square massacre. The experience profoundly changed his life. Steyn now lives in California. He works as a security consultant in Beverley Hills.