A SONG IN THE MORNING (22 page)

He had the running figure, seen between the railings, over the end of his barrel. Steady, squeeze . . .

The constable was bowled over by the blast that erupted from behind the plate glass of the hallway area. And with the driven wind came the glass shards, and then the crimson and orange billowing of the flames. Before he lost conscious-

ness he was aware of the glass splinters fragmenting around him, and of the heat of the spreading fire.

Jack ran two hundred yards. He had pulled the handkerchief off his face, tugged the anorak hood down from his head. Up Main, cars overtaking him, up Market, into the narrow side street off Becker, no-one in sight, off with the anorak, dump it, a distant siren, along the lanes off Diagonal, two men sitting, their backs against the wall, neither moved, past the closed Stock Exchange, onto Bree. He was walking when he reached Bree. He controlled his speed, harder to control his breathing. He tried to window shop, to appear to be strolling away the evening.

Two police trucks racing, sirens wailing, and the whine in the streets around him of approaching fire engines.

From the far side of Bree he looked back towards John Vorster Square . . . a bloody lunatic plan . . . He saw the orange glow reaching for the night sky. He saw the dark climbing column of smoke. Can you see that, Mr Thiroko?

He walked along Bree towards the Landdrost Hotel. He straightened his tie in a window, he casually wiped the sweat off his forehead. He knelt to wipe the earth from the gardens of John Vorster Square off his shoes. The last hundred yards, forcing himself not to look back. He steadied himself, and went inside. He stood in the lift with his back to a cluster of tourists. He went down his corridor, into his room.

He went first to the cupboard. He saw that the packaged pile of explosives was undisturbed. Of the three slabs that had been delivered in the Checkers bags, two were still inside his suitcase. He might have failed. But now he thought he had enough dynamite still to blow his way into the hanging gaol.

Jack dived onto his bed. His face was buried in his pillow, his legs shook without control.

God, what had he done? For his father, what had he done?

11

Just before eight o'clock, Jack joined the office workers and the labourers and the vagrants at the junction of Market and Main and Commissioner to see the damage. Police with dogs and soldiers in full combat kit kept the watchers far back from the fire darkened building. There was little to see, but that was no discouragement to the crowd.

Jack had already seen his morning
Citizen
with the special colour front page. The main photograph showed the orange flame ball alive inside the ground and first floor, billowing up the stairwell. He had read of the "miraculous escape" of the policeman on desk duty inside the door, how the heavy steel-panelled furniture had protected him from the immediate force of the fire and explosive blast. He had read that the offices above the hallway had been unoccupied, that had they not been the officers who worked there would have been killed when the floor above the hallway caved in. He had read that the steel and concrete construction of the block had prevented the spread of the fire, and that within 48

minutes the fire service had brought the blaze under control.

He had read that a single man was believed responsible, that there were reports that the man was a White, that the police were "keeping an open mind". The smell of a water-soaked fire is unlike any other. It was a familiar odour for Jack to sniff at as he stood with the crowd, and he thought of George Hawkins, pictured him beside him, remembered the demolition of a fire wrecked office in Guildford, and seemed to hear George's growl of approval. The newspaper said it had been the most dramatic attack against the country's security system since the car bombing of the Air Force headquarters in Pretoria and the rocket firing at the Voor-

trekkerhoogte base of the South African Defence Forces All down to you, Mr Hawkins.

He listened to the talk around him, mostly in English, a little in the Afrikaans language that he could not understand, all of it angry.

He took a last look at his work, and at the fire engines far up the street, and the police wagons. It was the controlled anger on the policemen's faces that would stay with him.

"You know what I heard?" A man with a loud voice said a florid face and a butcher's apron. "I heard that last the
bandiete
in the cells over there were shouting and singing, all the bastard politicals, cheering they were. Pity the scum didn't roast."

John Vorster Square still stood, foursquare. But he had shown them, he had singed its beard.

He walked down Commissioner to the junction of Harrison. Another thought as he walked. There had been Blacks among the sightseers, and he had not heard them Speak above a whisper. He had heard the vengeful fury of the Whites, but he knew nothing of the Blacks, whether cheered his attack, whether they feared the reprisals that would follow the violence he had directed against the principal police station in the city. He thought that in the world of Jack Curwen the Black man's opinion was irrelevant-Their fight was not his fight. His fight was family.

He took a taxi to the railway station.

• * *

The colonel sat in on the conference. He was not himself responsible for the direct gathering of intelligence. Many times Intelligence knew of an impending attack. Not the exact location, nor the timing, but Intelligence generally knew of a major infiltration, of the movement of explosives, of an order from Gaberone or Lusaka. Intelligence had sources. There were covert watchers, small teams of Recce Commando operating deep inside Angola, observing the Umkonto we Sizwe camps, listening to their radios, hooked into remote telephone lines that served those camps. There were deep sleepers in the overseas offices of the African National Congress. There were traitors, arrested in great secrecy, interrogated, frightened, turned, released. There were men and women inside South Africa who were under constant surveillance, their names having been first revealed to Intelligence by the S.A.D.F. capture of documents from A.N.C. offices in Gaberone. A treasure chest.

Intelligence had this time had no word.

The conference was boring the colonel.

For a while he endured in silence, then intervened.

"Was it a White or was it not a White?"

He could not be given an answer. The vehicle drivers had said they had seen the shape of a man, momentarily in the lights, nothing else. The gate sentry had been the only continuous eyewitness to the attack. The gate sentry had been concussed, was still sedated. The colonel was told that the gate sentry had rambled a description between reviving from concussion and being given sedation. A hood, a mask, eyes in shadow, always moving too fast.

"I think he was a White," the colonel said. "If he had been Black then there would have been a fire support team.

I think it was a White working alone. He ran away. There is no report of a pick-up vehicle. If this had been A.N.C.

then there would most certainly have been a pick-up. This one man, one White man, is at best no more than on the fringe of the A.N.C. It is now more than thirteen hours since the explosion, and Lusaka has said nothing. How many times do they wait thirteen hours? By the news agencies they would have known of the explosion within thirteen minutes, and they have still said nothing. I believe they have made no claim because they do not know who is responsible. I suggest this is the work of an individual, not of a cadre of Umkonto we Sizwe. Gentlemen, we have a White, we have a male. He ran forward fast, he threw a bag or sack weighing perhaps five kilos, he threw a fist-sized stone accurately through a windscreen. In my submission, we have a White male who is athletic, reasonable to assume that he is aged between 18 years and 30 years. We should meet again when we have the forensics."

• • *

The fire service had moved back from the hallway of the building.

Detectives and scientists moved amongst the sodden debris searching and picking. What they had collected in this initial examination was placed in metal bins to be sifted and then carried to the laboratories. A slow process, one that no detective experienced in this work, nor any scientist, would rush.

* * *

Jack went to the Whites Only ticket office.

He bought a day return ticket to Pretoria.

He went down the Whites Only entrance to the Whites Only section of the platform, alongside which would stop the Whites Only carriages.

Once the train had cleared the industrial and mining areas of Germiston and Edenvale and Kempton Park, it should have been a pleasant and picturesque journey. Past the factories and the gold waste mountains the train ran by the dry farm lands of the Witwatersrand. But Jack Curwen was not a tourist. He was an unidentified terrorist. He was on a journey to the city where his father was held, condemned to die. He thought it better to travel by train. No driving licence to be produced, no forms to be filled in at Avis or Hertz. In a train he was a lone microbe swimming in the vein of the state. He was in the heart kingdom of the Afrikaner regime. He was passing through the pretty satellite towns of Irene and Doornkloof and Verwoerdburg, rolling by the Johannesburg highway and the Fountain Valley Nature Reserve and the massive modern University of South Africa. He was coming to Pretoria, he was coming to his father.

A moment of confusion when he stepped down from the train. Which way to go? Streams of men and women, White and Black, crossing the platform around him. Confusion until he realised that the Blacks went left, the Whites went straight ahead. "Separate development" for leaving a railway station. He went through the Whites Only exit, and out into the Whites Only hallway of the station. His ticket had been clipped by a White official. He knew the cause of his confusion. His was a fear of going through the wrong exit, sitting on the wrong seat, urinating in the wrong lavatory, and being shouted at, called back, by a man in uniform.

There were uniforms all around him in the hallway.

Soldiers with the berets of the Parabats, and of Armour, and of Artillery, and of the Medics. Scrubbed clean conscripts who were serving out their army time in administration in the capital city. Haggard young men changing trains on their way home for leave from the operational areas of South West Africa and the fearsome close quarters of guerrilla war. The airforce technicians of the Mirage squadron at Hoedspruit.

The bearded and confident elite of the Recce Commando.

Jack eased his way through them. He was so very close to his destination. He went into the station magazine and sweet shop. He bought a map of Pretoria.

His finger nail searched for and found Potgieterstraat. He memorised the turns, the roads he would follow.. He folded the map, stowed it away in his hip pocket. He would not be seen on Potgieterstraat studying a map.

He went out of the station. Pretoria was higher on the veld than Johannesburg, cooler, and the first frosts were not long away. He ignored the taxis. He would walk. He could see more by walking. He went past the booths where Blacks could buy their railway tickets, then out of the station yard. He went past the Combi vans that ferried Blacks between the station and the townships of Mamelodi or Atteridgeville, by the small street market where fruit and milk was sold, and vegetables. He could sense the difference to Johannesburg. He felt a little at ease walking here, because there seemed no threat, no scowling eyes gazing at him. He walked past the big dairy, and there the pavement ended, as if Whites' territory was bounded by pavements. He crossed coarse open ground. Potgieterstraat was ahead of him.

So very close to the road he had taken when his mind was made.

Under the old railway bridge of darkened steel and cut stone.

Potgieterstraat stretched away up the hill.

Far in front of him, across the road, was a high slag yellow brick wall. He was within sight of Pretoria Central, of the Local gaol of the Pretoria Central complex.

Hell, and his gut was tight, and his legs were jellied.

He was the insect brought to a night light.

The wall was the colour of the mine mountains in Johannesburg. Pristine, dirty yellow and new. He walked up the hill. He was again on a pavement. Sometimes he looked to his left where there was nothing for him to see, sometimes he looked straight ahead at the tilt of Potgieterstraat. He pleaded with himself for naturalness. He was on foot, alone, and approaching one of the most security conscious square miles of the State. If he were to be challenged he had no story. Jack Curwen had sneered at Jacob Thiroko, he had told his mother that he was going to bring his father home, and he had planned bomb making with George Hawkins, and because of his hot headed nature and his arrogance Sandham was dead and Duggie Arkwright was dead. Lunacy and arrogance had carried him on the wing to Potgieterstraat. And thank God that Sandham and Duggie couldn't see him with jelly legs and his tight gut as he flickered his eyes forward to the high yellow brick walls of Local.

He looked right. He had seen on the map that he would pass what was labelled as D.H.Q. . . .

Couldn't believe i t . . . D.H.Q. He was walking past the Defence Headquarters of the Republic. The bastards had built Pretoria Central up the hill, same side of the road, spitting distance, rifle range distance, from the Defence Headquarters of South Africa. Throwback to the days of Empire, stone pillars holding the portico, weathered red brick, barred windows, creeper-draped railings topped with coils of barbed wire.

Eyes moving. From the nothingness of scrub and railway sidings to his left, on to Potgieterstraat and the walls that grew in height as he came closer, on back to the formal gardens of Defence Headquarters where the sentries patrolled with magazines fitted to their assault rifles. Duggie and Sandham were dead, and Jack hadn't even known that D.H.Q. was right alongside his target. All the sentries, and all the back-up that would be out of sight but there in support of Defence Headquarters.

The excitement seeped from him.

The building next to Defence Headquarters, sandwiched between D.H.Q. and Local, was that of the South African Airforce. More wire, more sentries.