A SONG IN THE MORNING (30 page)

Land mines, bombs, murders, riots, and the hacking and burning of Aunt Annie. And the statistics of revolt spiralling.

As if a roof had sprung leaks, and as fast as a leak was blocked there were more water springs soaking through. It was the bastards like Thiroko who pick-axed the roof, made the leaks, slaughtered old Aunt Annie who came to tea on each of their wedding anniversaries, and who poured from the silver pot.

* * *

Thiroko lay on his back. His bed was loose straw, wrenched from a string tied bale. He was the only one awake. The boys were sleeping, snoring at the roof of the cow shed.

They had arrived in the dark, and stumbled from the road across rough ground to the cow shed. The place stank of the animals. The shed was used by the farmer for storage and for when he had a difficult calving and the cow needed attention. They had dug against the back wall of the shed to uncover the weapons cache. Each of the A.K. 47 assault rifles was well sealed in plastic bags, each was dry and oiled.

They had taken five of the rifles stored in the shed. They had taken also 50 kilos of plastic explosive, and detonators and firing wire. What they had not needed they had buried again under the soil and manure.

When it was first light he had crawled to a place where the overlapping metal walls of the shed had been prised apart by the winter storms. The cow shed was on rising ground. He could see where the road ran close by, where they had been dropped after the drive down from Monte Christo, and he could see in the far distance the grain silos of Warmbaths.

He had tried to sleep. The pain ate inside him. It might have been the long flight from London, and then the flight from Lusaka to Gaberone that had welled the pain. It might have been the bone-shaking drive from Monte Christo. It might have been the twenty-four hours without food. It might have been fear. The pain was sharp in his stomach.

Travelling with the boys, he had learned much. Each of them had looked good enough in the training camps, and the instructors from the German Democratic Republic had said they were as good as any, and Thiroko had thought they were good until he had walked with them. Now he thought they were crap, because they had talked rubbish to him of a welcoming uprising. No inkling of the danger of coming as a stranger into their own land. They were going to have to shape up and learn fast and much between here and the gaol.

He lay on his back, in his pain, and he thought of the Englishman. An anxiety simmered in him, of business not yet talked through. Happy and Charlie and Percy and Tom were held in cells on the opposite side of Beverly Hills to Jeez Carew, and they would have to be reached before the assault on C section . . . He thought Jack Curwen would understand that four men must come before one.

Thiroko pushed himself awkwardly to his feet. The motion hurt him. He went out through the open door. He breathed in the cool clean air of his mother country. Down from this height was the sprawled town and beyond it the hazed flat veld. It was right that he should have come back, that before he died he should smell the air of his home.

He squatted beside a bush. His bowels were water, and he had no paper to wipe himself. When he stood and pulled up his trousers he saw that there was blood mucous in his mess.

He saw no movement except the birds skimming the long grass, he heard no sounds except their shrill calling.

* • •

The soldiers who watched the cow shed were the elite of the South African Defence Force. They were used to sterner tasks than this. In total and motionless silence they lay up in cover, at the nearest point a hundred metres from the rusted metal building, watching the four walls from behind machine guns and automatic rifles. They had seen Thiroko come out of the shed. It had been noted that he had no paper.

Six hundred metres away, where the road curved, hidden by a coppice of eucalyptus and scrub, was parked the car that had travelled after Thiroko from Ellisrus. The four men who sat in the car, or squatted outside it, wore civilian clothes, slacks and sweaters. Their hair was not cut short in the style of the military, two were bearded. They were unremarkable.

Crouched down in the coppice were the dog handler, his labrador, and the Bushman.

All watching until mid-afternoon to see if there would be a contact.

* • *

Ros drove away from the hotel. It was just past one o'clock, but they hadn't bothered to eat. They were not hungry, and Jan cracked a thin joke about Jack wanting to wait till he could have maize porridge with his friends.

Jack said that Brown's was like something from the cow-boy pictures. The open veranda, the swing slat doors from the street into the bar, posters for Saturday night live music and dancing, the carving in the dining room that was an F.N. rifle in relief. Jack said that as long as he lived he'd remember the springs in his bed. Ros didn't speak. They went right down the main road, then turned off towards the mountains. Past the huge modern angles of the roof of the Dutch Reformed Church, up along the straight tarmac strips that bisected the bungalow land, past the White school where the small boys were having rugby coaching and the girls were playing hockey. Jack thought Warmbaths was an oasis. Abruptly they were out of the town's limits, lawns and residences giving way to grazing lands. There was another three kilometres to go before the pale dust road ahead began to climb for the foothills and then the mountains. The high ground was grey hazed, cool and without threat.

Jan spoke to Ros in Afrikaans. She nodded. Jack sensed they were close to the drop point.

Jan switched to English.

"We're hardly stopping for you. You can see the place from the road, that's what my message said. It's a place where they can keep cattle if the weather's bad. You'll have to carry it all yourself, your bag and the tube things."

"That's fine."

The sun was high. The light bathed them through the car windows. Ros wound her window down, Jack followed her.

There was the rush of air on his face, her hair streamed across her cheeks and nose and mouth.

"There it is."

Jan was leaning forward between their shoulders. He pointed ahead, through the windscreen, under the central mirror. For a moment the sun had caught the roof of a building that was set back from the road. Beyond the place was a clump of tall trees. For only a moment the light hit at that particular angle and reflected from the tin roof.

"We'll put you down by those trees. Wait until we are gone ten minutes before you move."

"Goodbye, and again, thank you," Jack said softiy.

"Good luck, Jack. I hope you pull it off," a fierceness from Jan.

"I'll put you down in those trees," Ros said.

Jack grinned. "Not a chance that we won't."

The last of the big boasts. They had lost sight of the shed.

The big boasts were all right for his mother and fine for George Hawkins, great for Duggie, brilliant for these kids.

Ros was braking. The big boasts would stop when he joined Thiroko's men. Jack thought they were familiar trees, peeled bark trunks, but he couldn't put a name to them.

There was a car parked off the road and in the shade of the trees.

Jack saw two in the front and two in the back of the saloon car.

"I can't put you down next to them," Ros said.

They were passing the car.

As a flash, Jack saw the front seat passenger hunched forward, something in his hand, and his hand close to his ear. As a flash, Jack heard the distorted snatch of a radio transmission. Just a flash . . .

He had heard a radio transmission.

He swung to Ros.

His voice was a whisper. "Just keep going."

She turned to him, mouth sagging open.

"No sudden movements. Don't slow, don't accelerate."

Her face was washed with questions.

"Just drive as if it's normal, like nothing's important to us here."

Jack could hear her breath spurting.

"Don't turn round, don't look back."

God, and he wanted to look back. He wanted to look back and into the parked green saloon car and see whether the attention of the men inside was on the Beetle that had sidled past.

"Just drive on, as if it's natural."

Past the trees, he saw a cattle track leading from an iron gate away across a crudely fenced field, uphill towards a cow shed. He could see no movement at the shed. Above the engine were the crisp calls of the birds. He felt Jan's fingers on his shoulder.

"Don't stop, drive on," Jack snapped at Ros.

Christ, the girl was good, didn't argue, didn't talk back.

"Keep driving," a rasp in Jack's voice.

They went on up the slow incline. Jack pulled the map from the glove compartment. He unfolded it over his knees.

His finger was searching for Warmbaths.

The girl was great, the girl was driving with her eyes on the road like it was a Sunday outing.

"When we went past the parked car, as we passed it, did you hear anything?"

"I hardly saw the car."

"It was taking a radio message."

"So what?" Jan spoke before he had thought.

"There's not going to be a taxi out here. It was taking a radio message which means it's a police car. Cop on, kid."

"Christ . . . "

"Which means that the drop is under observation."

"Shit . . ."

Ros was expressionless. Jan sagged back into his narrow space alongside the metal tubes. Jack went back to the map.

He was a long time poring over it. He traced a route on to Mabula, and then a secondary road to Rooiberg, and then on until the turn off to Rankin's Pass through the mountains, and a crossing of the Mogol river and back to Nylstroom that was twenty miles north of Warmbaths. Without measuring the distance with his finger, he thought that the whole journey was more than a hundred and fifty kilometres, and that was the most direct route to Warmbaths without going again down the road past the cow shed and past the parked green saloon car.

"If they're there, in the shed, and the police move in on them, what would they do with them?" Jack asked.

A dulled reponse from Jan. "They'd take them to the police station at Warmbaths. From there they'd probably helicopter them out to Pretoria or Johannesburg."

"I have to know, what happens to them."

Jan flared. "It wasn't us that was followed."

"Pretty bloody irrelevant right now."

"I have to see what happens."

He gave Ros the route that he wanted her to take. She nodded, she was impassive.

"Is that all right?" Jack asked.

"I'm just your chauffeur," Ros said.

* * *

"You know what's there, Carew, and you know it's something that I never thought you'd let me see, too right."

"What's there, Sergeant Oosthuizen?"

"Can't you see what's there for yourself, Carew?"

Sergeant Oosthuizen liked a little game. He liked a child's riddle. Mostly Jeez humoured him. Most times in the last thirteen months Jeez had played along with him. Buggered if he wanted a joke that afternoon.

"I can't see that anything's there, Sergeant."

Jeez was pacing the concrete of the exercise yard. Sometimes the yard seemed large enough for him to stroll in. That afternoon he was constricted within the walls, caged by the roof grill shadows on the ground. Oosthuizen stood beside the locked door that led into the corridor and Jeez's cell.

His arms were folded. The great jowls of his chin were spread with his smile.

"Now, come on, Carew. You're not trying for me."

Jeez thought Oosthuizen so thick-skinned, and yet so innately kind, that he could rarely be sharp with the man.

Truthfully, Jeez thought it would be cheap to squash Oosthuizen. Nothing to do with the disciplinary measures that queued up behind Oosthuizen, not many privileges they could take away from a man when they were scheduled to take away his life within a week. He would hate himself if he put down Sergeant Oosthuizen. But buggered if that day he wanted to play a game, and buggered if he knew how to tell the old fool to shut his mouth.

Perhaps Oosthuizen knew of Jeez's wish for quiet. Perhaps he was determined to deny it.

"You've got to try for me, Carew, like a good man."

Jeez surrendered, as he usually did. "Where am I supposed to be looking, Sergeant?"

"I'm giving you a good hint, you're supposed to be looking at the flower bed, Carew."

Jeez stared down at the flower bed. Most of the geranium blooms were over, should have been pinched off. The lobelia was straggling, should have been pulled.

"I'm looking at the flower bed, Sergeant."

"And there's something in the flower bed that I never thought you'd let me see."

"I don't know what it is, Sergeant."

"You're not trying for me, Carew."

"Please, Sergeant, what is it that's in the flower bed?"

Oosthuizen tugged at his moustache. He stood at his full height and dragged in his belly so that his belt buckle sagged.

He was hugely satisfied.

"There's a
weed."

"A fucking
what?"

"Watch your language Carew . . . You've allowed a dandelion to grow in your flower bed."

Jeez saw the dandelion. It had no flower. It was half concealed by a geranium plant.

"Yes, you can see it now, but you hadn't noticed it before.

I'd never have thought you would let me find a weed in your garden, Carew."

Jeez wondered what would happen if he smashed Oosthuizen with his fist. He thought the man might burst.

Jeez knelt on the concrete.

The concrete was not warmed by the sun, the grilled shadows kept the heat off the concrete. He hadn't noticed the weed because he hadn't watered his garden for two days.

He could see that the geranium leaves were dropping and that the lobelia was parched. He pushed his fingers into the earth, he tugged at the dandelion root. He felt the root snap under the earth. The weed would grow again. He smoothed the earth over. The weed would grow again, but not surface before the following Thursday morning. He carried the dandelion to the plastic bag in the corner of the yard, where the dirt sweepings were left for a trustie to take away.