Bloodlines (51 page)

There were only three ways out of the country—by foot, on a five day hike over the Drakensberg Mountains into Lesotho; by sea, picked up on an isolated beach close to the northern border; or by plane, out of some remote airfield. My belly tightened and I felt the excitement that always kept me awake on my midnight trips to the border with hidden human cargo. But this was different. It wasn’t just me I was putting at risk. The tightening in my belly took on another meaning—perhaps it was my baby tensing at the thought of what I was about to put him through. And I was not the only one with misgivings.

“This is very dangerous, Michaela; more than anything we’ve ever done. And the stakes are higher. I don’t want to involve you, especially now—but I have no choice. They may be looking for us; they’ve already set up police roadblocks and random inspections. We’re going to be stopped, and your face is the least likely to cause problems.”

“You say the Branch doesn’t know who escaped. What makes you so sure they’re looking? And why here?”

“I have to assume they’re looking everywhere. There was an informer at the meeting, and now they’ve taken everyone at the farm into custody—lookouts, farm workers, secretaries. If any one of them knows anything, the Branch will eventually extract it—and they’ll go to any lengths to catch these men. All we can hope for is enough time to get them out of the country.”

“So where are we taking them? To the coast?”

He shook his head in the darkness. “Too well watched,” he said, “and the ships we have access to can’t outrun naval patrols. We have to stay inland. We’re flying them out.”

“What airfield?”

“Across the border. Swaziland.”

I envisioned the journey across two hundred miles of mostly unpaved roads, over sometimes mountainous terrain, in the dark. Once we crossed into Swaziland, we would still have to locate the airfield—and then I would have to get back across the border and return home before anyone noticed my absence.

“If we’re lucky,” I said, “it’ll take twenty-four hours, and we won’t be able to stop for fuel. We’ll have to carry enough petrol for the journey there and back. We’ve got some extra supply here, but the main tank is low and the supply truck doesn’t come until next week.”

“I don’t want you to use petrol from the farm—we don’t know if anyone at the distributor is keeping track of what you use. We’ve already arranged to pick up several full drums on the way out,” he said.

“Good.”

“The police are on high alert,” he continued. “They may be watching the farm. If we’re delayed or run into trouble, you’ll be away for several days. You may need to explain your absence.”

“I’ve already thought of that. I’ll say I took a holiday in Cape Town.”

He shook his head. “If they investigate your story, it would be easy to prove that you lied. No. We need another alibi for you. In fact, we need two. One in case the police come here to investigate. And it has to be an alibi that keeps them from following us, because if they follow us they’ll figure out who these three men are. But we also need a story that we can tell the police if we’re stopped on the way—one that they’re likely to believe. I’ve already spoken to Andrew,” he said awkwardly. “If the police come here, they’ll be told that you’re having a difficult pregnancy, and that you’re on bedrest for a few days at the clinic. He’ll be able to keep them away.”

“So you’ve been in touch with Andrew,” I said, unable to hide the hostility in my voice. “That’s nice. I’m so glad that you have a way to keep updated about my pregnancy.”

“Don’t,” he said quietly. “Not now.”

“When?”

“When this is over,” he said. “We have a lot to talk about.”

“You bet we do,” I said. “I’ve waited for over a month—I suppose I can wait a few more days.” I breathed deeply. “So, let’s talk about tomorrow. We have three passengers to hide—but the concealed compartment in the trunk is only big enough for one.”

“That’s one of the things we need to discuss,” he said. There was a pause, in which he reached out and took my wrist again. “I knew I could still count on you.”

Again, I withdrew my wrist, this time, not so gently.

Andrew was probably correct—Khabazela would think it normal to marry a traditional Zulu wife, and still have me on the side. It was consistent with his tradition, which he was unable and unwilling to discard. But he was also a product of Western culture and values, and he was intensely aware that he had betrayed my trust and my love. He said nothing about where he had been, or what he had been doing during his long and silent absence, but he didn’t have to. The word “still” gave him away, and told me all I needed to know.

That night, in the farm work shed, Solomon wired together a wooden frame just wide and high enough to comfortably hold two men. When he was satisfied that it would maintain its shape, he secured it over a mattress to the bed of an open-backed farm truck. He piled sacks of potatoes in layers on top of the framework so that the truck appeared to be fully loaded, but he arranged for the sacks on one side to be easily moveable so that the men could get out quickly if necessary. Before we left, the Chinese man and the black American lay beside each other on the mattress, and Solomon showed us how to reload the sacks to hide any evidence of their presence.

Andrew arrived with a passport for the Englishman, and the cassock of an Anglican Minister. The passport said that he was Father Peter Fitzpatrick, visiting Zululand from London, on an educational mission. He was a passionate ornithologist, and he had his binoculars on the dashboard within easy reach. We were going birding up north, and would be stopping at several Anglican mission schools along the way to deliver our potatoes.

It was a reasonable story—and from my experience teaching at the mission school in Sophiatown, I knew what the police attitude would be. They were disdainful of anyone interested in feeding and educating black children, and if we were stopped, they might sneer and joke at the purpose of our journey—but it would be believable enough for them to wave us on.

I drove the truck, and beside me sat Father Peter Fitzpatrick in his cassock. We left just after dusk, travelling in convoy, keeping as much as possible to the farm roads. I was behind, driving the open-backed truck. A few minutes ahead of us was an ancient closed van driven by Solomon, who had somehow converted himself into an inoffensive, elderly, round-shouldered Zulu in shabby grey overalls. He carried with him his pass identifying him as an employee of one of the gold mining syndicates, and a form from his employer giving him permission to be on the road.

The back of his van—the cargo compartment—had been converted into a makeshift bus with wooden benches along both sides, and it contained five men. Four were mineworkers who had allegedly been injured in a tunnel collapse a mile underground. They had been rescued and treated, and were being transported back to their villages, now unemployable until they were again fit for work. One had a broken leg in a splint, another a shoulder in a sling, a third—Khabazela—had a thick bloodied bandage around his head covering one eye, and the fourth lay on a stretcher on the floor, his chest bandaged. The fifth man was another mine employee along for the ride, to tend to the injured on their journey.

Beneath the benches, hidden behind blankets in which they had tied their belongings, were the high-powered rifles they had carried the previous night. And within the splint and the bandages and the sling were concealed other weapons—knives, knobkerries, short spears. Equally lethal, but silent.

Beneath the dashboard of the farm truck, Solomon had attached a two-way short distance transmitter. In the back of the van, the others could hear whatever took place in the farm truck. If we ran into trouble, they were only a few hundred yards ahead.

At several points along the two-lane road we encountered barriers manned by the local police. They stopped random vehicles and checked identification and, in the case of black drivers and passengers, pass books. We had no trouble with these—the police didn’t give our mineworkers a second glance, and they were courteous to my Anglican minister. As we waited in line behind the truck to get through one roadblock, we overheard conversation through the transmitter as officers approached the truck.

“Out of the truck, you. Open up the back.”

“Yes,
baas
.”

Solomon opened the driver’s door and we watched him shuffle slowly around to the back, where he struggled to undo the latch. There were two officers standing between us and the truck, and one of them, a head taller than Solomon, shoved him roughly aside. Solomon seemed to totter, almost fell, and then recovered himself. He said nothing. The officer fiddled roughly with the latch, opened it, peered inside, and stepped up onto the footrest. We heard him gasp.

“Shit,” he said. “Smells like something died in here.”

“No,
baas
,” said Solomon, straight-faced, “these men are not dead. The ones who died when the mine collapsed, we sent them back to their homes in a different truck.”

Laughing, shaking his head at Solomon’s stupidity, the officer stepped through the open door into the truck. Through the gloom, I saw him standing above a figure lying on a stretcher, the bloody bandage on his chest clearly visible. The officer thrust his foot at the man’s leg, forcing his knee off the stretcher, and there was a deep groan of pain.

The officer backed out of the truck and his companion straightened his cap, pulling it down over his forehead. “Come on,” he said. “This bunch isn’t hiding anyone—they don’t have enough brains between them to piss straight. Most of them are just going home to die. Let’s move on.”

Solomon closed the back door, tested it several times to make sure it was secure, then shuffled around to the front of the truck and took his time getting settled. Then, very slowly, he drove off. I inched forward and stopped at the barrier—but the two policemen were still laughing at Solomon’s comment about the dead men, and they glanced at our identification papers and waved us on.

As a result of these relatively easy encounters, we approached each police barrier without much concern. But roadblocks closer to the Swaziland border were manned by members of the Special Branch, and they were less courteous and far more thorough than the local police. They examined us with increasing suspicion and urgency as we approached the border; scrutinized us as if they had been instructed to match our faces to images or descriptions they’d been given earlier.

“It’s almost as if they’re expecting us,” I said at one point, after the men in the truck had been forced to a standing position, two of them having had to lift and then support their comrade on the stretcher.

“They suspect something,” he said, his voice from the truck muffled by the speaker. “They’re on increased alert along every possible escape path, or else they’ve been told that we’re headed in this direction.”

Each roadblock was constructed differently. We were pulled off onto the right side of the road, and then onto the left; we sat in traffic as vehicles were inspected directly on the road, one at a time. We were questioned inside the car, and forced to stand ten feet back as they did their work. We’d been examined by one officer alone, by two working together, and been distracted by three working on us at the same time, each one doing something different.

The Special Branch officers manning the barricades wanted to keep people off guard, and their strategy worked. Not knowing what to expect raised the anxiety level and increased the odds of someone making a wrong move, especially someone with something to hide.

Just before 2:00 am we bypassed the little town of Piet Retief, about ten miles this side of the Swaziland border. The road was completely deserted, and there had been no other vehicles for miles. As we went around a sharp curve we came suddenly upon a barricade, and with no time to slow down and put space between us and the truck, we arrived thirty seconds apart. As we arrived the inspectors were standing around casually, and one of them was at a field table pouring coffee from a large thermos into tin cups. To one side, there was a small enclosure delineated by several wooden barriers and by two black Special Branch vans. They directed Solomon into the enclosure, and waved at me to follow. The light inside one of their vans was on, and we could see a wire fence separating the baggage compartment from the back seat.

“They’ve got search dogs,” came a whisper from the transmitter. “Michaela, this is no time to play hero. Watch for us—if we come out of the van, you and Peter drop to the ground.”

Five Special Branch officers in brown uniforms and flat, hard-topped caps stood back from our two vehicles, bright flashlights in hand shining directly into our faces. One of them had a megaphone, which he lifted to his mouth.

“Turn off your engine.”

I obeyed, as did Solomon. With both motors stopped, we could hear the muffled sound of the dogs barking in the van. I knew the Special Branch dogs. They were Alsatians, German shepherds with thick, rough coats, dark brown and black; handsome, powerful animals. We had two as I was growing up, and they were gentle, loyal and intelligent. But the armed forces trained them as search dogs, eager to smell out contraband; and the police used their hunting instincts to terrorize the black population. The residents of Soweto and Sophiatown, and the workers on my farm all swore that police dogs could smell a black man at a thousand feet, and I knew the violence these animals could do. In the minds of many in the resistance, these dogs, and the free rein given them by their masters, were an emblem of the brutality and fear by which the government was able to function. An officer approached my window, and out of the corner of my eye, I could see that another was simultaneously approaching Solomon.