Bloodlines (52 page)

“Get out please, Miss, and your passenger, too. Bring your identification with you, and step to the rear of your vehicle.”

Carefully I opened the door and stepped down, identification papers in hand. Peter did the same, walking carefully to avoid tripping on his cassock. We met at the back of the truck, where the officer waited for us, sub-machine gun slung casually over his shoulder, one hand resting on the stock. A second officer stood waiting for Solomon, watching impatiently as he hobbled slowly around his van. The two men examined our papers in silence for what seemed like an interminable period, then looked at each other and began interrogating us, their questions choreographed to keep us off guard. I answered those directed at me, but all I was aware of was a succession of loudly barked questions that came fast and furious.

“What work do you do at the mine, old man?”

“Where in England is your ministry, Father?”

“When did this mine accident take place?”

“What is your connection to the Anglican Church, Miss Michaels?”

“How many injured miners are you carrying?”

“Which mission schools are you going to visit?”

“Tell me the name of the place you’re taking these injured miners.”

“You’re a farmer, Miss Michaels. Why don’t you show these schools how to grow their own potatoes? Instead you’re wasting your time, making our natives more dependent on foreign religions. The Anglican Church doesn’t have any business doing charity here in South Africa.”

This question was directed at me, but Peter Fitzpatrick—or whatever his name was—straightened the cassock on his left-wing shoulders and answered for me. He did so with the kind of fierce gentleness that took me back to my time in Sophiatown, and for a moment I felt as though I was standing beside Father Huddleston.

“The Anglican Church, and every other Church, my son, including your Dutch Reformed Church, has business wherever there is hunger. And if we don’t belong wherever governments repress their own people, then we have no ministry and no purpose.”

“Thank you for the homily, Father,” said the officer with a sneer, readjusting the weapon on his shoulder. “I’ll be sure to tell my Predicant what you said on Sunday morning. I suppose while I’m at it, I should also inform him that you want to give blacks the vote, and make it so one of them can stand in his place and preach in our church.”

“That would be a fine idea,” said Peter calmly.

“You people,” he said in disgust. “Communists, all of you. We ought to make you live with our
kaffirs
for a month. Then you’d change your bloody tune.”

The other officer watched this interchange, listening in silence. Now he looked at Solomon.

“Let’s see your miners, old man. Time to open up the van.” Then he turned halfway around and shouted something to one of the other men.

Suddenly the whining of the dogs increased in volume as the back door of the van they were in swung open. Their handler stood in the opening, wearing black-padded gloves and a black-padded jacket over his white shirt. In one hand he held a short, braided leather whip. Wrapped around the other hand were dog leashes, and from the back of the van three animals jumped to the ground, circling and snuffling the air. The handler knelt down beside them and released them. All three headed towards us, barking and whining. Solomon, still trying to open the van door, was clearly terrified.

“Please,
baas
,” he shouted over the barking. “They frighten me, your dogs. Please, take them away from me,” and he turned and ran in his slow shuffle back to the front of the truck, hopped up to the driver’s seat, and slammed the door.

They strutted about with their sub-machine guns, laughed, made light of Solomon’s terror. Nosing something other than potatoes, the dogs circled, sniffing intently underneath my truck. The other officers closed in, watched as the dogs worked themselves into a frenzy of excitement.

“Hah,” said the handler. “They’ve found something here.”

“What else are you carrying up to give to your mission students, Father?” said the officer who had questioned us. “You bringing them banned books?
Dagga
? Or is it worse than that? Weapons, maybe? You have something in these sacks, and I’m going to know what it is.”

He beckoned angrily to two of his junior men who quickly stowed their weapons beneath the field table and leaped up into the back of the truck. They began throwing sacks down to the ground, where a third man ripped them open as they landed. The handler whistled and one of the dogs jumped up as well, to stand at the top of the pile, pawing at the sacks, tearing the burlap with his claws, whining as he detected the scent of the two men below.

All eyes were on my truck, waiting to see what the two men and their dog would find. It would not be long before we were discovered. I turned to look at Peter—and as I turned I saw Solomon’s officer walking toward the driver’s side of the van. Out of the corner of my eye I watched the officer pull open Solomon’s door, grab a handful of his overall, and drag him out of the truck. Solomon stumbled, held on to the door to support himself, and then, as the officer pulled at him, let go and allowed himself to fall forward. As he fell, he reached down to his chest and held onto the officer’s wrist for support and they rolled to the ground together. From where I stood I saw what took place in the narrow space between the two vehicles, and I felt a surge of fierce joy at the look of surprise on the officer’s face as his inoffensive victim gathered himself and changed from a shrunken, stumbling old man into a nimble compressed powerhouse.

But the officer’s expression of surprise was short-lived. Solomon pulled something almost invisible from his overall—a foot-long bar of slender, quarter inch thick tempered steel, sharpened to a fine point—and in a single powerful motion he covered the man’s mouth with one hand and thrust the point directly into his eye. He drove it through the small opening in the bone behind the eye, severed the optic nerve, and as he inserted it deep in the brain cavity, he jiggled it back and forth within its bony fulcrum.

In the darkened strip between the vehicles, like a kneeling night ghoul, Solomon withdrew the bar and wiped it on the dead man’s uniform, and as I watched I shivered at how easy and mechanical this work of horror was.

But it had only just begun. Solomon crept towards me on his knees, steel bar poised at shoulder level. One of the dogs not on the truck was nosing at a tire, and as he sensed Solomon’s presence he growled and charged. Whether he intended to attack or to simply stand guard over Solomon I don’t know because Solomon—so seemingly cowed a few moments earlier that he had run away—dropped and rolled directly towards the approaching attack dog, reached out under the open jaws and thrust his steel bar deep into the animal’s chest. With a whimper the dog dropped to the ground and Solomon withdrew the bar, wiping it clean on the dog’s coat. And then, in the midst of absolute chaos, with our lives hanging in the balance, he reached out with his free hand to close the dog’s dead eyes. Then he banged the bar three times on the side of the van.

The back door flew open and Khabazela and his men exploded silently from the van. There was such an eerie absence of sound that my mind was unable to reconcile what was seen with what was unheard.

Time stopped. I became a frozen spectator to an ancient silent movie as the scene played itself out frame by frame. I watched my Anglican priest drop to the ground as we had been instructed, but I didn’t have the presence of mind to move, and so stood like a target in front of the truck. Not a shot was fired; none was necessary, or possible. I don’t recall seeing Khabazela or his men carrying rifles; they wielded only the silent, lethal, weapons they had hidden on their bodies.

Solomon was already halfway across the clearing headed towards the officer furthest away as the van door opened. As each man left the van he scanned the scene and picked his target. Khabazela was out first, saw where Solomon was headed, and made for the next closest officer. He covered the ground in an eyeblink. The second man selected the next closest and went directly for him. It was the first time I had seen precision killing, and it achieved its objective: none of the highly trained members of the Special Branch had time to raise or cock a weapon, or to alert any backup. They were taken down almost simultaneously: one grabbed at a throat slit back to the spine as he fell, blood coiling from his neck; another was speared through the chest at close range and the
assegai
quickly withdrawn as he fell, and his heart pumped itself out onto the dirt. A third had the side of his head bashed in with a knobkerrie. When all members of the Branch lay on the ground, Khabazela gathered his men in the center of the clearing to take stock. The two remaining dogs stood by their fallen handler, snarling, and I turned away as they were quickly dispatched.

Then it was over. Within minutes they piled the bodies—human and canine—into one of the black Special Branch vans and doused them all with petrol. One of the men wanted to take the weapons, but Khabazela insisted that they be added to the pyre. He wanted no sign of the night’s events traceable to us. Before we drove off, the men knocked in a few windows to allow for quick combustion, and set the van alight.

We watched the fire rise into the darkness behind us as we drove off, and after a moment there was a huge detonation as the petrol tank exploded. It was highly visible, an operation that would not be easily hidden. But we had yet to cross the border, send our passengers on their way, and return home—and it was certain that the forces arrayed against us would now be magnified a thousand fold.

We crossed the border into Swaziland without incident—it was less a border than an unmanned signpost—and five miles into the landlocked protectorate of the Swazi people we came upon a sandy landing strip that ran between two fields. The plane was already there, waiting in darkness for us.

As Khabazela’s guerillas silently heaved potato sacks from the sides of the truck to release the two men concealed beneath, I was already planning the route home. The journey back would be far more hazardous. We would have to drive by night, sleeping in safe houses during the day, and it would be too dangerous to travel together. We would have to separate, and I would be travelling without support or company. It was far more than I had bargained for.

But he was way ahead of me. As our passengers clambered down, stiff and sore, and stood beside the truck stretching, Khabazela was already instructing his men to reload the potatoes.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “I can’t go back with a full truck—we have to get rid of the potatoes.”

“There are plenty of people in this country who need the food,” he said. “My men will see that it goes where it is needed, and then go underground until it’s safe to return.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “You want me to wait here while they deliver the potatoes?”

“They’re taking both vehicles,” he said patiently. “We’re not waiting for them. When they can return, they’ll bring your truck back if it doesn’t seem too dangerous. Otherwise they’ll leave it here.”

“So how are we supposed to get home?”

In answer he pointed to the plane, now heading down the runway towards us.

“You’re going back to the farm in that,” he said, “via Maputo.”

The pilot flew us north in the two-engine prop plane whose owners were never revealed to me. I slept most of the way through Swaziland and woke as we entered Mozambique airspace. We landed at a private airstrip in a sandy field outside Maputo, and our three passengers were immediately whisked off to be flown out of the main airport. There were a half dozen uniformed guards patrolling the airstrip, and while they ignored me, they treated Khabazela with distant respect. I don’t know whose airfield it was, or who was protecting us, but for the first time I was aware that Khabazela was relaxed and calm.

Servants came and went with food and drink, and we spent the day in the shade, sleeping under a huge canvas awning, waiting for nightfall when it would be safe to enter South African airspace. The pilot stayed with his plane at the far end of the runway, and I saw him from a distance wandering around the aircraft, making sure that all was ready for our flight that night, and overseeing the refueling truck that appeared at dusk.