Then he saw the orange flashing lights coming closer from the blockade. Stared rigidly at them. Yellow? That was not the Law. A possibility whispered; he watched, filling up with hope as the vehicle approached, the noise reaching him, and then it took shape, rumbled past sixty meters from where he stood, and he saw the trailer clearly, the wreck being towed, a car that had rolled, and he knew it was not a roadblock they were not looking for him.
An accident. A temporary hurdle.
Relief.
He would just have to wait.
* * *
The problem, said Rahjev Rajkumar, is that Absa keeps only the last two months statements immediately accessible for any account. The rest are backed up on an offline mainframe, and there is no way to get in there. The good news is that that is the only bad news. Our Thobela had a savings account and a bond on a property. This is where it gets interesting. The balance in the savings account is R52.341.89, which is quite a sum for a laborer. The only income the last two months was from Mother City Motorrad, a weekly payment of R572.72, or R2,290.88 per month and the interest on the account, just over R440 per month. The debit order from the savings account for the bond repayment is Ri,181.59. There is another debit order, for R129 per month, but I cant work out what that is for. That leaves him with Ri, 385.29 per month to live off. He draws R300 a week from an auto bank, usually the one at Thibault Square, and it seems like the remaining R189.29 is saved. A disciplined man, this Thobela.
The property? Janina prodded.
Thats the funny thing, said Rajkumar. Its not a house. Its a farm. He raised his head, looking for a reaction from the audience.
You have our attention, Rahjev.
Eighteen months ago Mpayipheli bought eight hundred hectares near Keiskammahoek. The farms name is Cala, after the river that runs there. The bond listen to this is just over R
100,000
, but the original purchase price was nearly half a million.
Keiskammahoek? said Quinn. Where the hell is that?
Far away in the old Ciskei, not too far from King Williams Town. Seems he wants to go back to his
roots.
And the thing is, where did he get the other R
400,000
? said Janina Mentz.
Precisely maam. Precisely.
Good work, Rahjev.
No, no, said the fat Indian. Brilliant work.
* * *
Thobela Mpayipheli sat with back against a rock, watching the lights on the Ni.
The night had turned cool; the moon was high, a small round ball on its way, unmarked, to score the goal of the night in the west. His eyes wandered over the desolate ridges, followed the contours of the strange landscape. They said there were rain forests here long ago. Somewhere around here, he had read, they dug up bones of giant dinosaurs that lived between the ferns and short stubby trees, a green pleasure garden of silver waterfalls and thunderstorms that watered the reptilian world with fat drops. Weird sounds must have risen with the vapor from the proto-jungle: bellows, bugling, clamor. And the eternal battle of life and death, a frightful food chain, terrifying predators with rows of teeth and small, evil eyes hunting down the herbivores. Blood had flowed here, in the lakes and on the plains.
He shifted against the chilly stone. Blood had always flowed on this continent. Here where man at last had shrugged off the ape, where he left his first tracks on two feet in mud that later turned to stone. Not even the glaciers, those great ice rivers that transformed the landscape, that left heaps of unsuspecting rocks in grotesque formations, could staunch the flow of blood. The ground was drenched in it. Africa. Not the Dark Continent. The Red Continent. The Mother. That gave life in abundance. And death as counterweight, creating predators to keep the balance, predators in all their forms, through the millennia.
And then she created the perfect hunter, the predator that upset the balance, that could not be controlled by ice ages and droughts and disease, that kept on sowing destruction, rejecting her power and might. The two-legged predators carried out the great coup, the cosmic coup détat, conquered all and then turned on one another, white against white, black against black, white against black.
He wondered if there was hope. For Africa. For this land.
Johnny Kleintjes. If steadfast Johnny Kleintjes could bow to temptation, led astray by the rotten stink of money, merely one of the lures of this continent, could there be hope?
He sighed deeply. More lights broke away from the cluster in the darkness; an ambulance siren wailed through the night, coming closer, gone along the road.
Not long now.
It became systematically still again. He heard a jackal howl, far over the ridges, a mockery of the ambulance.
Predators and scavengers and prey.
He was the former.
Was.
Maybe. Perhaps there was hope. If he had looked into the mirror of his life and found it abhorrent, he who lived his carnivore vocation so mercilessly, then there could be others like him. And perhaps that was all that was needed, one person, first only one. Then two, four, and a handful of people to shift the scales, just a fraction of a millimeter, to reclaim Mother Africa piece by piece, foot by foot, to rebuild, to give a glimmer of hope.
Maybe, if he and Miriam could take Pakamile Nzululwazi away to the Cala River, make a new beginning far from the city, in the landscape of his forefathers, away from the cycle of poverty and soulless travail, the crime, the corruption of empty foreign cultures.
Maybe.
Because nothing in this world could make him as he once was.
* * *
The Rooivalk helicopters chose their flight path through the tops of the cumulus nimbus, the white towers majestic in the moonlight, lightning striking silver tentacles kilometers far through the system, turbulence jerking and shaking them, the green, orange, and red flickering of the weather radar screens confirming the system.
Another ten minutes, then were through, said the pilot of Rooivalk One. ETA, twenty-two minutes.
Roger, One, answered the other.
* * *
Just over 160 kilometers east of the two attack helicopters the flight engineer of the Oryx clicked on the intercom.
Better buckle up, Mazibuko.
Whats up?
Weather system. And it looks bad.
How long still? asked Tiger Mazibuko.
Just over an hour. I hope you brought raincoats in those crates.
Were not scared of a little rain.
Just wait,
thought the flight engineer.
Wait till the winds begin tossing us around.
13.
A
llison Healy wrote the story immediately, because the official deadline was already past.
CAPE TOWN A manhunt for an armed and dangerous fugitive is under way after an unknown government intelligence agency alerted local police and traffic authorities along the Ni to be on the lookout for a Xhosa man traveling on a big BMW motorcycle.
No,
she thought.
Too formal, too official, too crime-reporter. Theres a lighter element in this story, something unique.
CAPE TOWN A big, bad Xhosa biker on a huge BMW motorcycle is the subject of a province-wide manhunt, after an undisclosed and top-secret government intelligence agency alerted police and traffic officials along the Ni to be on the lookout for what they called an armed and dangerous fugitive.
Reliable sources told the
Cape Times
the alert was posted around 22:00 last night, but the directive did not provide details about the reason Mr. Thobela Mpayipheli was sought so desperately by what is rumored to be the Presidential Intelligence Unit (PIU).
The fugitive is allegedly in possession of two firearms and one BMW R 1150 GS, all illegally obtained, but apparently thats not the reason they want to apprehend him, the source said.
Now she had to spin another paragraph or two out of the meager details. That was all the front page would have room for.
The news editor stood impatiently in the doorway. Almost done, she said. Almost done. But she knew he would wait, because this was news, good front-page material. With legs, he had said in his cubicle when she had told him about it. Nice little scoop, Alli, very nice.
When she had scurried out to begin writing, he had called after her: Weve got a head start. When youre done, go get us more.
Who
is this guy? Why do they want him? And what the hell is he doing on a BMW bike, for Gods sake?
* * *
The Rooivalks are in Beaufort West, maam, said Quinn. They are waiting for your instructions.
Tell them to get some sleep. If we havent heard anything by dawn, they can start patrolling the N1 southward. But they must talk with us before they take off. I dont want contact with the fugitive before we are ready.
Very well, maam.
She gave him time to relay the message. She counted hours. He couldnt be close yet, too early. If he made good time on the BMW, he would be somewhere on the other side of Laingsburg. Another two hours to Beaufort West. Not a great deal of time.
Is the roadblock ready at Three Sisters?
The police and traffic people are there already, maam. They are moaning. Its raining in the Karoo.
Theyll grumble about anything, Quinn. They know they have to check all vehicles?
They know, maam.
How long before Mazibuko gets there?
Anytime now, maam. Ten minutes, no longer.
* * *
Captain Tiger Mazibuko sat with folded hands, eyes closed in the yellow-lit vibrating interior of the Oryx, but he did not sleep.
It was the dawning realization that the Reaction Unit would never come into its own that kept him awake. His teammates were asleep. They were accustomed to the cramped, uncomfortable conditions, able to snatch a few minutes or occasional hour of sleep between events. Mazibuko, too. But rest eluded him; the germ of unease over their deployment had grown since his last exchange with Mentz. He had never thought about it this way before: they were somewhere between a counterterrorist instrument and a hostage rescue unit, cast in the mold of the FBI Hostage Rescue Team and the similar group of the British Special Air Services, the SAS. They had been operational for thirteen months and had done nothing more than simulated training exercises. Until now. Till they had to invade a drug den like fucking blue-trouser cops, and now they were to man a roadblock in this godforsaken desert to wait for a middle-aged fugitive who might once have been an MK soldier.
Maybe he should go see his father and ask him whether, before he sold out to the Boers, before he sang his cowardly song of treason, he had known someone called Thobela Mpayipheli.
His father. The great hero of many kitchen battles with his mother. His father, who beat his wife and who beat his children to the breaking point because he could not live with his humiliation. Because in a Security Police cell he had broken, and the names and places, the methods and the targets had bubbled out over the floor with the spit and the blood and the vomit. And then, deliberately released, the shame shackled to his ankles defined the shuffling course of his life.
His father.
Isnt it time to move out from your fathers shadow?
Janina Mentzs words could not be blocked out.
Did you know Mpayipheli, Father? Was he one of those you betrayed?
Since the beginning he had had visions, dreams at night and fantasies in his solitary moments. Fired up by the training and Mentzs propaganda, prospects of microbattles, of lightning raids in dark passages, shots cracking, grenades exploding, smoke and cordite and life and death, bullets ripping through him, bursting his head, spattering his rage against the walls. He lived for that, lusted after it. It was the fuel of his zeal, his salvation, the ripping loose from the sins of his father, the destruction of the cells of his brain with the memories, and now he wondered if it would ever happen. Mentz telling him so seriously that the world had become an evil place, presidents and countries not knowing who was friend or foe, wars that would no longer be fought with armies but at the front of secret rooms, the mini-activities of abduction and occupation, suicide attacks and pipe bombs. September
II
was water to her mill, every statement of every radical group she held up as watertight evidence. And where did they find themselves now?
He heard a change in the note of the engines.
Nearly there.
Now they sat in a land the world had passed by. Even the terrorists were no longer interested in Africa.
The Reaction Unit, sent to man a roadblock. The worlds best-trained traffic officers.
