The Prey (11 page)

He was currently in a stope with Phineas and the Mozambican metallurgist they called ‘the Professor’. He’d been given back the daypack he’d gone underground with, once it had been thoroughly searched. He knew it had been gone through, not only because everything he’d packed neatly had been rudely stuffed back in, but also because the spare Leatherman tool he kept in the front pocket was missing. He had no weapon to fight back with or to use in an escape bid. What was the point, anyway; these rats would be on him before he found his way back to the shaft.

‘Luis?’ Chris called out.

The Professor moved from the darkness into the cone of Chris’s torch. ‘
Sim?
Yes?’

Chris followed Luis, who seemed at ease moving in the half-light and the shadows cast by Phineas’s lamp behind them. Chris tried to calm himself by taking note of their progress – which way they turned when they came to junctions, and to make note of landmarks. These were precious few, but he noticed bits of abandoned machinery and tools lying where they had last functioned.

‘Do you want to be down here?’ he whispered to Luis.

Luis half glanced over his shoulder and shook his head.

‘Hey, keep quiet. No talking unless I tell you,’ Phineas barked.

There were two soft beeps. Luis held his watch, a cheap digital, close to his face and pressed a button which made it beep again, and the tiny screen lit up. ‘Chris, cover your ears and open your mouth.’

‘What?’

‘Blasting,’ Luis said.

Chris was about to ask what was going on when the whole tunnel around them shook. A wall of dust raced up the working and the following shockwave knocked Chris to his knees. His ears rang and he felt like he’d been punched in the chest. When he took a breath he sucked in a lungful of dust, then coughed. ‘
Jislaik
!

Chris felt a hand under his arm, lifting him.

He was vaguely aware of someone whispering at him. Luis moved so he was face to face with Chris and mouthed the word ‘blasting’. Chris got to his feet and patted his overalls. Clouds of dust erupted from his clothes and hung in the air. Luis held his watch up so Chris could see it and pressed the light button again.

It was the end of a shift of legitimate miners and the charges had just been detonated. Chris spat grit from his mouth and took out a multi-gas meter and a dust monitoring pump from his pack. The meter measured oxygen, carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide and methane, and the pump was normally worn by a random sample of miners during a legal operation’s eight-hour shift. He knew already his instruments would confirm just how unsafe the air was around them.

Phineas put down his AK-47 and rested it against the side wall. He took out a box of matches and Chris drew a sharp breath and winced at the flare as Phineas struck a light and lit the ring on a gas cooktop attached to a Cadac bottle. Chris exhaled; it was almost suicidal to light a match so soon after a blast and so close to its origin. Phineas put a battered saucepan of water on the blue flame.

‘Tea,’ he said.

Chris shook his head. Work hadn’t stopped because of him. It was to be expected. He wondered if that meant they thought he was dead. In all reality, the way these guys worked he probably would be before long.

K
ylie adjusted the plastic strap at the back of her hard hat, then tested and attached her lamp. She had brought her own overalls and work boots, but not her hat as it was too bulky for her luggage. ‘All set,’ she said to Cameron.

He stared at her a moment and she thought she detected the slightest shake of his head.
Fuck him
, she thought. There were plenty of women working underground these days, even in South Africa. This was no longer a man’s game.

They joined a line of mine workers shuffling through the gate into the steel cage. Below them were two more decks, with six men in each. It would take them four and a half minutes to descend the fourteen hundred metres to the lower workings of the Eureka goldmine.

All the men she passed nodded or said, ‘Good afternoon, madam’, which she thought was nice but faintly ridiculous. She wanted to say, ‘Call me Kylie, that’s what all the blokes on the mines do back home’, but she thought it might be insulting in some way. In fact, when she rode a cage down into an Australian mine, most of the time the workers didn’t even acknowledge her presence, such was the inverse snobbery of the workplace culture in Australia when someone from
‘head office’ visited a mine. Kylie missed the days when she, like Cameron, had run a mine of her own and the workers really were happy to see her and greet her on her regular underground visits.

She and Cameron moved to the edge of the cage and filed in with four other men. The miners seemed more slight and wiry than big and burly. Some looked painfully thin and she wondered how many of the Global Resources employees around her were HIV positive. From her briefing papers she had learned the infection rate in the general population in South Africa was around ten per cent. Among the mining workforce, in the fifteen to forty-nine year old demographic, it was estimated at double that. The company encouraged its employees in South Africa to get tested and to know their HIV status. Cameron, she knew, had instituted an incentive program whereby employees received a ticket in an internal lottery every time they had an AIDs test, and stood to win cellphones, televisions and cash prizes. At the end of each year one lucky worker won a pickup truck; lucky, that is, if he or she also tested negative.

The cage closed and Kylie felt the oddly familiar crush of muscled bodies against her. The banksman sent a signal to the hoist driver and the brakes were released. The floor dropped and Kylie experienced the same mix of excitement, trepidation and contentment she did every time she went underground. She loved it down here, as she watched the cut rock wall of the shaft flash past her eyes. She reckoned that if she hadn’t been accepted into university to study engineering she might have been just as happy being an electrician or a welder or any other job that could have taken her to work in a mine. She had noticed four females getting into the cage. Yes, it could be a boorish, blokey, sexist and bigoted working environment, and it was hot and dusty and dangerous, but there was something cocooning, she thought – comforting even – about being in the embrace of the earth. And she liked the fact she had cut it in this hard world of men and machines.

The cage stopped abruptly, sending Kylie’s tummy jarring up against her rib cage. Her flinch was instinctive; they were nowhere
near deep enough yet. There was movement in the darkness all around her. Men were fidgeting and bending in the darkness. ‘Hey!’ An elbow dug into her back and she felt someone’s bony butt press into her thigh. ‘What’s going on?’

Cameron snorted. ‘You’ll see.’

She didn’t like surprises, or someone lauding it over her with knowledge of something. When she asked a subordinate a question she expected an answer, not ‘You’ll see’. There was the clang of things dropping on the steel floor of the cage. Men whispered to each other rapidly from the other cages below them. There was more movement and bustling in the blackness. A motor whirred and the cage jerked and started to rise.

‘We’re going back to the surface?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

Kylie wanted to know what was going on but she couldn’t demand an answer of Cameron with all these workers pressed around them. She didn’t want him to lose their respect by being bullied by her, and she didn’t want to display her own ignorance of procedures any more than she already had.

Kylie felt an elbow in her ribs as a man fussed next to her in the dark. ‘Hey, watch out.’ There was a muttered apology and more whispering as more men in the cage appeared to be fidgeting. When they returned to daylight Kylie was amazed to see glimpses of dark skin as the man two across from her zipped up his overall shirt. He looked away from her. A man next to her was trying, without much success, to fight the crush of bodies to bend down and put his boots back on. What the hell was going on here?

‘All right, everyone out,’ Cameron’s voice boomed. There were more hushed words as the men filed back out of the cage and Kylie joined them on the bank.

Kylie saw the floor of the cage was littered with stuff – just about everything in life a man might need. Two uniformed security guards entered and retrieved the contraband before the cage was raised to allow the men in the one below to get out.

While they waited for the next batch of miners the guards sorted the abandoned goods into piles. There was food – packets of biscuits, bananas, oranges, plastic bags of what she guessed might be maize meal, three small bottles of cooking oil and two bags of rice. There was tobacco – packets of cigarettes, tobacco papers and loose leaf. There were two ziploc plastic bags of what looked to her like something she hadn’t seen since her university days – marijuana – and another bag of small white pills. There were seven small half-litre bottles of various spirits, pornographic magazines, some unopened letters in envelopes, pens, CDs, an iPod and batteries scattered everywhere. The second cage revealed a similar hoard.

‘This stuff is all for the
zama zamas
?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’ Cameron surveyed the mounds of goods with his hands on his hips. ‘This is part of the problem, why we’re unable to stop the illegal miners. For the most part they’re supplied by our guys.’

‘Did you put this on for my benefit?’ Kylie asked.

Cameron scoffed. ‘Why would I show you how incapable I’ve been of stopping my own men from accepting bribes and perpetuating a crime that’s costing their employers millions of rand per year? No, I knew there was going to be a spot check sometime today, but not exactly when. I imagine the head of security, Tobias, timed this one for your benefit, though.’

A rotund man in the paramilitary-looking blue uniform of a security company pushed his way through the throng of miners and greeted Cameron then introduced himself to her. ‘Tobias Nombekana,’ he said. ‘Pleased to meet you, Dr Hamilton.’

Kylie shook the proffered hand and was impressed that someone, at least, had taken the time to read her CV on the company website or intranet.

‘Welcome to South Africa. I’m sorry to delay your visit underground, but we take security very seriously here at Eureka and I have to conduct some questioning. Would you like some coffee, tea or a cold drink while you wait?’ Tobias asked.

‘You can use my office if you want to check emails,’ Cameron said. ‘I’ll call you when we’re done here.’

She wasn’t about to be parked in a tearoom or fobbed off, and she was interested in how Cameron would deal with this situation. Clearly a number of employees had broken the rules, but how was he to conduct a thorough investigation and still get the shift underground in time to get some work done? ‘No, I’m staying. I want to sit in on the investigation.’

He looked at her and shrugged, then walked to the steel staircase that led up a level.

Cameron started speaking in an African language. ‘What’s he speaking, and what’s he saying?’ Kylie asked Tobias.

‘He’s speaking Swazi. He learned it as a boy and he is very fluent. He’s telling them the security officers are about to inspect the seals on their self-contained self-rescuers to see if they’ve been tampered with – opened. These packs contain an emergency breathing apparatus that –’

‘I know what an SCSR is, Tobias.’

Tobias nodded then called instructions to four other uniformed security guards who started moving into the ranks of miners.

Kylie watched the men. Some held their SCSR containers immediately out for inspection and stood there, looking either bored or relieved. Others jostled about in the group and tried to move to the back or lose themselves among their peers. The security guards started tapping men on their shoulders and separating them from the rest of the shift.

‘Those men have nothing in their SCSR containers,’ she said to Tobias, faintly incredulous as one by one the containers with broken seals were opened. She couldn’t believe men would go underground without their emergency breathing apparatus.

Tobias nodded and didn’t look alarmed at all. ‘It’s what they sometimes use to carry the contraband in. They know we do spot checks – frisking some of the men, and the women, too – and they must carry their own food for the shift in those clear plastic bags
you see most of them carrying. If they have too much food we know it’s to be sold to the
zama zamas
.’

‘But what if there’s a carbon monoxide leak or a fire? They’re gambling with their lives.’ Kylie thought of Cameron’s lottery. Perhaps day-to-day life was a gamble for these men.

Tobias shrugged. ‘Cameron will not be happy. This has happened before, and all the men know that emptying their SCSR is an offence for which they will be dismissed.’

Cameron spoke some more to the men, his cadence and tone rising. She could see his knuckles were white on the steel handrail he gripped.

Tobias translated: ‘He is asking them, “How can you men supply drugs and drink and food and tobacco to the men who murdered your colleagues?” He’s saying, “The bodies of Themba Tshabalala and Paulo Barrica are not yet in the ground; their widows and families are grieving, and you men are profiteering from the criminals who were responsible.” He asks how they can deal with those who have a good man, Christiaan Loubser, possibly held captive. Chris was well liked, Dr Hamilton, as is Cameron. These men must be feeling bad now.’

All bar seven men, those with the empty emergency packs, moved back into the cages.

The last gate was shut and the remainder of the shift were lowered away. They disappeared into the blackness. Cameron walked down the stairs, his heavy boots ringing on the steel. It was the only sound in the winding-gear room.

‘I’ll speak English now, so Dr Hamilton from head office can see what we do not tolerate here at Eureka. Anyone not understand me?’ He repeated the question in Swazi and then, according to Tobias, in Fanagolo. There were no responses and no raised hands. ‘Good. You all know the rules. They are given to you in written and verbal form by your shift boss each week. You are to check your SCSR packs before your shift starts and any man who does not have his emergency breathing apparatus with him underground is liable for dismissal. Understood?’