by Tony Park
Sannie carried on down the tunnel, faster now, hoping that one of the missing girls might be just minutes ahead of her.
The passageway curved to the right, and as she rounded a bend she saw them, a figure dressed in black pants and top and a ski mask, ushering on a white teenaged girl. Laura.
‘Police, stop!’
The kidnapper spun around and Sannie recognised the swell of hips and breasts. A woman. She raised a handgun and fired two shots at Sannie.
Laura screamed in fear and desperation. The bullets went wide as Sannie dropped to her knees and took aim. In the low light and with the woman pushing Laura into a run Sannie couldn’t risk pulling the trigger.
Sannie took a deep breath, got up, and set off after the woman.
‘Help me!’
The call was muffled, and had not come from Laura. It made Sannie slow down. She came to another door recessed into the wall, and heard the muted sound of hands banging on steel from the other side.
‘Help me, they’ve been keeping me locked in here!’ It was a girl’s voice.
‘Stand back, away from the door.’ There was a padlock securing the door. Sannie fired at it, twice – shooting a lock off was not as easy as it appeared in the movies – then kicked the door open.
The girl retreated to the corner of her cell.
‘It’s OK, I’m here to rescue you,’ Sannie said. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Lilly.’
The girl came to her and threw her arms around her neck. Sannie hugged the girl tight, briefly, allowing herself just a moment’s temporary relief that at least both of the girls who were still missing were alive, for now. She gently prised the girl off her. ‘Who kidnapped you?’
‘A woman . . . two men. They kept me locked in a room somewhere else. There was an explosion, then they brought me down here. There are other girls – my friend Thandi, and another girl, a white girl, foreign. I heard her talking and screaming.’
‘Thandi is safe,’ Sannie said. ‘The woman has the British girl, Laura. I just saw them.’
Lilly nodded. ‘Yes. I think she was coming for me, as well. I heard the key in the lock, then she ran off, with the other girl screaming again.’
‘I have to go and help Laura too, so you need to hide,’ Sannie said. ‘Head down the tunnel that way,’ she pointed back the way she had come, ‘then turn to your right, into the concrete pipe. At the end the entry is blocked, but I’m sure someone will realise what’s happening and start digging just now. You need to wait there for me. If people come, tell them what you know and that Captain van Rensburg is trying to find Laura.’
Lilly grabbed Sannie’s uniform shirt. ‘Don’t leave me, please.’
Sannie took Lilly’s skinny shoulders in her hands and locked eyes with her. ‘Listen to me, Lilly. You must go. Hide, where I told you. I will come back for you, I promise.’
After a moment Lilly nodded then turned and set off down the tunnel, with a nervous backward glance. Sannie broke into a jog, in pursuit of the kidnapper and Laura. Around another gentle bend – this hand-dug tunnel was not nearly as straight and precise as the other – she saw a dead end and the open wooden door in the rear of a second locker, just like the one that had hidden the entrance to this tunnel. Sannie approached the door, ready to shoot.
The red lights went out.
‘Put down your gun,’ a trembling girlish voice said from the darkness.
‘Laura?’ Sannie called.
‘The woman is telling me what to say. She says to tell you she has her pistol pointed at the side of my head. If you come for me she will kill me.’
The woman was not calling out herself. Why? Sannie wondered. The only obvious answer seemed to be that if the kidnapper spoke, Sannie would recognise her voice. She took a guess.
‘Tell the woman that if she puts down the gun, we can talk nicely and I will recommend the court treats her fairly.’
There was a pause, then Laura called back: ‘She says to tell you that if you insult her intelligence again she will kill me.’
‘What do you want?’ Sannie yelled. She leaned against the frame of the hidden door. Peering through, she saw a tunnel like the first one she had entered, made of cast concrete pipes, and once more heading east–west. From the distance she had travelled in the hand-dug tunnel Sannie reckoned that this one must have its entrance somewhere near the new, but empty, hotel development.
‘She says to put your hand through the doorway and to show you are holding your pistol by the barrel.’ The red lighting came on again.
Sannie knew there was no way she could close the gap between her and the woman and kill or disarm the kidnapper without being shot herself, or Laura being killed. She needed to buy time.
‘She says you have five seconds. Five, four, three –’
‘All right,’ Sannie called. She held her arm out into the main tunnel, her pistol held as directed, the barrel facing down.
‘She says for you now to walk towards us, hands up.’
Sannie stepped through the doorway and, hands in the air, started walking slowly down the tunnel.
‘That’s it, she says to keep walking,’ Laura said. Sannie could see that the kidnapper had her mouth close to Laura’s ear and was whispering into it as they carried on deeper into the tunnel for perhaps another hundred metres onwards. ‘Now stop. Put the pistol on the ground.’
Sannie did as she commanded.
‘Now take three steps backwards and get down on your knees,’ Laura said, her voice starting to quake.
Sannie lowered herself down, already planning her next move. The woman would not be able to pick up Sannie’s Z88 without letting go of Laura, and Sannie intended to give the girl a clear chance to escape. Sannie focused, through the red gloom, on the body of the kidnapper – what she could see of it.
The woman whispered something to Laura, who then moved away from her, towards Sannie. When Laura was halfway between the two women she lay down, face first on the concave floor of the concrete tunnel.
Sannie cursed to herself. The woman was cleverer than she had imagined.
The woman pointed her pistol at Sannie, but then reached into a pocket and took out a mobile phone and glanced quickly at the screen.
Laura had her neck craned, looking at Sannie. She saw tears running down the terrified girl’s face.
‘Don’t worry, Laura,’ Sannie said softly, ‘others – many more – are coming. They are already underground.’
The woman walked down the tunnel towards Sannie, pistol in one hand, the phone in the other. She paused by Laura and pushed the barrel of her weapon into the back of the child’s head, forcing her to face downward.
Sannie looked hard at the woman. ‘I know who you are.’ The build was right, and it all made sense now, who would go to such lengths and why. Sannie was seething with anger, but had to force herself to stay calm.
‘I know who she is as well,’ Laura blurted out, ‘she’s –’
‘Shut up.’ The woman dug her pistol harder into Laura’s head, silencing her. ‘In any case, it doesn’t matter. You had to find out eventually.’
She crouched by Laura, put the phone on the floor of the tunnel and pushed it so that it slid along the smooth floor. When it came to rest in front of Sannie, what she saw made her draw a sharp breath.
On the screen was a photo of her youngest child, Tommy.
Sannie glared at the masked woman again. Cooly, calmly, she whispered to herself: ‘I am going to kill you.’
Chapter 27
‘Jeff?’ Mia coughed and spat dirt. The blast had knocked her backwards and her ears were ringing. Her voice sounded muffled to her own ears.
She crawled out of the side tunnel into the main thoroughfare and went left, but the air was still thick with dust and the light from the exit Jeff had been headed for was gone.
‘Jeff,’ she coughed again.
Using her lighter she went back and had another look at the false door and this time was able to locate another torch clipped to the reverse side of the hidden door, which explained why Jeff didn’t find it earlier. She switched it on and particles danced in the beam.
There was no answer.
Mia stumbled along, the beam from her torch barely able to penetrate the cloud she found herself in. Very soon she met a wall of broken concrete, earth and rock. She dropped to her knees and started digging with her hands.
‘Jeff!’ She could hear herself better now, but there was still a ringing in her ears.
The last thing he had said to her was that he had seen someone. She wondered if he had somehow managed to get outside before the blast was triggered.
She thought about that. Sean had said the bomb at the tunnel entrance, the one that had killed the man who had shot the helicopter pilot, was command-detonated. That meant someone had to be nearby. It also meant someone was above ground. Jeff had said he had seen someone when he first discovered the tunnel. Perhaps, she thought as she continued shovelling dirt with her hands, the man had led Jeff towards the tunnel mouth, but then slipped off into the bush instead of heading underground. That way, all of them had gone underground, leaving the way clear for the poacher to press the switch, detonating the explosives and entombing them.
But maybe Jeff had got clear.
‘Jeff! Can you hear me?’
She stopped digging to listen. There was nothing.
She felt her fingernails, which she kept practically short most of the time, start to give way, but she carried on scraping out handfuls of dirt and rock.
Mia felt something soft under her fingers. It was fabric. She cleared away more soil and freed the garment. By torchlight she could tell that the piece of material she was holding was the torn remains of Jeff’s shirt. Most likely, she thought, it had been blown off his body by the force of the blast.
Mia started to cry.
‘Jeff!’ There was no reply to her repeated calls. Mia took a deep breath and coughed up more dust particles. She tried to work out what to do next. Shining the torch around her she tried to find her rifle, but realised she had, stupidly, probably buried it by mistake while scraping out handfuls of dirt in the half light.
Sobbing, she turned and ran westward along the main tunnel, towards Killarney. With luck she would catch up to Captain van Rensburg or maybe find another way out. Poachers had disappeared from view and the Vulture monitoring system at more than one location on Lion Plains, so Mia thought there might be more entry and exit points.
However, the further she went the more she became engulfed in new, lingering clouds of dust. She slowed as she was confronted with what she predicted and feared – there must have been another exit here, but it had also been blown and had caved in.
Pure panic surged through her body. It was, she told herself, adrenaline. She needed to calm down and to get herself out of this tunnel. As with the charge that had gone off when Jeff had tried to exit, the explosives at the central exit had brought down large chunks of concrete from the pipe and the shaft above. There was no way she could clear that by hand. She turned and forced herself to walk, conserving oxygen and energy, back to the side tunnel she had discovered through the false locker.
Stepping in, she followed it for some sixty or seventy paces, to where it ended. On the ground was a pick and a shovel and an upturned wheelbarrow left by whomever had been working there last.
Mia played the light of the torch behind her. By holding the torch at a ninety-degree angle and narrowing the beam, she could see that this tunnel had branched off from the main pipeline tunnel at an upward angle. The diggers were angling towards the surface. From what she could tell, the end of the tunnel might be only one and a half metres below the surface – less than half the distance of the shaft that she, Jeff and Captain van Rensburg had descended, near the termite mound.
Mia grabbed the shovel and attacked the roof of dirt above her head.
*
Sean and Benny searched in and around the sangoma’s home, but turned up nothing more than the grisly remains and item of clothing that had already been discovered.
The overworked male and female duo from the police crime scene investigation team had arrived, after Henk de Beer summoned them from the ruins of the school building.
Henk was briefing them at the door to the rondavel as Sean came up to them. If the crime scene officers were shocked by the prospect of seeing a human body part in a freezer, they gave no indication. Sean guessed they had seen some terrible things.
‘Any news from the school?’ Henk asked.
The female officer nodded. ‘Something odd, there. We’ll need more labour and maybe an excavator.’
‘Why? We’re stretched thin for manpower as it is,’ Henk said.
‘That blast,’ the woman said, ‘as well as destroying the building and the guy inside, it imploded.’
‘Imploded?’ Henk said.
‘Ja,’ the male officer weighed in, ‘the floor of the building collapsed, and much of the rubble fell downward. There’s like a cellar or something under the building. There would be a crater, but the building has mostly collapsed into it, filling it.’
‘Could the bomb have been detonated below ground?’ Sean asked.
‘Very possible,’ the female said. ‘No sign of blast residue or other markers on the walls still standing. Good theory.’
‘OK, we’ll leave you to the contents of the freezer and whatever else you can find in here,’ Henk said to the forensics team. ‘Sean, we need to try to find the sangoma.’
‘I just need to let Benny pick up her scent.’
Henk nodded, went inside, and came out with a floral dress, while the male crime scene investigator protested from inside about Henk disturbing his workplace. ‘I found this in with some dirty clothes. It could be evidence, but we can’t waste time.’
Sean held the dress under Benny’s nose. ‘Soek, Benny.’
Unencumbered by his lead, Benny trotted away immediately, with Sean and Henk half jogging to keep up. Benny picked up a trail that led them down the path from the rondavel and onto the gravel road that led to the new developments. Benny went past the ruined school building and carried on directly towards the empty, though substantially completed, hotel.
Benny trotted over rough ground, mounds of dirt that clearly needed to be levelled and landscaped if the hotel was ever going to open to tourists. It still largely resembled a construction site and two shipping containers sat next to what would one day be a substantial concrete in-ground swimming pool.
Thick power cables joined the two containers via holes in the walls. A flexible tube, about thirty centimetres in diameter, extruded from the side of one of the containers down to the ground. On the other side, a section of tubing ran from the steel box into a squat concrete cube of a building abutting the pool, a structure that was half buried in the ground so as not to interrupt the view of tourists sunbathing on a future deck. Benny sat down in front of a black-painted steel door in one side of the cube.
‘He’s indicating,’ Sean said as they caught up with him.
‘Inside that thing?’ Henk said.
‘Looks like it.’ Sean shrugged off his daypack, took out Benny’s chew toy and gave it to him to play with. ‘Good boy, Benny.’
Henk banged on the door with a closed fist. ‘What is this?’
‘Pump house?’ Sean guessed.
‘More like a bunker or a prison cell.’ There was a sliding bolt on the outside of the door, but it was open. Henk drew his pistol and motioned for Sean to take Benny to one side. The detective kicked the door open, bringing his pistol up at the same time.
Sean joined Henk and when they moved in, they saw that the ground dropped away before them into a shaft, with steel ladder rungs embedded
into a concrete wall. The flexible tubing and electrical cables they had seen above ground ran down into the pit.
Benny, finished with his solo game, walked into the room, carrying his chew toy in his mouth.
‘Eish, I’ve got to call this in,’ Henk said. He looked at the screen of his phone. ‘No signal. I’ll have to go back out near the sangoma’s house. I had three bars of signal there.’
As Henk turned to leave, the steel door they had entered through slammed closed and they both heard the bolt slide home on the outside.
After banging on the door, they took stock of their surrounds and discovered that the building was little more than camouflage for the opening of a shaft, which they climbed down.
‘A bloody tunnel into the reserve,’ Sean said, ‘dug by some machine.’ Red lighting allowed them to see. At the bottom of the shaft they found signs of human habitation – a stretcher and sleeping bag, camp chairs, a table, and several containers and boxes of various sizes.
‘Someone’s been living here for a while,’ Henk said, opening a plastic storage box. ‘Food, toiletries, there’s even a camping fridge here.’ Henk opened the lid and Sean saw beer, juices, meat and vegetables.
A bank of a dozen large twelve-volt batteries ran along one wall and was connected to an inverter that hummed away noisily, as did the fridge. They had worked out that the cable coming from above must be from a generator, most likely housed in one of the two shipping containers they had seen by the empty swimming pool.
The same type of flexible tubing they had seen passing through each side of the other container stretched away from them, along the tunnel, as did the thick black snake of bundled electrical cables and what looked like a high-pressure water pipe.
‘The power to run a drilling or boring machine is coming from that shipping container above,’ Sean said, training the cables and piping. ‘This pipe must supply water to lubricate the machine’s cutter head and then slurry must be pumped back out via the bigger pipe.’
‘And all the waste gets hidden on the construction site. Clever,’ Henk said.