by Mark Graham
He cleared his eyes, a mingling of his own sweat with the rain, and trained high-powered binoculars on the East Fields facility four kilometers away.
The first hint of activity was an added glow within the hull of Central Access. Suddenly, plumes of diesel smoke billowed from the building’s exhaust portals. A huge wall opened across its face. Four flatcars emerged from the building along tracks laid atop the ridge of a huge ore dump. Upon the backs of each car were identical long-range rocket launchers. Artillery teams assembled around each weapon.
Becker’s chest tightened. Prayers raced through his brain as he thought about the thousands of unaware people working merrily away in the mines upon which those guns were now aimed.
Adjacent to Central Access, at the face of a huge warehouse, three panel doors opened. Shafts of light preceded a convoy of flatbed trucks and two columns of soldiers. Methodically, the trucks formed a circle in a vacant shipping yard, and the soldiers broke into well-coordinated teams. Sheets of dark canvas, draped over the trucks like dustcloths covering antique furniture, fell away revealing antiÓaircraft guns, portable rocket launchers, and a host of long-range mortars. Squad after squad of foot soldiers followed the trucks out of the warehouse, each dispersing in orderly fashion toward the perimeter of the East Fields property.
****
Mansell followed the steep gradient into Pilgrim’s Rest past the timber mill and the fishery. Cottonwoods formed a tall hedge along the Blyde River. On his left, beneath abandoned mines, ore tailings cascaded down the mountainsides like frozen waterfalls.
Along the main street of town, gas lamps sprayed sidewalks and street corners with soft yellow light. Vacancy signs flashed conspicuous invitations in front of motels and inns, and most of the cafés and shops had Closed for the Season signs hanging in their windows. Mansell found an all-night café called The Impala in the heart of town. He went inside. A pretty black girl attended an empty counter. Two men, hunters by their orange caps and mackintosh coats, hunched over steaks and eggs in the corner beneath the mounted head of the reddish antelope that had lent its name to the diner.
“Good evening,” Mansell said, using Afrikaans now instead of English. He took a barstool. “Black coffee, please, and some much needed advice, if you would.”
“Where’s the best hunting, right?”
“No, no,” he answered, laughing. “I’m staying with a friend for a while. His place is on Cottonwood Road, and for the life of me, I can’t find it.”
Dark eyes studied him. “Kinda late to be looking.”
“Car trouble.” Mansell slid two rand notes under the saucer. “Know where it is?”
“Go north of town, maybe a half kilometer. On the left you’ll see the Grandfather Tree. All by itself. You can’t miss it. It’s a huge cottonwood. Some folks say it’s five hundred years old. You can’t miss it.”
The Grandfather Tree stood sentinel-like, gnarled and foreboding beneath a waning moon, at the junction of a narrow macadam road. Opposite the tree were three mailboxes. Two were freshly painted, names and addresses. Upon the third, stenciled in black paint, was the number 203, but no name. Mansell turned left. He doused the car’s lights.
Plowed fields and farmhouses flanked the road for a half kilometer on either side. Beyond the fields were thick forests of spruce and pine. In time, the trees left of the road gave way to an enclosed estate. The grounds were terraced and landscaped, eventually abutting a wide ark in the Blyde River. A stone wall, three meters high, separated the estate from the road. Chain link fencing separated it from the forest.
Mansell parked the car well off the road among the spruce on the right. He slid quietly out. Using the forest for cover, he walked parallel to the road for a hundred meters, studying the wall. Coils of barbed wire perched along the top for the entire length. The wall itself was unbroken except for tall iron gates at the entrance. These were four meters high and neatly enclosed by a stone arch. Gas-burning torches lit the entrance from iron sconces. Beyond the gates was a circular watchtower. A dim bulb lit the interior, but there were no guards.
A narrow drive led away from the gates in a straight line to an old country house. Spotlights illuminated an aristocratic portico with white columns, a peaked roof, and french doors. Lights burned from a first-floor window and from a garden patio off the south side of the house.
The solitude was disquieting, unnerving. The wind stirred, hissing between the branches. A night hunter crept through the woods behind him. Overburdened storm clouds anointed the forest with a cool drizzle. Mansell turned his collar up. He craved a cigarette, but instead, found a sheltered vantage point among the trees and waited.
Dressed in a silk smoking jacket and cradling a snifter of K.W.V. brandy, Minister of Justice Cecil Leistner paced in front of a roaring fire. The library represented one of but four rooms made livable by a harried caretaker over the weekend. The minister’s abrupt decision to visit the summer retreat had been met with consternation. The staff had already been dismissed for the season. The caretaker and his wife had been preparing for a vacation in East London.
Still, dust covers had been removed, the four rooms aired, and the cupboards hastily stocked. The other twenty rooms, with the minister’s approval, remained closed.
Further, Leistner had insisted the caretaker’s vacation plans not be altered. He was alone in the house except for Jeremy, his butler from Pretoria, who was asleep in the caretaker’s cottage, and the two guards and their dogs. He felt naked. Leistner was a believer in the old adage about security in numbers. And without people, he thought to himself now, power meant nothing.
He stoked the fire. He added pine chips and another log. He sought out the humidor, stored, as it had been for years, above the liquor cabinet nestled among book-filled shelves. Was it possible Charles might have remembered?
The minister cracked the lid to the humidor and beamed. It was chock-full of Te-Amos, pungent and suitably moist. He drew out one. He was snipping the end off when a soft tapping came from the outside door.
Leistner started, nearly dropping the cigar. Then he cursed himself, remembering the guards were due to check in. He crossed the floor, released the dead bolt, and opened the door.
“Good God. You!” he blurted out. “How can . . . Why are you here?”
Leistner backed away. Jan Koster crossed the threshold, saying, “I should have called first. Forgive me.”
“Something’s happened.” Brandy sent waves of heat and a struggling element of calm throughout Leistner’s system.
“Yes, something’s happened. The plan has been unearthed. Becker.”
“Becker? That’s impossible.”
Koster shrugged. “One plan fails, another succeeds.”
Retreating further, the minister said, “How did you know I was here? I never—”
“I made a point of knowing everything there was to know about you, Minister. I had to. All except that insane plan of yours to kill Ian Elgin. That I almost missed.”
“You . . . ? You knew about—?”
“Yes. Very theatrical.” Koster tapped the tip of his wet umbrella on the terra-cotta tiled floor. He moved liquidly, smiling. “Very theatrical. But then, theatrics is one of your weaknesses, isn’t it?”
“That’s impossible. I—”
“You’ve forgotten Ian’s letter, then. Destroyed, I imagine. Oh, but you couldn’t know. I have a copy. You see, your press secretary—”
“Neff?”
“Yes. A drug addict can be a dangerous ally, Minister.” Koster took a tiny reel of tape from his pants pocket and held it up. “We’ve talked, Oliver and I. More than once. Oliver would do anything to guard his secrets. You told him far too much, Minister. And what he knew, I knew. Steiner, the poison, the mock strangulation. Oliver was eager to vindicate himself. True, there were missing pieces. The time. The place. The bloody reason.”
“Elgin was a liability. He knew too much for his own good.” “Translated, he was making threats. That was fooli
sh.”
Bleak revelation spread across Cecil Leistner’s face. “Then it was you. You killed Fredrik Steiner.”
“Of course not,” Koster replied. “Well, I did provide the gun. That’s true. But then it wasn’t too difficult to convince your very own Captain Terreblanche that Steiner had become a problem. I merely suggested that unless the captain did something to prevent Steiner from leaving the country, I would be forced to reveal his darkest secret. The boy he was keeping in Uitenhage? The native? That is how you manipulated the poor captain from the very beginning, isn’t it?”
“My God.” Leistner consumed the better part of his brandy. The forgotten cigar rested upon the mantel. Koster circled the loveseat, fingering a volume of Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring. He placed an elbow on the mantel. He jabbed the umbrella at a loose ember, facing Leistner now within an arm’s length.
“I believe we understand each other at last,” he said. He tossed the reel of tape into the fire.
Leistner sucked air into his lungs. He thrust his chin forward, quickly taking in the room. When his eyes settled momentarily upon the fire irons resting next to the hearthstone, he recognized the opportunity and realized it might be his last. He glanced quickly away, saying, “Oh, the clarity of the situation becomes readily apparent. Yes.”
“Good. You see, that’s very important to me. A last door closing. The final note to an ill-begotten symphony.”
“Ill-begotten you may call it, but I would be leery about announcing its finale.” Leistner moved a step closer to the fireplace, calculating. He needed time. “In your jubilation you’ve evidently forgotten the explosives. In the access shafts beneath the mines?”
“On the contrary. But I never had any intention of sacrificing sixteen thousand good men, Minister, much less several million rand worth of mining facilities. That was your idea, not mine.”
“No matter. It’s still not over. “ Leistner inched backward. “Moscow has been well aware of your . . . conflicting interests. Your actions have been monitored with far more enthusiasm than even you could have thought possible. Did you think—?”
“The poker will do you no good, Minister,” Koster said, peering down at the fire irons. A swift kick sent the poker, tongs, and shovel sprawling across the floor. Smiling, he raised the umbrella. He touched the edge of the mantel, indicating the forgotten Te-Amo. “Please. I distracted you. Feel free. A good smoke does wonders for the nerves.”
The minister glanced at the cigar. He didn’t move. Jan Koster drew the umbrella slowly away, but then, with a practiced riposte, thrust the tip against Leistner’s neck. The umbrella recoiled like a rifle, silently. A single drop of blood surfaced. Leistner’s hand grasped the side of his neck. Horror washed his face.
“The pellet dissolves immediately,” Koster announced. “But you know that. A taste of your own medicine.”
Leistner tried in vain to protest. The muscles in his neck constricted. Brandy spilled across the hearth. Drops sizzled as they struck hot coals. The snifter tumbled from paralyzed fingers, shattering. The minister lunged toward his assailant, gasping for air as his respiratory system failed, but Koster sidestepped him. Leistner crumbled to the floor.
Koster set the umbrella inside the fireplace. He walked swiftly out the door to the patio. He circled the house and found the fuel storage tank behind the guest house.
After ten minutes of inactivity, Nigel Mansell scrambled to his feet. He retraced his steps back through the forest to a point opposite the south end of the stone wall. He crossed the road.
Here, a perpendicular chain link fence began, running east away from the road. The fence, like the wall, was three meters high, with a similar coil of barbed wire along the top.
Mansell moved along on a soft cushion of pine needles. Ancient spruce again provided cover forward and aft. Across the fence, the grounds were bathed in a soft light. From here, the house stood behind a row of cherry trees and a low hedge of holly berry. The stillness was near-hypnotic; the wind was cold right through to the bone.
And then, forty meters from the road, Mansell caught sight of the body lying inside the fence. He drew the Browning from its harness. He approached the fence in a low crouch, stealing from tree to tree. At the base of the fence lay a pair of heavy bolt cutters. A narrow opening had been ripped vertically in the chain link mesh.
Scanning the open ground leading to the hedge and then to the house, Mansell inched through the gap. The man lay curled in a ball, bound and gagged. Mansell rolled him onto his back. A thick bruise swelled about the temple and ear, but he was still breathing, the shallow breathing of unconsciousness. Beneath him lay a MAC-10 semi-automatic pistol. Next to him, sprawled in a pool of blood, was a huge doberman. A bloodied knife protruded from a gaping wound in the dog’s neck.
Jan Koster reentered the house carrying two twenty-liter buckets filled with petrol. Without haste, he soaked the library in gasoline. He took the second can into a family room shrouded in dust covers. Starting in the hallway, he poured gas across the floor, over furniture and drapes, and left a trail leading to a conservatory near the river. He set a lighted match to the trail. Flames galloped through the house to the family room and, in one giant leap, to the library.
Mansell was standing over the second guard, his hand on the man’s faint pulse, when he saw flames licking at the windows. Glass shattered. Flames climbed an outside trestle to the second story. He heard an explosion. The roof ignited. Off to his right, he saw a figure scurrying across the yard toward the river. Mansell hesitated. Finally, he raced toward the room off the patio. Flames consumed it. He yanked at the door handle, but fire drove him back. Still, through the open door, he could see an unidentifiable corpse being eaten by fire.
Mansell backed away. Turning, he ran across the yard to the front of the house. Over the conflagratory howl of the blaze, he heard a different sound. The roar of an engine. Briefly, he caught sight of a motorcycle speeding back toward the main road. Mansell glanced back at the uncontrollable fire, and then, deciding, raced back to the opening in the fence.
****
The fever of waiting and the heat of the tunnel sent waves of delirium through the boy’s head. He sucked air into his nostrils and heard the heavy breath of anticipation spreading through the ranks of his comrades down the length of the stone passage. The cool-air generators were no match for the mass of humanity. Comfort lay only in the ticking of the clock inside his head. . . . And then he heard the rumble of the engine overhead. The elevator cables went taut.
He was only nineteen, but Patrick Myeza had considered himself a soldier since the day his mama died of pneumonia two years ago in KwaNdebele. His father spent seven and a half hours on a bus every day traveling between their mud hovel and a factory job in Pretoria that paid R2.35 an hour. Eight kids were too many. The day after his mama died, Patrick crossed the border into Botswana and the jungle training camp that had been his home ever since.
The squeal of the transport elevator as it descended from the Homestake Mining storage shed forty meters above signaled the first joyous moment Patrick could remember since that day.
The elevator stopped with a heavy thud, and the metal screens were swept aside by a man in a light green jumpsuit with a gold Homestake insignia on his miner’s hat.
“Move your asses, boys,” he shouted. “Move it, move it.”
The fever broke. Patrick hoisted the crate of 130-millimeter shells with which he was charged and stepped to the back of the elevator. Bodies and crates pressed in around him. The screens clanged shut. The elevator churned upward. Patrick’s beating heart stretched the walls of his chest, and at the moment he felt it would surely burst, the elevator stopped. The cool air of the empty shed touched Patrick’s skin, and he knew that Homestake Mining was theirs.
Outside on his hillside pedestal, General Becker watched the second hand on his watch tick past the hour of midnight. He took up his binoculars and stared down at the East Fields compound. He could see the passing minu
tes working on the once stationary soldiers. In the distance, the Homestake and Highland Vaal plants seemed immune, indifferent. Slip trails of white light illuminated the facilities like patches of day. Blue flames and smoke whipped at the sky. Becker heard the screech of a train whistle.
He brought the binoculars back toward East Fields. It was then he saw the slight figure of a man climbing onto the back of one of the flatcars. He discerned the outline of the man’s brown suit, the glint of thick eyeglasses, and knew at once he was looking at Christopher Zuma.
At that moment, Becker felt something that was surely more than relief coursing through his veins. Maybe this time around, he thought, ignoring the harbinger wouldn’t be so easy. At last he relinquished the binoculars, satisfied. He turned slowly aside then and slipped back down the mountain to his waiting car.
****
Nigel Mansell used the military radio in his car to alert the Pilgrim’s Rest police constabulary of the fire on Cottonwood Road. He didn’t mention the motorcycle. As he sped through town, he could just make out the volunteer fire department’s siren.
Mansell judged the distance between himself and the motorcycle to be a full kilometer, maybe two. It was ten kilometers to Sabie, the next town with SAP support. From that juncture, there were four options. East into Kruger National Park—an unlikely choice, Mansell thought. West to Lydenburg and the plains of the highveld; a car might have a chance on the open highway, he realized, and the cycle would be an easy target for roadblocks. That left the two southern routes back to N4; both wound through the mountains, where a motorcycle’s maneuverability would be a sizable advantage.
Utilizing the radio again, Mansell contacted the police station in Sabie. It took thirty seconds to arouse a duty officer named Mouton. By the sound of the policeman’s voice, he’d been asleep. Brusquely, Mansell explained the situation. “A Security Branch matter,” he snapped. He told Mouton to monitor the junctions outside town and to report the motorcycle’s direction. “Do nothing else,” Mansell ordered. “Do not attempt to pursue.”