Wilbur Smith - Gold Mine

by Gold Mine(Lit)

  On his lap he held a wet pulpy mess that had been the geological report.

  "Joy, can you take over here? Terry's not too far gone, and I want to get my hands on that little Hun." joy took Dan's place over Terry's prostrate form, and Dan stood up.

  "What are you going to do to him? "Joy asked.

  "I'm going to beat him to a pulp."

  "Good show!" joy encouraged him. "Give him one for me." Manfred had heard the exchange and as Dan ran around the edge of the pool he scrambled to his feet, and staggered to the parked Alfa. He slammed the door and whirred the engine to life. Dan was just too late to stop him. The car shot forward across the lawns, leaving Dan running, futile, behind it.

  "Look after her, Joy!" Dan shouted back.

  By the time Dan had run up the terrace to his Jaguar and reversed it to point in the opposite direction, the Alfa had disappeared through the white gates with a musical flutter of its exhaust.

  "Come on, girlie," Dan spoke to his Jaguar. "Let's go get him The rear wheels spun as he pulled away.

  Without his spectacles Manfred Steyner's vision was blurred and milky.

  The outlines of all objects on which he looked were softened and indistinct.

  He instinctively checked the Alfa at the stop street at the bottom of the lane. He sat undecided, water still streaming from his clothing, squelching in his shoes. Beside him on the passenger seat lay the sodden report, its pages beginning to disintegrate from its soaking and the rough handling it had received.

  He had to get rid of it. It was the shred of incriminating evidence.

  That was the only clear thought Manfred had.

  For the first time in his life the crystalline clarity of his thought processes was interrupted. He was confused, his mind jerking abruptly from one subject to another, the intense pleasure of inflicting hurt on Terry mingled with the sting and smart of his own injuries. He could not concentrate on either sensation for over-lying it all was a sense of fear, of uncertainty. He felt vulnerable, hunted, hurt and shaken.

  His brain flickered and wavered as though a computer had developed an electrical fault. The answers it produced were nonsensical.

  He looked in the rear view mirror, saw the Jaguar glide out between the white gates and turn towards him.

  "Christ!" he panicked. He rammed his foot down on the accelerator and engaged the clutch. The Alfa screeched out into the main highway, swerved into the path of a heavy truck, bounded over the far kerb and swung back into the road.

  Dan watched it tear away towards Kayalami.

  He let the truck pass and then swung into the traffic behind it. He had to wait until the road was clear ahead before he could overtake the truck, and by that time the Alfa was a dwindling cream speck ahead of him.

  Dan settled back in the leather bucket seat, and gave the Jaguar its head. He was furious, outraged by the treatment he had seen Manfred meting out to Terry. Her swollen and bruised face had shocked him and his feet were firmly set upon the path of vengeance.

  His hands gripped the steering-wheel fiercely, he was muttering threats of violence as the speedometer moved up over the hundred mile per hour mark and he began relentlessly overhauling the cream sports car.

  Steadily he moved up behind the Alfa until he was driving almost on its rear bumper. The Alfa was held up by a green school bus. Dan could not pass, however, for there was a steady stream of traffic coming in the opposite direction.

  He fastened his attention on the back of Manfred's head, still fuming with anger.

  Dan dropped down a gear, ready to pull out and overtake the Alfa when the opportunity arose. At that moment Manfred looked up into his rear view mirror. Dan saw the reflection of his white face with disordered damp hair hanging onto the forehead, saw his expression change immediately he recognized Dan and the Alfa shot out into the face of the approaching traffic.

  There was a howl and blare of horns, vehicles swerved to make way for Manfred's wild rush. Dan glimpsed frightened faces flicking past, but the Alfa had squeezed around the green bus and was speeding away.

  Dan dropped back, then sent the Jaguar like a thrown javelin through the gap between bus and kerb, overtaking on the wrong side and ignoring the bus driver's yell Of protest.

  The Jaguar had a higher top speed, and on the long straight of the Pretoria highway Dan crept up steadily on the cream Alfa.

  He could see Manfred glancing repeatedly into his driving-mirror, and he grinned mirthlessly.

  Ahead of them the highway rose and then dipped over a low rounded ridge. A double avenue of tall blue gum trees flanked each side of the road.

  Travelling in the same direction as the two high performance sports cars was a Mini of a good vintage year. Its elderly driver was triumphantly about to overtake an overloaded vegetable truck. Neck and neck they approached the blind rise at twenty-five miles per hour, between them they effectively blocked half the road.

  The horn of the Alfa wailed a high-pitched warning, and Manfred pulled out to overtake both slower vehicles.

  He was level with them, well out over the white dividing line, when a cement truck popped up over the blind rise.

  Dan stood on his brake pedal with all the strength of his right leg, and watched it happen.

  The cement truck and the Alfa came head on towards each other at a combined speed of well over a hundred miles per hour. At the last moment the Alfa began to turn away but it was too late by many seconds.

  It caught the heavy cement truck a glancing blow and was hurled across the path of the two slower vehicles, miraculously touching neither of them; it skidded sideways leaving reeking black smears of rubber on the tarmac, and hurdled the low bank. It struck one of the blue gums full on, with a force that shivered the giant tree trunk and brought down a rain of leaves.

  Dan pulled the Jaguar into the side of the road, parked it, and walked back.

  He knew there was no hurry. The drivers of the Mini and the vegetable truck were there before him. They were attempting to talk each other down, both of them excited and relieved by their own escapes.

  "I'm a doctor," said Dan, and they fell back respectfully.

  "He doesn't need a doctor," said one of them. "He needs an undertaker." One look was sufficient. Doctor Manfred Steyner was as dead as Dan had ever seen anybody. His crushed head was thrust through the windscreen. Dan picked up the sodden bundle of paper from the seat beside the huddled body. He was aware that some particular importance was attached to it.

  Dan's anger had evaporated entirely, and he felt a twinge of pity as he looked into the wreckage at the corpse. It appeared so frail and small of such little consequence.

  The sunlight was sparkling bright, broken into a myriad eye stinging fragments by the rippling surface of the bay. The breeze was strong enough for the Arrow class yachts to fly their spinnakers as they came down on the wind. The sails bulged out blue and yellow and bright scarlet against the sombre green of the great whale-back bluff above Durban Bay.

  Under the awning of the afterdeck of the motor yacht it was cool, but the fat man wore only a pair of white linen slacks with his feet thrust into dark blue cloth espadrilles.

  Sprawled in a deck-chair, his belly bulged smooth and hard over the waistband of his slacks; he was tanned a dark mahogany colour and his body-hair grew thick and curly from chest to navel.

  "Thank you, Andrew." He extended his empty glass, and the younger man carried it to the open-air bar. The fat man watched him as he mixed another Pimms No. 1 cup.

  A white-clad crew member clambered down the companion way from the bridge. He touched his cap respectfully to the fat man.

  "Captain's respects, sir, and we are ready to sail when you give the order."

  "Thank you. Please tell the captain we will sail as soon as Miss. du Maine comes aboard." And the crew man ran back to the bridge.

  "Ah!" The fat man sighed happily as Andrew placed the Pimms in his outstretched hand. "I have really earned this break. The last few weeks have been nerve-racki
ng, to say the least." "Yes, sir," Andrew agreed dutifully. "But, as usual, you snatched victory from the ashes."

  "It was close," the fat man agreed. "Young Ironsides gave us all a nasty fright with his drop-blast matt. I was only just able to make good my personal commitments before the Price shot up again. The profit was not as high as I had anticipated, but then I have never made a habit of peering into the mouths of gift-horses."

  "It was a pity that our associates lost all that money," Andrew ventured.

  "Yes, yes. A great pity. But rather them than us, Andrew." indeed, sir."

  "In a way I am glad it worked out as it did. I am a patriotic man, at heart. I am relieved that it was not Mnecessary to disrupt the economy of the country to make our little profit." He stood up suddenly, his interest quickening as a taxi cab came down onto the Yacht Club jetty.

  The cabby opened a rear door and from it emerged a very beautiful young lady.

  "Ah, Andrew! Our guest has arrived. You may warn the captain that we will be sailing within minutes; and send a man to fetch her luggage."

  He went to the entry port to welcome the young lady.

  In mid-summer in the Zambesi Valley the heat is a solid white shimmering thing. In the noonday nothing moves in the merciless sunlight.

  At the centre of the native village grew a baobab tree.

  A monstrous bloated trunk with malformed branches like the limbs of a polio victim. The carrion crows sat in it, black and shiny as cockroaches. A score of grass huts ringed the tree, and beyond them lay the millet fields. The millet stood tall and green in the sun.

  Along the rude track towards the village came a Land Rover. It came slowly, lurching and jolting over the rough ground, its motor growling in low gear. Printed in black on its sides were the letters ARC, African Recruiting Corporation.

  The children heard it first, and crawled from the grass huts. Naked black bodies, and shrill excited voices in the sunlight.

  They ran to meet the Land Rover and danced beside it, shrieking and laughing. The Land Rover came to a halt in the meagre shade under the baobab tree. An elderly white man climbed from the cab. He wore khaki safari clothes and a wide-brimmed hat. Complete silence fell, and one of the oldest boys fetched a carved stool and placed it in the shade.

  The white man sat on the stool. A girl came forward, knelt before him and offered a gourd of millet beer. The white man drank from the gourd. No one spoke, none would disturb an honoured guest until he had taken refreshment, but from the grass huts the adult members of the village came. Blinking into the sunlight, winding their loin clothes about their waists. They came and squatted in a semi-circle before the white man on his stool.

  He lowered the gourd and set it aside. He looked at them. "

  "i see you, my friends," he greeted them, and the response was warm.

  "We see you, old one," they chorused, but the expression of their visitor remained grave.

  "Let the wives of King Nkulu come forward," he called.

  "Let them bring each their first-born son with them." Four women and four adolescent boys left the crowd and came shyly into the open. For a moment the white man studied them compassionately, then he stood and stepped forward. He placed a hand on the shoulder of each of the two eldest lads.

  "Your father has gone to his fathers," he told them. There was a stirring, an intake of breath, a startled cry, and then, as was proper, the eldest wife let out the first sobbing wail of mourning.

  One by one each wife sank down onto the dry musty earth and covered her head with her shawl.

  "He is dead," the white man repeated against the background of their keening lament. "But he died in such honour as to let his name live on forever. So great was his dying that for all their lives money will each month be paid to his wives, and for each of his sons there is already set aside a place at the University that each may grow as strong in learning as his father was in body. Of Big King there will be raised up an image in stone.

  "The wives of Big King and his sons will travel in a flying machine to I'Goldi, that their eyes also may look upon the stone image of the man who was their husband and their father." The white man paused for breath, it was a lengthy speech in the midday heat of the valley. He wiped his face and then tucked the handkerchief into his pocket.

  "He was a lion!"

  "Ngwenyama!" whispered the sturdy twelve-year-old boy standing beside the white man. The tears started from his eyes and greased down his cheeks. He turned away and ran alone into the millet fields.

  Dennis Langley, the Sales Manager of Kitchenerville Motors who were the local Ford agents, stretched his arms over his head luxuriously. He sighed with deep contentment. What a lovely way to spend a working day morning.

  "Happy?" asked Hettie Delange beside him in the double bed. In reply Dennis grinned and sighed again.

  Hettie sat up and let the sheet fall to her waist. Her breasts were big and white, and damp with perspiration. She looked down on his naked chest and arm muscles approvingly.

  "Gee, you're built nicely."

  "So are you," Dennis smiled up at her.

  "You're different from the other chaps I've gone out with," Hettie told him. "You speak so nicely like a gentleman, you know." Before Dennis Langley could decide on a suitable reply, the front door bell shrilled, the sound of it echoing through the house. Dennis shot into an upright position with a fearful expression on his face.

  "Who's that?" he demanded.

  "It's probably the butcher delivering the meat."

  "It may be my wife!" Dennis cautioned her. "Don't answer it."

  "Of course I've got to answer it, silly." Hettie threw back the sheet, and rose in her white and golden glory to find her dressing-gown. The sight was enough to momentarily quiet Dennis Langley's misgivings, but as she belted her gown and hid it from view he urged her again.

  "Be careful! Make sure it's not her before you open the door."

  Hettie opened the front door and immediately drew her gown more closely around her with one hand, while the other she tried to pat her hair into a semblance of order.

  "Hello," she breathed.

  The tall young man in the doorway was really rather dreamy. He wore a dark business suit and carried an expensive leather briefcase.

  "Mrs. Delange?" he enquired. He had a nice soft dreamy voice.

  "Yes, I'm Mrs. Delange." Hettie fluttered her eyelashes.

  "Won't you come in?" She led him through to the lounge, and she was pleasantly aware of his eyes on the opening of her gown.

  "What can I do for you? "she asked archly.

  "I am your local representative of the Sanlam Insurance Company, Mrs. Delange. I have come to express my company's condolences on your recent sad bereavement. I would have called sooner, but I did not wish to intrude on your sorrow."

  "Oh!" Hettie dropped her eyes, immediately adopting the role of the widow.

  "However, we hope we can bring a little light to disperse the darkness that surrounds you. You may know that your husband was a policy-holder with our Company?" Hettie shook her head, but watched with interest while the visitor opened his briefcase.

  "Yes, he was. Two months ago he took out a straight life policy with double indemnity. The Policy was ceded to You." The insurance man extracted a sheaf of papers from his case. "I have here my company's cheque in "settlement of all claims under the policy. If you will just sign for it, please." How much?"Hettie abandoned the role of the bereaved.

  "With the double indemnity, the cheque is for forty eight thousand rand." Hettie's eyes flew wide with delight. "Gee!" she gasped.

  "That's fabulous!" Hurry's original intentions had expanded considerably. Instead of a plaque on the cement plug at 66 level, the monument to Big King had become a life-sized statue in bronze. He sited it on the lawns in front of the Adminstrative offices of the Sander Ditch on a base of black marble.

  It was effective. The artist had captured a sense of urgency, of vibrant power. The inscription was simple, just the name of t
he man "King Nkulu" and the date of his death.

  Hurry attended the unveiling in person, even though he hated ceremonies and avoided them whenever possible. In the front row of guests facing him his granddaughter sat beside Doctor Stander and his very new blonde wife. She winked at him and Hurry.frowned lovingly back at her.

  From the seat beside Hurry, young Ironsides stood up to introduce the Chairman. Hurry noted the expression on his granddaughter's face as she transferred all her attention to the tall young man with both his arms encased in plaster of Paris and supported by slings.