by Larry Bond
“We’ll never get through that blery mess. We’ll have to try the back-“
Ian saw his chance and took it.
He rocketed off the bench, trying to ram the top of his head under the policeman’s out thrust chin and up. He wanted to slam the Afrikaner’s own head squarely into the van’s metal ceiling. It was just the kind of crazy stunt he’d seen work in films. The only trouble was, making such a move work in real life would take perfect positioning and even more perfect timing. Too late, Ian realized that he didn’t have either.
The adrenaline pouring into his bloodstream seemed to slow time itself.
The policeman saw him lunging upward and yanked his head backward, twisting right and away from him. At the same time, he swung his shotgun around through a narrow arc. Not far. Just far enough so that Ian’s head grazed the shotgun’s steel barrel instead of his vulnerable chin.
Red-hot pain blossomed. Jesus. He stumbled back against the bench.
The guard kept spinning to his right, trying to slam the butt of his shotgun into Ian’s exposed stomach.
React! Counter! Trained reflexes took over when conscious thought seemed to crawl. Everything around him blurred to a halt-an image held frozen in time between the blink of an eye.
The big policeman’s left leg was now straight, bearing all his considerable weight as he pivoted right with the shotgun poised for a crippling blow.
Perfect.
In one strangely calm corner of his mind, Ian remembered a dry academic voice saying, “The human knee, Mr. Sheffield, is a marvelously fragile mechanism. Momentum and the proper application of mass can maim any man-no matter how big or strong he might be.”
Without thinking, he rocked back on his own left foot,
spinning sideways to the left. His right foot came up as though he were pedaling a bike. Now! He kicked out and down with vicious speed and force.
His right foot smashed home two finger widths’ above the policeman’s left knee and kept going. With a sickening, audible crack, the policeman’s leg snapped like a dried stick. The big man flopped forward against the bench and screamed in sudden agony.
Ian stumbled against the van’s rear door, thrown off-balance by his kick and by a painful, glancing blow from the shotgun butt. He could see the smaller, darker-haired policeman clawing for his pistol. No, damn it!
He tried to turn, already knowing he wouldn’t make it.
Emily exploded into action. She scooped up the injured policeman’s fallen shotgun, snapped the safety off, and had it aimed squarely at the driver’s face before he had his own weapon more than halfway out of the holster.
Time accelerated back to its normal speed.
“Don’t tempt me, meneer. ” Emily’s voice was calm, even cold.
“I will not hesitate.”
The driver paled, and he dropped the pistol as though it were scalding hot.
Ian winced at the pain pounding through his head and turned to the other guard. No problem there. The beefy South African lay where he’d first fallen, cradling his broken leg in both hands. And Matthew Sibena had his feet planted firmly on the man’s throat-ready to step down hard at the slightest sign of trouble.
Ian could feel his pulse starting to slow to something near normal. He grinned at Emily and took a shaky breath.
“Jeez. Remind me not to ever piss you off on a date!”
She glanced down at the shotgun gripped tightly in both her hands and looked up with a somewhat shamefaced grin of her own.
“My father insisted
I learn about firearms when I was a small girl. But I must admit that I never thought such knowledge would be useful.”
Ian started to laugh. He had the strangest feeling that Marius van der
Heijden wouldn’t be at all happy to learn how well his daughter had learned her lessons.
TOP STAR DRIVE-IN, JOHANNESBURG
The minivan was as isolated as any vehicle could possibly be in the middle of a vast, modern metropolis. More than one hundred meters of empty, oil-stained gravel stretched in all directions-empty except for row after row of splintered wooden posts holding detachable speakers. Giant, off-white movie screens and a high fence blocked any view from the houses and small office buildings around. Even more important, trains roaring along a railroad line to the south and trucks grinding their way along a motorway to the north should muffle any noises made by the two handcuffed policemen locked away in the van.
Ian slammed the van’s windowless rear door shut, pointedly ignoring the smaller policeman’s hate-filled glare. The other cop lay still, driven into unconsciousness by the pain from his broken leg.
“Got everything?”
Matthew Sibena nodded eagerly and held out the assortment of paper money, coins, and identification cards they’d filched from the two policemen.
Ian noticed that the young man’s hands were still shaking. Well, he thought wryly, so are mine.
“And their weapons?”
Sibena answered by silently pointing toward the rusting trash Dumpster backed against the drive-in theater’s small cinder-block concession stand.
“Good.” Ian had vetoed the idea of taking the pistols or shotgun along when it became clear that neither of the two police uniforms would fit him. They were going to be conspicuous enough as it was without walking around in civilian clothes while armed to the teeth.
“Ian! Come take a look at this!”
He followed Emily’s voice around to the front of the minivan. She stood motionless by the open passenger-side door, pointing to a piece of paper taped to the dashboard.
She shook her head in disbelief.
“My God! So that’s how they found us!”
“Huh?” Ian looked over her shoulder at the typewritten list crammed full of names and addresses.
“My father must have given this to them. It’s a compilation of all my closest friends.” She sounded troubled.
“Are they in trouble now?”
He shut the door and led her away from the van.
“More to the point, how do we avoid getting nabbed by your dad’s goons a second time?” He squinted, trying to see the numbers on his watch against the orange glow of the
Johannesburg skyline.
“They’re going to start looking for this van any minute now, and they’ll find it in a matter of hours … even if we’re lucky.”
Sibena joined them.
“All set. The doors are locked and—he grinned and dangled a set of keys from one finger” they stay that way for a time.”
Ian thumped him on the shoulder.
“Good going, Matt.” He paused and looked seriously at his two companions.
“So where to now, folks?”
Sibena smiled shyly.
“How about America?”
A joke. The young black man was telling jokes now! Ian shook his head in wonder. After only three months around people who treated him as a man instead of two-legged livestock, Siberia was turning into a someone who could make light of danger-instead of cowering in fear. He wished Sam
Knowles were here to see it.
He smiled back.
“Maybe we should shoot for somewhere a little closer. Just for the time being, of course.”
Emily pulled nervously at separate strands of her long auburn hair.
“I
think perhaps there is one person who may be able to help us. ” She glanced quickly at Ian and then looked away.
“But it maybe risky.”
“Hold on there.” Ian shook his head.
“Remember your dad’s little list? We can’t count on any more of your friends. It’d be too dangerous for them as well as being suicidal for
US. I I
She shook her head, her expression unreadable in the darkness.
“Oh, no,
Ian. This one whose help I must beg wouldn’t be on my father’s list of my friends. ” Her voice fell to a whisper.
“Nor am I at all sure that he will come ag
ain when I call.”
And with that, Ian had to be content. She would say nothing more for the moment.
NOVEMBER 12-BRAAMFONTEIN CEMETERY,
JOHANNESBURG
The sun was coming again to South Africa, warming the air and earth below, and coloring the once pitch-black eastern sky a faint shade of mingled gray and pink. Inside the Braamfontein Cemetery, tall trees, headstones, and squat marble mausoleums that had for so long been nothing more than darker shadows among a lesser darkness took on line and form and hue as night faded slowly into day.
Ian yawned uncontrollably, rose, and stretched aching muscles. He looked warily around for signs of movement where there should be none. Both
Emily and Sibena had protested his choice of temporary sanctuary. But superstition worked both ways. Who would hunt for the living in a land of the dead?
He turned in a complete circle, studying every piece of ground in view.
And froze. A car, headlights on, moving slowly along the wide avenue running beside the cemetery. He sank back to the grass, listening now instead of looking. An engine growing louder—definitely coming closer.
Emily leaned closer and whispered, “I think it has to be the man we are waiting for. Who else would come here so early?”
“The police? A caretaker?” Ian shrugged. Emily’s reluctance to name this mystery man both irked and worried him.
He risked another glance at the oncoming car. It was close enough to make out details now. A Land Rover painted a uniformly drab green. That was odd.
The Land Rover stopped just outside the graveyard’s wrought-iron gate and sat idling.
Emily rose unsteadily to her feet.
“It’s him. It can’t be anyone else.”
Ian and Siberia started to get to their feet, but
she waved them back down.
“Come when I say … not before. Right?”
They both nodded their understanding and watched her make her way carefully downhill to the gate. Ian felt cold and damp and knew he was sweating again. What if they’d been betrayed? He studied the Land Rover through slitted eyes, ready to make a mad dash downhill if his worst fears were realized.
The driver’s door popped open and a tall, slender man stepped out onto the pavement. A man wearing an Army uniform.
Ian forced himself to breath. Emily wasn’t running away in panic-at least not yet.
She came to the waist-high stone wall separating the cemetery from the street and stood waiting. The soldier stepped closer, until he stood just across the wall. His shoulders seemed curiously rigid, almost as if he were holding himself at attention-or in check.
Emily said something too quietly to be heard at this distance, and the soldier leaned closer still before abruptly straightening up. Ian frowned.
For an instant this other man had seemed ready to embrace her. What the hell was going on here? Who was this guy anyway?
Part of his mind laughed at his own ridiculous pride. It was absurd to be jealous when half of South Africa’s police force must be busy hunting high and low for them. But a deeper, more primitive side wanted to go down there and beat the hell out of that damed soldier. Yeah, right. Me Ian, you
Emily-you my woman. Somehow he didn’t think she’d appreciate the caveman approach to love and commitment.
“There’s the signal!” Sibena tugged at his arm.
Ian glanced toward the gate. Emily was waving them down with short, sharp, urgent gestures.
Despite the jealous mutterings of his subconscious, his first impressions of this South African soldier were favorable. The man had a firm-jawed, weather-beaten face and open, intelligent gray eyes.
Ian lengthened his stride, aware that he’d also squared his shoulders. He stopped just across the wall from the soldier.
“Ian and Matthew, this is Kommandant Henrik Kruger.” Emily’s voice faltered, almost as though she’d been about to add something and then couldn’t think of the right way to say it. She recovered.
“And Henrik, these are my two friends, Ian Sheffield and Matthew Siberia. “
Friends? Ian nodded toward the South African, his face kept carefully blank. Kruger inclined his own head, acknowledging the introduction.
Neither man offered to shake hands.
“You are the American reporter the police are hunting?” Kruger’s voice was deep, almost melodic despite a clipped Afrikaans accent. An easy voice to hear amid the noise and confusion of a battle, Ian judged.
““That’s right.”
The South African soldier frowned.
“Then perhaps you can tell me why I should risk my career and my life to help you? Miss van der Heijden is a woman of my people reason enough for my aid to her … even if there were no other. “
Kruger glanced at Sibena.
“But this man is an enemy of my blood… and you are nothing more than an interfering Uitlander. Why then should I lift a finger to save you?”
Ian felt Emily stir and laid a gentle hand on her shoulder, cautioning her to stay out of it. This was his fight.
He looked steadily into Kruger’s eyes.
“There’s no reason you should,
Kommandant. No reason at all. ” He heard Emily gasp softly in surprise and distress.
“Matt and I will take our chances on our own. But you’ve got to promise me that you’ll keep Emily safe or get her out of the country.”
He pressed on, anger making his voice harsher, rougher.
“And if I ever hear that you’ve broken your word or hurt her, I’ll come after you myself. Is that clear enough, Kommandant?” He stopped talking, afraid that he might have gone too far and endangered even Emily.
But then slowly, almost imperceptibly, a tight, thin smile appeared on
Kruger’s sun-browned face-spreading from his firm mouth to the crow’s-feet around his steel-gray eyes.
“You make yourself very clear,
Meneer Sheffield.
The South African officer offered his hand.
“And you can all count on my help.” He shook his head, amused at some
private joke.
“God help me, but I must have a weakness for romantic idiots.
“
Ian shook his outstretched hand-an action imitated, after a brief hesitation, by Matthew Sibena.
“Now what?”
Kruger helped Emily climb over the wall and stepped back, allowing them to cross as well. He laid a hand on the Land Rover’s open door and smiled again.
“Now, meneer, we make arrangements for the three of you to hide someplace where Vorster’s police and spies will never think to look.”
“And just where would that happen to be, sir?”
Kruger’s smile blossomed into a full-fledged grin.
“Why, inside South
Africa’s largest military base, my friend. Where else?”
CHAPTER
Green Light
NOVEMBER 12-SUPPLY BASE FIVE, IN THE HILLS NEAR PESSENE, GAZA
PROVINCE,
MOZAMBIQUE
The corpses were laid out in a neat, orderly row. Even their clothes had been straightened, but nobody could rearrange the bodies where they’d been torn apart. Each bore several bullet wounds in the chest or face.
Maj. Jorge de Sousa had seen bodies before-hundreds, it seemed. Like these, most of the dead had been simple, unarmed Mozambican peasants, but these villagers hadn’t been shot by Renamo guerrillas. They’d been gunned down by socalled allies” guarding a Cuban supply depot.
There were a dozen such depots, each carefully hidden among the low, brush-choked hills surrounding Pessene. Each supply dump held a sizable fraction of the food, fuel, and ammunition needed to support the Cuban tanks, motorized rifle troops, and artillery moved into Mozambique over the past four weeks.
Each was guarded by a platoon or more of soldiers, a mixed
unit of Cubans and Libyans stationed together to foster “fraternal socialist awareness.” Or so their political
officers had claimed. Well, de Sousa thought coldly, these troops certainly didn’t look fraternal. They stood clumped in distinct national groupings while he and Lieutenant Kofi inspected their victims.
There were five bodies-two men, two women, and a teenage boy. All were pathetically thin, almost skeletal, dressed in rags that passed for clothing. They’d been shot for trying to steal a fifty-kilo sack of rice.
The rice bag, no different from hundreds of others piled high throughout the supply dump, lay nearby, also displayed as evidence. Apparently it had taken all five of them just to pick it up and carry it, a sign of their weakened condition.
The Cuban lieutenant in charge of this detail explained in Spanishaccented
Portuguese, “We heard a noise last night and fired a flare. Then we saw these thieves trying to make off with the rice, so we arrested them. And then we shot them.” Smiling, he motioned toward the row of corpses, slowly lowering his arm when he saw no praise forthcoming from de Sousa.
The Mozambican major turned on his heel and walked over to the Libyans.
Their uniforms were the same dark khaki color, but had a different cut, and they wore billed caps instead of the soft, floppy “sun hats” of the Cubans.
Both groups were armed with AK-47 assault rifles.
Their apparent leader, if de Sousa understood the Libyan’s rank insignia, was a sergeant whose dark-skinned face seemed locked in a perpetual scowl.
Without saying anything he looked the major up and down as he approached.
Finally, prompted by a glare from the Mozambican officer, the Libyan reluctantly came to attention and tossed off a salute that was almost grounds for a charge of insubordination.
De Sousa tried Portuguese, then English, even Tsonga, without getting any intelligible response. As a Moslem from one of Mozambique’s northern provinces, Kofi had more luck with his Tsonga-accented Arabic. The sergeant gave slow responses to the lieutenant’s questions.
Kofi turned to de Sousa.
“He says they have orders to execute anyone who tries to steal from the supply dumps, Major. “
De Sousa sighed wearily. His orders had been to guard the dumps, using force only if necessary. Someone else had obviously amplified those orders considerably.