Child of Africa

by T. M. Clark

  Hillary shook her head. ‘He was sentimental? I never saw that side of that man. Never.’

  ‘No. I wouldn’t call it that; I think it was more that the historian in him couldn’t destroy everything. Couldn’t destroy the history of his country. From what I gather from his files and diary, when he was visiting the same places his grandfather had spoken of, he noticed that the graves of those his grandfather had cared for had fallen into disrepair. He began to restore them, putting crosses where they should be, ensuring the names and dates were correct. While he was doing this, the villagers noticed, and he told them who he was. Many of the older people remembered his grandfather, or tales of the kind man, who was one of the last Native Commissioners. They asked him to mark their graves too. There were too many names to put on the grave markers. He knew that if he put multiple crosses, it would draw unwanted attention. Instead he began marking them too, with a single cross, and recording where they were.’

  ‘You have all that on his computer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the Black Mamba? Did he have any files on him?’

  Peta shook her head. ‘There’s no mention of him.’

  ‘This does not make sense. Kenneth Hunt worked for my boss. Why would he be putting crosses on graves?’

  ‘There’s a sort of justification statement for his actions on his computer. He was apparently building a case against Tichawana too. But unlike you, who wants him behind bars, we are unsure if he wanted to blackmail Tichawana for more money, or if he wanted to quit, and needed dirt on him, and this information was an insurance policy to ensure that Tichawana would let him go. I think that’s why he was marking the graves. He wanted out, but Tichawana wasn’t letting him go, so he was finding an alternative route.’

  ‘Dangerous game. He was lucky the lion got him and not Mr Ndou,’ Hillary said.

  ‘Apparently after he was kicked off his family farm in the Concession by the war vets, Hunt was extremely angry and got himself into trouble, and debt. To try to dig himself out, he did a job for your boss, moving ivory for him, through Zimbabwe and Mozambique to be shipped out of Maputo. He apparently hated what he was being forced to do to survive in a country that was changing from one he understood to one he no longer had a place in. Where his own family’s story was about to be erased from the history books.’

  A soft knock sounded on the kitchen door. She heard Madala answer it, and muffled voices.

  Julian walked into the lounge. ‘Miss Peta, it is all quiet outside. I thought that I might sit with you ladies for a while. Take my turn on the watch so that Madala could get some sleep.’

  Peta smiled. ‘You are welcome to come in and sit with us while we wait. And we both know that Madala is getting no sleep either tonight; we might as well all be awake together.’

  Peta knew Joss was a marine when she had started dating him, but nothing had prepared her for the sick feeling in her stomach, knowing that he was out there in the night, sneaking around, saving the boys, risking his own life while he did it. Even with the information they had gathered from Hillary, Tichawana’s youth camps were going to prove an interesting case, as they were not sure which one the boys were in. If they were lucky, they would slip into the first one, and quickly find out if they were there or not. If they were unlucky, they would have to move on to the others, and the darkness of night might disappear while they were still checking.

  She thought of the fact that Joss was in perfect health and super fit, just as any able-bodied marine like Mitch was, just that he had prosthetics. And while he acted like they were an extension of himself, she worried that they might be the part that let him down out there. That part that wasn’t one hundred per cent Joss.

  She looked at the baby monitor. If something happened to Joss, she wasn’t sure just how she would tell his beautiful daughter that her new daddy was hurt, and she prayed that it wouldn’t come to that.

  Peta straightened her back in the chair and lifted her chin.

  Her Joss was a Royal British Marine Commando. He had told her that he had done millions of missions like this during active combat; the only difference now was that instead of having five other highly trained marines with him, he had only Mitch by his side, and Amos and Bongani with their bush skills. She prayed that that was enough to keep them all safe and to save the children.

  CHAPTER

  31

  Combat

  The mud map Hillary drew was pretty accurate. She had also marked the most likely places they might encounter trouble.

  The strike team consisted of only four: Joss, Mitch, Bongani and Amos. A full unit of six anti-poaching guards from the Chizarira, who Peta had called on for help and knew she could trust, remained hidden with the vehicles, ready to extract the children when they had them, and protect their departure.

  Joss’s team had parked a little way away, hidden in the bush, and they walked towards the school. They had borrowed night-vision goggles from one of the private anti-poaching teams from the Victoria Falls area who were funded by an international organisation and were stationed a few kilometres up the road, ready to be called in if needed.

  The training college had two parts: in the front was the school, and at the back, the boarding house. That was where they suspected they would find the boys, if they were here. Joss hated that the boys had been gone twenty-four hours.

  The perimeter guards had offered little resistance and all six of them had been taken out quickly and permanently, with Joss and Mitch doing the work. They had passed a hanging tree that had recently been used, the smell rank, flies still buzzing around despite the night breeze. Some animal had been hunted and skinned, then the meat taken to the kitchen. They crossed over the tree line, their most vulnerable position, without anyone noticing them. The smell of wood smoke was heavy and clung to the establishment.

  Mitch signalled the window was only a few steps away, and Joss slid along. Mitch found the edge of the windowsill and drew himself up and over. He reached down for Joss, gripping his arm and hauling him in. He did the same for Amos and Bongani as Joss covered him inside.

  They were in a kitchen and they stilled, listening. No one had stirred, not even the cooks, who Hillary had warned were always up early. Joss signalled to Mitch, and they began clearing the rooms as they went, Joss in front, then Mitch, Bongani and Amos.

  There was an eerie stillness throughout the boarding house. They stopped outside a padlocked room. Joss stuck a scope under the door while Mitch looked at his small computer screen. When he brought his equipment home with him, Joss had never imagined that he would have been using it on a mission.

  ‘Storeroom. Move on.’

  They moved to the next door and repeated the procedure. That too was just a storeroom. In the third room they saw boys up against the wall, their hands bound to a pole above their heads. When their legs got tired, they would need to hang by their arms. Their bodies were slumped in exhaustion.

  Mitch nodded.

  Joss took the large bolt cutter from his pack and cut the lock. The clink they made was loud, but Mitch watched the boys. Not one of them stirred.

  Joss slowly opened the door and veered left. Mitch crouched low behind him, providing vital cover in case of resistance. Bongani walked through and went right, while Amos waited outside the room. They checked the room for guards, then Joss and Bongani looked at the boys. Lwazi and Ephraim were not among them. Bongani put his hand over one of the boys’ mouths, and his eyes shot open.

  In English, he reassured him, ‘I am not here to hurt you. I need to know where they put the new recruits that came in yesterday.’

  The boy swallowed, his eyes still large.

  Bongani cut him down, still holding his hand over his mouth. The ropes had sliced into his wrists and his knees buckled underneath his body. He slumped in a heap on the floor and shook his head.

  Bongani tried in Ndebele, but the boy shook his head, attempting to talk.

  ‘Quietly. Understood?’

  The
boy nodded. Bongani removed his hand.

  ‘I do not know where they are. I do not know.’

  ‘Did you volunteer to come here? To be trained?’ Bongani asked.

  The boy shook his head.

  ‘You are going to need to help us cut your fellow trainees down, quietly. Make sure that none of them makes a noise. We will collect you on the way out once we have found our own boys, do you understand?’

  The boy nodded. ‘What if the guard comes?’

  Bongani looked around. ‘There are lots of you. Overpower him until he cannot hurt you any more,’ he said and then the team walked out of the room, knowing that the boy was too scared and too relieved to do anything but what they had ordered.

  They looked into the next room, and found nothing, but the next one had children in it again. This time they were sleeping on mats on the floor.

  Once more Joss cut the padlock. They went into the room, sweeping it for guards and finding none. Bongani stepped quietly through all the children. Most of them were young girls. One woke up and stared at him. Quickly he placed his hand over her mouth.

  ‘Do not scream; we are here to help you. Do you know where they put the boys who came in yesterday?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Quietly,’ he said as he removed his hand.

  ‘The ones who were brought in the helicopters?’

  Bongani nodded.

  ‘In the school buildings. There are rooms under the floor. They put them there and tied them up. I saw them when Corporal Mazaiwana took me for his turn last night, before he locked me in here.’

  ‘Did you volunteer to be here?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. ‘My sister, she is also here and I cannot run away because she already has a broken leg, and she cannot run far. I will not leave without my sister.’

  ‘Is she in this room?’

  The girl nodded and pointed to the mattress next to hers. The girl lying there was younger than she was.

  ‘Can you wake her up quietly and get her ready to come with us? If you wake the other girls you know are not happy about being here too, once we have our boys, we will come past to collect you on the way out. We also have some boys in the back room who are waiting to escape.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Can I trust you not to raise the alarm?’ Bongani asked.

  She nodded again and crossed her chest with her hand.

  They left the boarding house and went to the school area. Within a few moments they could hear the boys. Their children were not silent, they were whispering loudly. They hadn’t been broken, but they were scared. Relief flooded Joss as he listened to them.

  ‘They will come for us, I know it,’ Lwazi was saying.

  ‘How can you be so sure?’ asked a voice they didn’t recognise.

  ‘Because that is who they are. Chief Bongani, he looks after his people, and Joss, he is a marine. A commando. A British SES soldier – you know, a green beret, like they sing about in the songs. So is Mitch. They are not scared of anything.’

  Joss stilled. If only that were true. Both Bongani and Mitch knew what taking up a gun against another human was costing him. He was the one who had laid down his weapons and walked away, chosen to take a chance on life in Africa instead of returning to the front lines. He was the one who had brought them all together, and the motivation for the kidnapping. His humanitarian heart had been exposed. He’d been taken advantage of, manipulated, because of it. Every man with them knew the cost of this mission and that, if it went wrong, they were on their own.

  Mitch looked at his screen. ‘Three guards. One on each side of the door and one sleeping a little away from the kids at four o’clock.’

  ‘I’ll take left; Mitch, right. Bongani, if you can get that third guard. Amos, hang back and defend the corridor in case we make too much noise and someone wakes. Try to get those kids to keep quiet when we go in.’

  There was no lock to break on the door, and the guards on the inside never heard the team as the two marines cut their throats and placed their silent bodies on the floor.

  Joss had his hand in front of his mouth, signalling for the boys to be quiet, and Bongani rushed at the third guard, his kill just as effective, if not as neat, as the trained marines’.

  ‘I knew you would come,’ Lwazi said. ‘I knew it.’ He threw himself at Bongani as best he could since he was handcuffed to the boy next to him, and then chained through that to the wall.

  Joss took the key off the guards and opened the cuffs on Lwazi’s hands, then he passed it to Bongani to free the other boys. He smiled. ‘Of course we came. Now stay real quiet; there will be time for talking once we get out of here.’

  Lwazi hugged Joss. ‘They took Ephraim to a different room. They beat him up in front of us and they took him away. They said that his grandmother was the one who told them everything on how to get us away from you and Bongani, so now he could tell them more about Bongani, because he must know more.’

  ‘Do you know which direction?’ Joss asked.

  ‘No.’ Lwazi shook his head. ‘He was bleeding, and the blood, it was bright red when he spat it out. He is hurt bad.’

  Bongani unlocked the last boy’s cuffs and freed the boys from the chain. They crowded around him, and he seemed to know them all.

  ‘Bongani, you and Amos take them back to collect the other kids. Mitch and I will look for Ephraim.’

  Bongani nodded. ‘Come, quickly,’ he instructed the boys as they made their way along the long passage and through the back door towards the boarding house.

  Joss put the scope under the next door and Mitch looked at his screen. ‘One body lying in the middle, not moving. On concrete. No sleeping mat. No bounds.’

  ‘No guard?’

  ‘No.’

  Joss opened the door slowly and Mitch covered him.

  Ephraim lay curled in a foetal position. Joss checked for a heartbeat. It was there, but faint. His breathing was shallow.

  ‘Dammit, kid. Don’t you die on me,’ he said, and he tapped Ephraim’s cheek to wake him. But even as he did it, he suspected that Ephraim wouldn’t wake without help. He was in bad shape. His fingers had been broken, as had his wrists. Someone had beaten his head with a blunt object, and his jaw was dislocated, if not broken.

  ‘It’s okay, Ephraim, I’m here; I’ve come to take you home,’ Joss said.

  Ephraim’s eyes opened but they were bloodshot and Joss didn’t know if they focused or not.

  ‘I’ll carry him,’ Mitch said. ‘You make sure no one shoots us.’

  Joss nodded.

  Mitch shouldered Ephraim. The teenager groaned in pain.

  ‘I know, but we have to get you out of here. Quiet now. If you can understand anything, you need to be quiet,’ Joss said.

  Ephraim quietened as though he had passed out again. Joss suspected that he was a dead weight across Mitch’s shoulders.

  ‘I can’t tell if he is alive or dead,’ Mitch said.

  ‘It doesn’t matter; we are taking him out either way.’

  They exited the school building. They were almost out the back of the boarding house when the gunfire started.

  Joss peered around the corner of the building and across the lawn area before the fence. Bongani and Amos had almost got all the kids into the bushes. The gunfire wasn’t close to them; it was coming from the front of the school.

  He saw the kids as they ran in a tightly packed group into the bushes and blended into the undergrowth, safe. A guard with a shotgun aimed in the air came around the side of the building. He was looking up.

  A peacock settled back on the roof. He tousled his feathers and craaaawwwwed at the guard. The guard took aim and shot. The bird fell in an ungraceful heap off the roof, tumbling to the guard’s feet as a second guard joined him.

  ‘Breakfast,’ the first one said and pointed and the second guard shook his head. The first guard picked up the bird and walked with an awkward gait towards the kitchen, as if the bird was heavier than he expected a
nd the long tail feathers were getting in his way.

  ‘Go now,’ Joss said to Mitch, and he too turned his back on the building and ran, constantly checking behind him, protecting Mitch and Ephraim.

  They got to where Bongani and the children still walked and looked around, slowing their pace to match.

  ‘How many kids did they have in that place?’ Joss asked.

  ‘When we came back, they were all here, and already many had run into the bushes in front of us. There are another hundred or so. There were these four big dormitories, and the girls had woken everyone up. Those boys who were tied up, they had woken all the boys too. Once we told them the guards were definitely dead, they began to run out, just trying to get away. I gave Lwazi the map that Hillary drew of the area. He and the other Bishu Village boys are leading the pack as they run for the bus depot. I told them we would get buses for them there, as long as they all stuck together. Those too weak to run can go in our vehicles, once we follow them through the bush.’

  ‘When those guards find no kids, they’re going to come after us like bulls out of a gate. They will hit us with everything they have,’ Mitch warned.

  ‘I know,’ Bongani said. ‘I am hoping that these men we have with us are enough to protect the kids now that we have too many to drive out ourselves.’

  Joss slowed slightly to jump a small ditch, and checked behind him again. ‘This kid had better live or I might just be finding your half-brother, putting him upside down in that hanging tree and doing some skinning of my own!’

  ‘You will have to stand behind me in that line,’ Bongani said.

  ‘You okay?’ Mitch asked, looking at Joss.

  ‘Yeah, just as well I have been pushing so hard in training. How much further do those kids have to run to the depot?’

  Bongani looked ahead. ‘Five kilometres.’

  ‘I’m worried Ephraim won’t make it. He needs a doctor now,’ Joss said, then stopped talking as all hell broke loose behind them at the camp.

  Their escape had been discovered.

  * * *

  Joss helped Mitch to get Ephraim flat in the back of the bakkie. He checked again for a heartbeat. It was faint. He nodded to Bongani, who sat with three other boys and four girls already in the vehicle. Each was drenched in sweat and exhausted. They hadn’t even made it past the bakkies, left behind by the others, who ran towards safety now with a pack mentality. The girl who had carried her sister along with her broken leg was now safely in the back too.