by Wilbur Smith
‘I want an ambulance team with a stomach pump up here,’ he yelled at Lourens. ‘And get an analysis of that bottle — its label and contents.’
Jakobus was struggling and Lothar hit him open-handed, back and across the face. Jakobus whimpered and subsided, and Lothar thrust his forefinger deeply down his throat.
Gasping and choking and retching, Jakobus started struggling again, but Lothar held him easily. He worked his forefinger around in his throat, keeping on even when hot vomit spurted up over his hand. Satisfied at last he let Jakobus lie in a puddle of his own vomit while he rinsed his hands in the basin.
He dried his hands and seized Jakobus by the back of his shirt. He hauled him to his feet, dragged him through into the lounge and flung him into one of the armchairs.
Lourens and the forensic team were already working over the apartment.
‘Did you get the photographs?’ Lothar asked, and Lourens handed him a buff envelope.
Jakobus sat huddled in the chair. His shirt was fouled with vomit, and his nose and eyes were red and running. The corner of his mouth was torn where Lothar had forced it open, and he was trembling violently.
Lothar sorted through the contents of the envelope and then he laid a glossy black and white print on the coffee table in front of Jakobus.
Jakobus stared at it. It was a photograph of the truncated body of the child, nestled in a pool of her own blood with the lollipop in her hand. He began to weep. He sobbed and choked and turned his head away. Lothar moved around behind his chair and caught the back of his neck, forced his head back.
‘Look at it!’ he ordered.
‘I didn’t mean it,’ Jakobus whispered brokenly. ‘I didn’t mean it to happen.’
The cold white fury faded from Lothar’s brain, and he released Jakobus’s head and stepped back from him uncertainly. Those were the words he had used. ‘I didn’t mean it to happen.’ The exact words he had used as he had stood over the black boy with the dead girl’s head cradled in his lap and the raw wounds running red into the dust of Sharpeville.
Suddenly Lothar felt weary and sickened. He wanted to go away by himself. Lourens could take over from here, but he braced himself to fight off the despair.
He laid his hand on Jakobus’s shoulder, and the touch was strangely gentle and compassionate.
‘Ja, Kobus, we never mean it to happen – but still they die. Now it is your turn, Kobus, your turn to die. Come, let’s go.’
The arrest was made six hours after the bomb blast, and even the English press was lavish in its praise of the efficiency of the police investigation. Every front page across the nation carried photographs of Colonel Lothar De La Rey.
Six weeks later, in the Johannesburg Supreme Court, Jakobus Stander pleaded guilty to the charge of murder and was sentenced to death. Two weeks later his appeal was denied by the Appellate Division in Bloemfontein and sentence of death was confirmed. Lothar De La Rey’s promotion to brigadier was announced within days of the Appellate Division’s decision.
Raleigh Tabaka arrived in Cape Town while the Stander trial was still in progress. He came back the way he had left, as a crewman on a Liberian-registered tramp steamer.
His papers, although issued in the name of Goodwill Mhlazini, were genuine and he passed quickly through customs and immigration and with his bag over his shoulder walked up the foreshore to the main Cape Town railway station.
When he reached the Witwatersrand the following evening, he caught the bus out to Drake’s Farm and went to the cottage where Victoria Gama was staying. Vicky opened the door and she had the child by the hand. There was the smell of cooking from the little kitchenette in the back.
She started violently as she saw him. ‘Raleigh, come in quickly.’ She drew him into the cottage and bolted the door.
‘You shouldn’t have come here. You know that I am banned. They watch this place,’ she told him as she went quickly to the windows and drew the curtains. Then she came back to where he stood in the centre of the room and studied him.
‘You have changed,’ she said softly. ‘You are a man now.’ The training and the discipline of the camps had left their mark. He stood straight and alert, and he seemed to exude an intensity and a force that reminded her of Moses Gama.
‘He has become one of the lions,’ she thought, and she asked, ‘Why have you come here, Raleigh, and how can I help you?’
‘I have come to free Moses Gama from the prison of the Boers – and I will tell you how you can help me.’
Victoria gave a little cry of joy, and clutched the child closer to her. ‘Tell me what to do,’ she pleaded.
He would not stay to eat the evening meal with Victoria, would not even sit down on one of the cheap deal chairs.
‘When is your next visit to Moses?’ he asked in a low but powerful voice.
‘In eight days’ time,’ Victoria told him, and he nodded.
‘Yes, I knew it was soon. That was part of our planning. Now, here is what you must do—’
When the prison launch ran out from Cape Town harbour, carrying Victoria and the child to exercise their six-monthly visiting rights, Raleigh Tabaka was on the deck of one of the crayfish trawlers that was moored alongside the repair wharf in the outer harbour. Raleigh was dressed like one of the trawlermen in a blue jersey, yellow plastic overalls and sea boots. He pretended to be working on the pile of crayfish pots on the foredeck, but he studied the ferry as it passed close alongside before it made the turn out through the entrance to the breakwater. He made out Victoria’s regal figure in the stern. She was wearing her caftan in yellow, green and black, the colours of the ANC which always infuriated the jailers.
When the ferry had cleared the harbour and was set on course towards the low whale-backed profile of Robben Island far out in the bay, Raleigh walked back along the deck of the eighty-foot trawler to the wheelhouse.
The skipper of the trawler was a burly coloured man, dressed like Raleigh in jersey and waterproofs. Raleigh had met his son at the Lord Kitchener Hotel in London, an activist who had taken part in the Langa uprising and had fled the country immediately afterwards.
‘Thank you, comrade,’ Raleigh said, and the skipper came to the door of the wheelhouse and took the black pipe from between his even white teeth.
‘Did you find out what you wanted?’
‘Yes, comrade.’
‘When will you need me for the next part?’
‘Within ten days,’ Raleigh replied.
‘You must give me at least twenty-four hours’ warning. I have to get a permit from the Fisheries Department to work in the bay.’
Raleigh nodded. ‘I have planned for that.’ He turned his head to look forward towards the trawler’s bows. ‘Is your boat strong enough?’ he asked.
‘You let me worry about that,’ the skipper chuckled. ‘A boat that can live in the South Atlantic winter gales is strong enough for anything.’ He handed Raleigh the small canvas airline bag that contained his street clothes. ‘We will meet again soon then, my friend?’
‘You can be sure of that, comrade,’ Raleigh said quietly and went up the gangplank onto the wharf.
Raleigh changed out of his trawlerman’s gear in the public toilet near the harbour gates, and then went across to the carpark behind the customs house. Ramsami’s old Toyota was parked up against the fence, and Raleigh climbed into the back seat.
Sammy Ramsami looked up from the copy of The Cape Times he was reading. He was a good-looking young Hindu lawyer who specialized in political cases. For the previous four years he had represented Vicky Gama in her neverending legal battle with authority, and he had accompanied her from the Transvaal on this visit to her husband.
‘Did you get what you wanted?’ he asked, and Raleigh grunted noncommittally.
‘I don’t want to know what this is all about,’ Sammy Ramsami said, and Raleigh smiled coldly.
‘Don’t worry, comrade, you will not be burdened with that knowledge.’
They did not spe
ak again, not for the next four hours while they waited for Vicky to return from the island. She came at last, tall and stately in her brilliant caftan and turban, the child beside her, and the coloured stevedores working on the dock recognized her and cheered her as she passed.
She came to the Toyota and climbed into the front seat with the child on her lap.
‘He is on another hunger strike,’ she said. ‘He has lost so much weight he looks like a skeleton.’
‘That will make our work a lot easier,’ said Sammy Ramsami and he started the Toyota.
At nine o’clock the next morning Ramsami presented an urgent application to the Supreme Court for an order that a private physician be allowed access to the prisoner Moses Gama, and as grounds to support his application he presented the sworn affidavits of Victoria Dinizulu Gama and the local representative of the International Red Cross as to the deterioration in the prisoner’s physical and mental condition.
The judge in chambers issued an order calling on the Minister of Justice to show cause within twenty-four hours why the access order should not be granted. The state attorney general opposed the application strenuously, but after listening to Mr Samuel Ramsami’s submission, the judge granted the order.
The physician named in the order was Dr Chetty Abrahamji, the same man who had delivered Tara Courtney’s son. He was a consulting physician at Groote Schuur Hospital. In company with the government district physician, Dr Abrahamji made the ferry trip out to Robben Island where for three hours he examined the prisoner in the prison clinic.
At the end of the examination he told the state doctor, ‘I don’t like this at all. The patient is very much under weight, complaining of indigestion and chronic constipation. I don’t have to spell out what those presentations suggest.’
‘Those symptoms have been caused by the fact that the prisoner has been on a hunger strike. In fact I have been considering attempting to force-feed.’
‘No, Doctor,’ Abrahamji interrupted him. ‘I see the symptoms as much more significant. I am ordering a CAT scan.’
‘There are no facilities available for a CAT scan on the island.’
‘Then he will have to be moved to Groote Schuur for the examination.’
Once again the state attorney general opposed the order for the prisoner to be moved from Robben Island to Groote Schuur Hospital, but the judge was influenced by Dr Abrahamji’s written report and impressed by his verbal evidence and once again granted the order.
Moses Gama was brought to the mainland amid the strictest conditions of secrecy and security. No previous warning of the move was given to any person outside those directly involved, to prevent the organization of any form of demonstration by liberal political bodies, and to frustrate the intense desire of the press to obtain a photograph of this patriarch of black aspirations.
It was necessary, however, to give Dr Abrahamji twenty-four hours’ advance notice to enable him to reserve the use of the test equipment at the hospital, and the police moved into the area of the hospital the evening before the transfer. They cleared the corridors and rooms through which the prisoner would move of all but essential hospital staff, and searched them for explosives or any indication of illegal preparations.
From the public telephone booth in the main hospital administration block Dr Abrahamji rang Raleigh Tabaka at Molly Broadhurst’s house in Pinelands.
‘I am expecting company at two o’clock tomorrow afternoon,’ he said simply.
‘Your guest must not leave you until after nightfall,’ Raleigh replied.
‘That can be arranged,’ Abrahamji agreed, and hung up.
The prison ferry came in through the harbour entrance at one o’clock in the afternoon. The deadlights of the cabin portholes were closed, and there were armed prison warders on deck, fore and aft, and their vigilance was apparent, even from where Raleigh was working on the foredeck of the trawler.
The ferry sailed across the harbour to ‘A’ berth, its usual mooring. There was an armoured prison van waiting on the dock, with four motor-cycle police in uniform and a grey police Land-Rover. Through the riot screens on the cab of the Land-Rover Raleigh could make out the shape of helmets and the short thick barrels of automatic shotguns held at port arms.
As the ferry touched the wharf, the prison van reversed up and the rear doors swung open. The armed warders seated on the padded benches in the body of the truck jumped down to meet the prisoner. Raleigh had just a glimpse of a tall gaunt figure in plain prison khaki uniform as he was hustled up the gangplank and into the waiting van, but even across the width of the harbour basin he could see that Moses Gama’s hair was now pure silvery white, and that he was manacled at the wrists and that heavy leg-irons hampered his gait.
The doors of the van slammed shut. The motor-cycle escort closed information around it and the Land-Rover followed closely behind it as it sped away towards the main dock gates.
Raleigh left the trawler and Molly Broadhurst was waiting for him beyond the main gates. They drove up the lower slopes of Table Mountain to where the hospital stood, a massive complex of white walls and red clay tiles below the stone pines and open meadows of Rhodes Estate and the tall grey rock buttresses of the mountain itself. Raleigh made a careful note of the time required for the journey from the docks to the hospital.
They drove slowly up the busy road to the main entrance of the hospital. The police Land-Rover, motor-cycles and armoured van were lined up in the public carpark beyond the entrance to the out-patients section. The warders had doffed their riot helmets and were standing around the vehicles in relaxed attitudes.
‘How will Abrahamji keep him there until dark?’ Molly wanted to know.
‘I did not ask,’ Raleigh replied. ‘I expect he will keep on demanding further tests, or will deliberately sabotage the machinery — I don’t know.’
Raleigh turned the car in a circle in front of the main entrance and they drove back down the hill.
‘You are sure there is no other way to leave the hospital grounds?’ Raleigh asked.
‘Quite sure,’ Molly replied. ‘The van must pass here. Drop me at the bus stop. It will be a long wait and at least I will have a bench to sit on.’
Raleigh pulled into the kerb. ‘You have the number of the telephone on the dock, and coins?’ She nodded.
‘Where is your nearest telephone from here?’ he insisted.
‘I have checked it all carefully. There is a public phone booth at the corner.’ She pointed. ‘It will take two minutes for me to reach it, and if it is out of order or occupied, there is another telephone in the café across the street. I have already made friends with the proprietor.’
Raleigh left her at the bus stop and drove back to the centre of town. He left Molly’s car in the side street they had agreed upon so that it would not be found at the docks or anywhere in the vicinity and he walked back down the Heerengracht showing his seaman’s papers at the gate.
The skipper of the trawler was in the wheelhouse and he handed Raleigh a mug of heavily sweetened coffee which he sipped as they went over the final arrangements.
‘Are my men ready?’ Raleigh asked as he stood up, and the skipper shrugged. ‘That is your business, not mine.’
They were in the bottom of the trawler’s deep hold where the heat in the unventilated space was oppressive. Robert and Changi were stripped to vests and jogging shorts. They jumped up as Raleigh came down the ladder.
‘So far it goes well,’ Raleigh assured them. They were old companions from the PAC Poqo days, and Changi had been at Sharpeville on the terrible day that Amelia died.
‘Are you ready?’ Raleigh asked him.
‘We can check,’ Changi suggested. ‘Once more will not hurt us.’
The inflatable Zodiac boat that stood on the floor of the hold was the seventeen-foot six-inch model that could carry ten adults with ease. The fifty-horsepower Evinrude outboard motor could push it at thirty knots. The cover of the engine had been painted matt black.
‘The engine?’ Raleigh demanded.
‘Robert has checked and serviced it.’
‘I even changed the gear-box oil,’ Robert agreed. ‘She runs beautifully.’
‘Tanks?’
‘Both full,’ Robert said. ‘We have a range of a hundred miles or better.’
‘Wet-suits?’
‘Check,’ Changi said. ‘And thermal blankets for the leader.’
‘Tools?’ Raleigh asked, and Changi opened the padded flotation bag and laid out the tools on the deck, checking each as Raleigh called them from his list.
‘Good,’ Raleigh agreed at last. ‘You can rest now. Nothing more to do.’
Raleigh climbed up out of the hold. It was still too early. He glanced at his wristwatch. Not yet four o’clock, but he left the trawler and went down the dock to the public telephone booth at the end.
He telephoned directory enquiries and asked for a fictitious number in Johannesburg, just to make certain the line was in order. Then he sat on the edge of the wharf with his legs dangling and watched the seagulls squabbling over the offal and refuse that floated on the harbour waters.
It was fully dark by seven-forty but it was another twenty minutes before the telephone in the booth rang and Raleigh jumped up.
‘They are on their way.’ Molly’s voice was soft and muffled.
‘Thank you, comrade,’ Raleigh said. ‘Go home now.’
He hurried back down the wharf and the trawler skipper had seen him coming. As Raleigh jumped down on to the dock the two deckhands threw off the lines. The big caterpillar motor blustered and the trawler surged away from the dock and headed out through the entrance.
Raleigh swarmed down into the hold where Robert and Changi were already in their wet-suits. They had Raleigh’s suit laid out for him and they helped him into it.