A SONG IN THE MORNING

by Gerald Seymour

  In the thrash of the rotors it took off into the low slanted sun. Behind the two pilots were eight White soldiers of the Recce Commando, a dog handler with his golden labrador, and a skeletal Bushman. The Bushman wore only shorts, his shock of black hair was ringed by a green tennis sweat band. He spoke his own language only, that of the Kavango region of South West Africa.

  The officer commanding the hunting team had been given an exact reference for the border incursion.

  As they were coming in to land, as they looked ahead into Botswana, the pilots could see a car parked on a dirt track, and pulling away from it were a land rover and an estate car.

  It took the Bushman only a few minutes to be sure of his starting point. When it became too dark for him the dog would take over the tracking.

  It was not a difficult trail to follow.

  * * *

  Ros drove into the poorly lit one street of Warmbaths.

  They checked into a hotel. They took single rooms.

  At the reception desk, as they wrote false names and false addresses in the book, Ros remarked to the owner that they were breaking the journey north west to the Ebenezer Dam where her brother and his friend would be fishing.

  14

  "If they knew what Jan was into, my Mom and my Dad, they'd die."

  "I told my mother that I was coming here to bring my father home - it must have sounded so daft that she didn't bother to argue with me."

  "Being daft isn't being a traitor."

  "You have to live your own life, for yourself, you can't live your life for your parents."

  "Try telling them . . . " Ros laughed.

  Jan was at the hotel.

  Jack and Ros walked along the pavement of the street that sliced through Warmbaths. A desultory conversation, and blotted out when the big lorries and their trailers passed.

  The road through Warmbaths was the principal route from Johannesburg and Pretoria to Potgietersrus and Pietersburg and Louis Trichardt and on to the Zimbabwe border. The road rumbled under the lorries. Jack liked this small town, it was an escape from the threat of the cities. Agricultural country.

  He had met the farmers the previous evening.

  With Jan and Ros he had eaten a quiet meal in the hotel's dining room. He'd gone for a stringy t-bone and shared what he couldn't eat with the hotel cat. It had been a quiet meal because the brother and sister had been arguing in her room, and they hadn't anything to say to each other in front of Jack. He thought she might have been crying before she'd come down to dinner. Her eyes had been reddened and her upper cheeks puffed out. It could have just been the strain of the drive, but he thought she'd been crying. He'd left them after the meal and gone into the bar. One of those God awful entrances. The talking had stopped. A warble of noise when he had opened the door, silence when he had come forward to be served, as he was looked at and stripped for information. They would have known he was English from the moment he opened his mouth to ask for a Castle. He'd been lucky because the old soak who propped himself in the corner of the bar had a grandson in England, at an agricul-tural college in the West. Jack had listened and laughed aloud at the alcoholic's jokes, and he'd been included in a round, and stood his own for half the bar. They were huge lads, the young farmers. He knew they thought he was all right because each one of them through the long evening had come to him to try out their English. There wasn't much politics talked, a bit towards the end. Jack had thought they were all as confused as hell. What the hell was their government doing? What was all this crap talk about reform?

  Was the State President in the business of giving the country over to the kaffirs? Funny for Jack, because back home the State President was seen as the high priest of conservatism.

  In the bar at Brown's, the State President was the missionary of liberalism. He quite liked the young farmers, and it was a good evening, and it cost him three visits to the lavatory along the open veranda from his room.

  Jack and Ros turned off the main road.

  Ros pointed out to him the weather worn red stones of trekkers' nineteenth century graves. They walked into a network of straight avenues bounded by bungalows and glorious gardens. Flowering shrubs, cut lawns, beds in bloom, and the drone of mowers and the hiss of stand pipes.

  "Jan's right," Jack said. "He's taken sides and he's right, because it can't last."

  "What's he right about?"

  "That it can't last, that it's going to collapse. It's beautiful and it's doomed because nobody outside White South Africa cares a damn for you. Not the Europeans, not the Americans, not the Australians. Nobody's going to lift a finger for you when it all goes wrong."

  She looked at him. She had a small and pretty mouth. A strand of hair was across her face.

  "I don't want a lecture, Jack, and I know what I want from my country. But my way of getting there doesn't include old ladies being pulled out of their cars and being knifed and being burned."

  He thought she walked beautifully. He thought there was a sweet loose swing in her hips. She had her arms folded across her chest, her breasts were lifted to push hard against the crumpled cotton of her blouse. She wore the same clothes as the day before.

  "Do people care about hanging here?" Jack asked.

  He saw a frown puckering and her eyebrows rising. They were a couple walking in a flower filled suburb, with a blue mountain ridge in distant sight, and he had asked her to talk about a court sentence that man should hang by the neck until he was dead.

  "It's not an issue. It's accepted that the penalty for murder is death by hanging. You've seen what they're like, our Blacks. Hanging protects us, the Whites. There's overwhelming support for hanging."

  "If it wasn't my father . . . "

  "And if it wasn't my brother."

  ". . . then I'd probably think the same."

  "If it wasn't my brother that's involved then I wouldn't cross the road for you, not if you were bleeding in the gutter."

  He ducked his head. He walked faster. As surely as he had involved her brother, he had involved her. Just as he had involved Sandham and Duggie.

  "What would you do for your brother, Ros?"

  "I'd do for him what you're doing for your father."

  "And after today?"

  "We drop you this afternoon, we turn round, we drive like hell back to Johannesburg. I give Jan my ultimatum, big word for a big speech, I tell him that he quits or I inform on him. I don't have to go to the security police, I tell my father. He'll do as my father tells him, or my father will turn him in. That's what's happening today and after today. I'm not going to spend the next weeks and months wondering how close some pig-eyed policeman is inching to Jan, and I'm damned if I'm going to spend the next few years traipsing to White Political at Pretoria Central."

  They turned back. He couldn't think of anything to say to her. He ought to have been able to talk to her because she wasn't an activist, neither was he. They were near to the hotel when she stopped, dead, swung to face him. They were in the glare of the sun, on a wide pavement, they were dusted by the lorries passing on the road.

  "Please, if you're trapped then get yourself killed."

  Jack squinted at her. "Great."

  "If you're held they'll make you talk. If you talk, Jan's implicated."

  "And you're implicated, if I talk."

  "So just get yourself killed." She was angry because he laughed. "I'm in deadly earnest. The decent thing for you to do if you're trapped is to get yourself killed."

  Jack straightened. There was a mock solemnity in his voice. "Goodbye, Miss van Niekerk, it has been a most pleasurable acquaintance."

  "You're pretty ordinary, you know that?"

  "Meaning what?"

  "So ordinary that you're quite interesting . . . If you were a mercenary or if you had some political hang-up about fighting racism, God you'd be boring. You're an ordinary person, ordinary attitudes, ordinary life. As I read you, there's nothing that ever happened in your life that wasn't just ordinary. Then you took a
plane, then you burned the back off a police station, then you planned to explode your way into a hanging gaol. But that doesn't change you, doesn't stop you being just ordinary."

  He took her hand. She didn't try to pull away.

  "Thank you for what you have done for me."

  "God damn you if you get yourself captured."

  They went into the hotel. They went upstairs to pack their bags. Later they would pay the bill, check out, and drive together to the rendezvous that Jan had been given.

  Jack could picture it. The car would stop. He would get out. The car would drive away. He would be met at the rendezvous. He would never see the car again, nor the boy with the crippled foot, nor the pretty girl who couldn't be bothered to make herself beautiful. In his room, before throwing yesterday's socks and yesterday's shirt into his case, he looked over the plans of Pretoria Central. By the time they met, later that day, he would have the germ of a strategy to put to Thiroko.

  * • *

  The Bushman and the dog had led the troops to the road junction outside Monte Christo.

  Through night binoculars they had observed the five men who waited for their pick up. They had seen them eat and urinate. They had heard the murmur of their voices. They had called in by radio for the necessary support. It had been a fine moonlit night. An ideal night for the operation. They had seen the collection of Thiroko and his comrades. Over the radio link had been passed a description of the vehicle and its registration plate.

  A motorcycle, travelling without lights, had picked up the vehicle at Ellisrus, south of Monte Christo. It was the only route the vehicle could have taken. Moving behind the motorcycle was an unmarked saloon car carrying four more members of Recce Commando. The vehicle had been trailed through the night as it came south through the Waterberge mountains towards Warmbaths.

  The Puma had come again and made a night landing in the play area of the school at Monte Christo, and roused the village as it picked up the troops. By a relayed radio link the pilot was able to keep in contact with the car that followed the motorcycle that followed Thiroko's vehicle. The Puma, with its range of 570 kilometres, had had no difficulty in holding the contact before the last message was passed to the cockpit from some four kilometres north of Warmbaths.

  * * *

  A morning of rare excitement for the colonel.

  The fire bomb investigation in the hallway ten floors below was no longer priority. His plan personally to interrogate the Methodist priest, White and elderly and stitched for subversion, was shelved. Set aside, too, was the case file that would convict two and possibly three of the F.O.S.A.T.U.

  leadership.

  One file on the colonel's desk. The heavily stencilled title was JACOB THIROKO. At the top of the file was a wire print of the photograph taken at Gaberone airport. The picture showed a slight, insignificant man walking on the tarmac, and there was something in his expression that told the colonel of pain, as if the wind were caught in his bowels.

  The file was three quarters of an inch thick. Intelligence material collected over the years from Gaberone, Maputo, Luanda, Lusaka and London, and for embellishment there were the statements of the men from the "suicide squads"

  who had allowed themselves to be captured . . . It always amused the colonel that the A.N.C. cadres liked to call themselves "suicide squads" and then chuck away their weapons and emerge from their bolt holes with their hands held high . . . He knew Jacob Thiroko well, as well as he knew an old friend. He thought he had evidence enough to put him away for twenty-five years. He was less certain that he would be able to stick upon Thiroko a charge of murder without extenuating circumstances.

  It would be good to hang the man, it would be a disappointment only to lock him away. Whether Thiroko hanged, or whether he was imprisoned, would depend on what information the bastard gave his interrogators. If he talked he would hang. Clear cut. The colonel would be responsible for the interrogation, responsible for making him talk. The photograph pleased the colonel. If Thiroko was in pain, if he had pain in his gut, then that would make easier the job of lifting the bastard onto the gallows trap.

  The latest report was that Thiroko and four other Black males had crossed the border and were now resting up, that his resting place was surrounded by the Recce Commando.

  The soldiers were ordered to hold off until it was clear whether a further rendezvous was to take place. He had been told that the military would move in by mid-afternoon, that directly after his arrest Thiroko would be flown by helicopter to Johannesburg.

  The colonel was wondering at the risk of it, why a man of Thiroko's prominence in Umkonto we Sizwe would dare to travel back inside South Africa, when his telephone rang.

  It was the direct line, with the unlisted number. He reached for it. He heard his wife's voice.

  Had he read the morning paper? About Aunt Annie?

  No, my dear, he had not.

  So he did not know that yesterday afternoon Aunt Annie, his brother-in-law's sister, had been killed by a Black mob on the Pretoria road?

  To his wife and himself she was always Aunt Annie, though only a few years older than they were. A dour old lady, and she had given them, as a wedding present, a silver tea pot which they always used in the afternoons when he was at home.

  He consoled his sobbing wife. He said he would not be able to come home before the small hours, persuaded her to go at once and spend the day with her brother, probably best to stay overnight too. He rang off.

  Land mines, bombs, murders, riots, and the hacking and burning of Aunt Annie. And the statistics of revolt spiralling.

  As if a roof had sprung leaks, and as fast as a leak was blocked there were more water springs soaking through. It was the bastards like Thiroko who pick-axed the roof, made the leaks, slaughtered old Aunt Annie who came to tea on each of their wedding anniversaries, and who poured from the silver pot.

  * * *

  Thiroko lay on his back. His bed was loose straw, wrenched from a string tied bale. He was the only one awake. The boys were sleeping, snoring at the roof of the cow shed.

  They had arrived in the dark, and stumbled from the road across rough ground to the cow shed. The place stank of the animals. The shed was used by the farmer for storage and for when he had a difficult calving and the cow needed attention. They had dug against the back wall of the shed to uncover the weapons cache. Each of the A.K. 47 assault rifles was well sealed in plastic bags, each was dry and oiled.

  They had taken five of the rifles stored in the shed. They had taken also 50 kilos of plastic explosive, and detonators and firing wire. What they had not needed they had buried again under the soil and manure.

  When it was first light he had crawled to a place where the overlapping metal walls of the shed had been prised apart by the winter storms. The cow shed was on rising ground. He could see where the road ran close by, where they had been dropped after the drive down from Monte Christo, and he could see in the far distance the grain silos of Warmbaths.

  He had tried to sleep. The pain ate inside him. It might have been the long flight from London, and then the flight from Lusaka to Gaberone that had welled the pain. It might have been the bone-shaking drive from Monte Christo. It might have been the twenty-four hours without food. It might have been fear. The pain was sharp in his stomach.

  Travelling with the boys, he had learned much. Each of them had looked good enough in the training camps, and the instructors from the German Democratic Republic had said they were as good as any, and Thiroko had thought they were good until he had walked with them. Now he thought they were crap, because they had talked rubbish to him of a welcoming uprising. No inkling of the danger of coming as a stranger into their own land. They were going to have to shape up and learn fast and much between here and the gaol.

  He lay on his back, in his pain, and he thought of the Englishman. An anxiety simmered in him, of business not yet talked through. Happy and Charlie and Percy and Tom were held in cells on the opposite side of Bev
erly Hills to Jeez Carew, and they would have to be reached before the assault on C section . . . He thought Jack Curwen would understand that four men must come before one.

  Thiroko pushed himself awkwardly to his feet. The motion hurt him. He went out through the open door. He breathed in the cool clean air of his mother country. Down from this height was the sprawled town and beyond it the hazed flat veld. It was right that he should have come back, that before he died he should smell the air of his home.

  He squatted beside a bush. His bowels were water, and he had no paper to wipe himself. When he stood and pulled up his trousers he saw that there was blood mucous in his mess.

  He saw no movement except the birds skimming the long grass, he heard no sounds except their shrill calling.

  * • •

  The soldiers who watched the cow shed were the elite of the South African Defence Force. They were used to sterner tasks than this. In total and motionless silence they lay up in cover, at the nearest point a hundred metres from the rusted metal building, watching the four walls from behind machine guns and automatic rifles. They had seen Thiroko come out of the shed. It had been noted that he had no paper.

  Six hundred metres away, where the road curved, hidden by a coppice of eucalyptus and scrub, was parked the car that had travelled after Thiroko from Ellisrus. The four men who sat in the car, or squatted outside it, wore civilian clothes, slacks and sweaters. Their hair was not cut short in the style of the military, two were bearded. They were unremarkable.

  Crouched down in the coppice were the dog handler, his labrador, and the Bushman.

  All watching until mid-afternoon to see if there would be a contact.

  * • *

  Ros drove away from the hotel. It was just past one o'clock, but they hadn't bothered to eat. They were not hungry, and Jan cracked a thin joke about Jack wanting to wait till he could have maize porridge with his friends.

  Jack said that Brown's was like something from the cow-boy pictures. The open veranda, the swing slat doors from the street into the bar, posters for Saturday night live music and dancing, the carving in the dining room that was an F.N. rifle in relief. Jack said that as long as he lived he'd remember the springs in his bed. Ros didn't speak. They went right down the main road, then turned off towards the mountains. Past the huge modern angles of the roof of the Dutch Reformed Church, up along the straight tarmac strips that bisected the bungalow land, past the White school where the small boys were having rugby coaching and the girls were playing hockey. Jack thought Warmbaths was an oasis. Abruptly they were out of the town's limits, lawns and residences giving way to grazing lands. There was another three kilometres to go before the pale dust road ahead began to climb for the foothills and then the mountains. The high ground was grey hazed, cool and without threat.