Per Fine Ounce

by Peter Vollmer

  Chapter Eight

  During the course of the following day, other than the necessary visit to the garage, they mostly confined themselves to their room, only venturing out for their meals. They agreed the less noticeable they were, the less likelihood of any suspicions being raised.

  Just after eleven that evening found them lying on their stomachs on the hard ground, which was still slightly warm from the sun of the day. A soft cool breeze blew over them. A half-moon hung in the clear sky; the Milky Way strung across it from horizon to horizon. However, in the distance towards the east, Peace discerned faint flashes of lightning — the first signs of a thunderstorm. But here in the desert, these storms often only threatened rain. There was plenty of wind, thunder, and lightning, but the rain clouds were inevitably blown away by the wind. Proper rain in this area was an event. He had learnt this piece of information from Cherry.

  A security-manned Land Rover had just passed and the dust that trailed it wafted over them. The main fence was no more than thirty feet from them. Cherry had told him to keep a sharp lookout for puff adders, which emerged at night from under the rocks and bushes to hunt rats and mice. This made him particularly wary. Peace held a medium-sized bolt cutter and Cherry carried two long steel hooks with wooden handles at their ends. They’d need these to pull aside the coils of razor wire once the wire had been cut. Once through, they’d need to pull the coils together again to conceal where they’d entered. Fortunately, the ground was rough and it would be difficult to see any trace of their tracks.

  “Okay, let’s go!” he whispered. It took a number of attempts to sever the wire and the snap of the blades as they bit through the strands was loud in the quiet night. They hooked the coils and pulled them apart. Once they’d clambered through, they closed the gap as best they could, the repair good enough to pass normal inspection at night.

  They had just managed to do this when they heard a whooping sound. It was nearby.

  “God, what’s that?” said Cherry, grabbing his arm.

  “It’s those hyenas. I hope to God they haven’t let the damn things loose in the corridors. They didn’t last night.”

  The hyenas continued to whoop as they crossed the cleared area to the inner fence. It consisted of closely knit steel mesh, which required only a few minutes to cut into, leaving a three feet square gap. They peeled the wire mesh back, climbed through, and then closed the cut with a few small pieces of soft wire. Peace made a mental note of the exact location of the breach in the fence.

  They now found themselves on the airfield itself. Crouched down so as not to be silhouetted against the light and keeping a sharp lookout, they made their way through the scrub towards the airfield’s buildings. Most lights around the airfield other than the perimeter lights had been doused; obviously, no air traffic was expected that night. Keeping to the shadows, they neared a large hangar.

  “Down!” he hissed suddenly and pulled her to the ground next to him. The sound of gravel on concrete echoed through the night, which was steadily increasing in volume as whoever was making it drew near. Peace lifted his head slightly and saw a guard. Fortunately, he had no dog with him. He did, however, carry an assault rifle, an R5, a formidable close-quarter weapon.

  The guard passed no more than twenty feet from their position. Had the man been more alert, he would have seen them. As he passed, Peace rose and silently moved towards him, approaching diagonally from the side. At the last moment, some sixth sense must have warned the man, for he spun round bringing up his rifle. He was too slow. Peace dodged past the rifle, came up close to the man’s chest, and thrust his long SAS knife up under the man’s ribs and into his heart. He slammed his other hand over the man’s mouth, reducing the man’s death scream to a muffled cry. The guard began to collapse and Peace had to let go of the knife to grab him as he crumpled into his arms. With the knife’s hilt still rammed in his chest, the man jerked feebly in his final death throes, his heels drumming a brief tattoo on the hard soil. The body eventually went limp. Peace slowly lowered it to the ground, his clothes splattered with the victim’s blood. He wiped the blood from his hands on some dry grass.

  “VA won’t like this,” he remarked, recalling VA’s request that none should die and then turned to face Cherry.

  She just stared at him; her face expressionless. At first he thought she was probably shocked by the surgical manner in which he had killed the man.

  “Cherry, there wasn’t anything else I could do,” he murmured placatingly.

  “I know, but it’s always a bit of a shock when you watch the first one go down — it’s never pleasant. After that, I’m fine until the next mission. And you? No regrets?”

  “No,” he replied.

  She did not respond.

  Part of the hangar cast a long shadow over the concrete, providing excellent cover. They dashed across it and flung themselves against the hangar’s corrugated metal side, trying to merge with the darkness of the wall. They could still hear the intermittent whooping of the hyenas; other guards could not be far away. What was going on? Staying in the shadows, they slid with their backs pressed against the metal wall while looking for an entrance. Cherry was leading the way when suddenly she stopped and turned, and he bumped into her.

  “Quiet!” she whispered in his ear.

  He stood still with Cherry close up against him. Over her shoulder, he saw a man who had just rounded the far corner of the hangar, with a dog pulling on a leash and whimpering in its efforts to drag its handler forward. The man shouted at the animal, trying to control it. Peace slowly drew the Heckler and Koch strapped to his leg. He lifted the automatic high to get the silencer to clear the canvas holster. He flicked off the safety catch; the man had still not seen them. The automatic barked twice, the first bullet hitting the man in the mouth, and he immediately collapsed to the ground. The dog reared up on hind legs in its effort to get at them, but the leash wrapped around the guard’s wrist restrained it. It took Peace’s second bullet to the chest, yelped loudly, and then it too collapsed to the ground. He removed his arm with the automatic from over her shoulder and let it hang next to his side. She spun round, hard up against him. He stepped back.

  “Well, if we are trying not to announce ourselves, we haven’t done very well, have we? You realise that was a hyena? Probably one of Van Rhyn’s trained-to-kill hyenas. That’s enough reason to allow us to shoot anything,” he said.

  She didn’t reply but now started moving along the wall looking for an entrance.

  “Here,” she called softly.

  He crossed to her and saw the door in the wall. She tried the handle, and the door opened. The interior was dark apart from a faint light visible on the far side of the hangar. The hangar contained two aircraft, one of which was a Beechcraft King Air 90 — a twin-engine turbo-prop executive aircraft with Van Rhyn’s Afrikaner Goudeiendomme’s logo on its tail. At first, Peace didn’t recognise the other aircraft, as it was hard to identify in the dark and was painted black. Then he recognised it — a Dornier twin-engine STOL high-wing aircraft, ideal for short field take-offs and landings. The cockpit doors were open, so he peered inside and saw keys to the Dornier hanging from the magneto switches.

  He pulled her close, his lips brushing her ear.

  “God, we’re lucky, the bloody keys are in it,” he whispered. “Maybe we can use it if we need to make a break for it.”

  Although in hindsight he wasn’t entirely convinced as it would take a while to pull the aircraft out of the hangar.

  She squeezed his arm and pointed in the direction of the interior darkness of the cavernous hangar. He could vaguely make out the shape of two other aircraft.

  “Jesus!” he whispered. “That’s a bloody Canberra bomber, and the other’s a Blackburn Buccaneer. Those aircraft can be used to deliver nuclear weapons! I thought they’d given all their Canberras to the Rhodesians.”

  As he stared at them, he was just able to make out the outline of the Dutch Cape Castle emblem with the spre
ad-winged eagle in the centre, the South African Air Force recognition marking. These had once been, or were, South African military aircraft. Clearly, Van Rhyn had friends in the right places. All this would have required massive amounts of capital, not to mention attracting and arming a ragtag group of predominantly Afrikaners and maybe moulding them into a professional fighting force if civil war was ever envisaged. From every newspaper report, including those from the Afrikaner press, it was clear that most intelligentsia in the nation saw the benefits of a new South Africa. He knew that the more enlightened in the country would be appalled if they could see what he was looking at. He also knew that most Afrikaners desperately wanted peace. They realised that the world was smaller; its vast distances reduced by technology, and that it was no longer possible to live in self-imposed isolation and exile.

  Suddenly, they heard loud shouts, the banging of steel doors, and the revving of vehicle engines. The whooping of the hyenas had increased.

  “I think they’ve stumbled on the bodies,” Cherry said.

  He indicated she should follow him and led her towards the light on the other side of the hangar nearest to the mine. They needed to get closer to the mine and investigate it. Why had a mine, previously thought to be uneconomical, suddenly been resurrected? The town had been deserted until about two years ago when Van Rhyn began to employ people to restart the mine, or so it was believed. This had to be Van Rhyn’s main operational base. It was perfectly situated geographically and in the middle of staunch Afrikaner territory.

  Their boots were crepe-soled and made no noise as they crossed the hangar floor towards the light. The bark of the dogs had subsided, and the vehicles had evidently been driven off. When they reached the other side, they saw it was lined with prefabricated offices, some in darkness, others with lights. All appeared to be vacant. The long line of offices along the opposite wall was broken by a gap revealing a lit passage, and a pedestrian tunnel which disappeared into the darkness. He hoped it would lead outside the hangar and to the mine. As he steered Cherry towards the passageway, he had no idea whether it was deserted but they’d have to just chance it. The problem was that anybody approaching from the other end would immediately see them.

  “This feels dangerous,” Cherry said.

  He agreed. He could not shake off a premonition of impending disaster. Of course, the guards would be looking for the intruders who had killed their companions and they now surely knew their security had been compromised.

  They walked along the tunnel but kept to one side, still uncertain what was at the end of it. They soon found their approach barred by a wall of steel bars but with a one-man-sized door within the barrier. This grille door was locked. Against the tunnel wall was a numbered keypad, which had to be accessed to activate the lock. Beyond the grille was the exit. A few small prefabricated buildings were visible in the weak moonlight. But how were they to get out? The steel barrier prevented any further progress and without the code to the keypad they would be stuck.

  “Wat die fok gaan hier aan?[6]” was suddenly shouted at them.

  Peace’s head jerked around at the sound and he stared at the man behind them who had materialised seemingly out of nowhere. He appeared to be unarmed. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Cherry had raised her silenced automatic and had it pointed at the man’s chest. Suddenly the man realised it was a gun she had pointed at him. His eyes widened in shock and his jaw dropped.

  “Maak die deur oop![7]” Cherry barked. For a few seconds the man seemed paralysed, not moving.

  “Doen dit nou of ek skiet![8]” she yelled at him.

  Clearly convinced that she meant every word, he slowly walked past them with arms raised and then pressed his finger to the keypad buttons and entered the code. There was a loud click and the door snapped open.

  “Thank God you speak Afrikaans,” Peace mumbled quietly.

  “VA did say he thought it would come in handy.” She smiled briefly.

  Peace pushed the grille open and they stepped through. Although the man had already raised his hands in surrender again, Peace swung his automatic and brought it down on the man’s head with a sickening thud. The man fell to the ground.

  “I think you’ve killed him,” said Cherry with a sharp intake of breath.

  “Does it matter? Come on.”

  He knew the man was just badly concussed and certainly wouldn’t be speaking to anybody for a while.

  They stepped outside into the cool night air.

  “That was obviously a quick access tunnel from the mine to the airport. It could be that those arriving by air don’t have to use the main gate,” Peace remarked.

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Who knows — it seems there are a number of hidden agendas here.”

  Before them, a wide concrete road sloped down and disappeared into a massive excavation similar in size to those found in a large opencast mining operation. Sheer cliffs demarcated the opposite side of the depression, about two-hundred feet deep and impossible to climb. At the bottom of the excavation’s cliff-face, two tunnels that bored into the granite could be seen, one larger than the other.

  A sunken area directly in front of the tunnels was well lit by floodlights affixed to the granite face of the massive excavation and Peace could see people in hardhats, gumboots, and reflector vests milling about. A stairway adjacent to the road led, in levels, to the tunnels’ entrances.

  A huge dumper truck laden with large chunks of broken ore suddenly exited the larger tunnel with a roar. The crescendo of noise from its exhaust hammered their eardrums as it approached the ramp’s incline. Two massive headlamps bored through the mist of grey dust being created by the people milling around, lighting the way for the behemoth. Green and red lights were also were affixed to the vehicle, making it look like a Christmas tree.

  Peace bent towards Cherry’s ear and shouted, “This is a helluva operation they’ve got here. He’s definitely resurrected the mining operation. I thought it was just a cover, but it seems to be the real thing.”

  “I think you’re right,” she shouted back, and then added as an afterthought, “that’s where we’ve got to enter and take a look.” She pointed at the smaller tunnel.

  He agreed but didn’t like it; they had to assume there was only one entrance. The surveillance photographs didn’t show another — and there’d be no escape if things went wrong.

  “If we are going to blend in, we’ve got to find hats, boots, and those reflector vests they are all wearing,” he whispered urgently.

  There were more of the prefabricated huts to one side and some were lit from within. They quickly walked over and peered into a few, until in one, they discovered what they wanted. It contained various pieces of equipment hanging from racks and coat hooks. They even saw a row of helmet-lamps on a bench, all connected to chargers. This was evidently a change room for the more senior staff. Peace entered and removed two hats, and two pairs of gumboots, which he thought would fit them. He also found some fluorescent coats and overall tops. They donned these and stepped outside, the lamps from their helmets bobbing as they walked nonchalantly towards the mine. The hat that Peace wore was of a different colour to the rest and had something written across the front of it — HOOF OPSIGTER.

  “That means Chief Supervisor in Afrikaans,” Cherry had said as she saw him place it on his head.

  Peace hoped the title indicated the wearer to be high up in the hierarchy and produce the respect they’d need to bluff their way past the guards or any other personnel. He felt conspicuous but hoped that they at least looked as if they belonged.

  They were no more than a hundred yards from the prefabricated building when he looked across to a large open expanse where there was a wire-mesh enclosure, about two-hundred feet square, its fence over six feet high. He saw movement within and on hearing the strange whooping sound realised the animals were spotted hyena. He knew their immensely powerful jaws could crush the largest of bones and even devour them as their gastric juices were stron
g enough to digest the lot. A bite from a hyena was capable of severing a man’s arm or leg, and in a pack when pursuing prey, they were formidable. Even lions respected them.

  A pickup approached and Peace grabbed Cherry and dragged her into the shadow cast by a prefab. The pickup then skidded to a halt in front of the enclosure gate. Two armed guards were standing on the back, clasping the cattle rail erected around the vehicle’s loading box. Assault rifles hung from their shoulders and both were looking down at something in the vehicle. A heated exchange between the guards and three other security personnel who had materialised when the vehicle had approached followed.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Peace asked, his voice barely audible.

  Cherry was listening intently to what was being said and spoke only after she’d heard enough.

  “It seems they’ve caught some Blacks on the property. The guards maintain they were snooping around, maybe thieves trying to steal something of value.”

  Two of the guards pushed a body from the back of the pickup. The man was a Black who was naked except for a pair of dirty white shorts. He must have already been beaten and probably tortured as he tried to shy away from his captors, his eyes wide with terror. He cried and wailed, and although Peace could not understand his yammering, it was obvious he was overcome by abject fear and pleading for his life.

  Two of the men grabbed him under each arm and dragged him towards the enclosure. The man’s cries seemed to agitate the hyenas and they moved closer to the wire in their strange looping gait while others slunk up and down the length of the fence. Every so often, they dipped their heads and then looked skywards, emitting a bloodcurdling whoop.

  “God Almighty!” Cherry whispered. “I think they’re going to put the man in the cage with the hyenas. Those men are animals!”

  It appeared she was right. The steel mesh-covered gate to the enclosure was opened and the approaching hyenas were beaten back with long sticks. The guards still had a firm grasp on his arms and half-carried him to the gate, his feet dragging in the dust, and shoved him into the enclosure, quickly closing the gate behind him. He shrieked a horrible sound which seemed to rise from the depths of his soul as the hyenas tore into him, raising a cloud of dust as they danced around him, tearing at him, whooping, and squealing. The man’s screams abruptly ceased and the only sounds they could hear were the whoops and snarls as the animals fought to get at the still twitching body. Peace heard Cherry suck in her breath. She lowered her head and covered her face with her hands. The snarls gradually abated, to be replaced by the sound of crunching bones and the occasional snap as the animals warned each other off. The guards and security men looked on nonchalantly, joking amongst themselves.