by Tony Park
Piet van Zyl got into the driver’s seat of the bakkie he had just broken into and popped the bonnet. He got out, opened it fully, found the car alarm and cut the wires with his pocket knife. At last the racket was over but, predictably, he could see a security guard walking towards him beneath the diffused glare of the sodium lights. The African had his right hand on his pistol and carried a large torch in his left. He shone the beam on Piet.
‘It’s OK, man,’ Van Zyl called, raising his hand to his eyes. ‘It’s my vehicle. Bloody alarm went off by mistake.’ He repeated his explanation in Afrikaans, in case the guard’s English was poor.
‘OK, sir. But I am required to ask for identification or proof of ownership.’
Piet turned around so the guard could see the red embroidered lettering on the back of the blue work shirt he wore. It said: De Kok and Sons Plumbing, in the same lettering as that on the side door of the pick-up. The guard smiled and nodded. ‘OK, sir. Goodnight.’
Van Zyl was winging this operation, which he wasn’t happy about, but there had been no time to plan in any detail. The Novak woman needed to be silenced – tonight. The news report had said she was still in a coma, and Piet said a silent prayer of thanks for that small mercy. He was beginning to feel this whole operation was jinxed. He had put two bullets into the woman, including a head shot, but still she lived. He’d seen stranger things on the battlefield, but all the same, it shook him. He had thought he might try to steal a lab coat or some scrubs once in the hospital, and masquerade as a doctor or orderly, but the plumber’s truck was a perfect alternative. He knew security would eventually come to investigate the blaring car alarm and he was pleased it was the gullible guard who had showed up first, rather than the vehicle’s rightful owner.
The bakkie had yielded not only uniforms, but also a wallet, in the glove compartment, with a plumber’s business cards, and a bag of tools from the floor on the passenger’s side. From the centre console he grabbed a sweat-grimed baseball cap, also with the business logo stitched on it. He took his pistol from the holster on his belt and the silencer from the pocket of his jeans. He screwed the attachment to the barrel and cocked it. As the weapon was now too long to conceal, he placed it in the canvas tool bag under a pile of wrenches.
As he walked through the car park he pulled the cap down low over his eyes, which remained downcast as he entered the bustling, chaotic emergency room.
There was a plan on the wall next to the receptionist’s desk. The woman looked harried, explaining to a distraught mother that her child would have to wait up to an hour to see a doctor. Van Zyl noticed a plastic container full of clip-on passes which each bore a capital V followed by a number. In smaller print below it said Visitor. While the receptionist was pointing out the toilets down the corridor to the woman, Van Zyl quickly leaned across the counter and palmed a pass. He clipped it onto the pocket of his overall shirt and returned his gaze to the plan. He found the intensive care unit and set off down the hallway.
‘Can I help you? Hey, you?’ a voice said behind him.
He turned and saw a white woman in green disposable surgical scrubs. ‘There’s a water leak in ICU,’ he said.
‘Can I see some ID?’
Van Zyl kept his cool. He put a thumb under the visitor’s pass and held it up for the woman to see, and fished in his pocket for one of the plumber’s business cards, which he handed to her. ‘I’m a plumber, not a doctor. They don’t give us fancy IDs.’
‘OK, sorry to trouble you, but we don’t want just anyone wandering around the hospital.’
He nodded. ‘It’s good to know your security’s working.’
He smiled to himself as he carried on. He turned right, his shoes squeaking on the freshly washed linoleum floor. He wrinkled his nose at the universal hospital smell, the sharp odour of urine and disinfectant.
It was marginally quieter in this part of the hospital than the emergency room, though nursing staff still paced the corridors and as he pushed open the swinging plastic doors to the intensive care unit, he saw that relatives hovered by two of the ten beds.
There was an African woman with two small daughters standing at the foot of the bed of a skinny man with a tube draining from his chest. At the far end of the ward a young woman’s face was lit by the greenish glow of a monitor, attached to a patient whose head was heavily bandaged. He checked off the colour, age and sex of each patient as he moved quietly between the rows of beds. The only white woman, he now saw, was the one with the head wound. It had to be Lisa Novak. Looking at the girl, who he guessed was not long out of her teens, he saw the family resemblance. A man about the same age, with bleached hair and brand-name Australian surfing shorts and T-shirt, stood beside his partner, with his hand on her shoulder.
The man looked around as Van Zyl walked past, glancing across to positively identify the Novak woman.
‘Had a complaint about a leaky pipe in the bathroom. Sorry for the disturbance,’ he said. The man nodded, stifled a surreptitious yawn, and returned his gaze to the unconscious woman.
Van Zyl was feeling the buzz now. The adrenaline was pumping through his veins, sending little jolts of electricity to his fingertips, but he forced himself to keep his emotions in check. The woman couldn’t have been placed in a better position. Her bed was right next to the door of the toilet and shower that serviced the ward. Piet opened the door and knelt down. From the bag he took one of the plumber’s wrenches and set to work on the cold-water pipe that fed the washbasin. He strained, then felt the connection loosen. As it came away from the wall he was pleasantly surprised by the force of water that jetted from the open end. Water gushed out onto the floor. To add to the realism he, too, was now drenched in water.
As he opened the bathroom door water flooded out into the ward, the flow increasing by the second. He went first to Lisa Novak’s relatives. ‘Hey, I’m very, very sorry, but this leak’s got worse and I’m going to have to ask you to move out for a couple of minutes. I’ll call the nurse, as well.’
‘Shit, man.’
‘Hush, Dirk,’ the Novaks’ daughter said to her partner. ‘Ag, what a mess. Isn’t this dangerous with all the electrical machines and stuff in here?’
‘Ja, very,’ Van Zyl said. ‘I’ll have the flow turned off in a second, but I need you to wait in the corridor for just a little while, OK? Sooner we get this cleaned up, the sooner you can get back to your mom.’
The girl looked at him, puzzled by something he’d said, but her heavy lids and the dark rings under her eyes betrayed her fatigue. ‘OK.’
Van Zyl moved the African family and asked them, too, to wait in the corridor.
As soon as both sets of relatives left he returned to the bathroom and simply turned off the mains switch that supplied cold water to the toilet and washbasin. He was lucky the young man had been too stupid to question him and suggest the most logical way to stop the water flowing.
Piet took his pistol from the sodden tool bag.
Novak’s mobile phone chirped in his pocket. ‘Hello my girl,’ he said hurriedly, ‘any news?’
Alex stood beside Novak in the emergency room, where they had just returned, en route to ICU. Novak nodded. ‘OK, I’m coming now. We’re back inside the hospital.’
‘Come,’ he said to Alex.
‘Something wrong?’
Novak lengthened his stride and Alex jogged a couple of paces down the corridor to catch him up.
‘Make way, make way!’ a woman shouted. Around the corner in front of them a team of doctors and nurses ran beside a bed, which was being wheeled by an orderly. The face of the female patient was deathly white, and for a second Alex feared it was Lisa.
The party’s onward rush had forced Novak and Alex to stop on one side of the hallway, to give way. The sudden burst of panic had increased Novak’s own sense of anxiety and he started to run. ‘What’s up?’ Alex called.
‘Something about a flood in ICU. Shit. This bloody country . . .’
‘A flood?�
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Alex reached for his Glock 19, concealed by the tail of his loose-fitting cream linen shirt. Checking no one was in sight, he drew the weapon, cocked it and stuffed it down the front of his pants, where it would be quicker to get to.
‘Shit,’ Novak said, as his foot slipped in water. Janine, her young husband Dirk, and a black woman and her children were huddled outside the swinging door that led to the ICU. ‘Where’s the nurse or the doctor?’
‘I don’t know, Pa,’ Janine said, looking up at him and wringing her hands. ‘It’s why I called you. I’ve asked a cleaner to fetch a nurse. He said he didn’t know anything about a problem with the plumbing.’
Novak burst through the door with Alex at his heels. The lighting in the ward was dim, in consideration of the hour, and Alex reached for his pistol as he saw the door to the bathroom near Lisa’s bed swing open. A man emerged carrying something in his right hand.
Time seemed to slow as Alex’s eyes fed the information to his brain. The man was indoors, but he wore a hat. Why? He was wearing a tradesman’s blue overalls and they were soaking wet. Did that mean he was a good plumber or a bad plumber? The thing in his right hand gleamed metallically in the diffused light of the monitor Lisa was plugged into, but it was too long to be a pistol. Or was it?
Alex’s hand was already moving, independently of his thought processes. It was this primal, warrior’s instinct that had kept him alive more than once. Training and experience could hone this weapon that all men were born with but not all men could wield. As he raised the pistol he called, ‘Novak, down!’
The South African, too, had not survived so many years in war zones by ignoring orders or allowing his reflexes to grow slow. He dived, but not to the floor. The force that drove him was protection. Like a sprinting rugby forward approaching the try line he landed across Lisa’s motionless body.
Alex knew what he had seen: a silencer screwed to the end of a pistol. But even as his brain put the pieces together he was already stopping, wrapping his fingerless left hand around his right and squeezing the two-phase trigger of the Glock.
The muzzle flash, and the noise from the two shots he fired, was like a lightning strike in the dim confines of the hospital ward. Alex saw the target’s right arm jerk once, from the recoil of a shot fired, and feared he’d missed, but he was rewarded with a shout of pain from the shooter. The plate-glass window behind the gunman shattered into a thousand glittering shards from Alex’s second bullet. Something clattered heavily to the floor.
Novak was groaning too, and Alex glimpsed a spreading bloodstain on Lisa’s white bedspread as Novak tried to stand.
Some piece of hospital equipment had short-circuited from a bullet or Novak’s crashing fall onto his wife. The lights flickered and went out and a piercing alarm sounded from Lisa’s monitor.
‘Stay down, Mark!’ Alex shouted. The South African was between him and the gunman, who had dropped down, perhaps to retrieve his fallen pistol.
Alex moved forward and cuffed Novak down with his left hand and fired two more shots at the shadowy figure who jumped up onto the windowsill then out into the night.
‘How bad are you hit?’
‘Through and through,’ Novak said, lifting his right arm. The bullet had pierced his forearm and was bleeding profusely. Novak winced and touched his arm. ‘Bone’s OK.’
Alex looked down at the bed and as lights flickered back on he saw where the stuffing had exploded from the mattress an inch from Lisa’s left shoulder. She was as safe as a woman in a coma with bullet damage to her brain could be. ‘Stay here with her.’
Janine and Dirk burst into the room. The girl was screaming incoherently and the hospital seemed filled with the clangour of alarms and raised voices. ‘Give me your .38 Special,’ Novak growled at his daughter. The girl, lower lip quivering, reached into her handbag and handed the snub-nosed pistol to her father. ‘Go, Alex. I’m fine. Cops will be here any minute – there’s always plenty of them hanging around this place at night.’
Alex peeked over the window ledge and saw the gunman running along the awning roof over the entryway to the hospital. The drop was about three metres. He leapt out into the cool night and landed, feet together and knees bent.
Although he landed upright he immediately rolled and dropped to his belly. He heard the crack and thump of air being displaced a few centimetres above his head as the man turned and fired a silenced shot at him. Alex stretched his hands out in front of him and fired twice, but the man had already leapt over the far end of the awning. Alex pulled himself to his feet and sprinted, his feet clanging on the tin roofing.
At the edge of the awning he paused. Below him was a rubbish skip and he prayed it wasn’t full of disposed needles and scalpels as he jumped over the edge. Foul-smelling garbage spattered up over his shirt and face, but he kept his pistol raised and out of the muck. The steel sides of the bin probably saved him, as he heard a bullet clang off the side. When he poked his head over the top he couldn’t see the man, so he vaulted out and ran into the car park.
‘Stop, police!’
Alex ignored the shout from behind him. He didn’t want to talk to the police about the night’s events, but nor did he want to be mistaken for the perpetrator and shot in the back. He doubled his body as he ran between the rows of parked cars.
Ahead of him he heard a squeal of rubber and the screech of poorly lined brakes as a car skidded to a halt. A horn was hooted and then a man started yelling abuse, but shut up quickly. Alex guessed the fugitive had pointed his pistol at the angry driver. Alex raised his head above the roofline of a Corolla and saw where the car had stopped. The driver had his hands held high and was backing away. ‘Sorry, sorry, man,’ the now terrified citizen was saying. ‘Take the bladdy car, just don’t kill me. I’ve got a wife and a sick kid in the hospital.’
Alex saw the hatted figure behind the wheel and cut through two rows of cars so that he was closer to the car park exit than where the hijacking had just taken place. The bastard would have to drive right past him.
As he heard the Corolla slide into the corner and the driver gun the engine into the straight, Alex stepped out from the protection of a BMW four-by-four and fired twice at the oncoming vehicle. The windscreen starred, obscuring his aim, but he pumped another two bullets into the driver’s side. Instead of slowing, the car accelerated and veered towards him. Side panels were dented and scratched with the sound of screeching metal as the driver glanced off the rear bumpers of three of four cars close to Alex, who had to step back further into cover as the car raced past him.
‘Shit.’ Alex realised the man must have ducked beneath the dashboard and driven by instinct. Charging full-pelt towards the enemy was, paradoxically, the best way to get through an ambush, and it had worked for Alex’s quarry.
Alex ran as fast as he could across another four rows of parked vehicles to his Land Cruiser. The vehicle had a powerful four-litre engine, but it was diesel and slow to reach its top speed. He’d have little hope of catching the nimble smaller sedan before it got out of the hospital grounds and into the maelstrom of Johannesburg’s fast-moving nighttime traffic. That is, if he stuck to the road.
Alex started the engine and turned in the opposite direction to the car park exit signs. Between him and the road onto which the car park fed was a raised earthen berm, covered in grass and flowerbeds. It acted as a partial noise and visual barrier between the hospital and the traffic outside. Alex shifted into low range four-wheel drive and lurched over the concrete kerb. The Land Cruiser’s wide, knobbly tyres bit hard into the landscaped topsoil, spun for an instant, then propelled him up and over the barrier with effortless ease. As he coasted down the other side he shifted back into high range and floored the accelerator.
The Corolla whizzed by him as Alex hurtled down the hill. As he left the high-raised kerb there was air under all four wheels momentarily. Horns blared around him as he veered out into the middle lane while wrenching the steering wheel around to the left.
The Corolla was two cars ahead of him, but couldn’t accelerate away as there was a semitrailer trying to pass another truck carrying a shipping container. The gunman leaned on his horn, but to no avail. Alex geared down to third, tortured the engine and transmission with another heavy burst of diesel, then shifted to fourth and narrowed the gap.
He saw the man’s white face for the first time as he turned and looked through the rear window. Alex accelerated harder, bringing his bumper almost to the rear of the Corolla. The man raised his hand and Alex flinched, expecting a shot, but to his surprise he saw the man was bringing a cell phone to his ear. That could mean reinforcements. Alex shifted up into fifth and the extra boost of speed on the slight downhill slope pushed him into the rear of the sedan. Alex heard the other car’s bumper shatter. The man braked instinctively, but Alex accelerated harder. Other cars hooted and sped around them, trying to escape the madness.
The man veered sharply to the right, into the oncoming traffic. His high-risk, gutsy move paid off. Alex braked and the Corolla weaved in and out of the erratically swerving parade of cars.
Alex wanted this man dead. He gritted his teeth and followed the gunman’s lead, swinging out around the lorry in front of him, into the oncoming stream. Cars jinked out of his way as he pushed the big diesel engine beyond its limits.
He was again closing on the Corolla, which had been slowed by some unseen obstacle up ahead which was reducing the traffic to a crawl. If the Corolla couldn’t find an exit soon, Alex would have him trapped. However, there would be innocents all around them. Alex nipped out into the wrong lane again, past the last car between him and the man he wanted, then darted back in behind his target. Although he saw the sedan’s brake lights flash, he touched the accelerator pedal harder with his toe and braced for the inevitable collision.
Gunfire erupted.
Too late, Alex glanced up into his rear-view mirror. A BMW 3 Series sedan was behind him and a black man was leaning out the passenger side, holding a Heckler and Koch MP5 machine pistol. Alex saw the muzzle winking in the darkness and heard the rattle of bullets on the rear bodywork of his vehicle.