by Steve Reeder
“How sure are we, really, that no-one will see us on a RADAR?” Freeman wanted to know.
“There are not many RADAR stations around here that don’t belong to the South Africa Air force,” Steffen replied, “And there are so many spotter planes and dubious people in the army doing stuff that they don’t tell anyone about that even if the Air Force do catch us on a scope somewhere, I don’t think they’ll do much. Besides, what are they going to do? Send up a fighter plane to investigate a small plane leaving the country? Why would they?”
Freeman nodded then asked about Zambia’s or Botswana’s air force. His companions burst into peals of laughter. Freeman sat back, partially satisfied.
What seemed like an extraordinarily long time late Reece spotted the old farm with its dirt landing-strip. He pointed excitedly and Steffen reduced height until he was barely fifty feet off of the ground. He brought the aircraft around to the north and flew down the runway’s length. Everyone who could do so studied the landing strip.
“Looks okay to me,” Cole ventured. Reece agreed. Steffen chewed his bottom lip and, realising he didn’t have a choice anyway, circled around to the north again and began his decent onto the hard-packed dirt.
“Hang on, everyone,” Reece shouted as the right wheel touched down, bounce once and then settled, followed by the left wheel and finally the nose wheel. There was an audible expelling of breath from behind the pilot.
Steffen nosed the aircraft under the trees near the end of the runway and cut the engine. Everyone piled out and stood looking around them. The air was hot. Fifty metres away across dry grass and a litter of small rocks stood the abandoned farmhouse. Outside the front of the house were the remains of a garden with rose bushes, now over-run with weeds, in a row on either side of what had been a gravel walk-way that ended where cars had once parked under several thorn trees that would have provided some shade for the family car. The long driveway led from there off to the east and disappeared from their view behind a low hill. A bougainvillea bush clung to the side of the house, giving it a spray of red and orange. There was a barn behind the house and even at this distance, over two hundred metres, they could see that the barn was slowly falling apart. John Smit, who claimed to know something about farming, told them that the farmer had grown maize at one time.
“I wonder why he left?” Reece asked rhetorically.
“Once the British gave Zambia independence back in the sixties a lot of the professional white farmers were forced out so that the president’s family could take the farms. Problem was that they had no idea about farming, so it all fell apart.” Smit held out his arms to encompass the entire nation. “This country could easily feed the whole of Africa with its farmland, but right now they are importing everything that they eat. It’s sad.”
Cole interrupted the discussion with a suggestion that the plane should be unloaded and everything moved into the farmhouse. Seven backpacks, seven R4 rifles with six magazines and ammunition for each weapon plus food for fives day took up a lot of space and Steffen stared at it, wondering how he had ever got the plane off the ground in the first place. With a bit of luck, he thought, there would be just seven men and a case full of diamonds on board for the final flight. Then he remembered that he was going to have get it back into the air within a day or two with most of it loaded again. It would be just his fourth flight piloting an aircraft of this type.
“The trouble started the next morning,” he told Tanya. “I guess that we should have given some thought to where the Americans would be flying into Angola from, but even now I’m surprised that they hadn’t been using an airport somewhere.” He fell silent again, his mind drifting far away to the fateful morning and the death it had brought.
“Tell me,” Tanya finally demanded. Tears were forming on her lower eyelids. She sniffed and wiped them away as they began to run down her cheeks.
“We were standing around eating breakfast and didn’t hear them land. Reece and Freeman were outside but somewhere back near the barn – no idea what they were doing there – so when the first guy burst into the house I thought that it was Reece”.
There were three of them; hard men with revolvers and angry faces.
“Touch it and you die,” the big man shouted at Cole who had begun to reach for his rifle. “Who the hell are you guys?” The big man moved into the centre of the room with one of his colleagues on either side of him.
Cole backed up, away from the rifles which were all stacked on the single remaining table, and looked behind him at the others. Steffen, Smit and Bomber all stood with shocked expressions.
“Who are you,” Smit asked, “and what are you doing here?”
“Don’t fuck with me, sonny, or I’ll rip your head off and shit down your neck!” the big one shouted. He had a gruff Texan accent.
“Does it matter who they are, Geoff?” one of the others asked. “Let’s just shoot them and get on with it.”
“Not yet. Where is Jenkins?” Geoff replied.
Before anyone could answer, the front door slammed opened and Sean Reece walked in, a wild grin on his face.
“If Jenkins was your pilot,” Reece said, “Then he won’t be coming because he’s dead.”
Geoff began to turn to face Reece but stopped when he saw the pistol. Reece was aiming directly between his eyes.
“Looks like we’ve got ourselves a Mexican stand-off right here,” Geoff said with an evil grin. “But we outnumber you a bit, don’t we? Three guns to your one. Now put that weapon down, son, and I’ll let your friends live.”
“I don’t think so,” Reece laughed at him. “It seems more reasonable that you should all lower your weapons first. After all, we were here first.”
Geoff shook his head. “I don’t think that you have the nerve to shoot me, Kid. So let’s stop messing around. Put the gun down.”
“Have I got the nerve?” Reece asked with a chuckle. “I’d shoot you just for fun. Besides, it is pointless you doing anything else, after all, you are not going anywhere without a pilot.”
The small man on Geoff’s right frowned and asked what Reece meant about the pilot.
“I killed your pilot,” Reece told him. “Slit his throat and then ripped his face right off of his head like I scalped him…”
Tanya gasped and her hand flew to cover her mouth.
“The idea was to just try to shock them, I guess, but it was a silly thing to say,” he told her. “The small guy starting screaming something and tried to swing around and shoot Sean, then Steffen made a grab for one of the rifles, so this Geoff dude shot Steffen and then Reece calmly shot all three of them.” He sat back and tried to get rid of the rising tension in his shoulders. “The rest of us just stood there looking a bit stupid. I guess that we were…I don’t know, kind of shocked; numb even.”
Tanya stood up, bumping the table, spilling her tea and walked swiftly from the room. He heard her blowing her nose down the passage and moments later the sound of running water as she washed the tears from her face. He looked around the kitchen, surprised even now, months later, that he should be sitting in a pleasant room drinking tea with a beautiful girl while his friends lay dead in foreign countries. He thought of the diamonds and vowed once again to make sure that shares were paid to the relatives of his friends. He wondered also what had happened to the other half of the gems. While he waited he mopped up the spilled tea. There were the US treasury Bonds too which should have been delivered by now. He made a note to call the main post office in Johannesburg the next day.
When Tanya returned she look calm and composed again, a droplet of water clinging to her chin. He watched her closely, marvelling at her strength and beauty. She poured him another cup of tea, refilled her own cup and sat at the table again.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “please go on. I must know…”
“Is he dead?” Bomber asked.
“Yes,” Smit looked up from where he squatted. “Ricky Steffen is dead.”
The others looked gl
um. They had known that the risk of some of them getting killed was very real, but to be confronted by a friend’s violent death shook them to the core.
Reece checked the three Americans. None of them were ever going home again either.
“What the hell do we do now?” Smit asked, clearly agitated.
“We bury them and carry on as planned,” Reece told them.
“Really, Sean? Hands up anyone who can fly the plane…or are you suggesting that we walk?” Cole asked somewhat resignedly.
“No, we ask the American pilot to fly the plane for us.”
“I thought you said that you had killed him?” said Bomber.
“Don’t be daft, Bomber, you’ve know me how long, and you think that I’d kill a guy and then peel his face off?”
“Well it was a bloody stupid thing to say under the circumstances! Steffen may be still alive if you handled that a little differently!” Smit shouted angrily.
Cole held his hand up and commanded silence. “What’s done is done, okay? Sean, where is this American pilot?”
“Tommy and I tied him up by their plane.”
There was a tense silence as the others absorbed this idea.
Finally John Smit nodded and asked about Steffen. “We can’t simply leave him here? And what about these guys?” he indicated the three dead Americans.
“We’ll have to bury them,” Cole said. “If they are CIA and anyone finds out that we killed them…”
“Even Steffen? I think he’s going to missed back home, don’t you?” Freeman asked, heatedly.
“Look, Tommy, the idea about arriving back at Ruacana and saying that our radio has been malfunctioning for a few days has gone out the window,” Reece told him. He turned and looked at the others, “now it’s about pulling this off and having a lot of money. Then we don’t have to go back at all. We can do pretty much whatever we like.”
“You’re talking about a life-changing decision, Sean,” Bomber said, rubbing his hand across his head. “I was kind of looking forward to carrying on with my life, but with a lot of money, you know? I have a girlfriend and parents and so on, and you’re saying we may have to leave all of that behind.”
“I think that the decision may have been made for us,” Cole said quietly. “We may not have any other option but to finish this.”
Bomber cursed, Freeman sat at the table and put his head in his hands and Smit left the room looking a little bewildered.
Franz had said nothing but now spoke up. “I agree with Sean. We go for it. If we’re going to be in trouble then let’s make sure that it’s worth it. And if we do manage to wangle our way out of it somehow and get back into camp, then at least we’ll be rich. Either way, there is no going back without finishing this.”
Cole and Reece found the pilot sitting on the ground besides the airplane; his hands were wrapped around the left wheel strut and tied together with the laces from his boots behind his back. He was tall and skinny and almost certainly had Native American blood coursing through his veins. He looked calm and resigned as he saw who they were.
“We have a deal for you,” Reece told the pilot.
The American looked up at the two of them. “I take it that Geoff and the others are not part of this deal?”
“No.”
“Am I to assume that one of the two choices facing me would be to join them?”
“Yes.”
“Then I accept.”
“You don’t know what the deal is yet.”
“Under the circumstances it doesn’t really matter, does it?”
Reece chuckled, “I like him,” he said to Cole.
“We should never have made that deal with him,” he told Tanya. “I thought that the possibility of getting an equal share of the money would get his loyalty, or at least get him to hold to the agreement. But we were wrong.”
Tanya glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall. It was nearly two in the morning and she could see that he was having difficulties keeping his eyes open.
“You need to get some sleep, “she said gently. “We can talk again tomorrow. I mean later this morning. You can have my bed. I’ll sleep in my mum’s room.”
He nodded, grateful for her suggestion. He was exhausted, not just because it was so long since he had slept but also from reliving the fateful events. Imagines of his dead friends swam in his blurred vision and the lure of a bed was strong.
Twenty Six
June. Durban.
Tanya lay awake, feeling restless. The bedside clock read four-thirty and she should have been asleep by now, but seeing him again, and hearing his dreadful tale, had taken a huge emotional toll on her. She wished that her mother had been home instead of with her sick aunt in Cape Town. She had not known all of the boys of course long, had only spent much time with Charlie Cole and Sean Reece through Bomber, but somehow she had got to know the others better from hearing Bomber and Sean talk about the others; laughing at their mannerisms and habits, listening to the stories of their adventures in the bush. Now all, but one of them, were dead.
Finally, giving up on the idea of sleep, she got out of bed, wrapped her dressing-gown around her and started for the kitchen, planning on making a mug of coffee. What made her stop outside the door to her bedroom was a mystery to her, but the need to be with someone, or perhaps to hold him and soothe his troubles. She wasn’t sure what it was. The door opened silently and she stood in the doorway looking at him. The moon was full and the room was bathed in its glow. The night was warm and he lay on his back with the duvet down around his waist and his left arm draped across his forehead. The pounding of her heart and the overwhelming sense of sorrow were not the only feelings that assaulted her. Quietly she walked over to the bed and stood looking down at him, watching his chest move up and down as he breathed in and out. For the first time she noticed the small scar that ran down his forearm from the elbow to the base of his thumb. What could have made such a wound, she wondered? Gently she touched her forefinger to the end of the scar and traced it back up to his elbow. She noticed a droplet of sweat on his chest and let her finger move to it; lifting it to her mouth she tasted it. Oh God, she thought, I can’t do this. But neither could she stop herself. She slipped the dressing-gown off and then reached up to her shoulder and slid the straps of her nighty off. The silky material collected in a pool by her feet. She lifted the duvet, slid into the bed beside him and gently laid her head on his chest. She could hear his heart beating and feel his breath as it trickled over her face. Sudden he moved and coughed gently, muttered something but then settled again but not before his arm came down, settling around her shoulders. Then he was fast asleep again. Now she could feel her own heart pounding.
She looked in at him just after nine in the morning; He was still asleep. He hadn’t moved when she got out of the bed an hour before and even now she hesitated to disturb him. Taking a sheet of paper from her bureau she wrote him a short message and took it through to the kitchen. She had prepared a cold breakfast of cereal, and propped the note up against the plate. She may even be back before he read the note.
“I wonder if he’s ever slept with a naked girl before and not known it?” she giggled.
The traffic going into Durban was crazy as always, but the scooter slipped between the stationary cars with ease. Some of the drivers hooted their irritation and she showed them a middle finger.
The bank manager would not be happy to see her after she had rebuffed his advances for the fourth time. But it was her uncle Albert that she went to see first. She did wonder about the man in her bed; He had not asked about the diamonds once.
“All of them?” Uncle Albert asked.
“Yes, Uncle Albert. I need to sell the rest of them as soon as possible.”
“They’ve arrived back in South Africa, haven’t they? Now they need money to hide from the police?”
“One of them has come home. The others were all killed.”
Albert demanded to know more and Tanya, who had become used to co
nfiding in her uncle, told him everything that she’s heard the night before.
When she had finished the tale he said, “It will take a week to ten days at least, Tanya. This will be the biggest package I’ve shipped to London.”
“I know, but I want to be able to give him the money as soon as I can. I know that he wants to give some of it to the families of his friends who didn’t make it back.”
“All right, bring me the rest of the stones this afternoon.” He looked at his niece and marvelled at her calm resilience. “Do you know how much cash is already waiting in the British bank account?”
She shook her head. “Quite a bit, I guess?”
“That is a bit of an understatement,” he laughed. “At the current exchange rate I’d say it’s over seven million Rand.”
He was in the shower when Tanya arrived back at the flat. The clothes that he had been wearing the day before were piled on the floor besides the washing machine. Tanya felt a sudden feeling of domestic joy, seeing them there. But that was silly of course. She dismissed the emotion but placed the clothes in the machine, added powder, and set it on a cycle.
The noise of the shower stopped and she heard the cubicle door slide open. She smiled coyly at the image of him standing there naked, drying himself. Then the light-heartedness that she was feeling vanished as she remembered the story he still had to finish telling her. She filled the kettle and set it to boil. She would have a pot of tea ready for when he came through to the kitchen, or perhaps he would be more comfortable talking in the lounge?
“We buried Steff on his own and marked the grave so that we could find it when we came back for him, even if was going to be months, or even years, and we wanted to be able to tell his parents where he was buried. The three Americans we buried out behind the barn, hoping that no-one would ever find them. The diamonds were scheduled to be exchanged the next day . . .”