by Steve Reeder
“I do kind of wonder what they are playing at,” he told Bomber, “if I was in command of that bunch I’d be pushing on as hard as possible. They must know that the border isn’t far.”
“Maybe they are smarter than you think.”
“In what way?”
“They may know that we have stopped and are sending troops on foot to out-flank us.”
“You really know how to cheer a man up, Bomber, you know that?”
Bomber grinned and slapped Reece on the shoulder. “Keep those eyes peeled, buddy. I’d hate to wake up to find an AK47 poking me in the ribs.”
As Bomber arrived back at the Toyota, Cole was opening the two brief-cases. Out of one of them he took the envelope containing the US treasury bonds. He looked up at Bomber and motioned him closer. “Franz and I think it would be a good idea if we split the bonds between the two cases and make sure that if any of us are split from the others for any reason that the two cases are split two; Just in case something happens.” He waited for Bomber to comment and when he didn’t Cole continued. “Having come this far we don’t want to risk losing both cases if something does happen.”
“Fine by me,” Bomber said.
Cole tipped the bonds out of the envelope and counted them before returning half to the envelope and depositing the other half in the second brief case. He handed Bomber the envelope, “that is half of them, but you can count them to make sure?”
“No, I trust your mathematical skills.”
After a moment’s consideration Bomber sealed the envelope and addressed it to Tanya. If something did happen and there was the slightest chance that it did get delivered then he knew he could trust her to look after them, although he admitted to himself that the situation seemed unlikely to arise.
The night was warm and for a while, bright, as the moon made its arc across the sky. Nothing moved and only the cicadas sounded. Charlie Cole took over the watch from Franz two hours before dawn. It had been a quiet night with no sign of the Angolans. As the sun did eventually begin to show signs of breaking the horizon, Cole jogged back into camp and woke the others. They would all stand-to as the army had trained them to. They knew that the enemy’s most likely time to attack was always at first light or just before.
The four of them watched the sun beak the horizon and slowly light the country-side. Two hyenas approached the camp but backed off at the smell of man, and an owl settled into a near-by tree for his daily nap, totally ignoring the watchful men below it. There was no sign of the Angolans.
“OK, let’s go,” Cole finally commanded. “Today is the day, guys. Fifty k’s and we are home free and stinking rich!”
“But it was not so simple,” Charlie told her. “We were about half way to the Zambia border, not that there is a real border-line or anything, just some markings . . . when we ran into trouble.”
“What happened?” Tanya asked breathlessly. He was so close to telling her what had happened to Bomber; Franz and Sean too of course.
“We came across a wrecked bull-dozer in the middle of the road. It was missing one track, or most of it, from an anti-vehicle mine. It must have been a pretty big mine too. Rusty as hell, it was, the bull-dozer I mean, and it must have been there for years. Anyway, there was some space to go around it but there were rocks and things in the road and on the far side too that would have been difficult to drive over. I don’t suppose anyone had driven any kind of vehicle further than this for years. Bomber was driving; Sean was sleeping, or pretending to sleep, on the back when we were forced to stop. I got out and had a look. The ground along-side the road was almost unpassable for a bakkie and it was obvious that we were going to have to clear a path for several hundred metres, so Franz and I walked up the road some distance, and Sean started clearing the rocks just ahead of the Toyota – alongside the bull-dozer. I took one of the briefcases with me as we had agreed to do . . .”
Cole set the case down a hundred metres from the stationary bakkie and started rolling the bigger rock off the track. Franz was doing the same twenty metres behind him. They worked as quickly as they could, worried that the Angolans would catch up, because the chances of escaping another battle seemed remote. Franz finally called out, saying it looked good. Reece had already returned to the back of the Toyota Bakkie and Franz returned to the passenger side. Cole turned to retrieve the briefcase with the diamonds, deciding to wait for the others to come to him. He bent over to pick up the case when the mine exploded, the shock-wave knocking him flat.
It was several minutes, and seemed longer, before Cole righted himself, coughing and brushing the dust from his clothes and out of his eyes. Sixty metres away the Toyota was a mangled wreck. Cole stared at it, unwilling to believe that they had come this close and now, afraid to move, he watched the wreck, but there was no movement. There was no-one left but him.
Reluctantly, hesitantly, he began to walk towards the smoking ruin.
“It must have been the bang – my ears were ringing – and I never heard the Angolan truck until it was almost there, behind the Toyota – or what was left of it. I just dived into the grass on the side of the track . . . they didn’t see me. I was perhaps fifty metres away.” He stopped and picked up the glass of water with shaking hands. “Two of the soldiers walked up to the Toyota and looked around, they were laughing and joking, and then the younger of them finally shrugged and called the rest of the troops to look around. There was no life from the bakkie, so I left before they found out that I wasn’t in there with the others.”
Tanya came around the table and wrapped herself around him. They both sobbed uncontrollably for several minutes. Finally, Tanya pulled away and brushed the hair from her eyes.
“Charlie,” she whispered, “I don’t want to hear any more now. Please just hold me. Make love to me now!”
“Yes, we can talk about it more some other day. We will have all the time in the world. I won’t ever leave you, Tanya.”
She pushed closer to him and he had his answer. There would be all the time in the world.
Twenty Eight
May 1986. Livingston, Zambia.
Leonard Ngosa was mildly amused and annoyed at the same time. As the governor of Livingstone Prison which was outside Zambia’s favourite city, he was responsible for every one of the prisoners serving time in the institution. He had worked hard to improve conditions, but they were still bad by international standards, and also to reduce the violence and illness that sometimes rampaged through the inmates. Generally speaking he did not particularly like or care for individual prisoners but every now and again one came along who interested and intrigued him. The white man, the only white he had seen in the prison during his time there, was an enigma to him. After three years he had not found out the man’s name. No-one knew it, and from the time the prisoner had arrived at the prison directly from the courts he had been know either by his prison number – three two three – or by the nickname, Tarzan. The name Tarzan was a corruption of three-two-three to tree-to-tree and so on until everyone called him Tarzan, even the guards.
Ngosa smile ruefully as he studied the man’s file. It was a surprisingly slim document. During three years locked up in the prison most men would have been involved in several fights, probably picked up several diseases including at least one sexually-transmitted disease and been locked a punishment cell more than once. Tarzan, however, was universally liked by all the inmates and the guards as well. It was unheard of! Not one visit to the sick-bay or punishment cell. According to the file Tarzan had befriended the leaders of both the main gangs in the prison, which was a feat in itself, and had started a teaching program to teach fellow prisoners to better their reading and writing skills. According to Ngosa’s eldest teenage daughter, Tarzan was dreamily good looking too.
The intercom buzzed gentle on his desk. He sighed and turned from the window over-looking the prison yard and tossed the file onto the desk.
“Yes, Tandy?” he asked.
“Sir, the prisoner is here f
or you.”
He pressed the button again. “Please send him in, Tandy.”
Moments later the door from the outer office opened and one of the guards showed Tarzan into the office. The white man was dressed in civilian clothing that had been in storage for three years but still seemed to fit him well enough.
“Please take a seat,” Ngosa said and indicated one of the two seats facing his desk. If the prisoner had still been in prison clothes he would have been told to stand and not talk unless told to.
“So, Tarzan . . . prisoner three two three, it seems that your time with us is over.”
The white man smiled and nodded, “And not a moment too soon, Sir.”
“They have given you all of your possessions?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Good. The money that you have been given will not last you long and usually I suggest somewhere for the released prisoners to go and some possible jobs that they might get, but I am thinking that you will not need this, hmm?”
“But I thank you for the thought, Governor.”
Ngosa nodded vaguely before opening the file before him. “I must just sign this release form and then you can go. There is a bus that comes past every day at two pm, so you have forty minutes. You know this of course, all the prisoners know that.” He hesitated again before he scrawled his signature across the bottom of the document. “Before I give this to you will you do me one favour?”
“If I can, Mr Ngosa,” Tarzan replied, deliberately not using either ‘sir’ or ‘governor’ anymore.
“Tell me why you have refused to tell anyone your name. You know that the courts might have given you a shorter sentence if you had been more compliant, don’t you?”
Tarzan smiled but said nothing. Ngosa stared at him for fully a minute before he shrugged, and slid the release form across the desk. “I usually tell the men that I release that I don’t want to see them back here again, but with you that will also not be occurring, will it?”
“No, sir, it will not.”
“He is so very handsome, isn’t he?’ Tandy asked as she watched the white man walk down the fenced aisle towards the main gate.
“Even with the scar?” Ngosa asked.
“When he first came here, sir, the scar was red and ugly, but now it makes him look very dashing and handsome.”
The prison chief shook his head at the reaction the white man got from women. Then his thoughts turned to the other young white man, who had been in the Livingstone hospital for the past three years. There had to be a connection, he thought.
Tarzan shook the hands of both the gate-keepers and strolled out onto the road to wait for the bus. The sun felt good on his face. Somehow it felt warmer and more welcoming now that he was outside the walls of the prison. Freedom! He had been dreaming of this moment for over three years now, yet dreading the moment that someone found out who he was and how he had come to be in a Zambian prison. The moment had never come, but now there was another moment to be faced; a life-changing moment that would tell whether he had just wasted three years of his life or not.
“We all thought that he was going to die. In fact I can’t understand how he was still alive when he was admitted,” the doctor admitted to Tarzan.
They stood at the bedside in a ward on the top floor of the old colonial hospital. There were no other patients on the floor, and only a revolving staff of nurses to care for the comatose patient.
“How long has he been in a coma?”
“For the first six weeks he was in ICU and every day I thought would be his last, but he is a fighter this friend of yours. After three months I moved him here. There is nothing that is physically wrong with him anymore.”
“Except that he won’t wake up.”
“Yes, but his physical injuries have all healed, that is what I am telling you. But who knows why a man goes into a coma. Perhaps the injuries he suffered were too much for his mind, or. . .” he shrugged, not sure what to tell this man who had come after three years to find out about the unnamed patient.
Tarzan looked down at the man in the bed. He certainly looked peaceful enough. “Has there been any sign that he will come out of it any time soon?”
The doctor thought that there had been some good signs; he also thought that it would be nice if this young man took his patient away, preferably to South Africa where the hospitals would be able to help with more sophisticated treatment. “The staff here have treated him every day with massages and physiotherapy, but I think that he needs a friend to sit with him and talk to him. Maybe that can be you?”
“OK, I’ll do that,” the man called Tarzan replied.
Twenty Nine
April. Livingston
Three weeks later a voice startled Tarzan; a voice he had not heard for three long years.
“Hello, Sean.”
The words, barely a whisper, but made Reece jump; He had been sitting by the bedside for four hours a day for what seemed months. He had been talking about girls, beaches, surfing, night clubs and anything else that he could think of.
“Hello, Bomber. I’ve been waiting for you,” he replied with a grin.
Bomber Harris smiled weakly and drifted off to sleep again. Reece thought about telling the duty sister but then decided not to. Not just yet. He wanted to have a longer talk with Bomber before the nursing staff and the doctor did. So far no-one in Zambia knew who either of them was and Sean Reece wanted that to remain the status quo for the time being.
The days passed rapidly until finally the doctor released the still-unnamed patient and urged him to return to whatever country he had come from. One of the nurses wheeled Bomber to the front entrance in a wheel-chair and watched him climb into a twenty-year old Toyota driven by his handsome white friend. She was happy to see him go, glad that he had survived and woken up after all this time.
“What now, Sean?” Bomber asked.
“You got somewhere to go in a hurry?” Reece asked with a cheeky grin.
“Yes; home. I let you talk me out of phoning my mom and dad until I got out of the hospital, but I need to talk to them; and to Tanya too.”
“Soon, Bomber, soon.”
“Sean, it’s not fair on them, or Tanya. They must think that I’m dead, that we’re both dead. Three years and four months is a long time.”
“I know, old buddy, but there is one thing that we need to do before we go home. I have a small house, not more than a one-room hut really, on a small-holding outside town. I’m taking you there and then I’m going away for a couple of days.”
“Where? And what the hell do I do while you’re larking about? I’m betting there’s a woman involved, right?”
“Not this time,” Reece said with a rueful smile. “Actually, I was hoping that you’d be fit enough to come with me, but . . . well there is a bit of a walk involved and I don’t think you’d make it yet.”
Bomber sat thoughtfully while Reece negotiated his way down several pot-holed streets until finally they hit the main road heading towards the Victoria Falls. Ten minutes later Reece turned off the road and onto a dirt farm road.
“You hid some of the diamonds, didn’t you,” Bomber suddenly asked. “You managed to get some of them away?”
“Not some of them, Bomber, all of them.”
“Jeez! You’re serious? You have the briefcase full of diamonds?”
“Yeah. Well, I had all of them, but we gave half to Charlie Cole to keep, just in case one of us didn’t make it.”
Bomber was stunned. “Cole is still alive?” he asked. “Where is he?”
“Do you remember much about that day that you got us blown-up?” Reece asked cautiously, not sure how his friend would react to the memories of that day.
“Not much, I’m afraid. I remember you, me and Cole in the Landcruiser not far from the Zambian border. I remember one of the other guys in the back, but more than that . . .” Bomber stopped talking as the events of that day came back to him. “I thought that they were all dead.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was a hell of a blast. Charlie was moving rocks from the road, maybe fifty to sixty metres, when you hit the mine - ”
“I was driving? I don’t remember that.”
“Yeah, you were driving. You had just taken over from me,” Reece said. “Anyway, I was lying almost under the Landcruiser after the explosion – no idea how that happened – and I could see Charlie. He was running back towards us and suddenly he stopped and dived into to bush and that was the last thing I saw of him.”
“He just left us behind?” Bomber was incredulous.
“Well in his defence there was a squad of Angolan soldiers coming up the track just behind us in one of those Russian trucks, and to be honest, when I looked at the wreck of the Toyota after we got out I couldn’t make out how either of us is still alive either.”
“OK so now I’m confused. Why are we not both rotting in an Angolan prison?”
“Two of the officers came and had a look at the wreck and then got back in the truck and buggered off again. I guess they hadn’t been told about the diamonds. Maybe they thought that we were toast too?” Reece pulled up outside a derelict-looking farmhouse. “I’ll be back in a second; I just need to give the farmer a week’s rent on the no-star accommodation.”
“I must be the only multi-millionaire living in such a shit-hole,” Bomber muttered as he swatted away another buzzing insect. Sean Reece had departed that morning, leaving Bomber with food, instant coffee and three dog-eared paper-backs to read. It was over three years since he had seen his parents or girlfriend and the aspect that was beginning to terrify him was that he could not recall all the details of Tanya’s face. Was this something to do with the coma? Did she still think of him? What if she had a new boyfriend, or got married? Maybe she had a family already! He cursed and threw the book he’d been trying to read across the room; he had read a copy of the same book twice in Ruacana anyway. It was going to be a long two days. Finally he levered himself out of the chair and set himself a target of walking the half kilometre to the farm gate and back.