‘I’m not playing,’ said Clay. Not with witnesses in the Chevy ready to testify that Cobra had acted in self-defence, had had no choice but use his weapon.
‘No. You’re not.’
Cobra moved so quickly Clay barely had time to raise his hands. There was no warning, no discernible lowering of the hips or tensioning in the shoulder. One moment Cobra was looking down the hill, and the next his booted right heel had whipped through a three-sixty arc and slammed hard into the side of Clay’s ribs.
Clay grunted with the impact, crumpled to the ground.
Cobra was standing above him, that same smile on his face. His handgun was nowhere to be seen. ‘That was for fucking with me, Straker,’ he said.
Clay was doubled over in pain. Cobra had hit him in his undamaged side, but the wrenching impact sent blades of pain screaming through his torso. He closed his eyes as the white shock exploded inside him, ripped through his consciousness so that for a long moment he was gone, unaware of his surroundings, of Cobra standing near him, of anything except the pain, those exquisitely evolved signals.
An arm threaded under his shoulder, thick and powerful, pulling him up, steadying him. And then a voice, far off, distorted: ‘Just behave, and this will be a lot easier for everyone. Come on.’ And him walking now with knee-jerking steps, groggy, his vision returning, vaguely aware now of the white Chevrolet pulling away, trundling down the street, everything coming through a rain-swept lens, the trees and the rich people’s houses and the clouds in the sky, everything liquid and uncertain.
Cobra was leading him down the hill, away from the road. Clay watched his own feet, the desert boots that had until recently belonged to Vivian’ husband, shuffling through the coarse grass.
‘Where are we going?’ Clay managed.
‘We have business to do, you and I,’ said Cobra, switching to English now for the first time.
Cobra’s car was in a lay-by on the other side of the park. He opened the passenger-side door, put his hand to the back of Clay’s head, pushed him down and in. The seat was too far forwards and Clay’s shins jammed up against the dash. Cobra walked around to driver’s side, opened the back door, threw in Clay’s pack, and then got in behind the wheel. He pulled out and unfolded a black cloth, about the size of a shopping bag.
‘Sorry to have to do this, Straker,’ he said, opening up one end of the bag and pulling it over Clay’s head.
Even the darkest night is blessed by stars. And up high, where the air is cold and pure and untroubled by the light of cities and the smoke of a million fires, it is as if darkness itself has been banished to some distant edge of the universe, and the stars fill every hole in the firmament. Nights in Ovamboland, when the new moon came and they were given a few hours to rest, he and Eben would lie on their backs and look up at the wonder. Eben would talk about relativity, about time and magnetism, about the vast improbability of life. He’d point to a star – always a different one – Rigel, there, so blue; Aldebaran, there, the red giant, do you see it? And he’d place Clay on that planet. Do you realise, he’d say, that if I saw you wave to me right now, right this instant, you’d have been dead for ten thousand years?
Then he’d go quiet for a long time and they would just lie there staring up into spinning infinity, and it was as if at any moment gravity would just let go and they would plunge into it, as if into a cold, midnight river. And lying there, close but not touching, so close that Clay could feel the heat coming from his friend’s body, it was as if they had shared the same womb, brothers now, that closeness that comes only when we finally understand and accept our own isolation.
Do you know what that means, bru? Do you understand?
Time isn’t an arrow. It’s not a flowing river. Space and time are like a block of ice. Every moment is frozen in place, forever: your first kill, your first kiss, swimming in the Cunene that day Wade gave us the afternoon off and we took turns on the bank with an R4 in case of crocodiles. And then he would smile that beautiful smile of his and say something like: ‘It’s the ultimate conscience, bru.’ And in a way that Clay could still not grasp, and was destined to never fully understand, he was standing on that planet, each fraction of a second of unending time there and so real as if nothing could ever take it away from him. And much later, with more time behind him than ahead and cold eternity beckoning, he would again consider the harsh physics of Eben’s philosophy and in it search for some kind of explanation for all he had done.
But now there was nothing. The darkness was absolute. It was hard to breathe. Fear poured into him, the terror of loneliness, of knowing that there was no one left to care.
The engine started, the transmission engaged. A snap and burn and then the sharp tang of tobacco as Cobra lit a cigarette. The rumble of backstreets, the car’s suspension groaning over the rough surface.
Clay considered options. Hands tied, blind, he had little chance of overpowering Cobra inside the car. There is always an opportunity, always something you can do, in any situation – that’s what Crowbar always told them. He would have to be patient, wait until they arrived wherever Cobra was taking him.
After a few minutes, Cobra slowed the car and brought it to a stop. He swung open his door, got out, walked around to Clay’s side and opened the door.
‘Get out.’
Cobra walked Clay a few metres across a hard surface, then stopped. Another car door opened. The sound it made was of wrenching metal, as if part of the car’s skin was being ripped away. A hand cupped the back of Clay’s head, pushed him into a seat. A door closed behind him, that same grating wrench. A powerful odour flooded the inside of Clay’s hood. A shudder boiled up in his diaphragm and quivered down through his guts to his sphincter. The smell was strangely familiar, like a forgotten nightmare – vaguely antiseptic, as if someone had tried to clean away something especially foul and had been only partially successful.
And then they were moving again, accelerating into second gear, the car lurching over a stretch of bad road, the shocks bottoming out as the wheels hit a succession of potholes. It was a different kind of vehicle, larger, it seemed, heavier, with a bigger engine. After a while the road smoothed out and the driver geared up into third and then fourth gear.
The sound of a lighter snapping open. The smell of burning tobacco cut through shit and disinfectant and rotten meat.
‘How did she contact you, Straker?’ Cobra said over the noise of the engine. ‘Was it during your first hospitalisation?’
Clay said nothing.
‘Are you a member of Torch Commando, Straker?
‘Jesus. No.’
‘Bullshit. What were you doing on that C-130?’
‘The question is what were you doing?’ said Clay. ‘Murdering bastard.’
He heard Cobra laugh under his breath, take a deep pull on his cigarette. By the change in the engine’s hum and the hiss of the tyres on the road, they’d now joined a major thoroughfare.
‘Clever of the doctor to fake your death like that,’ said Cobra.
The car decelerated and then came to a stop. Diesel fumes wafted through the car, the smells of the street coming through the open windows. Somewhere in the distance, the sound of children playing – a school? And then they were moving again, the street sounds drowned by the air buffeting through the open windows, the tyres on the road.
‘Too bad about your friend, though. Barstow, isn’t it?’
‘You bastards,’ hissed Clay. ‘We’re out there fighting and dying for our country. And you’re busy doing what? Running some kind of warped experiments? Getting rich?’
‘I’m too old for the righteous soldier bullshit, Straker.’
‘Fuck you.’ Clay strained at the ties around his wrists, wrenched and pulled against the sharp plastic.
‘You’ll just cut yourself,’ said Cobra.
‘Is it really going to matter?’
‘That’s up to you.’
‘You better hope I don’t get out of these things,’ Clay brea
thed.
A sharp turn, the acceleration pushing Clay into the car door, and then the vehicle slowing, out of the city now, or on the outskirts, the air cleaner, the smell of fields and green coming through the thick cloth of the hood.
‘You killed Wade, didn’t you? You and Botha.’
Cobra was quiet for a long time. Clay could hear him there next to him, working the pedals and the gears, lighting another cigarette, breathing in the smoke, exhaling long and deep, all this, too, locked away forever, to be viewed in ten thousand years from some distant star.
‘Not me.’
‘You’re BOSS, aren’t you?’
Cobra laughed. ‘Me? Hell no.’
‘Who the hell do you work for, then?’
‘Does it really matter?’
Clay could feel the rage growing inside him, the reactions firing, a dawning realisation of just how badly they’d all been duped. He felt as if he were going to be sick. ‘You, or Botha, or whoever you work for, you fucked up Eben’s operation, didn’t you?’
Just road noise for a long time. And then: ‘They shouldn’t have done that.’
‘So, it’s true.’
‘I’m sorry, Straker. I had nothing to do with it.’
‘Sorry?’ screamed Clay through the hood. ‘What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Fucking sorry?’
‘Take it easy.’
Clay whipped his head towards Cobra with as much force as he could muster, trying for contact with Cobra’s face. He met only empty air. Cobra was too fast, had moved back and away. Clay grunted as his side lit up. He collapsed back into his seat.
‘Keep that up and those stitches she put in you are going to open up.’
‘Fok jou.’
‘Your choice.’
And then the car slowing, the sound of gravel under the tyres, ruts in the road, the suspension groaning, the car lurching over potholes. The car stopped and Cobra turned off the engine.
It was suddenly very quiet.
Birdsong came on the breeze. The engine block ticked as it cooled.
Cobra lit another cigarette.
‘What the hell is going on?’ said Clay, his voice muffled.
‘Sit tight, Straker.’
And then the car door opening and closing, footsteps on the gravel, moving away, the background stench of the vehicle re-establishing itself. After a moment, the murmur of voices, the words indistinct across the distance: another man, his voice deeper than Cobra’s, and then, a woman’s voice, raised, scared.
Clay raised his hands, grabbed the hood and tried to pull it off. The thing wrenched under his neck. He searched the edge of the bag with paired hands. Some sort of drawstring knotted near his throat, soft, like a shoelace. Clay fumbled with the knot, sought an edge, a loop to exploit. He could hear the men talking, and now the woman again, tension in the voices, heavy in the crushed vowels.
And then, an opening. The knot unravelled. He yanked at the hood, pulled it from his head. The light was blinding. He squinted at the shapes beyond the windscreen. There were three of them, standing about twenty metres from the car. They were in a small clearing, surrounded by trees; a woodland of some sort. He fumbled for the door handle. The figures were walking back towards the car now, Cobra in the back, handgun drawn.
‘Get out, Straker.’
Clay pushed open the door, stepped to the ground, everything overexposed.
A white man with thin shoulders and a sparse beard strewn with grey stood behind Cobra. He wore a blue-and-red tracksuit, white training shoes, and a white headband over thinning hair. His face glistened with sweat. Beside him was the woman. She looked at Clay.
‘I think you two know each other,’ said Cobra.
Commissioner Barbour: Tell us, Mister Straker, about Torch Commando.
Witness: I really didn’t know much about it at the time. I was never part of it.
Commissioner Barbour: We understand that, son. But tell us what you, ah, what you know about it, for the record.
Witness: It was an organisation devoted to overthrowing the apartheid regime. It started, I think, in the military, in the 1950s; members of the armed forces who disagreed with the way the country was being run, with the subjugation of the blacks and the coloureds. They wanted a true democracy. It was an underground movement, a loose affiliation of independent cells. Whites. I’d heard of it, but had no idea it was still active.
Commissioner Ksole: And your Captain Wade, was he a member?
Witness: I think so. That would make sense.
Commissioner Lacy: And BOSS had him killed?
Witness: I can’t prove it, but yes, I think so.
Commissioner Lacy: Is that why your friend, Mister Barstow, dug up the notebook? Do you think he suspected a connection with Captain Wade’s death?
Witness: I don’t know, ma’am. He must have done it just before we left for Operation Protea. I can only guess that he thought it safer to keep the notebook with him than to leave it in camp, especially with Botha wandering around. Maybe he wanted to take a closer look at it, see what he could figure out. He was like that, Eben. Sucker for a book. He never got the chance to tell me.
Commissioner Barbour: And this organisation, Torch Commando, was the doctor, ah, the young lady, was she involved?
Witness: Yes, sir.
Commissioner Lacy: She was a very brave young woman.
Witness: Yes she was, ma’am.
Commissioner Lacy: So much has been lost.
Witness: Sorry, ma’am?
Commissioner Lacy: You must understand, young man, that this commission has already spent months hearing the stories of witnesses from across the country; stories of the hate and destruction and loss that has torn our country apart. So much has been lost.
Witness: Yes, ma’am. Much.
Commissioner Ksole: And on the other side, the Broederbond network. Were you aware, at that time, of the existence of this organisation?
Witness: No, sir. I’d never heard of it.
Commissioner Ksole: And later?
Witness: Yes, sir. I was … I was made aware.
Commissioner Barbour: Tell us what happened, son.
28
This Forgotten History
Some things are not as they seem.
Garbed in misdirection, cloaked in confusion, what lies beneath is hidden to us. But no camouflage is perfect, no ruse without flaw. Could you have detected those rips in the fabric sooner? And if you had, could you have seen through them? And then, much later, when the essence of the thing is stripped bare, naked and shivering before you, are you able to see it for what it is? For the real truth is that memories fade, and what may have seemed clear and self-evident at the time browns in the sun, erodes with the winds and rain of seasons, thins and grows frail as the body weakens and motives grow suspect.
Counterfactual: Sometimes things are exactly what they appear to be.
Thus does a decade of looping reconstructions and endless replays, conscious and subliminal, grow in a troubled mind. His. After all this time, he just wasn’t sure anymore.
At first, Vivian hadn’t moved. She just stood there with her mouth open in that little ‘o’ of hers, staring at Clay, at the ties around his wrists, and then past him to the vehicle he’d arrived in. Then she focused on Cobra and tightened her skilled fingers into delicate little fists.
‘Where is Joseph?’ she shouted, anger and fear sending visible tremors through her body.
‘Waiting for us at the RV,’ said Cobra.
Clay could see her swallow hard, choking on the confusion. ‘That wasn’t the plan,’ she managed.
‘Bullshit,’ said Clay, looking at Vivian. ‘He’s BOSS.’
‘No,’ said Cobra. ‘Please, listen to me.’
Clay took a step towards Cobra, lowered his hips, brought his wrists up over his right shoulder, his elbows together in front of his jaw, and prepared to charge.
‘Don’t Straker,’ said Cobra, whipping out a karambit. The knife’s ugly curved blade gle
amed in the sun slanting low through the trees.
Clay froze. Vivian stood where she was, staring at Cobra.
‘I know what you’re planning to do,’ said Cobra.
‘You don’t know anything,’ said Clay.
The guy in the tracksuit started backing away.
‘Stay where you are,’ barked Cobra.
‘Whatever is going on here, I’ve got nothing to do with it,’ the man in the tracksuit blurted, waving his hands in front of his chest. ‘I’m just out jogging, that’s all.’ He opened his arms as if to say, ‘look at me’.
‘Shut up,’ said Cobra. ‘I know exactly who you are.’
‘How did you get that?’ said Vivian, pointing past Clay, at the vehicle.
‘Joseph,’ said Cobra. ‘He told me to take it.’
Clay looked over his shoulder. The vehicle he’d come here in. It was an ambulance.
‘That’s how we’re going to get in,’ said Cobra. ‘All of us.’
Silence. The possible meanings of this whirring in three brains.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said the guy in the tracksuit. ‘I’m leaving.’
‘Alright,’ said Cobra. ‘You go ahead and finish your run, bru,’ said Cobra. ‘Go back to your wife and kids. Harriet and David and June, isn’t it?’
The guy in the tracksuit looked like someone had just severed his carotid artery. He staggered, blood draining from his face.
‘Give us what you came here to give us,’ said Cobra. ‘Then you can go.’
With a quick glance at Vivian, the guy unzipped his tracksuit top, reached inside and pulled out some kind of laminated card on a blue lanyard and a red plastic pass.
‘Give them to the doctor,’ said Cobra.
The guy complied, stepped back a few paces, stood hunched and uncertain.
Cobra waved his hand. ‘Go,’ he said.
‘You’re going to shoot me,’ said the guy. ‘Oh, God.’
Cobra looked bored now, that same look Clay had seen outside the bunker that day in Angola with the mortars raining down and the Hercules powering up.
‘If I’d wanted to shoot you, you’d be dead already,’ said Cobra. ‘Now piss off.’
Reconciliation for the Dead Page 24