Reconciliation for the Dead

by Paul E. Hardisty

  The guy turned and started walking towards the trees. After a few steps he started to run. In a few seconds he vanished into the woods.

  ‘Dof,’ said Cobra. He was smiling. Smiling. He looked at Vivian. ‘Now you have what you wanted. A way in.’

  Vivian stood mute, uncomprehending.

  ‘Torch Commando,’ said Cobra.

  ‘Don’t listen to him, Vivian,’ said Clay. ‘He works with Botha, with Doctor Death. He was there in Angola when they were injecting those blacks. It was his men who were throwing them into the ocean. He’s got nothing on you. Don’t say anything.’

  Cobra hung his head. ‘Look, I’m trying to help you. Can’t you see that?’

  Clay raised his wrists.

  ‘Would you have come with me otherwise?’ Cobra took a step towards Clay, stopped striking distance away, brandishing the karambit.

  Clay stood his ground.

  ‘Those BOSS types in the Chevy,’ said Cobra, ‘it was for them, Straker. All of it. I had to make it look good.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ said Vivian, recoiling now.

  It was then that Cobra struck. The movement was so fast that Clay barely registered it. One second he was standing there, wrists bound, watching Vivian trying to process what she was seeing and hearing, and the next he was free, the tie cut clean. Three small drops of blood bloomed on the outside of his left wrist where the karambit’s tip had grazed the skin.

  Cobra grinned, rubbed his jaw with his free hand. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’ve been working inside COAST for six months now. I’m Torch, like you. Joseph was the overlap in my cell. When you started hatching this plan to get into Roodeplaat, he came to me. We’ve been working this thing for too long for you to come in and screw it up.’

  Clay shook his head, unable to reconcile this with what he’d seen. ‘No,’ it can’t be true.’

  ‘Why do you think I let you go, that day in the back of the Herc, Straker? You and Barstow. I didn’t have to. Could’ve killed you right there. Too easy.’ Cobra sheathed his knife. ‘And who do you think tipped off Wade about the RV with UNITA that night in the first place? Someone had to have. There was no way you could have found us otherwise.’ Cobra paused, staring into Clay’s eyes. ‘That’s right. It was me.’

  ‘It could have been anyone,’ said Clay, still reeling from all he was hearing. ‘Zulaika. It could have been her.’

  ‘No way, Straker. You’re reaching. How could she have known?’

  Clay shook his head.

  ‘And before that, out in Angola, when that psycho Mbdele wanted to kill you; who stopped him? I’ve been looking out for you, Straker. You’re our star witness, bru. When this all comes to trial, one day, when all this bullshit is over, we’re going to need your testimony.’

  ‘No,’ said Vivian. ‘Joseph would have told me.’

  Cobra took a step towards Vivian, leaned in close so that his face was inches from hers. Then he said something that Clay could not make out.

  Vivian’s reaction was immediate. Her eyes opened wide, as if in wonder at hearing for the first time some great and secret truth, and then, as quickly, her face crumpled and tears were pouring down over her turgid lips, falling from her chin and jaw. She hid her face in her hands and sobbed.

  Cobra pulled out his handgun and checked the action. ‘We’re running out of time,’ he said. ‘Lab staff go home at five. That leaves only night guards front and back, and a night clerk. But they only accept deliveries until 6 pm. We’ve got less than twenty minutes.’

  ‘Vivian?’ said Clay.

  She looked up at him through tear-strewn eyes. Then she nodded.

  Cobra was already walking towards the ambulance. He opened the driver’s-side door, pulled out a set of white coveralls and threaded them over his clothes. From one of the pockets he produced a sealed badge and clipped it to his front pocket.

  Clay took Vivian by the hand. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, Clay. He’s telling the truth.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘But you can’t come with us. There is only one badge. You should go. Try for the border.’

  ‘I’m not letting you go alone, Vivian. Not with him.’

  Cobra was in the driver’s seat now, tapping the face of his wristwatch.

  Vivian put the badge around her neck. ‘Don’t worry about me, Clay. Please, go. Get to safety.’ She started towards the ambulance.

  Later, much later, in any one of half a million realisations, the results were different. Perhaps if he’d had more time to think about it, if he’d picked up on some of the hundreds of clues, if he’d simply been more aware, things might have turned out differently. But he didn’t, and with each decision, each action, icy reality was frozen into place forever. He did get into the back of the ambulance. He did ignore Vivian’s pleas to go. Cobra’s suggestion that he lie on one of the stretchers and feign incapacitation had seemed a good one, so he did it. And so, by the time the ambulance pulled up to the back gate of the Roodeplaat Research Laboratories on the outskirts of Pretoria just before six o’clock in the evening in September of 1981, at the height of apartheid, with the war on the border raging, the dead and the dying were already lining up to take their places in this forgotten history.

  29

  Structure and Function

  Clay lay on a stretcher in the back of the ambulance, feeling the vehicle rumble over the gravel. The same foul odour filled his nostrils, worked its way into his mouth and throat. It seemed to seep from the vehicle’s ridged metal floor and the canvas weave of the stretchers, that bitter cut of biocide barely masking the intestine stench of shit and blood and something else he thought he knew but didn’t acknowledge.

  Vivian and Cobra were up front. Vivian had donned a white lab coat and pulled her hair back into a work pony tail. He could hear them talking, muffled voices over the groan of the engine and the complaints of the suspension. The tone was businesslike, determined. They had decided they were working together, that was clear.

  But Clay couldn’t make the shift. Cobra, a member of Torch Commando? Undercover all this time, infiltrating Operation COAST, getting close to Botha and O Medico de Morte? It seemed ludicrous, more than far-fetched. And yet it was clear to him now that this thing was widespread, and big. Captain Wade – his own CO – had surely been part of it. Brigade, too, most likely. Who else? There was no way to tell. It could be anyone. So why not Cobra? Everything he’d said was true. At each previous encounter, he’d been instrumental in helping Clay and Eben escape or continue unscathed. And he’d convinced Vivian. Whatever he’d said to her back in the woods had instantly removed any doubt from her mind.

  The ride smoothed out, sealed road under them now, back in the platteland. Through the rear windows, Clay could see the lights of Pretoria, the taller buildings of the central district standing above the flatland like beacons in the darkness.

  The ambulance slowed.

  ‘Here we go,’ came Cobra’s voice from the front. ‘Remember, Straker, you’re unconscious, drugged up. Keep quiet.’

  You’d know all about it.

  ‘Straker?’

  ‘Ja, good,’ said Clay.

  The ambulance rolled to a stop. A voice from outside, the gate guard. And then Vivian replying, her voice professional, even – something about an unexpected patient, the need to conduct immediate tests. Unscheduled. They would be about an hour. And then quiet, Cobra lighting a smoke, the engine idling, rocking Clay in his cradle.

  They waited a long time. Perhaps the guards were telephoning someone for confirmation. Checking the register, Vivian’s pass, the vehicle’s registration number.

  And then Cobra’s voice, clipped and urgent: ‘Straker, they’re coming.’

  Clay closed his eyes, lay still.

  The rear doors opened with a crash. Cold, evening air flooded the compartment. A light flashing over him, around him. Voices. And then the beam steady on his face so the insides of his eyes lit up red and swimming and he could feel his lids twitching in the glare. He
didn’t breathe. He lay still and quiet and empty like all those dead men he’d looked down upon in this latest and perhaps last year of his life. He imagined fatalism. The kind of acceptance that so frequently overcame Eben, that seemed to punctuate his normal rebel insanity. Everything frozen forever, just like he’d said, there for eternity. What the hell.

  And then the light was gone and the doors were closed again and the smell re-established itself and the ambulance was moving. Clay opened his eyes. Through the rear windows he could see the arc-lit razor wire coiling the lip of the wall, a candy-striped barrier descending, and then the corner of a building as the ambulance veered left and slowed. A few seconds later they stopped again and the engine died. The front doors opened and closed and then the rear doors opened again and someone was clambering inside. Clay felt himself being lifted, let his head slump to the side with the movement, playing his role. And then he was being carried. The evening air flowed clean over his face and the smells were altogether familiar: the sweetness of far off veldtgrass and the dendritic majesty of the city’s two million jacarandas. New doors opened, closed behind him, and then it was as if a blanket had been thrown over him, a close, smothering warmth and with it a new and more powerful set of odours: hospital, yes – he knew that – but something else, too; oddly agricultural: silage and farm machinery and the stench of shit. And then the sound of footsteps echoing along some sort of corridor, peeling from linoleum flooring, another set of doors creaking on dry hinges. More voices – close by. A man with a squeaky voice saying something Clay could not distinguish. Another man saying: ‘Sign here.’ The distinctive scribble of pen on paper. A chair scraping over the floor. Now Vivian speaking, professional, calm, the sound of her voice like a rescue. ‘One hour,’ the squeaky voice said. ‘Thank you.’ Vivian again. And then, quiet. A door closing.

  ‘Okay, Straker, up.’ Cobra, hand on Clay’s shoulder.

  Clay opened his eyes. They were in some kind of examination room: stainless-steel work benches, seasick-green walls, glass cabinets. He stood

  ‘One hour,’ said Cobra. ‘No more.’

  Vivian nodded.

  ‘What are we looking for?’ said Clay.

  ‘Anything,’ said Vivian. ‘Anything that will help us understand what they are doing in here.’

  Cobra looked around the room. ‘The longer we stay, the higher the chances of something going wrong. They have cameras outside the building and covering the entire perimeter, but nothing inside.’

  ‘That tells us something,’ said Clay.

  ‘No records,’ said Vivian.

  Cobra glanced at him, then her. ‘The minimum, Doctor. Get what you need, no more.’

  ‘Well there’s nothing in here,’ she said with a final glance around the room. ‘Let’s go.’ She walked to the door, pulled it open a few centimetres and peered out.

  Nodding to them she started down a dimly lit corridor. Clay followed, aware of Cobra behind him, wary. She slowed outside the first door they came to, scanned the wall plaque, kept going. They passed a second door without looking inside. They were halfway down the corridor when Vivian stopped. She turned and faced them. ‘In here,’ she whispered. A small plaque to the right of the doorframe said: 2A Sequencing.

  She tried the handle. ‘It’s locked.’

  Cobra bid her move aside, reached into the pocket of his coveralls and pulled out what looked like a small knife. He bent to the handle, inserted the blade into the lock. In a few seconds he had the door open. They stepped inside, closing the door behind them. Cobra found the light switch. Fluorescent tubes clicked overhead, strobed, then steadied, harsh and clinical.

  It was some kind of laboratory. Various instruments ranked along opposing sets of polished, stainless-steel benches. A high-powered microscope, precision scales, glassware, pipettes and rows of test tubes in plastic racks. A dormant computer screen, a keyboard: HP – American. But what attracted Vivian’s attention almost immediately was none of these. It was a strange-looking thing – a box about the size of a packing crate, festooned with wires and tubes which entered the casing at different points. She made straight for it. Clay followed.

  The device seemed to be hooked up to a clear-plastic cylinder pump about the size of a car engine’s piston. Beneath it was a long row of more than a dozen small, steel doors, each with a vertical handle, what appeared to be a temperature gauge, and a timer. They looked almost like small household ovens. Vivian pulled out her camera, adjusted the lens and clicked off a few photos.

  ‘What is it?’ said Clay, leaning close.

  ‘A mass spectrometer,’ she said, without dropping the camera from her face. ‘And this is an HPLC – a liquid chromatograph. Down here, ovens for hydrolysis.’

  ‘What are they for?’

  ‘Peptide sequencing would be my guess. This equipment is very expensive, hard to come by. It’s all from America.’ She let the camera rest on its strap around her neck. ‘It’s for isolating proteins so you can study their structure and function. It allows you to understand cellular processes, for instance, and devise ways to manipulate specific metabolic pathways.’ She paused, glancing around the room, then opened a drawer under the lab bench, flipped through a stack of papers and withdrew a spiral-bound report. ‘Look at this,’ she said, handing it to Clay.

  It was about the thickness of a paperback. The cover was emblazoned with the now familiar SAMS logo, and Operation COAST in thick black letters. Below, a secondary heading: Swarts Bom: Voorlopige Verslag. Clay flipped it open, scanned the first page, the next, the one after that. Three words stood out amongst the formal Afrikaans and the scattered technical English, words that surprised him: eiers, sperm, and embrios.

  Vivian glanced at him. She’d seen them, too.

  ‘Swarts bom,’ said Clay. ‘Black bomb?’

  Vivian shrugged her shoulders. ‘It’s important,’ she said. ‘Take it.’

  Clay closed the cover and made to stash the report inside his jacket.

  ‘No,’ said Cobra. ‘Don’t take anything. We don’t want to leave any evidence that this was anything other than a routine delivery.’

  ‘You heard her,’ said Clay. ‘This is important.’

  ‘Nothing leaves here,’ said Cobra.

  ‘Not even us?’ said Clay.

  Cobra grinned, pointed at the open drawer. ‘Put it back, Straker.’

  Clay looked at Vivian. She took the report, placed it on the desk and photographed the cover and the first twenty or so pages, then replaced it in the drawer. Then she opened another drawer, flipped through the documents, took more photos.

  ‘Could this equipment be used for developing drugs?’ whispered Clay.

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘What kinds?’

  ‘Any.’

  ‘13B?’

  ‘Undoubtedly.’

  Clay’s insides tumbled. He took a couple of shallow breaths and followed Vivian towards the door. Cobra was already out in the corridor, waiting.

  Clay grabbed Vivian’s elbow, pulled her close. ‘What did he say to you, Vivian, back in the clearing?’

  She stared at him wide eyed, but did not answer.

  ‘What did he tell you that made you change your mind?’

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We don’t have much time.’ She had just reached for the light switch when Clay glimpsed something at the edge of his vision. It was the colour that caught his attention. Three racks of identical sealed tubes set side by side on the bench, ten or more tubes in each rack. Each tube contained the same red liquid. Each rack was labelled, thick black marker pen on white card: Blanke, Swaart, and finally, Primaat.

  Clay rocked back, realisation pulsing through him like a cold dose of adrenaline. He grabbed Vivian’s arm, and pointed to the bench. She stood there for what seemed like a long time, staring down at the tubes and the white cards. And then she turned off the light.

  ‘Holy Mother of Jesus,’ she whispered under her breath.

  It was the stench that led them onwa
rds.

  Vivian covered her face with the sleeve of her lab coat, as she pushed open a set of double doors into another corridor. This one was longer, set at right angles to the first, the spine of a second wing to the complex. At the far end of the corridor a large set of doors was painted in thick yellow-and-black chevrons. Biohazard signs flanked the doorway on both sides. With each step they took, the smell grew more powerful.

  Clay tried to breathe through his mouth. The stench lodged in the back of his throat, seemed to coat his tongue. He knew this taste, this bitter corruption, knew it intimately, wished it was not so. It was the smell of fear, thick and heavy, like staring into the worst nightmare, the one that’s real. And suddenly the walls of the corridor were closing in on him, the ceiling falling, the floor under his feet turning to cloying mud. Blood and shit swirled around his feet. Acids and solvents welled from pores in the walls, dripped from hairs that seemed to have sprouted from every surface, living follicles that swayed like the tentacles of anemone in the counter-currents of some deep-sea vent. His eyes streamed. He gasped for air, retched back the foul vapours. His head was spinning. His heart hammered inside his chest, a full-out sprint. He staggered a few steps, aware of Vivian moving away, Cobra following her, both mere blurs. He stopped, fell to his knees. What was happening to him? He was a combat veteran, for God’s sake. This was nothing. He’d been through so much worse. Why here, why now?

  He closed his eyes, felt himself moving towards a blurred edge, fought against the tide. He gasped in the toxic air, gagged, put a hand on the floor. And then a voice, a hand under his shoulder, coaxing him up.

  ‘Clay, what’s wrong?’ Vivian’s voice hollow, submerged.

  ‘I … I don’t know,’ he gasped.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, pulling him to his feet. ‘We don’t have much time.’

  Clay staggered forward, unsteady. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t know…’

  She took his face in her hands and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Shush,’ she said. ‘After what you’ve been through, I’m amazed you’re even walking.’ And then she smiled at him. ‘Come on. Almost there.’