by Deon Meyer
Pa didn’t scream and shout that night. It wasn’t in his nature. When she had told him everything, he calmly and reasonably told her what he thought of it. And then told her that his integrity demanded that he not remain silent. His conscience prescribed that the next day he go to the media with this information.
This too Ma expected and understood. She said nobody would believe him. And he would be killed. There were Gaia One people who were specially trained and stood ready for that possibility, who would kill him. And her. And me. She had had to agree to that before she could receive the antivirus.
Pa and Ma were watched. All three of us would die, before the war against the Plague even began.
Pa agreed to do nothing, because Ma and I were his first priority.
Ma had expected that and understood.
But he gave her a sleeping pill, and he took me and the Subaru Forester in the night, and we disappeared. Until after the virus was released. She phoned him, but Pa’s phone was off.
She hadn’t expected that, and she did not understand.
She asked me where we went.
To the caves in the Vredefort Dome, I replied. Pa tried to phone her during that time – why hadn’t she answered?
She said she never heard from my father again. He must have been pretending to call. She said she thought she knew why he did it. It was his way of distancing himself from the annihilation, and from her deceit. It was his way of giving his theories a chance, and to be part of that himself, to demonstrate that mankind’s ingenuity can overcome even the Fever.
That was when I thought back to my father’s speech that night after Pastor Nkosi Sebego founded his Mighty Warrior Party and called an election.
Aren’t you also amazed by what we’re capable of? Look at our journey, Homo sapiens’ journey, look at how incredibly far we’ve come, from savannah prey to a robot on Mars and the splitting of the atom and the decoding of DNA. And democracy, reason and rationalism. Science above superstition, facts above myth . . .
The Fever, it’s horrible, the billions who died in the Fever, I know, it’s terrible, but I wonder if the greater harm wasn’t the interruption of what we were on the road to accomplishing.
I realised he wasn’t just talking to the remainder of the Committee that night, but to my mother. It was his plea to her, his counter-argument against the Gaia One solution.
Yearning for my father was like a fire in my chest. I understood it all. I understood why he couldn’t praise me when I shot the KTM from their motorcycles. He was terrified that I was so much my mother’s child.
And I was, to a great degree.
My mother said she had no right to be angry with Pa because he left that night. After all her secrets and plotting. But she was enraged that he took her son away from her. He didn’t have the right, just as she surely didn’t have the right to conspire to practically wipe out the human race.
She never heard of my father again. Until Trunkenpolz told the Marauders over the ham radio: ‘Willem Storm of Amanzi. You kill that guy, and I’ll give you gas for ten years.’
Ma knew Pa and I wouldn’t die from the virus. She knew we would get very ill, like everyone who had the inoculation against the virus, but we wouldn’t die. However, she had no assurance that we would survive the chaos of the epidemic. She kept hope alive. She was one of the executive committee members of Gaia One’s Cape Town Base. She asked them to listen over the ether for the two names she yearned for: Willem and Nico Storm.
She gave them a photo so they could put it in the database of their military computers. They were employing the same systems once used by the USA to hunt terrorists, with military MQ-9 Reaper drones flying higher than the eye could see, but with such powerful cameras that computers could scan the video stream and identify faces to compare with what was in the database. And we were in the database, thanks to the photograph.
She kept hoping the drone camera would spot us somewhere in the vast expanse of the country, and that the program would set off the alarm when the system identified us.
So we could come to her. So we could have a better life. In a better world.
Because she had done it all, she had become involved and worked and planned and kept the secrets so that there would be a better world for us, and more specifically for me. Because she loved us, intensely and overwhelmingly, and she would understand if I wouldn’t accept that, but she begged me to think it over: a sustainable future for all species. For mankind too. And also for her son, Nico Storm, and his children and their children. Was that not what true love meant?
So she continued to hope that the radio operators would hear news of us, or the flying drones record us, even though the statistical chances of that were minimal.
There were only two drones at Cape Town Base. The Gaia One members who had been in the US military sent them by ship along with their operators, once the worst chaos was over. They were to keep an eye on threats, like the rise of communities on the edge of the mountain borders, the people of the West Coast, Lamberts Bay, the Bushmans Kloof and the much smaller one at Villiersdorp, where they had to send their troops and helicopters to frighten and drive them away.
Because the big lie about Koeberg’s nuclear reactor – and the fictitious threat of radioactive contamination – worked for more than three years. The reactor never malfunctioned. It was maintained by Gaia One and managed as the primary source of electricity for Cape Town Base. Back then, during the chaos after the Fever, they transported load after load of used tyres to Melkbosstrand and burned them to create the clouds of thick, black, stinking smoke. People saw and smelled it. The natural survivors who weren’t part of Gaia One’s conspiracy sensibly fled from the danger. Nobody looked back to see who stayed behind.
And then they sealed the borders – every mountain pass and tunnel into the Cape. They took car wrecks and dead bodies to the important access routes – Du Toits Kloof, Sir Lowry’s Pass, Piekeniers Kloof, Bains Kloof – so that it would seem as if the radiation and the virus had destroyed everything. And so, for three long years they had no invaders or curious people.
Until the pedlars and smugglers began coming in via Wupperthal, driven by hunger and curiosity. Some of Gaia One’s own soldiers and workers began trading with them. The way people do, people who always want more.
She told me first about the radio message that mentioned Pa’s name, and afterwards I asked her about Sofia spotting the helicopter. Later I had to work out the chronological order myself to make sense of it.
The droning that Sofia heard, the night on the strange farm’s veranda, and the streak of fire like a meteorite that she saw in the night sky, was one of the two Cape drones. It had mechanical problems, caught fire in the air and had to make an emergency landing in the mountains outside Richmond.
The helicopter Sofia heard the next morning was the mission to recover the drone. It was successful.
And then, weeks later, the radio message. ‘Willem Storm of Amanzi. You kill that guy, and I’ll give you gas for ten years.’ I knew it was Trunkenpolz, to the Marauders. But my mother and Cape Base didn’t know what it meant, except that my father’s name was mentioned.
They had the technology to determine the location of the two radio towers. One was in the mountains of Lesotho, the other was in a farmhouse on the mountain beyond Cradock. She had to beg the Cape Council to approve a mission, because there was great reluctance to move beyond the mountain borders with technology like a helicopter. At all costs they wanted to keep their presence and, naturally, the Great Conspiracy from the rest of the unenlightened world.
The breakthrough came when she said their radar showed that there was an aircraft used by someone beyond the mountains, a common survivor, not a member of Gaia One.
Then the Gaia One’s Cape Council approved the mission. They sent a helicopter with soldiers to gather intelligence at the radio sources. The mission extended over a few days, because the distances were too great for a single helicopter flight. They had to e
stablish refuelling points and supply them.
The radio in the Lesotho mountains wasn’t there. There were tracks of vehicles and signs of life, but the people had already moved on.
At the other radio, near Tarkastad they found people. One man, wild and bearded and high on cannabis, and a room of dirty, unkempt women. The soldiers asked the wild man where Willem Storm was. And where Amanzi was. But they could see he didn’t know. They asked the women, but the women seemed drunk and just stared at them.
Then the helicopter returned and the Gaia One soldiers said there were obvious signs at the Tarkastad radio that the wild man was part of a larger team of people. The helicopter visit was perhaps just poorly timed.
So they had the drone survey the area a few days later, for weeks long. But the radio mast was gone and there were no signs of life. My mother lost hope of ever tracking us down.
Just over a week ago, the voice was heard on the radio again, the same voice that had been broadcasting from Lesotho, so many months ago. And this time the voice said: ‘This is Number One, calling Willem Storm, this is Trunkenpolz, calling Willem Storm.’ The radio operators of Gaia One’s Cape Base sent for her, because the voice called over and over. She had sat down at the radio with earphones and heard the voice herself. Her heart wanted to burst with hope.
Then another voice: ‘Trunkenpolz, this is Domingo of Amanzi. I am authorised to respond. State the nature of your business with Willem Storm.’
And the Trunkenpolz voice laughed and said: ‘I don’t speak to servants, I speak to masters. Tell Storm I have a proposition. I will be listening on this wavelength.’
My mother waited by the radio. The ether in the forty-metre band was silent for hours after, but the technicians later told her the Trunkenpolz-voice radio was in the mountains near Ficksburg, and the Domingo-voice was at the Vanderkloof Dam.
My mother made the connection between Vanderkloof and Amanzi almost instantly. And simply knew that was where my father was. And perhaps I was too.
She waited beside the radio. At half past six she heard her husband, Willem Storm, speak on the radio, and in their radio room of Gaia One Cape Town Base she burst into tears of relief and gratitude and an overwhelming feeling of guilt. She cried so much she didn’t hear everything that was said over the radio. They had to replay the recording for her later.
The Trunkenpolz voice offered Pa fuel. Ethanol. And peace. No attacks for five years. In exchange for weapons. Pa said no, thank you.
There was no mention of Nico Storm.
Then my mother pleaded with the Cape Council for one last mission. A last chance, because time was running out. The Cape Base was to be evacuated in ten days’ time.
Chapter 118
The investigation of my father’s murder: XIV
My mother said she was responsible for the mathematical models and algorithms that predicted how many people would naturally survive the Fever – in other words, people who were not recipients of the Gaia One vaccine. And how many would die in the ensuing chaos when civilisation collapsed. She also had to try to predict how long it would take the survivors to organise themselves into communities and begin to produce food and energy, and trade and explore.
She studied the statistics of world and civil wars, or uprisings and revolutions, she analysed the effect of the Ebola virus in Africa and the swine flu and bird flu viruses in Asia. Her computer models predicted that all of Gaia One’s carefully selected bases would be secure and intruder-free for at least ten years, specifically also that after the Fever the Cape Base would be a safe harbour for Gaia One in Africa – also the only one they would maintain on this continent.
But mankind’s ingenuity, the ability to achieve the impossible, to solve problems and overcome circumstances, proved her mathematics wrong. Everywhere, on all the continents, the Gaia One drones showed that groups of people recovered and organised and produced far faster than they had predicted. That vehicles like lorries and even small aircraft kept driving and flying much longer than they thought fuel would still be usable. Which meant that someone was producing petrol and diesel.
Daring explorers had crossed the Cape Mountains much sooner than expected in search of tradeable goods, despite the clear warnings of radioactivity.
The rapid recovery of communities, the growth of curiosity and the will to explore didn’t only occur in Africa and the Cape. Gaia One’s bases in North America, Europe and Asia all came under pressure. And they were not nearly ready to tell the common survivors about their man-made pandemic to save the earth, nor to share their conserved technology and supplies with those people.
Initially they tried using non-violent strategies to scare those communities and drive them back, such as a boat full of people with artificial abscesses and simulated fever, because they were terrified that harsher measures would reveal them, and their terrible secret. Sometimes the strategy worked, but mostly – as with the ‘blister fever’ and the West Coasters – it had no effect.
Eventually they had to send in troops and helicopters, which led to unforeseen casualties on both sides.
Consequently the organisation collectively decided to take their people, technology and equipment to the safety and isolation of a few islands across the earth, to gain a few more years of secrecy: Mauritius, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Hawaii, Cuba, Ireland and Sicily. The translocation process had been going on for months.
The last ship from the Cape Town Base would leave the next morning.
That was why there was such urgency to fetch Pa – and hopefully me.
Ma sent the MQ-9 Reaper drone and the helicopter with Gaia One soldiers, armed with a photo of the three of us.
Thanks to Pa’s radio chats with other irrigation farmers from his location at Witput, the drone tracked Pa down and kept an eye on him.
Ma saw him, on the screen in the control centre at Cape Base. She sat watching her husband walk down the streets of Amanzi, get into a pick-up and drive. She said it was a highly emotional experience to see him, so near and yet so far. She wished he would walk or drive to his son while the high-resolution camera tracked him, so that she could see me. So that she could see that I was alive, so that she could see how I had grown.
But there was no sign of me, and in those few days she began to doubt that I had survived.
She sent the helicopter and soldiers in because the image showed that Witput was isolated. They would be able to reach Pa without anyone else witnessing it.
That afternoon the drone watched Pa disappear into the farmhouse at Witput. The helicopter with the soldiers completed the last leg of their journey and landed north of the farmhouse.
The drone recorded Pa as he ran, and it relayed his emergency call on the radio back to Cape Base: ‘Regards to Cincinnatus from Witput, regards to Cincinnatus, I am at Witput.’ My mother didn’t know what it meant.
Ma was riveted to the video screen as the drone cameras showed Pa come out of the house and walk in the direction of the helicopter. Then he turned and ran back. It showed her four Gaia One soldiers carry out their orders to get Pa out of the farmhouse.
The plan was to take Pa to the helicopter, where he could talk to Ma over the radio. And she could plead with him to come to her. And bring her son, if he was still alive. This was the only chance before the last ship left for Mauritius.
But then the man in the black Jeep arrived.
From an altitude of fifteen thousand metres with the drone camera pointed at Pa and the soldiers, the Jeep was a surprise. And then my mother saw Domingo get out and run towards the soldiers, and the firefight broke out. And how my father was shot in the skirmish. How he fell.
My mother screamed, in front of the operators in the control room. She screamed like a wounded animal.
She heard the soldier relay the news: Willem Storm was dead.
By that time we had been in the ship’s cabin for five hours. Right at the beginning, when she came in, she hugged me, but I pushed her away. After that there was a distance betwe
en us, for the duration of the conversation. Both she and I moved, paced up and down to control emotion or express it, but we didn’t touch each other again.
She told me she had seen Pa, her husband, die. At last she crumbled, she broke down, physically and emotionally. Sobbing, she said, ‘It was an accident, it was an accident, it was my fault, Nico,’ totally crushed, and I got up and embraced my mother, held her tight, comforted her. And I shared in her – in our – loss, I grieved with her. For that moment. Until the rage and loss, the disbelief and inability of a seventeen-year-old to handle all these revelations at once, forced me to push her away again.
Later she would tell me the drone had seen three white Toyota pick-ups in Luckhoff. Because of them the helicopter couldn’t take off for a while to pick up the grey men.
Later she told me the drones even had infra-red cameras able to isolate and identify the heat of a human body in the landscape. That was how they knew Sofia and I had bypassed the razor wire at Wupperthal earlier today, how they had guided the troops directly to our hiding place in the rock cleft.
I remember that was the last thing I registered before exhaustion overcame me.
I remember her leading me to the narrow bed and saying, ‘My child, my child. I’m so glad I found you, my child. I’m so happy you’re coming with me.’
Chapter 119
In the Year of the Lion the Enemy attacked us. We defeated them.
In the Year of the Lion I lost my father, and found my mother.
And Domingo died, but his story lived.
And I became a sergeant in a unit without a commander.
In the Year of the Lion the West Coasters came, and Pastor Nkosi Sebego and his followers in the Mighty Warrior Party left.