by Wilbur Smith
‘She told me where I could find you, but she didn’t send me.’
‘Same thing,’ Shasa said, and held the glass to his lips, letting the last drop run onto his tongue. ‘She wants me back, digging diamonds out of the dirt, picking grapes, growing cotton, pushing paper – damn it, she just doesn’t understand.’
‘She understands much more than you give her credit for.’
‘Out there men are fighting. David and my other mates. They are in the sky – and I am down here in the dirt, a cripple, grovelling in the dirt.’
‘You chose the dirt.’ Blaine looked around the filthy shack scornfully. ‘And you are doing the whining and grovelling.’
‘You’d better get the hell out of here, sir,’ Shasa told him. ‘Before I lose my temper.’
‘A pleasure, I assure you.’ Blaine stood up. ‘I misjudged you. I came to offer you a job, an important war job, but I can see that you are not man enough for it.’ He crossed to the door of the cottage and paused. ‘I was going to issue an invitation as well, an invitation to a party on Friday night. Tara is going to announce her engagement to marry Hubert Langley. I thought it might amuse you – but forget it.’
He went out with his long determined stride and after a few seconds Shasa followed him out onto the stoep and watched him climb the cliff path. Blaine never looked back once, and when he disappeared over the top, Shasa felt suddenly abandoned and bereft.
He had not until that moment realized how large Blaine Malcomess bulked in his life. How much he had relied on Blaine’s good counsel and experience, both on and off the polo field.
‘I wanted to be like him so much,’ he said aloud. ‘And now I never will be.’ He touched the black patch over his eye.
‘Why me?’ He gave the eternal cry of the loser. ‘Why me?’ And he sank down onto the top step and stared out over the calm green waters to the entrance of the bay.
Slowly the full impact of Blaine’s words sank home. He thought about the job he had offered, an important war job – then he thought about Tara and Hubert Langley. Tara – he saw her grey eyes and smoking red hair, and self-pity washed over him in a cold dark wave.
Listlessly he stood up and went into the shack. He opened the cupboard above the sink. There was a single bottle of Haig left. ‘What happened to the others?’ he asked himself. ‘Mice?’
He cracked the cap on the bottle, and looked for a glass. They were all dirty, piled in the sink. He lifted the bottle to his lips, and the fumes made his eye smart. He lowered the bottle before he drank and stared at it. His stomach heaved and he was filled with a sudden revulsion, both physical and emotional.
He tipped the bottle over the sink, and watched the golden liquid chug and spurt into the drainhole. When it was gone, once it was too late, his need for it returned strongly and he was seized by dismay. His throat felt parched and sore and the hand that held the empty bottle began to shake. The desire for oblivion ached in every joint of his bones, and his eye burned so that he had to blink it clear.
He hurled the bottle against the wall of the shack and ran out into the sunshine, down the steps to the beach. He stripped off the eye-patch and his rugby shorts and dived into the cold green water and struck out in a hard overarm crawl. By the time he reached the entrance to the cove, every muscle ached and his breathing scorched his lungs. He turned and without slackening the tempo of his stroke headed back to the beach. As soon as his feet touched bottom he turned again, and swam out to the headland, back and forth he ploughed, hour after hour, until he was so exhausted that he could not lift an arm clear of the surface and he was forced to struggle back the last hundred yards in a painful side-stroke.
He crawled up the beach, fell face down on the wet sand and lay like a dead man. It was the middle of the afternoon before he had recovered the energy to push himself upright and limp up to the shack.
He stood in the doorway and looked around at the mess he had created. Then he took the broom from behind the door and went to work. It was late afternoon before he had finished. The only thing he could do nothing about was the dirty bed linen. He bundled the soiled blankets with his dirty clothes for the dhobi wallah at Weltevreden to launder. Then he drew a kettle of fresh water from the rainwater tank beside the back door and heated it over the stove.
He shaved carefully, dressed in the cleanest shirt and slacks he could find and adjusted the patch over his eye. He locked the shack and hid the key; then, carrying the bundle of dirty laundry he climbed the pathway to the top. His Jaguar was dusty and streaked with sea salt. The battery was flat and he had to run it down the hill and start it on the fly.
Centaine was in her study, seated at her desk, poring over a pile of documents. She sprang to her feet when he came in and would have rushed to him, but with an obvious effort she restrained herself.
‘Hello, chéri, you look so well. I was worried about you – it’s been so long. Five weeks.’
The patch over his eye still horrified her. Every time she saw it she remembered Isabella Malcomess’ last words to her:
‘An eye for an eye, Centaine Courtney. Heed my words – an eye for an eye.’
As soon as she had herself under control again she went calmly to meet him and lifted her face for his kiss.
‘I’m glad you are home again, chéri.’
‘Blaine Malcomess has offered me a job, a war job. I’m thinking of taking it.’
‘I am sure it is important,’ Centaine nodded. ‘I am happy for you. I can hold the fort here until you are ready to return.’
‘I am sure you can, Mater,’ he grinned wryly. ‘After all you have been doing pretty well for the last twenty-two years – holding the fort.’
The long line of goods trucks drawn by a double coupling of steam locomotives climbed the last slope of the pass. On the steep gradient, the locomotives were sending bright silver columns of steam spurting from their valves, and the Hex river mountains echoed to the roar of their straining boilers.
With a final effort they crested the head of the pass and burst out onto the high plateau of the open karoo; gathering speed dramatically they thundered away across the flatlands and the line of closed trucks snaked after them.
Forty miles beyond the head of the pass the train slowed and then trundled to a halt in the shunting yards of the intermediate railway junction of Touws river.
The relief crews were waiting in the stationmaster’s office and they greeted the incoming crews with a little light banter and then climbed aboard to take their places on the footplates. The leading locomotive was uncoupled and shunted onto a side spur. It was no longer needed, the rest of the run, a thousand miles northwards to the goldfields of the Witwatersrand, was across comparatively flat land. The second locomotive would return down the mountain pass to link up with the next goods train and assist it up the steep gradients.
The incoming crews, carrying their lunch pails and overcoats, set off down the lane towards the row of railway cottages, relieved to be home in time for a hot bath and dinner. Only one of the drivers lingered on the platform and watched the goods train pull out of the siding, gathering speed swiftly as it headed northwards.
He counted the trucks as they passed him, verifying his previous count. Numbers twelve and thirteen were closed trucks, painted silver to distinguish them and to deflect the heat of the sun’s rays. On the side of each was blazoned a crimson cross, and in letters six feet tall that ran the full length of each truck, the warning: ‘EXPLOSIVES.’ They had each been loaded at the Somerset West factory of African Explosives and Chemical Industries with twenty tons of gelignite consigned to the gold mines of the Anglo American Group.
As the guard’s van passed him the driver sauntered into the stationmaster’s office. The stationmaster was still at the far end of the platform, his pillbox cap on his head and his furled flags of red and green under his arm. The driver lifted the telephone off its bracket on the wall and spun the handle.
‘Central,’ he said into the voicepiece, speaking i
n Afrikaans, ‘give me Matjiesfontein eleven sixteen.’
He waited while the operator made the connection. ‘You are through. Go ahead.’ But the driver waited for the click of the operator going off the line before he said,
‘Van Niekerk here.’
‘This is White Sword.’ The reply, though he had been expecting it, made the hair on the back of his neck prickle.
‘She is running twenty-three minutes late. She left here two minutes ago. The trucks are numbers twelve and thirteen.’
‘Well done.’
Manfred De La Rey replaced the telephone and checked his wrist-watch before he smiled at the two women who watched him apprehensively across the farmhouse kitchen.
‘Thank you, Mevrou,’ he addressed the older of the two. ‘We are grateful for your help. No trouble will come to you out of this, I give you my word.’
‘Trouble is an old acquaintance, Meneer,’ the proud old woman replied. ‘In ninety-nine the rooinekke burned my farm and killed my husband.’
Manfred had parked the motorcycle behind the barn. He started it and rode back down the track a mile or so until he joined the main road. He turned north, and a few miles further on he was riding parallel to the railway line. At the base of a rocky hill the lines and the road diverged. The railway tracks climbed the shoulder of the hill and then disappeared behind it.
Manfred stopped the motorcycle and checked that the road was clear, ahead and behind, then he turned off onto another farmtrack, and followed the railway tracks around the back of the hill. Again he stopped, propped the bike on its foot rest, and checked the locale.
They were far enough from the widow’s farmhouse not to attach suspicion to the old woman. The hill hid this section of the tracks from the main road, but the road was close enough to offer a swift escape route in either direction. The gradient would slow the approaching locomotive to almost walking pace. He had watched while other goods trains passed the spot.
He turned the cycle off the road, following the tracks of other wheels that had flattened the grass. In the first fold of the land, hidden in a cluster of thorn trees, the trucks were parked. Four of them – a three-tonner, two four-tonners and a big brown Bedford ten-tonner. Getting fuel rationing coupons to fill their tanks had been difficult.
It was a mere hundred paces to the railway line from where the trucks stood and his men were waiting beside them, resting, lying in the grass, but they scrambled up as the motorcycle bumped and puttered over the fold of ground and they crowded around him eagerly. Roelf Stander was at their head.
‘She’ll be here at nine-thirty,’ Manfred told him. ‘The trucks are twelve and thirteen. Work that out.’
One of his band was a railway man, and he made the calculations of distance between the locomotive and the explosive trucks. Roelf and Manfred left the others hidden and went out onto the line to mark out the distances. Manfred wanted to stop the goods train so that the two laden trucks were directly opposite the waiting vehicles in the clump of thorn trees.
They paced it out from this point and Manfred set the charges under the fish plates in a joint of the tracks. Then he and Roelf went back and laid the red warning flares, using the railwayman’s calculations of speed and distance as a guide.
It was dark by the time they had finished, so they could proceed to the next step. They moved the men out into their positions. They were all young, picked for their size and physical strength. They were dressed in rough clothing of dark colours and armed with a motley collection of weapons that had survived the call-in by the Smuts government – shotguns and old Lee Enfields and Mannlichers from other long-ago wars. Only Roelf and Manfred were armed with modern German Lugers, part of the contents of the rubber canisters from the U-boat.
Manfred took charge of the smaller group while Roelf waited with the work party that would unload the trucks, and they settled down in darkness to wait.
Manfred heard it first, the distant susurration in the night, still far off, and he roused them with three sharp blasts on his whistle. Then he armed the battery box and connected the wires to the brass screw terminals. The huge Cyclops eye of the approaching locomotive glared across the plain below the hill. The waiting men adjusted their face masks and lay hidden in the grassy ditch beside the railway line.
The beat of the locomotive engine slowed and became deeper as it ran onto the slope. It climbed laboriously, running past the first group of waiting men, and then it hit the first of the warning flares. The flare ignited with a sharp crack and lit the veld for fifty yards around with red flickering light.
Manfred heard the metallic squeal of brakes, and he relaxed slightly. The driver was acting reflexively, it would not be necessary to blow out the tracks. The second flare ignited, shooting out long tongues of red flame from under the driving wheels, but by now the locomotive was pulling up sharply, brakes grinding metal on metal and steam flying from the emergency vacuum tubes in screaming white jets.
While it was still moving, Manfred leapt onto the footplates, and thrust the Luger into the astonished faces of the driver and his fireman.
‘Shut her down! Switch off the headlight!’ he yelled through his mask. ‘Then get down from the cab!’
With the brakes locked, the railwaymen scrambled down and lifted their hands high. They were immediately searched and trussed up. Manfred ran back down the train, and by the time he reached the explosives trucks, Roelf’s men had already forced the doors and the wooden cases of gelignite were being handed along a human chain to be loaded into the first lorry.
‘What about the guard at the rear of the train?’ Manfred asked.
‘We have got him tied up,’ Roelf answered, and Manfred ran back to the head of the train. Swiftly he defused and lifted the explosive charges he had laid, delighted that it had not been necessary to fire them. By the time he got back, the first lorry was fully loaded with cases of explosives.
‘Take her away!’ Roelf yelled, and one of his men climbed into the cab, started the engine and with lights extinguished, drove it away.
The second vehicle reversed up to the explosives trucks and they began to load it.
Manfred checked his watch. ‘Twelve minutes,’ he muttered. They were ahead of schedule.
The driver, the guard and the fireman were tied securely and locked in the guard’s van while the loading of explosives went on smoothly and swiftly.
‘All finished,’ Roelf shouted. ‘We can’t load any more.’
‘Forty-eight minutes,’ Manfred told him. ‘Well done. All right, move out everybody!’
‘What about you?’
‘Go!’ Manfred ordered. ‘I’ll look after myself.’
He watched the Bedford truck pull away and waited until it reached the farm road and switched on its headlights. The sound of its engine dwindled. He was alone. If Roelf or the others had known what he intended to do now, they might have baulked and tried to prevent it.
Manfred climbed into the open door of the explosives truck. It was half filled with the white wooden cases. They had only been able to carry away a part of the load, while the second truck had not been touched. There were still at least twenty-five tons of explosive remaining on board.
He set the timing device with a delay of fifteen minutes and placed it in the gap between the stacked cases and the steel side of the truck, pushing it far back where it could not be readily seen. Then he jumped down to the ground and ran forward to the locomotive. None of the three men locked in the caboose of the guard’s van were members of the Ossewa Brandwag. Left alive they would be certain to give damaging evidence to the police. He felt little pity for them. They were casualties of war.
He climbed into the cab of the locomotive and disengaged the wheel brakes; then he opened the throttle gradually. The wheels spun, then found purchase and the train jolted forward with the couplings clanking. It began to pull away jerkily up the slope.
Manfred eased the throttle open to the halfway notch and locked it there. Then he jumped dow
n to the ground, and watched the trucks rumble past where he stood. They were gaining speed gradually. When the caboose passed, he walked back down the tracks to the clump of thorn trees, and sat astride the seat of the motorcycle.
He waited impatiently, glancing at his watch every few minutes.
The explosion, when at last it came, was a brief orange flare, like sheet lightning over the northern horizon, followed after a long pause by the puff of the shockwave against his face and a sound like distant surf breaking on a rocky shore.
Manfred kick-started the motorcycle and drove southwards into the night.
It was a good beginning, he thought, but there was so much still to do.
Blaine looked up as Shasa entered his office and hesitated in the doorway. He was neatly dressed in airforce uniform, medal ribbons on his chest, DFC and Africa Star, and the badges of rank on his shoulders.
‘Morning, Shasa,’ Blaine nodded bleakly. ‘Ten o’clock. May I offer you a whisky?’
Shasa winced. ‘I came to apologize for my behaviour the other day, sir. It was inexcusable.’
‘Sit down.’ Blaine pointed at the buttoned leather armchair against the bookcase. ‘We all act like blithering idiots at some time in our lives. The trick is to know when you are doing it. Apology accepted.’
Shasa sat down and crossed his legs, then uncrossed them. ‘You mentioned a job, sir?’
Blaine nodded and stood up. He moved to the window and stood staring down into the gardens. An old woman was feeding the pigeons from a paper bag. He watched her as he made his final decision. Was he letting his concern for Centaine Courtney and her son cloud his sense of duty? What he had in mind was critical to the welfare of the state. Was Shasa too young and inexperienced for the task? he wondered. But he had gone over this many times already, and he turned back to his desk.
He picked up a plain unmarked black folder. ‘This is highly classified,’ he said as he weighed the folder in his right hand. ‘A most secret and sensitive report and appreciation.’ He handed it to Shasa. ‘It is not to leave this office. Read it here. I have a meeting with Field Marshal Smuts.’ He pulled back his sleeve and glanced at his watch. ‘I will be back in an hour. We’ll talk again then.’