The twelve-minute flight was uneventful. The two cameras showed us breathtaking images of the mist rising from the trees, and glimpses of wildlife startled by the sound of the motors.
The Breytenbach game farm looked tranquil as it came into view, like a cluster of large sandwiches floating on a cushion of mist in the middle of the bush. Behind the complex the stark sides of a rocky hill rose above it, providing shelter from the wind and a craggy backdrop for the magazine articles. The resemblance to sandwiches came from the vast horizontal slabs of concrete which formed the floor and roof of the primary structure, with floor to ceiling glass squeezed between them. The other buildings in the complex mimicked the principal residence, but in a less extravagant manner. The gatehouse offered a cheeky variation on the theme by looking like someone had accidentally knocked the sandwich off the table and it had stuck at an awkward angle into the ground.
Chandler told me he thought I was being absurd when I mentioned this, and that I shouldn’t distract Fat-Boy, who needed to focus. Fat-Boy demonstrated his need to focus by sticking his tongue out and chewing on it as he watched his screen. The drones were settling, and he explained that this could take a few minutes as they adjusted to the wind and balanced themselves. Both cameras were pointing towards the fallen sandwiches, and he zoomed one of them in a little.
We could see the sentries moving around the perimeter. Two of them, dressed in black and carrying semi-automatic Vektor R5 carbines. It would have made more sense for them to have worn camouflage uniforms, but as Chandler said, their priority was looking good to the boss as opposed to being effective in the bush environment.
The drones let Fat-Boy know that they were settled, and he took the joystick in hand, and gently nudged Esmeralda forward. In a few moments we saw the drone appear in the camera view of the other one. Fat-Boy paused and looked up to Chandler.
“On your command, Colonel,” he said.
“Have we checked the phone?” Chandler asked Robyn.
“Yessir.” Robyn was in military mode, which was coming across a bit overdone. Something about her incongruous beauty made it seem as if she was being disrespectful. She had her hair pulled back, her voice was clipped, and she had a scowl on her face.
“Send her down,” said Chandler.
Fat-Boy pressed forward on the joystick and our view of Esmeralda showed her gently descending away from Shirley. Esmeralda’s camera showed us the Breytenbach resort, gradually expanding and exposing more of its secrets. The glass walls of the main building glinted the sunrise back to us like a mischievous wink. One of the sliding panels was open and we could see the shape of a man sitting at a table on the balcony.
“There’s your man,” said Chandler. “An early riser,” he added with approval.
The drone continued drifting lower, and Fat-Boy called the height out as it descended.
“Two hundred feet, one hundred, eighty …”
The sentries continued their slow progress around the perimeter, careful to keep a few metres inside the electrified game fence and keeping the Alsatian dog with them on a tight leash. They were walking away from us now, starting the climb back up to the far side of the property.
“What if they don’t notice?” asked Robyn.
“We’ll get close enough,” said Fat-Boy. “They’ll notice alright.”
“If we’d had their schedule, we could have timed it better,” said Chandler regretfully.
The sentries did notice the drone, but only when Fat-Boy had brought her all the way down below fifty feet. The moment was worth waiting for. One of them stopped and cocked his head to the side and looked up as if he thought a plane was flying overhead. The other one saw the drone and grabbed his partner so hard he almost dropped his R5 carbine.
The dog noticed the drone next and was the first to actually do anything. It raised up on its back legs and lunged forward with its jaws working. Barking presumably, although we had no audio.
“Hold her there,” said Chandler. “Let’s draw them out.”
The sentry not holding the dog’s leash spoke into the radio strapped to his shoulder, and then he raised his R5, and it jerked as he pulled the trigger.
“Pull back,” said Chandler.
The camera jumped as Fat-Boy pulled back on the joystick and the drone stumbled away from the sentries. From the higher drone we could see the entire complex and the group of five black-clad guards jogging towards the perimeter position with their R5 weapons held loosely ready for action.
Esmeralda recovered her balance and the silently barking dog appeared in view again. The sentry who had fired earlier was taking careful aim and we could see the barrel of the rifle lining up with the lens.
“Take her in,” said Chandler.
Fat-Boy’s tongue endured an extra assault from his teeth as he swerved his heavy body in an effort to twist the drone. The camera swung round as the drone lurched towards the chief residence. A fleeting image of Breytenbach on the balcony standing at the railing, his hand raised and pointing up as if no one else had noticed the drone. Fat-Boy brought her to within thirty feet, did a loop and headed back out again.
“Back over the fence,” said Chandler as if he and Fat-Boy hadn’t discussed this in detail.
“Getting there,” said Fat-Boy through gritted teeth.
The camera swept over the group of five guards who all had their rifles on their shoulders; the barrels jumping as they fired at the drone.
“Trigger happy,” said Robyn under her breath.
The camera view suddenly lurched to the side.
“I’m hit,” cried Fat-Boy.
“Over the fence,” shouted Chandler. “Get it over the fence.”
The camera was pointing directly down now, and the image flickered, then disappeared into a small dot which lingered, then faded altogether. Robyn was at the second laptop and zoomed the camera in to maximum. We could see the black shape of the wounded drone still moving towards the perimeter fence.
“Keep her up,” said Chandler. “Nearly there, nearly there.”
The black dot reached the fence and stopped moving as it snagged against the wires.
“Lift her,” said Chandler.
Fat-Boy pulled the joystick all the way, and a moment later the shape crossed the nearly invisible barrier of the fence.
“Yes, baby!” cried Fat-Boy. The drone continued for about fifty metres, when it suddenly disintegrated and dropped in pieces to the ground. We stood in silence for a moment. Chandler patted Fat-Boy’s shoulder.
“Splendid job,” he said. “Let’s see how long it takes them.”
We had another hot chocolate each and Chandler was warming the espresso machine when the phone receiver beeped. He picked up the headset and flicked the speaker on.
“Hannes?” said a gruff voice.
“Hannes isn’t on today,” said Chandler, “can I help you?”
“Not on? What the fuck? Where is he?”
“Hospital,” said Chandler, and left it at that. There was a moment’s silence.
“Who’re you?” asked the voice.
“Colchester,” said Chandler. “I’m working with Hannes.” He hesitated to add a little gravity. “Over this time.”
“Ask him to call me,” said the voice. “It’s urgent.”
“If it’s urgent, best I help you,” said Chandler. “Where are you calling from?”
“Ashanti.”
“There’s a problem?”
“We had a drone come over.”
“A weaponised drone?”
“We’re trying to retrieve it. Went down outside the fence.”
Chandler smiled at Robyn and me. Fat-Boy was outside on the terrace cleaning Shirley.
“I’ve got just the thing for you. Anything approaches within fifty metres it gets fried. I’ll come round.”
“Hannes not available? You don’t know how our boss gets about new people.”
“It’s all external. Your boss need not know we’re there.”
&
nbsp; There was a thoughtful silence. “OK,” said the voice.
“Be there in an hour,” said Chandler and ended the call. “Psychology,” he announced to us. “Understand their psychology and the rest is child’s play.”
“We had a lucky break,” said Robyn.
“Nonsense. They behaved the way they always have. Hannes told us they were always on the phone to him. Every time they had a scare. Humans are creatures of habit. What they’ve done before they will do again. It’s the basis of every successful plan.”
“Let’s hope Hannes doesn’t realise it was you who switched his sim card.”
“It’ll be a few hours before they issue a replacement.”
“Well then let’s hope a few hours is all we need,” said Robyn.
Twenty-Eight
The sandwich that had fallen to the ground and was being used as a gatehouse didn’t look so much like a sandwich when we pulled up in front of it at oh eight hundred hours in one of the Ashanti Jeeps. It was a menacing entrance that appeared suddenly as you rounded the bend of the dirt road that approached it. Robyn suggested I only found it menacing because I was approaching with nefarious intentions. She could have been right about that. The two armed guards who came out to greet us also came across as pretty menacing, particularly the way one of them held back and hoisted his weapon up and pointed it in our direction as his colleague approached my window.
Chandler explained that we were there for the installation, and that the electrician in the panel van behind us was needed to plug things in.
The fact that we were driving a black Jeep that matched the vehicles they drove, and were wearing uniforms that matched theirs might have helped ease the tension a little, but we weren’t greeted like welcome colleagues. The uniforms were absurd, designed by some fanciful artist. Black from top to toe, with enough pockets and straps to ensure that you could lose things in them for days. But they did have built-in webbing, and the steel-laced Kevlar that stops most pistol bullets before they do too much damage. Despite our fancy dress we were searched, and were required to leave our weapons with them, locked in a safe behind the reception counter. They also searched the vehicles, but the electronic junk we’d picked up in town the day before didn’t cause any alarm. Neither did the metal box that exactly matched the boxes that had recently arrived from the Cape cause any alarm. And why should it? Those boxes from the Cape had not arrived with manifests listing their contents, and so the guards probably had no idea what they had locked away in their storeroom.
Stripped of our weaponry, the guards decided that we posed no immediate threat, although they gave Robyn an extra check just to ensure that the bullet-proof vest was fitting as tightly as it seemed. They ushered us through to an empty room with a water cooler and a glossy wooden table upon which were the broken pieces of a large drone. We looked at them with interest. The chief guard, who was made mostly of muscle and had a face of stone and not quite enough blood to fuel the brain as well as all the muscles, swept the pieces of Esmeralda to the side.
“That the drone that caused the trouble?” asked Chandler with interest.
The guard grunted. The red smiley face was still intact and I could see Fat-Boy took some satisfaction in that. Chandler spread the plans he’d brought of the complex on the cleared table.
He explained that we’d have to install our gizmo in the roof, and that we would need to access the power routing, to run a cable to the box. He stabbed a finger at the red lines we’d sketched in the night before, showing where we needed to access the power.
“It will require a bit of drilling,” said Chandler, “but we’ll keep the disturbance to a minimum.”
The chief guard shook his head and tried to think of ways he could be obstructive. He came up with one pretty quickly.
“Not that room,” he said, and sat back in his chair to see how Chandler would respond to that.
“What’s the problem with that room?” asked Chandler.
“You can put it in the room next to it.”
“No can do,” said Chandler, and pointed at the symbols Robyn had stencilled over the other rooms around it. “What’s the problem? The boss works in there?”
The guard shook his head. “Out of bounds,” he said.
“You could post someone with us,” suggested Chandler. “Make sure we don’t steal the silver.”
“It’s out of bounds,” said the guard again, having reached the limit of his vocabulary on the topic.
“Well,” Chandler stared bleakly at the plans. “I suppose we could use this room,” he said, indicating a tiny storeroom adjoining the other. “We’d have to do more drilling, though.”
“Drill away,” said the guard.
“It will take us longer,” said Chandler.
“Take all day,” said the guard magnanimously. “I won’t rush you.”
And he was true to his word. He didn’t rush us. He personally walked ahead of our vehicles to guide us to a convenient parking spot near to where we would be working. I drove the customised Jeep with Chandler, Robyn drove the panel van because she needed the time at the wheel. “Practice, practice, practice,” said Chandler as we crawled down the dirt track between the thorn trees. He was getting himself into the zone, I was beginning to recognise the signs. “Marvellous vehicles these,” he said in his military British voice which was his chosen character for the day.
“It feels higher,” I observed. “It sits higher than it did yesterday.”
“Verisimilitude,” said Chandler. “I had it fitted with the extra suspension they have on all their vehicles. We have to get the details right.”
I nodded. Chandler had delivered several lectures on the subject.
“They can take a load of three tons,” said Chandler. “Four-wheel drive, raised air inlet and sealed doors so they can practically drive under water. Veritable monsters.”
“Three tons sounds a lot,” I said.
“Not when you need to carry loads of that heavy yellow metal around,” said Chandler, and his mouth stretched into a smile.
The storeroom that Chandler had reluctantly selected as a compromise was a narrow room that held Fat-Boy and the mortar drill and not much else. It had only one door which let onto the yard outside, where Chandler stood in the early morning sun engaging our chaperone in conversation. I fiddled about on the roof, pretending to fix a dome-shaped plastic box with some wires trailing out of it onto the flat concrete. Robyn moved the Jeep for no apparent reason down to the lower entrance, where she parked it with a group of matching vehicles under the watchful eye of two bored guards. I watched her walking back up the hill to the panel van, her pace measured and purposeful. She was doing her best not to attract attention. She reached the van, climbed into it and settled into the driver’s seat to wait.
The guard with Chandler didn’t seem to notice anything unusual when Fat-Boy emerged after half an hour of intensive drilling and pulled off his goggles and breathing mask and stood gasping for air at the entrance to the room. He looked like a grey ball onto which someone had sprayed a brown Zorro mask to look like eyes, a round circle for a mouth. The guard didn’t mention that it seemed an exorbitant amount of dust for a few holes that would take power cables, but I guessed that he wasn’t employed for his deductive reasoning capacity.
The same guard also showed no surprise when I was called down from the roof to help Fat-Boy and the two of us squeezed into the cupboard-sized room and disappeared into the cloud of masonry dust. Fat-Boy used his stage whisper, which I would have thought they could have heard all the way over at the entrance gates. He had connected the circuit breaker and was ready to trip the power. It was time to trigger the alarm.
I squeezed through the hole he had drilled in the wall and between the shelves of the cupboard in the next room. I twisted one arm back to signal to Fat-Boy that I was ready. He fired up the drill again and chose an arbitrary spot on the wall to provide the sound of a drill cutting into the wall. I pushed on the door of the cupboard. N
othing happened. It was locked. I backed out of the narrow gap, found a screwdriver in Fat-Boy’s toolbox and squeezed back in. I detached the lock from the inside of the door, keeping the screws in my hand so I could replace them quickly.
With the lock detached, I pushed on the door. It had one of those gentle closing springs, so I had to be careful that it didn’t spring open enthusiastically and leave me hanging through an open hole in a room full of invisible laser beams.
Those laser beams had been thoroughly positioned. The door hadn’t opened more than a few inches when the alarm triggered. Like some unearthly spirit suddenly discovering a heart-wrenching loss, the wailing filled the room and vibrated in the air.
Fat-Boy stopped the drilling, and I felt him tripping over my legs to get to the door. I let the door spring closed again and replaced the screws on the lock. There was shouting from outside, and I could hear Chandler’s voice, steady and calm. I got three of the screws in, then dropped the last one which I abandoned, and pulled myself out from between the shelves. Still the deafening wailing of the alarm continued. Fat-Boy was blocking the door, and I gave him a prod so he knew I was ready, and he stepped forward so I could follow as if I’d been there all along. Not that anyone noticed. The guard with Chandler had his gun raised, and his face was twitching anxiously. Chandler had his hands half raised in a placatory manner, and beyond them a group of three guards came running with their R5 carbines ready to be brought up to the shoulder and be put to use.
The siren stopped its wailing with a final squawk as if someone had it by the throat. The silence was sudden, broken only by the heavy breathing of the guards as they came up to us and raised their guns.
“It must have been the drill,” said Chandler loudly. “I was just saying to your colleague here that the vibration on the wall could trigger a sensitive alarm.”
The guards didn’t respond and kept their guns trained on us. Their radios crackled, and two of them lowered their weapons and moved away reluctantly.
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