“They’ve come to kill me, you fucking idiot,” he screamed with panic in his voice. “Shoot them.”
Sidekick was a bit slow on the uptake, but he reached for his handgun and withdrew it from the holster under his arm. Breytenbach cracked the shotgun open.
“Shoot them,” he said again, and then shouted with sudden rage, “fucking shoot them.”
He was fumbling with the cartridges and dropped one, which clattered off the tiled floor. Sidekick raised his weapon and pointed it at me, then at Robyn. His finger trembled on the trigger, and his eyes were full of confusion. I don’t think he would have squeezed the trigger if it had not been for the sudden cracking noise as Breytenbach snapped the barrels of the shotgun back.
The sound of the blast deafened me for a moment and in that silence Robyn collapsed beside me. Her head twisted sharply towards me and she crumpled noiselessly. I dropped to my knees and saw her eyelids flutter as she lost consciousness. It was a head wound. A trickle of blood appeared and made a path across the tiles.
I have been trained to respond to a sudden burst of adrenalin with instinctive, immediate action. I had the hot barrel of Sidekick’s Beretta in my right hand as my left arm gripped his skull-like face and twisted. He buckled under the blow to his groin from my right knee, and as his body curled up, I released his head and dislocated his right arm. His fingers released the Beretta, and he dropped to the floor with a howl.
Breytenbach had the Winchester up and pointing at me. I saw the stretched grimace of exertion as he pulled the trigger. I dropped to land with a jolt on the hard tiles beside Robyn.
Suddenly it was raining glass, and I was deaf again from the blast of the old Winchester. I felt the pain from the small pieces of shot that lodged themselves in my legs and back. The edge of the spreading blast had caught me, but only the edge. Breytenbach had loaded a single cartridge, and I glimpsed him struggling to open the gun again. Sound rushed back a moment later, and a siren wailed into life somewhere. I lifted Robyn onto my shoulder and stepped through the shattered remains of the glass wall and onto the thin lip of concrete outside. I glanced back. Breytenbach had the shotgun cracked open and was fitting another cartridge.
There was a four-metre drop into a patch of garden with neatly trimmed ornamental trees. Beyond them was thick scrub, and a dusty path winding into the bush. I could make out the forms of guards in the far distance running towards the alarm. I tucked the Beretta into my empty holster, held Robyn in my arms with her head supported against my shoulder and jumped. I landed badly and felt the anterior ligament in my left leg pop. I stumbled and almost dropped Robyn’s limp body, but managed to break her fall and then limped twenty metres away from the approaching guards, with Robyn’s feet dragging in the dirt. I laid Robyn down carefully and crouched beside her. Her breathing was shallow but rapid. The blood from the wound was spreading over her face now, and I made sure her nose and mouth were clear.
The guards were still far enough in the distance that I didn’t think they had seen us jump, but I heard the sudden shout of alarm from one of them, and through the haze of greenery saw their figures scattering to take cover. Breytenbach had stepped out onto the ledge and had probably mistaken their movement through the trees for his fleeing prey. He brought the shotgun up to his shoulder and fired both barrels towards them. The shot spread wide and kicked up a cloud of dust well clear of the guards, but their confusion was palpable in the silence that followed.
Breytenbach had the sun behind him from where I crouched. I could make out his shadowy form breaking the gun open again and fumbling to insert another two cartridges, little more than a black silhouette against the sun. As he raised the gun to his shoulder, I took careful aim with the Beretta and shot him three times.
The first shot caught him in the arm. He spun around, the shotgun flew from his grasp and dropped onto the ground with a clatter. The second shot went through his leg just above the knee, shattering the femur and passing all the way through. The third shot finally brought him down, catching him in the hip, where the bullet lodged. He gave a surprised gasping cry of pain and then crumpled like a paper bag and dropped into the ornamental garden with a sickening crunch. He lay in a heap only twenty metres from us and didn’t move. There was an awed hush for a moment and then the guards rushed over to him.
I knew that it would be a matter of only a minute or two before they found us. Despite their confusion and the focus on their fallen master, they would spread out and start the search. I wouldn’t be able to lift Robyn and limp out of sight in time. Her face was mostly covered now with streaks of the blood that was still seeping from the wound on the side of her head. I felt gingerly and found it above her ear. Her eyelids fluttered as she struggled to regain consciousness. It felt like a tear in the skin which meant a surface wound, but there wasn’t much hope if we waited for those guards to find us. They would probably shoot us on sight.
However, if I called them over, I might get them to help.
And then, just as I prepared to give ourselves up, I heard the sound of Chandler’s B-plan. The churning thump of a chopper’s blades. Not one chopper, but three of them. You don’t send a police van in to deal with a private army, you send an army.
The guards all looked up at the approaching helicopters. They recognised the camouflage markings and the distinctive shapes of the air force Denel Rooivalk attack helicopters. The choppers flew low over us to drop their troops onto the helicopter pad on the roof of the main lodge, blowing up a rolling mist of dust. The guards lowered their weapons and their leader called out orders. He posted two men with Breytenbach, and the others turned back to the barracks. It looked like the search for the person who had shot their boss would be postponed. A guard arrived with a field stretcher a minute later, and they loaded Breytenbach onto it. They carried him off, and we were left alone.
I lifted Robyn onto my shoulder. It was only a couple of hundred metres to the outdoor sauna and I limped all the way.
We laid Robyn on the slatted wooden terrace between the sauna and the ice pool. She had lost a lot of blood and her face was deathly pale beneath it, her hair a matted tangle.
I cleaned her face while Chandler cut her hair with scissors from the medical kit and gingerly explored the wound. His face was stone, his hands steady. Fat-Boy knelt at her feet, his eyes closed and he muttered under his breath, a prayer or perhaps an African enchantment.
We worked in silence and in haste. The entire lodge seemed to have gone quiet. Chandler’s assumption that the search for us would be abandoned when the army arrived was probably correct. The sauna outhouse was also the most unlikely place for us to run to, the furthest building from the main gatehouse, positioned on the edge of the bush not far from the small gate in the game fence used by the morning and evening patrols.
Robyn’s breathing was still shallow, but her pulse was steady and Chandler said the signs were good, although he didn’t look as if he believed his own words. But after a few minutes he gave a grunt and looked up at me.
“It’s a surface wound,” he said. “Scraped the side of the skull, gave her a nasty knock, took a few splinters with it. She’s concussed. But she’ll live.”
Fat-Boy stopped his incantation and opened his eyes. He turned away from us before we could see the tears.
I cleaned the wound and Chandler stitched the torn skin with an uneven row of small sutures. I attached a drip to her arm, and we wrapped her in a nano-heat blanket. Chandler worked on cutting the shot out of me and disinfecting the wounds. Fat-Boy used binoculars to watch for the return of the morning patrol. In the distance, we could hear the gentle hum of an approaching helicopter.
“I expect that’s BB’s ambulance,” I said.
From the terrace we were afforded an unimpeded view of the speck of dust that became a white chopper with a red cross on it as it approached over the scrub.
“Ambulance?” said Chandler. “You telling me they didn’t call a hearse?”
When Chandler was
satisfied that Robyn’s condition was stable, we moved her into the Jeep, which was roughly camouflaged behind some leafy branches. Then we waited on the terrace for the return of the morning patrol. The army helicopters had been on the ground a good hour, and everything was uncannily peaceful. Somewhere on the other side of the complex Breytenbach’s private army was facing the military team, and someone was trying to explain how it had happened that one of the ten wealthiest South Africans had been shot three times and fallen four metres from a terrace of his private estate. And trying to explain how it was that the person who had done the shooting might have been wearing their uniform. I expected they were also wondering why the call to the military base had been made an hour before Breytenbach had been shot.
We looked out over the African bush which stretched away to the distance. High above us the vultures were circling.
“The arm, the leg and hip?” said Chandler. “What were you playing at?”
“I needed to make sure he wasn’t going to follow us,” I said.
Chandler’s eyes narrowed, and he watched me closely.
“You can hit a one pound coin from fifty metres with a blindfold on, Corporal Gabriel. Are you telling me now that you didn’t go in there to kill him?”
“I chose not to.”
“Chose not to?” said Chandler incredulously.
“Robyn was with me,” I said, and lit another cigarette.
Chandler nodded as if that explained it, then decided that he was entitled to deliver some unsolicited advice.
“You need to play it carefully,” he said.
“Play what?”
“With Robyn.”
“She’s a big girl; she can look after herself.”
“It’s not her I’m worried about,” said Chandler. “She’s damaged goods and damaged people only pass the damage on.”
Before I could respond Fat-Boy called out. A cloud of dust was approaching from the wild side of the fence. The morning patrol was returning.
The patrol car threw up a cloud of dust which drifted past us as they spoke into the intercom at the gate. We watched from our leafy shelter as the gate squeaked open, and then they gunned the motor and filled their rear-view mirror with more dust as they headed into the complex. We needn’t have worried that they would wait to ensure that the gate closed behind them; they were out of sight before it had completely opened.
“You sure it’s not going to close on us?” asked Chandler.
“I did everything you said, Colonel. Cut the camera cable, blocked the sensor. You wait and see.”
We sat in our Jeep and watched as the dust settled. The gate didn’t close.
“All clear?” asked Fat-Boy.
“All clear,” I confirmed.
We rolled forwards and shook off our camouflage branches. Once we were on the far side of the gate Fat-Boy stopped the vehicle and climbed out to enable the sensor again. The gate squeaked closed.
“Shouldn’t we go back for Esmeralda?” asked Fat-Boy as he climbed back in.
“Who the hell’s Esmeralda?” said Chandler. Then he remembered and his mouth tightened. “Put your foot down on that accelerator, and don’t take it off until I tell you to.”
I was sitting beside Robyn’s head and her eyes flickered open as the Jeep bounced over the rough ground. Her eyes focused on mine, and I could see some clarity return through the cloud of confusion. She groaned and closed her eyes again.
Chandler gave me a tight smile. He was crouched in the back and his arm was resting on an old tarpaulin that covered an uneven pile of boxes.
“Is this car sitting a little lower than it was?” I asked.
“Not much,” said Chandler.
“Three tons did you say?”
“We’ve not loaded half of that,” he said and smiled again.
As we drove off down the dusty road into the wild game area, the ambulance chopper flew over us on its way to Nelspruit hospital. Chandler gave me a puzzled look.
“You’re a changed man, Corporal Gabriel,” he said. “Sending people to the hospital, and not the morgue. Never thought I’d see the day.”
Thirty
“An awful lot of people you come into contact with seem to sustain gun injuries,” said Fehrson in his most plaintive tone.
I said nothing.
“Well,” Fehrson sniffed. “He’s lucky to be alive, although he lost that leg.”
“And he blames me?” I said.
“He complained that you tried to kill him.”
I didn’t say anything, but Fehrson raised a hand as if to stop me.
“I told him that in my experience if you tried to do something, you rarely failed to actually do it. Particularly when it came to killing.”
We sat in silence for a moment. The clocks ticked loudly.
“You are no longer employed by the Department,” said Khanyi. “We wanted to remind you of that, and also of the fact that you are still bound by the Official Secrets Act.”
“You wanted to be sure I would keep quiet,” I suggested.
There was another brief silence.
“He’s also been kicking up a fuss about some gold that was stolen from him,” said Fehrson. “Do you know anything about that?” He looked at me with his innocent blue eyes.
“Was it a lot of gold?” I asked.
“Only a few bars. There are laws about how much he’s allowed to hold on private property, and there is something about a register not matching, which is probably why he’s being vague.”
“It probably is,” I said.
“Some of his staff have suggested that it was more than a few bars,” said Khanyi.
“Big numbers have been floated,” said Fehrson. “US dollars … millions of US dollars … tens of millions.”
“Goodness,” I said, and we sat for a moment in silence.
“We would be grateful to you, Gabriel,” said Khanyi. “If you did keep this whole thing quiet. The Lindiwe business, Mbuyo and so forth.”
“Yes, of course,” said Fehrson as if that had been one of his lines that he kept forgetting. “Very grateful if you left us out of it.”
“Very,” said Khanyi before I could spend too much time thinking about the specifics of their gratitude. “Father has even been taking a look at those expenses, haven’t you, Father?”
“I have,” said Fehrson, and he sniffed. There was a pause as he forgot his lines again. “There are one or two we might be able to concede,” he added when they came back to him.
“That’s very generous of you,” I said, and everyone smiled.
There are some days in the beginning of winter when Cape Town sits up and realises that it has had enough of all the moodiness and those temperamental rain clouds. It shrugs them off and provides the weary inhabitants with a clear and sunny day, and we all think winter might have been delayed until we open the front door and feel the bite of the snow from the mountains.
This had been one of those days and as Bill and I sat on his terrace and gazed out to sea, there was not a breath of wind. Bill poured us each a glass of a new Chardonnay he’d discovered. The sea was a solid steel plate across which a fishing boat was etching an elegant arc in the evening light.
“I can hardly believe he’s back on his feet,” said Bill. “They’re swearing him in next month. Is he immortal?”
“He has a steel plate in his head,” I said, “which probably amounts to the same thing.”
“Matlala’s still not convinced it wasn’t you who tried to kill Mbuyo.”
“Perhaps I did,” I said. “Stirring up the past.”
“That veal should be ready,” said Bill. “Let’s eat inside, it’s not getting any warmer out here.”
He stood, but didn’t move towards the house.
“I don’t want you to be angry,” he said.
“About what?”
“I received an envelope.” He placed his wineglass on the table as if he might need his hands to fend me off. He looked at me and drew a deep breath. �
�Addressed to you, but I opened it. It’s about Sandy.”
“What about her?”
“Photographs of her. A list of dates and some comments. A report of sorts.” Bill picked up his glass and discovered that it was empty. “I shouldn’t have opened it. It was addressed to you. Was it someone you hired to find her?”
“No,” I said, “it was a journalist.”
“That journalist friend of yours who died?”
I nodded and wondered whether my decision to provide the late Johansson with Bill’s address had been an arbitrary one. “He was working on a story and came across a photograph of Sandy.”
“Several photographs,” said Bill. “They’re inside.” His big face drooped.
“Your veal will be overdone if we’re not careful. Let’s go and eat and you can show me.”
There were many photographs in the folder, which I guessed the police had posted to the address I had conveniently written on the front cover. After they had decided the contents had no bearing on Johansson’s death.
Close-up photographs of Sandy’s vulnerable face. Wider-angle photographs of her walking with a group of men. In one of them she was wearing an elegant ruby suit, the only colour on the bleak, grey streets of Johannesburg. The men were in black suits and sunglasses despite the absence of the sun.
“Trafficking,” said Bill. “It says a suspected ring of human traffickers.”
He finished his veal and pushed the plate away as if glad to be rid of it. His heavy face was set with gloom.
“She doesn’t look as if she’s there under duress,” he said and looked away from me when I looked up.
“It doesn’t look that way,” I agreed.
“Do you think she’s working with them? How can she, Gabriel? It can’t be.”
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